A Field of Darkness

by Cornelia Read

  “That the middle?” she asked. She pinched up a swag edge, hammer poised.

  “Two inches to the right . . .”

  Mom elbowed the piece in place and basted it to the wall with three quick taps.

  She nipped down from the ladder. “That works, don’t you think?” she asked, hands on her hips.

  “Perfect.” I was cross-legged on the floor, cradling a glass of coffee in my lap.

  Mom was shortly back up on the top step with a pair of pleated jabots. “Hand me that one on the table,” she said, her back to me.

  I looked around the room. There were four tables heaped with undulating yardage. My sister would know exactly which “that one” she wanted, but I’ve never been as fluent in Constance-speak. She was never “Connie,” except to overfamiliar salesmen.

  “The staple gun, Madeline.”

  “A staple gun is a ‘that thing,’ Mom.”

  She extended her hand back toward me without looking down from the window frame, one neatly shod toe tapping on the stool’s red seat. I found the gun buried under an excrescence of silk and handed it to her.

  “This will work here, don’t you think?” She tacked up a jabot to cover a seam. “Oh yes . . . your mother is a wizard.”

  “A goddamn genius.”

  I headed through the archway to the kitchen and grabbed celery and bell peppers out of the icebox, thinking it was a good day for gazpacho. I’ve always said I learned to cook in self-defense.

  “So tell me about Lapthorne,” I said. I’d told her about the dog tags, sworn her to secrecy. I grabbed a good knife and the chopping block to set up on the tall island table, so I could keep talking to her.

  “Lappy was an okay kid. It’s not like he wandered around pulling the wings off flies or anything. Just quiet. You’d have to be with a father like Kit. Kit was always looking for order after growing up with Uncle June. June turned everything into chaos, and he was such a nitpicky bastard. . . . You never knew when he was drunk, except that he really always was.”

  She started experimenting with ways to drape the curtains along the sides, trying the tiebacks at different levels.

  “Lawrenceville was a godsend for Kit, because it got him away. Then he met Binty. One of those Westbury girls. Always in organdy, at dancing school, all floaty and perfect. We just had boring velvet. . . . A lot of dough, Binty—right up Kit’s alley.”

  “What’d they have, three kids?”

  “Lappy’s the youngest. Always running to keep up, never quite marching in step well enough. Kit likes everything precise. We used to call him ‘Hospital Corners.’”

  She came into the kitchen for a glass of iced tea.

  “I made Kit nervous,” she said, smiling. “I don’t think he really likes women. Always dated girls with figures like ironing boards. Clotheshorses. Well, I mean, look who he married—Binty, never a hair out of place and she doesn’t eat in public. ‘The really chic women smoke for lunch,’ she told me once.

  “I remember coming east for Aldrich’s wedding,” Mom continued, “and afterwards some of us went to Rothman’s for dinner. We took a bunch of cars to East Norwich”—she pronounced this Nahr-edge—“and I ended up at Kit and Binty’s table . . . with his partners from the firm and their wives. I was down at the end near Lappy and one partner’s boy, who were about seventeen. I guess it was right after I married Michael, ’67? ’68? They were talking about taking a semester off to work for Eugene McCarthy—”

  “‘Go Clean for Gene’?” I said, dicing three nice beefsteak tomatoes from a plate on the counter.

  “Exactly, which I thought was a lot more interesting than the discussion at the martini end of the table, so I was asking them about it when the partner stood up and pointed at me, livid, and said, ‘Lay off my son, you pinko!’”

  “Perfect moment,” I said. “How did Binty take it?”

  I dumped my tomatoes into the bowl and juiced a couple of lemons. I always like my gazpacho with some of the zest, too—cilantro if I can get it fresh, but that never happens upstate.

  “Oh, you know Binty—she’d already read me off in the receiving line because my skirt was too short.”

  “The good old days,” I said.

  “I’m hip,” answered Mom.

  I started broiling slices of French bread to go with the soup, in an attempt to develop a reasonable facsimile of crust on the flaccid local baguette.

  “With all Binty’s dough,” said Mom, “you’d think she might . . .”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know . . . be happy? Stop picking on everyone? Kit, her sons . . .”

