Before you speak, words are nothing, blank as unexposed film, meaningless. After you speak, words are irrevocable. At the moment of sound they are action. “Lieutenant,” she said. “I have to talk to you.”
The five men turned.
“Miss Matheny,” said the one with the strange eye, the lieutenant, “whatever it is, you better discuss it with your father.” He spoke respectfully. This was a big one, no ordinary murder, and he didn’t care to blow it.
“About a lawyer, you mean?”
“Adequate counsel,” he agreed.
“I don’t need one.”
“Why not talk it over with Mr. Matheny, anyway?”
“There’s no reason. I mean, you have to know this.”
They were all staring at her curiously.
“Alone,” she said.
“The breakfast room, then.”
Cricket nodded. I am voice, she thought.
“And how did they behave this time?” The questioning across the Tudor table had been going on for ten minutes.
“I told you. The same. Peaceable, very. Docile. Except Genesis.”
“Giles Cooke, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“How was he different?”
“It’s like he’d gone sort of crazy. He thought he was here to save the world.”
“How was he planning to do that?”
“He said there had to be a complete change in morality. His idea was that for the world to be right, most people would have to die.”
“And he was going to kill them?”
“He never said that.”
“But it was implied?”
“Not exactly.”
“He never said he was going to kill anyone?”
“No. But he had.”
“What?”
“He’d killed people.”
“When?”
“In the war and—”
“So did quite a few of us.”
“—after.”
“Oh? How many?”
“Two men.”
“Then he’s got a record?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And you knew this, Cricket?” By now he had dropped the Miss Matheny. “Before?”
“Not until the second time I stayed at REVELATION.”
“How are the others involved? Drugs?” (The police had found 4.2 grams of marijuana, machine-rolled into cigarette form, as well as traces of cocaine, in RB Henderson’s purse. When Cricket had gone into the kitchen, they were discussing whether this were a drug case.)
“Involved? I guess Roger was.”
“How? Drugs?”
“Roger never used grass, even. Last year Orion had this funny scab, and he—Roger—got him into a hospital. It was skin cancer, and he was operated on. Genesis hates knives and cutting. And doctors.”
“Then you think this is retribution?”
“And a warning to others.”
“That fits in with the writing, yes.” Pause. “Reed and Putnam, okay. Why Miss Henderson?”
“I don’t know. Maybe she was here, that’s all. Maybe she was the kind of person he wanted the world rid of.”
“Why leave out you and Mr. Reed and Miss Schorer?”
“We weren’t around.”
“You realize the charges you’ve made, Cricket?”
“Yes.”
“Are you willing to testify?”
“Me?”
“You.”
“In front of him?”
A long pause.
“I’m trying to understand you, Cricket. It’s not easy. Why a girl from a good family like yours gets mixed up with a bunch like this.”
“All right. If I have to.”
“Here. Take my handkerchief.” The detective opened the door, calling, “Get Mr. Matheny, will you?”
Alix, clothes piled to her chin, stopped at the open door of the library. The group might have been posed by a quattrocento painter. Em, the focal point, wore a sleeveless blouse—maybe she’d been gardening—and the slack of her arms was flattened across her bosom as if she cradled an infant. Caroline had an arm around her sister’s shoulders, attempting to draw the dyed head to comfort. Sheridan, his seat drawn to the couch, hunched toward his wife. In an almost identical position, Vliet held out a glass to his mother. He had changed his shirt, but not his pants.
Em glanced up.
She saw Alix.
Em’s pale-blue eyes were bloodshot, the upper lids red, the lower puffed and purple. For what seemed like forever, her eyes held Alix’s. A chill that came from another line of existence shivered over Alix, and she murmured, “Mrs. Reed, please.” Caroline shook her head, not unkindly. Go away, the shake meant. Don’t intrude. Sheridan was gazing at Alix, coldly, with tear-reddened eyes. Alix saw only Roger’s mother.
