Tiny Little Thing (7 page)

No, he didn’t say where he was going. Or if he’d be back at all.

W
hen Cap was five years old, his family moved abruptly from some foreign posting (Frankfurt, maybe? He had a vague recollection of a corner shop selling German candy) and returned to Boston, to the handsome brownstone on Marlborough Street that had been his parents’ wedding present from the Hardcastles.

He still carried a vivid memory of driving down the street in the middle seat of the moving van, next to his father in the passenger seat. “There it is,” Dad had said, lifting Cap onto his lap, and Cap had caught sight of his mother waving joyously from the stoop, bundled in a blue coat, holding his three-year-old sister’s woolly hand in hers. Dad was smoking his pipe, and somehow the smell of his tobacco burrowed its way into the memory of that afternoon, so that even now, as Cap opened the front door and followed the carpeted stairs stretching to the upper floors, as he smelled the familiar combustion of warm plaster and old wood, he thought of Dad and his pipe and his clean-shaven jaw. A sense of rightness stole over him, of impending happiness, just out of reach.

The happiest days of his life.

When he’d returned to Boston on furlough a month ago, he’d recognized the old place the instant he’d turned the corner and beheld it in the afternoon light. It was home. It was childhood, those few precious years between, say, five and eight, when they had all lived there together and Mother was alive. The large bay window on the parlor floor, overlooking the street, where Mother kept the piano. The paneled pocket doors to the dining room, endless fun. Dad’s study. Cap’s old bedroom on the third floor, at the back, which had been let out for years, like the other floors, bringing in money that he didn’t really need, money that went straight into his savings account, zeros adding up magically to some sum he refused to acknowledge.

Now, of course, in the hindsight of adulthood, he knew that they had returned because of his mother’s sickness, and that his father had been granted some sort of compassionate leave. That was why they had all lived with such furious domesticity in those years, such determination to love every moment together, to squeeze the day of every last drop of joy.

He led Tiny up to the fourth floor, his own floor, the attic floor. A tidy little bachelor pad with plenty of light: the old boxroom converted to a darkroom, a kitchenette in the corner, a sofa in the front room, and his own bedroom in the back. “It’s not much, but it’s home,” he said, opening the door, flinging his hat on the stand, conscious suddenly of the mismatched furniture, the walls covered in thumbtacked black-and-white photographs.

Neat, of course. Military neat. The bed made in hospital corners, the furniture exactly squared, the floor bone clean and smelling sternly of soap.

Tiny wandered to the window like a woodland deer. Her eyes were huge and glossy dark as she swiveled her head about, taking in the details of her surroundings. Her pocketbook dangled from her hand, the cardigan slung between the straps.

He set down his camera bag in the hall. “What’s your poison?”

“I don’t mind. Whatever you’ve got.”

Not much. He preferred to do his drinking elsewhere. Still, there was vodka, there was lime juice in the ancient Frigidaire. He poured out a pair of gimlets and carried them into the living room.

Tiny stood with her hands braced on the windowsill, staring at the green-leafed tips of the trees that lined the sidewalk below. The slanted sunlight just touched the back of her neck. He could trace the perfect arcs of her shoulder blades through the material of her dress, the flex of her calves, and he realized she’d taken off her shoes and risen up high on the balls of her feet.

There were a thousand questions he wanted to ask her, a thousand things he wanted to know about her. He advanced across the old wooden boards and placed the drink on the sill, next to her long-fingered hand. “What’s he like?”

“Who?”

He was close enough to smell the faint perfume on her skin, to detect the movement of her back as she breathed, the whisper of fabric. Close enough to realize, in shock, just how small she was, how delicately made, each bone and curve of her tuned in fine precision. “The man you’re marrying.”

She picked up the drink and turned her face away from the window glass to sip. She made a little moue, swallowed, and sipped again. An amateur. “He’s lovely. Handsome and brilliant. Harvard. He’s a lawyer, going into politics eventually. Or that’s the plan, anyway. Big things.”

“A real catch.”

“I like to think so.”

“How did you meet?”

She drank again, more deeply this time, and moved away from the window. “Oh, you know. I was at Radcliffe. We met at a mixer, my sophomore year. He was a senior.”

“Fell in love?”

“Yes, I guess. If that’s the word.
Fall
in love.” She shook her head and reached for her pocketbook, which was slung over the arm of the sofa.

“Well, you love each other, don’t you? That’s why you’re getting married.”

She took out a pack of cigarettes and a slim gold lighter. “Do you mind?”

He shrugged. “It’s your funeral.”

