Blacklist

by Sara Paretsky

  One afternoon I took Catherine to see Father Lou, who left her in a

  chastened frame of mind: she had been irresponsible in racing off to the North Woods with Benji. Renee had shot him, but Catherine had put him in the line of fire. The priest was still angry-no one who had come to his church for sanctuary had ever died while under his care; he wasn’t softened by Catherine’s pale face and quivering upper lip.

  The next day, Catherine and I went to Benji’s funeral at his mosque. We stood outside with a handful of other women while the men conducted the service. A couple of women hissed at us-the two Westerners who had led Benji to his death-but several commiserated with Catherine, imagining her in love with him. As perhaps she had been. Romeo and Juliet. When you’re sixteen, everything seems as though it will be forever, the bad as well as the good.

  It was Mr. Contreras who brought Catherine the consolation she needed. He was delighted to have a beautiful young waif to fuss over. In the daytime, while I was working, he brought Catherine down to his place, where she convalesced on his couch and watched horse races on television with him and the dogs. As someone who rode and groomed horses, she even gave him tips on animals that might run well; on her advice, Mr. Contreras won a hundred dollars at the offtrack place he frequents and bought us all steaks. Catherine, vegetarian that she was, wasn’t proof against his ingenuous good will: she ate a bite to please him.

  Catherine knew that I was trying to build a case against Renee for Marcus Whitby’s murder, but Whitby had never existed for her. One evening, after I’d been on the phone with Stephanie Protheroe in the DuPage sheriff’s office, going over Theresa Jakes’s statements about how much of her medication had disappeared, Catherine asked if I couldn’t just let it go.

  “I know Granny behaved terribly, but I don’t want her to go to prison.” “You want two things that can’t both happen,” I started to say, then told her instead to come for a ride with me.

  “Not home,” she said suspiciously.

  “Not home. I want you to meet someone.”

  We drove to the South Side, where I introduced her to Harriet Whitby. “This is Catherine Bayard. Her arm’s in a cast because some excitable deputies shot her a couple of weeks back. Tell Catherine about Marc; I want her to know what kind of man your brother was.”

  Harriet thought for a minute. “He was a writer. He was a careful man, quiet and private, really quite shy, but when he’d made up his mind to stand up for someone, he could be fierce, and always loyal. When I was six and he was twelve, I had a bad infection on my face, some kind of out-ofcontrol acne.

  “Some kids used to wait for me and taunt me on my way to school, until it got to the point where I would leave home in the morning, then hide in the park all day. When Marc found out I was skipping school, he told me I would go, that no bully could keep me from my right to an education, and he walked me to school, holding my hand. When we got to the waiting children, he stopped and said, `This is my sister, who is a beautiful black girl child. I expect you to recognize her beauty and respect her.’ He said it as calmly as if he were reading the weather report. He walked me to school every morning for three months, and fought five of them, two of them more than once, and I will never know a better man if I live to be a hundred and twenty.”

  Catherine didn’t say anything on the ride home, but the next afternoon when I got in from work, she tried to sort out her complicated feelings. “I loved Granny. I thought she and Grample were the most wonderful people on earth. I thought of them the way Harriet thinks of her brother. So how could they give Kylie Ballantine’s name to that creep Olin and then set themselves up as the biggest free speech defenders in the universe?” She was sitting on my living room floor with her good arm around Peppy.

  I shifted in my chair: these same questions had been churning in my own mind. “Everyone has a different breaking point. And a different fear point. The things you can’t bear to face, I mean. The McCarthy and HUAC blacklists shattered lives. People never worked again, or never worked well. They were ostracized, they lived in terrible poverty. Some committed suicide. Many went to prison, only for their beliefs, not for anything they’d done-not in China or Iraq, but right here in America.

  “You don’t race to embrace that kind of martyrdom. At the same time, your grandfather feared for the future of Bayard Publishing. Geraldine Graham’s mother was constantly threatening to give her shares in the company to Olin Taverner. If Laura Drummond had known your grandfather supported a group that she thought was a Communist front, she’d certainly

  have given Olin her shares. And that would have turned Bayard into a rightwing organization. They wouldn’t publish the great magazines they do today, such as Margent, or writers like Armand Pelletier and the guy you worked with last summer, Haile Talbot.”

  “So you think Grample was right to betray Kylie Ballantine and Pelletier and-whoever else he did betray? To save the press?” Her eyes blazed. “No. I don’t think it was right. I don’t believe that considering the greater good-the integrity of Bayard Publishing, in this case justifies betraying friends.”

  “And now, with his mind gone, I can never ask him what he was thinking, why he did it!” she cried. “I can’t stand any of this. Seeing him sick when I loved him so much-I used to feel so smug, knowing Granny and Grample were my family, compared to the kind of people my friends have, the kind who only think about money all the time! And now-my family is thinking, maybe not about money, but they don’t think about people and how to live a principled life, like they always claimed they did.”

