Speak Softly, She Can Hear

by Pam Lewis

  “Easy,” Eddie said. “You’ll cause a scene.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “Interesting you should ask that, because that was always my question. What did you tell her? What did she know? It took several times to find out. I had to proceed so gingerly. She was not in a frame of mind to talk. I had to come rather close to our little secret to find out.”

  “No, oh, please, no.”

  “I said close. That business in Grand Central. I told her we’d met up again in Stowe, and she wasn’t really that surprised. She never did like Naomi.” He paused and straightened up, looked around. “Tell me, where did it happen? I understand it was a heart attack. Did she go quickly?”

  She froze. Her father was watching them, a quizzical look on his face.

  “So that is him. I thought so. That’s what I thought he’d look like. Patrician and cool. Did you know that he had an affair not so long ago? Gloria something. She might even be here.” He sighed. “Your mother was quite the tiger. She’d lost her own virginity at an even younger age than you did, and not to your father, although he never knew that. She was under the impression that you’d come to find me at some point. She thought you’d have a soft spot in your heart for the man who’d deflowered you. And when you did, I was to let her know pronto. I was her connection to you in her mind. Poor thing. She never breathed a word of this to Conrad, though. She was quite afraid of him, but you must know that.”

  “There you are.” Her father was approaching them, striding over, a drink in his hand. “And you are?” He thrust out his free hand to Eddie.

  “Ed,” he said.

  Her father studied Eddie for a moment, squinting at him, waiting for more, and when no more was forthcoming, said, “Conrad Mason.”

  “I’m so sorry about your wife,” Eddie said, then excused himself, saying he’d be right back.

  “Ed?” her father said. “Can’t place him.”

  She shrugged as if to say she didn’t know either.

  “I’ve been trying to get your attention. People I want you to meet.” Her father stared into her face. “What’s the matter?”

  She didn’t trust herself to speak. She felt the beginning of tears.

  “Oh, sweetie,” he said. He gave her a quick hug. “I know, I know.”

  “Just give me a minute,” she said. “You go ahead. I’ll find you.” She didn’t want Eddie to come back, didn’t want him anywhere near her father.

  “Don’t let me down,” he said.

  She committed his expression to memory. His high forehead and thin lips. His caved-in expression of concern for her at that moment. She watched him cross the room away from her and get lost among other people. She was sweating, overly warm in the room, and she had to lean against the wall, which was cool. Eddie was returning, carrying two glasses of sherry. “There’s one more thing.” He offered her a glass, which she waved away. “Not to worry about the money you promised that night. There will be more. Quite a bit, in fact, and all yours.”

  “I will never give you one red cent,” she said.

  “Oh, yes, you will.” Eddie took a pen from his pocket and held it next to his glass, as if ready to tap the glass and bring the room to a hush. She didn’t dare call his bluff right then.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Good girl,” he said. “Let’s see how much you get.”

  “Get me a drink,” she said. “A real drink.”

  “That’s more like it.” And he was off again.

  She slipped from the room to the great, drab cavernous lobby of the club. There was a door to the right, and she went through it down a hall lined with bookcases. She turned to see if Eddie was following, but he wasn’t. She took the emergency exit to the street, praying as she opened the door that it wouldn’t set off an alarm. She found herself in a narrow alley. She’d left her coat, but that didn’t matter now. She slipped down the alley to Fifty-fourth and ran crosstown until her lungs burned. Miss Palmer, she thought. Miss Palmer must have told him, must have fallen for some story he told, that and his smooth voice. Or worse. He could be sleeping with Miss Palmer too, prying secrets from her.

  There was no question what she’d do. Pack her things. Disappear. If nobody knew where she was, she would be safe. Eddie would not try to get money from her father. She was sure of that. Women were Eddie Lindbaeck’s domain, people smaller and weaker than he was.

  The apartment was still strewn with her clothing from this morning, and she moved from room to room, picking the few things she wanted. She kept checking the window in case he had followed her. She stuffed her toothbrush and comb into her purse and felt the letters again from Rachel. She sat down on the bed and ripped them open. They told of the baby Pepper, how he had rolled over and cut new teeth. Of living in Rochester and the cold. There were pleas for Carole to write back and questions about what she was doing. Carole ripped through them, looking for an address. The last of them was postmarked San Francisco: “You should come out here. Haight-Ashbury is where it’s at. It’s wild. It’s fantastic. We’re the last house on Stanyan before Seventeenth Street.”

  Part Two

  Chapter Ten

  MONTPELIER, VERMONT

  NOVEMBER 1975

  There was a lull now, the bulk of customers having left for the evening. Only a few tables were left, finishing up their desserts or having a last beer or cup of coffee. It was a good moment, Carole thought, the planets in alignment and all that. She’d learned to recognize these times. They didn’t come all that often. When she felt one, she stopped what she was doing and let herself enjoy it.

  She had been putting a fresh cloth on one of the tables. She’d snapped it the way one does a bedsheet so it landed smartly over the table, leaving one dark table corner exposed. She left it there, half done, and slipped to the back of the restaurant, her own restaurant, Chacha’s. Someone had put on “Midnight at the Oasis.” Maria Muldaur’s throaty, slightly whiny voice filled the room, low and pleasant.

