Mrs. Sunderland took a beat before she surprised me. “I believe that article also described you as whimsical. They misused the word. You’re a little odd, but you don’t strike me as capricious.”
“Well, I think debonair’s really the word they were after.” I leaned over and patted her arm in return. “Mrs. Sunderland, I want you to take some professional advice. Next time you go honky-tonking, you ought to leave those rings home in a vault.”
“Mr.…Mangum, I only go out in public among friends.”
“I bet that’s what Julius Caesar said.” She surprised me again with a laugh that would have been loud on a woman twice her size. Then she invited me to “call on” her, then she introduced me to two friends hovering nearby, a fresh-scrubbed octogenarian widow of a department store, who said she couldn’t hear and just ignore her, and a Sunderland grandnephew who appeared to ski for a living. I spotted Paul Madison hunting through the dancers like Cupid through a cloud bank, so I slipped away without a word of warning to his next victims. No one else stopped me before I reached the buffet, where Judge Tiggs was trying to load his plate with deviled eggs, and his wife was trying to block his hand.
“Hey.” Somebody pulled me down by the elbow and kissed my cheek. “I’m surprised you came.” It was Alice, Justin’s wife. She’s a small beautiful copper-haired lady from the North Carolina mountains. Justin met her three years ago while we were investigating some folks that worked on her floor at Cadmean Mills, and the best move he ever made was to marry her as soon as he could talk her into it. Bluest eyes you ever saw, clean as the sky, and clear as we all used to figure truth was. Alice believes in truth, and loves politics, and claims she can keep the two in shouting distance. We argue a lot. Justin says that’s why he invites me to dinner twice a week, so he won’t have to “box around about ideas” with her himself. “Can you believe this man?” Alice would say. “Smart, educated, and he sits here and says he’s not interested in ideas, whatever that means.”
Justin would check his wine sauce. “It means, for Christ’s sake, I don’t care why Prohibition got voted in when it did. I thought we were trying to figure out if Billy Gilchrist’s too bad a drunk to be a reliable stool pigeon.” Justin would talk your head off about the people in the case at hand, but analyzing history bored him.
I put down my buffet plate and kissed Alice back. “Well, look at you.” I turned her around. “An old commie union organizer like you, used to go out to dinner in a sweatshirt with Emma Goldman on it, used to love a good brainy fight and a Hostess cupcake and don’t try to deny it ’cause I’ve seen the wrappers.” The waiter offered me a cup of punch, which was hard to drink because of the baby strawberries floating in it. “Now, Lord, Lord, Alice. Justin the Five’s got you all pregnant and dolled up in this swanky thing, looks like you borrowed it from Jackie Onassis last time y’all got together.”
“How do I look?”
“Like Christmas.” Her gown was a dark green velvet and her red curls were like ribbons. “You look like the prettiest Christmas present anybody ever got, by which I’m sorry to say I don’t mean me.” I kissed her. “Congratulations, Red. But please don’t name that child Cudberth, ’specially if it’s a girl. Is that Scotch? Where’d you get it, the men’s room?”
“Ladies’ lounge. You know, I don’t like the way liquor tastes anymore. I guess that’s lucky.” She gave me the drink. “I’m going to kill Justin.”
“You’re talking to the police chief. But I didn’t catch what you said.”
“I told him I wanted to tell you I was pregnant.”
“You know he can’t keep a secret. Good detective though, I’ll give you that. He tells folks his secrets, then folks tell him theirs, then we put the cuffs on them and haul them off.” I reached for a ham biscuit, but the waiter waved me away and tweezered one onto a plate stamped “Hillston Club.” I held up four fingers; he held up one eyebrow, then humored me and piled them on. “Alice, tell me about Mrs. Sunderland. How much say does she have at the paper?”
“Does have? Probably none. Could have? Probably lots.”
“You know her? Didn’t the Hillston Star endorse you?”
“She’s one of Justin’s godmothers.”
“Can’t hurt.”
