by Peter Straub
That’s all I can do, now most of my strength is gone. At least I can get him in and out of the bath, because how else is an old lady like me supposed to handle a full-grown man? Wasn’t supposed to end up like this, Neddie. We used to be like royalty in this town.
“I loved Aunt Nettie,” Laurie said, delivering me from the river-bottom and back to Le Madrigal.
“You can have her. Aunt May, too. Once you have May in your family, you never have to pay for anything again. May just picks it up for you. She’s a kind of magician.”
“What do you mean? She’s a kleptomaniac?”
“May’s beyond kleptomania. It’s like Zen, like a mystical kleptomania.”
Laurie appeared to contemplate the existence of a mystical kleptomania. “But you still want to do it, don’t you? You’re not afraid.”
A tingle of fear threaded my spine. “I want to find out whatever I can.”
I heard Joy saying, Sylvan moved the family out of town, and he and Ethel had a batch of kids, but some of those children, my daddy said, they didn’t look human at all. The word for that in French is “épouvante.” I was always superior to my sisters in my command of the French language.
“What was your father’s name?”
Speaking his name in public seemed a violation of my privacy, or of some ancient code. I said it anyhow. “Edward Rinehart.” It brought back the other name my mother had spoken, Robert. Who was Robert?
“What a great name. Swirling fog. A mansion on a rocky cliff above the coastline. A devastatingly handsome man in a trench coat and evening clothes. He never talks about his past. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you … Mr. Edward Rinehart.”
Feeling even more uncomfortable than before, I said, “I don’t think he was much like Maximillian de Winter.”
“Excuse me?”
“The husband in Rebecca. Grand house, rocky shoreline, unhappy secrets.”
“No, I’m sorry! Rebecca is one of my favorite movies. Laurence Olivier, of course, exactly.”
I had been thinking of Daphne du Maurier’s novel instead of the Hitchcock movie, but so what?
She placed her hand over mine. “I was going to show you the delights of Edgerton anyhow, so let’s see what we can turn up along the way. Together, we could accomplish more than you could on your own.” Her dead-level glance might almost have been a plea. “You’d be helping me, too. I need something to think about besides my stupid situation.” A moment of self-recognition silenced her, and she glanced away, then back at me. “Look, Ned, if I’m being pushy, or intrusive, or anything like that … or sort of crazy …”
And Sylvan told my daddy, Howard, don’t trust anyone but your kin and don’t trust them all that much, because you’ll be lucky if some night I don’t come along and split your head open with an axe. I always thought it was likely that my daddy shot Sylvan with that revolver he was supposed to be cleaning at the time of his death.
I told her she didn’t sound even faintly crazy, compared to some people in my family.
“All I mean is that helping you would …”
Would give her something to do besides brood about Stewart Hatch. “All right. Let’s help each other.”
“I’m free all day tomorrow. Stewart gets Cobbie on Saturdays. Which means that a hired flunkey pushes our son on the swings in Merchants Park until Stewart walks out of his office long enough to stuff Cobbie full of hamburgers and candy before delivering him to my house at eight P.M.”
We tried to work out where to meet. The park across the street turned out to be the place where the flunkey pushed Cobbie on the swings. Laurie suggested the front of the main library, four blocks up from the hotel and two blocks south, on the corner of Grace and Grenville.
“Grenville?”
“Half the streets in Edgerton are named after the families of people still walking around. Like Cobden Avenue? Stewart’s father was named Cobden Hatch, which is how Cobbie got his name, of course. When should we meet? Nine-thirty? A friend of mine, Hugh Coventry, who works at the library, volunteers at City Hall on the weekends. Everything’s closed, but he has access to all the offices, and he gets in around nine.”
I asked why she wanted to go to City Hall.
“Edward Rinehart should be in the records. And you might want to look at copies of your mother’s marriage license and your birth certificate. Nothing like hard data.”
“Nothing like a brilliant dinner companion,” I said.
