Vera Kelly Is Not a Mystery

by Rosalie Knecht

  A police car turned into Jones Street from Bleecker, its lights off. At the same time, a second one nosed around the corner from West Fourth, against one-way traffic on Jones, and stopped. Both doors opened.

  If I’d walked away right then, they wouldn’t have stopped me. There were lots of people on the sidewalks, and both cars were more than twenty yards away. They probably hadn’t seen me standing beside the door of the bar. But I dropped the cigarette and went back inside.

  A cluster of boys in eye makeup were laughing and spilling out of a booth, and I had to push through them, knocking into somebody’s drink, to get to the bar. Max’s back was turned to the room as she made some calculation with her book of receipts. It was too noisy and we had only a few seconds. If I stopped to think, I would run away like any sensible person, and I had made this choice already, to come back inside—I couldn’t change course now. I banged on the bar as loud as I could. “Raid!” I shouted. “Raid! Raid! Raid!”

  For a split second nothing happened, the hilarity went on, but then a girl to my left took up the cry. The crowd in the room paused, and then heaved and separated, like the Red Sea. I turned and saw Max execute a neat lunge for the jar of tips under the bar, come up stuffing money into her bag, ring the iron bell that hung over the till twice, and throw the list of open tabs into the sink, where it floated for an instant in soapy water and then succumbed. She saw me watching her and beckoned, and I lurched around the bar. Peach had disappeared already, and I wished her luck as we made for the door behind the bar. It opened into a dark hallway. Behind us, I heard the crack of the front door slamming against the wall and the bellowing of police.

  “Upstairs,” Max said. I could see her white face as she turned. She was holding on to my wrist and I was holding on to hers. She led me up a staircase. “Up?” I said, doubtful. Behind us, I could hear a clamor of voices protesting, chairs turning over. A glass smashed. “Hush,” she said. After two flights I saw a knife-thin line of light ahead of us, through which cold air rushed. Max pulled open a door and we spilled out, panting, onto the silver-painted roof.

  “The man who owns the building at the end of the block,” she whispered, panting, “is a friend of Antonio’s. He leaves the roof door unlocked.”

  The night clouds glowed a dirty orange above us, as if fires were burning somewhere. Sirens raced up Bleecker Street. Voices and hurried footsteps echoed from the alley behind the bar. We ran for the building on the corner, dodging television aerials and clotheslines. The roof door was unlocked, as she had said it would be. We descended into an ordinary apartment stairwell, tiled in a peaky Easter yellow. A child looked curiously out of a doorway as we passed.

  “I have a car,” I said. I was still bold. The hair that I pushed back out of my face was damp and hot. “Can I drive you somewhere?”

  She was ahead of me, and she raised her shoulders in acceptance without turning. “Sure, all right.”

  “It’s parked on Thirteenth Street.” Half a flight from the street, I stopped. “Should we wait? Or go out?”

  “Go out,” she said. “They won’t know where we came from. How are you dressed?” She turned my shoulder so she could get a good look at me. “Not like a dyke at all. Like a secretary.”

  “I had something to do for work,” I said, embarrassed. She was in high femme gear herself: false eyelashes, pale lipstick, a glittering swoop of hair above a short orange dress. Cops in the Village, even the vice squad, were blind to femmes. They arrested butches in droves.

  The child we had passed appeared one flight up, peering down at us through the railing. “How did you spot them?” Max said.

  “I was having a cigarette outside and I saw them coming. Both directions at once.”

  “It’s been a long time. I thought they had gotten bored with us,” Max said.

  “Somebody must be up for reelection.”

  We pushed out together onto the noisy sidewalk. I looked over my shoulder toward the Bracken, just once: lights bounced and streaked across the facades of Jones Street. A paddy wagon was backed up with the doors open, and in the spot where I’d been smoking I saw a crowd of women, their hair falling over their faces, their arms bent behind their backs. A bolt of guilt at having made it out. We turned the corner onto Bleecker, Max fastening her coat as we walked. The night felt colder. Would it rain again? There was something unstable in the humid air. I was aware of Max’s hot presence at my elbow as we walked north through the Village. I began to wonder what exactly I was doing.

