Christine Falls

by Benjamin Black

  “Right-oh, Sister,” Maisie answered, and giving Quirke another humorously big-eyed look she bent to the basket and trundled off with it.

  Sister Dominic, increasingly anxious to be rid of him, was edging along the wall towards the stained-glass vestibule through which he had been admitted. Following after her, he turned the brim of his hat slowly in his fingers, as she had turned the invisible Rosary in hers. He was convinced, despite the nun’s denial, that Christine Falls had been here at least for some time before Dolly Moran took her to the house in Stoney Batter. He pictured the girl trailing along these corridors in a mouse-gray smock like Maisie’s, her dyed yellow hair turning back to its original nondescript brown, her knuckles red and broken, and the child already stirring restlessly inside her. How could Mal have condemned her to such a place?

  “As I say,” Sister Dominic was saying, “we had no Christine Falls here. I would remember. I remember all our girls.”

  “What would have happened to her baby, if she had it here?”

  The nun kept her gaze directed in the vicinity of his knees. She was still sidling towards the exit and he was forced to keep moving in her wake. “She wouldn’t have,” she said.

  “What?”

  “This is a laundry, Mr. Quirke, not a lying-in hospital.”

  Spirited for a moment, she allowed herself to look him defiantly in the face, then lowered her eyes again.

  “So where would it have been born?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know. The girls who come to us have…they have already…given birth.”

  “And what would have become of the babies they would have left behind them when they were sent here?”

  “They would have gone to an orphanage, of course. Or often they-” She stopped herself. They had arrived at the glass door of the vestibule and with undisguised relief she pushed it open and stood back to let him go through. He paused in the doorway, however, and stood facing her. He tried by staring hard at her to make her yield, to make her give him something, however little it might be, but she would not. “These girls, Mr. Quirke,” she said coldly, “they find themselves in trouble, with no one to help. Often the families reject them. Then they are sent to us.”

  “Yes,” he said drily, “and I’m sure you are a great comfort to them.”

  The transparent azure irises of her eyes seemed to whiten for a moment, as if a gas had formed briefly behind them. Was it anger that was flaring there? The stained-glass panels of the door at her back had the look of a lurid, storm-riven sky, and he was startled and not a little appalled to find himself picturing her naked, a stark white impassioned figure by El Greco.

  “We do our best,” she said, “in the circumstances. It’s all any of us can do.”

  “Yes, Sister,” he said, in a forced contrite voice, embarrassed as that conjured image of her nakedness hovered still, refusing to fade. “I understand.”

  ONCE OUTSIDE HE TURNED AND MADE HIS WAY DOWN THE HILL IN THE direction of the river. The sky was heavy with a seamless weight of putty-colored cloud that looked to be hardly higher than the rooftops of the houses on either side of the road, and flurries of heavy wet snow scudded before the wind. He turned up his coat collar and pulled low the brim of his hat. Why was he persisting like this? he asked himself. What were they to him, Christine Falls, or Christine Falls’s bastard, or Dolly Moran, who was murdered? What was Mal to him, for that matter? And yet he knew he could not leave it behind him, this dark and tangled business. He had some kind of duty, he owed some kind of debt, to whom, he was not sure.

  20

  MOSS MANOR’S FAMOUS CRYSTAL GALLERY COULD ACCOMMODATE three hundred people and still not seem overcrowded. The Irish millionaire who had built the house, back in the 1860s, had handed his architect a picture of the Crystal Palace in London torn from an illustrated magazine and ordered him to copy it. The result was a huge, ungainly construction of iron and glass, resembling the eye of a giant insect, fixed to the southeastern flank of the house and glaring out across Massachusetts Bay toward Provincetown. Within, the great room was steam-heated by a latticework of underfloor piping, and palms grew in profusion, and dozens of species of orchids, and nameless dark-green creepers that wound their tendrils around the iron pillars that were themselves molded in the shape of slender tree trunks shooting up dizzyingly to spread in sprays of metal fronds under the gleaming canopy of glass a hundred feet above. Today, long trestle tables were set up under the palms, bearing heaping platters of festive food, sliced turkey and ham and goose, and silver tubs of potato salad, and thick slices of fruitcake, and glistening plum puddings shaped like anarchists’ bombs. Bowls of fruit punch were ranged at intervals along the tables, and there were ranks of bottled beer for the men. From a stage at one side a band of musicians in white tuxedos was blaring out show tunes, and couples were dancing restrainedly between the tables. Sprigs of plastic holly were tucked incongruously among the palm leaves, and streamers of colored crepe paper were strung from trunk to trunk and from pillar to metal pillar, and above the stage a white satin banner pinned with red block letters wished all the staff of Crawford Transport a Merry Xmas. Outside, the already darkening afternoon was dense with frost smoke, and the ornamental gardens were hidden under snow and the ocean was a leaden line in front of a bank of lavender-tinted fog. Now and then a pane-sized square of snow would slide from the roof and burst into powder and cascade in eerie silence down the glass wall and disappear into the drifts that had already built up at the edges of the lawn, white into white.

