A Field of Darkness

by Cornelia Read

  I looked across the broad expanse of lawn, toward the private dock to which his latest boat was moored, then handed him a quarter.

  “Here you go, Uncle Bonny,” I said. “Don’t spend it all in one place.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Mom bustled past us with a load of groceries, giving me a peck on the cheek.

  “Thought we’d have lunch on the terrace,” she said. “The cook’s at a wedding, so I’m making pork and beans with Mummie’s coleslaw from Thursday before last. You can take some plates out, Madeline.”

  Pork and beans with week-old coleslaw needed a little window dressing. I opened the pantry cabinets that held luncheon plates—considered an Imari knockoff in vivid rusts and deep blues, the chunky majolica cabbage leaves, the cartoony spouting whales from “that little woman on the Cape” . . . fifteen patterns.

  I chose the Luneville because it was Mom’s, because I missed eating in our kitchen in California. I loved the familiar bright nosegay centered on its white ground, the thin raspberry stripe piped along each plate’s scalloped edge.

  Bonwit came out while I was setting the terrace table. He dropped his railroad cap beside his plate and pulled up a chair. Mom followed with the wheeled cart, Van de Camp’s lukewarm in a big Lowestoft tureen up top.

  “Lapthorne called,” she said as she took her seat. “Wanted to let us know he’d be coming by water, around eight-thirty. . . . Maybe you should meet him on the dock?”

  Coins of light spangled through the fine old trees. Mom served Bonwit first.

  He poked around with his spoon and pursed his lips.

  “Pork and beans, pork and beans, I’m Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines,” he said. “Seem to have been eating an awful lot of this lately.”

  “They had a whole case at Foodtown, dented,” chirped Mom.

  “Well then,” he said, breaking into a smile, “let’s have some for this party. Might make quite a nice little pâté.”

  I passed my plate to Mom, not wanting to get involved. Mealtime conversation here was like watching Fellini and Wodehouse drop acid.

  “So, Madeline,” said Bonwit, “your sister tells me that poor people eat rats—”

  “Not again, Bonwit,” said Mom, handing my plate back. “For chrissake, how many times have you dragged this up—”

  “I wondered,” he continued, “whether they take the fur off beforehand, or leave it on and eat that too?”

  “Fur on,” I said. “For the roughage.”

  Egon started up a chain saw. Thank God.

  Ellis arrived right then.

  “Awfully good to see you, dear,” Bonwit said, over the racket.

  He reached across the table to give her hand a welcoming squeeze. It always seemed like he went out of his way to show how much he preferred her to me. But I knew how painful it had been for her to lose her dad, so I didn’t begrudge the attention, most of the time.

  It made me ache to see her face light up at the merest approval, to see how quickly she could draw sustenance from even Bonwit’s barren landscape of affection.

  The chain saw motor cut out.

  “Can I interest you in a plate of these delicious pork and beans, dear?” Bonwit asked Ellis.

  “Ah, can you smell?” called Egon, from across the lawn. “The linden tree is in flower again. . . . In the Hitler Youth, we make tea from the blossoms.”

  I helped Egon carry a couple of folding tables up from the cellar, then he put me to work slicing lemons and limes.

  “I was thinking about what you told me earlier,” I said. “That woman, Gerdie—”

  “Not one to be with children.” He snapped out a white tablecloth so it hovered in the air for a second, perfectly horizontal, before fluttering down.

  “Why, you think?”

  Egon shrugged. “The war.”

  “She was Swedish?”

  “Danish. From the Jutland.”

  “Was it bad there, in the war?”

  Another shrug. “Took it early, Fall Weserübung. Not real fighting . . . two hours, they give up. Then we just move through quick for Norway.”

  “So if it wasn’t so bad there . . . I mean, it’s still a war and everything—hard times. But you came out of it a solid guy, straightforward . . . real sense of honor . . . kind. . . .”

  Fond of torchlight rallies, known to whistle “The Horst Wessel Song” while lopping blooms off the hydrangea bushes . . .

  “For her, different. In the war she got . . .” He stopped himself, filled the pause by hoisting a case of tonic water onto the table. Then he started totting up cartons of liquor.

