Later, after we had eaten, we gathered for an extended family council meeting, al fresco. Clethra did most of the talking early on, seated there cross-legged on a blanket next to her brother.
“I have, like, a major thing to tell everyone,” she announced, speaking with newfound resolve. “I’ve decided I’m not gonna do that stupid book, okay? Like, I don’t wanna write it. I don’t wanna make speeches. I don’t wanna go on talk shows. That’s just not me, okay? I mean, I’ve been as famous as anyone could ever be. And I don’t wanna be famous anymore. I wanna live more like you do, Hoagy.”
“Careful. You may get what you wish for.”
“I mean it,” she said vehemently.
“I know you do.”
“Can it be done?” she asked me. “Can I tell them I’ve changed my mind?”
“All it takes is one fax.” Especially since they still hadn’t paid her so much as a dime. “Of course, they’ll be terribly disappointed.”
“How about you? Will you be disappointed?”
“I’ll live,” I told her. What I didn’t tell her was that I had already been approached about helping Dwayne tell his story—three publishers were still bidding hard for it. Seven figure advance, easy. I had said no because of the obvious conflict. Now I could say yes. I could if I wanted to, that is. But I didn’t. “What will you do instead?” I asked her.
“Apply to Barnard for late enrollment,” she answered. “I’ve only missed a few weeks of classes, and I’ve got, like, a pretty good excuse. I’ll try to get into a dorm. If I can’t, Barry said I can crash at their place until space opens up.”
“We’ve room to spare,” Barry added cheerily. “And I am, after all, her father.”
I found myself gazing at Arvin, the odd boy out. Because Barry was not, after all, his father. Thor’s son was staring down at the blanket, his Adam’s apple jumping.
Barry followed my gaze. “You’re part of our family, too, Arvy,” he added quickly. “I want you to know that. Marco and I very much want you with us. As long as we have a home, you have a home. Count on that. Now in a couple of years …” Briefly, his features darkened, his eyes avoiding mine. “… when Clethra turns twenty-one, she’ll be named your legal guardian. Until that time, I would be honored to serve in that capacity.”
Arvin nodded glumly and mouthed the word “thanks.” Although no sound came out.
“And if you ever need a place to hide out, Arvin,” Merilee spoke up, “you’re always welcome here. For as long as you like.”
He brightened. Not much, but a little. “Really?”
“Really,” Merilee assured him. “You, too, Clethra. Anytime you feel like coming. You don’t even have to call us. Just show up.”
“Although,” I pointed out, “we do charge seventy-five dollars a night per person. And food is extra.”
Arvin snickered. Possibly there was hope for him.
“While we’re on the subject of money,” Barry went on, “both of you kids will have some of your own when the estates are settled. Until then, I’ll be able to swing your tuitions at Barnard and Dalton soon as I sell the house out here. I can’t …” He faltered, growing emotional. “I can’t live in it anymore. Not after what happened there to Ruthie. Have to sell. And there’s my Sprite as well, which should fetch enough quick cash to tide us over. Still interested, Hoagy?”
“I am. And in Thor’s motorcycle, too.”
“You will not get a motorcycle, mister,” Merilee said crisply.
“I’ll get a helmet.”
“I don’t care. I will not spend my days and nights wondering if you’re smeared across the pavement somewhere.”
I grinned at her. “We’ll talk,” I said.
“We most certainly will not talk.”
Lulu let out a moan of consternation. She hates it when we disagree. Plus she was holding out for one with a sidecar for her.
“We’ll get through this,” Barry said, as much to himself as to the kids. “We’ll be fine. Isn’t that right, Hoagy? Won’t we be fine?”
“Yes, Barry. We will all be fine.”
He was sitting out by the first tee in his wheelchair with a blanket thrown over his legs. I couldn’t tell if he was watching the players out on the course or if he could even tell there were players out on the course. He was just sitting there, the breeze rippling his thin white hair. His nurse sat next to him on a bench.
“Mother is attending a lecture on primroses in the main hall,” she informed me with abundant good cheer. “Shall we head back inside? It’s getting rather chilly.”
“I’ll take over from here,” I growled, seizing the wheelchair from her.
She flared her nostrils at me and went marching off toward the main hall. I don’t predict she and I will be close.
