Misfortune

by Nancy Geary

  “Well, there’s myself. I’m secretary. Wallace Lovejoy, Peter Parker, they’ve both been on for years, and Clio Pratt. Clio, of course, was exercising your father’s proxy. He remained the named member of the committee.”

  “Did Clio approve of the Lewis application?”

  There was a long pause. Gail did not respond.

  “It’s important,” Frances encouraged.

  “I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful,” Gail said, speaking slowly. “It’s just that all of this is supposed to stay confidential. You might speak to your father about Henry Lewis. I suspect that he can help you more than I.”

  “What did you think of Dr. Lewis?”

  “From what I know, Henry and Louise are wonderful people.”

  “Does that mean you wanted them to be members?”

  “As I said, it never came to a vote. The committee abstained.”

  “But how would you have voted?” Frances persisted.

  “I’m fond of Louise.”

  “What about her husband?”

  “I accept that there were issues with their application. We don’t have any African American members. It would have been difficult for Henry to have been the first, although, I suppose, that was his choice.”

  “Do you happen to have an address for the Lewises?”’

  “They live in the city, 1010 Park Avenue. Their house out here is on the beach, Gin Lane, about a mile past the Beach Club.”

  “Thank you.”

  With that, Gail hastily said good-bye and hung up.

  As she drank her tepid cocoa, Frances thought about what Meaty had said. He had a hunch. Was it possible that something so attenuated as the existence of black hairs could link Henry Lewis to Clio’s murder? Could anyone possibly have cared so much about membership at the Fair Lawn Country Club that they would kill for it?

  “What is the world coming to?” Frances mused out loud. From where they lay on the floor, Felonious and Miss Demeanor looked up at the sound of her voice. Frances stood up, waited for the dogs to ease themselves up as well, and went into her bedroom. It was hardly dark yet, but she was too exhausted to worry about whether bedtime had arrived.

  Frances awoke to the telephone ringing. She glanced at the clock. It was past midnight, and she had been in a deep sleep for hours. She fumbled for the receiver on her bedside table.

  “How dare you try to badger my wife for information!” a voice screamed at her through a crackling line.

  “Who is this?” Frances said.

  “I also know you tried to reach my lawyer. Don’t think I don’t know what you’re up to. Who do you think you are, prying into my business? Besides, Miss DA, you should know he can’t talk to you. Attorney-client privilege, remember? And you’d better believe I’ll see him disbarred if he violates it.”

  Miles Adler, calling from Mexico City, Frances presumed, judging from the bad connection. “I’ll discuss it with you in the morning. Call me then. I was asleep.”

  “I don’t care whether you were screwing the maharajah. You listen to me. You’ve got some nerve waltzing around with your innuendos. I love your father, and God knows I’d do anything for him. In fact, if you want to know the truth, I’ve supported him and his wife for the past fifteen months. I’ve given them everything. Do you actually think I would kill Clio? You’re insane.” Miles slurred his words. Several stiff drinks must have fueled his call.

  Frances sat up and turned on the light. Seeing her surroundings made her feel more in control. “What are you doing in Mexico City?”

  “It’s none of your goddamn business. Leave me and my wife alone.”

  Frances said nothing.

  “First that stepmother of yours. Now you. I’ve had about enough of you Pratts meddling in my affairs.” Frances heard a crack as he slammed down the telephone.

  The line was dead.

  Wednesday, July 8

  Frances knew as she stood on the clubhouse porch overlooking the acres of grass tennis courts that she shouldn’t have come. She should have been the good daughter, gone to her father’s house, and tended to whatever needs he might have in the moments before Clio’s memorial service. But she couldn’t bring herself to watch him, his painstakingly slow movements, his efforts to conceal his agony behind his half-paralyzed face. Besides, Blair would be with him. She had stayed over from the night before, just in case.

  The sole source of activity at the Fair Lawn Country Club seemed to be the children’s morning tennis clinic. Bicycles in every color, brand, and size were stuffed into an inadequately small bike rack to the left of the porch steps or abandoned on the grass. Through the clear morning air Frances could hear shrieks and giggles coming from the four clay courts behind the clubhouse. She imagined twenty or more boys and girls swinging rackets bigger than themselves at balls thrown to them from the other side of the net. She had been one of them once.

