Later that morning, with sun on my windows and me still under the covers in bed, Connie calls and says, “What’d you do?”
I say, “What?”
He says, “You got us fired.”
“How?”
“The campaign manager called from Davis’s office and told me that they were consolidating and putting all the security assignments with Turners. God damned Turners! Deadwoods, for Christ sake. Everything was good yesterday afternoon. So, what did you do?”
I told him. Including the confrontation in the dark. Connie thought about it a moment. Then he says, “Got a pencil? Here’s the number. Call Davis. Tell him what’s happened. Then we’ll see.”
I left two messages before I got a call back. I told Davis that someone from his staff had cancelled our services and I thought it might be because I had gone around Mr. Eager and given the DVD directly to him.
I can tell Davis is with someone, but he doesn’t skip a beat. He says, “What? You don’t like our pizza? No problem. I’ll buy you a sandwich tonight. What do you like? Come in tonight. Tell your boss Connie that our guy got it backwards. We’re dropping Turners. I’ll talk to my guy and get it straight.”
He didn’t mention the DVD. I didn’t ask.
Davis showed up that night with a pastrami on rye for me, all the way from Michael’s Delicatessen in Brookline. Mr. Eager was nowhere to be seen.
At my age, it’s hard to eat pastrami at midnight and then get any sleep. So, I got to thinking about Harry Bellow, jr. again, and I wrote all this down instead.
18. Thanksgiving
November is a damned bleak month in Boston. The leaves have come off the trees. There is nothing to see because women are all wearing coats. It rains a lot. They’ve invented Thanksgiving and the National Football League to raise the month up a little from the dead of All Saints’ Day, but it’s still pretty sad.
I had tried to avoid thinking about Des, but it was a waste of effort and time. It meant lying in bed, wide-awake, with the same thoughts turning up. Wednesday night I found myself sitting in the dark with the radio on, wishing I had a pack of cigarettes to pass the time. I have some Jameson’s left, but I was not in the mood for getting drunk.
I should be pleased, after all.
Susannah had called. She was up from New York for a couple of days. Sarah was home from college, but both she and Matty were out visiting friends when I went by the house around noon. I stopped to talk to Mary Ellen because she hadn’t called with her usual invitation, and it was then she told me that her new boyfriend would be there instead, and I would not be invited the next day as I had been in the past. It would be the first Thanksgiving dinner I had ever missed with the girls.
So, like a fool, I was sitting in my underwear in the dark and thinking about all the things I had already thought about too many times before. And a lot of that was about Des.
I was thinking about the last weekend I had seen her, just a few weeks before. That was the weekend of Halloween.
I used to get a kick out of Halloween. Mary Ellen would take the girls down to a used clothing store called The Garment District to buy a pile of old stuff and get dressed up. I always put on an outfit I’d found at Goodwill years ago—something that might have once belonged to a fat little banker fallen on hard times. A pair of red galluses kept the pants up so that about six inches of leg showed. When I put on a Derby hat and rubbed some black on my upper lip I looked as much like Charlie Chaplin as a six-foot, four-inch, two-hundred-and-thirty-pound man can do. I handed out the candy at the door to little kids who had bigger eyes on me than I had on them.
I have no idea where my old outfit has gone to. Besides, Mary Ellen had been pretty uncomfortable with me at the door the last time I did it—the year of the divorce. So, the day before Halloween I was sitting in my room, same as this. But that day I was reading the Stark book on Loyalists of Massachusetts and trying to make some headway on my story, or at least pretending to.
Most weekdays Des took depositions or did legal research for Carey, Frost, and Theil. She was not required to do courtroom duty, which was fine with her, but she had to go out sometimes for the depositions. It kept her busy. I had not heard from her for most of the week.
