The Cavanaugh Quest

by Thomas Gifford

  “Your concern is very moving,” I said, but the conviction of my sarcasm was as bloodless as his face. A heavy truck ground its gears coming down the hill, its tires shredding the grass. It was carrying a load of brown fur. The aroma of dead rats penetrated even my nose. It reached the bottom of the slope and stopped. White-uniformed sanitation workers tied a canvas tarpaulin tight over the mound of dead things. My stomach slid sweatily and I looked back at Crocker.

  “The only danger I’ve encountered was from you,” I said.

  “It won’t happen again, I promise you. I know, it won’t fix your face, will it? There’s nothing I can say. I’m sorry.” He turned away, leaned a huge hand on the trailer for support.

  “You look like hell,” I said.

  “Just tired.” His voice was as gray and lifeless as his face, his lips. “Got to pace myself, that’s all. Fucking rats. When I sleep, I dream about them.”

  “You should go home. They don’t need you here.”

  “You don’t understand, I’m the boss. This is my company, my goddamn mess. I belong here. I rest in the van here … I’m staying all night … They tell me we may have it licked by nightfall. I’ll stay on tonight.” He was almost talking to himself, reassuring himself. “It’ll be quiet then. You just get the hell out of here and forget about all of us …”

  “Can’t forget Carver Maxvill,” I said. “Can you?”

  “Who? He looked up numbly, trying to get me in clearer focus. “Who did you say?”

  “Carver Maxvill. The man who’s come back …”

  He searched my eyes for several seconds, his broad, weathered face expressionless, and then began doing an old man’s death rattle which turned into a throaty, rolling chuckle. He flushed and leaned back against the trailer, where the sun caught him in the eyes.

  “You dumb son of a bitch,” he said at last, half choking on his quiet, bottled-up laughter.

  “You’re next on his list,” I said with fading authority.

  He kept on chuckling, a ruddy look seeping into his face, bringing back his tan.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Funny?” He wiped his eyes, leaving a dirty smudge. “Nothing, nothing … It’s just that I know who the killer is, that’s all.” He coughed deep in his lungs. “Shit, I guess it is funny … I don’t know. Just haul your ass off this site, that’s all. And say your prayers, Cavanaugh, you poor bastard …”

  I went back to my place. My face was on fire and my eyes ached. I popped a couple of the pain pills Condon had prescribed and took a shower, Archie’s signal to call. He’d gone home and gotten a telephone call from the little old nun in Dubuque.

  “Quite an old lady,” he said, measuring his words. “Memory like a damned elephant. She said she remembered what was so sad about Larry’s leaving the orphanage …”

  “So?”

  “Well, the thing was, he had a little sister—she thinks it was his sister—a little girl anyway, and this little girl, just a wee thing, who was terribly dependent on him … apparently she came unglued when Larry was taken away, or went away, whatever …” He paused, then filled the silence: “Well, I just thought I’d tell you, keep you current. You’ve got to admit it’s a sad story, right?”

  “Yeah. Sad.” I sat there at my desk, dripping wet, wondering. The pain pills weren’t working.

  Kim was sunbathing when I called from the lobby and when she opened the door, she’d slipped a pale-yellow shirt over a tan bikini which blended into the color of her smooth flesh. She gave me a quick shy kiss and ten minutes later we were sitting on her balcony eating cantaloupe halves filled with pineapple, strawberries, and cherries, and sipping icy Chablis. A day earlier it would have made me feel happy and cared for, a member of the human race. She murmured concern over my injuries. I nodded. Our normal roles were reversed; she was the one trying to ease the situation and give it warmth while I was off in a world of my own thoughts, disturbed and remote.

  She was facing the sun. A fine dew of perspiration stood out on her forehead and when she leaned forward to pour me more wine, the front to the shirt belled open and gravity drew a streak of sweat between her tiny breasts. She was making conversation and I nodded sporadically but I wasn’t listening. I was trying to sort out what my priorities were, love or curiosity, and were they in conflict? I didn’t want to drive a wedge between us: It had been so difficult to bring it this far. But I had to know the truth.