  The party had hardly been going an hour and already Andy Stafford had drunk too many bottles of beer. Claire as usual had wanted to be at a table at the front, to see everything that was going on, but he had insisted on getting as far away as he could get from that band-Glenn Miller types, average age a hundred or so-and now he was sitting on his own, glowering at his wife where she was dancing with that son-of-a-bitch Joe Lanigan. The baby was in her bassinet at his feet, though he did not understand how she could sleep with all the noise going on. Claire had said he would get used to the kid in time, but the months had passed and he still felt that his life had been invaded. It was like when he was a kid himself and his cousin Billy came to live with them after his old man blew his brains out with a hunting rifle. The baby was always there, just like cousin Billy had been, with his farm boy’s big hands and straw-colored eyelashes, watching and listening and breathing on everything.

  Joe Lanigan was a trucker like Andy, a big, freckle-faced Irishman with a boxy head and arms as long as an ape’s. He danced like a hillbilly, lifting his knees high and lunging down sideways until his fist with Claire’s hand folded in it almost banged on the floor. Andy eyed them sourly. Claire was talking nonstop-what about?-and grinning in that way she did when she was excited, showing her upper gums. The number came to an end with a brassy shout from the trumpet, and Lanigan stepped back and made an exaggerated, sweeping bow, and Claire pressed her clasped hands to her breast and put her head to one side and batted her eyelashes, like she was some heroine out of the silent movies, and she and Lanigan both laughed. Lanigan went back to his table, where that sidekick of his whose name Andy could not remember, a little fat guy with slicked-back hair who looked like Lou Costello, was sitting with a couple of pizza-waitress types. As Lanigan sat down he glanced back over his shoulder at Claire making her way between the tables toward Andy, smiling to herself, and he said something, and the fat guy and the two broads laughed, and the fat guy looked across at Andy with what seemed a pitying sort of grin.

  “Oh, I’m dizzy!” Claire said, arriving at the table.

  She sat down opposite him and swung her knees in under the table and lifted a hand to touch her hair, still being the movie star. She did not seem dizzy to him. Her blouse had damp patches under the arms. He stood up, saying he was going to get another beer, and she asked in her sweetest little voice if he did not think that maybe he should take it easy, and even though she made herself smile as she said it he scowled at her. Th
en she said that since he was up he could get her a glass of punch. As he was walking away she leaned forward eagerly and peered into the bassinet with another one of those loony smiles of hers.

  He knew he should not do it, but when he had got the drinks he made a detour that would bring him past Lanigan’s table. He stopped and said hello. Lanigan, whose back was to him, made a show of being surprised, and swiveled his big square head and looked up at him, and asked him how he was doing, and called him pal. Andy said he was doing all right; he was being friendly, not making any big point about anything. The others, the two women and the fat guy-Cuddy, that was the little creep’s name, suddenly he remembered it-were watching him from across the table; they seemed to be trying not to grin. Cuddy’s womany little pursed-up mouth twitched at one side.

  “Hey, Cuddy,” Andy said, still keeping it light, keeping it calm. “See something funny, do you?” The fat man raised his eyebrows, which were heavy and black and looked painted on. “I said,” Andy repeated, making his voice go hard, “do you see something funny?”

