by John Domini
All this, you see, being just the sort of Kinsey-cold detail I offered Dee, that night over herbal tea: detail as cold as the windows on a seaside Cottage in mid-winter, and all intended to prove just how much the Steyes like to fuck.
I was a flirt, in my skirt … Delete. In my jean skirt I smile, legs Indian-style … Delete.
As I say, my baby, last night in the Trauma Center I re-experienced the entire heartless episode, the mean bitch that I was … And the present-day Doctor Dee, don’t you know, Dee on duty—she actually exhibited some of the same responses as her younger self: then (in the flowery scent of the tea) her sensible gaze had flickered because she’d been stung, and now (in the antiseptic flatness of the Center) her look clouded because she became concerned; then as my nasty-nasty unfolded, her knowing posture had faltered, on my apartment’s deeply dented hassock, and now as I tried to explain, her perch softened, on her wheeled stool; then she’d spoken from deeper in the throat with every new question, and now the same, the same … And both episodes ended in tears, o, naturellement.
Then—it had pleased me, don’t you know, it had pleased your bitch mother to send Dee out of her place crying, to break down this girl a year “ahead” (so I suppose I’ve provided an example of Dee’s unusual spirit after all: I’ve defined serene-a-Dee by its absence)… It had pleased me to see the proof that Dee had cared for old Fudds, that he’d broken her down, too.
She loved my father; hence
I had to come to Providence.
And now—well. In the Trauma Center it ruined me, because I wasn’t just resurrecting a sour old spirit, I was resurrecting a whole crucifixion, I was resurrecting the whole unhappy Testament back to that first unhappy Garden, back through the Crisis Centers and the Cutty Sark and the Cottage, through the scars across your stepfather’s lovely eyebrow … It ruined me; I was the one in tears last night, Bette like the actress, absolutely dripping onto her lapels, proud black velvet lapels (I never so much as undid my first button), dripping with shame all over again—especially, my baby, when I brought up you.
For of course I did bring up you, my baby .
I’d searched out this woman because of you—not because of me and Dee and, well …
O, all right, I suppose I was also there because I needed to apologize, to make amends: all right, that too—but not just that, not solely that. Rather I journeyed to Providence to speak with two people at once (just as I’m doing now [maybe baby]): with her and, at last, with you .
Mysteries, God knows there are mysteries, and this one strikes me now as badly done: the clues at first are nowhere to be found, and then they come in clumps, the characters seem no better than cardboard cutouts and the villain (the real father [in fact I can only guess who it might be]) remains offstage the whole time. This should all be redone; certainly I can’t let your stepfather see it (Dee was kind to me, finally, and so will be Delete).
Kit didn’t need more clues. Knowing where his wife was headed, he’d long since unplugged the phone and poured the last finger of Johnny Walker back into the bottle. He understood: during the Rampage, she’d become pregnant.
I made a shambles of the clues back in those days, too, back when you were actually folded up there inside and trying to tell me … well. A missed period, there’s a clue, and a stout New England constitution that never misses a period, there’s another; and then your mother began to suffer wooziness in the mornings—though it was wooziness I always put down to the previous night’s rotgut and reefer; oh, I made a shambles of your every clue, my baby; I didn’t want to know. And even so, long thoughts did start to creep up on me, don’t you know, during my rare empty evenings; and I fell into even webbier meditations on what I’d done to Dee, how I’d hurt her and how she’d cared .
Then behind those thoughts there came to mind three or four occasions of conception to choose from, two or three perhaps—the fact is, I can only guess at your real father, my baby; and I don’t believe it was the ghost who’s come back to haunt me lately, the groan over the phone … Then the riding accident, what else? didn’t I say the characters here were nothing but cardboard? nothing but bright grubby subatomics moving in predictable patterns? I fell from my frisky Hepburn (my baby, all my mounts are Hepburns): fell clumsy with rotgut and reefer, fell careless with showing off for some tall-in-the-saddle bedmate; I fell and after my fall I had so much bleeding that I called a halt to my, to my, well … you wouldn’t call them “antics.” But whatever you call them, with the heavy bleeding I called a halt for a while, a while that went on stretching, stretching, just as every night my long thoughts were stretching: until they became so long and dark, my imaginings, that at no point was your mother able to bring herself to a doctor (your mother, me [I, she]: perhaps all I’m really doing these days is seeking a happy medium between first person and third)…
Dee was kind, as I say—Providence-tial and kind, yesterday—though she remained bewildered, and she hadn’t quite lost her frown yet, either; she must have asked me six times if I didn’t want to take off my coat. She had the answers I’d come for, however; and once you learn the vocabulary, my baby, honestly, you start to wonder what all he the fuss was about. Once you learn an expression like “spontaneous abortion,” well. That’s nothing to cry about, is it? and neither is a statistic like one pregnancy in every four. I would guess now that Dee was deliberately, um, underplaying: that she tempered her information, in order not to upset her bizarre midnight visitor any further—as when, for instance, she claimed that miscarriages of one kind or another were so common, we couldn’t even be sure that my riding accident had had anything to do with it. She was clever, actually, not merely kind, just as the neutral blue of her hospital uniform was a color cleverly chosen: restful and reliable: true blue.
