She thought I was another tourist, always dissatisfied with what was on sale. So, as I again began browsing through the dolls, I decided to establish that I was local, from Gloucester, the next town; this might give me credibility of sorts.
I picked up a doll dressed as a princess, in shimmery fabric and a tiara. “Has it been a good summer?”
“Hot.” She was writing something in a ledger.
“I’ve spent most of the summer on Cape Cod,” I said, volunteering more information than I’d planned, but desperate to resuscitate conversation.
She made no reply, just kept writing. A cat materialized, a Siamese with eyes as unreal as the dolls’, unnatural as star sapphires. The cat leapt from the counter near the cash register onto a shelf with a squadron of babies in wicker prams. Mrs. Mikkonen took no notice. Obviously, the cat was experienced, trained not to knock over the merchandise. The cat leapt back onto the counter, rubbing its face against Mrs. Mikkonen’s hip, against the shabby dress with all the teddy bears.
“It was hot even on Cape Cod.”
She licked one of her blunt fingers and turned a page of the ledger.
“I’m actually from here.”
“I know,” she said.
I felt as if life had suddenly entered all the dolls’ eyes, as if all of them suddenly were staring at me. But only the Siamese cat was actually paying me any attention. It hopped to the floor, weightless as down, silently landing at my feet, then rubbing its face against my legs, marking its territory. Mrs. Mikkonen was still enthralled with her ledger, or pretending to be.
“I’ve seen you before.” She closed the ledger.
I took a doll in my hands, like a hostage. “Where?”
“At the funeral,” she answered.
“Whose?”
“Are there that many funerals in your life? I feel sorry for you.” She looked me straight in the eye, but there was no more sorrow in her expression than in her cat’s. “At Ian Drummond’s funeral. Are you allergic to cats? She’s just marking her territory. Come here, Helga, over here.”
A Siamese cat named Helga. I almost took out the cult’s book, but I didn’t, and didn’t answer her question about my allergies, didn’t respond to her subtle intimidation. Instead, I stroked the cat’s back and gently tugged its tail. “Were you a friend of Ian’s?” It seemed like a ridiculous question.
“The Drummonds are a prominent family. Everyone knows them. I knew Duncan, the old man. He came into my shop. The son was killed on Cape Cod.”
“Yes, in Provincetown.”
“A horrible thing.” She sounded like a peasant speaking of the death of a reckless young noble. She was philosophical, remote, as though the death somehow was apt, God dispensing justice with democratic severity.
“I’m flattered that you remembered me.”
“You were a few rows in front of me in the church. Then I saw you at the house, afterward. I remembered you because you spoke to that woman who’d been crying. The woman who came with the black man.”
Suki Weatherbee and her African husband.
“Poor Mr. Drummond. Such a nice old gentleman.”
My father, I could have said. “Nice” was hardly his reputation during his prime: drinking away his liver, seducing other men’s wives. And my mother. “Was he a regular customer?”
“He stole things. He picked up things and forgot to pay. His mind was going.”
“The Alzheimer’s.”
“Whatever they call it.”
It was evident by this time that she had no accent. Just a stilted way of speaking, clipped, militaristic. Yes, there was something militaristic about her. Perhaps that’s why she’d shown me the drummer boy first. Did she keep this shop of artificial children because her flesh-and-blood-son had been such a disappointment?
“The family always paid. He’d come down with the chauffeur. In a big car the size of a boat. He was looking for dolls for his daughter. He’d forgotten she was all grown up.”
So there was a link, tenuous but ongoing, between the Mikkonen and Drummond families. Ian himself could have come here, to this room of staring glass eyes. And Edward could be right—Ian could have done some “legal bullshit” for the people in Truro.
“I was at school with Ian Drummond.” I pretended to examine a pale resin baby in a christening gown with enough lace to please a bride.
Mrs. Mikkonen was writing something with a pencil capped with the head of a miniature Cabbage Patch Doll instead of an eraser.
“I went to a place called St. Harold’s.”
Mrs. Mikkonen continued writing, muttering something about “fancy schools for fancy people.”