She called fairly late that Friday afternoon and asked what I was doing. All I had was a short job Saturday night at the Whistle, a nightclub over on Lansdowne Street. I was supposed to run interference for a country singer who was going to ‘surprise’ her main squeeze in some kind of outrageous costume. Her boyfriend was the lead singer in the rock group featured there. But I could hand that off to Burley. He was still low man on the totem pole and got the fewest gigs. Besides, Burley likes rock music. I might have thought twice if Miss Country was doing the performing. So I told Desiree I was free despite my mood.
Des wanted to go down to the Cape. I reminded her it was Halloween. It never gets that cold on the Cape, but in November it’s a chill that goes to the bone. She didn’t think much of my negative attitude. She said that would be the best time, when no one else was there. I didn’t argue. Partly it was just me wanting some company. I would have done whatever Des wanted.
I assumed then that I’d get to see the girls in a few weeks on Thanksgiving but thinking about Halloween had put me into a funk that day as well. I had the Friday off and just about read myself into an early sleep by the time Des called.
She said, “You want to go swimming?”
I got cute. “Sure. Your place or mine?”
She said, “The Chatham House. They have a pool.”
“I don’t have a bathing suit.”
“We don’t have to use the pool. Or you could just borrow one. I’m pretty sure they won’t let you swim naked there. It would scare the children.”
“When should I pick you up?”
“I’ll be ready in a hour.”
Suddenly, a very dark night just like this evening, had brightened considerably. Life jerks you around. The real job is keeping your balance.
As forward as she had been on the phone, Des was quiet in the car. I had no idea what was on her mind. I tried to make conversation.
“What did you do yesterday?”
“Work.”
“I missed you.”
“I missed you too.”
“Busy week?”
“Yes.”
That was about it for the first half an hour or so. It’s a long drive. After a while she asked me about the story I’ve been working on. We’ve talked about that before. She always seems interested in it. I told her I had hit a bump. I didn’t say who put the bump there. I just told her I had come on some new information that had changed my viewpoint a bit. She seemed to want me to talk about that, so I did.
Becky had called me in October, out of the blue. She had been working on an idea. She has friends at the New York Historical Society. Because many of the Loyalists who left New York after the Revolution in 1783 moved up to Canada via Halifax, following the same pattern as the earlier evacuation from Boston, she wondered if we might find some link. There was a nice cache of letters at the Society from various sources which had been microfilmed but not indexed. There were interns sitting on their thumbs. Why not see if they might turn up some contact with Izaak Andrews?
You have to understand Becky. It was a matter of pride with her. She had made a mistake in the original evidence for the murder of Mary Andrews and she wanted to correct it. And I needed the help. So I said yes.
In the middle of the week before Halloween, I had an e-mail and a PDF file of a letter written by a Reverend Jedidiah Frost in 1784.
‘St. Johns. March 3rd,
We are held by weather to the house of Izaak Andrews. The snow fills to our stirrups on the road making further progress impossible for the moment. Nevertheless, the whooping cough has reached Halifax and it is best we are out of it.
Mr. Andrews’ accommodations are comfortable and his good wife, Lydie, has a fair hand with meager stuffs. Our worries are beyond a sturdy
door for the moment.
Andrews is a Boston man who has been here for some years and made a solid establishment. I am in his debt for our refuge. I write to make known our progress, but too, that you may be of some help. Mr. Andrews has made a solemn request of me which I cannot in equity refuse, but that I wish to fulfill in any case for conscience’s sake.
Before his leaving of Boston after the insurrection there, his eldest daughter Mary had gone missing. The sadness of this misfortune is cast over the family to this very day. In addition, the event was coincident with the disappearance of an assistant, an indentured helper by the name of Cary Peet, who had become dear to their home. With the help of Reverend Samuel Chase, now deceased, and of the Town parish in Long Island, this young Mr. Peet had been rescued out of New York as a child from a home riven by the Pox. Izaak Andrews has no knowledge of the boy’s living family now, but that they once worked as oystermen in a place called Brookhaven.
