The Hellfire Club (30 page)

59

AFTER STOPPING AT
the linen closet for paisley sheets and matching pillowcases so new they were still in the package, they went into a front bedroom with flowered blue wallpaper and knotty pine furniture disposed around the edges of a pink-and-blue hooked rug. A rocker made of lacquered twigs sat in front of the window. Harwich ripped the sheets from their wrappers before flipping the dark blue duvet off the bed.

“The bed’s comfortable, but stay out of that chair.” Harwich nodded at the rocker. “One of Lark’s inspirations—a two-thousand-dollar chair that tears holes in your sweaters.”

He snapped a fitted sheet across the bed. Nora slid the top corner over the mattress as Harwich did the same on his side. They moved down the bed to fit the sheet over the bottom corners. Together they straightened and smoothed the top sheet and tucked it under the foot of the bed.

“Hospital corners,” Harwich said. “Be still, my heart.” They began stuffing pillows into the cases.

“Dan, what am I going to do?”

He shoved his hands in his pockets and stepped toward her, the playfully ironic manner instantly discarded. “First of all, we have to see if the police pick up Dart, or, even better, find his body. Then we want to find out if the FBI is still after you.” He put his right hand on her shoulder.

“You don’t think I should try to see this doctor?”

“Aren’t I good enough for you?” He tried to look wounded.

“The one Dick Dart wanted to kill.”

“The only thing you should do, if you still care about Davey, is tell him the Chancel House lawyers are selling them down the river. That might straighten out your problems with the old man.”

Dan Harwich seemed to have admitted fresh air and sunlight into a dank chamber where Nora had been spinning in darkness.

“If I were you,” Harwich said, “I’d take his father for everything I could get. That tough old number from up the road in Northampton, Calvin Coolidge, wasn’t wrong: the business of America is business.”

Nora closed her eyes against a wave of nausea and heard the shufflings of a gathering of demons. “Don’t do this to me,” she said. “Please.”

Harwich put an arm around her waist and guided her to the side of the bed. “Sorry. You need rest, and I’m talking your ear off.”

“I’ll be okay.” She clasped her hand on his wrist, feeling completely divided: one part of her wanted Harwich to stay with her, and another, equal part wanted him to leave the room. “I should apologize, not you.”

“Stretch out.”

She obeyed. He went to the foot of the bed, untied her shoes, and pulled them off. “Thanks.”

“You remember this doctor’s name?”

She shook her head. “Something Irish.”

“That narrows the field. How about O’Hara? Michael O’Hara?”

She shook her head again.

“The man you want is gay, isn’t he?” He began kneading the sole of her right foot with his thumbs. “I can’t think of more than three gay doctors in the whole town, and they’re all younger than I am.” What he was doing to her foot set off reverberations and echoes throughout her body. “Did you hear his first name?”

She nodded.

“What letter did it start with?”

Without any hesitation at all, Nora said, “M.”

“Michael. Morris. Montague. Max. Miles. Manny. Mark. What else? Monroe.”

“Mark.”

“Mark?” He dug his thumbs into her left foot, and a tingle wound all the way up her backbone. “Mark. With an Irish last name, and gay to boot. Let’s see. Conlon, Conboy, Congdon, Condon, Mulroy, Murphy, Morphy, Brophy, O’Malley, Joyce, Tierney, Kiernan, Boyce, Mulligan, this isn’t easy. Burke. Brannigan. Sullivan. Boyle.”

“Hold on. That was close. Sounds like Boyle.” She held her breath and closed her eyes, and a name floated toward her out of the darkness. “Foyle. His name was Mark Foyle.”

“Mark Foil?”

“That’s the name.”

He laughed. “Yes, but you were thinking F-o-y-l-e, which is why you thought it was an Irish name. Mark Foil is about as Irish as the queen of England, and his name is Foil as in
tinfoil.
Or as I heard him say once, Foil as in
fencing.
” He spoke the last phrase in a mincing, affected voice.

“You know him.”

“Foiled again,” Harwich said, using the same swishy voice.

“Is he like that?”

“He couldn’t afford to be. The man was a GP for upwards of forty years, and this isn’t the most liberated place on the face of the earth.”

“Where does he live?”

“The good part of town,” Harwich said. “Unlike we lesser mortals, Dr. Foil can behold a great many trees when he glances out of his leaded windows.” He patted her foot. “Look, if you want to see the guy, I’ll take you over there. But the guy’s one of those patrician queers.”

