Wicked Stepmother

by Michael McDowell

  The guard on duty in the lower lobby knew Louise. Three years before, the apartment building had been turned over to the Hawke agency for assistance in conversion to a condominium. He had, moreover, heard of Jonathan’s death, and when he saw Louise in black, he offered his condolences. “You’re going up?” he asked.

  Louise nodded.

  “You want me to send somebody up with a master key?”

  “I have one,” said Louise. She and Eric got into the elevator.

  “Where’d you get that key?” Eric asked, when the doors were closed.

  “Jonathan always kept one in the front hall in Brookline. I picked it up before the funeral.”

  Eric loosened his tie and leaned against the back wall of the elevator. “I still don’t know why you dragged me here. We should have gone to Brookline. I’m starving.”

  They got off on the thirtieth floor, and Louise let them into the apartment. Leading Eric through the rooms, she unpinned and removed her hat. She tossed it onto Jonathan’s bed, then pulled open the louvered doors of his closet.

  She turned to Eric. “Forget about the shoes, of course, but all the sport coats should fit. Jonathan was longer in the legs than you, so we’ll have to alter all the pants. Look at all these ties! And every time I saw him he was wearing that dingy old Harvard thing.”

  “Ma!” Eric protested. “Is that why we’re here?! I don’t want to wear a dead man’s clothes!”

  “For God’s sake, Eric, take the whine out of your voice. You’re twenty-eight years old.” She yanked a tweed jacket from its hanger. “These coats are the best wool. Look at the labels: Louis, Saks, Barney’s. Wait, here’s two silk suits for summer. More men ought to wear silk. Here’s some vicuna.” She went to the dresser and began pulling open drawers. “These sweaters are cashmere and wool. The shirts all come from Brooks Brothers. You’ve never had clothes like these, and if you don’t take them, Verity and Cassandra will come by here and send everything out to Goodwill.”

  “All right, Ma,” said Eric with a leer. “I guess I earned them. Just like you earned that house in Brookline, right, Ma? Or thought you earned it.”

  “Eric,” said Louise severely, “there are things that aren’t to be joked about, or even talked about, at any time. Not even when you and I are alone together—do you understand?”

  “I understand,” said Eric, shrugging. “I just want to know what you intend to do about—”

  “Do about what?”

  “Do about Verity and Cassandra.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Louise, a little uneasily.

  “Well,” said Eric blandly, “Richard and Jonathan are dead, right? And Verity and Cassandra are still alive. That’s all I mean.”

  “I have no idea in the world what you are talking about, Eric,” said Louise. “I don’t intend to do anything. After all, you’re married to Verity, aren’t you? And in eight months, Verity is going to have a great deal of money. And Cassandra’s only twenty-five or something, she’s not old enough to—”

  “To what?” Eric prompted.

  “To cause trouble.”

  “But what if she does?”

  “She won’t,” said Louise. “I’ll see to that.”

  “What about that detective Jonathan hired?”

  “Jonathan obviously didn’t tell Verity and Cassandra who the man was,” said Louise. “Or they would have said something. You know how snide Verity can be. She wouldn’t have let that opportunity get past her.”

  “So everything’s all right for now?” said Eric. “No more accidents for a while?”

  Louise turned away from her son. “Just look on this as recycling,” she said, as she leaned into the closet. She pulled half a dozen sport coats from their hangers and tossed them on the bed. “Try everything on. There’s no point in taking anything that doesn’t fit.” She thrust a handful of ties at her son. “Charity begins at home.”

  As Eric began trying on the jackets, Louise went through the bureau. “Do you need any cologne?” she asked.

  “Why not?”

  She selected three bottles of brand-name scent and put them aside. She went through Eric’s jewelry case, and picked out the cuff links and rings that were unmarked.

  “What if Apple notices somebody’s been through Jonathan’s things?” said Eric, extending his arms to measure the length of a shirt sleeve.

  “That’s perfect,” said Louise. “And don’t worry: women never remember men’s clothes the way men remember women’s. All men’s clothes look pretty much alike. The only thing that distinguishes them is quality. This stuff is quality.”

