At six o’clock we were sitting on white wrought-iron chairs at white wrought-iron tables on one of the little balconies dangling above the Sheraton-Ritz swimming pool. Sheila was down below with a long-handled squeegee pushing puddles of water toward the drains, then moving the featherweight lounge chairs back against the wall. The sun was angling into Kim’s eyes; her sunglasses were conservative in shape but constructed of hundreds of layers of delicately shaded colored plastic. The shadows of the balcony supports were long, slicing across us like penciled streaks. She sipped her lemonade through a straw, a bright red cherry floating on top of the ice cubes.
“Watching her reminds me of the job I used to have at Norway Creek,” she said. “I can remember evenings just like this, putting a terry-cloth jacket over my swimming suit, cleaning up and rearranging once everybody was gone.” She looked over at me, smiling thinly. I couldn’t see her eyes. “It was such a long time ago, going on twenty years ago. There was a time, wasn’t there, when the very idea of something happening twenty years ago was inconceivable. Now it’s turning out to be pretty conceivable after all. I used to have a kind of net for fishing stuff out of the pool, leaves and tennis balls and sandwiches … Labor Day weekend, that was always the last really busy time of summer, and then it wouldn’t be long until we drained the pool for good. Long time ago.”
“Billy,” I said. “I suppose he’d be mowing the golf course.”
“That’s right. Another life, light-years away.”
“But only a couple of miles from where we’re sitting. Space and time, two entirely different stories. Sometimes I think people never get very far away from where they start after all.” The lemonade was watery, not sweet enough. No taste, from some frozen concentrate; lemonade was like a lot of things they didn’t make the same anymore.
She wasn’t afraid of silences and she didn’t seem to mind my watching her. She was wearing a gray linen dress with a camel-colored sweater around her shoulders. She wore a turquoise necklace and the gold tank watch with the sapphire on the winding stem caught the sunlight. Her arms and legs were tan and bare.
“The past really does interest you,” I said.
“It’s always changing,” she said. “You’re right, it intrigues me. History of any kind.”
“But you won’t discuss your own history.”
“Not interesting at all.” She pursued her lips as if to elaborate, then didn’t, and sucked on her straw. She sat there, relaxed, but composed, drew her sweater about her as the sun ducked lower. Sheila lowered the umbrellas on the tables, scraped chairs along the cement. “What is it you wanted to talk to Ole about?”
“The man I mentioned before, Carver Maxvill. Did I mention him to you?”
“I don’t recall.”
“Well, has Ole ever said anything about him? Try to remember, Carver Maxvill …”
“I don’t have to try. He’s the man who disappeared a long time ago.” I nodded. “I’ve heard Ole mention him, not recently, but in a conversation. We talk a great deal and I suppose the disappearance of a man you know is the kind of thing you might bring up in one context or another. I can’t remember when, it was casual, you know … just a reference.”
“Did he ever suggest why? Or give a character description, maybe about drinking or chasing women? Anything that comes back to you …”
“No, I’m sure not.” She took off the sunglasses and focused her searching eyes on me. Her headband, holding every dark hair right where it was supposed to be, matched her turquoise necklace. She folded her long arms beneath her small breasts, which rose so slightly beneath the pale linen. “Look, Mr. Cavanaugh”—and she made a point of the formality—“what is it you’re after now? Whenever I begin to trust you, think you’re a nice, slightly nosy fellow, you start coming on again with all this picking around in the refuse.” There was so little overt charm in her; in that respect she defied femininity, the wiles and stratagems. It appealed to me but, as a product of my own times, I was pitched off balance by it. Which, when you thought about it, wouldn’t have been such a bad stratagem.
“I’m leveling with you,” I said. “I’m not digging around in your life, I’ve told you I’m not.” I didn’t know if that was true but I pretended. “But I am still kicking around in the ashes of the old hunting and fishing club. I am, I am, I am … I admit it. But I don’t know why it should bother you … Kim.” That last was a sort of tentative afterthought I immediately regretted; her sympathy was not to be won quite so easily and I knew it.