She laughed with her chin raised. “Cuddy, I never denied it.” Alice is in the state legislature now, which she wouldn’t be if it hadn’t been for Justin’s name, and for old Briggs Cadmean’s tossing a big chunk of money into her little campaign—out of some peculiar impulse that had nothing to do with late-blooming feminism. Now I’d heard she was also working to get Andy Brookside into the governor’s mansion, but I’d avoided discussing it with her.
We watched Justin waltz Mrs. Brookside in and out of duller dancers. The Jimmy Douglas string section was giving “Lara’s Theme” all they had, fighting back against the buzz of talk. “Isn’t my husband beautiful?” Alice smiled, happy as a cat.
“Motherhood hormones are eating up your brain, Red.”
“Well, he is. He looks like Paul Newman used to.”
“When was that?” We watched some more—his black coattails, Lee’s black gown lifting as they turned; her shoulders, his shirt front a bright white blur. “Married him for his looks, huh? I always thought it was his cooking.”
“Go break in on them, so I can dance with him. You know Andy’s wife?”
“I did a long time ago.” Alice gave me too straight a look, so I turned towards the buffet to scoop up some cashews, and I had a handful near my mouth when Lee saw me staring at her, and smiled. It was just a polite smile, then it went away as she recognized me; her body tightened, pulling Justin out of step for an instant.
Alice was talking. “Well, I feel like I ought to be at the vigil anyhow, but Jack Molina agreed if I could put some pressure on Andy’s position, or get to Lewis tonight, that might do more than holding up another placard at the prison. And now he’s not even here.”
“Who’s not here? Brookside?”
Alice was either looking at me funny or I was getting too sensitive. She said, “No, Julian Lewis, Julian D-for-Dollard Lewis, Justin’s whatever he is, cousin, the lieutenant governor.”
“He’s not here? Damn it.” I had promised George Hall’s new lawyer, an old friend, that I’d come to this dance, corner Julian Lewis, and give him some reasons why he should persuade the governor to stay tomorrow’s execution. Not that a lot of people hadn’t been giving the governor a lot of reasons for a lot of years, but last-minute reprieves appeal to some politicians. They’re catchy; the press likes them too. But as for Lewis caring what Alice thought, I didn’t see why she thought the lieutenant governor would listen to anybody who was trying to stop him from taking over his boss’s office, even if Alice’s mother-in-law was Lewis’s aunt. Plus, Lewis wasn’t going to think a damn thing the governor didn’t tell him to think. As for her influencing Brookside—in public, he too had stayed away from the Hall case, soothing his liberal constituency by keeping Professor Jack Molina (one of the Hall Committee coordinators) on his campaign staff. I looked around the ballroom. “Where is Brookside?”
“Go ask his wife.” Alice took my plate away from me.
“I don’t dance.”
“Oh bullshit, you’re a great dancer.”
“Honey, now that you’re a mama, you got to watch your language.”
She mouthed something that was pretty easy to lip-read, as I let her nudge me onto the floor. I eased my way through a cluster of younger dancers calling coded jokes from couple to couple while they circled. One pair just stood with their eyes closed, rocking softly back and forth.
Justin stopped the instant I touched his shoulder, and smiled like I’d brought him a million dollars, his long-lost dog, and news that the lab was wrong about his having cancer. I tell him, with that smile I don’t know why he isn’t in politics, except a year in the loony bin makes nervous voters nervous. I said, “Excuse me, may I?” And he said, “Hey, Cuddy, wonderful, you came!”
&n
bsp; “Why is everybody so surprised?”
“Have you two met? Lee Brookside. Cuddy Mangum, my commanding officer.” Justin did a little bow—I suppose straight from childhood dance class—and said, “Thank you,” to her, “Pardon me,” to us, and walked backwards smooth as a skater through the crowd. When I turned around to Lee, she had her hand up ready to rest on my shoulder. “Hi,” I said. Her hair was pulled back in its loose knot, away from her face, a smoky ash-blond, and her eyes, which I’d remembered as blue, were actually gray like an owl’s feather, flecked and warm. I hadn’t looked this close in her eyes in a long, long time; the last time I’d looked, on a Saturday morning in June, we’d both been crying. It’s easier to cry at seventeen. We were standing on a little wooden Japanese bridge in her backyard—except with that much land and trees and gardens, you don’t call it a yard—and she was telling me her mother wouldn’t let her see me again, not through the summer, not after she returned to private school in the fall, not, in fact, ever. I kept saying, “Why?” but we both knew why, and I don’t blame her now for not letting me force her to say it. After that, I’d next seen her a year or so later when she came to my house in East Hillston, called me a coward, and slapped me across the face. After that, only in passing.
