A Secret Rage (22 page)

Markowitz said goodbye hastily and absently. From the front window, I watched him actually do a little dance step before he got into his car. Then he turned and waved.

I walked back to the bedroom and threw myself down on the bed. Now I understood why I’d felt so oddly uneasy around Don and Charles. That evening at Don and Elaine’s, when I’d seen the lamp shining on Don’s bald head, I’d remembered there was something
to
remember. Charles’s hair was clearly thinning. He combed long strands across, but tanned scalp shone through. Thank God, Cully still had lots of hair.

But when I thought about it, I realized I’d met a lot of men in some stage of baldness since I’d come back to Knolls. Barbara’s friend – ex-friend – Stan. Theo. And I realized I could’ve saved Barbara her half-hour conversation with Jeff Simmons, now that I pictured his luxuriant blondness. I had to laugh when I visualized dignified Jeff Simmons skulking through the Houghton gardens in his three-piece suit. We had actually suspected him! I caught myself up sharp; I gave myself a slap. How could I laugh?

I could laugh. I gave myself permission. My responsibility was over. I’d done everything, every humanly possible thing, to help catch the man who’d attacked me and killed Alicia. The police wouldn’t go by our list. The police wanted facts. And I’d dredged up the very last fact I had. They had the blood type. They knew about the baldness. They’d listened to us when we told them the rapist knew us.

My part in this was over, I swore. My appointed role was that of victim. I’d been the very best little victim I could. I was sick to death of being a victim. I was turning in my pain, crawling out of the bog of suspicion and doubt. I would flounder in it no longer.

I shut a long narrow drawer inside me. The corpse it held was not quite dead; but I slammed the drawer shut with my own kind of ruthlessness. Maybe it would die for lack of air.

THE NEXT DAY
, the day of the party, I hummed to myself in the bathroom all afternoon, doing things to myself I hadn’t done since I moved to Knolls. Facial treatments, creams, the whole battery of makeup I’d considered never using again, all came out of boxes and tubes I’d stuck far back in my vanity.

After applying them, I felt a cool sheen slip over me, the sheen I’d worn like armor in the city. It didn’t fit as well as it had. But I could still wear it. The New York Nickie had had her points. She’d had that wonderful gloss of safety most people don’t even know they possess until they lose it. She hadn’t been a victim.

For the first time in weeks, I consciously examined my face in the mirror. Today it seemed important; maybe the most important thing about me. I examined every pore, every wrinkle-in-the-making, as I once had done daily. I did my exercises, which had also been neglected lately. My muscles ached afterward. Cully the jogger would be proud of me.

I recalled all the warning stories I’d heard about what happened when you dropped that daily exam and tone-up. I could hear a friend (another model) relating with horror what had happened to a comrade of ours who’d married months before; inexplicably, she had wed an upstate farmer. ‘In weeks, Nickie, just
weeks
, she’s lost all her muscle tone,’ Cicely had told me in a voice filled with outrage and fear.

Loss of muscle tone; oh my goodness gracious. A fate worse than death. I snickered at the mirror and went on with my work.

Through the bathroom wall, I could hear the
thunk
of Mimi opening the oven door in the kitchen. She’d forgotten to make cornbread for the dressing and was worried about leaving it out all night to stale, since Mao and Attila had shown themselves partial to cornbread in the past.

Cully had gone to the college to catch up on his paperwork. Most of the students had left for home the day before. His secretary was at home making her own dressing. He was looking forward to the peace and quiet, he’d said, when I’d asked him if it didn’t make him feel uneasy to be alone in the empty psychology building. He had looked at me rather strangely. Of course, men weren’t supposed to be afraid. They didn’t have to be.

I pulled my thoughts away from that dreary track. Was I going to begrudge Cully the fact that he ran no chance of getting raped?

Back to frivolity. Maybe I should turn gay. I’d known plenty of women in New York who liked their own kind, at least occasionally. But the idea had never appealed to me, even at times when I was depressed over some romance that had failed. I pictured myself waltzing into the kitchen and putting the move on Mimi, and laughed at the thought of the look on her face.

She overheard. ‘What’s so funny?’ she called from the kitchen in an aggravated voice.

‘Nothing!’ I’d tell her sometime when she wasn’t worried about sage and poultry seasoning. I felt a little uncomfortable being invited to a party Mimi hadn’t been asked to; but she had told me, almost too vehemently, that she wouldn’t have gone if she’d been asked. I had raised my eyebrows.

