The Cavanaugh Quest (7 page)

“Why, Tim’s all right, isn’t he?” My father’s blue eyes flickered up.

“Well, nothing has happened to him,” I said, “but it’s hard to say he’s all right.”

He picked his tooth with a pick, made a face. “Hmmm, I’ve stabbed myself. Ah, well … Tim Dierker. I met him forty or so years ago, known him ever since. Your mother’s family, as you know, had a good deal more money than was good for them, and I was sort of drawn into things like the Norway Creek Club because of it. That’s where I met Tim and Harriet.

“Tim didn’t have any phoniness about him; he was what we used to call a regular guy, which meant he took a dim view of bullshit, which you found a lot of at Norway Creek in those days. There were several of us out there in the long ago—we sort of hung around together.”

“Was this the beginning of your hunting and fishing club? I’ve seen pictures of you up north with Hub Anthony. Was he in this group?”

“Sure. We liked the chance of getting away from town—”

“And your wives, I’ll bet,” Julia said. She was ironic and wore very well. She and my father had met during the war and had taken up together fifteen years ago. She was his secretary, but she was a good deal more. Some of the time she stayed at the house, but she’d always maintained an apartment in town. She’d had a couple of husbands and that had cured her; she didn’t want a third.

“Of course. My wife in particular, I assure you.” He looked shyly at me, aware he’d insulted my mother, and I nodded. “What is behind this curiosity, if I may ask?”

I told them about the suicide of Larry Blankenship and the conversations with both Dierkers which ensued. My father is not the sort of man to become needlessly shaken by events occurring so far into the shadows, so far from his own concern. He nodded when I finished.

“Harriet is obviously as irretrievably nosy as ever and Tim is as irritated by bullshit. I’ve often thought of putting them into a book, what an absurdly mismatched pair—no wonder they never produced a child, it’d be like mating a Saint Bernard and a shrike …” He sipped at the goblet of Blue Nun Julia had freshened and took a cheroot from his shirt pocket. Julia handed him a box of matches from the cart beside the table. Wind rustled gently in the trees.

“I never
knew
Blankenship. I have met him, the name is familiar, probably because of his relationship with Kim Roderick, whom I did know somewhat.” He played with his cigar for a time and finally got it lit to his satisfaction. Julia slid an ashtray across the table toward him. A frog leaped onto a lily pad, the movement graceful, and sat squatting, staring at us. “It’s peculiar, she was the sort of person who gets talked about by others, even those who may not know her. I’ve met women like that from time to time in my life, not very often, when I think about it, but Kim was one of them. Star quality, maybe? Who knows. Maybe it’s genetic, just something in the blood.”

“Did everybody feel that way about her? Did they notice her?”

“I don’t know, but perhaps they did. It seemed that they kept talking about her … You should ask your former wife, my boy. Anne knew her when they were girls—Anne was being terribly democratic, as you know she sometimes is, and befriended this disconnected girl—”

“Disconnected?” Julia said. “What does that mean, for heaven’s sake?”

“Why, no connections, no family …”

“You mean she just appeared? The existential being?” Julia’s eyebrows arched.

“Yes, as a matter of fact, that’s exactly what she did, as I understand the story. Just appeared one day, applying for a job. But then, I’m only recalling what I’ve heard … But it’s a cinch she wasn’t one of the usual girls, wherever the hell she came from.”

“That’s about what Judge Anthony said,” I said.

“Well, he may have had an eye for her, you know. She was capable of that effect.” Archie drew on the cheroot, crossing his legs. Julia was pulling on her cotton gardening gloves. It was her flower garden and I could smell it, sweet, airy, like Julia.

“Was she liked? Did they like her?”

“Who? The men or the women?”

“You mean it was that obvious?”

“That’s what my friends used to say, they talked about her when we were alone. Not dirty, just appreciative, as I recall.” He sighed. “Julia would understand—Kim wasn’t the sort of woman you’d talk about in front of other women.”

“I do understand,” she said, standing up. “I met this girl, too, Archie, one year at the Christmas dance at the club. She was there with her husband, this Larry fellow. We were introduced, and I know what you mean about her—I may not have talked about her, but I caught myself thinking about her afterward. She was beautiful but somehow preoccupied. She seemed to be somewhere else. She had a … quality. Now, I must get my trowel and play with my flowers.”

