THE LADY KILLER: intense, suspenseful, gripping literary fiction

by LEE OLDS

  “Yes,” said Hammond, “perhaps an old-fashioned idea in light of everything that’s happened where relations have become as diverse as color combinations in a kaleidoscope. But I guess one could say that’s progress. We do say that’s progress. Moreover, it’s something we indisputably need to feel free like men should.”

  I made no comment this time.

  Chapter Seven

  Demonstrating the reserved manner he possessed, Hartwig to the contrary, unlike Johansson, didn’t inquire as to the why or wherefore of Gloria’s ‘new attitude’. He figured the reason’d come out sooner or later and he’d deal with it in time. After several days in town he returned to the beach where someone else who now also seemed to have designs on him was waiting. This, of course, was the socialite, Sandy Hightower, who he’d been dating because of the scheme we’d proposed to him.

  One morning at the breakfast table as the sky over the ocean appeared to compress into individual cloud puffs that scudded inland, Sandy said to Hartwig,

  “Today I have a special treat for you. Just be ready to get dressed in one of your suits.” Hartwig looked up from his paper.

  “My suit? You’ve got to be kidding. Out here? We must be going to the city. It’s such a nice day I’d rather lounge around …”And he lay back in his chair. He did acknowledge that he had a suit, of course, for since he’d been staying at the beach house he’d moved in some of his clothes.

  “We’re not going to the city.”

  The two had another minor skirmish, a disposition that just seemed natural to them ever since they’d met. Their bickering had little to do with them. Their personalities just clashed. You know, the smart intellectual and the idiot savant rich girl who couldn’t put anything together but nonetheless remembered all in vivid detail. Heaven help you if she once got hold of you and you tried to get away. She’d block your every move or a least try to. She had her way.

  At the designated time Hartwig appeared on the deck all spruced up in his blue serge suit, light blue dress shirt and tie, a perfect complement to his blue eyes. Sandy in a yellow sequined flowing concoction that you see women in fall fashion shows wear, appeared and stuck a white carnation she’d bought at the general store in the buttonhole of one of his lapels.

  “There,” she said, “now you’ll look just right.”

  It was obvious she was proud of his appearance and liked to display it. And despite their age difference of six years they made a normal if not a handsome appearing couple. There are certain brackets where a minimal age difference between couples is barely noticeable. This was one of them. If he’d been fifty and she fifty-six it’d been a different story. I believe Sandy knew this. It flattered her vanity to have a younger boyfriend in tow and she felt no compunctions in that regard of not being able to fulfill her duties as a woman.

  “Wait,” said Hammond. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Does that mean starting another family? Hadn’t she had enough? Hadn’t she learned?” He winced, imagining the one child she did have. The one at least we knew about. I broke out laughing.

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Should all of us just stop having families nowadays? If we did, you know, the world’d be a better place. It might survive.” He looked at me and responded with a guttural growl.

  And it wasn’t until the two were in her little Mercedes convertible with the top down driving around the lagoon in the direction of Salinas that she told him where they were headed.

  “Julia, Marcus’s sister and her husband are having a christening for their first child, Tod. I’ve been invited and so have you. We’re to be the boy’s godparents. The husband requested it.”

  “He …” Hartwig had a little burr in this throat. He knew Stich, the contractor. Not only through Sandy out there but he’d played tennis in the same circles as the man over the hill. Hartwig wasn’t nearly as good and had no end of admiration for the very large individual with the rocket serve who was also a successful businessman. “But …” he continued. “Isn’t Julia your friend June’s adopted daughter Marcus’s half-sister? Where’s June in all this? Shouldn’t she be the godmother…?”

  “Shh,” Sandy took one hand off the wheel to put her finger to her lips. “Yes, that’s true but neither of them are very fond of her. She’s just too bossy.”

  So though they notified June, they planned the christening when they knew she’d have to be away, apologizing for the timing but claiming it was unavoidable. Something about the priest’s schedule too.

