Graven Images
Page 5
The nightlight was on in Temple’s room. She was fast asleep, head crooked to one side, lips parted, her breath slipping through in shallow little rushes. I crouched at the side of the bed, trying to reacquaint myself with her face: the length of her lashes, the slope of her nose, her mouth, her skin. It never failed to astonish me. Every book I’d ever written was the result of constant editing and revision. My daughter was the only thing that had come out right the first time.
Her forehead felt hotter than a hundred and two. I sensed Cilda’s shadow filling up the door behind me. “You better get sometin’ to eat,” she whispered.
I waved her away. “I’m fine. Go to bed.” She nodded. I listened to the squoosh of her slippers on the stairs, the wheeze of Temple’s breathing, the faint crashing of waves, the tick of the clock.
Home.
That whole night I slept on the floor next to my child. Just as morning broke, I crept into my own room. She never even knew I’d been there.
“What’d the doctor say?”
“Strep. She’s sleeping again.” I’d waited for Temple to drift off before grabbing a sweater and heading out the back door. The rain had left the flagstones slick, but there was a patch of clear blue sky overhead; I was pleasantly surprised to find Jack in the office on a Saturday.
“Have you decided what you’re going to do about this?” He handed me an invitation, bold black letters on white—DANE BLACKMOOR—PAWNS, it said.
“Leave it for now,” I told him.
“It’s tonight. If you’re not going, I should—”
“Leave it.”
Jack pulled on his beard, a sign of mild annoyance. “Blackmoor’s going to be our next, isn’t he?”
“I’m not thinking about the next one yet,” I said, pulling a Diet Coke from the refrigerator. “I’ve still got to finish All Through the Night, remember?”
He shrugged. “Seems in pretty good shape to me.” I couldn’t argue that point. Except for the ending, which would be provided by the jury, the book was virtually written. Get ’em out while they were hot was my editor’s philosophy.
I sipped directly from the can. “Did you ever think I might want to take off for a while to hang out with my kid?”
Our eyes met. It was clear the thought of me as a stay-at-home mom didn’t fly with him. He said, “Next book, I want more responsibility.”
“Okay,” I said. “From now on, you can also make the beds and do the dishes.” I caught a glimpse of his face. “That was a joke, Jack.”
He wasn’t laughing. “These past couple of years have been great, but I want to be more than your personal secretary. I’m ready to do research, maybe handle a few interviews.”
Jack Tatum always seemed to catch me unawares. He’d come into my life out of nowhere, simply showed up on my doorstep and somehow managed to convince me that—more than anything else in the world—I needed an assistant. One by one he’d shot down my misgivings. Salary wasn’t an issue; he had some savings stashed away. He didn’t mind giving up his Manhattan apartment; rents were cheaper on the Jersey shore. He wanted to learn to write true-life crime, he told me; he wanted to learn from the best. That was Jack—an oddly attractive mix of flattery and pushiness. I watched him do it again now.
“Obviously, any contribution I made to the book would be minimal,” he said earnestly. “I’d do the donkeywork. It would free you up for other things.”
I felt a surge of childish emotion, the sort of territorial instinct that makes eight-year-olds trace property lines in the dirt—this is mine and you can’t come over. The expression on Jack’s face was enough to let me know I’d better reconsider if I wanted to keep him.
“Okay,” I said. “We’ll see how it goes.” I wanted to keep him. Jack walked with me back to the house. Temple was sitting at the kitchen table, looking much better. We played three-hand poker until dinnertime. Cilda had made a roast, and Temple asked if Jack could eat with us. I said fine, if it was all right with him. By the time he left it was after seven, and Temple was running a fever again.
“Beddy-bye for you, kiddo,” I told her. She made all the usual protests, but weakly. We walked upstairs together and I tucked her in, pulling a chair up beside her bed.
“I bet I know what you’re gonna do,” she said with a sleepy little smile.
Her words took me aback. “What?” I asked, trying not to sound guilty.
“You’re gonna write a book about the hand they found in that statue.” She edged herself up on her elbows.
“Who told you that?”
“Nobody. I just guessed.”
“Well, you guessed wrong,” I said.
She rolled toward me, one hand propping up her head. “Do you know him? Dane Blackmoor?”
“Temple,” I said sternly, “just go to sleep.”
