Compelled by some outdated formality that overtook her when she returned to childhood haunts, Gwen divested herself of jeans and slipped on a fitted rayon dress and flats. The short, graying hair got a few licks with a brush but, as always, it did what it did. Without saying good-bye to her mother, she lifted the car keys from the hook under the kitchen cupboard and slunk out the back door.
Dr. Korver looked much as he had as long as Gwen could remember:, bow tie, suspenders, a clean-shaven and age-defying baby face. His hair was white but was still so thick and lush, one could almost believe he had it bleached to reassure his older patients.
Perched fully dressed on the examination table, Gwen knew neither of them was completely at ease.
“Annie said an emergency,” Dr. Korver said for starters.
“I need to talk to you.” Dr. Korver didn’t do anything so crass as to glance at his watch, but he fidgeted and Gwen could read the impatience just as clearly. From the look on his face, talk wouldn’t take precedence over so much has an ingrown toenail. “I need to know how my father died,” Gwen said abruptly.
“Cancer. Surely your mother told you?”
Gwen nodded. “Did you see him?” she pressed.
“If I remember rightly, he died in Sioux City or somewhere, visiting I think. You should be asking your mother these questions, Gwen.”
“You never saw him dead?”
He shrugged his shoulders. This time he did look at his watch.
“So you don’t know that he died?” Gwen sounded accusing and he reacted in kind, his avuncular manner disappearing behind a mask of injured pride.
“He had an inoperable brain tumor. Unless he got hit by a truck first, he died of it,” he said bluntly, and stood to indicate the interview was over.
Gwen caught hold of his arm. “Please,” she said. “Could I see my medical records and Mom’s?”
Dr. Korver looked at her for a moment. His visage softened. He’d come to recognize pain in all its guises. “What’s wrong, Gwen?”
She said nothing and the kindness was pushed aside by irritation. “You can see your medical records, though I don’t know what good it’ll do you. I can’t let you see your mother’s without her permission.” He left and Gwen felt as cold and exposed as if she wore only a backless paper gown.
After pulling her file, Annie left Gwen alone in the records room. Quickly, she flipped through the pages. Though she was healthy, so many years of care made it thick. Before 1952 there were seven entries: three general check-ups, an ear infection, fever, a scald on her left forearm, and a hairline fracture of her left foot.
Taking advantage of Annie’s trusting nature, Gwen moved to the filing cabinet and walked her fingers through the C’s. Her father’s file was gone, taken to storage years before no doubt, but her mother’s was there. Still standing Gwen scanned the entries from 1945 to 1952: influenza, broken rib, tonsillitis, sprained wrist. The box marked INSURANCE/ HEALTH/LIFE had the word “None” scribbled in it twice. No wonder there was such a paucity of doctor’s visits during those years.
Footsteps sounded on the linoleum outside the door and Gwen hastily fumbled the file back into place. Her heart pounded as if peeking at her mother’s medical history were a capital crime. No one entered the records room and Gwen took a moment to pull herself together before she ventured out and said her good-byes to Annie.
She couldn’t bring herself to go back to her mother’s, not yet. She chewed mechanically through a late lunch at Kapoochi’s on Nicollet and Eighth. The food was more an excuse for the glass of Chardonnay than an end in itself.
When the dishes had been cleared and only another solitary glass or dessert could excuse lingering, Gwen returned to the festive crush on Nicollet.
Because the sun shone, Minnesotans made it a holiday. Flower vendors lined the street. People walked and waited for buses and shopped and chattered in groups. Gwen joined the loiterers gathering sun on the wide brick sills of the Conservatory.
Fortified with wine, she could again think of the skeleton, her mother, and murder. Broken rib, sprained wrist, scalded arm, fractured foot; a history of abuse or just the vagaries of living? Gwen had nothing to compare it to, no government statistics on how often the average mother and daughter damaged themselves in the pursuit of daily life.
Why kill a dying man? Surely it was easier and safer to let nature take its course. Self-defense? Possibly. A favorite with the girls: killed in a moment of jealous rage or because he was going to leave? Also possible.
