by Jane Langton
They walked up Clarendon Street past the Baptist Church, past old men walking timidly among crowds of students, old women daring the sidewalk for the first time since the ice storm in March. “Did you know I’m renting Rosie Hall’s apartment?” said Alan. “Harold Oates and I, we’re staying there while it’s in escrow, or whatever you call it. You know, while they settle her estate.”
Pip looked at him in surprise, and said nothing. His customary flow of talk was not forthcoming. Maybe, thought Alan, he was still too angry about the audition.
In the pizza place Alan ordered beers, and tried again. “How’s the job situation? Any new ones opening up?”
Pip was vague. “Oh, I get along. When I’m not at the hospital I work in a copy shop.”
The waiter delivered the beers. Alan couldn’t think of anything else to say. Fortunately Pip knocked his glass over, and in the confusion of mopping up the spilled beer, things relaxed a little. Alan ordered another, and asked him about Rosie. “You knew her pretty well, isn’t that right?”
“Oh, sort of.”
Alan had hoped for more. “She meant a lot to you, I’ll bet?”
“Well, naturally. Just as a friend. I mean we didn’t—”
“No, I didn’t mean that. None of my business anyway.” This topic wasn’t working either. “More beer?”
“No, thanks.”
Alan offered him the basket of corn chips. “I’ll be joining you in the ranks of the unemployed before long, when Castle gets back.”
Pip blinked. “Castle’s coming back?”
“No, no, but he will sooner or later. I don’t know why the hell he doesn’t let us know when.”
At last Alan had touched a chord. Pip leaned forward across the small table. “Suppose he doesn’t come back, will they keep you on?”
“I don’t want the job. By rights they should give it to Harold Oates, but I doubt they will. You know what he’s like.”
“You don’t want the job?”
“I want to build organs, not play them. I’d say you were the prime candidate.” Then Alan remembered Mrs. Frederick’s antipathy. Maybe he shouldn’t raise Pip’s hopes. The poor guy would have to find a permanent place in some other church. Of course another church wouldn’t pay anything like as much, but it would be better than making hospital beds and flipping pieces of paper in and out of copy machines. Alan stood up and said an awkward goodbye.
Pip did not get up.
On the sidewalk Alan looked back through the glass door and was surprised to see him getting out of his chair with difficulty, as though still suffering from the effects of his fall.
CHAPTER 53
Bear not false witness, nor belie
Thy neighbor by foul calumny …
From a hymn by Martin Luther
In his office Martin Kraeger could hear the organ guild experimenting. The building quivered. Behind him a book fell from a shelf with a thump.
He paid no attention. All he could think of was the grotesque suit brought against him by his ex-wife. He sat at his desk staring into his crystal ball, visualizing one face after another, the scandalized members of his congregation. By now the entire parish must have heard that he was doing repulsive things to his little daughter. His name in the city of Boston must be mud. Worse than mud—filth, foulness and obscenity.
But surely the people who had known his ex-wife were aware she was a nutcase. And surely little Pansy would stick up for him. Pansy and I know better, Kay had said, as if Pansy were on her side.
Then it occurred to Kraeger that Pansy was enrolled in the daycare center in the church basement. At this moment she was probably frolicking with the other children, playing ring-around-the-rosy, or whatever it was they did down there.
He leaped up from his desk and ran past Loretta, who had just arrived. She was taking off her coat. “Good morning,” he called over his shoulder, but from the way she looked back at him with huge accusing eyes, he knew she had heard the story too.
It was the same with Ruth Raymond. When Martin opened the door to the daycare center, she looked at him blankly and clutched the child in her lap, as if he might snatch it from her and do something unseemly. It was naptime. Most of the children were stretched out on blankets on the floor. Pansy was not among them.
“Pansy isn’t here today?” he whispered to Ruth.
She looked at him suspiciously. Her manner was defiant. “I’m sorry, but I’m not supposed to tell you where she is.”
“But she’s my own daughter.”
