Good. Everybody was happy now. I gathered up my notices and waved good-bye, and didn’t stop till I was halfway out the door. “Ms—”
“Opal. Please.”
“Opal, why were you surprised by the students’ generosity? I mean, today. Why today?”
She blinked, and looked as if, were she a less polite person, she might have told me how far from bright she considered my question. Then she cleared her throat. “Well, it’s been months since the hurricane, and grown people—let alone adolescents—just plain forget, get bored, or lose interest in much less time than that. Then, you think we’ve been doing this for nearly three weeks, and that’s enough to bore a young person. But here it is, nearly Christmas, and they open up their hearts and give more than ever. Wouldn’t you also be surprised?”
I would indeed have been surprised. Stunned. Dumbfounded. “And this ‘burst of generosity’ was how recent?” I asked.
“Very,” she said with a merry smile and a small laugh. “Like yesterday. All of a sudden, two hundred dollars more than the daily average last week. This jump is pretty significant, wouldn’t you say?”
“I certainly would.” Margaret and Eddie had been correct. When the money was coming in from each homeroom separately, somebody had intercepted it and siphoned off funds, but I couldn’t believe Opal Codd would dream of such an action. Somebody else.
I said nothing more about the sudden burst of generosity. Sweet Mrs. Codd thought the students were angels. Let her hold on to that idea as long as possible. Also, it was easier to ignore what was so evident, to play the game that if I didn’t acknowledge a problem, it wouldn’t actually exist and I wouldn’t feel compelled to do a thing about it. I have learned this loathsome way of “handling” things from my headmaster, so I knew he wouldn’t blow any whistles.
Feeling guilty but saying nothing, I managed to leave the office.
Griffith Ward was again holding court near the door. That seemed his spot. I wondered if there were turf wars on our no-campus school. In any case, Griffith owned that corner, and stood in his usual cocky stance in his WWII-bomber jacket. I’d seen the reaction to the jacket days ago—outright envy and enthusiastic claps on the back. He wore it as if he’d earned it shooting down enemy planes, and he wore as well his signature smirk.
I had to retool my thinking. His expression could be described as a benign relaxed smile. Not by me now, but perhaps in the future, when I’d be able to be more objective.
But then I saw him put his hand around the shoulder of a small brown-haired girl. She looked startled. Griffith said something, and the boys in the group laughed. None of the girls, including the one he was holding, joined in the laughter. Griffith said something more. I was still standing at the office door, too far to hear what was said, only able to read their body language, to see Griffith’s lips moving.
The girl shook her head.
Griffith cocked his, imitating flirtation, but making it clear that he was only imitating it, mocking it at the same time.
She shook her head again.
He leaned over and kissed her on the mouth, kept his mouth on hers for several beats too long, then slowly pulled back.
She twisted her neck, so that she was looking as far away from him as it was possible while being held.
The boys in the group laughed again.
This time he released his grip on the girl’s shoulder. She jumped back, her eyes wide, head swiveling to look at the handful of girls in the group. Griffith smiled, nodded at her knowingly, and winked at his friends.
The bell rang, the group dispersed, and I walked so as to wind up near the girl. “Was that okay with you?” I asked when I was beside her and we were walking up the stairs together.
“What?” she asked, her eyes wide.
“The way—that kiss. From where I was, it didn’t look as if the whole thing was your choosing.”
She had pretty eyes, a sort of green-gray, with heavy dark lashes, but at the moment, they were vacant, uncomprehending. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Her voice was sullen.
“Griffith. Griffith Ward kissing you like that.”
She tightened her lips. “Did we break some school rule or what?”
The “we” did not fit my take on the situation, but stupidly, I plowed on. “No. Not a school rule per se, but I thought perhaps he broke a federal rule about sexual harassment.”
She looked shocked. “He kissed me! He didn’t rape me!”
“But it looked as if you didn’t want him to. And you don’t have to take that kind of treatment.”
“God!” she said, making it a prayer, a curse, a shout of indignation, a cry of incredulity at my stupidity and crassness. We’d arrived at the top of the long staircase and paused. She looked at me with that special look of horrified awe teens reserve for adults. I knew she wouldn’t say what was going through her brain to me, a teacher, but I could almost read it nonetheless. I’d been an idiot. It had all been a game downstairs, and she wasn’t “it.”
I thought she was wrong. I thought she was either dazzled or intimidated by Griffith’s aura, his reflected glory, the fact that he was two years ahead of her in school—anything, everything. But it didn’t matter what I thought. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I misread the signals. I was only trying to help.” I could have said that the school might be liable for charges of sexual harassment. We had programs, we had built sensitivity training into the curriculum, but the impulses that fed sexual bullying weren’t going to be quashed by an hour or two in the syllabus.
“I’m sorry,” I repeated. She didn’t say anything, merely shrugged and nodded, and went off to her class.
“I’m sorry,” I said to myself. Not for trying to help, but for most likely leaping to a wrong conclusion. For disliking Griffith Ward so profoundly that I saw malevolence in whatever he did. Day after day I observed him back-slapping, chuckling, and smirking, and I could not shake the idea of a smug Pied Piper. Only he’d let his followers disappear into disaster while he remained in comfort, that smirk still on his face.
