Wit's End

by Karen Joy Fowler

  The pianist was playing “Blue Skies” and pretending that someone, anyone, was listening, despite the hubbub of voices and the clinking of bottles and glasses. She wore a sleeveless black sheath and had a spray of white flowers pinned into her wild, curly hair. “Blue Skies” gave way to “Blue Moon” gave way to “Love Walked In.” Rima was good at identifying songs, even those popular long before she was born. But then she heard something that stumped her, though in another context she might have thought it was Kelis’s “Milkshake,” a song she knew because of all the times she’d heard it in the school yard and had to pretend it had no sexual subtext of any kind.

  By now she’d already tasted the Blanc de Blancs. She’d had a pleasant exchange with a middle-aged couple from Kentucky who said they came every year and shipped wine home by pretending it was vinegar. Apparently there were states you could ship wine to and states that you couldn’t, but vinegar could be shipped absolutely anywhere, which the couple thought made no sense at all, as so many people preferred wine to vinegar.

  Rima couldn’t quite see the outrage, but she shook her head disbelievingly to be polite.

  Their server was a cheerful hippie with large brown eyes, a braid down her back, and moon earrings, the full moon in one lobe, a crescent in the other. Her name was Fiona. What were the chances, Rima asked, that they might see the ghost today?

  None at all. There was no ghost, Fiona said, though the winery had once made a Syrah-Zinfandel blend and called it Pierre’s Ghost after the winery’s founder, so maybe this had caused the confusion. She consulted briefly with another server, a chubby man in a blue Hawaiian shirt who looked too young to be pouring wine, but presumably wasn’t. He said he’d heard there was a haunted winery somewhere around Livermore. Footsteps, windows open when they’d been left shut, the air in the room suddenly cold—that sort of thing. No actual sightings, which would have been so, so much cooler. If there’d been sightings, then he’d be working there instead of here.

  Martin shrugged and changed the subject. He seemed untroubled to find he’d lured Rima with the promise of ghosts he was in no position to deliver. His sunglasses were pushed to the top of his head; his nose was in his wineglass. “Raisins?” he said to Fiona.

  “Very good,” Fiona told him.

  Had Martin just been complimented for guessing that the wine was made of grapes? It appeared that way to Rima. The piano switched to “The Streets of Laredo.” Martin reached over and took Rima’s hand.

  Rima took it back. “Martin,” she said, but he’d already flushed, bright, distinct patches on his cheeks as if she’d slapped him. “I’m not in any shape for that. I’m not even missing that right now,” she told him. “I’m too old for you.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Whatever. One reason’s plenty. Don’t take my head off.” He emptied what was left of his Pinot Noir into the dump bucket, returned the glass to the counter. “How about a Chardonnay?” he asked Fiona, and even though it was backward, going from red to white that way, Fiona said sure, they had one, which she poured, and pointed out its many notes and undertones, berries and chocolate and pudding and tomato sauce or something; Rima wasn’t really listening, she was too embarrassed.

  But this was good, really, Rima told herself. Good to get it out in the open and avoid confusion. Still, very awkward.

  Or maybe not. Martin was already flirting with Fiona, telling her there should be a wine named for her, something light and fresh-tasting. It was angry flirting, but Rima liked him for the effort. This seemed to be the pattern with Martin—she liked him and then she didn’t like him and then she liked him. Not liking him would come next. She had only to wait.

  The truly awkward part was that Rima wanted Martin to do something for her, and it wasn’t an ordinary something, like drive her to the airport or pick up her mail while she went on a trip. It was something requiring not only a request but an explanation as well. And after he’d done that, she still needed him to drive her back and stay for dinner and be nicer to his mother. It was quite a list. She started at the top. “What I really need,” she began, “is a little brother.”

  “So flattering, and yet no, thanks.” Martin swirled the golden wine in his glass and sniffed at it. “Too late to start sharing Mother’s love.”

