The war was in full swing by then. Some defect, the specifics of which Teddy wasn’t exactly sure—bad eyesight, flat feet—had kept Warren out of the Army. (There were those in town who suspected the defect in question was in fact Warren’s overbearing mother.) However, whatever it was that prevented Warren from dying in an anonymous trench in a farmer’s field in France also caused him to feel undermined. By the spring of 1918, Warren had watched all his classmates enlist and board a train bound for a southern state (Kentucky, Tennessee—Teddy could not recall exactly) to attend boot camp. All of them were given a hero’s farewell despite the fact at that particular juncture in time they had done little more than visit the Army doctor in Boston, turn their heads, and cough. With each train that pulled out of the station, Warren felt a little more deflated.
Warren and Ginevra knew how to have a lot of fun together, but their relationship was also often stormy, to say the least. When they quarreled, they did it with a variety of dynamite otherwise monopolized by rail barons for the purposes of blasting away bedrock. Ginevra in particular had a ruthless way with words. She knew precisely what to go for—the jugular, that is—and how to get at it most swiftly and efficiently. When Warren displeased her or made her cross, she wasted no time reminding him what people likely thought of men who sat on the sidelines of the war and let others do all the fighting. Folks who overheard these arguments guessed this was surely the reason Warren took up with other women on the side.
The other women never bothered Ginevra much. She knew about them in a vague way. Warren’s dalliances were mostly confined to the other side of town, which is to say to women of a different class, who hadn’t attended Ginevra’s debut, let alone their own. And so, being the only proper lady with a claim on Warren’s heart (not to mention on his trust), Ginevra didn’t feel terribly threatened. Besides, it was a well-known fact Ginevra liked to have her fun, too—it was a constant effort to be the belle of the ball, and with Warren sometimes on the other side of town she felt free to maintain the affections of her numerous other admirers. As far as Ginevra was concerned, it was all wonderful and fun, and not even an inch of it was serious. When Warren asked her to marry him the next summer, she accepted his proposal without hesitation. After all, they were the ones who mattered. Warren set about picking out a ring.
What came next in Teddy’s story changed everything. It marked yet another point of no return.
Details are such funny things. Having witnessed more than my fair share of criminal confessions now, I can tell you it’s true what they say: A lying criminal always trips himself up (or herself, I suppose, rare though that alternate scenario may be) by either giving too many details or else revealing the wrong ones. See, the thing about details is they’re nearly impossible to fabricate with any plausible success. If you’re telling the truth, you’re telling the truth, and you’ll get the details right, especially the queer ones. That afternoon Teddy recounted a rather unusual detail I don’t think he could’ve made up. After all, we humans lack the graceful capacity the gods have for total chaos. We are unable to come up with a pattern so free of obvious categorization; instead we know the world by types, by only the most common chains of cause and effect, by the rote and the familiar. There is a reason they say God is in the details. It is the precious details that can prove your innocence, and it is the vicious details that can get you hanged.
Of course, I did not have all this ambitious philosophy in mind at the time. I simply sat and listened to Teddy as he told the rest of his story, which, with Warren headed off to a jeweler in Boston, I’d already guessed was ultimately heading toward the engagement of Ginevra and Warren. And it was. In a thoughtful gesture, Warren not only purchased a ring, but also had a special diamond bracelet made to give to Ginevra as an additional engagement present. Warren’s thoughtfulness, not to mention his extravagance, had never been a handicap for him. In fact, he was so thoughtful, he even had an identical second bracelet made for a woman named Pearl who lived on the other side of town and who, if he’d been a married man instead of merely an engaged one, might otherwise be called his mistress.
Unfortunately for Pearl, Warren never got around to giving her the second bracelet. Out of a somewhat ironic and misplaced sense of loyalty, Warren insisted on presenting Ginevra with hers first, and on the night he did so, a terrible accident occurred.
