The Cavanaugh Quest (4 page)

The story Harriet Dierker told me about Kim Roderick was a honey, filtered through a mesh of venom, hatred. I couldn’t quite imagine why she was so virulent about it but then I remembered that Blankenship had done himself in only the day before and her grief, real or imagined, was at least new and raw.

According to Harriet Dierker, Kim had come down to Minneapolis from some backwater up near the Canadian border, one of the desolate places that made you feel that you were treading the line between life and death, balanced in the darkness between the blue-black forests of pine and evergreen and fir and the flat, strip-mined wastes where the Mesabi had been slit open and its innards pulled out for the good of the steel companies. That part of the country remained an impenetrable, sorrowful mystery to me. Anyone who’d come from there, it seemed to me, must have had to try a little harder. But people I knew who’d come south to the lights of the Twin Cities said I was wrong: Anything, they said, was easy after growing up on the Iron Range. Anyway, the Norway Creek Club must have seemed like heaven to Kim Roderick in the late fifties when she’d gone to work as kitchen help.

Mrs. Dierker, wasn’t sure if Kim had known Billy Whitefoot from up north or if she met him at the club, where Billy ran the tractor with the eight lawn-mower assemblies splayed out behind it, back and forth, every day all summer long across the golf course. Billy had been a very handsome black-haired, black-eyed Indian boy, who had done well at the club, lived over the pro shop, and gone to Dunwoody Institute in the fall and winter to learn the baking trade. Anyway, she thought so; after all, it had been more than fifteen years ago and she couldn’t expect to remember the details.

She did know that the members’ golf committee had allowed Billy to live in the room over the pro shop because they were convinced that here was a boy who just wasn’t like all the other Indians who didn’t give a damn about anything but getting drunk. By saying that, Harriet Dierker believed she was showing her own open-mindedness, her willingness to judge people individually. And Billy had been just fine for a while. Then there had been Kim Roderick. “Billy, my God—he looked like an Indian god, Paul, like a real-life Hiawatha!”—Billy hadn’t had a chance. By the end of the summer Kim was pregnant and she and Billy got married. After all, even though he was an Indian, he was a bright boy, well-liked, doing well at Dunwoody, a serious boy … And apparently he really fell for Kim Roderick. Harriet allowed as how you couldn’t blame him: a temptress, she’d been, always bending over and stretching and showing her legs and her bosom. “I’d never say anything but several of the club members used to make sure they were around when she’d help clean the pool late at night and take a dip,” she said. “I saw her and I saw the men watching her.”

The baby was due in the late winter, to the best of her recollection, and Billy Whitefoot didn’t live that winter in the pro shop. The couple dropped out of sight, maybe went back up north for the winter, but when spring came there was a letter from Billy wondering if their jobs were still open. They were and the first week in April they drove up in an old station wagon, Billy and Kim, no baby; everyone assumed it must have been left with a grandmother or an aunt up north and no one really wanted to know. There were rumors that summer about Billy. People said he’d been drinking; just like an Indian, some of them said. Several mornings he didn’t show up for work and the gigantic mower stood along with the other equipment in the shed. Kim never missed a day, though, refused even to discuss Billy, almost as if he weren’t there anymore. She was working as a waitress in the evening and as a pool girl during the day, but every free moment found her on the tennis courts with Darwin McGill, the pro, learning the game.

That was where Ole Kronstrom first really paid any attention to her.

The sun was warm and the wind scurried blissfully in the rich green crowns of the trees in the park. Mrs. Dierker showed no signs of letting up so I went inside and warmed four brioche, which were actually flown in several times a week, Paris to Minneapolis. I got out a crock of Keiller’s three fruits marmalade, knives and plates, butter, and a little wicker basket with a napkin to wrap the brioche. I was flattering her with my attention; my mind was empty of other things and the more people told me about this story, the more I wanted to hear. It was like killing time by stopping in at a movie you’d never heard of and getting hooked. Blankenship was the one who was dead but the one I was hearing about was Kim, the woman in the case.

Mrs. Dierker was admiring my shaded tuberous begonias and my two tomato plants, which stood a trifle hesitantly in the sun. But, after licking butter from a finger and a morsel of crumb from her lower lip, she wanted to get back to the story.

