Providence Noir

by Ann Hood

  Gussie vaguely recalled that R.C. had been on medication when she taught him. She thought he must be on something now too. “If it’s money for medication, I’m sure your mother would help you.”

  “Oh, I’ve got a special card for the drugs they want me to take. But I don’t never take them—” He fished around the inside of his jacket pocket, pulled out a small folded card, and tossed it on the table. Gussie could make out a blue anchor but the writing was too tiny to read. “’Cause the pills give me runs.”

  “Clown school?” Min said, merely to say something. And she regretted it.

  “At least give me one of the rings,” he said, growing agitated.

  Gussie sobbed that she couldn’t do that.

  “Alright then.” R.C. stood up and walked over to the kitchen door, grumbling.

  He opened the door, complained that it was too damn hot, and what kind of heater did they have anyway? He pulled a long wool scarf off the hook and tied Gussie’s hands behind her back, looping the ends of it through the bars of the chair, a tight, sophisticated knot learned in the Scouts. When Min protested, he paused long enough to point to the gun tucked, temporarily, between his bare belly and his jeans.

  “Funny how a thought will come to you, don’t matter where you at or what you’re doing,” he said, settling back down at the table with the gun before him like a plate of food. “You know what I was thinking about when I climbed into your basement? You ’member that talent show we had at the church? Miss Gussie, you had on a pretty white dress with a red carnation pinned up high. Pretty enough to frame. I couldn’t believe you was my teacher. Now, Miss Min, I didn’t know what to make of you—dressed up in a man’s suit—but I thought those red and white wing-tipped shoes was real sharp. Sharp as two tacks. ‘The Jitterbug Waltz’—that’s the song you two danced to. Maybe if you sing it for me, Miss Min, I’ll think about untying Miss Gussie so she can go get me one of those rings.”

  Usually Min’s voice was an above-average soprano. Now, with a nervous stomach, she couldn’t breath right, and it sounded like a falsetto. A poor one at that. “The night is getting on, the band is getting slow, the crowd is almost gone, but here we are still dancing . . .”

  R.C. jumped up and spun around, belting out: “Nothing to do but waltz!” He laughed, then turned sour, his words curling like the fingers of a fist. “Sounded better back in the nineties. What year was it, Miss Gussie?”

  “Can’t say I remember exactly, R.C.”

  “Miss Min, then.”

  “Nineteen ninety-eight, R.C. Nineteen ninety-eight.”

  “Well, make like it’s 1998, Miss Min. Put your proper singing voice on.”

  It turned out R.C. had talent for something besides mischief. His tenor was clear as crystal, unwavering like the man Min had stood next to in the church choir. “I’m tired and out of juice and yet from head to toe, my body’s feeling loose and warm and kind of supple . . . Nothing to do but waltz . . . Naw, that don’t sound right. I skipped a verse or two, didn’t I, Miss Min?”

  “I’m tired of playing this game now, R.C. I’m not going to speak to you again until you untie her.”

  “Min, please,” Gussie whispered.

  Min could see that her partner was petrified, the proof of which had gathered around the heels of her new slippers in a neon-yellow pool. “R.C.! You untie Gussie right this instant!” Then she reached across the table and grabbed the gun.

  R.C. gave Gussie’s chair a mighty kick, sending her down to the floor in a crash.

  The narrator pauses here—’cause Min would want it—to say that no one should ever come to know what it feels like when the shadow of many years of togetherness descends and you’re looking dead at the person shutting off the light.

  Gussie’s tears couldn’t be stopped; she trembled horribly watching her wife dial 911 with a steady hand.

  “This is Minrose Andrade at 28 Larch Street. I’ve just shot Robert Calvin Rutherford . . .”

  PART II

  WHAT CHEER

  ONCE, AT TRINITY REP

  BY ELIZABETH STROUT

  Trinity Repertory Company

  There it stands, on the corner of Washington Street, the pride of Providence. Trinity Rep has been in that old building for almost fifty years. Before that, the theater was used for vaudeville shows. I am an old lady, and my father used to speak of them; and I think that for a long time almost everyone who entered the place seemed to feel the history of past performances, the excitement of the unknown. Even with the beginning of Trinity Rep, how it did so well with the old chestnuts, or new unknown pieces, or the annual rendition of A Christmas Carol, the theater itself offered what theatergoers wanted: a promise of emotion. But after what happened, happened, it took people awhile to get back that feeling enough to abandon their guard, I think, and just enjoy the show. Season ticket subscriptions were down for years. And I’ve noticed, though no one mentions it anymore, that they have never staged an Ibsen play since, and this is no small thing in the life of a regional theater.

  Let me say this: the lead in A Doll’s House was a darling girl. That is how she was described later, by her mother: “A darling girl, with a heart of gold.” The poor mother was a mere sixteen years older than her daughter Lena, and Lena was an only child, so they were more like sisters. A number of people who knew them agreed with this. I knew them myself, and I agree with it too; they were as close as twins. Whatever living arrangements Trinity had made for Lena Lochsheldrake fell through at the last minute, and the directors approached me, knowing my rooming house—later I would call it a bed-and-breakfast—had few guests; people know things in a small town, which Providence is.

