by Peter Straub
“The brother wanted the restaurant?”
“Tommy wanted the money. Years back, Tina borrowed money from his father to buy the first two floors of his building. You can imagine what happened to the value of the real estate. Tommy thought he was going to get rich, and he’s hopping mad.”
Down at the bottom of the hill, one of the two old couples who had lingered at the grave shyly approached Michael and said that they would guide him to the Pumo house.
As they drove up a long unpaved drive past thick old oaks toward a neat two-story farmhouse with a wraparound porch, the old woman, an aunt of Tina’s, said, “Just pull up next to the house alongside the drive. Everybody does it. Ed and I always do it, anyhow.” She turned to Conor, who held Judy on his lap. “You’re not married, are you, young man?”
“Nope.”
“Well, I want you to meet my daughter—she’ll be inside the house helping out with the food and the coffee, I’m sure. Good-looking girl, and named after me. Grace Hallet. You be sure to have a nice talk with her.”
“Grace.”
“I’d be happy to help your daughter dispense the mead and sweet potato pie,” Harry said. “How about me?”
“Oh, you’re too famous, but this fellow here is just good folks. You work with your hands, don’t you?”
“Carpenter,” Conor said.
“Anybody can plainly see,” said Grace.
3
Almost as soon as they got through the door, Walter Pumo, Tina’s father, took Michael and Beevers aside and said he wanted to talk to them in private. In the dining room, the table had been heaped with food—a sliced ham, a turkey ready to be carved, vessels nearly the size of rowboats filled with potato salad, platters of coldcuts and pots of mustard, doughy little muffins and slabs of butter. A crowd circled the table, carrying plates and talking. The rest of the room seemed filled with women. Conor had been taken by the hand and introduced to a very pretty young blonde woman who had a bright distracted manner that was like a welded carapace.
“I know where we can find a little open space,” Walter Pumo told them, “at least I hope I do. Your friend seems like he’s busy with young Grace.”
He was leading them down the hallway that led to the back of the farmhouse. “If they come into this room, we’ll just heave ’em out.” He was a head shorter than both men, and as wide as the two of them together. His shoulders nearly filled the hall.
The old man poked his head through a doorway, then said, “Come in, boys.”
Michael and Beevers entered a small room crowded with an old leather sofa, a round table stacked with farming magazines, a metal filing cabinet, and an untidy desk with a kitchen chair before it. Clippings, framed photographs and certificates covered the walls. “My late wife used to call this my den. I always hated the word den. Bears have dens, badgers have dens. Call it my office, I used to say, but whenever I came in here, she’d say, ‘Going off to hide in your den?’ ” He was talking the edge off his nervousness.
Tina’s father straddled the kitchen chair backwards and waved the two younger men toward the couch. He smiled at them, and Michael found himself liking the old man very much.
“Everything changes on you, doesn’t it?” he said. “Time was, I’d be certain I knew more about my boy than anyone else in the world. Both my boys. Now I don’t even know where to begin. You met Tommy?”
Michael nodded. He could almost smell Harry’s impatience.
“Tom’s my son and I love him, but I couldn’t say I like him very much. Tommy doesn’t care if you like him or not. He’s one of those people who mainly wants what’s coming to him. But Tina—Tina went out and away, the way sons are supposed to, I guess. You two young men knew him better than I did, and that’s why I wanted to see you alone for a second.”
Michael felt uncomfortable now. Harry Beevers crossed and uncrossed his legs.
“I want to see him,” the old man said. “Help me to see him. I won’t be shocked by anything you say. I’m ready to hear anything.”
“He was a good soldier,” Harry said.
