The Cavanaugh Quest

by Thomas Gifford

  “Some people think she was a slut, a temptress, and I quote.”

  “Well, live and let live. I’m just telling you what I think.” She paused. “Poor Larry. I never told you but when he was going through one of his depressions and you and I were on the verge of murder, I met him at Norway Creek, it was around Christmas, when your emotions are all shot to hell, and we were both lonely and kind of drunk and I felt this big surge of pity for him, the earth mother in me, and I brought him back here and plied him with hot buttered rum before the fireplace. I told him I had a special Christmas present for him, and I took off my clothes—pretty neat scene, actually—and I was going to do a couple of things he wouldn’t soon forget. But he started to cry and talk about Kim and couldn’t get a twitch out of his little thing.” She picked some cheese and lettuce out of the salad bowl and licked the dressing off her fingers. The last piece of steak disappeared. “Now he’s dead and never knew what he missed.”

  “Does Kim know that?”

  “Sure, he told her, part of the Kigmy thing. He was that type, rubber mouth. But you know what Kim did? She came over very formally and told me that she appreciated what I’d done for Larry. We weren’t seeing each other at all in those days, our friendship was from our teenage years … but she thanked me. Now, in the last few years since you and I split up, we’ve sort of renewed our friendship, carefully but for real. Of course I’m always optimistic about things like that.”

  “Is she one of your trophies?” I said. “Noblesse oblige and all that, befriending the friendless and whatnot?”

  “Not really,” she said without anger at my cheap shot. “I think I’ve passed through that phase. She started out that way but not anymore.”

  “Doesn’t her relationship with Kronstrom bother you?”

  “My God, you have been doing your homework, little man. But no, why on earth should it bother me? From what I can tell you, whatever they have works pretty well for them. I’m just in no position to judge her, or anyone else, on moral grounds. People just do what they do …” She smiled sadly. “But I’m terribly sorry about Larry. As for blaming her, though, you’ll have to ask somebody else.”

  We went back inside and stopped in the darkened front hall.

  “I wish I hadn’t started all this,” I said quietly. “It just keeps me going round and round. It doesn’t seem to lead anywhere. I keep hearing all these conflicting attitudes about this woman and she’s a ghost, I’ve never seen her, I don’t even know what she looks like …”

  “You can always just stop worrying about it. You don’t have to do this, Cav.” She was talking to me now as she’d done in the old days, when we’d been in love.

  “I know. Maybe I’ll just say the hell with it.”

  At the door she said, “Say, I don’t mean to drag you back into it, but I just remembered that I do have a picture of her. A snapshot, taken about a year ago. We were playing tennis and Sam Proctor had his new Leica and he took our picture … Do you want to see?”

  I thought about it and said I guessed I did. It was just another step into the swamp. But I wanted to see what she looked like. I waited outside wondering about the carburetor, debating if I could leave it to Anne’s tender ministrations. It was almost midnight.

  She came back with a white photograph envelope.

  “There are more than I thought,” she said. “Just take the whole bunch.”

  “Okay, Anne. I appreciate it. And it was a wonderful dinner.”

  “Umm, look—do you want to come back in and mess around? You know. I’m sort of in the mood.” She looked demurely at the ground. “Or should I go back to my Messerschmitt?”

  “Well, you’d better go back to World War Two.”

  “It was just a thought.” She grinned.

  I started the Porsche and moved around the circle to leave. She waved and stood in the doorway until I was gone. I’d once told Anne that she was my life and she’d looked across the breakfast table, pulling her robe tight at the neck—it was her Peck & Peck period—and said, “What a life, you poor bastard …”

  It was a black-and-white picture and the high winds outside were shaking the antenna, making the screen flicker, but I could hear Tony Martin singing “I Hear a Rhapsody” while the lower classes danced in the beachfront bar and Robert Ryan was being nasty to Paul Douglas. Barbara Stanwyck was married to big, bluff, kindly Paul but she had the hots for lean, hungry psycho Robert, who ran the projector at the little movie house. It was Clash by Night from a lot of years ago but I’d enjoyed it when it was new and I was enjoying it now that it was old. I was drinking a cold Grain Belt and Barbara Stanwyck was looking sexy and cynical, saying tough things to Robert to show him she cared: “If I ever loved a man again … he could have my teeth for watch fobs!”

