Fast Start, Fast Finish

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  “But listen, if we sold that houses—”

  “There’d be plenty of money!”

  “It would be the answer to everything.…”

  “Oh, everything. It’s too much house for us, Charlie.”

  “We’ll get a nice little apartment in the city, go to the theater …”

  “Well, maybe still in Westmount. Because of my job.”

  “Oh, sure—well, I’ll buy that.”

  “Anywhere but on that Lane!”

  “What in hell were we thinking of, Nancy!”

  “Oh, darling, I’m so happy you suggested it. You can’t believe how happy I am, because—”

  “Because what?”

  “Because I just am!” she said.

  He was kissing her and tears were running down her cheeks—kissing there like two lovers on a lonely rock at the edge of an empty beach.

  “Darling—I’ve finished with the analysis!”

  “It’s really true—life begins at forty.”

  And they were laughing and kissing again.

  “Oh, look!” she whispered.

  “What?”

  He turned and saw that they were not entirely alone after all. An elderly woman in a black dress and lisle stockings was standing a little distance from them, looking at them disapprovingly. She had been shelling on the beach, and the front of her long dark skirt was lifted in one hand to form a little sack to hold her shells. Charlie waved to her and called out, “Life begins at forty!”

  “Ssh!” Nancy giggled in his ear and whispered. “Kiss me again!”

  “I love you.”

  “I love you too.”

  “And, oh, God, I need you,” he said. “Let’s never forget how much we need each other. We need each other always, don’t we, Nancy? Haven’t we always? Haven’t we?” He kissed her and the chilly wind was blowing, and the old shelling woman—no doubt—was still glaring at them, and he felt Nancy’s floppy rainhat blow off and roll across the beach as the fine spray blew up from the Atlantic and bathed their faces.

  “Sylvia?”

  There was a silence at the other end of the phone. Then a voice said, “Who is this?”

  “It’s Maggie Lord. Remember? I—”

  “You have the wrong number.”

  “No I don’t! I copied it off your telephone that morning before I left. Please listen, I—”

  “We don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Your telephone! At the foot of the stairs, in that house where you took me—your house in New Jersey!”

  She heard an intake of breath at the other end, and clutching the phone tight against her mouth, she said, “Listen! Please listen to me! If you hang up I’ll give your number to the police! Listen to me—I need help. Something’s wrong. I’ve started bleeding again. I want to see the doctor again. I have terrible—are you listening to me?”

  “We’re listening,” the voice said.

  Outside the telephone booth Harold made an approving O with his thumb and forefinger and winked at her.

  August, it turned out, was also a lousy month for selling houses. “People look for houses in the spring and in the fall,” the real-estate woman told them, “but mostly in the spring.” Still, though they had no offers, they had several calls just in that first day, and by Monday night several couples had looked at the house. The telephone would ring, and it would be the real-estate woman asking if she could bring some people by in about five minutes, and Charlie would then rush around the house plumping up cushions, emptying ashtrays, straightening bedspreads, trying to make the house look as presentable and attractive as possible. It was a good thing he was there during the day. He had started, with the first few people, going through the house with them, pointing out the house’s good features—adding a few little selling points here and there. But he had soon become disillusioned with that tactic, and now while the strangers prowled his house he did his best to hide from them. He had forgotten how blunt and tactless people were when they were shopping for houses. They weren’t looking for the good features. They were looking for the bad. Show them the shiny new furnace in the cellar, and they said they thought you had termites. “Of course, I’ve always hated this color,” a wife would say to her husband—right in front of Charlie, as though he weren’t there. And, “Oh, dear, what tiny closets.” And, “Do you really think we could ever make this room attractive? It’s so dark.” And, “This old-fashioned kitchen would drive me crazy,” and, “Only a tub in this one. We’d have to put in a shower.” It was depressing the way they talked, and so whenever he saw them coming he gave them a wide berth. When they came into his study—scowling, frowning, opening doors with sour looks—he scooted out. If he was on the phone they came right in anyway, talking loudly, opening closets, rummaging through his things, making their critical remarks: “What’s this? Oh, it’s a file for paintings.… Is it built in? How much would it cost to have it taken out?” He hated them all.