“But why, why, why?” she mimicked, without a smile.
“Because it’s a mystery.” I waited. “Because Tim Dierker is dead and Carver Maxvill’s name scares hell out of everybody and scrapbooks and newspaper files are being swiped. I’ve waited for a pattern to form, the indication of another presence, a person on the other side … I’ve waited, I’ve talked the ears off people and I’ve listened hour after hour, I’ve tried to tie things together, get a feel for what’s going on beneath the surface. Today, this afternoon, down in a room like Jack Benny’s vault, I got convinced—”
“And how did that come about?” She liked substantive talk, not shy smiles. I got a glimpse of white teeth.
“Somebody has gone to the trouble of stealing a file from the newspaper morgue. First time in twenty years or so, according to the keeper of the files, that one has left the room at all, let alone been stolen. It fits into a pattern, it makes an assortment of facts and suppositions take a shape, because it was the file of clippings about Carver Maxvill. Why and who … it’s a mystery, kid, and the sap is rising.”
A laugh bubbled out and she winked. I swear she did. “Oh, he is, is he?” She touched my hand for an instant and quickly leaned back. “This fascination with mysteries, it runs in your family, I assume?”
“My father’s the expert. I’m a critic who happened to write a book about a murder.” It was perceptibly cooler; gooseflesh prickled on her long dark arms.
“But Fenton Carey is a newspaperman. Perhaps he’s your ideal—are you trying to live up to your father’s expectations?”
“No, I’m more in the tradition of Steve Wilson of the Illustrated Press.”
“Never heard of him.”
We drove the few blocks to the riverbank and ate dinner at the Fuji-Ya, where you sit on the floor and hope your socks don’t have holes in them. We watched nighttime come to the river, hiding the junk piles and warehouses and drunks across the little dam and rapids. The food was fine, shreds of this and that steamed before your wondering eyes and shrimps that seemed mysteriously to have exploded. You weren’t hungry an hour later either; you were hungry the moment you finished eating. But there was the plum wine, a good deal of it. We drank glass after glass, eyes meeting fretfully, talking in spurts separated by lengthy, calm silences.
“You said you didn’t want to disappear,” I said. “How’s it coming?”
“Very well, thank you. Each day I’m more aware of my own existence.”
“History. You’re going to teach?”
“Law school,” she said. “That’s the scheme at present. I’ve got the right kind of mind for it, organized, analytical, daring when I think I can pull it off. Courtroom work, at least the idea of it appeals to me.”
“To have gone so far, that appeals to you, too. I’m beginning to know you. You’re proving all sorts of things. You’re way beyond validating your own experience.” I sighed into my plum wine and she held up her empty glass.
“I never, ever do things like this,” she said. “You may not believe that, but it’s true. I can’t remember ever, in my entire life, going out to eat and drink with a stranger, on the spur of the moment. I’m a planner, a plotter, and besides that I’ve had almost no opportunities.” Our wine was replenished. “It is fun, I really can’t deny it. It’s not me, but then behavior can change, even if your nature can’t.” She smiled openly for the first time, her nose crinkling and her large eyes squeezing together. She put her hand over her mouth, some
what surprised at herself. I hoped she wasn’t going to frighten herself and come to earth.
“How did you come to Norway Creek?” I said.
“I’ve told you, I don’t like to talk about my past …”
“Where are you from?”
