Flash House

by Aimee E. Liu

  Grace Darling was a short woman, as ill suited to her name as sweetbreads were to theirs. She barely came up to Lawrence’s shoulder and gave off a faint, disagreeable odor, like machine oil.

  “Coffee would be fine, thanks,” Lawrence said.

  “Good. It’s all ready. Why don’t you have a look at the pictures, then? I put out all the ones I could find of Alice. Whatever else she may have been, she certainly was photogenic.”

  And she scurried back, once again, into the bowels of the old house.

  She was that, Lawrence thought, picking up one picture after another of Aidan’s femme fatale. Dressed in jodhpurs and a man’s shirt, riding boots and helmet, astride a magnificent palomino. Or costumed for a ball in a long glittering gown slit halfway up her thigh, her blond hair a temptress’s pile of curls. As a Goldilocks baby reaching for an enormous soap bubble, mouth and arms stretched wide as if she meant to gobble it whole. As a girl Kamla’s age in a navy and white uniform not so different from Kamla’s school outfits, though Alice exuded a kind of carefree exuberance that Kamla surely had never known.

  He saw Alice water-skiing, diving into pools, hiking in the mountains, and striding arm-in-arm with girlfriends down the crowded avenues of New York City. She was every bit as glamorous and gorgeous as Joanna could have imagined in her darkest dreams. The perfect wife’s nightmare, Lawrence thought. A man’s woman, as poor Akbar had said.

  And yet, something about meeting these images of Alice James here in this strange musty house with Alice’s most unlikely sister pottering in the background disturbed Lawrence in a way he couldn’t put his finger on. It wasn’t the mental specter of Alice’s decomposing body. That, he’d prepared for. That, he’d experienced during the war, when visiting the parents of slain mates from the field. No, this was something else. Something more to do with Joanna than himself.

  “Mr. Malcolm,” said a quiet, elderly voice. He turned to face a woman who resembled neither Grace nor Alice yet could only be their mother. “I’m Helen James.”

  She deposited an armload of scrapbooks, school yearbooks, and bundled letters on the coffee table. “I appreciate your coming. I also appreciate why you’ve come.” She beckoned him to sit down.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s a long time after the fact.”

  Helen James clasped her hands in the lap of her dark blue dress. Her white hair was done up in a chignon. A simple gold brooch gleamed at her throat. No makeup. No earrings. Oyster gray eyes that were sober without being cold. “Once death has come and gone,” she said, “the passage of time becomes irrelevant.”

  Lawrence was spared the need for an immediate reply by the tromp of Grace’s footsteps and the distribution of coffee cups and saucers and spoons and coasters and all the edible paraphernalia that women the world over insisted on adding to the basic element of caffeine. Alice’s mother poured.

  “So,” said Grace. “You want to know more about Alice, I suppose? Everyone always does.”

  “Everyone?” Lawrence asked.

  “Well. Mr. Eldon did. And the two men from the State Department.”

  Helen sighed.

  Lawrence waited to see if she would speak. She didn’t. He asked, “The men who informed you of Alice’s death?”

  “No. The ones who came after. The one who came to tell us just told us, that’s all,” Grace said.

  “I see.” Lawrence sipped his coffee, which somehow tasted both thick and bland.

  Helen picked up her cup, not drinking, and held it as if to warm her hands. “The two men who came later wanted to know if Alice was a Communist. They didn’t say it in so many words, but they wanted to know who her friends had been, if we had any letters. They said they were from the State Department. I think they were probably FBI.”

  “Mother! Do you really?”

  “They didn’t show you any identification?” Lawrence asked.

  “Oh, they flashed some papers, you know how they do,” Grace said. “But Mother was still too upset to pay much attention, and I didn’t get here until they were half done—I don’t live here, my house is up on Pleasant Street, and so when she called me I had to drop everything and ask my neighbor to watch the kids—I have a boy and a girl, ten and twelve, though they were younger then, of course.”

  “Sure.” Lawrence turned to her mother. “Why do you think they were FBI?”

  “They wanted us to name names.”

