The Most Dangerous Thing

by Laura Lippman

  “At school, Go-Go? Has it happened at school?”

  He turns toward the wall.

  Doris knows now why Father Andrew is coming to tea. Her son has crapped himself at school. And now at home, within feet of a toilet. She isn’t sure why this is so much more shameful than wetting the bed, yet it is. Something is terribly wrong with Go-Go. Is he crazy? Are all the little things that once made them laugh—the energy, the dancing—were those things they should have been worried about?

  She sits on her son’s bed and places a hand on his back. He’s a strong boy, although short for his age, strength and energy almost pulsing through his body. He is, as always, warm to the touch, a furnace. She wants to remember the little boy that was put in her arms ten plus years ago, nine pounds, the biggest of her children, red-faced from his journey yet almost eerily calm. She wants to remember how sweet he was. She wants to believe he will be sweet again.

  But all she can think is: Father Andrew is coming to tea tomorrow. And whatever else went wrong today, she has managed to save those perfect, perfect pound cakes for him.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Winter 1980

  The university starts its holidays by mid-December, and Clem is home, left to his own devices during the day as Gwen still has a week of school and Tally has her painting. Creativity doesn’t take a Christmas break, she informed Clem loftily when he began enumerating the things they might do together. Loftily and a little desperately. “I have to make use of what godforsaken light there is this time of year,” she said Sunday evening. She says that there are studies showing that some people need light, that she wasn’t made to live in this climate. Clem pointed out—gently, he thinks, even comically—that her mother’s people were Scandinavian. “And our furniture is Danish modern, so you should feel right at home. Perhaps you just need herring.”

  Tally doesn’t find this funny. Tally finds very little funny as of late. She tells Clem that she hates their furniture, which she chose because it was the only style that worked in his house. His house. Clem isn’t sure about the lack of light being the cause of Tally’s moods, but the moods are undeniably real. She used to be more on an even keel, but now the happy—manic?—days are rare. For all the time she spends in her studio, she isn’t getting much done, and he thinks this might be the real source of her depression. The big canvas that she started a year ago ground to a halt this summer. Clem knows because he sneaks into her studio. He shouldn’t, of course. He should respect Tally’s desire to show her work to him when she’s ready. But he can’t stop himself. He wants to see her work because he wants to know that this is really what she does, all day.

  Until this latest project, most of Tally’s canvases were the sort of thing that makes people say, “My kid could paint better than that.” Tim Halloran said exactly that, adding: “And I mean Go-Go.” When Tim teased his kids, it never sounded quite right. Not to apportion blame, but—if that man in the woods had shown the boy any kindness, then Clem could understand how it happened. Go-Go yearned to be held by someone, anyone. Clem remembers how he used to climb Tally, seizing her hair, as if she were Rapunzel.

  Despite what philistines such as Tim may think, Tally has a gift for abstract painting. She owes a lot to Rothko and Motherwell, but those are good debts. She uses cool colors in shades so close to one another that it is necessary to stand back and study her paintings to understand how much variation there is. Completely self-taught, she’s uncanny, and he’s proud of her, wishes she believed in herself enough to push for a show or even enter an amateur competition.

  The painting that has bogged her down is figurative, however. No one’s child could paint this. It’s huge, an oil of two entwined children—well, teenagers, Clem has decided, because otherwise it would be almost pornographic. They belong to some other era, based on the clothing strewn through the foreground, an ancient time. The girl has a wreath of white flowers in her hair. A lion watches them from a glade. Pyramus and Thisbe? But the classic couple did not have a chance to make love before the lion entered their story. The painting is disturbing, in a good way, not at all trendy. But the faces are giving Tally fits. She clearly has tried again and again, but they are never quite right. The boy looks as if he’s in pain, not ecstasy, while the girl’s face has never advanced enough to have any expression at all. He yearns to ask Tally about what has inspired her, but then he would have to reveal that he has been sneaking into her studio.