  On Thursday the telephone rang, and it was the real-estate woman again, saying she had some people. Could she show the house? He told her yes, and then, before he had a chance to do his straightening-up the phone rang again, and it was a secretary saying, “Mr. Lord? Mr. Eaton is calling.”

  “Hello, Stan,” he said when Stan Eaton came on the phone.

  “Hello, Charlie. How’s everything?”

  “Just fine, Stan.…”

  “Say, you remember the fellow I mentioned to you the other day who’s our head art director?” Stan said. “Well, he’s back from his vacation, and I had a chance to speak to him.”

  “Oh, good,” Charlie said.

  “Well, it doesn’t sound too promising for our shop,” Stan said. “There just isn’t any opening at the moment. But then I had another idea that might interest you—”

  While he was talking the door to his study opened, and it was Maggie. She stood leaning on the door and said, “Daddy.…”

  He covered the receiver with one hand and said, “I’m on the phone, honey.” And then, “Yes, Stan.…”

  “Fellow named Crittendon, runs a TV art service we use sometimes. And if you’d like, I could call him—”

  “Daddy!”

  There was something in Maggie’s pale face that frightened him. Her face was a terrible white, and she sank down on his sofa, her head back against the cushions.

  “… know him pretty well. Has kind of a rough exterior, but underneath that rough exterior there’s a—”

  “Stan, can I call you back?” he said, and hung up the phone. “What is it, Maggie?”

  “Call Mother.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Daddy, can you call Mother?”

  He stood up. “Maggie—what is it?”

  “Just … oh, hurting!” she said. “Daddy. Bleeding. Call Mother.” And she fell back across the sofa and her arms flew back, above her head, in the way she used to sleep as a child, and her eyes closed and her mouth hung open. Then one bare leg slid to the floor. He ran to her and picked her up in his arms. “What is it?” he kept saying. “Maggie, what is it?” He ran with her limp in his arms down the stairs and at the bottom met Mrs. Monroe, the real-estate woman, coming up with her clients. He ran past them without a word.

  “What’s the matter? Is she sick?”

  He ran out the front door and down the steps. Their God-damn car was blocking his in the driveway. “Maggie?” he kept saying. “Maggie?” And then yelling, “Move that car!”

  “What’s the matter, Mr. Lord?”

  “Move that God-damn car!”

  “Is she sick?”

  “Move the fucking car!”

  “You don’t have to use obscenities!”

  It was like trying to move in a dream, where your feet would not do your bidding, where everything was in slow-motion. Each act took an eternity to perform. For several years they hunted for the keys, and another lifetime went by while the other car was started and was backed out of the driveway to make way for his, while
he stood there waiting with his burden. Then he had Maggie in the front seat of the car, had slammed it into reverse, and had driven out of the Lane before he realized that he did not know where the hospital was.

  There was a policeman on a corner. He pulled up beside him.

  “Hospital.”

  “Hospital? You go down Locust—”

  “Jesus Christ, which is Locust?”

  “You’re on Locust now.…”

  “Okay … Yes, yes …” he said, trying to memorize the directions the policeman was giving him.

  “Maggie … Maggie …?” he kept saying to the silent figure slumped beside him, trying not to look at the front of his shirt which was stained with blood. “Dear God in Heaven,” he prayed, “Holy Father …” He had never prayed before, and knew no prayers, and so his prayers became wordless, meaningless, and he heard himself saying, “How …? How …? How?” And “What?”

  He saw the “Hospital” sign ahead of him and swerved, cutting across traffic, into the long curving drive—a drive that curved as endlessly as the endless passage of prayers to heaven, and it seemed that the figure of God must lie at the end of that long parabola. He touched Maggie’s shoulder, groped for a hand while he tried to steer toward it. Oh, Father, Father. “Silence,” the sign said, and the silence in the car was huge, a huge being in itself, and the silence that was riding with them grew and deepened and filled the car. He stopped the car in front of some wide white marble steps, stopped it with a jolt that threw him against the wheel, and then he was out of the car, running around it, opening the door, and lifting her again, astonished at her lightness, like lifting air, astonished that the vast silence that had been with him in the car had shrunk so swiftly into one small person. But how?

