Who Made Stevie Crye? (28 page)

XLVII

“Welcome,” said Seaton Benecke
, alias Billy Jim Blakely, homegrown spawn of Satan. “I’m all set for you, ma’am. Not a monkey anywhere around, either.”

“One of them jumped me in the closet.”

“I’ll pick him up as I leave. Don’t sweat it. I’ve been trained for this.”

“They tore up Marella’s toy animals, those monkeys—mutilated her dolls and teddy bears, stole the stuffings right out of them.”

“Most of it’s shredded polyurethane foam, ma’am. Or colored paper clippings, or shredded cellulose fibers. As a worker for the Greater Southeastern Ridpest and Home Insulation Service, I recommend another layer of insulation up here in your attic. You were losing heat through your roof—so I put a couple of the white-throated pests to work to solve the problem. No extra charge.”

“If anyone should pay anyone else, Seaton, you should pay me, and there probably isn’t that much money in the known universe.”

“Amen,” said Sister Celestial.

Seaton touched the brim of his cap to acknowledge the prophetess’s presence, then launched into an incoherent spiel about the R-value of the substances often found plumping out the limbs, beaks, carapaces, and tails of stuffed animals. He offered fascinating asides on the toxic nature of certain formaldehyde-based insulations (cancer in laboratory rats) and on the incidental usefulness of urea-formaldehyde foam not only as a deterrent to roaches and silverfish (ask the Environmental Protection Agency) but also as a check to the fires that often break out amid the sentimental rubbish warehoused by Americans in their attics (independent insurance agents can corroborate). This speech had no real center, though, and so halting was Seaton’s delivery that Stevie had plenty of time to glance around at the intimidating clutter.

First, this upper-story shadowland was illuminated by the light seeping through the hatch from Marella’s room—as well as by, surprisingly, the beam of a slide projector that Seaton had placed on a dusty end table straddling a well-taped carton of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. Dust motes and stray cellulose fibers drifted through this beam. A long black extension cord snaked across the bridges of plywood planking, and down into the fiber-filled valleys between the joists, to a boxy electrical outlet beside Stevie’s foot. Opposite the projector, on a half-rotten sheet that Seaton had thumbtacked to the rafters as a screen, blazed a huge rectangular window of whiteness. Seaton himself stood behind the end table, hands in pockets, his pudgy face a miniature moon above the shimmering slash of the projector beam.

Second, the attic seemed at once cramped and immense. You had to stoop to stand inside it, but the truncated column of chimney bricks growing up through the western slope of roof beyond the makeshift screen looked as distant as a butte in Utah or New Mexico. A draft rippled the torn linen sheet; and the trunks, bedsteads, book boxes, mantel facings, mirrors, mattress springs, and all the other items strewn about like abandoned luggage on these plywood islands brought briefly to life Stevie’s memories of Ted. He had hated most of this stuff, but he had not wanted to throw it away. Therefore he had hidden it in the attic.

Third, Seaton was indeed “set up” for her, for both of the women. On one plywood island he had placed two metal folding chairs. Dust coated the chairs’ plastic-upholstered seats, and threads of spider silk trailed from their legs and cross supports—but, after concluding his talk on R-values, pest control, and fire prevention, Seaton waved Stevie and Sister C. to these chairs, bowing like a latter-day cavalier and using the hand-held remote to click a thirteen-year-old photograph of himself onto the blazing white screen.

“Sit down, ladies. No admission charge. This slide presentation is courtesy of the Greater Southeastern Ridpest and—”

“We know,” said Stevie. “But it’s
my
projector.”

“Yours and your late husband’s, right? Still works, doesn’t it? That’s me up there, a tow-headed kid lollygaggin’ into puberty. That’s Scottsdale Lake behind me, late July or early August. See those puckery places on my knees and arms? Mosquito bites. The ’skeeters were terrible that year.”

“Isn’t that where your doctor friends live?” Sister Celestial asked Stevie, leading her over the wobbly planking to the chairs, where she used a corner of her shawl to flick away the dust on their upholstery.

“Yes,” said Stevie abstractedly, “Scottsdale Lake.” She stared at the boy in cutoff jeans and mesh-bottom T-shirt; his image billowed in two dimensions on her sheet. Towheaded, squinty-eyed, strawberry-kneed, pigeon-toed. He looked normal enough, but his eyes were invisible to her and the wheals all over the exposed portions of his skin reminded her of witches’ teats. She did not recognize the section of Scottsdale Lake behind him (a bi-i-i-ig lake), but it was a popular recreational resource for Columbusites and Wickrath Countians, this lake, and she had no doubt that his family had once owned a lot there. The Kensingtons had no monopoly on shorefront property.

