Looking for Rachel Wallace (20 page)

Foley shook his head.

“Chief says he’s on his way, Fole.”

We kept going. On the porch I picked Rachel up—she was still in her bare feet—and carried her through the floundering waist-deep snow. The cruisers were there in front with the blue lights rotating.

Foley said, “First one.”

We got in—Foley in front, me and Rachel in back. He hit the siren, and we pulled out.

“Where?” Foley said.

“Boston,” I said. “Marlborough Street, Arlington Street end.”

Foley left the siren wailing all the way, and with no traffic but cops and plows we made it in fifteen minutes. He pulled into Marlborough Street from Arlington and went up it the wrong way two doors to my apartment.

“You ain’t here when we want you,” Foley said, “and I’ll be working next week in a carwash.”

I got out with Rachel. I had been holding her all the way.

I looked at Foley and nodded once.

“Yeah,” he said.

He spun the wheels pulling away, slammed the car into snowbanks on both sides of the street making a U-turn and spun the wheels some more as he skidded out into Arlington.

I carried Rachel up to my front door and leaned on my bell till Susan said, “Who is it?” over the intercom.

I said, “Me,” never at a loss for repartee.

She buzzed and I pushed and in we went. I called the elevator with my elbow and punched my floor with the same elbow and banged on my door with the toe of my boot. Susan opened it. She saw Rachel.

“Oh,” she said. “Isn’t that good!”

We went in and I put Rachel down on the couch.

I said, “Would you like a drink?”

She said, “Yes, very much.”

“Bourbon, okay?”

“Yes, on the rocks, please.”

She still had her gray blanket tightly wrapped around her. I went out in the kitchen and got a bottle of Wild Turkey and three glasses and a bucket of ice and came back out. I poured each of us a drink. Susan had kept the fire going and it went well with the Wild Turkey. Each of us drank.

“You need a doctor?” I said.

“No,” she said. “I don’t think so. I was not abused in that sense.”

“Would you like to talk about it?” Susan said.

“Yes,” Rachel said, “I think I would. I shall talk about it and probably write about it. But right now I should very much like to bathe and put on clean clothes, and then perhaps eat something.” She drank some bourbon. “I’ve not,” she said, “been eating particularly well lately.” She smiled slightly.

“Sure,” I said. “Spenser’s the name, cooking’s the game.”

I started to get up. “No,” she said. “Stay here a minute, both of you, while I finish this drink.”

And so we sat—me and Rachel on the couch, Susan in the wing chair—and sipped the bourbon and looked at the fire. There was no traffic noise and it was quiet except for the hiss of the fire and the tick of the old steeple clock with wooden works that my father had given me years ago.

Rachel finished her drink. “I would like another,” she said, “to take into the bath with me.”

I mixed it for her.

She said, “Thank you.”

Susan said, “If you want to give me your old clothes, I can put them through the wash for you. Lancelot here has all the latest conveniences.”

Rachel shook her head. “No,” she said. “I haven’t any clothes. They took them. I have only the blanket.”

Susan said, “Well, I’ve got some things you can wear.”

Rachel smiled. “Thank you,” she said.

Susan showed Rachel to the bathroom door. “There are clean towels,” Susan said. “While he was out I was being domestic.”

Rachel went in and closed the door. I heard the water begin to run in the tub. Susan walked over to me on the couch.

“How are you?” she said.

“Okay,” I said.

“Was it bad?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Was it English?”

I nodded. She rubbed my head—the way you tousle a dog.

“What was that old song?” she said. “ ‘Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio, we want you on our side.‘”

“Yeah, except around here we used to sing, ‘Who’s better than his brother Joe? Dominic DiMaggio.’ ”

She rubbed my head again, “Well, anyway,” she said. “I want
you
on my side, cutie.”

“You’re just saying that,” I said, “because DiMaggio’s not around.”

“That’s true,” she said.

While Rachel was in the bath I made red beans and rice. Susan put out the rest of the cornbread and I chopped green peppers and scallions. When Rachel finally came to dinner, she had put on some of Susan’s make-up and a pair of Susan’s jeans and a sweatshirt of mine that was considerably big. The sleeves were rolled up and made a bulky ring around her arms above the elbow. Her hair had been washed and blown dry and looked very straight. I said, “You want some more bourbon?”

