“Was she liked? Did they like her?”
“Who? The men or the women?”
“You mean it was that obvious?”
“That’s what my friends used to say, they talked about her when we were alone. Not dirty, just appreciative, as I recall.” He sighed. “Julia would understand—Kim wasn’t the sort of woman you’d talk about in front of other women.”
“I do understand,” she said, standing up. “I met this girl, too, Archie, one year at the Christmas dance at the club. She was there with her husband, this Larry fellow. We were introduced, and I know what you mean about her—I may not have talked about her, but I caught myself thinking about her afterward. She was beautiful but somehow preoccupied. She seemed to be somewhere else. She had a … quality. Now, I must get my trowel and play with my flowers.”
Archie got to talking about his group of friends of almost forty years ago. It was very unlike him and maybe that was why he seemed to enjoy going back over it; he wasn’t indulging himself, he was answering my questions, so maybe he didn’t look on it as a sign of age.
“What did your friends think of her? Your gang, I mean.”
“They liked her—admired her looks and her attitudes, I’d say.”
“Even Tim Dierker?”
“Sure. Hell, he was the one who put the stamp of approval on her for a job. He told Lenhardt, the guy who was managing the kitchen then—manages the whole damn place now, by the way—Dierker told him she was the kind of girl who’d cheer the place up.” He emptied the Blue Nun. The bottle was sweating. Julia had brought a bag of gardening tools and was kneeling by the border of lavender and yellow flowers circling the frog pond.
“I wonder what turned him against her?” I said.
“What are you talking about?” The breeze was blowing the cigar smoke away from us and the flowers smelled good. The lake glistened below, past the trees black and green with the sun’s rays filtering golden through them.
“Well, Harriet said Tim’s health broke when he was unable to convince Larry Blankenship not to marry her. She said Tim was very protective about Larry, like a son, and that he was desperately trying to talk him out of marrying her. And never got over having failed.”
Archie shook his head with its slicked-back white hair, so carefully barbered, and shifted his weight. The blue eyes blinked and looked out toward the lake as if an answer might be hidden on the distant shore.
“I can’t imagine what happened. He always seemed to like her. We all thought she was fine.”
“Tell me about the group,” I said. “Who all was in it?”
It was a varied collection:
In addition to Archie Cavanaugh, Timothy Dierker, Ole Kronstrom, and Hubbard Anthony, there were three others, all of whom had gone on to success and ease.
Jonathan Goode, four years younger than my father, was a career army man, retired now as a three-star general, but then a young captain stationed in Minneapolis at Fort Snelling. World War II had done some very good things for Jon Goode and the Korean War had done some more. He’d become involved in strategic planning at Pentagon levels, moving around with considerable familiarity in parts of our bureaucratic system which we taxpayers know nothing about. He wasn’t a spy, but he knew what spies know, was in the intelligence gathering and analyzing end of things, and had in fact been the man who’d contacted me for a simple mission. I’d ended up having to kill a man on a train; I wasn’t likely to forget General Goode, though I’d downed a good deal of scotch giving it a try. Although he lived in Minneapolis, retired and sitting on several boards, he didn’t move in precisely my social set; Archie still saw him fairly, regularly. I hadn’t seen him in years.
Father Martin Boyle had been a youngish Irish priest in the thirties; now he was an oldish Irish priest, overweight and red-nosed and much loved at the University of Minnesota, where he’d been the force behind the flourishing Newman Center. At sixty-eight he was still connected with the center, as its “patron saint,” some said, garrulous, full of gout, still playing golf with Jon Goode at Norway Creek. He lived still in a large turn-of-the-century house in Prospect Park, not far from the university, a house he shared with Father Conrad Patulski. They also shared a midnight-blue Cadillac limousine, which didn’t say much for the poverty of the priesthood, but then this was the twentieth century. Archie said that Boyle was a priest you could trust: He ate too much, drank too much, and liked women. He was never self-righteous, a very fine quality in a man of the cloth.
