by Packer, Vin
“I said yes; it is!”
“Don’t shout at me, Neal. I can’t take much more!” “What’s this all about suddenly, Penny?” He put down his fork and stared at her. Her face was red; she was close to tears. “You don’t even call me endearing names any more!”
“Oh, honey—”
“That’s the first time!”
“Honey, listen, listen.” He scooted his chair over next to her. “We both feel the strain. Pen, we knew it wouldn’t be easy; we knew we’d have to go for long stretches without seeing each other, we—”
“Stretches? You mean we’ll only see each other off and on?”
“We can’t just start seeing all we want of each other, Penny.” He put his arm around her shoulders and the gesture made her burst into tears. He sat there stroking her hair, wondering what would have happened if he had called the police that Wednesday night. Could there have been a way for them to know he had not been any part of it, some advanced police technique that would have told them as much? Then it would be for her to prove her innocence, to convince them she had not laid a hand on Margaret. There would have been a scandal, yes, inevitably, but wouldn’t it have been better to have gotten it all over with?
He would have lost his job at Rock-Or, no doubt; Doubleday would probably have disassociated themselves from him; but there would be no necessity to continue living this lie with Penny, no necessity to have to touch her. Good God, he could never touch her that way again, could he? Never. He could barely caress her now, when his life depended on it. He was stricken with disgust at the shoddiness of the scene, and the feeling of her warm tears running down his fingers as he lifted her face to his was as repugnant to him as if they were urine.
“Honey, look at me.”
“What?” she said weakly.
“I want you to be strong for me. I want you to promise me you’ll get hold of yourself for me. You’re important to me, honey. Don’t you know how important you are to me,” he intoned, “how much it means to me that you’re safe and happy? What’s this whole thing about, if it isn’t about that, hmmm? Don’t you understand how I feel about you?”
“Do you love me, Neal?”
“Oh, Pen, don’t you know?”
“Yes, but, I like it if you say it,” she said sniffling. She wiped away her tears with her knuckle, and the black mascara was smudged down her cheek. “I love you,” he said.
“I bought you a birthday cake and you said you didn’t want any dessert,” she whined. “Didn’t you think I’d buy you a birthday cake?”
“I didn’t think, honey. Thank you for going to the trouble.”
“You see what I mean?” she whimpered. “We’re so darn formal with each other, like don’t thank me for going to the trouble. A lover does that for her lover’s birthday, Neal.”
“You’re just very sensitive, Pen. Maybe I’m not sensitive enough, but I appreciate it, honey. I really do.”
She took the paper napkin from her lap and blew her nose with it.
“And I bought you a record,” she said. “Classical. Because I know you like that type music.”
He forced himself to press his lips against her forehead.
She said, “I bought you Claire de Lune. Do you have it?”
“No, I don’t. Oh, honey, that was very sweet of you. You shouldn’t have done that.”
She began to cry all over again.
“Why are you crying, Pen?”
“A lover buys her lover a birthday gift, Neal, don’t you know that?”
“I’m glad you did it, Penny. I’ve always liked Claire de Lune.”
“There are other things on the record, too,” she managed, trying to get control of herself. “It’s a long-playing classical.” She blew her nose again, and her moist left hand clutched at Neal’s. “You do love me, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Because I have to tell you something.” “What?”
“I don’t know what you’re going to say, so I’m afraid.”
“Try me,” he said. “Oh, honey, you don’t have to be afraid of telling me anything. We don’t have secrets, Pen. My God, we can’t have secrets from each other.” He gave her shoulder a gentle squeeze. “Just tell me, Pen; don’t worry about it.”
“Neal?”
“What?”
“Neal, I’m two weeks late getting my period.”
• • •
He ran two lights in Nyack, after he left the Grand Union parking lot. He had planned to buy Archie a birthday gift of some kind before he returned to the clinic, and automatically he headed toward the shopping center on the outskirts of Nyack. But he could not think of anything now except what Penny had just told him. He wondered if he was going to have to pull over and vomit, and he thought of just putting his foot all the way to the floor on the gas pedal and letting the Volkswagen smash into the truck ahead of him.
