“But Lici,” he said. “I’m not selling anything.”
“Father says everyone is either buying or selling. Or dead.”
“And where does your father stand? Is he sold on me, or is he not buying it either?”
“You’re clever,” she said. “I like that. But I don’t trust you.”
“Oh, but I’m very trustworthy. All Scotsmen are.”
“And what if you’re not really a Scotsman?”
“Would you like to see my kilt?” He pointed toward Cronin, standing awkwardly by the elevators. “It’s right there, in that bag. Would that convince you?”
“Now you’re making fun of me.”
“I’m just having fun with you. That’s acceptable, isn’t it?”
Lici considered him again. She took a long drag on her cigarette and jetted the smoke. “Just know that I’m onto you. I didn’t want you thinking you had us all fooled.”
“You seem to think I’m much more interesting than I really am. Hidden agendas, secret motives, counterfeit Scotsmanship. Do you see a fair number of detective movies, Lici? Perhaps read a Dashiell Hammett novel now and then?”
“Don’t be vulgar.” The cigarette flared between her lips one last time, then she dropped it and crushed it under her heel. “I had my doubts that you’d ever set foot in the Plaza.”
“So you came to check up on me?”
“Please,” she said. “I was meeting friends for tea.”
“I’m surprised,” Francis said.
“That I have friends?” Lici said, robbing him of a punch line.
“No,” he said. “That you drink tea. I had you figured for something stronger. But you’re welcome to follow me, if it will set your mind at ease. I’ll even introduce you to the staff. Collier must be around somewhere—he’s the concierge—and that’s Bobby at the front door, and Andy the elevator boy, for taking us to the seventh floor. He’s quite the wag, that one.”
“Now you’re inviting me back to your hotel room. What would Anisette think? She’ll be heartbroken.”
At the mention of Anisette’s name, a spark flared in his chest. He might have blushed. “Isn’t that half the reason you’d do it?”
“She was engaged to be married. Did she tell you that? The wedding would have been two weeks ago—a May bride. She broke it off when it became clear to her that her fiancé was a thug. But that’s not the story anyone tells. There are advantages to being a thug from a good family. A better family than ours, apparently.”
Francis fumbled for a response.
“Oh, it’s no secret. It was quite the scandal.” She leaned in, as if sharing a confidence, but spoke in a harsh stage whisper. “Anyone on Fifth Avenue will tell you that Anisette is hysterical. That she had a nervous breakdown—walking the streets in the middle of winter, with her clothes torn and her hair like a madwoman’s. That her fiancé and his family were so lucky to learn of her condition before it was too late.”
He tried to square the image of Anisette alone and in winter with that of the girl he had escorted through the park. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because you’re going to hear it sooner or later, and I’d rather you ran off now, before my sister and my mother get any more ideas about where this is all leading. My parents treat Anisette like she’s made of porcelain, and maybe she is. But I’d rather not see her shattered by the likes of you.”
“I think there’s more to Anisette than you realize.” He pictured her with the violin, at her house by the sea, and radiant in the gallery full of Rembrandts.
“You think you know her better than I do? Really? Do you know she still plays with dolls?”
“And what do you play with?”
“Clever, indeed,” she said. “But I still don’t trust you.” She turned toward the door, then paused and cast over her shoulder a look that was equal parts Marlene Dietrich and Edward G. Robinson. “Good-bye, Angus. Or whoever you are.”
Cronin was stewing by the elevator, but before Francis could reach him, he was again intercepted—this time by the concierge.
Collier was beaming. “Your Lordship! Wonderful news! Your brother has returned!” He clamshelled Francis’s hand between his and gave it a vigorous shake before remembering himself—Don’t touch the aristocracy—and placing his hands over his heart. The details of young Malcolm’s return poured out of him, but Francis took in hardly a word of it. Bodies in pastel fabrics and summer-weight suits moved through the lobby, laughter erupted as friends exchanged hellos, somewhere a piano tinkled through a tune he had heard but could not name, from the street came the whistle of the bell captain summoning taxis, Collier continued a recitation of miracles and good Samaritans, and over by the elevators Cronin slouched with a garment bag full of formal attire and the gun Francis would use to kill the king. All of it washed over him. The only thing that mattered was that Michael was back. He was safe. And tomorrow Francis would do what was necessary to keep him that way.