James Crocker, seventy, had been a football star at the university in the mid-twenties (Nagurski’s time? How the hell should I know? But Crocker had had his greatest day against Grange and the Illini; it was a legend), very nearly an all-American. His heart was wearing out, the plague of ex-jocks. He’d played professionally with George Halas’ Chicago Bears when Grange had made pro football happen. And by the mid-thirties he’d established contracting and land-development operations in the Twin Cities. As the years, then the decades, passed, he became a figure to be reckoned with in politics and gave his name to housing projects, then to a suburb. He’d given a good deal of money to Richard Nixon’s Campaign to Re-Elect, realized too late that it had been laundered in Mexico, and been very irritable ever since. He preferred to remember his greatest game as a Minnesota Golden Gopher when Memorial Stadium was dedicated and he helped beat the great Red Grange; he wouldn’t mention Nixon and Grange in the same breath.
“And everybody liked young Kim?” I said when he had run through the list.
“So far as I ever knew.” He stifled a yawn behind a wrinkled, pale hand. It was that kind of afternoon.
“But she was a slut, a monster who made her husband kill himself. Drove him to it with her infidelities.” I shook my head. “Inconsistencies, Dad.”
“Life’s full of them.” He smiled lopsidedly. “Anyway, all you’ve got for evidence is the raving of Harriet Dierker, not precisely an ideal witness.”
“But she was raving,” I said, remembering. “That’s the point. She wasn’t gossiping, not really. She was worked up.” I yawned, too. “And if Tim Dierker thought she was so wonderful, what bothered him so much about Larry marrying her? Pieces missing in there.”
“Long time ago. Half of what happened people forget entirely, the other half they get wrong in trying to tell it. It all gets distorted. Faulty memories are right in the middle of writing mystery novels—the characters have them, the reader sure as hell has one, frequently the writer does, too.” He yawned again. “Memories, on the whole, are for shit, Paul.”
“Ole Kronstrom fell in love with her, for God’s sake,” I said. “Now I ask you, would he fall in love with a monster?”
“Hardly. Ole was a simple man. Or a fool, or maybe just lucky. I mean, after all, Ole is not necessarily the fellow you’d pick for Kim, not on the nice shiny surface of things, anyway.”
“Did you know about them?”
“Tough not to.” Archie stood up and kicked off his sneakers, wriggled his toes in the grass. Newly mowed grass mottled his white feet. We walked up to the house together. A motorboat whined into life down on the lake and the sound floated up the hill, a part of summer indistinguishable from all the other parts, the smells of the flowers and the Coppertone and the sounds of the insects. I followed him back across the stones into the cool library.
“Enough history,” he said. “You want to know about the girl, not my old cronies.” He sank down into a flowered-print chair, the slipcover casually off-center, and crossed his bare feet.
“I really wanted to know why Blankenship killed himself.” I heard myself say it; it didn’t seem strange. I did want to know; the curiosity had just sort of infected me, like a siege of walking pneumonia I’d once had.
“That’s what I say, Paul—the girl.” He stroked his white mustache with a bony knuckle. “The girl, I’m trying to remember what, what it is I know, or knew, about her …” He sucked the knuckle for a minute and I could see Julia kneeling by the flower border. She wa
s troweling moist, dark earth and looked as if she were enjoying herself immensely. The sprinkler caught the sun through the trees, held it for a moment, then sprayed along on its way.
“She came to Norway Creek not long after I came back to the university. I didn’t pay any particular attention to her, though I couldn’t help noticing her. The way she looked, that trim, neat figger, sort of a solemn face, dark eyebrows, dark shiny hair—stupid thing to remember, hair, but what can I tell you?” He shrugged. “It made you wonder if she had a line of that dark hair going up her belly. Well, hell, let’s be candid, Paul. That’s they way she made me think …”
“You should be ashamed of yourself,” I said.
“Harriet told you more about her love life than I ever knew. I can’t vouch for the facts but it sounded more or less right to me. But she always impressed me as competent, the kind of person who’d get done whatever she set out to do. She always acted like a person right there in the present, very down to earth, not silly.” He sighed and pursed his lips. “Now, you can call that sort of attitude calculating or mature, dangerous or determined, depending on your point of view.