I sat. He didn’t seem to notice me there. “Brought you a present, Father,” I said, laying it in his lap. “My way of saying thanks.”
After a long, long while he glanced down at it. It was a dark chocolate pecan turtle from the Chocolate Shell in Old Lyme. His favorite candy in the world. He gazed at it fondly and reached for it, or tried, but his hand just sort of flopped hopelessly around in his lap before it lay still again. A pained expression creased his long, narrow face.
“Here, let me.” I broke off a piece and fed it to him.
He let it sit there in his mouth for a moment so the caramel would melt and he could chew it. “For w-what, Bucky?” he wondered, after he’d swallowed it. “Thanks … f-for what?”
“You cracked the case. Helped me figure out who killed my friend. You’re still a pretty shrewd article, you know.”
“… Bucky?”
“Yes, Father?”
“I was n-never a shrewd article. I was … I-I was conventional.”
“I wish you wouldn’t talk about yourself in the past tense,” I said crossly. “Besides, there’s nothing wrong with being conventional.”
“It’s … everything you despise. You t-told me that once.”
“That doesn’t make it wrong. Just means it’s not for me.”
He narrowed his blue eyes at me. I had to keep reminding myself he couldn’t see well out of them. “You’ve … softened some, haven’t y-you?”
“No chance. Not me.” I fed him some more of his turtle. “Have you decided whether or not to roll over that CD?”
He gaped at me, bewildered. “Which … CD?”
“The one you were trying to decide whether or not to roll over.”
“Bunch of … gibberish,” he grumbled. “Man h-has to know Latin to—”
“I can handle it for you, if you’d like. I’ll sit down with Gene next time I’m in town, go over your whole portfolio with him. What do you say?”
He chewed on his turtle, saying nothing.
“Father?” I pressed.
“You’ve … got y-your own life and your … own worries.”
“I’ve got no worries. At least none that matter to me as much as you and Mother do.”
“I c-can manage,” he insisted stubbornly. “I’ll … take care of it.”
“No, you can’t,” I insisted, giving him stubborn right back. That’s one of the things I’m best at. “I’ll do it. And I don’t want any goddamned argument from you, either. I want to do this for you. You will let me do this for you. Is that understood?”
He made a face, as if the matter were way too unimportant to merit further discussion. He was silent after that, his breathing weak and unsteady, the sound of it much like the sound of someone crumpling very dry tissue paper.
The breeze picked up to a gust and blew his blanket away from his legs. I straightened it for him and asked him if he was getting too cold, but he didn’t answer. He’d fallen asleep. I pushed him back to their apartment, his head lolling slightly over to one side. It was very warm in there and reeked of that same, sickly-sweet smell he reeked of. Mother was still off at her garden club lecture.
I positioned him in front of the TV set and sat on the sofa. “Father?
”
He stirred slightly, looking around. He didn’t seem to know where he was.
“Father, do you remember a long time ago when you used to come downstairs in the middle of the night for a glass of milk?”
He didn’t respond. “Do you, Father?”
He stared at me a long time before he spoke. “Where’s … your p-pal Stink, Bucky?” he said, grinning at me with his horsy teeth. “He still … out there t-trying to tie those f-firecrackers to … old man MacGregor’s cat?”
I sighed inwardly. “Yes, Father. Stink’s still out there.”
“Well, tell him to c-come on in. Mother will … m-make him some g-good hot cocoa. Getting awful c-cold out. Feels like … winter.”
“You’re absolutely right, Father. It’s beginning to feel a lot like winter.”
It was just past four in the morning when Tracy wanted to be changed. Merilee started to stir. I told her to go back to sleep and got up and took care of it myself. I was awake anyway.
Afterward, I carried Tracy downstairs and threw a log on the coals in the front parlor fireplace. Then I poured myself a Macallan and sat there on the sofa with Tracy in my lap and Lulu on my feet. She was giving me that look again—Tracy, I mean—the one where she was waiting for me to explain myself to her. I didn’t know how to. But for the very first time I felt strongly that I wanted to try. So I did something that night I had never done with her before.
