The Most Dangerous Thing

by Laura Lippman

  He gives Amanda a generic pep talk, sends her on her way. He needs to review three other student files before he meets with them this afternoon, but he feels logy. If he sits here, he’ll fall asleep. He will go for a walk, maybe buy a hot dog from one of the carts.

  The University of Maryland sits in a forlorn, somewhat forgotten corner of southwest downtown, although the neighborhood is beginning to catch a second wind. When the highway project was halted by community opposition—and Clem was one of those who fought it, because of what it would have done to Leakin Park, its flora and fauna—the city was left with blocks of houses it had planned to demolish. These “dollar” houses in nearby Otterbein ultimately were awarded in a lottery to those who promised to renovate them and live in them for at least five years. Some of those houses will come on the market soon, although the neighborhood is far from gentrified, despite talk about Federal Hill becoming the next Georgetown. Baltimore is one of those cities that defines itself by such comparisons. The next this, the next that. Except maybe Johns Hopkins, which considers itself far above the city, apart from it. But Clem has no regrets about choosing the University of Maryland. It’s a good school, too, and it doesn’t have to shoulder the weight of a worldwide reputation. Renown is overrated. Plus, one becomes responsible for all of one’s colleagues at such places. In the public’s mind, Hopkins is Hopkins is Hopkins. He can’t imagine that everyone at Hopkins is pleased with John Money right now, given his recent pro-incest comments in Time magazine. If Clem worked at Hopkins, he’d probably be asked about that constantly, would not be able to persuade people that a geriatric specialist has no overlap with the sex clinic.

  It’s a finer day than the morning had promised, and Clem decides to walk north, up Eutaw, to the pleasant chaos of Lexington Market. He won’t go so far as to say that he prefers Baltimore to his hometown of Boston, but he considers it a fair trade, especially since they moved into the house on Wetheredsville Road. Boston was fine. He understood it, and it understood him. But Tally wanted to leave, so they left—and allowed her to make him the scapegoat, telling her family it was Clem who desired a change. He shields Tally often from such unpleasant situations, but it’s a small price to pay for being married to her. He’s a lucky man. Other men, seeing Tally next to him, have told him that over and over. Twenty-five years after the fact, he still flushes at the memory of those early days with Tally. At least she wasn’t his student, although that’s what everyone seems to infer.

  Still, it was illicit by his standards, even a little sordid. That was part of its charm. And she had taken the lead. No one would ever believe that, and he would never say as much out loud. It’s not gallant, for one thing. Perhaps the truth is seldom gallant. Eighteen-year-old Tally Duchamp seduced thirty-two-year-old Clement Robison. He had no idea why she wanted to be with him, and he is even more baffled by why she stays with him. She is a headstrong woman, capable of marrying someone merely to antagonize her parents, then staying in that marriage to prove them wrong. Tally has enormous staying power for grudges.

  But she is fickle in almost all other aspects of her life. Clem has watched her flail and fail her way through a remarkable number of projects, attacking each enterprise with great energy, then dropping the new activity when the early passion dissipates. He should find it reassuring that painting seems to have taken hold, that she finally is finding a place to channel her formidable energy, especially now that Gwen is only a few years away from leaving the nest. But Tally’s current obsession unnerves him. She seems to be using it to wall herself off, to escape from the family. Did he feel that way before the night of the hurricane? Or is he projecting on her the burden of his secret? If she knew what he knows, she would be within her rights to distance herself.

  He wonders if Tim and Rick have broken their pledge. There is a prevailing theory that there are no secrets in marriages, not good ones. If they have confided in their mates—well, he envies them. He would love the release of telling someone, to hear someone say: What could you have done? Or: I don’t see that you had any choice. The problem is, he doesn’t trust Tally to say those things. Her best quality is also her worst. She’s relentlessly, reluctantly honest when asked her opinion. Oh, she won’t volunteer it, won’t go out of her way to make someone feel bad. She tries to be tactful. But if you insist on knowing what she really thinks, you’d better be prepared to take it. Sometimes Clem isn’t.