Seaton said, “The Beneckes—the Blakelys, I mean—had a summer cottage on the lake for years. While my dad worked, my mom and me spent June through early September there. . . . Here’s a picture of my mom.”

The changer clicked, and the squinting boy gave way to a graceful woman in a wicker chair on a sun deck. This woman wore a lounging robe patterned with almost fluorescent splotches of green, blue, magenta, and yellow. The image on the screen seemed to be radiating heat, a thermographic warmth that overrode the chilly decrees of February. Her eyes reflecting her robe’s colors, her ash-blonde hair softly coiffed, her lips parted as if to whisper, the woman radiated mystery and menace. Indeed, Stevie could not recall ever having seen another woman who so immediately evoked her envy.

Self-possession shone in Seaton’s mother’s features, easy control of her desires and of her household in her posture. Then in her late thirties (no more than that, certainly), she struck Stevie as the epitome of mature womanhood, a figure from a
New Yorker
ad for French perfume or a glossy American limousine. You seldom met anyone like this woman on the shores of Scottsdale Lake, where, by contrast, most females wore dungarees, shorts and halter tops, or even the kinds of rugged khakis and work clothes favored by their husbands.

“Here’s another shot,” Seaton said.

This time she wore jodhpurs, riding boots, and an open-necked shirt of red-and-white plaid, the swell of her breast against the fabric as soft and palpable as cotton batting.
Built
, Ted would have said. Although Mrs. Benecke did not smile into the camera, her face and body hinted at a feeling of secretive good humor, as if she knew something rare and exciting that she did not wish to disclose to the photographer or the anonymous beholder of this slide. The field of red clover in which she stood underscored this impression. As did the blue of the sky, the green of the jonquil stems, and the myriad golden dandelion heads bobbing on the crimson clover sea.

“This one’s my favorite, though.”

The changer clicked, and there knelt Seaton’s mother in blue jeans, tennis shoes, and a long-sleeved white shirt—with her thirteen-year-old son in her arms. The boy was receiving a kiss on the temple from her clover-red lips. Wearing a complacent, she-owes-me-this look, he slumped toward his mother as if she must hold him up or else watch him crack his head on the sun deck’s bottom step. She supported him without protest, honoring his unspoken demand with the glimmer of an indulgent smile in her eyes. No glamour gal here, she was still in Stevie’s opinion wickedly handsome, more threatening in tomboy garb than in sequins and silver-lamé slippers. Now, of course, she would be approaching fifty—if she had not long since attained it.

“What’s the point of this, Seaton?”

“Billy Jim, ma’am.”

“Right. Please tell me why you’re flicking your mother’s whole portfolio past us. Another facet of your Ridpest training?”

Seaton pressed the changer button, and the mother-and-son portrait slipped away into white-light oblivion, and there popped up a photo of his mother in the company of Sam and Elsa Kensington, all three in dirty leisure clothes at the end of a small wooden pier projecting into the lake. Seaton hit the changer again, and the screen showed this same group gathered around a cast-iron pot in which floured filets of bass swirled in a riot of boiling peanut oil. Hamlin Benecke—or Mr. Blakely, as Seaton would undoubtedly have called him—was conspicuous by his absence. Maybe, during this forgotten summer almost thirteen years ago, the Kensingtons had befriended Mrs. Benecke and her lonely adolescent son. How long had that relationship lasted? Dr. Elsa seldom mentioned it, so Stevie assumed that it had been a short-lived “friendship,” a fleeting summer chumminess that, years later, you can scarcely believe occurred.

“I hid out when they came around,” Seaton said. “I didn’t much like company.”

“You saw them often?” Stevie asked, her heart beating hard.

“Nah. I didn’t like people to come around. ’Crets wasn’t there to talk to, in those days, but when butt-insky neighbors left us alone, well, we did okay, Mom and me.”

“You mean
you
did okay,” Betty Malbon said. “Your mama likely enjoyed a bit of grown-up company.”

Seaton punched the changer button. An empty square of light flashed onto the sheet, a blank like the blankness in his eyes—which suddenly blazed sapphire-blue and fixed Stevie with the stickpins of a long-pent hostility. Stevie tried not to squirm beneath this gaze.

“I still don’t see the point of all this,” she said.

“Yes, you do.”

“No, Seaton, I—”

“You’ve known a long time, but you’ve pretended you didn’t. That was the summer your husband spent screwin’ my mom, Mrs. Crye.”

Stevie winced. “It’s time you left, Seaton. Pack up your monkeys, your slides, and all your other lies and get the hell out.”

“Okay,” he said. “My name’s Seaton Benecke. You knew it all along. I’m confessing it, okay?” He pointed his chin at the screen and snapped another slide into view. “But tell me who this is, ma’am. Tell me this good-lookin’ fella’s name, why don’t you?”

