The Cavanaugh Quest (19 page)

“She’s his problem. No business of mine.”

When we began strolling back, I said, “Do you remember a guy named Maxvill?”

He stopped and looked at me, his face furrowing in peculiar ways.

“Carver? Carver Maxvill? Asshole! He couldn’t take it, ran the hell away from it.”

“It?”

“Life, man! Life … I don’t know.” He swung back the way we were heading. “Poke around in that mess and you’ll find a reason; he was in trouble somewhere, pulled some shady lawyer bullshit and took cover for good, never came back out … just crap.” Teddy was playing with the chicken as we arrived back at the barbecue. “I never liked the guy. What the hell brought him up, anyway?”

“Martin Boyle mentioned him.”

“You’ve talked with Marty, too?” He shrugged and grinned. “Well, I’ll be damned. You should ask Hubbard Anthony about Carver, he was his pal, brought him into the club—Jesus Christ, the chicken’s on fire!” He made a grab for the tongs and picked up a flaming chicken, waved it in the air like an unusual banner. Teddy watched in amazement. The fire died. I smelled the burning barbecue sauce. Distracted, Crocker stared at the frazzled chicken for a moment, then placed it out of harm’s way in a corner of the grill.

“Well, look, I’m busy, Paul, got all these hungry people to feed. And I sure as hell don’t want to talk about Carver Maxvill.” We shook hands again and I went away licking barbecue sauce off my fingers.

“Give me a call, though,” he shouted, waving another chicken. “I’ll tell you some hunting stories. That’s what you’re after, anyway.”

I nodded and went on. The gardener looked up as I went around the corner.

“Find everything all right, sir?”

“Sure. I found everything.”

I’d pulled off the highway to buy some fresh fruit at a roadside stand when the gunmetal Mark IV shot past at about eighty. I couldn’t see the driver but the odds were good enough. I put the bags of apples, plums, peaches, grapefruit, and sweet corn on the passenger seat, offered up a frail prayer for the Porsche, and followed the silvery blur. I picked it up at the last stoplight in Wayzata, at Bushaway Road, and then stayed with it all the way into town, south on Hennepin, past the Walker/Guthrie complex, past the Lake Street intersection to Thirty-Fifth, right to Lake Calhoun, then left around the southern curve of the lake, through the parkway to Lake Harriet.

For the first time it was making sense to me; somebody was actually doing something that gave all my poking and puttering the semblance of a point. James Crocker, still wearing his shorts and his silly shirt, had run out on his dynastic picnic, driven all the way to town, and was running up the stairway to Jon Goode’s front door.

I parked up above the house, in the shade beneath some thick shrubbery. Five minutes later they came back down together, grim-faced, saying nothing, climbed into the Mark IV, and took off. I wasn’t worried about following them. I knew where they were going.

I lost them at the Lake Street light but picked them up again on the freeway heading toward St. Paul. They slid off up the University of Minnesota ramp, wound around the back streets to University Avenue, and turned right beneath the tower in Prospect Park. From the corner I saw them going up to Father Boyle’s place. I was what had set them in motion. I didn’t bother to wait. I’d touched a nerve named Carver Maxvill and set them running. The thing was, I didn’t know why. But they were all tied together.

M
Y BODY FELT LIKE A
clenched fist and I hadn’t been near the Y in a couple of weeks. I parked in LaSalle Court late in the afternoon and went upstairs to the smaller of the two running tracks, the one that’s dished and threatens to pitch you over the railing into the basketball players below. Five minutes of running and any sane commander would have left me for dead. I went downstairs and shot some baskets, grunting with exertion out beyond the circle, sagged down in the dry sauna amid some gentlemen who were just possibly in worse shape than I was, and concluded by collapsing across the rubdown table for about ten minutes. When I left I felt a good deal worse than when I’d entered but I had rinsed Goode and Crocker and Dierker and the whole sad bunch out of my mind for at least an hour. By the time I got back to the Porsche I was thinking about them again.

