All the Things You Are

by Declan Hughes

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Donna, it’s Claire, Claire Taylor. Did you by any chance just send me a text message?’

  ‘Claire? No. No, I didn’t …’

  ‘Sorry. I guess I’m kind of freaking out here, I suppose. I don’t know if he’s told you, your brother’s taken off, and foreclosure proceedings have been issued against the house?’

  ‘Foreclosure?’

  ‘Three months ago. I got a visit from the sheriff this morning, we have thirty-one days to quit. Or, I do. And he cleared out all our stuff. And there was a dead body there this morning, one of Danny’s old friends from school. And Mr Smith … someone killed Mr Smith, Donna, cut his throat …’

  Claire’s voice broke now, and hot tears filled her eyes. Before she could say another word, Donna spoke.

  ‘The girls are here, Claire. I looked after them last week, while you were away. Then Danny came by last night and asked me to keep them.’

  ‘They’re all right then? Oh, thank God.’

  ‘They’re fine. Do you want to talk to them?’

  ‘Maybe in a minute. Let me get my act together, I’m a mess here. What did Danny say?’

  ‘Very little. He’s in some kind of danger, he’s being blackmailed, or pursued, he has money worries. I don’t know. He seemed to think it wasn’t a good idea for you to know the girls were here, in case anyone is watching you. I asked him were you in danger, but he didn’t think you were. I don’t know, I mean the whole thing seems ridiculous—’

  ‘And then there’s a dead body, and a dead dog, and the cops swarming over the backyard of my house, a house that soon won’t belong to me any more. Whatever it is, it’s not ridiculous.’

  Donna was silenced by this. All Claire could hear was the boom of traffic on East Wilson, and the beat of her heart as it subsided slowly from her mouth. Barbara and Irene, Barbara and Irene, Barbara and Irene. Did she ever really believe the worst?

  ‘Tell me what you want to do, Claire. Come and see them, come and pick them up. Barbara’s coming down the stairs, will I put her on?’

  Dee was approaching now, Claire could see her in the distance, coming down Pinckney. She thought hard. Of course she wanted to talk to Barbara and Irene, to hear their voices, there was nothing she wanted more in fact than to go out there and spend the day with them. But that wasn’t going to get her anywhere. And if they were happy with Donna – and they always were – then that was all she really needed to know. She needed to get moving. Some of this was down to Danny, no doubt, but some of it was down to her as well.

  ‘Donna, I’d love to, but don’t, it would just upset them, upset us all. Tell them I called, and I’m fine, and I love them.’

  ‘Will do. I did … send you that text.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I … thought I was being loyal to my little brother. I should have known it would spook you. I don’t really know what’s going on, Claire.’

  ‘Neither do I. But I have to try and find out. I’ve got to get back to Chicago as soon as possible.’

  ‘Good grief. You and Dan are the same. One day you’re suburban mom and dad, the next you’re Nick and Nora Charles.’

  Only Asta is dead.

  ‘Well. I can’t do that with the girls to worry about,’ Claire says.

  ‘Don’t worry about them, Claire. And good luck.’

  Claire will always think of this moment, waiting for Dee to cross the street at Pinckney and East Wilson, this moment when, if she had spoken to the girls, Irene in particular, they would have worked on her so hard that she would have had no option but to travel to Cambridge to see them, and then no one else might have had to die.

  And then Dee was upon her, having walked the five minutes from the salon on Dayton. They embraced, and took the elevator to Dee’s apartment in silence. Inside, amid the Indian hangings and Persian rugs and Greek statuary, the musk of aromatic oil and scented candles on the air, in sight of the mist drifting above the lake, Claire drank chai tea and quickly told her friend everything that had happened since last night. When she was finished, instead of telling her what she had done wrong, or what Dee would have done in her place, or what an ass Danny was, Dee simply found her car keys and handed them to Claire, and held her close, and they took the trip back down to the parking lot beneath the building and Dee led them to her blue Toyota Corolla.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Claire said. ‘The Volkswagen is older, I don’t want to damage this and fuck up your insurance—’

  ‘The Volkswagen is a rusty old heap. It’s only fit for rural trails and trekking and hiking and so on.’

