The Cavanaugh Quest

by Thomas Gifford

  “That, yes, I heard about that.”

  “Such a tragedy,” she said reprovingly, as if I weren’t properly saddened. “He couldn’t have been more than forty and he had every reason to live …” She was edging toward my doorway, and it was inevitable. I asked her if she’d like to join me for my morning coffee. She said she certainly would and she could use a few minutes, sitting down, ignoring for the moment her own doorway not more than thirty feet away. But her husband was behind that door, dribbling cream on himself.

  I’d put the fresh-ground coffee into the top of the Braun Aromaster before my shower and it was steaming and ready. I poured two mugs and we went out onto the balcony, where the morning sun had dried the green Astroturf. The world looked fresh and clean. It was nine o’clock and Minneapolis was moving below us.

  “Shot himself in the head, poor man,” she began again, determined to get on with it, and I didn’t stop her. It was all coming back to me and I was curious. She repeated what I already knew about the circumstances of the suicide, item for item; she always had her sources. Her sorrow, her pity, they were all on the surface, in gestures and movements of her eyebrows and vocal intonations which conveyed another strong message: Somehow Harriet Dierker was above and impervious to the problems of lesser mortals. She sorrowed for them as she would for a dog struck by a bus.

  “What made it all the worse is that he’d just started his new job, he’d just moved in here, oh, my … and he had that lovely new Thunderbird, the green one parked down by the fountain. Everything seemed to have finally gotten all straightened out for him.” She pursed her lips. “And he was finally free of that woman!” The expression on her face reminded me that birds are killers. Only a few days before, I’d stood by the bird sanctuary at Como Park and watched a graceful, terrible swan rip a baby duck to pieces while the mother stared frantically, helplessly on.

  “Which woman is that?” I asked, sipping my milky coffee and watching the morning duck inspection far below in the pond.

  “His wife, of course, that Kim person—oh, she was lovely to look at, beautiful, but, Paul, she was the sort of woman the word ‘bitch’ was invented for …”

  “Really?” There was no need to prod her. She was moving ahead under her own power.

  “Worse, Paul, worse—you wouldn’t understand, no man could unless they’d known such a woman. A hellion. A witch!” She was working herself up to some pinnacle of ladylike disgust but words failed her and she made an alert, quick face of undisguised revulsion.

  “Hub Anthony said some people thought she was a little pushy, maybe,” I said, “but he couldn’t see it himself. Said she was always making herself useful—”

  She shivered as if Hubbard’s frailty made her flesh crawl.

  “Oh, Hubbard Anthony should know! He certainly should know!”

  “What do you mean? What are you implying?”

  She clammed up; she always did when someone stood up to her line of accusation, innuendo, half truth. She knew she’d gone too far and switched back to the subject of Kim Blankenship with awesome, practiced ease.

  “Did you know her, Paul?”

  “No. But I understand my father did, and your husband, as well as Hub. I never knew her. I never knew Blankenship, for that matter.”

  “Well, you were away much of the time, weren’t you?” She dabbed the corner of her mouth with a paper napkin. “And Larry’s world was quite different from yours—business, accounting, the sort of thing you never got involved in. Larry wasn’t sophisticated, no big college, none of the advantages,” and she went on in the Horatio Alger vein while I wondered why she was being so defensive about him. She sounded as if she had a stake in him, as if he were something like a son and I was the enemy who had cast some near aspersion on his background.