And yet Dee’s expert tone and the skill with which she later skated round my soggy offer to get together some time (perhaps on the astral plane, dear)—none of it, nonetheless, undid the basic compulsion at work in my Sunday (and in my Monday, too [I’ve got a lot to Delete])… none of it undid the decision I’d come to, the decision I’ve slept on and now input: my resolution that there’d been a fetus in the first place: there’d been something to miscarry.
Briefly you lived, my baby …
You lived, born of the worst mess of my life, and that mess was born of my father’s: you lived, and from there I scroll back, back … yet really I must Delete.
Really, this should all be, well. The lacerations itch, they ooze, and your mother can’t help but see the sheer silliness in what she’s done today, this weekend: like a talking head up on an interior screen, a perpetual electronic voice declaring: Look at you; Just look at you … (and the men have the same problem, my baby, judging from your stepfather). Your mother can’t help but cave in under the pressure of that head. My baby, I won’t deny you any longer: last night I said you lived in the face of Dee’s power to Delete, and today I’ve input the same, in the face of my own; I’ve said it, I’ve input … but I can’t print out, my baby; I can’t let your stepfather see me like this (not when he’s spending all damn day with that other Mzzzz buzzing around) …
O, what am I talking about? I came to my Apple with something simple to say, plain and simple .
This should all be redone .
*
Kit was thinking of the dead. By now he’d washed his face, splashing away a renewed spasm of moaning and near tears. He’d made more tea and reread the printout, or reread in patches while peeling away the borders and separating the pages. And he’d fought down an impulse to go searching for her again. Bette had faced enough hard cases for one day. She was coming out of this in her own good time, in her own chosen places. Patience, husband. Limit yourself to these few rooms and tools—a half-empty yellow legal pad, a decent black pen. Kit ended up back at the kitchen table, where he’d set the printout under the phone and swept the memo sheets out of the way with one lank robed arm. Thinking of the dead.
Junior was dead. Junior’s vict
ims. Bette’s baby.
Corinna had a sister who’d been shot by a boyfriend. The women’s center across from Sea Level had lost a member to an overdose. A skeleton had turned up at the excavations for the new T station. Then there was Kit’s father, upright beside his cockpit, hard-muscled and sure. Dead.
Leaving the pad and pen untouched, Kit replugged the phone. Uncle Les picked up on the second ring. Les, the other one.
“Listen,” Kit asked as soon as he could, “where’s Mom?”
Silence. More than likely Les had been expecting something about his out-of-the-closet brother.
“Mom,” Kit said. “I, ah, I’d like to talk to my Mom.”
The uncle worked up to his answer, beginning with: “The church.” Eventually Kit understood that his mother was making spaghetti for the Loaves & Fishes dinner at Blue Earth Presbyterian. Thanks to her fundraising, her knack for organization, the church now put on these dinners three nights a week. Lots of folks in need, Les said.
Kit was nodding. It took a long moment to recall that his uncle couldn’t see him, to work up to his own responses. He admitted he’d forgotten. He hadn’t even stopped to think what time it was out West. And for another few minutes Kit commiserated about the day’s bombshell from brother Pete. It came easy—he knew what the man wanted to hear. Les, Pete’s still the same guy he’s always been. Les, he wouldn’t have told you if he didn’t care about you. He needs you.
What the man wanted to hear, though, was the best Kit could manage. There over the waiting yellow page, he had a lot of work waiting, drafting longhand till midnight or beyond. All he could spare for Uncle Les was a brisk wrap-up, but this did mean he didn’t have to say another word about wanting his mother.
Yet even once he was off the phone Kit went on staring, thinking of the dead. If the phone hadn’t rung again, and if it hadn’t been another crank call—a serious jolt even though the caller made no noise, no groan—Kit might never have gotten started on his testimony.
Chapter 10
How about this—an actual newspaper. The pages crackling as he turned them, the ink getting into his fingers. The voices remained the same, too, column after column: declarative voices, conservative, every sentence squaring another to help box in some squirming cell of evidence. An actual mainstream newspaper. Kit had swung out of bed early, fired up about his draft, his finished testimony. In thick boot-socks he’d shuffled down to the freezing stoop to meet the boy with the morning Globe. Beside his unplugged kitchen phone he took time to read, while coffee reopened the nerve-ends in his bruises.