  “She got . . . ?” I coaxed.

  Poor Egon, so conflicted. Lips pressed tight to keep back the rest of the story, eyes already guilty with the pleasure of knowing he’d tell. It had to be something particularly nasty. Private.

  He tapped the top box on a teetering stack. “Gonna need more gin.”

  “Let me get it, after these limes,” I said, pretending absolute dedication to the precision of my slice cutting.

  He sighed and shifted around—couldn’t stand holding this morsel back.

  “She got . . .” He drummed his fingers, looking sideways. “She got . . . passed around, you know?”

  He pitched his voice just a notch above a whisper. “Walking home, one time. Maybe she was fourteen years old? Thirteen? Real young like that. No one told her yet what happens for babies . . . for anything. Big joke to them, those guys.”

  “Germans?”

  He shook his head. “From her town . . . why she come over here, after.”

  “She told you about it?”

  “Not me,” he said. “Louisa.”

  His wife. We’d never met, even though she and Egon shared a cottage on Bonwit’s place. Never seen the cottage, either. Up in the woods somewhere.

  “Louisa?” I said.

  “One time,” he continued, “they were maybe a little drunk together, New Year’s. In the kitchen, party for the Townsends. They talk when I was on the bar. Big dance, maybe five hundred people. Olden days.”

  At midnight Louisa had started to cry, he told me, because she couldn’t get pregnant. Tried for five years after they’d been married.

  “She was still so young then, Louisa. Such a tender heart,” he said. “Gerdie tells her, go adopt a child. . . .”

  Gerdie confided that she’d been raped, and about the baby afterwards. How she gave him up and always hoped the parents were loving, good people. Maybe like Egon and Louisa. And how maybe some other girl was wondering that right now—if there weren’t kind, honest people in the world who could love her child.

  And then the schnapps had run out, and Gerdie had found a bottle of brandy, which Louisa refused because by then she was a little dizzy.

  Gerdie refilled a juice glass, and admitted that she felt as though the Townsend boys were her own, sometimes.

  A good thing Mr. and Mrs. were so seldom at home. She had a free hand. They would respect women, those boys. She’d made sure.

  Finally Egon and Louisa had to haul her up the back stairs to her bed, Louisa with one hand clamped over Gerdie’s mouth because the woman kept sobbing.

  “Big she was, then,” he said. “Lot of work to carry, all that way. You wouldn’t know, you see her now.”

  I nodded, thinking of the tiny crone I remembered—thin white braids wrapped around her head, suspicious little wet-raisin eyes.

  “Was 1951, so . . .” he said, “same year was born the youngest, that one you ask about.”

  “Lapthorne?”

  “Sure.”

  “You ever see her with those kids?” I asked.

  “I was getting set up one time, another party. Lapthorne, maybe he was six years old. Gerdie had him, like this,” he said, grabbing my upper arm so hard I felt the blood stop. “Talking nasty . . .”

  “What’d she say?”

  “Calling him ‘filthy boy, bedwetter,’” he hissed. “Saying how she was gonna tell all the girls.

&nb
sp; “The mother come outside on a terrace and sees,” he continued, “with Gerdie still holding but now like this,” he gave my arm a twist. “Doesn’t say stop, that Mrs. Townsend. Doesn’t make even one sound. Only watching.”

  He was pretty much killing my arm, but I wanted to keep him talking so I fought the urge to yank it out of his grip.

  “You know how some people, you don’t have to see them, behind you?” he continued. “Just you feel it? So with Gerdie. Mrs. Townsend comes outside, she knows . . . stops talking, like . . .”

  He shuddered, melodramatic, and thank God relaxed his grip on me.

  I rubbed my newly paroled biceps. “Uncle Hunt claims the ambient temperature drops any time Binty comes in a room.”

  Egon nodded, his little grin betraying full awareness of her Nom de Bitch.

  “So . . . Gerdie turns around.” He drew himself up, assuming the rigid yet utterly servile posture one rarely sees perfected outside West Point. “The mother, when she knows she has attention . . . only she says, ‘What has Lappy done now?’”

