“The tooth is pretty bad,” he said. “The roots are really twisted. I’d go for the Valium if I were you.”
Claire disliked drugs, even if they were professionally administered.
“Well . . .” she said.
“It’s kind of like a twilight state,” Marshall told her. “It’s not at all unpleasant. Is it?” He turned to his dental assistant, who stood by ready with the injection.
“No, it’s kind of fun,” she said. The girl was young, barely out of college, with highlighted blond hair and perfectly applied lipstick. Her full young breasts swelled under the crisp white uniform.
“All right.” Claire nodded.
“Believe me, you’ll be glad you did.” Marshall smiled as he bent over her with the syringe.
Claire felt the needle go into her arm and then almost immediately her head began to float. She heard voices and supposed they were in the room with her, but she couldn’t be sure. She heard music, and knew that it was the classical station that Marshall always had on in his office, but the music sounded strange to her. A man was singing in German: “Ich liebe dich, mich reizt deine schöner Gestalt” . . . but she didn’t know if the song was on the radio or in her head. She could see people moving over her and around her, but they had no faces . . . they were white, such a bright white, and yet everything was blurred, as though filtered through a sieve . . . her mind tripped and looped around itself, and then it gave up the idea of consciousness altogether, and everything went black.
When Claire woke up her jaw ached, and when her eyes were fully focused she saw Marshall standing over her, holding a tooth in his hand. The roots were twisted and deformed.
“Ugh,” she said drowsily.
“The little monster put up a struggle, but we got him,” Marshall announced. “How do you feel?”
“Woozy. May I use the bathroom?”
“Of course. It’s all the way down the hall and to the right.”
Claire walked down the hallway and opened the first door she came to on the right. She stood there for a moment before she realized it was not the bathroom. The room contained a workbench covered with fine tools for jewelry making. A pair of unfinished gold earrings lay on the bench.
“Wrong room. It’s all the way down to the right,” said Marshall’s voice behind her.
Claire turned around, startled. “Oh, sorry,” she said, and backed out of the room.
“No problem.” Marshall closed the door behind her. “Happens all the time.” His words were dismissive, but she thought he sounded irritated.
“I didn’t know you made jewelry,” she said when she emerged from the bathroom a few minutes later.
“It quiets my nerves,” Marshall said. He held up a small bottle of pills. ‘Take two of these tonight and call me in the morning.”
Chapter 25
Claire went straight to bed when she got home that evening and slept eleven hours. She awoke early on Thursday and decided to save money and take a bus instead of a cab to Grand Central. Her tooth throbbed dully, but after only one of the Tylenol with codeine Marshall had given her the throb settled down into a mere ache. She put out extra food for Ralph, packed her bag, and left the apartment. The Riverside Drive bus came almost immediately. Claire got on and sat near the back, her duffel bag in her lap, Blanche’s manuscript clutched under her arm.
Sitting on the bus, watching the people with their placid, impassive faces, she wondered about the private thoughts and prejudices hidden underneath all those calm exteriors. She thought about the group of people she had seen on the news, brandishing their racism along with their Confederate flags. How could these people be so wrong and not know it, she wondered. The ideals they cherished were so evil, and yet they loved their children, watered their lawns, and greeted their neighbors—the white ones, at any rate. How did they treat the black ones? With icy silence? Disdain? Fire bombing? The Constitution gave them the right to wave the Confederate flag, but it was still wrong—wrong, wrong, wrong. She thought about how the black women in her gym had leaped and shouted for joy at the Simpson verdict, while Claire and the other white women stood by in stunned disbelief.
After a few stops a disheveled man with wild eyes stepped on to the bus. He lurched down the aisle and took a seat in the back. A few of the women instinctively pulled their purses closer to them as he passed. He wore a dingy green army-surplus jacket, boots with no laces, and an old-fashioned aviator’s hat.
Claire remembered a quote from Goethe which had always stuck with her: “I must have an ideal to love, but also one to hate.”
