by John Irving
It had been a popular photograph among Margaret’s colleagues in Missing Persons—when the case was still active—not only because the mother was pretty but because both boys, in their hockey uniforms, looked so Canadian. Yet to Margaret there was something identifiably American about these missing boys, a kind of cocksure combination of mischief and unstoppable optimism—as if each of them thought that his opinion would always be unchallengeable, his car never in the wrong lane.
But it was only when she couldn’t sleep, or when she’d looked too often and too long at these photographs, that Sergeant McDermid ever regretted leaving Homicide for Missing Persons. When she’d been looking for the murderer of the youngwaitress in the flying-hamburger T-shirt, Margaret had slept very well. Yet they’d never found that murderer, or the missing American boys.
When Margaret would run into Michael Cahill, who was still in Homicide, it was natural for her to ask him, as a colleague, about what he was working on—as he asked her. When they had cases that weren’t going anywhere—cases that had “unsolved” written all over them, from the start—they would express their frustration in the same way: “I’m working on one of those followed-home-from-the-Flying-Food-Circus kinds of cases.”
Missing Persons
Ruth could have stopped reading right there, at the end of Chapter One. There was no question in her mind that Alice Somerset was Marion Cole. The photographs that the Canadian writer had described could not be coincidental—not to mention the effect of the photographs on the haunted detective in Missing Persons.
That her mother was still preoccupied with the photos of her missing boys came as no surprise to Ruth, nor did the fact that Marion must have obsessed on the subject of what Thomas and Timothy would have looked like as grown men—and what their lives would have been like, had they lived. The surprise to Ruth, after the initial shock of establishing her mother’s existence, was that her mother had been able to write indirectly about what most haunted her. Simply that her mother was a writer —if not a good one—was the greatest shock to Ruth of all.
Ruth had to read on. There would be more photographs described, of course, and Ruth could remember each one. The novel was true to the genre of crime fiction only in that it eventually pursued a single case of Missing Persons to its solution: two little girls, sisters, are safely recovered from their abductor, who turns out to be neither a sex fiend nor a child molester (as one first fears) but a barely less terrible estranged father and divorced husband.
As for the waitress found in the flying-hamburger T-shirt, she remains a metaphor for the unsolved or unsolvable crime—as do the missing American boys, whose images (both real and imagined) are still haunting Detective Sergeant McDermid at the end of the novel. In this sense, Followed Home from the Flying Food Circus succeeds beyond the genre of crime fiction; it establishes Missing Persons as a psychological condition. Missing Persons becomes the permanent state of mind of the melancholic main character.
Even before she finished reading her mother’s first novel, Ruth desperately wanted to talk to Eddie O’Hare—for she assumed (correctly) that Eddie knew something about Marion’s career as a writer. Surely Alice Somerset had written more than this one book. Followed Home from the Flying Food Circus had been published in 1984; it was not a long novel. By 1990, Ruth guessed, her mother might have written and published a couple more.
Ruth would soon learn from Eddie that there were two more, each of them entailing additional casework in the field of Missing Persons. Titles were not her mother’s strength. Missing Persons McDermid had a certain alliterative charm, but the alliteration seemed strained in McDermid Reaches a Milestone .
The principal story in Missing Persons McDermid details Sergeant McDermid’s efforts to find a runaway wife and mother. In this case, a woman from the States abandons her husband and child; the husband, who is looking for her, is convinced that his wife has run away to Canada. In the course of setting out to find the missing wife and mother, Margaret uncovers some unseemly incidents involving the husband’s myriad infidelities. Worse, the detective realizes that the distraught mother’s love for a previous child (who was killed in a plane crash) has made her run away from the fearful responsibility of loving a new child—that is, the child she has abandoned. When Sergeant McDermid finds the woman, who was formerly a waitress at the Flying Food Circus, the policewoman is so sympathetic toward her that she allows her to slip away. The bad husband never finds her.
“We have reason to suspect that she’s in Vancouver,” Margaret tells the husband, knowing full well that the runaway woman is in Toronto. (In this novel, the photographs of those missing American boys retain their place of prominence in the detective’s monastic bedroom.)