  Watch fobs, indeed.

  “You impress me as a man who needs a new suit of clothes or a new love affair,” she said, giving Robert the old one-two. “But he doesn’t know which.” That really made him mad and I sat there enjoying his seething. Then I put down the beer and picked up the stack of snapshots, which indicated quite clearly why Sam Proctor had bought the Leica. There were twelve pictures, two of Anne by herself, six of the two women together from different angles, and four of Kim, two standing by the net and two in action, stroking the ball.

  I peered at her, trying to see into the third dimension.

  Hitting a forehand: arm straight, eyes watching the blur of white coming off the racket, a tip of tongue clenched between her teeth, pigtails flying. Backhand: almost on tiptoes, slicing a shot coming too close to her body, face a mask of concentration, her one-piece two-tone tennis dress molded back against her strong thighs and slender torso. By the net, in close-up as Sam found out what his camera could do, she gave him a faint smile in one shot, sweat running down her face, eyes boring into the camera. Again, off guard, she looked away, long fingers brushing perspiration from an eyebrow, a pigtail tied with a ribbon hanging forward over a shoulder. Her dark hair was pulled tight, her skin dark and smooth and youthful; I’d have called her twenty-five at the most, yet I knew I was a decade off. For some reason my stomach clenched up as I stared at the pictures. She frightened me and I had no idea why; she was just a woman, of course, but she’d been a different woman for everyone I’d questioned.

  Her dark eyes returned my stare.

  Hubbard Anthony had called her the sort of person who made a strong impression on you, always busy, always working, being helpful, always bettering her self.

  Harriet Dierker had said she was as good as a murderer, a hellion, a witch, lovely to look at, the sort of woman the word “bitch” was invented for, a temptress, always bending over and stretching and showing her legs …

  But Tim Dierker had refused to say anything at all.

  Bill Oliver had noticed a good deal more than he thought he had: businesslike, never a hair out of place, clothes just perfect, the way a certain kind of woman always was.

  For my father she was the sort of female who gets talked about, with a trim figure, a solemn face, dark eyebrows, shining hair. She had seemed a sexual creature to him: He’d said it made you wonder if she had a line of that dark hair going up her belly; that was the way she made him think …

  For Darwin McGill she was a cockteaser. “I pulled her brassiere off,” he’d said, “and there were these tiny round tits … with big stiff nipples … She told me that I was just one step from losing my job and facing a criminal action. She was so composed, Paulie, I just felt like I wanted to hide …”

  But Anne had had another view altogether, finding her terrified of sex, frigid, so competent and organized and neat and determined. She thought I’d have liked Kim, and what the hell was that supposed to mean?

  It didn’t hang together; it was a patchwork of contradictions and I couldn’t piece it together. I couldn’t help but wonder if what I was really getting was a series of impressions revealing more about the speakers than about the subject. I sat staring at the television picture
for a long time. Tony Martin was singing “I Hear a Rhapsody.”

  I finally padded on down the hallway to go to bed. Someone had slipped a small envelope under my door. Sighing aloud from weariness, I picked it up. It was a note from Harriet Dierker on paper with a. Raggedy Ann doll smiling in one corner. Larry Blankenship was being buried in the morning and she thought I might want to attend the graveside service. She gave me the details. She was a presumptuous little woman. But I went to bed, eschewing my baseball researches, and before I slept I decided I’d better attend.

  Larry Blankenship’s funeral was a peculiarly tearless affair and had something about it of an old fraternity meeting, something musty like the feel of Pa Dierker’s handshake. It took me awhile to catch the falsity of it; it was a breezy, cool morning with the treetops rustling in the characteristic solemn hush of the cemetery. Past the various gray marble gravestones, past the trees and the iron fence, cars sped along a parkway but they were soundless, gliding.

