People Like Us (6 page)

“Mr. Bailey,” she replied.

She was Chinese. It had not occurred to him that she would be Chinese. Her handwriting, in the letter she had written to him, asking him to come, reminded him of Peach’s handwriting, suggesting good schools and thrifty wealth. Her voice, when he had responded to her letter by telephone, was unaccented and American, and her name, Faith Haber, certainly gave no indication of an Oriental background. In the car, driving to where they were going, for the reason he had come, he was able to postpone the subject at hand by eliciting from her that she was from a Chinese banking family in Honolulu, had gone to a school there where Peach had gone during the year her parents almost divorced but didn’t, and then to college in New England where she had married the brother of her roommate and later divorced him. Gus liked vital statistics and had an ability to draw them out without direct questioning.

“That was a terrible story you told me on the phone about your daughter’s death, Mrs. Haber,” said Gus, when the car pulled into the parking lot.

“That was a terrible story you wrote about your daughter’s death, Mr. Bailey,” said Faith Haber.

“Listen, call me Gus.”

“Call me Faith.”

“Did they catch the guy?”

“No.” For an instant their eyes met in the darkened car. Gus reached over and touched Faith’s hand, which still gripped the steering wheel.

“He stabbed her twenty-six times,” said Faith Haber. “I have never been able to walk into her room again.”

Inside the hired room of a church hall where Faith Haber led him, he met the other parents who had suffered the same grievous assault on their lives that he and Peach had suffered. Folding chairs had been arranged in a circle, and the room smelled of the coffee brewing in a small urn plugged into the wall. He wondered, as he always wondered, what he could do to help them, what it was these groups expected from him when they asked him to come, ever since he had written about Lefty Flint, who killed his daughter, Becky.

Faith Haber sat next to him and told about her daughter’s murder, and the parents next to her told about their son’s, and the single father next to them about his son, and the couple next to him about their daughter. On the other side of Gus sat a woman too numb with grief to tell her story, so recently had it happened, and Faith Haber told the tale for her as the woman sobbed uncontrollably. Gus held her hand.

“No one really understands,” said Gus. “All our friends are helpful and loving during the time of the tragedy, but then they withdraw into their own lives, which is only natural, and soon you can see a glaze in their eyes when you bring it up because they don’t want to talk about it anymore, and it is the only thing that’s on your mind. That’s why these groups are so helpful. No one really knows what you are going through like someone else who has been through it.”

There were murmurs of assent in the room.

“The thing that makes me most angry is when people say to me, ‘At least you have another child,’ ” said Faith Haber. “What do you say to these people?”

“I have no answers. I know of no secrets to assuage your pain. I can only tell you that you go on. You carry on somehow. You live your life. You work hard. In time you’ll go to films and parties again. You’ll see your friends and start to talk about other things than this. You’ll even learn to laugh again, as strange as that may seem now, if you allow it to happen. My wife and I—”

He stopped. He never said “my ex-wife and I.” “Don’t call me your ex-wife,” Peach had once said to him. It was too complicated to explain about himself and Peach, what it was like between them. Only he and Peach understood that, and, anyway, that was not what he was here to talk about. Dealing with loss. That was the theme tonight.

“But it is always there, what happened to us. It becomes a part of you. It has become as much a part of me as my left-handedness.”

He talked on, but he knew that what he said was not reaching them. They wanted an answer.

“Out there, in Vacaville, California,” he said, finally, “there is a man called Lefty Flint. Lefty Flint held his hands around my daughter’s neck for five minutes, choking her until she was dead. Lefty Flint read the Bible all during the trial. Lefty Flint was sentenced to only three years in prison. In two years he will be out, having atoned, he thinks, for the murder of our daughter.”

Gus stopped, withdrawing into his thoughts. He remembered the trial. He remembered her friend, Wendy, who said, on the stand, “It was when she opened the door and saw Lefty Flint standing there that Becky knew, before he even raised a hand to grab hold of her body, that the end of her life was at hand.”

“Objection, your honor,” Marv Pink, the defense attorney, had screamed at the judge. “The witness cannot state what was in Miss Bailey’s mind.”

“Sustained,” said the judge.

“What would you do if you ever saw him?”

There was a silence before Gus realized that someone in the group had asked him a question.

“What?” he asked.

“What would you do if you ever saw Lefty Flint, after he gets out?” It was the single father whose sixteen-year-old son had been beaten to death with a baseball bat in a racial encounter.

Gus looked at the man. “The thought haunts me, because I feel almost certain it will happen, as if some higher power is directing such an encounter.”

“What would you do?” asked the man again.

“I may appear to be a calm man,” answered Gus, “but there is within me a rage that knows no limits.”

“What would you do?” persisted the man.

“What I want to do is kill him. Does that shock you? It shocks me. But it is what I feel.”

He did not add, “It is what I am going to do.”

4

On Thursday Justine Altemus canceled out of a benefit performance of the Manhattan Ballet Company, for which she was on the committee, to have dinner with Bernard Slatkin at a little restaurant on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village. On Friday she backed out of a family dinner at Uncle Laurance and Aunt Janet Van Degan’s to celebrate their thirtieth wedding anniversary to go to the television studio and watch Bernie’s newscast and have dinner with him afterward at a restaurant on Columbus Avenue frequented by theatrical people. On Saturday morning she called Ceil Somerset and said she couldn’t possibly go to the country for the weekend
because she had such a terrible cold and spent the entire weekend in bed with Bernie at his apartment on Central Park West. On Monday she told her mother she wouldn’t be sitting in her box at the opera that night for the new production of
Tosca
, which the Van Degan Foundation had partially financed, and took Bernie to Clarence’s, where he was curious to go, as-it was the hangout, as he called it, for all the people he read about in Dolly De Longpre’s column.