Em’s mouth opened. The mouth trembled, the mouth grew hard, ugly. The mouth pouched forward. She was about to spit, something that Em never would do. Never would think of doing. Spitting was a reflex, an atavism born of misery and despairing grief and absolute hatred. It was all the more terrible because Em, in her forty-eight middle-class years, never had made the age-old gesture that was meant to avert the evil eye, to dispel witch’s poison, to show utmost scorn. I spit on you and yours. Between her open lips, saliva was a thin vein glinting like a soap bubble. She swallowed convulsively.
Sheridan continued staring at Alix. Vliet had half risen. Not one of the four had spoken or taken their eyes from her.
Clutching her neatly folded clothes, she stood there, unable to move.
And then Dan pulled her toward the wide staircase. In her ear, low and hoarse: “Alix, sweetheart, may God damn them all to hell forever!”
She recovered. She moved from his protective warmth.
And Gene, emerging from the breakfast room, greeted, “Dan, Alix, Beverly.” (Beverly, having told Philip of the murders, was hanging up the phone.) “Come on in.”
“Gene,” Dan’s voice was hard. “Why let the press have more of a field day than necessary?”
Gene glanced over his shoulder at the breakfast room. “They’ll have it.”
“So there’s buttons to push.” Dan’s harsh loudness overrode discussion.
“Alix, honey,” Gene asked. “Is there anything I can do? Anything?”
“Please, Mr. Matheny,” she said. Her voice didn’t waver. “Roger’s things’re upstairs, all packed. And his microscope and books’re in the car.” She looked puzzled. “Dan, what should I do about the car?”
“Tomorrow I’ll send someone.”
“It’s the Mustang,” she said to Gene. “Oh, and he left his Anatomy in the yard.”
“The police took it,” Dan said.
“They never told me,” Alix said. “Why do you think they didn’t?”
“Probably regulations.”
“Mr. Matheny, will you see that Roger’s parents get everything?”
Gene nodded. He was crying. Through the blur, he saw Beverly, a tall, slender shape in pink stripes, moving toward the open door of the library.
“Buzz!” Dan snapped. “Get the fuck away from there!”
She was at her father’s, and the lines of force in his staircase were wrong, the treads moved like a rope ladder. She gripped the banister, and with effort, descended normally. The three of them, drinking, looked up.
She asked, “How about one for me?”
“Scotch?” Philip asked.
“Please.”
Dan watched her take the drink. His eyes were narrow, and under them small wrinkles pouched. Dan’s eyes pitied her.
“Dan.” She swirled three ice cubes in amber liquid. “Why not take Mother to dinner?”
“Come home,” Beverly said.
“It’s fine here.”
“Here, you don’t have a room,” Dan said.
“She has mine.” Philip.
“No-no. Father, I’ll take the couch. It’s the new line, isn’t it? The pullout?”
“You recognized it,” Ph
ilip said, pleased.
“You sent the catalog. Mother, don’t.”
“What?” Beverly asked.
“Cry.”
“I’m not.”
“You’ve got a look.”
“It’s the same name,” Dan said to Philip. “They’ll track her down easier, those damn reporters.”
Philip said, “I’m unlisted.”
Alix held her glass, not drinking, from time to time raising it to her lips. After a while she glanced at her mother, then Dan. “Let’s get the show on the road, kids.”
Dan came toward her as if to kiss her. She rose. “Take care,” she said to him.
Beverly, too, was moving in on her. Alix, stepping back, made a smile that was the Great Barrier Reef. Beverly sighed. The sigh lasted, holding Jamie, Roger, death—a trinity of desolation—and for a moment, as Dan opened the door, light folded into itself. Then they were gone.
Alix busied herself, pouring her Scotch, good J&B, intact, down the drain, rinsing the glasses.
“Want to eat at Donkins?” Philip asked.
“I’ll scramble us some eggs.”
She pushed hers around the plate and didn’t drink the coffee she’d brewed in the Melitta. She insisted on doing the dishes. Keeping things in order was good. Otherwise chaos. But all the time, those voices, soaring in the double-decker room. “Father, let’s take a walk.”
