Orient
Page 21
Beth pulled her underwear up. She climbed off the mattress and placed her palms against the bedroom door.
“Is someone there?” she screamed.
“Don’t, Beth,” Gavril pleaded. But her act emboldened him, and he gently pushed her aside to turn the knob. “You stay here. I go.” In her nightmare, she died in the hallway, Gavril after her in the bed, not vice versa. Best to die first, not second. What had seemed to her an act of bravery, she now understood as the easier sequence. “Çine esti tu?” Gavril yelled. “Lasati!”
Footsteps. Loud, clunky footsteps.
“Gavie, it’s Mom,” Gail called from the bottom of the steps. “Sorry. Broke a glass. A little tipsy. Couldn’t drive home so I used my keys. Don’t worry about me. I’ll curl up on the couch. Don’t you worry about Mom.”
“You scared us half to death,” Beth shouted into the darkness. “Don’t ever do that again.” She placed her forehead against Gavril’s shoulder. They were both moonlit with sweat.
For once, Beth got out of bed first. She went downstairs to a living room of long morning shadows and small dark furniture. A quilt was folded on the couch, one of its cushions still dented against the arm. Gail stood in the kitchen brewing coffee, her skirt rumpled, her feet webbed in beige panty hose. Outside, branches swayed in the rain. A fly crawled across the window over the sink. Gail’s high heels were stowed by the plant pots.
“I’m going to kill you,” Beth said flatly. “I mean it. I’m actually going to kill you right now.”
Gail turned with an exaggerated smile. Gail was an expert turner. She must practice turning with a grand expression on her face in front of her condo mirror.
“My lord, what a fuss you’re making.” She chose a mug from the shelf for her daughter. “I’m sorry I didn’t call first. I figured it best not to wake you. And it would have been fine if you hadn’t left a glass on the counter for anyone to knock over. I hope it wasn’t a favorite. I think I managed to get all of the slivers.” Gail diligently inspected the floor for sharp, bright slivers.
“Never again, okay? Unless you want to give us both a heart attack. What were you doing in Orient last night anyway? Drunk.”
“I was drinking, not drunk,” her mother said. “I had a few glasses of wine at Ina Jenkins’s house after the town meeting at Poquatuck. Have you seen your third grade teacher lately? Homely as ever, I’m afraid. And all those dogs. Just because they’re purebreds doesn’t mean they should be allowed on a table.” Gail shook her head. “But Ina did have a little gossip. Apparently Sycamore is terminating Ted Herrig after the semester. Cutting back on the entire geography department. And good riddance, as far as I’m concerned. Who needs a teacher to show someone how to look at a map? But I feel for his family. He and Sarakit were there last night, lecturing.” Gail started recounting the story of the town hall meeting. When she mentioned Magdalena, Beth glanced at the microwave clock.
“Are you going to her funeral today?” Beth asked.
“Why would I? I’m the last person she’d want there. I believe in respecting the wishes of the dead.”
“I’m going,” Beth replied.
Gail gave her a thin smile. “That’s sweet of you. I raised you right.” Her mother poured twin coffees. “Is Gavril going with you?”
“No. He refuses to set foot in a church. He thinks religion is humanity’s way of trying to be as immortal as a cockroach. Anyway, he hardly knew her. But I knew her. And you did too.”
Gail shrugged and opened the refrigerator. “I’m convinced soy milk is detrimental to fertility. Oh, thank god, you have two percent!”
“Has it occurred to you that Magdalena might have been murdered?”
Gail clasped her hands together and stared out the window at her old nemesis’s cottage. “Are you accusing me? I wouldn’t blame you if you did. That woman was a bully. She actually bullied me. Still, that’s a little far-fetched. Murdered at that age? In that ramshackle house? You’ve been in the city too long.” Gail dropped into a chair with the heavy resignation of a commuter settling in for a long train ride. “New York City, where no one knows a single thing about the people living right next door. Am I right? You could share a wall with someone for twenty years and never learn their first name. I can just see the real estate ads: ‘You will never be invited to a neighborhood barbecue. No one will make eye contact in the elevator.’ That sounds like heaven.” She took a sip and burned her tongue, wincing in pain.