  “Us?”

  She laughed.

  I checked the toasting progress. “Have you ever seen anyone happy, because of money?”

  “Not once. People with big dough, anyway—with our background. Maybe if you’d made it yourself? Maybe the new people are happy? If it were still all shiny and fresh, instead of something to live up to, something to lose . . . All the WASP shit, the Puritan ethic . . .”

  Everything she’d tried to escape by going west. Everything she’d come back to.

  “Mom, I just . . . I mean, we’re all fucked. We’re all crazy. But can you see Lapthorne doing this? Even with Binty as a mother. It’s not like she was sticking him with forks all the time. . . .”

  “Of course not. She hired a nurse for that. Awful little woman.”

  “Gerdie? I remember she gave me a cookie once. Like when I was four. Watched me eat the thing and then told me she’d poisoned it, after I swallowed the last bite.”

  “Horrible,” said Mom.

  I put the finished toast in a basket. “But even so—”

  “Even so,” she said, gathering bowls and plates and napkins and spoons, “I can’t picture Lapthorne polishing his own shoes, for God’s sake. Much less knifing anybody.”

  “I know. And I like the guy.”

  I started taking stuff to the porch.

  “Well,” she said, following me out, “we’ll just have to throw a cocktail party.”

  Her answer for everything. I ladled soup into the bowls.

  “It all comes around on the guitar,” she said, perkily misquoting Arlo Guthrie for the thousandth time.

  CHAPTER 12

  It was Monday, opening night of the New York State Fair. Dean was home for a too-small window of time and Ted wanted a midway-food “Eats” piece by morning. He’d begrudged me two comps for Jerry Lee Lewis at the Budweiser Pavilion.

  I’d been psyched, but the playlist was all flabby B-side ballads, each tinkling plink so low-rent Liberace I was ready to throw a candelabra at Lewis’s head. There was none of the flash, none of the raw swagger. His trademark forelock barely moved.

  It was pissing me off and I was dying to hear “Breathless,” but God knows I can’t imagine having to play something I’d written thirty years ago over and over again for yokels reliving their DA’d and Brylcreemed youth. Closest I’d ever get to being a musician was dubbing the occasional mix tape and knowing that you never want that last seat on the hastily chartered small plane, even if Plan B is a crowded station wagon through midnight Arkansas.

  The show seemed over, until Lewis leapt back onto the stage, catapulted into an encore by our tepid applause. He launched into a searing, lock-up-your-daughters rendition of “Great Balls of Fire.” He hammered the intro chords, growling, “You shook my nerves and you rattled my brain . . .” The piano shuddered, ready to levitate.

  Before he could inhale, every last person in the bleachers was standing up, screaming like the Beatles had just taxied up in a DC-3.

  Lewis’s long curls broke loose and danced across his face. He slammed the keys with his feet, his fists . . . he jumped around and played with his ass for a beat or two, then twisted back and hunched over the keyboard, elbows jumping as he threw off a flashy progression.

  We were all hoarse by the time he banged to a close, and he just stood up and looked out at us all with a smirk, like “Yeah, got your dam
n seven dollars’ worth,” before stalking off the plywood stage.

  Five minutes before, I’d been ready for a nap, but now my blood felt carbonated. “He’s still got it,” I said to Dean, “but what a strange way to show it, huh?”

  “Oh, I dunno, I always liked ‘Middle Age Crazy.’”

  “Gross.”

  “Just because you grew up listening to that Joni Mitchell-Baez estrogen crap. If you’d spent your summers with a crewcut riding around in the back of a pickup, you’d have a little more appreciation,” said Dean.

  “Oh, right . . . and then I could delight in hearing Wimpy go, ‘Your wife one o’ them girl-fags, like Kristy McNichol?’”

  He laughed. “Want a Pizza Frite?”

  I groaned. We’d had spiedies, the Binghamton specialty sandwich of blandly marinated sliced meat. We’d had bites of souvlaki, lobster egg rolls, and sausage, onion, and pepper sandwiches. By the time we got to Ye Olde Ox Roast, we could do no more than take one half-mouthful each of a tepid “Ox Burger” before balancing the plate atop an overflowing garbage can and slinking away.