Ole Kronstrom and Tim Dierker had been partners for a long time, as their fathers had been in the twenties, and it was natural for Helga and Harriet to have become best friends. Their husbands had always gotten on well and on business trips the two women had come to be more than friends. They were intimates; they had no secrets from each other. And it was natural for Helga to turn to Harriet with her suspicions about Ole’s chasing.

That was the summer Billy Whitefoot finally ran off and Kim Roderick (nobody had ever really known her as Kim Whitefoot) showed she had a real talent for tennis, among other things. That summer Ole Kronstrom took up tennis himself, fifty-two years old, married for thirty years to Helga, and maybe beginning to wonder if he’d had all he was going to get.

Harriet Dierker didn’t go into any details about Ole’s fall into depravity, though she must surely have savored them at the time.

“I knew Ole like a brother, he and Pa were that close,” she said, her little jaw clamped hard on her beliefs, “and I saw him make a fool of himself over that wanton girl who’d already ruined one man and abandoned one child … Oh, yes, it was Kim who ruined Billy Whitefoot, the rumors of what she was doing, the way she treated him—I mean it all fit, Paul—and she acted as if he didn’t even exist, as if he were a mistake she could erase. Well, she erased Billy all right, and he went to pieces. That’s the way it must have been. If you’d known them, you’d have seen it happen. Everyone knew it—”

“I don’t think Hubbard saw it that way,” I said. “She stayed on at Norway Creek, didn’t she? They wouldn’t have let her stay if it had been so blatant, would they?”

“The ones who understood things,” she said coldly, “they could see what was going on. It wasn’t our fault if the others—the men—were blind to the kind of woman she was. Is!”

“I see.” She wasn’t about to be trifled with and I didn’t want to antagonize her. I wanted to see where the story went.

“Ole had no sense about her, of course. For a while he pretended that they were just taking tennis lessons together from McGill, that it was natural for them to sit on the porch and have a lemonade together when they were finished playing. There they’d sit, giggling over their lemonade, and then she’d have to go put on her uniform to serve dinner.” She made a face, eyes flickering behind her oval glasses. “It was disgusting and Helga saw it all … but she wouldn’t admit the full truth of it. It was my unhappy job to help her see it and give her my strong shoulder to cry on. Of course Helga eventually confronted him with it and he denied any wrongdoing, as I knew he would.

“But I was right. In the end he was taking her to lunch at Harry’s and Charlie’s out in the open, and he even—God forgive him—talked about adopting her … because she’d had such a hard time, he said, with her husband running off that way, and because she was such a fine girl. I tell you, Paul, there was just no end to his misbehavior …   Helga stood it through that summer and she thought maybe it was over when winter came but I knew it wasn’t. One day in December, just before Christmas, I was having my hair done at Churchill-Anderson, I was under the dryer and I heard her voice, Kim’s voice, behind me, she couldn’t see me, and she was telling the stylist to hurry because her father was picking her up for lunch. It just sent a chill through me, Paul, a positive chill—I can feel it now. And I watched in the mirror; I saw this
father
she was talking about come into the waiting room. It was Ole. It made me sick, seeing her hug him …”

“Did you tell Helga?”

“What else could I do? She was my best friend.”

It was like something from an old Joan Crawford movie; I felt myself being anesthetized by Harriet Dierker’s voice, which grew increasingly short of breath as her plot thickened. But she held my attention. The story had momentum of its own and it just kept going on and on. Ole Kronstrom had refused to give up seeing young Kim, had funneled a good deal of his capital into clothes for Kim, a car for Kim, trips which Kim sometimes took by herself and occasionally with Ole. Eventually his money began to run low—it seemed incredible, but there it was—and of course Helga had left him, divorced him, and managed to come away with a handsome settlement.

What Helga got, Harriet noted, she deserved for all those years of fidelity; what Kim Roderick did was, of course, reprehensible, typical, and utterly bloodthirsty, and who was I to argue?

With Ole presumably on the ropes, Kim had then turned her sex ray on Larry Blankenship, who was still working for Pa (and for Ole, for that matter) but had moved from sales, through a company-financed accounting program, and into the public relations and advertising end of things. He’d had some “personality problems” and had consulted a psychiatrist but, even so, he was “a nice young man, very earnest,” and making a good salary. The sex ray did him in, however: Kim nailed him where he stood, married him, and Harriet wondered why. Love was out of the question; perhaps it was Kim’s misplaced striving for respectability.