I was holding the resin baby, which I felt compelled to support with both arms, as though it were real. Dolls had become so much more lifelike since I was a child. The doll in the christening gown looked like a baby, but not, I realized like a live child; it looked like a dead baby “prepared” by an undertaker. The resin had the hardness of dead rouged flesh.
“My son went to public school, right here in Rockport. It was good enough for Lucas.” Then her expression became hard as the resin dolls in her shop. “That school—St. Harold’s—closed down,” she said, with triumph.
The remark stung, small but sharp like a shaving cut. She stunned me when she added, “My son bought that school.”
“What?!”
She put down the pencil with the Cabbage Patch Doll like a head impaled on a spike. She must’ve known she’d said something significant, something she shouldn’t have revealed. “Are you interested in Baby Victoria? Because, if you’re not, I’m closing for lunch.”
Chapter Thirty-one
Was Ian connected to Lucas Mikkonen through St. Harold’s? Was the “legal bullshit” Edward had spoken of helping the school sell its assets to these fraudulent Nordics? Since I was already here on the North Shore, there was someone in the area I could ask.
I hadn’t gotten the chance to express my condolences in person to Mrs. Drummond the day of Ian’s funeral. She was mobbed by mourners and busy attending to her bewildered husband. So I brought her a bouquet, a half-dozen roses with baby’s breath in a cone of the florist’s green cellophane. I also brought my questions, many questions.
The Drummonds’ estate seemed to grow out of the granite of Eastern Point, squatting among the yews and rhododendrons. You’re entitled to some of this, a grasping little voice inside of me insisted. You’re more of a Drummond than she is; she’s a Drummond by marriage. You share genetic material, you share DNA, don’t be awed by their house or their things.
A plump maid with a moustache greeted me. Mrs. Drummond was in the library, a dark paneled room full of books whose gilt bindings had never been cracked. Janet Drummond had been “a great beauty” in her youth, so people said. You could still see that beauty in her high cheekbones and thick wavy hair, now silver but still brushing her shoulders. She was sitting on a low leather couch, the kind I associate with analysts’ offices, sorting through a pile of notes and cards, sympathy mail concerning her youngest son’s death. From somewhere in the room came the soft thwack of a ball then ripples of applause. Of course, she was watching a tennis match. I saw the portable TV on a spindly chrome stand, the sole cheap piece of furniture in a room of rich surfaces.
“Hello,” I said, and she glanced up just in time to say, “Ssssh! Sazonov is serving!” On the screen was the dripping face of Yuri Sazonov, the Russian tennis star rumored to be Mafia property. He slammed the ball toward his stunned American opponent, Matt Milner. Milner swung but missed, and Mrs. Drummond resumed writing on her heavy, cream-colored stationery.
“I’m terribly sorry about Ian.”
“You can’t know how a mother feels,” she said, which was certainly true, and a remark which needed no reply. “You needn’t feel guilty,” she added.
“Guilty?” With a tingle of dread, I was thinking that somehow, with a mother’s intuition, she knew I’d found her son without reporting his murder.
&nb
sp; “About that silly scrap at the nightclub.”
“Nightclub” was such a Fifties word. It called to mind El Morocco and Porfirio Rubirosa. But that had been Mrs. Drummond’s world, café society. She was a Midwesterner, from Gates Mills or Lake Forest, a tennis star who’d met Ian’s father out carousing in New York. Someone claimed the Duchess of Windsor introduced them.
I said, “We’d known each other so long, we were bound to have our moments…” I was still holding the flowers.
“Ian valued your friendship.”
Mrs. Drummond hadn’t invited me to sit, but I did, in a wing chair by a jade plant in a Chinese pot all courtesans and plum blossoms. The windows of the library were thrown open, so that I could see Gloucester Harbor beyond the granite ledges, see Ten Pound Island in the distance.
“Ian saved my life once.” I thought mentioning that might somehow make up for our fight.
“Really?” She put down her Mont Blanc pen. “How?”
I explained about our rowing to Ten Pound Island, then the storm blowing up, the sky boiling with black clouds, then the rain like bullwhips—and my freezing at the oars, unable to row home. “He took over and saved both our lives.”
