Finding Mrs. Ford

by Deborah Goodrich Royce

  Jack held his hands about two feet apart to indicate the length of the worms that were crawling in Venus’s wood.

  “Stop!” Susan laughed. “I think you told me that story before and the worms were only six inches long!”

  “Oh. They were?” Jack laughed. Venus moved seamlessly, her enormous engines roaring behind them, thrumming a steady vibration all through the boat. From where they were sitting, they could not see Captain Eric at the helm. Susan wondered if he could see the two of them.

  “Darling. Do you know why I brought you out here tonight?”

  “Not really, no. But I’m not complaining.”

  Jack reached down to retrieve a small, shiny navy bag, tied with a white ribbon. “Do you recognize this?”

  “No. Am I failing a quiz?”

  Jack laughed and handed it to her. “This is a Betteridge bag—from one of my favorite stores in Greenwich. Why don’t you open it?”

  “All right.” Susan took the bag into her hands and untied the ribbon. Inside, was a box, also wrapped in glossy navy paper with another white ribbon. “Is it like Russian nesting dolls? A box within a box within a box?”

  “Why don’t you find out?” He laughed again.

  God, she misses laughing with him.

  Inside the box Susan found the most exquisite pair of earrings she had ever seen. Each earring had three stones—graduating in size from slightly smaller than a pea to a little bigger than two peas—arranged in an off-balance way. The stones, from what she could see in the dim light, were pale blue. Tiny dark stones were scattered among the larger ones. “These are so beautiful. What are they?”

  “Seaman Schepps—another favorite of mine. The stones are moonstones. I was hoping for a moonlit night to give them to you, but I don’t always get my wish.”

  “You don’t? From the looks of your life, I’d say you usually get what you wish for, Jack.”

  “Well, darling, going forward, much of that will depend on you.”

  Grief, like a low, slow moan, permeates Susan.

  She longs for Jack. She misses him in a visceral way, like a toxin that moves through her muscles. She remembers that when he died, she lay in bed shaking for days. Just shaking. It was that physical sensation that had nearly unhinged her. She had steeled herself for the heartache. The pain was ferocious, yet she had expected it. But she had not anticipated the tremors. Her doctor had prescribed potassium and magnesium. He said she was dehydrated. He said this was grief. He said to be patient—there was nothing for it but time.

  Tonight, she is back in that place as if not a day had elapsed.

  Susan rises and walks to the bar off of the sunroom. She drops to her knees, opens the liquor cabinet and stares at the bottles. She thinks back to the summer of 1979, the summer she has run from all these years—the summer that has reared its gruesome head this week. She slams the cabinet closed.

  Jack Jr. is upstairs, asleep in his room. Tomorrow is D-Day. Together, they will drive to Boston to see the FBI. He will be with her to answer their questions about Sammy. He will support her when she repeats the story to the agents. Provenzano—the good cop, DelVecchio—the inquisitor. Jack Jr. has always been there for her. She does not know what she would do without him now.

  Susan opens the cabinet again and places her hand on the cool side of a bottle of bourbon. She extracts the bottle quietly, as though Jack, both Jacks, the ghost and the man, might hear her, and touches the same cool side to her cheek, first one, then the other.

  She again tells herself she has nothing to fear. It will all be smooth sailing tomorrow because Jack Jr. will be with her. He will help her make it clear to the FBI that she does not know Sammy Fakhouri anymore. She meant to say precisely that when she said she didn’t know him. She meant not anymore. When they understand that, she will be able to return to the life that she made with Jack.

  And the subject of Johnny need never come up.

  The shaking is spreading to her arms now and traveling down her legs.

  Susan opens the top of the bottle; she smells the bourbon inside. She sets it down on the floor beside her, then she picks it up again. She brings the bottle to her lips. She tells herself that these are extraordinary circumstances that call for extraordinary measures. She remembers the phrase: These are the times that try men’s souls. Was it from typing class? History? She doesn’t remember. It doesn’t matter.