Yes, Claire thought, that’s true, but why? Why was human nature so constructed that an enemy was equally important as an ally? Claire stared out the window at the elegant townhouses on Riverside Drive. She had no doubt that ethnic hatred was at the root of man’s most virulent mass evil—whether whites against blacks, Nazis against Jews, or Serbs against Croatians. Was it for everyone as it was for Goethe; was the need for an enemy hardwired into our brains, as it were, like the need for sex or companionship? Was it possible for an individual to evolve beyond this need, to achieve an enlightenment of universal goodwill?
“Why can’t I work at the post office? Why can’t I give orders?” the crazy man was mumbling from the back of the bus. “I’ll be a postal supervisor,” he said in a tone so conversational that Claire wouldn’t have known he was crazy if she hadn’t seen his arrival. He was the only one on the bus talking, and a couple of people glanced at him, but looked away quickly when they saw who was speaking. Claire sighed. The avoidance instinct was well developed in her fellow New Yorkers—a matter of survival. The man caught her eye and smiled, and she smiled back.
Claire worked on Blanche’s manuscript on the train, line editing, rearranging material, making notes in the margins. She would show it to Peter on Monday.
When Claire got off the train, Robert was waiting to meet her. He wore a red-and-black-checked flannel shirt, jeans and work boots. Even in these clothes, he looked neater than Detective Jackson did in his rumpled suit and tie.
“Hello,” he said, taking her bag. The sun fell on his hair, with its honey-colored highlights.
“How nice of you to come meet me.”
“I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to, but this morning’s job finished early. Want to go have an early dinner?”
“Sure.”
They climbed into his Rover and drove up Warren Street, past the jumble of architectural styles and into Hudson’s main square.
“So what are you working on these days?” he said as they drove along.
“I’m almost done with Blanche’s book.”
“Which book?”
“You know, the Klan book—the one she was writing when she died.”
“Oh. You mean, you’re finishing it for her?”
“Yes. Peter asked me to, and I agreed.”
“Awfully nice of you. I hope you’ll be getting some of the royalties.”
“Well, not exactly, but he did say that he’d ‘make it worth my while.’ ”
Robert laughed. “Good old Peter, always the pragmatist.”
They celebrated Thanksgiving with a quiet dinner at Antoine’s, where Robert joked about “these American holidays where you all stuff yourselves comatose,” then went to bed early. Claire still felt a little woozy from her tooth extraction, so she took it easy on Friday, spending the day editing Blanche’s manuscript.
By Saturday she was feeling better. After a late breakfast, Claire puttered around the house for a while, then went out to the garden where Robert was working, his long back bent over a bed of bulbs.
“I think I’ll go riding,” she said.
He looked up, his face smudged with dirt. “All right. Mind you don’t fall off.”
He always said that. Mind you don’t fall off. Claire thought it was a little hostile, a faintly passive-aggressive comment that supposedly demonstrated concern for her safety but that really hid a desire to spoil her fun. Every rider falls sooner
or later, and it can be frightening or no big deal, depending on the circumstances, but it is the one fear that sits with you every time you climb on the saddle. Will you fall this time, and if you do, how bad will it be? Riders make light of it, they joke about it; they tell stories of falls they’ve had, but even before Christopher Reeve every rider had heard stories of crippling accidents, and it is the specter of such bad falls that haunts every rider, from casual hackers to Grand-Prix jumpers.
Now, as she pulled on her jodhpurs and boots, Claire tried not to think of the possibility of injury but of the beckoning woods. She had grown up in the country, and living in the city, she yearned for the wind, the leaves, the smell of the woods, the thrill of it, being in the center of this world of bark and roots and rocks. She longed for the sound of rain on leaves, the whistling of wind through bullrushes, the caw of a crow on a black tree limb. Claire put on her old red-and-green wool jacket over a turtleneck shirt; the sun was out but the air was brisk outside.