Most of the people in the restaurant looked up as we moved toward the podium. Vincent’s smile barely concealed a leer.
In an alcove off the lobby, I went into a booth and placed two calls. Laurie Hatch was doing her best to look inconspicuous alongside a potted palm when I came out, and I hurried across the lobby and followed her through the revolving door. The doorman handed her yellow ticket to an eager kid in a black vest, and the kid raced down into the garage.
“Adventure beckons.” Laurie lifted her eyebrows in a comic, slyly conspiratorial glance.
The boy in the black vest jumped out of a dark blue Mercury Mountaineer and held the door. Laurie winked at me and drove away, and I walked across Commercial Avenue, going toward Lanyard Street and Toby Kraft’s pawnshop. According to Toby, long ago the street had been called Whore’s Alley, but these days all the best hookers were married to money and lived in Ellendale.
33
I began moving down Ferryman’s Road at the top end of triangular Merchants Park. Three-story brick buildings set back on postcard lawns lined both of the streets fanning out from the apex of the triangle. At the top of the steps before the first building in the row, a heavyset man in a tan uniform was flipping through a ball of keys. Wondering what sort of business required the services of a security guard on a Friday night in Edgerton, I looked for a sign, which did not exist. Then I noticed the legend carved on a stone headpiece over the front door: THE COBDEN BUILDING. I laughed out loud—here was where Stewart Hatch did whatever he did with his father’s money.
Set deep within a ravaged face the color and texture of oatmeal laced with maple syrup, the guard’s eyes fell on me. He looked too old for his job.
“A lot of keys,” I said.
“A lot of doors.” The guard continued to stare at me, not with the suspicion that would have been inevitable in Manhattan, but with an odd, expectant attentiveness. “No matter how many times I tell myself to put a piece of tape on that first one, I always forget. Here’s the little sucker.” He held up a key, and his belly strained the fabric of the uniform shirt.
“Do you work for Mr. Hatch?”
“Fifteen years.” His smile widened without getting any warmer. “You new in town?”
I told him I was there for a couple of days.
“You should take a walk around Hatchtown, see the real Edgerton.”
Ferryman’s Road reminded me of certain places I’d seen in the South, parts of Charleston and Savannah. A sense of purpose having to do with my investigations into the life of Edward Rinehart buoyed me up. In time, Joy’s irreconcilable story would fade.
My daddy had so much Otherness inside him, he didn’t care how he acted. Cruelty was his middle name. It’s nothing but a curse, that’s all. Nettie, she’s got her own views, and whatever’s Dunstan can’t be bad to her. But Nettie doesn’t know. What was in our daddy mostly came down to me, and it spoiled everything.
At the wide end of the park, I turned right on Chester Street and walked through a neighborhood of rooming houses and apartment buildings. Loud music poured from open windows. Mothers and grandmothers perched on the stoops. Outside the tavern on the next corner, men and women in bright clothes were dipping and moving to Ray Charles on the jukebox. Brother Ray was pining for Georgia, and the neighborhood people were celebrating the arrival of the weekend. I turned the corner and walked past an alley where two guys were hauling crates out of a panel truck.
On Lanyard Street the old fancy-houses had been replaced by a shoe-repair shop, an appliance store, a mom-an
d-pop grocery. The three brass balls of a pawnshop hung above an empty sidewalk.
I looked through the metal grate over the window lettered in gold with KRAFT TRU-VALUE PAWNBROKER. Two small lights burned at the back of the shop. I pushed the bell and heard a noise like an electric drill. A rear door opened in a sudden wash of light, and Toby Kraft came into view.
He unlocked the grate and swung it outward. “Get in here, will you? What a lousy deal, makes you think there’s no justice in the world anymore, if there ever was.” Toby closed the door and shoved a police bar into place. He closed his hand around mine. “Kid, your mother was a champ.”
Toby pulled me into an embrace. “It happened this morning, did it? Were you there?”
“We were still at Aunt Nettie’s,” I said.