  She has kept hold of herself all this time, through her lonely years, her married years, her widowhood, she has remained in control. Even when Jack died and she lay in bed, trembling. She heaves herself up and moves to the window, taking the long way around, avoiding the open bottle she has left on the floor.

  The lighthouse is there, always there, turning. It never stops. What normally anchors her only serves to unmoor her now.

  She grasps at her memory trick. She works to drag her mind from the present moment into a past event, one that will recalibrate her equilibrium. She struggles for a good one, the best one really, the one she uses sparingly. She trots out the recollection of the night she met her husband. The night her life changed. The night she turned the final corner away from the ugly “before” and toward the beautiful “after.”

  Susan mentally wrenches herself back to that hot July evening in New York. She places herself in the setting: French restaurant, Meat Packing district, cobblestone streets, steam rising up from the manholes. She turns her imaginary self to face the façade of the restaurant. She can see the wall of glass, the name, Florent, in neon. She walks herself through the door, past the other tables, all the way to the back to find their group.

  She had been friends—close friends—with Jack Jr. for a few years by that point, but she had never met his father. No reason, really. It just hadn’t happened.

  She seats herself at the table, on the banquette side in back. It was Bastille Day. The room was singing la Marseillaise. Jack Jr. told everyone that someone was coming. He asked Susan to make room. She does that in her mind, now, slides to the right on the bench.

  Jack Jr. was always her hero. His chivalry, yet again, shone through. He had once picked her up from the subway floor. That night in New York, he picked her up from her own, lonely life by placing his father right next to her.

  Had Jack Jr. known they would fall in love? Had he hoped for it? Had he regretted it at all? Susan has asked him this many times over the years, but he has remained coy.

  Anyway, it does not matter his intent. That night, Jack and Susan met. That night, silly as it sounds for people their age—she, thirty-eight, he, fifty-seven—they both experienced that thunderbolt, that crazy coup de foudre. Jack Sr. had walked into the room and he and Susan had locked eyes and all her years of solitude and sadness had floated up through the ceiling of the restaurant.

  Susan searches for the magic of that moment. She scans her mental movie to find the image of Jack approaching. The length of his stride. The color of his clothes. The blue of his eyes. Something specific like that will root her, ground her, start the film rolling and get her the hell out of where she is right now.

  Her thoughts become increasingly jumbled and frantic. Her game is not working. Even this, the practiced reminiscence of her first meeting with Jack, the ace in her deck of card tricks is failing her tonight.

  She cannot escape where she is right now—here in the room by the window facing the lighthouse alone. Jack Jr. is upstairs. Jack Sr. is dead. Sammy Fakhouri is being held somewhere by the FBI. Johnny Buscemi is wandering around New York.

  No trick of memory can save her.

  26

  Thursday, August 16, 1979

  Suburban Detroit

  Susan turned away from the service bar, where she was waiting for drinks, in order to watch a particularly graceful couple at the center of the dance floor. The girl moved so effortlessly that Susan recognized a fellow ballerina.

  Tonight, the mood at Frankie’s was electric. France Joli pulsed over the speakers; an orchestra of violins lifting her sultry Come
to Me into every dark and dingy corner of the bar. On the floor, couples danced elegantly. Dancing at Frankie’s was a thing of beauty. The grace exuded by couples doing the Hustle under the disco ball elevated the place out of its surroundings, and looked, from a certain angle, ethereal.

  The girls wore colorful leotards and matching Qiana skirts that wrapped around and tied at the waist. When the men spun the girls, and they did this often, the skirts lifted and revealed legs and leotards underneath. They always danced in heels. Some of them opted for Candies, Annie’s shoe of choice. But many of them wore Capezio character shoes—high heels with straps favored by Broadway dancers.

  The DJ seamlessly switched to Thelma Houston’s Don’t Leave Me This Way, another anthem of love and longing. The couple that Susan was watching twirled effervescently, heads held high, smiling radiantly.

  “Get your head outta the clouds!” barked Sherry, Susan’s self-appointed watchdog. She was standing far too close for Susan’s comfort and Susan backed up as much as she could in the small area at the side of the bar.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, get me out of this backwater,” Sherry spoke to the ceiling like a Christian martyr before turning her gaze to Susan. “Have you seen Diane?”

