I reached the booth before an elderly gentleman in pressed jeans and a baseball cap. I hadn’t noticed him, and, realizing my eminent rudeness, I made to offer him the booth first. But he shook his head, and smiled at me, and gestured for me to use the phone, making an obsolete turning motion with his finger to signify dialing a number.
He turned away from me, spying a waitress inside the window of the restaurant. He waves at her, a tinkly-handed kind of wave and she waves back. Then she points to me and laughs. He laughs too. Heartily. For a second I imagine his laugh is going to evolve into a hands-on-knees then head-thrown-back hale fellow kind of performance. But it doesn’t.
His small moment of bad luck is somehow hilarious to both of them and I wonder if they are deeply blessed, or else stupefied by rudimentary rural notions of contentment.
Either way, I knew now that I was a long way from the city.
I dialed the number for Keith’s aunt from memory. Her name, I remembered, was Bridget Cassidy, and she answered on the third ring. When I told her that I was looking for Keith she sounded pleased. When I asked if we could meet she sounded surprised but also perfectly willing. With no urging she gave me directions to her house, which was located close to the lake, in a small town called Harmony, a little more than a two-hour drive from where I was.
Harmony was a summer resort town, the kind that all but vanishes during the winter months. The main drag was narrow, relentlessly crafty, and teeming with shivering souls in shorts and T-shirts and spotless sneakers, skin raw-red in the middle of the afternoon. There was a Harmony Fashions. And a Harmony Realty. There was a gas station, one old crappy diner, one garishly tarted-up one, a liquor-drugstore with a reassuring fifties exterior, and countless small shops selling rough and crafty gift items.
The street dissolved into a parking lot, beyond which a breakwater of large, angular gray stones gave way to the white-sand beach, which in turn surrendered to the lake. That day a thick, insistent mist insulated the beach and shaved a good twenty degrees off the temperature.
A large brown dog of indeterminate breed was swimming in the water. A pre-teen intently manipulated a Nintendo Game Boy and sat all but motionless on one of the breakwater rocks. Three seagulls were picking listlessly at a bun from an old hot dog in the parking lot, and on a green painted bench facing out across the still water, Bridget Cassidy sat in faded denim shorts that showed lengthy tanned legs with goose bumps and waited for me with a slightly smiling face that I was certain had very little to do with my arrival.
She wore no shoes on her feet and her shirt was denim, large and loose, washed less, or else newer than the paler material of her shorts. The sleeves were loosely rolled up, her arms were a carelessly tanned brown. She was long-fingered, and her ringless, precise hands refuted the common wisdom of defining their owner’s exact age. A solid silver bracelet hung on her wrist. Her hair was dark red, thick and straight and reached down to her shoulders. Her nose was improbably long and pointed and she was made more beautiful by the imperfection.
She stood up as I approached her and I noticed that she was tall. Then she held out her hand, changed her mind, and very tentatively hugged me to her instead.
When she spoke, her accent was stripped down to the kind of transatlantic netherspeak many people accuse me of using.
“I’m awfully glad you’re here,” she said. “You made such good time. The road can be so slow in summer. With the repairs and the tourists. But today has been an odd kind of day hasn’t it? I could feel the temperature falling like a stone just walking down the road from my house. It’s the mist from the lake that’s doing that. I thought about going back and finding some warmer trousers to put on but I didn’t want to keep you waiting, and to tell the truth the chill is rather welcome. But poor you. You look positively freezing. Let’s go back to my house instead, shall we? This is really much too cold for summer. It makes rather a lie of the season.”
So we walked to her house.
“I tend to prattle on when I first meet people,” she said, and I smiled. “Living in a small town does that. My mouth doesn’t get enough practice.”
The street was sprinkled with sand, the ground beneath the grass in the front yards closer to sand than to earth.
“How do you like our Harmony?” She asked. She had taken my arm as we walked.
“It’s very quiet,” I replied.
“Yes,” she said laughing. It was an easy laugh. “It certainly is that. A place best suited for people who have retired or opted out in some fashion, I always used to think.”
“You seem a little young for retirement.”
She laughed again. “A lot young. Thank you very much. But I did retire I suppose.” She looked thoughtful then. “Well . . . perhaps it was more of a spiritual sabbatical. My husband chose to divorce me a few years ago. It all came out of the blue, and it was all rather unpleasant. Are you married? There I go again. That’s an abrupt and insufferably rude question to ask. But I can’t help it. Do you mind my asking?” She shook her head in playful befuddlement. “Oh why am I asking you that? Of course you’re married. You have a wedding ring. And you look so married.” She paused and looked sheepish. “I should try to be much quieter,” she said quietly.
“I am so married,” I said then, “I suspect it’s evident even without the ring.”
She gazed at me quizzically. “Oh dear, I managed to stumble into that one, didn’t I? Well, I’m just going to keep on talking. Where was I? Oh yes. Well, we had this place but we so very seldom used it. He hated it. My husband, that is. It had been in his family and he’d never got around to selling it. We lived in New York, but he was from here originally. So I took it as the settlement. I must say I surprised myself. It just suddenly seemed the right thing for me. It was really all I wanted from him.” She smiled. “God, I don’t think he could quite believe his luck. Anyway I licked my wounds here after our divorce was final. And after that I grew to like living here very much. My rash moment of intuition proved correct. The winters are long and beastly cold, but the isolation can be beneficial and the summers are truly a tonic. It was for me then, certainly, and now I’m happy to say I’m as well as can be, and considered something of a local by the genuine locals.”
