Childgrave

by Ken Greenhall

  Although I didn’t take Lee’s advice about sexual matters, I followed her suggestion about listening to music. I bought a little audio cassette player and a few tapes. I used headphones instead of a loudspeaker with it, and most nights after Joanne was asleep, I turned out the lights and put on the headphones. Nantucket and the surf disappeared, and I committed myself to the world of music—or, actually, to the world of Orfeo and Euridice, since what I listened to every night was Gluck’s opera. I had to hear at least the part where Orfeo is mourning the death of his love and thinking about killing himself. Then the moment I waited for—when Amor enters and announces that it was only a test of Orfeo’s love. Euridice is brought back to life, and the good times roll. Of course, I realized that in the original myth, as in most real-life situations, there wasn’t any resurrection and reunion. But I put my money on Gluck. I kept the sound volume turned down so that if Amor should knock on the door of the cabin with some good tidings, I wouldn’t miss them. There was no knock.

  Just in case Amor hadn’t heard about my change of address, I telephoned Nanny Joy and Harry Bordeaux once a week. No one had any news of Sara. Joy was lonely and Harry was busy.

  Toward the end of August, Harry and Lee visited me for a weekend, primarily so that Harry could show me the proofs of the book that was being published of the Spectral Portraits. Since there was no text in the book, it was simply a matter of approving the reproduction of the portraits. I approved almost totally. The publisher was using a new kind of coated stock, and the presses were being monitored by a computer that had a keen eye for tonal balance. My only reservation concerned the hundred-dollar price tag they planned to put on the unlimited-edition book. There was a time when I was lucky to get a hundred dollars for each of my edition-of-one prints. Then Harry told me that one of the original Spectral Portraits (or SPs, as they were now called) had fetched fifty thousand dollars. It was the result of a combination of genius (his and mine) and inflation, Harry said. He advised me to buy some real estate.

  While Harry and I were conducting our business, Lee spent her time with Joanne. In fact, Lee spent her time with Joanne regardless of what her husband and I were doing. When the ladies decided to have steak tartare for dinner, Harry rebelled and insisted that we go to a seafood restaurant. Things got a bit nasty and complicated, and Harry and I ended up going to the restaurant alone, leaving Lee and Joanne at the cottage table with their banquet of raw ground beef, egg yolks, and onion. The real problem, though, had been created by the garnish of canned anchovies, for which Lee had made a special trip to town. Harry said that civilized people don’t eat things that are preserved in metal. And he also wanted to know what kind of wine could conceivably accompany such a dish. I said that everything that was involved in that particular meal made me a little queasy. So Harry and I went to a restaurant and ate some kind of fish I had never heard of before and drank nonsparkling champagne. Harry confided in me that he and Lee were no longer living together. But judging from the sounds that emerged from their bedroom in the cottage that night, they either worked out a reconciliation or weren’t as estranged as Harry wanted me to think.

  The rest of the weekend—and the rest of the summer—was uneventful and doleful. I went gratefully back to Manhattan in September, but my gratitude didn’t take the expected form. What I would have expected was that, being a confirmed city person, I would have been gratified just to get away from rusticity. But what I found was that I was simply thankful for the busyness of the city, which would keep my mind off Sara’s disappearance. Surprisingly, the attractions of the city no longer seemed irresistible to me, and I realized that it would be possible for me to live happily away from the city if conditions were right—which meant if Sara were living with me.

  But, all other factors aside, I had to leave the island of Nantucket—as the whalers had to leave it in the nineteenth century—to meet the demand of commerce. Sooner or later you’ve got to get back on board the Pequod or the crosstown bus and wait for the beast to surface and spout.

  My beast surfaced timidly enough. It happened in the middle of November, during the first snowfall of the season, after I had bought a new wallet.

  Chapter 9

  I haven’t owned many wallets in my lifetime. I’ve made every one last as long as I respectably could, and I’ve parted sadly with each discard, eyeing the replacement suspiciously, knowing it was not going to be as satisfactory as the one that preceded it. Throwing away an old wallet is like throwing away part of your body—a valuable part. Worn smooth by your own touch, matching the curve of your hip, it is the receptacle through which has passed a good part of your fortune, and which has contained names and mementos of people who have been important to you. How can anyone part easily with an object like that—or part with it at all? But the time comes when you find your pocket full of leather shreds and loose currency and credit cards, and you admit that it’s time to shop around to find a replacement; something as much like the expired wallet as possible. Which is what I had done that day.

  I got home and began the sad process of digging out the contents of the old wallet: dog-eared snapshots, mutilated postage stamps, forgotten reminders, meaningless phone numbers, eccentric shopping lists, and cryptic notes. I sat before a wastebasket, tossing bits of the past away, when I found tucked away in the corner of a pocket a slip with the word “Chilegray” scribbled on it. I flipped the note into the basket and began to dig around in the wallet again. And then my hand stiffened. Chilegray. What was that? I retrieved the slip and stared at the word, trying to remember when and why I had written it down.