THE FARM
WHEN IS TOM COMING home?” Henry looked up from his dinner, fixing his mother with those eyes, more black than brown. He asked the question innocently enough, as if it had just occurred to him that there was an empty chair at the table. But it had to be the hundredth time he had asked her in the past week—maybe even the hundred thousandth. He had wailed when they left Tom at the depot and only the ice cream brought an end to the tears. She had paid the man in the ice cream parlor with a ten-dollar bill for a ten-cent scoop, and wasn’t that sure to get some folks talking—as if Alice hadn’t given them plenty enough already to set their tongues wagging.
Along with the ice cream had come a white lie: Tom would be back soon. Without that lie, Henry would have bawled while the ice cream melted onto his fist, then cried some more that he had lost his treat. He quieted himself, and only when he had finished the last soggy bits of the cone did she wipe his face of tears and snot and chocolate. She told him that Tom had to go on a short trip, which meant that Henry was the man of the house, and wasn’t it a good thing that he knew so much about caring for the new calf? And wouldn’t Tom be proud to see how hard Henry could work?
In the days that followed, the question kept coming and Alice did her best to answer in a way that would satisfy the boy without making any promises. “Any day now,” she would say. “Soon, I suppose.” But tonight at dinner, when Henry asked, Alice snapped. “Will you stop asking questions I can’t answer!”
Henry didn’t blink. Slowly his lip began to quiver and his eyes turned from coal to wet, limpid tar and then he was wailing again, whereupon the baby picked up the chorus. Alice sat there between them, one on each side and the smooth back of Tom’s empty chair across from her, and she let her face sink into the cradle of her hands.
How had she gotten in such a state? She had been on her own plenty of times, and she had never fallen to pieces before. So Tom had been gone a week? What was one week? She had borne up against departures that had struck deeper and lasted longer.
But it was how he had left, and where he was going. He had been summoned back to the city, back into the past, and Alice knew that was dangerous terrain. Hadn’t she wrapped that gun of his in an extra shirt and set it at the bottom of his valise? He’d thought he would be protecting her, leaving the gun behind, but what was Alice supposed to do with a wheel gun? She was a farmer’s daughter and a farmer herself, and she had learned to handle a shotgun, a rifle even, all before she was fourteen—the world was full, after all, of foxes, feral dogs, and livestock too old or too hurt to keep on living. On the night Tom left, as soon as she put the children to bed, she took her father’s shotgun down from the locked closet of his old room. She cleaned it and loaded it and laid it above the hutch where Henry could not see it. Just in case, she told herself.
But just in case of what? She knew that Tom had once worked for this man, and that the man was some sort of gangster who sold liquor and loaned money and probably did much worse. It all seemed like stories from another world, except n
ow that world had collided with hers: an old man in a long black car, shining despite the dust of the roads, had summoned Tom back to the city, and in his place he had left an envelope full of money. Tom said to buy the boy some ice cream and before she could reply that she had left her coin purse on the chifforobe, he spread open the mouth of the envelope to reveal dollar bills stacked like a deck of cards. Where—she thought to say, but she knew where, and she had some idea of why. There was more she wanted to ask him, but he was already wearing the mask of a stranger, and then he turned and his body carried him toward the depot, the ticket booth, and the train that would take him to the city.
The days since Tom had left had been like any other days, which was to say full of work. An envelope stuffed with money couldn’t milk the cows and pasture them, couldn’t feed the chickens, couldn’t toss and stack the bales in the haymow, couldn’t figure out why the tractor kept stalling, or keep an eye on the baby, or walk the field at night looking for the cows that had broken through the fence. All of it fell on Alice. It was only now—as she wondered if there was a neighbor she could ask to lend a hand—that she realized how much she and Tom had built a wall around themselves; created a world where they were happy but alone. The people in town could scratch their heads and think that Alice had lost her mind and her morals and the good name her father had given her, but contrary to the their opinion, Alice didn’t retreat out of shame. She just didn’t want to share her happiness with anyone else.
