Tiny Little Thing (18 page)

T
he phone rings at dawn, just as I’m about to take Percy for his walk. I snatch it up on the first ring, because who dials a telephone at dawn? Only bearers of bad tidings.

“Tiny, darling. Thank God.”

“
Mums?
”
There’s no point in trying to hide my astonishment. At five o’clock in the morning, my mother might just as well be heading for bed as rising from it.

“I just had the most awful dream about you. Are you all right?”

“Of course I’m all right.” I wind the cord around my finger. “How are
you
? This isn’t like you, calling so early.”

“I couldn’t go back to sleep. I thought you’d be up.” She pauses. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Absolutely. Just the usual summer nonsense.”

A long sigh rushes down the copper wires, from the tip of Long Island to the tip of Cape Cod. “Well, then.”

I hesitate, and then: “What was the dream about?”

“I don’t remember exactly. It was terrifying, though. Absolutely terrifying. My heart’s still thundering.” A faint and familiar clink underlines her words.

“Go back to sleep, Mums.”

She yawns. “No, I’m up now. How’s Pepper?”

“Pepper’s fine. Pepper’s . . . Pepper’s blooming.”

“Pepper’s
what
?”

“Groovy. Pepper’s groovy.”

“Is that some sort of slang? I wish you wouldn’t use slang, darling. It doesn’t suit you. God knows, Vivian’s bad enough, but from
you
? I don’t think I can take it. Not this early in the morning.”

“Well, you were the one who called
me
, Mums.”

More clinking. “Maybe I’ll drive up and join you two for a bit. See for myself.”

“Mums, I’m fine. Really. We’re both fine. You’re the last thing we need.”

“I just can’t get this out of my head. It’s too awful.”

I glance at my watch. “I’ve got to run, Mums. I love you. Smooches to Vivian and the boys.”

I stare at the telephone for a moment or two after I’ve hung up, tracing the dial with my forefinger. Because I could call her back. I could tell her that I’m in trouble, that I’ve screwed up, that I’ve made a few mistakes, a few doozies, and need a little help from the old Schuyler matriarchy. That maybe her dream isn’t so far out, after all. That maybe the good daughter, the tiny perfect one, is the greatest disappointment of all.

At my feet, Percy whines and nudges my ankles. I crouch down and take his soft bumpy head into my chest. I whisper into his ears, “You’ll still love me, won’t you, Percy? You’re on my side.”

The old house is silent as the grave. We hold our embrace for a moment or two, Percy and I, until at last he nudges me gently in the stomach to tell me it’s time to get moving.

•   •   •

I
spot a swimmer, out past the breakers, stroking steadily from north to south while the sun nudges up the horizon. Percy wants to join him.

I whistle, and Percy bounds obediently out of the uncurling surf, back toward me. He shakes the water free in an expert rattle of fur, from tip on down to tail, and then he looks up and whines, all huge eyes and cocked ears and general canine persuasion.

“Come on, doggin-boggin. Let’s not bother the poor guy. He’s working too hard. Anyway, you can’t swim out that far, you silly boy.”

You see them from time to time, the ocean swimmers. They’re the diehards, the merfolk, born with saltwater veins and seaweed hair; locals, usually. Sometimes I think there must be something addictive about it, plowing through the virgin sea, the gold water sunrise. My cousin Lily Greenwald swims out every morning, down the coast in Rhode Island, and it keeps her fit as a fiddle, though she must be in her fifties now. You have to be confident to swim like that. You have to have been doing such things all your life, to plunge so fearlessly through the waves of concussive surf and into the rollers beyond, to crawl atop the skin of the ocean while the vast volume teems beneath you.

This morning’s swimmer trundles along in a steady rhythm. His arms pump as regularly as pistons, and as I watch him swim, as I calculate the unceasing beats of his progress, I perceive that he lifts his head to draw breath on every fourth stroke.

Percy pads along behind me, resigned. I keep up a brisk pace, as if I might possibly outrun my thoughts, if I move fast enough. Last evening, Granny Hardcastle invited Constance and Tom and the children for dinner, along with a couple of other cousins. A merry bunch. Pepper appeared about halfway through, still in her dungarees, dressed in dust and a smear of grease. She grabbed a chicken leg and went upstairs, without even looking at me, and I haven’t seen her since. I couldn’t; how could I? If I forgive Pepper, if I even acknowledge her, I must also acknowledge and forgive Josephine. I must acknowledge and forgive Frank. I must acknowledge and forgive myself. The awfulness is still sinking into my bones. The enormity of what I have to face. The mountain I have to scale, because there are no more roads around it. I stand before Everest, with no hobnails and ice pick, no oxygen tank, no rope and no parka, no wise Sherpa to advise me. Just myself. Tiny me.

