John's Wife: A Novel (19 page)

Opal felt uncomfortable leaving her granddaughter and her little friend by themselves, dressed so provocatively, in that loud unseemly place, but she felt even more uncomfortable sitting there alone among all those ill-behaved children, so she often, whenever obliged to take Clarissa to the mall, fulfilled a second obligation, this one to her daughter-in-law, by visiting the child’s father, poor devastated Barnaby, at the retirement home, though it was hard to say in the end which experience was more repellent. The mall certainly was unbearably noisy and the air in the open restaurant area where the only chairs were was saturated with the fumes of fried fat and sticky sugars and cigarette smoke and a sour-milk smell that reminded her of sick babies. Outside there were no park areas or sidewalks or benches, or inside either, no place just to sit, but even if there were she would have felt conspicuous plopping herself down in the middle of all that mindless bustle. So, really, she had no choice, and anyway she did not really fear for her granddaughter, it was a public area, after all, dozens of people passing through every minute, and they all knew John’s daughter when they saw her, what could possibly happen? The town had changed dramatically, almost unrecognizably, since Opal was a girl here, but in some ways her son’s shopping malls, as Kate had pointed out to her when she was still alive, were a throwback to the village past of their youth, or perhaps even earlier. More anonymous maybe and off-center, but they were simple communal gathering places for scattered populations the way the old farm towns were (said Kate), this one among them, a place for barter and exchange, for the transmission of news and ideas, for ceremony and for courting and for friendly competition. When Opal, whose love for her son clashed with her distaste for his malls (if a throwback, certainly a parodic one), had objected that what was missing was that there were no churches out there, Kate had replied: No imported old world churches maybe, but holy places just the same, Opal, good old national temples with the sacred stuff of glorious enterprise heaped up at the altars and shopping baskets as communion trays and beeping cash registers like the ringing of church bells, moral lessons provided by merchant-priests and their security guard-sextons. And there are all the fastfood chapels for ritual feasting, inviolable in content as kosher or Eucharist, and the cinemas for divine specracle and iconic representation, with multiple screens for the different denominations, and mannequin angels and God’s omnipresent Muzak voice and the final benediction straight down from heaven of the accepted credit card and even, or maybe above all, the vast apocalyptic barrenness of the parking lots: go visit those prophetic fields on a Sunday morning sometime, “Opal, if you want a true”—and here she employed the very word that the preacher’s daughter (virtually unknown to Kate at the time, little Jennifer being a less than devoted user of the municipal library), was to use many years later, riding home from the mall, all ecstatic in her adolescent way, in Opal’s car—“‘spiritual’ experience.” Ah, dear impossible wicked Kate, who never ever went to the malls herself, how she missed her! And Harriet, too, the doctor’s wife, so many good friends gone! Even poor Audrey, difficult as she could be, Opal missed her, too, all her friends were slipping away, soon she’d be all alone. And now Audrey’s Barnaby as well, not much better off than dead; she visited him as often as she could, but he didn’t even seem to know who she was most of the time, it was very sad. It was while returning from just such a visit one day, Barnaby having mistaken her on this occasion for his dead wife, breaking into a violent tantrum and accusing her of betrayal and stupidity, some sort of division problem Audrey had got wrong or something, you could only make out about half of it, that Opal found the shopping mall surrounded by police cars with their blue lights flashing. She was in one of John’s cars that day, so they waved her through. She felt dreadfully guilty, though whether on account of Barnaby’s accusation or because of her abandonment of Clarissa or on behalf of her son whose mall was being so dramatically besieged, she couldn’t say. But when Clarissa saw her, she came dancing over as though nothing were happening, carrying a big plastic bag from Jeans City with what looked like a box of shoes and Jennifer’s folded-up jacket inside, Jennifer now wearing a man’s white shirt, knotted at the waist, over her printed tee shirt which on this day, as Opal remembered all too clearly, showed four naked men holding musical instruments in shockingly obscene positions. And she the minister’s daughter! These children today, Opal would never understand them. It was like there were no rules, no boundaries at all. And yet they seemed as innocent as ever. Clarissa, squealing something about finding “these really crazy walkers,” leaned in and gave her a big hug and kiss, just like she used to do when she was little, but hadn’t done in so many years Opal had forgotten what it felt like, and then insisted on skipping over to the police chief to show him her purchases. He waved her away with a weary smile, while continuing the conversation he was having on the walkie-talkie held at his mouth. Jennifer meanwhile, in the backseat, had a frozen smile on her face that made her look more dead than alive. Maybe she’d eaten something she shouldn’t have. All the way home, Clarissa kept wanting to know about Opal’s own adolescence, which Opal found flattering until Clarissa asked her: “When was the first time, Granny Opal, when you did it, you know, with a man, and what was it like back then?” “The first time was with your grandfather, of course,” she lied, feeling suddenly less flattered. “And it was just as it should have been.” The little rascal. When, a day or so later, Opal asked about the shoes, Clarissa shrugged and said they were the wrong size, she’d taken them back.