My request is for your assistance in finding any clue of these people now. The hope, nay, prayer, is that the boy and girl went off together and found God’s blessing with some relative in your vicinity. The boy, with the given name Cary, would presently be a man of about twenty-four years. He is of light complexion and red hair. The daughter, Mary, will have turned her 28th year in February, is fair, and I am told quite pretty.”
Everything was on its head. My previous presumptions about the murder of Mary Andrews were now waste paper. Becky has often said, ‘The history is better than the fiction.’ In this case I have been trumped by the possibilities of a better story. If I was going to make anything of my novel now, I must see all of this in a new way.
Desiree did not hesitate over the news. Before I had finished telling her about the letter from Reverend Frost, she was bursting with ideas. She has a cynical eye for human perversity. I think her legal research is too often concerned with individual meanness.
With Izaak, the father, apparently exonerated of any wrong doing, Des was immediately back to the murder itself. It did not have to take place over any great length of time. A rape, for instance, would not be prolonged. And if the act were not committed by British soldiers during the retreat, could it have been done by Rebels taking revenge on the Loyalist father?
This thought had been on my mind in any case from the beginning. Of course, I didn’t want it to be true. My sympathies were with the Rebels from the start. But like any aggregate of human beings, a small but not insignificant portion will be sociopaths, psychotics, and criminals. And those were more interesting times.
What did Des say?
We spoke primarily about the story, of course. Even late that night, after we had made love, she still seemed caught by the possibilities. This was my fault. I needed someone to talk to. I always have. Conversation often seems to grease the wheels in my brain. The image of the solitary writer in his garret does not fit so well with me. I used to bore Mary Ellen with this kind of thing until she would nod off to sleep. But Des was wide-awake into the middle of the night at the Chatham House.
I’d say you have to take a naked woman seriously.
What was it she said to me?
Wednesday night before Thanksgiving I wasn’t going to get any more sleep than I did that night with Des. I turned on the light in my room and tried to straighten things out from the churn of words I had been swimming through in the dark. In the dark, what I kept seeing was Des’s naked body. What I wanted were the words to set a direction for my story.
She had said, without irony, “Why was Mary nude? It’s a clue, don’t you think? There was no need from her to be completely stripped by her attacker. Especially if there was little time.”
‘Nude’ is a word I seldom use. It is somehow more prurient than ‘naked.’ But she had used that word and it worked in my attempt at reimagining poor Mary Andrews. To me, it made her that much more vulnerable.
I had brought the very same bottle of Jameson’s with me to the Cape that I have the remains of now. We had filled the water glasses from the room with crushed ice and poured the Jameson’s over it because Des liked it that way. By the middle of the night the ice had melted, and I went down the hall the last time in my bare feet, wearing the bedspread over my shoulders. On the way I met a fellow coming in from the parking lot who could not help himself from saying that I looked very becoming that way. Des seemed to find the encounter hysterically funny when I got back to the room and told her. She had become quite involved in her thoughts about Mary Andrews and had not laughed much before that at all. She likes to laugh.
And then, on a dime, she had said, “Your key is the boy. Your key is Cary Peet. If you can understand his role, you’ll know what happened.” Of course, I thought I knew his role. He was in love with Mary and had gone to defend her when he heard her screams.
But then, I was starting all over again. I might as well think this through once more.
Des said to me, “He was just a boy. If he would have been 24 in 1784, then he was only 15 in 1775. Boys started things earlier in those times, I suppose, but that seems very young to me. He might have been in love, sure, but he was actually not only a farm boy. He was an oysterman's son, you said. And you think he might have worked in Izaak Andrews’s tavern, don’t you? But, even though she was older, Mary would have only been eighteen at the time.” Des was speaking quickly then, the way she often did. The drink in her hand was already half finished. “Perhaps it was she who was in love with the boy. You can’t assume he was the cause of their relationship. Perhaps it was just her. Just a horny eighteen-year-old girl. By the time I was her age . . .” she stopped herself and looked at me with one eyebrow arched, “Hell, you don’t want to know what I was doing at her age.”