Tears stung his eyes. His mind was tortured with the certain notion that it could not be true and could not be happening to him, and yet it was true, it had happened, and for the first time since that Wednesday night when he had put Margaret into the ground the way someone would bury a dog, the enormity of what he had done hit him full force.
At the shopping center he pulled into an empty space, cut the ignition, and sat there holding himself like a small boy with a bellyache. His hands shook so that he could not light a cigarette, and he threw the last cigarette in his package away.
What he needed was a drink.
He got out of the car and walked aimlessly up toward the road, looking for a bar. There was no bar nearby; he knew it, and he retraced his steps, wondering if he could still drive. His knees seemed to want to give, and he coughed back what came out like a sudden sob.
A drink, or he would just let go everything.
Then he remembered that there was a bar in the bowling alley next to the A&P.
Inside, Neal ordered himself a double Jack Daniels. He drank it in one gulp, caught his breath, and directed the bartender to pour another.
—I don’t believe in abortion, Neal. It’s taking a life.
—What about Margaret’s life?
—That was an accident!
—And if you’re pregnant, what’s that?
The whiskey began to restore him. He was able to remember the times Margaret’s period had come late and it hadn’t meant anything.
He gave himself back all the rules for staving off panic which he had presented to his patients at the clinic.
Number One: Get your bearings; where are you?
He heard the thunder of the bowling balls streaking down to clatter against the pins.
He heard the noise of the jukebox and recognized The Doors singing “Hello, I love you, won’t you tell me your name?”
The bartender set the second drink before him.
He started to pick it up when he saw a familiar face.
It was Linda Chayka, the waitress from the diner where he stopped some mornings for breakfast. She was a dumpy brunette in a tight sweater, the sort who managed to work sex into a simple hello at seven in the morning.
She waved at Neal and Neal waved back.
She looked as though she were going to join him.
Finish the drink and leave.
He couldn’t do it all at once as he had with the first one. He took a breath, and while he waited to have the second gulp, Linda Chayka began walking toward him. Her breasts bobbed under her orange sweater; a man at the other end of the bar gave a low whistle and she blushed with gratitude.
Neal tossed down the rest of the whiskey and slapped four dollars down on the bar. “Hello, Dr. Dana.” “Hi, Linda.” “What’s your hurry?”
“I have to get back to work.”
He gave her a little two-fingered salute of farewell, noticing as he did the very ample bosom Linda had thrust near his coat. “So long.” He smiled, noticing the gold pin attached to her orange sweater, a Zodiac pin id
entical to the one Margaret had been buried wearing.
Was it an illusion, his mind playing tricks?
He pushed through the door, out into the fresh air.
Was that to be the next step in this deadly game: fanciful reminders of Margaret?
But the whiskey said calmly, why wouldn’t two women from the same town buy the same kind of pin?
Astrology was in, wasn’t it?
Wasn’t that fact the reason for all of it?
CHAPTER 14
Tiffany, the Siamese, sat on Neal’s lap and watched the bubbles in Neal’s glass of champagne with calculating crossed eyes.
Archie Gamble and Neal were comparing notes on their childhood.
Before coming here, Neal had stopped at the police precinct on River Road and reported Margaret’s “disappearance” to Tom Baird. The officer had taken down the pertinent information, but Neal had been surprised by the faint smile on Tom’s face. Neal and Margaret had never known the policeman well, but he had stopped by their house on a few occasions and had drinks with them, while he warned them against burning anything outdoors during dry spells or questioned them about hunters who poached in the woods.
What had moved him to smile? Had he decided that Margaret had left Neal after an inconsequential family squabble, or was he one of those people who suffered from “pathognomic parapraxis”—an inability to keep a straight face upon hearing of someone else’s misfortune?
