The purple sofa was empty. She’d folded up all the bedding and put it back in the linen closet. The only sign she’d been in town was half a paper towel, duct-taped to the coffee machine:
4:30 . . .
Couldn’t sleep so thought I’d drive home. Call re party. Must get you out of this fucking town ASAP. It does not deserve you.
Love, EBC
p.s. Do the dishes. You’re turning into my mother.
She still had my earrings, and the rest of the weekend sucked.
CHAPTER 22
By Monday night I was wallowing in the mood pool’s deep end.
I stood useless on the sidewalk outside work—still daylight, even though I’d been the last one out of editorial. The prospect of another Dean-free evening at home was too onerous to bear. Ellis blowing through had only made it worse.
All weekend, I tried to get up the nerve to drive downtown, ask Kenny’s opinion about the Schneider stuff. Didn’t happen. I was just glued to the damn sofa.
I’d checked my old paperbacks from A.P. U.S. history with Mrs. Laupheimer at Dobbs. Hue was indeed pretty high on the map.
In 1964, Americans were still supposedly there in a strictly “military advisor” capacity, going out on patrols with the South Vietnamese Army. LBJ was quoted as saying, “We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.” And then the USS Maddox was fired upon in the Gulf of Tonkin, or so we’re expected to believe.
I had to stop reading. Not just because it got me worked up about Schneider, but because I was still pissed off about the whole war. So goddamn depressing. So useless. I sat on that sofa, staring into the abyss, wanting to bitch-slap Kissinger and all the grownups who’d abandoned righteous anger for consciousness raising and chardonnay.
Never made it to the laundromat, a block and a half downhill. I kept thinking Dean might call, every time I considered the door.
And here it was Monday.
I told myself to go home. . . . My car was one of three in the lot. I stared at it, then started walking up toward the Crown.
Kenny got ticked before I’d even told him anything serious. Just “Schneider’s creepy and we climbed out the window,” and he went all old-country on me.
“Time you left this alone, Madeline,” he said, begrudging me a draft. “You sneaking out the back? All that? Dean not in town, I feel responsible.”
“Schneider doesn’t know my name. Even if he’d seen us leave, we were in a borrowed truck with Mass plates.”
He filled a pitcher for two guys down the bar. “That Ellis is trouble. Said so the first time you brought her in.”
“‘That Ellis’ is my friend, so lay off.”
“Friends like that . . .” He shrugged and walked the pitcher down, returning with a ten.
“You’re being a dick.”
He turned his back and punched some register keys. “Kiss your mother with that mouth?”
“Annually.”
Kenny shoved a thick finger into one last key and the cash drawer popped. He licked his thumb to make change, then took a fistful of singles down to the pitcher guys and chatted a good five minutes.
He came back and dropped an elbow for anchor right in front of me, leaning onto a leg-of-lamb forearm and staring over the top of my head. He even tried to whistle a little something.
“You’re the one who told me I should talk to him,” I said.
The whistling trailed off. “I tell you to go alone?”
“I wasn’t alone.”
“All practical purposes.”
We glared at each other.
“Two girls going in a bar. How that looks,” he said, raising a finger, “your husband out of town.”
“You’re fucking kidding.”
He dropped his hand and looked away, bull-exhaled through his nose.
“Kenny,” I said, “there were two hundred people. There was a band. It’s not like we were cruising South Salina in hot pants, leaning in car windows going ‘You boys dating tonight?’”
He made this minute gesture with his head. Just a sly inch of motion, richly endowed with inference. Byzantine.
I nudged a fist against his hand. “Anybody even noticed me and Ellis walking in, they probably thought we were a couple.”
No response.
“Or, I dunno, Canadian.”
Okay, so he smiled a little, around the edges.
I tried to move into his line of sight. “I mean, I’m here alone, right?”
“I look happy about that?”
It hadn’t occurred to me, but indeed this was my first time solo at the Crown.
“This place, you’re chaperoned,” Kenny said. “Some guy comes within ten feet . . .”
