Eugene prodded her. “Don’t you think that would be a good idea?”
“Of course I do. I love you so much. There’s nothing in the world I want more than to be your wife. . . .”
“But? I hear a but.”
“But I’m still in mourning right now, that’s all.”
Eugene laughed. “For Richard? Louise, we went to bed three weeks after he was buried.”
Louise pouted. “I mean, Eugene, that right now I am still regarded as a recent widow. That’s all. You’ve made me forget all about Richard.”
“But you don’t want to get married yet?”
“I don’t think it would look right.”
“Even if Jeannette started proceedings now, the divorce probably wouldn’t come through for another year. By then Richard will have been dead for almost two years.”
“Oh, well,” said Louise, a little vaguely, “then of course I’d marry you.”
He had seated himself on the sofa again, and she curled up beside him.
“No, no, no,” she whispered, “I’m not going to lose you. Good for Jeannette. She’ll get a divorce, and you and I can get married.”
“Jeannette is going to take me to the cleaners. That’s what she says.”
Louise drew back, and said, in a brisk voice, “How much does she know about your finances?”
“Some. Not everything.”
“Good,” said Louise. “Then start putting things aside. Lawyers know how to do all that kind of thing. You know what you might do?”
“What?”
“You might transfer some things to me. Deeds of gift, or whatever they’re called. I mean, if we’re going to be married afterward . . .”
“Louise . . .”
“What?”
“Let me ask you something.”
“Of course, darling.”
“What do you really think? About this divorce?”
“Eugene, the one thing in the world that will make me happy is to be married to you.”
“Even if means that you’re no longer Mrs. Richard Hawke?”
A shadow crossed Louise’s face. “I’d even give that up for you.”
“Are you sure?”
“There’s only one thing I don’t want to give up,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“I want that house.”
Eugene pulled back from her. “Why?” he asked in surprise. “It’s monstrous. Twenty rooms, at least, and three acres of grounds to keep up. It costs a fortune just to heat the thing. Do you have any idea what the taxes are on a piece of real estate like that?”
“I don’t care, Eugene. I want it. It’s exactly the house I’ve always wanted, ever since I first laid eyes on it. I hate this apartment. I hate every apartment I’ve ever been in. I want that house. Richard couldn’t leave it to me, but when you and I are married, we’ll be able to afford it, won’t we?”
The lawyer looked at her quizzically. “It belongs to Verity and Cassandra,” he said.
“We’ll buy it from them. They don’t need anything that big.”
“We wouldn’t either!”
“Oh, but it will be perfect for you and me, just perfect!” She snuggled closer to him.
“Louise, even if we had the house, it would still be too expensive to manage properly.”
“Oh, no . . .” She unbuttoned his shirt, and thrust her fingers inside, massaging the wiry gray hair of his chest. “The house is so big and those two don’t care about it anyway. Verity’s on cocaine all the time, and Cassandra’s always out somewhere with that awful band. It seems to me the place should be put to some better use. You and I could give wonderful parties. I have always liked Jeannette, but, Eugene, she was never a very good hostess. She never helped your career.”
Eugene silently digested this criticism of his wife.
Louise looked around her apartment and grimaced. “You can’t do anything in a cramped place like this. It’s like being caged.”
Eugene laughed a small mirthless laugh. He looked Louise in the eye. “Oh, well, you may not be able to have a party for fifty in here comfortably, but a party for just two . . .”
Louise didn’t reply. She pulled his shirt open and brushed her lips across his flesh. She glanced upward, and smiled. “If you don’t want to think about that house, don’t. I’ll take care of things. You know, Eugene, I like having something I can fight for.”
20
The servants had been given the day off at Thanksgiving. The holiday afternoon was lowering, raw, and wet. Gusts of rain blew away and scattered the few leaves that remained on the trees. Rocco and Cassandra prepared an early dinner in the kitchen, while Verity was entrusted with the preparation of drinks. Apple wandered back and forth, sometimes helping with some chore, sometimes chatting with Verity in the living room.