In McDermid Reaches a Milestone, Margaret—who has been “almost sixty, although she could still lie about her age,” over the course of two novels— finally becomes a sexagenarian. Ruth would instantly understand why Eddie O’Hare was particularly impressed by the third of Alice Somerset’s novels: the story concerns the return of a former lover of the sixty-year-old detective.
When Margaret McDermid had been in her forties, she’d been deeply committed to volunteer counseling of young American men coming to Canada to escape the Vietnam War. One of the young men falls in love with her—a boy not yet in his twenties with a woman already in her forties! The affair, described in frankly erotic terms, is quickly over.
Then, as Margaret turns sixty, her “young” lover comes to her— again in need of her help. This time, it is because his wife and child are missing—presumed kidnapped. He’s now a man in his thirties, and Sergeant McDermid is distracted by wondering if he still finds her attractive. (“But how could he? Margaret wondered—an old hag like me.”)
“ I would still find her attractive!” Eddie would tell Ruth.
“Tell her —not me, Eddie,” Ruth would say.
In the end, the former young man is happily reunited with his wife and child, and Margaret consoles herself by once more imagining the lives of those missing American boys whose pictures stare back at her in her lonely bedroom.
Ruth would relish a jacket blurb on McDermid Reaches a Milestone : “the best living crime writer!” (This from the president of the British Crime Writers Association, although it was not a widely held opinion.) And Missing Persons McDermid was awarded the so-called Arthur for Best Novel. (The Crime Writers of Canada named the award after Arthur Ellis, which was the name adopted by Arthur English, the Canadian hangman from 1913 until 1935; his uncle John Ellis was the hangman in England at that same period of time. Subsequent Canadian hangmen took the name “Arthur Ellis” as their nom de travail.)
However, it was not uncommon that success in Canada—and an even more measurable success in her French and German translations—did not mean that Alice Somerset was similarly well known or even well published in the United States; indeed, she had barely been published in the States. A U.S. distributor for her Canadian publisher had tried unsuccessfully to promote McDermid Reaches a Milestone in a modest way. (The third of the three novels was the only one of sufficient interest to the Americans for them to publish it at all.)
Eddie O’Hare was envious of Alice Somerset’s foreign sales, but he was no less proud of Marion for her efforts to convert her personal tragedy and unhappiness to fiction. “Good for your mother,” Eddie would tell Ruth. “She’s taken everything that hurt her and turned it into a detective series!”
But Eddie was unsure if he was the model for the young lover who re-enters Margaret McDermid’s life when she’s sixty, or if Marion had taken another young American as her lover during the Vietnam War.
“Don’t be silly, Eddie,” Ruth would tell him. “She’s writing about you, only you.”
About Marion, Eddie and Ruth would agree on the most important thing: they would let Ruth’s mother remain a missing person for as long as she wanted to be. “She knows where to find us, Eddie,” Ruth would tell her newfound friend, but Eddie bore the unlikelihood of Mario
n ever wanting to see him again like a permanent sorrow.
Arriving at JFK, Ruth expected to find Allan waiting for her when she passed through customs; that she found Allan waiting with Hannah was a surprise. To Ruth’s knowledge, they had never met before; the sight of them together caused Ruth the most acute distress. She knew she should have slept with Allan before she left for Europe—now he’d slept with Hannah instead! But how could that be? They didn’t even know each other; yet there they were, looking like a couple.
In Ruth’s view, they looked “like a couple” because they seemed to possess some terrible secret between them—they appeared stricken with remorse when they saw her. Only a novelist could ever have imagined such nonsense. (In part, it was because of her perverse ability to imagine anything that in this instance Ruth failed to imagine the obvious.)
“Oh, baby, baby . . .” Hannah was saying to her. “It’s all my fault!” Hannah held a mangled copy of The New York Times; the newspaper was in a lumpy roll, as if Hannah had wrung it to death.
Ruth stood waiting for Allan to kiss her, but he spoke to Hannah: “She doesn’t know.”
“Know what ?” Ruth asked in alarm.
“Your father’s dead, Ruth,” Allan told her.
“Baby, he killed himself,” Hannah said.
