“Did you take their car?” Agent Kaplan interrogated the man.
“Yo, wussup wid dis. You ain’t no po-lice.”
“That’s true,” Agent Kaplan said. “So when I put the muzzle of this nine between your little buns and pull the trigger, you won’t be able to call it police brutality. Think you can remember where that car is now?”
“Yeah.”
He was led off with three PAs to find it. At the same time, his taller colleague was carried out of the building horizontally in a latex bag on a stretcher.
Meanwhile, Maggie had ascended to the Masonic sanctum above. Flashlights cut through the dense, fetid air like knives through dirty gelatin. One addict kneeled on all fours vomiting onto the floor. The lights revealed another lying where she had been strangled hours earlier by the man with whom she had conceived a child that would never enter this world. A few others were too weak or too drunk-stoned-smacked-and-cracked to move. Then there was Lindy.
She lay in her stinking quilt panting and spasming, the result of one last speedball of the poorest quality, more methadrine and animal tranquilizer than true crank, with some toilet cleanser tossed in for good measure.
“Oh, dearest one.” Maggie fell at her side, ignoring the stench. “Just hang on. Hang on to life. We’re here now.”
Lindy tried to speak, but the sounds were not really words, and frothy bubbles were forming on her lips.
“She could go into arrest any moment,” said one Agent Grimsby, who had been a medic in the Kazakhstan airport hostage incident of the previous summer in which nine U.S. Marines had been gassed.
“Okay, let’s get a stretcher up here, pronto,” said Hayward, who knelt beside Maggie and held her shoulders. In less than a minute six agents were carrying Lindy double-time up Bovington Street, back toward the waiting helicopter in the police parking lot. Then, suddenly, magically, they were aloft, swinging up, up over the wounded city, up over the golden dome of the state house, over the empty factories and the forgotten lives, and all that forsaken Yankee heritage, up and away, until the tattered cityscape and its asteroid belt of malls and parking lots gave way to soft green woods and a tender patchwork of summer fields and pastures. As they rose higher in the sky, the temperature dropped until it was actually chilly in the shuddering barn of the huge chopper’s cabin. Walter held the saline bag of Lindy’s hydration IV. As the revivifying fluid entered her struggling cells, she tried to speak again. This time, words came out. Maggie had to hold her ears to Lindy’s cracked, peeling lips to hear through the horrible machine hubbub of the aircraft.
“I’m f-f-f-freezing,” Lindy said.
“We’ll be at the hospital real soon,” Maggie assured her and pulled the Mylar emergency blanket up around Lindy’s ears.
“Rem-m-m-m-member that first week of … s-s-s-s-school?” Lindy said.
“I do, dearest. Like it was yesterday.”
“You … you b-b-b-baked a b-b-b-birthday cake for … for K-K-K-Katie Spofford in my … my … my toaster oven?”
“Yes, I remember, Lindy. It was a lady cake.”
“L-l-l-lady cake,” Lindy repeated. A smile played across her face, momentarily erasing all the sickness and agony of recent months. “I th-th-th-thought, this chick is a p-p-p-perfect fucking angel. The f-f-f-future seemed im-m-m-mense. I r-r-r-remember what it was like to want … want … to l-l-l-live.”
“You’re going to live. You’re already getting better.”
“B-b-b-but I don’t want to.”
“Don’t say that.”
“It’s t-t-t-too fucking d-d-d-difficult.”
“It only seems that way because you’re unhappy.”
“No. No, you don’t understand. Th-th-th-this is the secret of life. I s-s-s-see it now. Some p-p-p-people are good at it. You’re g-g-g-good at it. I’m just t-t-t-taking up space with m-m-m-my stupid p-p-p-problems.”
“You’ll get over them. You can be happy. I swear.”
“No. I’m n-n-n-no fucking g-g-g-good at this. Y-y-y-you live for me, Maggie.”
Tears ran down her face and dripped onto Lindy’s.
“Tell you w-w-w-what.”
“What, dearest Lindy?”
“I’ll g-g-g-go up to … to heaven and t-t-t-turn down the sheets for you. It’s the … the least I c-c-can do to … to repay all your … k-k-k-kindness.” Suddenly, Lindy’s mouth drew into a rictus and her eyes bulged. A great spasmic shudder rocked her and a strange rattling noise issued from deep within.
“Oh, Lindy,” Maggie howled. Walter put down the saline bag and came around the stretcher to take Maggie in his arms. She resisted for a moment and then yielded, feeling as she sank against his strong, dense frame like a small furry animal who had come home to a familiar place beneath a great sheltering oak tree after a terrifying journey in a strange land.