  “All right,” she said matter-of-factly, setting down her empty wineglass and dabbing her lips with the lime-green linen. “What’s the matter? I can’t talk to myself forever, you know. So what’s troubling your poor smashed-in face?” She smiled very slightly.

  “Are we in love?” I blurted. “I don’t mean to lean on you, I don’t want to frighten you away … but there are a couple of things I have to do and before I do them I want to know what there is between us. One moment, when I’m with you, it seems that we are—in a funny way, sure, but real just the same—then, when I’m alone, I think I’m being foolish.” A helicopter swirled past the balcony, roaring angrily, shining like a metallic prehistoric predator in the sun. “Now I guess I’ve got to know … I’m sorry.”

  She leaned back, pushing her sunglasses up her moist, straight nose. I couldn’t see her eyes and felt as if I were revealed, naked under her gaze.

  “Why is it that you suddenly need some definite answer?” she asked. “What are you going to do? Not something foolish that you’ll regret, I hope … that I’ll regret …”

  “You’re just going to have to trust me. I can’t go into it.”

  “I told you our relationship couldn’t be normal. I warned you. I’m not ready, not able … you can’t say I’ve led you on.”

  “No. But the undertow has been one of secrecy, I’ve had to pry at you … if I hadn’t cared about you, I’d have said the hell with you. But I did care, do care. I’ve tried to guess at your feelings, I’ve accepted bits and pieces and scraps of emotion. And that’s all right, it’s a small price to pay if I can keep you. You’ve brought me back to life … I’d reached the point where I couldn’t imagine being close to anyone, certainly not a woman, and you’ve changed all that. I believed that the only woman I could ever love was a woman who could fill my attention, make all others irrelevant, and I was sure that no such woman existed.” I took a deep breath, rattled on. “I was wrong. There’s you. But that’s not enough … I’ve got to know what’s coming back, from you to me …” I waited but she simply stared at me, the sunglasses flat and black against the sun. “There’s got to be some kind of honesty and openness between us. Real honesty.”

  “Don’t you believe what I tell you?” she said edgily. “The whole point is that my secrecy has nothing whatever to do with our relationship. I have been honest about everything that counts between us—I haven’t ever lied to you about my feelings or kept them secret. I’ve told you about my personal problems, you know I’ve told you things about myself that only you know, I’ve made myself emotionally vulnerable … What more can you want? I’m not an expert on love, I’m not experienced in it … I’ve only wondered why my past has been so important to you, what it has to do with you. I still don’t know why but my feelings for you have even gotten me past that obstacle.” She leaned forward and emptied the Chablis into her glass, held the rim to her lower lip. “I think what I feel for you is love, Paul. If it has to be given a name, as you seem to think it does … you’re great on giving things names. I’m not. Why is it all so important to you—my past, giving what’s between us a name? I’ve never understood that. You’re not the only one who’s been in the dark …” But even in all this there was a curious quality of circumspection, guardedness, as if there were lavers of plot to her life I’d never dreamed of. Instead of making me see reason, she fed my curiosity, the sense of unease in which I’d come to live. I watched her sip the wine, saw a muscle jump in her soft, smooth cheek. For a moment, a shadow across her face, she looked as she had the night she’d driven
into the boy on the bicycle: unrepentant, cool, a distant arousal as if thrilled sexually by danger and the threat of death.

  “I don’t know why,” I said, “I’ve forgotten … I only know that it’s all important to me. I wouldn’t have come here to pursue it otherwise. It was now or never, maybe.”

  “Well, I’m sorry if I’ve disappointed you again.”

  “What was your mother’s name?”

  “Rita Hook.”

  “No, Kim, not your aunt … your mother.”

  “Why do you do this to me?” She put her hand to her mouth, the long fingers quivering. “It makes all your protestations of love seem false … calculated.”

  “A simple question. What was your mother’s name?”

  “Wilson,” she said. “Patricia Wilson.” The quaking of her hands had been communicated to her voice. “But she died when I was born.”

  I stared off across the city with its landscape of deserted railway terminals, renewal projects, and the towers of the University of Minnesota in the distance. When I looked back toward her, she was crying, tears seeping out beneath the dark lenses. I scraped my chair back, went and knelt beside her. She wouldn’t turn to face me. I touched her hair, kissed her cheek, and when I got up and left, she was still sitting on the balcony, her pretty linen napkin rolled into a tight ball and held tightly against her lips, tears sliding relentlessly down her beautiful, somber face.