But she wouldn’t drop it. “Because I thought you might.” She sat up now. “On TV last night, they were interviewing famous people, you know, about whether they thought he did it, cut off someone’s hand, and Grandpa Dudley was on”—the old, familiar anger surged; this was the way she knew her grandfather, as a sound bite, a legal expert who occasionally popped up on Larry King—“and I could tell by the way he talked that he knew Dane Blackmoor, so I thought maybe you’d met him, at Grandpa’s.”
I wanted to ask what Dudley said; instead, I pushed her shoulders gently back onto the pillow. “Shhh.” I stayed there until she lapsed into sleep.
It was ten after eight.
As though this was a sudden decision, and not something that had been in the back of my mind all day, I went into my room, peeled off my jeans and sweater, and pulled a very short, very tight, very red dress off its hanger.
I found Cilda downstairs in her room, knitting by the light of a television sitcom. The click of the needles punctuated the show’s dialogue like a tiny, tinny laughtrack. “I’m going out,” I said. “There’s a thing I have to attend in New York tonight.” A thing.
The Volvo was gassed up, the city a little more than an hour away. It wasn’t until I reached the turnpike that I allowed myself to think about Temple’s words—I thought maybe you’d met him, at Grandpa’s—and to finally answer her question, silently, while she slept miles away, unheeding, unhearing.
II — THE STORY
THE NANNY FOUND LITTLE CHARLIE LYING ON THE FLOOR OF THE SMALL CLOSET, A BLUE FRINGED BABY BLANKET WRAPPED AROUND HIS ARMS AND TORSO LIKE A WINDING-SHEET. HIS ONCE CHERUBIC FACE WAS A CONGEALED MASK OF BLOOD AND TISSUE. HE’D BEEN BEATEN BEYOND RECOGNITION…
IN HIS AUTOPSY REPORT, THE CORONER REMARKED THAT THE CHILD HAD SUSTAINED SEVERAL INJURIES IN THE MONTHS PRIOR TO HIS DEATH, NOTABLE AMONG THEM: TWO SCARS FROM CIGARETTE BURNS ON the INNER FOREARMS, AND A CONTUSION OF THE RIGHT SHOULDER.
EXCERPT FROMROCK-A-BYE BABY:
THE BALLAD OF DULCIE MARIAH
BY GARNER QUINN
(RANDOM HOUSE, 1981)
SOME PEOPLE HAVE QUESTIONED MY MOTIVES IN WRITING THIS BOOK. THEY SEE IT AS A SLUR ON MY FATHER’S NAME, AN ATTACK ON HIS REPUTATION. LET ME SAY THAT I NEVER SET OUT TO UNDERMINE DUDLEY QUINN’SINTEGRITY AS A DEFENSE ATTORNEY. I SIMPLY SET OUT TO FIND THE TRUTH. THIS BOOK IS NOT A PERSONAL VENDETTA. IF ANYTHING, IT’S LATE JUSTICE FOR A LITTLE CHILD. FROM THE BEGINNING, FOR ME, IT WAS ALWAYS ABOUT THE CHILD…
EXCERPT FROM THE PREFACE OF THE SECOND EDITION OFROCK-A-BYE BABY: THE BALLAD OF DULCIE MARIAH
BY GARNER QUINN
(POCKET BOOKS, 1983)
ONE
He came during the summer of 1969, the defining summer of my life.
By that July, all the turbulence of a turbulent decade, the unrest of a restless world, seemed to have gathered forces like some Kansas twister, beating a direct path to our beachfront estate in Spring Lake, New Jersey—coming right up onto our front porch, rattling the house to its foundations, turning everything upside down before winding its way into the sea.
For me, it will always be the summer of the Mariah Trial. The summer I got the Change—as thoug
h my body had reacted to what was going on around me by stirring up some excitement of its own. And the summer of Dane Blackmoor. He showed up, quite unexpectedly, one weekend, returning again and again, through the end of August, as if drawn by the scent of blood: the blood of the sensational case Dudley was trying; and, in some strange way, my own.
