“Un-huh.”
“You think I’m a whore. I’ve been a good wife and mother, Conn. I have been loyal to my husband. I love my son.”
Conn, silhouetted darkly against the window, took his hands from his pockets and clapped silently. She looked away, into the cold fireplace. Her voice seemed to be coming from somewhere else. It was almost as if she were alone.
“Are you married, Conn?”
“Yes.”
“Do you love your wife?”
“No.”
“Did you ever?”
“No.”
“Why did you marry?”
“I knocked her up.”
“So you have children?”
“Yes.”
“Are you a good father?”
“Probably not. I try.”
“How many children?”
“One son.”
“Tommy’s age?”
“Four years younger.”
“You love him.”
Conn was silent for a moment and the question lingered in the sunny room.
“As best I can,” Conn said.
He could feel her in the room. She pulsed out energy that only he could feel, like a dog with a silent whistle. It surprised him. He thought he had gone far enough inside. But here it was, the shock of her energy pulsing in him. April is the cruelest month. He felt something almost like amusement that he was remembering scraps of poetry. Maybe I should buy a mandolin. He moved away from the window and stood by the fireplace with his arms folded. The bright sunlight was on her face as she leaned forward. He was motionless by the fireplace, his soul clenched like a fist against the surge of feeling.
“There has not been a day,” Hadley said softly, “that I have not thought of you, Conn.”
Conn remained intensely motionless.
“You have thought of me,” Hadley said. It was not a question.
Conn nodded.
“With anger,” Hadley said, “certainly.”
Conn nodded again.
“But perhaps with something else?”
“Perhaps.”
Conn’s voice was raspy.
“Things come around, don’t they?” Hadley said. “I betrayed you long ago, and now, years later, and in another country, you may have your revenge.”
“I can’t leave that kid walking around loose,” Conn said. “He’ll do it again.”
“There are doctors,” Hadley said. “There’s a sanitarium in Switzerland.”
“Been preparing for the moment,” Conn said.
“I’ve known he’s not right,” Hadley said.
“What about Maureen Burns?” Conn said.
“I—I’m sorry about the little girl. I truly am. But it is too late to help her. I can’t think about her. I have to help my son.”
“Actually,” Conn said, his voice still hoarse, “you have to get me to help your son.”
“If you will let him go, I will send him to the clinic in Switzerland. He will never harm anyone again.”
“The cure rate is not good for perverts,” Conn said.
“He will be out of harm’s way,” Hadley said.
“And your husband,” Conn said. “What will you tell him?”
“He loves me,” Hadley said. “I can get him to do what I want.”
Conn didn’t speak for a while. The silence explored the room slowly and filled it the way water rises in a bucket.
“It’s my case. I could bury it,” Conn said. “You swear the kid was here that night. I believe you. I write the report. I don’t mention the underpants. Or the confession. Or the gun. Or the playhouse in Weston. The report gets filed. It’s done.”
“Will you do that?” Hadley said. Her voice was hushed.
Conn didn’t answer. Hadley got up from her chair and stood in front of him. She put her hands on his shoulders. Her face was upturned and close to his. Her lips seemed glistening. He could feel the involuntary contraction of his muscles, when she touched him.
“Will you?” she said. Her face was so close to his that her lips brushed his as she spoke.
“Better clean that gun,” Conn said. “The old man sees it, he’ll know it’s been fired.”
She nodded.
“You will,” she said.
Conn knew he wasn’t trembling. He knew he was as still as a boulder. But he felt as if he were trembling violently. He kept his arms folded, not touching her. She moved her hands down along his arms and unfolded them and pressed herself inside them, and pressed her mouth on his and put her arms around his waist. She moved against him so that the whole resilient sleek length of her insisted upon him. And he broke. The passion so silently contained for twenty-six years engulfed him and he held her hard against him and kissed her blindly.
The kiss lasted for a long time. Then she moved her mouth away from his, and put her head back a little, still thrusting her body hard against him, and said, “Maybe it isn’t too late, Conn.”
He held to her as if to lose her was to drown and said nothing.
“My husband will be home,” she said.
Conn didn’t move.
“But I could meet you somewhere … tomorrow.”
She pressed her cheek against his, and rubbed her hands along the long muscles of his back.
“Will you help me with my son?”
She could see herself, her face pressed to his, in the mirror above the fireplace. Her lipstick was smeared, her mouth already puffed a little from the ferocity of his kiss, her eyes were wide open.
Conn spoke finally. His voice was very hoarse.
“Sure,” he said. “Why not?”
Over his shoulder, in the mirror, behind him, she watched herself smile.
Conn
Conn walked across Mt. Vernon Street, and down Joy Street. He paused for traffic at Beacon Street and then crossed and went down the stairs into the Common.
Fool me once, he thought, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
He was walking slowly on the long path across the Common, the one that ran the diagonal and ended on Boylston Street near Park Square.
I should send that kid over.
