Vera Kelly Is Not a Mystery

by Rosalie Knecht

  I wondered how queer it all was: I couldn’t quite get a handle on it. All these long-haired, lovely young men in gaudy clothes, and yet the breathless speculations about hippie sexual practices that I heard were all confidently heterosexual. The groupings that I saw downtown tended toward young women arranged happily around a young man, like a frame around a painting. And they went out to California and lived in flophouses and ended up with babies. What would I have thought of it, if I were seventeen now? What did Max think of it? She sat at her piano bench, her back to the keys, watching the sermon as if it were her own private show. I would have liked it then, probably. I would have wanted to run away. Any circus would have done.

  At the end of the sermon, after Max played the recessional hymn, I threaded my way out of the pew and stood in the side aisle, under a window in which Jesus waited beside the still waters. Something came back to me, also in stained glass: the windows of the Catholic church where I had gone to Mass once or twice with Joanne after spending Saturday nights at her house, when we were still kids and nothing had yet gone wrong. Those windows had shown the thirteen stations of the cross circling the sanctuary. Jesus had been racked and pale, his forehead bloodied. Mary wept. Was something lost, in all the gentleness of a church like this one on Eleventh Street? Wasn’t Calvary more present in the world than the green meadows and still waters? They had shown a napalmed forest in Vietnam on the evening news three nights before. Or was the napalm here, too, implied in the face of the pacific angel over the altar? What drives people into a sanctuary but fear and violence?

  Max was approaching, but being waylaid every few steps by parishioners who clasped her hands. She looked happy.

  “Hello,” I said when she reached me at last. “That was beautiful.”

  “You liked it?” she said. She squeezed my elbow and we kissed on the cheek. “Is it just you?” she said, glancing around.

  “Just me? Yes, just me.” Should I have brought friends?

  “Are you starving? I like to get some eggs at the coffee shop around the corner on Sundays.”

  Hope surged. We went out into the cold. The coffee shop was tiny, a row of seats at a chrome counter and a few two-person booths in the steamed-up window.

  “Where’d you learn to play like that?” I said, after we had ordered and the waitress had brought the food to our booth. I had toast with black coffee and Max had a breakfast spread out before her that looked like it had been taken from a Rockwell painting.

  “Oh, you know—I took lessons for years and years. I had very good teachers.”

  “They must have been,” I said.

  “My parents thought I was a prodigy. I wasn’t a prodigy, but they were happy to spend money on lessons. It was lucky that I loved to play so much. I was a kind of showpiece.”

  “A showpiece?” I said.

  “Well, you know—sons in a family like mine—sons are one thing. Daughters are another. It was a nice talent to have. It kept me busy. The women in my family tended to have trouble staying busy.”

  “It sounds dynastic. What are you, an Astor?”

  She looked levelly at me, her expression pleasant but serious, and then said, “No, I’m a Comstock.”

  “Oh,” I said, and then again, more slowly, “Oh.” I thought of the Comstock Collection, a converted army barracks near San Diego filled with Romantic paintings. Then I remembered that the Comstock Institute of Texas was where my mother’s father had trained as a petroleum engineer. “Of Comstock Oil & Gas.”

  “The very same.”

  Something in her tranquil expression wobbled. She turned her attention to the street, where a silent ambulance had stopped in front of an old folks’ home across the way, its lights flashing. So the bartending job was—what? A lark, maybe. An affectation to liven up her youth.

  As if hearing my thoughts, she said, “They cut me off. I was an idiot.” A little shrug.

  “What happened?” I said, although I could guess.

  “After the college fiancé, they had another boy they wanted me to marry. He was a—I could tell you the name of his family but it probably wouldn’t mean anything to you, and I hate talking that way. I didn’t want to marry him and they fought and screamed, and then I ran away for a week with my girl—we went up to Santa Barbara. My parents had one of their private security men follow me and he caught us together.”

  “He caught you?”