That he should have come at all seems more astonishing to me now than it did back then. In 1964 Blackmoor’s plaster bandage–wrapped sculptures had hit the art world with a force of a Mack truck. He was twenty-six years old, and an instant star. His face was everywhere you looked: on the covers of Time and Life, inside the pages of Vogue, the cold stare, the permanent scowl, a ghost of a scar run amok on his chin, the epitome of physical beauty tamped within violence.
Women, I was discovering, went in for that sort of thing. At thirteen, I myself was singularly unimpressed by the romance of imperfection. The pictures of Blackmoor that sparked my interest showed him hurtling from parked limos into clubs, dashing from secret love nests into fast cars. I envied people who had places to go, and the means to get there. All year long, I stayed put in my father’s summer house, like the wicker porch chairs, and the empty hammocks, like the household help—waiting for a time when the great Mr. Quinn would favor us with his presence.
Then Blackmoor came.
I was in the kitchen that morning, as usual, reading the newspaper accounts of the Mariah trial. Dudley’s face beamed up at me off the front page, smiling the smile that was so much warmer in black and white than in the flesh.
“Get away from those cookies with them grimy hands,” Margaret the cook barked. I wiped the newsprint off on my dress before swiping a chocolate chip off the cooling rack.
“Using her shirttail,” Margaret snorted derisively to Cathy, the upstairs maid. “Not that that getup of hers could look any worse.”
Cathy stretched lazily on her stool. “You’d think with all his money,” she yawned, “he’d buy her some decent clothes.”
They always spoke about me that way. As though I were deaf, or retarded, or not even there. When I was little it hurt, but as I got older I found out there were certain advantages to being invisible. If I stayed in the corner, quiet, eating or reading the paper, all sorts of astonishing information passed my way.
“Wonder which one he’s bringing with him this week,” Margaret said, with a sly wink. I knew she was talking about Dudley and his many ladyfriends. I kept thumbing through the paper, scanning the human-interest story. Dudley was in this picture, too, standing just behind his famous client, the pale halo of her hair obscuring his face. I tried to picture her here in the kitchen, Dulcie Mariah, leaning casually up against the stainless-steel counter, flanked by the pots and pans, the utensils hung in orderly rows, enveloped by the day-after-day tedium of this small world. I wondered if—offhandedly almost—she might let it slip. Whether or not she’d killed her little son, Charlie.
“Ga’ner! Ga’ner Quinn!” Cilda’s strong arms pushed open the swinging doors. “What you doing in ’ere this long time?” she demanded in her mean Jamaican Woman voice. Without answering, I ran from the kitchen, into the dining room, through the hall, and out the front door. This was my new way of dealing with Cilda, the flight-not-fight technique. It seemed to be working.
I sat down on the steps, yanking navy pleats over my knees. I would have to speak with Dudley about the pathetic state of my wardrobe. The problem was getting him alone, especially now, with the trial in full swing.
Pete the Handyman appeared from around back, carrying a large black caldron of geraniums. “What’s new, pussycat?” he called, flashing teeth the color of a stained porcelain tub. Pete never just said hello. He said things like “What’s the story, morning glory?” or “What’s up, doc?” Once I’d found it funny; but since I’d turned thirteen, it was wearing thin.
“Will you take me to the beach?” I asked.
“Can’t, Garn.” Pete shook his head. “Mr. Quinn’s home tonight. Got to get these flowers out.”
Mr. Quinn. That was the way they all said it—never “your father,” “your old man,” “your daddy.” It was one of the reasons I’d come up with The Story in the first place. Looking at him today, hunched over and grimy, it was hard to believe that Pete the handyman once figured prominently in The Story. I’d gotten much pickier since that first time, so picky, in fact, that I hadn’t had a candidate in over a month. My longest dry spell ever.
The truth was, there just didn’t seem to be very many men who could qualify as my Real Father.
First off, he had to be old enough. Mr. Kelly, my piano teacher, scored high on most counts. He was handsome, intelligent, and he had that fatherly way of putting his arm around me as he demonstrated the left-hand part. At Christmas, he’d even given me a card, not from a box, but the sort you bought separately, especially, at a shop. It read: “TO A SPECIAL GIRL.” He’d signed it: “Love, Mr. K.”
Love.
Mr. Kelly had seemed just about perfect until I figured out that he would have only been twelve years old when I was born. And there was no doubt about it. Mr. Kelly wasn’t the kind of person who would have done It at twelve. Mr. Kelly didn’t even seem like the kind of person who had done It at twenty-four.
