Voices in the Dark (15 page)

“Morgan?” Her voice lacked tone. Her narrow hand came out. “Do you have identification?”

Satisfied, she let him in and led him to a chair near a trumpet vase of lilies. He sank into the cushion. She stayed standing, her face pinched tight under an upsweep of hazy hair. She was short, petite, with the overbright eyes of an insomniac and the diaphragm of a wasp.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “It happened in Boston. Why should you be interested?”

“The police here got in touch with me about your son. I broke the news to your former husband.”

She was poised quite still with her legs together, as if her body were a single muscle, its only function to hold up her head and hair. “Glen was an expense, that’s how Harley viewed him.”

After a moment’s hesitation, Morgan said, “Are you satisfied with the police account of your son’s death?”

“My only child has been taken from me, that’s all I’m sure of.” Her eyes refocused and dwelled on him in a way they hadn’t before. “You don’t look like a policeman.”

“I did when I was young,” he said. When he was young he had worn a uniform and a revolver on his hip. The holster, brand-new, shined like a shoe. When he was young his wife had been alive and the world had been wider.

“Did you know my son?”

“No,” he said but wished he had. Perhaps now he would be drawing conclusions instead of dealing with suppositions.

“Not an hour goes by I don’t think of him. Sometimes he fills the hour and then the next one. Do you have children, Morgan? No? Then you stay a child yourself.” She moved to a captain’s chair, though he knew she wouldn’t sit in it. Her hand, dry and colorless, gripped the top of it. “What is there about you I don’t trust? Are you holding something back?”

He rose stiffly and showed her the Polaroid, but she needed glasses to see it. They were behind her on a table. When she fitted them on, they consumed her face. Slowly she shook her head.

“I don’t know him. Should I?”

“He may have seen exactly what happened in the subway station.”

Her glasses slipped to the tip of her nose, and she removed them. The fullness of her grief was in her eyes. “Do I really want to know? Will it bring Glen back?”

“I’m sorry I had to bother you,” he said.

She reached out, and her faint touch on his arm had the same weight and ungiving warmth as winter sunlight. “Stay for a sandwich,” she said. “I need the company.”

In the kitchen he trod over octagonal tiles that seemed to spring up at him. They drove him to a table, where he drew a chair and sat with an elbow near a veneer basket of fruit that had passed its time. The wall clock could not be counted on. It varied radically with his watch, which he knew to be true.

“Glen liked corned beef,” she said and unwrapped some. The bread was rye. Her back was to him, and he stared at her shapely head and undersize shoulders.

“May I ask you something brutal?”

“It won’t matter. I’ve already been brutalized.”

“In his heart of hearts, do you think …”

She uncapped a squat jar of mustard. “Go on, Morgan. I’m listening.”

“Do you think your ex-husband might have wished the boy dead?”

She concocted two sandwiches he knew neither she nor he would eat, and then she added a slice of pickle to each plate. Turning, she said, “Why did you ask that?”

“It was unworthy,” he said.

“No,” she said. “No, it wasn’t.” She placed the sandwiches on the table and stayed on her feet. “Harley and I divorced six years ago, and he has seethed over every nickel he’s had to lay out for Glen. He’s never been normal about money, but it got worse when Glen was diagnosed with leukemia. The insurance coverage is limited.”

“Still and all, his own son.”

“After the divorce he ceased to have a son. He identified Glen with me, and me he hated. Claimed I was sucking him dry.”

His voice level, Morgan said, “Do you think he could have been involved in some way with Glen’s death?”

Her face tightened in the instant, as if a key had been turned. “If you know something, tell me.”

“I don’t. I have only suspicions.”

Her fist, gripping the back of a chair for support, looked like the skull of a small animal. “You have suspicions, Morgan. I have nightmares.”

• • •

Alone in the big house, Regina Smith entered her daughter’s disheveled bedroom, read cryptic entries in Patricia’s diary, surmised meanings, and shuddered. Her anger was deep, bitter, and specific.

Her stepson’s bedroom had been picked up, the bed made, things in proper places. In Anthony’s clothes closet her slim hand dug deep into pockets. In his bathroom she touched soap that had dissolved into a tattered lump and from a hamper dragged up sweat socks that would never come clean and briefs that had the pungent smell of an orange peel. In her mind she imagined his tongue eaten up by lies he had told.