The salt morning air fills my lungs. I stride faster and faster, until my legs sing and my feet almost break into a run. My canvas shoes fill with sand. Ahead, the jetty stretches out like a dark finger, made of large slippery rocks; the boats are moored on the other side. I usually turn here and head back to the Big House or, perhaps, if I’m feeling particularly energetic, strike out another lap up and down the Hardcastle beach. I reach the base of the jetty and pause, preparing to turn, when Percy lets out a soft call, more a yip than a bark, and I look down the length of the jetty to find the swimmer climbing up the rocks at the end.

Climbing: I should say hoisting. The tide is high; the jetty is low. The swimmer braces his palms on the topmost rock and launches his body upward, utterly naked, and as the new-risen sun finds his skin, and his torso unfolds, a gap appears between the bottom of his left knee and the jetty below.

Dive, Tiny. Run for cover.

But nothing moves, not a twitch.

He stands only fifty feet away, wet and white-backed. His face and front are charcoal with shadow, a classic Grecian silhouette, broad of shoulder and narrow of hip, balanced on the one whole leg. My instinct is that of a deer caught in the open: if I don’t move, he won’t see me. My body will remain camouflaged against the sand.

Well, it seems to be working. He hasn’t noticed me yet. He reaches down for the towel on the rock—my God, did he simply dive off the jetty and into the water?—and rubs himself dry.

You should really go now, Tiny. You’ve mastered your shock. So Caspian’s back here on the Cape, physically manifest, arrived in the night when you weren’t watching. God knows why. Now turn around and steal off down the sand, and maybe he’ll stop by for breakfast. Tell you why he returned, today of all days, when you have just been sent down in disgrace.

But like the sight of those baby starlings, like the sight of Pepper’s swollen and guilty chest, the extraordinary balance of Caspian’s body holds me fast. It shouldn’t. I of all people know how the human body can align itself on a slender vertical axis, can spin and point and leap from a single well-trained toe. Why should I gaze in awe at the way Caspian dries his body with a towel, drapes the towel across a rock, and reaches for a tubular object that must be his artificial leg?

And then Caspian freezes altogether, for what I believe they call a pregnant instant. His hand is braced against a piling. His back is smooth. I wonder if he’s breathing, if he’s thinking, because I surely to God am not. I surely to God cannot move a single fiber, cannot connect a single synapse.

A pair of seagulls dispute a morning crab. The silence melts. Caspian lifts his head and then his torso, straightening and turning in my direction at the same time, I don’t know how. The leg hangs from one hand. He stands at an angle, catching a bit of newborn sun on his front, and now I
know
I should turn away, I should hide my virtuous married eyes, but how can I do that? Turn away from Caspian, when he’s showing me this. The stump ends in a curious round bump, a ball of unfinished tibia covered with skin.

Percy breaks away from my legs and bounds down the jetty toward Caspian, pumping his tail.

You can’t hate a man like that, can you? You aren’t allowed to hold any grudges when he’s given his lower leg for his country. Given it for you, inasmuch as you’re an American, too. One hundred millionth of that lost leg is for your sake. A single cell, maybe, but it’s enough. The purest kind of restitution. And if you don’t hate him, and maybe you never really did—maybe you just hated yourself, after all, transference or projection or whatever a shrink would call it—then what
do
you feel?

Percy reaches him. Sniffs at the leg dangling from his hand. How must that left foot ache, supporting Caspian’s soldierly weight, all alone. He scratches Percy’s ears.

I think, This is absurd. Caspian’s standing there, naked as noon, staring at me, daring me. Anyone might be watching. You can see the pair of us from the ocean windows of just about every house on the property, if you happen to be peeping your bloodshot eyes through the curtains at half past sunrise on a Friday morning.

I open my mouth and call down the length of the jetty. “Good morning!”

“It certainly is.”

He has the trick of making himself heard without shouting. Like an actor, whispering in such a way that the rear stalls can hear him.

I whistle for Percy. He lollops back toward me, grins his guilty canine grin. The sight of his face breaks the spell. I clip his leash to the collar and turn for the house.