I took my hand from my pocket now. “You still mad?”
She said, “My God, how long has it been?”
“Don’t start counting. How’d you like that French college?”
And she laughed years away for a minute. “Oh my, was I ever young enough to go to college?”
“Hey! I’m still going.”
“You are? You’re the police chief.”
“That’s true, too.”
She still had her hand held near my shoulder, but lifted it back so I moved forward and circled her waist, and we started dancing. I couldn’t really remember what it had felt like all that while ago, pressed together in the gym under the sagging streamers and balloons, or in some school friend’s hot dim living room, not moving when the records changed. Now she felt cool and sure, accustomed to dance with strangers. There was something sad about her eyes, but it was hard to imagine her crying easily anymore. We danced at first without speaking, at one point passing close to Justin and Alice; Justin was humming, Alice smiled at me, and wiggled the fingers woven with his.
Finally Lee moved her head and asked me, “So you stayed in Hillston. You always wanted to travel.”
“I’ve traveled some.” I summed up two years in Southeast Asia, then six months in Europe (on the G.I. savings I’d planned to use to buy Cheryl and me a house), seventeen months teaching school in Costa Rica, a summer in New York City, when I decided I wanted to be a police detective. I said I still like traveling; I take a special package charter some place new every vacation I get. Last year it was Nova Scotia; the year before, Haiti. I said, “But mostly Hillston, since I’ve been with the police department here.”
“Why the police? I mean I guess I always expected to read how you’d…I don’t know, written the history of the United States.” She was squeezed against me by a wild-spinning couple.
I backstepped us away. “Well, probably the more history I read, the more I figured, crooked as the law is, it’s straighter than lynch mobs and posses on the loose, right? I’m a great believer in capital-L Law. And Hillston’s home. So here I am, enforcing the law in Hillston.”
“Hillston’s gotten so big.” Her hand lifted out of mine to gesture at the room. “I used to think I’d find myself seated beside you at a dinner, but I never did.”
“I used to think that too.” I didn’t tell her that when I’d first gone to Paris, I’d get the dumb notion to rush off to a certain park or museum because I was sure that’s where I was going to see her stroll by.
She’d stayed abroad after college. Her first husband was a French mountain climber; I’d read in a paper that he’d died in a hotel fire, only twenty-seven years old. I remember thinking: the French mess up in Vietnam, the U.S. sends me over there, I’m lucky and escape, Lee’s husband makes it up Mount Everest but can’t get out of a suite on the Riviera. Six years after his death, she’d married Brookside. She had no children.
“Andy was there the same time you were,” she said, her neck arching back to look up at me. “In Vietnam. Have you two met?”
“Over there? Nope, we never did run into each other.” It was interesting—“Andy”—the matter-of-fact assumption that everyone knew who her second husband was, which of course everyone did. The “Have you met?” probably meant local politics, since I doubt she figured young Major Brookside had ever swooped down in his jet to shoot the breeze with the boys in the mangrove swamp. Well, maybe she’d lived so long in a world where everybody knew each other, that’s all the world she thought there was. I mean world, too. Randolphs and Fanshaws, now, they counted in Hillston, and Cadmeans and Dollards might own the Piedmont and have a long lease on the state, but Havers had been so rich for so long, they were on the big map. When Chinese and Kenyans and Danes smoke your cigarettes, you can build universities with your loose change, and you can expect even your collateral daughters to marry heroes; you don’t need them to marry money. That message her family had sent to the little Japanese bridge—well, you could see their point. I’ve got my All-State Guard plaque and my dinky combat medals in my bureau, I’ve got my three-inch Newsweek clipping on the refrigerator door. Andy Brookside’s got a cabinet full of football trophies, a Congressional Medal of Honor and a presidential committee appointment to study that sad war, a Pulitzer Prize for the book he wrote after he studied it, a Time magazine cover, and Lee Haver. There’s no catching heroes. They’ve got the gods running interference for them, you know what I mean? The gods keep them wrapped in a glow, you can see the shimmer when they come in a room.