They ate dinner late in the afternoon, sitting in the dining room with candles and a fire, while the continuing rain spattered loudly against the windows. Not only the weather, but the absence of Jonathan, rendered the meal a melancholy affair. Later, when Verity had lighted all the candles in the living room in an attempt to stave off some of the damp exterior gloom, they all sat down before the fire blazing in the hearth.
While Verity was pouring brandies, Eric, unannounced and uninvited, rapped on the panes of the French doors. For several moments everyone stared at him shivering in the chill and the wet, until he impatiently rattled the knob, and called out dimly, “Why the fuck doesn’t somebody open the fucking door?”
Rocco got up and unlocked the door. Eric jumped inside, shaking water off himself like a wet dog. He glanced through the open dining room door and saw the remnants of dinner on the table. “Why didn’t you invite me?” he asked querulously. “I ended up having a sandwich at Howard Johnson’s. It was depressing.”
Verity was kneeling at the marble coffee table, drawing out lines of coke.
“Sorry,” she said without looking up. “None of this was planned. It was just thrown together. Maybe next year, Eric.”
“Yeah,” he sulked, “sure. A lousy chicken sandwich. Whole place was full of pimps. If anybody ever asks where pimps eat Thanksgiving dinner, you tell them, ‘Howard Johnson’s on Route Nine.’”
Verity held the razor blade poised. She looked up and said, “Eric, it’s time for you to go. Good night.”
“I just got here,” he protested in a whine.
“Then stop complaining, take your coat off, and help me cut this coke. Come dry off by the fire, you’re dripping on the rug.”
He tossed his wet pea coat over the back of a chair, and stepped around the couch. He knelt across the table from Verity, with his back to the fire. Cassandra picked up his coat and carried it to the hall closet.
“Are you hungry?” asked Apple politely.
“No,” he said, taking the razor blade from his wife.
“There’s plenty left,” offered Rocco.
“How many lines do we need?” he asked.
Cassandra, Apple, and Rocco declined on account of full stomachs.
“Well,” Verity sighed, looking up at Eric. “I guess it’s just you and me. Thrown together—again—by circumstance.” Passing the straw back and forth in an unvarying rhythm they cleared the table of coke. They spent several moments of watery-eyed sniffing until Verity was slightly out of breath.
Cassandra, Apple, and Rocco watched the coke business with some amusement.
“Eric,” Cassandra asked, “why didn’t you go to your mother’s today?”
His mouth creased sharply downward. “She didn’t invite me either.”
“Couldn’t you have thrown yourself on her?” Verity asked.
“I tried,” admitted Eric. “She told me not to come over, she was busy.”
They were silent for a while, staring into the fire. The rain began to come down harder as the daylight dwindled quickly past twilight into darkness. Verity put on music, and, after a bit, Cassandra said, “Verity, would you and Eric mind doing me a favor?”
“What?”
“Go in the kitchen and get out five champagne glasses.”
“Sure. Have we got anything to go in them?”
“It’s in the fridge.”
In a few minutes they had returned. The tray was set down on the coffee table, and Eric held out the bottle. “Who likes to do this?” he asked, holding the neck of the bottle pointed away from him.
Rocco took the champagne, and pried out the cork. It popped loudly, and flew into a dark corner of the room. The champagne bubbled over, and he poured out the five glasses.
“What are we celebrating?” asked Verity.
Cassandra stood and moved by the fire to face them all. She raised her glass toward Rocco and Apple.
“The first leg of the road tour was signed, sealed, and set, yesterday afternoon. The play dates beyond that will be confirmed next week. People Buying Things plays second on the bill at CBGB’s in New York on New Year’s Eve.”
Verity gulped her champagne, and exclaimed, “This calls for more coke!”
Apple, still sitting on the couch, was flushed with pleasure.
Rocco stood up and kissed Cassandra lightly on one cheek.
Eric yawned and refilled his glass.
Cassandra raised her glass: “To the success of People Buying Things!”