  Cuddy, too near to laughter to risk answering, looked at Lanigan, who answered for him. “Hey, hey,” he said, lightly laughing himself, “take it easy, Stafford. Where’s your Christmas spirit?”

  One of the women giggled and leaned sideways to the other one until their shoulders met. The one who had laughed was large and blowsy, her big front teeth flecked with lipstick; the other was thin and Spanish-looking, showing a bony expanse of broiled chicken breast in the loose V-shaped neck of her blouse.

  “I’m just asking the question,” Andy said, ignoring the women as if they were not there. “Do either of you guys see anything funny around here?”

  People at nearby tables had turned and were staring at him, all of them smiling, thinking he was making some joke. He heard someone say, Look, it’s Audie Murphy, and someone else gave a stifled shout of laughter.

  “Listen, Stafford,” Lanigan said, starting to sound nervous, “we don’t want any trouble, not here, not today.”

  Where, then, Andy was about to ask, and when? but felt a touch on his arm and turned quickly, defensively. Claire was beside him, smiling. In her bright little baby-doll voice she said:

  “That punch is going to be warm before I get to taste it.”

  He did not know what to do. People three tables away were looking at him now. He saw himself as they would see him, in his white shirt and jeans and cowboy boots, with that glass of pink stuff in his hand and a nerve jumping in his cheek. Lanigan had turned sideways on his chair and was looking up at Claire, signaling to her silently to take her little man away and keep him out of trouble.

  “Come on, honey,” she murmured. “Let’s go.”

  When they were back at their table Andy’s left knee began to twitch up and down very fast, making the table vibrate. Claire was pretending nothing had happened. She sat with her chin propped on a crook’d finger, watching the dancers and humming, and weaving her shoulders to the rhythm. He imagined himself snatching the punch glass from her hand and breaking it on the edge of the table and thrusting the shattered rim into her defenseless soft white throat. He had done it once before, long ago, when he slashed the face of that high school prom queen who had laughed at him when he had asked her to dance, which was another reason for him never to go back to Wilmington.

  JOSH CRAWFORD WAS IN ALMOST A LIGHTHEARTED MOOD TODAY. HE liked to savor the fruits of his success, and the sight of his staff disporting themselves amid the greenery in this glass pleasure dome was sweet to him, he who these days had to taste so much of bitterness. He knew there would be few more such occasions; this might even be, for him, the last. The air around him grew thinner by the day; he sucked at it in a kind of slow panic, as if he were slowly sinking underwater with only a tube to breathe through that was itself becoming increasingly fine, like one of those glass tubes he remembered from his school days, few and long ago though his school days had been-what were they called, those tubes? He found in a strange way comical the process of his accelerating dissolution. His lungs were so congested he was swelling up and turning blue, like some species of South American frog. The skin on his legs and feet was as taut and transparent as a prophylactic; he joked with the nurse when she was cutting his nails, warning her to be careful not to puncture him with the scissors or they might both end up in trouble. Who would have thought that time’s betrayal would strike him as funny, at the end?

  He rapped his knuckles now on the arm of the wheelchair to make the nurse stop pushing and attend him. When she leaned down from behind him and put her face beside his he caught her pleasing, starchy smell; he supposed it must in part be a smell he was remembering from his long-dead and long-forgotten mother. So much of his concern now was for the past, since there was so little of the future left to him.

  “What’s the name of those things that chemists use,” he said hoarsely, “those thin glass tubes that you put your finger on the top of to keep the liquid held inside-what do you call them?”

  She gave him that skeptical, half-smiling, sidelong look that she did when she suspected he was teasing her. “Tubes?” she said.

  “Yes, glass tubes.” His patience was fraying already, and he beat again at the arm of the chair. “You’re a nurse, damn it, you’re supposed to know these things.”

  “Well, I don’t.”

