“The c-c-c-curse. Didn’t Jackie tell you about it?”
“About a curse? No.”
“We have a family c-c-c-curse. Doesn’t every family have one?”
“Probably. Ours was my mother. Tell me about your family curse, Bobby.”
He stood up and started pacing as he spoke, his hands working on each other as if out of control. “It’s from the c-c-c-company. The c-c-c-company wasn’t always named Reddman Foods. That name came in only when our great-grandfather gained control. Before that it was called the E. J. P-P-P-Poole Preserve Company. That was before Great-grandfather’s special method of pressure pickling took the country by storm, when they mainly canned tomatoes and carrots and other produce. Apparently Elisha P-P-P-Poole was a drunk and the company wasn’t profitable before he sold out to Great-grandfather, but as soon as the company started selling the new pickles and turning a profit P-P-P-Poole turned bitter and accused Great-grandfather of stealing the company from him. He made a couple of drunken scenes, wrote letters to the police and the newspapers, threatened the family, and made a general n-n-n-nuisance of himself. But it never got him any stock back or affected the company’s profits. Eventually he killed himself. Great-grandfather did the charitable thing and took care of his family, giving the widow an annuity and her and her daughter a place to live, but he always denied stealing the company. Said P-P-P-Poole was drunk and deluded, that the lost opportunity drove him mad.” Bobby shrugged. “Supposedly, before he died, he c-c-c-cursed Great-grandfather and all his generations.”
“How did Poole kill himself?” I asked.
“He hanged himself from the rafters of his tenement,” he said. He looked at me with his eyes widening. “M-m-m-maybe it really was the curse that got her.” And then he laughed, a scary sniveling little laugh, and as he laughed his eyes dropped down from my face to my crotch again before he turned his head away. I looked down at my fly. Still zipped.
“Is there a problem with my trousers?” I said. “Because you keep on looking down there as if there was a problem.”
With his head turned away and his hands still kneading one another he said, “I j-j-j-just thought you might be l-l-l-lonely up here on the th-th-th-third floor. I th-th-th-think Caroline’s asleep already d-d-d-downstairs. One too many M-M-M-Manhattans. So if you want I c-c-c-could keep you c-c-c-company.”
“Ahh,” I said, suddenly getting the whole idea of his visit. I wondered how he had gotten the wrong idea about me. Was it my suit, my haircut? It must have been my haircut; the barber this time was a little too enthusiastic with the electric clippers. “I’m just fine, actually, and a little tired, so if you’ll excuse me.” I slapped my legs and stood up.
“I didn’t m-m-m-mean, I’m s-s-s-sorry, I-I-I-I…”
“It’s all right, Bobby,” I said, as I held the door open for him. “Don’t worry about it. I’m glad we had this chance to talk.”
He stepped through the door and then turned around. “I like g-g-g-girls too.”
“All right.”
“I d-d-d-do. Really.”
“It’s all right, Bobby.”
“It’s j-j-j-just they don’t come over much.”
“I understand, Bobby. Really. And you don’t have to worry, I won’t tell a soul.”
2. Molto Vivace
I shut off the floor lamp and stripped off my pants and crawled back into the slightly sodden bed, staring once again at the decrepit ceiling. I thought of the drunken Elisha Poole, railing at his missed opportunity for a fortune, blaming Claudius Reddman, blaming the alcohol that deadened his predatory instincts, blaming capitalism itself. I wondered where his heirs were, how they were faring. They had probably grown to be pathetic money-maddened lawyers, searching the byways of America for a case, just one case, to make them as rich as they were meant to be. Even so, they were probably in better shape than Claudius’s heirs. Jacqueline, hanging dead just as Elisha Poole himself had ended by hanging dead. Or Bobby, his tongue twisted by the pressures of his family history, sexually confused, finding his meaning in the blinking numbers of a computer monitor. Or Caroline, irrationally terrified of cats, seeking solace in a perpetual state of arrested rebellion. Or Eddie, gambling away his fortune with a fat, mob-invested, now sadly dead and soon to be buried bookie.