Glasses were raised and there was a general murmur of reinforcing sentiments. From the hallway, a voice, loud and crystal clear, intoned: “Let me add my congratulations as well.”
There, in the darkness, stood Louise Hawke, enveloped in her sable. Her hair was no blacker than her coat, and the firelight was reflected in her glittering eyes.
“Hello, Mother,” said Eric politely.
“I’m so glad someone invited you somewhere, Eric darling,” Louise said languidly. “You always seem to end up alone at holidays.”
Louise came forth out of the darkness of the hallway and took a chair across from the fire. Verity, very slowly, removed the evidence of the cocaine. “Would you like some champagne?” Rocco asked.
“I have nothing to celebrate,” said Louise dolorously. A queen, whose realm had just been snatched away by a revolution, might have spoken in the same tone.
“What’s wrong, Louise?” asked Cassandra suspiciously.
“There was a fire,” she whispered.
No one said anything. Louise looked sharply at her son.
“Where?” Eric asked suddenly. “Where was it?”
“My apartment,” Louise replied, almost inaudibly.
“Your apartment?” exclaimed Verity, with real surprise.
“That’s terrible,” said Apple. “I once got burned out, and it was horrible.”
“Was it an accident?” Cassandra asked. “Or was it set?”
“Set? Who’d set a fire in my apartment?”
Cassandra said nothing.
“What happened, Mother?” Eric moved beside her.
“I was in the kitchen fixing myself a little Thanksgiving dinner, when I went in the other room for a minute. Suddenly there was this huge explosion, and the kitchen just blew apart! I was lucky to get out alive!”
“A gas explosion?” asked Apple.
“It caught fire,” said Louise breathlessly, “and started spreading before I knew what was happening. I got my credit cards and my checkbook and that’s about all.”
“And your sable,” Verity pointed out.
Louise touched the fur. “I was wearing it, lucky thing.”
“You were wearing a sable coat while you were fixing dinner?” Verity exclaimed.
Louise paused a moment. “The furnace wasn’t working. I was cold.” Then she sat up and exclaimed, “I have just been burned out of the only home I’ve known for seventeen years, so what difference does it make what I was wearing when the fire started? I’m just happy to be alive.” She sighed, leaned back in the chair, and massaged her forehead with the tips of her fingers.
“How much was damaged?” asked Cassandra.
“The kitchen is gone,” said Louise softly. “Everything else has smoke and water damage.”
“How long is it going to take to fix back up?” asked Verity.
“I don’t know,” she sighed. “I don’t even want to think about it.”
“You have to think about it, Ma!” Eric exclaimed. Louise looked up suddenly. “Mother,” Eric corrected himself. “I mean, where are you going to stay? Hey,” he went on, feeling the effects of the coke, “you can stay with me.”
Louise sat up straight and stared at Eric as if he were insane, or as if he were an actor in an important role who had just forgotten his lines and was making up new ones.
“I thought,” said Louise, glancing at her stepdaughters, “that I would ask Verity and Cassandra if I might stay here, at least for the time being. They have a great deal more room than you do, Eric.”
“Here?” echoed Cassandra.
“Of course,” said Louise. “This seems the natural place—my husband’s home. I’ll just slip into the master bedroom, it’s empty.”
“It certainly is empty,” said Verity. “You took all the furniture away. Now I suppose it’s all been ruined in the fire.”
“Actually, no,” said Louise. “The bedroom door was closed, so everything in there was protected. I know what! I’ll just send the movers over tomorrow and have them bring it all back. That’ll please you two, I know, won’t it?”
“This was a terrible thing to have happen to you, wasn’t it, Louise?” remarked Cassandra blandly.
“It was,” agreed Louise. “And disaster is so exhausting. I think I’ll go upstairs and lie down for a bit. I’ll just stay in one of the guest rooms tonight. I don’t want any of you to give me another thought!” She stood, shook her hair back, and disappeared into the darkness of the hallway.
“It really is an awful thing to happen,” said Apple.
“Awful isn’t the word,” said Verity, slapping the container of coke back onto the coffee table. “Now she’ll be here night and day, in and out, upstairs and downstairs, and in my lady’s chamber.”
