A Field of Darkness

by Cornelia Read

  CHAPTER 46

  I awoke the next morning to see Bonwit glowering over us, in stained painter’s pants and a moth-eaten old pink sweater monogrammed with his daughter’s initials.

  “Charming,” he said, looking from me to Lapthorne.

  “My thought exactly,” I croaked back. Lappy and I still had our shoes on, for God’s sake, not to mention all our clothes. I tried to shut my eyes and ignore him, but he sent Egon out with the gas-powered leaf blower, which he aimed at the bottom of the French doors right next to my head.

  “I’m beginning to see what you mean about a certain lack of hospitality extended on your behalf,” said Lapthorne.

  “The usual rude awakening. I apologize.”

  Lappy stood up and threw Egon a stiff-armed Sieg Heil, which pissed the old guy off so much he shut down the blower and stomped off into the bushes.

  “Be careful,” I said, laughing. “He’ll probably go paint swastikas on your car.”

  “Fuck ’im,” he answered. “Let’s drive out to civilization and find some breakfast.”

  Mom cornered me on the second floor as I was taking the blankets back up.

  “I have to say, Madeline,” she said, “that I’m appalled. Sleeping with your cousin, for God’s sake . . . you could at least have had the courtesy to take him up to the third floor—”

  “The operative word there is ‘sleeping,’ Mom, as in ‘we fell asleep.’”

  “Don’t use that bitchy tone with me.”

  “Fine, then. I’ll use a polite one,” I said, flaming with moral indignation and feeling perfectly justified in skewering her. “You’ve just accused me of fucking my cousin in a big glass room, and implied that it would have been perfectly all right if I’d snuck him upstairs and out of sight. Are you more worried we outraged your boyfriend’s sensibilities, or that his wife might have dropped by and seen us?”

  “I just don’t dig it,” she said.

  I walked away.

  When I got back from the diner in Bayville, I threw everything into a ratty duffel bag and came downstairs to say goodbye to Mom.

  She was in the kitchen, snipping the ends off the year’s last roses at the sink.

  I hugged her from behind, telling her again that I was sorry.

  “There’s someone on the phone for you,” she said. “Bonwit’s got it in the green room. I hope you have a good trip. . . .”

  I went on into the green room, where Bonwit sat at his desk with a big Luneville cup of boozological tea. He had one hand raised in the air, and the phone dangled from his fingers, spinning slowly back and forth on its coiled cord, the dial tone dopplering.

  “Oh, hullo, dear,” he said. “It was someone from Canada, but I think they hung up about five minutes ago.”

  He let the receiver fall to the desk with a thunk, then turned and smiled at me.

  Dean must have called the paper, to know I was here. But at least he’d know that even Bonwit wouldn’t blow him off if I’d been killed.

  “You suck, Uncle Bonny,” I said.

  “Don’t I just?” he said, pulling his glasses back down off the top of his head and reaching for the book he’d been reading by way of goodbye.

  I shouldered my duffel and walked out, tossing it into the back of the car on top of my gun, tightening the baling wire on the hatchback so the damn thing would stay shut.

  I walked up to Lapthorne’s window. “So we’re picking up Ellis?”

  He nodded. “She’s hitching a ride to the Taconic. Gas station right off the Austerlitz exit.”

  “Race you,” I said, and we tore out of the driveway.

  PART V

  CAMP

  The land! Don’t you feel it? Doesn’t it make you want to go out and lift dead Indians tenderly from their graves, to steal from them—as if it must be clinging even to their corpses—some authenticity, that which—

  Here not there.

  —WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS, IN THE AMERICAN GRAIN

  CHAPTER 47

  Coming into the Adirondack Park was like driving suddenly out of Appalachia and into the forests of Bavaria. From the nearly treeless expanse of the Mohawk’s run between Syracuse and Albany, the road plunged into a landscape dense with brooding, wizard-hatted pines and spruce.