“No.” I said to that. “No, I don’t.”
And suddenly she had grown quiet and repeated it. “No. You don’t. That’s history too. I am not that girl anymore.”
And she had held me then and stopped talking altogether.
Had I forgotten anything worth remembering?
On that Saturday we walked from Nauset Light south until the beach ended in a flat hard spit of sand that seemed dangerous just for being so completely exposed to the unending assault of the waves, and then back again. We had jackets over our sweaters but still it was too cold to stop moving. The sun was uneven through thin clouds. The wind blustered at the first and last but calmed at midday. The beach was littered with debris and remnant foam and we collected bits and ends until our hands were filled and then used it all to make an odd little monument in a wind sheltered nook between two dunes—not far I think from where Henry Beston once had his Outermost House. We ate our lunch there as I told her all about the Beston book, which I had read as a boy, and still love.
I started in on a sand castle until my hands were too numb from the cold to manipulate the piece of driftwood I used to dig. Des had covered herself in our blanket from head to foot and I quit the castle and covered her in dry sand. This seemed an eerie image in my mind now, with her body covered like a grave, but at the time it was funny enough. She kept pushing her hand up from underneath to scratch her nose so that the sand parted in small explosions which exposed the bright red plaid of the blanket through the grey sand—until there was nearly too much sand for her to move. Then I ran my hand beneath at unexpected places and made her giggle and made her beg me to stop.
Des was right about the beach that day. No one was there except for several fishermen who stood within a few hundred yards of each other in loose companionship. They looked bored and more interested in us than we were in them.
One more thing she had said comes back to me now.
“You have to be careful of what you wish for.”
Why was that?
We had talked about food, and movies and cars. I had told her about my wanting a motorcycle when I was a kid. I went on about it quite a bit, I suppose. I had wanted to take a trip across the country and described the plan in great detail. But I never got it. It is still one of my big re
grets.
She had said, “When I was younger, what I wanted more than anything was a Corvette. I’m not sure why. I think maybe my father wanted one but never managed to get it. I’m not sure. I know he liked toys. In any case, I wanted a yellow Corvette. And then I got it.”
She stopped speaking to look at something—just a ridge of dark seaweed high on the shore. I waited. Of course I already knew then that she didn’t have a driver’s license. When nothing more came, I had to ask. “What happened? What happened to your Corvette?”
She did not look at me as she spoke. Her voice had gone flat. “It was a present, and the very first week I had it, I hit a telephone pole in Bodega Bay and ended up in hospital for a month. I had lots of time to think about what I wanted in life after that. Maybe you’re better off without some things.” ButI was not about to ask who would have given her such an expensive gift.
So this might be an explanation for the odd fact of her not having a license any longer. I didn’t pursue it. What I did follow up on at the time was her use of the noun ‘hospital.’ The way the British do, without the article ‘the.’ An odd thing. Where had she picked that up?
I remember asking, “Did you ever spend much time in Britain?”
She said, “No. Only a couple of weeks. There were no jobs. But I saw an ad when I was there for the job in Evora. In Portugal. It seemed very exotic at the time. I made a phone call. I faxed my resume. And before I even had a reply, I bought a ticket for the ferry. I couldn’t wait. Looking back now, the real motivation was just being able to do it. To just be able to pick up and go.”
I had asked, “What did you do there?”
She said, “I taught English as a second language. Of all things. I stayed there for more than a year. It was lovely. Not exotic at all. A great deal like Texas, actually. I’ve always liked Texas.”
“When did you leave?”
“After a year or so. Some things had not turned out the way I wanted and I couldn’t stay. And I had no attachments. I was free.”
This was a feeling I had not known since the year I had gotten out of the army. To my own shame, I had taken the first job I could find, teaching history as a substitute at Arlington High.
John Finn Page 19