  Egon did a perfect Binty, had her nailed right down to the impeccably condescending nostril flare with which she accompanied any stressed word—nasal italics.

  I shivered.

  “Gerdie,” he went on, “all sweet, she says, ‘I’m reminding him to be on his best behavior, madame’ and Mrs. Townsend answers, ‘That’s wonderful, we like to see a firm hand.’”

  I was still babying my sore arm, and Egon’s gaze flicked across it.

  “The little boy was hurting more than that,” he said, “from what she did. He was holding it, trying not to cry, but his mother turns to go without ever looking him in the eye. At her back, her son gives one moment, one face of the most pure . . . But Gerdie, he wants to please. Obedient. A little dog.”

  He gave his head a cunning tilt and raised his hands like paws. “A puppy.”

  “Did you and Louisa take Gerdie’s advice, about a baby?”

  He nodded. “We adopted that year Helen. Then Louisa got pregnant, after, with Julia. It happens like that a lot. We raised both girls just the same. We loved them just the same, until we lost our Helen.”

  “I’m so sorry. . . .”

  “She died in college,” he said, looking off toward the water. “She was drowned. I had to fly out . . . tell them ‘Yes, my daughter.’ For two days I cried, after. Only time, you know? Since I was a kid.”

  “Oh, Egon . . .”

  He pulled a sharp breath through his teeth. “You cutting those limes too thick.”

  When I was back up from the cellar, placing the case of Gilbey’s on top of the carton pile, Bonwit stepped into the doorway. He put his hands in his pockets and leaned against the frame, whistling.

  “What you need?” asked Egon.

  “Hm?” said Bonwit, looking up and batting his lashes.

  He snapped his fingers a few times, as though trying to remember why he’d come.

  “Oh yes . . . that was it . . . someone on the phone for you, Madeline,” he said at last. “Rather an impatient bugger.”

  I darted past Bonwit for the pantry, not fast enough to miss hearing him say, “Wonder who the hell’d bother with her, eh?” behind me.

  I yanked up the receiver, hopeful and breathless. “Dean?”

  “No . . .” Throat-clearing on the other end. “It’s, ah . . .”

  There was all this murmur and clinking glassware in the background.

  “Kenny?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Yes.”

  I heard him fumble the phone.

  “You still there, Maddie?” he asked, sounding all worried. “I was, Jesus . . . I acted like a goddamn . . .”

  “Sure did,” I said.

  “Just . . . I feel terrible. I’m sorry. Everything.”

  “How’d you find me?”

  “Your machine,” he said. “Guess you left it on there for Dean, in case?”

  In case. Yeah.

  Kenny coughed.

  “So, ah . . . make it up to you,” he said, “I called in a couple favors. Might’ve found something out.”

  CHAPTER 25

  Kenny told you Lapthorne was in jail?” asked Ellis. “Why is that good news?”

  We were up on the third floor, putting on our makeshift costumes.

  “It was the same night as those girls were killed,” I said. “Kenny got an old cop pal to go through files, and the guy told him Lapthorne was picked up for driving drunk or something. Whatever the timing was, Kenny said it meant he couldn’t have done it. He was in some holding cell all night, before the MPs took him back to Camp Drum.”

  “Kenny was that vague?”

  “Bonwit kept picking up the phone.”

  She snorted. “Was he pretending to be the receptionist at the Academy of Blind Interior Decorators?”

  “Don’t you goddamn laugh,” I said. “Poor Kenny . . .”

  She couldn’t help it. Kept snickering. “I’m sorry, he did it to me this morning. Offering discounts on Braille wallpaper . . .”

  “Such a prick.”

  Ellis shrugged, tucking in the tails of a boiled shirt we’d found in a steamer trunk of tuxedo bits, its bib of pleats still rigid with ancient starch. She’d decided to go as F. Scott Fitzgerald, complete with spiral notepad and mini-golf scorecard pencil in the hip pocket of her dinner jacket.

  I was a Titanic survivor in Mom’s deb dress: yellowed peau de soie, off the shoulder with those fifties pointy-atomic-boob darts. The thing had gotten ripped to shit when I wore it to come out myself at the Junior Assemblies, its hem trod upon continually in the Plaza Hotel’s ballroom murk.