At the same time, I knew he’d done nothing to make me feel that way.
His supposed victim had looked at me as if I were crazy.
I was sorry for feeling that way about Griffith, and for thinking that maybe she was right.
Fourteen
* * *
* * *
The morning did not go well. Lessons proceeded, life went on, but I didn’t feel fully present. I’d entered school towing massive weights tied to my ankles: two women dead. Murdered. They couldn’t be ignored or removed.
And though the episode with Griffith might well have been a misperception, it added still more drag to every step I took. If I couldn’t trust my reactions, what could I trust?
By lunchtime, I knew I needed to do something positive, to move forward, ankle weights and all, so like most of the student body, I braved the cold to leave the building and find food or company—or, for some of them, a poker game—elsewhere. I was going to Top Cat and Tails, and since I couldn’t take a place with that name seriously, it should have lightened my mood, but it didn’t.
But at least I had a sense of progress. It was important to see whether Merilee could be the “M” who’d visited the last night of Phoebe’s life. Her arrival would have been the surprise Phoebe mentioned to the neighbor because they’d been estranged. She would have anticipated the possibility of peace with her longtime friend.
As I crossed the square, I pulled out my phone and turned it on, meanwhile catching a glimpse of the knot of boys, Griffith at its center, at one of the corners. I felt very old, because nothing would have convinced me that it was a good idea to play a game—any game—outside when the temperature was somewhere in the 20s. I wondered if parents would sue us if their children wound up frozen to the pavement.
I headed up Walnut and glanced at the phone, which said I had a message. These days, my mother is also armed with a cell phone, and it has unlimited flat-rate long-d
istance capability. No longer can I predict when she’ll call. It almost makes me yearn for the olden days, when I only worried when the rates lowered after dark.
She’s no longer as worried about me now that I’ve achieved what is “safety” in her cosmos—i.e., I’m married. Nonetheless, what she’s done is smoothly shift into next gear. These days, calls touch on which of her lucky friends has become a grandmother. If I remind her that she is already a grandmother to my sister’s two adorable children, she says I don’t understand.
These days, I often receive envelopes filled with clippings from magazines and newspapers about the joys of motherhood, and sometimes, pictures of admittedly adorable infants, with a note saying, “Just saw this and thought that’s probably what your baby will look like!”
I was surprised she hadn’t found and sent an actual biological clock that would let me hear my reproductive minutes tick away.
But this message was not a familiar number, and definitely wasn’t my mother’s, so I walked along and listened first with interest, and then confusion.
“Vesta here, although I’m not sure we’ve met. Maybe you dialed wrong?” the voice said. “But if not, call me again. I’m home now.” Of course her “now” had been a few hours ago, but I dialed the number she’d left because it filled the chilly walk to Merilee’s store. By the time the phone rang at Vesta’s, I was moving away from the busy center of the city to where the stores dribble away as you approach the river, the railroad station, and Penn and Drexel’s campus beyond.
I reintroduced myself and asked her why she’d phoned me.
“You phoned me, miss!” she said sternly.
“I’m afraid—”
“No. You did. I recognize your voice. You left a message on my machine last night. What is it you want?”
I had to stop walking, and think, and then I remembered the call to Gregory McIntyre. It had been a man’s voice on the machine, but Sally had said he lived with his widowed sister. “Ms. McIntyre? I was trying to reach your brother. I guess I didn’t say that in my message.”
“You certainly did not,” she said. “Because if you had, I wouldn’t have phoned.”
“Is it possible to speak with him?”
“Surely. But I better warn you, it’s a long-distance call.”
“That’s all right.” Like my mother, I had unlimited dialing. Unlike her, I used the powers so bestowed judiciously. “Whereabouts is he now?”
“In Long Beach. That’s California.”
The far end of the country. Gregory was on the lam. “Sounds nice,” I said, swiping at my runny nose and stomping my feet for warmth.
“Nice for him,” Vesta snapped.
“I guess on a day like this, we’d all like to be where it’s warm.”
“But some of us are responsible human beings. Some of us have to make sure the pipes don’t freeze and the bills get paid.” Her voice sounded as if she kept its harsh edge permanently honed.
Gregory might well want to get away from home for reasons that had nothing to do with Phoebe. “Could you tell me how to reach him?”
She did, spitting out each number and then repeating them, at my request, as my cold fingers wrote them on a notebook. “Will he be there long?” I asked.
She harrumphed. “He has a friend there.” She made “friend” sound like a shameful word. “He sublets a room from the friend, bargain price, so he said he wouldn’t be back until it was warm here again.”
“Do you happen to know when he left Philadelphia?” I asked.
“Of course I do. Who do you think had to drive him to the airport? Besides, it’s the same day he went last year. November fifteenth. Mid-November through mid-March, that’s when he’s in Long Beach. Doesn’t even stay here for Thanksgiving.”
Gregory had left town two weeks before Phoebe died. The role he’d played in her life was as one bad date, and he’d played no role whatsoever in her death.
I thanked his sister, and moved on, thinking that escaping to California did not sound like the worst idea.
