“Who names their kid Toy?” Mackenzie asked. “But aside from her name, I don’t see why hiring her is such a big deal. It’s the smart and easy thing to do. As long as Dennis divvies up the spoils properly, including the cost of staging, then let the Toy girl make the place sell.”
“I’m sure that’s what’s going to happen. It wasn’t really about that. It was about staking a claim, about rights and privileges. About Sasha having Toy appear versus Sasha making the decision to hire her herself.”
“Interesting what things are really about versus what we say they’re about,” he murmured.
Milky winter morning filtered through the skylight. When I’d looked out the windows of the loft that faced the street below, I’d seen people huddling and bundled, and I was glad I had the car again today. “I couldn’t find anything interesting so far,” I said. “I’m pretty sure she wasn’t far enough along with online dating for there to have been some unknown crazy person who did her in. She probably was waiting for that new photo.”
Mackenzie finished his coffee and stood up. “You know this is hogwash, don’t you? Phoebe killed herself, on purpose or accidentally. We don’t know the reason and she didn’t choose to share it with us. Her business was failing, her partner accusing her of all kinds of evil behavior, her husband was dead, she’d done the marriage thing too many times already, and her only child was a creep. So maybe she was simply tired of it all, or she drank too much and mixed it up with pills by accident. Inventing a conspiracy, a crime, isn’t an appropriate way for Sasha to mourn.”
“I promised.”
He cocked his head and raised an eyebrow. “You know what Napoleon said?”
“‘Not tonight, Josephine’?” He winced. “‘Able was I ere I saw Elba’?”
“You know what Napoleon said about promises.”
“I’m fresh out of Napoleonic quotes.”
“He said, ‘If you wish to be a success in the world, promise everything, deliver nothing.’”
“Are you sure he said that? Most of our politicians could have; and why are you quoting Napoleon so early in the morning?”
“Because I want to impress you with my learning, and because I thought it was apt.”
“I am impressed. Incredulous, actually, that I say the word ‘promise’ and that you’ve got that quote at the ready, right on the tip of your tongue.”
“Well,” he said with a wink, “might not have been there a week ago, but I’m reading this terrific biography and I just read that line.”
“You’re reading for fun? I thought you were up to here with schoolwork and moonlighting and your family’s woes and—”
“I am. But sometimes I need a break from the here and now. Don’t you? You’ve been talkin’ about A Tale of Two Cities, which got me to thinkin’ about the Revolution, the Terror, and how little I really know about how Napoleon came to power—or much of anything, except for word games like that Able/Elba thing you said.”
“Promise everything and deliver nothing. Does that mean you won’t really check the databases for Sasha?”
“’Course not. I’m too tall to have a Napoleon complex. I’m checking out as much as I can about Phoebe, and Dennis, and the late lamented Mr. Ennis, too, just in case he left dangerous enemies behind. Any lawsuits, debts, prison experiences—”
“Phoebe?”
He shrugged. “So far, zilch, but I’m not finished. Oh, I’m also looking at exes, living exes, and I did see that Allenby, the original husband—”
“And father of Dennis.”
He nodded. “—who is still alive and well and living in New Jersey, has a bit of a credit-rating problem. I looked at his history and it’s like a roller coaster, and I’m willing to bet, without anything concrete to substantiate it yet, that Ex Number One has a gambling problem.”
For a moment, I was thrilled—we’d found something. But one moment doesn’t go very far. One exhalation later, my elation was history. “I don’t see what that could have to do with the way she died,” I said. “I wish I did, but I don’t.”
“Neither do I. Unless we find out he inherits something.”
“She didn’t have anything worthwhile except the house. Unless Dennis did it for the love of his daddy.”
He smiled. “Dennis may have done it for the love of himself. He has his own checkered history.”
“Sasha told me he’s screwed up a number of times.”
“Including one brief arrest for brawling, and once a charge of domestic abuse, although the charge was dropped. And financially, he seems to have made teetering on the edge of catastrophe a lifestyle. Sometimes he’s had major assets, and then the bubble—one or another kind of bubble—bursts.”
“Is it all legal?”
“Far as I can see. Legal but risky. There have been civil suits, especially when he apparently had friends invest in his schemes.”
“Sounds more likely that somebody would kill him rather than the opposite.”
“Profits from the house might save him from bankruptcy. I need to look into that more, but suffice to say he isn’t in great shape as far as income is concerned.”
“And his father?”
Mackenzie shook his head and went to get his coat. “I only mentioned Harvey Allenby’s problems to dazzle you—to show you that I’m on the trail, the track, the whole superhighway. I’m not ignoring my obligations. I’m not breaking my promises, no matter what Napoleon advised. But maybe my fantastic work will convince you that you don’t have to make this your number-one priority, and you shouldn’t expect much in the way of dramatic results.” He turned toward the pegs where we put our coats, and stopped. “And what is this?” he asked mildly, bending to retrieve a painting that I’d propped against the wall.
