Dover Beach

by Richard Bowker

  "How awful."

  "You get used to it."

  And then she started to cry. I had been expecting it. "It's all so stupid," she said. "The world is falling apart, and I'm unhappy because I had a lousy childhood."

  "Everyone's pain is real," I replied. I reached out and took her hand.

  "I was just looking for love, and I never could seem to find it. Just looking for some... normal... love."

  I thought of Cornwall's love, in quotation marks: a momentary weakness. "Your mother loves you," I said. "That's pretty obvious."

  Kathy shook her head. She took her hand away from mine and fumbled for her handkerchief. "So stupid," she repeated. And then: "You know, he wasn't a bad father, he really wasn't. Just, you know, private. And the divorce was good for all of us, I think. When I came to visit, he would take an interest, we would do things together. I remember once—it was my thirteenth birthday—he gave me a gold necklace. I still have it. And he hired a car and we went for a drive. We stopped off in a village somewhere and we had lunch, and then we just walked about. We went by a playground, and we stayed for a while watching the children running around, enjoying themselves. And I don't think I had ever felt so happy—because I didn't envy those children their normality, you see. I was there with my father, holding his hand, and nothing else mattered.

  "But even so, even then, I couldn't really... connect. Sometimes I think I'm studying to be an actress just so I can find the right role. 'Is this it? Is this what you want?' Just so I can connect with him. Oh, God."

  Kathy sobbed some more. I was silent. The train rattled toward Waterloo.

  When it came into the station, she quickly dried her eyes. "I'm sorry," she said, as usual.

  "It's all right," I murmured.

  "This is inexcusable, though. You, with your problems—"

  "I left my problems behind when I came to England," I lied. "The only problem I have now is a desk clerk who thinks I should pay the hotel bill for Winfield and me."

  She glanced at me. Her eyes were red, her expression uncertain. "You know," she said, "you could stay at my flat if you like. My roommate moved out a couple of months ago, so there's an extra bed." And then she added quickly: "You don't have to come, of course. It's not, you know, that sort of invitation."

  Why would she think I'd object to that sort of invitation? Well, it didn't really matter. "I'd like to come very much, Kathy. Thank you for asking."

  She smiled. I smiled. The train came to a stop.

  When we got off, the affectionate couple we had seen at the beginning of our journey was ahead of us, walking slowly, hand in hand, through the vast empty concourse. We followed them to the exit, and then our paths diverged.

  Kathy lived two flights up in an old brick building on a Soho side street. She was in better spirits as we took the brief Tube ride from Waterloo. We joked about Mrs. Stumple and her mother's cooking, and there was no crying, no mention of her father. She didn't apologize until we reached her building. "Sorry for the climb," she said. "The lift never works."

  "I've lived in places like that," I replied.

  And it wasn't until we were on the landing outside her flat that she gripped my arm, her eyes wide with fear.

  She was looking at the door. It was open a couple of inches. "I'm sure I locked it this morning," she whispered.

  I pried her hand loose and moved forward.

  I looked inside. The flat was dark. I strained to hear any sounds. Nothing. I kicked the door all the way open and stepped to one side. No response. I walked in.

  "Winfield?" I called out, guessing. "Cornwall?" No one answered. "Is there a light here, Kathy?" I asked. She came up behind me, reached to the right, and flipped a switch.

  We were standing in a large living area. At the far end, three windows looked out onto the street. There was a kitchenette to the right, and three doors leading off to the left.

  The living room looked all right, except that papers were scattered all over the floor around a rolltop desk next to the kitchenette. I quickly searched the two bedrooms and the bathroom on the left. Nobody under the beds, nobody in the closets or the shower. The drawers of Kathy's bureau had been emptied. Papers and makeup and jewelry and underwear and clothing covered the floor. I shuddered and returned to the living room.

  Kathy was sitting by the rolltop desk, staring at the chaos. Her arms were folded tightly across her breasts, as if to protect herself from the unseen forces that were attacking her. She seemed too stunned to cry. "You think it was Winfield?" she asked.

