by Howard Owen
“Well,” McGrumpy says, lifting his ancient eyebrows in an approximation of juvenile salaciousness that makes me want to smack him, “you all have a nice visit.”
There is every probability that there will be some mention of Kate’s impromptu visit in the next Prestwould Post, whose gossip column is co-written by McGrumpy. Jesus.
Upstairs, I am happy to see that Custalow is absent, working on some balky part of our ancient building.
Kate sniffs the air as we walk down the thirty-foot hallway leading to the living room, but she doesn’t mention anything about illicit smoking. I’ve been pretty careful. The hallway was what hooked her on the place, I think, made her feel like we had to have it. The walls are what I called pink and she called coral, with a couple of pillars halfway down. I’d never tell Kate this, but it reeked of the old-money Richmond her middle-class heart must have secretly coveted while she was overworking her way to summa cum laude and through law school.
“Not bad,” she says, obviously pleased not to see empty pizza boxes on the coffee table or a week of dirty dishes in the sink. “Abe must be keeping you straight.”
“I’ve had some practice at not being a slob.”
“Yeah,” she says, smirking. “I remember.”
“It wasn’t that bad. I always had clean underwear.”
She looks up at me and feeds me my lines.
“Do you still?”
There might as well be a teleprompter in front of me.
“Why,” I ask, regretting my words while I say them, “don’t we go and find out?”
CHAPTER NINE
The services at St. Paul’s are over by two forty-five. We gave Clara a ride, and she is among the chosen few dozen who have been invited to Lewis and Carl Witt’s afterward. I’m not so sure that the Witts included us in that inner circle, but, hey, I’m driving.
The crowd at the downtown church was, as I’d expected, out the door. Despite the fact that Alicia Simpson had been seen as almost a recluse by the outside world, she had a lot of friends—from St. Catherine’s and Sweet Briar and, according to the obituary, various boards and committees. And then, there were the gawkers, people who might have known the family and had nothing better to do on a Wednesday afternoon than put on a suit and go see how the rich handle tragedy. We used to have an obit writer who called it funeral porn.
At the Witts, the crowd is somewhat more select, present company excepted. The old Tudor that Carl inherited from his father looks like it could have been, as was the case with a slightly larger concoction farther west, taken apart in Merry Olde England and reassembled on the banks of the James. Perhaps only in Richmond would this not look out of place.
In the receiving line, Lewis is polite enough to me. She probably thinks I’m using Clara Westbrook to pick the lock on her front door, but Clara helps me out there by introducing us and explaining that she needed a ride to the funeral, and was able to prevail on “these nice young friends” to accommodate.
“We’ve met,” Lewis says, giving me a completely neutral smile. “I didn’t know you were friends of Clara’s.” She says it in a way that indicates that this seems an unlikely match. Lewis probably can smell Oregon Hill on me.
Kate is smitten, as she often is among people with money. She says all the right things to Lewis and Carl. I am fortunate to have two charming women with me to smooth any rough spots my appearance might have produced.
Next to Carl is a man who appears to be about my age, although it’s hard to tell. I shake hands with him and offer my condolences.
“Hi,” he says, “I’m, ah, Wes,” like he forgot his name for a half-second. He grips my hand like a drowning man reaching for salvation. I can feel a slight tremble in it before I pull away.
Alicia’s brother looks like he’d rather be just about anywhere else.
He’s a tall man, maybe six-three, with spiky, steel-gray hair. The frown crease above his nose, along with the bloodshot eyes with enough baggage under them for a trip to China, more or less negate the smile he attempts. He looks at me like a kid who doesn’t know it’s not polite to stare.
Kate is pleasant enough to him. Then, Clara, who has lingered to speak quietly with Lewis, comes up and gives him a full-blown Clara hug, complete with tears.
“I haven’t seen you in so long,” she says. He is looking over her shoulder, in my direction. He gives a kind of “what can you do?” shrug.