  Again, Grace jumped in. “They asked about Alice’s boyfriends and clubs, things like that. They said they were investigating her death, and why she’d gone to China, and maybe someone had been with her there—well, we knew someone was with her, of course. Mr. Shaw. But they made it sound like, I don’t know, maybe someone was stalking her, or something. For Pete’s sake, I bet you’re right, Mother!”

  Lawrence continued to look at Helen, who was worrying the plain gold band on her ring finger. “Did they tell you they suspected Aidan of being a Communist, or did you only find that out when the journalists began calling?” He glanced at Grace. “Joanna showed me your letter to her.”

  A grunt from Grace. “Yes. Well, I’m sorry she never answered.”

  “I don’t blame her,” said Helen.

  There was a long silence during which Grace swallowed elaborately, then adjusted the antimacassar on the arm of her chair.

  Helen said, “No. They told us nothing about Mr. Shaw. Only that another journalist had been traveling with her, and he now was missing in China. It was Mr. Eldon who told us that you and Mrs. Shaw suspected her husband was there at the time of the accident.”

  “If you can call it an accident,” Grace said.

  Lawrence sipped his coffee. The dog was pawing at a door somewhere in the back of the house.

  “What else did Ben tell you?”

  “That she was gone days, maybe weeks before you found her. And buried her. Thank you for that.”

  “You have Joanna to thank, really.” Lawrence waited for Helen to question him. But she didn’t.

  “He wanted to know if Alice wrote us from China. They all wanted to know that.” Grace topped off her cup with cream. “She didn’t. Not a word.”

  After another long pause Lawrence said, “Aidan was my mate, so maybe I shouldn’t comment. But I don’t believe he was a Communist.

  “We ’ve read his articles,” Grace said, drilling into him now with her narrow brown eyes. “Maybe he didn’t carry the card, but—”

  “That’s enough, Grace,” her mother said. “I don’t believe Mr. Shaw was a Communist, either, Mr. Malcolm. Any more than Alice was.”

  “Oh, for crying out loud. You always covered up for her.” Grace leaned forward and flipped through the top scrapbook on the pile until she found a page of clippings under the banner Belmont Sentinel. “These were articles Alice wrote for the school paper. Just listen. ‘Students Rally in Support of Industrial Workers of the World,’ ‘Why Roosevelt Needs Stalin to Win the War,’ ‘This Girl’s Guide to the Meaning of the Internationale,’ ‘Belmont Students Found Young Socialist Club.’ Alice dated the president of that club for two years, Mother. She was one of those founding members. I told you, and you just kept saying, oh, it’s a phase, she’s experimenting, she’ll grow out of it and come to her senses. Well, she didn’t. I’ll bet she did join the Communist Party when she went off to that fancy liberal college you sent her to back East. You know that old boyfriend of hers, Fred Hurley, was blacklisted, don’t you? He hightailed it over to France and became a musician or something. Probably playing ‘The Internationale’ even as we speak!”

  Grace thrust the scrapbook at Lawrence, though her argument was aimed at her mother.

  Helen didn’t react. She sat stirring her coffee with a little spoon, around and around in circles, the coffee surely stone cold by now. She hadn’t taken a sip.

  Finally Grace got up in a huff. “Oh, I quit. I just quit. You’d think you were glad she died, you know? I mean, it’s the Communism that killed her!” She put her hands on her hips an
d turned to Lawrence. “She was heading for Russia. She called it the ‘back door.’ ‘If I can, I’m going to find a back door in and see what it’s really like.’ That’s what she said right before she left.” She fumbled through the bundle of letters until she found a pale blue aerogram, which she thrust at him. “See for yourself!”

  She cast one more long-suffering look at her mother and left the room. “I’m coming, Lily!” she called down the hallway. “Yes, yes, there’s a good dog!”

  Lawrence dropped his eyes to the letter.

  Don’t worry about me, Alice had written, not from China but from Kashmir. I’m traveling of my own will and on my own steam. I’ll be out of touch for some time, I think, and I’m not entirely sure where this trek over the mountains will land me, but I’m picking up all sorts of interesting material. People are extraordinarily helpful, and it’s just the sort of adventure I need.

  What was it Weller called her? Eager beaver, cub reporter? Might not have been far off, from the sound of it. But why did she need an adventure?

