“No, wait.” I caught at her arm but it tensed, and I let my hand fall away. “Let me walk you to your car,” I said.
“It’s not necessary,” Alice said.
“Oh, don’t leave on my account,” called Susan, stroking her hair up from the nape of her tan neck.
“I’m not,” Alice said.
“You just got here. And you both look like you could use a drink. Meanwhile, have we met before, Alice? Did you say her name was Alice, sugar?”
I said, “Susan, please.”
Her eyes grave and a darkening blue, Alice looked back at Susan. “Yes, my name is Alice. No, we haven’t met. But I have met your husband. I work at C&W.”
“You do?” Susan smiled. “What do you do there? Let me guess. You work on the line, just like in that movie Norma Rae with that short girlfriend of Burt Reynolds’s playing a redneck with all those children by different fathers. Isn’t it boring how little bitty the world is?”
Alice said, “No, I don’t find the world little or boring.”
“Lucky you.”
“Yes. Good night.” Alice walked out of the room, and I followed her.
Outside by the Volkswagen I said, “I’m sorry. I had no idea she would be here. I should have told you. I’d hoped to end—”
“Please.” Alice’s hand waved away my words. “There’s nothing to apologize about. And I’d rather you didn’t try.” Her voice was as brisk as the air clouding her words. She was in her car now, but I was holding the door open. She tugged at it. “Would you please let me shut this?”
“Alice, let me talk to her and then come over to your apartment? Will you? Please? I’m so sorry for putting you in an awkward—”
She said, “I didn’t feel awkward.” And she pulled the door closed, and drove away.
Back inside, Susan stood at the unlit fireplace, watching herself brush her hair in the mirror above the mantel.
I said, “You were a bitch. What are you doing over here?”
She looked around and widened her eyes and then turned back to the mirror.
“Susan, let’s…”
“Let’s what, sugar?” She kept brushing.
“Talk.”
“Talk away. Don’t you want to change first? And bathe? Look at yourself.”
“Lawry told you what happened?”
“He thinks you’re crazy.” She kept her eyes on her image.
“Because I didn’t care to join his four-way fuck!”
“I told him you weren’t into group things. He never listens to me. He said you knocked him down.” Now she curved sideways, and looked at me, her head tilted into her hair. “That kind of turns me on.”
I walked away and sat down in the rocker next to the couch. I asked her, “Will you answer a question? Have you been having other affairs? Since we’ve been involved?”
“Affairs?”
“Sex.” I watched the big diamond move with her hand, dead in the muted light.
She glanced at her brush, pulled the loose hairs from it and balled them between her fingertips. “Do you want to know?”
“That means you have. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You’re so old-fashioned, honey, I didn’t think you’d want to know. It wasn’t serious.”
I glared at her until she shrugged and turned back to the mirror. Then she asked, “Who’s that girl?”
I was quiet, listening to the rattle of the water in the radiator. Then I said, “I’m in love with her.”
Susan spun around. “What? You’re reading me the riot act, and you’re balling that dirty little redneck hippie?”
“That’s enough! And I’m not sleeping with her. I just met her.”
Susan came across the room and stood over my chair. “You are nuts, you know that?”
I stood up, knocking over the wineglass as I squeezed past her to move away. “Listen, Susan. I’ve been trying to say this a long time, and now I’ll just say it right out. I don’t think we should see each other anymore. You never had any intention of divorcing Lawry. I don’t know why I wanted you to. Let’s just stop it right here and now.”
“No,” she said, as if I’d asked her if she wanted another drink. “I don’t want to stop it.”
“I do. I’m sorry. I don’t want to see you anymore. I’m very sorry if this is hurting you.”
“Oh, crap, Justin. Not again. We’ve played this scene before. Don’t pull this on me tonight about leaving Lawry.” She picked up her purse from the floor, put her brush in it, and started looking through its depths for something else.
“I don’t want you to leave Lawry,” I snapped. “I think you two suit each other just fine.”
“Now, don’t be sarcastic.” She found a gold tube of lipstick.
