by Savage, Tom
“My dear, I was one of the first people in the world to do so. Fischer, Spassky, and me—they tried it out on us. And I must tell you, we always won. It’s rather boring.”
She regarded him a moment. Then she nodded. “I’d be honored—if you promise not to slaughter me.”
The old man smiled. “My dear, who on earth would want to slaughter you?”
He liked her. At the same time, he was aware of the tension, something unspoken between them. He wondered what it was.
“And now,” he said as soon as Raymond had reappeared to take away the tea tray, “a game.”
The girl immediately rose and went to get the chessboard. She lifted it slowly, carefully, and brought it over to the table. He noted how gently, almost lovingly, she set it down. He was pleased: she respected beautiful things.
She won in eleven moves.
He let her win in eleven moves.
She didn’t flatter herself: he’d carefully set it up so that she couldn’t help but win. But he looked surprised and shouted bravo, so she smiled and went along with it. When she offered to play again, he shook his head, pushed the board aside, and sat back in his chair, gazing across the table at her.
“So,” he said at last. “You’re from California. You must find the weather here dramatically different.”
“Yes. That fog yesterday—well, I’ve never been around much of that before.”
“I daresay. Did you have a horse there, or is riding a new experience, too?”
Holly grinned. “You’ve been spying on me!”
“Not really,” her great-uncle said. “I saw you from my window this morning. And yesterday morning.”
“Oh. Well, there was this ranch near us in Indio, and when I was in high school.…” She trailed off, studying him. “Ichabod, what exactly is it you want to know?”
The old man laughed. He seemed to be completely relaxed in her company now. “Checkmate, again! I saw you riding with young Jessel.”
“Yes,” she said, feeling the warmth on her cheeks. “Kevin.”
“Kevin,” he repeated. “An interesting young man—or so Raymond tells me. Yale, summa cum laude. Not bad for the chauffeur’s son. With his degrees, I’m surprised he doesn’t have some fancy job in New York or somewhere. Oh, well, he’s got his life ahead of him.…”
Holly thought about that. She’d never wondered. She didn’t even know what Kevin’s major had been. “You’ve known him all his life, I should think.”
“Not really,” he said. He waved a hand, indicating the room. “I rarely leave here. I’ve seen him around since he was tiny, but I’ve probably spoken to him a grand total of five times.” He seemed to be studying her face. “He’s very handsome, though.”
“Yes,” Holly said.
“Popular with the ladies, according to reports from below stairs.”
She shrugged. “I suppose.…”
“Do you like him?” he asked abruptly.
Holly smiled again. “Yes, I do. I like him very much.”
“Hmm. Well, be careful. You’re an heiress now, don’t forget, and a lot of people are going to come crawling out of the woodwork. And more than a few of them will be handsome young bucks like Kevin Jessel.”
Now Holly blushed. “Ichabod! You’re beginning to sound like my parents!”
He leaned back, smiling. “Forgive me, Holly. I’m a very old man. When you reach my age, you’ll have learned to come right out and say exactly what you mean. You never know how much time you have.” He took a long breath, regarding her. “And as for sounding like your parents—well, they’re gone now.”
Holly blinked. “I meant my parents in Indio. Mr. and Mrs. Smith.”
He nodded. “Ah. But they’re not your real parents.”
“No,” she agreed, “they’re not.” Now she leaned forward, studying him as he had studied her. “Do you—do you remember them?”
“Of course,” he said.
So, she thought, we’ve finally come to it. My real reason for this interview. She took a deep breath. “What were they like?”
So, he thought, we’ve finally come to it. My real reason for this interview. He took a deep breath. “I can show you what they were like. What we were all like.…”
He was aware of her watching him as he rose from his chair and went over to the crowded bookshelves near the door. He selected two of his three scrapbooks, pulled them down, and carried them back to the table. Settling into his seat again, he reached for one and opened it. He waved to her, indicating that she should get up and come around to stand beside his chair. She did.
“I have three books full of memories,” he began. “This one is the family. The one still on the shelf over there could not possibly interest you: it is about my career in chess.”