I softly closed the door to the hallway and opened the corner cupboard, the one we hid the television in. One of the local stations in New London had the genius to schedule The Pre-Dawn Moronathon every morning from four until six—two solid hours of the Stooges. If Tracy wanted to understand me, I could think of no better or healthier way to start her out than this way.
We came in on the one where they’re locked in a haunted house, which I realize isn’t too specific since they were almost always locked in a haunted house. I took her hand and pointed so she’d know which one was Larry, which was Moe and which was Curly. She took it from there all by herself. And believe me, it didn’t take her long. Not with this man’s blood coursing through her veins. She was giggling in less than a minute. Squealing with delight in just over two.
God, I was proud.
And pumped beyond belief. Because here, at last, was something we could share, just we two. And I do mean we two. Merilee would not approve. In fact, she’d kill me if she ever found out I was polluting Tracy’s brain this way. But, hey, she could raise Tracy her way, I’d raise her mine. What a feast lay in wait for her—Daffy Duck, the Roadrunner, Laurel and Hardy …
Mitchum I’d save for when she was in the Terrible Twos.
My daughter and I watched a solid hour of the Stooges together, Lulu curled up on my feet with her tail thumping. Not only because she’s a big fan herself but because she, too, had started to figure out just how much fun it might be having Tracy around. I guess I had to realize it myself before she could. We have tremendous control over those around us, whether we know it or not, whether we want it or not. That’s one thing I learned from this entire experience with Thor.
We sat there together in the pre-dawn darkness, Tracy engrossed in Larry, Moe and Curly, me still wondering about Thor. Why he’d run off with Clethra. Why he’d chosen to show up at my door that night. Thorvin Alston Gibbs wasn’t perfect. But he was my friend. In life, he had given me the courage to believe in myself. In death, he had given me something even more precious.
In the morning I wrote.
Sometimes as I sleep I hear a creak on the stairs. For a moment I think it is my father on his way down to the kitchen for a glass of milk in the night, and that I am in my own room, snug in my narrow bed. Briefly, this comforts me. But then I awaken, and realize that it is my own house that is creaking, from the wind, and that I am in the master bedroom. She sleeps next to me, secure in the belief that I know what I’m doing. I don’t know what I’m doing.
He never did either. But he was exceptionally good at convincing others that he did—so that they might sleep soundly in the night. This was, perhaps, the one thing he was best at in life. This was, for him and others like him in the middle of the American century, what it meant to be a man.
Quietly, I slip out of bed and go downstairs and pour myself a glass of milk. I check to see that the doors are locked, that the furnace runs smoothly, that the grounds outside my kitchen window are secure in the moonlight. I cherish these moments alone in the night, when my family sleeps. It is my favorite time. It is my favorite thing.
It’s a guy thing.
Turn the page to continue reading from the Stewart Hoag Mysteries
One
DEAR HOAGY,
You don’t mind me being so familiar, do you? I hope not. I feel like I know you, having read and enjoyed your work so much. And “Mr. Hoag” just seems so stiff, somehow.
I’m enclosing the first chapter of what I’m hoping, with your generous assistance, to develop into a novel. It’s about a character who I believe has the potential to make as big a name for himself in modern American fiction as Holden Caulfield. I’ve structured it in the form of letters to a friend, much like Ring Lardner did with the letters Jack Keefe wrote to Friend Al in “You Know Me Al,” a work I freely admit has influenced me greatly. Maybe even too much. I don’t know. I’m not a professional writer. At least not yet.
But I do feel this is a VERY commercial project. I need advice and help. I need a collaborator. I need YOU. Once we find a publisher I can promise you your usual fee and royalties, including a nominal share of the film rights. This is a natural for a film, by the way.
I have gone ahead and written the first chapter on my own as a sample. I am told I pretty much have to do this. I hope you can spare the time to read it. And can advise me what I should do next. I really look forward to meeting you. I’m a real fan.
Yours truly,
the answer man
I WAS AT THE COUNTER of the Oyster Bar in Grand Central that day showing Tracy the proper way to eat a bluepoint. I figured it was important that she learn about these things from me. Who else was going to teach her? Some pimply little weasel named Gunnar or Doogie? What the hell would he know about raw oysters? He’d probably tell her to order a dozen. Wrong. The correct number is nine. He’d probably tell her to drown them all in lemon juice. Wrong again. You squirt each oyster individually, and only when you are just about to eat it. Add a dash of Tabasco, then swallow whole. That’s how you eat an oyster.
