All Our Yesterdays (39 page)

They may know how to conserve money
, Mary Alice thought,
but they sure don’t know how to dress
. She sat on the couch. Piper turned from the window and went to the desk.
They all look as if their wives cut their hair
.

“So, my little chickadee,” Piper said. W. C. Fields was his favorite, and he was sure he did a convincing impression of him. “You’re not in Washington with Parnell.”

Mary Alice shrugged and smiled.

“Well,” Piper said, “Parnell’s loss is certainly my gain.”

“It certainly is,” Mary Alice said.

“I know you had Parnell’s confidence, and I want you to know that you have mine.”

“Thank you, Your Honor,” Mary Alice said.
I wonder if he’s hinting for a blowjob
.

She smiled. Piper smiled back.

“My friends call me Win,” he said. “No need for formality.”

“Sure, Win.”
He’s hinting
.

Piper sat down. He was wearing a gray suit with narrow lapels. The suit jacket seemed pinched around the shoulders. His tie was narrow and was narrowly
patterned with blue and gray stripes. Behind the desk he sat straight up, both feet on the floor, his back not touching the chair. He drank a sip of coffee—black, no sugar, decaffeinated.

“What do you think of the way I’m portrayed in the press, Mary Alice?”

“The press is full of overeducated Paddies,” Mary Alice said, “that still want to be Irish homeboys. And one way to stay loyal to your roots is to make fun of affluent Protestants.”

“Like me.”

“Exactly like you.”

Piper looked into his coffee cup for a while as he thought about what Mary Alice had said.

“I like this job. I’m going to run for a full term this fall,” Piper said. “I even have a campaign slogan. Win with Win!”

“Great slogan,” Mary Alice said. “Now what you need to do is something that will get the anti-Wasps on your side without alienating the Wasps.”

“I’ll be guided by your recommendation. I know Parnell counted you among his most trusted advisors.”

“Most trusted,” Mary Alice said.

Piper stood and walked across the room and sat beside her on the couch. His face was bright red. There was a hint of sweat on his forehead. He put his hand on her thigh.

Mary Alice grinned at him.

“Perks of office, Winston?”

“I”—Piper cleared his throat—“I admire you very much, Mary Alice. I’d like it a lot if you were to be my trusted advisor too,” he said.

Mary Alice nodded, still grinning.

“Shall I just lie back here on the couch and we can advise and consent for a bit?”

The sweat was clearly visible on Piper’s high forehead.

“I don’t want you to misjudge me, Mary Alice.”

“No problem, Winston,” she said. “I’m a modern gal. Just a collegial toss on the couch. We may do it again. But fun is all that’s at stake.”

“I love my wife,” Piper said. His voice was raspy.

“Sure you do, except she wears Birkenstocks and no makeup and thinks head is the opposite of foot.”

Piper blushed. Mary Alice smiled.

“So we’ll get to know each other and when it’s over maybe I’ll have a recommendation you’ll want to implement.”

“Yes,” Piper said. His voice was very hoarse. “Anything. Please.”

Without his clothes Winston Piper was as narrow and pale as his wardrobe. His shoulders were narrow. His legs were pale. Mary Alice showed him things to do. When they were through he got up immediately and began to dress. Mary Alice lay back comfortably on the couch. She made no effort to rearrange it. As he dressed, Piper stared at her nakedness.

She smiled at him.

“Win,” she said, “I recommend you name Chris Sheridan police commissioner.”

S
he met Gus for a drink at the Ritz bar, where they had met first to talk of their children. People looked covertly at Gus. His picture had been everywhere.

“Been a while,” Gus said.

“Yes,” Laura said.

She glanced around the bar. “People recognize you.”

Gus nodded.

“How are you?” he said.

Laura nodded.

“I’m all right,” she said. “You?”

Gus smiled.

“Divorced, out of work, publicly disgraced,” he said.

Laura nodded again slowly.

“And our children are still estranged,” she said.

“Yeah.”

It was late afternoon, the bar was beginning to fill with people having a drink after work. The waiter came and took drink orders. Gus asked for beer. Laura, white wine.

“I’m sorry about everything,” Gus said.

“I know.”

“Is there anything you don’t know, anything you’d like to ask?”