The word
queers
chilled Nora. It sounded ugly and wrong, especially coming from Dan Harwich, but she pushed aside her distaste. “You think he wouldn’t have time for me?”

“Foil never had time for
me
, if that’s any indication. God, you should see his boyfriend.”

The telephone down the corridor began ringing. “You could probably use a nap,” Harwich said.

“I could try.”

Released, he gave her foot a last pat, went smiling toward the door, and closed it behind him. Nora heard his footsteps racing toward the telephone, which must have been in his bedroom. A moment later, in a voice loud enough to be overheard through the door, he said, “Okay, I know, I know I did.”

She thought she might as well take a bath. On the marble shelf beside the antique sink in the bathroom lay three new toothbrushes still in their transparent pastel coffins and a pump dispensing baking soda and peroxide toothpaste. Nora struggled with one of the toothbrush containers until she managed to splinter one side. Above the tub, modern fittings protruded from the pink-tiled wall. Checking for the necessary supplies, Nora saw a tall, half-filled bottle of shampoo and a matching bottle of conditioner, both for dry or damaged hair, surrounded by a great number of hotel giveaway containers. A used shower cap lay over the showerhead like a felt mute over the bell of a trombone.

Lark had moved out of Harwich’s bed before she had moved out of his house. On a shelf above the towels Nora saw a deodorant stick, a half-empty bottle of mouthwash, a Murine bottle, a nearly empty aspirin bottle, an emery board worn white in a line down the middle, a couple of kinds of moisturizer and skin cream, and a tall spray bottle of Je Reviens, almost full. She began pulling the T-shirt out of her jeans.

Someone behind her said, “Hold it,” and she uttered a squeak and jumped half an inch off the ground.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to . . .”

She turned around, her hand at the pulse beating in her throat, to find an apologetic-looking Dan Harwich inside the bath-room door.

“I thought you heard me.”

“I was getting ready to take a bath.”

“Actually,” Harwich said, “maybe we ought to get in touch with Mark Foil. In case Dart did get away, as unlikely as that is, we have to make sure Mark is protected.”

“Well, fine,” Nora said, unsure what to make of this sudden reversal.

“We might be able to go over there this morning.” His whole tempo had sped up, like Nora’s pulse. Smiling in an almost insistent way, he went sideways through the bathroom door, silently asking her to come with him.

“You changed your mind in a hurry.”

“You know my whole problem? I can’t get out of my stupid patterns. I think Mark Foil looks down on me, and I resent that. An egotistical voice in my head says I’m a hotshot and he’s only a retired GP, who does he think he is, screw him. I shouldn’t let that kind of crap keep me from doing what’s right.”

Nora followed him into a huge bedroom with a four-poster bed and a big-screen television set. Clothes lay scattered across the floor. “What was Dart going to say to these people? How was he going to get into their houses?”

“I was supposed to be writing something about that summer at Shorelands—the summer of 1938. Everybody knows about Hugo Driver, but the other guests have never been given their due. Something like that.”

“Sounds good,” Harwich said. “If I have a talent for anything besides surgery, it’s for bullshit. Who do you want to be?” He kicked aside a pile of old socks and sweat clothes on his way to a bookcase.

“Gosh, I don’t know,” Nora said.

“What’s a lady-writer kind of name? Emily Eliot. You’re my old friend Emily Eliot, we went to Brown together, and now you’re writing a piece about whatsit, Shorelands. Let’s see, you got a Ph.D. from Harvard, you taught for a while, but quit to be a freelance writer.” He was paging through a fat directory. “We have to make you a respectable citizen or Mark Foil won’t give you the time of day. You published one book five years ago. It was about . . . hmm . . . Robert Frost? Was he ever at Shorelands?”

“Probably.”

“Published by, who? Chancel House, I guess.”

“And I was edited by Merle Marvell.”

“Who? Oh, I get it, he’s the big gun there.”

“The biggest,” said Nora, smiling.

“The whole point about lying is to be as specific as possible.” He flipped a page and ran his finger down a list of names. “Here we go. Since this is Mark Foil we’re talking about, he might be spending the summer on a Greek island, but let’s give it a try. What was his boyfriend’s name, Somebody Monk, like Thelonious?”

“Creeley,” she said.

Harwich dialed the number and held up crossed fingers while it rang.

“Hello, I wonder if I could speak to Mark, please. . . . This is Dan Harwich. . . . Yes, of course, hello, Andrew, how are you? . . . Oh, are you? Wonderful. . . . Provincetown, how nice for you. . . . Well, if you think you could. . . . Thanks.”