  The clubhouse porch was empty. Most members, Frances assumed, were home preparing to attend Clio’s memorial service in less than an hour. Some friends, others who felt compelled to attend, the crowd was sure to be large, but dressing for a summer funeral took time. It was difficult to set hair or smooth nylon stockings in the July heat.

  Frances had tried to pay attention to her appearance, but she realized how out of practice she was. She smeared mascara under her eyes several times before washing it off all together. The lipstick she found in a basket under the sink smelled funny, so she had to settle for Chap Stick. The navy-blue-and-white-plaid jacket and navy skirt was her most solemn lightweight summer suit. It would have to do.

  She had the perfect funeral dress, simple without any frills, lace, or buttons, but the zipper no longer closed and the fabric pulled over her thighs. It was the dress she had bought for Justin’s funeral, a dress that Pietro had picked out for her, a dress that she’d never worn again. Still in its dry-cleaning plastic bag, it hung at the back of her closet.

  The night Frances had learned of Justin’s accident, she’d sat in a corner of the living room of the apartment she shared with Pietro, her knees tucked under her. She had wanted desperately to be numb, devoid of feeling. Each time she closed her eyes, she saw her half-brother struggling with no one there to help. The image was intolerable. Despite their age difference, despite the fact that Justin was Clio’s son, she had loved him, felt protective of his sweet innocence. But she also knew that her own emotions had to pale in comparison with her father’s grief. She couldn’t bear the thought of his pain, couldn’t imagine the desperation he had to be experiencing from the death of his only son.

  Pietro offered her a drink, food, implored her to conserve her strength because her father needed her. Then, defeated, he pleaded with her to come to bed. His cajoling hadn’t worked, and she stayed immobile for eighteen hours, long past the point where the muscles in her back and legs had knotted in pain. The next morning Pietro managed to dress her and get her out on the street in search of something to wear to the funeral. “You’ll want to look nice,” he said as he took her hand and led her into the subway. They emerged from underground to find street cafés brimming with life. Frances remembered girls wearing tight black pants that rested on their hips, navels exposed, and platform shoes. They sat in clusters, smoking and drinking bottled water. A table of tourists, laden with shopping bags, watched the passersby. Young bored men in mirrored dark glasses slouched in their seats, nursing hangovers, their arms dangling on the enclosure rail. To these people, musing over whether to continue drinking or to saunter to an air-conditioned movie theater, it was another carefree day.

  Frances wanted to scream.

  She and Pietro entered Barney’s through the huge double-glass doors and walked up the internal winding stairs to the women’s department.

  “Can I help you?” A blond woman with lips outlined in purple pencil stepped forward to greet them.

  “Yes,” said Pietro. “We need a black dress for her. Something simple.”

  She walked over to a rack and pulled out a s
leeveless dress with a layered skirt.

  “I want sleeves,” Frances said.

  “Is this for a particular occasion?” she asked.

  “Uh. Yes. A funeral,” Pietro mumbled.

  “For my brother,” Frances added. “He drowned.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said awkwardly.

  The saleswoman and Pietro selected several dresses. Then she showed Frances into the dressing room and gently pushed her inside, as if she were uncertain whether Frances could move from the place where she stood.

  “I’ll wait right here,” Pietro said.

  “Let me know if there is anything I can assist you with,” the saleswoman added.

  Alone inside the plush, mirrored dressing room, Frances felt her knees begin to buckle. She tried to take off her clothes, but the zipper to her pants stuck, her shoelaces were inextricably knotted, and her head was unable to fit through the neck hole of her T-shirt. Overcome by emotions she didn’t fully understand, she sat on the carpeted floor and began to cry.

  “Are you all right?” the saleswoman asked.

  “No.”

