by Peter Straub
“And I’ll arrange tickets to Milwaukee,” Poole said. “We’ll go as soon as I can get away.”
Conor hated to leave Tim Underhill in that apartment.
They went outside into air that seemed surprisingly springlike, and the warmth of the day as well as what he had been thinking prompted Conor to risk making a fool of himself. “Look, I don’t know why I should say this, Mikey, but if you need a place to stay or anything, just give me a call, you know? You can always stay with me if you need a place.”
Mike didn’t laugh at him—he stuck out his hand and gave him a good handshake. “Why don’t you come along on this trip to Milwaukee?”
“Bread, you know,” Conor said. “Gotta get that bread. I wish I could, though. But really … this whole thing … don’t you think it’s time to hang it up and tell everything to that cop? We’re just following Beevers around, and that’s no good, man.”
“It’ll only be a couple more days, Conor. I’m in a funny period anyhow, and this gives me something to do.”
Conor nodded, wishing he knew what to say or the way to say it, and they parted. After a few steps toward the subway, Conor turned around and watched Mikey walking in the sunlight toward Ninth Avenue. He wondered if he knew where he was going, or if he was really going anywhere at all, and for a second felt like rushing after him.
4
Poole realized that he could walk to the garage on University Place. It would be an enjoyable way to delay his arrival back in Westerholm, a free zone given him by the unseasonal weather. Right now a free zone seemed welcome.
He crossed Ninth Avenue and turned right toward 23rd Street. It occurred to him that he could walk down through the Village, cross Houston Street, and go to SoHo. Maggie Lah was probably still at Saigon. It would be interesting to see what she and Vinh were doing with the restaurant. Poole decided against doing this, but wondered if Maggie would be interested in going to Milwaukee with Underhill and himself. She might be able to identify Spitalny from photographs at his parents’ house. A positive identification from Maggie would be helpful when they made their case to the police. His thoughts drifted along pleasantly as he walked down Ninth Avenue toward Greenwich Village.
5
Maggie, in the meantime, had decided in the middle of a conversation to tell Vinh that the writer Timothy Underhill, Tina’s friend in Vietnam, had secretly come back to America and was now staying in Harry Beevers’ apartment. As far as Maggie was concerned, this information was another proof of Beevers’ instability. She knew that Vinh detested Beevers, and assumed that he would feel as she did about his attempting to continue his private efforts to find the man who had murdered Tina. She also knew that Vinh could be trusted with any secret told him. But his response startled her—he stared at her for a long time, then asked her to repeat what she had just said. All the rest of the afternoon he worked in silence, and around five o’clock, just before Maggie left, said, “I must call him,” and put down his blueprints and went to the telephone in the kitchen.
6
Michael rolled up his windows, put into the tape deck a cassette of Murray Perahia playing Mozart piano concertos, and rolled out onto University Place. Music of great delicacy and melancholy began to come through the speakers. It was the wrong music. Michael ejected the tape, put it back in its case, opened another, and fed it to the machine. The first bars of Don Giovanni filled the car. The opera would get him home.
On the expressway into Westchester County he remembered the Babar books in his trunk—why had he put them there?
Because he wanted to have them with him if he did not go back to Westerholm. He had not wanted to lose them, and if Judy found them she would throw them out.
But an hour later here he was, home again, the good Dr. Poole, turning off at the Westerholm exit, winding in his little car through streets without signs or lights and lined with hedges, beneath branches that would soon begin to bud, across Westerholm’s Main Street with its branches of Laura Ashley and Baskin Robbins, the garage where the proprietor “dialogued” with you about Scientology while he filled your tank, then past the General Washington Inn and the duck pond, “O misery misery, Lascia le donne? Pazzo!” Don Giovanni bawled, “Leave women alone? You’re mad—why I need them more than the bread I eat, than the air I breathe.” On impulse Michael did not turn into his street but kept on going until he had come to the site of Sam Stein’s new medical center.
