Mr. X

by Peter Straub

  “Did you know who I was the first time you saw me?”

  The top of her head nearly struck my chin. She moved a few inches away. “How could I?”

  “Stewart pushed you off the committee because he didn’t want you to see the pictures I showed you last night.”

  “Never mind Stewart. Do you think I recognized you?”

  “I’m trying to figure that out.”

  She took another exasperated step away. “Stewart is about a hundred times more interested in his family than I ever was. I don’t remember how much attention I paid to the Hatch stuff. I looked through it, if that’s what you mean. Maybe your face looked familiar when you came up to me in the hospital, but I wouldn’t have known why.”

  “Didn’t you call Parker Gillespie two days later?”

  “Of course I did!” She raised her arms and held out her hands, palms up. “Ashleigh was in town, remember? I was worried about what would happen to Cobbie if Stewart went to jail. The natural person to talk to was the lawyer for the estate. Ned, don’t make both of us unhappy.”

  I took her hand in mine and kissed it. “I don’t want to make anyone unhappy. I’m just looking for explanations. Tell me about this. A day after you did everything you could to help me find Edward Rinehart, you wanted me to forget the whole thing.”

  Laurie settled her hand on my hip. “Honey, you told me you thought you might be putting Cobbie and me in danger.”

  “You probably haven’t heard about Grenville Milton.”

  Her eyes deepened.

  “Last night, Grennie charged two first-class tickets to Mexico City and took off for a motel in Cape Girardeau. He was carrying a hundred and thirty thousand dollars and a gun, and he begged his girlfriend to come with him. When she refused, he killed himself.”

  The shadow of a thought as precise as a Euclidean theorem moved across Laurie’s eyes. She moved toward the table, tapping her lips with an index finger. “Does Stewart know yet?”

  “That’s probably why he called C. Clayton Creech.”

  “Stewart’s going to ruin as many people as he can. He’ll try to bring down everyone who ever had anything to do with him.” Laurie slid out the chair from which Captain Mullan had begun our progress toward a believable fiction and sat down almost heavily. “He’s going to smash up everything he can.”

  “Like the Hatch trust,” I said.

  The sketchy smile brought to her face by the thought of her husband’s destructive passions disappeared. She crossed her legs and waited for what I was going to say. Her face looked as transparent as a mountain stream.

  “He called Parker Gillespie,” I said. “He couldn’t have known that I was talking to a cop named Mullan about Cordwainer Hatch. He just wanted to smash things up.”

  “He wanted to smash me up,” Laurie said.

  “He said he was relinquishing his claim to the trust. He told Gillespie that he had discovered the existence of the rightful heir, Ned Dunstan, who was the illegitimate son of his father’s older brother. Too bad for Cobden Carpenter Hatch, but he could not suppress the truth. It would have gone something like that.”

  Laurie shifted sideways in the chair and noticed the tidy graffiti on the edge of the table. She lifted a hand and glided her fingers along it, as Mullan had done. In the inner ear of my inner ear, Star said, He kept moving deeper and deeper into that melody until it opened up like a flower and spilled out a hundred other melodies that got richer and richer …

  “I never heard very much about Cordwainer,” Laurie said. “Wasn’t he arrested for something, ages and ages ago?”

  … and there I was, with you growing inside me, and I thought it was like one beautiful birth after another.

  “The part about arrests and convictions doesn’t apply to Cordwainer. Cobden Hatch added it in the late sixties.”

  “I hardly know what to say.”

  “You don’t sound too surprised.”

  “You gave me a big, fat hint about thirty seconds ago,” Laurie said. “That doesn’t mean I’m not surprised. Mr. Creech talked this over with Gillespie? There isn’t any doubt?”

  “Stewart knew what he was doing,” I said. “Was any of this on your mind when we talked about you moving to New York?”

  Her composure saw her through a long moment of silence. “That was nasty.”

  “I couldn’t blame you for wanting Cobbie to get what he was always supposed to have.”