I looked to my left: eight empty stools between me and the regulars. I felt bad, all of them squished down at the end like that.
“Aside from issues of propriety,” he continued, “Dean would have my ass, he knew I agreed to you chasing around on this. It’d be goddamn dangerous even if you actually had some idea what you were doing.”
I pressed both palms against the sides of my glass, rolling it slowly between them. . . . Clockwise . . . Counterclockwise. “You gonna tell him?”
The motion of my hands was so slow the beer barely climbed the sides of the vessel. Slender ribbons of bubbles continued to rise, undisturbed.
“I mean,” I said, keeping my eyes on the golden liquid, “it’s not like you can just pick up a phone. He’s in a crew car, halfway to White Horse or Yellow Knife. Saskatoon.”
Spin . . . spin . . . “Last time he called, they’d driven seventy-five miles for a cup of coffee. Some breakdown, dead moose or whatever, so there was time to kill. Took the truck out with a couple of guys. Nothing but trees for an hour each way.”
I looked up. “That was Friday. I told him Ellis was here, that we were going out to see the Kingsnakes. Dean’s the one who said Schneider was into them, right?”
“He know the rest?”
“Would if he’d called since.” I stared down into the glass, shrugged. “Guess he wasn’t too worried.”
I raised the beer and drained it.
He didn’t offer a refill.
“Please, sir,” I said, ducking my head in supplication, “may I have another?”
“Damn it to hell,” said Kenny.
He put my glass in the sink, reached for a fresh one.
I took that as a good sign. “So can I talk to you about what actually happened?”
Kenny couldn’t resist pausing mid-step to patronize me. “What, you called everybody into the library and someone confessed, like those pinkos on PBS?”
He had the nerve to chuck me under the chin.
I considered biting him. “I’m serious.”
He grinned, hands and my as-yet-unfilled beer glass raised in mock surrender. “No need to get testy.”
He pulled the tap, glass tilted to keep the head slight.
“Oh, g’ahead,” he said, all bogus expansive, “ask me anything.”
“Fine,” I said. “What’s a double vet?”
He swung his head toward me, beer still running. Liquid bulged above the rim of the glass, then broke and washed down over his knuckles.
Kenny shoved the tap shut, slopping more foam to the floor. He ignored it—stepped right back in front of me and leaned close, free hand gripping the bar.
“Where’d you hear that?” he said, very quiet.
“I read it,” I answered, voice pitched just as low. “Why?”
“Where’d you read it?”
“Off Schneider’s lighter.”
Kenny’s skin went from gold to gray-green.
“You okay?” I touched his hand.
“What you said, it’s apocryphal. Goddamn Jane Fonda horseshit that never happened—hippies made it up to smear us.”
“If it never happened, how come Schneider had it engraved on his Zippo?”
Kenny looke
d at the glass in his hand. He set it down with exaggerated care.
“According to the lighter, he was in Hue,” I said. “In 1964. Same year as that crap in the Gulf of Tonkin. Back when it was all still ‘advising’ the ARVN. . . .”
Kenny wouldn’t look me in the eye.
“So he was a Green Beret or some shit, right?” I said. “Just like you told me all you cops figured it was, when those girls got killed.”
I waited for him to answer. He didn’t even exhale.
“Chrissake,” I said, “be straight with me. What the hell’s it mean?”
He raised his eyes. “Double vet?”
I nodded.
“You want to believe the long-hair propaganda, it means he killed a woman in ’Nam,” Kenny said, “right when he’d finished balling her. That straight enough?”
The guys down the bar kept chatting. The compressor on one of the coolers clicked alive. I could feel it shudder before it settled into a steady hum.
“That lighter had five notches on it,” I said. “Schneider’s left-handed, and he buys all these children’s books. . . .”
I waited for him to comment, the silence stretching out.
“I know it isn’t any kind of proof,” I said, “but it’s something, right?”
He turned his back on me. Picked up a towel. Ran it around the fat neck of the pickled-egg jar.
I could see his face in the mirror. “Kenny?”
