Though most of her counterparts had nannies and housekeepers who lived in, Eliza was happy with the situation she and Mrs. Twomey had worked out. Mrs. Twomey stayed whenever Eliza needed her. Mrs. Twomey made it possible to go to KEY and concentrate on her work. Mrs. Twomey made it possible to make a living. Mrs. Twomey made it possible to leave Janie without too much guilt. Eliza supposed that she could somehow survive without Mrs. Twomey, but she couldn’t imagine how.
Mrs. Twomey was standing in the kitchen doorway.
“I was thinking about that poor Mr. Kendall all night. Such a shame, it is. Him so young and all. I remember that cocktail party you gave that he came to. I don’t mind telling you it was a real thrill to meet the man after watching him for so many years on television. He stood and talked to me like I was the most important person in the whole world. Imagine! Him so grand and all! I told all my relatives about it.”
“You are the most important. . . . I don’t know what Janie and I would do if we didn’t have you.”
“Ah, go on with ya.” Despite her protestations, Mrs. Twomey was pleased.
“You’re right, Mrs. Twomey. It is a shame about Mr. Kendall, a real shame. When someone dies in the prime of life, it seems so unfair.” She stopped, the inevitable thought of John creeping into her mind. Protectively, she rose from her chair. Keep moving, she thought. Don’t think about it now.
Eliza went into Janie’s 101 Dalmations–decorated bedroom and kissed the head with hair the exact shade as her own. It was amazing how much Janie looked like John as she slept. Like everything else Janie did in her life, the little girl even slept purposefully, getting her rest for another busy day of nursery school, lunch, Riverside Park and the merry crew of preschoolers who played there in the afternoons. With a little luck, by the time Janie and Mrs. Twomey got back from the park, Eliza would be home.
The driver had the car radio on. Shock-jock Howard Stern was in full throttle. “What the hell’s going on over at that place? KEY News is falling apart. First Kendall bites the dust. Now, you’re telling me, Robin, that Eliza Blake is loony?”
Robin Quivers, Stern’s on-air sidekick, laughed. “No, Howard. It doesn’t say loony. It says that she spent some time in a hospital that treats substance abusers and people with mental problems.”
“So what is she anyway? A junkie?”
The driver snapped off the radio.
When she arrived at the KEY to America offices, the day’s newspapers were already piled on her desk. The headlines all trumpeted the anchorman’s death.
Harry Granger handed her a cup of coffee.
“Unreal, huh?” he shuddered.
Teaming Harry Granger with Eliza Blake had been the network’s attempt to break the morning co-host mold followed by the other networks. KEY took a chance that viewers would want an alternative to the thirty- and early forty-something teams on the other shows.
Granger was in his late fifties and on first impression would be described as craggy. He had a way of saying what others were thinking but hesitated to say aloud. This tendency had, on more than one occasion, gotten him into controversial situations. On any given morning viewers, as well as the show’s producers, were never quite sure what Harry would ask or respond in an interview. It lent an excitement to the show.
There had also developed an interesting tension between the two on air. They genuinely liked each other. Granger sometimes came across as paternalistic toward Eliza. Sometimes she went with it and enjoyed it, other times she bristled at it. Always there had been a mutual admiration and stimulation and it came across to the audience. The ratings reflected that the viewers liked what they saw.
“God, I just saw him Tuesday,” Harry continued. “In fact, we had coffee in the commissary together. We talked about the usual. . . company politics, the ratings, the campaign. . . .” Granger paused for a moment, his eyes focused on the pen he was twisting in his hands. “It’s such a short damned ride. I can’t believe he just dropped dead.”
“Neither can I,” Eliza sighed. She lifted her mug and carefully sipped the bitter black brew. “Bill was always so kind to me. I remember when John died. . . .” Eliza’s voice trailed off. She bit the inside corner of her mouth. She didn’t want to start crying now. She looked down at the papers on her desk.
Granger patted her hand. He knew her well enough to know that she would talk when she was ready. “Go ahead, read on,” he said. As he walked slowly away, Eliza heard him grumbling to himself, “There’s no way in hell that Pete Carlson can fill Bill’s shoes.”
Eliza was unaware that Harry’s eyes followed her as she turned to her Newstar terminal and typed in K-E-N-D-A-L-L. He watched her fiddling with the little charm on the bracelet she always wore as a long list of stories slugged for the anchorman popped on the computer. Poor kid. She’d been through a lot. John was a nice guy and she had been crazy about him. She had taken it hard. Now, to have the hospitalization brought up in such a scabby way, casting doubt on her ability to do a job she clearly excelled at, no, she didn’t need that. She didn’t deserve it.
Harry could not know that Eliza was turning her dream of last night over in her mind and the biting comments she’d just heard on the radio as she highlighted the latest entry and punched the button to make the editorial information appear on the screen.
Much of the data was a repeat of what she had learned from Mack McBride’s report on the special. The only new information was what Mack had not been able to pin down from the police last night. The autopsy on Bill Kendall’s body was being done today.