  ‘But you never use rural trails. You’re not the trekking and hiking type.’

  ‘I know, I know, I got it when I was with that guy with the beard, the outdoor guy. But it turned out, I’m not an outdoor girl.’

  ‘If only they made hiking boots with heels,’ Claire said.

  ‘Take the Toyota. Can’t have you bowling around Chicago like some cheesehead on a day trip.’

  When Dee said goodbye, she had her sad face on, for real, with tears in her eyes.

  ‘I’m frightened for you, baby,’ she said, and Claire had to work hard not to lose it there and then.

  ‘I’ll be fine. The kids are safe, that’s the main thing.’

  ‘That’s right. Everything else, you can work out.’

  ‘Or not,’ Claire said.

  ‘Danny’s not a bad man,’ Dee said, her face having morphed from sad to tragic, and Claire nearly laughed.

  ‘Aren’t you supposed to be reassuring me? I don’t think he’s a bad man.’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry. I just don’t know how he could have done what he’s done. The house, oh my God.’

  And Claire held Dee then, as if the misfortune had befallen her.

  ‘I’ll be all right. It’s not all down to Danny. I have a plan.’

  Dee nodded, tragic morphing into brave.

  ‘So phew,’ Claire said, ‘that makes it all right then.’

  And Dee smiled, and said, ‘Look, Claire, if there’s anything I can do, just say the word.’

  Claire takes a pen and a notebook from her bag and scribbles on it.

  ‘Well there is, actually … since I’m gonna be away, why don’t you take Donna’s number? In case there’s anything with the kids. I mean, she can handle it, but God forbid she comes down with flu or something.’

  ‘Sure. She’s in Cambridge, right?’

  ‘I’ll put the address down too.’

  ‘There’s no need. Cambridge is the kind of place everyone knows everyone, I can just ask in a coffee shop,’ Dee said. ‘Or call in advance.’

  ‘Well no, actually. Donna being Donna, she plumped for somewhere remote, by the lake.’

  ‘We love our lakes,’ Dee said.

  ‘And she tends not to answer the phone.’

  ‘Runs in the family,’ Dee said, and they both laughed then, high laughter on the edge of tears, and hugged their last goodbyes.

  ‘I’ll be fine, don’t worry,’ Claire said as she got into the car.

  ‘You sure, sweetheart?’

  ‘Seriously, Dee – when you know your kids are all right, you can handle anything.’

  But that’s not what anyone would have thought if they’d seen her on the road. Did she cry continuously from Madison to Chicago? No, just for the first hour as the fantastic events of the past week coursed around her brain. Could Danny have murdered Gene Peterson? She saw him pocket the knife before he went down to greet him. Was he capable of such violence? Not to her knowledge. And certainly not because of some shambolic fling she and Peterson had many years before. But kill the man who had lost them so much money, who was about to lose them their house? Claire could stab Peterson herself. But then there was poor Mr Smith. And on the other side, the ornament on the mantelpiece, unbroken. Mirabell and Millamant, married. Round and round it went in her head, leaving her none the wiser.

  The housing estates and motels flanking the I-90 fell a
way, and marsh and woodland, dotted by occasional farmhouses, took over. Somehow the sparse, dank beauty of the landscape seemed to act on Claire then, turning fear and panic into something more thoughtful and considered.

  Because in a weird way, she had always been braced for this, or something like it, some disaster, some unforeseen but long awaited apocalypse. They argued over trivial stuff, she and Danny, but with the big things, they didn’t really do confrontation; they tended to let it go. When ‘don’t go there’ became the phrase of choice, back in the nineties, she remembers how they bonded in recognition of its rightness, both as a general principle and a description of their personal MO. Neither of them liked to go there, either with each other or, Claire often thought, with themselves. Maybe this was the reason the marriage always seemed so fragile, as if it was only ever one botched dinner date or missed sexual connection or argument over childcare away from the final break-up: they didn’t really know each other, or themselves. And what was more, they didn’t want to know.