  The ill-kept two-lane road jumped and dove ahead of us, revealing, from between the stands of evergreens beginning to blacken in the ebbing light, sudden glimpses of great, still, pewtered lakes or flashes of deciduous trees whose fall color was so intense I continually mistook them for fire.

  There were few towns this far north, just sometimes clusters of buildings around the old iron bridges spanning necks between lakes.

  I was glad to be tailing Lapthorne and Ellis, as the only indication you get for the four-mile-long dirt driveway in was an inch-high series of code flags painted on a one-foot-square plywood sign: C-A-M-P. He slowed way the hell down at the sign for the town of Macy’s Lake.

  Camp was on its own “pond” to the south, a fish-shaped three-mile length of water called, redundantly, Little Smalls. Great-grandfather Lapthorne had bought the five thousand acres surrounding this in about 1892, when building “Great Camps” was just becoming fashionable among the rich who wanted to summer more rustically than was possible in Newport or Long Island.

  He commissioned a sprawling lodge of dark wood on the edge of the water, connected to its outbuildings by a series of covered walkways through the forest. There was an icehouse and a boathouse, servants’ quarters above an octagonal dining room, and an old stable that had been converted to a garage, complete with a Deco gas pump out front.

  When I stepped out of the car, I stood for a minute, struck by the stillness of the place, the absolute quiet punctuated only by an occasional loon. And of course gunfire.

  From the slow rhythm of the shots, I deduced that those already here were getting in a little target practice off the dining room porch, which stood on a large boulder about thirty feet above the water.

  For almost a hundred years now, family members had saved any small bottles to toss out onto the lake. They made great targets because they’d float until hit, and the water just off the dining room got very deep very fast, so broken glass didn’t bother anything but the few trout who’d survived the onslaught of acid rain. The water was frozen from the shore to about thirty feet out, and looking oily beyond that.

  I left my gun in the back of the car, since the weapon of choice for this game was a .22, they obviously hadn’t run out of bottles yet, and you couldn’t set up the trap for skeet below while people were shooting off the porch. I hauled my duffel out and followed Ellis and Lappy up the steps to the front door.

  “God, it still smells the same,” I said, stepping inside and inhaling wood smoke and spruce and the must of generations.

  “Batshit,” he said. “They get in through the vents, and the roof is leaking.”

  “Oh, come on, Lappy,” I said, dropping my bag next to a dark wooden hatrack carved to resemble a small bear trying to climb a leafless tree, “allow me a little moment of sentiment. I haven’t been up here since I was twelve.”

  “I had no idea you liked the place. I’m more than happy to drag you up anytime—maybe the four of us should come back for Thanksgiving.”

  Ellis was beaming and I tried really hard not to look too pathetically grateful, but must have failed miserably because he threw an arm around my shoulder and clenched me in half a hug, saying, “Least I can do, considering.”

  He led us up the stairs and showed us our room. I had no doubt we’d be rearranging quarters after the grownups had turned in for the night, but for the moment I was bunking with Ellis.

  “I’ll be right next door,” said Lapthorne, “should anything go bump in the night.”

  In the end we didn’t have to shoot at Dodie’s urn, or even cut a hole in the ice. We gathered where a brook poured into Little Smalls, and the way the water frothed after tumbling through its cut in the bank kept ice from forming for a radius of ten
feet.

  We stood in a broad, ragged circle, on either side of the brook, Ellis and Lappy much further up the hill from me. There were no words spoken as Ogden, her eldest son, stepped down to the edge and shook Dodie’s ashes into the water, though I have to say the stuff looked more like gravel to me. Kitty Litter. We were just all silent in the face of the great stillness that seemed to rise off the cold surface of the lake, the hysteria of a single loon bouncing off the dark mountains ringing the water, its voice reverberating in the depth of quiet.

  We stayed there with our heads bowed, and I thought about how the perfection of this body of water had been paid for with the utter desecration of Lake Oncas, and how, even so, Little Smalls mattered to me more than anywhere else on earth, more even than most people.