  “In other words, bullet proof?” Said Hartwig. “All that for a christening. Maybe June has a right to be miffed.”

  “Does not!” Came out of the socialite’s mouth like a high-speed recording that’d omitted the personal pronoun due to some emotional reaction. Perish the thought of her boyfriend taking her girlfriend’s side in anything.

  “Why?” Said Hartwig. “Don’t you like June? I thought she was your best friend?”

  “You know how that goes between women. Let’s just say we have our differences.”

  What Hartwig didn’t know, of course, was that June was a raving blond with more money than Sandy, more education and abstract ability. Perish the thought in a woman. In mentioning her Sandy’d never really described her. On purpose it would seem. Sandy, in other words had been deathly afraid to even introduce her boyfriend to her girlfriend for the very reason he might indeed abandon her for this new find. For a woman so rich and attractive she was unfathomably insecure. Now, today at least her fears had abated and she was about to become a godmother.

  The church they’d chosen to hold the sacrament in was barely a church, just as the priest whose parish it was, was barely a priest. He not only had a family out there, which took a lot of his attention, but also a full time job in a brokerage house over the hill.

  “A priest, a stockbroker? Come on,” said Hammond. “The next thing they’ll be secretary treasurers but they’re already pretty good at that. They’re better at getting money out of people than the IRS.”

  “I didn’t say stock, I merely said broker. I believe he was an insurance broker in some sort of non-profit organization.”

  “Oh, that makes it better?’

  “It might if you knew him.”

  Thomas Bosworth had attended seminary school back east. When he graduated he inherited the small parish from his father who retired. This little enterprise couldn’t afford to sustain itself on its own. The much larger church directly across the street from it easily could. It not only had a priest but a priest’s assistant and a groundskeeper, who lived in the little monastery in the rear. If in a certain season they didn’t do so well, money was funneled in from the greater diocese to tide them over. It was why large organizations survive, little ones don’t. Remember the ancient Hindu law of the fishes wherein the bigger eats the smaller, eats the smaller, and so on. It was something like that.

  In fact St. Aidan’s Episcopal Church resembled a tent more than a building for the roof joists overlapped the walls and continued right down to the ground like guide ropes. It was all white inside like a spider’s cocoon, its windows narrow, tall and widely spaced. The pews were hewn of solid oak and the altar consisted of a mere table with a cloth over it, atop which sat a golden crucifix. An ornate wood carved crown that was attached to the wall behind wreathed this and it reached almost to the ceiling. The baptismal font stood to the right and Bosworth’s little change closet was to the left as you came in. The pews extended from one side to the other and were bordered by aisles. There was no center path to the golden altar in this church. Perhaps symbolic, perhaps not. But there was a full kitchen at one end, and a skylight along the roof’s ridge brightened up the place in the daytime while four large multi-faceted globes that hung like Chinese lanterns from the ceiling lit the place at night. It sat sixty or seventy at most, and in the winters Bosworth let the homeless sleep inside, his wife feeding them when she could.

  “They … they must’ve loved that,” said Hammond. “Put up and fed in a holy place no
less, not bad.”

  “Well,” I said, “most of them weren’t basically bad though the priest did lock away the golden cross while they were sleeping over. Brochowitz’d even stayed there for a time before he’d been able to latch onto Sandy. The priest realized how violently disturbed he was and’d tried to help him, but that, I think, was a problem for this priest.”

  “Really, why?”

  Though young, attractive and well meaning, Ted Bosworth had a very peculiar way about him. You’d ask him a question and he’d turn right around and ask you what you thought the answer was. And that was even if he knew it. He was a man who always seemed to be perpetually perplexed about any and almost everything. Now how can men with an attitude like that help anyone? You need someone to take charge and tell you what to do, a drill sergeant if you must, especially with someone like Brochowitz. You don’t say, ‘what do you think about some men’s hatred for women’ when you’re talking to the greatest woman hater of all time. He’ll just invariably say, ‘I approve. It’s something that gives me great pleasure,’ or deny it entirely and go on to vent his sick passion. You see …?

