With Friends Like These...

by Gillian Roberts

  My mother made comforting noises and Alice uttered grating homilies about the good dying young, and I felt useless and awkward and tried to concentrate on the wall that adjoined the picture window, a montage shrine to the late Lyle Zacharias.

  My mother had a similar wall in Boca Raton, and I had spotted the beginnings of one at Beth’s house. Apparently, the real umbilical cord is strung between the delivery and dark rooms.

  There were Kodak moments of Lyle on a bear rug and on a pony, dressed for baseball, tennis, swimming, and high school graduation; with a toothy prom date in taffeta, with a grin a mile wide under the marquee of the theatre that had premiered Ace of Hearts. There was a snap of a blurred trio of happy faces in matching jackets—Wiley-Riley and Lyle—and there was a picture of boyish Richard Quinn and Lyle grinning nervously from behind matching wooden desks. There were travel snaps: Lyle and Hattie in the surf, on a mountain with a small Asian guide, on board a raft in a dark jungly setting, at a Thanksgiving gathering.

  There was a remarkable absence of females, except, of course, for Hattie. I searched for someone who might be my father’s foster sister, but couldn’t find a likely subject. Couldn’t find Sybil, either. Couldn’t find Tiffany.

  It was Lyle she cared about and for. Period. Even Reed was barely present, and always a sidekick, never the real subject of the photo.

  The housekeeper, urged on by Alice, offered me a cup of coffee for the third time in perhaps seven minutes. She looked desperate to end this impasse, so I accepted the flower-sprigged, nearly transparent cup. I grappled with its too-small handle, and as this seemed a particularly inappropriate time to destroy anything else Hattie cherished, I looked for a place to put it down.

  I was standing next to a table with a display-case top. Not a suitable coffee-cup rest, but intriguing in its contents’ brilliant colors and convoluted shapes. I had expected to see bibelots, man-made treasures. Instead, the glass covered a purple butterfly, an orange and black shedded snakeskin, a fern frond, two small pressed flowers, a red-armored beetle, a large gray-green pod, a thickly veined leaf, a bird’s wing that varied from scarlet to buttercup to azure, a chambered nautilus shell. I leaned close and read a tiny brass plaque: treasures collected by Harriet zacharias.

  I turned and was surprised to find Hattie watching me appraisingly. “Wonderful,” I murmured.

  She nodded agreement. “When I was a girl, I dreamed of two things. First, I wanted to be a naturalist, but of course, girls didn’t get to do such things in my day. The closest I came was working at the Academy of Natural Sciences from the time I received my Secretarial Certificate until…” She paused and bit at her lips. “After Ace of Hearts, I was able to retire.” She sighed and pressed a handkerchief to her mouth.

  So she had saved the little orphaned nephew, and then he had saved her.

  “What was the second thing, Hattie?” Alice asked, much too brightly, as if she were the host of an afternoon talk show. “You said you’d always wanted two things,” she prompted.

  “To travel.” Hattie answered so softly I had trouble hearing her. “But of course, once I had a little boy to raise, I couldn’t. When Lyle was five, he said, ‘Aunt Hattie, when I grow up, I’m going to send you all over the world. Every place you ever wanted to go.’ And he did. Even back then, when Lyle said he was going to do something, he really meant it. I’ve never doubted his word once.”

  She suddenly sobbed, then wiped at her eyes while Alice annoyingly repeated, “There, there, mustn’t get riled.” Alice had a lot of undeserved self-confidence and was never at a loss for words, although the words she found were clichéd, meaningless, and irritating.

  My mother made sympathetic clucks and held Hattie’s free hand. The housekeeper stood in the doorway to the kitchen, studying us impassively.

  Hattie resumed her one song. “Such a good boy and such a good man,” she said.

  “Lyle was too good to live, is what I say,” Alice added, just in case Hattie wasn’t feeling bad enough already.

  Hattie sobbed into her handkerchief.

  “Wasn’t Mr. Lyle just the kindest man who ever lived, Maria?” Alice persisted.

  “Yesss,” Maria said sibilantly, her face sullen.

  “Sound a little more like you mean it!” Alice laughed, then turned to us and rolled her eyes. “The man was a prince!”