  Waddling like a pair of Charlotte’s Web rat Templetons, we’d dragged ourselves past the hawkers of cotton candy, Karmelkorn, Hawaiian Sno-Kones, and Sugar Waffles, but had given in to temptation at the NAACP Chuckhouse, sampling sublime greens, sultry ribs, and a thin wedge of platonic-ideal sweet potato pie. Two hours of Jerry Lee and flat beer, however, hadn’t rekindled my appetite.

  “How about a ride instead? The Cortina Bob, or the Ferris wheel?” I asked, steering him toward the sawdust and flashing lights. “Maybe if we jiggle everything around a little we’ll have room for a quick funnel cake.”

  Dean nodded and we walked toward the rides, but I was arrested by the sight of one of those games where you swing a sledgehammer and try to ring the bell at the top of a pole.

  “I can’t believe they have one of these,” I said. “It’s like straight out of Popeye.”

  We watched the line of local swains smashing the hammer down, trying to win their sweethearts a stuffed animal, but none were successful. The guy in charge of the game climbed off his stool every five customers or so, hitting the thing one-handed and dinging the bell without a change in his flat expression. Dean watched until he figured the angle needed to make the clanger jump to the top.

  He stepped up to the plate and won me a small cobalt-blue teddy bear, but when he gave it to me I shivered, having a sudden flash of the Rose Girls and their soldiers standing right in this spot, before this same tattooed carnie in his greasy undershirt.

  The Cortina Bob whipped around its canted oval track, Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” cranking, and I felt like if I just squinted hard enough, all that frosted and overpermed mall hair would become Aqua Net-lacquered beehives, and it would be 1969.

  I turned around slowly, saw a small trailer wedged in between the Ferris wheel and the Tilt-a-Whirl. The thing had been mocked up to look like a Gypsy wagon, with red-spoked wheels and a peaked roof shingled in cedar. A sign over the doorway read “Classic Silhouettes by Professor Archibald Sembles.”

  There were little lightbulbs screwed into this legend’s frame, all the way around, like some old backstage makeup mirror. The clear globes winked on and off in sequence, except for three burned out at one corner.

  “Bunny, you okay?” asked Dean. “You’re white as hell. Pillar of salt.”

  “That’s the guy,” I said.

  “What guy?”

  “Archie Sembles. He did their portraits the night of the murders—Rose Girls and the soldiers. It was in Wilt’s article.”

  “Wanna talk to him?”

  “I should,” I said.

  “So get him to do one of you.”

  “Dude,” I said. “Way too creepy.”

  He shrugged. “Okay,” he said, “so don’t.”

  “But I should.”

  “So go ahead.”

  “Really?” I asked.

  He shook his head, then grabbed my hand and towed me over to the trailer.

  I looked down, the steps’ turquoise paint all chipped craquelure at my feet. I couldn’t move.

  Dean gave me a nudge, and I put a foot on the first tread. He gave me another nudge.

  “Lay off,” I whispered, raising my eyes to the threshold, the white-and-gold sheet vinyl floor buckling where the door had leaked.

  “Look, you don’t want to go in,” said Dean, “let’s leave.”

  “Fine,” I said, still whispering. “Be impatient, Mr. ‘I’ll be in goddamn Canada’—”

  “Your choice,” he said, not taking that bait. “Go in, or just go.”

  So I climbed the stairs, then looked back at him. “Aren’t you coming?”

  He shook his head. “You don’t need me for this.”

  “Of course I need you. . . .”

  “No,” he said. “This is your deal.”

  “Dean . . . what the hell?”

  “Look, I don’t agree with this, but I’ll respect whatever you decide to do, here. Just don’t ask me to coax you into it.” He wasn’t acting snarky, just annoyingly calm and reasonable.

  “But I’m not asking you to—”

  “Bunny, if you really want to talk to this guy, then you don’t need me as a cheerleader. I’m gonna go buy a soda. The rest of it’s your call. I’ll be back in a minute, but I’m staying outside.”

  I watched him go, the shithead. He disappeared into the crowd.

  I took a deep breath, then slipped my face and one toe past the doorframe.