  I went back to my apartment, packed an overnight bag, and just made the two o’clock Northwest flight to Chicago. By three thirty, thanks to a twenty-five-dollar cab ride, I’d found the Merrivale Memorial Hospital on a tree-lined street not far from the University of Chicago. It was small and old and private, looking more like a discreet residential hotel than what it was. With my face giving off signals, the lady behind the information desk tried to direct me to the outpatient area but I held firm in search of the records office.

  A middle-aged woman, in what used to be described as a severe suit when people still wore them, was watering a split-leaf philodendron in a small office at the end of a long dingy hall. A window gave on a tiny shaded courtyard. I watched a nurse push a bundle of ailing human being around the path in an old wicker-backed wheelchair. The lady in the suit finished with the drooping plant, sighed, and blinked huge watery eyes floating behind thick spectacles. “The problem is, I’m very much afraid, a lack of sunlight in this office and there’s not much I can do about that, is there? And what can I do for you?” She checked a large Timex watch on a thin wrist and smiled at me with a mouth that remained oddly pursed. I got the feeling that her philodendron problem was about as close to grief as she got.

  I told her I had come all the way from Minneapolis to check on a matter relating to an inheritance, orphans, a bit of quick embroidery which was so old a line that it may not have occurred to her to doubt me. I lied badly but made a show of inspecting the undersides of the plant’s leaves as if I knew what I was doing. I implied vaguely that I represented a firm of attorneys.

  “It’s a question of two sisters,” I said, “and two children born in this hospital quite a long time ago. Both children were orphaned and two people have now turned up with claims on an inheritance.” I grinned beneath my bandaged nose.

  “How very Dickensian,” she said, eyes brightening enthusiastically. “Are you a private eye?”

  “No, not really.” I shrugged diffidently, leaving her in doubt.

  “I thought you might be … your nose, the bandage. I’m sorry, I sometimes leap before I look.” She sat down primly at her desk, her fingers checking the wisps of gray hair dangling from her bun. “Now, precisely what do you need to know?”

  It wasn’t difficult once I got it rolling. I gave her Patricia Wilson’s name first, noting that she presumably had a child, female, at Merrivale in 1940. Would she be good enough to check? The green file cabinets, their tops covered with cactuses in clay pots, lined one wall. It wasn’t a big hospital; all the records were in those cabinets. I watched the courtyard, the old men sitting on a slat bench in bathrobes, doling out bread crumbs to pigeons. It was unbearably hot and humid in the tiny office. There were streaks on the inside of the window. I hadn’t noticed how uncomfortable I was until I had to wait while she searched. It took forever.

  Finally she gave me a perplexed look. “Nothing! No Patricia Wilson, not in 1940, never. We do all our filing by last names—we’ve got two Patrick Wilsons both deceased, but nary a Patricia. Could she have been admitted under another name, by chance? A maiden name?”

  “I don’t know and I don’t know how to find out,” I confessed. “But there’s the other sister—let’s check her. Name was Rita Hook … she was here in 1932, reportedly gave birth to a boy. She was a resident of Grande Rouge, Minnesota, and Patricia Wilson’s sister.” My voice seemed to be droning on, coming from someone else. I was watching the scene, sweating and feeling light-headed. I was afraid. She knelt down and began flipping through folders. The last fly of summer banged against the window like a machine bent on self-destruction.

  “Well, now, that’s odd,” she said, straightening up, a knee cracking. “Very odd, indeed. This is Rita Hook’s file, all right … but what we’ve got here isn’t what you’ve described. How peculiar …”

  “What’s wrong?” I said, my voice dry.

  “Well, your Rita Hook, your resident of Grande Rouge, local next of kin Patricia Wilson, sister, she was here in 1932—gave birth to a boy just as you suggested. Robert, eight pounds, two ounces, father one Ted Hook, Grande Rouge, Minnesota … that’s all right here …”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “Well, that was only her first visit,” she said slowly. “Somewhere along the line you’ve gotten your facts askew … Eight years later, in 1940, it wasn’t Patricia Wilson who came here to have a baby … it was Mrs. Hook again, Rita Hook, and Patricia Wilson was again listed as local next of kin.” She peered up at me over the edge of the tattered manila folder. “Don’t you see? Mrs. Wilson was next of kin, not the mother … this Rita Hook person was the mother both times, a boy, that was little Robert in 1932, and then little Shirley in 1940 …”

  “And nobody died?” I asked. “The little girl’s mother survived the birth?”

