The Do-Right (20 page)

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THE MARKETING LETTER had taken major figuring. What would Phelan Investigations help these companies with? Stealing. Cheating. Lying. Double-crossing. That would be your embezzlers, pilferers, fake-identity employees, crooked partners, sabotagers, etc. You couldn't use those words though, they weren't businesslike. Not classy. People didn't want to broadcast they'd been taken in by crooks like that. Make people throw the letter away.

In the course she'd completed at Gatesville, Mr. Wally had taught how to use larger words that weren't plain from the get-go, that hinted, let you read the page and sit back and think about it, apply it to yourself gradually, not all at once like a sharp stick in the eye. Accordingly, Delpha had written bland and broad, picking a few of what Mr. Wally called
utility words
. Phelan Investigations could help you straighten out
difficulties
in business
dealings
or
personnel activities
. Those problems that distracted a
successful
business from its
goals
.

She'd written a catchy enough first sentence. Then a little about their services and their standards: they aimed to assist your business in returning to profitable operations. They were quick and discreet.
Discreet
, she looked up because there was “discreet” and then there was “discrete.” Mr. Wally had a droning lecture about bad spelling or using the wrong word of a pair that sounded alike but meant different things.
Like
their
and
there
. Didn't matter if you were smart. Those mistakes made you look like you were sporting a dunce cap. Delpha's last paragraph was dedicated to their contact information. Please do not hesitate to call or to stop by, should your business…etc., etc., address and phone number.

Her back hurt between the shoulder blades from tensing up about the letter, from intent typing. She'd felt relieved when Mr. Phelan thought it looked fine. She had a bunch of letters to go.

A Thursday evening and Delpha was drinking coffee in the Rosemont lobby after dinner, not much attending to conversations unless they insisted on being attended to.

The special prosecutor had called for President Nixon to turn over the secret tapes, Nixon had stonewalled, and the Senate had hurled a subpoena into the Oval Office. The discussion of these dramatic events had carried over into a contentious debate about whether Henry Louis Aaron would chase down George Herman Ruth's 714 career homeruns.

Mr. Nystrom finally scissored his arms like a ref calling “Safe,” then pronounced that he could not. Hank Aaron was thirty-nine years old, and youthful as that was, it was old for a professional athlete. Okay, so he'd squeaked out 700, but he'd never reach 714. He didn't have another season in him.

“Squeaked out!” huffed Mr. Finn. “Gimme some of that squeak. You just don't want him to beat The Babe.”

Mr. Nystrom fired back, “So what if I don't?”

“Newspaper says Hank Aaron's been getting death threats. For hitting homeruns. Harry. What kind of person wants to kill a baseball player for hitting homeruns?”

Mr. Nystrom's face swelled. “The record should hold.”

“Wish it could. 1935. My wife was in the pink and a looker
still. Kids were running in the back door and through the kitchen. I miss those days. We all do.”

“Oh, quit bumping your gums,” said Mr. Nystrom.

Mrs. Bibbo, regent of the television, rolled her eyes and beckoned for Delpha to come watch. With no night job anymore, Delpha usually walked or read a book upstairs. Isaac wanted to see her earlier, but she couldn't feature him sauntering through the lobby past all the residents like he was picking up his aunt for a date, or them climbing the stairs side by side, turning all heads in the lobby. She didn't want judgments, stares, or confidential advice to unburnish her time with Isaac. Their time was good where it was.

A commercial interrupted Mrs. Bibbo's program: “Socialites, the choosy woman's choice”—a beanpole in a short beige dress murmuring
Yes, yes
to a pair of black patent leather shoes with stocky heels. Delpha looked away to see Calinda steering through the lobby toward the TV couch.

“You got a letter.”

Her chest seized. She let Calinda reach her before she accepted the envelope, which lacked a return address and so had not been issued by the Texas Department of Corrections. Therefore, she was not, today, being ordered back to prison. She breathed again. Delpha abandoned the television and ran up to her room, locked the door.

Linen paper, cream-color like the envelope. Typewritten.