  “You and I are judging this in the calm and safety of my living room,” I said. “We’re not facing a congressional inquiry that would use our beliefs to turn us into criminals. If that ever happens to us, then we’ll know what we’re made of. I spent a month in prison once. It was a terrible experience, one that very nearly destroyed me. If I knew I had to go to prison again, I don’t know how strong I would be in standing up for my values. I hope strong to the end, but even more, I hope I never have to find out. I’m only trying to say that what your grandfather did makes me-oh, incredibly sad, heartbroken, really. But I can’t judge him, because I haven’t been on that battlefield, looking into the mouths of those cannons. But your grandmother crossed a different river when she resorted to murder. And I want to see her pay the price she earned by killing Marcus Whitby. Which is why you should move out, instead of staying here to watch me do it.”

  “But how can I ever live with them again?”

  “You could go to Washington with your father,” I suggested. “Yeah. You know he calls me every hour on the hour.”

  It wasn’t quite that often, but he did call from Washington once or twice a day, alternatively cajoling and ordering Catherine to follow him east.

  “Daddy can’t believe I’m not ready to embrace the right. He thinks seeing that Grample was a fraud means I should abandon all his and Granny’s ideals. Daddy’s fed up with me trying to defend them.”

  “So I gathered. You can’t stay here forever, you know. After a while, the romance of living on a trundle bed would pall; you’d start wanting your private bath, your wide-screen television and all the other simple pleasures of home. Anyway, aside from your grandmother, you need to be in school.”

  “Back to Vina Fields, with everyone staring at me and talking about me?” I grinned. “A chance to show what you’re made of But you’re a rich girl, and a smart one: you have choices. You can go to Washington, but insist on a school with more progressive values than the one your father picked out. You could go to boarding school-doesn’t your family have a tradition with Exeter? But you only have one more year after this one; transferring for your senior year might not be in your best interest. Isn’t there a friend you could stay with?”

  She muffled her face in Peppy’s fur. “I’ve been through too much this winter. None of my friends is close enough to understand. And anyway, school seems totally pointless. Lacrosse, who’s dating who, it’s like-after seeing B
enji die, none of it means anything.”

  “You could take a year off to work with Habitat for Humanity or a similar group that tries to help people as poor as Benji’s mother. My lover-if Morrell-when Morrell comes home, he can help you find a good program.”

  That suggestion appealed to her at once. We spent the next several days discussing hows and whens. Catherine finally decided to finish out her year at Vina Fields, since she couldn’t do much until her arm recovered, then try to start in a program like Habitat during the summer.

  I hadn’t heard from Darraugh since the night I’d abandoned him in his bedroom, but he surprised me again after Catherine had decided to go back to school: he called to offer her a home for the balance of the school year. To my relief, Catherine accepted: I was more than ready for someone else to have care of an ardent adolescent.

  She decided to spend a weekend in New Solway with her grandfather. She would collect her things and move in with Darraugh on Monday

  morning. She talked to Renee, making her promise to stay in town, and on the last weekend in March, when daylight savings time began, climbed with me into the Mustang for the drive west.

  I brought the dogs with me. After I’d seen Catherine into the Bayard mansion, where Ruth Lantner refused to say a word to me, I drove over to Larchmont and let the dogs out. I took Mitch and Peppy with me through the woods, retracing the route that Catherine followed as she slipped home after bringing Benji supplies. The dogs loved it: they found deer and chased them through the woods.

  I wasn’t really thinking about Catherine and Benji as I walked back to Larchmont, but about Calvin Bayard and all the nights he walked this path to lie with Geraldine. To lie with Geraldine, to lie to her.

  The Boy Wonder, had he been a golden calf, an idol too false for worship? Or just a flawed human being? Calvin shone, that was his problem. When I heard him speak all those years ago, he seemed literally to shine like gold itself. I was dazzled to the point of enchantment. If you had that gift, the gift of enchanting those around you, what would ever make you want to temper it?

  The dogs caught up with me as I passed the Larchmont outbuildings. Mitch dove into the pool and pulled out one of the rotting carp. He rolled in it before I could grab him. I got Peppy into the car before she could join him, then went back to leash him up. “One thing’s certain in this life, my friend,” I told him. “You need a whole lot more dazzle than you’ve got to make me overlook that stench.”

  When I’d shoved him into the back of the Mustang, I drove the short distance around Coverdale Lane to Anodyne Park. Geraldine Graham was home, the guard at the gate told me; I could go right up.

  Geraldine answered the door herself, as she had when I first came to visit her. Her left foot was still in a cast, she was using a walker, but she was managing on her own. She did ask me to get down her Coalport mugs for tea, but she handled the boiling water and the tea bags without my assistance.

  I carried the cups to her alcove, burning my fingers on the thin china as I had on my first visit. The space looked bigger and lighter. At first I couldn’t figure out what was different, and put it down to the greater light in the room from the coming of spring. When Geraldine clumped in behind me on her walker and sat, though, I realized she had taken down her mother’s portrait. The small mountainscape hung there instead.

  She saw me looking at the wall and smiled in satisfaction. “When I hit Renee with Kylie’s mask, it brought me a sense of pleasure I don’t believe I ever experienced before, not even in Calvin’s arms. Certainly not in Armand’s, or any of the others.”