  “Well, no, I don’t,” said Hammond, “but continue. The coronation or baptism or whatever it was…”

  “Yes, that got started in the early afternoon and what a surprise it turned out to be.”

  The little crowd of Stich’s friends and several distant relations all wearing formal attire, an oddity for that one horse town I can assure you, for as many times as I’d been there I don’t ever recall anyone having worn a suit, gathered before the little chapel under a sunny sky, which was starting to become overrun by an offshore fog bank that having hovered all day had suddenly decided to charge the land. West of them stood the tennis court, which was surrounded by tall fir trees. To the south just across the street, as I said, stood the large Catholic Church which was Gothic, and to the north on the adjacent hillside the gravestones of the small town cemetery were tapestried against the hill.

  Bosworth who with his lanky blond hair combed flat to either side of his head and typical blue-eyed looks of his race, who might’ve been mistaken for an actor dressed in priest’s garb, met the father and wife who held the baby at the chapel door. Directly behind them stood the godparents, our friends, attached as it were to the bubble of guests or witnesses. You know in those affairs you’re more of the latter than the former for in that way the church endeavors to gain your patronage as well. You witness their truth … a lot of it has to do with sentiment but what else is faith … strengthening it in the event anyone might be tempted to veer in the other direction(s)… The church employs many kinds of rituals to the same effect, not the least of which is prayer. For all the real good any of it does, as we’ll see. In some circles it’s called ‘brain washing’.

  “No, now wait a minute,” said Hammond. “Maybe you’re telling the story but remember, I still go. Wife drags me almost every Sunday. And she prays. I have to hear her at night before we go to sleep. And that’s after she’s said them with the children.”

  “Drags, right?” I responded, but his comments went no further.

  After a holy solicitation from Hartwig and his girlfriend on behalf of God in the child’s name, Bosworth who wore a purple stole, removed it and, taking the one year old boy from his mother, placed it over the tiny limbed infant with his white booties and dark blue suit with short pants. The little tot, a miniature man, with cupped hands and a wrinkly face, kicked and squirmed, but as to whining, his real forte, it was entirely absent. And its surprise couldn’t’ve been entirely due to unfamiliarity with Bosworth for the parents had brought the boy there to several masses before in its short life. And as you know, even children that young have certain kinds of memory. Bosworth, the doubter, with a benign gesticulation then addressed the crowd.

  “If you think it suits you, you might want to leave your conflicts outside this door.” He glanced at the oaken jamb above him as if it were gold for, however naive the priest was, he was faithful to the core. And as in many other religions, I believe, he’d die for his beliefs whether they were false or not. That may be as good as religion gets or anything else for that matter. The mortal bond or blind faith is generally all we humans live by. The little truth there is in the world may indeed have minor import whether it be politics, religion or love.

  The priest, still holding the boy, marched inside, directed the crowd to be seated and approaching the baptismal font handed the boy back to the black-scarfed mother while he retreated to his little closet and replaced his violet stole with a white one, which this time he placed on his own shoulders.

  “Yes, yes, I remember something like that myself,” said Hammond, “not my own certainly, when I was invited to be a Godparent. And it was in a Catholic church not an Episcopalian. Why the same sort of symbolism? Why the purple for the white anyhow? Why not just all white? Or all violet?’

  “You know,” I said. “Now you’re beginning to sound like the priest. How should I know? Why do they do this? The more complexity in rituals, I suppose, the more genuine they’re bound to appear. But listen to this …”

  Sandy and Hartwig stood to either side of the waist high marble font facing one another while the priest, who now held the naked infant, crossed its forehead with his forefinger that he’d dipped in the font like a piece of meat au jus, then he crossed its breast or heart. With that feat accomplished and an adoring crowd looking on, he proceeded to drag the back of the child’s head through the holy water twice in the form of a cross. First it was a cross then the form of a cross. Although Hartwig stared straight up at the raftered ceiling during this procedure, for you know what he thought of religion and must’ve felt that was the best place for his eyes, Sandy stared directly at her handsome date with a look of adoration you wouldn’t believe. It was like the Virgin Mary adoring the Christ child, her own child. In fact she glanced from the child back to Hartwig; then back again.

