Tiny Little Thing (17 page)

“I’m pregnant,” Pepper says to the starlings.

The Coke sputters from my lips.

“Isn’t it stupid? Here you are, wanting a baby so much, Frank’s messing around with other girls, and here am I, the fallen woman . . .” She shakes her head against the leather. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t going to tell you. I haven’t told anyone.”

“Not even Vivian?” My voice lands somewhere between a whisper and a squeak. I wipe the Coke around my mouth with the edge of my dress. Surely I’ve misheard her. Or she’s joking. One of Pepper’s jokes.

“No. She’s off in East Hampton for the summer. It’s not the kind of thing you just bring up over the phone. Anyway, she’s got her own bag now.”

I set down the bottle and lay my forearms over my belly. “How are you feeling?”

“Oh, fine, actually. I’m like a peasant woman. A little woozy when I’m hungry. And I can’t face bananas, for some reason. My boobs hurt, though. They’ve started busting right through my brassiere. Look.” She unbuttons her blouse, and sure enough, her breasts are spilling out the top of the pretty lace-trimmed silk, plump and creamy, like a pair of overambitious soufflés.

I gaze at the abundance of her, the living proof, unable to look away. “Have you decided what to do?”

“Do you think I’d be hiding out around here if I had?”

“What about the . . . you know . . .”

“The father?” She laughs him away.

“Does he know?”

“Not yet.”

“Is he married?”

“He might be.”

“Oh, God, Pepper.” I turn my head away from the mesmerizing sight of her pregnant breasts and look through the bars of the steering wheel to the dull curved metal of the Mercedes hood. Pepper has a baby inside her. A real live baby, the kind that didn’t die in your womb. How could a baby possibly die, with vibrant Pepper to nourish its dividing cells?

Pepper pregnant. Pregnant by a married man, a man she probably knew from Washington. Maybe someone I know. Frank knows a lot of people.

“Well, anyway. I know you were wondering why I’ve been hanging around like this. I probably owed you an explanation.”

“No. I mean, you didn’t. But thank you for telling me.”

“Thanks for not telling me how stupid I am. How I get what I deserve.
Oh, Pepper, how on earth could you get yourself into a mess like this
?
”

“Well, I already
know
how you get yourself into a mess like this. I’ve been trying to get myself in the same mess for two years now.”

“I’ve always been careful, you know. Honestly, it’s a mystery. Some fucking determined little sperm.”

“I always figured you were on the Pill.”

“You’d think, wouldn’t you? A fun-loving girl like me. My mistake.”

“His mistake, too.”

She shrugs.

“You have to tell him, Pepper. It’s his responsibility. He should do something for you.”

“Really? And if your husband was to get some girlfriend pregnant, you’d want him to do something for her?”

An image materializes before me: pretty Josephine, her triumphant belly curved with Frank’s baby, her breasts spilling out of her expensive career-girl brassiere. Frank lifts her hair from her bare shoulder and kisses her skin. She gazes past his head and smiles smugly at me. My hands curve into fists.

“I’m sorry,” says Pepper. “Jesus. What a dumb thing to say.”

“No. Fair point.”

“I’m going to hell, aren’t I?”

“Probably,” I say, “but we all make stupid mistakes, don’t we?”

“Except you. My perfect sister.”

“Oh, I’m not so perfect.” I unclench my fists and raise them to the edge of the windshield to hoist myself up. “I think I’m going to go back to the house and get changed.”

•   •   •

W
hen I reach the front door of the Big House, shoes and stockings dangling from my fingers, Mrs. Crane is there to greet me.

“Oh, there you are, Mrs. Hardcastle! There’s a Mr. Lytle on the phone for you.”

I set down the shoes and roll my stockings into a ball. “Did he say why he was calling?”

“No, ma’am.” She glances at the slender leather pumps on the floor, the stocking ball in my hand. “It’s the second time he’s called.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Crane. I’ll take it in the library.”

Lytle’s voice is low and confidential through the long-distance cables. “Mrs. Hardcastle. How are you?”

“I’m well, thank you. Mr. Lytle.” I say his name with particular emphasis, to make it quite clear that
Jack
is an expedient of the past.

“Are you alone?”

“For the moment.”

“I just wanted to let you know that I consider this morning’s interview—the whole twenty-four hours, really—to be off the record. I mean that.”

“Do you really?”

“Look, I know how it can be for you wives. I don’t envy you. But I do have a job to do, Mrs. Hardcastle, and I’m working on a lead or two now that . . . well, you might not like what you hear.”

“What sort of lead is that?”

“Like I said, I’m just doing my job. I like you, Mrs. Hardcastle, and I’d hate to see you get hurt, but that’s the nature of the business. I don’t think it’s any secret that I’m digging around, up here. I just wanted to let you know, as a courtesy . . .”