‘I’ve only met the guy once, and I didn’t like him,’ she had said lamely. ‘And his
wife
!’

Aha. ‘What about her?’

‘I hate her,’ Mimi had said to my surprise.

To answer my stare, she’d advanced the story that the woman kept a photograph of her father in his casket – on her bedside table.

How on earth did Mimi know that? Something in her face had warned me not to ask. But I’d told her about the time in New York when I’d gone out for a drink with the photographer who’d said my eyes were like opals (I’d always love him a little for that). He’d confessed to me after several Scotches that when he’d first opened shop, he’d made some money that way. ‘You’d be surprised,’ he told me earnestly, ‘how many people want pictures of their loved ones in their boxes.’ Then he’d made me swear to keep his former sideline a secret.

I mulled over that odd story as I unrolled the special pouch that held my arsenal of brushes. I decided that we all carry our dead with us. My hostess-to-be just carried hers openly and visibly.

Nickie the philosopher.

My left nostril is a fraction larger than my right. I painted it even. The work of art complete, I slithered out to the kitchen in a lounging robe I saved for great occasions, a gorgeous thin slinky thing. The big room was in a state of chaos. Mimi was determined that our Thanksgiving feast be full and traditional. She’d hauled every spice out of the rack so she could pick up what she wanted instantly. A heap of sweet potatoes was piled on the counter, and the turkey was perched to thaw in the drain rack.

Attila was prowling around the fringes of this bounty, hoping to snitch some of it. Mao was curled up on top of the microwave staring at the turkey as if it were a live bird she was stalking. Mimi was crumbling the still-steaming corn bread, a pained expression on her face. She glared at me as I opened the refrigerator.

‘Now, Nick, don’t get drunk tonight, you hear? You can’t have a hangover tomorrow. You won’t eat much if you have a hangover.’

‘Okay, Mimi,’ I said meekly. ‘Can I have a sandwich now?’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ she said, and suddenly grinned. The old warmth was back. ‘I reckon you might find some food around here.’

‘What would you recommend?’ I asked seriously. ‘The peanut butter and jelly or the leftover meat loaf?’

‘Oh, boy, a meat loaf sandwich. Make me one, too, will you? Heat it up in the microwave, with cheese all over it.’

I began rummaging through the refrigerator. It might take me hours to come up with the meat loaf, the shelves were so jammed. ‘You’d think,’ I muttered, ‘we were expecting an army instead of just us and Barbara.’

‘Well . . . Charles is coming.’

I froze with my hand, finally, on the meat loaf. I felt the tension radiating from Mimi. She thought I was still worried about her protection of Charles, but actually I was struggling to slam a mental drawer in which a corpse had just moved and groaned. ‘Okay,’ I said, when I could. I heard her sigh behind me.

Cully hallooed from the door then, so the moment passed. I unearthed the serrated knife to slice some of my homemade bread for our sandwiches. Cully wanted one, too.

‘When’s Barbara coming over?’ Cully asked as we sat on the benches in the breakfast nook wolfing down our food.

‘Seven-thirty, eight,’ Mimi said indistinctly. ‘We’re going to set up the dining table in the living room, and we’re going to figure out when the turkey has to go in, and she’s going to grip the bird while I reach in to get the innards out. I don’t think I got him out of the freezer soon enough, to tell you the truth. I think the cavity’s still frozen.’

‘Wear rubber gloves,’ Cully advised. ‘That’s what Rachel always did.’

Oh, great.

The phone rang when I was halfway to the counter to either make another sandwich or throw the meat loaf at Mimi and Cully. I picked up the receiver on our brand-new kitchen wall phone. (Mimi had gotten tired of standing in the hall to talk, and had had the old one taken out.)

‘Hello? May I speak to Nickie?’

‘Mother?’ I felt age sit on my shoulders. I felt the stillness behind me as Cully and Mimi quit eating.

‘Baby? Guess where I’m calling from!’

Oh, not the outskirts of Knolls, please no. She’d come to see me at Miss Beacham’s like that, once. She didn’t sound drunk. But she sounded uncertain, shaky. I felt my face settle into tense lines.

‘I don’t know, Mother. Where?’

‘Well.’ I heard her take a deep breath. ‘I checked myself into a center for alcoholics two weeks ago.’