  Archie Sembles dozed in a wing chair. Light from a standing lamp reflected off the worn-shiny patch of brocade around his head, off the greasy white hair raked across his scalp in Zen-garden-gravel stripes.

  The tabletop next to him held an ashtray, ripped sugar packets, and shreds of foil and brown paper—Hershey Bar remains.

  I caught a whiff of something sweetish in the heat, familiar. Saw a thread of perfumed smoke rising from one of those chalky green spirals you light against mosquitoes in the tropics.

  Sembles hadn’t moved. But for the spots on his hands, he was opaque as tallow, like some figure at Madame Tussaud’s they hadn’t yet painted to resemble flesh.

  I cleared my throat.

  Guy didn’t even twitch. Maybe he was dead and I wouldn’t have to talk to him.

  “Sir?” I asked, voice all quavery.

  Sembles blinked—eyes chicory blue, pupils small as fine-print punctuation. He raised his head and turned it slowly toward me.

  “Step into my parlor,” he said, in a measured contralto.

  Then he smiled, teeth black as a Japanese courtier’s.

  CHAPTER 13

  Seven dollars, dearie,” said Sembles. “Or ten for the special, which includes a mat and frame.”

  He gestured toward the wall behind me, closely packed with examples of his work. There were silhouettes of children, couples, men in glasses, women in hats—black on white.

  I counted out the last of my crumpled bills. “I have eight,” I said. “Not enough for the frame.”

  “It’s been slow tonight,” said Sembles. “I’ll give you the special for eight.”

  He had me sit on a tasseled piano stool, then jacked me up three lurches with a foot pedal. I thought of Bugs Bunny in that barber chair.

  Sembles spun me a quarter-turn on the stool, centering my head against a piece of black felt tacked to a row of cabinets.

  He switched on an old gooseneck lamp, then angled its head so I was caught in the glare.

  “I thought you’d use backlight to throw my shadow on a screen,” I said. “Doesn’t ‘silhouette’ mean shadow?”

  “Shadow cutting is strictly for amateurs, my dear. . . .” he said. “Housewives . . . the untrained.”

  I snuck a look at him. He squinted, moving half a step backwards.

  “The word ‘silhouette,’” he added, “has nothing to do with shadows.”

  Satisfied with the position of my head, he resumed his seat in th
e greasy wing chair.

  “Well, what does it mean, then?” I asked.

  He blinked at me, twice. “What?”

  “Silhouette,” I said. “What does the word ‘silhouette’ mean?”

  “Silhouette,” he sniffed, “is the surname of the man who first practiced paper-cutting as portraiture . . . Étienne de Silhouette, French Minister of Finance.”

  “Fascinating,” I said, trying to sound like I meant it.

  He sniffed again, offering no further comment.

  “And may I ask,” I said, “by whom you were trained?”

  “I learned from my grandmother, who was instructed at the knee of the master: Augustin Amant Constant Fidele Edouart. He revived the art, perfected it.”

  “Where did they meet?”

  “He was often at Saratoga, when my grandmother was a girl,” he said. “Edouart traveled to all the top resorts, in season.”

  He yawned. It made his eyes water.

  “And she was from Saratoga, your grandmother?”

  “Ballston Spa,” he said.

  Sembles peered at me, then adjusted the lamp again.

  “Better,” he said. “Now we begin.”

  He reached into some lower shelf of his little table, producing a piece of matte black paper and folding it exactly in half, so that only its white backing showed.

  He looked up and caught me watching him.

  “You must hold still,” he said, leaning across to reposition my chin with a bony finger.

  “Why do you fold the paper?” I asked, trying to watch him without moving my head.

  He took up his scissors. “One achieves better detail cutting against white than black.”

  “Remarkable,” I said.

  “Every profile is captured in fifteen cuts,” he continued. “A true likeness requires precision, nuance. I rely on German scissors and doubled paper—both of which are nearly impossible to get in these sorry times.”

  “A lost art.”

  “I rather prefer to think otherwise.”

  “My most profound apologies,” I said, looking at the profiles arrayed in front of me. “You are quite gifted. Does your work require a great deal of travel?”