  It is an hour before dusk. Tally has retreated to the kitchen, where she will drink tea and mutter while preparing dinner. Clem loves the light at this time of year. True, he’s not a painter, but he can’t imagine anything better than walking through these hills of denuded trees. The soft gray light suits his mood. He’s not exactly upbeat himself these days. Ronald Reagan, president. A Republican-controlled Congress. It is scant comfort to live in one of the six states that Carter carried. If Tally’s depression were situational, he could better understand it, but she’s grown indifferent to politics. The only news that has affected her of late is John Lennon’s murder, which she insists on calling an assassination. Clem cannot bear to have such an important word used for the murder of a musician, and he told Tally as much. The argument spiraled out of control, perhaps because they seldom argued and had little practice. She wheeled their large dictionary over to him, showing him that it was accurate to use the word for the murder of any public person. “But for political reasons!” Clem countered. “Mark David Chapman was crazy, pure and simple. The desire for fame is not a political stance.” It was such a strange fight. Clearly, Lennon and Chapman were proxies for grudges they did not dare to address.

  Now, striding across the hills in the fading light, it occurs to him that they were arguing over the fact that they were of different generations, that Tally had a stake in John Lennon’s murder, while Clem did not. But she doesn’t, not really. Although Tally is only four years older than Lennon, she is too old to be one of his true fans. By the time the Beatles came on the scene, she had opted out of her generation and joined Clem’s.

  But perhaps that was the underlying cause of the fight, Tally’s lost youth—and the fact that she was the one who squandered it. He knows she doesn’t regret their marriage or the children. But she can’t stop wondering what might have been, a truly tragic affliction. Clem, born in 1923, had an old-fashioned education, the kind that involved lots of memorization and recitation. (How appalled he had been when Gwen had come home from her first day of high school and announced excitedly that her history teacher didn’t believe in dates. As if this were progress, as if dates had no relevance. What next, a chemistry teacher who threw out the periodic table?) Clem knows not only the famous Whittier line For of all sad words of tongue or pen / The saddest are these: “It might have been!” but he also knows the whole poem, “Maud Muller,” and finds the preceding lines far more chilling: God pity them both! and pity us all / Who vainly the dreams of youth recall.

  What would his children regret? How could he keep them from having regrets? They are so different. Miller, always determined to do the right thing in the right way, marrying at twenty-four, now on his way to being a father. Fee, so shy and diffident, a mystery even to herself. Gwen, her mother all over again, which scares him more than anything. He wishes he could protect them from disappointment, but he lost that battle long ago. Once, when Miller was very young, Clem drove him to a railroad crossing in South Baltimore, near Stockholm Street. A freight train finally lumbered past, a long one with varied cars. Miller, not even four at the time, was thrilled. When the last car passed, the train’s whistle blowing, he turned to his father and said: “Again.” And when Clem could not make it happen, he cried bitterly, upset not only by the lack of another train but at his father’s impotence.

  Clem himself has no regrets. Well—he had no personal regrets until a little over a year ago, and he still can’t see what he might have done differently, so is that truly regret? He crests another hill, sees the little house on the other sid
e of the stream. Is there smoke coming from the chimney? Are there chickens in the yard? He speeds up, almost running, splashing through the creek without thinking about his shoes, much less the risk of tetanus. It was all a horrible dream, then. The night never happened, the man never died, that’s why his body didn’t show up at the morgue.

  But when he reaches the house, there is no smoke, and the “chickens” are old newspapers, blowing lazily in the breeze. The house looks different, though. And Clem can be sure of this because his walks, over the past fourteen months, keep leading him back here, although he hasn’t entered the yard for a month or two. Someone has been here recently. Probably kids. Only it looks neater, which makes no sense. Kids, even good kids, don’t leave things neater.