“Sasha wanted me to have it. She said it was one of Phoebe’s favorites, and she’d already taken several other paintings. After Toy showed up, instead of thinking about tossing things, Sasha went through picking out things that had meaning for her. This was one of them. I thought it was nice enough. No, actually, it isn’t nice enough. I’m not fond of it, but I thought not accepting it would hurt Sasha’s feelings.”
C.K. held it in one hand, moving it back and closer, staring. The fruit in the foreground was against a midnight-dark void, as if beyond these pomegranates lay nothingness. The silver pitcher next to the fruit reflected light from nowhere. I didn’t like it at all.
“Okay,” I said. “Granted. It’s not nice at all, but maybe not repulsive?”
He looked at me with as little expression as he could allow.
“Okay. Kind of repulsive,” I acknowledged. “The frame’s probably worth more than the painting.”
He raised one eyebrow. “To whom?”
“I don’t know. It’s so fancy, I thought…”
He carefully put it back on the floor, propped against the wall.
“I know,” I said. “I was thinking the same thing myself.”
“How would you know what I’m—”
“—the loft’s huge, with tons of wall space and we like light colors, an airy feeling, so the reason this painting’s on the floor is that there isn’t a single inch where it would look right. Aside from being mildly creepy, it’s going to look like a splat, a splotch, a dark hole on our walls.”
“We’ve been married too long,” he said.
“Two months? Too long?”
“When you finish each other’s sentences, or don’t even need the sentences to know what they’re thinkin’…one of the ten warning signs you’ve been married too long.”
“What are the other nine?”
“Can’t remember,” he said, “except that not being able to remember the warning signs is another of the signs.” He shrugged on his coat. We were both in the process of wrapping ourselves in coats, scarves, and gloves, and when finished—twice the size we’d been before the cocooning began—we turned and double-checked that we had everything we needed. “Think she’ll be upset if she doesn’t see it when she
comes over?” C.K. asked.
“I’ll find a wee corner somewhere,” I said, and we were off to our schools.
“Morning, morning, morning,” Opal Codd said. “Ugglesome day, isn’t it? Subboreal, and all that faffling!”
“You rehearse these greetings, don’t you? Don’t tell me those words come tripping off the tongue.” She insisted that I, as an English teacher, must know all the obscure words she spouted. And if I did not, which was a sad commentary on the state of knowledge these days, then I must, at the very least, have a great joy in being introduced to them. For, she’d told me, this was the very heart of education. “Never stop learning, that’s my motto,” she’d said.
She was right, but there were so many things to learn, I wished she hadn’t decided to master words nobody used. Nonetheless, I did my best to act thrilled with each new incomprehensible entry.
“Ugglesome,” she said in her precise manner. “Horrible or frightful. Subboreal, cold but not freezing. Faffling, blowing.”
“Thank you! I really like ugglesome, too!”
“One out of three is pretty good,” she said.
The contents of my mailbox were ugglesome. Notice of a faculty meeting to discuss “recent disruptive activities including prohibited gambling in or around school property.” The poker games must have prompted this, but what did it mean that “around school property” was no-man’s-land? I wondered how wide an area “around” encompassed. I also wondered how the school could patrol and enforce the rules of its “around” area.
I wished I could have hauled Havermeyer in for a few remedial English sessions.
There was more. A notice to be read to our homerooms that the drama club’s winter production, scheduled for February, would be The Man Who Came to Dinner and that auditions would begin after school today. A note from a student explaining why he had been unable to do his homework. The reasons were so convoluted, involving the woman with whom his mother co-shared a job, and that woman’s fuel pump and an accident that had blocked the expressway, and—I gave up. Another notice about holiday parties and assignments over winter break. Maurice Havermeyer was apparently in favor of minimal parties (“food residue and similar detritus abandoned and left in classrooms over the winter break presents serious sanitation issues to the maintenance staff”) and maximum assignments (“bearing in mind the possibility that our students’ families may be relocating the students during the break, so access to encyclopedias and specialized research resources may not be possible”).
I have long suspected that our headmaster lived in an alternate academia, where Philly Prep students would spend their winter break agonizing about being in Belize instead of a world-class reference library. Or, in fact, would do any assignments over winter break even if they were spending it in a world-class reference library. Or, in fact, would remember during winter break that they had assignments.
And yet year after year, Maurice Havermeyer issued the same daffy, optimistic warnings. Perhaps he could be that way because he almost never interacted with the actual breathing students who populated the school, preferring the scholars of his imagination.
I tossed the notices into the trash and made my exit.
Either Jonesy Farmer spent most of his days near the front entrance, or his timing and mine had been synchronized, because I once again found myself nodding to him. But not before I’d noticed his hunched posture, as if he was holding a secret to his center, perhaps protecting it from Griffith Ward and a third cohort beside him, another of the subspecies that make me believe the word “spoiled” is appropriate. There was something soft and gone to rot in these boys, and part of what seemed missing was the true joy of youth, the excitement, the sense of adventure. They seemed jaded, old in bad ways before their time. In class, they tilted their seats back in eloquent body language that said they’d rather be anywhere but there. They traded signs and signals only with each other and did not participate in group discussions. In the great sea of students, they were the undertow, pulling us down if we allowed it.