  Then I remembered: Joanne had said the word when she was in her Colnee phase. She said Chilegray was where Colnee lived. And if Colnee lived there, maybe Sara lived there too. I felt like Jonathan Brewster for the first time since Sara had disappeared. All I had to do was find out where Chilegray was. I put my new wallet in my pocket, grabbed my coat, ran down the stairs, got into a cab, and headed for the reference room of the main library. Somewhere near Thirty-fourth Street, the cab driver asked me if I’d mind not whistling. I hadn’t realized it before, but I was whistling the little orchestral figure from the scene in Orfeo in which Amor announces that Euridice is going to be brought back to life. I was feeling good enough that I wasn’t even upset by the fastidious cab driver, who had decorated the taxi with badly lettered signs prohibiting everything except paying the fare and tipping. I paid the fare, but I didn’t tip. I left the cab amid a stream of abuse, and the driver actually got out and started to follow me up the library steps, shouting for his tip. But I was moving too fast for him, and he gave up quickly. I guess he realized that there’s no use trying to keep up with someone who’s received a call from Amor.

  My plan was to go through the index of the biggest U.S. atlas I could find. If that didn’t help me, I would ask a reference librarian for advice. By the time I got into the library I was so excited that I had to stop off in the rest room. The main branch of the New York Public Library has always awed me anyway. It seems like the closest thing the city has to a temple. The cathedrals, the universities, even the stock exchange, seem a few notches below the library in importance, when all the motives and benefits are taken into account.

  There were lots of atlases available. I picked out the biggest one and turned to the index. I knew things were going well when the book opened automatically to the page that listed the CH’s. But despite the good omen, it took me a few seconds before I could bring myself to start reading the page. I wanted to put my hands over my eyes and slowly separate my fingers just enough to get a glimpse of the words. But I got my courage up and did things the adult way.

  There was no Chilegray on the list.

  I looked through the names a dozen times, thinking maybe I had forgotten how to alphabetize. But there was no Chilegray. Then it occurred to me that as good as Joanne was at enunciating, she still needed a few more years of practice before she
could handle all the sounds in TV-commentator fashion. She tended especially to neglect the consonants. I looked at the list again, and there—I was certain—was the name I had been searching for: Childgrave.

  Childgrave, New York; estimated population, 250. I turned to the map. Childgrave was a little more than a hundred miles north of New York City. I closed the atlas and kissed it. Then I went to a public telephone and talked to various long-distance operators, who assured me that there was no telephone service to Childgrave, New York. I wasn’t discouraged by that news; in fact, it only made me more certain that I was on the right track. Sara hadn’t thought of telephone service as a necessity when she was living in Manhattan, so it was only logical that she might have been raised in a place that didn’t have telephones. The only thing that disturbed me was that I didn’t think there was a community of any size in the United States that was without phone service. The more I thought of it, the stranger it seemed. You’d think that at least the mayor or the chief of police or the doctor would have a telephone. However you looked at it, you had to conclude that Childgrave wasn’t your ordinary all-American village.

  As I left the library I got out my new wallet and removed twenty dollars, which I dropped into a donations box in the lobby; a little offering at the temple. Outside, the snow was falling more heavily. I stood in the storm for a couple of minutes, letting it add to my exhilaration. Then I went to another telephone and called my apartment. I told Nanny Joy I had to go out of town on business and that it was possible I’d be away overnight.

  I walked to a car-rental agency. I thought I would be able to make it to Childgrave in only a couple of hours, even taking into account the snow and my cautious, inexperienced driving.

  As I drove north into the Catskills the freshly fallen snow, which was patchy as I left the city, became deeper and unbroken. Before I reached the approach to Childgrave, I drove for miles without seeing a person or even anything a person could live in or drive around in. When you’re in the city, there’s almost always someone around; maybe someone objectionable or threatening, but at least a person and not a rock. When I finally sighted the village, it was in heavy shadow. It lay in a remarkably small, steep-walled valley. Sunlight was still reflecting off the surrounding peaks, but a few lights were already visible in the houses of the town. I reduced my speed as I approached a hand-lettered roadside sign. The top lines read:

  CHILDGRAVE

  Founded 1636

  At the bottom of the sign was an inscription that I had to stop the car to be able to read:

  We did come unto this

  incorrupted Wilderness

  that we might live as

  Sainctes under a Covenant

  with Christ Jesus

  I switched off the ignition and wondered if I should try to find a motel to spend the night in. I told myself it would be easier to get my information in the morning. But I was trying to deceive myself. What I should have told myself was that I was frightened. The darkness seemed to be increasing faster than it ever did in the city. I kept glancing at the sign. For the first time, I let myself think about the town’s name. Death and children had become two of the big themes in my life in recent months, and I was glad I hadn’t brought Joanne along on my trip. It would be wisest, I thought, never to bring her here, no matter what I might find.

  Then I realized I was not alone. There was a crunching of snow somewhere nearby. An animal? Were there bears up here?

  The car was suddenly filled with light, and I looked up into the beam of a powerful flashlight. There was still enough daylight for me to see that the flashlight was held by a short, overweight man wearing what I took to be a police officer’s uniform. Whatever he was, he was armed. He switched off the flashlight, opened the door of my car, and eased himself into the seat beside me.