“Tiny!”

I wave good-bye over my shoulder. But the image remains in my frontal lobe all through shower and breakfast, all through the morning, all through my life. You can’t ever forget a sight like that.

•   •   •

S
peaking of breakfast. Pepper doesn’t come down. Strengthened by the image in my frontal lobe, I search her out in her room, where she’s filling a blue suitcase and smoking a cigarette. A tall glass of tomato juice sits on the windowsill.

“You’re packing.”

“You don’t say.”

“You don’t have to leave, Pepper.”

She straightens from behind the suitcase lid and tips her cigarette into the ashtray. “Don’t I? Surely you’re not planning to convert the old place into the Hardcastle Home for Fallen Women and Foundlings.”

“Look, I’m sorry. You caught me by surprise, that’s all. The timing wasn’t the best. To say the least.”

“No, you’re dead right. I’m the enemy, aren’t I? The kind of woman who steals your husband and gets pregnant with his baby. The one who breaks up families at Christmas and makes wives and kids weep bitter tears into their pillows. You’ve got every right to shun me. You especially, Tiny dear. You
should
shun me.” She reaches for her tomato juice and drinks it down in such a way that makes me suspect it isn’t just tomato juice. I have the feeling she’s not looking for sympathy. That she neither wants nor expects me to fold her in my arms and say,
Hush now, that’s not true, you made a mistake, that’s all, we shouldn’t judge you like that, oh, society is so damned cruel and unjust to women like you.

“All right.” I round the corner of the bed and take the cigarette from the ashtray. I examine it from all sides, like a relic of an alien civilization, and then I lift it to my mouth and inhale. Tobacco, with a garnish of tomato juice and vodka. “You’re the enemy. You’re the predator. You’re the bitch who stalked down some poor little innocent and well-meaning husband and slept with him and got herself pregnant. But you’re also my sister. You’re
my
predatory little bitch. And that baby is
my
nephew or niece. So you can stay with me as long as you need to.” I grind out the cigarette into the ashtray. “As long as you want to.”

Pepper sinks into the slipper chair and cradles her glass. One slender leg crosses over the other and bounces, bounces. Her face is so beautiful, you can’t find a single flaw. The geometry of her cheekbones deserves its own mathematical theorem. “Is that so? Have you checked with your in-laws?”

“They can choke on it.”

“I’m three months along. Can’t hide it much longer.”

“All the better. I can’t wait to see their faces when they put one and a half together. We can invite the press. I happen to know this guy at the
Globe
, a sucker for a good story.”

She props her head on one hand and laughs. “You’ve changed, Tiny. I didn’t know you had a sense of fucking humor.”

I turn to the suitcase, remove a jumble of shirts, and start to fold them into a neat stack on the bedspread. “You never fucking asked.”

After a moment, I hear the raspy click of a cigarette lighter, and then Pepper joins me at the sleek blue Samsonite, casting me in her statuesque shadow. She picks up the stack of folded shirts. “My, my, Tiny girl,” she says, around the cigarette that dangles from her lips. “What would poor old Mums say about the two of us?”

T
iny’s mother. The mother of the bride, as she so pointedly pointed out, dressed in a flawless white-trimmed navy blue suit with elbow-length sleeves, and a small navy blue hat that matched her navy blue shoes. The heels on those shoes must have been four inches at least. Four excessive inches, for she was already tall: as tall as a fashion model and just as sleek.

And who the hell was
he
?

“I’m a friend,” he said. “Do you know where she is?”

Mrs. Schuyler lifted her cigarette. Just before it touched her lips, she said, “If I did, do you think I’d tell you?”

He shrugged. “I just want to make sure she’s all right.”

She blew out a long curl of smoke. “You tell me.”

“Isn’t she there with you?”

“No, she isn’t.” Mrs. Schuyler gestured over her shoulder, with her drink hand, into the apartment. “She hasn’t answered her phone in two days, so I thought I’d come up and check on her. I don’t suppose you happen to know where she’s been?”

“She’s been with me.”

She raked him over, forehead to toe and back to forehead again, lingering expertly on the narrowness of his hips and the width of his shoulders. As she might have measured up a horse for the sixth race at Narragansett. “I see.”

“I’ve slept on the sofa, Mrs. Schuyler.”

“Have you? That’s good of you. You do know she’s going to be married shortly?”

“That’s up to her, I guess.”