“I’d like to see it sometime,” she said. “And the third?”
He smiled at her and patted the arm of his chair. She settled down onto it. “We’ll come to that presently.” He smoothed his hand over the first page of the volume. Two wedding pictures, the one on the left extremely old and yellowed. “These are our parents, Emily’s and mine, on their wedding day. Over here we have your grandparents, Emily and James Junior.” He turned the page. “That’s all of us at Emily’s wedding reception, right here in the Great Hall. That’s your great-grandmother, Ellen, next to the bride.…”
She sat on the arm of the old man’s chair, staring at the cavalcade of images that arrived before her as the sun outside began to set and the shadows in the room lengthened. His voice continued to narrate the history.
“… and that’s your father when he was, let me see, about three, with the baby, John. Emily had just brought him home from the hospital.… A picnic in the woods near the pond, Alicia and Emily and Jimmy, your grandfather, and the two boys. See how they’d grown! Jim was about fourteen here, and John would have been eleven.… Jim’s high school graduation. How handsome he was in his cap and gown. I don’t know where Emily found that awful hat! I’m not sure who the girl is, the other graduate with Jim. He has his arm around her, so she must have been his steady at the time. Perhaps her name was Cindy, or Candy; something like that.… Here’s Jim at Yale, in his football uniform. His friend there next to him became a lawyer, I believe.…”
“Yes,” Holly said, studying the photograph. “His name is Gilbert Henderson. He’s my lawyer now. He’s the one who arranged for my adoption by the Smiths.”
Ichabod glanced up at her, then back at the album. “Fancy that! Well, anyway, he was your father’s closest friend.… Here they are, Jim and Gilbert, graduating from Yale, just before Jim went to work in the New York office of NaFCorp.…”
On it went through the years, through births and weddings and funerals, Christmases and summer outings and various parties and business functions. Alicia cutting a ribbon outside the new Randall Public Library. Holly’s grandfather, James, receiving a citation from NaFCorp. Her father and several other young people, including Gil Henderson, at what might have been a debutante ball. Two shots of her grandfather, with two successive presidents of the United States. Her grandparents and Alicia with Elizabeth Taylor and Dina Merrill, taken at the family’s house in Palm Beach. The Randalls with the Biddles. The Randalls with the Mellons. The Randalls with the Mountbattens.
At last, he turned to the final page. “And this is everyone, the whole family, at the Waldorf in New York. Jimmy and Emily and Alicia and Jim and John. I’m not in the picture because I’m up on the dais, receiving some silly thing from the International Chess Association. Lifetime Achievement, if you please!” He chuckled a moment, then his humor faded. He stared sadly down at the picture. “This was the last photo of—everyone. All together.” He sighed and closed the book.
It was now very dark in the room. Holly stood up from the arm of his chair and walked over to the window. Twilight had fallen, and the light from the downstairs windows stretched out over the lawn and the drive. Soon it would be time for dinner.
His voice continued
from the darkness behind her. “I’ve shown you all this because I wanted you to see how it was, what the Randall family once was. Before they were banished from the garden. And then, as before, it was the work of a serpent. An attractive, seductive reptile named Connie. Constance Hall.”
She looked out at the lawn, thinking, Yes.
Then his voice again, the merest whisper. “Come back to the table, Holly.”
He waited until the girl had resumed her seat on the arm of his chair. He reached up briefly and patted her arm.
“Please remember that this has nothing to do with you,” he told her. “Your father was a decent man, a kind man. But he was young, and young people sometimes make reckless decisions.”
“Yes,” the girl whispered.
He picked up the other scrapbook and opened it to the beginning. “He met her at a party, the opening night party for the off-Broadway play in which she was appearing.…”
She looked and listened. She already knew most of this story, having pieced it together from the extensive newspaper coverage she’d found in the library in Palm Springs. Rich young corporate executive with bachelor pad in Greenwich Village meets beautiful young actress. Dates. Parties. Whirlwind romance. Photographs from various gossip columns, Suzy and Cindy Adams and all the others. Jim and Connie at a restaurant. Jim and Connie on a yacht. Jim and Connie dancing. Two beautiful, blond, blue-eyed young people in love. Published rumors, from the very beginning, that the Randalls of Randall, Connecticut, were Not Amused.