He had smiled. Neal mulled it over in his mind as Archie Gamble described his father’s tyranny. Neal half-listened and thought vaguely of his own father. He had hated him every bit as much as Archie claimed to despise his, but the tyranny was of a different sort, the worst kind: the tyranny of the weak. Norman Dana had been a big, muscular, table-pounding job-jumper whose rages were invariably followed by self-pitying tears and meaningless wails of mea culpa. He would actually get down on his knees and weep into his wife’s lap; Neal’s mother treated him like a little boy she had always to forgive for being naughty.
Neal had to force himself to keep up his end of the conversation.
He said, “I was terrible at all sports. I loved long-hair music; my friends were bespectacled library-goers, and my father had a habit of calling me ‘Cornelia.’ “ (—Son, will you forgive Daddy for that? Oh, Daddy’s so bad!)
“My girlhood wasn’t much different,” Archie chuckled. “I always had my nose in a book, hated football and baseball, and loved opera. My old man once said he wouldn’t hit me because he didn’t hit girls.”
Neal and Archie laughed and so did Mrs. Muckermann. Dru was in the kitchen slamming dishes around furiously, still in a fit over Anna Muckermann’s surprise visit. A friend on her way to Tarrytown had deposited Mrs. Muckermann on the Gambles’ doorstep in Piermont. Dru had no alternative but to ask her to join the birthday party. Mrs. Muckermann had remembered that they had decided to have the party on Saturday night instead of the following Tuesday, which was the actual birthday, so she had arrived with gift-wrapped presents for both Archie and Neal.
Mrs. Muckermann said, “You see? You are typical time twins; you have a great deal in common! And you’re both typical Geminis with Taurus rising.”
Archie said, “Hi there, TV viewers. I want you to meet my athtro-twin. Ithn’t he marvy? As boys, we were thimply thickening thissies!”
“The interest in music, of course, is the Taurine influence,” said Mrs. Muckermann.
“That’s right,” Archie said. “That famous pianist, Harry Truman, is a Taurus.”
Mrs. Muckermann regarded him with cold eyes. “Brahms was a Taurus,” said she, “and Sullivan of Gilbert and Sullivan, Nellie Melba, and Irving Berlin. Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby, and Perry Como are all Taureans, too.”
“So is that distinguished politician, Shirley Temple,” Archie added, getting up to pour more Piper.
Had Tom Baird somehow heard the reason for Margaret’s absence three years ago? It was unlikely; everyone but Neal’s close friends had thought she was in Bucks County looking after her mother, who was convalescing from an illness.
Since Margaret’s death, Neal had often found himself wondering how life would have seemed to him if it were really true that Margaret had simply disappeared. Cold. Populated with the likes of a Cliff Bates who hadn’t even bothered to discuss it at length with Neal or to ask Neal to come to brunch anyway, and with a police officer who smiled … smiled when Neal announced he had no clue to Margaret’s possible whereabouts. And the Gambles? Neal had told them over the telephone last night that he was going to the police. Archie had all but dismissed the subject, murmuring something about such things happening “to the best of us.”
How could the Gambles presume to know what had happened between Neal and Margaret? Did they imagine that Margaret would actually run off without a word over a silly argument concerning the show?
All of it was such an injustice to Margaret! She had deserved better than that! She had been such a good woman, trying eternally to improve herself, going to so much trouble every day to make life gracious, meaningful. God, and to have it be someone like Penny Bissel who would strike her down—Neal was convinced of that now; Margaret had not hit Penny.
It was Margaret who had been unable to finish what she was saying: “Face what you are! Cheap, CHE—”
Yes. Cheap!
How could he not have seen that from the beginning? How could he have missed the way Penny began every sentence with “Like,” the way she picked at hangnails and let her tongue root around her teeth to wipe away food particles when she finished eating, the way she left the bathroom door open when she was on the toilet, the way she pinned a ripped seam in a dress instead of sewing it, and her habit of combing her hair constantly: on the street, in restaurants, even immediately after lovemaking—her perpetual fixation with her hair, and that particularly stupid expression which came over her face as she jerked the comb up and down, like someone priming a pump.