Archie got to talking about his group of friends of almost forty years ago. It was very unlike him and maybe that was why he seemed to enjoy going back over it; he wasn’t indulging himself, he was answering my questions, so maybe he didn’t look on it as a sign of age.

“What did your friends think of her? Your gang, I mean.”

“They liked her—admired her looks and her attitudes, I’d say.”

“Even Tim Dierker?”

“Sure. Hell, he was the one who put the stamp of approval on her for a job. He told Lenhardt, the guy who was managing the kitchen then—manages the whole damn place now, by the way—Dierker told him she was the kind of girl who’d cheer the place up.” He emptied the Blue Nun. The bottle was sweating. Julia had brought a bag of gardening tools and was kneeling by the border of lavender and yellow flowers circling the frog pond.

“I wonder what turned him against her?” I said.

“What are you talking about?” The breeze was blowing the cigar smoke away from us and the flowers smelled good. The lake glistened below, past the trees black and green with the sun’s rays filtering golden through them.

“Well, Harriet said Tim’s health broke when he was unable to convince Larry Blankenship not to marry her. She said Tim was very protective about Larry, like a son, and that he was desperately trying to talk him out of marrying her. And never got over having failed.”

Archie shook his head with its slicked-back white hair, so carefully barbered, and shifted his weight. The blue eyes blinked and looked out toward the lake as if an answer might be hidden on the distant shore.

“I can’t imagine what happened. He always seemed to like her. We all thought she was fine.”

“Tell me about the group,” I said. “Who all was in it?”

It was a varied collection:

In addition to Archie Cavanaugh, Timothy Dierker, Ole Kronstrom, and Hubbard Anthony, there were three others, all of whom had gone on to success and ease.

Jonathan Goode, four years younger than my father, was a career army man, retired now as a three-star general, but then a young captain stationed in Minneapolis at Fort Snelling. World War II had done some very good things for Jon Goode and the Korean War had done some more. He’d become involved in strategic planning at Pentagon levels, moving around with considerable familiarity in parts of our bureaucratic system which we taxpayers know nothing about. He wasn’t a spy, but he knew what spies know, was in the intelligence gathering and analyzing end of things, and had in fact been the man who’d contacted me for a simple mission. I’d ended up having to kill a man on a train; I wasn’t likely to forget General Goode, though I’d downed a good deal of scotch giving it a try. Although he lived in Minneapolis, retired and sitting on several boards, he didn’t move in precisely my social set; Archie still saw him fairly, regularly. I hadn’t seen him in years.

Father Martin Boyle had been a youngish Irish priest in the thirties; now he was an oldish Irish priest, overweight and red-nosed and much loved at the University of Minnesota, where he’d been the force behind the flourishing Newman Center. At sixty-eight he was still connected with the center, as its “patron saint,” some said, garrulous, full of gout, still playing golf with Jon Goode at Norway Creek. He lived still in a large turn-of-the-century house in Prospect Park, not far from the university, a house he shared with Father Conrad Patulski. They also shared a midnight-blue Cadillac limousine, which didn’t say much for the poverty of the priesthood, but then this was the twentieth century. Archie said that Boyle was a priest you could trust: He ate too much, drank too much, and liked women. He was never self-righteous, a very fine quality in a man of the cloth.

James Crocker, seventy, had been a football star at the university in the mid-twenties (Nagurski’s time? How the hell should I know? But Crocker had had his greatest day against Grange and the Illini; it was a legend), very nearly an all-American. His heart was wearing out, the plague of ex-jocks. He’d played professionally with George Halas’ Chicago Bears when Grange had made pro football happen. And by the mid-thirties he’d established contracting and land-development operations in the Twin Cities. As the years, then the decades, passed, he became a figure to be reckoned with in politics and gave his name to housing projects, then to a suburb. He’d given a good deal of money to Richard Nixon’s Campaign to Re-Elect, realized too late that it had been laundered in Mexico, and been very irritable ever since. He preferred to remember his greatest game as a Minnesota Golden Gopher when Memorial Stadium was dedicated and he helped beat the great Red Grange; he wouldn’t mention Nixon and Grange in the same breath.

“And everybody liked young Kim?” I said when he had run through the list.

“So far as I ever knew.” He stifled a yawn behind a wrinkled, pale hand. It was that kind of afternoon.