  “He’d been a Pinkerton, I think. He was creeping around the windows of our bungalow at night. When I got back to Los Angeles they told me they knew everything and I had to marry this boy or be disinherited. So I was disinherited. I was twenty-two.”

  I finally put down the cold toast in my hand. It plinked on the plate. I tried to square all this—the rending of ties, the gothic glitter—with the winking girl behind the bar. “Why did you say you were an idiot?”

  “Ah, well. Because that girl left me. Because if I had held on another three years I would have had a trust, which I don’t think they could have taken away without a lawsuit, which would have meant their lesbian daughter in the papers, which they never would have allowed. Youth—you know.”

  “So you have nothing?” I said.

  “Not a thin dime.”

  “Do you speak to them?”

  She laughed. “If Episcopalians sat shiva, they would have sat shiva for me.” Her voice was light, but her body had gone tense. I had been brought up in a prosperous suburb full of diplomats and lawyers and women who took tennis lessons, but this was something different. I thought of Hearst Castle at San Simeon, which I had seen in a photo essay in Life magazine. It was a sprawling mansion on a hill. Zebras, which had amused some child once, and then multiplied into herds and gone native, grazed alongside Hereford cattle on the slopes. There were carved and painted ceilings, looted from the churches of Europe after the First World War, with char and smoke still visible on them.

  “So what did you do?” I said.

  “I moved in with my girl for a few months and got a job in a restaurant. I had no idea what I was doing, but she helped me. And then when that fell apart, I packed up my things and came back east. I came on a bus and I had just enough saved from working in LA for a week in a boardinghouse. I got that job in the Bracken on the sixth day. I’ve been here four years.”

  “I had no idea I was in such lofty company,” I said.

  She glanced at me, measuring, and then her face went tight. Maybe she thought I was making fun of her. She leaned back from the table, smiling now, all charm. “Well, what do you do with your Sundays?” she said.

  I tried to think of an answer that might extend this moment in the damp heat of the restaurant, let it clarify itself, but she seemed to be preparing to go, and the fact was that I had work to do that day. “I have to drive up to Saint Jerome,” I said. “A weekend shift.”

  “All work and no play,” Max said. “Well, it was nice of you to come.”

  She asked for the check and with some sleight of hand I got it away from her. She seemed to like that.

  “Again, yes?” I said.

  “Sure thing,” she said. She drowned a little more sugar in the last of her coffee and emptied the cup. “You know my number.”

  I drove up to Oakwood in my rattling car, wishing I couldn’t feel the drafts so keenly around the windows. The day felt colder the longer it went on, the sun barely free of the trees on the ridges. I reviewed the information I had. The night Bobby Candelario left St. Jerome’s was a Thursday, and on Thursdays only one bus left Oakwood. It was the Valley Flyer and it made local stops for twenty miles, covering the inland towns that the train didn’t reach and then coming back down to the river at Peekskill. He wouldn’t have dared to take the train—it would be full of staff, going both directions. How long would a fourteen-year-old boy have to stay on a bus before he felt that he was far enough away from a place he never wanted to see again? How long could he stay on a bus before he was too hungry to go any farther? The Thursday bus stopped at White Plains, Valh
alla, Thornwood, Pleasantville, Chappaqua, Millwood, Crompond, Peekskill. I stood in the bus depot in Oakwood, where four concrete berths for coaches exhaled cold air and gasoline into a small waiting area. The schedules had schematic maps printed on the backs that I distrusted. I had my own, an AAA foldout in my purse. Three little girls huddled around their mother on a hard bench like a pew, dolefully eating cookies. It was a quiet place. I asked the ticket man if he’d seen a boy like Bobby a couple of months back, identifying myself as a worker from up the hill. He said he’d only been hired in December. There was no one else in uniform in the depot. I bought a ride on the next Valley Flyer, which left the depot in two hours. It made the same stops on a Sunday as it did on a Thursday as far as Peekskill, after which it went express up to Poughkeepsie, an extremity it would not have reached on the evening Bobby left. I had a sandwich at a café across the street and came back at two o’clock. The 2:15 was already idling in the berth. I sat on a bench with an open book, thinking about Félix. Had he waited long? Maybe he had planned his escape ahead of time and knew the schedule already, so he could slip down the hill just before the 8:30 bus rumbled to life. Someone had done an inventory of his effects after he had gone, which I found in his chart. His bag and winter coat gone—it was cold in November, especially cold along the river—and both pairs of trousers. His dress shoes remaining, his tennis shoes gone. No socks or underwear left in the dresser. It was a church in White Plains that provided the winter coats. I had seen the request forms. The boys didn’t like them and called them “church coats.” Some had their own winter jackets, worn proudly back to campus after visits to family. But Bobby had probably had a church coat. They were all the same color, a dark green.

