by Warren Adler
BOOKS BY WARREN ADLER
Banquet Before Dawn
Blood Ties
Cult
Death of a Washington Madame
Empty Treasures
Flanagan's Dolls
Funny Boys
Madeline's Miracles
Mourning Glory
Natural Enemies
Private Lies
Random Hearts
Residue
The Casanova Embrace
The Children of the Roses
The David Embrace
The Henderson Equation
The Housewife Blues
The War of the Roses
The Womanizer
Trans-Siberian Express
Twilight Child
Undertow
We Are Holding the President Hostage
SHORT STORIES
Jackson Hole, Uneasy Eden
Never Too Late For Love
New York Echoes
New York Echoes 2
The Sunset Gang
MYSTERIES
American Sextet
American Quartet
Immaculate Deception
Senator Love
The Ties That Bind
The Witch of Watergate
Copyright © 1985 by Warren Adler.
ISBN 978-1-59006-104-6
All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced
in any form without permission. This novel is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, places, incidents are either the product
of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.
Inquiries: WarrenAdler.com
STONEHOUSE PRESS
Contents
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
For my grandparents
Se niente va bene, chiama nonno e nonna.
1
FRANCES watched him as he stood in the patch of garden in the sweltering night, squinting into the grate on which the steaks sizzled, intense and absorbed in his task. In the air conditioned cool of the den, she sipped the martini he had mixed with scrupulous care. It was strange and bitter to her taste. Music spilled softly from the speakers. Mozart, he had said. She whispered the name and continued to watch him.
He wore a blue blazer, light gray flannels, and a floppy polka dot bow tie, which, in Dundalk, would have certainly seemed eccentric. But in the environment of this townhouse in Columbia, it was, she supposed, perfectly appropriate.
The candles he had lit in the den cast a flickering orange glow on the books, some helter-skelter, some standing like soldiers, in the paneled bookcases. On the walls were paintings, real paintings, not just prints. Mostly, they were splotches of deep colors in strange shapes. Abstract art, he had called them, expressing the hope that she loved them. She did not give him cause to think otherwise. It was all very wonderful and mysterious and she felt transported into an environment totally different from any she had ever known.
She had, in a way, expected this first formal date to be exactly as it was turning out. No, there were no disappointments. In her life, that was most unusual.
“I know it’s confusing.”
Those were his very first words to her, soft and considerate, yet unmistakably authoritative. It was, after all, his department and she was hired merely as a temporary to check input forms for some computer program, of which she understood little. He did not know, of course, that she was mortified by her failure. Nor could he see the symptoms of her agitation, the sudden tightness in her stomach, the tremors in her knee joints, the dryness in the roof of her mouth.
Patiently, like some kindly teacher, he had re-explained the process, and by the time he looked up at her, showing dark brown eyes with yellow flecks, her symptoms had disappeared.
“I’m terribly sorry,” she had whispered. She hadn’t expected the apology to be as abject as it must have sounded. Apparently, though, it struck a chord of sympathy in him, and later in the day he had stopped by her desk, looking over her shoulder until she felt the symptoms begin again.
“Now you got it,” he had told her. This time, the receding symptoms left anger in their wake. He is treating me like a child, she thought defensively. The way she sometimes treated Tray, her five-year-old, when he did something right after repeated failures.
“Thank you,” she had replied, wondering if he caught the tinge of sarcasm. It frightened her to think so, and she turned to look up at him and flash him a quick smile. In that instant, she sensed that he had, in some strange way, photographed her with his mind. It was so unexpected and illogical and ill-timed that she tried to force herself to deny it. But that didn’t stop her from thinking about it, and soon she simply dismissed it as a mirage.
This is ridiculous, she had told herself the next day as she hunched over the forms, feeling his gaze at her back destroying her concentration. And when she got up to drop her batch of finished forms in the collection tray, the gaze continued to follow her. To test her imagination, she turned swiftly, only to confirm her instinct. Through the glass partitions of his office, he was, indeed, watching her, too absorbed to discover his embarrassment. When he did, he grew flustered, blushed scarlet, and his hand inadvertently brushed against a half-filled coffee mug, which sent its contents onto his lap. He knew, of course, that she had seen the mishap, and now it was her turn to be embarrassed.
She must have been to him some kind of a curiosity, she decided. Certainly he was not looking at me as a woman, she assured herself, although vanity dictated that she take stock of herself, which she did immediately in the mirror of the ladies room. That morning she had allowed herself a light dab of lipstick and only the faintest touch of mascara, wondering if even that little makeup was appropriate to her recent widowhood.
