Three-Day Town
Authors: Margaret Maron
THREE-DAY TOWN
MARGARET MARON
NEW YORK BOSTON
This one is for the
Weymouth 7—
Diane Chamberlain, Katy Munger, Sarah Shaber, Alexandra Sokoloff, Kathy Trocheck, and Bren Bonner Witchger—who were there at the conception and cheered me on to the delivery.
Thanks, ladies!
I love short trips to New York; to me it is the finest three-day town on earth.
—James Cameron
W
ith flirtatious ceremony, Associate Professor Steinberg, Art History, lifts the heavy silver table lighter from the coffee table in front of his brown leather couch and clicks it two or three times till the wick catches fire before holding it out to Miss Barclay, who teaches Modern Poetry. Two of their students roll their eyes at each other when Miss Barclay cups her slender hands around his, as if the flame might be blown out by a strong wind before her cigarette is fully lit.
Professor Abernathy, Modern American History, watches, too, but her steely blue eyes are narrowed in disapproval. In her opinion, a lady does not smoke—not that Miss Barclay is a lady if she lets herself be wooed by the first Jew in the long (and previously all-Protestant) history of Stillwater College. And what the dean was thinking of, she could not fathom. “A modern liberal education should include exposure to other races and other cultures,” he had told the faculty search committee, but
really
!
Poor Miss Barclay, thinks one of the watching girls, the only sophomore in this interdisciplinary seminar. While not yet a completely dried-up old prune like Professor Abernathy, Miss Barclay has to be at least thirty-five, if not close on to forty; and although Professor Ronald Steinberg may look like the answer to a maiden’s prayer with his manly pipe, graying temples, and cleft chin, she knows for a fact that he is queer, having seen him kissing a younger man on the lips a few weeks earlier. Fortunately, he had not seen her.
Had she reported him, he would have been summarily fired. Not that she ever would. In the first place, she would have to admit that she had sneaked off campus after hours to meet a boy and had wound up in a part of town strictly forbidden to Stillwater students even in broad daylight. Too, she has always enjoyed knowing things that no one else knows, and this is a particularly delicious secret. That this oh-so-proper girls’ school has not only hired a Jew but a fairy as well?
On the other hand, it would serve him right if she exposed him. Of all the teachers at this small New England college, he alone mocks her accent and acts as if a Southern drawl automatically deducts ten points from her IQ. Only this morning when she correctly answered a question about Picasso, he had stared at her in exaggerated surprise and said, “Well, hush my mouth! Is the South finally dipping its toes into the twentieth century?”
It’s bad enough that half the class has a crush on Professor Steinberg, something that he does nothing to discourage, but to lead poor Miss Barclay on as if he really does have a sexual interest in her? Although the sophomore considers Miss Barclay naïve and too carried away by poets who burn their candles at both ends, she likes the woman and thinks it’s rotten of Professor Steinberg to toy with her emotions.
Discovering that he is a phony in one area has made her question everything else about him. He claims to have had drinks with Joan Miró and Max Ernst in Paris before the invasion and to have played chess with Marcel Duchamp when he was working on his doctorate at Columbia University. The paintings on his walls, the framed photographs, the bits and pieces of artwork scattered around the public rooms of this house—are they by important artists or merely pale imitations he has picked up down in New York?
Two senior girls arrive as Miss Barclay and Professor Abernathy take their places on the couch and prepare to lead the afternoon’s discussion of how their three disciplines overlap and enhance each other.
While Professor Steinberg helps the latecomers off with their coats and scarves, the sophomore goes upstairs as if to use the bathroom. Once out of sight of the others below, she opens the door opposite the bathroom and steps into the professor’s private office. The door was slightly ajar when she was up here last week. Amid the jumble of artifacts on a chest near the door, a small object had piqued her curiosity.
