Maggie left by the kitchen door, stuck her duffel in the backseat, and climbed in the car, pulling down the visor over the passenger seat to check her lips, wet with creamy lip gloss from Zee’s top drawer.
She looked eighteen, she thought, her hair pulled back into a fuzzy bun, her cheeks flushed with borrowed rouge. Zee was hurrying across the yard, opening the low gate to the alley, her necklaces jangling. From that distance the crow’s-feet around her eyes, the parentheses around her lips were camouflaged and Zee looked eighteen too. They were best friends for life.
“We’re off,” Zee said, hopping into the driver’s seat, lifting Maggie’s hand and kissing her fingers.
“Off to where?” Maggie asked.
Zee had said nothing specific, only that they were going somewhere. A surprise.
“Oz,” Zee said. “I bet you’ve never been there.”
REUBEN HAD CALLED early that morning while Lucy was making breakfast for Felix, incapable of eating herself since Maggie left.
It was the first time she’d spoken to him since he’d left New York for the Cape and she resented him for that. Hated him, she decided, and it pleased her, the sound of an unspeakable word caught in the wide net of her mouth.
He had left two messages on her answering machine, feeble messages laced with excuses. Elaine’s parents are here so I haven’t been able to break away to call, he’d said in the first message. I’ll try again tomorrow. Hope things are great. The second message two days later. The Brownings from Elaine’s office have come with their kids for several days so I’m pretty tied up but tell Maggie and Felix I love them and especially you and I think of you every minute of the day.
“Hello, my heart,” he said when she picked up the phone.
“Maggie has run away from home.” Her voice was flat.
“She has?”
“She crossed the street yesterday and actually walked away from home.”
“So you know where she is.”
“It doesn’t make a difference that I know,” Lucy said. “She packed her suitcase with her favorite things and left.”
There was a long familiar pause while Reuben reassembled.
“A little rebellion isn’t life-defining,” he said. “You understand that, Lucy.”
“Call me when you’re back in New York and free to talk,” she said.
“On Monday morning I’ll be back in the office.”
He sounded relieved to disconnect.
Lucy sat down with Felix, sharing his blueberry muffin, then cleared the table, rinsed the dishes, wiped blueberry off Felix’s mouth, combed her curly hair with her fingers.
It was seven-thirty, a Friday morning about the time the women in the neighborhood met at Zee’s for coffee.
“I’m thinking we’ll maybe go to the Mallorys’ with the other mothers and you can play on the front porch.
“Will there be kids?” Felix asked, dragging his yellow chicken with half a red beak which he had chewed off. “Maybe Teddy.”
“Maybe.”
“Will Maggie be there?”
“I don’t know,” Lucy said, standing on the front porch, Felix’s small, sure hand in hers, her heart fluttering in her chest. “I hope she will.”
The women were gathering on the porch. Lane was already there and so was Josie, dressed in a pants suit for work, Robin Robinson sitting on the top step folded over like a doll, her arms around her knees. Lucy had not seen Miles Robinson for days but she thought about him.
Simply as a kiss. A disassociated kiss.
Victoria, in a leotard and tights for the ballet class she taught at the community center, was on her way down the steps from August’s house and waved to Lucy, who leaned as if resting against her brick wall, summoning the courage to cross the street to enemy territory.
She had made a promise when she left New York to extend herself beyond the boundaries of her own house, something she had never felt the need to do in the West Village. There she had her work and her children and Reuben.
Just watching the women spread across the front steps of the Mallorys’ filled Lucy with a nostalgia for something she had never had.
“Are we going to Zee’s, Mama?” Felix asked.
“I’m thinking about it.” Lucy crouched down to his level and pulled up his sagging shorts.
“Teddy says that Zee has toys in a box on the front porch.”
“You have a lot of toys too, Felix.”
“Not in a box on the front porch.”
“We can get a box and put it on the front porch.”
“Do you know how come Maggie moved across the street to Zee’s house?”
He rested between Lucy’s knees, leaning against her with his full body weight.