A mirror loomed, and in a refracting moment she saw herself at Patricia’s age, full of upheaval and change, of fleeting moods complex and expressive, with lapses into the vulgar. The first boy in her life had been less a lover than a mechanic checking her oil. The second had grinned the whole time from his good fortune.

She clumped downstairs with memories that could still make her cringe and stepped to a window, where she swept a dead hornet from the sill and stared out at the faultless morning, the sky unwaveringly blue, which gave the grounds a surer green. An automobile of note rounded the drive.

Harley Bodine climbed out with an air of recklessness and, approaching the house, glimpsed her in the window. A cigarette was snared between his teeth. He chucked it. “I don’t mean to bother you,” he said.

She spoke through the screen. “But here you are.”

“May I come in?”

“I’ll come out,” she said. They followed a footpath of crushed white rock, strayed from it, and took sanctuary near an oak cursed with gypsy moth blight. Flecks in his otherwise somber necktie caught the light. His close-shaved chin, she noticed for the first time, had the hint of a cleft. “The police chief is making moves against me,” he said with a cocky smile that surprised her. Much about him was beginning to surprise her.

“What moves?”

“He’s keeping my son’s death alive.”

“How?”

“He has his ways,” he said mysteriously, and she wondered whether he was growing paranoid. His voice ran on a single note, and he seemed to gaze at her in a code he expected her to break. “Morgan’s playing policeman. Kate’s the prize.”

“Is he harassing you?”

“He thinks he is, but he’s out of his league.” The jolting cry of a jay startled her but not him. He crept closer. “Kate and I are fucking again.”

“Congratulations,” she said in a temperate voice. His eyes slid over her without restraint, an affront to the dignity of any decent woman. “You could get arrested for that,” she said.

His hand reached out vaguely. She wasn’t sure what he hoped to touch. His breath was in evidence, neither good nor bad, mostly cigarettes. “I wish Kate were you.”

She brushed his hand away. “But she’s not.”

• • •

Beverly Gunner felt she had to talk to someone and, though not on intimate terms with any woman in the Heights, chose Phoebe Yarbrough. Phoebe lived in a contemporary that had long walls of glass and sheets of skylights to exorcise darkness. “Light is life,” Myles Yarbrough said. She had not expected Myles to be there. Myles, according to her husband, was a loser. His eyes were jittery, his voice thin. Taking her by the elbow, he piloted her over hardwood floors free of carpets and then told her to continue on herself, straight out to the pool. “That’s where the fun is.”

She did as she was told, the heels of her beige pumps clicking over the hardwood. When she swished open a slider, she heard a spate of voices, which almost made her turn and run, but heads were already pivoting from a semicircle of colorful poolside chairs.

“Bev! How nice!”

Phoebe instantly erected an extra chair, practically sat her in the sunken seat, and served her a brimming glass cup of punch laced with rum. Crossing her legs, she felt painfully overdressed, though only Anne Lapierre, proudly displaying the scar tissue of an old Caesarian, was in a swimsuit. Sissy Alexander, the ball player’s wife, was in something that resembled a sunsuit, and Kate Bodine and Germaine English wore loose shirts over shorts. Phoebe’s slender neck, careening out of a tank top, was nearly long enough to make her head independent of her body.

Phoebe said, “Kick your shoes off, Bev.”

She would have done so if her pumps had not been so tightly clamped to her swollen feet. The chlorine odor of the pool was strong, and the bright water looked as if blueing had been added. She heard Anne Lapierre say, “I had walls to scale, but Armand didn’t want me to. He was afraid men would look up my dress.”

“So what?” said Phoebe. “As long as you had something on underneath.”

“I often didn’t,” Anne Lapierre said wickedly, her red frizzed hair a small fire.

The first swallow of punch loosened a knot. They, Beverly suspected, were on their second or third cups. Germaine English’s shirt was tailored, Kate Bodine’s was not. She admired their strong youthful figures, no sallow skin in their cleavages, no penciling on their smooth legs.

“We all had our dreams,” said Germaine English. “Mine was to get on a horse bareback and ride naked. In the moonlight, of course.”

“Your hair flowing,” offered Kate Bodine.

“Yes, it was long then.”