  “Midway through the war she wanted to join the Young Communists, but her father wouldn’t hear of it.” Helen spoke calmly, as if Grace had never opened her mouth. “Andrew—Mr. James passed less than a year before Alice.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lawrence said. “That must have been terrible for you.”

  “It was worse for Alice. She adored her father, and he loved her extravagantly.” She studied the cup in her hands as if wondering how it got there. She set it down on the table. Alice’s fabulous face beamed at them from the photographs that Grace had arranged around the room—perversely blocking the pictures of her own children, which Lawrence only now detected lurking on the corners of the mantelpiece.

  “You were a close friend of Mr. Shaw?” Helen asked.

  Lawrence nodded. Though he had turned his head he could feel her gray eyes resting on him, waiting. A door slammed at the back of the house.

  “And Joanna Shaw,” he said. “The reason I’m here—”

  “Is to find out whether my daughter and Mrs. Shaw’s husband were lovers.”

  Lawrence blinked at her. “Actually—”

  “Actually, it’s a perfectly reasonable question. The answer is probably yes. Not that it makes a whit of difference now. But wives always want to know, don’t they? No matter how long after the fact. Jealousy is far more insidious than betrayal.” She pinched the folds of her dress, arranging them over her knees. “Are you her lover? Joanna Shaw’s?”

  “I—” He caught himself. This was a woman who had known secrets. Their vapors still shrouded every corner of this house. But he sensed that she herself now rejected them. They’d become, like time, irrelevant. “I have been,” he said. “After we found Alice, it seemed—likely—that Aidan had been with her. That he must also be dead. But a few months ago Joanna learned he’s still alive. Inside China.”

  She slowly turned her eyes to the window. Not looking at him, she asked in a restrained voice, “Has she contacted him?”

  “No. I’m sorry. We’ve no hard evidence,” he lied. “Only rumors of a sighting—in a prison up near the Soviet border.”

  She considered this for a minute. Then said, “So you gave her up. You gave each other up. She’s still in love with him, I suppose. In spite of Alice.” Helen had turned her hands over, fingers outstretched in her lap, and was staring at her palms. Her pale lashes had darkened, wet, though Lawrence could not see actual tears.

  “I don’t think you should blame Alice for Aidan’s actions.”

  “I’m not blaming Alice for anything!” Helen James said hotly, whipping a white handkerchief from her dress pocket and stabbing at her eyes. “She’s dead and yet the three of you are alive—”

  Her voice broke off. Lawrence, feeling unjustly accused, selected another scrapbook and began turning pages jammed with pictures from camp, birthday parties, family outings to the beach and mountains, Helen and Mr. James with the classes they’d taught, hers around Simon’s age and his in upper school. Andrew James, it appeared, had been a stout man with an appealing smile and good teeth, perhaps ten years older than his wife. His students tended to be laughing in their pictures with him. Helen’s, though younger, leaned more toward valedictorian poses—chins in the air, heads turned in profile, eyes meeting the lens indirectly. As if she’d coached them. Even Grace, who seemed to have had both of her parents as teachers, adjusted her attitude to the preferred model. She looked ridiculous—overweight and pompous—in the portrait with Helen, but happily mischievous with her father. Only Alice seemed to disregard her parents’ influence. In both her class pictures she stared defiantly into the lens, head cocked to one side, lips simultaneously pouting and smiling like a born seductress.

  Grace’s heavy footstep sounded again in the hall, and she appeared in the doorway dressed in a long black coat, striped muffler, red tam-o’-shanter, and green mittens holding the dachshund, also dressed in a dog’s striped sweater. “I have to go now. My children will be home soon. It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Malcolm. I’m sorry I couldn’t be more help.”

  “Actually, there is one more thing before you go.” He glanced from Grace to her mother. It was Grace who had written to Joanna. Grace who meticulously chronicled her grievances against her sister. Helen’s self-appointed secretary. “Ben Eldon,” he said. “I’m traveling to D.C. next, and I’d like to look him up, but I seem to have misplaced his address. I can write Joanna, of course, but that will take weeks to turn around—”

  “Oh, you don’t have to do that!” Grace stepped to a small writing desk in the corner and fished around the drawer. “Here. He left his card.”