The Witts seem to have an entourage of servants, at least on this sad occasion, who come around with scallops wrapped in bacon, little tomato-cheese-and-parsley things on toast, Smithfield ham biscuits and other tidbits that seem more appropriate for a cocktail party than a day like this. Hell, maybe it’s supposed to be a party. Celebration of life and all that crap. Hey, I want kegs and my favorite blues band at my going-away bash.
Nobody, though, seems much in a festive mood. Lives that end at forty-four don’t elicit a whole lot of giddiness, in my experience. The Witts and their friends handle it better, or at least more sedately, than the East End families of drug war casualties, but dead is still dead.
I feel a tap on my shoulder and turn around to face a woman who looks to be about five feet tall, in her early forties, kind of cute, nice, well-preserved body, blonde this month.
“I need to talk to you,” she says, and I say fine.
“Not here,” she says, and demands my cellphone number. I’m inclined to give attractive women pretty much anything they want.
“I’ll call you,” she says, looking over her shoulder the way some of our editors at the paper do when they’re bitching and worry that one of Grubby’s snitches might be within earshot. Then she’s gone.
Clara spends half an hour talking with old friends, and Kate finds a couple of lawyer acquaintances to chat with. Between ham biscuits, I call Sally and tell her I might be a tad late.
“Get here when you can,” she says. “If you’re gone two or three days, Wheelie might notice.”
I see the mystery woman across the room and ask Clara who she is.
“Which one?” she says. “Oh, there. That’s Bitsy. Susan Winston-Jones. She and Alicia are—were—close.”
As we’re leaving, Lewis puts her hand on Kate’s arm.
“I understand,” she says, “that you’re defending my sister’s murderer.”
Says it as calm as dawn, as Peggy used to say. I don’t know how she has learned that already, probably gleaned it from someone here at the death party. There’s definitely a pipeline that moves the news faster than our printing presses do.
Kate is thrown for a couple of seconds, which seems to have been the intent.
“I am defending the man accused of that, yes,” she says at last, and I’m proud of her for not doing the hummina-hummina, not apologizing or making excuses.
“Good day,” is all Lewis Witt says before turning her back to us.
“That went well,” I observe.
Clara seems perplexed. The possibility that Alicia Simpson’s murder wasn’t as cut-and-dried as our editorial pages say it was hasn’t occurred to her.
“Well,” she says, “I’m sure there’s more than one side to the story.”
Kate, who still can let herself be bothered by the knowledge that she has displeased one of the elite, in spite of all her efforts to do otherwise, gives Clara a hug.
“Do you think,” Clara says, “that we could go by the Quarry?”
It’s already four thirty. It’ll be dark in less than an hour. It’s cold as a witch’s tit.
“Sure, why not?”
Kate shrugs and says she has nowhere particular to be.
Clara, it turns out, is on a committee in charge of making whatever minor repairs the place needs. A couple of jackleg carpenters are supposed to have fixed a small hole in the roof over the dressing rooms. A tree branch fell on it after the last storm.
“I just want to make sure it’s covered,” Clara says. “It’s supposed to snow next week.”
It’s only five minutes
away. Clara gives me the key, and I open the gate and drive us as close to the building as possible.
We all get out, and Clara steps back far enough to determine that there is, indeed, some kind of patch on the roof. She nods her head and says, “Good.”
She looks out across the Quarry. What’s left of the sun has lit it up so that it looks like a pit full of gold instead of water.
“We had some good times here,” she says, leaning on her cane. She has risked leaving the oxygen bottle at home, and she’s hoarding her breaths like she knows she doesn’t have an infinite number of them left. “Alicia was such a good swimmer. I taught them how, you know. The two youngest ones anyway. Her and Wesley.”
I ask her to fill me in on Wesley. All I’ve had so far is the shorthand version.
“Can we go sit in the car?” Clara asks. “I need to warm my rear end.”