He could still smell her, feel the press of her against him, taste her lipstick. He was barely there, in Boston, on the Common, heading for Boylston Street. There seemed to be no sound around him. The pigeons flocked silently about him and broke like scattered leaves as he walked through them. The life of the park around him seemed phantasmagorical. Others walking the long path seemed as soundless as ghosts. Cars drifted faintly along the borders of the park like memories. The barely budded trees were angular and still in the pale air of the late afternoon, and the squirrels glided translucently from limb to limb.
She was going to let them hang me.
He imagined her naked. Or was he remembering? Imagination and memory mingled like vapors in a bell jar. He was permeated with the image of something he had never seen. Hadley at forty-six, perfumed with affluence, enriched with station, elegant and compliant, silk lingerie, stockings, breasts, thighs, the slope of her belly. The touch of her mouth. Frightened, vulnerable.
Conn reached Boylston Street. He paused. He had walked this way aimlessly. He had no thought on where next to walk. It had been years since he thought of Dublin. Boston was the world he knew. Dublin was remote. But now, standing on Boylston Street, he looked at the old familiar city as if it had just been rough-formed of primordial clay. The yet ungreening grass of the Common looked raw. He had a moment of vertigo, suffused with feeling he could not contain.
I’ll do it again, he thought. I have to, God help me. He stood motionless at the end of the long path, as if he needed to get his bearings. He smiled at his own near prayer. He hasn’t done a hell of a job so far. Silently, the old colonial city wound down around him like a slow carousel when the music had stopped and the machinery was coasting to a halt.
Conn arched his back, and stretched his neck, and flexed his shoulders.
Softly he said, “Once more unto t
he breach, dear friends,” and laughed out loud and turned and walked back the way he had come.
Conn
At ten o’clock in the morning he had already checked into a room at the Parker House, and was waiting for her in the lobby, by the elevators, when she came in wearing a wide-brimmed spring hat and white gloves. Her New-Look suit was dark blue, the skirt to mid-calf. Her silk blouse was white. She wore white high-heeled shoes. She carried a white straw purse. Around her neck was a stone marten wrap. She smiled when she reached him and put her arm out. He took it and without a word guided her into the elevator.
“Five,” he said to the operator, and they stood in silence as the elevator rose.
Their room had flowered wallpaper, and a double bed with a rose-colored satin spread, and one window that looked out over School Street at King’s Chapel. On a small table by the window was a bottle of whiskey and a bucket of ice and a siphon of seltzer.
“Would you like a drink?” he said.
“Yes.”
While he made two drinks, she took off her stone marten wrap and draped it over the back of a chair, and removed her big hat and placed it on the dresser. He handed her a drink. They touched glasses. And drank.
“Thomas has agreed that Tommy go away to school in Switzerland,” Hadley said.
There was a small armchair next to the table by the window, but neither of them sat in it. Nor did they sit on the bed. They stood, drink in hand, facing each other under the blank beady inspection of the stone martens’ artificial gaze.
“Does he know why?” Conn said.
“No. I told him that Tommy was having some trouble at school and the school had recommended it.”
“Does he believe you?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. He acquiesced. Thomas is remote from his son.”
Conn drank some of the whiskey. Only a small drink. He did not want to miss any of this.
“And the school will take him?”
“Yes. I wired them today.”
“What if they don’t take him?”
“I told you,” Hadley said. “I’ve been preparing for this. I have done all the research. They are already committed to take him. And treat him.”
“And contain him?”
“Yes. It’s what this school is for.”
There was a silence. Hadley drank a substantial swallow of her drink. Her dark lipstick marked the glass.
“Maybe they’ll cure him,” Conn said. “It happens.”
“Maybe.”
Hadley drank again.
“Can we make a bargain?” she said.
“I think so,” Conn said.
“We can be what we were. We can be lovers. But my son is spared, and my husband doesn’t learn of it.”
“Your son or us?” Conn said.
Hadley finished her drink and turned and made herself another one.
“Both,” Hadley said. She was much calmer today.
Conn nodded. He took a very small sip of his drink. He too was calm. He felt a stillness at the bone, as if his anticipatory physical self were holding its breath.
“Promise?” Hadley said.
He nodded again.
“Say it,” Hadley insisted.
“I promise.”
She had her glass half raised to her lips and she studied him over the rim for a moment.
“I trust you,” she said.
She put the glass on the table by the window and turned back toward him and smiled. Wordlessly she took the rope of pearls from her neck and put them on the bureau. She took off the suit jacket and hung it over the chair, covering the unblinking stone martens. She unbuttoned the cuffs of her blouse and then the blouse itself and took it off and folded it neatly and laid it on the bureau beside her hat. She wore a white bra with small scallops of white lace on it. The skin of her arms was smooth. Her shoulders were firm, and the white straps of the bra made very little indentation. She stepped out of her shoes, and pushed them carefully under the table, one of them standing, the other on its side. Her skirt had a button and a side zipper which she released. She made a small movement with her hips and let the skirt slide to the floor. She was wearing a white half slip with lace at the hem. She bent and picked up the skirt and smoothed it, and laid it over the jacket on the back of the chair. She tucked her thumbs inside the waist of the slip and slid it down, did the same hip movement again, and let it fall around her ankles. She stepped out of it, and left it where it fell.