“I think she moved because she’s a little mad at me.”
Felix folded his arms across his chest, considering.
“Maggie told me she’s mad because you tell lies.”
Lucy smarted. Of course Maggie would have said something like that to Felix.
“What is lies?” Felix asked.
“Like the story of Pinocchio who tells little lies and his nose grows,” Lucy said.
“I don’t like Pinocchio very much,” Felix said with obvious pleasure in his role as critic. “I love Winnie-the-Pooh and Christopher Robin and they don’t tell lies, right?”
“Right.”
“So tell me what is lies?”
“If you do something that is not the right thing to do like take a toy away from Teddy Sewall and hide it and when he asks you where the toy is, you say you don’t know and that is a lie because you do know.”
“Why does Maggie say that you tell lies and so she has to move to Zee’s house?”
“I don’t tell lies. Maggie isn’t exactly right about that. I keep secrets and she wants to know the secrets.”
“I want to know them too.”
Gabriel Russ was trotting around the path from the back of August’s house and down the steps, a little round bun of a man wearing August’s Bermuda shorts and a T-shirt with Save the City in red letters, much too large for his body, scurrying on his bare feet, plump with squared-off toes.
“Hello, Lucy. You are just the one I am looking for, you and Felix the Great.”
“We’re going to Zee’s house now to play with her toys in a box,” Felix said.
“No, no, not at all. Not today,” Gabriel said, waving them on to follow him. “My brother August Russ wants you to come over for coffee with us. It’s Friday morning and we have chocolate donuts on Friday mornings and very delicious coffee and August Russ is sitting in the kitchen waiting for you.”
“Later we’ll go to Zee’s,” Lucy said relieved. “Now we need to be with August for chocolate donuts. I’ll be right back.”
She crossed the street to the Mallorys’ side of the avenue, walked down the long path, stepping over a basketball, a scooter dropped on its side, a melted ice cream sandwich in a pool of chocolate on the flagstone, knocked on the door, looked through the glass. The house seemed empty. Onion, lying on the Oriental rug in the hall, looked up at her when she knocked but didn’t move. The women had dispersed with their coffee cups.
Adam had been gone for more than an hour and Zee with Maggie beside her in the front seat of Adam’s Toyota was just turning left on Connecticut Avenue headed to the Beltway.
Lucy walked up the front steps to August’s house, catching a glimpse of Felix. She would watch the Mallorys’ house all day. They would be back, at least for lunch unless they’d taken a day trip. Certainly by dinner when it started to get dark.
AUGUST WAS SITTING in a wheelchair in the kitchen, the legs of the wheelchair lifted to an angle. His face was ruddy with color and his hair had been cut.
“Hacked off,” he said. “Gabriel did it.”
Lucy kissed his cheek.
“You look better than you did day before yesterday when I was here.”
“I’d be fine if I weren’t so weak but my brain seems normal as it ever was
, god knows why.”
“My brain is not normal but normal is normal, isn’t that right?” Gabriel asked. “Which is why I was fired from my job after twenty years putting shiny shoes on men’s feet.”
Felix scrambled onto the couch in the corner of the kitchen, his feet on the cushions, his head on the arm.
“My sister Maggie lives with Zee Mallory,” he said glumly. “I guess you know that.”
August poured Lucy a cup of coffee.
“Cream?” he asked. “I don’t have milk.”
“My sister Maggie lives with Zee Mallory,” Felix said again, a chocolate donut in his hand, chocolate on his cheeks and lips. “Did anybody in this room hear me?”
“I did hear you,” Gabriel said, sitting down beside him on the couch. “You said My sister Maggie lives with Zee Mallory.”
“I know that’s what I said but nobody was listening.”
“Maggie is only visiting Zee. Isn’t that right, Felix?” August asked.
Felix shook his head.
“Victoria told me she was having a sleepover for a couple of nights.”
“That’s right,” Lucy said, “but Felix is inconsolable.”
“I’m very sad too,” Gabriel said. “Inconsolable.”