  “Really,” said Hammond. “Then you think maybe that’s why she dragged him over there then? She had the same designs on him? Though not as godfather and godmother now but as man and wife, bride and groom? And the infant, the catalyst… Why, of course, it could be theirs.” Hammond slapped his knees with his hands. “Women do that sort of thing, you know. It’s their way of indoctrinating you. Setting you up for the kill which, of course, is their wedding ceremony.”

  “Maybe,” I said, “but if so this phantasm was short lived. For guess who’d just entered the chapel door and stood just inside the entranceway with her arms folded as if she were a Sybil about to go to war?”

  “You’ve got me, who?”

  “June, who else? Somehow she’d found out when the rite was to actually be performed and had managed to arrive back in time for it. At least part of it. And there she stood, the ravishing blond in her own white dress. And I might add she appeared far more chic in it than Sandy in hers, though the two women were about equal in looks and figure. If you like blonds, of course.”

  “Well,” said Hammond, “Hartwig was certainly no gentleman if that means anything.”

  “Oh,” I disagreed. “In his own way I think you could say he was.”

  As soon as Sandy noticed the newcomer, of course, her jaw dropped open. She knew damn well what she’d done by accepting the honor and in turn usurping her best friend’s filial right. And now as it were it was as if she’d been caught red handed. Her beatific look was replaced by one of downright fear, like the look of a guilty child. Temporarily, however, temporarily for the very instant the priest pronounced the concluding orisons and the crowd broke up to approach the mother one by one to squeeze the tiny mitt of the urchin (some with two fingers only) she held up like a votive offering, Sandy ran over to June and threw her arms around her cold corpse.

  “So glad you’re here. I want you to meet my new friend. We thought you couldn’t make it.” Her cheeks flushed. She appeared elated.

  “Yes, Sandy,” June replied with the ember eyed stare of Medusa speaking to a ch
ild. And in an icy, facetious voice continued, “it’s so good to see you.” And she removed the hands as though they’d been poisonous vines that had suddenly entwined her. She then went to her son in law, Stich, to engage him in some important business deal (as a realtor she was always making them) while Sandy joined the line of hand squeezers.

  “There,” said the enormous man, Stich, the contractor and father of the child, to June, “Well you may be the last but you’re certainly not the least.”

  And as she moved forward and touched the baby, guess what. The infant who as a rule whined non stop in almost any situation but who had been silent all day, perhaps in pleasant bewilderment, as soon as it saw the hand of its grandmother come out towards it must’ve been frightened beyond credulity for its sudden spasmic howls and wails played from the little creature’s lungs like the movement of a triumphant symphony that had just run a life’s course from birth through procreation to old age and back. It cried, said Hartwig, like a cosmic orgasm. ‘Just like a cosmic…’ Everyone stood still to listen.

  “Oh, come on,” said Hammond, “you don’t have to go that far. Did the thing ever stop?”

  “Never,” I shook my head, “that is not until after the procession down old Wharf road to the beach was over and it got home. And guess who held it all that while. The luckless father, who rocked it back and forth in his arms making his own baby sounds if you can believe it as though he could make himself understood, this big bear, and in the baby’s language. Of course, he couldn’t…”

  “I wouldn’t either,” said Hammond, “if I’d been an infant and seen this Medusa from what you say about her. I’d probably’ve wailed all day too.”

  “No doubt. No doubt about it,” I said, “the godmother’s mere appearance must’ve set it off.” Like ten thousand sirens screeching at once. Sometimes a child’s intuition is truer than a sermon on the mount. June’d been introduced to Hartwig. That’d evidently been more important to her than a slight to the person she was. If indeed it was a slight and anyone made the connection. As a matter of fact from the first handshake and kiss on the cheek she monopolized him the rest of the afternoon.