  “But he was a good boy and when he came down to Minneapolis—let’s see, it must have been 1952 or 1953, I’d think—he showed up at the plant asking Pa for a job, wanted to go on the road and learn the business by selling paint.” She cocked her head like an aging parrot, watching a memory scurry along the edge of time like a mouse behind the sideboard. “I remember Pa coming home that day and telling me about this young man with white socks and a blue suit—that always appealed to Pa, that the boy dressed the same unfashionable way he did himself. He’d come in and looked around the offices and it was lunchtime and the secretaries all happened to be out and Larry saw Tim’s name on the office door, Timothy Dierker of Dierker and Company, and he figured this must be the fellow to see, the big mucky-muck, he called him …” Her eyes were developing shiny tears and I supposed she really was remembering. “He walked right in on Pa and Pa was so surprised and impressed that he gave him a job. Oh, if Dan Peterson hadn’t finally come into the office off the road, there wouldn’t have been a job but Pa always said he’d have found him a job, he liked him that much.” She sighed spitefully. “Oh, he’d never met her at that point … but, you know, Paul, it must have been foreordained even then because it was just about that time that Ole Kronstrom began giving Helga problems—Helga was his wife, one of my best friends, and Ole was Pa’s partner in Dierker and Company.” She was turning it over in her mind, like a marginal worm. “Yes, it was just about the time that Larry Blankenship came to work for Pa that Helga told me that she thought Ole was going through the change—she thought he was running around with girls; she saw him winking at the waitresses out at Norway Creek … it was hard for me to believe at first because Pa had never been one to engage in that sort of smutty thing. But wives know their husbands best, Paul”—she touched my arm to underline her contention—“and it turned out that she was right, Ole was beginning to chase …” She sniffed righteously. “Working his way up, or down, if you see what I mean, to that Kim Roderick, who was just nothing, nothing but a waitress herself at Norway Creek, a waitress out to catch a rich man.” It was difficult to tell which upset her more, Ole’s infidelity or the fact that it had been committed with a waitress. The Dierkers had never really gotten used to having a lot of money, even though they were the second generation in paint, but while Tim never took it very seriously Harriet was self-consciously moneyed—unsure of her grammar and schooling and antecedents but sure of her power over underlings, all those who didn’t have as much money and were defined in their own minds by the lack of it. Largesses, noblesse oblige—she loved to take those poses but only if you were well behaved and knew your place. Larry Blankenship had but Kim Roderick apparently hadn’t.

  The story Harriet Dierker told me about Kim Roderick was a honey, filtered through a mesh of venom, hatred. I couldn’t quite imagine why she was so virulent about it but then I remembered that Blankenship had done himself in only the day before and her grief, real or imagined, was at least new and raw.

  According to Harriet Dierker, Kim had come down to Minneapolis from some backwater up near the Canadian border, one of the desolate places that made you feel that you were treading the line between life and death, balanced in the darkness between the blue-black forests of pine and evergreen and fir and the flat, strip-mined wastes where the Mesabi had been slit open and its innards pulled out for the good of the steel companies. That part of the country remained an impenetrable, sorrowful mystery to me. Anyone who’d come from there, it seemed to me, must have had to try a little harder. But people I knew who’d come south to the lights of the Twin Cities said I was wrong: Anything, they said, was easy after growing up on the Iron Range. Anyway, the Norway Creek Club must have seemed like heaven to Kim Roderick in the late fifties when she’d gone to work as kitchen help.

  Mrs. Dierker, wasn’t sure if Kim had known Billy Whitefoot from up north or if she met him at the club, where Billy ran the tractor with the eight lawn-mower assemblies splayed out behind it, back and forth, every day all summer long across the golf course. Billy had been a very handsome black-haired, black-eyed Indian boy, who had done well at the club, lived over the pro shop, and gone to Dunwoody Institute in the fall and winter to learn the baking tra
de. Anyway, she thought so; after all, it had been more than fifteen years ago and she couldn’t expect to remember the details.

  She did know that the members’ golf committee had allowed Billy to live in the room over the pro shop because they were convinced that here was a boy who just wasn’t like all the other Indians who didn’t give a damn about anything but getting drunk. By saying that, Harriet Dierker believed she was showing her own open-mindedness, her willingness to judge people individually. And Billy had been just fine for a while. Then there had been Kim Roderick. “Billy, my God—he looked like an Indian god, Paul, like a real-life Hiawatha!”—Billy hadn’t had a chance. By the end of the summer Kim was pregnant and she and Billy got married. After all, even though he was an Indian, he was a bright boy, well-liked, doing well at Dunwoody, a serious boy … And apparently he really fell for Kim Roderick. Harriet allowed as how you couldn’t blame him: a temptress, she’d been, always bending over and stretching and showing her legs and her bosom. “I’d never say anything but several of the club members used to make sure they were around when she’d help clean the pool late at night and take a dip,” she said. “I saw her and I saw the men watching her.”