  I waved ceremoniously at the car when we found it. “Ta-da.” I got in first and leaned across to open her side. I was short of breath, still nervy from our escape. Few things felt as good as not being arrested. Her hair brushed the roof; she tucked the flaring edge of her coat in beside her and pulled the door shut. The seats were vinyl, cracked, and cold.

  “Where are we going?” she said.

  “I was going to ask you the same thing. Aren’t I driving you home?”

  “I guess so,” she said, sounding disappointed. “It’s the Aurora on West Sixty-Second.” But then she sat up. “No,” she said. “Let’s not. I want to go someplace fun.”

  I turned pink and was glad she couldn’t see it. The lift of a night not ending yet. “Another bar? We could go uptown.”

  She laughed. “God, no. I mean real fun. The beach? A mountain? I wouldn’t mind seeing a mountain right about now.”

  I noticed that I was gripping the steering wheel as if we were in traffic already. She made me so nervous. She wanted a mountain? “How about the Catskills?” I said.

  “I would,” she said. “I’m not joking.”

  “I’m not either. There’s a road atlas in the glove compartment.” I turned out into Thirteenth Street. We would go up the West Side and into the Hudson Valley, and it could take all night, I didn’t care. We would find a hotel somewhere. The word hotel slunk around in my brain. Max took the road atlas out and turned the pages, tilting it toward the windows so she could catch the glow of the streetlights as we passed through Chelsea and merged onto the West Side Elevated Highway. My car protested on the on-ramp and vibrated until I could ease it into fifth gear. The black of the Palisades rose up across the river, crenellated with the lit apartment blocks of Union City. A legion of billboards to our right advised us to stop for gas, for drinks, for a show.

  “You don’t have somewhere to be tomorrow?” I said.

  She laughed. “You mean at work?”

  “I guess not.”

  “No, they’ll make him fight to get the liquor license back for a day or two.”

  “Anybody expecting you home?”

  “My roommate.” So the Aurora was a boarding house. “But not expecting me, really. She won’t be sitting up in a chair. What about you?”

  “I live alone.” And yet I thought of Jane, huddled on my stoop. She told me once, the first spring that we were together—the only spring we were together—that when I left her alone in my house for a day while I went to work, she searched my bedroom and the second-floor office for a journal, a diary, something. But there wasn’t anything. She told it like it was a funny story—the woman who kept no diary. As if everyone kept a diary! As if the chief drama of that story were not, in fact, her searching my house! I’d been angry when she told me, but I’d also been astounded by the thought of a person wanting so badly to know me.

  Jane had found some photos from Argentina once, in the sideboard in the living room. Tourist snaps I had taken on quiet days. A man selling peanuts out of a cart in front of the immense fortress of the Teatro Colón. Students on the steps of the Facultad. A photo I had asked an acquaintance to take of me, in sunglasses, under a date palm in Parque Centenario. “What were you doing there?” Jane said. “I was a student of languages,” I said.

  Max and I drove in silence, while the Bronx presented itself on cascades of granite to our right. “Where are you from, Max?” I said finally.

  “Los Angeles,” she said.

  “Oh? Why did
you leave?”

  She didn’t say anything and I thought I had offended her. “It’s just that everybody makes it sound like heaven,” I said. I put my hand on the gearshift unnecessarily, and then moved it unnecessarily to the emergency brake. Then she said, “I came east for college and I stayed.”

  “College?”

  “Vassar. What about you?”

  “No college,” I said.

  “No, I meant where are you from?”

  “Washington, DC.”

  She was quiet again. Then she said, “I can’t think of a single thing to say about that.”

  I shouted out a laugh. “You could say, ‘Cherry blossoms.’ Or, ‘The Smithsonian.’”

  “Oh, yes, cherry blossoms.”

  “They’re very beautiful,” I said.

