Daniel Heeney, running late, took the last open seat in the car. The westbound Amtrak out of Boston's South Station was full with a weekend crowd. As he sat, he glanced at the girl sitting across the aisle from him in the way most young men glance at girls on public transportation, in quick appraisal, and the first thing he took in were the legs. They were long, extremely long, too long for Amtrak's mingy accommodations, and she had to park a dozen inches or so of them in the aisle. They were well shaped, too, with slender ankles and bare, all the way from her leather sandals right up to where they vanished into baggy khaki shorts. When people moved past in the aisle, she hiked her knees high, presenting him with an appealing glimpse into the shadowed higher reaches. The rest of her was not so appealing, however. Homely, was his first take. Very short hair, nearly a buzz cut, a big nose, too. She was wearing a black T-shirt with some kind of red design on it, and it hung loose in front. A shame, he thought, nice legs, no tits, and that face. He pulled a physics text and a yellow highlighter out of his pack and began to study.
When the train stopped at Providence, he became aware of a low muttering coming from across the aisle and he looked up from his book. The girl had equipped herself with a set of headphones, hooked into a tape player sitting on the tray table. The phones were not the flimsy kind that come with tape players, but big, padded Bose jobs with a tiny red LED glowing on the side, which indicated to his experienced eye that they had sound-damping electronics built in. At first he thought she was voicing the words to a song, in the annoying way some people did while using earphones, but as he observed her, it became clear that something else was going on. She had a notebook out and she was writing rapidly in it, occasionally stopping to reverse the tape and repeat a section. Her mumbles seemed to be in a foreign language. Listening to a taped lecture, he thought. And a foreign student, too, probably. The train started again and her mumbling faded against the ambient sounds of the train.
When study at last paled, his gaze moved again from his text to the girl. She had a fat volume on the tray now; it looked like a dictionary. One of her legs was thrown up over the arm of her chair, her sandal hanging loosely on her toes, moving slowly with the motion, like a plumb bob. She seemed completely at ease, oblivious to her surroundings. There was something erotic about studying her he found, like spying through a dorm window. He liked the way the armrest dug into the meat of her thigh, exposing its tender inner skin. The shorts were so baggy, he could see almost up to her crotch. His eyelids twitched with the strain of peripheral visioning.
She looked up just then and he flicked his glance back to physics, to a page of equations whose meaning he had quite forgotten. He felt stared at, and his ears reddened. A minute or so later, he got up and went to the lavatory. His face in the spotted mirror looked even less attractive to him than it usually did. Dan Heeney owned the visage of a rococo cherub: milky skin, red-rose mouth, silky golden curls, the sort of face that was entirely out of fashion in an age that preferred the dangerous, hard-bitten, stubbled look. Although he had found that a certain kind of woman doted on such a face as his, he did not dote in return upon that kind. They reminded him of his mom. He had a taste for the crazy ladies, with the piercings and the spiked hair, but by and large they did not have a taste for him.
He finished, flung open the door, and almost walked right into her. She looked him full in the eye for an instant, made a polite noise, moved past and through to the next car. In the brief encounter, he had time to notice that the geometry of her face changed when seen full on, its strong planes snapping into a configuration that might with justice be called interesting or exotic rather than homely, more like the faces of the women who get to be stars in foreign films. Her mouth was wide, with full, slightly everted lips that seemed to balance the prow of the nose. Mainly he noticed the eyes. They were the palest possible brown, with yellow lights in them, just the color of cigarette tobacco.
These observations flashed through his mind in a moment and stimulated only the faintest curiosity, and little interest. She was, after all, just a face on the train, probably going to New York or D.C., probably a foreigner. He went back to his book and to the Fitzgerald contraction, its fascinating mathematics and its cosmological implications, none of which had to do with girls on trains, unless they were traveling at speeds approaching c.