  Her job was mostly done for the evening. Soon the customers would go home and just she, Will, and the Weaver-Lears would be left to plan out the year’s nighttime cross-country ski trip. They’d done the trip in each of the past four years. Every year it was the same, and every year they met here to plan it. She liked knowing what to expect after all those years of moving around.

  She caught sight of herself in a nearby mirror and stared. She had changed in the past ten years. She had grown into herself, you could say, become set; she had a slightly wary look, as though she were endlessly expecting something to happen. Her eyes were hollow looking, her mouth neutral, but beautiful too, Will told her. He said she had a certain elegance of bearing in her tall, thin way, a kind of grace and purpose. “And that hair,” he would say, burying his fingers in the kinky ashy-blond nimbus around her face, “your great shimmering halo.”

  She’d met him on a dare not long after she’d opened Chacha’s. Back in the days when her life had exactly one dimension, when she was still scared silly about whether she was doing it right, doing all the work herself, putting up deli platters à la Bo and dinners à la Earl, furnishing the place with tag-sale tables and chairs. She was buying the food and cooking it and serving it and washing up afterward. Every night she counted her money down to the last penny, left it in the night drop at the bank, and went home to sleep, only to start the same thing all over again the next day. And the customers were starting to come. Mostly they were kids from the colleges and hippies from the surrounding towns and people Rachel called the voluntary poor, who seemed to do nothing but always paid their bills. They’d come in and sit around playing checkers and nursing a beer and sometimes staying for dinner. Carole didn’t have many rules for the place. She didn’t want them. And she certainly never told anyone where to sit, not after growing up with her father, who always asked for a different table. Every single time, even when the first table was a good one.

  On this night, though, the place was deserted because of a storm tha
t had dumped over two feet of snow and shut down the whole town. Rachel was there, stranded and waiting to go home with Carole. And the only other person in the place was a man sitting at the bar, watching the news on TV and sipping coffee. He was a big guy, probably six feet three or four, and wide through the shoulders. He had on a leather jacket and Levi’s. And he was black, which you noticed because it was unusual for Montpelier.

  “I dare you to go over and strike up a conversation with him,” Rachel said to her. Carole had come over to see what it was doing outside. She was looking down Main Street, which was bone white, silent, with snow coming down thickly. “He looks cool,” Rachel added.

  “Dare?” Carole said, turning to Rachel. “What is this, third grade?”

  “Okay, double dare,” Rachel said. She was tucked into the corner of the sofa, her feet drawn up, wrapped in a gray shawl she’d knitted herself, and she was knitting something else, something big and brown for Morgan. A sweater maybe.

  “Well, I’ve already talked to him, so I guess I win,” Carole said.

  “Not patron to customer.” Rachel widened her eyes as if to say duh. “Woman to man.”

  “This is a restaurant, Rach,” Carole said, glancing over at the guy and hoping he wasn’t listening. “Not a singles club.” But the truth was that she had already noticed him, and not as a customer either, but as a guy, and when he’d spoken to her, asked for coffee and a bagel, she’d felt the slightest fluster and had shaken back her hair and then felt exposed and a little foolish.

  “I’m not suggesting you take him home with you. I just think you could use a little practice, and don’t get me wrong or anything, but you need to branch out a bit.”

  “I’ve got a lot to do,” Carole said. “I can’t go striking up conversations with the customers just for the practice.”

  “Oh, come on,” Rachel said. “You’ve got nothing to do. Nobody else is coming in here tonight in this weather, and you know it. You could close up right now and not lose a dime. Hell, you’d even save on electricity if you closed now.”

  Carole looked over at the man, all by himself, and she felt a little bit sorry for him. Will later told her that he’d heard every word, that he was trying to keep a straight face and look a little lonely.

  “Maybe you don’t have the nerve,” Rachel said.

  Carole walked right over, sat down on the stool beside him, swiveled to face Rachel, and gave her a so there look. The man—well, Will, but she didn’t know his name yet—just kept staring at the TV screen overhead as though he hadn’t noticed her sitting down.

  Carole cleared her throat to get his attention, but he didn’t blink. Rachel made a sign with her fingers: Say something! But what was there to say? She had no experience in this. If she was on the other side of the bar, she’d know exactly what to do, but here? Next to him like just another customer? She scowled at Rachel again, but the trouble was, she couldn’t exactly get up and admit defeat. Her only option was to pretend she just happened to have sat down on this particular stool, when all the rest of them were available. She tipped her head up and watched the TV too, feeling so bloody foolish and ticked off at Rachel for getting her into this, and she was going to get even, oh, yes. Look out.

  It seemed a woman had died in the snowstorm the night before. Her car had veered off the road and gotten stuck in a snowbank. She had left it and set out on foot. Speculation was, she was headed for a house she must have remembered passing. She was found dead in a snowbank less than a quarter of a mile from her car. “Dumbest thing she could have done,” the man said to the TV. “She should have stayed put.”