By all accounts, the evening in question had been one of those balmy, grass-scented summer nights. As was so often the case on such nights, Warren and Ginevra had spent the evening motoring around in his little roadster with the top down. The trouble happened when they took a road that ran through a switchyard a few miles outside of town and crossed over several sets of train tracks. The car stalled, and the tires somehow got stuck on one of the tracks that usually carried the nighttime freight train. By the time the engineer was able to make out the silvery flank of a roadster parked perpendicular on the track, it was already too late to stop. The freight trains that ran at night clipped along at a good pace and almost never had cause to slow up as they entered Newport.
The tragedy was not a complete holocaust. Ginevra had managed to get out in time and was saved. But Warren—poor, misguided Warren—had died attempting to throw the gear in reverse and save his treasured roadster by freeing the tires. There was a lot of talk around town that the two of them had been drinking, and that the whole thing had been a criminal act of recklessness. Some repeated the rumor of what the coroner had told his wife: that Warren’s body—or what horrific gruesomeness was left of it—smelled suspiciously like whiskey. A few folks even suggested that Ginevra had gotten Warren drunk on purpose and that being on the train tracks was no accident. After all, it was no secret they’d argued at the restaurant where they’d dined earlier that evening. In a moment of dramatic flare, Ginevra had even thrown a drink in Warren’s face. But when Ginevra gave her statement to the police officer who attended the scene she was as sober as a judge, and with very somber eyes, she swore Warren had been, too. Of course, it wasn’t just her word. There was a witness—one of the switchmen who worked the night shift in the yard. The switchman (a tall, swarthy man with a rather pockmarked complexion) had seen it all and had given a statement to confirm Ginevra’s story: There had been no negligence involved, and certainly nothing malicious. It had simply been a freakish and terrible accident. Case closed.
At this point in his telling, Teddy heaved a burdensome sigh. “It was sad for the whole town, but it was especially sad for my aunt and uncle.” He squinted at the opposite shore of the Sound and frowned. “They don’t speak of it, not ever. My own folks tried to keep it from me, too; I suppose to protect me. But I wish they hadn’t, because it only left me with questions. Questions and a rather uneasy feeling about the whole business. You see, I’d grown up admiring my cousin so much—I was an only child, and he was like a brother to me—and then . . . then he was suddenly just gone. It took me quite a few years to finally lay hands on the newspaper clippings and to get people in town to tell me the details about it.” He spoke in a frank tone and ran a hand through his hair, separating the clumps of strands where they had dried together. “I suppose it’s a good thing she’s so memorable—Ginevra, I mean. Because that’s probably why people can recall the details. In fact, just the other day, I was talking to the police officer who attended the scene of the accident, and he remembered something. A detail I’d never heard before.”
“What was that?” I asked. It came out in a more demanding tone than I’d intended. By that point, I suppose one could say I was invested in the story’s outcome. Teddy flinched at the sound of my voice, as if he’d gotten so lost in the telling of his story, he’d forgotten I was there. He turned and looked at me, and when he spoke again I spotted something in his innocent face I’d never glimpsed before, something sharp and incisive.
“The officer remembered something funny about Ginevra that night,” he said. “The accident had made quite a terrible picture, you s
ee, and so he didn’t really remember or focus on this fact until later. It might very well mean nothing. But . . .” Teddy paused as though to consider. He cleared his throat. “When she gave her statement, Ginevra was wearing both bracelets.”
A chill raced down my spine. My mind had split itself into two halves—one half raced to list the coincidences, the other half raced along a parallel trajectory to refute them.
“Where is she now? Ginevra, I mean,” I asked once Teddy had reached the conclusion of his story.
“Missing,” he answered.
“How do you mean?”
“She left town shortly after the accident. Some people say it was because of the tragedy, some people say it was because of all the talk. Can’t say I blame her, but it was quite a disappearing act she pulled. Left in the middle of the night; didn’t even tell her parents where she was going.”