Shady Acres Farm was in Garrison, right across the river from West Point, on a dirt road off Route 9. Claire had found out about the farm three years before when she saw a handwritten poster at the Half Moon Inn in Cold Spring Harbor. TRAIL RIDING—BEAUTIFUL SCENERY, GENTLE HORSES, it read, and there was a phone number scribbled at the bottom in red Magic Marker. When Claire called the number Lena Dougan answered. When Claire asked how long the rides were, Lena said, “How long do you want to go out for? Two hours, three—five?” Claire knew then this was the place for her.
An hour later she pulled up to the farm in Robert’s “second car,” a battered Ford pickup. There was no sign of people. The horses stood in the paddock, dozing with their heads down, and at the sound of her car they looked up with mild curiosity in their big soft eyes. Claire thought of them as five-year-old children who happened to weigh a thousand pounds. Lena raised mostly Morgans, a smart, sturdy, surefooted breed developed in Vermont in the nineteenth century by John Morgan. All the horses had grown their winter coats, furry and thick, and the three ponies in the paddock looked like stuffed animals, fat and fuzzy. Claire got out of the car and walked over to the corral. Her favorite horse, a chestnut mare named Cora, stood on the other side of the paddock under a scrub oak.
“Cora,” she said softly, “do you want a carrot?”
Cora trotted over to her, and so did all the other horses. Cora was the dominant mare, the alpha female at Shady Acres, and she picked on the other horses constantly, asserting her status. She frequently tried to bite or kick the other mares, especially when she knew people were watching. It was mostly show; she usually ended up just biting the air, but Lena said that the important thing was that Cora was demonstrating her willingness to take anybody on. None of the other mares challenged her; they were all afraid of her, and just backed away when she got it into her head to nip at them.
Just then Lena Dougan walked down from the house, carrying a halter and a bag of apples.
“Hello there,” she called.
Lena Dougan was a tiny, fierce blond woman who treated her horses as if they were her children. She had been everywhere and done everything, much of it revolving around horses. She had been a circus rider in Sweden, a carriage driver in Belgium, and a trail guide in Ireland. She had studied dressage in Germany, ridden with the Lipizzaners in Austria, and performed in shows all over Europe. Now retired to her native Putnam County, she raised Morgans and gave lessons and trail rides. She knew horses the way Claire knew books, and there was no horse she couldn’t train. Lena’s Morgans were well trained, schooled in dressage and jumping, and very agreeable.
“Going out on the trail today?” Lena asked as she let herself into the paddock. She had just turned seventy, but her legs were tanned and trim as a teenager’s.
“Yeah, I thought I might go down to Mystery Point.”
The horses in the paddock went up to Lena and sniffed at the bag of apples. The younger horses followed her everywhere. If she was in the paddock setting up jumps, they would trail along after her like obedient dogs. Claire brushed Cora, cleaned her hooves, then put on a saddle and a bridle with a simple snaffle bit.
Claire mounted Cora and started off down Manitou Road. Lena had told her that “manitou” was an Indian word for a wood spirit, a sprite who lives among the rocks and trees and likes to cause trouble and play tricks on people. The woods were still and quiet today, but across the river Claire could hear the cadets at West Point taking target practice, the crack and pop of their rifles echoing thinly through the trees. During the Revolution, West Point had remained an American stronghold in spite of Benedict Arnold’s attempt to deliver it to the British. We hold these truths to be self-evident . . . Was there such a thing as a self-evident truth? wondered Claire, or was everything our imposition of meaning over an essentially indifferent universe? Claire felt that her natural mysticism was at bottom deeply suspect, a product of wishful thinking, the most naive kind of personification. Pathetic fallacy. Well, it was most probably false, and pathetic as well, she supposed, wanting to feel a bond with a tree. You might as well feel a bond with a head of lettuce, or a carrot, before you fed it to your horse.
