“How’s everything going, Looocy?” Nicholas popped his head around the door, rattling her out of her astounded stupor.
“Oh!” Vivian jumped in her chair, startled.
“Can I make any copies for you?”
“Copies?”
“Of the record you were looking for.”
Nicholas walked over to the table and took the record from her hand that had frozen in place like one of Freedlander’s glove mannequins.
As he walked back toward the door she remembered herself.
“I’m still looking for one more. I think these I-through-Js may be in here by mistake?”
Nicholas raised his eyebrows and walked back to where she was sitting. She pointed at the names and then the folder tab. Nicholas scratched his head, “Hunh, what do you know.” He then picked up the I–J folder and opened it to Eberhardt. “Well, there you go! The E-through-Fs!” He handed her the folder, unconcerned with the mix-up. “I’ll come back in a little.”
After a little, Nicholas did return, and by then Vivian had found what she came for.
“Nicholas, if you could copy these two records for me, that would be lovely. Would you mind?”
“Oh, Looocy.” Nicholas shook his finger at her and gave her another wink.
And it was just that easy. Vivian had gotten exactly what she needed, and more. That poor Mrs. Ada M. Carr was going to have her hands full when she got back to the office, though. Who knows what other mistakes and messes Nicholas made?
Vivian sat in her hotel room in the armchair next to the window, eating her Italian take-out ravioli with the fork she’d had to borrow from the hotel’s kitchen. She supposed the restaurant just assumed she’d be taking her food home to eat in her own kitchen because the bag held only the food and a paper napkin, and what kind of respectable lady stayed by herself in a hotel? She wondered if the cooks in the restaurant were authentic Italians, and if they were, were they using the good sauce recipe?
She put the ravioli and fork down on the little side table and got up to push the window open, brushing garlic bread crumbs from her skirt, which did have faint paw prints on it, thank you very much, Brucie. She’d also gotten a run in her stockings. They’d caught on the corner of the Buick’s door as she was making her escape from Mildred.
Vivian settled back into the chair with an eye roll, a heavy sigh, and a cigarette, which she smoked out the open window as the water filled in the bathtub. It’d been the kind of day that required a cigarette and a proper relaxing soak in the claw-foot tub, where she tried not to think about the birdhouse or her driver’s license, and just focus on the hot water soothing her muscles. Edward—she sighed to herself—you make my ass tired.
With her dentures soaking in a glass next to the sink, she slathered on her face cream, inhaling the familiar scent that almost made her feel like she was at home, but then she heard footsteps in the hallway outside her door that made her tense up until she heard, “Laundry!” yelled at the door of one of the other rooms. Oh, shut up. Vivian stomped over to the door, kicking out the bottom of her nightgown, and shook her fist at the voice in the hallway. She couldn’t get more than a few minutes of quiet in this place. Couples laughing in the hallway, or the man in the room next to her coughing all through the night. What kind of person spent more than a few days here and needed to have his laundry done? Criminals. Gangsters. Husbands who’d been kicked out of their homes for lying to their wives.
Vivian’s eyes rolled up and around and right over to the foot of the armchair where she’d eaten her ravioli and smoked her Lucky Strike. When she’d first gotten back to the room she’d plopped her pocketbook and clipboard there on the floor. The photostat of the second birth record Nicholas had copied for her at the clerk’s office was sticking out of the clipboard. It was the one she’d been looking for, and shouldn’t really have surprised her.
The year of the birth was 1922. Male, six pounds seven ounces. Mother: Mildred Fischer. Father: Edward Dalton. Vivian had already done the math while sitting at the long table in the empty file room. At the time that baby boy was conceived Edward would have been fifteen years old.
Chapter 33
Vivian had more than a couple of things to mull over as she maneuvered the Buick out onto State Street in Syracuse and headed toward the highway that would take her back to Wooster. On the one hand, there was the fury. She hadn’t decided if her fury about Edward having a son was stronger than the fury she’d felt about Edward having had a first wife. Probably not. Once you’d learned that your husband had lied to you about one big deal, it wasn’t too surprising to find that he’d lied about another. It sure didn’t make it any better, though.