“I’m sorry.” Ruth looked away and hissed at one of the children, “Cecily, lie still.”
But Cecily was kneeling upright on her blanket. “Pansy’s at Mother Goose Land,” she said brightly. “They have a pony at Mother Goose Land.”
“Cecily, lie down!”
Martin went back to his office and looked it up in the phone book. Mother Goose Land was on Hereford Street, not far away. He ran as far as Exeter, then slowed down and walked the rest of the way.
Mother Goose Land occupied a basement below the level of the pavement, like the daycare center in the church. Martin opened the door and entered a sunny room with windows overlooking the alley. Through one window he could see a small paved area at the back, where an aged donkey hung its head, its winter coat coming off in patches.
There was a cheerful babble of childish voices, a tumble of small children doing exercises on rubber mats. Two hardworking women were stuffing some of their charges into jackets and tying their shoes. One of the children was Pansy. At once she ran over to hug Martin’s knees and give him a huge gap-toothed smile.
He picked her up and hoisted her over his head. Then he sat down on a small chair and held her on his lap and inserted her feet into her Donald Duck cowboy boots.
“You’re Mr. Kraeger?” said one of the women, smiling at him, apparently unaware he was a lecherous monster. “I can see you’re an old hand.”
Martin set Pansy on her feet and drew her toward him until her small face was close to his. “Listen, Pansy, dear,” he whispered, “your mother says I was mean to you. What did I do, Pansy? Can you tell me? I don’t think I was ever mean.”
Pansy lowered her eyes. “My panties,” she whispered. “You took off my panties.”
“Well, of course I took off your panties. Because—you remember, Pansy—they were wet. They needed to be changed.”
Pansy was silent. She stopped up her mouth with her thumb. At once she was swept up by a whirlwind.
“Pansy, don’t you speak to him,” cried her mother. “I told you, Pansy, not one word.” Kraeger’s ex-wife looked at him, clutching Pansy to the front of her coat. “How dare you? How dare you talk to Pansy behind my back?”
The children of Mother Goose Land stopped milling around. They stared. The two teachers exchanged glances, then went on shepherding their flock out to the playground. Through the window Martin could see the donkey shamble away into the farthest corner.
“For heaven’s sake, Kay, I’m just trying to find out what this is all about. Pansy says I took off her panties. Well, of course I did, but Pansy knows why. She wet her panties, that’s why.”
“Pansy does not wet her panties. That is a complete fabrication. Pansy is completely toilet-trained. She has been toilet-trained since she was one year old.”
“Oh, now, Kay, you know she has accidents all the time.”
“I know no such thing. You took her panties off, you pervert, and did something to her!”
“Did something to her? I put on clean panties, that’s what I did to her.”
“Pansy,” said Kay Kraeger, plopping Pansy down on the floor again and looking at her fiercely, “did you wet your panties?”
Pansy shook her head violently, and looked at the floor.
“Pansy, did your father do something to you?”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake, Pansy,” said Kraeger, “tell your mother what happened.”
“Pansy,” whispered her mother, “you told me he did som
ething to you, something unspeakable, didn’t he, Pansy? Didn’t he?”
Pansy was trapped. It had been unspeakable, what had happened, and she couldn’t possibly mention it. Her mother had threatened that if she ever wet her panties again she would be spanked. So Pansy had suppressed the evidence.
Her mother’s threats about lapses in perfect behavior had made her an adept at concealment. There were petrified meat patties tucked behind the furniture, and fossilized baked potatoes in the back of the bookcase, and dusty brussels sprouts under the grandfather clock. One day last month when her father had been taking care of Pansy in her mother’s house, repairing a plugged-up sink at the same time, there had been an unfortunate calamity. Her father had tut-tutted gently and cleaned her up and found her a pair of clean panties, and then he had washed out the old ones and put them in the laundry basket. Afterward Pansy had removed them carefully and tiptoed downstairs and carried them under her sweater to the trash barrel. With her fragile fingers she undid the plastic tie of one of the trash bags, dropped the panties inside and twisted it shut again.