“If that’s what you want, why would you go to a town hall meeting?”
“Honey, I own this house and the two and a half acres it sits on. When the board starts talking about new zoning restrictions, I damn well better pay attention. I’m invested. Bryan Muldoon really shamed himself last night. It was a delight to watch.” Gail held her head up by the temple.
Beth sat down across from her. “Did Jeff Trader ever do repairs for you?”
“Yes. Here and there. Who do you think was going to clean the gutters? Mario? I would have paid to see that. Jeff even installed our boiler.” Gail looked around the kitchen, as if she could gauge the air temperature by sight. “Do you have the heat on? That thing has a warranty. Why is it so cold in here?”
“So he had keys? Keys to this house?”
“Let me think.” Gail ruminated, counting on her fingers either husbands or the number of times she’d been forced to change the locks. “Yeah, he probably does. Did. Not that it matters.” She nodded toward the windows. “None of the latches actually work. The historical board wouldn’t let me do all the improvements I wanted. They insisted that the façade couldn’t be touched. The original fingerprint needs to be preserved, they said. For who? I said. What about those of us who are living inside the fingerprint? How about wanting to keep warm in a fingerprint?”
“It’s called a footprint, not a fingerprint,” Beth corrected. But her mother was right: the house was one big open door. Beth had been breaking into the Shepherd house since she’d started dating as a teenager, and now her distant memories of jiggling open windows or climbing up the trestle at 2:00 A.M. came back as frightening reminders of the defenselessness of its current occupants.
“If you’re thinking about getting an alarm system,” Gail said, “I hear Adam Pruitt has started his own security company. Do me the courtesy of not going with Bryan.” Beth looked at her mother. Her hair was in need of a touch-up; a thin, gray cloud bank was showing beneath the chemical copper. Beth thought of the photograph of the red-haired woman found in Jeff’s book.
“Did you and Jeff Trader get along? Was there ever a fight between you two?”
Gail looked taken aback.
“Why are you asking me so many questions? What you should be asking me is how I can help with your project.” She eyed the area of the table that hid Beth’s stomach. “How’s it going? Don’t tell Gavril, but I was talking to him the other day and he—”
“Mother, did you and Jeff Trader not get along?”
“What?” A housefly landed on the lip of Gail’s mug and she shooed it away. Her fingernails were chipped. Beth had never questioned her mother’s finances, but she wondered if this evident cosmetic decline meant that Gail was hurting for money. “I never really thought of Jeff as someone to get along with. So I guess that means we did. We certainly never fought. Why are you constantly changing the subject?”
Beth got up, opened the back door, and walked around the house to her car. The mailman was in the driveway, shielded from the rain in a layer of transparent plastic, like a newspaper. He waved at her and said, “Congratulations.”
Confused, she ignored him and glanced at the windshield of her car. The snapshot of the woman was visible on the dashboard for anyone to see. Beth opened the car door and grabbed it. She carried it back into the kitchen and held it up in front of her mother, who was downing the dregs in her mug.
“Is this you?” Beth pointed to the red-haired woman with horns, a goatee, and scratched-out eyes standing by a rosebush. Gail looked up at her,
horrified. Did her mother think she was making a joke about her plastic surgery? Did she think Beth had drawn the horns herself?
“No, that’s not me. What an insensitive thing to say. After how giving I’ve been.”
“I didn’t mean—”
Her mother stood up to reclaim her shoes.
“I’m not interested in being insulted.”
“Mom.”
“Something’s come over you lately. And I don’t like it. You’ve become a different person. You’re selfish. And you’re mean.” Gail brought her arms out for balance as she shoved each foot into its appropriate heel.
Gavril stumbled into the kitchen, one hand scratching his facial hair, the other holding a pile of mail he’d collected from the floor of the foyer. He tossed the mail on the table and smiled at his mother-in-law.
“Rough night?” he asked.
“Rough morning,” she replied. “Your wife is becoming intolerable. She needs to be reminded of the importance of the family she has left.”