When her father, in his mangled voice, had told her, Marry that one, he was speaking aloud a wish that Alice herself hadn’t dared to make. Her life and Tom’s meshed like the cogs of a machine, working together, coming in contact, moving apart, but always working, and always bound to circle back to each other. She had come to treasure those moments in the day when she would see him: first at breakfast, then in the milking parlor as she shoveled silage into the cows’ trough, then as she crossed the yard to collect eggs, then while she hung the laundry on the line, while she weeded the vegetable garden as he led the cows in from the pasture, and at last across the dinner table. Before the end of Tom’s first year on the farm, Alice knew she loved him—that she was in love with him—and she was sure he felt the same. But what did love and a shared appetite for labor matter when she already had a husband and a child? Alice confined herself to believing that if she was to find happiness, it would be as a mother and nothing more. She had married unwisely, and even though she loved this man she saw every day, the only way to atone for her misjudgment—her mistake—was to deny herself, raise her son, and work.
That was one way of looking at it.
But after a year of seeing a better life right in front of her, she was worn down. Wanting had made threadbare the false satisfaction of keeping up appearances. Hadn’t her own father, an honorable man who knew the pain of loss, told her that she deserved more?
If she had left it up to Tom, nothing would have happened. There would be no them, no Grace. They would have continued to circle each other, desperate and lonely and unworthy, growing older and having only their love of Henry to serve as a channel for the full weight of their feelings. Tom, schooled in self-denial, could have done it. But Alice could not bear it. One cold fall night she went to his room and—Shush, shush, shush—she quieted his shocked protests and climbed beneath the quilt on his bed and as she laid her head on his chest and her hands began to explore the knotty sinews of his body, she felt his resistance melt away.
If she had let the rising sun shame her the next morning, Tom would surely have fled, thinking he had despoiled her and the farm itself. Instead she greeted him, and the day, with a kiss on his wide, worried forehead and told him to get to work while she lit the stove. When he came in for his breakfast with her and the toddler Henry, he was perplexed but he knew that this was his family, if he was strong enough to accept it. Had he skulked into the house on unsteady feet or been unable to look her in the eye, she would have sent him on his way. He seemed to know it, and he washed the dust and the years from his hands and took his place at the table, giving a little nod, and they had been husband and wife ever since, as good as if it had all been settled in a church.
Sitting at that same table, with Henry sobbing and Gracie hiccupping through her tears, Alice pressed her fingertips into her eyelids. She could imagine her eyes popping like tomatoes left too long on the vine. She pressed, felt the shape of them, and watched the bursts of silver-black, of purple like an electric current. When she was a girl and her mother was ill, she would stare at the sun and count to ten. If she could make it to ten without closing her eyes, she believed, then Mother would get well. Her eyes would flood with inky black puddles fringed with a hot edge of red, but she would never make it to ten, and her mother never got well.
Now, watching those same pulses and shimmers, she slowly counted to ten. When she reached the last number, her eyes intact, she raised her head and began stacking the plates. She collected the spoons and the forks and scraped a crust of bread and two corncobs into the bucket for the pig Tom insisted on keeping in a sty he had built behind the barn. Henry was sniffling, his breath coming in great, wet gasps, while Gracie was red-faced and sticky with tears. Alice set the dishes in the sink and opened the pie safe, where the jelly tarts she had made that morning were piled on a plate. It had been too hot to make a pie, but a few scraps of dough and last season’s blueberry preserves baked quickly enough, and when she laid one in front of Henry and wiped his face with a napkin, his sniffling gradually ebbed and was replaced with the contented sounds of chewing and mouth-breathing. She half filled Henry’s glass of milk and then scooped up Gracie, holding the baby close so she could smell the top of her head. The scent always soothed her, and she made a slow whooshing sound that eventually brought an end to Gracie’s tears.