The old man looked down, struggling with his feelings. “Look,” he said, “in the end, everything’s a kind of mystery. Listen to me, Lieutenant. This land here—my grandfather plowed it and fertilized it and watched what the weather did to it all his life, and my father did the same, and I did too, nearly fifty years. Tommy didn’t have the kind of love for it you have to have to do that kind of work, and Tina never even saw the farm at all—he was always looking out toward the world. The last time my name was in the Milburn paper they called me a real estate developer. I’m no real estate developer, but I’m not a farmer either. I’m the son of a farmer, is what I am. That’s a goddamned good thing to be.” He looked straight at Michael, and Michael felt a current of feeling go through him. “They drafted Tina. Tommy was too young to get called up, but Tina went away to that war. He was a boy—a beautiful boy. I don’t think he was a good soldier. He was ready for life. When he came back he didn’t know who he was anymore.”
“I still say he was a good soldier,” Beevers said. “He was a man. You can be proud of him.”
“You know what tells me Tina was a man? He left his property to someone who deserved it. Tommy was rarin’ up to sue, but I talked him out of it. And I talked to that girl on the phone. Maggie. I liked her. She knew what was going through my mind before I even said anything—a man might meet a woman like that in his life, if he’s lucky. She almost got killed too, you know.” He shook his head. “I’m not letting you boys talk.”
“Tina was a good person,” Michael said. “He was responsible and generous. He didn’t like bullshit and he loved his work. The war touched everybody who was in it, but Tina came out better than most.”
“Was he going to marry that Maggie?”
“He might have,” Poole said.
“I hope she would have married him.”
Michael said nothing, seeing that the old man was full of another question.
“What happened to him over there? Why did he have to be afraid?”
“He was just there,” Michael said.
“It was like—like he knew something was coming for him. He was braced for it.” He looked straight at Poole again. “My grandfather would have bribed the cop in there, taken the killer out into a field, and beaten him to death. Or at least he would have thought about it for a long while. I don’t even have a field anymore.”
“It’s a little early to bribe Lieutenant Murphy,” Beevers said.
The old man put his hands on his knees. “I thought Murphy talked to you, out at Pleasant Hill.”
“Excuse me,” said Beevers. “Pit stop.”
Pumo’s father leaned back on the seat of the chair and watched Beevers leave the room. Both men heard him turn left toward the living room. “Tina didn’t like that fella much.”
Michael smiled.
“He did like you, Doctor. Can I call you Michael?”
“I hope you will.”
“The police picked up a man this morning—Murphy told me as soon as he got here. He hasn’t been identified yet. Anyhow, they think he’s the one who killed my boy.”
Soon after they left the office and returned to the living room. A crowd of relatives surrounded Walter Pumo and began cross-talking at him. Judy frowned at Michael from across the room, where she was talking with a slightly older man.
Harry Beevers grabbed his elbow and pulled him sideways toward the arch of the entrance. In his attempt to conceal his distress he had become so stiff he hardly seemed able to bend. He hissed in Michael’s ear. “It’s terrible, Michael. They got him! He confessed!”
Over Harry’s blue pin-striped shoulder Michael saw Lieutenant Murphy bearing down on them from across the room. “Spitalny?”
“Who the fuck else?”
Lieutenant Murphy had come close enough to give them both a confidential, almost conspiratorial glance that was as good as a command.
“Calm down,” Michael said.
; The big policeman stepped up beside them. “I wanted to tell you our good news. Unless you’ve already heard it from Mr. Beevers.”
“I didn’t say anything,” Beevers said.
Murphy gave him an indulgent look. “We had what looks like a good confession this morning. I haven’t seen the suspect yet, because I was on my way up here when he was apprehended on another charge. He confessed during questioning.”
“What other charge? What’s his name?”
“The man is not quite in this world, I gather, and he won’t give his real name. I hope the two of you would be willing to have a look at him for us.”
“Why do you want us to see him?” Beevers asked. “He already confessed.”
“Well, we think you might have known him in Vietnam. It’s possible he doesn’t even remember his real name. I want to be sure about who this character is, and I’d like you to help me out.”
Poole and Beevers agreed to come to a line-up at a precinct-house in Greenwich Village the following Monday.
