The Side of the Angels (14 page)

I sighed to myself. Couldn't Louise ever date anyone normal?

“How was it that Hub did not know this?”

“He was busy.”

“It was five years, Louise.”

“Hub is a trusting person. He thinks that if you put your faith in people, it nearly always pays off.”

“There's a fine line between faith and stupidity, if you ask me. He didn't really go around hurting seeing-eye dogs, did he? Because I think you can be arrested for that.”

“Of course not. It's a metaphor for how angry he was at his
own
blindness about Karen. He always says he didn't let go of the pain about her until the moment he looked up from the accident and saw me.”

Louise never met any of her nonnormal men in a normal way. She'd first encountered Hub when he got into a car accident late one February night at the intersection near her apartment, which was the corner of Tenth and Pennsylvania. Louise had heard the crash and run out to be of what assistance she could. She fed Hub and the other driver sandwiches and coffee while they waited for the police to come.

“I still can't believe you did that, Louise,” I said now. “Don't you know better than to flit out into the street at nearly midnight, in your neighborhood?”

“Nicky, I know my neighborhood. You think it's dangerous just because it's mostly black people, which is very narrow-minded of you.”

“No, I think it's dangerous because it's mostly people with prison records. I don't care about the color of their skin, and neither should you. You should just stay inside and call 911. Remember when they raided that crack house two doors down from you and you stood on the sidewalk offering to feed the dealers' rottweilers for them until they made bail? I swear, Louise, please don't make me come down to the morgue and identify you.”

My brother Joey referred to my cousin's living situation as “Louise's single-handed attempt to integrate Southeast.” In her determination to rub shoulders with her fellow man, Louise had been mugged, burglarized, and had her butt grabbed by a fondle-and-run molester on a bicycle. My theory was that Louise had chosen her dicey neighborhood
because it was as far from the rest of her family as she could get without decamping to the suburbs. And the rents were low, so that Louise could squirrel away her money in the event that someday the supply of lonely hearts gave out.

“Hub's band is playing D.C. and Baltimore all through Christmas and New Year's. Will you come hear them with me? We can go backstage.”

“If I'm home I'll come, sure.”

“You have to come home. I want you to see him at his best, when he's performing.”

It was hard to imagine that Hub could be any
worse
on stage than when he appeared before me in person trailing an aura of sweat, stale marijuana smoke, and sandalwood. He believed, Louise informed me, that deodorant caused cancer of the lymph nodes.

I plunged. I knew better, but I did it anyway.

“Louise, don't you think that any of this sudden intensity with Hub has even a little to do with Johnny?”

“Nicky, I wish you'd quit harping on that. No one could be happier for Johnny than I am. Let go of these girlish fantasies. We're all grown up now.”

I tried to speak her language.

“Louise, don't you think maybe that the Universe wants you to save Johnny from spending his life with someone humorless and unloving?”

“You don't know that Betsey is those things.”

“She doesn't laugh at his jokes. She'll make him live in some development in Gaithersburg.”

“Many very nice people live in Gaithersburg.”

“Many nice people live in Moscow, too, but that doesn't mean we want Johnny to be dragged there. I have a bad feeling about her, Louise. I just can't help thinking that all elementary school teachers have a little too much of the bully in them. I mean, one of these days she's going to tell Johnny he has to raise his hand before he goes to the bathroom.”

Louise ignored me.

“How did you do, seeing Tony again?”

I had filled her in during a brief phone call while packing.

“Horribly. I don't want to talk about it. It'll just depress me. Tell me what you've been up to the last few days.”

“Actually, I went with Betsey to see about the wedding flowers. Johnny's bugged me and bugged me to do something chummy with her, so finally I did that. It didn't go too well, to tell the truth.”

Floral wrangles seemed to be the theme of my night. It transpired that Betsey was so enamored of natural simplicity that she intended to carry a bouquet of dried lavender and baby's breath in her tiny, doll-like hands. Apparently the fragility of dried lavender presented a real challenge, and the florist had doubted Betsey's chosen arrangement would make it through the ceremony intact. I could see her, shedding dead blossoms all the way down the aisle.

