Bitter Truth

by William Lashner

  Without waiting for me, Caroline went to that door and shoved it open. I followed her inside. This room too had a fireplace and there was a mattress on the floor and an old transistor radio, circa not 1923 but 1979. On the wall to the right, its sole window covered with plywood, hung a poster with a grinning, multicolored skull above the legend “STEAL YOUR FACE!” and another showing a leather-jacketed greaser with a pair of sneakers hanging from the neck of his guitar. Bruce Springsteen? The Grateful Dead?

  “I guess old Mrs. Poole was ahead of her time,” I said.

  “This was our room,” said Caroline softly. She picked up the small black-and-gray radio and turned it on, but nothing happened. “It’s still tuned to WMMR, I’d bet. Oh God.”

  “What was this room before you and Harrington took it over?”

  “I think it was Mrs. Poole’s bedroom,” she said without turning to me. “I seem to remember there was stuff in the closet.”

  I looked at her for a moment, standing still, with the dead radio cradled in her arms like a baby, and then I stepped quickly to the closet door and pulled at it. It was stuck at first, swollen shut, but I gave it a good yank and it opened up for me with a shriek from the hinges.

  Inside, moth-eaten, shabby with age, like skeletons of their former selves, were dresses, some still hanging, some slumped to the floor, their frills darkened, their colors washed out by the white light of the flashlight and their age. Which of these dresses, I wondered, had she worn on the night of the ball when she so publicly refused Claudius Reddman’s offer to dance? Well, he sure as hell deserved the rebuke.

  With two fingers I lifted up the dresses from the floor, finding nothing but old shoes underneath. There was a shelf above the bar and I stood up on my tiptoes to look at it. Hats and shoes, the leather cracked, and a pile of rags in the corner. I jumped up and grabbed at the rag pile and pulled them down. Dust flew and I sneezed loudly. When I stopped sneezing I noticed now, in the corner, a little wooden box. I jumped up again and snatched it. With a little work I was able to lift off the lid.

  “Photographs,” I said.

  Caroline emerged from her reverie and we sat down together on the mattress, their mattress, to look at the pictures.

  They were old black-and-white photographs, many with curly edges. There was a pretty young woman sitting on the ground, her head tilted suggestively, a long string of pearls knotted beneath her breast, and then the same woman sitting on a stoop, her hair long and young, a sly, sensual smile.

  “Any idea who she is?” I asked.

  “It looks like the woman that was next to Elisha Poole in the other pictures,” said Caroline.

  “It does, doesn’t it,” I said, and it did, but it also didn’t. There was nothing sour in this young woman. “It must be Mrs. Poole, you’re right, but look how young she is. And in this one she’s almost laughing.”

  There were other photographs of the woman, more formal photographs, posed in a studio, going back in time until there was one of her as a young girl, with her parents, the girl wearing a frilly dress, like an angel’s, button leather shoes, the serious smile of the very young. And there were pictures of a brash young man with wavy hair, leaning dramatically against a post, or clowning at the beach. On the back of the picture at the beach was written in a fading ink, “Elisha, Atlantic City–1896.”

  “Look how handsome he was,” said Caroline. “Who would have imagined? I guess he was something before he became a bitter old drunk.”

  “They’re all something before they become bitter old drunks.”

  We kept going through the pictures, shining the light carefully on each, examining them one by one. There were pictures of the woman and the man together, laughing, in love, ready to conquer the world. In one picture there was an old man with his arm around Elisha. Elisha was leaning away, as if to gain some distance. The old man’s eyes were half open, one was blackened from a brawl, his nose was large and venous, teeth were missing from his mouth. “Elisha and his father,” was written on the back. And there was one that brought a gasp from Caroline.

  “That’s my great-grandfather,” she said.

  A young Claudius Reddman, in a vested suit, high collar, bowler hat cocked low over his bulging eyes, standing side by side a young Elisha Poole, their arms linked, a great blocky building behind them.

  “That must be the before shot,” said Caroline.