‘What?’ I felt dizzy and sat on the floor with a bump, taking the telephone receiver with me. I drew my knees up. ‘You what?’

‘Sober for two weeks,’ she said, and began crying.

‘Oh,’ I said wonderingly. ‘Oh, Mama!’ All the years sloughed off. I pounded my fist against my knee for joy. ‘Mama! Really? Really?’

‘This is my first phone call,’ she said. ‘They don’t let you make a phone call for two weeks, until they can be sure you won’t plead to be taken home.’

I noted the call had not been made to Jay.

‘Where is he?’ I didn’t have to specify who ‘he’ was.

‘Gone.’ Her voice was very controlled. ‘I waited till he went out of town. I’m really kind of a coward, Nickie. I’m glad you’re grown up now. Maybe you can understand. I waited till he was gone. Then I filed for divorce, and I changed all the locks on the doors, and then I packed a bag and I headed here after I called my doctor. I was so drunk I barely made it. In fact, I drove over some bushes at the entrance. But they took me.’

The tears trickled down, tracking the work of hours. I gestured frantically at Mimi and she passed me a napkin to blot them. I felt the cold linoleum of the kitchen floor bite into my rump through the thin bathrobe. The muscles in my rear were cramping. I didn’t care.

‘Are you there, honey?’ The frail voice was scared again.

‘You’re wonderful,’ I said. ‘Oh, bless you, bless you.’

‘Hardly wonderful,’ said my mother, with a ghost of amusement in her voice. ‘Fourteen years too late. Not wonderful. And it’s not over, by a long shot.’

‘You’ll make it,’ I told her fiercely, trying to will my hope through the telephone line.

‘For the first time, yesterday I really began to think I might,’ she whispered.

‘You will.’ I paused. ‘Have you heard from him?’

‘He can’t call in,’ she said smugly. ‘I won’t come to the phone.’

‘Yahoo! Good for you, Mama!’

‘I have to go, Nickie. It’s a long road out of these woods. Don’t expect too much.’

‘You think you might be out by Christmas?’

‘I don’t know. I hope so. Maybe I’ll feel strong enough by then.’

‘If you are, I’ll come home,’ I promised. I took down her phone number and address at the center.

‘That’ll give me a goal – Christmas,’ she said, and chuckled. I hadn’t heard that chuckle in so long I barely remembered she used to do it all the time.

‘I love you.’

‘I hope so,’ she said. ‘Bye bye, Nickie.’

‘Bye, Mama.’

We both hung up very gently.

Mimi smilingly passed me another napkin.

* * * *

My fitful good mood, which had been artificial earlier, now had some basis in fact. I almost danced as I got ready for the party. I only dance when I feel secure; my dancing resembles nothing so much as a frog leaping from pad to pad.

‘Now I know you’re human,’ Cully remarked as I capered from the bathroom to the closet to extract my costume. I swept by him in a particularly daring maneuver and gave him a kiss on the forehead.

‘Did you ever doubt it?’

‘At one time,’ he admitted.

‘Why?’ I stopped cavorting and looked at him.

‘Oh . . . you never admitted anything was wrong.’

Well, well, well. I sat down at the foot of the bed with a thud. ‘Explain.’

He folded his fingers together and looked at me with his lips flattened. I got a glimpse of what his patients saw. (Or did he call them ‘clients’?)

‘You were so beautiful,’ he began, and I winced. It always came back to that in the end; my blessing and my curse. ‘You were intelligent. You did very well at school, even while your home life was falling apart. Mimi told us what was happening with your parents, eventually; but you never said anything—’

‘I was ashamed,’ I interrupted.

‘I can see that now, but at the time – I was inexperienced, too, you have to remember – it just looked like it wasn’t touching you.’

A very different view of one of the most anguishing periods of my life. I’d been so afraid of tainting the smooth Houghton household with my sleazy problems. Faced with the cold perfection of Elaine, who could openly discuss having an alcoholic mother? I told Cully this.

‘I can understand it
now
,’ he emphasized. ‘But then, I was only a kid, too. I was busy being a mighty senior in high school, then a lowly freshman in college, and every time you came to see Mimi I would go through torment. You just seemed far too perfect for someone like me. Then you went off to New York to become exactly what you wanted to be. Brave. Beautiful and brave, smart, successful. Making a lot of money. I met and married Rachel. Then you came to Mimi’s first wedding looking like a woman from another planet, your clothes and face were so sophisticated.’