She said yes.

I gave her some more, with ice, and she sat at the table in the dining area and sipped it. I served the beans and rice with the chopped vegetables and some canned chopped tomato on top and put out a dish of grated cheddar cheese. Susan and I drank beer with the meal. Rachel stayed with the bourbon. Like the martinis she’d been drinking when we met first, the bourbon seemed to have no effect.

There was very little talk for the first few minutes. Rachel ate rapidly. When she had nearly finished, she said, “Julie is that woman’s daughter, did you know that?”

“Yes,” I said.

“They took me because of her, you know.”

“I thought they might have.”

“They wanted to punish me for corrupting their girl child. They wanted to separate us. They wanted to be sure no one would ever see Julie with me. The idea that her daughter could be a lesbian was more than she could think. I think she thought that if I weren’t there, Julie would revert to her normal self.”

She said
normal
with a lot of bite in it. “It wasn’t anything to do with your books?” Susan said.

“Maybe it was, too,” Rachel said. “Especially the man. I think he was more comfortable with the kidnaping if it was for a cause. He called it a political act.”

“And what did they plan to do with you?” I said.

“I don’t know. I don’t think they knew. I think the one that actually took me, the big one that works for them … ”

“Mingo,” I said. “Mingo Mulready.”

“I think he wanted to kill me.”

“Sure,” I said. “You’d make a damaging witness if you survived.”

Rachel nodded. “And they didn’t conceal their identities. I saw them all, and they told me they were Julie’s people.”

“Did they treat you badly?” Susan said. Rachel looked down at her plate. It was empty. I said, “Would you like more?”

She shook her head. “No. It’s very good, but I’m full, thank you.”

“More bourbon?” I said.

“You know, that’s the thing you’ve said to me most, since I got here? You must have great faith in its restorative powers.”

“It’s a way of being solicitous,” I said.

“I know,” Rachel said. “And yes, I’ll have another. I, too, have great faith in its restorative powers.”

I got her the bourbon.

“I wonder why they didn’t kill me,” she said. “I was afraid they would. I’d lie up there in the dark, and each time they came I’d wonder if they had come to kill me.”

“Probably didn’t have the balls,” I said. “Probably would have had to find a way to maneuver themselves into having Mingo do it.”

“Like what?” Rachel said.

“Oh, get up some kind of ultimatum and present it to the cops. An ultimatum that couldn’t be met. Then they could say it wasn’t their fault. They’d been left no choice, and they’d had to do it to stop your poison because the officials were duped by the Antichrist, or the commies, or Gore Vidal, or whoever.”

“The mother would have wanted to most,” Rachel said. She looked at Susan. “They didn’t mistreat me in the sense of torture or anything. I wasn’t tied up or beaten. But the mother wanted to humiliate me. And the son. Julie’s brother.”

“Lawrence,” I said.

“Yes, Lawrence.” She shivered.

“What did Lawrence do?” Susan said. Her voice was quite soft.

“He used to come up with my food and sit beside me on the bed and ask me about my relations with Julie. He wanted explicit detail. And he would touch me.”

I said, “Jesus Christ.”

“I think he got excited by the talk of my lovemaking with Julie. And he would say in his position he rarely had the opportunity to be with a woman, how he had to be careful, that he was in an exposed position and couldn’t risk being compromised by a woman. And then he would touch me.” She stopped.

Susan said, very quietly, “Did he rape you?”

“Not in the traditional sense,” Rachel said. “He—” She paused, looking for the right way to say it. “He couldn’t in the traditional sense. He seemed unable to erect.”

“His mom probably told him not to,” I said.

Susan frowned at me a little.

“And,” Rachel went on, looking into the glass half-full of bourbon, “I would try not to talk about Julie and love-making because I knew how he would get. But if I didn’t tell him, he would threaten me. ‘You are entirely under my control,’ he would say. I can do anything to you I want to, so you better do what I say.‘ And he was right. I was. I had to do what he said. It was kind of a paradigm of the situation of men and women—the situation which I have so long opposed and tried to change.”

“Not only Lawrence but his mother,” Susan said.