But she was not going to the City, it turned out. She got off at New London as he did and took the shuttle to the ferry dock, boarding the Sea Jet along with him. He took a window seat, where he watched the shining Sound bounce along for forty-five minutes, his mind occupied with the various fears and hopes attendant on a family reunion in a family with some history of discord, and recent additional stress. Still, he was oddly aware of her presence on the craft, like an itching spot on his spine just beyond reach.
When the hydrofoil docked at Orient Point, Long Island, he found himself a few feet behind her, amid the crowd of debarking passengers, moving with their luggage to cabs and other vehicles jockeying into the curb. She had a soft cloth suitcase at her feet, and a military bag hung off one thin shoulder. The design on her shirt he now saw was Chinese calligraphy. He thought, I should ask her what it means, or make something up. You will meet a redheaded stranger who will change your life. The foreignness put him off, however. What if she spoke broken English, or none at all? No, she had a Boston College button on that bag, so a student there, so she had to speak English. Him being MIT would impress a BC girl. Or maybe not, given the nerdy rep. What was a foreign girl doing at the tail of Long Island on a summer weekend? An au pair, maybe, or an exchange student. He would never know, unless she happened to drop something and he picked it up. Maybe she would take the bus to Southold, in which case he would grab a seat next to her and say something. Maybe she was European, lonely, of casual European morals, looking for love…
In the meantime he stared at the legs, at the way she stood on one of them and slowly rubbed the crown of her foot against the back of her calf. He rehearsed pickup lines. Come here often? What's your major? Are you Polish? French? I couldn't help noticing your… I couldn't help noticing your legs. Do you think you would ever let me chew on them, like you do on a spicy Buffalo wing?
Too late. A red pickup truck had honked from across the street. In the back of the truck were two boys waving and shouting, and also an immense, black, slavering dog. Two women were in the cab. The girl waved, grabbed her bag, ran across to the driver's side, spoke briefly to the driver, and then jumped up into the bed of the truck. Which oddly enough did not move away, but honked again. He looked up. The woman in the passenger seat was calling his name and waving. To his immense surprise (together with a little jolt of pleasure, which followed soon after) he recognized his mother. He crossed the street, where he observed that his sister, Lizzie, was also sitting in the front seat. A quick kiss, a brief explanation, and he found himself in the rear of the truck, being drooled on by the dog, with his knees within inches of hers. The boys stared at him shamelessly. Twins, he noted.
"Small world," he said.
She grinned, showing small, even white teeth. "That's what they say." She stuck out her hand. "Lucy Karp. These three are Zak, Giancarlo, and Gog."
"Gog is the dog," said Giancarlo. "You can tell him from Zak because Zak doesn't drool as much." A brief flurry of friendly punches and nuggies, to which Lucy put an authoritative, physical halt.
"They know they're not supposed to do that in the truck," she said, sitting again. "Who are you, by the way? I saw you on the train and the ferry."
"Did you think I was following you with evil intent?"
"No. You don't look like the following kind. Or evil."
This was said in a flat tone that did not invite banter. Deflated a little, Dan introduced himself, and they spent the rest of the short trip exchanging information. After the usual school and job stuff, he asked, "What were you doing with the headphones on the train?"
"Translating. A speech by the Polish finance minister into French."
"You can translate Polish into French?" he asked, not keeping amazement from his tone.
"Yes, and if you think that's impressive, I can also crack my toes." She demonstrated.
"No, really…"
"She can speak fifty-seven languages," said Giancarlo.
"My agent," she said. "And a lie." To the boy: "How's the garden coming?"
The boy told her, at length, interrupted from time to time by interjections from his brother on the subject of suppressing vermin.
From time to time she looked at Dan, to draw him into the family chatter, but not too far. A strange bird was his thought. Clearly some kind of genius but diffident about it, used to keeping it under wraps. He wondered what the real girl was like.
"Ah, the ancestral mansion," Dan exclaimed as they pulled into the drive. It was a large, two-story, brick house, painted white long ago, with the brick underneath showing pinkly through. The paint on the green shutters was peeling off in strips, and the lawn was high and ragged. Weeds thrust up from the gravel drive.
"Your ancestors need a lawn mower," Lucy said.