I was too tired to eat a real meal so I cut some cheddar, sliced an apple, spread out a big slice of Dimpfelmeyer rye bread on a cutting board, put on a sweater, and went out on my balcony. The ball game hadn’t started and WCCO was telling me what a hell of a year 1932 had been. They played Bing Crosby’s recording of “Night and Day” and then told me that on March 1 the nineteen-month-old son of Colonel Charles Lindbergh and Anne Morrow Lindbergh was taken from his crib at the family home in Hopewell, New Jersey. On May 12 the boy’s body, little more than a skeleton, was found in the bushes a few miles from the house. In the end, maybe, you never got far from home. Then Fred Astaire sang, “A Shine on Your Shoes” and I began to nibble my dinner.

There were so many pieces to try to fit together, to interlock, but all I could see or feel—anybody who had talked to the people I had was bound to have the same feeling—was that they all belonged to the same puzzle. It was like having pieces from each of the four corners of the puzzle; none of them seemed to touch. I suppose it was a good example of the untidiness of life as compared to the formal complexity of one of my father’s novels or one of Agatha Christie’s. I sat and munched on apple and damp rye bread and felt like a child crouched dumbly in the playpen with all my toys collapsed around me, not knowing which one to fiddle with next.

I kept thinking back to Archie’s blackboard, wondering how the diverse elements might make a real, visible pattern rather than a felt pattern, the kind I was arriving at by intuition. I could picture the blackboard in my mind but whatever I felt we’d be closing in on was utterly gone. In school geometry class had affected me the same way. It always seemed so pure and logical as the teacher worked through the theorems on the board; I never had a question, never a doubt as I watched the clean little miracle unfold out of her chalky hand. But once I sat down in my room with my homework it never made sense. Somewhere between school and home the logic had gotten lost and I couldn’t produce my own. All I really wanted to do was turn on the radio and listen to
My Friend Irma
and think rude thoughts about Marie Wilson’s bosom.

What was the pattern? There was the
scrapbook.
And the dead people:
Larry
and
Tim.
Who both spoke with
Kim
shortly before they died. And the
club
had known Larry and Kim, if only peripherally. And
Carver Maxvill.
The mention of his name, a man nobody had seen in thirty years, frightened
Father Boyle, General Goode,
and
James Crocker.
I sorted through the stuff in my mind, made entries on filing cards of different colors (my father’s son, yes)—a card for names, for things, for possible motives … I almost forgot to make a name card for
Billy Whitefoot,
the all-but-forgotten man. “The Forgotten Man” … Franklin D. Roosevelt had made that popular during the 1932 Presidential campaign. The club was meeting up north, snapping their pictures and drinking too much and catching fish and raising hell, and Franklin D. was running for the White House in a wheelchair. Had they cared? Had they really been a part of their times, or just a sprinkling of warts? It was so hard to tell. Forty-odd years ago, who had they been, really? Could they even cast a glance along the track of time and remember?

On the radio Barbra Streisand whacked out another hit from 1932, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” pronouncing it “doime,” and I remembered seeing her at the Blue Angel in the early sixties (or had it been the late fifties? So much for trying to remember how it had all looked in 1932).
Of Thee I Sing
won the Pulitzer Prize that year and to commemorate the event, just before the 1974 Minnesota Twins took the field against the Kansas City Royals, they played “Wintergreen for President” and I was tapping my feet and humming. I wondered if Archie had seen Charlie Chaplin in
City Lights
that year. Had he cheered on June 21 when Jack Sharkey decisioned Max Schmeling and brought the heavyweight championship back home? Had he seen Paul Muni in
Scarface
?

I sat in the dark for a long time listening to the ball game and picking through my memories of everything I’d seen and heard since Hubbard Anthony and I had come back from playing tennis that first day. I tried to remember it all and I came up with one peculiar scrap, one connection between two people who had died: the gray fluff from Timothy Dierker’s slippers … That was what I’d seen sprinkled on the floor of Larry Blankenship’s sad, hollow, echoing apartment. The dirty gray fluff hadn’t been kicked into the corners; it was out in the center of the room … Timothy Dierker had been down to visit Larry Blankenship not long before he died. Did he know what had driven Larry to suicide? Or was it Pa Dierker who had cleaned out Larry’s apartment
after
the suicide? My problem was that I kept coming up with more questions and whenever I had the glimmering of an answer it would split apart à la Walt Disney and transform itself into several new questions. I finished the apple and cheese, chomped up the rye crust, and opened a can of Olympia. The Twins had just gone ahead on Carew’s double up the middle. It felt as though autumn were definitely in the air.