Edward Shaw had turned out to be a short man, heavy not of the bone but of the flesh, with a cigarette constantly in his sneering lips. His eyes were round and sort of foolish, filled with the false bravado of a loser who thinks he’s ready for a comeback even though the final bell has rung. His left arm was bent stiffly at his side and I smiled when I saw it, thinking it unexpectedly wise of Calvi’s men to have left Eddie’s check-signing arm whole. Through the entirety of that evening, through the insipid cocktail conversation, through the nauseating dinner, through the smell of those moldy cigars the men smoked in the mite-ridden library, a rancid smell of old towels burning we endured as we talked of investments and Walker Cup golf and how the Wister yacht ran aground in the sandbars off Mount Desert Island in 1938, through it all I kept my eye on Eddie, and he seemed to keep his eye on me. I tried to talk with him more than once, but I never got the chance. He successfully avoided me, as if he knew my mission there was to smoke him out. Whenever I approached to say hello he smiled tightly and slipped away. I had that effect on people, yes, but Eddie’s reticence was more sinister than mere distaste at being bored by a man in a suit. It seemed to denote a wild sense of guilt, or at least so I hoped.
I was thinking of it all when I heard another knock at my door, this one less hesitant, quicker, full of some unnatural energy at that late hour. Again I grappled on my pants. In my doorway, clutching a painted canvas, I found Kendall Shaw, Eddie Shaw’s wife.
Kendall was a thin pretty woman with straight honey hair cut in an outdoorsy style you often see on women who think the great outdoors is the space between their front doors and their Volvos. She wore a red wool dress that hugged her tight around aerobically trimmed hips. As soon as I opened the door she started speaking. She spoke breathlessly and fast.
“I hope I’m not bothering you, and I know it’s late, but I had something I just had to show you. It’s so exciting that you’re an artist and a friend of Jackie’s. I guess Jackie introduced you to Caroline. Caroline is just wild, but so much fun too, don’t you think? We were all so disappointed about her movie. First she was raving with excitement and then, poof, she pulled the plug. That is so like her. She collapsed tonight in her old room. Too much to drink, poor dear. It always seems to happen when she comes home. Do you meditate? Jackie always used to talk about meditation. I tried to meditate but I kept on thinking of all the things I needed to buy. Maybe it was because my mantra was MasterCard. So have you met Frank yet? Frank Harrington, he’s also a friend of Caroline’s, an old friend. What a handsome man, clever too. You two should meet. So tell me about your painting. Where have you shown? I paint some too. Mostly landscapes. I’m not very good, heavens, but I find it so soothing. I brought one to show you. Tell me what you think, and be honest, but please not too honest.”
It didn’t take me long to figure out how it was that Kendall stayed so thin. The painting she had handed me was a landscape all right, an imaginary view painted right from the instructions on the PBS painting shows, with spindly trees and moss-covered rocks and majestic peaks in the background. It was actually pretty good for what it was and it could have proudly held its own on any Holiday Inn wall. “I like it,” I lied.
“Do you, really?” she shrieked. “That is marvelous, simply marvelous. It’s a gift, from me. I insist. I have others if you want to see them. You must. Believe it or not this isn’t even a real place. I dredged the landscape out of my imagination. It’s so much more psychologically authentic that way, don’t you think?”
Something she had said in that first torrent of words interested me. “You mentioned a Franklin Harrington. Who is he?”
“Oh, Franklin. An old family friend, the family banker now. He was suppo
sed to come tonight but had to cancel. I thought you knew. I was sure you did. He’s Caroline’s fiancé. Oh my, I hope I haven’t spilled anything I shouldn’t have.”
“No,” I said. “I’m sure you didn’t.” I turned my attention back to the painting, holding it before me as if I were studying it with great seriousness. “You know what this work reminds me of? That special place that Jackie used to talk about, where she would go in her most peaceful meditations.”
“How extraordinary.” Her eyes opened wide. “Maybe Jackie and I were linked in some mystical way.”
“Maybe you were,” I said. “That would be so cool. You know, sometimes people who are connected in mystical ways can feel each other’s emotions. On the night she died, did you feel anything?”