Chapter 15
The KEY to America morning show televised from a ground floor glassed-in studio. During the live broadcast, outdoor television monitors allowed those who showed up each day a chance to see themselves on national TV.
The man noticed that the crowd gathered outside was larger than usual this morning.
He never went too near the crowd. The voices told him not to. Instead, he watched the monitors from a distance. It didn’t matter that he couldn’t hear what was being said because Eliza Blake spoke to him directly. Sometimes she told him where to go and sometimes she even told him where to find the animals for his beloved brass menagerie.
Something was wrong today.
Eliza looked very serious and sad on the monitors. She usually smiled a lot.
Now a news story was playing in the monitors. There was a closeup picture of a handsome man on the screen and then a reporter was standing in front of a townhouse with a big black door. A big elephant doorknocker gleamed from the center of the door. At the bottom of the screen flashed the reporter’s name and his location.
The homeless man recognized the townhouse. He had passed it many times on his rounds. He had always admired that knocker, but the voices had never told him to take it.
Until now.
Chapter 16
Louise Palladino Kendall stepped into the marble foyer. In the few months she had been living there, she had grown to love her condominium at Bears Nest. Her generous divorce settlement from Bill Kendall allowed her to have a very comfortable lifestyle.
She had purchased the multilevel, luxury condo in Park Ridge, New Jersey, when William moved to the supervised group home where he lived with five other mentally retarded adults. Louise had no longer wanted the house with its accompanying worries. Everything from security to snow removal was now included in her monthly maintenance fee. It made her life much simpler.
Her neighbors were mostly executives employed by the corporations headquartered in the northern New Jersey area, successful private businessmen, lawyers and doctors. There had also been famous residents. Former President and Mrs. Nixon had made their home at Bears Nest. That certainly had not hurt real estate values.
Louise was more aware than most of the market prices of condominiums, and most of the other residential real estate in the Pascack Valley as well. Louise Kendall sold real estate. She was quite good at it.
When Bill had gotten the New York network
job, they had decided to live in the suburbs. Better for William, they decided, to be somewhere where he could freely roam around the backyard than life in the city. Both William and they had enough to contend with. Making day-to-day living as pleasant and easy as possible had been a high priority for the Kendalls.
That was before they had finally gotten a diagnosis for William’s developmental delays, before they had ever heard of Fragile X syndrome.
At first, Louise had frantically occupied herself with getting William settled in his special school and immersed herself in the therapies, teaching theories, specialists and constant worrying that went along with having a child with “special needs.” It was the constant worrying that sent her way down.
Bill was new at KEY at the time and the network seemed to think they owned him. He was away quite often, many times for long stretches. Alone at the end of the day, when William was finally sleeping quietly, Louise had too much time to think.
She thought about her son and his future. She thought about the cruelty of other children and the ignorance of some adults. She cringed at the thought of William being made fun of by anyone. She thought about the looks from other mothers at the Grand Union, their eyes quickly averted when caught staring at her little boy as he flapped his arms and bit his hands in the supermarket aisle, or bit holes in the neck of his shirt while he bounced up and down on his toes at the checkout counter. She thought about what kind of life William could expect and what, in turn, that would mean to her life. And finally, she thought about what her son’s life would be after she was gone. These thoughts consumed her.
Finally, her doctor had told her that she had to get some sort of work out of the house. Real estate had fit the bill. She could make her own schedule, was always in the area, easily accessible to either home or school if William needed her. The fact that she enjoyed her work was an unanticipated bonus.
The work served her well and she was grateful for it. When her marriage ended, she was thankful that she had her real estate career on which to force her concentration. It was work that provided her with a social outlet as well as a sense of purpose.
But tonight, as she walked across the freshly vacuumed carpet and switched on the light, real estate and its values were far from her mind.
Bill dead.
William’s father, her ex-husband, the man she had lived with for fourteen years. No warning. Gone.
The last twenty-four hours could not have really happened. The frantic call from Millie, the maddening ride into New York, crazed at the thought of William being there, needing her. The frustrating traffic, even going toward the city at evening rush hour, crawling across the George Washington Bridge. She had listened as the radio announcer talked about the death of the KEY anchorman. Bill, her Bill.
William had run to her, eyes swollen. Limited though his mental capacities may have been, William understood that his father, the man he loved more than any other, had died. He sobbed like the child that he was.
The police had been polite but there really wasn’t much they could tell her beyond what she had already heard on the car radio. The autopsy would tell more.
Louise had appeared calm. Icy, a policeman would later describe her to his celebrity-struck wife. Louise remained in the townhouse until the body had been taken away and the police had completed what they had to do. She instructed the badly shaken Millie to go home, pressed some crisp bills into the housekeeper’s palm and told her that she would call her about what to do next. Louise and William left through the rear to avoid the television cameras out front. Ironic, she thought. Bill made his living in front of those cameras, and in his death we were trying to escape them.