  She heard a key turn in the lock of the dressing room and felt Pietro’s arms around her. He hugged her and kissed the back of her head. She appreciated his silence. He didn’t condescend to tell her that everything would be all right, to soothe her with platitudes about how time would heal her pain. She knew that he would sit with her on the floor of the fitting room, surrounded by black dresses, soft light, and flattering mirrors, all day and night if that was what she wanted. In their many years together, it was the one moment when she had no doubts.

  “I can’t do this,” she’d said after several minutes. “You pick something, anything, I don’t care.”

  Pietro had looked at the dresses hanging on the hook for a moment, selected one, and handed it to the saleswoman, who hovered in the doorway. Then he’d reached into his pocket and handed her his credit card. “If you could ring it up, we’ll be out in a minute.”

  Ten years later Frances faced a second Pratt funeral. Two sizes bigger, navy blue and white was the best she could do from her existing wardrobe.

  Frances took a deep breath and smelled the salt air on the mild westerly breeze.

  “May I help you?”

  She turned to see a stocky, muscular man with tanned skin and blond hair. He wore tight white shorts and a white polo shirt with green trim on the collar.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you a member here?”

  “My father, Richard Pratt, is. I’m Frances.”

  “I’m sorry about Mrs. Pratt.” He stood looking uncomfortable for several moments, then bent over to retie his shoelace.

  When he straightened up again Frances asked, “Were you here on July Fourth?”

  “Virtually everyone was. I had lessons scheduled all morning.”

  “Are you a tennis teacher?”

  “We like to say ‘coach.’ It sounds more professional, but yes, I give lessons.” He extended a hand. “I’m Paul.”

  She shook his hand. “Did you ever coach Clio?”

  “Not one-on-one. Occasionally, she did the ladies’ clinic on Thursday mornings. It’s more of a social thing, but we do drills, set up matches, work on specific strokes. She wasn’t a regular.”

  “Did you see her here last Saturday?”

  “I may have passed her on the porch, but I can’t be sure. The place was pretty crowded, weekends usually are, plus there were spectators for the tournament. Once my lessons start, I don’t have much down time. Of course, after we got the news, after they found her, at that point everything pretty much came to a halt.”

  “I understand she played tennis earlier in the morning.”

  Paul shrugged.

  “Is there any way I could find out whom she played with?”

  “If she played, sure. We keep track for billing purposes. The ladies who play regularly tend to split the fees. Men rotate. One guy pays the whole thing one Saturday, the next week someone else does. I don’t know why it tends to fall into that pattern.”

  “Another one of the many mysterious gender differences,” Frances said facetiously.

  The tennis coach nodded in agreement. Then he consulted a board covered in sheets of white paper diagrammed with numbered rectangles. Each rectangle had times and lines inside it. The lines were filled with penciled scrawl. Frances must have looked confused, because the man explained, “Each rectangle corresponds to a tennis court. People sign up for a particular court. Even though we like to think all the courts are equal, some people have pretty strong preferences about where they play.” He flipped back four pages to expose Saturday’s sign-up. “Let’s see. Yeah, here it is. Nine o’clock. Pratt, Helmut, Carver, and Winters.”

  “Would that be Beverly Winters?”

  “Sure. Ann Helmut, Susan Carver, and Bev Winters.”

  Frances glanced over his shoulder at the tennis court diagram. “Lewis plus guest” was written in the adjacent rectangle on the nine o’clock line. “Who’s that?”

  “Lewis must be Louise Bancroft Lewis. She’s supposed to go by Bancroft. That’s the way she’s billed, but we all know Louise’s married name so it doesn’t matter.”

  “Are you sure it’s her?”

  “Yeah. The only other Lewis members we have are Reginald and Monica, but they’re elderly. They don’t play anymore. Mostly they come for a cocktail, or to watch some of a match. Social members, we call them.”

  “Can you tell me who Louise Lewis’s guest was on Saturday?”

  “Certainly.” Paul consulted a green leather book embossed with a gold “Guest Register” on the front. Overhead, on the bulletin board, Frances focused on the sign that read “Members Must Register Their Guests.”

  “Here it is. Saturday. A Ms. Aurelia Watson.”