  He enters the market. Noisy and chaotic on this Thursday before Memorial Day, it comes at him in a wave of aromas. Fried food, deli meats, fish, flowers. The sweet, buttery smells of Konstant Candies’ peanut brittle trumps everything else. He will buy some for Gwen only—she doesn’t eat candy anymore. His mood flags, thinking of his daughter, the obsession with her weight. Worse, her intense interest in boys. She used to have a lively, curious mind and now all she cares about are clothes and how many boys call her each week. It wasn’t that long ago that she walked with him through the woods on weekend days, raptly absorbing his knowledge of plants and wildlife. Only two years ago, they read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn together, which provided a lot of opportunities for valuable discussion. Poverty, the lives of immigrants, even sex crimes. When he speaks to her now, she is very patient and kind, as if he were mildly retarded.

  He decides to have a crab cake at Faidley’s. And a beer. It’s practically the holiday weekend.

  Someone has left a copy of yesterday’s Star, the afternoon paper, on the counter. Clem flips through it reflexively, pushing it away when he chances on an item from Chicago, something about a possible appeal in John Wayne Gacy’s case. Every year, there seems to be a new unthinkable horror. Jim Jones in 1978, John Wayne Gacy last year. What will 1980 bring before it’s over? And will his first name begin with a J?

  His food arrives and he focuses on enjoying the platter, a cholesterol horror show—French fries and macaroni and cheese, the fried crab cake. He would chide a patient for eating such a lunch. But his own cholesterol is excellent, as is his blood pressure. He knows his good health is a lottery ticket, but he’s proud to show patients what is possible as one ages. Yet no matter what he does, statistics show his wife is destined to be a widow at a relatively young age. That’s a bum thing to do to the person you love most in the world.

  Tally was adamant that she understood the actuarial odds. That she would rather have a foreshortened time with him than a longer marriage to anyone else. Still, he wonders if she will decide that it was a poor bargain, giving away her youth, only to find herself alone with much of her own life ahead of her. Say she’s sixty-three when he dies, which would make him seventy-seven. That’s too late for a true second chance. She’ll almost definitely be a grandmother. She might be on her way to being a great-grandmother, if either Miller or Fee decides to start a family early. His money’s on Miller, a bit of a throwback, short-haired and stalwart and dutiful. Miller, born in 1956, almost seemed disappointed that he had to sign up for the draft but not actually serve. Miller lives to serve. He always wants to do the right thing. In other words, he’s just like his father. He has made a good marriage to a terrific girl. And that girl, like her mother-in-law before her, has persuaded Miller to abandon his hometown, only in her case she wants to be close to her family. He calls every Sunday, recounting his week. In some ways, Clem feels he knows more about Miller’s life than he does about Gwen’s.

  Now Fee is quiet, withdrawn. She has a secret, even if she doesn’t know it. Tally believes it’s her sexuality, which makes Clem sad, only because he believes Fee’s life will be harder for it, that she will not be comfortable in her own skin. She’s in San Francisco, but she might as well be in . . . Dubuque, based on what Clem has gleaned of her life. She goes to school—she’s working toward a master’s in psychology—and spends her weekends biking obsessively, almost as if she’s trying to get away from herself. Clem hopes she eventually finds a way to be still.

  As for Gwen—sweet, pretty, eager-to-please Gwen. Whatever she does, she’ll do well. So much younger
than her siblings, Gwen had the best of both worlds: she was essentially raised as an only child, but by parents with plenty of field experience. Some might call her spoiled, but Clem thinks she’s the opposite. Gwen is a delight. Or was.

  “What if it were your child? What if it was Gwen or Mickey?” Tim Halloran asked Clem and Rick that night. To this day, Clem has to fight down the impulse to blurt out: It wouldn’t be. Gwen isn’t stupid that way. He isn’t blaming the victim, Go-Go. He’s castigating the Hallorans for not preparing their son for the world at large. Was it because he was a boy that his safety in the world was presumed, or because he had two older brothers who were supposed to show him the ropes? Yet Clem and Tally hadn’t abdicated their responsibility to Gwen because of Miller and Fee.

  “Hey, he tried to hit Mickey,” Rick said. “He could have killed her. The kids say he kept an old shotgun in that cabin. What if he had grabbed that instead of his guitar?”

