Guilty Parties

by Thomas Gifford

I seemed to have no appetite. Everything seemed to have conspired to leave me feeling gaunt and dry and old. I got dressed and sat at the scarred old desk looking out over the Public Garden in the evening’s slanting sunlight. I went outside and went into it, the garden and the sunlight, smelling the flowers and watching the children tugging at parents and young couples sitting in the grass kissing and touching one another. I walked down to the little wooden jetty at the Frog Pond and went aboard one of the swan boats, waited for it to fill up, then stared off at the haze and the soundless people on the banks, felt the coolness as we slid under the footbridge, heard the children beside me chattering, only as if they were far away, at the end of a long tunnel. My God, I felt so old. And I didn’t have a man I loved, or a husband, and I had no children, and I couldn’t believe I was going to start having them now … and my best friend had been someone else all along, someone who hid things from me, who couldn’t share her life with me. And all I had to show for any of it was a bunch of paintings. Of myself. Christ, the whole thing was making me fairly sick just then.

  What had Hacker Welles said? I know I didn’t have it all exactly right, but he’d taken a fairly dim view of us, all of us, and had called us all guilty parties.

  What were we guilty of? I’d wondered.

  Maybe an answer was taking shape in my mind. Maybe we were guilty of self-absorption and insulating ourselves and keeping too many secrets and not just letting go and being kind and decent and loving. Maybe. I didn’t know and probably never would.

  I left the swan boats and the Frog Pond behind and walked along Arlington Street, past the offices of The Atlantic Monthly and the corner of Commonwealth and then turned and headed up Beacon Hill. I wanted to reach the top and stand by the State House and look down over the Common and Park and Tremont and the Parker House and pretend for a moment that Jack and I were kids again headed for a party at somebody’s place in the Back Bay where you could hear the music from the open windows six blocks away.

  Of course, I couldn’t stop thinking. Nothing Tony Chalmers had told me led me to believe that Jack had any reason to kill Venables. No reason from the past.

  The fight between Jack and Harry—now, that must have been something. Jack was lucky he hadn’t killed Harry, if it came to that. And breaking a lamp over Jack’s head—my God, what a pair. I dug around in the corners of my mind, through the oldest rubbish, to see if the fact that they were apparently fighting over me provided me with any retroactive satisfaction. It didn’t seem to. Would it have then? I couldn’t answer that question. I didn’t know how stupid I might have been in those days.

  So that was how Harry reacted to having his girlfriend pinched from under his nose by another Ruffian. Not a pretty picture. No wonder Venables had taken such care to keep it quiet. Maybe that was why Sally hadn’t confessed all to me. Maybe he had told her about the lamp and Jack’s head and Harry and the three flights of stairs at Eliot House.

  Then, nearly twenty years down the road, Peter had come back to see Harry and Sally. And maybe Jack had been right.

  And maybe Harry had found out. …

  I saw him and for a moment I was afraid he’d seen me. I’d been leaning at the fence surrounding the Common, the State House right behind me, and I hadn’t been paying any attention to anything but what was going on in my head.

  Suddenly I’d seen something I or my subconscious recognized, a man coming up the steep hill from Tremont Street toward the top of Beacon Hill. The light had pretty well failed in the western sky and the streetlamps were on. First he was just a big dark shape; then I focused on him and heard myself gasp. I didn’t do what a normal person who hasn’t been kicking through the past and fights and murders and illegitimate babies and whatnot would have done: I didn’t call his name gladly and happily and grasp for something on the bright side—oh, no, I let myself shrink back into the shadows beneath the trees while I watched him cross the street and pass in front of the State House.

  What the hell was he doing here?

  And don’t give me coincidences, not now. I was there, Tony Chalmers was a few blocks away, and there he was striding determinedly along like a man who knew exactly where he was going.

  I waited for him to pass; then I followed along on my side of the street, ready to dart down into the Common and God only knew what awful fate if I thought he’d spotted me. I must have been going quite mad.

  He pushed onward and I kept him in view. He wasn’t looking around and he wasn’t dawdling. I knew perfectly well where he was going to stop and turn.