  The baby was due in the late winter, to the best of her recollection, and Billy Whitefoot didn’t live that winter in the pro shop. The couple dropped out of sight, maybe went back up north for the winter, but when spring came there was a letter from Billy wondering if their jobs were still open. They were and the first week in April they drove up in an old station wagon, Billy and Kim, no baby; everyone assumed it must have been left with a grandmother or an aunt up north and no one really wanted to know. There were rumors that summer about Billy. People said he’d been drinking; just like an Indian, some of them said. Several mornings he didn’t show up for work and the gigantic mower stood along with the other equipment in the shed. Kim never missed a day, though, refused even to discuss Billy, almost as if he weren’t there anymore. She was working as a waitress in the evening and as a pool girl during the day, but every free moment found her on the tennis courts with Darwin McGill, the pro, learning the game.

  That was where Ole Kronstrom first really paid any attention to her.

  The sun was warm and the wind scurried blissfully in the rich green crowns of the trees in the park. Mrs. Dierker showed no signs of letting up so I went inside and warmed four brioche, which were actually flown in several times a week, Paris to Minneapolis. I got out a crock of Keiller’s three fruits marmalade, knives and plates, butter, and a little wicker basket with a napkin to wrap the brioche. I was flattering her with my attention; my mind was empty of other things and the more people told me about this story, the more I wanted to hear. It was like killing time by stopping in at a movie you’d never heard of and getting hooked. Blankenship was the one who was dead but the one I was hearing about was Kim, the woman in the case.

  Mrs. Dierker was admiring my shaded tuberous begonias and my two tomato plants, which stood a trifle hesitantly in the sun. But, after licking butter from a finger and a morsel of crumb from her lower lip, she wanted to get back to the story.

  Ole Kronstrom and Tim Dierker had been partners for a long time, as their fathers had been in the twenties, and it was natural for Helga and Harriet to have become best friends. Their husbands had always gotten on well and on business trips the two women had come to be more than friends. They were intimates; they had no secrets from each other. And it was natural for Helga to turn to Harriet with her suspicions about Ole’s chasing.

  That was the summer Billy Whitefoot finally ran off and Kim Roderick (nobody had ever really known her as Kim Whitefoot) showed she had a real talent for tennis, among other things. That summer Ole Kronstrom took up tennis himself, fifty-two years old, married for thirty years to Helga, and maybe beginning to wonder if he’d had all he was going to get.

  Harriet Dierker didn’t go into any details about Ole’s fall into depravity, though she must surely have savored them at the time.

  “I knew Ole like a brother, he and Pa were that close,” she said, her little jaw clamped hard on her beliefs, “and I saw him make a fool of himself over that wanton girl who’d already ruined one man and abandoned one child … Oh, yes, it was Kim who ruined Billy Whitefoot, the rumors of what she was doing, the way she treated him—I mean it all fit, Paul—and she acted as if he didn’t even exist, as if he were a mistake she could erase. Well, she erased Billy all right, and he went to pieces. That’s the way it must have been. If you’d known them, you’d have seen it happen. Everyone knew it—”

  “I don’t think Hubbard saw it that way,” I said. “She stayed on at Norway Creek, didn’t she? They wouldn’t have let her stay if it had been so blatant, would they?”

  “The ones who understood things,” she said coldly, “they could see what was going on. It wasn’t our fault if the others—the men—were blind to the kind of woman she was. Is!”

  “I see.” She wasn’t about to be trifled with and I didn’t want to antagonize her. I wanted to see where the story went.

  “Ole had no sense about her, of course. For a while he pretended that they were just taking tennis lessons together from McGill, that it was natural for them to sit on the porch and have a lemonade together when they were finished playing. There they’d sit, giggling over their lemonade, and then she’d have to go put on her uniform to serve dinner.” She made a face, eyes flickering behind her oval glasses. “It was disgusting and Helga saw it all … but she wouldn’t admit the full truth of it. It was my unhappy job to help her see it and give her my strong shoulder to cry on. Of course Helga eventually confronted him with it and he denied any wrongdoing, as I knew he would.