Soon as he noticed I was watching, his gaze flicked away.
“Turns out it was a local guy,” he said, “you can ignore it, right?”
“Ignore it, hell,” I said. “I came to you. Just like I did about the dog tags.”
Kenny turned around. “This cousin, he’s loaded?”
I hunched my shoulders, wrapped both arms tight across my belly.
He leaned in, hand in my face, pad of his thumb running back and forth across fingertips. “Isn’t he?”
I tilted my head away. My throat hurt.
“Fancy schools,” he said. “Some hoity-toity accent. Just like you.”
Snick. That familiar sound. Cut from the herd.
“So if it looks like Schneider killed those girls,” he went on, “your boy’s off the hook.”
“That’s not—”
Kenny held up a hand, shaking his head. “You found your scapegoat,” he said. “Word to the wise, though, Madeline? Watch out you don’t let anything about this town actually touch you.”
I stood up.
“You really believe that’s what matters to me?” I asked, my voice so quiet even I could barely hear it.
“Only thing matters to you is finding some reason to get the hell out of Syracuse,” he said. “Doesn’t make a difference what it is, who it hurts—long as you end up back with your kind.”
“I had hoped ‘my kind’ was you, Kenny.”
I pressed some bills on the counter and turned to go, but he wasn’t finished.
“Be sure you tell ’em, back home,” he said, “that I think your finishing school was worth every last penny.”
“Back home?” I swung around, stared him full in the eye. “Where the hell’s that? Think I’d be here at the Crown, I had anywhere else to go?”
He lost the smile. The certainty.
“Look at this place . . .” I said, “have to be goddamn desperate . . .”
“Aw jeez,” he said. “Aw jeez . . . don’t cry.”
Kenny reached a hand toward my shoulder, but I twisted out of comfort’s way. After shoving my crumpled singles toward his side of the bar, I put my glass on top, like they might otherwise blow away.
PART II
CENTRE ISLAND
Ralph sometimes called his mother and grandfather the Aborigines, and likened them to those vanishing denizens of the American continent doomed to rapid extinction with the advance of the invading race. He was fond of describing Washington Square as the “Reservation,” and of prophesying that before long its inhabitants would be exhibited at ethnological shows, pathetically engaged in the exercise of their primitive industries.
—EDITH WHARTON, THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY
CHAPTER 23
Friday I threw my backpack in the Rabbit so early it was still dark—stars overhead shivering bright in the dew-point chill. By Ithaca it was pouring.
I called in sick from a piss-rank Catskills phone booth, so the guys at the Weekly wouldn’t try me at home and hear how I’d left Bonwit’s number on our machine, just in case Dean called.
Just in case he didn’t remember the number, or where Bonwit lived, or how to call Information, or was lying alone and sick by the railroad tracks somewhere in the Yukon, or had actually really wanted to call his wife all along, but was the captive of Maoist polar bears.
Wilt picked up in editorial, and he was totally onto me. “Nothing undercuts a good flu story, Maddie,” he said, “like the sound of eighteen-wheelers downshifting in the rain.”
“Don’t tell Ted, okay?” I said. “Be a pal?”
He promised to swear I was home in bed, suffering. I dropped the phone in its greasy cradle and shoved out for air.
Back on the road, the wipers left a widow’s peak on my windshield, rain coming down like hammers until just before the Tappan Zee Bridge. Suddenly it was clear, both Hudson and sky saturated with that poignant cusp-of-fall blue, perfect gateway for descent into lush Westchester. I accelerated for the Throgs Neck and the Long Island Expressway—five hours down, one to go.
You smell Oyster Bay before you see it—air growing rich with salt tang on the curve before Mill Hill Road, then everything on your right drops away but the old seawall’s metal railing, the beach grass below, West Harbor and Centre Island beyond.
This island used to be the family farm. I was the tenth generation, matrilineal. Its main charm now was how well it concealed the “embarrassment of riches” from prying eyes. Only a handful of houses can be seen from the tree-canopied road.