He put his hand over the receiver. “His boyfriend says they’re going to Provincetown for the rest of the summer. Doesn’t sound too good.” He attended to the telephone again. “Mark, hello, this is Dan Harwich. . . . An old friend of mine from Brown, a writer, showed up here in the course of doing research for a book, and it turns out that she wants to get in touch with you. . . . That’s right. Her name is Emily Eliot, and she’s completely house-trained, Harvard Ph.D. . . . A poet named Creeley Monk? . . . Yes, that’s right. She’s interested in the people who were at a place called Shorelands with him, and it seems she came across your name somewhere. . . .”

He looked at her. “He wants to know where you saw his name.”

Dart had not explained how he had heard of Mark Foil. “Doing research on Creeley Monk.”

He repeated the phrase into the telephone. “No, she did a book before this. Robert Frost. . . . Yes, she’s right here.”

He held out the receiver. “Emily? Dr. Foil wants to talk to you.” When she took it from him, he pretended he was working a shovel.

A clipped, incisive voice nothing like Harwich’s effeminate parody said, “What is going on, Miss Eliot? Dan Harwich doesn’t have any serious friends.”

“I was a youthful mistake,” Nora said.

“You can’t be writing a book about Creeley Monk. Nobody remembers Creeley anymore.”

“As Dan said, I’m working on a book about what happened at Shorelands during the summer of 1938. I think Hugo Driver’s success unfairly eclipsed the other writers who were there.”

“Do you have a publisher?”

“Chancel House.”

A long silence. “Why don’t you come over and let me take a look at you? We’re going out of town this morning, but we still have some time.”

60

A SLENDER, SMILING
young man in a lightweight gray suit and black silk shirt opened the door of the stone house amid the oak trees and greeted them. Harwich introduced his friend Emily Eliot to the young man, Andrew Martindale, who looked straight into Nora’s eyes, widened his smile, and instantly changed from a diplomatic male model into a real person filled with curiosity, humor, and goodwill. “It’s wonderful that you’re here,” he said to Nora. “Mark is tremendously interested in your project. I wonder if you know what you’re in for!”

Nora said, “I’m just grateful that he’s willing to talk to me.”

“
Willing
is hardly the word.” Martindale let them pass into the house and then stepped backwards onto a riotous Persian rug. A broad staircase with shining wooden treads stood at the end of a row of white columns. “I’ll take you into the library.”

At the end of the row of columns, he opened a door into a book-lined room twice the size of Alden Chancel’s library. In a dazzle of sunlight streaming through a window, a white-haired man in a crisp dark suit who looked unexpectedly familiar to Nora was standing beside an open file box on a gleaming table. He grinned at them over the top of his black half-glasses and held up a fat volume bound in red cloth.

“Andrew, you said I’d find it, and I did!”

Martindale said, “Nothing ever gets lost in this house, it just goes into hiding until you need it. And here, just in time to share your triumph, are Dan and Ms. Eliot. Would you like some coffee? Tea, maybe?”

This was addressed to Nora, who said, “If you have coffee ready, I’d love some.”

The white-haired man tucked the red book under his arm, twinkled the half-glasses off his nose and folded them into his top pocket, and came loping across the room with his right hand extended. He was as smooth as mercury, and though he must have been in his mid-seventies, he looked as if he had undergone no essential physical changes since the age of fifty. He shook Harwich’s hand, then turned, all alertness, interest, and curiosity, to Nora, who felt that with one probing glance Mark Foil instantly had comprehended all that was important within her, including a great deal of which she herself was unaware.

Harwich introduced them.

“Why don’t we sit down so that you can tell me about yourself?” Foil indicated a plump sofa and two matching chairs near the bright window. A glass table with a neat stack of magazines stood within reach of the furniture. Nora took one end of the sofa, and Mark Foil slid into the other. As if he were cutting her loose, Harwich moved around the glass table, sat down in the chair beside the far end of the sofa, and lounged back.

“You haven’t been sleeping very well, have you?” Foil asked.

“Not as much as I’d like,” she said, surprised by the question.

“And you’ve been under a good deal of stress. If you don’t mind my asking, why is that?”

She looked across at Harwich, who looked blandly back.

“The past few days have been kind of strange,” she said.

“In what way?”

Looking at the kind, intelligent face beneath the white hair, Nora came close to admitting she was here under false pretenses. Mark Foil took in her hesitation and leaned forward without altering his expression.