On the ride home, Louise fought back the tears as she listened to her son recall a conversation about the Yankees that he’d had with his father.
Louise could always tell when William was trying to make sense of something. He would do a replay of a conversation with the person involved. Amazingly, she’d known him to be extremely accurate in his recall. He was a wonderful mimic.
Now he was trying to somehow make sense of the fact that his father, who’d promised they’d go to some Yankee games, was gone and wouldn’t be taking him.
William had stayed with her last night. Surprisingly he fell asleep quickly and he slept through the night. Louise knew that while it was easier for those around him to think that the young man really didn’t have the same emotions as “normal” people, William did have feelings. He felt things deeply. William idolized his father. This was a profound loss.
There had been a few phone calls last night, friends wanting to connect. But she was exhausted and hadn’t really wanted to talk. The phone had continued to ring today. Neither she nor Bill had ever remarried. Bill’s parents were dead and there were no brothers or sisters. As the mother of Bill’s son, Louise was the one they called with condolences and questions about arrangements.
By late afternoon, William, who had spent most of the day in the den playing video games on the computer, approached her in the kitchen.
“I want to go to my house,” he said.
Louise was surprised. “You do? Why?”
“I’m used to it. I want to go.”
Knowing how important order was to him and knowing that he had never really considered the condominium his home, Louise had driven William back to the group home a few miles away. She herself would have preferred to have her son with her tonight, but she always remembered what a friend who had long taught special education told her: the children who do the best are the ones whose parents let go the most. She encouraged acts of independence. She wanted William to function as well as he could on his own, to have some measure of self-confidence. The counselor had reassured Louise that he would call if William seemed to need her.
Now, home again, she sat in the crewel-covered Queen Anne wing chair and began to flip absentmindedly through the mail. A department store flyer, a couple of bills, mail order catalogs, the order form for the tickets for the New Visions for Living fund-raiser in June. Tired, she rubbed her forehead round and round with her fingertips. God, Bill was scheduled to be the featured speaker at the fund-raising dinner. He did it every year. It was a big draw. Now what would they do? Maybe she could get someone else from KEY News to fill in for Bill and make a speech. But who could do it nearly as well as Bill with all the experience he brought to the subject? Louise didn’t want to think about that now.
The familiar handwriting on a long white envelope caught her up short. Her name and address were written in Bill’s distinctive scrawl.
Louise sat for a few moments, staring at the letter. She pictured Bill licking a stamp and sticking it on the corner of the envelope. She wondered if he had walked to a mailbox himself to deposit it, or if he had just given it to Jean to mail for him. She thought of him doing a common, everyday task, oblivious of what was just ahead.
Briefly, she thought of calling someone to be with her while she read the contents of the envelope. She reconsidered, knowing there was no one with whom she wanted to share the intimacy of Bill’s last message to her. Louise bit her lip as she carefully tore open the flap. Inside was a letter on heavy paper, and a gray computer diskette.
Dear Lou,
By now, you’ve learned that I am dead. I’m so sorry that it had to be this way. I’m sorry, too, about leaving you to take care of William all alone.
Leaving you? She stared at those words and reread them over and over again, afraid to continue. How did Bill know that he was dying? She tried to think of how he looked that last time she had seen him. She forced herself to read on.
William’s the best thing about us, Louise, and you’ve been the greatest mother he could have ever had. I’ve put all my financial affairs in order, as best I could, and you and William will be taken care of.
You know how much I’ve always hated wakes, so please, just a Mass. I know how strange it may sound, but I want to be buried from Sacred Heart Cathedral in Newark.
Newark?
There’s a young priest there, Father Alec Fisco, and I’ve already let him know that I want him to give the eulogy. Please make the arrangements, Louise. Maybe a donation’s in order, as I’m not a regular parishioner there. If you would, have my body sent back to Nebraska—there’s a plot next to my parents’.
It’s always amazed me how the experts seem so sure that suicides are angry, wanting their loved ones to know that their love was not enough.
Oh my God! Suicide. But that’s impossible. Bill would never take his own life.
I’m not angry, Louise, especially with you. You were a good wife. I want you to know that what we once had was very precious to me. I failed at being the kind of husband you deserved, and though I’ve seemed like a success to the rest of the world I’ve failed at facing life—failed, I guess, at the most important thing there is. I just can’t go on, knowing what I know.
I’ve enclosed a diskette for William. He so loves that computer. I want him to have a goodbye note from me. I know that I’ve left you with the impossible job of explaining this to him. Again, I’m sorry, Louise. Please forgive me.
Love,
Bill.
Louise sat alone, stunned, listening to the sound of the ticking clock. The phone rang three times before she even heard it. Range Bullock was on the other end of the line.
“Louise, it’s about Bill. The autopsy results are back. I’m sorry. . . .”
“I know,” she whispered, not bothering to wipe the mascara running down her cheeks.
Chapter 17
“This is the Bill Kendall autopsy results narration in three, two, one. . . .
Do You Want to Know a Secret? Page 6