She studied the woman in the pictures. Tall, slender, very pretty. Shoulder-length blond mane in a then-fashionable style made popular by some movie star. Always laughing, flashing even white teeth at the cameras. There were a couple of production shots of her onstage during a performance, in an evening gown with her hair up, holding a martini and smirking at an actor in a dinner jacket. A Playbill of the production, a revival of Private Lives by Noël Coward.
“Where did you get this?” she asked her great-uncle, pointing to the Playbill.
“When I went to see the play,” he said. “Emily and Jimmy were invited, and so was Alicia, but they all refused. They never met her. They thought she was a ‘phase.’ But I went: I always liked your father, and he was always kind to me, and I guess I’m just not a Randall. I didn’t care that he was dating an actress from Nowhere, Long Island.”
Holly nodded. “So, how was she? In the play, I mean.”
The old man shrugged. “Well, she was no Gertrude Lawrence—but she was no slouch, either. She was quite good, actually.”
Then he turned the page, and Holly felt a small shock. It was a glossy photo of her parents at City Hall, and her mother held a little bouquet in her hands. Beside them, smiling at the camera, stood John Randall and Ichabod. “You went to the wedding?”
“Of course. I was living in New York then, so I saw them a few times. I saw her in the play, and I went to the wedding, and once—no, twice—they had me over for dinner. I had them over for dinner once.”
“Did you like her?”
Ichabod looked up at her then. “I don’t know: I never really thought about it. I liked him, your father, and I was aware that he was hurt by my sister and Jimmy and Alicia, the way they ignored the situation. They never met Constance, not once. He’d really severed all ties with his family by that point. Except his brother, John, oddly enough. And me. So John and I were the relatives, you see?” He paused a moment, thinking. “But did I like her? Well, not really. She was very dramatic, very actressy, rather loud. And rather cold. She always smiled at me, but it wasn’t a real smile. And she insisted on calling me Icky, even after Jim asked her not to. I don’t think she liked me, particularly. She had a habit of—well, staring.” His right hand came up to the birthmark on his face.
“I see,” Holly said. And she did. Her mother had not been well-bred, that was certain. The steadily increasing public jokes about Ichabod’s blemish had driven him, ultimately, to life as a recluse. No, Constance didn’t sound like a nice person.
He turned another page.
Holly stared down at the yellowed clipping from the front page of the New York Post, dated April 2, twenty-four years ago. At the screaming, one-word headline:
MURDER!
There was more, much more. Headlines and articles and photographs. APRIL FOOL! Her father’s body on the floor of the bedroom in Greenwich Village, a big, dark stain on the front of his white shirt. Her mother in sunglasses, head bowed, flanked by police. THE APRIL FOOLS’ KILLER: THE JOKE’S ON HER! The funeral at the little cemetery here at Randall House, with the family and a crowd of others in black, including Gil Henderson. Her mother again, handcuffed, being helped out of the back of a van by a grim-faced woman. The lettering on the door of the van identified it as belonging to the East Side Women’s Detention Center. Another headline: CONNIE RANDALL PREGNANT WITH DEAD HUSBAND’S BABY—NO (APRIL) FOOLIN’! Editorials in the New York Times and various other papers: WOMEN AND THE DEATH PENALTY. And on and on.
Ichabod had been thorough in his collection of information. The trial came next. RANDALL TRIAL BEGINS; CONNIE SAYS, “NOT GUILTY!” … STATE ARGUES FIRST DEGREE; JUDGE KEENE UPHOLDS SECOND … “DEFENSE HAS NO CASE!” SAYS D.A.… WHERE IS CONNIE’S FAMILY? … CONNIE SOBS ON WITNESS STAND: “HE ATTACKED ME!”