“How do you live?” I asked her. “The upkeep. And things like that.” I realized I was being inquisitive.
She seemed happy to answer. “Oh I live very cheaply. I find myself dieting much more than I eat, as I get a little older. I like to swim and walk in the woods nearby, and these things are free. Before I married, I worked in New York for a publishing house as a copy editor. I still get work from them occasionally. I proofread the local rag. There are a few writers in this neck of the woods, good ones actually, though a little backwoods macho, and I edit their work for them and make sure they sound as tough as they want to be.” She smiled proudly. “I’m really rather productive. I’d starve to death in New York, of course, but here I do manage to get by.”
“It sounds like a pleasant life,” I said.
“Oh, I daresay. For some people at least. Confirmed hermits like me, I suspect. But it’s certainly not for everyone.” She paused before adding. “A citified soul would go stark raving mad here in winter.”
We waded through a tiny screened porch full of clutter—old walking shoes and winter coats, a box filled with cook books, another filled with old newspapers, a lamp with its shade shapeless and askew—to the door that led into the house proper.
It was a small and comfortable place, all on one level, a white cottage of freshly painted wood, with a garden far wilder and prettier than the ones on either side. The living room was warm and fussed over. There were bleached logs in the fireplace and well-read books packed tightly into two fitted bookcases, an antique desk with a Compaq computer that Nye would frown upon, an external modem, and a dot matrix printer nearby. Two armchairs and a small couch circled a coffee table, a portable te
levision was pushed into the far corner of the room, and framed posters showed painted flowers from a gallery exhibition in Los Angeles that had taken place more than twenty years ago.
I couldn’t help thinking that they were very nice frames, my chosen profession seemingly reluctant to cast me loose.
There was also a bathroom, two small bedrooms, and a kitchen. All were tidy without being obsessive; all contained vases of cut flowers, either fresh or else dried, all were painted a pale yellow-white, like the color of aging sunlight.
She offered me beer or coffee and I said a beer would be nice. She returned with two bottles of Rolling Rock. I wasn’t offered a glass. After a moment’s hesitation, we sat together on the couch and drank for a while, engulfed in a pleasant silence.
I found it impossible to believe that Bridget Cassidy was James Pringle’s younger sister but that was what Keith’s passport application had stated. If James was close to sixty, then Bridget Cassidy, who had obviously chosen to keep the name of the husband from whom she was now divorced, could only be in her middle to late forties, and was fighting the aging process with spectacular success.
I wanted to ask her but she beat me to it. “I should probably tell you that I’m not actually related to Keith.”
I must have looked puzzled. “But on the passport application . . .”
She nodded slowly. “Yes. I know. I’m afraid that document is very much inaccurate in that particular regard. Keith wrote to me a while ago and he said he wanted to come to America to visit. He was a little vague about dates, about everything actually. He’s mostly a boy you know, much younger than his years. His job history and such were spotty and he needed a relative to vouch for him in order to obtain an entry visa. I was the obvious choice, probably the only choice. But I was very happy to do it. It seemed like a formality. I never even expected to see him.”
I was confused. “Then how did you . . . did you even know Keith?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t actually. No. Oh, I did know of him. You see I went to teacher training college with Tony, Antonia I should say, Jimmy’s younger sister. She was older than me and decided on teaching late. I trained but then I packed it in. We’ve kept in touch over the years though, and she must have given Keith my address.”
“You lied to the immigration people.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Oh gosh yes. And the British Consulate too.” Then she smiled. “I used to be a right little Bolshevik when I was younger, and little people in positions of authority still manage to bring out my worst side. I’m afraid I’ve lied before and I rather expect I’ll lie again. Can’t be helped I’m afraid. Thankfully no one ever bothered to check Keith’s statement, and lo and behold, he suddenly had an aunt in America. But I think that’s enough of my sordid side for now. I want to know something about you. You’re doing a good thing you know. Looking for him. I have to admit I’m slightly curious.”
“Why am I doing this? Why am I looking for him, you mean?”
“Well, yes. I did rather wonder.”
“Mostly for my own small and selfish reasons.”
“You don’t accept praise very well, do you?”
“You helped him.”
She shrugged. “It was easy. A little lie on a piece of triplicate paper in all likelihood filed away and forgotten. I remember Tony talking about him in her letters. He was the proverbial black sheep of their family. But I got the impression that they were all much too fond of him for their own good. He would grow to hurt them with his charm and his helplessness.”
“Why did you help him?”
She smiled as if recalling a cherished secret. “For much the same reasons. Because he was charming and because he was helpless.”
I said nothing then. But I did wonder if perhaps he had hurt her also.