  I have no talent for quiet meditation, have never gained an insight on the nature of the universe while having to duck my head in silence for anything. My mind just wanders and jumps. I didn’t even have a kind thought left for the flight of Dodie’s supposed soul, instead considered Kenny with his halo of coins, the pomegranate seeds, and wished I could have brought him here just once.

  People started raising their heads and walking slowly back toward Camp. I stayed in the same spot, just breathing in the cold sharp air and looking out over the water and wondering, now that Dodie was gone, if I’d ever have been allowed to come back here but for Lapthorne.

  Binty was the last to start up the hill. I was ready to follow, but she stopped before I took a step, blocking the trail.

  When everyone else was out of earshot, she looked down at me, saying quietly, “You realize, of course, that when your parents sold their shares in Camp, they were told it meant their children would never be allowed to buy back in?”

  Then she smiled and strode away.

  I just stood there, slackjawed in the cold.

  CHAPTER 48

  Egon was manning a bar in the dining room for most of the afternoon, and by dinner that night I was much the worse for wear. Lappy and Ellis sat with me at the kiddy table, the rest of the family gathered around the great round oak table in front of the fireplace.

  “Titanic salad,” said Lapthorne, pushing the quarter-wedge of iceberg doused in Thousand Island dressing to the edge of his plate.

  “Not a big group for cuisine,” I said.

  “All too drunk to know what they’re eating,” he said.

  I realized that I was, too. Things were blurry enough that I kept wanting to shut one eye, and I had no interest whatsoever in dinner.

  I heard Kit’s voice ringing out at the next table, “Cute story . . . cute story . . . friend of mine bought a snowblower and dropped dead of a heart attack . . .”

  “So tell me about Dodie,” said Ellis. “What was she like?”

  “The only thing I know about her is she was a junkie,” I said. “I just have this picture of her shooting up with a monogrammed Tiffany syringe in her dressing room, surrounded by all her Belgian shoes.”

  “Oh no,” said Lapthorne. “Dodie never shot up . . . she wasn’t into morphine or heroin. She had a more old-fashioned bent.”

  “What was she into, then?” asked Ellis.

  “Chloral hydrate,” he said. “It was pretty much the first thing they gave for sleeping pills, other than laudanum or opium. She had terrible insomnia after Jake died. The syrup form is what bartenders used to use for knockout drops when they had unruly drunks or rich ones they wanted to roll. Called that a Mickey Finn, after the first guy who made a habit of it in Chicago . . . I guess he ran a pretty notorious dive right around the time of the big fire there.”

  “So it just makes you sleep?” I asked. “What fun is that?”

  “Oh, Madeline, addiction is really never about fun,” he said. “It’s always about pain.”

  I bowed my head in concession to that.

  “It still seems like a pretty unusual choice for what could be called ‘recreational’ use,” I said, “fun or no fun.”

  “Well,” he explained, “it’s one of the few scheduled drugs you can make at home, with a little bit of chemistry background. That’s where Jimmy the driver came in. Wonder what he’ll do now.”

  “Jesus,” I said.

  I found myself drifting over to Egon and the bar more than usual that night. At one point, when no one else was within earshot, he looked at me seriously and said, “I hear from your mother you been finding a lot of bodies.”

  I wondered whether it had become her latest lagniappe of intriguing news, the top of the hit parade for phone calls to her friends: “And you’ll never guess what Maddie’s been up to in Syracuse. . . .”

  “Someone you know?” he said, more sympathetic than I’d ever seen him.

  “The last guy, yeah,” I said. “A good friend.”

  “Not just dead, ja? Maybe hurt before they die?”

  I nodded.

  “I’m sorry. Makes it much harder. I remember with my daughter, when I had to see the body, and they tell me what was done to her before she die.”

  “I thought she drowned . . .”

  “In a bathtub. First they cut her feet maybe a hundred times, and put a knife up . . . you know. Police tell me they find her body, that she was drown after they do all that.” He looked down at the white tablecloth, clenched his fists.

  The image he’d rendered of his daughter’s torture, his sadness, made me bow my head. Who were the people that could inflict this? Could leave echoing, haunted voids where beloved children had been? Egon with that pain at the center of his life forever.