Dear Delpha Wade
,

I am writing to you as Isaac's mother to ask that you stop seeing him. Perhaps you will not believe this, but it is not your criminal record that concerns me. Neither is it the large gap in your ages. I want you to stop seeing my son so
that he will agree to finish his education on the East Coast. That is where he belongs. He has a future in science. He has friends from families who can help him make a first-rate start in life, though he is not presently in contact with them. Isaac has completed his junior year. There is only the final year left. Now all he talks about is staying here in Beaumont
.

You may judge me prurient when I say I am not sorry he met you, but I believe young men need first affairs like the one he has had with you. Isaac is changed. I would go so far as to say he is able to be kinder. I can persuade him not to worry about his mother any longer, and I can persuade him to return to Princeton, as long as you will break off with him
.

A woman with your past undoubtedly understands how a situation can call forth necessary if regrettable actions
.

I wish you well. Truly
.

The letter had no signature, but the writer had stated who she was in the first line. Delpha read it again. What a difference that third paragraph made.

Undoubtedly understand
.

Necessary if regrettable actions
.

Right. She did know about those.

Delpha put the dry fountain pen, nib-up, in one skirt pocket and five dollars in the other. Passed head-down through the lobby and went out walking on the openness of Main Street and Liberty Avenue, past the Jefferson Theatre where the marquee hawked “The Day of the Jackal,” starring no names she knew. She took long strides, hands in pockets, feeling the pen, the folded bill, and her own hipbones swinging along. She stayed away from Crockett and walked
Forsythe Street, Bowie and Fannin, Neches, and Archie. This old downtown was not really a wide acreage until it met and opened up to the port and the ship basin's oily water. She stopped in front of St. Anthony's, looking up at its brick towers with the white columns, the white crosses on top.

“You lost something, ma'am,” a voice called. An old man, sitting on a bus bench the other side of Jefferson Street.

Delpha waited for a car to go by and then crossed over to him, slowing up as she saw he wasn't so old as she'd thought he was, late forties or fifty. Broad, mixed-race man wearing a thin-lapel suit new maybe the year she went away. A cane leaned against his knee.

“Why you think I lost something?”

He flipped a finger toward the red-brick church. “St. Anthony. The saint of lost things. I'm a deacon there, so I'm qualified to tell you”—he smiled, gap-toothed—“if you pray to St. Anthony, he'll help you find whatever you lost. Or I could pray for you, if you like. Would you like me to?”

The chaplain at Gatesville used to ask that. Used to say, You don't tell me no, Miss Wade, I'll pray for you anyway. That chaplain visited Huntsville too, even the men on Death Row, and he loved and prayed for them, he said. That impressed Delpha, made her think. One of her thoughts was the chaplain was loving humbled men, not free ones bent on harm. Could he do that too?

“Like to ask you a deacon question.”

The man straightened and looked at her hospitably, as if she'd stepped into his office.

“A chaplain once told me if you harbor hate in your heart, if you don't let forgiveness in, it'll poison you. You believe that?”

“Yes, ma'am. I do believe that.”

“Chaplain said if you harbored hate, you had hate. If you
found love in your heart, that's what you'd get. Love. You believe that too?”

“Oh, yes.”

“So how is it you get from the hate to the love?”

A car approached, lighting them both up. It was slowing to the curb. At the wheel, a black woman with a white scarf on her head and a cigarette in her mouth. The man held up his hand, and she doused the lights.

“You don't get there once, Miss. You get there over and over. You have it, you lose it, you find it. That's why St. Anthony is powerful. We have to keep finding.” The man stood, jacket in hand, leaning his weight on the cane. “I know a long prayer to him and a short one. Which would you like?”

“Short.”

“St. Anthony, St. Anthony, please come round. Something is lost that needs to be found.”

Delpha smiled at the rhyme.

So did the deacon. He said, “Hey, baby” and maneuvered heavily into the passenger seat, drew in the cane after himself. He spoke up at her. “You're gonna find it now.”

He was right. She had it already. Delpha had just wanted more opinions on the matter, more time for her decision to form. Decisions took time, took scrutinizing and sifting and measuring and weighing. A decision wasn't sure till it settled in the body.