  “No. I haven’t seen her at all this week. Was she on the schedule?”

  “Listen, missy, don’t you worry about the schedule. You’re just here to do your job. Can you manage that?”

  “I’m sorry. I was just wondering.”

  “Well, wonder about this—there’s some bimbo barfing in the bathroom. Get the bucket and clean it up!”

  What was Susan going to say? No? Do it yourself? At least it was a good excuse to get away from Sherry.

  “Sure,” Susan said, “but I have this order to deliver.”

  “I’ll do that. You go get the bucket.”

  Susan surrendered her tray to Sherry. “This goes to table ten.”

  Susan made her way through the tightly packed crowd, talking, laughing, sloshing drinks all over the floor and themselves, and elbowed herself toward the kitchen. She expected to find the bucket in a small broom closet down the back hall, past the large food storage room and close to where the Castiglione brothers had their office.

  Pushing her way through the swinging doors, Susan noticed her watch was missing. What a stupid girl she was! She should not be wearing her mother’s Longines watch when she came to work at Frankie’s. She knew that, of course, yet it had not stopped her from doing it. Wearing that watch felt like armoring herself with a shield from her own very different—and, superior, to use Annie’s word—life.

  Clearly, the shield had not worked. She’d checked the clasp as she always did; it must have loosened anyway. It would be impossible to find during work hours; she would need to tell the cleaning crew to keep an eye out for it later. Disgusted with her own imprudence, Susan held her naked wrist with her opposite hand as she turned to head down the back hall toward the broom closet.

  Frankie’s Disco had only one office that the three brothers shared. Carmine, rarely present at night, used it during the day. Vito began his evenings there, reviewing the books that Carmine kept, before settling into his perch at the corner table with Johnny Buscemi, Officer Danny, and the rest of his crew. Frankie wasn’t really the office type, so Susan was surprised to see the light on and Frankie standing facing someone she couldn’t see from the way the door was positioned, half closed. She truly, deeply wished that she wouldn’t keep running into Frankie, back of house.

  Annie’s voice rose above the disco music, still audible but less throbbing at this distance. Annie’s voice, in fact, could be heard above quite a lot of noise right now, ringing strident and sharp as it moved from entreaty to threat.

  “Frankie, just tell me!” she shrieked. “I know you’re sleeping with Sherry. Tell me, Frankie! Why don’t you just tell me?” Annie was talking rapidly. Far too rapidly to Susan’s ear. She must be high on cocaine tonight. She was probably high every night now. Susan clutched her watchless wrist even tighter.

  “C’mon, baby, c’mere.”

  Susan had to hand it to Frankie for trying the charm route. It really was one of his best tools.

  “Frankie, don’t touch me! Just tell me! I need you to tell me.” The door was creaking slowly backward, exposing Annie in her florid state.

  “Aw, Annie, c’mon, I love you, baby.” Susan could tell he was nearing his limit. She prayed that Annie had the sense God gave her to notice the same thing, but knew it wasn’t likely.

  “Frankie, Goddamn it! I said don’t touch me! I’ll scream, Frankie! Honest to God, I’ll scream!”

  “Who gives a shit if you scream?” Susan could practically hear Frankie’s tether snapping. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean? We’re in the goddamn back of a goddamn disco, for Christ’s sake. Scream, baby, scream!” Frankie started laughing maniacally. Maybe he was on coke, too.

  Susan was coming to see herself as the Olivia de Havilland character in the movie, Snakepit, descending ever deeper into the levels of madness surrounding her. Here she was again, an audience of one in a theatre from which she wished she could exit. Standing still was really the only option. The doorknob to the broom closet was near, but any move toward it might have caught Frankie’s eye. Maybe she’d died and gone to hell and was doomed to repeat these voyeuristic scenes with Frankie and the various women in his life for all eternity.