  “But I was right. In the end he was taking her to lunch at Harry’s and Charlie’s out in the open, and he even—God forgive him—talked about adopting her … because she’d had such a hard time, he said, with her husband running off that way, and because she was such a fine girl. I tell you, Paul, there was just no end to his misbehavior … Helga stood it through that summer and she thought maybe it was over when winter came but I knew it wasn’t. One day in December, just before Christmas, I was having my hair done at Churchill-Anderson, I was under the dryer and I heard her voice, Kim’s voice, behind me, she couldn’t see me, and she was telling the stylist to hurry because her father was picking her up for lunch. It just sent a chill through me, Paul, a positive chill—I can feel it now. And I watched in the mirror; I saw this father she was talking about come into the waiting room. It was Ole. It made me sick, seeing her hug him …”

  “Did you tell Helga?”

  “What else could I do? She was my best friend.”

  It was like something from an old Joan Crawford movie; I felt myself being anesthetized by Harriet Dierker’s voice, which grew increasingly short of breath as her plot thickened. But she held my attention. The story had momentum of its own and it just kept going on and on. Ole Kronstrom had refused to give up seeing young Kim, had funneled a good deal of his capital into clothes for Kim, a car for Kim, trips which Kim sometimes took by herself and occasionally with Ole. Eventually his money began to run low—it seemed incredible, but there it was—and of course Helga had left him, divorced him, and managed to come away with a handsome settlement.

  What Helga got, Harriet noted, she deserved for all those years of fidelity; what Kim Roderick did was, of course, reprehensible, typical, and utterly bloodthirsty, and who was I to argue?

  With Ole presumably on the ropes, Kim had then turned her sex ray on Larry Blankenship, who was still working for Pa (and for Ole, for that matter) but had moved from sales, through a company-financed accounting program, and into the public relations and advertising end of things. He’d had some “personality problems” and had consulted a psychiatrist but, even so, he was “a nice young man, very earnest,” and making a good salary. The sex ray did him in, however: Kim nailed him where he stood, married him, and Harriet wondered why. Love was out of the question; perhaps it was Kim’s mis
placed striving for respectability.

  Pa had done everything he could to talk Larry out of it; he’d gone off his feed, spent night after night worrying about what the marriage would do to Larry. Harriet had never seen Pa take anything quite so hard, as if Larry were a son. It was about then that his health had seriously begun to fail. She could almost pinpoint it, the night he’d come upstairs to bed gray-faced, shaking; Larry was decided, he said; there was nothing left for him to say. The girl had him and Pa had fidgeted all night; a week later he’d had his first coronary. As far as Harriet was concerned, Pa was another of Kim’s victims. I wondered why Pa had taken it so hard; she offered no substantive explanation.

  So Larry and Kim were married. Pa’s health failed through a long winter, and what of Ole Kronstrom? Another peculiar facet glittered in the darkness of the story: Ole had given the bride away … and his wedding present to the happy couple was a honeymoon trip to Europe. He didn’t seem to resent her marriage, which left Harriet Dierker with only one rational conclusion. His relationship with Kim was stable, enduring, continuing.

  My head swam with the Byzantine complexity of it all. I had never looked upon myself as an innocent, but my God.

  “But Larry was blind to all that, Paul,” she said. The coffee was cold and the brioche were gone. “Self-deception. Was he happy? They were never happy, not really, I’m sure, certainly not after that first year. They had a child, who didn’t turn out right at all—not long after that, Larry left Dierker and Company. Pa tried to keep tabs on him and he moved through several jobs, never seemed able to find himself. They—Larry and Kim—stopped by one Christmas to see us; we gave them some eggnog. I just sat there—I didn’t know what to say to them—but Pa wanted to talk … But there wasn’t much to say. I don’t know to this day why they came to see us. She said almost nothing; Larry seemed tired, drained. Not much after that we heard that they were living apart, then nothing. Pa had another coronary, then a third one, and we got rid of the house and moved in here. I don’t suppose I thought about Larry or Kim for quite a long time. Until a month ago, when Larry moved into this building. Pa acted so funny about it when I told him I’d seen Larry in the lobby … Larry dropped by to see Pa two or three times during this past month but Pa’s been so sick, you know. And now”—she caught her breath—“and now Larry’s dead …