“Have they made . . . an effort . . . to find her?” I asked. My voice sounded very small in the back of my throat.
“Nice families don’t hire private investigators,” Teddy said in a flat tone. “At least, not any they’d admit to, and the lousy ones they might hire on the side are never going to find anything anyway. But I’d really welcome the chance to talk to her. There are things that just never made sense about that night, and I’d like to get some of that business cleared up. I’ve been looking for her for . . . quite a while. You understand how it is, of course.” He turned to me and held me in a long, meaningful stare. My body was almost completely dry by that time, and I could already feel the beginnings of a sun-burn. It was not the least bit cold out, but nonetheless I felt a cold shiver run through me, and suddenly my arms and legs bristled with goose pimples.
I started violently when I heard my name being called. I stood up a little wobbly-kneed on the raft and shaded my eyes, only to see Odalie calling to me from the shore. “Oh!” I exclaimed. I don’t know if she could see who I was with on the raft, but I recognized a certain urgency in her voice.
“If you’ll excuse me,” I said to Teddy. He nodded and smiled, tight-lipped but knowingly.
“Of course.”
Forgetting completely about the tower, I made a shallow dive from the raft and began swimming diligently toward Odalie where she waited on the shore. I was a little overcooked by the sun at that point, and the water felt colder to me than I remembered it being during the swim out. As I swam I realized I had another sensation, too; I couldn’t help but feel the tiniest bit of threat emanating from somewhere behind me, somewhere still floating idly on the raft.
17
We spent the afternoon avoiding Teddy. It was like a game of cat-and-mouse: We settled into one location, and when Teddy came along Odalie made up a creative excuse to move on to the next. Odalie never said as much, but it was plain to me that Teddy had her unsettled and distinctly on edge. Her open aversion to his presence did very little to soothe the suspicions Teddy had raised with his story about “Ginevra.” I said nothing, but for the remainder of the afternoon I couldn’t help observing how Odalie’s jumpiness increased every time Teddy materialized and tried to join in one of our activities—and boy, did he: a round of golf (a game I had never played and found incredibly boring until he showed up), croquet on the lawn (Odalie taught me the rules of the game, and then promptly taught me how to cheat), even our afternoon tea. (I’ll let you in on a little secret, she leaned in and said to Teddy, who gazed at her as though in shock that she should finally speak to him. Afternoon tea is meant to be enjoyed by the fairer sex, not by your lot.) He was persistent. But Odalie was even more persistent in her evasions and her fevered attempts to display her indifference. Her wonderfully enchanting smile was stretched a little thin by the end of the afternoon, but she was bent on having a good time and not letting him ruin it, or else she had decided she would knock herself out in the attempt to show as much.
I, by contrast, had finally relaxed into having a reasonably good time. The focus of Odalie’s forced hilarity had landed on me, and suddenly she was absolutely breathless to know everything she didn’t already know about me. That afternoon, we sat around a tea-table joined by a handful of the Brinkleys’ other guests (mostly ladies and a few hen-pecked husbands). But despite the number of perfectly voluble and friendly guests at our tea-table, Odalie turned to me in an intimate way and started up a conversation in a confiding voice, as though we were alone. Even in my growing wariness, I couldn’t help but feel more than a little flattered by this turn of events. I answered her readily as she peppered me with questions about my upbringing, and I was surprised at my own eagerness to talk about the childhood I usually kept private. I recounted for her the names of all the sisters at the orphanage, their relative holiness, and some of their more secular flaws. For her part, Odalie seemed curiously delighted by this information, memorizing the statistics of each nun as though I had just handed her a pack of holier-than-thou baseball cards.