  “Tell me, Frankie! Tell me! Tell me! Tell me!” Annie resumed her refrain. Susan thought she might scream herself, her nerves were frayed to breaking. She saw Frankie look at the unhinged Annie, squint into her face, and then she watched him lift his left arm and, almost in slow motion, haul off and backhand her, hard, across the face.

  The relief Susan felt at seeing her friend get hit in the face surprised and shamed her. A woman seeing another woman slapped should feel nothing but revulsion. Susan was appalled but she was also grateful that Annie had finally shut up. The benefit of the doubt that Susan had granted Annie from the first moment she’d met her had ebbed since their ugly fight in the car. And she’d never seen anyone in the state that Annie had been in just now. Some outside force had to be employed to stop her. And that force was Frankie. Deus ex machina in a disco.

  His left hand had struck her on the left cheek. Susan saw the blood before she noticed that Frankie was wearing a diamond pinkie ring. The blood popped from Annie’s perfect cheekbone and ran in a straight line down the side of her face and onto her neck. There it bloomed in a red starburst, like a Rorschach test, on her white shirt collar, creeping toward the knot of her tie.

  The force of the slap had rotated Annie’s face toward Susan. Her eyes were huge and round as she turned them speechlessly to her friend. And that, in turn, drew Frankie’s regard in the same direction. Once more, Susan was staring eye to eye with Frankie and a woman with whom he was having an intimate moment.

  It was Annie who broke the stare down with three words, delivered staccato-like, each word punctuated by a full stop. “Fuck. You. Susan,” she said, then she turned to Frankie, crying like a little girl. Frankie, sensing his opportunity, took Annie into his arms and gently closed the office door with his foot.

  Susan was alone in the hall near the broom closet. She felt a surge of repugnance and rage, which compelled her to bolt in the direction of the employee’s bathroom where, she too—like the inebriated patron in the front hall ladies’ room—threw up into the toilet.

  She threw up until she dry-heaved. And when she was finished, she laid her cheek on the seat of the filthy toilet and stared at the names scratched on the stall wall. She had no intention of cleaning up the vomit of the patron in front. She had no intention of getting up. She had no intention of any kind at this moment, other than to rest her head on the toilet seat and read the graffiti—the names and initials of those who had loved and lived, for a time, in this God-forsaken bar.

  27

  Wednesday, August 13, 2014

&n
bsp; Watch Hill

  Susan awakens to the sound of birds. Seagulls are swooping overhead, calling out ownership of gable perches and fighting over oysters. The noise is harsh and provokes a pain in her head that matches the stiffness in her body. A wave of sick remorse overtakes her when she opens her eyes to discover that she is lying on the floor of the bar, her cheek pressed into the bottle cap. She is falling apart, when she can least afford it. She drags herself up, closes the wretched bottle, cleans up the scene and hurries to her room before Jack Jr. wakes.

  An hour later, Jack navigates his black on black Mercedes SL northward, from Watch Hill to Boston. Susan sits back and rests her eyes behind her black-on-black sunglasses. She hopes, this way, to avoid conversation. Jack Jr. tends to be talkative.

  They have left early to allow time for the unforeseen. Which pretty much sums up events of late. Susan wouldn’t be surprised to see Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny driving the opposite way down the highway.

  Jack locates the large, midcentury brick building at One Center Plaza with no difficulty and parks in the garage. They have more than an hour’s wait until Susan’s scheduled interview.

  They are faced with two time-killing choices: to the left is the Kinsale Irish Pub, which, at this early hour, is closed. That narrows the field to the deli on their right, which goes by the name of Finagle A Bagel.

  “That’s funny,” Jack says, without laughing, as he holds the door for Susan. Jack enjoys an everything bagel with everything on it. Susan orders coffee and lets it grow cold.

  “Look, this is just a courtesy.” Jack reads her wariness. A blindfolded man could perceive Susan’s anxiety right now. “You’re here to be polite.”

  “Thanks, Son.”

  “Of course, Mom. It will be all right.”

  “You’re the best.”

  “I know.” Jack consults his watch. It is half an hour before Susan’s appointment time. “Shall we? Early in, early out. Maybe we can get in nine holes this afternoon?”