Still, as she rode down the long dirt road toward the Hudson, Claire marveled that an animal as beautiful and graceful as a horse would let her climb onto its back and ride it. On a horse, she felt like the Greek hero whose strength derived from the earth: she felt connected, rooted, a part of the greater plan of nature, whatever that might be. Claire patted Cora’s neck, feeling the warmth of her smooth long muscles underneath the soft coat. She ran her hand through Cora’s chestnut mane, picking out a briar her curry comb had missed.
A gust of wind picked up some dead leaves on the road and blew them in a little whirlwind in front of her. Again Goethe’s poem came to her:
Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind?
Es ist der Vater mit seine Kind
The Erl King was Death, of course, but he was more than that. He was Fate, the apparitions you see at night in the darkness behind your own eyes; he was Loss and Grief and all of the things you can’t escape because they’re a part of life. You can pretend they’re not there, like the father does as he rides through night, but his son knows better. The boy hears the crooning voice of the Erl King, soft in his ear, beckoning him to the darkness of sleep. And in the end, of course, the father’s punishment for not listening to his son is losing him: the Erl King claims his own. Maybe the father’s refusal to hear the voice of the Erl King is part of what saves him from the same fate as his son, she thought. Maybe the Erl King is also madness, that slipping into a darkness of the soul from which there is no return.
The clip-clop of Cora’s hooves along the hard-packed dirt road lulled Claire deeper into her meditative state. A lone turkey vulture circled overhead, looking for carrion. Carried by air currents, wings outspread, the bird was her only company except for the tiny brown and white chipmunks who scampered and scurried among the dead logs at the edge of the woods.
And if the Erl King exists, Claire thought, does his opposite also exist, and what is it? Love, courage, compassion; what? With what resources do we fight the forces of darkness as they close in upon us? Illness, disease, death . . . do we just ride our horse faster and faster through the woods and hope that we elude for a time the gathering darkness? Or do we turn and face it, issuing a challenge full square in the face of disaster, like a gunfighter at high noon? The opponent we all go out to face in the sun-drenched dirt and dust of a lonely Western town isn’t another gunslinger, she mused; it’s Death, and sooner or later it will outdraw us all.
Reaching the bottom of Manitou Road, Claire crossed Route 9D and continued down to the river, past the historical sign marking the place where the American army stretched a chain across the Hudson to keep out British ships during the Revolution. When she was only a few hundred yards from the river, she turned right, passed through a gate, onto the straight dirt path that ran parallel to the railroad tracks. At the end of this path was the
place the locals referred to as Mystery Point, a slip of land jutting out into the river.
The path was straight and about a mile long, perfect for a good long canter. Claire urged Cora into a sitting trot, and then a canter. The horse’s hooves resounded against the hard ground, one two three, one two three. Cora liked to run, and never needed much urging; this was one of the reasons Claire enjoyed riding her. One two three, one two three . . .
Wer reitet so spät, durch Nacht und Wind?
Well, we can keep riding, Claire thought, and not look over our shoulder, and see only the road ahead. One two three, one two three . . .
Claire could see the Hudson through the trees, the water grey and choppy in the gathering wind. She cantered parallel to the railroad tracks for half a mile or so, then stopped to let Cora rest and eat grass. She dismounted and sat on the ground next to the horse, listening to the soft crunching sound the mare made as she chewed. Claire thought of all of the people who had ridden through these same woods, patriots and Tories, engaged in the struggle out of which emerged a new nation . . . under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
A sudden gust of wind whipped across the water and through the trees, shaking their thin, naked branches. Claire shivered and pulled her wool coat closer around her.
Mein Vater, mein Vater, und hörest du nicht,
was Erlenkönig mich leise verspricht?
“Come on, Cora,” she said, “it’s time to go home.” She mounted and turned the horse back toward the barn. Cora left her grazing reluctantly, pulling up one last mouthful of yellowing grass, chewing it as she walked.
Who Killed Blanche DuBois? Page 22