  I said nothing, only stared, feeling the life and camaraderie in the picture, the linked arms, the burgeoning possibilities. They had been friends. I hadn’t counted on that but here was the proof. They had been friends; did that make the betrayal any deeper? Is it more acceptable to swindle a stranger than a friend? Or can a friend more clearly understand that he is only doing to his pal, his buddy, his comrade-in-arms, what his comrade-in-arms would do to him had he half a chance? Could it have been that Elisha, in paying his friend what Yitzhak Rabbinowitz had described as a miserly wage, had a hand in his own financial destruction? “It was only business,” had said Claudius Reddman and I couldn’t help but wonder if he hadn’t learned his business practices from his dear and valued friend Elisha Poole.

  So engrossed were we in the pictures that we didn’t hear the front door open or the creak of someone walking through the parlor and the kitchen and the dining room. So engrossed were we that we didn’t hear a thing until we heard the soft even footfalls rising up the stairs.

  47

  I STUFFED THE PHOTOGRAPHS back into the box and the box into my pack and clicked off the light. Darkness covered us. And in the darkness an uneven wiggle of shadow impressed itself upon the air around the door. A candle? Yes. I grabbed hold of Caroline and whispered in her ear, “Absolute silence.”

  The footsteps continued to climb, step by step. The light causing the uneven shadows became ever more prominent. The intruder reached the top of the stairs and hesitated.

  Slowly Caroline and I crawled together off the mattress to a corner of the room where someone glancing in the doorway wouldn’t so easily spot us. I crouched into a ready position and hefted the flashlight in my hand. It was as heavy as a billy club. We waited.

  Ten seconds. Twenty seconds. I heard something and was about to tell Caroline to be quiet once again when I realized it was my breath, coming out in gulps. Sweat blossomed on my forehead, sweat trickled down my sides. I couldn’t stop thinking of what Kingsley Shaw had said, that his mother was alive in the Poole house and waiting for him. Was it she holding the candle, rising up the steps? Whoever it was, I was certain, whoever had climbed those stairs was the murderer who had been stalking the Reddmans. And now Caroline and I were cowering in the corner like two targets. My heart jumped in my chest. I willed whoever was coming to turn around, to step down the stairs, to just go away and leave us alive.

  And then the steps began again. Toward us. The uneven flicker of light growing. The intruder stopped at one door for a moment and then moved on and stopped at another and then stopped before our own.

  I grabbed tighter to Caroline and held my breath. Go away, I thought, we’re not here, nobody’s here.

  A hand with a white candle slid through the doorway and then the arm, black-sleeved, and a man’s shoe.

  I clicked on the light as soon as the head appeared, aiming the beam at the figure’s face. It whited out for an instant before we could recognize who it was.

  “Franklin?” said Caroline.

  “Get that out of my face,” said a calm Franklin Harrington.

  I scrambled to my feet and sent the light sprawling against the far wall. His face, now lit only by the candle held below it, flickered in ominous shadow.

  “Jesus, Franklin, what are you doing here?” asked Caroline, now also standing.

  “I saw you go out the back of the house and I was worried about you,” said Harrington, “so I followed. Little did I know you were coming here to tryst with your new boyfriend. And in our old room, yet. Trying to bring back the magic?”

  “Shut up,” said Caroline. “You
’re being a bastard.”

  “So what are you two up to?” he asked.

  “Archaeology,” I said.

  He turned his attention to me, his eyes dark sockets of shadow in the candlelight. “Digging for mummies?”

  “No,” I said. “Pooles.”

  He stared at me for a moment before smiling. “Curiosity,” he said, with a lighthearted warning in his voice that wasn’t lighthearted at all. “What is it about the Pooles you want to know, Victor?”

  “Mostly,” I said, “I want to know if there are any still alive.”

  “And so you came here, to their old haunt, to snag yourself a Poole. Don’t you think you’re a little late? Maybe seventy years too late?”

  He circled around the room, examining it by candlelight.