A large sign announcing WESTERHOLM MEDICAL CENTER in tasteful, almost unreadable green on brown stood before a large lot. Behind the lot was a nature preserve. As soon as spring came, this lot would be filled with bulldozers and excavators. This was the future kingdom of Dr. Sam Stein.
Michael got back into his car and drove home. He had lost track of what was going on in Don Giovanni, and the big voices boomed and cajoled, fighting for air and space. He turned into his driveway, and the gravel crunched beneath his tires. This was home, he was safe. Zerlina sang, “In happiness and joy let’s pass our days and nights.” Like a magic light that could pass through stone, brick, lead, wood, and skin, music streamed through the world, on its way to somewhere else. Michael drew up before his garage and switched off the engine. The tape cut off and leaped noisily up into the slot. Michael picked up the novel beside him and got out of the car. For a moment he saw his wife and Pat Caldwell looking at him from the living room window. They broke apart as he began to walk toward the front door.
1
“The thing is, I like her,” Conor said. “I can hardly believe I’m saying this, but I not only like her, I think about her a lot. You know what she told me? She said she likes the way I talk.”
“No kids?” Poole asked.
“Thank God, no. This Woyzak guy never wanted ’em. Kids drove him crazy. But this Woyzak guy, everything drove him crazy. Didn’t I ever tell you about him?”
Poole shook his head, and Conor ordered another round of drinks and began describing how he had been reminded of Victor Spitalny as soon as he had met Tom Woyzak. They were in Donovan’s on the Friday night following Michael’s return from New York on Monday. On Tuesday night Michael had brought a jumble of clothes in a suitcase to Conor’s apartment. Every day he drove to his office, where he saw patients and tried to settle his affairs before returning to South Norwalk.
“What I mean is, nothing really ever disappears. We should have known it’d turn out to be Spitalny. He was there. He was there in everything.” Conor’s eyes were shining with uncharacteristic inspiration. “We even talked about him in Washington, remember?”
“I remember. But Beevers was so positive. And I guess I thought Spitalny was dead. I certainly couldn’t see him calling himself Koko and going out and murdering a bunch of people.”
Conor nodded. “Well, at least now we’re that far ahead. Beevers says he didn’t get any responses to his ads yet.”
Poole too had spoken to Beevers, who had spent ten minutes complaining about the way Tim Underhill had deserted him.
“He’s all pissed off at us, man.”
“He’s pissed off at everybody.”
“I didn’t know about Vinh, though.”
“I guess we didn’t know Vinh.”
Beevers was still furious that Poole had told Maggie Lah about Underhill, for Maggie had told Vinh.
“So what are they doing?” Conor asked. “Are Underhill and Vinh and Vinh’s kid all living in the restaurant?”
“I don’t think so. I think Vinh and his daughter live with relatives. I guess Underhill used to help Vinh’s family, back in the old days, and Vinh is repaying the favor.”
“I hope your thing works out all right, man,” Conor said.
As soon as Michael had seen Pat Caldwell standing beside Judy in his window, he had known that his marriage had reached its final stages. Judy had hardly been able to speak to him, and had soon retreated to her bedroom. Pat, grimacing with the difficulty of her position and managing by her very sympathy to suggest that she would speak privately with h
im later, had said that Judy felt hurt and betrayed by something that had happened between them. She no longer wanted to stay alone in the house with him. Pat was there to supply moral courage and womanly support—and to be witness to what Judy perceived as her humiliation.
“Of course you can tell me to get out, and if you do I’ll go,” Pat said. “I have only the most general idea of what this is all about, Michael. I like both of you. Judy asked me to come here, and so I did.”
Michael had spent the night on the couch in his little office downstairs, Pat in the guestroom; when Judy had told him that she would never be able to forgive him for the way he had treated her—a statement she appeared to believe—Michael had moved out to the George Washington, which had a few rooms it let out to boyfriends and grandparents. The following night he had gone to Conor’s. Now he spent hours each day talking to Max Atlas, his lawyer, who had visible difficulty keeping himself from showing that he thought his client had lost his mind. Max Atlas never smiled anyhow, his big fleshy face naturally expressed gloom and doubt, but during the hours Michael spent with him his dewlaps sagged and even his ears seemed to droop. It was not Michael’s marital difficulties that depressed him, but that a client of his should voluntarily leave a business just before it began to mint money.