Her face became streaked with tears. “You were at St. Harold’s together.” She wore a small pin, a gold tennis racket, fastened to her black and white blouse. Ian had once mentioned the story of that pin: how she’d bought it in London while competing at Wimbledon and wore it at tennis-connected events. She wore it even today, while answering this wrenching correspondence. That athlete’s spirit helped her survive times like this.
“You know I accepted Ian for whatever he was. Just as I accept you, Mark. I mean, any number of the girls I competed against…” She was talking about tennis, of course. “Any number were veritable Amazons…What’s the zip code for Prides Crossing?” I told her. “God,” she sighed, “I hope I never get like my husband.”
My father. I couldn’t say it. “I saw him in Provincetown.”
“Did he recognize you?”
“I certainly hope so. His…friendship means a lot to me.” My tone and the break in my voice had a desperation that should have surprised her.
“Of course it really doesn’t matter, does it? We should be thankful he gets pleasure from our company. I wish I had more patience, but he’s so frustrating to deal with, so recalcitrant. It’s awfully hard on Sallie. She was his little princess, his blue-ribbon equestrienne. Sallie was the best athlete in the family. The best amateur…Fulton and George have such busy lives, I’ve asked Sallie and Alexander to settle Ian’s affairs.”
This was an opening of sorts. “What was Ian doing out west?”
“Real estate. A development north of San Francisco. In Marin County, a gated community. The whole thing fell through, the financing went bad. It was just as well, I wouldn’t have wanted him settling out west. I think family is awfully important, don’t you?” She glanced at me with a trace of pity; the sadness in her face was not just for herself.
“Awfully important—”
“I had a lovely note from your mother,” she said.
Who’d avoided Ian’s funeral to paint in her back yard. Did she know about my mother and her husband? It was hardly a state secret that he was the Casanova of the country club circuit. It occurred to me then, for the first time, that he could’ve fathered other children outside his marriage. Either way, both she and my mother were wronged, used by a faithless charmer. He’d collected women the way he’d collected the eggs of rare birds, damaging the environment in each case.
“It was too bad your mother was away the day of the services. Duncan would have enjoyed seeing her. All of us would have.” She was pressing a stamp onto an envelope. Her tears had dried, and her voice was as crisp as her Shreve, Crump & Low stationary. “I always liked your mother. She always ‘did her own thing’ as they used to say.”
Was she was being sarcastic? I couldn’t tell. Her face remained mask-like and genteel. My mother seldom spoke about Janet Drummond, and I couldn’t recall Mrs. Drummond mentioning my mother at all.
“She persisted with her first love,” Mrs. Drummond said. Did she mean Duncan? I wondered for an instant, but she said, “She persisted with her art.”
“She began as a musician.” I was about to mention Lulu Wright’s and my mother’s phony story, which had survived all these years like an intricate but unexpectedly sturdy piece of origami.
“Your mother didn’t cave in to the bluenoses.” By having me, I assumed she meant, in addition to heeding her muse. She deleted a name from her list of people to thank. Was it ruthlessness that made her so mechanical today, made her write while watching a tennis tournament? No, that was unfair. She could be sedated, or numb.
I wanted to say, I’m not interested in your money, but I’d like the chance to get to know my father. But then she changed the subject, as if anticipating some unpleasantness. “Ian wasn’t out west very long.”
“I thought he was gone two years.”
“Well, he maintained an apartment in San Francisco, on Telegraph Hill. But the Marin County project fell through quite quickly.”
“How quickly?”
“I think he was through with things in six months,” said Mrs. Drummond. “So we discovered once he was…gone. Ian wasn’t the most open fellow around. We disagreed about an awful lot. We fought like cats and dogs about politics. I’m a Democrat to the end, you know.”
I didn’t. She was full of surprises.
“Ian had changed these last two years. He’d matured, become a seeker. He was reading Emerson and Thomas Merton, all those tortured, questioning souls.”
