Till the End of Tom

by Gillian Roberts

I was only a few blocks away, and the rain was so gentle, it could have passed for heavy mist. I could walk to the library, talk with her, and be back well before Mackenzie was ready to work again. She’d at least know about that cryptic family, and she seemed eager to vent about it and if she was there today, her husband wouldn’t be around to censor her.

  Nor was my husband-to-be around to censor me, to remind me to stay on track. I headed across the street, toward the Parkway. It looked as much like the track as anything else did at this point.

  * * *

  Twenty

  * * *

  * * *

  THE rain became more assertive with every step I took, so I hurried along, noting with sorrow the patches of bright dead leaves being washed down and away. And then I was there. There are few more satisfying destinations than a library, particularly when the weather is less than perfect. To be out of the cold or heat or wet and into a world bordered with books is close to as good as it gets, and I felt that again as I stood there.

  I wanted it to appear we’d met accidentally, and the problem was coming up with a reason to be in the Children’s room. Then I realized she didn’t know my occupation, only that I was about to be married and wasn’t going to have the ceremony at The Manse, so I wandered around the room, remembering my father bringing me for my first visit here as a preschooler and how awed I’d been by the enormity of the treasure house. I remembered it as the size of a football field or a castle, and now it was simply the size of a pleasant children’s library collection. Cozy, actually. It had obviously shrunk while my back was turned.

  Then I saw Meredith helping a child find a book, opening it and describing why this was a volume dear to her heart. No wonder the woman had raised such an exemplary daughter. I wandered close, waited till the little girl had padded off, clutching her treasure.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “But do you know where the fairy-tale collections are?” Forget the units I’d taught on using the Dewey decimal system.

  She turned, her expression helpful and friendly. “I can surely . . .” She frowned slightly, either surprised to find an adult in search of fairy tales, or with a sense of familiarity. “Don’t I . . . ?”

  “It’s Mrs. Arbusson!” I hoped my expression of surprise didn’t look too false. “We met Sunday. I was just here on another errand, and I thought that a book of fairy tales might work into a unit on folklore and myths I’m teaching and—too lazy to look it up, I guess.”

  “Er . . . forgive me. I remember you, always remember a face,” she said, “but your name?”

  “Amanda Pepper.”

  “Ah, yes. I hope you aren’t too furious with my daughter. She’s an amazing woman, but getting her to make up her mind on serious things like where she’ll be married . . .” She shook her head in despair. I could imagine my mother mouthing the same words—except, perhaps, for the “amazing” part, and I thought I’d therefore found a path into Meredith Arbusson’s confidence.

  “I’m so glad to have bumped into you,” I said. “I wanted to talk to you ever since Sunday. I was hoping it wouldn’t be an imposition, but I thought you’d know about other sites, that you’d have good ideas about putting on a December wedding. Given that you’re also a little late in the planning, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

  “Well, I’m not late, if you don’t mind my saying so. My daughter is. She is completely in charge of her wedding. Pretty much the way she’s been about her entire life. I, on the other hand, tend to be compulsive. It’s the way nature keeps the human race going, making the neurosis skip a generation. It also makes the generations always be on each others’ case. It’ll serve her right if she has a daughter who’s a planner, the way I am.”

  “Ah,” I said, looking down at my hands. “I thought . . . my mother’s in Florida and so—communication and . . .”

  “Oh, my dear. Of course. She’s told me about other places—I’ve gone to look at some with her, so it’s the least I could do, given that we snatched that place from under your nose.” She checked her watch. “Would you consider standing in the rain—under cover—while I indulge my secret vice?”

  “It won’t be much of a secret then.”

  “Secret from Philip the Puritan.”

  And so we wound up huddled against the door, under the smallest of overhangs, along with five other people. I looked out through the drizzle, over the traffic moving around Logan Circle to where banners hung outside the Franklin Institute of Science, another warm and solid building filled with fond childhood memories.