  How did the children ever find their way here? It’s a question he has asked himself over and over again. The adults knew about the old man, of course, if not his predilections. In winter, the cabin’s roof was visible from the road they all used as a shortcut. But to the grown-ups, the house was a blight, an embarrassment. Clem and Tally, in particular, felt odd, living down the street from a man whose life seemed little better than a sharecropper’s. Meanwhile the Hallorans were appalled because the man was black, not that they were polite enough to use that term, or even Negro. Doris Halloran pronounced people “colored,” as if it were the enlightened thing to say, and Tim Senior—well, he liked to mix up his epithets. He seemed to think his large stock of synonyms passed for wit. Jungle bunny, coon, tar baby, spear chucker. But never nigger, which only convinced Clem that Tim was dangerously racist beneath his I’m-just-having-fun-I-dare-you-to-say-otherwise gaze. Clem wonders if he still uses those words. He doesn’t know, because he can’t bear to be in the same room with the man, not that they had spent much time in each other’s company before the night of the hurricane. Maybe at a potluck, or the progressive dinner Tally put together one time, inspired by a book she was reading to Gwen, but he wasn’t sure.

  He tries to tell himself that he objected to Sean as Gwen’s first boyfriend because of Sean’s father, his fear that any apple that dropped from the Halloran tree had to be poisoned. Oh, he liked Sean as much as any man could like a teen daughter’s first boyfriend, but he was glad to see him go. In the early stages of Tally’s stalled painting, he worried it was inspired by Sean and Gwen, that she knew something he didn’t. But, no, it just can’t be. He’s a doctor. He understands, theoretically, that Baltimore is full of teenage girls having sex. But not his daughter. Not with Sean.

  And then he realizes that thought is as bigoted and snobbish as anything Tim Halloran ever dared to say out loud. Every time Clem wants to think he is different from Tim, something reminds him that he is not blameless. He will never be blameless.

  He starts walking back, crossing the stream, a relative trickle today, then heading up the hill. This is the steepest part of the terrain. He imagines this spot as it was in the storm, what someone would have seen from where he’s standing now. Two men, hale and sure-footed, running down the slope, then kneeling in the rushing water, a slightly older one making his careful way toward them, flashlight strafing them with light. He sees the older man bending down—but he can’t stay outside the scene any longer. He is there again, realizing that the inert object at Tim’s and Rick’s feet is a man, dark as coal except for odd patches of unpigmented skin. And dead.

  “He was dead when we got here,” Rick said.

  “But Tim was ahead of you, going down the hill, he had at least twenty-five yards on you—”

  “He was dead when we got here. Right, Tim?”

  Tim Halloran nodded. He was shaking all over.

  “The fall killed him,” Rick said. “See? That rock, that’s where he hit his head, and he’s been lying in this stream ever since, his lungs filling up with water. Between that and the head injury, he never could have survived. It doesn’t matter what the kids did. Leave him here.”

  Clem bent down, tested at the neck for a pulse, knowing there would be none. He had no obligation to the dead, had taken no oath on their part. Still, it seemed wrong to leave the man here.

  “He lived in these woods. He has no family, no one looking out for him,” Rick said. “It was an accident.”

  “Was it?” Tim and Rick had crested the hill before him. Clem had heard shouting, though, seen an arc of light moving wildly through the night. He wouldn’t be surprised if there was flesh and blood clinging to Tim’s flashlight, even in this driving rain.

  “An accident,” Rick repeated. “There’s nothing to be done. He slipped and fell. Talking about how he came to fall, or why we were here looking for him—there’s no point. We’ll have to talk about . . . everything. And that’s not going to be good for anyone.”

  They left him there. Clem later made an anonymous call to the police from a pay phone downtown. A week later, when Clem hiked back into the woods, the man was gone. Clem wanted to believe that his anonymous call had yielded results, that EMTs had somehow found his body. But wanting to believe it didn’t make it true.

  “Did you see his guitar?” Gwen asked one night, weeks later.

  “Whose guitar?”

  “The man in the woods. When you found him—did you see his guitar? It was steel, it was probably ruined in all that rain.”

  “Honey, there was no guitar.”