“I mean it.” I raised my voice. “Will you look at me!”
Her head swung up. “What in hell is the matter with you?”
“I said I mean it! I want us to say good-bye. I’ll walk you to your car. Is it out back?”
“Are you pissed because I told you I screwed somebody else? Grow up.”
“I’ll get your coat.”
After examining the lipstick tube carefully, she closed it and dropped it back in her purse. “Is this a joke? It’s not funny.”
“I’m serious.”
“Oh, fuck. This is ridiculous.” She laughed with a short, harsh sound. “A month from now, when you want back…”
I stunned myself by yelling, “I’m going to marry Alice MacLeod!”
Now she stared at me, her mouth in a grimace. Then she hissed, “You shit!” and bounded off the couch and slapped me across the face. I let her do it. The edge of the platinum setting of the big square diamond cut into my lip. I let her slap me twice more, and then I grabbed her wrist and pulled it down.
I said, “I’m sorry, Susan. I haven’t behaved well. I wish this didn’t have to be painful. You act as if it sounds like its coming out of nowhere, but…”
She yanked her arm away. “You are so full of it. I don’t know why they ever let you out of that nuthouse.” Swooping up her purse, she stalked into the hall and stabbed her arms into the mink coat.
I went after her. “Be honest, God damn it. You don’t love me. You never have. I was somebody to slip off and eat lunch with. That’s it.”
She shook the perfect blond hair free of the fur collar. She said, “Sugar, all you ever were to me was a dick. And that doesn’t mean cop.”
The door slammed behind her, and the hall shuddered.
Chapter 25
Saturday, January 22
The next morning I opened one eye to squint at my brass clock, and instead I saw an old, loud-ticking tin alarm clock with two bells on top. Beyond it on a papered wall I saw a photograph of Martin Luther King, and beside that a poster of an Appalachian bluegrass festival. I turned over and I saw the red tangle of Alice MacLeod’s hair. I was only an instant surprised; after that, I felt that I was looking at my life, familiar and sure as when, after traveling home from New England schools, mile by mile beside the highway, granite turned to red clay and each bend of the road was felt before seen.
I was awake and had been visited by no ghosts in white dresses—or in white hospital coats. I was freshly awake and had scarcely slept.
Last night at one when I’d rapped on the door of her basement apartment and, squatting down, had tapped on a window, Alice had pulled back the blue cotton curtains and told me through the glass to “Go away.” Had not her upstairs neighbor, a brawny man I immediately detested, come down in his T-shirt to the landing of the old, partitioned house, and asked her if she wanted me “gotten rid of,” she probably would never have let me in. Mud-clotted as I was, I didn’t look very reputable, and I think that helped her decide in my favor.
Embarrassed, she opened the door, and embarrassed, I followed her in. I stepped down into what must have once been the kitchen of the house, down into a room that was like seeing Alice MacLeod herself, fully, for the first time. The pine furniture l
ooked mountain-made. On the unvarnished floor was a dark-blue oval rag rug, and thrown over the couch a wedding-ring-patterned quilt of pale bleached blue. Filling a corner was a wooden handloom, its shuttle resting among green hues of thread. A typewriter was crowded by textbooks on a card table, and plants in rubber pots leaned toward the light.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“This is a wonderful room.”
“Thank you.”
“I came to ask if you would marry me,” I added, shivering in my sodden clothes.
“No, I won’t. Good night.” In the green wool robe that fell over her bare feet, she stood stiffly upright, like a small red marigold.
“I wonder if you would give it some thought,” I said.
“I don’t even know you.”
“Oh, yes, you do. Don’t you believe: ‘Whoever loved that loved not at first sight?’”
“No.”
“I do,” I assured her. “I want to be around you every minute you’ll let me.” I sneezed.
“You ought to get out of those clothes.”
“All right.” I pulled off my coat and jacket together, and grabbed at my sweater.
She almost smiled. “You ought to go home and get out of those clothes.”