Charlie, Chuck’s father, still wore a scrap of black crepe on his shirt. It was as if he had dedicated his whole being to memorializing his son. Of course, she did understand his pain, the lonely agony of his and Molly’s loss. Chuck had been, after all, their only child, the entire product of their long marriage. It gave her guilt feelings to assess her own grief and find it wanting. At times she wondered if Charlie wore his scrap of black crepe solely to remind her of her widowhood. It was, she knew, an unworthy thought. By then, she was having lots of those. Particularly disturbing was the eerie sense of freedom that Chuck’s death had given her. Grass widowhood had actually been more lonely than the real thing was. Now there was no more apprehension, no more anxiety, no more waiting. Chuck was never coming home, ever again.
Her scrutiny of herself had proved that she was reasonably neat. She had ironed her skirt and blouse the night before. There were no tears in her panty hose. Her chestnut hair, washed, set and brushed that morning was, well, in the flattering light, nice. Her skin, if one ignored the little milky way of freckles over the bridge of her nose and cheeks, was clear. As always, she ignored the circles under her eyes, a genetic gift from her mother, destined to deepen and darken, as her mother’s had done as despair over her father’s loss and declining health slowly destroyed the woman’s life.
Her image in the mirror had been oddly reassuring, marking what was, in retrospect, a new chapter in her life. At the time, it was impossible to acknowledge such a fact. It was too soon. Even now, watching Peter squint into the smoke, it was still, chronologically at least, too soon. Or was
it?
She had squirreled away the memory of their first full-length conversation. Most of her responses had been evasions. Had she been too frightened, too conscious of her own vulnerability? He had materialized beside her in the company cafeteria. She had sidled off by herself, deliberately eschewing the company of her co-temporaries. Later she would question that contention, since she had observed him in line behind her and it had set her wondering why he was not in the executive dining room where he belonged.
“Do you mind?” he had asked, putting his tray down beside hers.
“Of course not, Mr. Graham.” What else could she have said? She was, after all, not exactly annoyed. Surely curious. But she refused to give herself permission to feel flattered. She did remember, however, that she had posed to herself the inevitable question, “Why me?”
“Peter,” he had said. “My name is Peter.”
After an awkward silence, she had said, “This seems like a very nice place to work.” It seemed an embarrassingly trite response, and she had had to pause to ride out a difficult moment.“ . . . Peter.”
“Yes, it is. I am happy here,” Peter said tentatively. But the message he conveyed was very clear. Happy here? He was clearly advertising a condition of his life outside of the office and scrutinizing her for a reaction. When he observed nothing definitive, he looked down at his tray and cut his beef patty with a fork. “Do you live around here?” he asked, obviously seeking a new tack.
“About forty minutes away,” she said. She wasn’t sure if she was being clumsy, guarded, or merely afraid to tell him Dundalk, as if it would define her as being beneath him, a thought that brought an immediate sense of belligerence. “Dundalk,” she said, slightly snappish. She felt better after getting it out.
He shrugged.
“I’ve never been there. I live in Columbia. Just ten minutes from the office.” He looked up at her, but when she returned his gaze, he withdrew his own. “I’ve got a townhouse. Not bad for a bachelor. I’m divorced.”
There was no mistaking the approach, of course. She wasn’t that naive, she told herself. She also couldn’t yet quite conceive herself to be available, even for this type of conversation. Besides, she had forgotten how to participate in the ritual. No, she had never really known. With Chuck the evolution was natural, the contrivances nonexistent.
She had been working as a receptionist in a daytime radio station with its studios and towers on the edge of a marsh north of Baltimore. Chuck’s job was to climb and check the structure of the three directional towers that sent out the station’s signal. From the window beside her desk, she would, with her heart in her throat, watch him climb, a romantic and courageous figure in cowboy boots and tight jeans, golden hair flowing in the breeze.
It was always a relief to see him descend and move gracefully toward the little building that housed the studios. While he waited to give his report to the engineer, they would drift into conversation which, in time, turned into what she supposed people termed courtship. Then came marriage, motherhood, estrangement, and widowhood.
In her mind the chronology of events became blurred, leaving her with only the terrible memory of perpetual loneliness and the never-ending search within herself for blame. So not everything natural was automatically good, she had told herself later when the comparisons between Chuck and Peter rose more sharply in her mind.
But, in that first conversation, Peter had persisted.
“They say it’s supposed to be easy for men. I can tell you, it’s not. Even though I wasn’t married very long.” He drew in a deep sigh and offered a smile. To foreclose on his asking the inevitable question, she interjected her own.
“Any kids?”
“No, thank goodness.”
“You don’t like kids?”
“Oh, I like kids, all right. I mean it’s lucky we didn’t have any. No. I do like kids. She didn’t, you see.”
“I have a five-year-old,” she had replied.
“That’s terrific,” he had said, but she had noted the considerable damper her seeming unavailability put on his initial enthusiasm. He actually flushed, and she noted that he pushed his tray a trifle forward, as if he had suddenly lost his appetite. She debated telling him of her marital status, but by the time she made her decision, he had looked at his watch as if he had just remembered an important meeting, gotten up, muttered a good-bye, and gone off. She wasn’t certain whether to be insulted or relieved.