  That did it. He’d blown it now. “In the car?” Carole said. The words practically exploded from her lips. “You think she should have stayed in the car?” What kind of a guy would blame that poor woman for her own death?

  He took a calm sip of coffee and spoke, still staring at the overhead TV. “That’s what I said. She should have stayed put. She could have run the car now and then for a little heat. It’s a shame.”

  “Oh, please,” Carole said. “The car was disabled. They just said that on the news. She needed shelter.” Over on the sofa, Rachel must have heard everything and was shaking her head.

  Now, finally, he did turn to look at Carole, but slowly. He had the kind of face where you could see the structure right underneath, as though it had been assembled out of clay and covered with skin the color of cider. He was very good looking, and she suspected he knew that. He took the time to look over her whole face feature by feature, as if searching for something in particular. Her eyes, her nose. When he looked at her lips, something totally unexpected happened to her. It was a kind of collapse deep within her, a delicious pooling warmth that caused her to sit up straighter and again, as she’d done earlier, push her hair from her face over her shoulder. He grinned at her. “She already had shelter,” he said.

  “A car isn’t shelter.” Carole knew instantly that she was wrong. Of course a car was shelter, but she charged ahead. “A house is shelter,” she said as levelly as possible. “Her body told her to get out of the car and go to that house, where she would be warm and safe.” She felt the exposure of talking about a woman’s body and what it was saying when her own body was doing plenty of talking on its own. She’d been in a deep freeze for such a long time and now she was thawing out so fast she ached.

  He smiled at her and shook his head. “Her body told her to stay put, believe me. But she didn’t listen to it.”

  Carole turned to see if Rachel was watching, and she was.

  “You think I’m being a jerk,” he said.

  “Maybe a little,” she said. “Well, no, not a jerk. You’re just—” Her right hand reached up and fiddled with her hair again. “Opinionated,” she said. “I see you have opinions about this.”

  “Will Burbank.” He extended his hand. “I should,” he said. “It’s my field. I teach this stuff at the community college.”

  “You mean you teach—” She didn’t know what to call it. She was thinking about what they taught at Vassar—the history of western civilization, the poets of the Victorian period. She’d never heard of a college course in why not to get out of your car in a snowstorm, and she was confused by the feel of his hand in hers.

  “Survival,” he said.

  “But what’s there to know? No offense, but is it a whole subject?”

  “You’re not from here, are you?”

  She shook her head and shrugged as if to say, Got me.

  “So, Chacha,” he said, using the name of the place since she clearly wasn’t going to tell him her real name. “Try this one. Who’s the most important person in a rescue? The victim or the rescuer?”

  “The victim,” she said immediately, even though it was probably a trick question.

  He looked almost apologetic. “It’s the rescuer.”

  “But if it’s the victim who needs help—” She laughed. “How does anybody ever get saved?” She pictured a scene in which somebody was drowning, calling for help, but the person on the beach was just standing there saying “No way. Too dangerous.”

  “Sometimes a victim shouldn’t be saved. The rescuer needs to assess the danger to himself. He knows what he’s doing.” His hand was still on her wrist, heavy and warm. “Do you want to hear?”

  She did, actually.

  “If the rescuer dies, so does the victim. Do you see? It’s automatic. The rescuer has to keep himself alive to do any good, and that means putting himself first.”

  “Or herself.”

  “Or herself. She has to be number one, or they both die.” She liked the way he shifted genders for her without missing a beat.

  “What else?” she said, ever the student. “Try me on something else.”

  He did, but she flunked every test. She’d swim for it if she fell out of a boat far from shore. Wrong—she should do something called the survival float to retain heat. “I can teach you that,” he said, causing her heart to pick up speed for a couple of sec
onds at the very thought that there might be more, later, some other day, with him.

  She also got the falling-through-the-ice rescue wrong. You don’t walk to the victim. You don’t even crawl on hands and knees. You get down on your stomach, spread your body weight over as large an area as possible, and slither.

  “You know my best credential in this area?” he said. “It’s being from Queens and not from up here. I tell my class that on the first night. Every time. Brings home to them that survival is learned behavior. It’s not instinctive. For most of us, our instincts will kill us.”

  They moved over to the armchairs, where it was more comfortable, pushing them close together so they could talk in low voices and not wake Rachel, fast asleep on the couch. Carole told Will that she’d dropped out of college and supported herself for a year working in a restaurant in New York, then hitchhiked to California on the day of her mother’s memorial service. There had been nothing left to keep her in New York. It was the most she’d told anyone except Rachel about herself.

  “What about your father?” he asked her.

  “Dead,” she said, and felt miserable about the lie, except that Will’s reaction saved her by being so cerebral and absent of pity. Not a shred of oh, poor you. “So you’re alone,” he said. “Any other family?”

  She pointed to Rachel and told him how, when she’d hitched across the country, all she had was a scrap of paper from Rachel. “‘We’re the last house on Stanyan before Seventeenth Street,’” it said. When I think back on it, I was lucky. I hardly even knew her.” She paused, uncomfortable about brushing up against the truth of her past. “Now it’s your turn,” she said.