“He’ll be home soon,” she said to Henry, and to herself. She ran a hand through the boy’s hair. “I don’t know when, but soon.”
Henry nodded and continued to eat.
“I miss him too,” she said. “But tell me, what would Tom say if he walked in and found us here, crying and squabbling?”
Henry scrunched his face, as if he were puzzling out one of Tom’s quizzes. Tom knew the name of everything that grew, and he would often ask Henry, What sort of tree is that? What’s the name of that flower?
When the answer came to Henry, he spoke in the booming voice he used when he imitated Tom: “What’s all this rumpus?”
Alice had to admit that’s exactly what he would have said. Both of them now looked at the screen door, and Alice knew that they were imagining, hoping for, the same thing. It was getting late but they were approaching the longest day of the year. The sun would be up for another hour, even here, where the low mountains cast shadows across the fields and forests. There was still time, wasn’t there, for the screen door to open, for the spring to creak before snapping the door shut, and for Tom to return home. The day was long, but sooner or later, without Alice noticing the exact moment it happened, the darkness would fall.
FORDHAM HEIGHTS
BEFORE THE CALL FROM the front desk of the Plaza Hotel informing them that young Sir Malcolm had safely returned, Martin and Rosemary were dressing for the rehearsal dinner. The babysitter was due to arrive any minute, cocktails were to be served at the Hallorans’ home in Riverdale at five thirty sharp, and yet Martin moved like a man who’d had the marrow scraped from his bones. He was stiff and fragile, likely to break. He had spent the past forty-eight hours scouring Manhattan’s precinct houses, hospitals, missions, and morgues. Starting on the east side, he had worked his way down to the Battery, then backtracked up the west side as far uptown as Columbus Circle. Michael had simply vanished, it seemed, and it was Francis who had lost him. All through his search, he had seen Francis only once, escorting—or being escorted by—that phantom in the blue serge suit. Martin was sure he would have been able to place the man if only his rage at Francis wasn’t burning so bright. Yoked to that anger was envy; envy
that Francis could turn off whatever bond of love and filial loyalty had driven Martin to the streets.
Or maybe Martin was giving himself too much credit. Maybe it was just the hard lump of guilt in his chest—the product of years when he’d barely thought of Michael at all—that kept him looking for his brother. He wanted to say to someone, This isn’t fair! He wanted to shout it. Why this week of all weeks? The wedding reception was going to be his big break, he could feel it. He had put so much of himself into the band, into the arrangements, into keeping the group together, and oh! how they could swing. Only now it was ruined. Francis had wrecked it, and he hated himself for thinking this, but Michael had wrecked it, too. But who wanted to hear that? Even the cold, selfish center of Martin’s heart shrank from the raw truth of it.
Tonight Rosemary had given him a free pass—Skip the dinner, keep up the search—but as much as he dreaded the idea of mixing with the Dwyers and the lace-curtain Hallorans, he told himself that by going he could spare Rosemary a night of sideways glances and halfhearted inquiries into his whereabouts. It was a game she could not win—he lost his brother? How did that happen?—and it would only add another chapter in the story of Martin, the Man Who Can’t Get It Right. Along with that, he had blindsided her when he quit Chester’s band, and she was likely at her wits’ end about his plans for the future. So he owed her one. But he also knew that going to the dinner gave him a high-minded, self-sacrificing reason not to do the thing he dreaded even more, which was roaming the grimy underside of the city to call at cop shops where midnight brawlers and jake-leg drunks were hauled in, or at the rescue missions with their reek of flop sweat and disinfectant, or at the hospitals where a hot fog of infection surrounded him, or at the morgues where the John Does lay half covered in the hallways, their bare bruised feet tagged for some other poor sod to claim. Martin didn’t want to choose between the dinner and the search. He wanted some feat of magic that could give him the week he had imagined rather than the one unfolding around him.
The World of Tomorrow Page 42