  To his amazement—and to his gratification, for Gwen had seemed cool and frivolous of late—she burst into tears. But it was the last time they ever spoke of the incident. Now, only a year later, she chatters away about dates and boys and, very occasionally, about school itself. The hurricane is forgotten. Her old friends appear to be forgotten. Mickey never comes to the house, although there’s still a drawer filled with the sugary junk she loved. The Halloran boys have abandoned the woods, although Clem sometimes sees little Go-Go walking along the top of the hill, where there’s a path.

  It is the old who are supposed to have memory problems. Senility, Alzheimer’s, dementia. But in Clem’s experience, no one can forget the way a young person can. He specializes in the elderly, he is himself becoming elderly, but to be interested in old age also means thinking constantly about youth. That’s the paradox. His daughter is now almost the age her mother was when Clem first glimpsed her, a beautiful, high-spirited girl. No one thought it was that outré. Yet if a thirty-two-year-old man were to regard Gwen with anything approximating lust, he would want to kill him.

  Only he wouldn’t. That’s the difference between him and the Tim Hallorans of the world.

  Dead when they got there. Sure, why not? Could be. The man was dead when Clem had gotten there, and wasn’t that all that mattered? He hadn’t done anything except agree to a reality that meant a little less pain for everyone. Go-Go would never have to speak to strangers about what happened to him. Tim would not be called into account for his actions, whatever they were. Clem and Rick would not be labeled accessories. And the women and the children were allowed to sleep the blissful sleep of the ignorant, protected by their men, which is what men are supposed to do, first and foremost.

  He turns back, looks at the funny little cabin, comically small and lopsided from this distance. Funny, how they never connected it. The grown-ups drove past this cabin, saw something shameful, a man living like a sharecropper only a few miles from downtown Baltimore. The grown-ups saw the past, complicated and cruel. Their children saw a playhouse. The man who lived here saw a potential victim in Go-Go.

  What if it were your child? Tim had asked Clem that night. To this day, Clem thinks: It wouldn’t be. He knows that’s wrong. He understands intellectually that anything can happen to anyone at any moment. Even in his world of medicine and science, there are no absolutes. People smoke their entire lives at no seeming physical cost, while someone who has never so much as held a cigarette can get lung cancer. But he has to believe that his own daughter is immune to such danger, that she never would have allowed herself to let a stranger touch her as this man touched Go-Go.

  He probably was de
ad when Tim got there. He slipped, he fell, and his lungs filled with water when the children ran to get help. Who can fault them for not staying with him on that dark rainy night? Who would ask them to administer first aid to that monster, lying in the creek? Yes, there was the strange arc of the flashlight going up and down, instead of side to side—Stop, he tells himself. Believe what’s easiest to believe. There’s no harm in it.

  He is home now, or almost there, at the peak above his house. Your dream house, as Tally always says. It is. He built a house to his taste on a site that he loved, assuming his wife and children would love it, too, but only Gwen shared his affection for the place. Now even she wouldn’t object to moving, as long as she could continue to be the queen bee of her social set at Park School.

  Someone—Clem has no idea who—called children and wives hostages to fortunes. He will never see it that way. His wife and his children are his real contributions to the world. He isn’t demeaning what he has accomplished professionally. He’s good at what he does and enjoys it, the best of all possible combinations. But there is always someone to take one’s place in any profession, no matter how singular or vital. There’s no shortage of men who want to be president or discover vaccines or explore the Amazon. Only Clem can be Tally’s husband, father to Miller, Fee, and Gwen. Only he can love them as he loves them.

  As he descends the hill, he realizes that as much as he hates Tim Halloran, he envies him, too. Because Halloran proved he would do anything for his children, whereas Clem couldn’t even give up this jury-rigged, imperfect house. What Halloran did was savage. But it was also love, immutable, enormous love. He killed the man who touched his boy. If a police officer ever shows up on Clem’s doorstep, Clem will sell the others out in a heartbeat, cut a deal for himself. But their silence, their pact, was not simply about avoiding discovery. When they agreed that night to say nothing to anyone else about the man’s death, they condoned what Tim did. He avenged his son. He was a real man.