I decided I’d never get on top of the mess of detail and fact and implication without applying a new discipline to it. A clear mind, a healthy body; God knows what had gotten into me. A diet revision seemed a good place to start and I was peering warily at a half of pink grapefruit, my entire breakfast if you didn’t count the coffee with Weight Watchers sweetener, when the phone on the desk beside me rattled like a snake.

It was Hubbard Anthony. He wanted me to meet him for lunch at the Minneapolis Club and there was a vaguely judicial, oddly insistent quality in his voice. It wasn’t a command but on the other hand it wasn’t a chance suggestion. Clearly, I wasn’t supposed to make my apologies.

The vines still clung to the brick in the sunshine and the hush lay like the soft cloud of tradition on the dining room. Minneapolis is not an old city but it is a wealthy one. The Minneapolis Club therefore purchased its aura of age, turning new into old with a peculiar kind of social alchemy. Money had done a good deal for Minneapolis but it was still a trick, the city was built on a trick; it was a thought which had subtly invaded my thinking years before but I held onto it with the strength born of conviction. I had the feeling that no matter how long Minneapolis lasted, it would still be new, wanting to be old.

Hubbard was tall and elegant in blue summer-weight pin-stripe, a gold collar pin tweezing the long points tight beneath his striped tie. He smelled good, too, as he led me up the stairway and into lunch. He was a perfect reflection of the typical Minneapolis power broker, though somewhat better dressed than the grain barons and the department store princes and computer tycoons. He moved through the room like a saber blade and I followed, a large fellow in need of a diet. It was quiet with the gentle clink of cutlery on china and ice in tall glasses of tea. Beyond, in the dark, polished lounges, there were occasional elderly gents reading the
Wall Street Journal
or writing odd little notes on the club stationery or sleeping it off in the little compartment tucked behind the library, out of range of families and impatient offices.

“Clear soup and the sole,” Hubbard said thoughtfully, as if it were the day’s big decision. Proudly I required two soft-boiled eggs and two slices of dry whole wheat toast. Hubbard raised his eyebrows, nodded, and sipped his perfect martini.

“Well, we’re surely not here to arrange a tennis date,” I said.

“Hardly.” His eyes settled on a man two tables distant. Thin, sallow, worried in his glen plaid. “Andy Malcolm over there—have you heard of his problems? No? Well, you surely will. In the papers.” Hubbard sighed, wistfully mocking. “He’s about to be indicted—that’s his lawyer he’s about to weep on. Andy, as it happens, has been caught up in his enthusiasms for Mr. Nixon, running in and out of the country with satchels full of cash, ‘laundering it’ as we’ve been learning to say in recent months. At this point in time, Andy’s rather afraid he’s headed for the clink. After golf at Woodhill people will mention his name and chuckle behind their hands … which causes him much distress.” He sipped at the martini and made a sour face. “Crooks of his class really do have a pathological fear of being revealed for what they are. Not overly bright. Can you imagine committing a crime for Richard Nixon? It’s really rather astonishing.”

“Will he go to jail?”

“Good lord, no. Did I give that impression? He belongs there, of course, but we must be realistic. He’ll avert the final disaster.”

Lunch arrived and I sliced open the eggs. A gasp of steam escaped from each one. They required salt and pepper. I could see Andy Malcolm and luckily the sight took away my appetite; he wasn’t laughing or smiling. His face was yellowish and deeply lined, jaw clenched, and he looked as if he had to go to the bathroom. I hoped Mr. Nixon appreciated his sacrifice.

“I got a call from our aging football hero, Jim Crocker, last night, Paul. Threatening more or less to run you over with one of his bulldozers. He demanded a meeting. Have you ever confronted a hysterical fullback, or whatever he was? Even at his advanced age the prospect is alarming.” He chewed a bit of sole and nodded happily. “So I met with him. And Martin Boyle. And Jon Goode. Talk about a cabal, it was remarkably offensive in almost every detail. Their hysteria differed only in degree. Crocker appeared in danger of an apoplectic fit and Boyle was, as is frequently the case, about two-thirds gone—on Irish whiskey, I assume. All”—he sighed—“because of your little social calls … Really, Paul we’re going to have to get you straightened out and the old lads becalmed before they croak out of pure terror and indignation.” More sole disappeared. An egg was gone and I was choking on the odd bite of whole wheat toast.