“But she was a slut, a monster who made her husband kill himself. Drove him to it with her infidelities.” I shook my head. “Inconsistencies, Dad.”

“Life’s full of them.” He smiled lopsidedly. “Anyway, all you’ve got for evidence is the raving of Harriet Dierker, not precisely an ideal witness.”

“But she
was
raving,” I said, remembering. “That’s the point. She wasn’t gossiping, not really. She was worked up.” I yawned, too. “And if Tim Dierker thought she was so wonderful, what bothered him so much about Larry marrying her? Pieces missing in there.”

“Long time ago. Half of what happened people forget entirely, the other half they get wrong in trying to tell it. It all gets distorted. Faulty memories are right in the middle of writing mystery novels—the characters have them, the reader sure as hell has one, frequently the writer does, too.” He yawned again. “Memories, on the whole, are for shit, Paul.”

“Ole Kronstrom fell in love with her, for God’s sake,” I said. “Now I ask you, would he fall in love with a monster?”

“Hardly. Ole was a simple man. Or a fool, or maybe just lucky. I mean, after all, Ole is not necessarily the fellow you’d pick for Kim, not on the nice shiny surface of things, anyway.”

“Did you know about them?”

“Tough not to.” Archie stood up and kicked off his sneakers, wriggled his toes in the grass. Newly mowed grass mottled his white feet. We walked up to the house together. A motorboat whined into life down on the lake and the sound floated up the hill, a part of summer indistinguishable from all the other parts, the smells of the flowers and the Coppertone and the sounds of the insects. I followed him back across the stones into the cool library.

“Enough history,” he said. “You want to know about the girl, not my old cronies.” He sank down into a flowered-print chair, the slipcover casually off-center, and crossed his bare feet.

“I really wanted to know why Blankenship killed himself.” I heard myself say it; it didn’t seem strange. I did want to know; the curiosity had just sort of infected me
,
like a siege of walking pneumonia I’d once had.

“That’s what I say, Paul—the girl.” He stroked his white mustache with a bony knuckle. “The girl, I’m trying to remember what, what it is I know, or knew, about her …” He sucked the knuckle for a minute and I could see Julia kneeling by the flower border. She was troweling moist, dark earth and looked as if she were enjoying herself immensely. The sprinkler caught the sun through the trees, held it for a moment, then sprayed along on its way.

“She came to Norway Creek not long after I came back to the university. I didn’t pay any particular attention to her, though I couldn’t help noticing her. The way she looked, that trim, neat figger, sort of a solemn face, dark eyebrows, dark shiny hair—stupid thing to remember, hair, but what can I tell you?” He shrugged. “It made you wonder if she had a line of that dark hair going up her belly. Well, hell, let’s be candid, Paul. That’s they way she made me think …”

“You should be ashamed of yourself,” I said.

“Harriet told you more about her love life than I ever knew. I can’t vouch for the facts but it sounded more or less right to me. But she always impressed me as competent, the kind of person who’d get done whatever she set out to do. She always acted like a person right there in the present, very down to earth, not silly.” He sighed and pursed his lips. “Now, you can call that sort of attitude calculating or mature, dangerous or determined, depending on your point of view.

“It seems to me that somebody—Dierker, I think—told me she was an orphan from up north, maybe from the town near where we had the lodge. That must be how Tim knew about her, sounds possible. She was a charity case, anyway, and the guys in our group sort of felt sorry for her—seems she was the niece of somebody. Christ, I’m hazy on this, Paul …

“You really should ask Anne about her if you’re sufficiently curious. Girls do talk to one another, don’t they? They played a lot of tennis. Anne was taking lessons from her, I suppose. Anyway, that’s about all I know …”

We sat for a while, sleepy. Archie picked up one of the Michael Gilbert novels. I felt my eyelids getting heavy from the luncheon wine and the fact that I’d gotten up way too early. Something made me jerk and I looked at Archie. He’d gotten out of the flowered chair and was peering into one of the floor-to-ceiling bookcases built into the wall. They were glossy white. He finally reached up and withdrew a large brown leather photograph album.

“You awake?” He cleared his writing gear to one side of the old oak desk and placed the photograph album in the center. I nodded. “Thought you might like to see this,” he said. He opened the album, which was held together by heavy brown twine threaded through each page. I went over to the desk. I looked at my watch. An hour had passed since we’d come back to the library.