“To tell you the absolute truth, Victor, I did have a premonition. I was in North Carolina, vacationing, when I felt a sense of dread come over me. Actually I thought it was Edward’s plane. He flew back that morning, for business, and on the beach I had this horrible sense that his plane had gone down. I was so relieved to hear from him, you couldn’t imagine. But that was the day that Jackie died. You think I was getting those horrible images of death from her?”
“I don’t doubt it,” I said.
“How marvelously strange.”
“Tell me, Kendall. What was the business your husband flew north for that day?”
“Oh, some real estate thing. Edward dabbles more than anything else. He’s waiting for the inheritance so that he can buy a football team. He’s just a boy like that. And do you want to know something else very interesting about my husband, Victor? But I have to whisper it.”
“Okay, sure,” I said, anxious to hear whatever other incriminating facts she wanted to tell me about Eddie Shaw.
Kendall looked left down the hallway, then right, then she leaned forward until I could smell the Chanel. “My husband,” she whispered, “is fast asleep.”
And then she bit my ear.
3. Marcia Funebre
When I was alone in my room again, I laid the painting on a tottering old dresser, having successfully avoided laying Kendall Shaw, and once more took my pants off and fell into bed. She had been particularly ardent, Kendall had, which would have been flattering had she not been so obviously hopped up with her diet pills and suffering from some sort of amphetamine psychosis. Upon biting my ear, she performed a talented lunge, kicking the door closed with a practiced side swipe at the same time she threw her arms round my neck, but I fought her off. It wasn’t that I wasn’t attracted—I was actually, I have a thing for women just like Kendall, hyperactive and thin with sharp Waspish features and outdoorsy hair—it was just that it was all so sudden and wrong that I didn’t have time to let my baser instincts kick in before I pulled her off and sent her on her way. I sort of regretted it too, afterward, as I lay in bed alone and waited for my erection to subside. It had been a profitable visit in any event. I had learned Eddie’s whereabouts the night of Jackie’s death, I had gotten a motel-quality painting, and I finally knew exactly who that Harrington was whom I had run into at the First Mercantile Bank of the Main Line. He was Caroline’s fiancé and knowing that made Caroline even more attractive to me in the deep envious reaches of my petty mind, which meant it took longer for me to relax enough to even try once more to sleep. So I lay in the bed, staring at the ceiling, letting the blood flow back to my brain and trying to sort it all out in my mind, when I heard still another knock on the door.
“Oh, Mr. Carl,” said Selma Shaw, Caroline’s mother, through the wooden door. “I have something for you.”
I bet you do, I thought, as I slipped out of bed and grappled again with my pants. I opened the door a crack and saw her standing there with a covered plate in her hand.
“I noticed you didn’t eat much of the dinner,” she said, her voice slipping raw and thick out of a throat scarred by too much of something. “I thought you might still be hungry.”
I looked at her smile and then at the plate and then back at her smile and realized that I actually was hungry so I let her in. Selma Shaw was a tall, falsely blonde woman, so thin her joints bulged. Her face was as smooth and as stretched as if she were perpetually in one of those G-force centrifuges they use to train astronauts, and her smile was a strange and wondrous thing, a tight, surgically sharp rictus. She stepped to the bureau to put down the plate and noticed the painting there.
“So Kendall’s been here already,” said Selma, her smile gone.
“She wanted to show me one of her paintings.”
“I assume that was not all. I wish Kendall would be more concerned with taking care of her husband than rushing to the third floor to show visiting artists her trashy little pictures. But,” she said, her voice suddenly brightening, “enough of that dervish.” She spun around almost gaily and smiled once more. “I assumed you were being too polite to eat, worried about the strange surroundings, so I had Consuelo make you up a sandwich.”