  Halfway up the steps he heard—he had not put the brake on—his car roll forward a short distance and crash into the rear bumper of the car parked ahead of it, and that was the end of that—but how.

  Inside the great glass doors more slow-motion people came toward him, some in uniform, nurses, and others with slow-motion faces, talking in slow-motion, and reaching out slow hands, and then he realized that the burden of his dead child had been lifted from him.

  “Dead.”

  He tried to push his way through them, after her. “But how.… But how …?” He heard his own distant words like words in a dream, because he was dreaming, and this was a dream. Soft hands all around were reaching out, restraining him, pushing him down, and he could no longer move against the soft hands and bodies, and he let their pressure push him down. “But how?”

  “Mrs. Lord, would you come in here a minute?”

  “I’m with a customer.…”

  “Please come in for just a minute.”

  She hurried into his little office. “She’s buying out the whole store!” she said excitedly. “She’s bought five—” But then she saw his face and sat down hard in the straight chair. “What’s happened?”

  “There’s been a terrible tragedy, Mrs. Lord,” Mr. Singleton said.

  “What kind of tragedy?” She sat very still.

  “The worst kind.”

  “Someone dead. My father. Thank God.”

  “Your little girl.”

  “What? No, it’s my father.…”

  “Maggie.…”

  “Maggie.” She repeated it. “Maggie?”

  “Mrs. Lord.…”

  “Why not my father? Who?” she asked. “Did you say—Maggie?”

  “Mrs. Lord. Please.”

  “Oh, God!” Her head fell, and she let him lift her up and support her out through the back door, toward the parking lot.

  17

  August ended with a downpour. The rain began before dawn, and by noon Roaring Brook Lane was a river itself, a torrent sweeping down across the asphalt. The hard-baked earth would not hold the water, and hollow places on lawns became lakes, and across the street Nancy watched a miniature Niagara pouring down the McCarthys’ wide flagstone steps. In the village the storm sewers rose and spilled over into the streets and across sidewalks, and Main Street was closed to traffic. At nine o’clock Mr. Singleton had phoned to tell her not to come to work; he would not open the shop today. Now she was on the phone with Mrs. Monroe, the real-estate woman, and they were talking about the weather and agreed that they had never seen such a terrible cloudburst. Water was falling in sheets. “But we needed the rain,” Mrs. Monroe concluded.

  “Yes.”

  “Anyway, what I was really calling about, Mrs. Lord, was to see whether we perhaps ought to consider a more realistic asking price.”

  “Don’t you think sixty thousand is realistic?”

  “It’s so hard to say. Somebody might come along who’d just fall in love with your house and would pay anything. On the other hand, from the people I’ve shown it to so far, the general reaction has been that it’s too high. And I know you’re anxious to sell it soon.”

  “Yes.”

  “I do have one couple, the Robinsons, who are really quite interested, but they say they simply cannot go as high as sixty.”

  “Well …”

  “Well, what do you think?”

  “I just don’t know. What do you think, Mrs. Monroe?”

  “I think perhaps we ought to start in the middle fifties and see what happens,” she said.

  “Well, all right,” Nancy said.

  “And, Mrs. Lord, I just want to say how sorry I was to hear about your daughter … so tragic. I just don’t know what to say.”

  “Well, thank you.…”

  “There’s nothing to say, is there? Except—that you have all my sympathy, both of you. And I wanted you to know you were in my prayers last Sunday.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And I can understand why you’re so eager to sell the house. It must have such unhappy memories for you now, that poor little child.”

  “Yes.…”

  “I lost a child once, when it was a tiny baby, but this—this must come as an even more awful thing, when they’re older. I just don’t know.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do they—do they know what it was, Mrs. Lord?”

