07-Past Imperfect

by Margaret Maron

  And even though she’d never felt comfortable enough to initiate mother-daughter confidences, she found herself asking, “Why didn’t you remarry? Was it because what you had with Dad was so special that you couldn’t? What was he really like?”

  “We’ve talked about this so many times, there’s nothing new to tell, honey,” Anne said, cutting into the crispy grilled skin of her succulent chicken.

  The mouth watering smells of lemon, sweet yellow peppers and garlic drifted up from both plates, and Sigrid lifted her own knife and fork.

  “He used to take you to the park and—”

  “No,” Sigrid interrupted. “Not as my father. As a man. A police officer. Your husband.”

  “As a man?” She chewed thoughtfully. “Okay. As a man, incredibly handsome. That was the first thing anyone noticed about him. Tall and blond and the bluest, bluest eyes I’ve ever seen. You know how blue your cousin Hilda’s eyes are? Go one shade brighter and that’s the color Leif’s were. I could never quite catch it in the camera. And when he turned those eyes and that smile on you, you felt as if you were the only person in the whole world he’d ever really listened to. It was as if he’d been waiting all his life to hear the things you were saying. I’m here to tell you there was nobody like him in Colleton County.”

  A rueful smile curved her lips. “He certainly dazzled this little hick. Mama always swore he had an Irish tongue in his head the way he could charm birds off trees.”

  Sigrid had heard all the family tales of how Grandmother Lattimore had rushed up from North Carolina to save her innocent eighteen-year-old daughter from an unsuitable alliance and had wound up so charmed that she’d blessed the wedding on condition that the ceremony be shifted from the Lutheran chapel in Greenwich Village to the Southern Baptist church Grandmother’s own grandparents had helped build near the family homeplace in central North Carolina.

  “He never saw a stranger,” Anne said. “There was a time when we couldn’t walk through the Village without running into at least two people on every block who knew us and were glad to see us both. But if we did wander into a strange cafe or deli once in a while and if they weren’t real busy, your daddy’d have them talking like old friends in just minutes.”

  That was the easy-going father image Sigrid had grown up with, and yet . . . “Mick Cluett, the last time I spoke to him, said Dad could freeze someone with a look if he wanted to.” Sigrid topped their glasses from the bottle of white Zinfandel.

  “Mickey said that?” Anne lowered her fork. “Yes,” she mused. “Yes, he could do that, too, if the mood struck him . . . if he felt too hemmed in. It was like—”

  She hesitated and her lovely face was earnest as she searched for the right words. “Once, when you were about eight or nine, the thermometer broke and you chased that little blob of mercury all across the table top. It kept breaking into smaller drops or slipping away from beneath your fingers and you were laughing but you were frustrated, too, because you couldn’t pick it up. Remember, honey?”

  Sigrid nodded.

  “That was Leif. Quicksilver. Just as enchanting, just as elusive if you tried to make him stand still in one place. It took me a long time to realize that it was nothing to do with me, it was just the way he was made. Like mercury.”

  An undertone of regret shadowed her voice.

  “Metaphors, Mother?”

  Anne smiled warily and took a sip of wine. “You asked.”

  Sigrid began to feel as if she’d opened a bright familiar door into a dark and unfamiliar room, yet she took that first step across the threshold. “Didn’t you love him?”

  “Well, of course, I loved him!” Anne said, surprised. “In the beginning—”

  “At the end, I meant.”

  “At the end, too, even though it was a different love. Time and marriage do that, sugar. You just can’t sustain that catch-in-your-throat delirium; you’d burn up if you did. But certainly I loved him.”

  “Would you still be married if he hadn’t died?”

  Anne considered for a moment. “I don’t know,” she answered slowly, then she gave a little shrug. “Maybe he wouldn’t have wanted to stay with me.”

  “Was he unfaithful?”

  “Sigrid!”

  “Sorry, Mother, but—”

  “No, no, it’s . . . I mean I . . . ” She shook her head, looking annoyed with herself, and at the same time, faintly embarrassed. “I’m not as cold-bloodedly modern as I sometimes think I am. You’re our daughter, Siga. I just can’t talk about our sex life with you.”