“Oh, a clean liver. My fiancé would approve, when he isn’t out enjoying a smoke himself, on the sly.” She set down her drink to light the cigarette. “Don’t tell on me.”

“Your secret’s safe with me.” He leaned back against the windowsill and crossed his arms. “You didn’t answer my question, though.”

She blew out a slow cloud of smoke and waved it away with her hand. “Look, can we not talk about the wedding for a single damned minute? I’ve been living and breathing it for the past six months.”

“All right. What
did
you want to talk about?”

She was wandering the room again, in quick little strides, searching him out. A bundle of nerves now, Miss Tiny Doe, her hair ruffled, her drink and cigarette in hand. A current of restless energy surrounded her, vibrating with possibility, with the potential for a rare and shattering explosion, a shower of sparks, the Fourth of Tiny July.

She stopped by the wall of photographs and touched the edge of one with her finger, which was manicured in berry red, matching her dress. “Yours?”

“Yes.”

“They’re very good. This one here, the vagrant, with the sunlight glittering on his stubble. Very good. Are you a professional?”

“It’s just a hobby. I’m a soldier, actually.”

She turned her head. “I might have guessed. That, or an ex-cop. The way you acted in there. What branch of the service are—?”

He snapped his fingers. “Yeah, that reminds me. So about what happened today. Any particular reason you gave them the slip?”

“Who?”

“The
police,
Tiny.”

She stared down at her cigarette. “Do you have an ashtray?”

He sighed and heaved himself away from the window to the kitchenette, where he found one of his mother’s teacups at the back of the shelf, an old-fashioned red-hued pattern, chipped and scarred. “You can use this,” he said, turning the corner to hand it to her.

She took it without looking at him and dropped a long crumb of ash inside, just in time, followed by a single wet drop.

“Oh, Jesus.” He touched her elbow. “Are you all right?”

“Yes!” She jerked her elbow away and turned her shoulder, but it was all a lie. She wasn’t all right. The tears tracked right on down her pristine cheeks, to be whisked instantly away in furious strokes of her fingers.

“Shh. It’s okay. It’s done. You’re okay here.” He rested his hands on the balls of her shoulders.

“Stop it. I don’t— I never cry—” She tried to juggle the drink and cigarette and teacup, and the drink lost out, dropping in a wet crash to the wooden floor. “Oh, damn, I’m so sorry—”

“Forget the drink. Jesus. You can cry. Cry all you want. Here’s my handkerchief.” He pulled it out of his jacket pocket and held it out to her, but she still had the cigarette and the teacup left. He took the smoke from her unresisting fingers and crushed it out in the teacup, and he set them both down on the floor next to the broken glass. “Come here, before you cut yourself.”

“I’m— I’m all right. I’ll get a—get a—cloth or something. Clean up. I’m sorry. I’m a—such a klutz—”

He picked her up and carried her to the sofa, where she hiccuped and buried her head in his shoulder and cried in earnest, soaking his jacket and the shirt beneath. His hand absorbed the tremors of her back. He closed his eyes and sat absolutely still, waiting out the storm, tracking its arc in the strength of her sobs, the pace, until bit by bit she blew herself out, ebbing and ebbing, a final gust, and quietude, except for the low parabolic roars of the passing cars.

He fingered her hair, which smelled like a garden. A garden at night. Gardenias? He didn’t know much about flowers.

Without lifting her head, she said, muffled in his jacket, “You probably hate crying women.”

“You’d be surprised. A lot of men cry out there. In the field. At night. The younger kids, missing their mothers.”

“But women. Women crying. Most men hate that.”

“I don’t give a damn. Cry all you want. Anyone would cry, after a thing like that.”

“But not you.”

“Well, I’ve seen worse. But if I hadn’t, I’d probably be crying right along with you.”

She didn’t answer, only sat there curled up into his shoulder, as if she were too embarrassed by the loss of composure to lift her head. Cap went on stroking her hair, and not just because it felt so damned good, because
she
felt so damned good, firm and soft and dainty and strong and wet and fragrant, a gardenia-scented bouquet of tender female limbs tucked into his sofa and his body. No, not just because of the pleasure of stroking her hair, but because it was the only thing keeping the awkwardness at bay, between two strangers like them. The only thing to comfort her.

She could be crying with anyone. She could have gone to her mother or her best friend, she could have gone to a grandmother or cousin or sister or brother, if she had them. She could have gone to her fiancé. She
should
have gone to her fiancé, a day like today.

Why had she come to him?

She shivered a little, the way you sometimes did after a long cry, when the heat and the energy fled and you were left with nothing to keep you warm. He went on stroking her hair, feeling her breath in his shoulder, trying not to think about having sex with her.