Opal would have blamed gambling for their woes, and would expect me to seize this opportunity to say something to them. Reform their degenerate game-playing.
But what would I say? Half the country was enraptured with poker: poker as spectator sport on TV; poker as online Internet gambling; and, presumably, old-fashioned, sit-down-and-play-with-your-pals poker.
I suspected that lots of factors—more than I could guess at—were responsible for their missing parts, and criticizing, let alone trying to change what they did on their own time outside of school, would be rightly seen as none of my business or concern, as picking on them.
There would be some truth in that.
I sighed. I wasn’t doing too well with my like-every-child decision, was I? Not when it came to The Griff and company.
The position of the trio prompted me to active eavesdropping, a talent I admit with no shame. Knowledge is power. Understanding anything more than what they willingly shared was, if not power, then perhaps comprehension of my students. Especially given that they shared next to nothing.
So before he was made aware of me, I’d caught a snippet of Jonesy’s conversation, if conversation it was. “—can’t,” he said. “You have to wait….” His voice was low but urgent. “Give me a little—”
“Now!” That was said with such force, I didn’t even have to eavesdrop. Several other students turned to look at Griffith, who dropped back to sotto voce. “…know how.” I missed the rest of the sentence until I heard, “—again?” As usual, Griffith looked smug, imperious, his posture slouched in a way that made it clear whatever was bothering Jonesy in no way troubled him. His buddy, Casey, the yes-man with arms crossed against his abdomen, nodded every time Griffith spoke.
“I can’t!” Jonesy said.
“No choice,” Griffith said.
The toady shook his head, emphasizing Griffith’s dictum.
“But not—I—I didn’t mean—”
“Didn’t mean what you said? Interesting.”
I was close by now, lingering, pretending to have something wrong with my briefcase. I was intrigued by how Griffith made his flat statement reverberate with the sense of a massive, threatening subtext. Without moving a muscle, his words pushed and shoved Jonesy.
I wished for a cartoon character’s ear that could telescope out, the better with which to hear, as I caught only snips. The word that most surprised me was “honor,” but as I tried to move closer, fiddling with my briefcase as a delaying tactic, Jonesy spotted me. He put a hand on Griffith’s arm as he said, a little too loudly, “Hey, Miss Pepper.”
Griffith turned and grinned at me. “Hey,” he said with complete ease. He looked a little goofy, but certainly not like the threatening bully I’d thought I’d heard. I felt a rush of shame. I wondered why I had such well-developed antibodies to his hail fellow well met charisma. His peers certainly found him charming. Why did I suspect his charm, resent his breezy self-assurance? Was I jealous? Upset that I hadn’t had that smooth patina, that easy self-confidence, when I was in high school?
“Morning, guys,” I said, and I moved toward the staircase. With difficulty, I controlled the urge to look back, to see if and how their body language changed when I moved out of sight. I wanted to know whether their cryptic discussion continued. It had certainly not seemed resolved.
The day ahead rolled through my brain, hour by hour, as I walked up the stairs. A grammar quiz in one class, vocabulary work in another, oral book reports in my two sections of seniors, and more of A Tale of Two Cities with the ninth graders. In a larger school, with thousands of students, large staffs, and the need for many English classes at each level, I might have taught five sections of one grade and faced only one daily preparation. Sometimes, and this morning might have been one of them, that sounded like a dream, a way to avoid the frazzle of my multi-preparations, an easy slide into home each day.
Other days, and this might be one of those, too, I wondered how t
hose teachers managed to make the fifth presentation of the same material feel fresh to the students, and more importantly, to themselves. By the end of the day, did they even know what they were saying or were they like telemarketers with a memorized script?
All things considered, I didn’t begrudge the rigorous schedule. I wheeled through a lot of emotions at Philly Prep, but boredom was seldom on the list. Still, I kept returning to that throwaway line from the morning, when I’d asked Mackenzie about his extracurricular reading, and he’d said he needed a break from the here and now. “Don’t you?” he’d asked without expecting an answer.
I should have said an emphatic yes. Too often of late, I thought I was approaching the telemarketer side of the teacherly scale. Saying what I should, but with too little heart, and sometimes mind, in it. The larger problem was that I didn’t know what to do about it, but a break from the here and now sounded perfect, if only I knew what that could mean.
And there was almost no emotion, let alone passion, invested in settling what happened to Phoebe Ennis. However, I’d told Sasha this would be my final session in Jersey, and knowing the end was in sight eased the strain. I’d try to speak with that other neighbor, ask around to see if anybody else on the block had noticed anything, and take care of whatever other investigating there might be from home or at the office. Whatever I did was pure formality in any case. Wouldn’t anyone who’d noticed anything odd have already told the police? And if they had reason to keep it to themselves till now, why would they tell me?
When I reached the top of the stairs, I could no longer resist. I went to the banister and looked down, and saw Griffith and Jonesy high-fiving and nodding.
Ah, the dramatics of high school. Standoff one minute, best buds the next. All was obviously well, and life would roll on, and I had been reading much too much into overheated adolescent dialogue, my reaction compounded by my unprofessional and baseless antipathy toward Griffith.
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