  “He should get it.” She faced me with a direct appeal. “Ned, I’m still adjusting to your news, and I haven’t had time to think about how it will affect you and me, but you must see that this isn’t right. Don’t you agree? Twenty-four hours ago, you had no idea that Stewart’s uncle was your biological father. He didn’t want to inherit the trust. He wasn’t even a real Hatch!”

  “Legally, he was,” I said.

  “But you—you, Ned Dunstan—you’re not that kind of person. You’re not like Stewart. I want us to have a life together in New York. You’d be a better father to Cobbie than Stewart ever was or could have been. That’s true. And I love you. There’s no reason for the two of us not to have a wonderful life together. But Cobbie’s right to the trust is more valid than yours. You see that, don’t you?”

  “What I see doesn’t make any difference,” I said. “According to the law, Cobbie has no right to it at all. Before we can start talking about the rest of our lives, you have to deal with the real situation, not what you want it to be.”

  She continued to focus her utter transparency upon me. “What would have happened if Grennie hadn’t killed himself? If Stewart hadn’t called Parker Gillespie?”

  “You know the answer to that,” I said. “I would have gone back to New York and waited for you. I thought that sounded great.”

  “It still sounds great to me,” she said.

  “But if Stewart hadn’t called him, Parker Gillespie would be about to find himself in a terrible dilemma. This afternoon, everyone in Edgerton is going to learn that Sawyer was Cordwainer Hatch, and that I was his son. What do you think Gillespie would have done?”

  “Spoken up,” she said. “Obviously. I don’t know if he would have done it right away, but it wouldn’t have taken him more than a couple of hours. And then we would have celebrated at Le Madrigal.”

  “Like a happy family.”

  “Isn’t that what you want most of all?”

  “Even Stewart had me figured out better than I did,” I said. “You saw through me right away.”

  “I saw the most interesting man I had met in years,” Laurie said. “I started falling for you when we had dinner with Ashleigh. You know what you did? You told Grennie he was a jerk, you understood my sense of humor, and you were all there, Ned, you looked at me with those incredible brown eyes and you were there. You weren’t judging me, you were looking at my face instead of my breasts, and you weren’t trying to figure out how fast you could talk me into bed. The last thing I wanted to do was get interested in some new guy, but I couldn’t help it. Ashleigh knew what was happening in about ten seconds. If you don’t believe what I’m saying, you’re a fool.”

  “I started falling for you in the hospital gift shop,” I said. “After Creech told me about the trust, he asked how much I wanted to give away. He could see through me, too, but C. Clayton Creech sees through everybody.” I told her about the division of the money and the new trust to be set up for her son. “In the meantime, you’ll have two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year, paid from his share.”

  Nothing had changed in the bright shield of her face. “You don’t think we should have talked about these arrangements?”

  “I was in a cell at Police Headquarters, Laurie. Creech came in for about fifteen minutes before they let me out. I did what I thought was right.”

  “Creech convinced you of what he thought was right. It isn’t too late to change things.” Shining with the utter, straightforward sanity of twenty-twenty foresight, she opened her hand before her as if the world lay in he
r palm.

  “Creech doesn’t know about us. And he doesn’t understand New York. How could he? The kind of apartment I’m going to need costs about two million. I’ll have to have dinner parties, meet the right people, and do the right things. We’ll need teachers and tutors and lessons in Europe. How much do you need to be set for life? Three million? Five? The rest could be made over to Cobbie, with a provision that I have something between five and eight hundred thousand a year. We would be together. If we got married, it would be as though you never gave anything up.”

  “Would you want a prenuptial agreement?”

  Laurie leaned back and regarded me in a steady, unflinching manner that seemed less measuring than conducted in the light of previous measurements and considerations held up for revision. None of this was even close to being cold or calculating. The quality of her steady regard spoke for her—it declared the terms of her immense attraction. What I saw in her face was sadness suffused with irony, and it struck me that until then I had never so much as imagined the existence of ironic sadness. I felt the pull of a future open to nuances beyond my own reach: at that moment I could not have denied what seemed the central principle of her life, that in the realm of adult emotion range meant more than depth. Like great, cool wings, Laurie’s range extended for miles on both sides. I had taken this capacity for a shield, but it did not fend off or deflect, it took in, and all that it took in increased it. She sat before me, blazing with consciousness.

