Old Acquaintance (Ray Guinness novels Book 2)

by Nicholas Guild

  About half of them were of Kathleen or Duelle or Rocky, or some combination of the three, but the rest were strangers, doubtless all members of Duelle’s family, since Guinness had seen pictures of Kathleen’s mother and father and was unable to find them there.

  They were a substantial group, both collectively and individually. Guinness picked one of the photographs up, Duelle and an older woman, presumably his mother; Duelle was in his academic robes, the gold tassle hanging from his mortarboard, and the woman wore a violet brocade dress and had her hair done up in an elaborate beehive. It was a studio job, free of shadow and colored just a shade too vividly to be quite real, and the woman, looming solid and threatening behind her son, was by far the more commanding figure. A studio picture with his mother, celebrating his having received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, his having assumed full manhood at last. Poor bastard, probably he had never had a chance.

  Guinness lowered himself down onto the sofa, and then gradually began sinking sideways back into the cushions, until only the fact that both feet were still planted firmly on the carpet kept him from being completely supine. He didn’t wake before he felt Kathleen’s fingertips on his eyes—a trick she had learned from him.

  “Can you take Rocky to school?” she asked softly. “I haven’t had a chance to dress.”

  It was the sheerest generosity on her part; he had never known anybody who could get dressed as fast as Kathleen. And yes, he would be grateful for a few minutes alone with his only child. Probably he would never have another chance.

  “Sure, if you’ll loan me your car. Mine’s still parked over by the university.”

  So it was settled. She fished around in the pocket of her bathrobe until she came up with a wad of keys, which she dropped on his chest.

  “Another twenty minutes, okay? It’s only a little after eight thirty, and I don’t like her getting there too early.” A worried expression crept into her eyes. “You understand, with all this going on I haven’t wanted her hanging around outside.”

  Guinness understood. He promised he would wait and see that Rocky made it inside the school building safely, that he would take her in himself. He had a far clearer idea of the dangers than did Kathleen.

  So father and daughter set out together, in mother’s chocolate brown station wagon. They traveled in silence; apparently Rocky had lost interest in talking about novels.

  Or rather, more accurately, something else had displaced that interest. She said nothing, yet; but it was clear she was preparing herself, or waiting simply for the proper moment, to say something—or to ask something.

  She would have her questions, surely. She was a perceptive little thing and would know that something was happening around her, even if she didn’t understand precisely what. She sat there beside him on the front seat, her hands folded over a loose leaf binder and a history book with a bright yellow cover, biding her time.

  “Are you one of daddy’s friends?” she asked finally, not quite looking at him. A little of her former hostility had crept back into her voice, making him wonder what she would take for a right answer.

  “Oh, I don’t think you could say I am,” he answered, damned grateful they had just pulled up to an intersection and he had a traffic signal to watch. “I haven’t known him very long—only a few days.”

  “Are you a friend of mommy’s?”

  He opened his mouth to say something, probably to issue some denial, and then thought better of it and merely nodded. He was a skillful liar, but he had the uncanny feeling that she would be able to see right through him if he lied. So instead, he looked at her until he caught her eye, and then smiled. “For a long time,” he said. “Since before you were even born.”

  Fortunately, she didn’t pursue that line. It didn’t seem to be her principal interest just then.

  “Is daddy coming back?”

  He eased forward and made the turn down College Avenue; the sidewalks were covered with students on their way to classes at the university. They all seemed to know exactly where they were going. It must have been nice.

  “I don’t really know—that’s something you’d better ask your mother. Do you want him to come back?”

  She didn’t answer—why should she?—but only looked out her window as the shop windows slid by. As they passed the movie theater, she dropped her gaze back down to the cover of her book.

  “If he doesn’t come back, are you and mommy getting married?”

  “No.”

  It was impossible to tell whether she was glad or not. It was impossible to tell anything—at nine years old she had learned to be as opaque as a sheet of steel.

  “Did you know my real daddy?”

  Guinness nodded. “I thought so at the time.”

  “Did he really die? Or was it like now?”

  “No, he really died, in England.” Lying to her was easier than he had expected. He smiled again, although he really didn’t much feel like it. “You were born there.”

  It was something of a relief when they made it to the school building. He took her in and watched her as she walked without hurry down to the door of her classroom, waiting until she was inside before starting back toward the main entrance. She had never looked back.

  There were bulletin boards along either side of the hallway, displaying crayon drawings on 8½ by 11inch sheets of coarse paper, and he examined several of them hoping to find one of Rocky’s. Apparently, however, her talents didn’t run to art. He forced himself to keep moving, afraid that if he stopped he would yield to the temptation simply to go back for his daughter and take her away, once and for all.

  But he couldn’t do that, not really. What could he say to her?—“I am your father and I am going to carry you and your mother off, and we’ll all live together somewhere in the Canadian northwest, in the shadow of a glacier, where no one has ever heard of any of us.”