“Listen, please,” I said. “I’m sorry about tonight. Susan is someone I was involved with because I didn’t care what I was doing, and neither did she. I just told her I have fallen in love with you. Could I please stay and talk to you awhile? I know it’s late, but tomorrow’s Saturday. No World War I to the Present.” I grinned, holding my breath for her answer.
Alice frowned at me, and then she frowned at a faded photograph on the mantel of the wide, low cooking fireplace. In the photograph a young, thin, serious-faced couple looked uncertainly at the camera; he in an army uniform, with Alice’s eyes; she in a cotton dress, with Alice’s hair. After studying their picture, Alice walked out of the room. She came back with a large pair of folded denim overalls, their soft blue as pale as the quilt on her couch. “Okay. You can wear these,” she said. “Bathtub’s back there.”
I took them from her, saying, “I hope they belonged to your father or your brother or your grandfather and not to that fellow who wanted me ‘gotten rid of.’”
“No brothers,” she said, but she called as I walked off. “And the guy upstairs is gay.”
And so afterward I went out in her backyard and scrounged for fallen branches to crack over my knee, and together we built a fire with them, and we talked about the mountains. We talked about our pasts, as though we could see them in the bright leaping fire. And hour by hour, our eyes, spellbound, interwove all difference. So that, when long into the night our voices sank lower, like the fire gleaming quiet and warm, and I took her hand, our palms, wordless, spoke on together in conference too tenuous and sensible for speech.
When we went near morning to her bed, I had learned that her grandfather had beveled the corners and plaited the ropes beneath the yielding feathery mattress on which, in the dark blue dawn, we slept.
Early Saturday as I left Alice’s home, I was singing. I was thirty-four and had long ago stopped listening to love songs as though they had anything to say to me. Indeed, I was faintly surprised to realize that people kept on writing the songs, and that new lovers would be forever stepping into the dance I thought I had left for good. And now, walking along the cold crystalline sidewalk in those overalls, I had a feeling of such glad buoyancy, such bighearted, lighthearted amplitude, that I expected my feet not only to dance but, like Paul Bunyan’s, to bound over the houses, and my eyes to wink at breakfasting families of birds in the top branches of trees.
Chapter 26
In my living room, I sat thinking about Alice, thinking that Alice was the source of Joanna Cadmean’s vision of my falling into something new, whether good or bad, she couldn’t say. I was also waiting for someone to pick up Cadmean’s phone. Then, after I was told for the fourth time that old Briggs was unavailable, I decided to use a family connection. I called Cuddy’s River Rise condominium and spoke with Cadmean’s daughter, and with some difficulty persuaded her to find out for me her father’s whereabouts. When my phone rang shortly afterward, I assumed she was calling back, but instead I heard a voice whose rusty cough I recognized before he finished asking, “Could I talk to Mr. Justin Savile? This is Walter Stanhope. From the Banks.”
“Hello, Mr. Stanhope. This is Justin. How are you?”
“Don’t mean to intrude. Wondered how it was going.”
This morning, in my own expansive state, his calling felt to me a gesture of enormous outreaching. I told him, “Sir, I’m following in your footsteps. I’ve been suspended.” Then I told him of Joanna Cadmean’s death and of the evidence that linked Rowell Dollard to it, and linked Rowell, by the coin, to Bainton Ames’s death as well. I told him of Luster Hudson and Ron Willis and Charlene Pope, and of Lawry Whetstone’s information. I told him that far from being further harassed by old Briggs Cadmean, I couldn’t even get past the old man’s iron gates to speak to him about why he had lied to me when he claimed he’d never seen the Ames designs that Cloris had wanted to sell to Bogue.
“Ah,” replied Stanhope. “Cadmean lied? Find out why. And why Bogue lied.”
I told him everything Rowell had said to me in the hospital: that Joanna had plotted to kill herself in order to take revenge on him.
“Know she tried suicide before?” asked Stanhope. “Back in college.”
“Yes, sir, I was told, but…”
He cleared his throat slowly. “Something didn’t go into the report on that attempt. I guess, her dead, no harm saying it now. Doctor told me at the time he released her back then. She’d just had an abortion.”