  How could she explain her unwillingness to find out who her birth mother and father were? It wasn’t as if she even had to make much of an effort: on the day she left Rockford for UW Madison (having offered her the opportunity to find out regularly since she was twelve) the Taylors had given her an envelope containing the details of her origins. It’s safe among all her personal stuff in the tower on Arboretum Avenue, waiting for her to inspect. One day. Of course, she could always have gone through the state adoption authorities that had handled her case, but she doubted she ever would. And in any case, that envelope had come with so much more, with flowers and leaves and herbs pressed within the pages of every play her green-fingered foster parents could find with a horticultural connection, be it ever so tenuous (invariably the title): The Petrified Forest, The Autumn Garden, The Country Wife, The Field, The Cherry Orchard, Desire Under the Elms. They had come with her too, almost her last connection with the Taylors, who were killed in a car crash the summer before her final year. They had lived frugally, and died leaving Claire just enough to cover the rest of her fees, and the memory of their cheerful, gentle, unflaggingly positive encouragement, and their quiet, diligent, undemonstrative alcoholism. Claire wondered often if that was one of the unconscious attractions she and Danny had to each other, that they were both children of alcoholics – even if, in her case, it was nurture and not nature.

  She didn’t drink much any more, unless you count a lost week in Chicago. She didn’t honestly know how much Danny drank any more; little or nothing at home, a couple of beers watching sports was all. At work was another matter. What happens in Brogan’s stays in Brogan’s. God, Brogan’s. They had met there, on their first day at UW. Danny had sought refuge from the helter-skelter of university, and after all, it was his family firm. What was her excuse for skulking in a dark old Irish bar? She had found the going a bit frantic herself, and slipped downtown and found a volume of Dawn Powell stories in Avol’s vast used bookstore on Gorham, the store itself almost every bit as exciting as university, and her eye was caught by the stained glass and brown wood paneling of Brogan’s, the type of bar the actors in her beloved old black and white movies would have favored. (She had learned her love of those movies sitting with the Taylors each evening, the air sweet with the sugar-sour tang of booze as they firmly but gently self-medicated, so the lure of the bar was maybe no accident.)

  And there, seated at the hushed, deserted afternoon bar, in a thrift-store gray 1940s double-breasted suit, reading The Locusts Have No King by, yes, Dawn Powell, and looking like an actor in a black-and-white movie himself, a dove-gray Fedora and a frosted martini at his elbow, there he sat, twenty-six to her nineteen and, Claire thought, there and then, destined to be the absolute love of her life, the first man she had ever wanted, after the shambling, eager, clueless boys of Rockford.

  She could see him eyeing her up as she approached the dark wood bar, enthralled by the beer taps and the mirrored wall of bottles, could see him clock her thrift-store forties look, her tailored red jersey day dress, her low-heel pumps, her boxy black jacket, her black felt hat. Music was playing in the background, and she lilted along with it, tapping her feet to the samba-style rhythm.

  ‘You like the music?’ he said.

  ‘Nelson Riddle. What’s not to like?’

  ‘I’m impressed. Not many people your … would even know who Nelson Riddle is.’

  ‘Not many people my what?’

  ‘I don’t know. Your hat size. Do you know what it’s called?’

  ‘“Gold.” From Tone Poems of Color. Is this the album?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Then “Black” by Victor Young is next.’

  ‘I think that deserves a drink.’

  ‘Not in this hat size.’

  ‘Eighteen?’

  ‘Plus one. Still a couple of years to go.’

  ‘Well. It would have been fine in ’eighty-four, before Reagan stuck his dumb oar in. Let’s see what we can do about turning back time here.’

  With that, he got up and went outside. She heard him turning a Yale lock and running a bolt. He came back in and crossed to the bar and began mixing a shaker of martinis – Tanqueray, vermouth, cracked ice.

  ‘We’re closed for a half-hour. Is that all right with you?’

  ‘It’s fine. Except, if the cops call, it’s your fault.’

  ‘The cops won’t call. They know we run a tight ship.’

  ‘Where’s the crew?’

  ‘You’re looking at them. Danny Brogan.’

  ‘Claire Taylor.’

  ‘I saw you on campus earlier. I like your get-up.’

  ‘I like yours. You a senior?’