Bonwit’s gravel driveway was good for a couple tenth-of-a-mile odometer ticks, downhill toward the water. The house was old-school Abercrombie and Fitch, back when they outfitted Roosevelts for safari rather than rent boys for Fire Island. It was all creamy stucco and white shutters, under a blue slate roof.
No cars out front. No one home.
I walked into the green-walled mudroom, past piles of rubber boots and field hockey sticks and tweed caps and bicycle-polo mallets and an umbrella stand filled with rain-bent tennis rackets.
Above the inner door was a warthog-head trophy, sporting a gold hoop in one ear. I gave it a salute and cut through the “bierstube,” a small dining room of such Bavarian flavor that you half-expected to catch the St. Pauli Girl filing her nails at the head of the table. I lugged my pack up to the third floor. Bonwit had welcomed us kids to live in the northern part of the servants’ quarters. Actual servants rated rooms in the half of the house he’d pay to heat, come winter.
I washed my hair, then made my way back to the kitchen for iced coffee and the Times crossword.
I was stuck on 13 across when Egon the Nazi gardener came in. He was white-haired, buff, and close to seventy-five. Bonwit found him working in a German boatyard after the war. Brought him over and set him loose in the camellias.
“Morning, Egon,” I said. “Any ideas for a Latin American capital, seven letters?”
His blue eyes narrowed. “Trouble with Latin America is the Jewish bankers.”
“I like Jews, Egon. They’re nice to me. Plus they don’t put Spam on a Triscuit and call it dinner, which is more than I can say for some people.”
“Ja, okay,” he said, rocking back onto his heels. “When I work bartending around here, is always the Jews who are generous, you know? One time I have a guy, tells me, ‘Egon, you give only one ice cube in a cocktail, or it’s your ass.’ You never have a Jew tell you some crap like that.”
Egon was a shithead. For instance, he delighted Mom’s boyfriend Bonwit by calling me and my siblings die lumpen—“the most de
graded stratum of the proletariat.”
But the guy loved to gossip. If Lapthorne had secrets, Egon’d spill them faster than he could throw up a Sieg Heil arm.
“You must see an awful lot, working around here,” I said.
“Oh, ja, plenty,” he said, nostrils flaring with satisfaction.
“Stuff people wouldn’t want known,” I said.
He grinned. “Ugly things.”
“People can be pigs, can’t they?” I said.
“All the time messes,” he agreed. “Sometimes they want me to clean it up.”
I nodded.
“Ja, so,” he said, eyes shifting around to check the room for a broader audience.
I nodded again, and he sidled up to the table.
“It’s the money,” he confided. “You or me, we do wrong, there’s no protection. For them the story gets all smooth, after. If it’s suicide, maybe the police just say ‘accident.’ If the police say suicide, then probably two people involved, you know? How many suicides you know some guy shoot himself and falls forward? I seen people shot in the war. Only time you go face-first, the gun is behind you, understand? You tell me, how a man shoot himself in the back?”
I shook my head. Then nodded and shrugged at the same time . . . shocked at these revelations. Shocked.
Egon, visibly touched by this show of awed disbelief, continued.
“Is because they don’t love their children,” he said. “Big house, too many servants. The mothers . . . useless.”
“That’s like my cousins, Lapthorne and those guys. They always got left with this woman Gerdie.”
Egon’s face pinched up in distaste. “That one, she give the Nazis a bad name—”
Bonwit walked in, dressed in a herringbone railroad cap, his typical threadbare wide-wale corduroys, and the seersucker busboy jacket he’d “liberated” from a 1930s-Havana-restaurant garbage can. The latter now sported buttons embossed with the Hohenzollern crest. Twenty-four karat. It was the sort of sartorial nose-thumbing that once landed him on Cholly Knickerbocker’s “worst-dressed” list, sandwiched between Gandhi and Howard Hughes.
Bonwit inspected my wet hair. “Have you been bathing again? Don’t suppose you have any idea how expensive hot water is. . . .”
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