  “I don’t know,” said Eric doubtfully. “Did you chain the door?”

  Louise went to do it.

  When she returned, she went methodically through the closet, pulling out what she’d missed on the first go-round. Rummaging through the laundry bag, she extracted in triumph a handsome pair of gray wool slacks. “These go with everything!”

  “Ma, will you go see if there’s something to eat? I can’t go on with this unless I have something to eat.”

  “All right, but you keep trying things on.”

  She returned from the kitchen in a few minutes with a large glass of milk and a package of Pepperidge Farm Milanos. “This was all I saw.”

  Eric grabbed the cookies and devoured several greedily. He then swallowed off half the milk, and licked his lips.

  “All right,” Louise asked, “what fits and what doesn’t?” Eric pointed at the smaller of two piles on the bed. Louise began hanging these up again. After half an hour or so, there was a large pile of clothing on the bed, but everything else looked as if it hadn’t been touched.

  “How are we supposed to get all this stuff downstairs?” asked Eric.

  Louise’s mouth twitched. She walked out of the room, and returned a few moments later carrying a large, dusty suitcase. “Vuitton,” she said. “Bet it hasn’t been used in years.”

  She packed the clothes in the bag, and Eric lugged it out into the living room. Together they set the bedroom to rights, and then took the elevator down to the basement.

  The limousine was brought around, and Louise gave the driver Eric’s address in Cambridge.

  “I wish we could have taken all that luggage,” sighed Louise. “It’s a beautiful set.”

  As they crossed the river back into Cambridge, Eric started to ask his mother something, stopped himself, began again, and again stopped.

  “Are you having some kind of spasm?” Louise said. “If you have something to say, then say it.”

  “Can you give me a check?”

  “I gave you a check two weeks ago.”

  “The economy’s soft.”

  Louise draped her veil up over the brim of her hat and pulled off her gloves. She leaned forward toward her son. “Eric, darling, I am sick up to here,” she said, touching her chin with a flick of a ruby fingernail, “of hearing this sort of thing from you. I go out of my way to do things for you, to provide you with a wardrobe any young man in this city would be proud of, for instance. There is nothing I wouldn’t do for you, but sometimes I think I am too generous for your own good. Let me remind you that you are married to a very rich young woman. You know what happens when Verity turns twenty-nine?”

  “She gets a third of the trust fund.”

  “No. Now that Jonathan’s dead, she’ll get half. That’s at least four million dollars. I don’t need to tell you that is considerably more money than I have. There’s no reason in the world you should come to me, when your wife has that kind of wealth. I’m serious. As of now, I stop subsidizing you.”

  Silence fell between them. After a few moments, Eric said, “You keep going on about how rich Verity is going to be, but you haven’t told me how . . .”

  “How what?”

  “To get Verity to give me some money.”

  Louise seemed to have been waiting for this.

  “Get her pregnant,” she said without hesitation.

  Eric
looked at his mother as if she’d slapped him. His eyes narrowed suspiciously and he tilted his head as he said, “How am I supposed to do that? She won’t even let me touch her. We haven’t slept together since before she went out to Kansas City.”

  “Seduce her, for Christ’s sake. Be nice to her, tell her you’re still in love with her, get her drunk, I don’t care! Just get her into bed.”

  Eric threw up his hands. “So Verity gets pregnant. So what? Where does that get me? There’s no guarantee she’d take me back. And even if she did, I don’t want a kid. Neither does she.”

  “Of course she doesn’t. She’ll get an abortion.”

  “Then what—”

  “Then you sue her for a divorce. Do you know what a judge in this city—this Catholic city—is going to do when he finds out that your spoiled rich wife went out and willfully destroyed your baby, your only chance at a reconciliation, the baby you’ve always wanted, even after you said you’d keep it if she didn’t want it?”

  “With my luck, she’d go through with having the kid. Then where would I be?”