She turned her head, freeing her face, and sighed. “I guess you’re probably wondering why I’m here.”

“The question crossed my mind.”

Tiny sat up. “Do you still have that handkerchief?”

“Right here.”

“Thanks.” She stood up, with her back to him, while she made busy with the handkerchief, fixing her face. His gaze fell to her calves, slender and graceful, curved with firm muscle beneath her stockings. He closed his eyes and tried not to picture them wrapped around his back.

“So. I was wondering, Cap . . . I was hoping . . .”

He opened his eyes. She was facing him again, eyes red and puffy but surprisingly composed, surprisingly put back together. You couldn’t ruffle Miss Tiny Doe’s dignity for long. Even her hair seemed to have fallen back into place, or maybe that was the stroking of his hand.

“Yes?” he prompted, when her voice faded away.

Her shoulders rose bravely. She knit her hands together in front of her tiny waist, folding the handkerchief in the smallest possible square between them.

“Do you know how to make a person disappear?”

W
hen I was about five years old, my parents nearly divorced. I doubt either of my sisters remembers this; they were practically in diapers still. Daddy had come back from the war, shot in the groin, and for a long time, he didn’t seem to be getting any better. I remember how he used to sit in his chair atop some sort of odd-shaped blue cushion, drink in one hand, cigarette in the other, looking as if he might curl up against the upholstery and die at any moment. I wanted to climb on his lap and hug him, but I couldn’t. His wound.

Eventually he started getting up and about, and went back to work at the law firm in which he was a partner, and that was when he found out Mummy was having an affair. (This part was explained to me later; at the time, all I knew was that there was fighting and tantrums, that Mummy and Daddy didn’t seem to like each other anymore, and I had to remain very, very quiet in my room or I might make it worse.) After they went to bed, invariably in separate rooms, I would slip out and clean up all the messy cocktail glasses and the cigarette butts. I would get up early and bring Mummy her coffee, I would tidy my room, I would mix Daddy his martini, because you never knew what might help. You never knew what might make them love you enough to stay together.

Looking back, as a worldly adult, I suspect Daddy was so upset because of the injustice. Due to the nature of his injury, sexual activity was impossible for some time. I think there were specialists involved, delicate surgeries, until things were back in working order, but in the meantime he was unmanned, and there was Mums, dissatisfied as ever, seeking satisfaction the only way she knew how. The only way they both knew, really, because I also happen to know that he slept with other women when he was overseas: Mums once told me about the letters she found in his kit that came back with him. (They liked to do that with me, amassing evidence against each other, in case I should ever find myself having to choose sides.)

Anyway, Mums had her revenge, and Daddy couldn’t revenge her revenge, and everything balanced precariously for a while, and I don’t know why they didn’t divorce. People were divorcing by then, it wasn’t all that big a scandal anymore. Maybe Mummy and Daddy had married into an expectation of discreet infidelity, as rich people did back then, and they came at last to an understanding. Maybe they really loved each other, and found the grace for forgiveness. Or maybe neither of them wanted to give up the apartment on Fifth Avenue. (New Yorkers are practical like that, especially when it comes to real estate.) Who knows, really? Only the two of them. Eventually the fighting simmered down, the balance of power was restored, and life went on. They remain married to this day, God help them both, and are even sometimes happy with each other.

But I’ve never forgotten that year on the brink. I’ve never forgotten what a small thing I was, tiny and powerless in my bedroom, afraid to shout out and ruin everything. And I’ve always been amazed by my younger sisters, who are never afraid to shout for anything they wanted, not the least little bit.

•   •   •

T
ake Pepper, now. Pepper walks into the Hardcastle breakfast room four days later like she owns the joint. She kicks off her shoes and settles in, beneath a watercolor seascape executed by Granny Hardcastle herself in 1934, during her blue phase, and she says, loud and fearless: “Did you know there’s an old car out there, buried in the shed?”

I look up from my coffee. “What shed?”

“The one near the elbow of the driveway. Covered in brambles.” She reaches for the toast rack. She smells fresh and salty. Her hair is done up in her cheerful yellow head scarf, and she hasn’t taken off her sunglasses. A good thing Granny Hardcastle eats breakfast in her room. “Where is everybody, anyway?”

“It’s Monday morning, darling. Frank’s gone into Boston, trawling for campaign money, and his father’s back at his desk. For work,” I add, with a slight emphasis on the word
work
, because isn’t that what Pepper’s supposed to be doing right now? Working. In Washington. Not here.