  “It’s not the same,” Halloran shrilled, his voice high-pitched as a woman’s. “It’s not the same.”

  Halloran was right, but not in the way he believed. Clem could not bear to tell Tim that a violent physical assault on a girl would, according to the law, be judged much more harshly than the touches that the old man had bestowed on Go-Go. What would the courts have done to him? He would have gotten a year or two at the most. And what if he had denied it? How could it be proved? According to Sean, Mickey couldn’t describe what she had seen in the darkness of the cabin, only that the old man had become violent when she found him alone with Go-Go. Yes, the man was old and black and indigent. The justice system would not be predisposed in his favor. But whatever sentence was meted out would never have satisfied Tim. Hell, a smart defense attorney might summon Dr. Money as an expert witness, ask him to tell the court what he had told Time magazine: “A childhood experience, such as being the partner of a relative or of an older person, need not necessarily affect the child adversely.” But what was a child? What was a relative? Clem remembers, as he often does, the image of eighteen-year-old Tally, passing canapés in her parents’ house, offering her tray to her bachelor uncle’s best friend, pregnant by him not even a year later. Utterly different, of course—and yet some people wouldn’t consider it so. Both situations would be covered by Dr. Money’s rubric.

  The discussion was moot. The man was dead at their feet. Events and possibilities swirled around them, fast as the water rushing around the man, unstoppable, implacable. Any number of things could have killed him. The fall, the blow to his head, a heart attack, drowning. What good would it do to tell anyone about the children, how the man had chased them through the woods, much less why. They agreed that Clem would place an anonymous call to 911 from a pay phone downtown, reporting a body in the woods, then check the morgue to find out when a John Doe was brought in. An autopsy would determine if it had been a heart attack, or even a stroke, brought on by exertion. No one was to blame for what happened.

  But when Clem finally called the morgue on an elaborate pretext, claiming he needed to collect data on all over-fifty deaths in September for a research project, there wasn’t a single John Doe who matched the description of the man in the woods. Had his body not been found? Could he have been wrong about the man’s death? If so—

  He pushes his plate away, incapable of finishing. He should buy something for the girls, as he thinks of Tally and Gwen. But what can he take them? Tally is proprietary about her menus and resents any unsolicited contributions. Gwen no longer eats sweets. The market’s flowers are not the best, a little bedraggled and mealy-looking. He has nothing to bring them but himself, old and tired at the end of another day.

  Chapter Twenty

  “I found my thrill,” Larry sings, “up on Strawberry Hill.”

  “Strawberry Hill Apartments . . . for–e–ver,” Rita sings back, unwrapping glasses. Lord, Mickey did a shit job packing them, and a few are chipped. Inevitably, it’s her nice ones, the matched set of heavy Mexican amber from Pier One. Why couldn’t the freebies from the filling station giveaways end up cracked?

  But even the broken glasses can’t dim Rita’s mood, although she makes a mental note to find Mickey later and give her what-for.

  Moving, which is supposed to be one of the most stressful events in a person’s life, has brought Rita nothing but a constant, giggling joy since she signed the lease on the Strawberry Hill apartment last month. She floats through her days, her temper soft, and she rockets through her nights, shooting up, up, up on waves of sex, then falling into the best sleep she has ever known. She can’t believe Larry volunteered to move in with her, without even being asked. Being legit—sharing a bed and an apartment with Larry, if not the actual lease—is the best high she has ever known. Everything is better. Each cigarette, each drink, punching out at work. Even Joey, something of a wild child, is suddenly an angel. It’s almost as if he knows who his real father is, although Rick—of course!—continues to be the superdutiful dad, coming by every other weekend and Wednesday nights. God, Rita would love to tell him the truth, just to wipe that superior look off his face, but she doesn’t want to say good-bye to his checks.