And then there was the shock of that other misfiled record Vivian’d found that had just about knocked her right out of that uncomfortable chair. Jeeeeeeesus Christ! She couldn’t believe it. It had dropped her chin right on the floor. And once she’d picked her chin up again, after Nicholas interrupted her, she’d felt something close to what she’d felt when she’d gotten Aunt Catharine’s Irish claddagh ring. Vivian felt satisfaction. No, she felt smug. Smug was better. Vera, always laughing at her, always pointing out her mistakes, making sure everyone knew she’d poured salt into the frosting batter instead of sugar. Irish rogue, stupid, not Irish robe. And tattling about her eavesdropping. Just like her sullen, grumpy mother, Vivian only remembered the bad things, so, yes, when she’d gotten Aunt Catharine’s ring she’d felt smug. And she felt smug now.
Vivian pursed her lips into a tight grin over her perfect set of false teeth as she pressed the gas pedal down to merge onto the highway. My, oh, my, the things you could find at the city clerk’s office in Syracuse. And she didn’t even have her high school diploma! She wondered if she shouldn’t just hang out her own shingle: “Vivian Dalton, Private Investigator,” pleased to meet you. There were a lot of people, and a lot of important people, who would pay big money for the information she now had tucked into the bottom of her suitcase. When you were a big, important person, especially someone like the mayor of Wooster, everyone cared what you did and how you did it, that was for certain.
Vivian not only couldn’t believe what she’d uncovered, she couldn’t believe she was the only one who knew about it. Li’l ole Vivian Dalton. She felt the sense of control again. It almost made up for the confirmation of the mess Edward had made of her life.
Vivian had been missing something for the past couple of months, but didn’t know what that something was. Like an invisible fiber floating on the surface of her eye that she couldn’t grasp and pull away. It was there; she could feel it. Mucking up her life like those damned threads mucked up her mascara when she’d try to pull them out.
Well, she’d met the first Mrs. Dalton, and now that “something” had a face. A face she didn’t bother to put makeup on when she answered her door, but a face just the same. And the birdhouse! The birdhouse had been another sharp jab in Vivian’s side, and it left an ache somewhere between her ribs and her heart as she stared through the windshield at the barren, snowy highway. Maybe he made it for their fifth wedding anniversary, she thought. Wood.
The car radio had gone to static a while back, as she got farther away from Erie, Pennsylvania, where she’d stopped for a cup of coffee and the use of a clean bathroom. Vivian had been so preoccupied with her thoughts that she hadn’t noticed the hissing from the speakers until she was crossing the border into Ohio. She was just reaching for the dial to turn the radio off when she heard a low whine, like a summer mosquito had somehow gotten trapped inside the Buick. It got louder.
Eeeeeeeeeeeee.
She looked in the rearview mirror and saw flashing lights on top of the approaching patrol car. Goddammit. Oh, good goddamned gravy on Christ crackers! Had she been speeding? She’d lost her focus after driving for so many hours, she may have been pressing a little too hard on the accelerator pedal, and now was going to pay for it. Boy, was she going to pay for it. Speeding tickets could run upward of thirty dollars, and
Vivian had already spent nearly all of her cash.
She eased onto the brake and steered the car over onto the snowy shoulder until it came to a complete stop. As she put the gear in park she remembered her driver’s license.
“Oh, goddammit, goddammit!”
She’d seen plenty of car chases in movies, and her glance jumped from the gear shift, to the road that stretched out in front of her, to the rearview mirror, where the officer had closed his car door and was crunching over the snow toward the Buick. Her nerves jerked and her hand hovered over the gear shift. She checked the rearview again. Don’t do it. The figure in the patrol uniform was imposing, the black boots, the visored cap, and the dark sunglasses. Don’t. She didn’t always listen to that knee-jerk voice in her head; the one that piped up first when she needed an answer. But this time it was insistent. Logic (and recent events) told her she just wasn’t built for a quick getaway. She suspected the Buick wasn’t, either. It might even need a push to get out of the snow she’d just rolled into. She blew out a defeated breath and thought she might break down in tears right there. She waited until the officer rapped on the window with his knuckles before she rolled down the window.