  I had gotten to the cemetery early while the other mourners were at the church. Standing on top of a gentle knoll, with a huge elm rustling overhead, I leaned on a very old, cracked marker and watched the hearse lead the small parade through the high gate, around the reflecting pool, and along the path of finely crushed pinkish gravel. There weren’t many cars following the black Cadillac hearse but they were all top of the line: Mark IV’s, Cadillacs, Mercedes. For a guy who never quite made it, who was such a persistent loser, Blankenship had very tony friends.

  I’m not sure who I thought would be there. But it didn’t take a genius to identify them, particularly having had access to my father’s photograph albums. One at a time they emerged from their automobiles, stood blinking in the sunshine before moving off across the green.

  Father Martin Boyle arrived in the midnight-blue Cadillac limousine driven by another priest, doubtless Father Patulski, his housemate. Boyle was round, rolled when he walked, stumping a bit with the aid of a blackthorn stick, knobbed and lethal-looking. His gout must have been bothering him. His thin hair, red still glittering through the gray, blew silky in the wind and wraparound dark glasses hid his eyes. He plodded toward the open grave with its mound of moist dark earth.

  The Dierkers came next in their Mercedes sedan. Pa shambled on the grass and Ma, birdlike, held his arm, steadying him. He looked pale, a sick man with his sickness accentuated by the string tie which seemed to be part of the uniform the gravebound habitually affected. His suit hung obscenely, like loose flesh, a skin about to be shucked. His wife looked like his keeper.

  James Crocker, still giving off the illusion of fitness regardless of his heart troubles, drove himself in a gunmetal-gray Mark IV. He was wearing a dark-blue suit, carefully shaped, the vanity of an old athlete. His hair was silvery, wavey, thick; his glasses were heavy black plastic. He spoke briefly to Pa Dierker, then fell in beside the two priests. He looked fit enough to climb up and man a bulldozer himself; I’d have bet he spent a good deal of his time in a hard hat where the buildings were coming down and the buildings were going up.

  General Goode looked very little changed from the old days when he’d learned I was going to Scandinavia and had asked me to deliver a package in a village not far from Helsinki. For a long time I’d thought him an evil, perverse man, and then I’d undergone some slippage. Perhaps he’d been as much a victim as I. But it had taken a great many nights with the baseball-record books to get rid of the picture of the old man dying.

  Now Jon Goode was walking toward the gravesite looking almost unchanged; medium height but looking taller because of the formality of his carriage, the leanness, the gray hair cropped down close to his small, squared skull. He was wearing a navy blazer, dark-gray slacks, a white shirt, and a rep tie. His face and hands were deeply tanned and my father was with him looking rumpled in a blue cord suit.

  I didn’t move from my observation point as the casket was carried to the grave and placed across the heavy tapes which would lower it into the earth. Though I couldn’t hear what was being said, I could see that the minister, a young fellow with a bookish, white face, had begun to speak when another car wheeled up the path: a bronze Mark IV gleaming in the sun like a lump of gold. Another older man got out quickly from behind the wheel and opened the passenger door.

  She looked exactly as I expected.

  Ole Kronstrom walked beside her to the group of mourners as heads turned, sensing the new arrival. Since the ceremony of burial had begun without them, I assumed Kim Roderick and Ole Kronstrom had not attended the church services. They stood somewhat apart from the others and while he looked steadfastly at the minister and then bowed his head for the prayer; she peered into the grave, slowly moved her head to watch the others. She wasn’t paying any attention to the minister; she was too curious. Her appearance was as advertised: sleeveless dark-blue dress, blue shoes, very darkly tanned arms and legs, dark hair curling under at her shoulders and held in place by a wide headband. It startled me when her gaze carefully moved upward and found me, as if she expected me to be there. I felt myself shrinking inwardly, knowing that I was reacting illogically, but unable to stop. Her gaze held me for a long time, as if to say, I’ll remember you and you’ll be sorry, and finally, as the minister concluded his remarks and the casket was lowered, she broke away and went to shake his hand.