  “All you have to do,” Rima said in her nicest voice, “is tell a bunch of lies to someone I’ve never met.” She felt how wrong this was as she said it, a bad idea, a bad thing to be talking Martin into.

  Right would have been Oliver’s talking Rima into it. Rima liked it so much better when she got to express her strong objections, go along reluctantly, predicting the worst, and then find herself completely validated when the worst happened. She was still certain the worst would happen, but now she didn’t get to say so and turn out to be right. Now Martin got to do that part. Martin had been training for that part his whole life.

  Rima had never appreciated how hard it was to be Oliver. “It’ll be fun,” she said, which was what Oliver always said, but he probably believed it when he said it. Oliver had an expansive idea of fun.

  Fiona brought a dessert wine. Something about it—Rima didn’t hear what, because Fiona was hardly bothering to talk to her now; it was all about Martin—made it just right for the holidays. Two men had replaced the couple from Kentucky at the counter. “My cat likes wine,” one said to other. “But only the good stuff.”

  “That’s a cat for you,” the second man said. The pianist was playing “The Wanderer,” hitting the notes hard to rock them out. “What’s your cat’s name again?”

  “I can fill you in while we drive,” Rima said.

  Martin looked straight at her, moving his sunglasses from the top of his head to his eyes so she couldn’t see in anymore, his face blank behind the lenses. His hair fell forward and he brushed it back. “So where are we going? Where is this person you never met?” he asked. The question had undertones of raspberries in it.

  (4)

  They missed Holy City Art Glass on their first pass. It was a low-slung building set into a deep curve on the road with no prominent sign and no prominent address and almost nothing but trees around it. Coming back from the east, Martin spotted the name in the window and pulled into the parking lot. Across the old highway, behind a screen of birches, Rima could see part of a decaying house that had once been painted white with maybe a green trim on the windows. Next to that, an empty lot with the brick foundations of a vanished building.

  The door to the Holy City Art Glass company led into a studio, an open-beamed workshop with long tables on which several projects were in process. The windows were coated with dust, and the place smelled of wood chips and blowtorches. A man was bent over one of the tables, matching pieces of glass to a paper pattern of a mermaid under a low-hanging fluorescent. “Can I help you?” he asked without looking up. He had a bald spot on the top of his head, but he was so tall that normally no one would see this. Rima guessed he was in his forties or fifties.

  “Are you Andrew Sheridan?” Rima asked.

  “Last I looked.”

  To the left of the worktable was an open door into a second room. Rima could see through to shelves of Christmas ornaments, vases, and many rows of glass pumpkins, some orange, some purple, some mottled like pebbles. One of the larger ones was a Cinderella carriage with gold wheels, but no horses and no footmen.

  “I got your letter,” Martin said. “About Constance Wallace.”

  “Wellington,” said Rima.

  Martin held out his hand. The man took it, looking up at them for the first time. He was wearing a green shirt that advertised his own shop, and there was an old scar, barely visible, along the bone beneath one of his eyes.

  “I’m Rima,” Rima said. She gestured toward Martin. “This is Maxwell Lane.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  (1)

  Andrew Sheridan released Martin’s hand. “You have the same name as that detective. That’s got to be weird.” “Named after,” said Martin. “Take it up w
ith my mom.”

  Sheridan stood for a moment, looking him over. “How old are you?” he asked. “You don’t look old enough to have known Constance.”

  “Thank you,” said Martin, which Rima thought was pretty good, and probably what Oliver would have said.

  Maxwell Lane dealt with doubt by silence. Let the suspect talk himself through it, Maxwell said. Just keep your eyes directly on his, don’t blink, and wait him out.

  But Oliver advocated meeting doubt with effusion. Rima put herself between Sheridan and Martin. “Constance was my grand-mother’s cousin,” she said. “I’m the one who asked Maxwell to write. I’m putting together a family history, just for us, you know, not to publish or anything, and I wanted to include Constance. I didn’t even know she was dead. Because of the cult thing. The family didn’t talk much about her. Could you tell me about her? And Holy City?” While she was talking, Rima had made her way into the back room. “Did you make these pumpkins?” she asked. “I’d love one as a memento. Are they for sale?”