Madolyn Clear never remarried and Gwen had believed it was because she never stopped loving her dead husband. Could it be that memories of a bad marriage made her shy of the institution? And the lilacs? “Now you can keep the house full of flowers. Small blessings.” Revenge? Planting a man allergic to lilacs under six trees of blooms? Each thought was more wretched than the last, sick-making, and Gwen shook herself free of them as a dog rids its fur of raindrops.
Too many years had passed since the death of a father she had never known for the lash of his murder to cut too deep. Betrayal of truth was the injury; loss of the idea that love existed, that she was born from it and to it. Death of the possibility, of the dream.
Gwen relinquished her place in the sun to a polite young woman with tricolor hair and two nose rings. There was one more stop to be made and then she must go home.
St. Bartholomew’s was in South Minneapolis in what was considered a bad section of town, though to Gwen’s perception—altered by years in other cities—the homes still retained their dignity and the people on the streets didn’t appear to have lost their hope. The church was staid and conservative, an edifice of brick and mortar that blended well with the apartment houses that had sprung up around it in the 1940s. The front lawn was badly in need of attention and the steps had deteriorated, not from the constant tread of feet but from disuse and neglect.
The front doors were locked. Gwen picked her way through the struggling rhododendrons to the rectory behind the church. Decay had taken the small brick dwelling as well. Windows were draped-as if against terrible cold, and leaves from the previous autumn lay in dusty piles in the corners of the porch.
After two tries with the doorbell and a rapping that left her knuckles burning, Gwen was turning to go. Soft shuffling from within stopped her. Unconsciously donning a pious look, she waited in feigned patience.
A man so old he looked elemental—cracked stone and sere earth—opened the door and blinked up at her from eyes made milky with cataracts. Beyond the changed flesh Gwen could barely recognize Father Davis, the priest to whom she’d poured out childish confessions. Cataracts and time had clearly robbed him of all recollection of her.
“I’m Gwendolyn Clear,” she told him. “My mother, Madolyn Clear, and I used to attend mass at St. Bartholomew’s.”
For long moments he stared at her. Minute workings of the muscles around his mouth attested to some kind of mental process. “Gwennie,” he said at last, and she was impressed. “Do come in. You’re just in time for something I’m sure. Tea? Sherry? Coffee? It’s always a good time for company.”
Inside, the rectory was dark and stifling. Father Davis wore wool trousers and a pullover sweatshirt and tapped at the thermostat as he passed, his old bones needing heat from without.
Ensconced in a worn chair by a blessedly dead fire, Gwen accepted a glass of orange juice as the quickest way to absolve both of them of the niceties and waited while Father Davis settled himself. Scooping a tiger cat from the seat of the chair opposite her, he lowered himself carefully into its depths then arranged the cat across his knees like a rug.
“I no longer say mass,” he said. “But I still occasionally hear confessions of the very wicked.” He smiled to let her know he was teasing.
Because he was a priest and because he was Father Davis, Gwen told him everything. She finished and the silence between them was long and comfortable. The old man stroked the tiger cat, the muscles around his mouth twitching as he though
t.
“As a priest I’m not allowed to speak of much the good Lord has seen fit to let me remember,” he said at last. “But you mustn’t let these shadows from the past blot out your faith in the things that are good: love and forgiveness, sacrifice, redemption. I have known you all of your life and known your mother most of hers. All I can tell you that might be of help is that to my knowledge your mother loved your father dearly. Indeed, loved him more than she feared God.”
Blinking again in the clear sunlight, Gwen fished sunglasses from her bag as she skirted the shrubbery in favor of paving stones on the way back to where she’d parked the car.
Time had poured its obscuring dust over events but still she held some facts—or educated guesses that she would use in lieu of facts. Gerald Clear had a temper. Gerald Clear was beloved of the ladies. Gerald Clear had inoperable brain cancer. Her mother had killed him or knew the person who had, and hid the crime by burying him in the backyard. Madolyn loved him “more than she feared God.” Medical records catalogued four possible abuse injuries in seven years.