There are few joys, in my experience, equal to stepping from a windy, chilly January day into a heated car, with the late afternoon sun streaming in, and listening to a good story while the sun and the heater warm your bones. All that’s missing is a pint of bourbon to pass around. Can’t have everything.
Clara is a born storyteller, one who remembers the small details and hasn’t picked up the annoying habit of telling the same tale two or three times.
“Wesley must be forty-six now, because he’s two years older than Alicia,” she says, shielding her eyes from the glare. I pull down the visor.
“He was a wonderful boy. Made straight A’s and was on all the ball teams. Baseball, football, basketball. He could beat Harper at golf by the time he was thirteen, and Harper was good. Simone called him her golden boy.”
But then, he came home from school one day and said he didn’t think he could go back. He had started hearing voices, telling him to do things. Eventually, he would heed the voices when he didn’t think he could do otherwise. A garage set on fire, a “borrowed” car wrecked, a neighbor’s cat hanged.
“It was so awful,” Clara says. “It seemed like one minute he was this All-American boy, mowing our lawn, looking you in the eye and talking to you like an adult, but polite, ‘Yes, ma’am’ and ‘Yes, sir,’ like he still knew he was a kid. He told them in the ninth grade that he was going to Princeton, Harper said.
“And then,” Clara says, snapping her fingers “just like that, he changed.”
They tried everything money could buy. The best shrinks, private schools that focused on “special” students, every kind of magic dust some drug company could come up with that might help but didn’t.
“The worst thing,” Clara says, “was that day at the Quarry.”
She thinks it was about a year after Wesley was first diagnosed as schizophrenic. He was there with his parents and Alicia.
“I remember it was Fourth of July weekend, so the place was packed. Old Richmond all in one little knot there. I was sitting at one of the picnic tables, with the Tayloes, I think, when suddenly we heard this commotion.
“And then I hear Harper yell, ‘Get back in there. Get back in there, goddammit.’ Excuse me.
“We all look up, and there’s Wesley, naked as a jaybird, walking and running toward the water, with Harper right behind him, trying to catch him. He runs out on the diving board and jumps in.
“He was a good swimmer. He must have stayed out there in the deep water for fifteen minutes at least, mooning everybody and giving us the finger. Harper just stood on the beach and finally gave up even trying to coax him in. By that time, I think Simone had gone to the car.”
He finally had to come in, and by then whatever had gotten into him seemed to have gotten out again. Harper threw a towel around him, Clara said, and more or less dragged him to the car, with Alicia in tow.
“I heard a smack, we all did, and then Alicia screaming, ‘Don’t you hit him! Don’t you hit Wesley!’ ”
Clara sighs.
“I never saw Wesley at the Quarry again. I don’t know if he was banned or not, but after that, it was like he was invisible.”
Finally, his father just seemed willing to cut his losses.
“Harper and Wesley had been close, closer than most fathers and sons, and I think what happened just killed something in Harper. He couldn’t deal with it, couldn’t accept that Wesley was broken, couldn’t accept that Wesley couldn’t help being broken. Simone wasn’t that strong, I guess, and she kind of went along with sending him away. Lewis was older and I think just wanted some peace. I suppose it was all about Wesley back then.
“The only one that didn’t give up on him, I guess, was Alicia.”
I’ve got to get back to the paper before Sally sends out a search party, or they just say fuck it and hire a new night cops reporter. But with a little encouragement, Clara tells me the rest.
Wesley was eighteen when Alicia was raped, living in a group home somewhere on Meadow Street. Everyone was so upset that it was three days before they realized Wes was missing. It took six months and a private detective to find him, in a jail in Nevada. Apparently, a cop had tried to arrest him, and Wes took a swing at him.
“I guess what happened to Alicia just drove him over the edge. Harper spent a few thousand dollars, I heard, to get him out of there and back home and back on his medication.”
Home, Clara explained, wasn’t the stately manor where I’d tried to talk with Alicia. Or at least not for very long. Something, she said, would always happen, and Wes would be evicted. He lived in various “homes,” and sometimes in his own apartment, depending on how well his current drugs were working and how faithfully he was taking them.