  I had no fond memories of standing in the rain shivering, but there I was. Needless to say, I was the only nonsmoker in the group, but I remembered times I would have been puffing through the raindrops, too. That didn’t make it more pleasant to shiver and stamp my feet while Meredith Arbusson lit up and silently inhaled and exhaled a few times before she said, “How are your wedding plans coming along?”

  “Not so well.”

  “Are you cold?” she asked, as if surprised.

  “No,” I lied. “I’m fine.” I was on the verge of teeth-chattering. I hadn’t expected the drop in temperature and wasn’t dressed for it. But Meredith Arbusson’s expression of incredulity suggested that she found the environment bracing and exhilarating as would any woman of character. I thought warm thoughts and tried to stop goose bumps from forming. “But I’m afraid that we—”

  “You don’t have a place, now that we’ve pulled the rug from under you, is that it?”

  “Oh, no, I didn’t mean—” But I did mean. I meant to prey on her sense of guilt. If I could have arranged for a trio of sobbing violins to stand behind us, I would have done that, too.

  She blew a ragged smoke ring into wet air. “Philip isn’t to know about this, right? This is between you and me.”

  “You make Philip out to be such a Puritan, but he seemed sweet.”

  “Philip? After the way he practically gagged me when we were talking?”

  “Oh, he didn’t, not really. He just seemed uncomfortable . . .” Tell me, I mentally signaled her. Finish the sentence he interrupted that day. Pathetic when you’re relying on telepathy when for all I know, thought-beams might be water soluble and would fall to the cement without reaching her.

  “Many things make Philip uncomfortable. He’s an old dear,” she said, “but he’s peculiar when it comes to talking about people. He calls it gossip. Isn’t that funny?” She snorted, cigarette smoke coming out of her nose. Then, with a final drag, she looked at me and smiled. “I call it talking.” She dropped the cigarette and stepped on it, then carefully picked it up and put it in her pocket. “I do not litter.”

  I smiled back, hoping we’d now go find a warmer, drier spot.

  No such luck. Meredith lit up again and took a lengthy drag, looking at the cigarette in her hand while she exhaled and then inhaled again. She apparently smoked packs too quickly to read the Surgeon General’s warnings on them. But how could she believe her husband didn’t know about this habit? Were there binge smokers? Did she only smoke when volunteering at the library? Was that in fact why she volunteered in the first place?

  “The good news about Philip,” she finally said, “is that he’s a man of great honor. The bad news is that it means when someone else behaves without honor, it pains and distresses him.” She glanced my way, and then looked at her cigarette—only half was left—with a wistful expression. I sensed that a third smoke was on the way. “I gave them up, you see,” she said. “I promised my daughter and Philip, of course, that I would stop this. I know it’s a bad habit, and . . .”

  “When was that?” I asked.

  “Sunday. We went out to lunch after we made the arrangements at The Manse, and . . . Philip would surely consider this a breach of honor. I promised, you see, and what makes him most uncomfortable is a betrayal of trust. Especially with people that you, well . . . trust.” She seemed lost in contemplation of her own hand and the burning cylinder in it. “The bad news is, he considers talking ab
out the breach of trust as gossip. It isn’t the easiest thing on earth being married to an honorable man.” She exhaled and laughed. “Not that I’m recommending a dishonorable one, you understand.”

  And right then, between puffs of smoke that must have muffled them, my intense telepathic messages hit their target. “What were we talking about when he went into his Grand Inquisitor mode?” she asked. “The wedding? The funeral?”

  I tried to look as if I needed to think back. “About . . . I think—yes, we were talking about the missing—about Tomas’s sister, and whether she was alive or dead, and you were upset about the way the family, well, not Mr. Severin senior, had treated—”

  “See, that’s precisely what I mean. Philip has never gotten over that disappointment. It had nothing to do with his working life, and in truth, we weren’t all that close with the Severins, not even while Philip was his number two man, but even so, even so . . . He felt it was such a display of weakness on Tomas Senior’s part, it was as if his friend had presented himself wearing one face, and then had revealed that it was only a mask. The reason he doesn’t want me talking about it is because it still makes him uncomfortable. He doesn’t want to think about it, but, my goodness, if more people would have spoken up, have dared to speak up to Her Highness—”

  “Mrs. Severin?”