  Lawrence jotted down the address. A postal drop on D Street under the banner of Kodak. Sales Representative, Asia. It matched the card Eldon had left with Joanna. Neither listed an office or phone.

  He handed the card back to Grace and told her she’d been very helpful. She flung a defiant, needy look at her mother and was gone.

  Again, Helen began speaking as if Grace had never been there. “Alice was so wild and free. She and I never really understood each other any more than she and Grace did. Only her father could talk to her, reason with her. Probably that was because he never made the mistake of trying to control her. After he died, she wanted to get as far away from here—from us—as she possibly could. She loved us. It wasn’t that. But it was as if she viewed us as a kind of cage.”

  She sighed and once again toyed with her wedding band. “Politics were the least of it, Mr. Malcolm. You understand?”

  He felt his chest tighten. He reached through the distance that separated them and took Helen James’s hands in his. “I do,” he said. “Believe me.”

  They talked awhile longer. He read Alice’s letters and looked through the rest of the scrapbooks. Then it was time to leave. The sun made a blur of white above the black tassel of tree branches stretched across the western horizon. In the opposite direction the lake had calmed to the color of sea glass. Helen came out with him to the end of the veranda. She had only a thin blue shawl around her, but she assured him she was used to the cold.

  She shook her head at the brightly shining trolls standing watch over the driveway. “Grace and her husband’s Christmas present to Andrew the year before he died. Aren’t they awful.” She smiled, tentatively, met his eyes. And they began to laugh. They laughed harder.

  “Oh no!” she said, “I’m starting to cry. I can’t cry in this temperature. My tears will freeze!” She was laughing so hard she grasped his arm. He pulled her closer. He had no idea why they were laughing, but it seemed the most natural thing in the world. He wound his arm around her shoulders, and she warmed her face on the sleeve of his coat.

  The tears and laughter subsided, and he guided her back to her front door.

  She put up the back of her hand to her nose, her warm gray eyes looking out at him over her palm. “Thank you, Mr. Malcolm. Really.”

  The door closed so quickly that he didn’t have time to finish sa
ying “Lawrence.”

  That night in his hotel room he wrote sixteen different accounts of his meeting with Helen James. He meant to report back to Joanna from every stop along this route of investigation. But none of the accounts seemed acceptable. How could he explain why he had exposed Joanna so utterly to this stranger? How could he be certain she would not find in Helen’s story cause for despair instead of hope?

  Finally he placed the attempts in his valise along with the rest of his notes. He turned out the light and lay watching the moon stitch in and out of the clouds. What had disturbed him in the James home, he now saw, was the fact that the portrait of Alice he’d formed there so closely resembled Joanna. But could he also find in Jo Helen James’s capacity for understanding?

  He wished the answer were yes. He hoped it might be, for Joanna’s sake.

  2

  They each paid twenty rupees for the hour. This was a high rate, but the Princess’s youth and blue eyes were charms in my favor. In the beams of the headlamps, I stood out among my new sisters. I went with two to three men each night. This way I had only to go one or two nights each week in order to meet my obligation to Jaggu, and only on nights when I did not have school the following morning. I would make up the sleep through afternoon naps, and if Mem asked why I was suddenly so tired, I would tell her I stayed up late doing homework.

  Most of my customers resembled the first. Oh, they would be fatter or slimmer, hairier or noisier, with thicker lips or fleshier hands. Only a few could afford a motorcar and the protection of the Jai Mahal, so most took me instead by cycle or scooter to some secluded place—a public garden or construction site, or to a nearby school where the chowkidar opened a room for the purpose in exchange for a small payment. But in the darkness and with the Princess as my mask, I paid scant attention. To me just one man was significantly different from the rest. He claimed me on my second night at the roundabout.

  His car was neither handsome nor moneyed but a battered white Ambassador. It circled the roundabout twice before it pulled over. “You!” The driver leaned out and snapped his fingers, but when I went closer I saw that the driver was a middle-aged Sikh, a servant who barked his words. He named a price. I asked for more. The driver started to berate me, but a voice from the backseat stopped him. It was an old voice, breathless and coarse. It agreed to my demand.