“Hello, Lucy Painter, the painter,” he said, coming through the front door, stopping at the picture of Reuben beside the door.
“I know that person,” he said. “He is on television. What’s his name?”
“His name is Reuben Frank.”
“I think he’s on Days of Our Lives.”
“Quite possibly,” Lucy said.
“I have come with a mission. Mission means church in California English, but I have not come about church. I have come because my brother, Augustus Russ, called August for short, asked me if you would read the book he is writing about shame on you. Do you know that book?”
“I do,” Lucy said. “Before he fell he often came over in the morning to talk to me about it. He needed a listener.”
“Yes, he needs a listener to listen to him because his wife Anna is dead and so she can’t listen any longer. You know that.”
“I do.”
“So I came home tonight and unlocked the front door and turned on the television and opened a can of beets for dinner and then I suddenly remembered I was supposed to ask you about shame on you and so here I am just as I promised my brother Augustus called August who has a very bad memory since he cracked his head open.”
Lucy was grateful for once that his sentences were so endlessly long she had time to think of a response.
“As soon as August is out of the hospital and well enough, we will talk about the book,” she said, heading to the kitchen to turn out the lights. “Just not now.”
Gabriel followed her.
“Maybe you’d like some ice tea or ice cream.”
“I would like some tea ice cream with chocolate sauce,” he said, sitting down, his small hands folded on the table, while she scooped chocolate mint in a bowl and boiled water for tea.
It was almost midnight by the time Gabriel left and Lucy was wide awake. She checked on Felix stretched out on her side of the bed and went quietly upstairs to her studio. Biography of the Outsider in America was facedown in the drawer where she had hidden it covered by her art smock.
She was a slow reader and it was after 2 a.m. when she finished Chapter 8, a chapter entitled “The Splendid Deception” about the careful concealment of President Roosevelt’s paralysis. Page 135 and so far no reference to Samuel Baldwin. She turned the page to Chapter 10, page 201. Althea Enright: Daughter of a Nazi Collaborator.
There was no chapter 9. She flipped quickly through the remaining pages. Pages 136 through 200 were missing. Ten stories of the shame of outsiders and she had read them all but the last two chapters so the missing pages must be the story of Samuel Baldwin.
She put the manuscript back in the drawer face down, covered it with her smock, turned out the light and went downstairs to her bedroom, pushing Felix aside so there was room for her to slip into bed.
Fifteen
LATE IN THE afternoon on the Friday after the Fourth of July, August arrived home by ambulance to a small crowd gathered with balloons and champagne standing in the street in front of his house. The usual collection on Witchita Avenue, including Mrs. Greene and the elderly man who lived with his daughter on the other side of Lucy and the speech therapist who had been working with August in the hospital. Gabriel was standing on the sidewalk in a business suit and tie with Victoria’s mother visiting from Indianapolis. Victoria, whose business card read Jill of all Trades, had been hired for the short term as a part-time caregiver and was dressed in a facsimile of a nurse’s uniform—tight white Capri pants, a white T, and ballet slippers—appearing at all of her pickup jobs dressed for the occasion.
When the decision was made to release August from the rehabilitation hospital, Gabriel discovered his calling.
I will take care of my brother, Augustus, for the rest of his natural born life, he announced to the women of Witchita Hills.
“Natural-born?” Josie asked. “Could someone explain?”
He stood as if at attention, his short arms pressed to his side while the stretcher bearing August was carried inside.
August, propped up with pillows, smiled wanly, raising his fingers in a wave.
“That’s it for cleaning the gutters,” he said to no one in particular, and Josie remarked later that his eye-hand coordination was off.
He was thinner than he had been, his hair long and scruffy, his eyes opaque as if he had developed cataracts. He had grown a beard speckled beige.