Laura shook her head.

“I know too much already,” she said.

The waiter brought drinks. He put them carefully in front of Gus and Laura, each neatly on its little paper doily. He poured beer into Gus’s pilsner glass until it was half full.

When he left Laura said, “Did you know you were going to drag the whole department into it?”

Gus shook his head.

“That was Butchie, he plea-bargained a sentence reduction.” Gus picked up his beer bottle and carefully filled the glass, measuring the foam. “And, he took a lot of people with him. Evened it up, so to speak.”

“But you got off,” Laura said.

“I had a good lawyer,” Gus said.

“Chris.”

“Yeah.”

“And you plea-bargained.”

“Yeah.”

“And my husband is dead.”

Gus’s voice was soft. “Yeah.”

“It would have been worse, had he lived and stood trial,” Laura said. “For him, for us.”

Gus was quiet. Outside the window the bright yellow taxis came and went, bringing well-dressed people and taking them away.

“I sometimes think you might have had something to do with it.”

Gus shrugged.

“You were there.”

Gus nodded.

Laura waited.

Gus didn’t speak.

Laura shrugged.

“It has hit Cabot hard,” she said.

“I’m sorry.”

“I don’t know what it means to Grace … and Chris.”

“If they’re going to have a chance it had to happen,” he said.

“You truly think so?”

“Chris will be the first Sheridan I know anything about got a chance to live a genuine life. I hope that includes Grace. But if it doesn’t, it doesn’t.” Gus sipped his beer. “Still a genuine life.”

“And you’ve never lived a ‘genuine life’?”

“Not till now.”

“Not even when you were with me?”

Gus folded his thick hands together, and rested his chin on them. He looked at her and she could feel the weight of his gaze, as she always had, tired and cynical, yet full of power and passion and seriousness. It seemed to fill her up as it always did. It made her feel as if there were more of her.

“Probably the only happiness I’ve ever had has been the time with you,” he said. “In terms of men and women, it’s the only love I ever had.”

“What other terms would there be?” she said.

“I love my son.”

“Yes,” Laura said. “Of course.”

She twirled the stem of her wineglass slowly without lifting it from the table. She hadn’t drunk any.

“I guess that’s almost exactly true for me,” she said. “In fact for me it was genuine.”

“Yes,” Gus said.

“But it couldn’t be for you, could it,” Laura said. “You knew what my husband was. You knew, at least toward the end, what was coming.”

“It was like a train bearing down,” Gus said.

Laura smiled. “And we were doing it on the tracks.”

Gus’s beer glass was still half full. There was a wisp of foam along the inside of the rim. Laura twirled her wineglass some more.

“So where are we?” Gus said.

Laura stared into her slowly turning wineglass.

“I think what you did was right, Gus.”

She turned the glass slowly.

“But I don’t think I can get past it.”

Gus nodded.

“I didn’t love Tom, and, God, what I’ve learned makes me glad that I didn’t. But he was what I settled for and he was my husband and the father of my children.”

“Lot of history,” Gus said.

“Yes.”

“Be kind of hard to move right over from him to the guy who may have caused his death.”

“And who, even if he didn’t, exploited his life.”

Gus nodded slowly.

“Too hard,” he said.

The tears began to form in Laura’s eyes.

“I have loved you, Gus. And I know you have loved me.”

“Still do,” Gus said.

“Yes.” She patted her eyes with her napkin, but they filled again. “I’ll ruin my makeup,” she said.

“We can go,” Gus said.

“I want to go alone,” she said.

“You going to be all right?”

She paused for a moment and seemed to think about the question.

“Yes,” she said finally. “I think the time with you may have made me all right.”

Gus nodded. Laura stood and bent over and kissed him on the mouth and turned and left the bar. From where he sat by the window, Gus could see her as she went out the Arlington Street door of the hotel and spoke to the doorman. He watched as the doorman got her a yellow cab and held the door, and took her tip, folding it smoothly into his pocket as he closed the door behind her. The cab pulled away down Arlington Street and turned left onto Boylston Street, and went along that side of the Public Garden, past the Four Seasons Hotel, mingling with the rest of the late afternoon traffic, and out of sight behind the still thick foliage of the early fall trees.