"My ancestors have gone to their ancestors, leaving debts and not much else. The place is in hock. My mom has the use of it for her lifetime, if she can pay the taxes and maintenance, which she can't, so it's up for sale."
Everyone left the truck and there were more introductions. Rose Heeney led them all around the side of the house and into a huge kitchen, where she served out sodas and iced tea to all. Rose announced that her husband and her elder son were coming in that Friday, and she invited the Karps to join them in a beach cookout.
"Why not," agreed Marlene. "Butch will be here, too. You'll get to meet him."
At this juncture, Giancarlo, who had wandered out, came back in and asked, "How come you have no furniture? Are you moving in?"
"Out, I'm afraid, dear," said Rose. "We have to entertain in the kitchen like the peasantry. It's the only inhabitable room in the house besides the bedrooms." The furnishings in the remainder, she explained, had all been sold off or taken by Rose and her brothers after their parents' death. "It's terribly Dickensian, or maybe Chekhovian, I don't know which. The decay of a distinguished old family. The Wickhams settled here in 1741." She added to Marlene, "I'm sure you'll want to hear all about them."
"You will even if you don't," said Dan.
"That's his father talking," Rose said. "I'm not allowed to be a bourgeois oppressor of the poor even for one tiny instant."
An uncomfortable pause here, which Marlene ended with a remark about how pretty the house was, after which Rose suggested a tour. Dan said to Lucy, "I'll show you around the grounds. It's included in the package. You also get a brochure printed on recycled paper and a handy souvenir key chain."
"Keep an eye on the children," said Marlene, "and take Gog," at which Lucy made a mumbled agreement and said, "Let's go, brats!"
Lucy and Dan left the house through the empty front rooms, preceded by the three children running with the dog, their footsteps echoing loud on the hardwood. They walked across the sketchy lawn to a low stone pumphouse. The boys and Lizzie ran into it and emerged with scraps of lath, pirate swords. Dueling and shouting, they ran off toward the dunes.
"Now this pumphouse is where George Washington and John Adams planned the American Revolution," said Dan.
"Really? Gosh, it doesn't look big enough."
"Yeah, it fooled the redcoats, too. This is the place. We used to have a plaque but the birds got to it. And I believe this"-here Dan kicked at a weathered butt-"is one of the cigarettes Jefferson smoked while he was writing the Declaration. Our home is indeed rich in history."
"I'll say! Why, compared to your ancientness, my family is just off the boat. And those dunes! Why they look just like the ones Columbus landed on… but… but, that's impossible."
"No, those are the very ones," said Dan in a plummy voice. "Let's explore among them. Who knows? Maybe we can find important artifacts of white imperialist hegemony."
They went up through the line of low dunes and sat down with their backs against the warm sand. Below, the three children raced in circles with the dog. Their screaming came back in snatches on the sea wind. They goofed some more about historical obsessions, about the scene in Boston, about their school life. Lucy mentioned that she had often been at MIT.
"Taking courses?" he asked.
"Oh, right-I can barely do fractions. No, I have sort of a job with the computational linguistics people. They pay me to inspect my brain."
"You're kidding."
She had an urge to say yes. She did not want to interrupt in any way this unexpected pleasure, sitting here on the dunes with a luscious boy who did not seem afraid of her-not of her height or of her face or of her other peculiarities. Of course, he did not know about those yet. For an instant, she was aware of an intense desire to be someone else, before she said, "No, I'm not. I'm a language prodigy. My brain is a national resource."
"Like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge?"
"Except smaller. What kind of prodigy are you?"
"Oh, you know, the usual MIT crap-grades, boards, Intel Scholarship. Except I come from West Virginia and I'm not Asian." A little bitterness here, she thought. She didn't know anything about West Virginia. Coal? Hillbillies? That song. It must not have been fun growing up a nerdy, pretty boy in a rural high school.
"So… are you going back to Boston?" she asked.
"I don't know. I have a job up there if I want it, you know what I mean, just computer shit, but it pays. I kind of like the idea of kicking back here for a while. I mean I've been working my butt off this year."