  "Maybe. Maybe he figured he'd find an address where he could find your father. Or maybe you just got robbed. Why don't you check to see if anything's—"

  Kathy got up and rushed into her bedroom. She returned a few moments later with a gold chain, which she carefully placed around her neck. I knew without having to ask that it was the one her father had given her on the magical birthday she had talked about on the train.

  She leaned against the wall and closed her eyes. "Everything's going to be all right," she repeated softly, as if it were a mantra. "Everything's going to be all right."

  Chapter 25

  "Shall we call the police?" I asked her.

  She opened her eyes and shrugged. "I should tell Grimby, I suppose. But that can wait until morning."

  "Okay. What about your mother, then? If Winfield is prowling around looking for your father, he might end up at her place."

  "Oh, I can't imagine he would go that far. Anyway, I couldn't face talking to my mother again tonight. Let's just clean the place up and go to bed, shall we?"

  She was wrong not to call her mother, but I figured it wasn't up to me to argue with her. "Whatever you say, Kathy."

  We spent half an hour setting the flat to rights, and then Kathy made up the bed in the spare room. I tried, and failed, to fix the broken lock on the front door. "Have to get a new one, I'm afraid," I told her.

  "I'll worry about it tomorrow," she said. She looked exhausted. "I'm glad you're here, Walter."

  "So am I."

  "Will you be staying up?"

  "For a while, maybe."

  "Well, you can read, of course." She motioned to a large bookcase next to the desk. "And the refrigerator—there's not much in it, but feel free."

  "Don't worry about me. Get some sleep."

  She smiled. "All right. Good night, then. And thanks."

  "Good night, Kathy."

  She went into her bedroom and closed the door. I went into the bare room on the other side of the bathroom and sat in an uncomfortable ladderback chair, trying, and failing, not to listen. Another night eavesdropping on Kathy preparing for bed. Where had I gone wrong?

  I knew, of course. Kathy was not a private eye's fantasy. She was too real. When she cried, her nose ran like a little girl's. There was a cut on the index finger of her left hand. She was mean to her mother; she apologized too much. All of this made her infinitely more appealing than the sultry blondes in the novels I had read; but it also made me unwilling to try to make her part of my fantasy. This was life, for better or worse, and I had to learn how to live it, private eye or not.

  After a while her sounds ceased. I wandered out of my room and into the kitchen. Photographs of skinny models were taped to the refrigerator door. Kathy was prettier than any of them. I looked inside: tomato juice, milk, cottage cheese, eggs. She was right—not much. I noticed the bag of leftovers on the counter, next to the scale. I took out half a turkey sandwich and put the rest of the bag into the refrigerator. Munching on the sandwich, I went back to the living room.

  There were mostly plays in the bookcase. Too bad. What I needed was some fat, exciting novel I had never set eyes on before—something that would sweep me up in its plot and make the hours till dawn fly by.

  I read The Winters Tale instead. Shakespeare would do.

  And after I was finished, I sat in a rocking chair by the window and stared down at the silent street.

  Too deep in my dreams, I didn't react
at first to the sound behind me. The ever-alert private eye. I turned my head slightly and caught a glimpse of a white shape creaking toward the kitchen. "Kathy?" I whispered.

  The shape gasped and stopped. "Walter?"

  "I couldn't sleep."

  "Neither could I."

  "There's half a turkey sandwich in the refrigerator."

  "Oh. Thanks." Kathy went out to the kitchen and turned on a light. A minute later she returned with the remains of the sandwich and a glass of milk. She came over and sat on the sofa to my left. I moved the rocker slightly to face her. She was wearing a plain white nightgown and fluffy slippers. She looked very real. "You like Shakespeare?" she asked, pointing to the play on the floor next to the rocker.

  "'We shall not see his like again,'" I said.

  She smiled. "You're an interesting fellow, Walter Sands."

  I shrugged.

  She stared at me. "You don't talk about yourself, do you? My mother certainly didn't get much information, for all her prying."