I said, “Well now, this is a pretty place. Never been in here before, myself. You come to these Christmas parties with your family back then?”
She didn’t answer. A tiny blue vein in her neck tensed against the diamond necklace around it. Then, after a silence, she said, not smiling, “You know, I hated you for a long time.”
The rush of old intimacy shocked me. I tilted my head to look at her; it felt like that sudden fall that jerks you awake when you nod off in a chair.
Her eyes searched in mine until finally she said, “You remember that day I came to your house with the box of letters? Right before I left for France? You wouldn’t even talk to me. You wouldn’t look at me. Your mother left us standing there in your living room, and shut the door to the kitchen. I think she was crying too. She asked me if I wanted a glass of tea, and you snapped at her, ‘No, she doesn’t.’”
I said, “I remember it very well. You threw the letters at me and slapped me in the face.”
Her palm moved inside mine as she pulled her hand away. We stopped there in the middle of the dance floor.
“You’re the only man I ever hit,” she said.
She put her hand back in mine. Other couples seemed to be moving around us, but far away, small and shadowy, as if the room had suddenly doubled in size. We moved together. Then I heard, coming from a distance, the rustle of applause, and I realized the music had already stopped.
I was going to ask her if she’d like that glass of tea now, when through the knots of applauding couples I saw Andy Brookside walking towards us, tall, bright-haired, full of energy, his handsome head nodding right and left; maybe he thought folks were clapping for him instead of the band. He touched Lee’s arm, and claimed her. “I’m sorry, darling, I got caught up in a conversation.” (It was the first I’d seen him all night, and I wondered if he’d been down in the men’s lounge where the “real drinks” were.)
She said quietly, “There you are.”
He put his arm through hers, saying, “Shall we?” before turning to me with a friendly, expectant face; I didn’t see a twitch of phoniness in it, and I was looking hard.
Lee stepped away from him to introduce us. “Have you met my husband, Andy? Cu
ddy—” And then the beeper in my breast pocket went off, which meant that Sergeant Davies at headquarters had decided I needed to make a decision, which to him could mean anything from Mrs. Thompson had called again because Clark Gable was back in her attic crawlspace, to Officer Purley Newsome had put another dead cat in Officer Nancy White’s locker, to a gang of terrorists with Uzi machine guns were holding the entire downtown population of Hillston hostage.
I turned the beeper off. “Excuse me, I better go phone in.”
“You’re a doctor?” Brookside smiled, then showed me how he’d won the nomination. “No, wait…Cuddy, Cuddy…. Of course, Mangum! Our police chief. Last spring at the Jaycee’s breakfast panel, ‘Improving Town and Gown Relations.’ Right?” His handshake was professional but not stingy. “Good to see you. Tell me, what’s your sense of the George Hall situation?”
“Lousy for George Hall,” I said.
“Naturally, yes. Of course, I meant the governor. Clemency.”
I said, “I don’t think so. But then I’m not in tight with the powers that be.”
Lee had been standing there, her fingers touching a jewel on the necklace. Into our silence, she suddenly said, “Andy phoned the governor yesterday, asking him to extend mercy,” then she looked up at Brookside as if to make sure it was all right to have told me. There was something uncomfortable between them, which was odd in such a poised couple. I mean, I knew why I felt uneasy—I was half back to eighteen years old—but I certainly didn’t suppose I was what was troubling the Brooksides.
“Um hum….” I looked from her to him. “Well, there’s mercy, and then there’s justice.”
“True.” There was nothing in his eyes but earnestness.
“Hall’s supporters wanted not just clemency, but a pardon. At this point, they’re just trying to get the stay of execution. And if you’re planning on making any statement about ‘mercy’ of a little more of a public nature, seems like waiting much longer might make it pretty moot.”
Uncivil Seasons Page 35