  Sheridan was suddenly enthusiastic, not on the subject of the pumpkins, to which he barely responded, but on the subject of Holy City. He said they should call him Andy. “I only got here after it closed,” Andy said. “Riker’d been dead for years. But Constance told me a lot.”

  Andy took them to the back wall where he’d stapled a bunch of newspaper clippings, since they weren’t the first to come asking. He opened a drawer and drew out a folder of photographs so they could see how the buildings used to crowd this curve of the street, and where the billboards used to be. “William E. Riker,” read one. “The only man who can keep California from going plum to Hell.”

  “Where we are now, this used to be the post office,” Andy said, passing over a photo of the old interior. Rima looked at it closely. It was larger and more stately than the present building suggested. Just beneath a soaring ceiling was a mural depicting Jesus, William Riker next to him, and next to William Riker someone Rima couldn’t identify. She pointed to him.

  “Maurice Kline,” said Andy. “Holy City’s Jewish Messiah. Until he sold the property.”

  The final photo showed the eatery. Its flat roof was lined with Santa Clauses, and these were Santa Clauses Rima recognized. Currently, they were up in Addison’s attic, or else those there were identical to these here. This startled her so much that she missed part of what Andy was saying, something about the pamphlets and how Father Riker couldn’t spell worth a damn.

  From the same drawer, Andy pulled a mimeo of the minutes from a meeting in which the governing board of Holy City removed Father Riker as its head (only Riker voting to the contrary) because he was running for governor and the rest of them believed in the separation of church and state. In the unlikely event that he lost the governorship, he was to be automatically reinstated at Holy City. The minutes had been submitted and signed by Constance Wellington, recording secretary.

  Andy also showed them a recent map of the property lines done by the real estate company that was handling the current sale.

  Then, “Come with me,” Andy said, and he took them out the front, down the steps, and around the back of the building. They passed through a wire gate, walking over a track so wet that Rima’s sneakers were soon heavy with mud. Farther on, the track dipped; the mud turned into a spongy layer of pine needles, and then they were standing in the same ring of redwoods, the same hollowed-out bowl of grass where, in a different season, in a different time, Father Riker had once spent a night in drunken sleep. “I think I know who built the wall,” Andy said, indicating the high semicircle of stone that enclosed the far end, but not sharing his suspicions.

  In an alcove under some tree roots someone had made a shrine. It held four pictures of the Virgin Mary and one of the Buddha, several colorful bits of broken glass from the glassblowing shop, some dusty silk flowers, seashells, and five red candles.

  “There are nuns who come here sometimes,” Andy said. “One of them is psychic. She talks to the trees.”

  “What do the trees say?”

  “Bunch of boring shit. Lots of people come here. You wouldn’t believe how many rituals I’ve interrupted—black magic and healings. And sex. High school students come here to have sex. There’s just something about the place.” (As if high school students were pretty picky about where they had sex.) “I worried a bit after nine-eleven,” Andy said. “I thought we might be a target just because it says Holy City on the maps. But now I don’t think we were attacked by the people everyone else thinks we were attacked by. I’m on to other theories now.”

  “I bet you’d like my mom,” Martin told him.

  Around them, the mountains rose green and quiet. Rima saw a radio tower in the distance, but no houses, no roads. She heard a car coming behind the stone wall, and then she heard it going away. They were in the middle of nowhere. Who would have thought California still had anyplace so remote?

  She tried to picture how the Showhouse and Lecture Hall would have looked, her young, young father and Addison parking their cars and going inside to meet each other for the first time.

  Andy told them that the only other Holy City building still standing was Riker’s house, across the road. Constance had moved into it in her final years, though she’d confessed she never did feel right about that, as if she’d gotten above herself somehow just by surviving. Now it was vacant, except for the occasional squatter, and not in good repair. “I’d show you,” Andy said, “but it’s private property. I’m not supposed to go in. Anyway, there’s nothing to see. Your cousin’s stuff was all hauled away years ago.” They were walking back to the highway now, picking their way through the mud.