  That really wouldn’t work very well, even if he could somehow persuade Kathleen to come back to him. For her, at least, it would be out of the frying pan and into the fire, and he didn’t want another woman, and perhaps their child as well, wandering into the fallout zone the next time somebody with a long memory for grievances took aim. Once was enough, thank you.

  “Are you and mommy getting married?” She had already asked, and he had already answered. Best leave it at that.

  He stood for a moment out on the sidewalk, astonished at how sticky the air managed to feel, even at nine o’clock in the goddamn morning. How did places like this ever come to be inhabited?

  18

  Kathleen didn’t know either.

  “When we first got here, Holman wanted me to join the University Women’s Club. All the faculty wives, you know, getting together every month, sitting in little rows of little wooden chairs, wearing our silk dresses with the ruffled sleeves and our little white gloves, just like it was Mother’s Day. We’d start every meeting with a prayer. We’d pray for Clemson, can you imagine?

  “And the first time you came, they gave you a little name tag—yours forever in a little plastic shield. Only, you couldn’t take it home; they were all kept together between meetings, up on a green felt board against one wall. So if you missed a meeting, everyone could see your name tag up there all by itself. The chairmen’s wives were all each other’s rivals—who could show up with the most people, like feudal barons with their retainers—and they always checked the board to make sure nobody had broken rank.

  “You could listen to the mildew grow while the minutes were being read—nobody talked or laughed or whispered. We all practically had to be at attention. I remember one time Lillian Alkire had to leave early—she was a lecturer or something in the English department; hell, she had a class—and every eye in the room followed her out the door. I remember that she wore a pair of sandals with wooden heels; I didn’t think anything could sound so loud as the noise those heels made as she tried to tiptoe back to the door.

  “As soon as Holman got tenure, I laid down the law.
I didn’t care if he had to wait until the Second Coming for his next promotion, I wasn’t going back to be a part of that freak show.”

  She stopped for a moment, leaning with one hand against the No Exit sign that stood at the mouth of the cul-de-sac in which Strawberry Lane ended, shaking loose a pebble from her left shoe. She had on a pair of Bermuda shorts and a cutoff sweatshirt from the University of Washington, and her hair was simply brushed straight back and allowed after that to do what it would. She looked more relaxed, more her old self, than at any other time since he had found her again, and when she was finished she took his hand again and they continued on their walk down to the tennis courts to pick up his car.

  The feel of her hand inside his own gave him a sensation of perfectly ridiculous pleasure that had nothing whatever to do with the future of their relationship beyond the end of this particular short journey or, for that matter, with their relationship at all. Nothing seemed more important than that warm pressure against the crook of his thumb.

  “So you quit?” he asked, not caring what she talked about, even if it was the University Women’s Club, provided he could just go on listening to the sound of her voice.

  “Yes, of course. Everything. There hasn’t been a senior professor or his wife inside our doors for over a year and a half.”

  The way she said it, you might have thought she was announcing some significant personal victory. And maybe she was—hell, the emotion was common enough. He remembered the way he had felt, the way Louise had felt, after he had received his letter of appointment to an associate professorship. The way all of his friends had felt. Screw the bastards.

  “And how does Duelle like that?”

  It seemed a harmless enough question—he hadn’t intended to send any sort of signal—but there was, nevertheless, a slight relaxation of the tension in her fingers, a perceptible gathering back into herself of whatever frail threads of sympathy she might have been willing to let join the two of them. If he had looked at her, he suspected, he might have seen something very much like domestic guilt tightening the lines of her face.

  He was sorry; he wished to hell he’d learn to keep his mouth shut. He wasn’t in a position to feel superior on the score of domestic guilt, or to champion the cause of wronged husbands. He wished he could say he was sorry, if only just to break the silence.

  “Not much, as you can imagine.” Her voice was hard, one might even say vindictive. “Oh, he’s endlessly ambitious. But none of that matters anymore. After I’ve left here it’ll all seem like a bad dream.”

  The sun, as they came out by the edge of the university, suddenly became immensely more glaring; and it was only then that he noticed how along these older residential streets the trees on either side had grown together at the tops, making a roof like the vault of a cathedral.

  “I’ll come with you,” she had said. And she had taken his hand and off they had gone, to run the gauntlet past all the little houses on Strawberry Lane.

  Was that what it had been about? An announcement, for the benefit of any of the faculty wives who might have been staring vacantly out of their kitchen windows, that Mrs. Duelle was leaving her husband’s bed and board, that it had all been a bad dream?

  It was funny how he discovered that he resented being employed as a symbol of Kathleen’s emancipation. Without making a great production of it, he withdrew his hand and put it in his pocket. They turned up toward the tennis courts, hardly less cordial than when they had started out.

  The car, needless to say, was parked right in the sun—between two large shade trees, as if to add insult to injury. This time he was more careful, avoiding french frying his fingers by using his key to open the door.

  “Don’t get in yet,” he murmured to Kathleen. She took her hand away from the door handle on the passenger’s side and stepped back a pace. She was a smart woman, smart enough to know she no longer understood the rules, to do what she was told.