When the ambulance arrived, Lucy was upstairs in her studio with Felix, working on Vermillion. Violet, a broad-tailed hummingbird with a full wingspread of iridescent green and bronze was spilling over the end of the page as if the page could not contain the spread of her wings, which covered the lifeless body of Vermillion. All that was visible of Vermillion was his tail wrapped around a large branch.
Lucy heard the commotion on Witchita Avenue. The ambulance with August was arriving and she was just on her way downstairs when the doorbell rang and through the glass she saw Miles Robinson.
“Miles Robinson,” Felix announced.
It was not the first time Miles had arrived unexpectedly in the last few weeks.
“I didn’t see you in the crowd so I came up to check if you were here,” Miles said. “Maggie’s down there with Zee.”
“Where’s Sara?” Felix asked.
“Visiting her grandparents in Chicago with her mother,” Miles said, walking with Lucy down the front steps.
Zee was standing with Maggie just apart from the group, thinking how August’s accident had fallen from her mind lately. How everything but Maggie had fallen from her mind.
One week she was arranging a vigil so he’d never be alone, arranging dinners at the intensive care unit with her friends, waiting for the doctors, keeping the neighborhood updated on his latest prognosis, bringing Gabriel into the circle of her own family.
And then she wasn’t. She simply lost interest. Not only in August, who just weeks before had gotten her through lonely nights when she was lying sleepless next to Adam. She had also lost interest in her dear, dear friends, her chicks, who had depended on her above all others. She still served coffee and muffins or donuts and fruit out of her kitchen every morning but sometimes she forgot to go out on her own front porch for wine. There they’d be chattering without her while she lay on her bed, the twins asleep, Adam watching television downstairs, and Zee checking for the lights in Maggie’s bedroom to go out.
“How bad does he really seem?” Josie asked Zee.
“Zee says he’s still disoriented and his speech is soupy,” Lane said.
“He’s hard to understand, is what I said.” Zee wrapped her arms around Maggie’s shoulders.
“Can we go in his house?” Lane asked. “I’ve never been inside.”
“Bad idea,” Josie said.
“We could bring him a glass of champagne,” Lane said. “What do you think, Zee?”
But Zee was watching Miles Robinson, home early from the Watergate hearings, walking towards the group bending down to talk to Lucy full of animation.
And the sight of them together, of Miles’ obvious pleasure in being with Lucy, sent Zee’s mind spinning.
Victoria was hurrying down the steps, her frizzy topknot the size of a yellow tennis ball bouncing to and fro.
“Oh my god, did you see Gabriel?” She was shaking her head. “If I were August, I’d remain in a coma indefinitely.”
“Do you think he’ll ever be able to get back to his ordinary life?” Josie asked.
“He’s going to be fine,” Victoria said. “That’s what the doctors assume. More or less normal.”
“Did you hear that the book August has been writing turned up at Lucy’s house?” Lane asked. “Maggie told Maeve that Lucy had discovered it under the couch when she was cleaning the slipcover.”
“I heard that,” Josie said. “True, isn’t it, Maggie?”
“It’s true.” Maggie shrugged. “Weird!”
“Did you read it, Lucy?” Lane asked as Lucy joined the group.
“I skimmed it,” Lucy said. “I knew about the book but I have no idea at all how it might have gotten under my couch.”
“HAVE YOU EVER seen this?” Lucy had asked Maggie.
“Did you ask Felix?” Maggie said.
“He’s three,” Lucy had said. “Of course I didn’t ask him, but someone took the manuscript from August’s house and put it in ours.”
“That someone was not me,” Maggie said.
“It’s a manuscript about 250 pages long and it’s missing some pages.”
LUCY SEARCHED MAGGIE’S room for the missing pages, searched the house, the laundry room, the basement, even under the seats of her VW van. But the pages didn’t turn up.
“I don’t know what to think,” she told Reuben.
“We know she’s been looking for answers ever since she was little,” he said.
“Lately she’s been lying,” Lucy said.