And now Penny was two weeks late … now there was a very good possibility that she was carrying Neal Dana’s child. Carrying a motive for Neal Dana’s murder of his wife.
• • •
“Your lack of interest in sports is consistent with the Taurine inertia,” Mrs. Muckermann was saying as she unwrapped a stick of Juicy Fruit. “Taurus is a slow, bovine sign; Taurean children are often dreamers. Introspective. I can see where the males might be considered slightly sissified as youngsters. Rudolph Valentino was a Taurus. Henry Fonda is. Tyrone Power was, and James Mason is.”
“Freud was, too,” Archie Gamble said. “But Neal and I are Geminis, remember?”
“Geminis with Taurus rising,” said Mrs. Muckermann, popping the gum into her mouth. “Taurus is a decided influence.”
Neal glanced down at the cat hairs accumulating on his brown slacks and pushed Tiffany off his lap. Margaret had never liked cats after she had seen one kill a baby sparrow … Neal didn’t see how he could give Sinister away. He sat there remembering the way Margaret had put all her maternal energies into looking after the bird. He wretchedly recalled his inertia over their vague plans for looking into the possibility of adopting a child. It hadn’t been Margaret’s idea, it had been Neal’s, and she hadn’t pushed it, but why hadn’t he been sensitive enough to her needs to encourage it? What kind of barren, ungratifying existence had he forced on her? How bravely and thoughtfully she had tried to make the best of it! And he had dared to cross off her interest in subjects like astrology as hogwash, just as though Neal Dana knew wiser ways to come to grips with the monotony of life.
The champagne was reaching him; he called out in his mind for Margaret to forgive him, and guiltily he envisioned her there with him, enjoying this discussion of astrology, punishing himself with the knowledge of how it would please her.
As though she were reading his mind, Mrs. Muckermann inquired, “What sign is your wife, Neal?”
“Virgo.”
“Yes, well, the Taurean side of your nature probably doesn’t like the critica
l character of Virgo … but Gemini is ruled by Mercury, as Virgo is: you both enjoy people; you’re both outgoing. Of course, Virgo’s a little more realistic.” Then she said, “Has Archie shown you his chart and explained it to you? The same things would apply to you, of course.”
“I’ve been sparing him that,” said Archie.
“You really should look at it,” Mrs. Muckermann told Neal. “King Lear once remarked, ‘The stars above govern our conditions.’ “
Archie said, “He made that remark to Shakespeare, didn’t he?”
She ignored the sarcasm and continued. “But I favor a philosophy that believes we can work with our stars to change our conditions.”
“The fool is ruled by his stars, the wise man rules his stars, is that it?” Neal said.
Mrs. Muckermann said flatly, “No … You never rule your stars, my dear Neal: you work with your stars. And you must know what to be wary of, what aspects to watch, good and bad.”
Archie was rolling his eyes back in his head, and holding his palms up in his lap in a “what do you do?” gesture.
“Oh, I know Archie’s making faces behind my back,” Mrs. Muckermann said, “and since you’re his astro-twin, Neal, you’re probably highly skeptical, too, but it’s for your own good that I warn you.”
“Warn me?” Neal said.
“You’re very badly aspected right now.”
• • •
But it was not until Dru had served the moules marinières, French rolls, and romaine and onion salad, that Mrs. Muckermann really got rolling. She was drinking champagne with the meal as fast as Archie could pour it, and she was monopolizing the conversation, leaving no doubt in anyone’s mind that Saturn’s malignant influence was “probably already” affecting Neal’s and Archie’s lives. She dragged in the moon-Mars square again, rode hard on all the oppositions being stimulated, and paused only long enough to advise Dru that she had not chopped the garlic for the moules fine enough.
“I just swallowed quite a sliver of it,” she cackled. “You’ll all pay tomorrow.”