  “Mr. Lyle he was a prince,” Maria said with no conviction. Her expression remained as impassive as it had been since we entered.

  “How could this have happened?” Hattie sobbed.

  I awaited the next blow, Hattie’s theory of how, indeed, it had happened. But instead of pointing at my mother and yelling “J’accuse,” Hattie looked toward the ceiling. “It’s that girl!” Her voice cracked with emotion. “It’s all her fault!”

  “What girl?” Alice asked.

  Hattie waved her away. “You weren’t even there last night.” And then I knew which girl Hattie meant, and I wondered why she was again fixated on poor Lizzie.

  And then I wondered why the police weren’t.

  And then I was ashamed of myself all over again. The young chef was as ludicrous a killer as my mother was. The Boarding House was her business. She’d been flushed with creating a successful party and with what it could mean for her future.

  Of course she had behaved bizarrely…

  But again I argued myself down. Something might be neurologically or emotionally wrong, but that wasn’t the same as having either a motive or the temperament to murder and self-destruct.

  Alice looked mortified, either about being excluded last night or about Hattie’s reminder of the same just now.

  Facing me across the room, a crimson and gold mask, vaguely Indonesian, contorted in confusion and pain. It seemed to capture, in one ambiguous expression, the sadness, unfairness, and waste of Lyle Zacharias’s death.

  Hattie saw me studying it. “We bought that in Bali. The artist called her the Queen of Hearts. Not like in our playing cards, but like in love and heartache.” She sighed, heavily.

  “Take some comfort,” my mother said sympathetically, “that at the end he was surrounded by his friends, the people closest to him on earth.”

  Alice snorted. “With friends like that, who needs enemies?” Her face flushed with excitement, as if she’d invented the expression that very moment. “I’ve known that boy from the time he was a toddler, and the one thing wrong with him was that he was too trusting. Thought everybody meant him well. It was his fatal flaw, I’d say. Right up to that last day.”

  “Alice,” Hattie said. “Please.”

  “Well, it’s no more than the truth, and I for one am sorry he was so eager to see them all again. Let sleeping dogs lie, I say.”

  Was Alice truly Hattie’s friend, or merely a grief vulture who fed on misery? Maybe Hattie, ill with mourning, lacked the energy to throw her out of the apartment.

  “Couldn’t pick friends, couldn’t pick wives,” Alice said. “Starting with that little hippie girl—”

  I saw my mother’s spine straighten. So, apparently, did Hattie.

  “Alice!” she said sharply. “Bea was related to Cynthia. Cynthia was a very nice girl. And pretty. Reminded me of Maureen O’Hara.”

  “Did I even hint that she wasn’t nice or pretty?” Alice asked with a fake smile. “She was an angel. But surely you’ll agree that Lyle was unlucky to have his child—”

  “That was not Lyle’s child.” Hattie turned to my mother, who had been watching the two women as if they were a sporting event. “I wonder what became of that girl,” she said. “A bad seed, if you ask me.”

  “No, just a baby,” my mother murmured. “The accident must be a terrible burden to bear. I hope she turned out all right.”

  “So you haven’t stayed in touch, then?” Hattie asked.

  My mother shook her head. “I’m ashamed to say we wouldn’t know Betsy if we bumped into her on the street.”

  Hattie raised her eyebrows and looked as if she had more to
say, but Alice pushed back into the conversation. “All I mean is that Lyle’s own flesh and blood is a different breed of cat. Reed is certainly not the kind to pick up a pistol and—”

  “Alice!” This time Hattie’s voice was nearly a growl.

  “I didn’t mean—” Alice looked upset for a moment, but she had a quick recovery time. “Then how about his other wives? You’d agree that they were not lucky choices, wouldn’t you?”

  Hattie glared wordlessly.

  “All right! Not another word,” Alice said. “My lips are sealed.” And she made a motion—I could have predicted it—of zipping her mouth shut. Only the zipper broke immediately. “Wasn’t that coffee delicious?” she chirped. “Maria is the best coffee person in the city!”

  Maria glowered. I couldn’t remember what I’d done with my cup.