“I’m not crazy about the way they cooked this fish,” said Bernie.

“Oh, people don’t come to Clarence’s for the food. People come to Clarence’s to look at each other. Almost everybody here knows each other. We call it the club, although it isn’t a club at all. Of course, Mother says she won’t come anymore because her sable coat was stolen when she went to the ladies’ room, but she’ll be back. Just wait.”

“Point out Clarence to me,” said Bernie.

“Oh, there is no Clarence. That’s just a name. It’s Chick Jacoby who owns Clarence’s, and unless Chick likes you, or knows who you are, you’ll never get a table at Clarence’s,” said Justine.

Bernie looked around him. “Looks like we have the best table.”

“We do,” laughed Justine.

“I guess Chick Jacoby likes you.”

“He does.”

“Tell me about your father,” said Bernie. “You never talk about him.”

“Oh, Daddy,” said Justine. “He’s so sweet. Drinks a bit. More than a bit, if you want the truth. He married badly after he divorced my mother, and no one in the family sees him. He lives up in Bedford with his new wife in a house she got in her divorce settlement from one of her previous marriages. Belinda, she’s called, and she looks like a Belinda. Mother calls her a strumpet, but Mother would have called anyone a strumpet
whom Daddy married. She never got over the fact that Daddy left her.”

“She loved him then?”

“It’s not that she loved him that much. They used to fight all the time, and my brother and I were glad they got a divorce at the time. Mother thought she was calling the shots in the marriage because she was a Van Degan and had so much money. The Altemuses are what’s called good goods. Marvelous family. Goes way back, but no money to speak of, at least no money in the way the Van Degans have money. Look, there’s Violet Bastedo over there. Your old girlfriend.”

“She’s not my old girlfriend,” said Bernie.

“You went to bed with her.”

“She told you that?”

“Oh, she told me a lot more than that,” said Justine, her cheeks turning pink with embarrassment.

“What else did she tell you about me?” asked Bernie, amused that this shy girl was embarrassed.

“Oh, nothing.”

“Don’t give me ‘oh-nothing,’ ” he persisted.

“She said you had a huge you-know-what.” Justine covered her face with her hands.

“At least she’s not a liar.”

Justine laughed. “No, she’s not a liar.”

“I didn’t know proper young ladies like you and Violet Bastedo talked about the size of men’s dicks.”

Justine blushed. “She said it in French.”

Bernie roared with laughter.

“Were you serious about Violet?”

“It was a one-night stand, for God’s sake. I never saw her again.”

“I wonder if Maisie Verdurin knows that you are the terror of her parties. She thinks her parties are all about conversation, you know, and all the time it’s a launch pad for Bernard Slatkin’s assignations.”

“We’re having a conversation right now. Maisie would be proud of us.”

“Violet Bastedo is getting another divorce. That’s her new lawyer she’s having dinner with.”

“I want to talk about Justine Altemus, not Violet Bastedo,” said Bernie. He put out his hand across the table and took hers. Whereas Violet Bastedo was flighty and silly, Justine, Bernie could see, was more serious. Although she was no less interested in the parties, travels, comings and goings of the people she knew than Violet was, she was also a great reader, of both books and newspapers, and could converse on issues of the day, which Violet couldn’t. Justine not only watched Bernie interview news figures on his daily newscast, but could remember specific details of the interviews, and this delighted Bernie. “I didn’t believe Assemblyman Walsh for a single moment when you asked him about kickbacks.” Or, “That poor little Missie Everett girl. I wept for her when she told you about her sister. I hope that man gets life.”

“Did you ever think of having a career?” Bernie asked her.

Justine looked at him. He thought he detected a defensive look in her face. “I do a great deal of charity work,” she answered evenly. “Committees and things, and one day a week I work at the hospital as a nurses’ aide. And, of course, there’s Adele Harcourt’s book club. There’s an enormous amount to be read for that. I am, at the moment, deep in Dostoyevski.”

At that time Bernie had never heard of Adele Harcourt’s book club, but, like all New Yorkers, he knew who Adele Harcourt was, and, in time, he became impressed that Justine was a member of it, and had to have, no matter what,
The Idiot
read in its entirety by the following Monday evening when they would meet to discuss it in Adele Harcourt’s apartment.

“I suppose never having to worry about food or rent money must make it less urgent for you to compete,” he said.

“You’re not going to put me on a guilt trip because I was born into a rich family, are you?” she asked.

“No,” he said, smiling at her.

She smiled back at him. “I still have a brother you haven’t asked me about.”

“Hubie. Right. Mysterious Hubie. I’ve got my theories about Hubie.”

“Oh, poor Hubie. The apple of me mum’s eye. Blind to all his faults, she is. He’s always getting beaten up by all those hustlers he picks up. I mean, my mother would die if she knew. She thinks all the girls are just mad about Hubie and that Hubie’s just mad about all the girls. Half the time he’s got a black eye or a broken nose.”

“Does he drink too?”

“He has an occasional lapse into insobriety, of course, but nothing compared to the way he used to be,” said Justine. “Ever since Juanito came into his life.”

“Who’s Juanito?”

“Don’t ask.”

Bernie laughed. “We’re real square in my family compared to you,” he said.

Across the room at Clarence’s, Violet Bastedo told Herkie Saybrook, her lawyer for her second divorce, that she didn’t want anything for herself from Pony Bastedo except, as she put it, “Out. Out. Out,” of the marriage, but she did want a trust set up for little Violet, as well as all the usual things like Nanny’s salary, school fees through college, medical care, and “whatever else you can think of.”

“I can’t believe my eyes,” said Violet.

“What?” asked Herkie.

“There’s Justine Altemus over there, with Bernard Slatkin of all people.”

“Who’s Bernard Slatkin?”