  Sigrid was horrified. “That’s not what I meant at all.”

  “Then what did you mean? Oh, honey, are you going to go from believing he was a hero ten feet tall to wondering if he had clay feet? Do you really want that?” She reached across the table and clasped Sigrid’s hand. “You asked me what he was like as a person and all I can tell you is that he was just a man. A wonderful man most of the time—funny, smart, exciting, and yes, ma’am, sexy, too—but just a man. Isn’t that enough?”

  “Mick Cluett—”

  “Mickey Cluett wanted to be your daddy’s mentor,” Anne said impatiently. “Not that mentor was a word anybody’d ever heard of back then. He was like a turkey buzzard trying to take a falcon under its wing. Leif never needed his protection and I think Mickey resented that.”

  “What about Tom Oersted?”

  “Oersted?” Anne lifted the napkin over the bread basket and took out a soft roll. “I remember the name, but I can’t quite recall a face. One of Leif’s colleagues or yours?”

  “Dad’s, I guess. Retired now, but he used to belong to the Viking Association.”

  “The Viking Association!” Unexpectedly, Anne giggled. “Now them I can tell you about! What a wonderful, rowdy bunch they were. The year we were married, Leif took me to one of their weddings at the old Norwegian Hall in Brooklyn. I’ve got pictures somewhere. They carried the groom’s Volkswagen up two flights of stairs and deposited it on the dance floor. For all I know it was still there when they tore the building down. And oh, the beer and aquavit that used to flow on Swedish Nation Day or after the Norwegian Constitution Day Parade! You should join them.”

  “Right,” Sigrid said dryly.

  In the Village, forty blocks south, McKinnon leaned back on his couch, deep in memory. The coffee table, the floor, the cushions on either side of him-all were littered with piles of black-and-white photographs. Anne had taken dozens of rolls of film for her photography class and many of these were culls too good to throw away but not good enough to take to class.

  He remembered sitting at the kitchen table with Leif, as Anne snapped picture after picture, experimenting with her cameras to learn their limits and what effects she could achieve by opening up or stopping down the lenses, by playing around with shutter speed and film types. Each click of the camera had been fully documented in her notebook.

  Here they were in shirtsleeves, their uniform jackets draped over the backs of kitchen chairs. Close-ups of their faces, the badges on their hats, his gun, Leif’s ear, his own hand holding a glass of beer. He’d forgotten this one of Mickey Cluett. Had Mickey Cluett ever been that young, that lean? A whole series of baby pictures: an owl-eyed Sigrid splashing in the deep laundry sink or seated on one of their laps to gnaw on a teething biscuit. He could almost smell the baby powder and gummy Zwieback, see those impossibly tiny fingers closed around one of his.

  And there were pictures of Anne. Occasionally she’d leave a camera unattended and one of them would turn the lens on her and snap her with her head tilted back in laughter or with the tip of her tongue caught between her small white teeth as she concentrated on one of those complicated Danish recipes Leif’s aunt had written out for her. God, how beautiful she’d been! And how young. Only nineteen.

  More pictures spilled from another manila envelope: he and Leif clowning around the day they’d gotten their gold shields and hung up their uniforms. He could remember their celebration right down to the b
ottle of champagne Anne had bought. What he couldn’t remember was the name of that redheaded reporter from the old Journal-American with whom Leif had celebrated the next night.

  “Well,” said Pam Peters, “I’m sorry Matt’s got another cold and of course, we can always use the overtime, but you know what it’s like, Frances, when you’ve got three little ones and he’s never home to help.”

  Frances agreed that she did indeed know what it was like.

  “I probably shouldn’t have tried to go back to work so soon. Even though it’s only three days a week, it just messes up my whole routine and—”

  Frances uhmmed and oh?ed in all the appropriate places, but her mind was on her own sons. Dressed in their colorful warm-up suits, they loomed over her and huffed impatiently for her to come on.

  “Sorry, Frances, but the baby’s crying and I have to go. Talk to you soon,” said Pam and hung up as if it were the older woman who’d prolonged the conversation.