T
he house was in Concord, a three-hundred-year-old farmhouse on twelve acres of land that sloped gently down toward the Assabet River. He was ripping out lath and plaster in the kitchen when Chris arrived. The back door was open and the radio was on. A music-of-your-life station was playing loudly. Gus wore tan shorts and work boots and a gray sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off. He put down the pry bar and slid the hammer into a holster on his belt. He went to the refrigerator and got out two cans of Budweiser Dry and opened them and handed one to Chris.

“What’s that song?” Chris said. He drank some beer.

“Tommy Dorsey,” his father said, “‘Song of India.’” He pointed out the back kitchen window.

“Look,” Gus said.

Through the window Chris saw three pointer puppies scrambling up the slope from the water toward the house. They were so young they didn’t run well and bumped into each other and fell down often. The shape and movement clear against the yellow-green, nearly April meadow.

“Jesus Christ,” Chris said.

“Coming to meet brother,” Gus said.

“Pointers?” Chris said.

“Yeah. German shorthairs.”

The dogs moiled into the house through the open
back door and banged into Chris’s legs and rolled around on his feet and between his legs and licked his face as he squatted to pat them, and nipped with their pointed puppy teeth at his fingers and wrists.

“Guy I know in Canton raises them,” Gus said. “I bought all the females from his litter.”

“No males?”

“Males are trouble,” Gus said.

Chris smiled. “So are females.”

“I’m talking about dogs,” Gus said.

“They got names?”

“Patty, Maxine, and LaVerne.”

Chris straightened and looked around at the house. One of the puppies began to chew on his shoelace.

“Ill-gotten gain?” Chris said.

“All those years on the pad,” Gus said, “I managed to put a little something aside.”

“Needs some work,” Chris said. The puppy had his shoelace loose and was tugging on it. He reached down and picked her up. She lapped frantically at anything she could reach.

“I’m going to peel it back to the studs first, see what I’ve got. Then I’ll start the rehab.”

Chris nodded.

“Want some help?”

“Sure.”

The puppy began to chew on Chris’s wrist.

“What’s this one’s name?” he said.

“The brown one’s Patty,” Gus said. “The other two I can’t tell apart yet.”

They took their beer and went out and sat on a couple of folding chairs in the yard and watched the dogs dash around. The land was overgrown with wild grass and evergreens; only a small area around the
house was mowed. The generational additions on the house made it ramble idiosyncratically. The foundation plantings needed pruning. At one corner some desolate roses clung tiredly to a sagging trellis.

“Lot of work,” Chris said.

“Yeah.”

“Be nice when it’s done,” he said.

“Nice to do,” Gus said. “Even if I don’t finish.”

“I was thinking that,” Chris said.

There was a little wind. It brought the smell of the river up to them. Gus got up and went to the kitchen, stepping over the lath and plaster that littered the floor. He got two more beers and brought them back and handed one to Chris. The puppies were out of sight in the tall grass, which moved as they rummaged through it.

“Whole place is fenced,” Gus said. “So I don’t have to worry about them.”

The road that curved by Gus’s house was empty of traffic. Where they sat they could see no other houses, only the overgrown fields, and the ragged evergreens, and the narrow gleam of the river at the foot of the hill.

“I can help you with this on weekends if you’d like,” Chris said.

Gus nodded. Across the sloping meadow, beyond the river, the sky was dark.

“That’d be good,” Gus said.

“I won’t have as much time as I used to,” Chris said. “I’m going to be police commissioner.”

Gus stopped with the beer can nearly to his lips.

“Boston?”

“Boston.”

“Jesus Christ,” Gus said.

Far to the east, lightning flickered against the sullen sky, so far away that they couldn’t hear the thunder. Where they sat the pale spring sunshine was still on them. Light, but not much warmth. Gus put his left hand out and took Chris’s right hand and held it for a moment. It wasn’t a handshake. Then he let go and leaned back in his chair.

“That’s the balls,” Gus said.

Chris grinned at him. “A touch of the poet,” he said, “in every word you speak.”

Gus smiled and drank some more beer.

“Well, it may be inelegant, but it is, in fact, the fucking balls,” Gus said.