  “She won’t go through with it, and we both know it.” Louise touched a hand to her breasts and said mockingly, “And you’ll be devastated. You’ll be a mere shell of your former self, a broken man overwhelmed by the tragedy of your insensitive wife’s selfish cruelty.” Louise recovered her tone. “Newspapers’ll love it. You’ll walk away from that courtroom with enough to keep you on the sunny side of Easy Street for the rest of your life.”

  Eric remained doubtful. “Nice plan, but lots could go wrong.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like what if she won’t have anything to do with me, no matter how nice I am to her? Then what do I do?”

  Louise shrugged, and lowered her veil again. “Drug her,” she advised quietly.

  PART THREE: The Clever Daughter

  17

  Shortly before his death, Jonathan had turned over to Cassandra twenty thousand dollars of his own money, to fund the conversion of the space above the garage into a rehearsal studio for People Buying Things. Cassandra herself had hired the carpenter-contractors, men who had restored and reworked the eighteenth-century building in which the Menelaus Press had its offices. These young men had presented several alternative plans for the job, which Cassandra, Rocco, Jonathan, and Apple went over in detail. As soon as a plan was chosen, the men went to work. Jonathan had died just as the work was getting well under way. By the end Cassandra had had to add another fifteen thousand to her brother’s original contribution, but the thing was done right.

  The garage had been converted into an apartment during the early 1950s; now the workmen took down all the interior walls except those defining the kitchen and bath. The space was soundproofed, rewired, and weatherized. A stage was built at one end, and along one long wall were accommodations for storage of instruments, costumes, and personal effects. Worktables had been set up at the end of the room away from the stage, with filing cabinets for the band’s records, a rehearsal piano, and comfortable furniture for guests, potential backers, and the band itself. “If you ever make money,” Cassandra explained, “this place is all set up to turn itself right into your very own recording studio.”

  The workmen drove in the last nail, swept up the last wood shavings, and soaped away the last black marks on the walls one Friday afternoon in August. Rocco began bringing over instruments and music on Saturday morning. Cassandra helped him unload the car, and when everything had been brought in, he looked around and said, “I can’t believe you did this for us.”

  “Jonathan and I did it,” returned Cassandra. “Because we wanted to.”

  He threw his arms over her shoulders, leaned forward, and smiled. “Shouldn’t we have a dedication ceremony?”

  Cassandra bit lightly at her lower lip and breathed out as she turned her face to one side and closed her eyes. Rocco trailed his lips down her neck. She drew her breath in again as he closed a hand over her breast and bit lightly at her bare shoulder. Cassandra slid her hands about his neck and pulled one leg up to press herself closer against his nakedness. Slowly and gently Rocco entered her. Cassandra groaned aloud, her body buckling slightly against his thrusts. Her fingers twined in his hair as he covered her mouth with his, grazing his tongue across her teeth and probing deeply into her wet mouth. Cassandra, moving with him, drew up her other leg. Rocco leaned up to brace himself on his elbows and drove more deeply into her, his mouth never leaving her lips. Sweat began to glisten on their bodies as the sound of flesh smacking against flesh echoed against the walls of the empty room. Rocco’s muscles tightened and Cassandra pulled her mouth free of his. She pressed her face against his neck and cried out as they reached orgasm together. He remained tense for several moments while her body buckled and shook against his. Then a long spasm racked her legs and stomach, and after that she was still. Rocco held her even tighter, and together, they slowly relaxed. Cassandra lowered her legs. Rocco kissed her again as he slid off to one side, his arm beneath her neck, cradling her against his shoulder. He pressed one of his knees between her legs. With the back of his hand he tenderly wiped the beads of sweat from her cheeks, and then pushed damp tangles of hair from her forehead.

  They lay on a blanket in the long wide open space above the garage on the Hawke property. Their clothes were discarded about the blanket on all sides of them. Although the afternoon was cool, the windows along one wall had been raised a few inches and a light breeze pushed at the blinds drawn against the light. The air felt suddenly chill against Cassandra’s body and she shivered as the sweat began to dry on her flesh. Rocco leaned across her and yanked up her side of the blanket and pulled it over her. Cassandra rested her face against his chest.