  “A cyst or a tumor that—ruptured internally, and there was—hemorrhage, and—oh, you know how these doctors are. You can’t understand what they’re saying.…”

  “Yes. And—so suddenly. Tragic. I was there, you know, when your husband carried her out. There didn’t seem to be anything I could do.”

  “There was nothing anyone could do.”

  “Well, you’re lucky to have your job, that’s all I can say. I’ve always thanked God for my job—that I have something to do to keep my mind occupied. We just have to pick up and go on, don’t we?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I’ll be in touch. And let me know when you feel like having me show people through the house again.”

  “Oh, I think—any time is all right now.”

  “Very well. And I think we’ve got a more realistic price idea now for you.”

  “Yes. Thanks very much.”

  “Good-bye.”

  She hung up the phone.

  Charlie put down his newspaper and said, “What did she say?”

  “That she was sorry. And so forth.”

  “I hadn’t heard that about a cyst or a tumor. Is that what they think now? I thought they said something about an infection. Do they—”

  “I thought we weren’t going to talk about it!” she said shrilly. “What good will it do to talk about it? We agreed—”

  He jumped to his feet. “Don’t I have a right to know how my daughter died?” he said. “I want to know why! Why?”

  “You agreed! I agreed not to talk about Cathy, and you agreed not to talk about this! You promised!”

  “I want to know! Maggie and Cathy are two different things. My God, Maggie was my daughter and I want to know what killed her. You talked to the doctors—I didn’t. I want to know what they said.”

  “Stop this! Stop it!”

&n
bsp; “Then I’ll ask them myself,” he said, starting toward the phone. “I’m not going to sit here day after day, not knowing, with you refusing to talk about it.”

  “No!” she cried.

  “Then tell me.”

  She stood very still in the center of the room, saying nothing. Then she said something he could not hear.

  “What?”

  “A puncture, a uterine … puncture.”

  “What does that mean?”

  In an altogether unfamiliar voice, she said, “She tried to abort herself—they think.”

  He stared at her. “You mean she was pregnant?”

  “No. There was no sign—that she was.”

  “Then—”

  “She must have—thought she was. That’s what they think.”

  “Why didn’t she tell us?”

  “Afraid to? I don’t know. Afraid the other kids would find out, the neighbors.… I don’t know.” She sat down very quickly and covered her face with her hands.

  “Afraid of us?”

  “I knew she wasn’t feeling well, but she wouldn’t tell me what it was. I wanted her to see a doctor, but she wouldn’t. It was her fault—not mine.”

  “Nancy …”

  “Her fault! Not mine!”

  “Nancy, Nancy.…”

  “Oh, God, forgive me!” she sobbed, and then, for the first time since it happened, she began to cry.

  He sat beside her for a long time, his arm around her, while the rain fell outside the windows. At last she was still and looked up. “I’ve got to go,” she said. “I’ll be late for my class.”

  After a while he got up and started up the stairs to his study. The sound of his footsteps on the stairs was heavy and old, as old as the sound of the rain outside. The sound of the rain was eternal. Nancy’s father wanted the ashes to go to Detroit, to some Aylesbury family place, but Nancy did not want Maggie in Detroit, and neither did Charlie. But it didn’t seem right to have the ashes in Westmount, either—nor in California. There didn’t seem to be any proper place for her in this world or the next, and he envisioned her only in some timeless place, under the rain. He opened the door to his study and turned on the light, trying to make himself stop thinking these thoughts, as they had promised each other to do. But it was so infuriating to think of Nancy’s father, who had not even seen a way to come to the little private services (tied up at a business convention in Phoenix, accepting another chairmanship, tied up!), trying to control the destiny of a tiny box of ashes. Just because W. R. Aylesbury regarded himself as immortal did not give him the right to take charge of other immortal things. Over the past week and a half Charlie had grown to hate his father-in-law more violently than ever. He sat down in front of his easel and picked up his brushes, trying to fall in love again with the smooth feel of wood between his fingers, trying to find in the feel of the wood some kind of solace.