There, in the same thronelike wicker chair in which Seaton’s mother had earlier appeared, sat Theodore Martin Crye, Sr., just as Stevie remembered him from the first days of their marriage. He was dressed in work clothes—a short-sleeved blue shirt, heavy-soled shoes, and the uniform-like navy-blue trousers he wore on his plumbing and electrical jobs—but the precise part in his hair, the sophisticated half-smile on his lips, and the freezer-frosted glass in his hands (containing either a gin-and-tonic or an exotic vodka concoction) gave him the air of a youthful shipping magnate, say, or a data-equipment executive on holiday. Although Ted had seldom grown blurry-eyed from drinking, Stevie could tell by his look of hyper-vigilant lassitude (an oxymoronic state unique to Ted) that he was tipsy. Probably no one else but Stevie would have noticed.

“You were seven- or eight-months pregnant when this picture was taken,” Seaton said. “Summer of 1968. In June, the trap under our cottage’s kitchen sink rusted out. Before that, our garbage-disposal unit had been on the fritz. Mom called the Kensingtons—’cause she knew they lived out there, and Dr. Sam had been to Daddy’s store a few times—to ask what to do. Dad never came up from Columbus except on weekends, and they recommended she call Ted Crye in Barclay. She did, and he came out to replace the trap and fix the disposal. That’s how they met.”

“So he had a drink on your sun deck. That doesn’t mean he was—”

“—screwin’ my mom?”

“That there was anything illicit between them. Ted never charged much for what he did. Sometimes people gave him a drink, or sent home baked goods, or repaid his work with favors of different kinds.”

“Yeah.” Seaton’s stare turned into a contemptuous leer. “What shit.”

Stevie looked at Sister C. “I won’t listen to this. I don’t take foul language from my kids, and I won’t take it from this creep, either.”

“Shit!” Seaton repeated.

Stevie said, “Self-definition, Seaton.” Trying to rise, she found that Betty Malbon had placed a hand on her shoulder.

“Better listen to him, child. It’s ugly soap-opera stuff, but it happened to him, and it hurt him, and he’s got no other motivation—outside of being a nobody in his own family, that and bushels of smashed or unfulfilled hopes—for what he’s doing. It’s all coming down on you, Stevie, ’cause he doesn’t know where else to put it. If you can take it and bob back up, well, you’ll beat him. That’s what this chapter’s all about.”

“About
lies
, Betty? The profanation of a good man’s memory? That’s what this chapter’s about?”

“Yeah,” Seaton said. “Ol’ Ted sure had a lot of work at Scottsdale Lake that summer. Lots of calls from the cottages.”

“I don’t remember,” Stevie said curtly.

“He did, ma’am. Lots of ’em. Most from Mrs. Hamlin Benecke—Lynnette she had him call her when he was out there, just like she called him Theodore. He probably told you he was going someplace else, though. You don’t remember because you had a load in your belly and a load on your mind. Where were you gonna get money for a crib? When was sweet ol’ Ted gonna paper the nursery, keep sensible hours, or write down income and outgo like a regular businessman? A man with kids couldn’t be so loosie-goosie as Ted always was.”

“Ted took work where he found it,” Stevie said.

“Favors too, huh? Free sweets from grateful mothers?”

“Insinuation and innuendo,” Stevie appealed to the Sister. “He shows me one picture of Ted in semiquestionable circumstances—a drink in his hand—and starts building a dozen episodes of
As the World Turns
on top of it. It’s soap-opera stuff, all right—but it
didn’t
happen.”

Seaton appeared to have been waiting for this rigorous defense of Ted, for Stevie’s words prompted him to click off a sequence of painfully incriminating slides. Ted and Lynnette on the cottage’s sun deck. Ted and Lynnette playfully wrestling on the end of the dilapidated pier. Ted and Lynnette in the front seat of the GM truck that Seaton’s mother used to commute between Columbus and Scottsdale Lake. And six or seven more shots of the couple, the last few slides flitting by so rapidly that Stevie could not register their locations or the degree of intimacy between her husband (a man only two years older than Seaton was now) and the wholesome-looking middle-aged vamp who had so obviously (
damn
her!) taken out a sublease on his affections. For what Stevie could not mistake was that an unseemly intimacy had indeed existed, and that Lynnette Benecke’s grownup weirdo of a son had not fabricated the relationship that these photos chronicled. Each new slide bolstered Seaton’s indictment of Ted. Together, they dismantled the rambling palace of illusions that Stevie now inhabited. She watched the slides appear and disappear—appear and disappear—hypnotized by this remorseless process of destruction. Ted and Lynnette were a truly attractive couple. . . .