  “Mrs. Pepper and her daughter are ready for refills,” Alice said. “Do you think that might be possible, Maria?”

  What I thought might be possible was hurling Alice out the window if all the rest of us cooperated in the effort. If we got our angle and swing right, she might even sail all the way into the river. Become part of the view. “None for me,” I said.

  “Oh, my! The time,” my mother exclaimed.

  “You can’t leave yet!” Hattie looked alarmed and somewhat put out.

  Accusation time at last. I tried to avert it, tried to hurry my mother by talking right over her voice, offering my sympathy again and asking for my coat.

  “Please, don’t,” Hattie said, teary-eyed. I thought her misery must at least partially be fear of being alone with Alice.

  “I promised Mandy, you see,” my mother said.

  Maybe this sort of thing went on all the time. Maybe my social life was always the mainstay of her conversation. But she was usually a thousand miles south of Philadelphia, so at least I normally couldn’t hear it.

  “She has a…a prior commitment, you understand,” my mother insisted on saying as I scrambled into my coat.

  Given their emotional states, I don’t know how my mother expected them to react to her coy euphemism, but I knew how I had, and, feeling like a great oafish toddler, I tugged at her sleeve.

  Hattie stood up, the cashmere throw falling around her feet as she lurched forward and clutched my mother’s coat, and the slightly dazed, mostly benign expression she’d worn hardened so that her wrinkled old face was more crazed and crackled than ever. “You’re not really leaving, though, are you?” she asked.

  “Well, as I explained, Mandy—”

  “I mean back to Florida.” The hand clutching my mother’s coat had long nails painted an incongruous scarlet. It reminded me of a tropical bird’s foot.

  I couldn’t decide if she was hostile, or angry, or if her cracked vocal cords were in need of oiling. But there was a note of urgency that seemed misplaced.

  “You mean right away?” my mother spluttered. “We meant to, well, the tickets were for…but you know, Gilbert had a little accident, his foot, and we can’t.…” Her words accelerated, one falling on top of the other. She was afraid she wasn’t being kind enough, sensitive enough. “Besides, I wouldn’t leave now, not until after the… I’ll be here. I’ll come visit you again, too, if you like.”

  She wasn’t paying proper attention to that hard-coal stare of Hattie’s. She thought Hattie was asking for company, and instead Hattie was preparing a trap, a subtle snare. The j’accuse was just around the corner, I was positive. I only wished I could see through her game plan.

  “If there’s anything I can do,” my mother said, “bring you, take care of, drive you…”

  I particularly liked that last offer, as she hadn’t a car, only a chauffeuring daughter.

  “Please,” my mother continued. “Don’t hesitate to…”

  Stop, I wanted to shout. Run back home. Did Florida have extradition?

  “Let me help you, Hattie, however I can,” my mother babbled on. “We go way back, after all, there’s no denying…”

  No, no! Remember Hattie? The overprotective? She thinks you killed the light of her life!

  “If there’s an errand I can run, something I could cook—”

  “No.” Hattie was loud and final, all tension abruptly gone. “Nothing. But it’s good to know you’ll be around.” Her hooded eyes fixed on my mother with a predator’s grip. My breath caught as she nodded, satisfied that the quarry was near at hand and all hers.

  Twelve

  My dear mother. I saw it again, that dreadful optimistic innocence lighting her face. And all would be well, all would be well, some tiny spirit sang inside her.

  She was not only capable of walking into the lion’s den, but of petting the lion while he devoured her. While she devoured her.

  I drove away from the apartment building, unable to shake the image of Hattie Zacharias X-raying my mother. I couldn’t imagine why she was playing cat and mouse instead of acknowledging her suspicions, but whatever her reason, her actions made me queasy.

  My mother broke off her humming. “Drop me off anywhere,” she said. “I’ll hail a cab.”

  “Of course not!” Where were her brains? What had happened to her self-preservation instincts, all the warnings and precautions she directed my way?

  “You can’t be late for your—”

  “It’s not a—” I couldn’t bear to hear the word, to realize once again that this sweet woman was stuck in a Judy Garland movie time warp. “I’ll drive you to the Sheraton,” I snapped, rather more harshly than intended. I smoothed my voice, tried to keep the frustration out of it. “It’s close, on Dock Street. Right here in Society Hill. There’ll be a cab outside, or we’ll have them call you one and you can wait in their lobby.”