  “I’m so glad to hear it.”

  “If you’re going to give me a hard time, you’ll have to pay for tolls.”

  “Lucky thing I have so many nickels,” she said.

  We passed over Spuyten Duyvil, the river letting in beneath the highway just as the far bank of the Hudson towered and pressed close, and crept on through the remains of the Bronx into Yonkers and out into Westchester County. A mountain had been her idea, but it was me and my car that made it real, and being in charge of this venture weighed on me. Max sat so lightly in the passenger seat, checking the pages of the atlas as we went, looking out through the passenger window with her chin on her fist—waiting for whatever it was, this plan I had scooped us into.

  “Are you hungry?” I said.

  “God, yes. I would have sent somebody out to get me a burger just about now if we hadn’t been raided.”

  The lights of a town showed at the foot of a dark ridge. It was nearly eleven o’clock and I doubted we could get a hot meal, but if there was a gas station nearby they might have something. One of those menacing piles of sandwiches wrapped in plastic. I turned off the highway and we bumped over the seams and cracks of a smaller road, down to an intersection where a red light blinked for the benefit of no one but us.

  “There’s a Sunoco,” I said.

  I filled the tank. Max stayed in the car. It was colder outside the city, and I wished I had a scarf. The wind carried the river with it. I paid inside at the register, counting the money in my wallet: it might be enough for a single meal and one night in a motel, but not more. I wondered how much Max had and how I could possibly ask. I remembered the payment I got from Mr. Ibarra and felt, again, as trapped and doomed as I had in the office. Under the eyes of the ancient and papery attendant at the counter, I perused the two short aisles of candies and crackers, trying to guess what Max would like. I chose a bag of peanuts and two packets of crackers filled with yellow cheese. Mr. Ibarra leaving my office and going—where? Not back to some floor-through Fifth Avenue apartment, as I had imagined before. Some barely furnished base of operations? A hotel room? A Balaguer safe house in New Jersey or Queens?

  When I got back to the car, Max had turned the dome light on and was reading a paperback, holding it up close to her face. I walked around to my side, watching her in the bell jar of light. The night around us had drawn very close. At the edge of the parking lot, scrubby woods screened off a village block of small, pale homes. The low cloud cover of the day had thinned, and the moon rose in a long strip of space. I rarely got to see the sky black. In the city it was always washed with color. Max’s shadowed face, still with concentration, caused a soft pulse of fear in my gut. An errant sensation from the dark woods. It was only that I was afraid I would make some mistake, ruin whatever this was supposed to be, which I was supposed to know. Fail to stay here forever, which was what I wanted, since what waited for me in the city was another mess, another set of choices that all made me either a dupe or a hack or a harder person than I really wanted to be anymore.

  I settled in next to her. She smiled at me. The book was The Power and the Glory.

  “Crackers,” I said, handing them to her. “Peanuts?”

  “I’m starving.” She took them happily from my hands. “You know what? The girls talked about a place up this way when we were at Vassar. One of those summer places with a hundred rooms. For the winter they had a sauna and some things like that. There was a lake.”

  “In Poughkeepsie?”

  “Near it. It was called Oskar’s.”

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s go.” In my role again, the bold squire. I kind of liked to be led around myself, but I always went for this type of girl, and that’s not what they did. It was one of the inconveniences of my personality.

  “I don’t remember where it was, really,” she said.

  “We can ask someone when we get close.”

  Poughkeepsie, with its high bridge, was nearly another hour up the road. By the time we reached it I was beginning to feel more comfortable. Max handled the radio and made conversation. She knew half the Village. I mentioned a gallery show that had just gone up, and it turned out that Max knew the painter, had been to some party of his at a beach house on Long Island, had surprised him in a pantry with a Vanderbilt. She gossiped with pleasure but no malice. Since I couldn’t keep up with her, I grew quiet, although I liked the way she talked. Everything was a story. At a gas station where I could look out from the car and down the stairstep terraces of streets and wood-frame houses to the river below, Max jumped out and asked the counter man for directions to Oskar’s, and got back in with a map of Dutchess County and the route traced in pencil, as well as a pamphlet for the place itself. Swimming pools, tennis, boating, it said. What would be left for us? A bar would be nice, I thought. We were close to Vassar now, and Max tapped on the glass as we passed fields where she had camped during freshman rush, a church where she had sung Reformation music with a choir, an ice cream shop where she had worked two summers. “Don’t let me go on and on,” she said finally. We were turning up a narrow road by then into total darkness, no houses anymore and no lights.