Gavril was used to humoring the long-standing feud of the Shepherd women, trying as much as possible not to take either side. Suddenly, his smile morphed into a grimace. “That fly,” he said. “Do you hear it? That buzz.” The housefly zigzagged through the air, its drone increasing and falling away, cruising slowly then speeding up for turns. “That awful sound. It’s exactly like the bugs back in Bucharest.” Gavril picked up a flyer from the mail and chased the insect around the kitchen. “Those little black listening devices,” he said. “In my childhood we called them bugs, just as you do. The Securitate put them in the walls of our homes. When they went bad, they sounded just like a bug, like a fly.” He swatted and missed. “For days we would hear it buzzing. ‘The flies are back,’ we would say, because that is all we could say. If we wanted to talk we would say, ‘Dad wants to go outside for a smoke.’ Then the police would come, pretending to be janitors, and it would be fixed, silent again. The bug, an insect listening.” The fly froze on the wall, and Gavril swung and smashed it. He threw the flyer on the table, the juicy insect smeared across its postage square. “They killed thousands of my people with their little bugs. To this day, when I see an insect, I think it is spying on me.”
“See,” Gail said, gathering her purse as she looked at her daughter. “Your life could be a lot worse. You should be thankful for how easy you have it.”
“Oh, she’s not so bad.” Gavril pinched Beth’s waist and commandeered her coffee cup. “This weekend we’re throwing a party.”
“A party?” Beth hadn’t agreed to that. She had a moment of déjà vu. Haven’t I been here before? Haven’t I had this exact conversation in the kitchen with Gavril and Gail? Haven’t I already lived this once? To live in a small town was to accept déjà vu as a daily sensation. “I’m not sure it’s the right time for a party.”
“Too late.” Gavril smiled. “I already invited the friends we have out here. You know, Gail, the North Fork has become very chic for artists. And my gallerist is coming from the city. And Luz and Nathan, and Isaiah. A last party before I finish the work for my next show.”
“Look at her. She’s worried I’ll come,” Gail said coldly. “She’s really awful to me. I’m sure she’ll yell at you the minute I leave for mentioning the party in front of me. Beth, I’m not going to come, for God’s sake.”
But it wasn’t the prospect of her mother’s attendance that caused Beth to turn pale. It was the dead-insect flyer, and three others in the stack of mail Gavril had brought from the foyer. Now that you’re pregnant, the real sales begin, read one in bloated marshmallow letters. Baby cribs! Baby mobiles! Baby blankets! Baby everything!!! Demanding, jubilant, openmouthed infants infested the flyers, promising freebies, discounts, and a dancing chorus of pink-and-blue dollar signs. Each one was addressed in computer type to Elizabeth Shepherd. How did they find her? Just because she’d spent a few hours searching baby sites on her computer? She’d been careful not to fill out a single form. Had her gynecologist sold her address?
As nonchalantly as possible, Beth gathered up the flyers before her husband or mother could notice their common theme. “I have to get ready,” she said as she left the kitchen. She had saved herself for today, but there would be mail tomorrow, and the day after, endless opportunities for an onslaught of baby announcements to fall into the hands of those she wanted to keep her secret from the most. Who could she call to stop the delivery? Ripping the flyers to pieces, Beth hurried upstairs to dress for a funeral.
CHAPTER 13
Most of Orient braved the rain to bid good-bye to Magdalena. Beth arrived at the church late and had to settle for a seat in the last pew, far from the altar decorated in white roses and yellow four-o’clocks. It hardly mattered. All funerals followed the same sluggish formula. The same prayers, from the Twenty-third Psalm; the same lumbering notes of the organ; the same wallet-size cards listing the vital stats of the deceased; the same poly-blend black blazers and black knit sweaters and midnight-blue stockings; the same coughers coughing; the same loving words recited about the dead.
Beth had no objection: funerals had been spared the culture’s otherwise relentless carnival need to entertain. Still, sitting in the last pew of the Orient United Church of Christ, Beth thought back to how practically everyone with whom she’d smoked pot pledged that they wanted their ashes sprinkled on Mount Kilimanjaro, or wanted the guests to wear leis and build a bonfire on the beach, or wanted a giant party thrown at Dizmo’s Tavern in their honor. Surely her generation wasn’t the first to hope for some touch of the personal to dignify their commemorations. Surely, this braying organ solo and rote floral spray wasn’t what Magdalena Kiefer would have wanted. Even in the age of individuality, death remained on the side of the masses. Perhaps dependability was the chief comfort of a funeral, as dependable as banisters for mourners to lean on. Who can lean on Kilimanjaro?