“It seems to me that somebody—Dierker, I think—told me she was an orphan from up north, maybe from the town near where we had the lodge. That must be how Tim knew about her, sounds possible. She was a charity case, anyway, and the guys in our group sort of felt sorry for her—seems she was the niece of somebody. Christ, I’m hazy on this, Paul …
“You really should ask Anne about her if you’re sufficiently curious. Girls do talk to one another, don’t they? They played a lot of tennis. Anne was taking lessons from her, I suppose. Anyway, that’s about all I know …”
We sat for a while, sleepy. Archie picked up one of the Michael Gilbert novels. I felt my eyelids getting heavy from the luncheon wine and the fact that I’d gotten up way too early. Something made me jerk and I looked at Archie. He’d gotten out of the flowered chair and was peering into one of the floor-to-ceiling bookcases built into the wall. They were glossy white. He finally reached up and withdrew a large brown leather photograph album.
“You awake?” He cleared his writing gear to one side of the old oak desk and placed the photograph album in the center. I nodded. “Thought you might like to see this,” he said. He opened the album, which was held together by heavy brown twine threaded through each page. I went over to the desk. I looked at my watch. An hour had passed since we’d come back to the library.
“Sure,” I said. “What is it?”
He spread the pages flat; black-and-white snapshots, some slightly yellowed, held in place by little black pasted-down corner pieces. I’d seen the album before, as a child, and later checking on pictures of my mother. Archie was not the dramatic type: He’d left her pictures where they’d always been, bearing her no grudges but merely glad to be rid of her.
“Pictures we took up at the lodge. All these fellows you see as old men now, me and the rest of them, this is the way we looked back in ’33, ’34. You were just getting yourself born, Paul.” He pointed to the first picture, upper left, left-hand page, and began telling me about them, identifying the men and what they were amusing themselves with on those long-ago summer days when they went up north to get away from it all.
I wasn’t really listening but I was getting enough, like background music, and I was thinking about the men. There was the picture of Hub with the slicked-back hair, the shadows on his face, the bony shoulders square and taut. Archie was smiling remotely, squinting from behind round, silver-rimmed spectacles, looking up from a book as he lay in a striped canvas chair.
Ole Kronstrom and Jonathan Goode bulked large and white in swimming suits which clung tightly to their wet bodies. They stood in the sand near the water, fishing poles in their hands, shadows black on the beach.
Martin Boyle in a sweater and a white shirt stood beside a four-door Pontiac sedan, his foot on the running board, a hand raised in salute to the photographer. A dog of no discernible known breed stood at his feet, staring up at him. Timothy Dierker sat behind the wheel, framed in the window, his face in motion, mouth open, saying something. James Crocker, the football star overflowing his trousers ten years later, looked down into the camera from atop a ladder where he was painting a wall of the lodge. He waved his paintbrush, carelessly letting white paint drip down the handle of the brush.
They appeared to be men from another age, another century; I didn’t know anyone who went off that way anymore, hunting and fishing and away from their wives. I didn’t know men who gathered in groups of any. kind; a night out with the boys, it seemed an anachronism, the way nobody wrote like Robert Benchley anymore. It seemed unbelievable that those men could still be alive. They looked out from an innocent, pre-World War II past, sealed away like relics in a tomb. They didn’t look curious or amused or even very intelligent. But they did look privileged, almost without care, in a way that was unheard of anymore. Arrogance of a subtle sort; the arrogance of innocence.
“Why are you laughing, Paul?”
“I’m not. It just makes me smile, that’s all. Long time ago. People looked different then. Not just their clothing. The people themselves. Do you see it?”
He shook his head. “How can I? I’m one of them.”
He slipped a finger under the next page and slowly turned it over. More pictures: the lodge, the boys.
“Do you still go up there?”
“Hell, no,” he scoffed. “My God, I outgrew that a long time ago …”
“Lost interest in hunting and fishing?”