“A little town up north—now that’s it, no more, or you’re going to become Mr. Cavanaugh again.” She stared off through the glass wall into the night and I leaned back against the bamboo or whatever it was. Lights flickered on the far shore, past the black river. But she went on. “I’m a different person from the one I was born.” She hiccuped quietly. “I don’t want to sound like a fanatic, but I look on myself as reborn, dating from the moment I realized that I had better be the most important person in my own life, not in someone else’s life … I’ve truly changed the course of my life, more than most people, I’ve decided to get somewhere. I care what I think about me. I know what I was and what I am, I know what people have said about me … and I have made myself not care what they say.” She took a long swallow of plum wine and I blinked. The wine was getting to my eyes and the base of my well-worn skull. I was hot; but I knew I should be paying attention to the recitation. “You’ve already talked to Darwin McGill and Anne, they must have given you a clue or two to some of the stages I’ve gone through, surely Darwin had a story to tell …”
“Yes,” I mumbled, “he told me about one incident …”
“He ripped my blouse and brassiere off,” she whispered, her eyes flat, the sparkle suddenly extinguished. “He stood there looking at my breasts, grunting like a pig, and it shocked him when I wouldn’t be frightened by him, or ashamed, or try to cover my breasts. He grabbed me and I felt his erection against me and I just chilled him … I was the sort of girl then, or in the position then, that men thought they could have, handle, use … I had to work hard, I had no money, no status, I was nobody … but that’s only the way it seemed to people like Darwin McGill. And he discovered he was badly mistaken. Did he tell you that?”
“Indeed he did. You taught him a lesson, no doubt of that. He tells me he’s dying, by the way.”
“I’m desolated,” she said tonelessly, her glass newly full.
“Are your parents still living?”
“Absolutely none of your business. And I’m going to feel terrible in the morning.”
We went outside and walked slowly toward the river. The cool breeze took the punch out of the night, the change that had been building. I put my arm around her shoulder.
“And Anne told you I’m frigid, didn’t she?”
“She said she thought you might be. Or that you think you are.”
She shrugged. “It doesn’t matter.”
“We’re kindred spirits,” I said lightly.
“What do you mean?”
I turned her around and we walked beneath the dimly glowing windows of the restaurant where the kimonos passed quietly.
“That’s why you’re willing to talk to me. You sense that we’re alike. Somewhere, like an electronic probe plunged into our brains, we’ve been wounded. I know where it happened to me, when, how, and why. About you, that’s something else again …”
“Oh,” she said as we were getting into the Porsche. She was wrapped up in her own life; she didn’t care about mine and I didn’t blame her for that. She was, or seemed to be, utterly egocentric, private. Her control; it wasn’t necessarily a sham, but it was a calculation, a conscious effort. Envying it, I admired her. We drove in silence back to Riverfront Towers. I pulled into the curving drive. The doorman waited inside, secure.
“Are you up to giving me a tennis lesson?” I asked. “Season’s almost over. There’s not much time left I’m going away for a holiday …”
“Yes, so am I.”
“Well,” she said, “we’ll see. Maybe.” She got out of the car, motioning me to stay put. She stopped on my side, a safe distance away. “Good-bye. And thank you for dinner.” An almost smile glittered in the night and she clutched the sweater tight, making her shoulders seem narrow and her hips broader. “I enjoyed it. I think.”
I nodded but she didn’t see me. She’d turned and was gone. She didn’t look back.
I fell asleep with My Little Chickadee, watching W. C. Fields fight off the redskins with a slingshot which kept bouncing back and striking his forehead. Turning away from an argumentative Margaret Hamilton, he muttered, “I hope she doesn’t get any more violent … I haven’t the strength to knock her down.” I thought about Kim, sleepily, and chuckled happily, eyes lowering, feeling young again, a nipper once again … As he bathed, he said, “Reminds me of the old swimming hole, when I was a nipper … that was where I caught malaria, what a foul summer that was … the summer the Jones boys murdered their mother … I remember her well, carrying the wash on her head …”
I slept badly, just skirting the edges of consciousness all night, and woke early, yawning. There was a peculiar anticipation in the blood. After my grapefruit I trundled off in the Porsche, fancying I could smell her next to me. Romantic twaddle, I told myself.
The two cracked flights of stairs leading up to Father Boyle’s home seemed to be getting longer and steeper. There was a thick morning fog sitting on Prospect Park, obliterating the neighboring houses and the tower. He stared at me through the screen door, taken by surprise, his face veering between fright and surprise. He’d known Hubbard would warn me off; he hadn’t expected to see me again. His eyes squinted, the broken veins on his cheeks stretching.
“Good morning, Father,” I said. “I just wanted to stop by and apologize for the other night. Have you got a cup of coffee?”