Conn watched her gravely. He made no move to undress. His face showed nothing.
Under the slip she wore white silk panties, hose, and a white garter belt. The panties had lace at the leg openings.
She paused and picked up her drink and swallowed half of it. Her eyes met his, and she seemed to stand more erect as if she were proud to display herself in her elegant white underclothes. She drank again and put the nearly empty glass back on the table. She reached behind her and unhooked her bra and hunched her shoulders and let the bra slide forward down her arms. It dropped to the floor and she let it lie there next to her slip. She straightened. Her breasts seemed unaffected by motherhood or time. Her breasts looked to Conn as they had when he first saw them in the garden of the house on Clare Street twenty-six years ago. Her lips were wet from the whiskey and soda, and they glistened. Her eyes seemed to have gotten larger and darker, the pupils widening until there was barely any iris. She looked at him and her face was serious. Their eyes held. She slid her underpants down her thighs, bending forward to guide them past her knees. Then she straightened and let them drop and stepped out of them. Except for stockings and garter belt she was naked.
“You look like a French postcard,” Conn said. The ice in his drink had melted. He didn’t want the drink anyway. He put the glass on the bedside table.
She smiled for the first time.
“You ain’t seen nothing yet,” she said.
She carefully unsnapped the garters from the tops of her flesh-tone nylons. The stockings began to sag. She reached behind her and unhooked the garter belt and dropped it onto the table. Then, balancing first on one leg, then on the other, she got out of her stockings. He noticed that there was polish on her toenails. At one point she seemed to need help with her balance, putting a hand on the back of the chair.
She stood erect, facing him. Except for her rings, she was stark naked. She seemed blonder than he remembered her in Dublin.
“I’m going to make another drink,” she said. “Would you like one?”
“No, thank you,” Conn said.
“While I’m mixing it, perhaps you would like to take your clothes off, or have you grown modest in your middle years?”
Conn smiled slowly.
“I have a lot to be modest about,” he said, and took his gun off his belt and put it, still holstered, on the bedside table.
They were naked together, facing one another in the quiet hotel room.
“Adam and Eve,” he said.
“After the Fall,” she said.
She took a long drink of her whiskey and put the glass on the table and stepped to him. She touched his shoulder where the scar of the old bullet wound remained.
“I remember,” she said.
He nodded. They were so close that her nipples brushed his chest. He was motionless. She put her arms around his waist and pressed herself against him.
“Conn,” she said, “let go.”
She spoke with her lips brushing his and then she kissed him hard and opened her mouth and his arms tightened around her. After a time she pulled her mouth away from his.
“Too tight,” she gasped. “You’ll hurt me.”
He knew how strong he was. He knew he could squeeze harder if he wished. He continued to hold her tightly for a moment, then relented, letting his hands rest quietly on her buttocks.
“We should lie down,” she said.
“Yes.”
On the bed beside her, Conn felt frightened. As if he were about to step off a ledge in the dark.
But the feeling was wan compared to the rich insistence of desire.
Her lovemaking was as expert as his. Conn registered this dimly as they explored one another on the bed. His expertise was hard earned. Years of experience. Where had she learned hers? But the question buried itself, as his fear had buried itself, lost in the pulsating realization of a quarter century’s containment. She had no inhibitions. Nothing she would not do. Nothing she did not know how to do. She was still the woman who had liked to make love in odd places, thrilled by the danger of discovery. Some of the time she whispered profanely to him, urging him, entirely conscious of his every response. Some of the time she seemed lost in a drama of her own, asking him what he was doing to her, not talking to him, he knew, speaking only to enact a private passion. He didn’t care. He had his own private passions and she was first among them.
“I want you to fuck me in the chair,” she whispered.
“Anywhere at all.”
She made love skillfully in the small armchair, her back arched, her head thrown back moaning as if in labor. The clothes she had so carefully draped’ across the back of it fell to the floor in a tangle, the stone martens curled like weasels in a tangle of silk and linen. When it was over she got up quickly and went into the bathroom and ran the water in the tub.
Conn
Knocko was putting most of a glazed doughnut into his mouth in front of a doughnut shop on Clarendon Street near Warren Avenue.
“I was with a woman the other day,” Conn said. “Claims she’s got no sex life. Says she and her husband do it about once a year to celebrate the Fourth.”
Knocko grinned at him as he swallowed his doughnut.
“You been shagging my old lady?”
“You must have some kind of sex life,” Conn said. “All those children.”
Knocko peered into the white paper sack on the car seat between them.
“That’s the problem,” Knocko said. “Faith’s afraid if I fucking sneeze she’ll get pregnant.”
“You could take precautions.”
“Not if you’re as Catholic as Faith is.”
Conn shrugged.
“Anyway,” he said. “This woman I’m with, she knows stuff would make you blush.”
All Our Yesterdays Page 12