  I was late for my appointment with Richard Quinn, but all the same, I waited outside, needing to be certain my charge didn’t wander out into danger. I had to control the urge to remind the cabbie to drive safely.

  I was becoming just like the woman.

  * * *

  Consciously or not, Richard Quinn had matched the walls of The Scene to his eyes. It was a good choice. They—the eyes and the walls—were a silver-blue counterpoint to the dark night river and sky outside the oversized windows. The focal point here, as in Hattie’s nearby apartment, was a head-on view of Camden with a bonus peek at the lights of the Ben Franklin Bridge.

  “Sorry I’m late,” I said. “I hope nothing’s ruined.” Nothing like arriving out of breath, flustered, and mildly sweaty from anxiety, but, I reminded myself, this was not a date. Not the way my mother meant. I was here to check out the room and the food. “I was paying a condolence call on Hattie Zacharias. Got delayed,” I offered as excuse for my tardiness.

  He tilted his head. “You know her?”

  “My mother does. Did. I chauffeured.”

  “Bad, huh?” He helped me off with my coat.

  “Why’s that?” Your mission, I told myself, is to wrestle nouns and verbs and even more than one sentence at a time out of him.

  Quinn shrugged. “The way she was about Lyle.”

  “So you knew her, too?” I examined the restaurant-to-be. It was washed in marine colors, from the silvery walls to the aquamarine upholstered chairs to the deep-sea, blue-green carpeting.

  “She checked me out.”

  I waited.

  He gave up and released an entire set of sentences. Victory for my side. “Checked everybody near Lyle out. Had to approve. Lyle didn’t mind.” He shrugged, then put my coat in an empty cubicle lined with bright blue pegs and lifted off a numbered tag hanging from it.

  “I don’t think I need the check,” I said.

  He put it back. No smile. No sense of the ridiculous. Boring. “Didn’t mean to go on that way,” he said.

  “When?” He needed remedial going-on-that-way help.

  “Like it?” Quinn opened his arms to embrace the room at large.

  I stated my approval at length—more length than I honestly meant to provide, much more length than he’d ever ma
nage, certainly. But each time I paused, thinking I’d concluded, Quinn raised his eyebrows and looked as though he hoped for more. He was stingy with his words, a glutton for mine. If it had been money instead of language flowing between us, I’d be the U.S. deficit and he’d be Midas.

  It wasn’t that easy finding subjects to praise. After all, the main item to appreciate in a restaurant is the food, which was conspicuously absent. I trusted that Quinn had it squirreled away somewhere, as a treat after the compliments, and at least as a sampler of what the place would offer, and so I went on about how much I liked the color scheme, the way the tables weren’t overly close to one another, and the quality of the linen and china samples Quinn showed me. Growing desperate, I even said how much I liked what wasn’t there, such as fishermen’s nets and fake sea gulls and the hard surfaces that make too many restaurants uncomfortably loud. He handed me a menu, and I complimented the prospective variety of entrees and even the teal-blue leather folder that held the list of offerings.

  And then I hit the compliment wall. “Must be scary to start a new venture,” I said, in search of a new conversational tack.

  “Shows, huh?” He rolled his head back and pushed at his neck in a classic, but probably futile, attempt to ease the tension. “I’m pretty rattled.”

  “Well, even if you weren’t just about to start something new, last night would leave you jangled.” I chitted, he chatted. Whenever I think longingly of marrying, it is primarily to avoid this tiptoed tour of forced cheer. But then I look at old marrieds’ silent meals in restaurants and I stay happily single. We made our way to the glassy end of the room, where all three walls were windowpanes and water lapped at the sides of the pier. “I mean, losing a friend—and losing him that way…” I pulled my attention away from the view of glamorous Camden and looked up at Quinn, who stared out over the water, his face as unrattled as a face can be.

  I wondered where everybody else was. Shouldn’t people be rehearsing? Stocking the pantries and the bar? Setting the tables?