That was interesting, she thought: his accent was drifting from middle American to something more regional. This yee-a. Y'know whut a mean. He's relaxing a hair.
She said, "So? Kick back."
"Can't do it. I need the money. And if I'm not working, he's going to want me to go back home. My father." Dan looked blankly out at the Sound. "We all have to support the struggles of the working folks."
"You sound doubtful."
"Do I? I was raised in the faith, but it's hard to keep on believing in it nowadays. Or anything. I guess I still do. Have you ever been in southern West Virginia? The Kanawha? No, nobody has. Everyone uses the stuff they make there, plastics and chemicals, and all kinds of toxic shit, and we all use electricity from the coal, and we don't think about the poor bastards who have to live there and make it and breathe it in and taste it in their water every day, and dig out the coal while their houses get slowly demolished around them from the blasting. It sucks, yeah, and we ought to do something to change it. But…"
More interesting, she thought. The accent reverts to mid-American when he goes into speech mode, plus something else. A little roll in the r. Irish?
They both listened to the wind for a long moment, and the calls of the children.
"But, what I like to do is to hang out with smart people in Boston, and do science."
"And feel guilty," she said.
He turned to look at her, frowning, and saw from her eyes that she was not needling him, or mocking him, but just reflecting what was in his own mind. It was faintly irritating nonetheless.
"Jesus, I don't know why I'm talking like this. I just met you. You don't need to hear all this crap."
"No, we could talk about celebrities, instead." She pitched her voice up and added a slight Valley drawl. "I think Jennifer Lopez is like totally cool. Or sports. How about those Sox!"
He laughed and she joined him. She had a throaty, full-belly laugh that he found surprising in a skinny girl, but pleasant.
"Okay, deep and serious-so what do you believe in?"
Oh, well, Lucy thought, here it comes. All things must end.
"I'm a Catholic."
He snorted. "Yeah, right. Luckily, I was spared all that crap. I think my mom is some kind of Episcopal, but of course Dad is a devout atheist. He used to sing 'Pie in the Sky When You Die,' whenever we drove past a
church. That's another thing that endeared our family to the McCullensburgians."
He would have chattered on in this vein, but it dawned on him that the social smile had quite faded from her face, which now bore a curious expression of resignation, a slight tightening of the jaw, as if anticipating some attack.
"Wait, you mean you're actually Catholic?" A little frown creased his brow. "You believe all that God and the saints sh-business? And the pope?"
"Uh-huh. It's a package."
"Wow. Why?"
She shrugged. "Why is the sky blue? I don't know. I'm just a believer. Mom says I have the God gene."
"So… by the whole package you mean, um, virgin birth, raising the dead? Abortion? Birth control? Lourdes?"
"Well, it's a very big package. I'm not sure the pope buys the whole package. But pretty much, yeah."
"But you're smart."
"And you're insulting," she snapped. She got to her feet, stuck two fingers into her mouth, and produced an amazingly loud whistle. The dog leaped from the shallows and started up the beach, followed by the twins and Lizzie.
"I'm frying. I'm going to take the kids for a swim." She turned and walked away.
After a moment, he followed, attracted, as was his pattern, by rejection, although this was a new, and actually a more interesting, variety.
Karp did not have to go to jail anymore. Although it had never been a place he liked to visit in the days when he had to go a lot, he still went from time to time. Usually, he went because he thought it was good for his soul to immerse himself in the literally stinking part of the system he administered. It was particularly stinking today because it was hot, stinking with the unmistakable penetrating stench produced when large numbers of male primates are kept confined. It had been hot for several weeks and was going to get hotter according to the smiling weatherpersons on the news. Karp would not have minded if they air-conditioned the jail, but he understood that his fellow citizens did not, by and large, agree. That would be coddling criminals, a practice now many years out of fashion, and it did not help to explain that the people in the Tombs were not criminals but the accused awaiting disposition, entitled to a presumption of innocence. But not to comfort.
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