  Joy Street.

  I stood well out of the penumbra of a streetlamp’s glow and watched him, as if he were a robot and I was controlling the handset. Turn, I thought, and he stopped, looked at his watch, and turned.

  I crossed over and stood in the shadows at the corner. He made his way up the street. He didn’t need to check any house numbers. It was familiar territory.

  He went to the door of Tony Chalmers’ house, pushed the buzzer, and the light over the door clicked on. The door opened and in a matter of a minute or so I heard, then saw their shapes, as they came through the dining room and out onto the deck.

  I heard the clinking of glasses in the summer-night stillness and if I’d wanted to I suppose I could have gone closer still and heard their voices.

  Tony Chalmers and Hacker Welles.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  I WENT TO BED THINKING my journey into the past was over, figuring that it was all too deep and muddied for me to deal with, figuring that I’d never get my tired brain wrapped all the way around Harry and Tony and Hacker and Jack and Mike and poor dead Peter. They’d lived in their own little world and I was a woman. I wasn’t even going to understand it and no matter how hard I tried I was never going to gain admittance. It was a men’s club and time had locked the door and thrown away the key.

  That’s what I’d thought when I went to bed that evening, still seeing Hacker in the shadows of Joy Street, waiting at Tony Chalmers’ door.

  But when I woke in the morning and had a fine breakfast of eggs and croissants and marmalade and hot coffee brought to my room—then I began thinking that maybe the journey wasn’t over quite yet. If I hadn’t actually been a Ruffian, I’d been, along with Sally, as somebody had once said, one of the Ladies Auxiliary. Somewhere inside I was part Ruffian. What was happening now proved that. As the Ruffians had come to grief, as the old edifice had begun crumbling, Sally and I had gotten trapped inside too. We were paying the same price.

  So I had one more call to make and I knew I had to do it in person.

  I rented a brown Chevy, loaded my overnight bag, and drove west into the summery Berkshires, dark green and thick as a forest in a fairy tale where the trolls lived, and connected with the New York State Thruway. I turned south. It was perfect for August, hot and pale blue, almost white, and the highway shimmering in the heat like a fluttering ribbon. I played the radio and half-heard the Top Forty and the news on the hour and all the commercials and the hiss of the tires and the whoosh of passing trucks, half-heard it because I was thinking again.

  Hacker had told Mike he was off to do some research. Only one kind of research you do with Tony Chalmers. But what could be left for them to talk about? They’d researched the Ruffians for a year, getting the show down on paper.

  Hacker had wanted to talk to me after the caper at Jack’s apartment, but somehow we hadn’t gotten to it. I’d been through the Suicide Night and Harry with his off-the-wall declaration of unrequited love, and when I’d called him he was already gone … and now he turns up dogging my tracks in Boston.

  What was going on? I felt like a spy, a secret agent, but I didn’t know what I was doing. Spooky feeling.

  But not as spooky as thinking about Harry. Harry and his fight with Jack. Harry still determined to love me. Venables coming back and telling Harry he’d come for me.

  Everything kept coming back to Harry. Harry betrayed almost twenty years ago by Sally and Venables. Harry, Harry
, Harry.

  Harry in the Turtle Bay house while Sally slept. With a sleeping pill, I’d bet. Harry confronting Venables … Harry with, a shotgun solving a lot of problems. …

  I knew the turnoff.

  Everything slowed down once I left the thruway. I could hear the sounds of summer that summer, not man, made. It was a relief. The road wound up into the green mountains, where I left a trail of dust swirling behind me. A dog barked at me from beside the road and the trees were full of little sounds, whiffs of breeze, a stream tumbling along beside the dusty road. The heat clamped a kind of bell of stillness over everything. I’d turned the radio off once I’d left the racket of the highway and the quiet had swallowed me.

  The forested hillsides closed around me as I climbed, and the road got narrower. Then I came upon a clearing, a turnaround where the road petered out. I parked the brown Chevy, which had grown a thick covering of dry countryside, and sat for a few minutes, afraid to leave and knowing I had to. It finally got too hot in the car and I had to get out.