“We arrested this guy on various charges of attempted murder and assault with a deadly weapon, and assault with intent to kill,” Murphy said. “The story is a little strange. This character flipped out in a Times Square movie house during a showing of Bloodsucking Freaks or some such masterpiece. He whipped out a knife and started to saw the head off a guy who put his hand on his crotch. When he pretty well accomplished that, he started in on the people in front of him. Apparently they never noticed that someone was being decapitated right behind them. Anyhow, the people in front raised enough of a ruckus for the bouncer to jump the guy. The bouncer got a knife in one lung for his troubles, and by this time our hero is making a speech about how the sinners of the world have degraded him long enough, and now he’s going to set things straight. Starting with Forty-second Street.”
Conor Linklater and young Grace had wandered up to listen to the detective’s story. Young Grace had entwined Conor’s hand into her own.
“You’ve got one punctured bouncer, one man bleeding to death, two people with less serious stab wounds, and the whole theater is going nuts.”
Murphy was an entertainer, and he enjoyed the spotlight. His eyebrows arched, his eyes gleamed.
“Anyhow, this guy finally creates so much commotion that he has to run out into the lobby. Somebody called us by then, and four patrolmen jumped him by the popcorn counter. We take him to the station and get statements from a dozen witnesses. The funny thing is, as soon as we get our guy into the station he is perfectly calm. He says he didn’t want to cause so much trouble. Things have been bothering him lately, and they just got too much for him. He hopes he will not be kept too long because he has important things to do for the Lord. After we book him and tell him that he will have to stay with us for a while, he says, oh yeah, I guess you ought to know that I killed that man Pumo last week, upstairs in a loft over a restaurant in Grand Street.”
Conor looked down and shook his head; Harry Beevers pursed his lips and blinked.
“The man can describe the loft perfectly, but there are a couple of points we’re not satisfied on. So after the line-up there are some things I’d like to go over with the three of you.”
After Murphy left them, Judy walked in from the dining room. “Have you spoken to that detective? Everybody’s saying that they caught the man who killed Tina.”
“It looks like they did,” Michael said. He told her about being asked to appear at the line-up.
4
All Sunday the Pooles behaved toward each other with a conscious courtesy that would have suggested to an onlooker that they were comparative, slightly unfriendly, strangers in a neutral setting. It was the first full day they had spent together since Michael’s return from Bangkok, and the surface of their life together felt eggshell-thin. Michael saw that Judy wished to “put the past behind them,” which for the two of them meant to live exactly as they had for the four years since their son’s death. If he could forgive her affair—forgive it by wrapping it in layers of silence—she would make it not have happened.
Judy brought a cup of coffee and the Sunday Times to the bedside. Feeling oddly more dutiful than she, Michael drank the coffee and leafed through the magazine section while Judy sat beside him and talked brightly about what had happened in her school over the last few weeks. This is an ordinary life, she was saying; this is how we live. Don’t you remember this? Isn’t it good?
Together they limped through the day. They ate brunch at the General Washington Inn: Bloody Marys and pickled okra and blackened red snapper, for it was “Cajun Festival.” They took a long walk through the neighborhood past brown winter lawns dotted with FOR SALE signs and new houses rising like fantasies of glass and chrome on lots rutted with tire tracks. The walk ended at a long duck pond in the middle of little Thurlow Park. Mallards paddled sedately in pairs, each green-headed male insistently driving off the other males who approached his mate. Michael sat on the bench beside the pond and for a moment wished he was back in Singapore.
“What was it like, having sex again after all that time?” he asked.
“Dangerous,” she said.
That was a better answer than he had expected.
After a little while, she said, “Michael, this place is where we belong.”
“I don’t know where I belong,” he said.
She told him he was feeling sorry for himself: behind these words was the assumption that their life was fixed, unavoidable; their life was life.
To Michael the entire day seemed to be happening to someone else. Actors must feel this way, he thought, and only then realized that all day he had been acting the part of a husband.