Gwen drove back to Lake Nokomis so slowly that cars honked at her more than once, but she scarcely acknowledged them. At a stop sign less than a block from the house her car came to rest. Traffic was light and no other vehicle appeared to remind her of the business of driving. As the car idled in neutral, the doctor’s reports filtered back through her mind.
No insurance. Not life. Not health.
In 1952 the Clears were poor—poor as church mice, her mother was fond of saying. There would be no money for the medical bills from an extended illness. Dad was going to kick the bucket anyway so what the hey?
Gwen shook her head as if disagreeing with some unseen adversary. Madolyn had loved her husband more than she feared God. And the pieces fell in place. Sudden tears choked Gwen and she sat at the intersection and cried till the pressure of a Volvo in the rearview mirror forced her to move.
Madolyn Clear was propped up in her hospital bed, sun from the bay window making a patchwork of light and shadow across her legs. While Gwen had been out she’d been given a shampoo and short snow-white hair fell in natural curls. A pair of reading glasses hung around her neck on a cord of psychedelic colors. One hand, slightly gnarled with arthritis, rested on the book she’d been reading.
When Gwen came in she smiled. The teeth were yellowed and crooked but they were all her own and Gwen thought her smile beautiful. It faded to a look of concern as Gwen crossed the hardwood floor close enough that her mother could read the strange lines her face had fallen into after the storm of tears.
Gwen sat in the window seat, the light at her back, and took the ring from the pocket of her dress. Laying it on the coverlet between her mother’s hands, she said: “I know all about Daddy.”
Madolyn stroked the dull gold with one finger as if it were a tiny living creature. “And do you hate me?” she asked without looking up. Beneath white lashes tears sparkled in the sun. Gwen pretended not to notice. Her mother had seen fit to hide them for over forty years. It would be ungracious to discover them now.
“No, Momma.” Gwen wanted to take her hand but lacked the courage. Instead she laid hers on the coverlet touching her mother’s as if by accident. “I admire you. I’ve always admired you.”
They sat for a time without speaking. A house finch came and hopped along the windowsill beyond the glass and Madolyn’s old Siamese cat crept close to fantasize.
“Why lilacs?” Gwen asked. “Dad was allergic, wasn’t he?”
Madolyn looked startled then laughed. “That’s right, he was. It’s been a very long time. Gerry said they were his favorite flower because they gave me so much joy. He knew he couldn’t be buried in consecrated ground so he asked to have lilacs planted over his grave. So I’d visit often, he said.”
“Was he afraid of the pain? Of losing his faculties?” Gwen asked.
“Your father wasn’t afraid of anything,” Madolyn said. Then: “Of course he was. Who wouldn’t be? But he would have faced it as he faced everything. He knew he was dying and that the medical costs would eat up our savings, our car, even our home. You and I would be left alone with nothing. He loved us very much.” Tears trickled from beneath the papery lids and found channels in the wrinkled cheeks. This time Gwen did take her mother’s hand and Madolyn held tight, her grip warm and dry.
“But he didn’t kill himself,” Gwen said.
“It would have meant his soul,” Madolyn said. “And there never was a finer.”
FRANCES FYFIELD is the best-selling author of seven crime novels. A Question of Guilt, Trial by Fire, Deep Sleep, Shadow Play, and A Clear Conscience feature Crown Prosecutor Helen West and the detective Geoffrey Bailey. As Frances Hegarty, she has also written two psychological thrillers, and a new novel, Lets Dance, was published in the UK by Viking in October 1995. Frances Fyfleld is a practicing solicitor in London, currently working with the Crown Prosecution Service in a specialized capacity.
Nothing to Lose
Frances Fyfield
“Y ou like my country?”
“Oh yes. I like. I like very much.”