  "There's not much to tell," I said. "Just the usual tale of mistaken identity, unrequited love, vengeful fairies, and feigned madness. Shakespeare wrote about it all the time."

  Kathy laughed. "Come on, Walter." She paused. "I've told you a lot."

  Had she? I suppose she had, although I still didn't feel as if I knew her very well. Would she know me if I recited the grim facts of my past? That wasn't the way I wanted her to know me, of course; but the way I wanted her to know me was fantasy, and this was real life. I didn't want to talk about my past, but I didn't have a strong reason not to, just a temperamental disinclination. And there was this in its favor: if I talked, Kathy would stay. I wanted very much for her to stay. "Well," I said tentatively, "what do you want to know?"

  "Everything. Start at the beginning." She curled up in the corner of the sofa and waited for the story to start.

  The beginning. "Chapter One: I Am Born," I said. "Eight months after the war. I like to think I was conceived on the day itself—you know, so that at least something good came out of it. But I don't really know."

  "Where were you born?"

  "On a farm in Maine—in the northeast corner of the country. The bombs didn't hit us, and most of the fallout missed us, too, so we were better off than a lot of people. But that's not saying much. The harvest was lousy, and the winter was bitter cold, and everyone was sick and hungry, and that's when I came into the world. My mother didn't survive the labor. People were surprised that I did; I guess I didn't know any better.

  "A woman on another farm had lost her baby about the same time, so she nursed me, but then she died too. There was a lot of dying going on back then. My father and I were left to make it on our own—and, believe me, I wasn't much of a help.

  "I don't expect he had much fun running the farm and taking care of me. The machinery would wear out and couldn't be replaced, of course, and the growing seasons were all screwed up for a while, and there were no pesticides, and I certainly didn't know enough not to complain when there wasn't enough to eat.

  "The worst of it was, he seemed to think it was all his fault. Or maybe his only fault was that he had brought me into this world, when he should have known better. At any rate, you're a pretty good apologizer, Kathy, but you've got nothing on him. The most vivid memories of my childhood are of him saying he was sorry about something—no Christmas presents, no milk, no new shoes, too many chores to be done.

  "And then, of course, he got sick."

  "Oh, Walter," Kathy whispered. I felt uncomfortable, playing on her sympathy, but what else could I do? She had asked for the story, and here it was.

  "He made some neighbors promise to take care of me," I went on. "I was almost old enough to be useful, so it wasn't a bad deal for them. And when he got too sick to work anymore, he went out and dug a grave—I don't know where he got the strength—and then he sat down beside it and shot himself in the head. I think if he could have gotten into the grave and shoveled the dirt in on top of himself he would have. He wanted to make it easy on us. He was sorry about having to die on me; he was sorry about everything."

  Kathy had started to cry.

  "You want to hear Chapter Two," I asked, "or have you had enough?"

  "Is it... too painful, Walter?"

  Well, it wasn't as much fun as eating a Big Mac, but it wasn't as bad as I had thought it would be. "It's okay," I said. "Mr. and Mrs. Simpkins took me in. They weren't bad people, I think, but times were too tough to let them be very nice. There was too much work to be done and too little food, and there was no hope of it ever getting any better. They would talk about moving to California or Florida, places where they'd heard life was still almost normal. But it was impossible to get to those faraway places—and besides, life was normal there because the people who lived there kept everyone else out. So finally they decided to try Boston. Someone told them Boston was all right, Boston had food and jobs; things were looking up. So they hitched their old wagon to their old horse and abandoned the farm they had lived on for thirty years.

  "It was a mistake."

  "My father lived near Boston," Kathy said. Her gaze never left my face.

  "That's right. The city wasn't hit, but, like most places, order broke down pretty completely afterward. The British sent troops and supplies over to help out along the East Coast, but for some reason Boston treated the British as if they were the enemy. Maybe it was some racial memory of the American Revolution, or maybe it was the Irish and their memories of oppression—or maybe people were just plain crazy. At any rate, the residents gave the British soldiers a hard time, and eventually you folks pulled out and left the city to fend for itself.