“Let’s say it was Maggie and she did take the missing pages and she does read the manuscript. Not very likely for a girl her age, a boring manuscript of however many pages it happens to be,” Reuben said, “and she does find out about your father. What likelihood is that?”
“If she reads the pages and they are about my father, she won’t know who it is. Right? Only that we happen to live in the house where a man died. And he had the name Samuel. After all, August has no idea that I’m associated with the man in his book.”
“Maggie has a grandfather with a terrible secret, so she thinks, and he’s dead and his name is Sam.”
“That’s too much of a leap for Maggie.”
“August could even have discovered that this dead Samuel had a daughter named Lucy?”
“Why are you doing this to me, Reuben?”
“Because I think you should tell her the truth. I think you should tell everyone who matters to you the truth.”
“I’m not ready,” she said.
“You’ll wait so long, it will be too late.”
“Whatever that means.”
And Lucy let that problem sink into the quicksand of her daily life.
In time, she would ask August when he was well enough to concentrate. Meanwhile, Maggie and Zee were the subjects on her mind. At night, she would lie in bed too stiff with tension to sleep.
“Are you staying at Zee’s for hot dogs?” Miles asked Lucy.
“I need to take Felix home and cook dinner for us.”
“Do you mind if I follow you?”
“That would be nice,” Lucy said, taking Felix’s hand up the many steps to her house. She was hesitant with Miles, perplexed.
It wasn’t the first time he had come to her house alone without Robin—a distant, self-contained man more likely to be in his own house working into the night than to visit one of the neighbors.
In late June on a rainy night, he had walked up the hill from the bus and stopped to help Lucy take groceries into the house.
“What a warm cozy house,” he said as he left, which had seemed out a character for a man like Miles to notice.
Later in the summer at a Mallory potluck, he carried Felix home after he had fallen down the back steps and hit his head. He stayed with Lucy, sitting on the arm of the couch while she cleaned out the cut and settled Felix in a blanket with warm chocolate milk.
“You know how to watch for concussions so call us if he seems worse,” Miles said, touching her shoulder as he left.
She wouldn’t have even noticed that his hand had glanced her shoulder if he were a different man and not so awkward—long-legged, slender, almost arthritic in the stiffness of his movements so just his hand on her shoulder called attention to itself, as if he’d thought about it first, dared himself, and then didn’t quite have the courage to follow through.
Now he sat at the kitchen table with the glass of wine that he’d brought from Zee’s, took off the navy blazer he was still wearing, and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt.
“An unbearably hot summer to be spending in front of television cameras and lights,” he said.
“It is hot,” Lucy said. “I’ve never been on a television set so I didn’t know it was so hot.”
“It’s the lights,” he said.
The shadows under his eyes were nearly black, his eyes damp with weariness, his hand holding the wineglass trembled.
“Exhaustion,” he said when he caught Lucy watching.
Something about him disrobing in her kitchen, his jacket off, his sleeves rolled up, his thick gray hair plastered to his head with perspiration surprised Lucy and moved her.
He was a quiet presence in the room, his chair tilted back on two legs, looking out towards the garden, dusk lifting over the horizon.
“The investigation is costly,” he said finally. “Taking down a president like this.”
“You’re taking him down?”
“Nixon did it to himself of course. Everyone involved did, but it’s the darkness about it all. I feel the need for something innocent in my life when I come from work at night.”
“Sara?”
“She’s too grown up and already at odds with us.”
“I know,” Lucy said. “Felix is my something innocent.”
Felix had come in the kitchen with his Legos and poured them out on the kitchen floor.
“I’m building a cave right now,” he said.
“For you?”
“For my sloth.”
Miles sat down on the floor in his polished black shoes and trousers, gathering a pile of Lego pieces in his clean, clean hands.
“Vermillion is the name of my sloth and he has three toes,” Felix said.
“Vermillion is the hero of the children’s book I’m doing,” Lucy said.
“Then he certainly needs a cave.” Miles was on his hands and knees. “You tell me what to do.”