Agent Grimsby muscled in to attempt CPR, but Lindy failed to respond, did not come back, would not come back.
“It’s a damn shame,” Hayward reflected, turning to watch the astounding spires of Manhattan appear at the horizon in the syrupy summer twilight. “Funny, though,” he continued, speaking to no one in particular, “I have a lot of hope for mankind. Didn’t used to but I do now, despite all I’ve seen, all I know. A strange feeling has come over me lately. I’m convinced that a new day is at hand. We won’t all get there, but some of us will. Those of us who would be saved have to save ourselves. If I ever wrote a book—and I just might do it—that would be the moral of the story. It would also be nice if everybody lived happily ever after. Who knows? This is a mysterious universe. Anything’s possible. Even happiness.”
Epilogue
Noel
The winter solstice of that year brought viewers of the Family TV Cable Network “A Maggie Darling Christmas,” taped in the ballroom of the house at Kettle Hill Farm on a snowy night that could not have been more perfectly New England. Public opinion had swung back Maggie’s way at the end of this annus horribilis. On the eve of jury selection for the Merritt Parkway sniper trial, it was announced that defendant Kenneth Darling had signed a deal with Apex Communications—parent company of Trice and Wanker Publishers—for a tell-all book about his twenty-year-marriage to the goddess of hearth and home. He hated to do it, Connie McQuillan reported in People magazine, but there was no other way to cover his lawyers’ fees. (Ms. McQuillan, incidentally, was not among the 214 guests invited to the taping of “A Maggie Darling Christmas,” nor for all Christmases to come so long as there is a Christmas.)
It happened that Maggie had seen a Xerox copy of Kenneth’s book proposal—she still had friends in the employ of Trice and Wanker, though it was no longer her publisher—and it was a pitifully composed semiliterate pack of lies involving stock pornographic fantasies of the most puerile kind and wild accusations of Maggie’s infidelity with everyone from Mr. Steve Eddy of Hollywood, California, to the vice president of the United States. In fact, it was such a meretricious bundle of self-evident absurdity that Maggie deemed it beneath her dignity to even bring suit against her former husband, who, in any case, stood to forfeit his life on the alter of justice for the deliberate murder of twelve Connecticut citizens.
Besides the scurrilous Ms. McQuillan and the dastardly Kenneth, a number of other personalities present at the previous Christmas Feast for Two Hundred either could not come or were not invited to return. Frederick Swann was in London preparing for the December 25 opening of Starvation, Franz Tesla’s $165 million vampire epic. The stakes were so high that Basilisk Pictures had to sink $40 million into advertising and promotion alone. The showbiz grapevine had it that the movie was an unspeakable abortion. Swann himself was said to have shown promise as an actor but had forsworn any future roles because of the hardships of life on a movie set—all that waiting around, the fussing of the makeup artists, the gaffers’ never-ending technical boo-boos, the extreme boredom of it all, not to mention the travail of dealing with such monsters of egotism as Tesla. Swann told Rolling Stone magazine that he was
happier singing his “little ditties,” as he called them, and playing a benefit concert once a year for Her Majesty.
Harold Hamish would not have been invited to the party taping even if he had not suffered the misfortune of being clipped in the groin by the mirror of a speeding gypsy cab in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral the week after Thanksgiving. In any case, he could watch “A Maggie Darling Christmas” on TV, if inclined, from his hospital bed at Columbia Presbyterian, where he was still recovering from penile reattachment surgery.
Leonard Moile would have been invited, but an aortic embolism intervened in September of the year and his ashes had since been scattered around the kelp-carpeted rocks of his beloved summerhouse in Bar Harbor.
Fedo Prado, of the New York City Ballet, was prevented from attending by the AIDS virus. Lucius Milstein had taken his own life (asphyxiation by oven à la Sylvia Plath) after being described as “an arrant fraud” in the New Yorker’s coverage of the Whitney Biennial. Milstein had long been considered mentally unstable and had threatened to kill himself so many times before that even his art dealer laughed at his continual threats. The morning after his body was found in his West Broadway loft, the price of his fraudulent paintings quadrupled.
Of course, Maggie’s mother, Irene, and stepfather, Charlie, were not there because Maggie detested them—guilty as this made her feel.