“I quite understand. Is that all?”

“Yes. Yes, I suppose it is.”

“Thank you for calling.” I pull the receiver away from my ear, which has taken on a kind of numbness, a cold cotton stuffing, and at the last instant I hear a faint
Wait!

I return the receiver to my ear. “Yes?”

“Maybe you
can
help me with something, Mrs. Hardcastle.”

“I can’t imagine what.”

“I don’t suppose you’ve heard anything in the family, any explanation for a certain incident in Mr. Hardcastle’s junior year at Harvard. Anyone ever discuss that with you?”

“What sort of incident?”

“A disciplinary incident, Mrs. Hardcastle. Surely you’ve heard about it.”

I turn my gaze to the wall of the library, where Frank’s Harvard degree hangs on the wall next to his father’s, and his grandfather’s, too, framed in burl wood. The comfortable Latin words are identical in all three, down to the typescript:
OMNIBVS
AD
QUOS
HAE
LITTERAE
P
ERVENERINT
SALVTEM
 . . .

“Mrs. Hardcastle?”

“I’m sorry. I can’t imagine what you mean. My husband’s record at Harvard was exemplary. He was the salutatorian. He gave a speech at the commencement ceremony, a very stirring speech.”

“No one’s ever referred to any dealings with the dean’s office?”

“The dean’s office? What sort of dealings?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out, Mrs. Hardcastle, and I must say it’s been slow going. Records missing, that sort of thing.”

“I’m at a loss. I’ve never heard of such a thing. I’m sure you must be mistaken. Did the suggestion come from our opponent’s office? Because it’s completely out of—”

A shadow falls across the doorway, in the corner of my vision. I startle around to find Mr. Hardcastle standing just inside the threshold, hat in hand, jacket over his arm, watching me quietly.

“Mrs. Hardcastle?”

“Out of character. I really must go, however. Thank you for calling.”

I settle the receiver in its cradle, straighten my skirt over my bare legs, and smile at my father-in-law.

“I hope I haven’t interrupted,” he says.

“Not at all.”

“I’m just heading back into town. I’ve spoken with my mother to fill her in. We’re both in agreement that you should continue here at the Big House for the time being, until you’re feeling better.”

“Actually, I’m feeling quite well. I—”

He steps forward, kisses my cheek good-bye, and puts on his hat. His hand lingers around my upper arm, and his smile is bland. “Don’t try to sneak away, now.”

He turns and leaves the room, and it isn’t until the front door latches faintly from the hallway that I realize he never asked me who was on the telephone.

T
he day Caspian’s mother died, the principal came to his classroom and beckoned to the teacher, Miss Flaherty, and Miss Flaherty, after a whispered conference, had arranged her face into a sympathetic mask and walked up to his desk and said, “Caspian, gather your books; your father is waiting for you in the office,” in a voice just short of a sob.

All the other kids had stared at him as he took out his notebook and pencil case and the lunch box he wouldn’t need today. Everyone knew that his mother was sick, of course. That she was gonna croak. He had felt the eyes tracking him as he trudged to the door, to the waiting principal, whose face wore the same sympathetic mask as Miss Flaherty. Had felt those speechless young eyes transforming him forevermore into Cap Harrison, the Boy Whose Mother Died.

Now, be nice to Cap,
their moms would say, as they handed out lunch boxes and pencil cases and mittens the next day, before the school bus trundled around the corner.
He has no mother now
. A motherless boy.

They had stopped at his sister’s classroom first, before proceeding to the office. She had come out crying, and he had put his arms around her in the backseat of the car, as Dad drove them to Granny’s house, where Granny was waiting in her chintz chair in the living room, wearing a navy-blue dress and flamingo-pink lipstick. By the time they reached Brookline, Cap’s shoulder was wet through with his sister’s tears.

He dialed her up now. “Janet?”

“Cap? Jesus! Hold on.” A child was crying in the background. Her second, from the high-pitched sound of it, a girl improbably named Ursula. The older one never did cry much; she was too busy consoling her mother. Janet had gotten pregnant at age seventeen by a junior officer in Manila, a nice fresh West Point boy who did the right thing and married her, started sleeping with other women almost immediately, and then progressed along the spectrum of infamy until he was regularly hitting his wife by the time the baby was born. She’d hung around a year before she divorced him and started having a little fun herself, to make up for the misery. If she knew who fathered Ursula, now two years old and a sulky little beauty, she wasn’t telling. The crying stopped, replaced by canned television laughter. “Where are you? What time is it?”

“I don’t know. Seven o’clock, maybe. How are the girls?”

“They’re great. They love California. Is everything okay?”

“Sure, everything’s okay.”

“Because you sound upset.”