He lent her a jacket, too big and very light, navy quilted dacron, his new sailing jacket. Boats slapped, docks creaked, and the night fog blurred reflections on black water. And then a very strange thing happened. In the darkness she saw Roger. Very clearly. It was as if film were projected onto a screen: Roger stood beyond the torn net, his new racket across his T-shirt, sweat darkening a path down white cotton, drops shining on his forehead, his nose burned from yesterday in the sun. Knees flexed, muscles alert, he watched her serve. And the ball, a clean new Spalding, rose into blue sky, the beginning of 2001, revolving through endless, countless, unknowable millennia to become a round, white reflection in black water. This morning, she thought, I made that serve this morning. Almighty God in everlasting glory, Prince of Peeeee-eace. She covered her ears. The music grew. She put her hands in the pockets of her father’s jacket and walked faster.
“Hon, let’s go home.”
They turned back.
“Thank you, Father.”
“What for?”
For somehow understanding how every bit of me has to be devoted to hanging in there.
When they got back, a lantern-jawed man in a mustard jacket waited by the door. He asked quickly, “Miss Schorer, are you aware that Giles Cooke has stated under oath that the murders were committed by his orders? Lance Putnam carried them out.”
“Who are you?” Philip asked. “How did you know to come here?”
And Alix said, “Orion? But he’s dead.”
“He killed himself, after.”
“Orion? Genesis?” Her voice was bewildered. “They killed Roger?”
“Your, er, fiancé tried to protect Miss Henderson, Cooke says, but he, Cooke, had the others hold him. He said Reed was antilife, and Miss Henderson, too. Putnam managed the girl alone, but he needed help for Reed. What shape was the body in? Bad?”
Philip had the door unlocked. “You’re trespassing.” He sounded sarcastic rather than angry. “Alix, hon, come in.”
“Miss Schorer! Was this a grudge slaying? Cooke insists they had it coming to—”
Philip slammed the door. One of the pillows on the couch (new line) was flattened. Alix understood she must plump it. Philip dialed the security guard.
Alix was changing her father’s bed when the guard arrived. The guard suggested that Philip hire his cousin, recently retired from the Venice Police Department. So that night Alix sat on a chair facing a freshly made-up bed, while on the steps outside, a gray-haired man sat with a .38 under the old jacket that protected him from sea damp.
3
It was her old room, the room she’d had as a girl.
Dr. Porter had come to shoot Demerol into her, and because of this, they assumed she could not think or feel or remember. They assumed she slept. But her eyes were open a fraction, and in the single light she could see, blurrily, the old highboy and therefore she knew she was in her old room, the same Em, but grieving, tired, numbed, and diminished oh so greatly.
How?
She thought through the drug. How could it have happened? I, always so careful, feeding him his Polyvisol and orange juice. I, sterilizing his teething ring and putting Vaseline on his circumcision. I, standing by his father. Even when it wasn’t easy. Sheridan, he still bows his head so I can see the bald spot, telling me of the nastiness, and I reply that I’m his wife and we have our sons and they’re all that counts. The girls today, they don’t understand. With their Pill and living together and going from one to the next, they don’t understand what it is to work at marriage. They don’t know. Her! Her!
Em felt a hot redness, unhalted by the drug, pass through her mind. Somewhere far away, Em Wynan Reed moaned and turned her face to clean-smelling pillowslip while, tentatively, her hand inched up to her breast. The sudden shocking cold of her fingertips distracted her and she felt herself drift to another time.
A nurse handing me the baby. The wrong one. No. Not the wrong one, the dark one who looks like Sheridan. But I am careful to hold him just as snugly, for I love him—less, to be sure, but I do love him, for he is mine—and oh, the tenderness when he touches at the side of my breast. He, red and squirmy and open-mouthed, wants the bottle. There. Formula draining. Contented little gurgles and grunts. Mine. Mine. I must see he gets everything, like his brother. Oh, nice and milky is his smell.
Em’s fingers squeezed, then fell away.
She made an effort to see Roger at two, three, five. She could not. Nothing.
Ahh, yes.