“She's such a pill, Louise. There's a reason why roses are the flower of choice. Is she cheap or something?”

“No, I think her parents are footing the bill and they're
quite
well off. She just has very specific tastes. It's her big day. I can't blame her.”

Louise was being charitable. I knew her opinions on weddings: the gaudier the better. Louise's wedding, whenever it occurred, was sure to be as flaky as they came, populated by Quakers, Scientologists, palm readers, anti-vivisectionists, and tree spikers—guests from every cause or sect Louise had ever stepped foot in. But whatever her bridal excesses, you wouldn't catch her in a wilted linen dress like the one Betsey had chosen, or foisting carrot cake on her unsuspecting guests, as it appeared Betsey was planning to do.

“Betsey asked me if I thought Johnny would agree to get a professional manicure the day before the wedding. I told her I didn't think he'd be amenable to that idea.”

Tactful Louise. I'd have laughed out loud. If you marry a mechanic, you'd sure better be okay with grimy fingernails. My father and brothers had always relied on an excellent snot-colored, oil-based concoction by the trade name of Glop, but no matter what you used, there'd be traces of engine oil and dirt that would never come out. It was ingrained in the skin.

“Louise, don't you see? It's happening already. Who does she think she's marrying here?”

“Nicky, in my work I've seen that it's not so uncommon for one partner to try to change the other partner at first. Many couples grow out of that.”

“But we're not talking about her making an alteration in his table manners. We're talking about his work, his work that he loves. She's going to make him feel like a grease monkey.”

“She must make him feel good about himself somehow, because he's marrying her.”

“Her, not me” were the words she didn't say.

“Are you speaking to Johnny again? He told me you'd had a fight.”

“It was nothing. I was a little emotional that night. Hormones.”

“It's nowhere near your period.”

“Work stress.”

She said she was tired a moment later. After we'd hung up, I ran a bath in the clawfoot tub and lay there thinking about Louise and Johnny, and what could be done to engineer the happy ending they both so richly deserved.

Betsey was like the murder victims in my Agatha Christie novels. She was like selfish, spoiled Linnet Doyle in
Death on the Nile
or vain, cheating Arlena Marshall in
Evil Under the Sun
. Not as attractive or underhanded, of course—just, as they were, overpoweringly in the way. She had to be gotten rid of, but how? Louise was no match for her. Louise would keep kidding herself with men so odd and needy that their very oddness and neediness was a distraction from the fact that she didn't love them. All the while, Johnny was being frogmarched to the altar.

When I returned home for Thanksgiving, I vowed, something had to give. Don't interfere, Ma had said. But I wasn't so much interfering as inviting fate to use me as an instrument to set things right. Who could say that wasn't noble?

T
ONY ORDERED EGGS
over easy, a disgusting dish I'd always hated watching him eat, the egg whites runny and almost translucent. I ordered blueberry pancakes with a side of bacon. Here we were, eating breakfast again together as we had so many times. Lovely.

Trying to appear not to be trying, I'd gone for a wholesome effect that morning—or as wholesome as I ever get. I wore a boat-necked sweater of dark gray fleece, and a pair of slim-cut charcoal-gray flannel trousers with a silk lining that felt like heaven against my legs. My only jewelry was a tiny dog tag on a pewter chain. Louise had given it to me. If you looked closely, you could see that the dog tag read, “goddess.” Louise has a gift for giving presents that become talismans.

The morning light wasn't kind to Tony. Sitting across from him, I could see that the last five years, doing the work he did, had taken a toll. There were faint bags under his eyes that hadn't been there when I knew him, and lines around his mouth I didn't remember. He seemed not so much older as exhausted. Part of me was dismayed, but part of me was smug. I'd told him to slow down. Now look at him.