“Just wanted to check in. See how you’re getting along out there.”

“I’m good, Cap. I am. The job’s going well. Night school’s going well. Even Dad might be proud of me.” She allowed a touch of sarcasm. She and their father had never really gotten along. He had been too taciturn, and she needed affection. She needed a mother. She needed a father who hugged her and called her his princess, not a man stuck in perpetual mourning for a woman his daughter could never match.

Cap sighed. “He always was proud of you, Janet.”

“No, he wasn’t, Cap. Let’s not have this argument again. So why did you really call?”

He sighed again. The line crackled with his breath.

“Come on, big brother. This call is costing you. Coast to coast. Make it snappy.”

What the hell was he doing here? Why was he calling Janet, of all people? He almost hung up, and then: “All right. There’s this girl.”

A shriek.

“Calm down. Christ. She’s engaged.”

“Oh,
engaged.
Well, that’s nothing. You’ve got it all over the other guy.”

“You don’t even know the other guy.”

“I know
you.
”

He stared down at the beige box of a telephone, at the numbers and finger holes spaced evenly around the dial. The cradle beckoned, the twin plastic buttons. He could just press one down and end the call now. Save himself a few bucks. Janet’s breath popped and crackled down the line, her faith in him. He closed his eyes.

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” he said. “She just left.”

“Left for good?”

“I don’t know.”

“Aren’t you going after her? Find this guy of hers and punch his lights out?”

“Hadn’t planned on it.”

“Then why the fuck are you calling me, big brother?” she said, exasperated, mindless as usual of the child in the room behind her.

He rose to his feet and walked to the limit of the cord. “I don’t know. Shit. I don’t know.”

She laughed. The television noises were gone; maybe she’d moved to the kitchen. He pictured her tiny house in San Diego, the corner kitchen with the peeling fruited wallpaper, Janet carrying the telephone from one room to the other, the receiver cradled between her ear and shoulder, the line stretching out behind her to the jack in the wall of the living room, under the window. “Dad used to hate it when we swore,” she said.

“Washed my mouth out with Ivory soap.”

“Mine, too. Didn’t help. So listen, Mr. John Wayne, strong and silent type. Your lips taped shut. I know you don’t want to talk about it anymore, so I’ll just say this. A woman wants to know you’ll fight for her. That you want her badly enough. If she’s going to leave this fiancé of hers, she wants to know it’s worth her while. So
is
it worth her while?”

“Hell, no. I’m shipping out in two weeks. This guy’s a prince. I’m just a soldier, blood all over my hands, a grunt with no—”

“Jesus, Cap. It was a rhetorical question. Of
course
it’s worth her while. Soldier. Grunt. For God’s sake, you’re a decorated officer. You’re the best. You’re the best—” Her voice got all scratched up. “The best brother in the world. Rescued me over and over, when anyone else would have given up on me. You pay my damned rent every month. My girls, they fucking adore you. Shit, you’re making me cry, Cap. Just go out and make some girl happy, okay? Some lucky girl.”

“Janet, I don’t know where she lives. I don’t even know her last name.”

“Go find out.”

Go find out.
He stared at the wall of photographs, on which he’d tacked a large print of Tiny in the upper right corner, soaring off the edge of the plaster in an arc of inexpressible grace. Her face turned away. “Are you coming to Frank’s wedding?” he asked.

“Frank’s wedding? You mean cousin Frank? Who’s he marrying?”

“I don’t know. Some Park Avenue girl, I think. Couple of weeks. New York City. I’m stopping there on my way out.”

She chuckled feebly. “I guess I wasn’t invited. Can’t have the unwed mother hanging around the corner of the ballroom, eating up the canapés and disgracing the family name, can we?”

Damn it.

“I’m sorry, Janet.”

“Don’t be. Enjoy yourself. I’ll see you in a couple of weeks, right? Before you report?”

“I’ll be there.”

“Bring your new girl so I can meet her.”

“I’ll try.”

“What’s this
try
business? That doesn’t sound like my big old brother. Just do it, Cap. Execute.” She said it just like their father used to, when confronted with disappointing report cards or cars that needed washing on a raw February morning.
Execute
. Get it done, no excuses.

Except that Tiny wasn’t a report card or a dirty Chevrolet. She wasn’t a problem that could be solved with a little determination and elbow grease. Just because he wanted her in his present bed, in his future life; wanted to write to her from the jungle and tell her every last thing, to write her his soul; wanted to read her letters, to tuck her picture in his pocket and stare at her image until he fell asleep and dreamed of her, too; wanted with an irrational fierceness to know that Tiny would be waiting for him, suntanned and bare-armed, in a small rented house in San Diego a year from now when he stepped off the Lockheed C-130 a free man: just because he wanted all these things, didn’t mean he should have them.