  “Rudd,” he said. “Delbert Rudd. Chief of police down there in Childgrave.”

  I sat and watched him grin. It wasn’t what I’d have called a welcoming smile. And who the hell had given him permission to enter my car? I didn’t think it would be wise to say what I wanted to say, so I didn’t say anything. It was quiet; the ringing type of silence you never experience in the city. I was grateful for the occasional click of cooling metal beneath the car hood.

  “I’m interested in fundamentals,” the chief said. “I’m interested in food, God, and unlawful acts.” He unzipped his jacket and chuckled. His shirt, tight across his belly, gapped open, revealing a patch of shiny, hairless flesh. He produced a battered metal lunch box and settled it in the folds of his lap. “I come up here every night about dusk to have my dinner. From New York City, are you?”

  “Yes. My name is Jonathan Brewster.” Suddenly I wanted to please him. “Is it that obvious? That I’m from New York, that is?”

  “Just a lucky guess, Mr. Brewster.” Chief Rudd patted his lunch box, making a series of drumlike little thuds. “This lunch pail belonged to my father. So you could say I’m also interested in tradition. The people realize that. It’s one of the reasons they trust me, Mr. Brewster. Some of those lights you see coming on down in the village are kitchen lamps. The people are stocking their ovens, handling cold meat, and reading recipes that were written out by parents and grandparents. So the people share my interest in food and tradition. And even though they pretend not to, they share my interest in unlawful acts.” The chief opened the lunch pail and removed the foil wrapping from a pale, skinless chicken breast. “Care to join me?”

  The only thing I wanted was to have him get out of my car. I was frightened, not so much by his appearance as by his words. I thought people in small towns were supposed to be either friendly or taciturn. “Thanks,” I said, “but I had dinner a few miles back.” That wasn’t true, but it seemed simpler to say that than to explain that I had suddenly lost my appetite.

  Rudd nodded, still staring down at the village. “Not many laws get broken in Childgrave,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean that some of the people don’t have unwise impulses. People can get frightened by some of the impulses they have. I understand that. That’s why they made me their chief. They feel better knowing I’m here to look after them. That’s not to say they’re my friends, though. I can see the fear behind their smiles. They know I’m aware who went in or out of the wrong door; who’s walking too fast.”

  He lifted up the piece of chicken and closed his eyes. “I thank thee, Lord, for nourishing me both physically and spiritually. And I thank thee for revealing your desires to this community.” The chief opened his eyes and looked at me with what might have been amusement. “Grace,” he said. “Grace is what makes our town different from most others, Mr. Brewster. Strangers don’t always understand that.”

  Oh, don’t they? I thought. Oh, don’t they? I was furious, but at the same time my fear was growing. If he had put handcuffs on me and searched my car, or if he had hinted that a cash contribution would keep me out of jail, I would have been less disturbed. To be pushed around or coerced by a cop is within the realm of possibility. You can deal with it. To have him talk about grace is against the rules and therefore terrifying. In any case, by that time it was obvious that I wasn’t expected to say anything. I let him go on.

  “There’s not a stranger enters Childgrave that I don’t know about in five minutes. I like to have a little chat with them like this, Mr. Brewster. I like to let them see how the leather of my holster is worn and shiny after twelve years, and I let them notice that my patrol car is painted black instead of the baby-blue you see in some places. I like them to know that this is a town of grace and law.” He turned to me and smiled. “And I give them a chance to tell me how long they’re planning to stay and for what purpose.”

  He took a bite of the chicken breast. That was my cue, I supposed. I wished there had been time to rehearse my lines as the chief had obviously rehearsed his over the years. I had the feeling that I would have
to be careful in what I said. But I didn’t want to seem hesitant. I plunged in.

  “My business is simple, Chief, and I think you’re just the one who can help me.” The chief continued to chew, looking down at the village. I went on: “I’m looking for a young woman named Sara Coleridge. I understand she lives here.”

  Rudd swallowed. “She lived here once, but she left about a year ago. A year and three days ago.”

  “I thought maybe she’d come back recently.”

  “No.”

  There was obviously no reason to ask him whether he was certain. “Would you know whether she’s expected back?”

  “I’d say not, Mr. Brewster. I’d say definitely not. But you might want to talk to Sara’s mother about that.”

  “Then she has relatives living in Childgrave?”

  “Her mother. Her husband.”

  The chief turned to look at me. I guess he wanted to watch the color drain from my face. I wondered whether my vocal cords were still operating. “She has a husband?” I asked, in what came out as a stage whisper.

  “Ex-husband. I forget that sometimes. We don’t have much divorce in Childgrave, Mr. Brewster.”

  I was very tired of Childgrave’s chief of police. There was no reason I had to put up with his moralizing. I wasn’t trying to do anything illegal. I just wanted to drive into an ordinary village in New York State and get some ordinary information.

  “Maybe you could give me the address of Sara’s mother,” I said. “I’d like to talk to her.”

  Rudd looked displeased. “Evelyn Coleridge will be going to a meeting tonight. The historical society. Maybe it would be better for you to come back tomorrow, Mr. Brewster. Yes, I think that might be better altogether.”