She tapped her cigarette thoughtfully against the doorjamb and took a delicate sip of her drink. “I don’t believe I caught your name, young man.”

“It’s Caspian, Mrs. Schuyler. Caspian Harrison.”

She frowned. “That’s an unusual name.”

“My mother was a little unusual.”

“No doubt.” She lifted a telling eyebrow. “In any case, Mr. Harrison, I think I’m getting the picture here. I suppose every bride gets the jitters, even a girl like my daughter. And I suppose if she’s going to get the jitters, she might as well do it in style. God knows I did.”

“She hasn’t got the jitters, Mrs. Schuyler.”

“But I do think, Mr. Harrison, if you’ll excuse me, that as her mother, I’m in a better position than you are to understand what constitutes my daughter’s happiness. To know and want what’s best for her. Do you know, she’s been in love with her fiancé for four years now? No, five. They’re the loveliest couple in the world. Really, you should see them together.”

“I sincerely hope I don’t.”

She lifted her glass, but she didn’t drink. Instead she held it there, next to her navy-blue bosom, while the smoke trailed lazily from the fingers supporting her elbow. “I do hope, Mr. Harrison, that you’re not the sort of man to take advantage of a girl’s perfectly natural nervousness on the eve of her wedding.”

“I haven’t touched her.”

“I don’t give a damn if you’ve touched her or not. She’s entitled to enjoy herself a little, if she likes. God knows she’s earned it. What concerns me, Mr. Harrison, is what you intend to do with her now.”

“As I said before, that’s up to her.”

She considered him. The hallway swelled with afternoon warmth, and the ice in her glass had nearly melted. The condensation fell downward onto her fingers, which were white and well kept but not lacquered. Cap took in all these details in the dusky light and wondered how he would shoot her. From the side, maybe, to capture the queenly slant of those cheekbones, exactly like Tiny’s, only sharper with age. He would maybe turn on the light overhead to make that shadow harsher, to etch out the fine lines at the corners of her eyes. If he turned her at just the right angle, with the light just so, and the focus just right, he could find the transparency of her irises. Could express the brittle character of her beauty, the enigma of what lay beneath.

Mrs. Schuyler lifted herself away from the doorjamb. “You might as well come in, Mr. Harrison.”

Inside, Tiny’s apartment was small and spotless. There was no sign of a roommate. The kitchen was no larger than his own, taking up a corner of the living room, and a door at the opposite end indicated a bedroom. Mrs. Schuyler stalked to the kitchen, stubbed out her cigarette, and poured another drink. She opened up the icebox and took out a tray of ice cubes from the freezer compartment. “Drink?”

“No, thanks.” He leaned against the wall, next to the door, and folded his arms. “You don’t know where she is, then? Has she been home?”

She dropped three cubes in her glass and stuck the tray back in the icebox. A bottle sat on the counter. Vodka, nearly full. She reached for it and unscrewed the cap. “You’ve misplaced her, I take it?”

“She left my apartment a few hours ago.”

Mrs. Schuyler turned and leaned against the counter, holding her drink at her hip. “I don’t know where she is, but she’s taken a suitcase. I checked.”

A suitcase. The air sucked from his chest, beneath his folded arms. “And no word where she’s going?”

“Not a peep. No note.
Quite
unlike her.” She sent him a gimlet look that placed the blame for this anomaly squarely on his shoulders.

He looked right back. The same way he looked at a colonel when they called him up before the brass. The same way he looked at his grandmother when she summoned him for a teatime chat about his future.

“You know, Mr. Harrison . . .”

“Captain Harrison.”

“Oh, indeed? I
am
impressed. But the fact remains,
Captain
”—she said the word in a throaty purr—“I know my daughter a great deal better than you do. She might think she needs a few kicks before settling down, and maybe she’s right. I’ve sheltered her, I admit it. Wanted to keep her from repeating a few of my more egregious mistakes.”

“No doubt.”

“But you must understand, Captain, that Tiny’s a good girl. I mean that literally. She’s
good.
She’s far better, for example, than
I
am, and God knows I don’t deserve her.” She drank her vodka and reached for the pack of cigarettes on the counter. Parliaments. She didn’t open them, however. She only tapped the cardboard with her long fingernail, like a spy signaling to another spy.

“Funny, I had the same thought,” he said.

“I named her after my husband’s aunt. Did you know that? Christina Dane. She died in a hurricane before Tiny was born. The most awful thing. They never even found the body. And I always thought—well, it was almost as if she
knew,
even when she was a baby.”