  “One minute, guys,” Frances said and hurried down the hall to the bedroom. She found Matt stretched out on their bed watching the news on their portable television. Except for his shoes, he was still fully dressed.

  “Matt, you promised. Under the covers, lights out.”

  “As soon as the news is over,” he said. “Honest.”

  “And no snacking,” she ordered. “I know exactly how much ice cream’s in the refrigerator and how many cookies are in the box”

  “Ma-aaa,” came her older son’s plaintive cry from the back door

  “Go on,” said Matt. “You’re going to make the boys late.”

  She glanced at the clock, realized he was right, and rushed to join their sons.

  CHAPTER 21

  Above ground, defying the promise of more snow, Times Square was a gaudy blaze of Saturday night light and color. The temperature was still well above freezing, and up and down Broadway and along Forty-second Street, endlessly flashing marquees backlit the titles of raunchy XXX-rated movies. Brazenly garish neon signs spoke of everything from unfettered sex to everything-must-go luggage sales. Up above, more lights on enormous electronic billboards. Waves of light. Green for Japanese film, red for soda pop, blue for German cars and Colombian coffee—the colored lights washed their sales pitches across the buildings. Even higher, the buildings themselves, dark and massive blocks of granite, were jeweled with lighted windows and floodlit peaks. And down on the littered sidewalks, weaving in and out around overflowing trash baskets, panhandlers, and sex shills forcing handbills on every male who made eye contact, were the faces of all the nations on earth—the stunned, the stoned, and the starry-eyed—invincibly jaywalking through unbroken lines of shiny yellow taxis, avoiding the puddles of filthy slush melting at each corner, spilling around knots of people who stopped to laugh and talk and argue about whether to go here for drinks or there for the show. Steam rose from a hundred grates and manholes. Back and forth, in and out, swirling in chilled circles were families of wide-eyed tourists, threesomes of pink-cheeked South American sailors. Bridge-and-tunnel kids, acting out, razzed the transvestites who braved the winter night in short fur jackets and crotch-high leather miniskirts. Over it all, mingled with the yeasty aroma of money, sex, and cold plastic, floated the smell of damp cement, diesel fumes, and slightly charred hot pretzels.

  Beneath Times Square, the push and jostle was fueled by the junction of three subway lines and the shuttle from Grand Central Station. Crowds of people flashed on and off the trains, dressed in everything from blue denim to black satin, ready for everything from just hanging out to hanging over a box seat at the theatre.

  On an ordinary Saturday night, this was the frantic, jagged heartbeat of the other New York, the one they’re always going to do something about. Heartbreaking and hopeless. The roar, the crush, the frayed connection were in the very marrow now; mechanically urban, determinedly artificial.

  Suddenly, one section of the busy underground concourse was pierced by a wilderness sound straight from the deep woods: a barred owl’s sharp, barking hoohoo-hoohoo, hoohoo-hoohooaw! Twice more came the calls, predatory and haunting, then they were followed almost immediately by squawks and chirps and the raucous shriek of a blue jay’s Thief! Thief!

  It was as if a crate of wild birds had suddenly been upended on one of the lower train platforms and people within hearing distance paused and craned to see.

  As the wildly insane oo-HA-oo laughter of a loon floated up from a nearby stairwell, one of the aimlessly drifting figures stiffened like a bird dog that had unexpectedly caught the pheasant’s scent out there in the tall grass. Checking out this Times Square station had been an impulsive hunch, nothing more. Turning now, quartering the area.

  Oo-HA-oo.

  Downstairs.

  Good God! Was it really going to be that easy?

  On the next level down, a slender sandy-haired man had backed himself against a steel girder between two sets of stairs. His overcoat was unbuttoned and the right side was pushed back so that passersby could, if they so desired, easily drop money into the slotted can that dangled from his belt. He carried in his hands a stack of bird pictures, cut from an adult coloring book, which he had accurately colored in vivid crayons, then glued to thin cardboard and covered with clear plastic wrap. Each picture was about six by eight inches and neat hand-lettering on the border identified each bird by both its common and Latin names.

  So intent was the sandy-haired man on his act, that the nondescript figure walking slowly down the stairs didn’t even register as an individual.