“You make the cave so it’s perfect with only blue and white Legos, no red or yellow, and it has to be big enough for Vermillion to fit.”
“How big is Vermillion?”
“Big,” Felix said. “He is a boy sloth and boy sloths are big and he hangs by his tail from a tree branch and he’s dead, right, Mama?”
Miles looked up at Lucy.
“In a children’s book?”
“Not really dead. Just full of sorrow,” Lucy said. “It ends happily for Vermillion.”
She felt a surprising rush of happiness and relief with this man on the floor playing with her son, this make-believe husband opening a window on an ordinary domestic life.
She set the table and snapped the beans, sliced tomatoes, put tuna under the broiler, and when dinner was ready, she went to the door to call Maggie, who was lying on her back with Maeve on the Mallorys’ front porch.
“I have plenty of tuna if you’d like to stay,” she said.
“I can’t. I have work but there is something I’d like to ask you when you have time,” Miles said. “Not now during dinner with the kids.”
“You can come later after they’re in bed. I’ll be working tonight too.”
Lucy could see Maggie head across the street and up the steps, banging through the screen door.
“Or tomorrow.”
“I will come tonight,” he said.
“Hello, Miles and Mother,” Maggie said, walking right by Miles on his way out of the door and straight up the steps to her room.
“Aren’t you going to have dinner?” Lucy asked.
“I had dinner with the other families in the neighborhood. Hot dogs. Delicious so I’m not hungry.”
THERE HAD BEEN a report of rain. Zee set up a table on the porch, brought baked beans and sauerkraut and a macaroni pasta to the table, lemonade and wine, double chocolate brownies and two gallons of Bryers vanilla. Plates and silver rolled in cloth napkins, wineglasses so the children could pretend they were drinking wine instead of lemonade.
In the front yard Adam was grilling hot dogs.
Tipsy—Zee had noticed.
She put a hot dog in a bun, slathered it with mustard and onions.
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“Eat this,” she whispered, handing him a plate. “You’re drunk.”
“Absolutely on target, Zelda,” he said. “Thank you for the news flash.”
Maggie followed her into the kitchen.
“Can I help?” she asked.
“You already helped me get ready for the party.” She kissed Maggie’s curly head. “Last-minute parties like this are so great but I wish your mother could have stayed longer tonight.”
Maggie shrugged.
“She’s weird.”
“Maybe she already had a plan with Miles who I notice is over at your house now.” Zee took out a punch bowl and poured cranberry juice and ginger ale, emptied two trays of ice. “She might have asked him for dinner since he’s probably lonely. Robin is at Lake Michigan with Sara and her parents.”
She handed Maggie the punch bowl.
“Miles Robinson is having dinner at my house?” She balanced the punch bowl against her bony hip. “Creepy. He’s not the type.”
“For dinner?” Zee asked.
Maggie laughed. “For dinner at my house.”
It was drizzling and the children had gathered on the huge front porch with their hot dogs and drinks. Maggie plopped down beside Maeve.
“Miles Robinson is at my house for dinner,” she said.
“Bor-ing,” Maeve said. “He’s the most boring man I’ve ever met but he is sort of handsome, don’t you think? I mean if you like older men, he’s better than the other fathers, especially Adam with his crinkly red face.”
“Except for Miles’ chin,” Maggie said. “So pointy.”
“I like pointy,” Maeve said. “But I bet he’s too freaked out about women to do any of the positions like 69 in The Joy of Sex.”
And Maggie giggled although she was uncomfortable with the thought of Miles Robinson at her house mixed up in a conversation about The Joy of Sex.
“Maybe Miles has a crush on your mother,” Maeve said.
“I don’t think so,” Maggie said. “He’s not the type to have crushes and my mother doesn’t have boyfriends.”
“Never?”
“Never.”
“Well she had you and Felix so she must have had a boyfriend for a while.”
You Are the Love of My Life Page 19