Assessing her reactions later, she had wondered why she did feel even a smidgen of righteousness. She was, after all, a very recent widow and very conscious of propriety. How could she not be? With Charlie still in deep mourning and Molly breaking into an occasional lip tremble and Frances herself trying to look appropriately grieved, although it was difficult to maintain the pose, since she wasn’t feeling it. It was, in fact, awful to live with the feeling of liberation that Chuck’s death had given her. Yet it was only a partial liberation, since she continued to search for reasons her marriage failed. Death could not erase her own failure. If she only knew where it lay. What were her marital sins of omission and commission? Was she destined to repeat her mistakes and relive her disappointments? On the plus side, at least she had been left with a fine, beautiful, healthy child and some semblance of family.
It took her a week to tell Peter the truth about her status. Not that he wasn’t friendly after their conversation in the cafeteria, but it was in a purely office sense. He had continued to watch her. There was no mistaking that. Actually, she watched him as well, and not without some womanly reaction. It was a fact that was troublesome to admit to herself, especially at night, lying on her back looking at the endless expanse of shadowless ceiling. She took her mind off it by listening for Tray’s breathing, waiting for his heart-stopping little sighs.
“A widow? Are you really?” he had said, a reaction that did not hide his elation. “You’re so young.”
“I don’t feel so young.” Somehow, twenty-five did not seem very young. Considering what she had already been through, orphaned and widowed, that quarter of a century seemed like eons. But she had hastened to put her widowhood in its accurate time frame. “Less than two months ago. He fell off an oil rig in Saudi Arabia.”
“How terrible,” he had replied.
What she had wanted to say was that it had been terrible for him to have been there in the first place, terrible for him to have felt this need of both adventure and distance, terrible for Tray to have been left fatherless. For her, the tragedy had been her inability to engage his permanent interest. True husbands and fathers did not volunteer to go off to die in faraway places. Not without wars or compelling and unavoidable reasons. It was odd, but the idea of his death filled her more with anger than with remorse.
Frances and Peter had begun to take their lunches together every day, and although she did feel that others in the office were taking notice, she chose to ignore their occasional odd glances and chance remarks. There was, indeed, no doubt about his interest in her.
“How does your boy take it?” he had asked. His probes were, she observed, very careful, as if he were frightened of offending her. It’s all right, she wanted to say. But she had her own fears to contend with. After all, he was her boss, even though she was temporary. And he was vastly more educated, a computer engineer, an executive in a big company, a man of means and substance. Her life had been so . . . so inconsequential compared to his. Was the mysterious power of attraction able to bridge that gap? She had no trouble thinking up questions to nag at her.
She had no one to confide in, of course. No one to whom she could express her fears and doubts, or even to merely report her conversations with Peter. There had been relationships with young couples at the beginning of her marriage to Chuck, but with Chuck’s long absences, those had gone out the window. She had felt like a third wheel, which also considerably dampened her enthusiasm for socializing. Then bringing up Tray alone became a more acceptable excuse for her isolation. The easy way out was to
fall on the mercy of her in-laws, whose agenda was a lot different from her own. Charlie would, of course, be appalled by her growing friendship with Peter. To him, widows mourned, especially Frances, who had married his golden-haired prince. It wasn’t just a matter of wearing black, which she had dutifully done for a few weeks, it was also a question of wearing an appropriate expression of inconsolable grief. She was not very good at that. For Charlie, she knew, the tangible symbols of her mourning would never, could never, be enough. And yet, he might have prevented Chuck from leaving home and dying. But he had not raised a finger to stop him. He hadn’t even tried.
She might have confided in Molly. Between them had always lain the possibility of real friendship and understanding. But the opportunity always fell short of the wish. Molly, after all, had given her life to Charlie, and one could never be sure how one’s confidences might be distorted.
But when Peter asked her out for the evening, she invariably refused.
“It’s my son,” she told him apologetically. It was only partly true. She could always have dropped him off at her in-laws’. But then they would be curious about her absence, and she was not very good at telling lies.
“What about weekends?”
“I really can’t.” Of course, she wanted to. And she hated the burden of fear and guilt.
“Why?” After a while, it became his refrain.
“Bring your son, then,” he had begged her.
That would hardly have been a solution. Tray would spill the beans to Charlie in two seconds flat.
“It’s just too soon, Peter.”
She didn’t explain about Charlie and Molly. Perhaps Peter would think her too weak, too dependent. He just might be right about that. Then, of course, there was the chance of familiarity breeding contempt. It was nice and safe to have these cozy little lunches in the cafeteria. She could keep herself guarded so that he might not truly know the dimensions of her inadequacy. In that way, she could avoid disappointment.
“Then when would it not be too soon?” he had asked.
“I’m really not sure.”