Didn’t mean he
could
have them.

“All right, Janet,” he said. “Whatever you say.”

“Do you want to talk to the girls?”

“Sure. Put them on.”

He spoke with his nieces for a few minutes, first an incomprehensible Ursula and then her more rational sister, Pamela, whose front teeth had come in at last and forced away the final traces of her lisp. He said good-bye and hung up the receiver, hard, so the bell gave off a startled ding, and he stared up at the ceiling—he was on the sofa, now, in the exact squishy spot he cradled a shuddering Tiny yesterday—and wondered what it would be like, having kids with Tiny.

That’s how crazy he was.

•   •   •

B
ut he was a man of action, after all. Not a man who sat on sofas and stared at the ceiling, kicking a beige telephone on the floor with his toe.

Execute.
His father’s voice, or his sister’s?

It didn’t matter. The echoed word in his head was enough to start the inevitable chain reaction, the chemical combustion that set him in motion. He jumped to his feet, grabbed his wallet and keys, slammed the door behind him. He thundered down the stairs and out on the sidewalk, where the sun was still high enough to be seen above the housetops, and the air had only just begun to cool.

He reached Boylan’s Coffee Shop in four minutes flat, just as old Boylan was flipping the
OPEN
sign to
CLOSED
.

“What’s up, Boylan? Closing early?”

“I’m too old for this shit. What the fuck was you doing, getting blood all over my nice clean floor the other day?”

“Just saving your customers from getting shot up, old man.”

“The fuck you were. That nice Mrs. Larkin, the one with the big tits, she got a hole in her shoulder the size of a baseball, she says.”

“She’ll be all right. Give her a good story at the bridge club. Listen, I need your help.”

“Cops all over the place, drinking all my fucking coffee. Are you coming in, or what?”

Cap stepped inside the restaurant and discovered he was starving. He made himself a sandwich in the back while Boylan hunted down Em’s phone number in the office. Turkey and Swiss cheese. Mustard and mayo. He could have used a drink, too, but that’d have to wait. The kitchen reeked of Lysol. Maybe the cops took one look at the stove and sent over the health department.

“Here you go.” Boylan shoved a piece of paper in his hand. “Andrew four-five-oh-two-six. You better not be messing with my waitresses, you dumb cluck.”

“Can I use your phone?”

Em was surprised to hear his voice. No, she didn’t know Tiny’s address, the lady lived a few blocks away on Dartmouth, that’s all she knew. Her last name? Not sure. Something to do with the sky. Skylark?

“Schuyler?” he said.

Schuyler.
Tiny Schuyler. Her name.

“That’s it. Now be gentle. She’s a nice girl. And she’s nuts about you.”

The weight on his shoulders lifted a fraction. A few meager stacks of bullion. “I sure as hell hope so, Em.”

Tiny Schuyler proved easier to find than he imagined. There were several Schuylers in the phone book, but only one Miss C. Schuyler resided on Dartmouth Street, at number 26, apartment 2B. He shut the directory and realized he’d just done the same detective work Tiny did, two days ago. The both of them, tracking each other down in turn, trying to find a way in.

He hoped Em was pouring herself a drink and putting her feet up.

In no time, in a lifetime, he wheeled around the corner of Dartmouth Street and into the volcanic glare of the dying sun. He wondered what the
C
stood for, but only for an instant, because number 26 stood only a couple of houses down the block, a regular door, a regular building. A genteel, well-kept old town house, divided into genteel, well-kept apartments, suitable for young women living alone. The front door was polished, the stoop clean, the knobs brass. He’d passed this door a dozen times in the past month, and probably a hundred since he was a kid, and what do you know? Tiny Schuyler’s door. He found the button for 2B and pressed it. SCHUYLER, said the label above, in typed black capital letters. His pulse beat in his throat.

The intercom made a noise that might or might not have been a human voice.

“Hello?” said Cap. “Tiny?”

Static.

“Tiny? Tiny, it’s me. Cap.”

The door buzzed, and Cap threw it open before it shut off. The hallway smelled of old sunshine and cigarettes. He bounded up the stairs to the second floor. Apartment 2B. The B flat would be in the back, wouldn’t it?

He turned his head, and there at the end of the hall leaned a beautiful woman in the open doorway of apartment 2B, one leg crossed over the other, holding a cigarette between the first and second fingers of a bejeweled right hand, and a highball glass in the bracelet-framed palm of the left hand.

Cap rested his hand on the bannister. “I’m sorry. I was looking for Miss Tiny Schuyler.”

The woman straightened her elegant long body and crossed her arms, keeping careful hold of both drink and cigarette. “I’m Mrs. Schuyler. The mother of the bride. Who the hell are you?”