He looks up at me, his fist clutched around a bouquet, the stems are too short. “For you, Mommy,” he says. I take the flowers, putting them in a water glass, not smiling, for these are the pansies I planted this morning, yellow and purple, from the flats that were my birthday gift. He’s only three and thinks they’re pretty. For you, Mommy. Vliet calls me Ma. Sheridan says Roger must be spanked for the picking, but I say no, that’s not fair. I never told him he mustn’t. He’s not quick to smile like Vliet, but he’s a good boy, no trouble, someone to be proud of in the Family. All As. Harvard. Johns Hopkins. Grandma, I wish you could have seen him a man, my Roger. He was a very good, decent man, my Roger.
But she.
She!
Oh God, forgive me, I wish her dead, too. She, standing there, beautiful for all men to lust after, I could smell the cologne from where I sat. Even then, cologne. Ready for the next one. Now the girls don’t care about fidelity and such, they take off their skin-tight pants and lie down with as many men as they can. Nasty.
A long black hair wrote W-H-O-R-E across Em’s brain.
She slept.
A little after nine they pulled into Mrs. Wynan’s drive. Gene, Caroline, and Cricket. Sheridan opened the door. Redness rimmed his eyes, and his shirt collar seemed a size too big for his heavy neck.
Caroline pressed her perfumed cheek to his. “How wise you were, not going home. We’ve had one thousand hideous calls, and there’re tribes of newspeople camping on our doorstep.”
Gene gripped his brother-in-law’s shoulder, all enmity for once forgotten. And Cricket said, “Uncle Sheridan,” kissing him.
“How is she?” Caroline asked.
“Sleeping,” Sheridan replied.
“Thank God for Dr. Porter’s magic needle.” Caroline held out a pink box. “Coffee cake, direct from my freezer.”
Sheridan said, “Mrs. Monk”—Mrs. Wynan’s current nursecompanion—“gave us breakfast.”
Caroline was not to be daunted. She set minute pastries on a salver and reheated coffee. They sat around the dining table.
“Vliet, take one,” Caroline insisted.
> Vliet bit. He glanced across the table at Gene. “Beats ours,” he said.
“At the price, Bailey’s has to do something.” And Caroline, chattering continuously through cigarette smoke, pressed coffee and tiny, buttery cakes on everyone.
“Luv,” she asked Vliet, “did you find one?”
“In his closet,” Vliet said. “Trust Ma. She’d had it cleaned, and there it hung, in its plastic, for three years.”
“Does it still fit?” Caroline asked.
“Does it still matter?” Vliet replied.
“He didn’t own a real suit!” Caroline had tears in her eyes. “My Gawd, can you imagine any twenty-five-year-old man without a suit in our day? Much less a doctor?”
Sheridan said, “Dad, as long as I can remember, wore the same one to church. Brown and too tight.” His voice held pride in his boyhood poverty.
“What sort of life is it now?” Caroline choked and her tears spilled, as if Roger’s lack of a suit managed to sum up the entire tragedy.
“Well?” Sheridan asked Gene.
“Yes, we better.”
The two men stood. Sheridan put on his coat, which had been hanging over the back of his chair.
“You have everything?” Caroline asked. “A tie?”
“My new striped one,” Vliet said.
“And a shirt? Does he have a clean white shirt?”
“An old one,” Sheridan said.
“It won’t fit!”
“Forest Lawn has the secret passed down by ancient Egyptians,” Vliet said. “It’ll fit.”
“I can run down to Brand Boulevard in five—”
“Caroline,” Gene said quietly, “just calm down.”
She followed them to the door, embracing both.
Em’s old room was in front. Gene’s muffler on sunken paving must have disturbed her. “Vliet?” Her voice came plaintive, querulous. “Vliet, is that Aunt Caroline?”
“Me, luv,” Caroline called. She poured coffee, set two dainty twists of cinnamon on the saucer, and cigarette between her lips, navigated through the living room to the bedroom hall.
Cricket and Vliet sat on opposing couches. From a gilt frame a young woman, wickedly haughty, looked down on a tall, handsome young man and a tiny blonde cuddling a needlepoint pillow: her descendants.
Vliet held part II of the Times. “Dad tossed the front section,” he said, unfolding the paper, scanning. “This you won’t believe, Cricket. In editorials we have replaced the war in Indochina.”
Rich Friends Page 39