He smoothed his hair and wiped his hands on his trousers. “How are you doing?”
“I couldn’t tell you,” I said.
“How about a schnocker?”
“No, I just…. Yeah, why not?”
“I’m still busy, but it won’t take long.” When I looked at the counter, he said, “Your momma sure brightened up the place when she stood back there. Who’s getting your business, Spaulding?”
It took me a moment to understand what he meant. “Nettie thinks I spent too much money.”
At the back of the shop, Toby waved me into a small, hot room with fluorescent lights. A metal desk heaped with papers faced out from the back wall, and a low bookcase jammed with green ledgers and a metal safe stood against a half partition dividing the office from a darker space containing rows of industrial shelving. Old calendars with pictures of naked, lushly upholstered women plastered the walls. The men I had seen in the alley were carrying boxes into the area beyond the partition. “Kraft?” one of them said.
“It’s just my grandson.” Toby turned back to me. “Don’t let those girls poor-mouth you. They have enough to get by on. When’s the funeral?”
“Wednesday morning.” I sat down on the folding chair.
Toby sighed. “One second.” He went around the gap in the partition and talked to the men. I heard the truck drive away.
“I’m glad Nettie and May have enough to get by on.”
He rubbed two fingers together and winked. “I promised you a drink.” He took a liter of Johnnie Walker Black and two smudgy glasses from a bottom drawer of his desk. “Sorry about the no ice, but I never got around to putting in a fridge.” A pack of unfiltered Camels and a gold lighter came out of his shirt pocket. He poured three inches of whiskey into our glasses. “I wish it was a happier occasion. Here’s to Star.”
We clinked glasses.
“You getting on okay?”
“Pretty well,” I said. “I saw Joy today.”
“Been a long time since I did.” We drank. When he thrust the bottle toward me, I shook my head. “She and Clarence doing okay, or is that too much to ask?”
“Clarence has Alzheimer’s,” I said. “She keeps him strapped in a wheelchair and feeds him baby food.”
“I don’t suppose Clarence is much of a conversationalist anymore.”
“Joy did a lot of talking, though,” I said.
He tilted back in his chair and smiled. “You’re a smart kid, I don’t have to tell you which end is up. Joy is a very unhappy person.”
I took another swallow of whiskey and thought about what to say. “I don’t suppose a lot of Dunstan babies were born with wings and claws, but there must have been something funny about a couple of Howard’s brothers and sisters, because Clark mentioned it, too.”
Toby propped his head on the back of his chair and stared up at the fluorescent light. A plume of smoke floated toward the ceiling. “First of all …” He grabbed the bottle and leaned forward. “Have some more goddamn Scotch. You’re making me do all the work.” I offered my glass, surprised that it was almost empty. He added more to his own, set down the bottle, and considered me for a moment. This was going to be good.
“First of all, think about Nettie’s husband. I say that because being Nettie’s husband is Clark Rutledge’s full-time job. He’s the vice president of Dunstan, Incorporated, and one thing about Clark, the man loves his work. What’s the main thing about work?”
“The salary?”
“Nope. Work gives you a place in the world. Clark is Somebody because he’s a Dunstan, and he’ll milk that cow until it drops. On top of that, Clark is not on your normal wavelength. One day he’s telling you why the Jewish people, one of which is me, brought on Hitler by hoarding all the gold in Germany. The next day, the Jews are a great people because they’re the people of the Book.”
I smiled at him.
“Okay, that’s Clark, first of all. Joy, now, Joy always felt left out. You notice how she talks about her daddy all the time?”
I nodded.
“Howard was a strange guy, but him and Queenie always got along. Joy had a problem with that. Joy was one of those kids, whine, whine, whine. Gimme more, gimme more, and it’s never enough, right? Women built like that, they always want more than what they got, because what they got is never enough. It can’t be, on account of they got it.”
Toby’s description seemed surprisingly acute.
“Queenie knew how to handle the old man, but Joy only knew how to get sore. Take what she says with all the salt in the grocery store, and then some.”