  She straightened, disappearing behind him, and began to push him forward again. He could not stay angry at her for long. He liked people who stood up to him, although with her, he believed, it was less a case of courage than of stupidity: she did not seem to realize just how dangerous he was, or how vindictive he could be. Or maybe she did know, and did not care? If no man is a hero to his valet, he thought, then maybe no man is a monster to his nurse. On her first day at the house he had offered her a hundred dollars to show him her breasts. Fifty bucks apiece! She had stared at him and then laughed, and, stung, and unexpectedly discomfited, he had tried to bluster his way out of it, telling her it was something he asked all his female staff to do, by way of a test, which by refusing she had passed. That was the first time he had seen that archly mocking, faint smile of hers. “Who says I’m refusing?” she said. “I might have shown you them for nothing, if you’d asked me nicely.” But he never did ask again, nicely or otherwise, and she had not repeated the offer.

  The couples at the edge of the dance floor had noticed him by now, and they had stopped dancing and stood watching his approach, awkwardly together, two by two, like children, he thought contemptuously, in their gaudy party outfits. Unlike the nurse, they knew his reputation, and what he could do, and had done, when provoked. One of the women began tentatively to applaud, then her partner joined in, and then so did the rest of the stalled dancers, and after a few moments the great glass hall was filled with a storm of clapping. It was a sound he hated; it made him think of penguins, or was it seals? He lifted a hand in a limp, papal gesture, nodding acknowledgment to one side and then the other, wishing they would stop this awful racket, in which the band members now joined, rising to their feet and launching with their instruments into a string of farts and whistles that he dimly recognized as a parody of “Hail to the Chief.” At length, when the last, would-be ingratiator had let fall his or her hands, and the band had sat down again, he made an attempt to address the crowd, to wish them the happiness of the season, but of course his voice failed him, and then he began to cough, and soon he was doubled over on himself, almost falling forward out of the chair, gasping and shuddering and dribbling mucus on the blanket covering his knees, and the nurse was fumbling with the stopcock of the oxygen tank that was slung under the chair between the wheels, and then a hand was laid on his shoulder and a voice said:

  “You called, dear?”

  ROSE CRAWFORD WAS A HANDSOME WOMAN, AND SHE KNEW IT. SHE was tall and slim with narrow shoulders and a narrow waist and a panther’s stalking stride. Her eyes were large and black and lustrous and her cheekbones high-it was rumored she had Indian blood-and s
he looked down upon the world in general with undisguised, sardonic amusement. Josh Crawford liked to boast that she was his most prized possession and joked that he had swapped a Rembrandt for her, though there were some who thought it might not be entirely a joke. She had appeared in his life seemingly out of nowhere, sporting a ring on her wedding finger with a diamond set in it that was surely the size, someone had said, of Josh’s prostate. There had been a previous Mrs. Crawford-two, in fact, the first of whom had died-but she had been bundled away into a fancy nursing home and now no one could remember clearly what she had looked like, the memory of her eclipsed entirely by the far more ritzy Rose. It seemed something out of a fairy tale, or maybe one of those stories out of the Bible, more like, the union of this hard but beautiful woman and the bad old man. People looked at Josh Crawford looking at his so much younger wife and were reconciled for a moment to being not as rich as he was or as good-looking as she.

  Rose took the plastic face mask brusquely from the nurse’s hands and pressed it over Josh’s nose and mouth. The hiss of oxygen in the rubber pipe always made her think of snakes-with brittle affection she often called Josh her old cobra. Today, crouched hugely in the wheelchair with rounded shoulders and gasping into the muzzle of the mask, he resembled more a wounded moose. The interrupted dancers had been gaping at him with anxious interest as he struggled for breath-he was their meal ticket, after all, she reflected, though he certainly did not overfeed them-but at one sweeping glance from those inky eyes of hers they turned hastily away.

  Josh tore the mask from his face and flung it aside. “Get me out of here!” he snarled, gasping. He was furious at being seen like this by the workers. The nurse made to take the handles of the chair but he twisted about and swung a fist at her. “Not you!” There was white froth on his lips. Rose smiled at the nurse in her blithe, bland way and turned the chair about and set off toward the archway that led into the house proper. Josh was scrabbling now with his nails at the leather armrests of the chair and muttering to himself some word that sounded like pipit. Birds, Rose asked herself-why was he talking about birds? From the dropsical caverns of his chest he produced a deep, rolling rumble that she recognized as laughter. When he spoke again she had to lean forward and put her face beside his, as the nurse had done earlier.