  “Ingrid, yes. The czarina of fashion, of What Is Correct and What Is Not. Nobody dared to say anything if they wanted to be a part of that world. And Tomas Senior doted on her. He was much older than she was, and he treated her like a pet, or a toy. Indulged her and turned away from evidence of how cruel she was to her daughter. I finally said something, but only after Philip had decided to leave the firm. It was time to go off on his own, which he did, and I didn’t care if I ever was part of that world again.” She seemed satisfied with that, and might have ended the conversation, though I knew she didn’t mind staying outside in this miserable weather because the longer we stood, the greater the opportunity for yet another cigarette. This one was down to a burn-the-fingertips nub, and she sighed and tossed it to the ground, repeating her careful grinding of it, and then retrieving it and putting it in her pocket.

  “Do I dare ask what it is you said?”

  She glanced at me, her eyebrows slightly raised. “Philip’s nowhere in sight, is he?” She smiled to herself, obviously still relishing the memory of telling off the social dictator half a century ago. “I told her that her cruel style of mothering had gone out with fairy tales and even then it had been stepmothers, not birth mothers, who behaved that way. To treat one child as if he’s perfection and the other—well, it wasn’t Cinderella because the girl didn’t have to sweep fireplaces, but it was something akin to it. An inside-out Snow White, maybe, with the beautiful queen fearing a nonrival. Not that she actually poisoned Shippy.”

  “Her name was Shippy?”

  “Sigrid, actually. Ingrid and Sigrid. Cute, yes? She was supposed to be a little Ingrid, a tiny clone. Her crime was that she wasn’t. The story goes that Tomas called her by her monogram—S.S., which apparently was on just about everything she wore or touched. He called her the ‘S.S. Sister,’ and that was thought to be quite darling, because everything he did was overpraised. But ‘S.S. Sister,’ of course turned into ‘steamship’ first, and then ship and thus to Shippy, which stuck. And you’re probably wondering what Ingrid said back to me, right?”

  I hadn’t been, but it seemed rude to admit, so I nodded.

  “You’ve met her, so you know how imperious she is. So she straightened up and told me that I could raise my children however I chose to, and she would do the same, thank you. And that neither I nor my children were welcome in her house again. It was the very sound of freedom to me.”

  “What did Ingrid do that was so horrible, and why?” I asked.

  She seemed to need to shake herself back into the present, and then she stood for a while, both hands in the pockets of her blazer, considering my question. “Why comes first,” she finally said, “and you aren’t going to believe this, but it’s God’s truth. Shippy’s crime was being fat. And that is why she was treated like a prisoner. Shippy didn’t fit Ingrid’s image. She wasn’t something adorable to trot out for visitors to see, which is to say, she wasn’t a miniature Ingrid. She was, let’s be honest, the worst you could be—unfashionable—at age two, and three, and five, and seven.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That was more than enough for Mrs. Chic, but the fact that her husband allowed it to be enough to exclude and punish makes it still worse. Philip, of course, is sure Tomas Senior didn’t truly understand the extent Ingrid went to. Like starving the child, forbidding her to come to meals, firing servants if they gave Shippy food, except for the diet rations taken up to her room. And when nothing worked—the cook did sneak up food, or she somehow got it—they sent Shippy away. Now I know, I know—many children are sent to boarding school, and they grow up to be well-adjusted adults, but not that many children are banished, and that’s what was done to Shippy, and she knew it. And she wasn’t only sent to boarding school, but to fat farms, and fat-kid camps, and to psychiatric facilities. She ran away from just about every one of them, but she couldn’t run home of course because they didn’t want her, so she got into lots of trouble. Lived on the streets when she was a teen, selling herself in exchange for a place to stay.”

  “And her family?”

  “Did nothing, except when notified of her whereabouts, they retrieved her and sent her away again.” She looked at me, shrugged and said, “One more. And then I’ll toss the rest of the pack and that will be it.”

  “Good luck,” I said. “There are clinics if this doesn’t work. Or those patches.”