  Watching from the hillside gave me a sort of second-balcony perspective. I could see the choreography as one by one the men came toward her, each one taking her hand in his, a few words being spoke, then passing her on to the next member of the dance. She did almost nothing, acknowledging them with a nod, waiting for them to finish. The Dierkers stood near the grave, which was flanked by several arrays of yellow flowers. Harriet finally jerked her arm away from her husband’s and strode off to their car, leaving him alone and old and weak. He took a tentative step forward, arms stiff and a few inches from his sides, seeking the proper balance. Then he gathered steam and walked slowly toward her. He was the last one and she was alone, waiting for him; at my distance it was impossible to know whether she was being patient or imperious, making him come the whole way by himself.

  He was still huge in comparison to her and he leaned, forward slightly to address her, using his grip on her hands for support. She listened at length, nodded, then spoke briefly; looked over toward where Harriet sat in the car. Then he made his way tortoise-like across the rich greenery and she was alone. Ole Kronstrom walked back to the car with Dierker, the two old partners approaching the end so differently.

  I watched Kim go to the grave again, saw her sigh, with her shoulders giving a little heave as she said good-bye to the loser who had been her husband. She was quick and determined going back to the car. Ole broke away and went with her and the cars slowly peeled away. There were big white clouds jamming up over the city by then and just a touch of moisture was in the air.

  General Goode and my father were the last to leave and I went down the hill to join them. Goode smiled ambiguously and said it was nice to see me again. I wondered if he even remembered what he’d gotten me into in Finland.

  “Well, you got to see her,” Archie said, squinting at me with a malicious little grin. “I wasn’t sure she was going to show up at all.”

  “Was she the only family he had?”

  “So far as I know,” Goode said quickly. “Orphan, I guess.” He wore a thin gray mustache and his ice-water eyes gave me a chill, like a cloud across the sun. “She was holding up quite well,” he said.

  “Why not? It was all over between them.” My father was a realist. “When it’s over, it’s over.” He shrugged. There was no more to the conversation and after they’d gone I walked back across the lawn, watched the workmen filling the grave. The clouds really were beginning to nip at the edges of the sunshine. Did old men go to a funeral and wonder how much time they had left? Dierker and Father Boyle did not seem to be in very robust health. Did they dwell on how short their futures might be?

  There had been something wrong abo
ut the funeral and I couldn’t quite name it. I walked back up the knoll, across another stretch of lawn, where a sprinkler was keeping things green and healthy. Mark Bernstein, a shadowy presence I’d not seen before, slid into a police cruiser and glided away. The bedraggled Porsche sat under a tree, ugly but comfortable with its rusty body and balding tires. As I drove back to my office to deliver some stray book reviews which I’d completed a couple of weeks before and forgotten, I realized what had been wrong.

  It had looked like a family funeral. But it wasn’t. Only the hunting and fishing club had been there, with the exception of Hub Anthony, who had a heavy work load. Had they been there as friends of Larry Blankenship? Or of his wife? It bothered me because it didn’t seem quite real. There was something stagy about it, almost as if attendance had been required. But why?

  There were other questions in my mind as I sat in the cluttered office, watching the afternoon turn gray. Who had been emptying Larry’s apartment of the little personal bits and pieces? What had been going on between Kim and Larry in the parking lot the day Bill Oliver had seen them?

  And why the hell did I care?

  It was raining hard when I finally got home. The windshield wipers on the Porsche didn’t work, which made getting home a treat. I fixed eggs and tomatoes and sausage and toast and sat on my balcony eating and getting damp, washing it down with a Bloody Mary. No good movies on the tube, no ball game; I put an opera on the record player and cleaned my plate and poured another Bloody Mary. I watched the rain, heard the girl laughing in another apartment—same girl as always. Her life must have been excruciatingly funny. I felt as if I were waiting for something.

  It happened about ten o’clock. I was half asleep and the rain was still falling steadily, almost quietly. But I saw it go by my balcony, plummeting soundlessly through the rain. A bundle of somebody’s dirty clothes, a joke. But it had arms and legs. I was terribly slow on the uptake, wondering if I’d seen it in my sleep.