  ‘No, I … had a late vocation. Freshman. I think we have classes together. Here you go.’

  ‘Black’ was playing now, preposterously romantic strings that, in concert with her first sip of ice-cold dry martini, made her swoon, or at least feel as if she was swooning.

  ‘Good?’

  ‘Very good.’

  ‘Gin. With a little gin in it.’

  ‘It’s the kind of thing that might catch on.’

  They talked about Dawn Powell, and Nelson Riddle, and Preston Sturges, and Danny told her he’d show her how to mix a martini, and Claire said she was a fast learner, and a half-hour later, after Claire had learned and shaken and poured, and Danny said he had to open the bar because the after-work crowd were on their way, Claire looked at him intently until he kissed her and, kissing him back, thought either she must be in love, or drunk. As it turned out, she was both.

  The industrial estates and retail parks gave way to residential blocks as she reached the outskirts of the city, crying again, this time with a kind of sweet sadness. Where did that thing between them go? That charm, that easy desire, that lightness? From then on, Brogan’s in the afternoon had been their sanctuary, their church, their sacred place. Now, and for many years, it was where Danny worked, and where he hid from her, where she was happy to let him hide. Don’t go there, they said, holding a little back, and then a little more, until maybe each was keeping the best from each other. Don’t go there. Until one day, like the autumn leaves you’ve been tracking that suddenly vanish, leaving bare silhouettes against the sky, one day you don’t go anywhere. One day there’s nowhere left to go.

  The lunch crowd at the Twin Anchors is all a-clamor around her. She finishes the club soda and orders the Greyhound, wishing it was her second, that she could have her second drink first.

  She thinks she knows what happened to her: having failed in the theater, she thought she could return to a life of domestic tranquillity and that that would be enough. And then she was too frightened to admit that it wasn’t. (Where does the fear come from?)

  But what had happened to Danny? What kind of gnawing sense of powerlessness, of disappointment, of fear, yes, fear, had led to him losing their house? What kind of trouble is he in, and how can she help get him out of it? She stares into her drink and thinks about Jonatha
n Glatt taking their money, how all Danny did was shrug his shoulders and say he could forget about early retirement, and she said well, he didn’t play golf or sail so what was he gonna do with all that time, probably spend it in Brogan’s anyway, so he might as well be on the business end of the bar, and they both laughed, still angry and upset but secretly relieved, or so she thought, that the unspeakable prospect of Danny’s early retirement had been removed from view.

  Now she sees, because that was only six months or so ago, that Jonathan Glatt’s betrayal must have come as a total body blow to a man who was struggling to keep the house from being repossessed. Now she sees … but of course, that’s just what she doesn’t see, what she hasn’t seen: her husband, a man who can keep so much from her, who can not only remortgage a house worth, what, they had it valued just for the hell of it the last time house prices took a hike, 450 grand two or three years ago, and now that house is a month away from being sold, what the fuck kind of money trouble had Danny got himself into and how the fuck had he not betrayed a single glimmer of it to his wife? The notion that she didn’t notice a thing is a gall to her, a bitter reproach, she sees that at least, not just to her sense of herself as a wife, God knows what a hash she’s made of that in various ways, but as what she has most prized herself to be in her heart of hearts, even after she failed at it: an actor, with all the arts of observation and sensitivity, the acute awareness of mood and feeling she has cherished in herself, falsely, if as it seems the man she has been closest to her entire life stands revealed to her as a complete mystery. Who is he? She doesn’t really know.

  Here comes Paul Casey now, talking of people she doesn’t really know. She takes a hit on her drink and wonders once more if Danny had followed her to Chicago last week, or tracked her down while she was there. Had he seen her bring Paul Casey to her room? Had he seen her go to his apartment? Did he know for certain that she hadn’t slept with her ex-boyfriend? Did she even know herself? Because she had probably done stuff that nudged up against what any reasonable person would consider the married line. Had she gone further? Paul said no, and she believed him. But she couldn’t remember. And if Danny had tried to find her, for any number of legitimate reasons, and had caught the faintest whiff of what had happened, well, maybe that was what had sent him hurtling over the edge.