Opal’s occasional visits to Barnaby were among the few that shattered man now received, Alf being about the only person outside of immediate family who still looked in regularly upon the old master builder since the stroke that had ripped away the main connections. His patient now lived alone in a three-room unit in the “professionally assisted” retirement center his son-in-law had built, a morose and defeated man, severed from his simplest habits, his speech difficult to comprehend even when he was coherent, which most often he was not, so far as Alf could tell. The old fellow wept a lot, especially whenever his daughter was mentioned. He spoke of John’s wife as if she had been taken away and no longer existed, even though, on different days than Alf, she paid him weekly visits, according to the log in the main lobby. Barn sometimes wept over his wife Audrey, too, reenacting her deathbed scene, if that was what it was, but at other times he did not even remember who she was. He rarely remembered who Alf was, confusing him with old friends and relatives long dead, when acknowledging him at all. Others, still living, did drop by from time to time, at least early on, but the awkwardness of the exchange, its often bitter and bizarre nature, discouraged them. Barnaby had gone into deep retreat, making his visitors feel like intruders, disturbers of his misery’s sour peace, so most stopped coming, sent notes instead which Barnaby left unopened. Alf supposed at first that depression over Audrey’s death had fused the poor man’s circuits, but in time he came to understand that it had more to do with some final desperate conflict with John, real or imagined, who could say. Something maybe about the new civic center. Difficult as things were between Barnaby and his son-in-law over the years, they might never have reached such a crisis, Alf now figured, tuning in as best he could, had it not been for John’s paving over of the city park. Probably looked like outright treachery. Barnaby had drawn up the park plans while he was still in the army back during the war, and as soon as he got out he had razed the old wooden buildings that stood there, rolled the terrain out for the landscapers, personally planted the first tree and put the gingerbread on the bandstand, doing it all at cost or less, part of his vision of a builder’s place in his community, and now suddenly there was his son-in-law, moving his bulldozers in. Had to upset him, and maybe all the more so that his name was attached to it. John’s project was popular enough: a low-budget preformed concrete structure with an auditorium, gymnasium, Olympic-sized swimming pool with retractable roof (much ballyhooed, but more like a car sunroof, once in place), and ample parking space, which most people saw as a means of revitalizing the decaying town center, turning it into a kind of Main Street mall. John’s old high school coach and airport manager, now a councilman, had rallied city hall support, John’s father had helped the city get partial funding for it from the state, and downtown businessmen had put up a substantial part of the rest, using the
Town Crier
column header as a fund-gathering slogan: “You Can Bank On It!” As for the park, John’s argument was that it had become little more than an outsized litter basket, too expensive to keep safe and clean, and a breeding ground for crime and drugs. These days, nature lovers—and he (though armed) was one—went out of town for their rustic pleasures; the tired old park, ravaged by Dutch elm disease and a farm for vermin, was an anachronism. Saved them all money, too: the park land, he pointed out, was free.

There were plenty who disagreed. Committees were formed up to try to save the park, there were door-to-door campaigns, petitions for a referendum. Marge, needless to say, though Lorraine did, was mad as a wet hen. Lollie’s helpmeet Waldo thereupon started calling her a “wet Hun” and dropped out of the club golf tournament that summer in protest against her constant bellyaching, which he said was polluting the course with acid pain, and also his heinie. Marge had her small successes, but Barnaby, at the time clear-sighted still, saw clearly the futility of this homely town-meetinghall approach: John had the mayor and the city council in his back pocket, plus the full weight of state and national government behind him, probably even majority support in town, and the park
had
been allowed to fall into a state of serious disrepair—part of John’s strategy, Barnaby supposed. Had to credit the boy’s wile. First, he destroys the town center with his junky outlying malls, then he puts the squeeze on that center’s ruined faithful to buy themselves something back, cutting himself a handsome profit each direction. So ruthless was he, Barnaby actually began to fear for his daughter for whom, until then, he had only, John being the sort of husband that he was, felt sorry. Of course, there was nothing wrong with a civic center—hell, Barnaby would happily have built one twice as beautiful for half the money John was asking—but why, he wanted to know, did the town’s only park have to be sacrificed for it? Too few objected, and they objectors more by reflex than by rage. Even Ellsworth, who should have known better, homespun tree-loving eulogies aside, seemed unable to resist the appeal of John’s grand but fraudulent architectural drawings, which he published regularly in
The Town Crier
, fanciful as illustrations in children’s books. There was only one way to stop him, Barnaby came to feel, and that was somehow to wrest his old company back from John, something only he and, with Audrey gone, he alone could do. Wouldn’t be easy. It would mean risking everything he had. Might even alienate his daughter, an almost unbearable thought, she being all he had left in this world save his builder’s pride. But he glimpsed a way, lonely and heroic though it was. One last grand adventure, come what may: he saw a path and took it. Well. A catastrophe, of course, worse than ever he could have guessed. Ruined. Made the villain of a plot no longer his. Humiliated in front of his own daughter. Stripped of everything he had. Though he never figured out how or why. Betrayal probably. Didn’t matter. When it was over, half of him was crushed and embittered, the other half was dead.