  She nodded, rather impatiently, eager to get the next cigarette into her mouth. Once it was lit, and she’d had a major drag, she nodded again. “You’re probably wondering why I know all this. I am not as much of a snoop as this sounds, but even though he was banned from the household, our son Benjamin is—make that was—a schoolmate of Tomas’s, and so he’d come home with these stories about Shippy, all told from the official family point of view.”

  “Tomas went along with it all, I assume,” I said, vaguely remembering something intimated along those lines on Sunday.

  She nodded. “Why wouldn’t he? He was the golden-haired darling. And then Tom Senior died, and we thought at least Shippy would be safe because we knew he’d set up a trust for the girl. He and Philip had talked about protecting the children, at least financially, so we knew about the trust. But it somehow got reinvested in stock that all but disappeared. Reinvested by son Tomas. Would have been worth millions. Many, many millions if the stock had stayed in the company.”

  My goose bumps were returning, and I still didn’t know how the sad story of Shippy had any potential link with Tomas’s death. “Do you think Shippy’s dead?”

  “I assume that. If for no other reason than that she wasn’t at the funeral.”

  “But she was estranged—”

  Meredith Arbusson nodded, almost impatiently. “Yes, yes,” she said, “but I think she’d have come.” She sighed and shook her head. “She’d have come, hoping that this time, her mother would speak to her, would acknowledge her. Might even accept her. She had this pathetic need that nothing seemed to squelch.”

  What huge amounts of pain Ingrid’s self-centered worldview had created. “Had she tried before?” I asked.

  “She sent letters and phoned. One day, when she was about fifteen, she showed up at my house and asked to use the phone. I was in the room when she called. She was polite enough, but they were still quite annoyed and rude. Ingrid asked her if she was still fat. That was that, and Shippy disappeared again. There’d been a car, a friend, waiting outside. I didn’t know what to do—to betray her trust by calling the police—and where would they take her? Her family wouldn’t accept her. But I still feel guilty about doing nothing.”

  “What could you have done in that window of time?” I wondered
whether the phone calls grew less polite as the years went by until they could have become the “you don’t deserve to live” calls Tomas had described to Sasha. Maybe Shippy wasn’t dead, simply elsewhere. A phone call could be made from anywhere.

  I thought about Jay’s reference to the skeleton in the Severins’ closet. About legal cruelties. His ideas locked around this news of Skippy and felt a perfect fit.

  “I assume she wouldn’t exactly grieve at Tomas’s death,” Meredith said.

  Would she rejoice? Would she actually cause it, and then finally receive a share of the family wealth?

  Without my voicing it, Meredith tossed doubt on that tidy supposition. “Her father left her the obligatory one dollar, and nothing more, and Tomas accepted that situation when he took the helm. She reappeared once again that I know of. There were probably other times I didn’t know about. But she phoned me that time, because she had remembered me as being kind, she said. Imagine! What a sad commentary on how few friendly voices there must have been in her life. I put her up for a few days and gave her some cash, nothing enormous, and she called her mother and—well, this is incredible, but all Ingrid said was, ‘How much do you weigh?’ And Shippy still weighed too much, so Ingrid hung up. I just wanted to shake that woman, shake her till her skinny bones rattled. Her daughter—by the time she came to see me that time, she’d been married twice, both times to wretched men—the kind of terrible men a girl who doesn’t believe anyone could ever love her would accept. She had nothing, nobody, not even a decent education. You should have seen her. She looked awful. I’m not talking about her size, but about her skin, her hair. She looked unhealthy, which she probably was.”

  “Did she try to reach her brother?”

  Meredith Arbusson nodded. “He refused to see her, too. And worse, refused to part with even a fraction of his fortune. I made her ask about the trust, and he informed her that the holdings were now virtually worthless. That the trustees had felt the company’s stock was too ‘risky’ at the time, and converted the shares into investments in other stocks that, alas, didn’t work out. I say he looted it, but she didn’t have the wherewithal to take him to court, and you know that Philip wasn’t going to let me get involved as some kind of third party. I did talk to her about getting counseling, and . . . she left. I never heard from her again.”