  Frances stood on the terrace with her back to the house and her face turned up to the sun. A random birdcall and the distant laughter of the neighbor’s child mixed with the sounds of purring motors. A fair-haired, shirtless boy gave a last-minute trim to the boxwood hedges, while another cut stray grasses growing up through the brick with an electric edger. Not a single bug or stray leaf marred the serene surface of the swimming pool’s turquoise water. Through the kitchen windows, open to the faint breeze, she heard the rattle of preparations, a symphony of kitchen sounds. Lids clanged on pots. Boiling water burbled. A steel knife chopped rhythmically against a cutting board. China plates clattered. “We’ll start with the cold hors d’oeuvres. Let’s have four servers passing. Check for toothpicks and shrimp tails. I don’t want to see platters covered in refuse. Remember, we’re expecting a crowd of two hundred, maybe more. We need to keep the food moving. After the crowd thins, we’ll start the buffet. They’re expecting only about half to stay for lunch.” Frances could hear the strange voice of the coordinator Blair had hired to oversee the funeral reception as she delivered instructions.

  Frances looked out across the green lawn that stretched for more than an acre away from her father’s house. This field had been the site of many “capture the flag” games where Frances had ended up the prisoner waiting to be rescued from jail. Her father, the quickest, most agile player of the troops she and Blair were able to round up on a Sunday afternoon, never let her down.

  Looking at the lawn, Frances thought of a Christmas long ago, the year she turned ten. By then her and Blair’s holiday routine had been established: Christmas Eve and morning with Aurelia in Manhattan, then a driver transported them to Southampton for the afternoon and night with their father. The emotional disruption had been explained as good fortune. “You get two Christmases,” was the parental line, the assumption being that two was better than one.

  “Your present is outside,” her father had said that Christmas afternoon. Frances and seven-year-old Blair had put on parkas over their party dresses and started out across the brown winter lawn, the frozen grass crunching underneath their red Mary Jane patent-leather shoes. Frances remembered holding her f
ather’s hand as she skipped alongside him to keep pace with his lengthy stride. He chatted about how much he loved Christmas and was glad that they were all together, conversation she later realized was meant to distract her, to keep her attention focused on him, to keep his gift a surprise as long as possible. Partially sheltered by a large maple tree was a trampoline with a painted aluminum base and a large black surface.

  “Merry Christmas!” Richard Pratt’s enormous brown eyes registered delight at the excitement of his two daughters.

  He lifted Blair up over the high railing and set her down on the jumping mat. Frances scrambled up herself, catching her dress on the metal coiled springs. Together they shot up into the air at odd angles like water streams from a swirling hose. Frances’s legs tingled as she pushed off and leapt up. Then, as gravity reversed her, her long hair stayed up over her head to linger one brief moment before following her body back down. Watching, her father beamed.

  “We were wondering when you would arrive.”

  Frances’s reverie was interrupted. She turned to see Jake. He looked thinner than she remembered, and his pin-striped suit fell loosely from his shoulders. He embraced her stiffly.

  “When did you get here?” Frances asked.

  “This morning, why?”

  “No reason. I’m sorry to hear your visit to your family was canceled.”

  Jake retracted his chin and wrinkled his nose, obviously puzzled. “That’s right. I had some work to attend to in the city.”

  “Over the holiday?”

  “Those of us who aren’t government employees don’t get every holiday. Look, Blair and Lily are loading your father into the limo. We’re ready to go.”

  Frances, Blair, Jake, Richard, and his nurse sat in silence as the black-capped chauffeur drove slowly toward the beach. As they rounded the bend from the Fair Lawn Country Club, Frances could see the small brown church up ahead. The parking space directly in front was empty, waiting for them. People milled about on the strip of lawn between St. Andrew’s and the street. Next door to the church, the flag at the Bathing Corporation flew at half-mast. Otherwise life continued seemingly unaffected by the ceremony twenty yards away. Barefoot children with peeling noses and icecream cones loitered by the club’s front steps. An elderly woman in a wide-brimmed hat stood supporting herself on her metal walker, waiting for her driver to arrive.