“Well, looky here!” the officer cried, his breath crystallizing in the cold air outside the car.
Vivian squinted up through the tears that’d started, into the familiar face that matched the familiar voice.
“Uncle Hugh!” she exclaimed in a delighted gasp as the tears blurred her vision.
“What in the world are you doin’ all the way out here?” he asked. “Are you crying?”
She laughed through the tears, not quite believing her good luck. It was about time she had some of that!
“Vivy,” Uncle Hugh said more seriously, “what are you doing out here?”
And Vivian’s relief at her incredible good luck turned back into tension with that question. She remembered where they were, and her smile faded a little, as she blotted her tears with the fingertips of her gloves. She was supposed to be in Akron, visiting her “sick” sister. She hadn’t expected to have to come up with an excuse other than that one, and that’d just been for Edward and Charlotte. What could she tell her Uncle Hugh? Poor Vera has syphilis. But, even if she could’ve said that about her sister, she was much farther north than Akron, not to mention driving in the wrong direction.
“Ohhh,” she stalled. “Edward . . .”—think, dummy, think—“. . . ’s mother. Edward’s mother. She asked me to go up to Fair Haven. To see about one of their houses.”
That was good. Edward did have a mother, and she did have a couple of houses.
Vivian knew the McGintys were a little sore when it came to matters of property. They’d had to work hard for what they had, and saw Edward as something of a spoiled only-child whose parents owned more houses than they needed. She hoped Uncle Hugh wouldn’t want to know any details beyond that.
“Oh, right,” he said. “You and Edward plannin’ on movin’ up to . . .”
“Uncle Hugh.” Vivian’s teeth had begun to chatter as the wintry air blew into the car through the open window, and the cold air must’ve jump-started her brain. “I lost my driver’s license back in Fair Haven, and I’m a little worried about getting pulled over again. Could you follow me back to Wooster?”
If she were pulled over again it would be a problem. She had only one uncle on the Ohio State Patrol.
“Course I can, honey. Just lemme call dispatch first. And take it easy on that gas pedal!”
He ambled back to his squad car and Vivian rolled up her window, letting out a tiny squeal. Luck of the Irish, today, Vivian.
She waited until she saw Uncle Hugh’s arm wave outside his window, and then pushed gently on the accelerator. The Buick’s whitewall tires spun a little, but then gained traction as the car bumped its way from the shoulder back out onto the highway.
With her uncle following her in his patrol car for the rest of the drive back to Wooster, Vivian finally relaxed, and her mind began to run through the story she would tell Edward when she got home. Then she thought about what she was going to do with the information she had at the bottom of her suitcase about J. Ellis Reed. And then she thought about how she would now need to get a new driver’s license. Oh, for chrissakes. She could picture her license, the small white card with “OPERATOR’S LICENSE” printed in bold uppercase letters at the bottom, and her name and home address typed in a block at the top. The license had her address. And now, so did Mildred.
Chapter 34
“Dad, do you have Aunt Vera’s address? Should we send her a get-well card?” Charlotte had asked. Her father had said no, and they should just wait to see what her mother said about the visit.
After three days in Akron with Aunt Vera, whom her mother rarely spoke to, and whom she didn’t seem to like all that much, her mother came back even angrier than she had been when she found out about Dad’s first marriage. Aunt Vera must have done something to make her even madder.
“How is Aunt Vera doing, Mom?”
“Not good, Charlotte!” her mother yelled, as she opened and slammed cupboard doors in the kitchen. “Not good!”
Charlotte was really curious about whatever was ailing Aunt Vera. Was it terminal? Was it contagious? Was it polio, like her cousin James had a few years ago? She didn’t think grown-ups got polio anymore, it seemed to just be children. But what could be so serious that her mother would go up to Akron for three whole days? Was that what the envelope of money was for? What with her mother’s acid tone and violent abuse of the kitchen cabinets, she didn’t think now was the time to ask.