Trustingly, believing me, he swung the screen door wide and let it slam behind us. I followed him to the kitchen, marveling at what a friendly word can do and how badly people want to hear one from time to time. Takes the sting out. Useful for a liar, too.
He was still shuffling about in baggy tweeds, thumping the knobbed blackthorn stick, and his stubbly white whiskers seemed to have gotten stuck at half an inch. The kitchen reeked of bacon grease and a crusted frying pan sat on the gas stove. He motioned me to a booth in the breakfast nook and I squeezed in behind the oilcloth-covered table. He brought mugs of coffee. The warm cream from a jug on the table separated the instant it hit the hot coffee, forming nasty little gray clots floating in all directions. He lumbered back, muttering, and laboriously got himself opposite me, wheezing. A plate of eggs with mushrooms and onions had cooled and hardened before him; he chipped at the remains with a fork. He slurped coffee and picked his binoculars off the oilcloth and peered out the window beside us.
“There’s a finch out there,” he growled, “in the patch of fog just beyond the birdbath. Don’t see him often, the wily finch.” I saw a flicker of movement in a looming bush. On the table next to his plate were several soiled, oily-looking copies of Penthouse and Playboy, a ceramic Hamm’s beer ashtray with a cigar ground out in the bear’s grinning face. “Harmless enterprise, bird-watching,” he said, “but I’m strictly the backyard variety. No field trips and hiking through brambles for this old specimen …” He put the binoculars down on the Penthouse and rubbed his eyes. When he took his hands away his eyes stared dully at me, slightly glazed, and I wondered if he’d been at the booze already or if the night’s painkillers were still working.
“I am sorry about the other night. I had no intention of upsetting you.”
“Ah, yes,” he remembered, “you’re the young philosopher, the Conrad man … Still chewing on the idea of evil, are you?”
“Not especially. I told you what I thought. What Conrad thought.”
“So you did. I was blaming the Devil for mischief, aha, and you believed that … let me get it right, you believed that ‘men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.’ Is that it? Have I got that?”
“You have.”
“Well,” he mused, slyly poking at the mushrooms, “I’ve been thinking about it and it’s quite possible that you’re in the right and I was … copp
ing out, as my young university friends say. After, all, when you can blame the Devil, man’s load is substantially lightened. And if I can blame the Devil for my sins, all the better. It all comes down to the old question we’ve been debating since the year one, free will. Are you responsible for your acts or can you say, along with Mr. Flip Wilson, the devil made me do it?” He wheezed, staring at me, sucking in air, face turning florid, hand gently patting the table. “Perhaps men can be driven to any evil act … to survive, to protect themselves. Perhaps.”
“What happened with Goode and Crocker?” I asked. “I was called to account by Hubbard Anthony and it isn’t that I can’t take my medicine, but I wish I knew what it was that made everybody so angry.” I was innocent; I’d come to my priest for counsel.
“Goode and Crocker, we’re all old, time is running out …” He blinked, trying to focus the empty, glazed eyes on me. “They came to see me, with the wind up, telling me you’d been to see them talking about Carver Maxvill, that I’d told you about him.” He waved a white hand. “Yelled at me, told me to keep my mouth shut and not to talk to you anymore, I’d only make a mess of everything … Can you credit that, I’d make a mess of everything? Hail Mary, what next? Told me not to rake up the past—” He broke off, chuckling, shaking his head. “I told them it was bound to happen sooner or later but I got to wheezing and they outyelled me. Farcical, those dumb bastards yelling at me … well, maybe they’re right, maybe it will stir up a mess, but if it does, what difference does it make, what real difference? We’re all gonna die, even the young ones, everybody dies, so what difference does it make? What is there to be afraid of here? It’s afterward, then’s the time to be afraid, and keeping it quiet here isn’t gonna do any good afterward, anyway … Oh, yes, they’re fearful men, afraid of what’s long gone, dead and buried.” He swilled cold coffee and worked the binoculars again, sucking in breath. The fog was lifting very slowly and the finch was visible, considering a short flight to the birdbath.
The Cavanaugh Quest Page 17