I also recounted for her a random selection of memories from my time at the Bedford Academy—recalling how, for instance, all the buildings smelled like wet wool socks but that I’d secretly liked that about it, and how we all had to wear matching light blue dresses and I’d secretly liked those, too, despite the fact all the girls were socially required to act as though they detested them. I told all about the time I’d gotten an award for having the best penmanship in the entire school and how this meant I got to sit nearest the woodstove in our classroom, a position that was very coveted in the wintertime. I recounted how there had been a boys’ school down the road and how there was one boy in particular when I was fourteen who used to walk by the school gate and slip letters inscribed with my name written in very elaborate calligraphy through the bars. I never opened those letters to find out what they said on the inside, and when Odalie asked me why, I told her it was because I knew nothing that was written inside could be as pretty and as perfect as the calligraphy on the outside. When I said that, she turned and looked at me with an oddly appraising gaze, and curiously, I got the impression she approved.
All the while I talked, Odalie listened to my mundane stories as though enraptured. That is, she did until Teddy joined our tea-table. Once Teddy sat down, her mood abruptly shifted. Unexpectedly, Odalie began to volunteer information about her own childhood, which, this time around, she remembered as taking place in California.
“What part of California?” Teddy politely asked. By then, everyone at the table had joined in our conversation and was listening intently, mesmerized, as people so often were, by Odalie’s enthralling manner of telling a story.
“Santa Fe,” she answered.
“I see,” Teddy replied. Either no one wanted to confess they had not paid much attention to the geography teachers of their youth who had faithfully stood at the blackboard with pointer-stick in hand, or else no one wanted to contradict her, for all faces at the table remained pleasantly composed. “And how did you happen to visit all the way out there?” Teddy asked.
“Why, I was born there,” Odalie replied with a sweet smile. I glimpsed a tremor of surprise jolt through Teddy’s posture, but if Odalie detected it, she either did not care or else purposely ignored it. She continued on with her recollections.
Both the sun and the breeze were quite strong that day. As she talked, Odalie’s sleek hair swung under her chin, the fine cut of her bob ruffling in the wind. Little bursts of bright sunshine flashed along the high cheekbones of her face as the yellow-and-white striped umbrella overhead fluttered. Everyone else at the tea-table seemed to put complete credence in Odalie’s words, but this was not enough for her. She could not seem to ignore what she took to be a skeptical expression on Teddy’s face, and I caught the lightning-fast flicker of her gaze as it flashed hotly in his direction several times. I knew this much from my time with her: She was not accustomed to being doubted. Her mouth twitched at the corners. When a woman named Louise cut in to contribute a story about the honeymoon trip she and her hus
band had taken to the little seaside village of Santa Barbara, Odalie excused herself and stood up abruptly to leave. I watched her storm away, wanting to follow her but feeling compelled to offer a polite excuse to the table.
“Was it something I said?” Louise asked, her face screwed up in earnest puzzlement as she looked around the tea-table for someone to affirm she’d done nothing wrong. “Heavens . . . isn’t Santa Barbara near Los Angeles? I only brought it up because I thought she’d be tickled to hear a story about her old stomping grounds. . . .”
I took this as my cue for a tidy exit. “I believe she said earlier she has a headache,” I explained to the group. “I’ll go check on her.” I scurried after Odalie, feeling Teddy’s eyes burning into my back as I hurried away.
When I got upstairs to our room, I found Odalie angrily brushing out the tangles the wind had knotted into her usually silky-straight bob. I hesitated. I wanted to ask her about the things Teddy had told me—mostly, I admit, because I wanted her to tell me none of them were true. I was beginning to comprehend just how little I knew about the woman I was now beholden to. I remembered the fragment of gossip I’d heard at the precinct about Odalie and Clara Bow dancing on a table in a movie. The California story, I tried to convince myself, could very well be part of that. So many of her stories could be true, if only they didn’t cancel one another out—that was the trouble. If she looks me in the eye and promises me, if she says it like she really means it, I told myself, then I will decide to believe her, right here and now. I would believe her, and all the rest of it wouldn’t matter. Sometimes the truth of a situation was about more than simply uncovering the facts; it was about choosing allegiances. I screwed up my nerve and cleared my throat.
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