  A quick search under the seats didn’t turn up any sticks of dynamite or suspicious looking wires. He popped the hood and checked to make sure there weren’t any surprises around the engine block. There weren’t.

  “Go ahead. Everything’s fine.”

  When they were seated inside, and he was rolling down his window to keep from being steamed like a clam, he noticed the way she was looking at him—sideways, out of the corner of her eye. He didn’t like it; he didn’t enjoy the analytical quality of the thing, as if he were some specimen in a bottle at the Smithsonian.

  “Do you always do that?”

  “Only when I’ve been away from a car for some time,” he answered evenly, not much caring for the tone of the question. “I saw someone blown up in a car once.” He smiled. “It’s enough to make you give up driving altogether.”

  He dropped the shift into first and started to pick his way off the gravel shoulder, leaving Kathleen in silence to deal with her fear alone.

  . . . . .

  Coffee and coffee and more coffee, cup after cup, until poor Guinness, doing a pretty fair imitation of Dr. Caligari’s somnambulist, felt at once ready to fall over in a coma and as if his nerves would fracture into brittle little shards the instant he slipped to the floor. Kathleen, for whatever innocently sinister reason of her own, seemed determined to keep him awake, and her instruments were Chase & Sandborn, brewed down to the consistency of wallpaper paste, and the running chronicle of her life in disguise as a southern belle.

  “Do you know what they do here at dinner parties?” The question was purely rhetorical; from the way she was leaning forward over the breakfast table, her knuckles whitening with strain, it was obvious the answer was altogether too astonishing for him even to venture a guess.

  “All the ladies go off into one room, and all the gentlemen into another—just like in Gone With the Wind. I couldn’t believe it at first; we would all sit around together, passing around little plates of minted cookies, and talk about whether the A&P was likely to fold and, if it did, where we would ever be able to get Breyer’s ice cream. It was the major topic of conversation during academic year ‘73-’74.”

  She paused, and sat with her chin resting on top of her clasped hands, seemingly waiting for him to express his indignation and astonishment. But that was only an impression; in fact, she was perfectly prepared to carry forward the whole discussion by herself, without a word of support. She was like a windup doll, in serious danger of having her spring snap. Everything he had seen of her that morning, her bitterness, her self-absorption, the pathetic anger that appeared to embrace her husband, herself, the universe, the engineering department wives, everything and everybody in never ending concentric circles—it all spoke with painful eloquence of her relief and her misery.

  “It might have all been at least tolerable if just—I don’t know, Ray; I don’t mean to blame him. But he’s so committed to it all. Even when we were alone I couldn’t—It was like trying to be Olivia DeHaviland every second of your life.”

  “And did you never love the man, Katey?”

  She winced slightly at the question, as if the words had been a hand brought up to slap her across the face.

  “I don’t—I don’t even know anymore. Which means, I suppose, that, no, I never did.” She smiled wanly, and closed her eyes; a tiny tear squeezed out at one corner. “That sounds terrible, doesn’t it?”

  He didn’t answer; he only kept on holding both her hands, his fingers pressing gently against her palms. There was nothing he could answer—except to say the intolerable, that she had been wrong, had wronged both herself and Holman Duelle by marrying him without love, that there might be a sense in which she had driven him to everything he had done against her, that womanly contempt will drive a man to desperation quicker than fear or envy or the promptings of any species of greed.

  But who the hell was he that he should fault Kathleen?

  Who, after all, but himself had forced her to relinquish their happy marriage, and how much of the capacity to be happy—something,
God knows, she must have needed badly enough over the last several years—had that cost her? So he wasn’t handing down any verdicts; it was no part of his role in this thing to go around exposing dangerous and unpleasant truths. The truth could be left to moral philosophers and subscribers to the Washington Post. What, after all, should he care about the truth?

  Poor Kathleen. It hadn’t, apparently, been easy for her.

  “I felt, I suppose, that I ought to. You can’t know how it was—I had Rocky, my father was just dead. I was lonely.” She held up her fist and shook it. “I hurt inside. Where were you, where the hell were you? You can’t say there was anything wrong with what I did; Duelle seemed like a good sort of man, and I needed a good sort of man. Why in God’s name do you think most women get married in the first place? Out of passion? Out of love?” The hand opened and turned palm up. “I did what I had to do—it was a mistake, but I couldn’t have known that then.”

  There was no answer he could make, and he didn’t even try. He only tried to keep from doing anything, from making any gesture, that must suggest a judgment on her. Because she was right, of course—where the hell had he been?

  Down in Los Angeles, actually. Finishing an advanced degree in English literature and waiting, without being conscious of it, for the pieces to come sufficiently back together to allow him his own second chance. And, as Louise Harrison Guinness might testify from her vault in the mausoleum at Riverview Memorial Gardens, that hadn’t worked out to be such a howling success either.

  “So you married him,” he said calmly, very much like a judge, after all, summarizing the case for the defense. During the pause that followed, he decided that he was a little irritated.

  What earthly fascination did she think the private history of her second marriage could hold for him? Was she trying to shift the blame, or make him jealous? If that was her motive, it had worked.