  So Lena Lochsheldrake and her mother stayed with me; they’d sit at my breakfast table for hours—they both loved to talk—and I would leave something in the refrigerator for Lena when she came in late at night, and I served her breakfast any time she wanted, and made snacks for her to take to the theater.

  “Oh, thank you,” she always said, her brown eyes sparkling. “Thank you. Look at this, Mother, what she’s done”—holding out the custard, wrapped in foil. “Oh, you’re just the best.”

  Lena did not have those perfect teeth you see on all the young people today; her teeth were slightly indented and crooked, and this was very endearing somehow, her smile. And yet I often could not help but see those teeth and think of the word rabid. I assume because they were pointed and made me think of a fox. But she was a darling girl, really, just as her mother said.

  Lena had been born Hope Mayhew. Her mother sent out birth announcements saying: Hope Has Arrived. They loved telling me this story; they loved any story about themselves. Once they asked if I’d been close to my own mother, and I said my mother had died when I was young. This was true, and enough truth as needed, so when their faces clouded and they said they were sorry, I looked away and they asked me nothing more. I’d not have told them anyway. I had learned long ago that no one wants to hear the story of an ambulance in a driveway when a child gets home from school—­­of a mother’s furious screeches that she only wanted to die, had been acted upon. It is the darkest story in the world.

  But these two! Chattering like birds, fluffing their feathers. Of each other they could not get enough, and I learned how the young girl took the name “Lena” because she thought it was stagelike, and later Lochsheldrake because she’d been born in upstate New York not far from the town with that name. Lena Lochsheldrake. That’s who she was, in theater programs and on posters and spelled out with lights on the marquee. But her friends, the ones from the cast who came to see her in my home, always slightly shy and always polite, referred to her as Lena Lock.

  According to the papers and police reports, Lena had hundreds of friends all over the country. This was before the days of Facebook, which would have undoubtedly added thousands more, but still, each friend had to be accounted for, and this took a great deal of time. One newspaper was not so friendly after a bit, and clearly had some connection in the
investigator’s office, because reports began to appear that Lena Lock had quite a reputation, particularly with older men. This caused her mother Carina to be even more distressed, if such a thing was possible, and I’d have taken care of Carina had she not chosen to return home after the first few days, after the police released all the business in their rooms at my B&B—the clothes and jewelry and letters and stuffed animals, which Lena always took with her on the road. A man named Luther arrived, and Carina, poor stunned thing, climbed into his car with Lena’s belongings and drove away. I missed them terribly. I was stunned myself. Well, the whole town was.

  It turned out that Carina Mayhew could not stay away from television, going on any station that would have her, saying her daughter was a darling girl with a heart of gold, and that in such a business as show business, a pretty, darling girl had admirers of all ages. Nothing could possibly account for the tragedy done to her, and it was done to her—this part the poor woman cried out again and again from the television studios. And after a while, Carina Mayhew got a famous woman lawyer who began to appear on these shows with her, saying that a blame-the-victim mentality had plagued women for years; that everyone should be ashamed. Ashamed. That lawyer was frightening looking, like an eagle with a wig of dark hair. Of course this lawyer was looking for libel suits and money, and poor Carina eventually became someone who people in town here lost interest in sooner rather than later. This is New England, after all, and incontinence is not a virtue. But I have not forgotten Carina. I have not forgotten Lena. Not for one day.

  And the men—they could not forget so easily! I could see that. Certainly not the men who had seen Lena perform, not the men who had staged the show, not the men who had paid her rent in the past, or paid for trips to Europe with her mother (they called my home in such distress, these men, telling me things I should not know, did not want to know, but they could not forget her). And not the men, either, who had seen her walking down the street while she was in town, or in the restaurants, or at the stage door at night signing programs; and not the man who helped her with a costume change backstage and was the last to have had a “real” conversation with her before she returned to the spotlight in her sweet little dress and character shoes, and touched her rather flat chest in front of a full house and collapsed. The costume changer’s name was Kip and his proximity caused him to be the first suspect. Photographs of this young man sobbing on the front page of the morning newspapers didn’t help with his public image. (Speaking of incontinence.) And he was gay. There were, don’t not believe this for a minute, people in neighborhoods of Providence who thought that a gay man in the theater was as likely a culprit as anyone else; after all, weren’t there reports that some of these individuals had anonymous sex in public places, particularly at the YMCA? Oh, lives in town were destroyed before this whole thing was over. If anything is ever over. You decide that one.

  But back up and picture this: Fantastic reviews when the show opened. Lena’s face all over town on posters and on television—such a lovely interview she gave the local TV station, saying she did not think of her character Laura as a feminist, she thought of her as a woman deeply in love with her husband; in other words, Lena charmingly gave answers no one expected. She did have this “thing”—that could not be denied.