Beth watched her neighbors concentrate on sitting still. They sat quietly, pained but not crying, for an old woman who had lingered in death’s sunroom for years. The organist sang “Here I Am Lord,” off-key and distractedly, as if she were singing to herself. “Is it I, Lord? I have heard you calling in the night.” Karen Norgen turned in her pew to glance at Beth while placing a chalky tablet on her tongue, a mint or an aspirin. Four high school students, released from third period, carried the casket to the hearse.
On the church’s rain-soaked steps, black umbrellas bloomed. Beth declined Arthur Cleaver’s offer to share his umbrella. He held it over her anyway, and she was forced to lean into him, smelling chemical gardenias.
“I’m not going to the cemetery,” she told him. “I’m just walking to my car.”
“Yes,” he said, drawing out the word. “I wanted to ask you a question. I noticed your mother at the town meeting last night. I hope this doesn’t sound inappropriate, but do you own your house now, or does it still belong to your mother?”
“She owns it,” Beth replied. She was walking quickly up the sidewalk, and either out of courtesy or the need to glean more information, the thin, older man in gray cashmere kept pace with her.
“I only asked because OHB wanted to know who to speak to about selling the development rights. Your property is a sizeable lot on the Sound, and they’re hoping to ensure its protection.” He held up his hand. “I’m merely an ambassador here. As you know, your mother doesn’t get along with certain members of the board. They were wary of approaching her directly.”
“She doesn’t have plans to turn it into an art gallery, if that’s what the board is afraid of.”
Cleaver smiled. “They feel they never know with your mother. It would be money up front for her, and, of course, she’d still own the land.” He cleared his throat. “Personally, it doesn’t matter to me. I only serve as their counsel, and they asked me to approach you about it.”
Beth smirked. Orient’s entire population counted somewhere in the seven hundreds, and yet her neighbors were trying to negotiate with her through an attorney.
“Unfortunate thing, that,” he said, stopping. They had bypassed his red Lexus. Cleaver’s courtesy extended only as far as his car. “She was going to wait until the board set itself up as a trust. She wanted to guarantee that her property would be preserved as part of the conservancy. I guess we all thought she’d live a few more years. Who could have expected a heart attack over bees?”
“I see,” Beth said. The rain slicked her cheeks. She thought of Jeff Trader’s warning that something wasn’t right with OHB. “You don’t know of any reason Magdalena might have grown doubtful of the board, do you? That maybe there was some cause for her to second-guess its motives?”
Cleaver shook his head. “Magdalena’s name is on the conservancy initiative. She was a highly dedicated member of OHB.”
“So what happens to her estate?”
“Estate,” he repeated drolly. “You’d have to ask Cole Drake. He’s that kind of local lawyer. I wouldn’t know what to advise a woman like Ms. Kiefer. I deal in corporations, not individuals. I try to steer clear of messy emotional decisions. And that’s how most people make decisions, isn’t it? Emotionally.” Cleaver took a step back, the umbrella no longer even pretending to shelter her.
Beth wondered if Arthur Cleaver ever cried. His face was perfectly engineered for it, with carved aqueducts from eyes to jaw to dispense tears efficiently. The only real passion she knew Cleaver to possess was for paddle wheel steamboats, the kind that used to travel from Manhattan to Orient a hundred years ago to transport vacationers to the beaches and hunting fields. For the past five years, he had been building an exact replica of a wrecked 1902 Baltimore steamer on the lawn behind his neoclassical mansion, importing tropical hardwoods to reconstruct the antique vessel right on his rolling escarpment above the Sound. Most Orient residents had never actually seen the boat up close. It was referred to locally as Arthur’s Ark, and some joked that the first sign of the end of the world would be Cleaver’s steamer floating off to sea, loaded with his treasures and none of his neighbors.