Ruth was shocked. She’d not thought her father capable of suicide, because she’d never thought him capable of blaming himself for anything.
Hannah was offering her the Times —or, rather, its wrinkled remains. “It’s a shitty obit,” Hannah said. “It’s all about his bad reviews. I never knew he had so many bad reviews.”
Numbly, Ruth read the obituary. It was easier than talking to Hannah.
“I ran into Hannah at the airport,” Allan was explaining. “She introduced herself.”
“I read the lousy obit in the paper,” Hannah said. “I knew you were coming back today, so I called the house in Sagaponack and talked to Eduardo—it was Eduardo who found him. That’s how I got your flight number, from Eduardo,” Hannah said.
“Poor Eduardo,” Ruth replied.
“Yeah, he’s a fucking wreck,” Hannah said. “And when I got to the airport, of course I was looking for Allan. I assumed he’d be here. I recognized him from his photo . . .”
“I know what my mother is doing,” Ruth told them. “She’s a writer. Crime fiction, but there’s more to it than that.”
“She’s in denial,” Hannah explained to Allan. “Poor baby,” Hannah told her. “It’s my fault—blame me, blame me !”
“It’s not your fault, Hannah. Daddy didn’t give you a second thought,” Ruth said. “It’s my fault. I killed him. First I kicked his ass at squash, then I killed him. You had nothing to do with it.”
“She’s angry—it’s good that she’s angry,” Hannah said to Allan. “ Outward anger is good for you—what’s bad for you is to implode .”
“Go fuck yourself !” Ruth told her best friend.
“That’s good, baby. I mean it—your anger is good for you.”
“I brought the car,” Allan told Ruth. “I can take you into the city, or we can drive out to Sagaponack.”
“I want to go to Sagaponack,” Ruth told him. “I want to see Eddie O’Hare. First I want to see Eduardo, then Eddie.”
“Listen—I’ll call you tonight,” Hannah told her. “You might feel like unloading a little later. I’ll call you.”
“Let me call you first, Hannah,” Ruth said.
“Sure, we could try that, too,” Hannah agreed. “You call me, or I’ll call you.”
Hannah needed a taxi back to town, and the taxis were in one place, Allan’s car in another. In the wind, in the awkward good-bye, The New York Times became more disheveled. Ruth didn’t want the newspaper, but Hannah insisted that she take it.
“Read the obit later,” Hannah said.
“I’ve already read it,” Ruth replied.
“You should read it again, when you’re calmer,” Hannah advised her. “It will make you really angry.”
“I’m already calm. I’m already angry,” Ruth told her friend.
“She’ll calm down. Then she’ll get really angry,” Hannah whispered to Allan. “Take care of her.”
“I will,” Allan told her.
Ruth and Allan watched Hannah cut in front of the line waiting for taxis. When they were sitting in Allan’s car, Allan finally kissed her.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“Strangely, yes,” Ruth replied.
Oddly enough, there was an absence of feeling for her father; what she felt was no feeling for him. Her mind had been dwelling on missing persons, not expecting to count him among them.
“About your mother . . .” Allan patiently began. He’d allowed Ruth to collect her thoughts for almost an hour; they had been driving for that long in silence. He really is the man for me, Ruth thought.
It had been late morning by the time Allan learned that Ruth’s father was dead. He could have called Ruth in Amsterdam, where it would have been late afternoon; Ruth would then have had the night alone, and the plane ride home, to think about it. Instead Allan had counted on Ruth not seeing the Times before she landed in New York the following day. As for the prospect of the news reaching her in Amsterdam, Allan had hoped that Ted Cole wasn’t that famous.
“Eddie O’Hare gave me a book my mother wrote, a novel,” Ruth explained to Allan. “Of course Eddie knew who’d written the novel—he just didn’t dare tell me. All he said about the book was that it was ‘good airplane reading.’ I’ll say!”
“Remarkable,” Allan said.
“Nothing strikes me as remarkable anymore,” Ruth told him. After a pause, she said: “I want to marry you, Allan.” After another pause, Ruth added: “Nothing is as important as having sex with you.”