Anne Lapierre said, “My first lover was a graduate student. What I remember most about him is that he said dry witty things none of us had answers for. The real problem was that he painted me as pure, which meant I had no place to go but down.”

Relishing their droll smiles, Beverly wanted to speak but feared some absurdity would leap out. She was out of their beat, but she was not stupid. She read poetry. Wordsworth pleased her, Eugene Field’s “Little Boy Blue” brought tears to her eyes, and James Russell’s rhetorical and immortal question about the month of June raised her to a higher plane.

“My first romance didn’t last the winter,” Germaine English said. “I couldn’t tolerate sleeping with a man who closed the windows tight. I like air. I like pulling the covers over me for warmth, not kicking them off for breath.”

She admired Germaine English, whose charm emanated from her soulful eyes and slow smile, and she enjoyed looking at Anne Lapierre’s clean little ears and saucy large mouth. Phoebe had beautiful fingernails. Glancing at her own, she resolved to treat them better.

“Did I tell you about my second lover?” Anne Lapierre asked. “He always went at it at top speed, like we were on a railway track with a train coming.”

“He must’ve been married,” Phoebe said.

“No, I was. Not to Armand, to my first husband.”

Beverly’s glass was empty. She had blotted up even the dregs, which doubtless accounted for the feeling that was washing through her. It lifted her in a phantom way and left her suspended, though the weight of her pumps was a drag. Phoebe’s ankles were long and shapely, splendidly tapered, and her own, she began to suspect, had never been as trim as she had thought. Afloat, she felt bulky and clumsy. Surprising herself, she said, “I don’t like my arms.”

No one heard her.

“Eight inches, I swear, and this big around,” Anne Lapierre said, curving a childlike hand.

Kate Bodine stirred. “That doesn’t sound pleasant.”

“Often it wasn’t.”

Listening, Beverly uttered a laugh that came out unattractive and wished she could take it back. Uncrossing her legs, she then swept them aside to let Phoebe pass. “Why didn’t you say something?” Phoebe said to her, returning to fill her glass. Phoebe’s long, flawless face with its raised cheekbones seemed borrowed from a magazine.

Sissy Alexander, sitting as if shackled, round knees nailed together, shyly allowed that her husband, the ball player, had been her first man. “He was my childhood sweetheart. We’ve been through good times and bad, all the highs and the lows.” The voice was wholesome, like bread baked at home. “Now I know the marriage will last forever.”

Wonderful words. Paul was Beverly’s first man, her only man, and their sons parodies of him. Lifting an arm, sloshing punch, she could feel her dress sticking. Phoebe stared hard at her, and the blue-green of Phoebe’s eyes became fixed in her mind, perhaps forever. In a loud voice, rocking in the chair, she said, “I hate my husband!”

• • •

“So there you are,” said Mary Williams in a hearty voice as she entered the common room at Hanover House. A couple of elderly women whose heads were too weighty for their frail shoulders smiled from chintz chairs. Each had nothing to lace thoughts together but relished the passing attention she gave them. A man sitting with a cane between his knees grabbed a look at her. She kissed her mother’s tightened cheek, the skin stretched from twig to twig, and glimpsed the thin telltale scar racing from ear to jaw like the red margin on a sheet of notepaper.

“I didn’t think you were coming,” Mrs. Williams said, thrusting aside the
Wall Street Journal
, which she had read religiously for as long as Mary could remember.

“I told you I was.”

“You’re not reliable.”

She let that pass, from long habit. “You look marvelous, Mother.”

“I keep up. One has to.”

In younger years her mother could stand still, not move a muscle, and pull people to her. The poet Robert Lowell had aggravated a dicky heart by falling in love with her, and the president of the First National Bank of Boston had been a personal adviser, but all the men in her life had had a temporary look, including her own husband, Mary’s beloved father. Mary could forgive her for many things but not that.

“How’s your friend?” she asked.

“I have all my marbles, Hilda doesn’t. She was raving about her husband, so they had to hit her with a hypo.” Seated upright, Mrs. Williams adjusted the hem of her dress, which was fashionably short. Her knees were shiny. “And how is
your
friend?” she asked. “Still living off you?”

Her mother despised Dudley, had detested him on sight and called him a pearl.
You know what a pearl is, don’t you, Mary? It’s a sick thing in an oyster.