  I stood at the top of a narrow path looking down at a flat, absolutely placid lake so still it resembled a giant coin at the bottom of a thick green carpet. Halfway down the hill an A-frame cabin sat amid the trees. A balcony faced the lake. The quiet was overpowering. The buzz of insects, the occasional call of a bird, the leaves rustling in the wind. I felt the sweat drying on the back of my neck as I stood looking down on the tranquillity.

  Far below, a gray dock jutted out into the lake. A small motorboat bobbed at the end of its tether. A woman sat at the end of the dock with her knees drawn up to her chin. She was staring out at the water. A couple of large, elegant birds swept through the heat over the lake. I stood watching the stillness and the isolation for what seemed an eternity. Then, without warning, the woman on the dock stood up, turned toward me, and waved, as if our minds had signaled one another without a sound, through all that empty space. It had always been that way. The unexpected phone call when I’d most needed it, my turning up on her doorstep just when she’d begun to cry and throw pillows at the wall. I waved back and went down the hill.

  She hugged me but she wasn’t the same Sally. Something was different, but it didn’t become clear to me until she’d made us gin-and-tonics and we’d gone to sit on the balcony and I saw her face as she stared out over the water again. I looked at the water and it occurred to me that it was a perfect place to die, to leave the world behind you, to just slip away and pull the hole in after you. That was what was different about Sally. She was quiet and composed and at peace, which wasn’t like her. The tensile strength, the fierceness that had always lain beneath the surface, was gone. There was a coolness, a calm, as if she’d glimpsed the end and wasn’t afraid of it. Peace. I watched her and I looked out at the water and I thought it was the peace of death.

  “Are you all right?” I said at last.

  “That’s a funny question. Harry’s trying to convince people I took an accidental overdose, he even tried to convince me. What a silly man. No, I’m not all right but in a strange way I’m better off than I was.” She turned the lamps of her black eyes on me. “How are you, Belinda? How’s it all going? I’ve been wanting to talk with you, needing to.”

  “Now’s a pretty good time,” I said, looking around at the blanket of isolation. “No interruptions.”

  “I’ve been thinking. Since, you know … Peter’s death and my typical flubbing of my own. You’re so well-mannered you’d probably grow old and gray and die yourself before asking me why I did it—isn’t that the truth?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve wondered, naturally …”

  “Well, I’ve wondered if I should tell you or if I ought to just let it go. What do you think? Does it interest you?”

  “Talk about funny questions,” I said. Her eyes bored into me in a curiously disinterested way, as if none of it really mattered much anymore. Her voice held the same lack of concern, as if a vampire had bled it of all emotion.

  “I’ve asked myself so many funny questions. I came up here to ask funny questions and then I thought I might go swimming and just not come back. You wouldn’t believe how deep this lake is. Or how cold, even in summer. Icy. I went out in the boat and shut it off and just floated one day, looking up at the sky, watching the clouds go by, seeing the faces and the animals and countries the cloud shapes make, and I dangled my hand over the side—God, it was so cold—and before I knew it my hand was numb, and I thought, hmmm, that’s not such a bad idea, all I’d have to do is just slip over the side and in a matter of seconds, a minute at most, I’d be numb and that would be it. Sound crazy to you, Belinda? Am I crazy or what? Or am I sane? Maybe I just want to make everything come out right, even everything up … and that’ll be the end of people getting hurt.” She poked her finger down into the drink and twirled the lime slice around, licked off her finger. We might have been sitting by the pool at a country club talking about the sex lives of the members. “I’ve got a daughter. I never told you that.”

  “No.”

  “No, I don’t have a daughter, or no, I never told you that?”

  “I know you have a daughter.”

  “Really? Is it common knowledge, then?” She sipped her drink. Emotionless except for maybe a slight curiosity.

  “No. But I wish you’d told me yourself.”