“Thank you,” I said, truly grateful. I hadn’t eaten much at dinner, Selma was right about that, but it wasn’t out of politeness. We had eaten in the dark, cavernous dining room of Veritas, stared at by stern brown portraits on the walls, the only bit of color the blue-and-white marble of the fireplace that looked to be carved from blue cheese aged too long. The food that Consuelo had served in the dark room had fallen to the far side of vile. A spiky artichoke, a bitter greasy salad, overcooked asparagus, undercooked potatoes, fatty knuckles of mutton with thick stringy veins snapping through the meat like rubber bands. There had been pickles of course, a platter of pickles fresh from the factory, and Dr. Graves, on my right, had advised me that pickles were always served at Veritas. The only light in the dining room had come from candelabras on the table, which, blessedly, were dim enough to make it difficult to see what the muck it was we were eating, but I saw enough to turn my appetite. I tried to look at least interested in the food, pushing it around on my plate, actually swallowing a small spoonful here and there, but when something in the bread pudding crunched between my teeth like a sharp piece of bone I figured I had had enough, spitting my mouthful into my napkin and dropping the napkin over my silver dessert plate in resignation.
“I hope you don’t mind me putting you all the way up here on the third floor,” said Selma Shaw, “but we weren’t expecting so many people to be forced to stay over because of the flood. There are not so many rooms available to visitors anymore. We’ve closed down the east wing to guests because my husband is a troubled sleeper and he finds it difficult to rest with anybody in close proximity to him during the night. Me included.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t get to meet him.”
“Don’t be. I love him dearly, of course, he’s my husband, but he can be a very difficult man. Childhood trauma will do that.”
“What kind of trauma?” I asked.
“Oh, it’s a terribly sad story,” said Selma. “Too depressing for a rainy night like this. Do you really want to hear it?”
“Yes, actually.”
“Well, make yourself comfortable at least,” she said, almost pushing me onto the bed and sitting right beside me. The bed creaked beneath us.
She crossed her legs and put her left arm behind her so that her upper body was turned toward me. She was wearing a clinging black dress that sparkled in the dim light and the sharp points of her breasts gently wiggled at me from beneath the fabric.
“I won’t bore you with the details, but in a horrible mistake Kingsley, my husband, shot his father to death on the back patio of this very house on a dark, rainy night much like this one.”
Her brown eyes were looking straight into mine, as if in warning. I blinked twice, thinking that what Caroline had successfully avoided talking of during the ride to Veritas her mother had blurted to me with nary an excuse, and then I shifted away from her as politely as I could.
“Needless to say,” she continued, “it has scarred my husband terribly. This house used to be so grand a place, I am told, a marvelo
us place for parties. But that was when Mr. Reddman was still alive. He knew how to run a house. My husband has let the house go. I’ve done what I could to maintain it but it is so difficult, almost as if it has become what it was always meant to be, as if its essential character is becoming exposed with all the leaks and warped floors and the browning wallpaper. Is it any wonder, then, that I spend much of my time away? Would you spend all your life here if you had a choice, Mr. Carl?”
“No,” I said, shifting away from her a little more.
“Of course not, and still they carp. But enough talk of Kendall and my husband’s sad past, both subjects are entirely too morbid. Tell me about you and Caroline. She said you are lovers.”
“So she did.”
“You know of course that she is engaged,” said Selma and on the final syllable her right hand, which had been floating in the air as if held high by a marionette’s string, dropped lightly onto my knee.
“Yes, I do, Mrs. Shaw,” I said, looking at her hand. While her face was stretched taut and young, her hand had the look of a turkey foot about it, bone-thin, covered with hard red wrinkles, tipped by claws. I tried to deftly brush her hand off as if it had fallen there by mistake, but as I performed my gentle brush her fingers tightened on my knee and stayed put.
“Caroline has known Franklin Harrington for years and years,” said Selma Shaw, not in any way acknowledging the ongoing battle over my bended knee, “ever since Mother Shaw brought him to this house as a boy. They took to each other so quickly we had always assumed their marriage. Caroline, of course, has dallied and so, I am told, has Franklin in his way, but they will be married despite what any of us would prefer. You should be aware of that as an unalterable fact. Destiny, in this family at least, must always have its way with us. Even love must yield. No one knows better than I.”
“Could you move your hand off my knee, Mrs. Shaw?”
“Of course,” she said, loosening her grip and sliding her hand up my thigh.
Bitter Truth Page 15