  Easy does it, thought the bird dog. No eye contact. Don’t spook him. So that’s Jerry the Canary. This clown really likes train stations. Platform’s too crowded. Another push? Could I get away with it? Or better to follow and see where’s he’s nesting now?

  His audience hooked, Jerry the Canary held up his next bird card, a bright red cardinal, and burst into a mixture of clear and slurred whistles: what-cheer-cheer-cheer. In swift procession came a bluebird’s soft gurgling notes, a wood thrush’s rounded flutelike phrases, a robin’s joyful whistle, and a virtuoso rendition of a horned lark’s high-pitched series of irregular tinkling notes, which was so delightful that it brought a round of applause from his audience.

  Experience had taught him when to stop and pat his money can and do his stork walk around the circle of onlookers. When one or two bills were dropped in along with several coins, he twittered a song sparrow’s sweet-sweet-sweet!

  Before the Canary came too near, his stalker had turned away, pretending an interest in the overhead sign that identified this as a stop for the Broadway-Seventh Avenue Local. Like a taxi summoned by a doorman’s whistle, the 9 train rushed noisily into the station and disgorged another load of Saturday night revelers.

  Jerry the Canary had just begun to mimic a catbird when a policeman from the Transit Authority leaned over the railing above and spotted him.

  “Hey!” the cop shouted, “Canary! I want to see you!”

  Instantly, the catbird picture was replaced by an amateurish drawing of a fat yellow Tweety Bird. “Ooh, I t’ought I taw a puddy-tat!” he lisped and ducked into the 9 train just as the doors were closing.

  The transit cop sprinted down the steps. “Wait!” he yelled.

  But the conductor never heard and the train had already picked up speed. In frustration, the cop thwacked the nearest I-beam with his nightstick and glared at the laughing bystanders.

  Across the platform, the bird dog reined in similar frustration and bitterly consigned all T.A. cops to hell.

  “Beep!” went her answering machine and “Dammit all, Siga!” went Oscar Nauman’s exasperated voice. “Why’d you give me your work schedule, if you’re never going to be in?”

  Sigrid clicked off the tape and lazily undressed. She’d had just enough wine to feel mellow as she hung up her slacks and jacket, put the rest in the laundry hamper, and slipped into a red silk negligee Nauman had given her. How amused he’d been to discover that while she didn’t s
eem to care what her street clothes looked like, she did have a weakness for expensive silky, lacy lingerie.

  The gown was a clear red. No orange overtones. An “Eastern Winter” red. Well, no one had ever faulted Nauman’s color sense, had they? She smiled to herself and turned the tape back on.

  “Anyway the panel went okay. The Mickey Mouse guy dropped out to go to Cologne to pick up some prize or other. Buntrock took his place and did his usual tap, toe, and bubble dance about appropriations, simulacra, Foucault . . .”

  As Nauman dismantled Buntrock’s speech, Sigrid pulled from her closet all her earth-toned clothes: the browns, bricks, and terra-cottas. Next went the yellowy beiges and olives, even though this left her closet decimated. She was ruefully intrigued to see how many of Grandmother Lattimore’s jewel-toned choices remained. Nauman was always trying to make her wear them. She thought of that museum benefit she’d promised to attend next week. Maybe she’d surprise him and wear that dramatic sapphire taffeta.

  “—and the parties were better than I thought they would be. Got to see some of my pictures I hadn’t seen in years. Years? Hell, decades! You never forget a one of them, Siga. Funny how they mellow. I hated to walk out of the room . . . was like I might never see them again . . . never had that feeling before.”

  The concert at Avery Fisher Hall had ended and the audience streamed out into Lincoln Center’s broad plaza. As the floodlit central fountain gushed upward in changing colors, the pathetic falling cadences of a mourning dove attracted some of the concertgoers: ah-love-love-love! came the wistful call. Ah-love-love-love.

  Despite the cold, many lingered to hear what would follow. With the music of Mozart and Haydn still echoing in their heads, the contrast between that sophisticated orchestra and this primitive maker of naive music was deliciously irresistible to certain jaded palates.