Both my nose and eyes were running, but I’d reached Merilee and Phoebe’s once-hopeful business, its façade festooned with a soft yellow metal awning (“Golden Retriever blond” Merilee had once told me with a straight face), which echoed the color of the Top Cat and Tails logo written in script on the front window. The shop reflected its downhill slide. A sign—in what I had to assume was Labrador Retriever black—said: “Going out of Business Sale: Everything Must Go.”
I had a quick fantasy of cockapoos, parrots, and boa constrictors rushing, slithering, fluttering, galumphing into the store to snatch up bargains. But not only were they nowhere in sight, even their doting owners were among the missing. The shop looked empty.
That included most of the shelves, so perhaps the bargain-hunters had already been here. Merilee, with the same suddenly-old-and-defeated look that I’d seen at the memorial service, sat in a slump behind the cash register. The accelerated aging process was a matter of muscles loosening—as if she was no longer interested in keeping her face together. The net result was that her hair looked borrowed from somebody much younger. A bell rang when I opened the door, and Merilee looked up with no expression.
Then she activated herself, wrinkling her forehead for only a second, then nodding recognition. “I know you,” she said. “You’re Phoebe’s stepdaughter’s friend, aren’t you? You were at the memorial.”
“Sasha’s friend Amanda, yes. I was walking this way—I’m on my lunch break—and saw the store. You remember, I was in with Sasha in the autumn.”
She nodded. Her bulldog, today in a tartan jacket, sat on a nearby chair, snuffling.
“So I thought I’d say hello. Sorry to see that the store is closing,” I said. “Are you relocating?”
It was a mean question because I knew the answer, but I hoped my purported ignorance—my appearance as a new set of ears to hear her woes—might get her talking.
“Don’t I wish!” The bitterness in her voice was so sharp, my taste buds cringed. “This had the makings of a gold mine. Started off so well.” She shook her head as if her thick red hair would erase whatever had happened after that great start.
When she didn’t say more, I once again primed the pump. “What happened?”
“Sasha didn’t tell you? I’m sure Phoebe told her her version.” She looked startled, eyebrows raised. As if waiting for me to admit that I knew what had befallen her.
I’d never cared much for Merilee, and her accusations about Phoebe had done nothing to make me think more highly of her. So I wanted to be clear that I hadn’t come into the shop as her sympathizer. I wanted to make her stop considering herself the center of the known universe, the reference point for all of life’s events. I knew it was an impossible task. Perhaps years on the couch could have done it, but not a lunch-break visit to her store. Still, I used the only ammunition I had—and poor stuff it was—which was to let her know that her story was not on everyone’s lips, that a person such as I wouldn’t know what had happened to her. Of course, by that I meant a lovely, upstanding, non-gossipy person, who had never felt schadenfreude, had never delighted even mildly in another person’s ill fortune. A good person. An ethical person.
I was not that person.
I was appalled by the thoughts prancing and striking poses in my mind, even though I was hearing them from a distance because I was so far up on my high horse. But even at that lofty altitude, my unbearable self-righteousness was audible.
Yes, it was way past time for Merilee to learn that other people had feelings. And yes, it was sad and stupid and maybe heartbreaking when your husband decided to swap you for a newer model. But you were breaking the rules of womanhood when you transferred all your fury to your longtime loyal friend and business partner, who had nothing whatsoever to do with your marital woes.
“What happened?” Merilee asked rhetorically. “I’ll tell you what happened. Your friend’s stepmother—”
“Former stepmother
.”
“Whatever. They were still close, as if the relationship hadn’t ever ended, and whatever you want to call her, she ran this business into the ground. Never pulled her weight, considered herself the ‘idea’ person. I know that her husband died and all….” She cocked her head to the side for a moment, granting Phoebe that distraction. “But even so, this was our business. This was my life’s blood—”
This was hogwash. Merilee hadn’t thought of working until finding an “amusing outside interest” became the chic thing for women in her circle to do.
“—and the capital for it, which is pretty much missing now, was provided by my…by me.”
Not her. Her husband. She couldn’t even gulp out his title, and I felt my first flash of sympathy for the hell she was experiencing.
And then she managed to make me stop feeling anything for her. “It was money left to him, and it’s gone. And now she’s dead!” She made the words an accusation. “Kills herself! That makes it pretty damn impossible for me to ever prove what happened to the money, and she wrecked my marriage through it, drove my husband into another woman’s arms, and look!” Her arms waved at the emptiness around her. “I had to sell the inventory for cost so I can get out before another rent’s due. And now—what do I have? Nothing! Absolutely nothing! My whole life…” She reached for a tissue and blew her nose.
The bulldog looked up at her, panting and drooling sympathetically.
Even when I was in junior high, still defining what it meant to be a woman, when Merilee would stop over at the Bergs, she’d seemed misplaced in time, one of those 1950s Monroe-wannabe baby-doll women. “Cute and helpless” died out shortly after the dinosaurs as far as I’m concerned, but Merilee didn’t seem to have gotten the news. Even “cute” all by itself had a sell-by date, and Merilee was long past it. But until recently, until the dumping, she had played the worn-out, threadbare role for all it was worth.
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