  “Oh, my, yes,” she said, a faint note of shock in her voice. “You don’t look so well, though. Here, sit down …”

  “It’s my nose. I get flashes of pain—”

  “Here, have some water.” She handed me a tumbler from a tray on a bookcase. The water was warm and dust floated on it. “Can I get you an aspirin?”

  “No, no, I’m fine.” I took a deep breath.

  “Well, at least no one died,” she said consolingly. “That’s good.”

  I nodded. She gave me the address listed for Patricia Wilson thirty-four years ago. I thanked her, picked up my overnight bag, and went back out into the wet, steaming afternoon. I wasn’t stopping to think. I just wanted to keep moving.

  18

  I STOPPED AT A DRUGSTORE on the corner and went to the telephone booth back behind the flea-and-tick spray. The book hung by a chain and appeared to have been chewed on by something with very big teeth. But there was a P. Wilson with the same address as the one in the hospital’s records. It had been a long time at the same address. I went back out on the corner and wiped my face as best I could but the sweat got under the bandage and felt as if fire ants were building a nest. A black kid was leaning against a fire hydrant with a portable radio blaring soul at his ear; he watched me from milky caramel-tinted eyes. I walked over to him.

  “Hey, how’s it goin’, man?” he said, rocking his head to the music. “Whatcha lookin’ for, man?”

  I gave him the address and he said it was only five minutes from where we stood. He gave me explicit directions and I thanked him; he gave me the peace sign and smiled and I wondered why he was so friendly. Friendly people always surprise me. I passed a filling station and popped for a Coke, drank it in the shade watching cars lined up at the gas pump
s, a sign of the rotten times. Nixon was a crook, gas was seventy-five cents a gallon, and Ford was a lackey. There were rats crawling around beneath Minnesota’s answer to the nastiness of urban sprawl. Bodies were piling up back home and Kim Roderick had quite a surprise in store for her. It had been a long day and the sun was burning a hole in my back as I set off again. The day wasn’t done yet.

  The row houses must have dated from the turn of the century and leafy old trees threw the street into deep, moist shadows. A tiny green patch of grass lay between a wrought-iron fence and the brick housefront. A Boston fern sat alone and regal in the window, lace curtains at the side. I pushed the doorbell. I saw a movement behind the leaded glass and an elderly woman in a voluminous housecoat opened the door.

  “Mrs. Wilson?” I said. She nodded, head forward, leaning on a white cane. She wore tinted glasses, heavy costume rings on gnarled, crooked fingers. I told her I’d come from Minneapolis to ask her about her sister, Rita. She nodded again and beckoned me into the dark hallway, on into an old-fashioned parlor. She didn’t seem surprised. She sat down in a Leatherette recliner and motioned me to a straight chair.

  “I knew you were coming,” she said, her voice high and almost musical, like a child’s. “I’ve been expecting you.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “Why? How could you?”

  “Oh I’ve always known you’d turn up,” she said, leaning back, her face tilted slightly upward. She was blind or nearly so and she had no fear of a stranger. “Something about Rita. I’ve always known I hadn’t heard the end of Rita. It’s just like Donald, my husband, Donald Wilson—I’ve always known that someday, out of the blue, I’d hear about Donald … he was a sailor, a navy man, he went off almost forty years ago and never came back. The Depression got to him, the responsibility of a wife, and he just shipped out one day. I’ve lived alone ever since. Waiting, you might say. And then little Rita, she’s my younger sister, you see, she went off, too. I never knew how they did it, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure it out—I’d have just gone off myself, too, but I never got the hang of it, how you do it. Seems funny now but there was a time when it wasn’t funny at all …” She smiled tentatively, squeezing the handle of her cane. “So what have you got to tell me about little Rita, Mr. Cavanaugh?”