The case against her had vanished. Not until her mother undressed her that evening did she discover that Pansy was wearing panties with bunnies on them instead of teddies. Pansy had answered her mother’s outraged questions as cautiously as she could, and by saying as little as possible had shifted the blame to her father.
Now Pansy looked sideways, left, then right, and then, slyly, she nodded.
“Oh, Pansy,” moaned Kraeger.
“You beast, you beast,” cried Kay, making shuddering sounds of revulsion. “I’ll see you in court.” Snatching her daughter’s hand, she rushed away, with Pansy half-flying behind her.
CHAPTER 54
Why strengthen your walls—they are trash; the walls with which a Christian should fortify himself are made, not of stone and mortar, but of prayer and faith.
Martin Luther
Woody looked with dismay at the new cracks in the east wall. They had crept up and fanned out like forked tendrils of lightning. He couldn’t understand it. He left the sanctuary and descended two flights of stairs to look at the foundation. In the furnace room he worked his way through the warped scenery left over from a Christmas pageant until he uncovered the supporting walls of the east end of the church.
The stones were not rectangular blocks but ragged boulders fitted neatly together. In his basement office they were painted white. They looked immensely heavy and strong, mighty enough to hold up a building ten times the size of the Church of the Commonwealth.
Ah, here was the problem. A fissure had opened in the wall where the mortar had given way. Nothing to it. Woody went to the closet where he kept bags of sand for the winter sidewalk and sacks of lime and fertilizer for the garden, and hauled out a bag of cement. Dumping some of it into a bucket, he added water from the set tub in his office and stirred up a batch. Then he applied it to the fissure, using a putty knife to shove it deep between the stones. There, that was taken care of. Now he could concentrate on resurfacing the walls of the sanctuary.
Woody didn’t trust anybody else to do it. Who else could restore the William Morris trim of vine leaves around the windows? It would be a full-time job, and it would have to be done by Easter Sunday. He’d have to call in a retired friend of his to take over the usual cleaning and daily up-keep. Woody cleaned out his bucket and called up the friend, who said he’d be right over, toot sweet.
When Martin Kraeger came striding in next morning, the place was noisy. A stranger was running a waxer in the vestibule, making shiny circles on the floor. Above the whine of the waxer there was a high buzzing from the sanctuary, and the loud bah-bah of the organ.
Feeling uneasily at loose ends, Kraeger climbed the steps to the balcony. From there he could see Woody on a high ladder at the far end of the sanctuary, using a power sander on the wall. Alan Starr sat at the organ console, his eyes closed, trying to hear above the racket while he played a pedal scale. Kraeger sat down and listened.
Whah,
whah,
whah,
whah,
whah, droned the sixteen-foot Prestant.
Kraeger found it comforting. The nice thing about music was its abstractness. It was totally unconcerned with human problems and nasty little random perversions.
Alan hit the lowest note and held it. The balcony shook. On his ladder Woody was surprised to see the crack he had filled with Spackle open up again. Below the dried surface it must have been still a little wet.
Alan turned to Kraeger and said, “Good morning.” His greeting was friendly and natural, not tainted with loathing.
Kraeger was grateful. “Nobody’s been bending any more pipes?” he said, just to say something.
“No, everything seems all right. Woody’s hired a doctoral candidate from Boston University for weekend nights. He writes his thesis in here, doesn’t fall asleep like some of us jerks.”
“Well, good.”
Alan looked at him keenly. “Are you all right?”
Kraeger was surprised at the way it flooded out of him, the whole crazy story about his ex-wife’s unsavory accusation.
“But nobody will believe it, will they?” said Alan. “I’ve heard that your former wife is—forgive me—some kind of a fruitcake.”