She went upstairs to her room and looked at the Coca-Cola wall calendar hanging over her desk. Valentine’s Day was Saturday. Charlotte traced a heart with her finger around the “14” square. She wondered what this Valentine’s Day would look like. Fingers crossed it would look like Max Zimmerman, but it might still be too early for that. It was a new thing, Max’s apparent interest, and she didn’t know if he really liked her or just felt sorry for her because of her family’s “unfortunate situation.” Most of her classmates—Sue, Barb, the other girls in the GAA—had really rallied around her after the scandal, knowing she was an accidental victim. Charlotte didn’t like to think of herself as a victim, she just knew she didn’t have the kind of antagonistic personality that would have encouraged anyone to say the word “bastard” out loud. She thought that if this had happened to Sue, there might have been a bit more whispering and probably some nasty comments. People tended to like it when bad things happened to Sue.
Some kids, like Margie Miller and her friends, gossiped about the bigamy story, but didn’t aim any malice at Charlotte herself. Not that Charlotte would have cared very much. Margie was only a freshman. After the “shit a brick” comment Charlotte had overheard, she figured Margie probably did and said a lot of things just to get attention. Because I know people, Charlotte thought to herself, imitating her mother. She would say that her mother probably “knew” people maybe sixty percent of the time that she thought she did. Maybe sixty-five. There was a lot she missed.
Charlotte certainly didn’t expect any displays of romance between her own parents in regard to Valentine’s Day, although her dad had been going over and above to try to please her mother. When her mother had walked in the door with her suitcase, Charlotte’s dad looked up from his newspaper and in a voice she rarely heard him use had said, “Pussycat, pussycat, where have you been?” Charlotte had thought, I’ve been to London to visit the queen, because that was how the rhyme went, but her mother had barked, “Akron, Edward, you know I was in Akron!”
In the Dalton household Valentine’s Day used to mean sour cream cookies. It was the same recipe her mother used for her Christmas cookies, just with different cookie cutters. Heart-shaped and frosted in thick buttercream icing with a single cinnamon Red Hot placed in the center. When Charlotte was in grade school her mother would make an enormous batch of these, and then line a dress box from Beulah Bechtel’
s in wax paper and place the cookies in careful rows, separating the layers with more wax paper, for Charlotte to take to her class. Once Charlotte got older, she stopped taking cookies to school, much to the dismay of her classmates.
This year Charlotte wasn’t sure what to expect. Everything felt electrically charged.
With her ears still ringing from her mother’s shouting and banging around the kitchen, Charlotte went to the bathroom. When she came out she saw that her parents’ bedroom door was ajar, and she could see her mother’s purse sitting open on the bed. Charlotte glanced down the stairs and then tiptoed into the room, and as she drew closer to the bed she saw the little brown notebook peeking out of the top. Had her mother made any new entries? Were there any new discoveries? She quickly flipped through the pages, past the ones she had already seen to a new entry.
I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that he had taken away My sins, even Mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.
This was scribbled in fervent hand. It was not what Charlotte had been expecting, and she looked from the page to the bedroom doorway. She could hear her mother still banging around in the kitchen downstairs. What had prompted this? Aunt Vera’s illness? Was it something she had heard in church? Charlotte was usually the one actually listening to the sermons, but this seemed a little more intense than anything that might be engendered by Reverend Alsop’s mild words of worship. Was her mother doing something sinful that she needed saving from? Charlotte pulled a face at the thought. When Charlotte thought about sinning, she thought about Max Zimmerman, not her mother. She had decided that her parents had “sinned” only one time, in order for her to be conceived. Thank God, and, yuck.
She spent the next hour and a half lying on her back on the floor of her bedroom, listening to Eddie Fisher and constructing imagined conversations and scenarios with Max Zimmerman at the Valentine’s Day dance.
The Operator Page 21