  As she lay snuggled in his arms, Rocco asked, “Shouldn’t I close some of the windows? Aren’t you cold?”

  “I like being cold. At least when I’ve got somebody to warm me up.” She lifted up her chin and he leaned down and kissed her.

  “And the floor doesn’t bother you either? It’s not too hard?”

  “No,” she replied. “See?” She slid out of his arms, and lay flat on the blanket. She held out her arms to him, and he slipped on top of her. They began to make love once more.

  The door of the rehearsal studio opened. The soundproofing was so effective that they had not heard footsteps on the hollow wooden stairs.

  Cassandra looked over, and gasped, “Louise!”

  Rocco stopped moving atop her and looked at Cassandra in confusion. “What . . . ?” He followed Cassandra’s line of vision and was mildly startled to see the widow Hawke. He rolled off Cassandra and lay on his back, one arm behind his head. He made no move to cover himself, though Cassandra instinctively pulled up the blanket to conceal her nakedness.

  Louise’s hair had been permed into a mass of black waves that fell heavily about her shoulders. She flipped it off one shoulder as she came into the rehearsal room. Several wide bands of silver on one wrist clinked as she fingered the large gold heart-shaped pendant resting just above her exposed cleavage. She looked at Cassandra and Rocco with sarcastic disdain. She sighed and touched the collar of her snugly fitted black silk pantsuit.

  “I just came,” said Louise, glancing up and down the length of Rocco’s exposed body, “to look the place over.”

  “Louise, what do you want?” Cassandra demanded.

  She stepped farther into the room. Her eyes drifted about the space. “This was such a nice apartment, perfect for a single. It was cozy. Now it looks sterile. It looks like a room above a garage.”

  “That’s exactly what it is. Didn’t you notice the two cars and the boat downstairs?”

  Louise peered into the kitchen and the bath. “Eric would have been very comfortable in here,” she mused, then turned quickly and smiled a brittle smile at Cassandra, “before the conversion, I mean. I would have thought you and Verity would have liked to help him out. You know what kind of financial state he’s in. He hasn’t been able to find any
work, and his landlord raised his rent by thirty percent this past year. I don’t know what—”

  “Louise,” said Cassandra, “please go away.”

  Ignoring this, Louise wandered toward the stage end of the room. “The problem with a conversion like this—and I imagine it didn’t put you back less than thirty thousand—is that it’ll cost you more than that much to reconvert.”

  “Why should I want to reconvert?” asked Cassandra.

  “This place,” said Louise, glancing at Rocco, “makes a great love nest, but what happens when the bird flies away? You’re stuck with a rehearsal studio.”

  Rocco started to speak, but Cassandra put a hand on his arm. He clapped his mouth shut.

  “Louise,” said Cassandra with warning in her voice. “If you have something to say, say it.”

  Louise stood at the edge of the stage. She suddenly turned around, and leaned back against the edge. “I did come over here to talk to you about something, but . . .” She looked disapprovingly at Rocco.

  He started to sit up. If he felt any embarrassment at being caught naked in front of a middle-aged woman who was distinctly overdressed for Saturday morning, he effectively concealed it. “I’ll run over to the house.”

  “Put something on first,” said Louise.

  “Stay put,” said Cassandra.

  He leaned back, propped on his elbows. Cassandra draped a corner of the blanket across the middle part of his body.

  “I came over here to tell you what I think of your little investment here and about the way you’ve been acting these last months.”

  “I don’t care what you think,” said Cassandra mildly.

  “I’m going to tell you anyway. I wouldn’t be doing my duty as your guardian if I didn’t.”

  “You are not my guardian,” Cassandra pointed out.

  “Maybe not legally,” said Louise. “But morally. I’m your father’s widow. As your father’s widow, I have some responsibility toward you and Verity. I wouldn’t say anything now, except that I think you’ve gone off the deep end.”