She liked the way he regarded her with a smile so full of sweetness it was better than a pineapple, fresh plucked and sold for cents, sliced for her as if she were royalty at a banquet. She liked the way no one on this West African beach looked askance at her figure, but smiled into her eyes. She liked: she liked so very much that she had almost lost her command of English. Much, very. Words of more than two syllables had slipped to the edge.
Wherever Audrey looked, she was blinded by what she saw. The sand was canary yellow, the sky was blue; the colors of cotton iridescent. All skin was as brown and various as the polished wood of her own antique furniture. Walnut, mahogany, oak, stained pine, nothing quite black. There was no such thing as really black wood. Black was not a color, it was an illusion.
“It’s good? Is it good?”
“What?” For a moment, she was confused. What was good?
“The pineapple?”
“Oh, very.”
“See you later.”
“Not much later?”
“Of course.” She watched his progress away from her and knew she would wait. For him to come back and look at her with the great kind eyes of a man who could not harm a fly.
Abdoulie had been squatting beside her heavy wooden sunbed, his pose laconic and restive, full of the spring of a tiger. He could look at ease with his elbows on his knees, his buttocks almost touching the sand, his long arms hanging loose until he spoke, and then his arms and fingers became the whirling tools of gestures. His was hesitant English, better by far than her own command of any foreign language, but still the level of fluency which would scarcely gain him admission to many an old-fashioned English secondary school. Mrs. Audrey Barett was aware of that. At home, she commuted from her village to teach difficult children in a school where half the problem was language. Punjabi versus English, own goal. In rapid reverse of her own childish belief that anyone who spoke a foreign language must be sublimely clever in order to get their tongues round all those sounds, she had advanced beyond the stage of imagining that either soul or intelligence could be gauged by what words came out of the mouth. Goodness had nothing to do with linguistics. She was also beyond imagining that her own admirable culture (and she did admire it, without apology) was better equipped than any other to rule the world. Audrey was an intelligent, middle-aged lady who read the quality newspapers and the better kind of novel which made one think. She was liberal and conservative in the same breath, her life without blame, and yet she still felt a sense of failure. No one had ever shouted admiration at Audrey Barett.
She chewed her nails, something she had always done. These days, she exerted control over her shyness.
“How many childrens, many, many, I think, Mrs. B., I think?” the hotel manager had asked, questioning her respectability and looking for a common denominator. People would always talk about their children, and in his family,
any woman over fifty was obliged to be a grandmother by now.
“Thousands,” she had said, grandly, startling him a little until she explained. She failed to add, two, of my own. Anxious girls, long gone, phoning every week from London, which is very different from the North of England, you know. Long gone, along with their father. Such is history. She could not quite imagine how she had come by them, except for the fact that hormones do not dictate the best choice of partner. Her own husband had been a little vicious; something she liked to forget and translated into a fondness for men who would never consider violence, but splendid results sometimes arrive as the result of bad mistakes, her best friend Molly was fond of saying, and the mistakes can last for years, as hers had done.
“Abdoulie is a good boy,” the manager said meaningfully. “He will look after you.” Then he bent toward her, speaking confidentially. “He has had a sad life, that boy.”
The description of “boy” was inaccurate, Audrey thought when she saw him. Abdoulie was not a boy; he was a man of almost forty and he needed looking after. There were fabulous young men on this Gambian beach; Audrey watched them, early on the first morning, with the same disinterested fascination she might have given to a series of moving pictures. They worked their lithe bodies with exercise, hoping for a big break into the football team; fitness could catapult a boy into employment, even stardom. Abdoulie was not one of these. He was immensely tall, with dark coffee skin, a broad torso, and a slight squint in one eye. His wife and child had long since died in a fire, he said, and he was not eligible enough or prosperous enough to begin again. He did what he could, he said. He might have been, in his own estimation, too old for hope and he was not a glamorous young lion. Audrey would not have looked at him twice if he had been a youth. As he was, in the high street of the prosperous village where Audrey lived, under her gray skies and mirrored in the green eyes of the inhabitants, he would surely look like a god.
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