  "And then the Frenzy started. That's what people call it now. During the Frenzy, you didn't go out at night. Night belonged to the crazies—and maybe if you went out at night there was something in the air that made you crazy too. We were spared the Bomb, but the Frenzy did a pretty good job of destruction on its own—mostly libraries and laboratories and concert halls and colleges, the places where science and civilization had once been. The places that had created the world we now had to inhabit."

  "How long did the Frenzy last?" Kathy asked.

  "Depends on how you want to define it. The worst of it was over within a few months, from what I'm told. But then it became a sort of institutionalized anarchy that went on for years and years."

  "How could anyone live through something like that?"

  I shrugged. "You got used to it. There were rules of a sort, and you learned the rules. By day things were tolerable. There were all these petty kingdoms—those six blocks of Roxbury belong to Horrigan's people, that bridge is controlled by the Monument Square gang—and if you knew the turf, you'd be all right. Unfortunately, Mr. and Mrs. Simpkins didn't know the turf."

  "What happened?"

  "Well, they knew enough to come into the city during the day—or maybe that was just dumb luck. All I can remember is how excited I was when I saw the Boston skyline in the distance. I had never seen anything remotely like it, outside of old magazines. Life would be different here, I knew, and since life couldn't get any worse, that made me happy.

  "Anyway, we clomped along the highway, and eventually the highway became the lower deck of this two-tiered elevated structure, and we all became pretty nervous—with good reason, since nobody had done any maintenance on structures like that in years. We became even more nervous when we saw three men standing at the far end, waiting for us. Mr. and Mrs. Simpkins muttered to each other about turning back and finding another way into the city, but in the end they just kept going, right up to where the men were standing. They were carrying shotguns. 'Toll road, pal,' one of them said.

  "Mr. Simpkins asked what the toll was.

  "The guy looked at us. He knew the sort of people we were. 'We'll take the horse,' he said.

  "Mr. Simpkins looked at his wife. They wouldn't need the horse in the city. They were scared. They just wanted to get to the food and the jobs. Mr. Simpkin
s got down to unhitch the horse.

  "Now, see, that was his mistake. If he had tried to bargain with those guys, everything would've been okay. They would've taken his old Timex watch or something and let us go. But agreeing to hand over the horse showed just how much of a rube he was. The men lost respect for him. So the guy raised his shotgun and said, 'We'll take the kid, too.'

  "One of the men came over and pulled me down from the wagon. Mrs. Simpkins started screaming then about how you people can't take the kid, he's ours, we need him, but she didn't do anything to get me back, and neither did her husband. Finally the third guy clubbed her on the head with his shotgun. 'Get outta here before we pitch you over the side,' he said.

  "So she got off the wagon, blood running down her face. Her husband just stood there. And finally the two of them started hauling the wagon into the city themselves. Once or twice they glanced back at me. I think they were crying, but I'm not sure. And that was the last I ever saw of them. I think maybe I'd like a glass of tomato juice."

  "I'll get it for you," Kathy said, and she raced into the kitchen.

  I rocked. It had been a long time since I had allowed myself to dredge up some of these memories. I hoped it would be a long time before I'd be forced to do it again. "Thanks," I said when Kathy handed the glass to me.

  Her fingers lingered against mine. "Walter, please don't go on if it's too much for you," she said.

  "Oh, maybe I'll just summarize the highlights. Believe me, none of it is really very interesting."

  She sat back down. "But what did the men do with you?"

  "They took me home. They were part of a gang, and they figured I'd be a good addition. Everyone lived in an old warehouse in Charlestown. It wasn't bad: there was food, and there were guards all around the place, so you felt safe. But I didn't like being kidnapped, so I felt obliged to escape and look for Mr. and Mrs. Simpkins. They were nowhere to be found, however, so I ended up on my own."

  "Was it hard, being on your own?"

  "Sure. But I learned fast. I had to."

  "Weren't there—I don't know—orphanages or something?"