  “But I just did, Belinda. I didn’t know you already knew. Be fair. I had to tell you because I want to sort of clear up accounts. I want everybody to know the stuff that matters. Is that stupid? Oh, I suppose it is. Who cares, right? Well, I guess I care. How would you like to hear the story? I’ll tell you. Horses-mouth stuff and I’m the only horse left.”

  “I’m glad you brought it up, Sal,” I said. I reached over and took her hand, squeezed it softly. The answering pressure was so faint it might not have happened at all. “I wish you would tell me the whole story. Get it off your chest. Then we can begin life all over again.”

  “Can we, Belinda? What an extraordinary idea. But you’ve always had terrific ideas. As far back as I can remember.”

  I wanted to get her talking. I didn’t want Sally to head out into that lake and not come back. Talking her way through the whole story might be just about the only way to keep that from happening.

  “You can imagine what it’s been like,” she said, “sitting on a page-one story for nearly twenty years, not being able to tell my very best pal. Not being able to tell anyone, not even talk about it with the man. Having a daughter. Never seeing her, never hearing from her, knowing she thought her mother had died. It’s been a chore, Belinda. Painful, so painful I pretty well managed to convince the daily me that it had never happened at all. There have been days during those years when I never thought of Peter Venables, nor Delilah Venables, even one time. Not many days, but some. God, there were so many reasons why it could never come out. You see that, don’t you?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. It was up to you, I guess.”

  “Do you realize what it would have done to Harry? Just think of it—Harry would have clouded up and rained all over everything, every inch of the life we had. And God has no idea of what might have happened between him and Peter. I could have dealt with it. But it might have ruined Harry’s life. He’s a romantic guy, love means a lot to him … but then, you know all about that. Sometimes I forget that … that prehistory of ours. Love means a lot to most people, but I’ve asked myself, does it to us, Belinda? Or is it really the day-to-day living that matters? How far can love take you? That’s the way I used to feel about things—oh, I think I probably delivered myself of those sentiments to you at one time or another in girlhood. That’s the way I thought when the thing with Peter started. Romance and passion were one thing, an ephemeral thing, and what I had with Harry was for the long run. Then Peter came back to New York and I was positive all that was behind me, all those fires had died out a long time ago. Maybe Harry could still work up some grand passion for a woman, I was sure he had, but not me. I was scared about seei
ng Peter again, scared in a vague way, but I hadn’t seen him in such a long time—I didn’t believe in passion anymore, so what harm could seeing him do? And he didn’t seem to have any qualms about coming back. I made myself ignore the question of Delilah. She was a young woman I didn’t know. I might not even have liked her.” She stood up and went to the railing, turned her back to the sun so she had no face when I looked at her.

  “Then he came back, he was in the house,” she said, “and I discovered I’d been wrong. Wrong about just about everything I’d been so sure of.”

  “I know the feeling,” I said, but she didn’t seem to hear me.

  “I was crazy about him, Belinda,” she said softly, “and, better yet, he felt the same way about me. It was magic. Does that sound stupid? Do we believe in magic anymore, Belinda? I was so sure I didn’t. But I did. Oh, goodness, I did. Do you still feel passion, the real thing? Have you felt it lately? Or is it a memory?” She looked at me expectantly.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I felt lame, half a person. The passions I’d felt lately hadn’t had much to do with love.

  “You don’t know. Belinda doesn’t know. Do you know if you’d like something to eat, then? That’s an easy one.”

  I tried to laugh but it’s hard to laugh alone. I followed her into the kitchen and watched her slice some cold chicken for sandwiches. It was a very quiet process.

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  HER MOOD REMAINED CONSTANT THROUGHOUT the afternoon as she told me the story of her affair with Peter Venables. She might have been talking about someone else, had I just been hearing her tone; but the story she told was as personal as things get. The story was as real as sex and love and all the other messes people make of their lives. It was just that Sally’s story sounded like the plot of an old Lana Turner movie. Yet I had moments when I wanted to cry and take her in my arms and feel her sobbing. But she wasn’t sobbing. She was beyond sobbing and I could only hope she could find her way back to safety, the safety provided by familiar emotions.