“I’m awfully pleased to hear that,” Allan admitted. It was the first time he’d smiled since he saw her in the airport. Ruth needed no effort to smile back at him. But there was still that absence of feeling for her father that she’d felt an hour ago—how strange and unexpected it was! Her sympathy was stronger for Eduardo, who had found her father’s body.
Nothing stood between Ruth and her new life with Allan. There would need to be some sort of memorial service for Ted. It would be nothing very elaborate—nor would many people be inclined to attend, Ruth thought. Between her and her new life with Allan, there was really only the necessity of hearing from Eduardo Gomez exactly what had happened to her father. The prospect of this was what made Ruth realize how much her father had loved her. Was she the only woman who’d made Ted Cole feel remorse?
The Standoff
Eduardo Gomez was a good Catholic. He was not above superstition, but the gardener had always controlled his inclination to believe in fate within the strict confines of his faith. Fortunately for him, he’d never been exposed to Calvinism—for he would have proven himself a ready and willing convert. Thus far, the gardener’s Catholicism had kept the more fanciful of his imaginings—in regard to his own predestination—in check.
There had been that seemingly unending torture when the gardener had hung upside down in Mrs. Vaughn’s privet, waiting to die of carbonmonoxide poisoning. It had crossed Eduardo’s mind that Ted Cole deserved to die this way—but not an innocent gardener. At that helpless moment, Eduardo had seen himself as the victim of another man’s lust, and of another man’s proverbial “woman scorned.”
No one, certainly not the priest in the confessional, would fault Eduardo for having felt that way. The hapless gardener, hung up to die in Mrs. Vaughn’s hedge, had every reason to feel unjustly done-in. Yet, over the years, Eduardo knew that Ted was a fair and generous employer, and the gardener had never forgiven himself for thinking that Ted deserved to die of carbon-monoxide poisoning.
Therefore it wreaked havoc on Eduardo’s superstitious nature—not to mention strengthened his potentially rampant fatalism—that the luckless gardener should have been the one to find Ted Cole dead of carbon-monoxide
poisoning.
It was Eduardo’s wife, Conchita, who first sensed that something was wrong. She’d picked up the mail at the Sagaponack post office on her way to Ted’s house. Because it was her day of the week to change the beds and do the laundry and the general housecleaning, Conchita arrived at Ted’s ahead of Eduardo. She deposited the mail on the kitchen table, where she couldn’t help noticing a full bottle of single-malt Scotch whiskey; the bottle had been opened, but not a drop had been poured. It sat beside a clean, empty glass of Tiffany crystal.
Conchita also noticed Ruth’s postcard in the mail. The picture of the prostitutes in their windows on the Herbertstrasse, the red-light district in the St. Pauli quarter of Hamburg, disturbed her. It was an inappropriate postcard for a daughter to send her father. Yet it was a pity that the mail from Europe had been slow to arrive, for the message on the postcard might have cheered Ted—had he read it. (THINKING OF YOU, DADDY. I’M SORRY ABOUT WHAT I SAID. IT WAS MEAN. I LOVE YOU! RUTHIE.)
Worried, Conchita nonetheless began cleaning in Ted’s workroom; she was thinking that Ted might still be upstairs asleep, although he was usually an early riser. The bottommost drawer of Ted’s so-called writing desk was open; the drawer was empty. Beside the drawer was a large dark-green trash bag, which Ted had stuffed with the hundreds of black-and-white Polaroids of his nude models; even though the bag was tied closed at the top, the smell of the Polaroid print coater escaped from the bag when Conchita moved it out of the way of her vacuum cleaner. A note taped to the bag said: CONCHITA, PLEASE THROW THIS TRASH AWAY BEFORE RUTH COMES HOME.
This so alarmed Conchita that she stopped vacuuming. She called upstairs from the bottom of the stairwell. “Mr. Cole?” There was no reply. She went upstairs. The door to the master bedroom was open. The bed had not been slept in; it was still neatly made, just as Conchita had left it the morning before. Conchita wandered down the upstairs hall to the room Ruth now used. Ted (or someone) had slept in Ruth’s bed last night, or he had at least stretched out on it for a little while. Ruth’s closet and her chest of drawers were open. (Her father had felt the need to take a last look at her clothes.)