Nina Stegman had returned to the fold, no longer as an employee but as a dear friend who was now the proprietor of a fabulously successful seafood restaurant, Nautilus, on the sound in Fairfield. And where would she be found this evening, in the hour of pre-party culinary-preparation panic? But, of course: in the kitchen, helping to mount the angels on their savory horsebacks and test the hams and taste the plum puddings and whisk the hard sauce and generally to lend a hand to Rosie Bly, the formerly pink-haired, former Columbus Avenue shop clerk who had so impressed Maggie with her poise and self-possession that she had given her a chance to run the Kettle Hill Farm kitchen. Rosie had proven herself magnificently in the months that followed Lindy Hagan’s tragic departure from this world.
With regard to Lindy, there was the matter of Buddy Hagan, lately of Hollywood, California: upon learning that he was, in fact, HIV-negative, he had moved to a Benedictine monastery in Novato, taken the vows, given away his house, his Mercedes, his cell phone, and everything except his Montblanc Diplomat pen, and had rededicated his life to the service of Christ and mankind.
Lawrence Hayward was fully a hundred pounds heavier than he was at Christmas a year ago.
Not invited under any circumstances, and no longer present in this world of sin, either (but of some account to this narrative), were members of the Businessmen’s Lunch Posse, aka the entertainers Chill Az Def. They had been gunned down in an ambush laid jointly by the FBI, DEA, and ATF, who, having received a tip about an upcoming caper at Bouley Bakery on Halloween Day, had arranged to pose as customers and staff in an attempt to entrap the bandits. In the course of the operation, Murphy’s law had asserted itself, resulting in the death of one ATF agent and all members of the posse. The rights to their life stories were purchased by the Disney Corporation, which planned to make an animated feature and a line of children’s action figures based on their “hip-hop Robin Hood” exploits. Their sudden demise—and the secrets that died with them—permitted Hooper Darling to return from exile in Rome, where he had settled in a garret behind the Piazza Navona and spent half the year sketching the classical orders and antiquities in preparation for the architecture program at Notre Dame.
Having been home for a month now, Hooper was therefore on hand for the Christmas festivities this enchanted evening and was very much occupied by the alluring Sarah Jane Fayerwether, who had become a production assistant for Maggie Darling’s newest venture, the Maggie Darling Way, a monthly magazine of recipes, domestic crafts, and gardening that was an instant runaway hit at the airport newsstands, with a circulation of just under one million after four months of operation. Hooper and Sarah Jane made a lovely picture, full of vitality, promise, beauty, and gravitas. Something equally felicitous could be said for Sarah Jane’s father, Walter Fayerwether, and Hooper’s mom, Maggie Darling, only the picture of them was not a figurative but a literal one— composed and shot this holiday evening by Reggie Chang as they stood hand in hand beside the glowing hearth in the music room, in those magically fraught moments of anticipation when everything that could possibly be looked after had been looked after, before the first guests arrived.
By Columbus Day, Walter had given up the pretense of keeping a domicile of his own and moved into the mistress’s house (and bedchamber) at Kettle Hill Farm. He still supervised the gardens, but he was now Maggie’s business manager as well, and it was he who held chief responsibility for organizing the new magazine and hiring its staff, negotiating the twenty-six-weeks-per-year Wednesday feature appearance of Maggie Darling on Good Morning America (at a cozy $3.4 million a year), and licensing the Maggie Darling line of kitchenware to Neiman Marcus and the signature apparel line to the Gap. The divorce from Kenneth would be granted around Valentine’s Day, whether he was sentenced to lethal injection or not, and there were intimations around Kettle Hill Farm of an upcoming nuptial event in the springtime.
The state of the nation early in the twenty-first century could be described as precarious but holding. The Pacific Northwest had not yet seceded, despite the best efforts of the radical ecologists. Boston was the hot new city. San Francisco’s stock was decidedly down after another earthquake (moderate: 5.1 on the Richter scale). Los Angeles was a hopeless ethnic war zone. The Biscayne aquifer was drowning in salt water as the ocean’s level rose with global warming; Florida’s coast would soon be uninhabitable. Atlanta was choking on its car traffic. The Hanta virus replaced AIDS as the most lethal contagious disease in the U.S., with severe outbreaks in Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Albuquerque. The Miss America Pageant was discontinued. The New York Yankees were sold to Madonna and took up residence in a brand-new ballpark on 125th Street. The St. Louis Rams moved to Salt Lake City. The cuisine of the decade was Tibetan (“Chinese done by the Scots,” quipped Maureen Dowd in the Times).
More than this it would be unfair to reveal, except to say that the human race’s indefatigable resilience allowed us, even in the most trying of times, to carry forward the difficult enterprise of civilization.
Maggie Darling Page 28