No chance last week to examine it closely. Now she quickly enters the room and is delighted to realize that it is even more vulgar than her original impression. Without really considering, she hastily jams it to the bottom of her capacious bookbag, shifts the items atop the chest to disguise the gap, and returns to the living room. Another girl passes her on the stairs as she descends. Before today’s session ends, she knows that at least three or four others will have visited the bathroom. Even if Professor Steinberg realizes tonight that something is missing, he will have no idea which of them took it.
Or why.
As she sinks onto a cushion on the floor she recognizes why this theft is doubly satisfying. He will not be able to report his loss or even accuse one of them. The piece is modern and much too crude to be valuable, but even if it were, he cannot risk the questions a description of the piece might raise with both the police and the dean.
The South may be mired in the nineteenth century
, she thinks,
but Stillwater’s dean is a direct descendant of seventeenth-century Puritans
.
Neither is it the place to get the best cab accommodations. The horses are street-car derelicts, the harness gives evidence of disintegration, the carriage and the shabby unshaven driver are usually the worse for wear. One resolves not to be bothered by such small matters.
—
The New New York
, John C. Van Dyke, 1909
D
wight paced the kitchen, muttering about school buses that clog our morning roads and how we were going to miss our train if I didn’t quit dawdling and what the hell was taking me so long, but I had a mental list of what had to be done before we could leave and I was determined to check every item twice even though we were a couple of weeks past Christmas and I wasn’t Santa Claus.
- Cal and a week’s worth of clean clothes over to Kate and Rob’s.
Check. - Bandit and a week’s worth of terrier chow to Daddy.
Check. - Amtrak tickets in Dwight’s jacket pocket.
Check. - Keys to Kate’s Manhattan apartment on both our keychains.
Check. - Cosmetics and warm clothes packed.
Check.
(“
One new wool hat. Check
,” whispered the preacher, who lurks on the edge of my subconscious and approves of all things useful.)
(“
And one new black negligee
,” chortled the pragmatist, who shares the space and has his own opinion as to what is useful.)
- All perishables out of the refrigerator.
Check. - Gas turned off at the tank.
Check. - Thermostat—
“Let’s go, shug.”
“One more minute,” I pleaded. “I know we’re forgetting something important.”
“That’s what phones are for. Anything we forget to do, we can call Mama or one of the boys and they’ll come take care of it.”
True. My brothers and I do have keys to each other’s houses. Nevertheless…
“Dammit, Deborah!”
Reluctantly, I let Dwight herd me out into the frigid winter air.
After a full year of marriage, we were finally going to have a honeymoon. His sister-in-law Kate’s first husband had been a successful investment banker on Wall Street. After Jake’s death, she had moved down to his family farm here in our neighborhood, where she met and married Dwight’s younger brother Rob, a Raleigh attorney. She had kept the apartment in Manhattan, though, and rented it furnished to a Frenchman whose business interests took him to Europe several times a year. Part of the rental agreement was that Kate would have the use of the apartment whenever he was away, which was how she could give us a week in New York as a Christmas present.
“January may not be the best time of year,” Rob had teased us, “but you’ll have your love to keep you warm.”
We were in Dwight’s pickup and halfway down our long driveway before I finally remembered.
“That package!” I cried. “We have to go back! I forgot Mrs. Lattimore’s package.”
He kept his foot on the gas. “No, you didn’t. Your suitcase looked pretty full, so I stuck it in mine.”
Relieved, I leaned back in my seat and watched the sun edge up over the horizon. It sparkled on frost-covered fields planted in winter rye and turned bare oak branches into lacy Victorian silhouettes against the early morning sky as Dwight pointed the truck toward Raleigh. He glanced over at me and smiled.
“You look like a kid on her way to a party.”
I smiled back at him. “That’s exactly how I feel.”
Most of the time I love my life, but a whole week with no work and no family? Just Dwight and me alone together in New York? A long-bed Chevy pickup is nothing like a pumpkin coach, but I really did feel like Cinderella on her way to a ball.
Best of all, my happily-ever-after Prince Charming was driving the horses.
The Amtrak station lies on the south side of Raleigh and it was crowded with passengers waiting for the Silver Star. Although today would be my very first train trip, I had already decided it was better than flying.