And so it went. Candidates were either too young or too old. Father Barnes, of course, was a priest, and it just didn’t feel right to involve him. Then there was the tutor whom I nixed on account of his strong body odor; and Dudley’s partner at the firm, Geoffrey Nash—the biggest disappointment of all. That plotline came to an end the night I asked Dudley why Geoff wasn’t married. “Because he’s a homosexual, Garner,” he told me impatiently. I nodded as though I’d suspected all along. Later, in my room, I pulled out Webster’s and read:
homosexual
adj. of, relating to, or characterized by a tendency to direct sexual desire toward another of the same sex
I lay on my bed, shoes off, bare legs up, the toes of my feet tracing designs on the wallpaper, trying to picture Geoffrey Nash as someone who would have such a tendency. I closed my eyes, imagining him kissing another man—Mr. Kelly, or Pete, even Dudley himself—but I could only get to the initial clinch before the camera in my mind stopped clicking. I decided I might have better luck if I found another homosexual to imagine him with. This project occupied much of my time in the days that followed.
But it was boring, always being on the lookout for—as Cathy called them—queers. What Geoffrey did in private didn’t seem to have anything to do with me. It wasn’t like The Story, which, after all, was my life.
Pete had finished arranging the urns of flowers around the porch. “Wanna Juicy Fruit?” He pulled a pack out of his pocket. I took a slice. It was warm and limp from being in his trousers, and its smell was so sweet I could taste it before it was actually in my mouth.
“What’s your father like, Pete?” I asked.
He scrunched up his face. “Aw, my old man died a while back.”
“Did you love him?”
Pete considered this for a while, then said, “He was just my old man, Garn. I didn’t really know him.”
I nodded, understanding. Then I told him, “See ya,” and headed out toward the front gate. I wondered whether I should risk a run to the beach before Cilda noticed I was gone.
“Hey, kid, com’ere,” a man hissed from across the street. I knew all about talking to strangers, but I was bored and lonely. I crossed.
The guy was Elvis-haired and paunchy, with a pale blue polyester suit and an open-collared print shirt, the kind that would pass for silk if you’d never actually seen silk before. He carried a black canvas bag. “You live over there in that big house?” he asked, his voice low and friendly. I suspected he’d offer a lollipop next. That would be time to let out the Tarzan yell.
For now I nodded.
“Listen,” he said, “I happen to know that Dane Blackmoor is gonna visit here today.” He took out his wallet. It was flat and greasy, embossed with the word Swank.
“Why?” I asked.
“It’s nothin’ illegal,” he assured me. “I just wanna take some pictures.”
I took the money, wondering whether I should shake hands to seal the bargain. Before I could, the guy slipped into a nondescript car. A rental, I noticed, as it pulled away. I tucked the fiver into my pocket and walked back to the house, thinking about what I’d buy with the blood money.
Cilda turned off the vacuum as I went by. “The car is carrying ’imself back tonight. See you do somethin’ about that hair.” I started hopping up the staircase, one step at a time. “Stop that! You want to wake the ’ouse?” Cilda hissed.
“And you won’t?” I tossed my head toward the Hoover.
“About time they get up, sleeping all day,” Cilda sniffed, snapping the machine on again.
I walked through the upstairs hall. There were no vacancies today. With the Main Attraction home for the weekend, the place would be swarming with what Dudley called houseguests and Cilda called freeloaders. Strangers in the house made Cilda nervous. Some mornings she’d come down limping, shooting black looks, warning me to stay away from the man with the ’at, or the woman with the evil little dog that put a spell on her back. I suspected what made Cilda’s back hurt had more to do with floor scrubbing than men with hats or old ladies with poodles; but I liked to hear her tales about people who had The Way, so I kept this theory to myself.
I stomped down the corridor, making as much noise as I could without actually banging on the walls. My room was all the way on the end, set off by an enamel plaque with Garner scripted in rambling roses. I opened the door, steeling myself against an onslaught of flowers and bows. One of Dudley’s women, a French lady named Simone, had recently redecorated the upstairs. She’d promised once it all came together I’d love the florals and chintz, but some pastel deficiency in my brain made me ache for the drab reds and browns of Dudley’s study.