  “Ahh, the memories,” said Harrington. “I can truly say some of the happiest moments of my life were spent in this room. But you knew, didn’t you, Caroline, that before this became the scene of our childhood romance, long before, this was Mrs. Poole’s bedchamber? After her husband hanged himself and your great-grandfather deeded her this house, which she accepted only because she had no choice, no other place to go, she spent months in bed in this room, never rising, only weeping.”

  “She had her reasons, I figure,” I said.

  “Her husband’s suicide was a blow, yes,” said Harrington, as surely as if he were discussing a ball game he had played in a few years back. “She would have killed herself, too, except for her daughter. But even before his death, she had given herself over to mourning. Her husband would lose himself in drink and she would spend her days castigating him or cursing Claudius Reddman to the heavens, blaming their misfortunes on him.”

  “How do you know all this, Franklin?” said Caroline.

  “I’ve made a study of the Pooles. They’re fascinating, really. A family cursed by luck. Did you know that the grandfather, Elisha Poole’s father, lost everything he owned in the depression of 1878? Ten thousand businesses failed that year, including his. He owned three buildings on Market Street, owned them outright, but mortgaged the buildings to buy shares in a gold mine in the Black Hills of the Dakota Territory from a drinking buddy. Fortunes in gold were being dug out of the ground daily then, but not from that mine. With the depression, his tenants couldn’t pay the rents and he couldn’t pay his mortgages. He lost the buildings and spent the rest of his life drinking in celebration of his misfortune. Just like his son, who complained so bitterly about your great-grandfather.”

  “Maybe he had his reasons,” I said.

  “What reasons, Victor?” said Caroline. “What are you trying to say?”

  “Only what you suspected, Caroline,” I said. “Those records you found behind the panel in the library, the accountant looked them over today. They show pretty clearly that your grandfather stole the company right out from under Elisha Poole.”

  She didn’t respond, she just blinked at me for a moment, as if she was having trouble processing the information.

  “Should I show you the rest of the house?” said Harrington, without even a hint of surprise at what I had said. “Maybe we should start with Emma’s room.”

  He strolled out into the hallway and back to the room with the listing bed and the tacks in the wall. Caroline and I tilted our heads uncertainly at each other and then followed. His candlelight bathed the small room in a flickering yellow.

  “Emma came to this house of despair when she was five,” said Harrington, the tour guide. “Walked four and a half miles to the public school each day. Cared for her mother through her long bouts of melancholia and then through her final sickness. Though rather unattractive, she idolized the famous beauties of her time, cutting their pictures from the papers and tacking them onto these very walls, Theda Bara, Lillian Gish, Irene Castle. And despite it all she remained rather cheerful and good-natured, until the end of her time here. Then even she lost her battle and turned to bitterness to keep her going.”

  “How do you know all this?” said Caroline.

  “She moved her mother permanently down to the parlor after a crushing stroke to make it easier to carry the old woman to the porch on warm days and allow her some fresh air. She moved herself out of this room into her mother’s room, which was bigger and had better light. It was in that room, our room, Caroline, that she fell in love and then fell pregnant.”

  “Who was her lover?” I asked.

  “Does it matter? I think she still believed in love then but just a few weeks before her delivery date her mother died, the deed to the house expired, and she moved out, deserted and alone. She had the baby in an asylum for unwed mothers outside Albany.”

  “How do you know all this?” said Caroline. “Tell me, how?”

  He turned to look at Caroline, the shadows on his face dancing from the candlelight. “She told me so herself,” he said.

  “Who told you?” demanded Caroline.

  “Emma,” he said. “She told it all to me.”

  He spun around, walked out of the room, and climbed down the stairs. I started shaking from the cold as I watched him go. I turned to Caroline and we stared at each other for a moment before hustling out to follow. We caught up to him in the parlor.

  “Franklin, dammit, what are you talking about?” said Caroline. “Who told you all this?”