“Abortion?” I think this fact shocked me as much as her death.
“Not a very good one.”
“My God. Dollard’s?” And neither she nor Rowell had ever had another child. Think of me as your father, I could hear Rowell saying.
“I’d expect so.” Stanhope stopped to cough. “I were you, I wouldn’t shut out any possibility ’til you’re sure.”
“Pardon?”
“Sure that Dollard’s not telling the truth about her. People can hate a long time, even ordinary ones, and she wasn’t ordinary.” In the background I could hear the recording of the baroque violin music stop, then in a moment another record begin.
“But to plan out her own murder like that? It’d be diabolical.”
“People can be diabolical, if you want to use that word.”
“But she was psychic, Mr. Stanhope. She told me she felt like there was a phone ringing while Cloris was being assaulted, and now we’ve found out Whetstone actually was trying to call, right then!”
“Not saying she wasn’t clairvoyant. Know for a fact she was. Saw her prove it.” I could hear him try to swallow. “But both can be true. The way she used to look at Dollard; it was past what most people would call love.”
“Mr. Stanhope, I’m convinced she’s right about Rowell killing Bainton Ames. And I thought you agreed.”
“Maybe he did. Could be she thought she could get him back by blackmailing him. Could still be true he didn’t kill her. You said out here how she told you she was going to die soon. Could be she’d already planned it.”
“No, what she said was somebody was going to kill her.”
“So why didn’t she protect herself? Why wouldn’t she leave the lodge? Another thing; you just said it struck you funny how she was all dressed up that night, not like her regular style. That sticks out to me too. Excuse me.” I could hear his muffled coughing and the wheeze for breath.
I said, “Are you all right, Mr. Stanhope?”
He said, “Okay.”
“Do you mind if I ask, have you seen a doctor?”
“Yep, I’ve seen a lot,” he replied, and changed the subject. “Well, think about that white dress. I’ll tell you what I thought when you told me: dressed up for a wedding.”
I had thought of that too, while Rowell was talking there in the hospital. And I had dreamt it. But I didn’t want to think it; I didn’t want to believe she’d made me a part of her plot.
Stanhope was asking, “Could she have planted the coin in that closet?”
And I could remember how she’d suggested she go see Cloris’s bedroom, remember her going back into her own room before we left the lodge, remember the shoulder bag pressed tightly to her side as we climbed the Dollard steps together. “‘Yes,” I said. “And I guess she could have had the letter to me already written. And I guess if Mangum hadn’t come to take Briggs out to dinner that night, she could have already figured some other way to get rid of her, once she knew Rowell was coming.” I was fighting hard against what I had already started to believe yesterday as I looked into Rowell’s eyes in that white room. “But the broken chain and…”
“Just saying,” Stanhope whispered in his graveled voice, “keep it in mind. Up to you, but I’d try tracing that coin, and same, if you can, for the leather diary. Where were they bought, who by? And what’s the C&W connection? That’s what police can do. It’s just no fun.”
Before hanging up, Stanhope made a dry noise that could have been a laugh. “Never knew why people figured justice ought to be stoneblind, but I always knew she was. Looks like here you’ve got plenty of evidence to get Dollard for killing Mrs. Cadmean, which maybe, maybe now, he didn’t do. And no way at all to convict him of killing Bainton Ames, which maybe he did do.”
“I’ve got the coin.”
“Well. You know juries. And after fifteen years, well.”
“Maybe, Mr. Stanhope, if Joanna Cadmean did commit suicide, she realized exactly what you’re saying now; she knew we couldn’t get Rowell for Ames, but could get him for her.”
“Could be. Kinda doubt that was her motive.” His cough started again.
As we said our good-byes, I told him I had hopes of getting married by summer. He wished me well. “Hope is all I have to go on now,” I said, and thought that I was beginning to sound like Cuddy Mangum. I added that the woman I wanted to marry me was from the mountains and had never seen the Banks, and that I’d like to bring her out there. “And I’d like to have her meet you then, if that’s all right. Maybe in June?”
Uncivil Seasons Page 24