“I meant it was awful she got burned out of her apartment,” Apple corrected.
Verity laughed. “Don’t try to tell me that Louise didn’t take a blow torch to that kitchen. I can just see her, in those spikes and that sable, zapping the toaster with a flame gun!”
“That’s not true!” Eric snapped.
Verity turned around to him. “Where’d you find her a torch, Eric?” she asked quickly.
“I—” He clamped his mouth shut. He looked around at the others. “I’m getting out of here,” he said, standing up unsteadily. “I was crazy to come here in the first place.”
“I put your coat in the hall closet,” said Cassandra.
He stalked out of the living room, and a moment later the sound of doors slamming echoed through the rooms of the house.
“We need to talk about the insurance on my apartment,” said Louise to Eugene Strable later that evening. Rocco and Apple had left much earlier, and Verity and Cassandra were out at a film. Louise led the lawyer to the study, and seated herself behind her late husband’s desk.
He looked at her apprehensively. “Are you sure,” he asked in a low, earnest voice, “that you want an investigation into the cause of that fire?”
“There’s already been a preliminary report,” said Louise. “It was a combination grease fire and electrical shortage, or something. It could have happened to anybody.”
“Oh.”
“So I might as well get the money that’s coming to me.”
“Are you going to fix the apartment up again?”
“Of course.”
“And move back in?”
“Not on your life,” she said flatly. “I intend on remaining right here in Brookline. Those two girls are going to have a pretty difficult time getting rid of me.”
“Then why do up the apartment again?”
“I might as well make some money off it. I’ll sublet it, for eight hundred a month, and s
tay on here. Or maybe I’ll give it to Eric. He could use a decent place to live. I wanted that garage for him, but Cassandra went and turned it into a damned studio for those punks.”
Eugene ignored this. “We’ll have to sit down and itemize what was lost and its worth.”
Louise slid open the middle drawer of the desk, and extracted a sealed business-size envelope. She handed it to Eugene. “I’ve already done that.”
The lawyer’s brow creased in question as he slipped the envelope into an inside pocket of his jacket.
“It gave me something to do while I was waiting for you to show up,” remarked Louise. “Christ, you aren’t thinking I torched the place too, are you?”
“I didn’t say a word,” he said gently. “Has someone accused you of it?”
“Cassandra and Verity think so. They actually said it in front of strangers tonight after I went upstairs.”
“Strangers?”
“That Italian, and that awful woman Jonathan was engaged to.”
“They’re hardly strangers around here.”
“They’re going to be,” said Louise firmly.
“How do you know they accused you?” asked the lawyer.
“Eric told me. Eric,” said his mother with a proud smile, “has finally learned who’s on his side, and who isn’t.”
21
The following day, the moving men brought back Margaret Hawke’s bedroom furniture from the smoke-damaged apartment on Marlborough Street. When Louise appeared at the house in Brookline late in the afternoon, she had four suitcases filled with clothes. “Not as much was damaged as I thought,” she explained to Verity, who met her at the top of the stairs.
“That’s good,” said Verity. “I know you’ll be happy to be back in your own cozy apartment after having to camp out here. Do you think everything’ll be cleaned up by the end of the week?”
Louise looked hard at her daughter-in-law, and said, “There’s another couple of bags down in the car. Could you help me with them, please?”
“I’ve just done my nails,” said Verity, fanning her unpainted fingers before Louise and turning around. “They’re still wet.”
During the next few weeks, Louise’s presence wasn’t as all-pervasive and overpowering as Verity and Cassandra had feared it would be. She was up early and out of the house usually just as Cassandra was coming downstairs to breakfast. She didn’t return in the evening until six or seven, and was always careful to telephone Ida ahead of time to let her know whether to prepare dinner or not. She seemed to go out of her way not to antagonize her step-daughters. Still, there was a strain in Louise’s demeanor, as if her pleasantness were an ill-fitting garment that chafed, but was still necessary to the occasion.
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