  “Death, maybe, it’s simple,” he said, “maybe . . . if you don’t see it coming. But when you know the person have to think about it first, have to know . . . Well, I’m sorry for you.”

  He put his hand on top of mine and gave it a little squeeze.

  When the elders had gone to bed, the moon came up, dyeing the ice blue, and there was a stiff breeze riffing on the sluggish, not-yet-frozen water in the center.

  Ellis was telling us about taking Lapthorne to see the Winslow Homer watercolors at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, saying how glad she was that they’d caught the show before it’d closed last Monday.

  I’d stopped drinking cocktails, but suddenly got very thirsty. Egon was long gone, so I cut clumsily through the dark dining room toward the kitchen. When I got through the swinging door, I realized Lapthorne was behind me.

  I could see a six-pack of ginger ale on the counter, in the moonlight spilling through a pantry window, and walked over to take one. When I turned around, he was standing right next to me.

  “She’s right, you know,” he said.

  “Who?” I said, steadying myself against the counter.

  “Ellis. It is a crime you’re married.”

  He leaned toward me and crooked his index finger under my chin, tilting my face up.

  “Lappy—” I said, worried he was going to try kissing me, worried about what I’d do—all that rum making the edges of everything way too soft and comfortable.

  “Don’t say a word,” he said, placing the pad of his thumb tenderly over the center of my mouth. “It’s just too bad, that’s all. Thought you should know.”

  He stepped away from me and then walked out of the kitchen. I cracked open the soda and decided it was high time I put myself to bed.

  When I finally got there and lay down, the bed was spinning and all I could think about was Egon’s daughter, floating in a pool of water with her feet cut to ribbons. The image tugged at the edge of my consciousness until finally the bed seemed to take such a dip that I put my foot on the floor to stop it from moving.

  CHAPTER 49

  You should get up,” Ellis said, sitting on the edge of my bed and nearly sending the contents of my stomach to Tilt. “Everybody’s gone but us.”

  “If they’ve all left, what’s the hurry?” I said, pulling a pillow over my eyes to avoid the painful sunlight. She pulled it away.

  I opened my eyes and looked at her. She had a goofy little s
mile and kept rolling her eyes up to check out the ceiling, avoiding my face.

  “What?” I said. “You have that look.”

  “What look?”

  “Oh for God’s sake, Ellis.” I sat up and swacked her with the pillow.

  “Okay . . . so Lapthorne . . . last night,” she said.

  “What?”

  “He told me he’s in love with me,” she said.

  It’s just too bad, that’s all. Thought you should know.

  “Wow,” I said. “Congratulations.”

  She held out a fist, then opened it, palm up.

  Resting there was a pin, the row of diamonds and emeralds I knew from Dodie’s portrait. The one she’d worn on her hip.

  “He gave me this, but . . .” she said.

  I touched it with one finger. The sunlight hit its stones and the whole thing flashed. Full-spectrum glints from the diamonds, deep blue from the emeralds.

  “But what?” I asked.

  “I mean, he said this belonged to Dodie. I think it should have gone to you.”

  “Do you have any idea how happy it makes me? That he gave this to you?” I said. “It’s perfect.”

  “Thank you,” she said, still uncertain.

  “Ellis, after Dean, you guys are my two favorite people. Maybe we’ll all be . . .”

  “The four of us,” she said. “That would be the best part, wouldn’t it? Can’t you just see . . .”

  “Everything . . . the most amazing . . .” I started, then didn’t want to add another word, certain that saying the least bit more out loud would jinx all the gorgeous possibilities.

  I tried to stop even the delicious rush of visions in my head.

  Don’t think about all of us together, when Dean comes home. Don’t think about us sprawled out on the Naugahyde, talking late into the night, or cooking a big dinner in our kitchen or Lapthorne’s.

  Don’t think about who would wake up first on a Sunday morning after a party and cue up the coffee before starting to collect half-full glasses from all over everywhere, and how I would put on some Puccini but Ellis would want Talking Heads . . .