There were no defense witnesses, but several for the prosecution. Maids and waiters and actors, all painting a portrait of a cold woman with an often violent temper. Slapping Jim once in a restaurant. A marital scuffle backstage at the theater. The cleaning woman who’d overheard several violent arguments in the apartment in the Village, and who’d cleaned up broken glass on more than one occasion. A fellow actress who stated that the defendant had told her more than once that she’d married James Randall III for his money. A doorman who told the court that Mr. Randall would often disappear from home “for weeks at a stretch,” during which time he frequently saw Mrs. Randall in the company of “other gentlemen.” On cross-examination, he was unable to identify any of the “other gentlemen,” but the public defender’s motion to strike the doorman’s testimony from the record was overruled.
However, the single most damning thing about the whole trial, Ichabod told her, was the absence of any family. Neither the Halls nor the Randalls ever appeared in court, and they declined to make any statements to the press. Constance’s mother would finally appear once, years later, on a national news program, denouncing her daughter as a cold-blooded killer, and blaming her for her father’s early grave.
The jury was out for less than an hour. Constance Hall Randall was found guilty of second-degree murder. She was later sentenced to life and transported from the detention center to the Kingston Women’s Correctional Facility. Two subsequent appeals were unsuccessful.
Ichabod went to Randall House to be with his sister after the murder. He had moved into this guest room, and he had never left. Emily died a year after her son.
“There was more to the Constance Randall story,” he said now. “She made headlines again, twice, while she was in prison. Fights with other inmates. One of them lost an eye, as I recall. You can imagine how that affected the parole people. She was there for nineteen years.”
“Yes,” Holly said. “And a year after she got out, she killed herself. On April Fools’ Day. I guess she at least had some kind of a sense of humor.…”
Ichabod nodded and turned to the final pages of the album. Several more clippings, ranging from the sober New York Times (CONSTANCE RANDALL DEAD, A SUICIDE) to the snide, obviously delighted tabloids (CONNIE FRIES! and JOKE’S OVER FOR THE APRIL FOOLS’ KILLER!, and even FOOLED US TWICE—SHAME ON HER!).
There were pictures of the burned seaside cottage and the covered body being loaded into an ambulance. The final picture in the album, accompanying a small notice of her burial in a Long Island cemetery, was an early publicity still. In it, her mother was once more young and blond and beautiful, grinning into the camera, without a care in the world.
Ichabod close
d the album. They sat there, he in the chair and she on the arm of it, for several moments. He reached up and took her hand in his. When he looked at her, he saw that she was staring down at the closed scrapbook.
“Why?” she whispered at last. “Why do you suppose she did it? What the hell happened?”
He squeezed her hand and shrugged. “Why, indeed? It’s a question no one has satisfactorily answered, not even the prosecutors. Not even Constance herself. She obviously had a violent nature: there is too much evidence to deny it. Too many people saw and heard things. Even if you ignore the gossipy doorman, what about the cleaning woman? And the actress, and the waiter? I hardly see it as an elaborate conspiracy. No, she and Jim had a bad relationship, that much seems clear.”
He could almost feel her confusion. “They were only married a year and a half. Eighteen months.…” She shifted on the arm of the chair, looking down at him. “Do you have a theory?”
“Yes,” he said. “I do.” He rose from the chair, pulling her up by the hand as he did so. They walked together over to the window and stood, holding hands, staring out at the dark landscape. “I think your father changed his mind. I think this young woman, this actress, met a handsome, extremely rich young man and, well, latched onto him. He was dazzled, of course, but only for a short time. He wanted to be independent: he’d already moved out of this house and taken an apartment in the city. He wanted a life apart from Randall House. I think he saw something irresistible in the concept of familial disapproval. Raising a ruckus, as we used to say. Shaking things up a bit. Emily was my sister, and I loved her more than anything, but she and Jimmy could be the most awful snobs. Your father told me once, just before the wedding, that he was rather happy about the fuss he was causing. He was—what?—thirty years old, and he’d never misbehaved before. Not once, not ever. John was always the bad boy, not Jim. I think he married her because he knew he wasn’t supposed to marry her. It was a lark, you see?”
His great-niece removed her hand from his and turned to face him. “Yes, I see. And then, afterward, when they were actually married, he …”