“Joy weighs about ninety pounds. Clarence is maybe one fifty, pure deadweight. She gives him a bath every night.”
“Good trick.”
“Joy says she inherited psychic powers from her father, and all that’s left of them is enough to pick Clarence out of his wheelchair, lower him into the tub, clean him up, dry him off, and move him back into the chair.”
“I’ll give her this, her stories are getting better.”
“She moved his wheelchair back and forth just by pointing at it. Then lifted her finger and made it float off the ground and swing around in midair. Clarence liked it so much, he drooled like a baby.”
Behind the thick glasses, Toby’s eyelids rattled down and up twice, like window shades. I reached for the bottle.
“That stupid fuckin’ Joy.” He heaved himself off his chair and went around the partition. I heard him check the lock on the alley door. The Camels came out of his pocket. He took out a cigarette and examined it for flaws. After he got the cigarette going, he tilted back in his chair and looked at me some more.
34
“This is what you came here to talk about?”
“It’s one of the things I came here to talk about.”
He ran a pudgy hand over his face. “I don’t even know that much to begin with.”
“You know more than I do. And everyone else refuses to say anything at all.”
“Star didn’t want you to know about this business.”
“What business is that?”
“What passed down through your family, starting with Omar and Sylvan. You heard about Omar and Sylvan?”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “Particularly from Joy.”
Joy’s frail voice told me, My grandfathers, they were the surviving remnants of pagan gods and could have ruled over earthly Dominions but cared for nothing but wealth and pleasure. To build that house on New Providence Road, Sylvan had the ancestral house in England taken apart stone by stone and brick by brick, and he shipped all those stones and bricks across the sea and put them back together again exactly the way they were in the old days. He might as well have flushed his money down the toilet. My daddy was the same way. C’est dommage.
“She could of had the decency to keep her mouth shut.”
“Because my mother didn’t want me in on the family secret. Whatever it is.”
Toby took another slug of whiskey and pressed the glass against the silver fur spilling out of his shirt. “Your mother wanted to protect you. I’d say she did a pretty good job.”
I stared at him without speaking.
Toby raised his left hand and held it palm up, so t
he smoke curled around his fingers. The gesture said: it’s no biggie. “You were normal. There was stuff you were better off not knowing.”
“I was normal.”
“When Joy was a baby, I guess, if she didn’t get fed on time, shit went flying all over the place, windows broke…. Where with you, all that happened was, you had those fits. Which ain’t that unusual for a person. Hey, does that still happen?”
Recognitions, thoughts of a kind, began to take shape in my mind.
“I always hoped you were gonna grow out of that.”
“Toby, you just said, ‘All that happened was you had those fits.’ ”
“You did! Right there on your third birthday.”
“But everybody thought something else might happen to me. You were waiting to see if I was going to make things fly around the room.”
His face sagged into a trapped, gloomy frown.
“We’re talking about what passed down through the Dunstans. When it got to me, it looked ordinary enough to look normal.”
“You never should of went to college,” he said. “You listen too good.”
“How much did Howard pass down to Queenie?”
“My wife had a lot of Dunstan in her, I’ll say that much.” He pulled at his whiskey and smiled to himself. “Sometimes she’d rise up a couple feet off the bed and hang there. Sound asleep. Take the covers with her. Damndest thing you ever saw in your life. And she knew things.” A memory made him laugh. “The first year we were married, two different pairs of idiots walked into the shop to score some easy money. They were thinking, old lady like that, show her a gun, she’ll give it up fast. What you call a basic error in judgment.”
Toby chuckled. “Second they come in, Queenie hauls the shotgun up from behind the counter. Scares the shit out of the little bastards. ‘Lady,’ they say, ‘you’re making a mistake, put down the gun before something bad happens.’ Queenie says, ‘If you don’t get your asses out the door before I count three, you bet something bad is gonna happen, only you won’t know about it.’ Never had any more problems with stickups.”