“I never was much for that stuff. Did you ever go fishing, Paul? Sitting in a boat in the middle of a lake? It’s like An American Tragedy. You begin to understand why Montgomery Clift wanted to push Shelley Winters out of the boat. He was bored.” He sat down in the captain’s chair by the typewriter table. “I used to take books up there, read all the stuff there was never time to read at home. Sinclair Lewis, John Galsworthy, Willa Cather, got hooked on S. S. Van Dine and Agatha Christie …” He sighed, reaching for the cigar humidor on the corner of the desk. “It was really quite a civilized group at the beginning, surprisingly so, I suppose.” He gave in and withdrew a cigar, stared at it appreciatively.
“It stopped being civilized?”
“Rowdy. Predictably, the jolly boys decided that what the hell was the point of getting away from it all if you behaved yourself? So a good deal of drinking was getting done and that was terribly boring and then the stag films with the naked guys in the black socks and Lone Ranger mask and the inevitable horsing around with ladies of the night … also boring. I was trying to get away from women and now, all of a sudden, they were talking about importing them.” He lit a cigar. “And that was when I bowed out. Later we moved to Chicago and that was that.” He beckoned for the album and I handed it to him. “I’m not a sentimental man,” he said, “but I get a little twinge when I see these pictures. No point in denying your humanity, is there? We were a lot younger then and time has had a go at us since … I can remember the days up there, cold beer and a good book and lying in the sun. Well, you can’t get ’em back once they’re gone. As I suspect you’re discovering, my boy.” He looked down at the album. “It was a nice lodge, big fireplace, lots of wicker furniture, big old oscillating fans on tops of bookcases, nice screened-in porch, rocking chairs … Kept it nice and clean. That’s what she did.” He put his finger on a group picture, a brunette standing on the porch with the men grouped somewhat formally by her side. She looked as if she’d been taken by surprise, hustled out of the kitchen in her apron and snapped abruptly before she’d slid her public face into position. Archie was at the far left, looking away from the happy scene. Tim Dierker was smiling stiffly next to the woman, looking as if he were afraid he might touch her accidentally. The men all looked a bit self-conscious but the woman had a reserved, boys-will-be-boys expression of tolerance. She had an oval face and a widow’s peak pointing at a straight, handsome nose.
“Who was she
?”
“I can’t remember her name. She came to the lodge from the town and kept house while we were there, did the dishes, got rid of the empties, generally tidied up.” He closed his eyes and leaned back. “Nope, I can’t remember her name. But it was a long time ago, Paul. Almost as long as you’ve been alive. So why should I remember?”
“Who took the picture?”
He looked at it. “Must have been Ole. He’s the only one of us not in the picture.”
I decided to quit fighting it and go he down in a lawn chair. But I stopped at the French window. Archie was putting the album back on the shelf.
“I understand you saw her last week.”
“Who?”
“Kim. Blankenship’s wife.”
“Yes, I did. Playing tennis with what’s-his-name, the pro at the club. She was giving him a run for his money.”
“Has she changed much?”
“From when?”
“I don’t know—from when you first saw her?”
“Who knows? I saw her often enough so that any change was a gradual one. But she’s not the kind of woman who lets herself go. Minimal change, I’d say.”
When I woke up, the sun had slid well below the treetop level and the long shadows had a furry purple color, like giant caterpillars stretched out across the lawn. I was stiff and had a headache. There was a green light hanging in the evening down by a boathouse. The days were getting shorter as August pressed on. I went inside. Julia was drinking iced tea in the long living room, curled at one end of a pale-gray modern sofa. The only light came from the see-through glass ginger jar beside her. Dusk had settled across the room and crickets made the only sound. She looked up and smiled faintly.
“Feel better?” she asked. She put her book down; it dealt with the peculiarly successful marriage between Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West.
“Just a little worse, actually.”
“Iced tea in the pitcher on the cart.”
I poured a tall glass and added lemon and sugar, slid into a chrome-and-leather director’s chair. My mouth tasted like an army had used it for a latrine all evening.
The Cavanaugh Quest Page 6