  She paused, then added, “I loved Calvin, you know. I knew his weaknesses, but I loved him nonetheless. I didn’t think I could forgive Renee, for sweeping in and taking him over, for queening it over me or for setting him up on a pedestal and indulging his weaknesses. But when I brought that mask down on her head-I felt an extraordinary lightness. I am ninety-one now; I have not now the strength to move heaven and earth, but I am grateful for a freer spirit for whatever remains in life to me. I decided you were right: I didn’t need Mother up there reminding me of past humiliations.”

  I stayed with Geraldine for an hour, rehashing the case, her life, Darraugh’s life. She had finally told him this week that Calvin was (probably) his father. That explained why Darraugh had invited Catherine to live with him, I supposed-the startling realization that she was his niece. How did it feel to know Edwards Bayard was his brother, I wondered.

  “It upset Darraugh, of course,” Geraldine was saying in her high, tremulous voice. “He loved MacKenzie. I told Darraugh it didn’t matter, that he did right to love MacKenzie as a father: MacKenzie was the man who stood beside Darraugh’s nursery bed when he had chicken pox. MacKenzie, not the nurse, certainly not 1, bathed his face to keep him from scratching the pustules. MacKenzie read Darraugh nursery rhymes and put him up on his first pony. MacKenzie did all those things a father does. And some that a mother who wasn’t fleeing the torments of her home might have done.”

  “Darraugh should tell his son, his own MacKenzie,” I said. “You guys live such an incestuous life out here-it would never do for young MacKenzie to fall in love with Catherine Bayard”

  She looked at me with a momentary return of hauteur, then relaxed and said she would suggest it to him. “What is happening with Renee? They have not yet arrested her.”

  I grimaced. “I don’t know if they ever will. The evidence is there, but

  it’s all circumstantial, in a way. So what that her prints are on Theresa Jakes’s phenobarb bottle-why shouldn’t Renee have picked it up, wondering what medication her husband’s nurse was taking? And the rest of it-the cab she took from the corner near Marcus Whitby’s house, the valet at the golf club who saw her climb into a golf cart and ride off, she’s taking a firm hand with that and claiming they must be mistaken. The police tread warily when it comes to arresting people from places like New Solway.”

  She caught the bitterness in my tone. “Don’t make that the only way you think of us, Victoria. We do some good as well. Without us, there wouldn’t be money for symphonies and theaters, after all.”

  I rubbed my fingers wearily through my hair. “I don’t think there’s a ledger of good and evil, this much good offsets that much evil. It’s just; oh, you know, there was that popular book a few years back, when bad things happen to good people, or whatever it was? That’s pie-in-the-sky stuff, to keep all us working stiffs from rising up in fury at the inequities in the world. No one ever writes about all the good things that happen to bad people, how the rich and powerful walk away from the messes they make, and people like me, like my neighbor, like my parents, pay for the clean up.

  “I get tired of it. I’ve been pampering a confused rich girl all week. I like Catherine, but she put Benji at risk when she ran off with him. She can take time off from school to focus her life, while Benji’s mother and sisters can’t even come to America to mourn at his grave, and who knows what they’ll live on.”

  “Yes, that’s very wrong,” Geraldine said. “To leave them wanting. I will talk to Catherine when she’s with Darraugh and remind her that she must look after Benji’s family.”

  She pushed herself upright with her walker to escort me to the door. “I hope you will visit me again, despite your misgivings about our New Solway morality.”

  I walked slowly along the winding paths, trying to shake a sense of melancholy the conversation had given me. The rich are different than you and me: they have more money and they have more power.

  I finally dragged myself back to my car. The stink of rotting carp filled the Mustang. I indulged in a moment of melodrama and imagined it as the stink of New Solway riding with me to Chicago. But it was just Mitch,

  after all, doing what dogs love to do. I opened all the windows and drove along the tollway at a fast clip.

  When I got home, I dragged Mitch up the back stairs and chained him to the porch rail. I fetched a bucket and a scrub brush from the kitchen. He was covere
d in lather when the phone rang; I almost let it go, but just before it kicked over to my answering service, I sprinted in to pick up the kitchen extension.

  A man with an Italian accent answered. He was looking for Victoria Warshawski. That was me? He was Giulio Carrera with Humane Medicine. My heart stood still. The scrub brush clattered to the floor.

  “Morrell?”

  “Yes. We have Morrell. He was shot, out in the Afghan countryside. We don’t quite know what happened yet, but local women found him and took care of him. We traced him through rumors and airlifted him to Zurich early this morning.”

  “He’s alive?”

  “He’s alive. The women saved his life. He is weak, but he gave us your telephone number and told us to ring you. He said to tell you it was not the Khyber Pass where he was shot. Do you understand that?”

  I laughed shakily: my worry about his being shot and left to die in the Khyber Pass-he was alert, he could remember that, he remembered my phone number. He remembered me. “Where is he?”

  Carrera gave me the name of the hospital. I sent messages to Morrell, I babbled in Italian and English. Long after Carrera hung up, I still clutched the phone to my chest, my face wet. Once in a blue moon, in the midst of pain and helplessness, life hands us a reprieve.

  Sara Paretsky

  ***

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  Document creation date: 30.05.2012

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