Dutch, would-be emulator of John’s killer instincts, though only half so sure a shot, looked on admiringly as his ex-battery mate and fellow hunter gunned down his own in-law, toying with the hapless dodderer before finishing him off as one might shoot away the knees of a dumbstruck moose so as to create a moving target. Shot him down, then gutted him, cleaned him out. Many in town suspected betrayal, meaning Maynard, but Dutch knew better, having sat with John in his motel Back Room sucking a beer while on the other side of the mirrors poor old Barnaby with Maynard’s slick collusion spread the hand they’d hoped to play. Dutch, as always slow to pick up on the story stuff of numbers, was a bit baffled at the time, understanding the conspiracy’s dynamics but not the details, until the whipped and humbled Nerd, deftly pressed one afternoon at the motel bar, filled him in, at least enough to outline the plot by which the old man had hoped to retake the firm he had lost by an ill-writ will. Audrey’s doing. After the wedding, the construction business, enlarged by the assets John brought in, was still, as Barnaby thought, three-fourths in the family, jointly owned by himself, his wife, his daughter, plus her husband John, a quarter each. In effect, though, it was a troublesomely fifty-fifty partnership between the two men, Barnaby the senior partner and a bully of a sort, full of antique certainties, John forced to bide his time. Audrey, meanwhile, anticipating as most wives do a prolonged widowhood, with John’s advice so revised the family will as to change the shares to thirds on the death of any member, business a nuisance to her once Barnaby was gone and trusting her much-loved son-in-law to further gild her golden years, sparing her the details. And thus, when unexpectedly she popped off first instead, Barnaby was left with the short straw, a minor shareholder in the enterprise he had with his own hands created and by which he felt his life defined, now suddenly overruled by John at every turn, turns taken often and without remorse or pity, though always with a smile. Embittered, exasperated, but unbeaten (“It was the civic center that broke his water,” Nerd told Dutch over an unhappy happy hour martini, “worse than rape, he said, the town like some kind of woman to him, to do that to the city park …”), Barnaby, abetted by Maynard, devised a scheme to recapture what he’d lost.

The deal was this: Through a dummy put in place by Maynard, Barnaby bought up controlling interest in another smaller building firm, an upstate industrial and commercial paving business with other attractive holdings, at least on paper, staking on this bold maneuver almost all he had, much more to be sure than that down-at-the-heels outfit, soon to be John’s by default, was worth. Then, Barnaby still screened from view, Maynard approached John with a merger proposal, asking for forty-five percent of the new corporation, but “negotiating” easily down to thirty, giving John the illusion of continued control but Barnaby actually majority stock, once the masks came off. John still seemed reluctant, or else distracted, short on cash, he hinted, problems to be solved, so Maynard coaxed Barnaby into sweetening the pot with an investment offer: three hundred thousand dollars was the figure they came up with. Too much maybe, looked too eager. Probably what made John suspicious, though just how that wily fuckhead read their elaborately veiled stratagems as easily as the goddamn funny pages, Maynard would never figure out. John’s wife might have helped him somehow, Barnaby being a sentimental old coot who talked too much, but she didn’t seem quite in the picture, not these days anyway. Probably, as Maynard put it to Dutch out at the Getaway Bar and Grill that wet and gloomy end of day, remembering all the Monopoly games he had lost as a kid, it was just genius, intuition, John’s fucking gambler’s luck, and Dutch with a grunt agreed. “Or else there was a leak somewhere.” “Mm. Speaking of which,” Dutch rumbled, tweaking his crotch and sliding down off his stool. “Have another one on the house while I’m gone.” He nodded at his barkeep as he sidled away, and the woman down at the other end of the bar stubbed out her smoke and said: “Thanks, honey, don’t mind if I do.” Maynard’s bibulous and bilious ex. She often came in this time of day to wait for her husband Stu to drop in from the car lot and join her for a friendly drink or two before their serious swilling began, main reason Maynard didn’t stop in here more often. “Hey, Daph,” he greeted her, hunched over his glass, tearing the wet napkin under it with the pointed end of his plastic swizzle stick, “what’s your ass go for these days down at the used-cunt lot?” “More than you’re worth, scumbag.” “Hunh. You mean it’s overpriced like all the other junk your old man peddles.” “Hey, you want me to punch that fatmouth sonuvabitch?” asked some swarthy young guy in greasy workclothes, sitting over in the shadows with a bottle of beer in his mitts. Maynard hadn’t noticed him there before, didn’t know who he was, though he’d seen him around town from time to time of late. One of his cousin’s underpaid throwaway workers probably. “Nah, you better not, sweetie,” Daphne said, lighting up again, blowing smoke out through her flared nostrils like rocket launchers. “That’s the Nerd. Swing at him, you just get yourself all splattered in shit.” “Jesus, what a nice fuckin’ town this is,” the guy muttered, and slumped back into the shadows, sucking at his beer.