Kraeger grinned painfully. His wife was a fruitcake, all right, but the wrong kind of fruitcake. If she were huddling in a corner with her head drooping on her breast, she would have been hauled off to a psychiatric ward long ago. Instead she was a totally self-confident megalomaniac, and it would take a war to stop her from ruling the world. “Maybe so,” he said, “but her lawyer isn’t a fruitcake.”
The sander buzzed again. Alan looked down thoughtfully at his feet and ran up the scale again. Then he stopped and turned to Kraeger. “You need a lawyer too.”
“I suppose so. I haven’t got one.”
“I know a good one. So do you. Homer Kelly used to be an attorney, back when he was a lieutenant detective in Middlesex County.”
“Oh, yes, I remember. Does he take an interest in this kind of—repulsive sort of matter?”
“I don’t know. Why don’t you ask him?”
“Well, all right, I will.”
“I see him pretty often. He’s working on the disappearance of Rosie Hall.”
“Disappearance? But she’s dead.”
“Well, maybe, maybe not. Did I tell you, I’m staying in her place now? You know, right next door. So is Harold. We’re staying there together.”
“Is her child still missing?”
“I’m afraid so.” Alan looked gloomily at the DIV INSP stop knob, reached over and pulled it out. A little DIV INSP was what he needed right now. “Here,” he said, fishing in his pocket, “I’ve got Homer’s phone number right here.”
Kraeger went to his office and called the number. Mary Kelly answered the phone. When she spoke, Martin remembered meeting her at the church door after a service last month. He remembered her great height and sympathetic face. Once again his story poured out of him.
“Tell you what,” said Mary Kelly. “Homer isn’t here, but he’ll be back later on. Why don’t you come out for supper?”
Kraeger paused, remembering the church council meeting he was supposed to attend. Well, those people would have a better time of it if he weren’t there. They could tear him to shreds in absentia. “Sure, I’d love to.”
“Good. Now, listen closely, here’s how to find us.”
It was no joke. Finding Fair Haven Road in Concord was tricky in itself, and then you had to choose fork after fork in the woods and look for a faded sign on a tree. It was like going deep into the forest to find the cottage of the wise witch.
He found it at last, a small house at the end of a long dirt road. “What a beautiful lake,” said Martin, looking out at Fair Haven Bay.
“It’s not a lake,” explained Homer. “It’s a big bend in the Sudbury River.”
“Oh, I see. What’s that bird in the water
? See the one with its head sticking up?”
“No. Oh, yes, I do. Oh, my God, it’s a loon. Look, Mary, a loon.”
“So it is. Well, good for you, Mr. Kraeger. We’re off to a lucky start.”
They sat down in the narrow living room under the map of the river, and once again Martin went over his sordid little story, his tongue loosened by whiskey. At the end he said, “Do you people have kids?”
“Well, no.” Homer glanced at Mary. “But we’ve got a little nephew named Benny.”
Mary grinned. She was wearing flowered shorts over stockings with red horizontal stripes. “So we know all about it. My sister and brother-in-law had already reared six kids when Benny came along. He was the last straw. They sort of gave up, with Benny. He’s ten now, and he goes to baseball camp every summer, but there was a time”—Mary gazed dreamily into the past—”he was three before he was out of diapers, although he could spell metamorphosis. In first grade he was doing algebra, but he always got to the boys’ room too late. Darling child.” Mary looked at Martin. “Pansy has the same problem?”
“Exactly, but her mother refuses to recognize it. That day I met you two people in church, Kay brought Pansy to spend the afternoon with me, and Pansy was wearing wet panties. I washed them out and dried them on the radiator in my office, and then put them back on Pansy, so Kay may not have noticed what happened. But the occasion she’s so furious about was the weekend she wanted me to stay with Pansy because she was going away, and I was supposed to fix the drain in the kitchen sink. Pansy wet her pants, so I washed them out and put them in the laundry basket. My wife must have found them there, and of course she would have known right away what happened.”
“So you think she made up this story about your molesting Pansy?” said Homer.
“Well, of course, she must have. But she’s so angry, she really seems to have convinced herself I’m a monster.”