  “It sounds like you were happy here,” I said.

  “Very happy,” she said. “I even had girlfriends.”

  “They allow that sort of thing at Vassar?”

  “They would have some job on their hands if they didn’t.” She laughed. “I had a boyfriend at first, actually. They would throw mixers for us—for the Vassar girls and the boys from Rensselaer and Bard. We were supposed to get fiancés and I did, for a little while. I was still deathly afraid of myself then. His name was William. I went into a hysterical fit halfway through my sophomore year and mailed him back his ring. Poor thing. I wonder where he is now.”

  I thought to myself that in another life, if things had gone differently for me at seventeen, this might have been my story too. It was what girls from my neighborhood did. Girls from families like mine, from schools like mine. We drove in silence while I thought about it, and then I said it out loud.

  “If I hadn’t messed up so badly in my junior year of high school,” I said, “I probably would have gone to a place like that. That’s what my mother wanted.”

  “The mystery speaks,” Max said.

  “I’m not a mystery,” I said.

  “Ha! The other girls at the bar talk about you. Always swanning in by yourself. Dressed the way you are. Somebody asked if you were married. They thought you were an adulteress with money.”

  “Dressed how?” I said. Then: “An adulteress?”

  “I disagreed. I said no way you were married. Money, yes.”

  “But my clothes aren’t—”

  “I know they’re not, but I know how rich girls dress, too. A certain kind of rich girl. They don’t go to Bergdorf and buy up the season. They get a crepe de chine from the consignment room at Eula’s.”

  I smiled. I was embarrassed. Sometimes you think you’re doing something unexpected, or that you can’t be read at a distance. “I was brought up that way.”

  “Ah, no,” she said. “I’ve made too much noise and now you’ve run away.” She looked out the window, at the dark, undifferentiated woods.
“I’m sorry, I’m being rude.”

  “No, you’re not.” I was thinking of the Silver Spring Cotillion, still the banner event of the year when I was a girl. The limousines parked in the circular drive of the Corsair. The golf club, where my father wouldn’t let us go even on guest days, because the pool was segregated and he was a member of the Civil Rights League of Greater Washington.

  Haloed lights appeared through the trees, then a white-painted sign: OSKAR’S RESORT HOTEL. An oar, looped with rope, was arranged along the top of the board. We proceeded down a paved driveway and into a lot. The place was rusticated and gigantic, with half-timbered gables upon half-timbered gables unfolding in both directions to the edge of the woods. I could sense cold water in the dark: the lake at the back of the hotel. I was starting to be concerned about the money in my wallet, but there were only a few other cars in the wide lot, and I hoped for off-season rates. When we pushed through the doors, the scale of it knocked me back: the lobby was furnished with acres of vinyl sectional sofas that repeated in shifted formats until they reached a grand staircase ascending to a mezzanine floor. A general impression of brown and gold soaked into me. Max was already chatting with a night manager, an elderly woman with very black hair seated at a desk the size of a fishing boat. “I’ve got cash,” Max was saying. I intervened gallantly, offering a check. She hesitated, then let me pay. This financial operation made me blush. I had missed the part of the conversation where the room had been described. How many beds? I couldn’t imagine she would have asked for only one. We went up in an unattended elevator to the third floor and walked an endless, silent hallway. “Look at this,” Max said, pushing open the door to our room. “A view! I think she liked me! A closet case for sure.”

  Two beds. “It’s big,” I said.