The morning light wasn't kind to this town, either. I had forgotten what it's like in places like this, where the ghosts of more prosperous decades seem to hang in the air around you. On my way to Yancy's, I'd driven past a hillside graveyard with an elaborate scrolled iron gate and hulking Victorian monuments. Winsack's rich had once counted on winding up here, side by side with people they wouldn't object to knowing in the afterlife. Now, except for one plain, modest marker on which someone had placed a vase of red plastic roses and an American flag, the weeds and keeled-over stones made it clear no one ever visited.

Down the street from Yancy's, rising four stories high (which was high for Winsack), was one of those old hotels for businessmen with the words “Prospect House: Clean Lodging, One Dollar a Night” still visible on the side of the building. The building was now a center for troubled youth. You could see that the five-and-ten, with its Egyptian-style Deco storefront, had once been a dazzling emporium, complete with a soda fountain sparkling with chrome. Now only the display of potted plants on the sidewalk revealed that the place was still in operation.

Aside from these shipwrecked remains, the business district consisted of small outfits whose dusty facades made you wonder how they kept going. For example, who patronized the “Topline Tuxedos” shop with its flyblown windows bearing the gold-stenciled motto “Serving Winsack Society Since 1963”? I felt, for a very short moment, sorry for Bennett Winslow with his elaborate black marble fountain in the hospital lobby. His dreams of grandeur were about fifty years too late for this town.

Yancy's was quiet at this hour on a Saturday. It was the kind of classic, uncompromising diner that all right-thinking people enjoy. Nothing had been jazzed up or spoiled. There was a luminous greasy film on the tabletop jukeboxes, and you could search the menu until your eyes ached and not find anything healthier than cling peaches in heavy syrup with a scoop of cottage cheese.

We sat in a big corner booth. At the counter was what looked like a delivery guy on a quick break, and a few booths down were two old ladies who were rather loudly planning a day of shopping at the new mall in Providence. No place in the world makes tougher old ladies than New England does, and these two were prime examples: flinty, soberly dressed, composed and unself-conscious as statues or thoroughbreds, speaking loudly not because they were ill-bred but because, it became clear, they were rather deaf.

“How's your bed-and-breakfast?” Tony asked with derision in his tone. Any lodging but a cheap motel made him feel inferior, reminding him that he came from a coal town where the only restaurants were a pizza parlor and the bowling alley snack bar.

“It's gorgeous,” I said, although even this early in my stay I was getting
sick of the bright pink moire bedspread and the matching hangings that were reflected, their color shrieking at my hair, in every one of the five gilded mirrors in the room. The mattress was deep and soft, though. I knew I looked fresh this morning, and better for our five years' separation than Tony did. Take that! I thought, stabbing a stray blueberry.

“I'll never understand why you'd stay at a place like that when you could have something with all the modern conveniences.”

“For the same reason you like those revolting eggs and I like a breakfast that doesn't include the exciting possibility of salmonella poisoning.”

He mopped up a last streak of egg yolk and pushed his plate aside.

“Let's get down to specifics,” he said.

“I'm not finished with my food yet.”

He looked pointedly at his watch, then glared out the window while I speared one small piece of pancake after another, chewing with a ladylike delicacy entirely foreign to me.

Finally, I wiped my mouth daintily with a paper napkin and said, “Okay, I'm ready. Where's Clare, by the way? I'm not kidding about needing to speak to her today. The sooner the better.”

“She was in negotiations all night. Still going on as of her last phone call. You'll see her soon enough, either way. If talks break off this time, we're going out as of midnight tonight.”

“Why aren't you in negotiations?”

“No big reason,” he said. “A squabble with someone on the other side's team, that's all.”

I'd have to ask Kate for details.

He took out a list written in pencil on brown mailing paper. Wendy would have found Tony sadly unprofessional.

“Here's what we can get going with, for now,” he said. “I marked your part.”

“I'm not doing any of Hamner's make-work, I can tell you right now. I have other clients to juggle and I don't have time for his shenanigans.”

“You and Ron are that booked up?”