“Why are you sad too?” Felix asked.
“Because your sister Maggie is living with Zee Mallory. Just like you, I am sad too. All day and all night, which is why we’re eating a chocolate donut, right?”
“Right,” Felix said.
“I especially like a chocolate donut because it makes me happy when I’m sad and now today, this morning sitting here with you, I’m very happy.”
“Right,” Felix said, putting the donut on his lap, licking the chocolate off his fingers. “You know the reason Maggie is mad?”
“I didn’t know she was mad,” Gabriel said.
“She is very mad,” Felix said, “because Mama tells her lies and lies and lies. That’s how Maggie said it to me. Lies and lies and lies.”
The kitchen was still, only the sound of the coffeepot making its quiet clicks and the guttural animal sound in Gabriel’s throat when he was nervous, Felix smacking his lips, his tongue following the line of chocolate in the corner of his mouth.
Outside in the front of the house, a squeaking of brakes, a horn, and Lucy, her legs folded under her, was frozen in her seat.
She looked over at August, his head, just slightly to the side, his eyes soft, his face in repose, watching her kindly.
“That is why Maggie left,” Lucy said so quietly she could barely hear her own voice.
AT LUNCHTIME, GABRIEL made sandwiches—Mayo or mustard? Pickles? Tomato and lettuce? Peppers, red and green.
“Tomato, lettuce, and peppers,” Lucy said to Gabriel. “Red peppers if you have them.”
“Oh no, we don’t have peppers, not red, not green. I’m pretending I’m not here in Washington, D.C., at August Russ’s house but that I have a job at Jack’s Sub Shop in Albany next to my shoe store where I have been fired and you have come for lunch at my sub shop.”
“No peppers, thank you,” Lucy said, wrapping a light blanket around Felix, who had fallen asleep with his yellow chicken under his chin.
“That’s what they say behind the counter—they shout out Peppers, red and green. Tomato and lettuce. Wheat bread or white.” Gabriel was spreading mustard on wheat bread. “Welcome to my submarine shop in Albany, New York. I am Jack.”
LUCY SETTLED INTO August’s kitchen as if they were a family. No talk of lies or August’s manuscript. Just the mundane daily chatter of people who belonged to one another.
Felix woke up in time for lunch and later he stood at the sink helping Gabriel with the dishes and then they all took a walk, Felix sitting in August’s lap, Gabriel pushing the wheelchair down Witchita to Connecticut Avenue, along the avenue, stopping at the bookstore where August bought Felix Mr. Popper’s Penguins and two Spider-Man comics, at the toy store where August bought a plastic figure of Spider-Man himself which Felix coveted. They crossed Connecticut, down McKinley, and left on Broad Branch, stopping at the market for penny candy and a coffee, up the hill to Lafayette School, sitting under the trees in the filtered sunlight watching Felix play with two little girls on the jungle gym. It was almost five when they started back home, stopping at the Safeway for groceries.
“Spaghetti for dinner,” Gabriel said. “I make my spaghetti with tomato sauce and noodles and meatballs too.”
“Which is what we think of when we think about spaghetti,” August said.
“Right,” Gabriel said. “And I am thinking about spaghetti.”
“Spaghetti is delicious,” Felix said.
After dinner, after the dishes were done, candles still lit on the kitchen table, a second bottle of wine half gone, Felix sat on the couch looking at Spider-Man comics. Lucy was stretched out, her head back, her feet crossed at the ankles resting on a chair.
It was eight o’clock, a warm summer evening beginning to crawl towards night and she didn’t want to go home in the dark, where Maggie’s absence spread without mercy through the house.
“You and Felix could stay the night,” August said. “I have an extra bedroom and it’s getting dark.”
She could stay, Lucy thought. Here with August and Gabriel, across the street from the Mallorys’. She’d be able to see Maggie if the bedroom August offered was at the front of the house. Or she could stay right where she was in the warmth of the kitchen flickering with candlelight.
“Maybe,” she said.
“The bed has clean sheets,” August said.