He went to bed early, leaving Judy watching “Masterpiece Theatre” in apparent contentment. He undressed, put on his pajamas, and began brushing his teeth while he read Newgate Callendar’s reviews in the book section of the Times.
Judy amazed him by easing around the bathroom door and twinkling at his reflection in the mirror. Also amazing was that she was wearing a pink satin nightie and clearly intended to go to bed before the end of “Masterpiece Theatre.” “Surprise!” she said.
The person whose role he was acting said, “Hi.”
“Mind if I join you?” Judy plucked her own toothbrush from the rack and nudged him an inch to the side. She ran water over the brush, squeezed on a fat curl of toothpaste, and raised the brush to her mouth. Before she inserted it, just as he was swishing water in his mouth, she asked his face in the mirror, “You’re surprised, aren’t you?”
Then he got it: she was acting too. That was deeply comforting. Any reality in a scene like this would have made him lose his mind with pain and fear.
When he edged around her and left the bathroom, she waved with her free hand. “Bye.”
Michael walked to his side of the bed on someone else’s feet, switched on the bedside lamp with someone else’s fingers, and pushed his stranger’s legs down into the stranger’s bed. Then he picked up The Ambassadors and was disproportionately relieved to discover that it was really himself and not the person he was pretending to be who was reading it.
The Ambassadors was about about a man named Strether who had been sent to Paris to fetch back a young man suspected of dissipation. Strether soon found that Chad Newsome, the boy, had been enhanced instead of corrupted by the experience of Paris, and was not at all sure that he ought to go back. Strether himself put off his own return for weeks, discovering newer, subtler, better flavors and refinements of manners and feeling—he was alive and at home in himself, and he did not want to go home either.
As soon as Michael began reading, he realized that he felt he had a lot in common with Strether. They too had gone out to find a corrupt man and had found him a different, better man than they had expected. Poole wondered if Strether was ever going to bite the bullet and go home. This was a very interesting question.
Judy slid into her side of the bed and advanced nearer to him than was usual.
“Thi
s is a great book,” he said. The statement was nearly not acting, but it was acting.
“You’re certainly engrossed in it.”
He put down the book just to make sure that Judy was still acting and he saw instantly that she was.
“I think you’re mistaking me for Tom Brokaw,” he said.
“I don’t want to lose you, Michael.” She was acting her head off, but she was serious about it. “Put down the book.”
He placed the book on the bedside table and let Judy come into his arms. She kissed him. He play-acted kissing her. Judy slipped her hand past the waistband of his pajamas and fondled him.
“Are you really doing this?”
“Michael,” she said. In a second she had tossed the pink nightie aside.
He kissed her back with real play-actor’s fervor. For an instant his penis stirred as she rubbed and squeezed it, but his penis could not act, and it did no more.
Her arms tightened around him and she hoisted herself up onto his body. The humor in all this play-acting melted away, and all that was left was the sorrow. Judy squirmed on top of him for a time, frantically kissing his face and his neck.
Judy lapped at him with her tongue and pushed her breasts into his face. He had forgotten how Judy’s nipples felt in his mouth, round and sly. For an instant filled with danger and violence he remembered how her breasts had swelled early in her pregnancy, and his cock stiffened in her hand. But she shifted, and he felt how her real emotions turned her body to steel and balsa wood, and his cock went back to sleep. Judy labored over him for a long time, and then she gave up and merely hugged him. Her arms were trembling.
“You hated doing that,” he said. “Let’s tell the truth. You detested it.”
She uttered a low, feral sound, like a thick fold of silk being ripped in half, hoisted herself up onto her knees and struck him very hard in the middle of his chest. Her face was distorted by passion and her eyes were wild, glowing with hatred and disgust. Then she scrambled off the bed and her solid little body flashed through the room. He wondered how many times in the past four years he had, with increasing tentativeness and foreknowledge of failure, tried to have sexual intercourse with that body. Maybe a hundred times—not at all in the past year. Judy snatched up her nightgown and slipped it unceremoniously over her head. She slammed the bedroom door.