“Yes. She, too. The matriarch. Trying to prevent the world from changing and making what she had always been seem unimportant, or even worse, silly.”

“I wonder how conscious they were of that,” I said.

Susan shrugged.

Rachel said, “Not conscious, I think. But subconscious. It was a kind of dramatization of the way they wanted the world to be.”

“Who took your clothes?” Susan said.

“The mother. I assume she wanted to demean me. She had Lawrence and the other one that worked for them strip me when they took me to that room.”

“I wonder if that might have been for Lawrence, too,” Susan said.

Rachel drank some more bourbon. She held some in her mouth while she looked at Susan. “Perhaps. I hadn’t thought of that. But perhaps she had some sense that he was not sexually ordinary. Maybe she thought the chance for a nice uncomplicated rape would help him along.” She finished the bourbon. I poured her some more without asking.

Susan said, “You haven’t said anything very much about how you felt about all this. You’ve told us what happened. But maybe it would be good to get some feelings out.”

“I don’t know,” Rachel said. “I have learned to keep my feelings under very strong control. Maybe not so different from himself here.” She nodded at me. “I have had to, doing what I do. I’ll write about the feelings. I write better than I speak. I do know that being a captive is a humiliating, a debasing experience. To be in someone else’s hands. To be without control of yourself is terribly destructive of personality and terribly frightening and terribly … I don’t know quite what I want to say. Terribly … ”

“It ruins your self-respect,” Susan said.

“Yes,” Rachel said. “You feel worthless. That’s just right. You feel contemptible, almost as if you deserve the mistreatment. As if you’re somehow at fault for being where you are.”

“And the sexual mistreatment merely intensifies the feeling, I should think.”

Rachel nodded. I opened another beer and drank most of it. I had little to offer in this conversation. I gestured the beer bottle at Susan. She shook her head.

Rachel turned and looked at me. She sipped some bourbon and held the glass toward me. “And you,” she said. For the first time there was just a faint blurring in her speech. “There are things I need to say to you. And they are not easy to say. While I lay back in your bathtub and tried to soak some of the filthiness of this all away, I thought about what I should say to you and how.” She looked at Susan. “You are invited,” Rachel said to Susan, “to help me with this. Maybe you have some sense of where my problems lie.”

Susan smiled. “I’ll pitch in as needed,” she said. “I suspect you won’t need me.”

“There are a lot of things that don’t need to be said,” I said.

“But these things do,” Rachel said. “I always knew that if someone found me, it would be you. Somehow whenever I fantasized being rescued, it was never the police, it was always you.”

“I had more reason,” I said.

“Yes, or you would see yourself as having more reason, because you would perceive yourself as responsible for me.”

I didn’t say anything. The beer was gone. I got up and got another bottle and opened it and came back and sat down.

“And you did it the way I expected you would. You bashed in the door and shot two people and picked me up and took me away. Tarzan of the Apes,” she said.

“My brain is small, I have to compensate,” I said.

“No. Your brain is not small. If it were, you wouldn’t have found me. And having found me, you probably had to do what you did. And it’s what you could do. You couldn’t remain passive when they wanted to eject me from the insurance company. Because it compromised your sense of maleness. I found that, and I do find that, unfortunate and limiting. But you couldn’t let these people kidnap me. That, too, compromised your sense of maleness. So what I disapproved of, and do disapprove of, is responsible in this instance for my safety. Perhaps my life.”

She stopped. I didn’t say anything. Susan was sitting with her heels caught over the bottom rung of the chair, her knees together, leaning forward, her chin on her left fist, looking at Rachel. Her interest in people was emanant. One could almost feel it.

Rachel drank some more bourbon. “What I am trying to do,” she said, “is to thank you. And to say it as genuinely as I can. I do thank you. I will remember as long as I live when you came into the room and got me, and I will always remember when you killed them, and I was glad, and you came and we put our arms around each other. And I will always remember that you cried.”

“What’ll you charge not to tell?” I said. “Makes a mess of my image.”

She went on without pausing. “And I shall in a way always love you for those moments.” Her glass was empty. I filled it. “But I am a lesbian and a feminist. You still embody much that I must continue to disparage.” She had trouble with
disparage
. “I still disapprove of you.”