She peels off her sunglasses—masculine wire-rimmed ones, like those worn by fighter pilots—and smiles. “Don’t you fling those dirty four-letter words at me.”

“You’re welcome to stay as long as you like, of course,” I say. “But aren’t they expecting you back in the office by now?”

“Oh, we understand each other, Washington and me.” Pepper gnaws her toast, glances at the buffet laid out behind us, and reaches for the coffeepot. “About this car, though. I think you should have a look. It’s very old and lovely. I’ll bet it’s worth a mint.”

“What do you know about cars?”

“More than you think.” The old sidelong wink.

It occurs to me, as we strike out across the damp grass of the driveway oval, that if you told me a week ago I’d be tolerating this—striking across grass with Pepper, striking across anything and for any length of time with Pepper, for that matter—I’d have smiled politely and reached for the telephone to dial up the loony bin. Percy trots at our heels, in the wary wedge of space between us. “Just how did you happen to be poking around there, anyway?” I ask.

“I’m nosy.”

“Well, I knew
that.
But you’ve only been here four days. Don’t tell me you’ve already exhumed the Big House of all its secrets.” I picture my underwear drawer. Surely not.

Pepper waves this away. “I might have made a wrong turn last night, coming back from the tennis courts.”

“I can’t imagine how.”

“Anyway, I came back this morning with a crowbar—”

“You didn’t!”

“Useful little darlings, crowbars. And look!” She points across the remaining few yards of grass and into a patch of brambles, which, on closer inspection, obscures the gray weathered boards of an old shed.

“I’ll be damned,” I say.

“Tiny!” Pepper is shocked. Shocked.

I pace a slow half circle around the bramble patch. Why have I never seen this before? Or perhaps
noticed
is a better word. After all, I’ve driven past these brambles countless times, in Frank’s yellow roadster, in my own staid blue Cadillac. (And then in another car entirely, on another day I would rather not recall.) The bushes tangled into vines, which tangled into the shade of the birch trees that protected the Hardcastle property from the curious public road, from the photographers looking to make a buck. For some reason, the groundskeeper has simply allowed this descent into wilderness.

“Well, it’s odd,” I say. “This isn’t like Fred at all.”

“Not a bramble man, our Fred?”

“It’s not the brambles themselves. You perceive this whole mess is supposed to block the view from the road, after all.” I wave my hand in the direction of the pavement, on the other side of the trees, from which a telltale drone of engine obligingly raises its voice to a roar. “The more brambles, the merrier.”

“The shed itself, then?”

“Yes.” I pick my way through the brambles to the wide door, which stands ajar, presumably because of Pepper’s crowbar. The air is cool on my bare arms, shaded by the layers of vegetation. “If Fred weren’t using the shed, he’d have had it torn down, instead of letting it collapse on its own.”

“It isn’t collapsed.”

“Not yet. Was it locked?”

“Yes.”

I turn my head and raise my eyebrow at her. She shrugs an innocent pair of shoulders. “That’s what crowbars are
for
, Tiny.”

“I suppose you’d know.” The door is only cracked open. One of a double set, taking up almost the entire end of the shed. The other door still lies flush with the wall, held in place by the encroaching brambles. The doors are made of vertical boards, in contrast with the rest of the shed, clad horizontally. A rusty lock lies in the matted grass at my feet, still attached to its mottled metal plate. I can see the scars on the edges of the doors: fresh unpainted wood against the peeling gray.

“Well, go on.” Pepper prods my back. “Open it.”

Like when we were girls. Like when she or Vivian would dare me to peek in on Grandmother Schuyler swimming naked in the pool on Long Island, or to lick the frozen lamppost outside our Fifth Avenue apartment. A rush of trepidation overcomes me, a premonition of . . . no, not evil, not exactly. But
something.
Something behind that door. Something rather formidable, something complicated. Something I’d really rather not face at the moment.

But it’s too late for nonsense. I stick out my hand and haul open the door.

The hinges shriek in shock. A gust of air greets me, cool and musty, smelling of black grease. I wave my hand in front of my nose, imagining mildew. “I can’t see anything.”

Pepper is struggling with the other door, pushing hard against the brambles. “Hold on. Here comes the sun. Ouch! God
damn
it!”

“Splinter?”

“No. Thorns.” She sucks on the pad of her thumb and gives the door a last almighty shove, and lo! like magic, or divine benediction, a shaft of pale morning sun finds the exact angle between the branches and brambles and open door, and turns the air to gold.

Illuminates the dusty chrome points of the object that fills the shed.

“You weren’t kidding,” I say.

“Would I jest?”