And then she liked finding out things—had known that before. Knew it more now.

The matter at hand tonight—a knowledge, an understanding—hadn't been lost. Just postponed. She herself was holding off looking at it.

Delpha walked on, toward the New Rosemont. Her blouse was sweated-through under the arms. She'd have to rinse it
out in the sink with a smidgen of Ivory, drape it over the back of her chair.

She'd had to walk to overcome the old push-pull feelings of receiving a letter. Happy when she got a birthday card from her friend Barbara Jean. Happy when her great-uncle Lafayette sent a letter every month, though he mostly wrote the same talk about the weather. Letters were just measures of distance between her and the free world, but it was better to get them. It was empty to receive no Christmas card in '71, even when she'd been notified that Lafayette passed. Nothing after.

She climbed the stairs, unlocked her door, locked it and kicked off her flats. Sitting on her bed, she reread Isaac's mother's letter aloud in a low voice.
Perhaps
, a common word anybody could use except everybody around here would say “maybe.” Didn't prove anything. But
prurient
, that was the word Delpha'd had to look up in the dictionary. That word their second client, who was not Mrs. Lloyd Elliott, had used on the telephone—explaining herself when she didn't have to. “Prurient, perhaps, to have my husband and his lover photographed at a motel room. But I must. Some things cannot be let pass.”

“They can't, and that's the truth,” Delpha had replied and given her the amount that was owed on her account. The woman had not offered to send a check but named the steakhouse museum for the payoff.

The red pocket dictionary had informed Delpha that
prurient
meant “having an excessive interest in sexual matters.”

Perhaps. Prurient
. Both words on the same page of stationery.

Coincidence? Perhaps.

*

Sandwich in her purse, Delpha stepped through the library on Friday at twelve. Sun-flooded stained glass jewels, creaky old wooden floor. She stationed herself in the periodicals, searching through the year's newspapers backwards by date until a square-inch, handsome, middle-aged Isaac startled her, staring out at her from the obituary page. A strong-boned face, confident, casual, the smile in the eyes rather than the mouth.

Dr. Charles Robbins, 47, lost his valiant battle with cancer on June 2, 1973. Survived by wife of twenty-two years, Lucinda, and one son, Isaac. Dr. Robbins employed since 1961 by Daughtry Petrochemical of Beaumont in the department of Research and Development. In lieu of flowers, the family requested that donations be sent to the Dr. Charles Robbins' Memorial Scholarship fund established at Lamar College.

Isaac's dad, Charles Robbins, the chemist at Daughtry.

He'd devised the formula that attorney Lloyd Elliott had been engaged to defend against Enroco Oil Co. Was married to a woman with an educated vocabulary and a mind on the bedroom part of marriage. Maybe because she'd never ever make love to her husband again. Forty-seven wasn't old. Maybe the last time, they hadn't known it was the last time. Or maybe they had.

The real telephone number, not Walgreen's payphone, would be listed in the book. Now Mr. Phelan would have at least part of his outsize curiosity satisfied. Delpha would pass on this information to her boss, if she was right. If she and Mrs. Robbins got straight about her request to let Isaac go.

That had to come first
.

Angela rounded the stacks and paused by the remote table
for a whisper-chat. An assistant librarian, sweet girl who overdid her makeup, she'd caught Delpha stealthily biting a sandwich and shown her a more secluded lunch spot, out of the head librarian's route.

They talked from time to time, which pleased Delpha. It was like she had a friend she wasn't assigned to. Angela wanted to know if Delpha was going to the festival on Crockett Street this weekend. Her uncle's band was playing. “I'm hustling up an audience, you oughta go. They're pretty good, really. They can play everything on the radio. Sometimes they let my cousin sing a song. He's just twelve but he can really give you the creeps.”

“I don't know. I might.”

“You finding everything you need?” Angela had individual, black lash-strokes painted on the skin beneath her eyes, and above a panorama of mermaid green. Her solicitous smile was framed in a thick shade of nude.