  Besides, Rick’s visits seem to be the only thing that rouses Mickey out of her permanent sulk. Suddenly, nothing makes that girl happy. Take the school thing. She hates her current school, Rock Glen. She was excited about the transfer to a new district when Rita first told her. Then Rita told Rock Glen that Mickey has a medical condition and wouldn’t be able to attend the last three weeks. She now lives too far away to walk to the bus stop, and who’s going to drive her there at 7:30 A.M. every day? Not Rita. Besides, no one learns anything the last three weeks of school. You think a girl would be happy, getting a head start on summer vacation. Plus, Rita’s paying Mickey to babysit during the mornings, when it would be entirely reasonable to expect her to do that for free. A dollar twenty-five an hour, five hours a day, five days a week. Heck, that’s better than Rita does some nights. The girl should be delirious.

  But Mickey hates the new apartment. She has to share a bedroom with Joey, at least until Rita can justify buying a sofa bed, but it’s not like either kid can be in Rita’s room, now that Larry is sleeping over. The new place may be smaller, but it’s nicer. Clean, freshly painted. Besides, her car insurance dropped almost by half just for moving out of the city, and they are a mile closer to the shopping centers up on Route 40 and out Security Boulevard. Mickey could take the bus to any of those places, go shopping, go to the movies. But when Rita points this out, Mickey sighs and says: “I miss my woods.” Her woods? Foolish girl.

  Rita can’t waste time worrying about Mickey. Her immediate goal is to make Larry a man, a real man. Someone who provides. Someone who doesn’t deal drugs, maybe uses them from time to time, but doesn’t sell.

  “What is this?” Larry asks, pulling a long, lidded metal pan from a box. She needs a beat to identify it.

  “A fish poacher.”

  “Have you ever used it?”

  “No. I brought it home from work one night because I heard that was a good way to make fish, but my kids hate fish.” Actually, it was Rick who hated fish, but she tries to mention him as little as possible. She wants to erase Rick from the record, pretend he never happened.

  “ ‘Brought it home’—you mean you nicked it.” Larry smiles. He likes her wicked side.

  “Maybe.” She gives him a sideways bump with her hip as she passes him in the small galley kitchen, then turns and bumps her rear against his crotch, moving lazily back and forth until she sees Mickey standing in the living room, watching them through the pass-through. No expression on her face, no comment, just watching. The girl sees too much. Rita wonders if Mickey has noticed her brother’s marked resemblance to Larry. Thank God both Rick and Larry had dark hair and eyes. There’s nothing obvious to link Larry to Joey unless one looks for the resemblance, as Rita does, repeatedly. There’s a thinness at the bridge of the nose, camouflaged by Joey’s chubbiness, a sameness to the ears. Yes, the ears
. She knows Larry that well, inside and out.

  Which means she understands it won’t be easy, domesticating a man who loves her wild side. Rick was the big attraction, the thing that brought Larry back to her. Now that they aren’t cheating, his interest could fall off. If she leans on him to give up dabbling in drugs, move in officially—no, he has to make those decisions on his own. Or think he’s making them. So be it. She knows how to keep him happy and interested. Last week, they went to the drive-in up on Route 40 and Rita was dead tired, but she made sure to go down on him. Twice. Her hair was coated with grease and salt from his popcorn when she finally pulled her head from his lap. The people in the next car gave her a dirty look. They had a bunch of pajamaed kids with them. So what? It was an R-rated movie about two teenagers trying to lose their virginity. Those righteous parents were the creeps, bringing their kids to something like that.

  She wonders if Mickey has gone all the way yet. She thinks not. She doesn’t want her to, of course, although Rita was only sixteen when she did it the first time, and girls grow up faster now. Still, Mickey needs a boyfriend, someone to distract her so she wouldn’t be in the apartment all the time, sneaking up on Rita and Larry. Maybe Rita should take Mickey to her doctor, get her on the pill? Or an IUD, like she uses, because she smokes. Does Mickey smoke? Does she use drugs? Rita won’t let her get away with that, even if it does make her a hypocrite. Does Mickey know she uses on occasion? Used. Probably, the kid doesn’t miss a trick. Look at her, standing there, staring. Who is she to judge Rita? It might look bad, leaving Rick, taking up with Larry so fast, but if only Mickey knew the whole story. Rita isn’t taking a family apart, she’s putting one together. The girl should be kissing her feet with gratitude.