He enrolled at VCU and eventually got a degree, more than I can say for my darling daughter so far, and was hired to work for the law firm of one of Harper’s old friends, “probably just clerical stuff, but he had a job.”
“Lewis said he lives somewhere over in the Museum District now. He kind of keeps to himself, and she said he hasn’t had an episode in more than six years.”
“Had an episode” apparently is code for “went batshit.” The last “episode,” Clara tells us, ended with Lewis and Carl traveling to some small town in Quebec and spending what would be, to me, a lot of money.
“But Lewis says the drugs they have now are so much better than in the old days.”
Lewis also confided in Clara that Wesley is spending at least some of his time in their parents’ old house, now that they’re gone.
“I don’t think Lewis is too happy about that,” Clara says. “She’s afraid it’ll make him get into old habits.” Like going nuts, I guess. “But they left the house to Alicia, and she didn’t seem to mind him staying over.
“It probably passes to Lewis and Carl now, so I don’t know what’s going to happen. Lewis said they might move back in, try to fix the place up. It’s gotten pretty run down.”
Run down, I’m thinking, is a relative term.
We’re nearing the Prestwould, where I’ll drop Clara off and Kate will retrieve her car, when I ask Clara about Lewis.
“Oh,” she says, “Lewis is Lewis. Harper always called her his rock, the one he could depend on.”
Lewis was the only one of the three who went what you might call the traditional West End route. From what I’ve seen of some of these tapped-out old Richmond families, one out of three ain’t bad.
She graduated in four years from Sweet Briar and married Carl. They have a son who’s just gotten into law school at the University of Virginia, a daughter at Sweet Briar and a younger son still at home.
“Wonderful kids,” Clara says. “Wonderful family, really. Simone was so proud of them. They’re members of the Quarry, too, although I don’t see them as much as I used to.”
I walk Clara up the steps to the front door, and she gives me a peck on the cheek.
“You know,” she says, looking down at Kate, who’s waiting for me to take her around back to her car, “what was good once can be good again. Broke doesn’t have to stay broke.”
“Maybe” is about as far a
s I’m willing to take that one.
“Well,” Kate says, after I’ve driven her around to the back parking lot and gallantly open her driver’s side door for her, “thanks for the ride . . . and all.”
“And all? That’s a pretty paltry phrase for this afternoon’s festivities.”
“Hah,” she says. It sounds like something between a snort and a laugh. “Festivities. I like that.”
“You certainly seemed to.”
“I was faking it.”
It’s time for my own “hah.” The former Kate Black, perhaps soon to be the former Kate Ellis, could fake a lot of things—interest in my stories of ill-fated drug deals, tolerance for my perambulations from the straight and narrow, my old Oregon Hill friends, an admiration for my crumbling physique.
What she could not and cannot fake is an orgasm. I remind her of that, and she blushes, pretty much the same way she blushes when she is being vigorously entertained by Mr. Johnson and can’t hide it.
“Well,” she says, “so I’m a slut.”
She gives me a kiss, a real one with all the bells and whistles.
As she reaches to unlock her car door, she says, “But this was an aberration, an anomaly, a one-night—or afternoon—stand. You’re a bad habit I can’t afford to get hooked on again.”
OK. Fair enough.
“But it was good,” she concedes, just before she shuts the door on our little time-out from divorce.
Back at the paper, I do a little electronic snooping and get to read Baer’s story on the funeral. He wasn’t invited to Chez Witt, of course, but he’s done a passable job of catching what he would call the zeitgeist. I remember the time Sally called him on that one when he used it in print, in a story about the watermelon festival in Carytown.
“Shit, Mark,” she said, “why don’t you just come right out and tell them how much smarter you are than they are? People love to be talked down to. Save ‘zeitgeist’ until you get that job at the Post. ‘Zeitgeist’ and ‘watermelon’ do not belong in the same story.”