Her legs were on the coffee table, and when she crossed them I noticed that the balls of her feet were hard-skinned and smooth, the result, I imagined, of spending much of the summer barefoot, walking fearlessly over sharp grass and soft sand. The largely nonsexual urge to touch her legs was an incredibly insistent one.
“What can you tell me about Keith?” I asked her. “What do you know that will help me find him?”
“Oh, I can tell you lots about Keith,” she said. “I assume he’s still missing.”
I nodded.
With an effort, I stopped looking at her legs.
“He came here to see me at the beginning of the summer. He was going to stay for a week and ended up staying for almost three. A cynic would assume he planned it that way. I’m not so inclined. He’s a disorganized boy, I feel, but not a disingenuous one. Oh and I’m not complaining about that. I do like to have company. He certainly wasn’t any trouble. Keith’s a timid soul. He phoned early one evening and said he was close. He wondered if it would be okay if he dropped by, to pay me a visit, to just say hello. He wanted to thank me for the passport. I asked him how he was. He said he was okay but he didn’t especially sound it. I told him it was nonsense just dropping by like that. He could stay for a few days if he liked. He said thank you and I could hear the relief in his voice. He showed up later that same night. It was almost dark. I’d made a beef stew which he shoveled away in silence. To look at him you couldn’t imagine where it all went. A racing metabolism he must have, perhaps. As I said he stayed for almost three weeks. We walked in the woods a lot. It was still a little colder than the locals like for their outdoor activities, but us hardy foreigners are used to the cold. He so loved to walk. We even swam in the lake. Brrr.” She pretended to shiver. “Can you imagine the temperature of the water that early in the season? But he was an excellent swimmer.” She stopped suddenly.
“Dear me. I notice I’ve relegated him to the past tense. That is always made ominous in mystery stories. Is he really dead, do you think?”
I shrugged, which instantly seemed a cruelly glib gesture. “I really have no way of knowing for sure.”
She looked hard at me. “But you do have a strong suspicion.”
I nodded slowly. “I somehow can’t help thinking that he’s dead. When I saw his name in the newspaper all I could think . . .”
“Yes?”
“Was that I was reading the name of a person already dead.”
“It was an intuition, was it?”
“Don’t you believe?”
She hesitated. “No,” she said slowly, “not especially.”
“I don’t either. Or I didn’t. I think this was my first.”
“And you are inclined to believe it?”
“I don’t know.”
“And then you came all this way. Despite your intuition.”
“It’s not so very far. And anyway it’s not . . . it’s something I can very easily do.”
“You do seem to insist on making light of it.”
“You seem intent on interrogating me and trying to make me confess to being on a holy crusade.”
“I’m very sorry.” She spoke quietly, and I knew I had offended her.
I spoke quickly, “Did you know we grew up in the same town?”
“No, I didn’t.” She looked hard at me. “You’d never know to look at you. You’re a very different species from Keith.”
“I left there a long time ago. I’ve lived here for a long time. Maybe having come into some money . . . perhaps that makes a difference.” But I knew as soon as I said it that that wasn’t right, that that wasn’t what made us different.
She hesitated. “No . . . I don’t think that’s quite it.” She spoke carefully. “He’s a young man still. Keith’s a wide open soul. . . he’s haphazard . . . nervous . . . utterly passionate.”
“I’m not terribly passionate by nature,” I admitted.
She smiled a little maternally then. “Don’t reprimand yourself. As a nation, we’re a soulless, callous bunch. Keith must have had some swarthy i
nfidels’ blood somewhere inside him.”
We drank for a while without speaking. Then she put her bottle down and turned to me. “There’s something I’m going to tell you now.” She raked her hair with her hands. And then she turned away, for the first time suddenly unwilling to look into my eyes as she spoke. “I told myself before you came that I wouldn’t say anything about this. But now that you’re here I find I do want to tell you. I slept with Keith. It was the very first night he was here.”
I said nothing.
“It was close to midnight when he arrived. I remember letting him in. God, he was a sorry sight. Covered in dirt. He said he’d hitchhiked and walked.”
I tried to touch her shoulder. “You don’t have to tell me this,” I said softly. “It isn’t necessary.”
“No. It is though, for me. I want to, anyway. Please let me finish. After we ate, I made up the bed and showed him where the spare towels were because he said he wanted to shower; he was so filthy dirty. I went to bed and fell asleep listening to the water falling. Later in the night I woke up and he was in the bed with me, sound asleep, his hair still wet on the pillow. I just watched him for a while. Watched him breathe and shiver from time to time. And then I fell asleep again. I really couldn’t think what else to do. In the morning we both woke up very early, and we made love then. And after we made love he cried like a baby and I held him in my arms, and I remember I felt very maternal and very foolish all at the same time.”
She was crying now, a rush of tears, perhaps for her foolishness, perhaps for the lost Keith, perhaps for both.
“Please don’t cry,” I said, inanely, in time-honored stupidity.
She wiped at her cheek with her hand. “It never happened again. I can’t imagine why it happened at all.”
I couldn’t think of a thing to say.
And then I said the first thing that came into my mind.
“I wonder if it made him happy?”
She smiled a little. “It would be lovely to think so,” she said. “Wouldn’t it?”
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