  The boys were given a dollar in spending money every week. The bus ticket cost seventy-five cents. Maybe he had saved for a few weeks before he left, or maybe he had run away with twenty-five cents in his pocket. That was more likely, since it looked like it was an impulse, the distress of the stolen clock, that made him go. He was young enough to make that kind of decision.

  I took a seat close to the back of the bus. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. I wanted to think like him, try to feel where he would have gone. A place that looked warm and alive from the road. A place not too far and not too close. He had lived a long time in Sheepshead Bay. I wondered if he liked to be near the water. He would have remembered the blue of the Caribbean. It made me sad to think of a child used to white sand beaches and a warm salt wind landing in the far reaches of a Brooklyn winter. And then to be brought to a place like this. Bare woods slid by. Sodden lawns, a mail truck making a slow circuit of a subdivision, white siding against an off-white sky. The remains of old snow, packed and sculpted by rain, lay in blackened ridges along the curbs. The bus turned onto the highway.

  An old woman across the aisle from me was singing softly to herself in Spanish. She had crochet needles, and something white and pink was growing stitch by stitch between her hands. “Regresando,” she sang. “Regresa-a-a-ando.” A song I had heard once from a Puerto Rican singer in a club uptown. Puerto Ricans in New York spoke of the island the way the Jews in Babylon spoke of Israel. In my last boardinghouse, I had been friends with a girl from Ponce who had come up for art school, an illustrator who did evening and weekend work for an advertising firm in Midtown. I heard her sometimes crying on the telephone to her mother in the great room downstairs, and she would come up afterward with a distant look, her eyes very black and her cheeks pink, as if she’d been communing with spirits. She had postcards of Ponce tacked up all around the mirror in her room; she went home three times a year, and she used to tell me I could stay with her grandmother if I ever came to visit the island. I had never gone, but sometimes I would sit in her room drinking Nescafé on winter Sunday mornings, looking at those photographs, those endless confrontations with a gentle sea.

  Where were Bobby’s parents? No—correcting myself. Félix’s parents, Dionisio and Altagracia Ibarra. If they were in prison in the Dominican Republic, as the false señor and señora had said, then I didn’t have much hope. I had read stories. People didn’t really come back from Trujillo’s prisons, even if they left alive; the same was true of Balaguer. They were the same prisons, the same guards. It didn’t bear thinking about. Where would this boy go if I found him? If his parents were unreachable, his wealthy relatives a fiction, what would I do with him once he was rescued? I looked out the window at the highway, the gray fog of the woods. A farm appearing in a space between two Levittowns, a few cows on a slope; forlorn, as if they had washed up there. If he had no family, then he would stay in foster care. Knowing the truth about his parents wouldn’t make any real difference. He would gain nothing except the knowledge that he was in danger and his parents were lost and in pain.

  I was going about this all wrong and in the wrong order. I was impatient with myself for not seeing it sooner. Maybe his parents were not in prison at all. I had no reason to think I had been told the truth about them. They might be anywhere, and I needed to find them, too.