“She came to the job one day,” Conor was saying. “In a Blazer. The Blazer was beautiful, man. I saw her get out, and she looked good. The woman looked real good, let’s face it. In spite of the fact you could see that she was down on account of her old man being put away. Ben Roehm hauls me out from where I’m working and says, ‘Well, Conor, I guess you ought to meet my niece Ellen.’ Right away I think I don’t have a chance with this woman. But it turns out that her father was a carpenter, her grandfather was a capenter, Ben Roehm is her uncle, and even her husband, who was bughouse ever since he came back from the war, was a sort of a half-assed carpenter. Guess what she likes?”
“I think I got it,” Michael said.
“No—guess what she likes to do?”
“The same things you do,” Poole said.
An expression of blissful amazement spread across Conor’s face. “She likes sitting around the apartment and talking. She likes coming in here to the bar and having a drink. We have great times. She claims she gets a big kick out of me. She wants to have a little house up in Vermont. She wants to have a man to hang out with. She wants kids. That asshole wouldn’t let her have kids, which was really okay seeing what a rat in the grass he turned out to be. I’d like to have kids, Mikey, I really would. You get tired of living by yourself.”
“How many times have you gone out with Ellen?”
“Fourteen and a half times. Once we just had time for a couple of beers before her parents took her out. They’re concerned about her.” He revolved his beer glass on the bar. “Ellen gets a little money from Ben Roehm, but she’s about as strapped as I am.”
“I ought to get out of your way,” Poole said. “You don’t want me sleeping in your place, Conor. You should have told me when I called you. I can go somewhere else.”
“No, her mother’s down with something, and Ellen’s taking care of her. So we wouldn’t be together anyhow, for a couple days. And besides, I wanted to tell you about her.” Conor looked away for a moment. “But I was wondering when you were planning to make that trip to Milwaukee. Her mother is getting up and around a little more these days.”
“I could do it the day after tomorrow,” Poole said, laughing. “I have to go to another funeral. That patient of mine I told you about.”
“Mikey, would you mind if I, if I, you know …”
“Of course not.”
“You’ll like her,” Conor said, and slid off the stool to go to the pay phones.
Ten minutes later he returned with a big grin on his face. “She’ll be here in fifteen minutes.” He kept on grinning. “It’s a funny thing. I feel like I’m joining up with the world again—like I was floating around in space, and I finally came back to earth. It took a long time, man.”
“Yes,” Poole said.
“That whole time we were on that trip, when I look back, it was like I wasn’t really there. Everything was like swimming underwater with your eyes open. It was like I was in a dream and nothing was real. I was a human blur. And now I’m not anymore.”
Conor gulped down his beer and set the glass on the bar. “Did I say that right?”
“I’m like Ellen,” Poole said. “I like listening to you talk.”
2
A little while later Poole too went to the telephone, thinking that it was not so very different for him. During their time in Singapore and Bangkok, everything had seemed very sharp and clear—he had been reminded of what it had been like in Vietnam. But in a short time everything had switched around. Singapore and Bangkok felt like peacetime, and what was around him now felt like Vietnam. Another version of Elvis was following them. Like Conor, Poole had not thought that he was asleep and dreaming when he had walked through the Tiger Balm Gardens and Bugis Street; but maybe his first moment of real awakening had come on the rickety bridge beside the cardboard shacks. That was where he had started to give things up.
He dropped in coins and dialed his wife’s number. He expected to hear her message, but someone lifted the receiver after the first ring.
Silence.
“Hello, who is this?” he asked.
“Who is this?” asked a strange female voice.
Then he knew who it was. “Hello, Pat. This is Michael. I’d like to speak to Judy.”
“I’ll do what I can.”
“Please.” Poole waited for long minutes while he watched Conor look at the door whenever someone walked in. He would have to leave Conor’s apartment and check into a hotel that night—it was not fair to keep him from his girlfriend.