I step forward and rest my hand on the hood ornament, a delicate three-pointed star enclosed in a circle. “It’s a Mercedes-Benz.”

“You don’t say.”

I turn my head. Pepper’s still standing near the door, backlit by the sunshine, one leg propped against the doorjamb, her arms crossed beneath her breasts. A speculative posture.

“Oh? And what do you know about Mercedes-Benzes?” I ask.

She pushes off from the doorjamb and strolls along the side of the car, drawing a trail along the endless black hood. “Oh, this and that. Not the sort of machine a Schuyler would be caught driving, would it? Rich and glamorous.”

“And terribly German. The wrong kind of German.”

“That, too.”

“How old do you think it is?”

Pepper circles the sloping rear like a trainer inspecting a Thoroughbred. “Oh, thirty years at least. It looks like the kind of thing Göring would have driven around Berlin, doesn’t it? Look at the curve of the fender. The way it swoops down from the front tires like that. It absolutely screams sex, doesn’t it?”

I release the star and step around the left front wheel. Two slender exhaust pipes extend from the side of the hood and into that glorious swooping fender, like Adam’s ribs. A canvas sheet is draped atop the open cockpit. “Hard to tell under all that dust,” I say.

“Oh, you’re better than that, Tiny. Even you can see what’s beneath. The curve of this rear.” She shapes it in the air with her hands, just so. “Can’t you just imagine driving this gorgeous beast down some lovely old road? Miles and miles. To the middle of nowhere.”

“
You?
The middle of nowhere?” I lift the canvas sheet. A slow drift of dust slides down the other side, like snow. “Anyway, it can’t possibly start.”

“Who says? Let me help you with that.” She moves to the passenger side and grasps the opposite end of the canvas.

“In the first place, the gas tank will be empty.”

“How can you be sure of that?”

“Evaporation, darling. Thirty years of it, probably.” We fold up the sheet in perfectly synchronized movements, lengthwise and lengthwise again, and then we meet at the top of the hood to bring the edges together. “And oil.”

“What do you know about oil?”

“I know cars need it, so the parts don’t stick together.”

“Oh, an expert, then.”

I fold the sheet over my arm and turn back to the car. “I suppose we’ll have to call somebody in to fix it. Or else tow it to a garage.”

“Don’t you dare!” Pepper walks back down the hood to the passenger door. “Just look at this leather, Tiny. All brown and soft. The dials.”

“Don’t open it!”

But it’s too late. Pepper tries the handle and—much to my surprise—the door gives way fluidly, without a squeak, a miracle of Teutonic engineering. She lowers her body inside and closes her eyes. “Oh,
Tiny.
Come inside.”

“You’re a dope.”

My sister leans her head back, eyes still closed, mouth curved in a luxurious smile. “Better than sex,” she says.

“Surely you’re having better sex than
that,
Pepper darling.”

She cracks open an eyelid. “Better than what you’re having with old Frank, I’ll bet. Nice married under-the-covers missionary sex.” She pats the driver seat. “Come on in. You know you want to.”

I swallow back my outrage—well, she’s right, isn’t she? Hit the old nail smack on the head—and set the thick square of folded canvas on top of the hood, just behind the ornament. “I do have work to do, you know. At least a dozen notes to write, and Frank wanted me to look over his speech while he’s away—”

“Oh, screw the housewife routine, just once.” She pats the seat again.

I exhale the heavy sigh, just to show her how large a favor she’s asking, and swing around the side of the car to the driver’s side. This door sticks a little, or maybe it’s just me, sticky and incompetent, but Pepper reaches over and gives it a shove, while I tug, and at last the latch gives way and the door glides weightlessly outward. I hold my skirt beneath my thighs and slide downward into the driver’s seat.

“You see what I mean?” says Pepper.

The scent of leather rolls around me in a masculine fog. I place my hands on the steering wheel, two o’clock and ten o’clock. The thick dust on the windshield obscures my vision. Behind me, the seat molds itself around my back and legs, the curve of my buttocks, like a pair of large and skillful hands.

“I see what you mean.”

Pepper’s opening the glove compartment, the ashtray. “Look at this!” she exclaims, holding up a cigarette butt, rimmed in pink lipstick.

“Good Lord.”

She revolves it between her fingers. “Can you imagine? I wonder who owned it.”

“One of the Hardcastles, obviously.”

“Do you think so? A German car like this? A special order, I’m sure, right from the factory. You would have had to be some sort of European aristocrat to get your hands on this. Anyway, the Hardcastles were like the Schuylers, especially in those days. Nice reliable Packards and Cadillacs and Oldsmobiles. Nothing too flashy.”