  “I hate the whole idea of prenups,” she said. “What a way to begin a marriage. You might as well buy a Coca-Cola franchise.” Her face settled into a smile of unreadable privacy. “Philadelphia might be good for us. It’s less expensive than Manhattan, and the Curtis Institute is a great music school. Lennie Bernstein went there.”

  Like C. Clayton Creech, Laurie reassembled herself without altering her posture or moving any part of her body, then smiled at me and stood up.

  Her next words clarified whom she had included in “us.” “You’d visit Philadelphia, wouldn’t you?”

  “Better tell Posy to apply to Temple or U. Penn,” I said.

  “I can always find another Posy.” Laurie knew that she had shocked me. The administration of the shock was a deliberate acknowledgment of our new relationship. “Especially in Philadelphia. The hard part was finding one in Edgerton.” She kissed my cheek. “Call me before you leave. I need your address and phone number.”

  I watched her saunter across the hallway to the staircase.

  131

  Wisps of fog drifted across Veal Yard. A film of condensation gleamed on the cobbles. In the gray light, the buildings around the square seemed on the verge of departure. On the far side of the fountain, a woman’s black pump stood with its heel lodged between two stones, as if abandoned only minutes before. A woman leaving, a woman walking away with such finality that she had left her shoe in token…. I remembered the eloquence with which Laurie had passed through my doorway and the undiminished clarity of Star’s voice, describing an alto solo in a concert she had seen while pregnant with me.

  All at once, grief spoke from every gleaming cobble and wisp of fog, and the world seemed to deepen and enlarge. Grief, I thought, it’s everywhere, how could I have supposed I would ever get away from loss—

  Robert’s face vanished backward into a lane.

  “Robert!” I called. “I have to—”

  On the way to Cherry Street, I kept glancing over my shoulder to find him sprawled across the backseat and opening his mouth to say something funny and cruel, but I was still the only person in the car when I pulled up in front of Nettie’s house. It was a little past 9:00 A.M. All three of my favorite relatives would be in the kitchen. I got out of the car and looked at Joy’s front windows. The net curtains hung straight and undisturbed. It was too early in the morning for Joy to take up her post.

  Nettie and May bustled around the stove, preparing scrambled eggs, bacon, and what smelled like chicken livers. Clark Rutledge sneered up at me from his bowl of pebbles and sugar.

  “Good to see you wearing that pretty jacket, boy.”

  Nettie asked if I wanted to join them for breakfast, and I said that I was hungry enough to eat anything they put in front of me. I sat down next to Clark.

  “They say on the radio Grenville Milton killed himself last night. Care to hear my opinion?”

  “Fill me in,” I said.

  “It’s a setup, pure and simple. Stewart Hatch has enemies who would stop at nothing to put him in a bad light.”

  “Mrs. Hatch must be going through the torments of hell,” Nettie said. “And such a lovely woman. Isn’t she, Ned?”

  “One of a kind.”

  May ladled eggs and chicken livers onto the plates, and Nettie took a foil-wrapped package of bacon from the oven. Clark pushed his empty bowl to the center of the table. “Left Mr. Hatch holding the bag. That was the point of the exercise.”

  “And him with a wife and child,” May said.

  “His wife and child are going to get ten or twelve million from a family trust,” I said.

  “They will have a roof over their heads,” May said. “I am comforted.”

  “I’m comforted to know you’ll have a roof over yours,” I said. “When Stewart Hatch heard about Milton’s suicide, he told his family’s lawyer, Parker Gillespie, all about his Uncle Cordwainer, so you won’t have to worry about that anymore.”

  Nettie and May applied themselves to the chicken livers.

  “By tomorrow, everyone is going to know he was Edward Rinehart,” I said.

  May sank back in her chair and gazed heavenward. “That is a great relief. I may not be an eater, but I am a talker, and silence comes hard to me.”