  The “thing” was not traditional star power. It was sweeter than that sort of blazing charisma. She was, as her poor mother said, darling. She was adorable. She was disarming. Her active, pretty face held genuine expressions as she spoke of her past, how she had been Miss Cornflower at the age of three, how she had been Miss Baton Champion at the age of five, how she had been the mascot to the football’s marching band at Buffalo State when she was seven—all accompanied by snapshots moving across the television screen of this darling little girl raising that tiny leg with the tasseled boot. Some people you can’t stop looking at, and you don’t know why. This was the case with Lena.

  It was raining the night of the incident, as nature would have it. Pouring from the heavens in sheets. And yet the house was full. People checked their umbrellas and coats with the sopping wet shoulders, or else folded those coats under their seats, though there was barely room. The place smelled a bit like boiled wool and wet dogs—I hate that smell.

  The lights went down, the stage lights came up on the rather traditional set. But they did not have a curtain for the show, it was at a time when curtains were going out of fashion; that attempt to keep the audience in the dark, so to speak, was going out of fashion; the idea was to make things more intimate with the audience, not to leave them out of the make-believe. Or so Lena said. You would have thought she was the first person to have heard of any of this—she got a little high on her horse when she spoke to me about it—and I did not tell her that these changes had been going on for decades before her. But young people are like that, and her mother was like that too, only worse, because she knew less. The only thing Carina knew was what her daughter needed: the face lotion, how much to eat, how much to sleep, how to put hemorrhoid cream below her eyes after a night of drinking. Close as two peas in a pod, that’s how they were.

  Carina was at the show that night too. She almost always went, so she and Lena could talk the next day, or maybe well into the night, about every line, every audience reaction; they loved it all, I will say. I don’t know that I’d have had the energy, had I been a mother, though undeniably Lena was more needy than most daughters would be. I thought about it sometimes, how could I not, their infectious love and excitement right there in my house.

  Do you have children? Lena had early on turned and asked me one night, her brown eyes round and warm and curious. I told her I did not, and she said she was sorry. No need to be sorry, I said. Life hands you what it hands you, and in that department it handed me an empty plate. They exchanged a fleeting glance then, mother and daughter, and it was hard to be seen as I felt they saw me, a barren woman with a thickening waist serving people oatmeal every morning. And then Carina couldn’t help herself and asked if I had been married, and they got the story out of me, my twenty-year marriage, all the miscarriages, my husband endlessly kind and then distant and off with a woman half his age—I became a statistic; you never expect to, but you become a statistic, and yes, before Lena and Carina could ask, I said yes, yes, he had his children now. It’s a story to scare any woman, I know that. And they laughed and said, oh, men are so awful, just awful, they only want one thing, and I began to think these two were not my . . . caliber. Well, I had known that all along. But I had to take an extra sleeping pill that night, one of the many I got in Mexico on a vacation there, since there is no need for anyone in this talking town to know the B&B proprietor needs nerve assistance some nights. I could hear them whispering late, on and on, and perhaps it was egotistical of me, but it was my life I felt they were discussing with that energy. On and on it went.

  So that rainy night Carina was in the audience with a friend she had made here in town, a woman who brought the muffins to my house when I had more than a few guests; Carina had struck up a silly, girlish friendship with her, and there they sat in their complimentary house seats, dead center. Carina turned and waved at me. Her eyes were brown like her daughter’s, and in some ways her face was a more conventionally pretty face, but she did not have that “thing” that Lena had.

  When the show began and Lena appeared, there was a hearty applause at the mere sight of her; that is how much she was already loved in this town and on this stage. She did a nice freezing thing, the way they must teach actors when this happens, to just stop herself—in character of course—and then sail into her line. I had not seen her perform before, though she had offered me tickets on opening night two weeks earlier. I had turned her down then with a vague excuse, but really I had no one to go with, and as much as I was mesmerized—oh, that is too strong a word—by this pair in my house, I had not wanted to sit next to Carina, knowing that I would have to breathe toward her and receive from her a cloying adoration regarding her girl.
I should not have worried; I did adore seeing the show. I watched far more attentively than I had imagined I would, and I sat next to the one woman in town I can claim as a friend, though much of the time she tires me, this friend—a school librarian who had also found herself alone in midlife. She was wearing a scent that night I had not noticed on her before; it gently came through the smell of dampness all around.

  At intermission my friend wanted a glass of wine, or rather a plastic cup of wine, and I stood with her in the lobby and introduced her to the sparkling-eyed Carina who was filled with liveliness at the success of the whole show, and most especially of course with the success of her daughter. I believe I drank from a bottle of water I bought when my friend got her wine. And then a drowsiness came over me, as though I had had the wine, and not my friend, but it was distinct and peculiar, to feel so apart from the bustle of everyone else as they took their seats for the final act.