  “Constance wrote my father about a man who died here,” Rima said. “It was ruled a suicide, but she was really troubled about it. Do you know anything about that? The man’s name was Bogan.”

  “You name it, Holy City had it,” Andy said. “Arson, burglary, murder. During World War Two there was some quarrel about putting emergency fire escapes on the buildings. Where or how to put them. One of the residents beat another to death with an iron bar. I don’t think the police were all that interested in what went on here. Constance said that Riker had an eye out for troubled young women. All that no-sex stuff was for everyone else.

  “She wouldn’t quite say so, but I think she’d come to see him as a sort of predator. He specialized in girls who had no one.”

  Rima was a girl who had no one. She put this thought out of her mind as quickly as it had come in.

  “He was a good-looking guy when he was young,” Andy said.

  Martin snorted.

  “Okay, you can’t see it in the pictures. But he’d have recruitment meetings with free food during the Depression. That’s why Constance came, because there was free food.”

  Rima followed Andy and Martin up the steps. She stopped at the doorway. Her shoes were too muddy to go inside, but then so were Andy’s and he hadn’t stopped.

  “Could I see Constance’s letters?” Rima asked. This was the reason she’d come. Everything else, all the lies she’d told and made Martin tell had been to get to this question.

  “See, that’s the weird thing,” Andy said. He stood, blinking down at her. Light from the windows glinted off the green glass of the mermaid’s tail, threw rainbows on the walls. “I gave them to this other woman who said she was a friend of Constance’s. Just two days ago. The whole box. I helped her load it into her car.”

  “Did this woman say who she was?”

  “She said he”—motioning to Martin—“sent her. Older woman. Kind of wild-eyed. She said that she’d known Constance in the old days.”

  By holding open the door, Rima had let a fly into the studio. She could hear it, bumping against the dusty windowpane, again and again.

  “Frankly, she was more believable than you guys are,” Andy said pleasantly.

  (2)

  Martin told the story with great enthusiasm and in great detail at dinner. He did not forget to include: tha
t someone had murdered someone else at Holy City in a disagreement over fire escapes; that we haven’t gotten the full story on 9/11 yet and probably never will; that trees are boring conversationalists. There was very little left for Rima to add.

  “Did I mention that I was pretending to be Maxwell Lane at the time?” Martin asked. He was teasing his mother, because he had not forgotten to say so; he had repeated this three times and counting. Granted, it was, along with the trees, one of the good parts.

  Tilda had made scampi, rice pilaf, and broccoli amandine. Rima had never seen her as happy as she looked that night, listening as Martin talked with so much animation, and laughing whenever he wanted her to. Though she did pause for a sober moment to note that the way the towers had come down was more consistent with an explosive detonation than with an airplane crash.

  “What did you hope to get?” Addison asked Rima.

  “Constance’s letters.”

  “Why?”

  Why indeed? Because that’s what Oliver would have done, and the whole world can’t change just because Oliver isn’t here? “My father wrote her after I was born. I’d like to read that letter. And I was curious about the whistling man. Constance told Maxwell about him. You put him in Ice City.” Rima took a bite of shrimp and spoke around it. “Some of the letters she sent to Maxwell are missing.” She hoped the shrimp muffled any sense of accusation the observation might have contained. She would ask about the Santas later, sometime when it didn’t feel like a piling on.

  Addison responded by noting that cataloguing and curating were better left to the experts. UC Santa Cruz had a standing offer for her papers. They had also acquired a set of letters Ted Hughes had written to his mistress while married to Sylvia Plath. Hughes had made it clear before his death that he didn’t want the letters made public. On the other hand, scholars were interested. Scholars, in Addison’s opinion, were just gossips with degrees. She was waiting to see how the university would handle the Hughes collection before she made up her mind about her own papers. She said most of this aloud.