Pa had done everything he could to talk Larry out of it; he’d gone off his feed, spent night after night worrying about what the marriage would do to Larry. Harriet had never seen Pa take anything quite so hard, as if Larry were a son. It was about then that his health had seriously begun to fail. She could almost pinpoint it, the night he’d come upstairs to bed gray-faced, shaking; Larry was decided, he said; there was nothing left for him to say. The girl had him and Pa had fidgeted all night; a week later he’d had his first coronary. As far as Harriet was concerned, Pa was another of Kim’s victims. I wondered why Pa had taken it so hard; she offered no substantive explanation.

So Larry and Kim were married. Pa’s health failed through a long winter, and what of Ole Kronstrom? Another peculiar facet glittered in the darkness of the story: Ole had given the bride away … and his wedding present to the happy couple was a honeymoon trip to Europe. He didn’t seem to resent her marriage, which left Harriet Dierker with only one rational conclusion. His relationship with Kim was stable, enduring, continuing.

My head swam with the Byzantine complexity of it all. I had never looked upon myself as an innocent, but my God.

“But Larry was blind to all that, Paul,” she said. The coffee was cold and the brioche were gone. “Self-deception. Was he happy? They were never happy, not really, I’m sure, certainly not after that first year. They had a child, who didn’t turn out right at all—not long after that, Larry left Dierker and Company. Pa tried to keep tabs on him and he moved through several jobs, never seemed able to find himself. They—Larry and Kim—stopped by one Christmas to see us; we gave them some eggnog. I just sat there—I didn’t know what to say to them—but Pa wanted to talk … But there wasn’t much to say. I don’t know to this day why they came to see us. She said almost nothing; Larry seemed tired, drained. Not much after that we heard that they were living apart, then nothing. Pa had another coronary, then a third one, and we got rid of the house and moved in here. I don’t suppose I thought about Larry or Kim for quite a long time. Until a month ago, when Larry moved into this building. Pa acted so funny about it when I told him I’d seen Larry in the lobby … Larry dropped by to see Pa two or three times during this past month but Pa’s been so sick, you know. And now”—she caught her breath—“and now Larry’s dead …

“Pa thinks I’m crazy; he wouldn’t even talk to me this morning … but I want to know why Larry Blankenship killed himself. I really want to know, Paul. What did she do to him? I know she killed him, as surely as if she’d pulled the trigger.

“Why don’t you find out for me?”

When I thought about it later, it didn’t surprise me that Harriet Dierker would ask me to do such a nebulous, largely fractured sort of thing. It was precisely the sort of thing she would ask, unhesitatingly, without giving the question’s implications any serious consideration. Her mind worked that way; she wanted to know and she asked me to find out.

But looking back on it, tweezing through the effects which the search for her wretched answer had on my life, yes, I do wonder at my ever having gotten involved. Like a pulsing swamp, it sucked me in and set me wondering if I were in some way defective in my resistance. So many things have seeped up around me while I wasn’t paying attention. There is a kind of stickiness that overcomes you eventually when you realize that things have taken a peculiar turn. By then it has always been too late. Once, in an echoing, damp night I killed an elderly man in another country …   Once I married Anne. And just once I really paid attention to Harriet Dierker.

It would be unjust to blame her, though. If there had been no more to it than our balcony-and-brioche conversation, I’d have to let it go. Larry Blankenship’s death would have given me pause and I would have doubtless remembered the story of Kim Roderick, but nothing more. I had other things to think about. I could have spent the summer reviewing the new movies, seeing what the Guthrie was doing, striking up hopeful acquaintances with moody actresses who would be there for a season and go conveniently away at the proper time. I had done most of that, as a matter of fact, and I’d interviewed the television personalities coming through and I played tennis and looked with dismay at my Porsche and lunched by the pool in the sunshine at the Sheraton Ritz. I pretended I was only thirty. I experienced the peculiar sensation of someone you recognize through a shifting curtain of people and realize with a flicker in your chest that it’s you you’re seeing, you when you were ten years younger, moving through time like a ghost. Not better, not happier, but more hopeful. Hope had been all around you then and more often than not it had looked like a woman.