  “What the devil are you gabbing about?” Clark asked.

  “Mr. Hatch has released us from our vow of silence,” Nettie said. “It seems we have the boy to thank for that. You’ve done well by us, son, and we are grateful for your efforts on our behalf.”

  “I second the motion,” Clark said. “Although I regret that Mr. Hatch is bound for the clink. He was generous to a fault.”

  “Stewart Hatch laid out a lot of money to keep you from talking about his uncle. Which is why you couldn’t tell me about Edward Rinehart.”

  “Well, son,” said Nettie, “we couldn’t help but know a lot more about Mr. Edward Rinehart than your mother ever did.”

  “Because he looked like your father.”

  “You could not miss the resemblance,” said May. “And we couldn’t tell her the facts. You can’t talk about a thing like that to an innocent young girl.”

  I laughed. “I guess it would have been hard to suggest that her boyfriend was your father’s illegitimate son without actually coming out and saying it, but how in the world did you know he was Cordwainer Hatch?”

  “Why, that was Joy,” said May. “You know how she sits in that window day after day. One evening, she called up and said, ‘May, I just saw that scalawag Cordwainer Hatch waltz into our sister’s house with Star hanging on his arm.’ That was the one and only time Star had him over to meet her family. I put on my best coat and hat and hurried across the street quick as a bug. Right after they left, I called Joy and said, ‘Joy, that young man must have fallen off our family tree, but his name was not Cordwainer Hatch.’ And Joy said to me, ‘Honey, you’re wrong as you can be. He must be passing under an assumed name by reason of his scandalous reputation.’ ”

  “How did Joy know he was Cordwainer?” I asked.

  “Joy spent three whole months working in that house,” Nettie said. “She was eighteen years old. It was the Depression, you know, and while we were still comfortable from the sale of our land out of town, it was all you could do to get a job. Carpenter Hatch advertised for a girl of good character willing to do household work, and Joy interviewed for the position. She said she wanted to get out of the house, can you imagine? To think of her now, you can hardly believe it.”

  “Carpenter Hatch hired her?” I a
sked. “Didn’t he know who she was?”

  “If you ask me, he liked the idea of a Dunstan girl changing his sheets and cleaning his bathroom. Joy started at the end of October. Cordwainer was in boarding school at the time. His parents were forced to send him away, you know.” Nettie nodded in a beautiful imitation of sympathetic sorrow. “One day while rearranging the contents of Mrs. Hatch’s dresser drawers, Joy came across some photographs the lady had hidden from view. She noticed the resemblance between the boy and our late father. It was not long after that she was let go.”

  “Hatch fired her because of something she said?” Then I understood what Nettie had told me. “No, Joy wasn’t rearranging Mrs. Hatch’s dresser drawers, she was redistributing their contents. She was a magpie, like Queenie and May.”

  “Though not up to our standard,” May said. “All the same, Mr. Hatch could never prove anything, but his suspicions settled on her, and then it was farewell, job.”

  “She told you what she had seen, and you saved it up. When did you have these helpful discussions with Stewart Hatch?”

  “When was that, Clark?” Nettie asked.

  “Around 1984 or ’85. Mr. Reagan was in the Oval Office. Like the man said, it was morning in America.”

  “I suppose you had gone through the money Carpenter Hatch paid for the property on New Providence Road.”

  Nettie said, “Clark put a large sum into cranberries.”

  Clark informed me that the cranberry was a fruit of remarkable versatility. Its juice, health-giving and enjoyable by itself, appeared in several popular cocktails. Rendered into sauce, the cranberry appeared on every table in the country, come Thanksgiving. A note of regret accompanied this recital of the cranberry’s virtues.

  “Unfortunately,” Nettie said, “the cranberry did not render us into millionaires.”

  “The man I dealt with could be called a common criminal,” Clark said. “Though he was as smooth as silk.”

  “So you had a talk with Stewart Hatch.”

  “For the purpose of presenting him with a real estate opportunity,” Clark said.