“Knew what?”

Tap
tap tap.
The icebox—an elderly model—coughed wheezily behind her, held a perilous silence, and then resumed humming at a more subdued pitch.

Mrs. Schuyler set her glass on the counter. “I’ll tell you a little story. You see, we didn’t baptize her until she was almost two. I’m not the most religious girl in the world, I’ll admit, and I wasn’t on what you’d call speaking terms with God at the time—we have that kind of relationship, He and I, a real love-hate sort of thing—but the Sunday we finally chose just so happened to fall on the first Sunday after Pearl Harbor. The church was packed, as you can imagine.” She stopped tapping at last, took out a cigarette, and casted about, frowning. “I don’t suppose you have a light, Captain?”

“Afraid not.”

She opened a drawer next to the tiny gas stove and found a book of matches. “Anyway, packed church, everybody scared out of their wits, war’s arrived at last, and God knows we’ve all seen what Europe’s been through already. France occupied, London in ruins. To say nothing of poor old Shanghai. And Tiny, she arrives at the altar, and she doesn’t cry a bit, does she? She’s an angel. She’s wearing a lovely white silk dress, trimmed with lace, an heirloom. Her hair was much lighter then, when she was a baby. Almost gold. The minister reaches into the font for the water, and she holds out her little hand, Captain Harrison, her sweet little hand, and she catches the drops in her fingers and she laughs.
Laughs
. Golden laughter, like the goddamned bells of heaven. You should have heard the gasp from all those poor heartsick people in the church that day. She
cured
them. There’s no other word for it.” Mrs. Schuyler struck the match and turned away as she held it to the cigarette, as if she were trying to hide something, tears maybe. “And we all knew, didn’t we, in that second, that everything was going to be all right. That God maybe gave a damn after all.”

“I think I can picture it,” said Cap.

Mrs. Schuyler dropped the match in the sink and faced forward again. “Well, I saw right then that she was meant for great things. That she was going to be a queen among us, someone for the dirty masses to look up to and worship. Sixty, eighty years ago, I’d have taken her to Europe and married her off to a duke or a prince, but these are modern times, Captain Harrison, and nobody cares a damn about titles anymore, titles are a joke that isn’t even funny, so when she found the next best thing, all by herself, you can imagine my delight. All those years, I’d raised her to be the perfect consort. I’d sheltered her, I’d educated her, I’d kept her safe until her prince found her. I’d done it, against the odds. Against, you might say, my own nature.” Her hand was a little shaky, operating the cigarette back and forth, back and forth to her glossy pink lips. Short and deep. “And I really cannot see, Captain, how
you,
however handsome and broad-shouldered and concerned for her welfare, fit into the picture.”

There was one window in Tiny’s living room, double width, facing south over what should have been a garden below. Outside, the sunset transformed the sky, pink and brilliantly gold, still bright enough to spar by. It softened the lines of Mrs. Schuyler’s face, so that if she were made on a more delicate scale, her mass reduced by perhaps a quarter, bones shrunk and skin tightened in exact proportion, she might almost have been her daughter.

Cap uncrossed his arms and straightened himself. “Well, then I guess we’ve got nothing else to say. If she turns up, do you mind letting me know?” He reached for his wallet and hunted down a card.

“I most certainly will not.”

He handed her the card anyway. “Just let me know she’s all right, Mrs. Schuyler. That’s all I ask.”

She slipped it into her jacket pocket without looking. “I don’t suppose I can ask you to return the favor.”

He placed his hand on the doorknob and stared at the curled fingers, as if he wasn’t sure they belonged to him. “I can promise you one thing, Mrs. Schuyler. If Tiny’s with me, nothing and no one is going to hurt her.”

He opened the door and left the room. Just before he closed it behind him, Mrs. Schuyler’s voice drawled across the stagnant indoor air.

“I can’t tell you how much that comforts me, Captain Harrison.”

•   •   •

H
e walked slowly, and by the time he reached his own house, the pinks and golds of the promising May sunset had dissolved into a bruised twilight. The hallway was dark. He didn’t bother turning on the light. He climbed the stairs and pulled the key out of his pocket.

“Caspian?”

He held himself still at the top of the stairs. To his right, a shadow detached from the wall.

He looked down at his hand, and the faint glint of the key in his palm. The slow thud of his heartbeat surprised him. But maybe he knew she was there all along.

“Tiny,” he said.