  The bus advanced from town to town, rumbling down off-ramps into Pleasantville, Chappaqua, Millwood, Crompond, pausing briefly in front of town halls and department stores. I noted the places where a restaurant that would appeal to a fourteen-year-old boy with less than five dollars in his pocket was visible from the bus stop—Pleasantville and Peekskill, with a Shakey’s and a Howard Johnson’s, respectively. I wrote down how long it had taken to get there, what towns we had passed on the way, which stops let more people on and which let more off.

  If the parents were in prison, after all, then what would Balaguer want with the son? If the family had already been defeated, why pursue the boy here? If there was no hope, why go so far to snuff it out?

  At Peekskill the bus waited for thirty minutes before setting out on the return journey, and I got down and found a telephone booth. I could still remember the number. I had never written it down. An indifferent female voice answered on the third ring.

  “Anne Patterson calling,” I said. “Is Gerald Carey available?”

  CHAPTER 11

  I chose our meeting place. Not the coffee shop he liked on East Fifty-Second Street but instead a dark bar in Hell’s Kitchen whose collection of tiki accents—woven palm fronds, hula girl figurines, strings of dusty silk hibiscus—failed to conceal its Irish-cop nature. I picked it because there were booths in the back and they never played music before ten o’clock. Maybe I also picked it because he would dislike it. He was fastidious. He liked things bright and clean; there was an essential, almost aggressive wholesomeness to him. I arrived first and saw him come in, edging through the street door as if he preferred not to touch it. He spotted me, but his expression didn’t change. It had been a year.

  “Hello, Gerry,” I said.

  He dropped his hat on the table, and then slid into the booth across from me and laid one large hand across the other.

  “Vera,” he said. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  “I got you a drink,” I said. I pushed an old-fashioned across the table with the tip of my finger.

  He looked into it without touching it. “I didn’t think you ever wanted to speak to me again.”

  “I didn’t,” I said. “But I got into something.”

  I watched his face. When I first met him, I had thought he was oblivious, because he didn’t seem to react to what he was told, to adjust to small adjustments in other people. Later I realized that he grasped everything, and that his languor was strategic. He nodded toward the bar and said, “I can’t drink alone in company.”

  “I don’t need anything,” I said.

  “It’s been a long time, Vera. To our health.”

  He rose and went to the bar, and returned with another old-fashioned. We clicked them together. I took a cigarette from my pack, and he lit it. He had a heavy gold watch I hadn’t seen before. Maybe he’d been promoted. The green-shaded lamp over the table buzzed, and the place seemed very quiet.

&nb
sp; “You didn’t come after me when I left,” I said. “That’s something, at least.”

  He shrugged. “You had completed your assignment.”

  I had. I had gotten myself out of Buenos Aires after the coup had closed the ports, after my contact had turned on me and run, after spending three months holed up with a man I’d met from Texas in an apartment on Calle Tucumán, waiting for a break. Calling Gerry every day from pay phones all over the Centro, holding on to a hope, long after it stopped being sensible, that he would conjure me an exit visa. Every day I had expected the police to knock on the door. In the end I had made my own exit, leaving the Argentine sovereign territory on a fishing boat, under a false name, concussed, dehydrated, and sick from the subpolar atmosphere of the Strait of Magellan.

  “What is it?” he said.

  I drew the ashtray across the table. “A missing Dominican boy.”

  “Are you freelancing?”

  “Yes.”

  He looked disapproving. “You have no backing.”

  “I didn’t have much backing with the CIA either.”

  He looked away.

  “An old couple came to me and said they were looking for their great-nephew. They said his parents were in one of Balaguer’s prisons and he was here in New York. But when I looked into it I could see that they weren’t who they said they were. They’re not his family.”

  “Who are they?”

  “They must be Balaguer’s people. I don’t know what they want with the boy, but if he’s who they said he is, his parents are in trouble with the Dominican government. I need to know where they are.”