  “Mrs. Poole, Emma’s mother, died right here,” said Harrington. “In her last breath she cursed once again Claudius Reddman, who was still then alive in the big house on the hill. There wasn’t much left to curse; his lungs were tumorous and he medicated himself into a stupor with laudanum every night to keep his whole body from shaking, but that didn’t stop her. She cursed your great-grandfather, Caroline, and all his progeny, much like her husband had fifteen years before. This was just after your grandfather was shot dead by his son, just a few days after actually, and, with one Reddman daughter missing and one Reddman daughter dead, it looked like the curses were all coming true. I wonder if she died at least a little happy, seeing tragedy so visibly visited upon her enemies. Think about what it is to live a life where your only joy is someone else’s tragedy, think of that, Caroline. She was ruined all right, but not by your great-grandfather, no matter how much he stole from that family.”

  “Stop it, Franklin,” said Caroline. “Just stop it. I don’t want to hear anymore. In all these years, how come you never told me any of this before?”

  “I didn’t think you were interested in anything but your own disasters.”

  “Oh, just go to hell,” she said. She walked over to the fireplace and looked up at the old drawing of Elisha Poole tacked above the mantelshelf. “What do you mean she told you so herself?” she asked quietly.

  “When I was eighteen,” said Harrington. “It was the spring while I was waiting to hear from Princeton. Your grandmother sent me to her. Emma was living in the Cambium, in the very same apartment where Jacqueline died. Your grandmother was supporting her, paying the rent, paying for a nurse to care for her. She didn’t live long after my visit, almost as if she were waiting for me to come to her before she died.”

  The chill I had been feeling the last few minutes grew ferocious. I couldn’t tell now if it was the temperature or the dawning realization. “Why would the Poole daughter be waiting for you?” I asked.

  “Because, as I found out that day, I’m her grandson,” said Harrington.

  Caroline spun around at that and spit out, “Fuck you!”

  “Through my father,” continued Harrington. “Although I didn’t know it at the time, that was why Faith took me out of the orphanage and brought me to Veritas, why she provided for me and paid for my education. For the same reason she was taking care of Emma. Because we were both Pooles. It was Faith who discovered that you and I were lovers, Caroline, which is why she finally introduced me to my grandmother.”

  “And that’s why we could never be together?” said Caroline. “Tell me, you asshole, is that why?”

  “The tragedy of the Pooles,” said
Harrington, “was not that their business was stolen from them by your great-grandfather. The tragedy of the Pooles was that they allowed themselves to be tragic. They defined themselves by what the Reddmans had taken from them, by what the Reddmans had become. I was never going to let that happen to me.”

  “We were in love,” groaned Caroline.

  “I thought I’d leave and be done with it all when I found out,” said Harrington. “But I let your grandmother put me through Princeton, sort of as a recompense. I figured why not, and then I let her put me through Wharton, and then when I was offered the job at the bank, it was naturally advantageous to have her trust accounts under my aegis, and pretty soon I was neck-deep in Reddman money, so it didn’t quite work out like I had thought. But I wasn’t going to join the family, Caroline, at least not that. That I would never do.”

  “You said you loved me.”

  “I did.”

  “And you never told me.”

  “I didn’t know until that day.”

  “And you didn’t tell me then.”

  “How could I?” said Harrington, a soft pain in his voice. “You were a Reddman and I was a Poole. How could I…”

  “Did you ever think, Franklin, did you ever consider that by leaving me you became just as much a victim as the rest of them? Did you ever think of that, you asshole?”

  He didn’t have a chance to answer before she was out the door.

  Harrington and I both acted as if we were going to go after her, but then our eyes met and we stopped. I felt for an instant like an old-time gunfighter, waiting for the man standing across from me to make his move.

  “Did you hire Jacqueline’s killers?” I asked finally.

  “You didn’t listen to a word, did you?”

  “If you didn’t, who did?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where’s your father?”

  He looked at me for a moment. “He’s long gone,” he said. “He passed away from us years and years ago.”