“Clean green sheets with brown ferns on the pillowcases,” Gabriel said. “Real cotton. One hundred percent. Not polyester.”
But in the end Lucy refused. She needed to be in her double bed with its soft mattress next to Felix, who never slept in his own bed, needed to sit in Maggie’s room with her own angled view of the Mallorys’ refuge for unhappy children.
Upstairs Gabriel was looking for the carbon copy of August’s book.
“I don’t know why those pages would be missing from the manuscript,” August said when Gabriel returned with the book.
“Strange, yes?”
“So the only part that was missing was the section I wanted you to read in particular about the man who was a special assistant to President Truman in the White House when he died in your house. A midwesterner,” he added as if the fact of this geography was an important detail.
She knew this. She had known it from the beginning when August mentioned her father.
“He hanged himself on a Sunday morning in the summer of 1951 after he was discovered in a homosexual act at the downtown YMCA, which is what I describe in the book. Sodomy is what the papers reported.”
Her mouth was bone-dry, her lips tightened around her teeth.
“My take is that he must have killed himself because he was a public figure in the White House—not a man who had any past mental problems, no indications of instability as far as I could see—only a peripheral life considered aberrant in our society and he knew that the following morning the newspapers were going to print the story of the incident at the Y.”
The air was empty and hot even with a fan blowing her hair off her face but Lucy was clammy.
“I have the articles,” he said. “You might like to see them.”
“Why are you telling me this?” she asked finally.
“Why did I write about him, you mean?”
“Why did you want me to see these pages?”
“I thought you would be interested because someone had died in your house,” August said. “That’s the sort of thing that would interest me because . . .” He shrugged. “The book is social history and his story reflects the prevalent attitudes towards homosexuality which still exist today. And besides, I admire Samuel Baldwin.”
“I am interested,” Lucy said, and the words tumbled out before she had a chance to think of what she wanted to say or how to say it, to consider the consequ
ences. “I’m interested in all of it, the book you’re writing about shame and homosexuality and secrets and why people cover up secrets with lies. All of that, every bit of it. And I know the man . . .” She took a breath, grabbing it out of the air as if the air in the Russ kitchen might disappear. “Samuel Baldwin was my father.”
THE LIGHTS WERE out at the Mallorys’ house that night. Lucy had noticed it at dusk after they left August’s house, after he had followed her in his wheelchair to the back door, taking a light hold of her wrist—I am so sorry, he’d said. No wonder.
No wonder? As if August knew her inside out.
IN MAGGIE’S BEDROOM, she sat on the bed, holding back the curtains. They could be at the movies or maybe at the Sewalls’ or at the coffeehouse next to the Safeway listening to music. Not something Maggie had ever done before.
Lane answered the phone on the first ring.
“I thought it might be Will,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” Lucy said. “Just me wondering if Maeve knows where Maggie is tonight. It doesn’t look like anyone is home at the Mallorys’.”
“Adam took the boys to the beach to camp out. I know that,” Lane said. “Maeve?”
She must have put her hand over the receiver because Lucy sitting cross-legged on the bed, her cheeks burning, the phone pressed against her ear, couldn’t hear what got said between them.
“Maeve doesn’t know but Maggie did ask her to drop a note at your house for Felix and it’s in the mailbox.” She took a deep breath. “Honestly, Lucy, I don’t how you can stand what is going on . . .” her voice trailed off.
“I can’t,” Lucy said.
MAGGIE BEGAN TO seriously worry when they left the Garden State Parkway in New Jersey for the New York Thruway to Albany. It wasn’t the first time she was conscious of trouble. Someone is following us, Zee said just past Baltimore on Route 95 checking the rear-vision mirror again and again. Maggie had turned around to look at the boxy red car behind them.
The woman in the red car? she asked.
It’s a man and he was right behind me in the Baltimore Tunnel and he’s still there.
But the red car with a woman driving pulled over to the right lane as they were talking and that was the last they saw of it.
You Are the Love of My Life Page 23