The books I’d seen Sallie jettisoning back in Provincetown, stuffing into a green plastic trash bag. Had Ian’s financial losses made him more spiritual? And caused him to apologize for his past bullying that day in the dunes? Something big had been preying on his mind.
“Did Ian know a Lucas Mikkonen?”
“Not that I recall.”
I would broach something mildly controversial before daring to bring up my parentage: “There wasn’t any mention of Ian being gay…at the funeral.”
Any youth in her being seemed to recede so that her tired expression matched her silver hair. “Is everything an occasion for some political statement? Are we always obliged to educate bigots, or cater to activists? Aren’t we ever allowed just to be sad?”
Before I could answer, someone said “Mother?”
In the library doorway stood Alexander Nash. He wore sea-blue Bermuda shorts, revealing his strong, tanned calves. He was extraordinarily handsome.
“Alexander is helping me hold down the fort while Sallie minds my husband on Cape Cod,” said Mrs. Drummond.
“When I saw your husband—”
“He’ll find a vase for those beautiful flowers.”
I was a fool, an idiot, a coward! I’d squandered my chance to discuss my mother’s claim. Why had I wanted to do this? To be sure she was telling the truth, I suppose, to discover if the family had been informed, if they knew, to learn Duncan Drummond’s version of the events, some fragments of the story the Alzheimer’s hadn’t yet stolen.
Shepherding me from the library, Alexander kept repeating that the North Shore was gorgeous, how lucky I was to have grown up here. Did folks around here really appreciate it? Everything was so historical. He rattled off a list of sights he’d visited: Beauport just down the road, Fort Sewall in Marblehead, the House of Seven Gables in Salem, the Saugus Iron Works…He’d bought postcards and a pot of candy, some Boston Baked Beans.
Infuriated at not tackling my own story with Mrs. Drummond, I asked him, “Where are you from?” just to be polite, to distract myself.
He’d grown up “mostly” in a small town east of Santa Barbara, a place that was half oil fields, half lemon groves, where the oldest piece of architecture was a plaster-domed Greco-Roman gas station dating from the Depression.
In the kitchen, he found a tankard-like vase, something pewte
r, for my sympathy bouquet. I realized now that baby’s breath was not the most sensitive flower to give the mother of a murdered son.
“So you’ve known the family all your life, Mark.” Alexander poked the flowers into the vase until they were positioned just so. His finding a vase for my flowers and escorting me to the door implied a vaguely servant-like status. As a future son-in-law he was on his best behavior, in the family yet not quite of it, a situation not unlike my own.
“That’s very nice. Did you take flower arranging classes?” I asked as a joke.
“Actually, I did. Ever the self-improver.” Alexander was one of those people who hold a stare until it makes you self-conscious. His eyes were the deep blue of the northern Pacific, where he tagged walruses and measured the spiky legs of gigantic crabs. For a moment, I thought he was cruising me, drinking me in with his stare. Instead he lobbed an unexpected question: “Did Ian have any significant others?”
“He wasn’t that domestic. He dated now and then, mostly Log Cabin Republicans, but there was no real lover that I can remember.”
“What about women?” He was staring with those Pacific-blue eyes. Not bedroom eyes. Was he studying me? At Mrs. Drummond’s request? He’d called her “Mother,” so they had to be close, or else he was putting on a show. Perhaps she admired his princely athletic ease, the way he occupied the physical world. And he wanted the status of a son as soon as possible.
“Ian was involved with Suki Weatherbee at St. Harold’s. But so was our whole class, so was anything male in the Berkshires.”
“It’s kind of sad. Ian dying without ever being loved. Romantically, I mean. Hate crimes are so senseless.”
“Ian didn’t believe in them.”
“Beg pardon?”
“Ian didn’t believe in hate crimes. He said, ‘How many crimes are committed out of love?’”
He acted a little baffled. The heat could have affected his alertness. The kitchen with its big restaurant-sized stove was stifling. Rather than explain my reference to the incident at Arthur’s, which had happened before he and Sallie had come east for Ian’s funeral, I paid him a compliment instead. “You seem to fit into the family pretty well.”
The Fisher Boy Page 22