Nora looked up from Foil to Harwich, who was staring at her in unhappy alarm.

“To tell you the truth,” she said, “I’ve just become meno-pausal, and my body seems to have turned against me.”

Foil leaned back, nodding, and behind him, unseen, Harwich flopped back into his chair. “Apart from your looking much too young, it makes a lot of sense,” Foil said. “You’re seeing your gynecologist, keeping a watch on what’s going on?”

“Yes, thanks.”

“I’m sorry if I seemed to pry. I’m like an old firehorse. My reflexes are stronger than my common sense. You and Dan were friends at Brown?”

“That’s right.”

“What was our eminent neurosurgeon like in those days?”

Nora looked across at our eminent neurosurgeon and tried to guess what he had been like at Brown. “Ferocious and shy,” she said. “Always angry. He improved once he got into medical school.”

Foil laughed. “Wonderful thing, the memory of an old friend. Keeps us from forgetting the cocoons from which we emerged.”

“Some old friends remember more than you imagine possible,” Harwich said.

“When I was that age, I read Browning and Tennyson until they came out of my ears. Not very up to date, I’m afraid. I suppose part of what I liked about Creeley’s work was that although he was much better than I ever would have been, he wasn’t very up to date, either. In medicine you have to be up to the minute to be any good at all, but I don’t think that’s true in the arts, do you?”

Andrew Martindale backed through the door holding a wide silver tray with three cups and a silver coffeepot in time to hear Foil’s last sentence. He turned around to carry the tray toward the glass table. “Not again.”

“But this time we have a Harvard Ph.D. and professional writer to consult. Emily, what do you think? Andrew and I have an ongoing argument about tradition versus the avant-garde, and he’s completely pigheaded.”

Martindale slid the tray onto the table, almost clipping the stack of magazines. Nora looked at them and knew she was lost, out of her depth, about to be exposed as a fraud.
Avec
,
Lingo
, and
Conjunctions
, which almost certainly represented Martindale’s taste in literature, might as well have been written in Urdu, for all she knew of their contents.

“Settle our argument,” Foil said.

Harwich said, “You shouldn’t—”

“No, it’s all right,” Nora said. “I don’t think you can settle it, and I don’t think you want to, because you get too much fun out of it. Speaking for myself, I like both Benjamin Britten and Morton Feldman, and they probably hated each other’s music.” She looked around at the three men. Two of them were gazing at her with undisguised friendly approval, the third with undisguised astonishment.

Martindale smiled at them all and vanished.

As if following stage directions, the three of them picked up their cups and sipped the excellent coffee.

“You’re right, we enjoy our ongoing argument, and part of what I like in Andrew is that he keeps trying to bring me up to date. And although Creeley’s work is not the sort of thing he generally likes, he’s been supportive of my efforts to publish a Collected Poems.” Foil smiled at her. “It would be nice if your work finally permitted me to do him justice.”

Nora felt like crawling out of the house.

“Merle must be your editor.”

“Excuse me?”

“Merle Marvell. At Chancel House. Isn’t he your editor?”

“Oh, yes, of course. I didn’t realize you knew him.”

“We’ve met him a half dozen times, but I don’t really know him except by reputation. As far as I know, Merle is the only person at Chancel who’d have enough courage to take on a proj-ect which might turn out less than flattering to Lincoln. In fact, I have the idea that Merle is the
only
real editor at Chancel House.”

Nora smiled at him, but this conversation was making her increasingly uncomfortable.

“Do you think Chancel House would be willing to publish something which puts Driver in a different light? Creeley didn’t think much of him to begin with, and by the end of the summer, he positively detested the man.”

“I think they’re willing to present a balanced viewpoint,” Nora said.

“Well, then.” Foil placed his cup in its saucer. “I don’t see why I shouldn’t share this with you.” He picked up the thick red book. “This is the journal Creeley kept during the last year of his life. I read it when I went through his papers after his death. Read it? I
studied
it. Like every suicide’s survivor, I was looking for an explanation.”

“Did you find one?”

“Does anyone? He had been disappointed the day before he killed himself, but I wouldn’t have thought . . .” He shook his head, the memory of defeat clear in his eyes. “It still isn’t easy. Anyhow, if you’re interested in bringing the celebrated Hugo Driver down a peg or two, this will be useful to you. The man was a weakling. He was worse than that. It took a while for Creeley to convince anybody of the fact, but he was a thief.”