  Ellis looked at this tattered getup, frowning. “Your mother made you wear that? To an actual deb thing?”

  “It didn’t look this bad when I showed up,” I said.

  “So, then you got jumped by your ugly stepsisters, and . . .”

  I shook my head and pulled on one long kid glove, wiggling fingers and thumb into their respective casings. I donned the second one, then started wrestling with the three tiny buttons at my left wrist.

  “I mean, I made it through . . . damn it . . .” I said, my kid-covered fingertips slipping off the first disk, just as I’d almost got it through the microscopic buttonhole.

  Ellis leaned in, gently pushing my hand aside. “Let me.”

  “I made it through the receiving line,” I continued, “before this thing actually started disintegrating.”

  “Other hand,” Ellis said.

  I held my wrist out. “Just all these people stepped on it, later. Dancing. I kept hearing it tear. . . .”

  “Turn around. . . . I’ll do you up in the back.”

  “Thanks.”

  There were fifty-seven silk-upholstered buttons going up the bodice—no bigger than Excedrins—each needing a nimble shove through its own little silken loop. Not a dress you could get into, or out of, alone.

  “Dress like this,” I said, “chastity’s practically guaranteed.”

  “Oh please,” said Ellis, kneeling behind me. “Throw the skirt over your head and go to town.”

  “In the fifties, I mean, all those garters?”

  She tugged at the fabric around my hips. “So after talking with Kenny, you figure it’s cool? All this stuff with your cousin?”

  “If Kenny thinks so? Sure,” I said, smiling.

  Now it was just a party.

  “Breathe out,” she said. “I’m at the tricky part.”

  I exhaled and sucked in my stomach.

  “More,” she said.

  “Bitch,” I muttered.

  “More,” she said.

  I pushed the last quarter-cup of air from my lungs, already feeling dizzy.

  Ellis stood up, her breath warm on the back of my neck.

  Her fingers climbed slowly. Seemed like decades before she reached my shoulder blades.

  “Okay,” she said. “Inhale.”

  I did and my vision went all black and spotty around the edges for a second
.

  “Almost done,” she said, but as she tucked the last button through she accidentally pulled a strand of my hair along with it, some piece that had fallen free from the bone pins holding up the rest.

  I jerked my head away from that sudden pinch, felt the little hairs yank out. Stupid reaction . . . hurt like hell.

  I winced and raised a gloved hand to the spot.

  “Sorry,” said Ellis.

  “My fault,” I said.

  She stepped back and appraised me. “Pearls. More the better.”

  I dropped half a dozen strings of them over my head—different lengths, different diameters, all fake as hell—then turned to see the effect in the closet door’s long mirror.

  In the reflection, I tried to catch Ellis’s eye. “Darker lipstick, you think?”

  She didn’t answer for a second, just stared blankly at my neck, now hung with a Mardi Gras’ worth of milky plastic.

  “The other stuff,” she said, “that doesn’t still bug you?”

  “What other stuff?”

  “The dog tags,” she said. “I mean, if he was in jail, how’d they get in the field?”

  CHAPTER 26

  The Bancrofts wore capes and berets, the Hollingses his-and-hers Groucho glasses, and Louis Toohey, fresh from a Caribbean prison after that unfortunate misunderstanding about the crates of automatic weapons in the hold of his ketch, insisted that coming in his own clothes was costume enough, by God.

  The noise began to arc in dips and swoops, shot through with hoots of laughter.

  Ellis and I went for the bar, past Bonwit holding court in a Porthault-sheet toga and a flesh-toned bathing cap fringed with black curls. Mom was still at the door, meeting and greeting. She always dressed as a witch for costume parties, teasing her hair until it looked like unruly surf, then dusting it with talcum powder.

  Bobby Millhammer stood up from his crowded sofa, declaring, “Off for another drink, fellows, what may I get you?”

  Down the line they answered:

  “Scotch on the rocks.”

  “Scotch on the rocks.”

  “Bourbon on the rocks.”

  “Scotch on the rocks.”

  “Gin and tonic . . . I’m driving.”—This last met by restrained brays all around.