Pat’s mild voice came back on the line. “She won’t, Michael. I’m sorry. She just won’t talk to you.”
“Try again. Please.”
“One more try,” she said.
This time Judy came to the telephone almost immediately.
“Don’t you think we ought to get together and talk about things?”
“I’m not under the impression we have anything to talk about,” Judy said.
“We have a lot to talk about. Do you really want the lawyers to take over?”
“Just stay away from here,” Judy said. “I don’t want to see you, I don’t want you sleeping on the couch, and I don’t want to talk to you now.”
It was all a game—sooner or later Judy would want everything back the way it used to be. For now she wanted him to suffer. He had kept her from doing something she had been pretending with all her heart to want to do.
“Have it your way,” he said, but she had already hung up.
Poole wandered back to the bar. Conor took one look at him and said, “Hey man, Ellen and me can always stay at her place, you know. The only reason we use mine is that she lives over in Bethel and it’d take me a little longer to get to work, but the real main reason is that Woyzak’s got all his stuff all over the walls, pictures of himself in uniform and a bunch of medals all framed, everywhere you look there’s Tom Woyzak sighting down on you. It gets to you after a while.”
Poole excused himself and went back to the telephone. By now the bar was full of people, and he could barely hear the mechanical voice instructing him in the use of his credit card.
A man answered, asked for his name, and said that he would bring Maggie to the telephone. He sounded very paternal.
In a moment Maggie was on the line. “Well, well, Dr. Poole. How did you know I wanted to talk to you?”
“I have an idea that might be interesting to you.”
“Sounds interesting already,” she said.
“Has Tim Underhill mentioned our trip to Milwaukee to you?”
He had not.
“It hasn’t been too definite yet. We’re going to look up Victor Spitalny’s parents and spend a little time seeing if we can pick up s
ome new information on him. He might have sent a postcard, there might be someone who’s heard something—it’s a long shot, but it’s worth trying.”
“And?”
“And I thought that maybe you should come along. You might be able to identify Spitalny from a photograph. And you’re a part of what’s going on. You’re already involved.”
“When will you be going?”
Michael said that he would book tickets that night for Sunday, and that he expected to be gone only a couple of days.
“We’re opening the restaurant in a week.”
“It might only take a day or two. We might find out that it’s just a cold trail.”
“So why should I come along?”
“I’d like you to,” Michael said.
“Then I will. Call me back with the flight times, and I’ll meet you at the airport. I’ll give you a check for my ticket.”
Michael hung up smiling.
He turned to face the bar and saw Conor standing face to face with a woman who was perhaps an inch taller than he. She had long, unruly brown hair and wore a plaid shirt, a tan sleeveless down jacket, and tight faded jeans. Conor nodded in his direction, and the woman turned to watch him approach them. She had a high, deeply lined forehead, firm eyebrows, and a strong intelligent face. She was not at all what Michael had expected.
“This is the guy I was telling you about,” Conor said. “Dr. Michael Poole, known as Mike. This is Ellen.”
“Hello, Dr. Poole.” She gripped his hand in hers.
“I hope you’ll call me Michael,” he said. “I’ve been hearing about you too, and I’m glad to meet you.”
“I had to get away for a little while so I could check up on my sweetie,” Ellen said.
“If you guys ever have babies, you’d better ask me to be their doctor,” Poole said, and for a time they all stood in the noisy bar grinning at each other.
3
When Michael slid into the last pew at St. Robert’s on the village square the service had already begun. Two pews near the front had been filled with children who must have been Stacy’s classmates. All of them looked taller, older, and at once more worldly and more innocent than she. Stacy’s parents, William and Mary, “like the college,” they said to those who met them for the first time, sat with a small group of relatives on the other side of the church. William turned around and gave Michael a grateful glance as he sat down. Light streamed in through the stained glass windows on both sides of the church. Michael felt like a ghost—he felt as if bit by bit he were becoming invisible, sitting in the bright optimistic church as an Episcopalian priest uttered heartfelt commonplaces about death.