Tony, who’d been there behind the raw bar since VJ Day, certainly concurred. As for Lulu, my noted nose bowl champ, she merely grunted peevishly. She’d been in a sour mood ever since her annual physical exam, when her doctor remarked that she was becoming a trifle, well, jowly. It didn’t matter that she was in tip-top health otherwise—sinuses clear as a bell, figure svelte, gums as gingivitis-free as those of a basset hound half her age. Lulu was steamed—her looks mean a lot to her. Plus Tony was taking his sweet time with her oyster pan roast, mostly because he kept stopping to make funny faces at Tracy, who kept responding with gales of laughter from her perch there next to me. At eighteen months, Tracy remained a sunny, happy baby. Clearly, the Hoagy genes hadn’t kicked in yet. They would. I wasn’t at all concerned. Or at all looking forward to it.
Still, no complaints from this end. It used to be that spending the better part of an afternoon on a stool in the belly of Grand Central terminal slurping up oysters was called loafing. Now, thanks to Tracy and the sober responsibilities of fatherhood, it was called quality time.
Afterward, we meandered over to Fifth Avenue to take in the annual Christmas display in the windows of Lord and Taylor, Tracy swaddled in her periwinkle-blue snug suit and cashmere ducky blanket. It was a bright, frosty early December day, the best kind of day in the best time of year in the best city on earth. New York comes to life between Thanksgiving and Christmas. The air is as bracing as a sharp whiff of ammonia. The chestnuts are roasting. People have a bounce in their stride and
an unfamiliar bit of color in their cheeks. A few of them even smile. At least they smiled at us as we walked along. It was Tracy, chiefly. Not that Lulu wasn’t lookin’ buff in her Fair Isle sweater vest, prancing along beside her baby sister’s stroller. Not that I was looking too terrible myself in my shearling greatcoat from Milan, which I wore over the barley-colored Donegal tweed suit from Strickland’s, a cream and blue tattersall shirt of Italian wool and a knit tie of rose-colored silk. No, it was Tracy. Her emerald-green eyes, chiefly. Merilee’s eyes. And those luxuriant blond tresses that spilled out from under the knitted cap that was perched on her somewhat largish head. She was an uncommonly beautiful baby. People always lit up when they saw her. Especially when she was with Merilee. The two of them made quite some pair. In fact, I was becoming deathly afraid they’d soon be asked to appear in one of those vomitous celebrity mother-daughter fashion spreads in Vanity Fair.
I’d be damned if any daughter of mine would be exploited that way. Especially without me.
From Lord and Taylor’s we strolled down to the Old Print Shop on Lex, me limping slightly. The limp had nothing to do with age and everything to do with that damned play Merilee was rehearsing. I picked out the frame for Merilee’s Christmas present, an etching that Levon West did in the early thirties of a busy New York street on a rainy day. Merilee had much admired it—looking at it, you can practically hear the car horns and the Gershwin in the background—but she was way too much of a frugal Yankee puritan to spring for it. That made one of us. For Tracy I had bought one good book. I’d decided to buy her one good book every year for Christmas—each a signed first edition. This particular Christmas, her second, she was getting The Sun Also Rises. From there we worked our way back up Madison to Worth & Worth, where I had my Statler reblocked while I studied how I looked in a homburg. Distinguished, I decided. I also decided I could wait another ten years to look distinguished. Lulu’s new district check wool cap had come in. She tried it on in the three-way mirror, snuffling happily. Shopping always cheers her up. Something she got from me. That and an aversion to any film starring Meg Ryan. Afterward, we took in the tree at Rockefeller Center, a seventy-five-foot Norway spruce that had been donated by two nuns in Mendham, New Jersey. We watched the ice skaters. We stopped at the St. Regis, where Sal Fodera trimmed my hair. It doesn’t take him as long as it used to, but Sal is courtly enough never to point this out. Mary at the front desk fussed like crazy over Tracy. Lulu took a nap, which is one of the things she is best at.
The Girl Who Ran Off With Daddy Page 27