Nobody had anything new on Monsod. Grand Jury subpoenas so far were straight out of Casablanca: Round up the usual suspects. Fire and emergency personnel, prison security, those clowns Ad and Amby. Kit saw his own name on the list again. Attached, the tag “unavailable for comment.” The Jury had called a couple of prison inmates as well. These weren’t the howlers down in solitary, the steel-shivered voices who’d turned Kit round and round. Rather the Jury would cross-examine “convicts assigned to the penitentiary workshop at the time of the disturbance.” And that was some progress, at least. That meant big media realized Monsod’s trouble had started in the workshop. They’d learned something since Thursday night, the garbage Kit had seen on TV. Nonetheless, so far the closest the investigation had come to the root problem—guys, the walls are caving in—was a subpoena for the standards supervisor on the original project. Aw, the guy was a family hire. Responsibility for keeping Monsod up to code had been foisted off on an emeritus professor at Boston College whose last construction experience had come after the hurricane of 1938.
Nothing new. Nothing better. To judge from the Tuesday wrap-up, Kit’s own eight- and ten-week-old research still had him a step ahead of the pack.
My. Are we proud? Are we?
Not particularly. Kit sat reading in his last clean suit. His trenchcoat hung over a chair, belt-tip on the linoleum, the reassembled gun bulky in one pocket. He was returning to the office as soon as he was done with his reading, his thinking. He needed to negotiate something different with Leo, and after that with Louie-Louie, but neither of them would be in before ten. Kit would have time even to turn the gun in to the police in Central Square. They took weapons no questions asked.
No, what Kit read this morning didn’t make him proud. Rather he still felt the way he had since finishing up last night, flarey and quick, bristling with ideas.
The Globe, much as he’d rushed to get it, to read it, also looked like just another paper sampler. On this table, at least. Kit turned the wide, crackling pages across the loose pink tongues of phone-memos, and across Bette’s black-&-white printout. If you saw the letter out of the corner of an eye, and against the staid design of the Globe to boot, Bette’s work appeared all ratty line breaks and hyperactive punctuation. Plus there was Kit’s work, his statement for Asa Popkin. A draft in the blocky mix of script and print he’d been using since he was a teenager, it was the most vivid thing on the table. Blue fountain pen on yellow legal paper.
Eyewitness testimony, far tougher going than the morning news. Kit had only made it through four of the five W’s, before his handwriting broke down sometime after midnight. It wasn’t fatigue that stopped him, though. It was that fifth W itself. Who, What, When, Where—he got through those in plenty of time, with energy to spare. But then came the fifth, Why. Then came Kit’s heady return to the Cottage beach, the moil of the Wood’s Hole crossing. As he’d told Bette, on that beach, first he had to direct the question towards himself. Why? Why had this happened, who did he think he was? In the winter fog that was his testimony, a good six or eight possible Kit Viddichs flickered. Kit the cowboy, there was one. The cowboy who couldn’t adjust to city life, indoor life. Or there was Kit the caveman throwback, never more than a hot evolutionary minute away from bloody murder. The new women’s magazines would like that one. Kit the crazy man flickered out there, too—an easy guy to spot, lately. And there was always, of course, Kit the klutz.
Oh, Bette said now, in his coffee-brightened head. Kit the wit.
He’d trusted none of them, finally. How could he trust these ghost rationale, ghost selves, fluttering in and out of his mind’s eye like a newspaper flying apart in a storm? In the end, as his handwriting broke down, Kit had dummied his fifth W. He’d fallen back on a mockup testimony, with mockup words like “self-defense” and “in the confusion.” Of course he admitted what he’d done. He admitted he’d hit the man a second time. When, Where. The coroner’s report, Kit wrote, would corroborate. And he went on to point out what else the coroner would corroborate. The city media had gotten Junior’s death wrong, Kit wrote, and they’d been perpetuating their mistake since last Thursday.
He went on to nail every bad guy in sight. The overhead pipes for instance, the way Garrison and the inspectors pussyfooted around any mention of the overhead pipes, that was no mystery. That was as simple as gravity: Water doesn’t run uphill. As simple as muscle power: Junior couldn’t possibly have pulled out an iron chain bolted to the wall, not even on drugs—unless the bolts were weak to begin with. The BBC inspection had actively avoided the real problem. They’d invited Kit along to make it look otherwise, CYA. But the real problem remained, the seepage from overhead, seepage that had loosened connections and softened materials all over E Level. And the faulty plumbing ran back up through D Level. Through the workshop. Conditions must’ve gotten so bad that, last Thursday morning, one of the cons had finally done something desperate.
No mystery, none of it. Kit named as well the man behind the entire bogus operation, Forbes Croftall. The Senate majority whip had the means. He had deep connections with both the construction industry and the Building Commission. And Monsod had gone up during his tenure, a project of the ‘60s.
The inspection was a sham, Kit wrote, and the motive no doubt goes back to the original contracts.
Strong words. And then this morning, Kit found the Senator in the Globe. In the “State House Notebook,” Kit fo
und an item that some muckrakers would’ve taken for corroboration. Croftall had announced he was getting a divorce. Calling it quits after a marriage of twenty-eight years, the majority leader had read a prepared statement.
It fit, sure. Corroboration, some would say. This was 1978, and the wives of sleazeball politicians could dump their husbands more freely than in the past.
It fit—but Kit wasn’t putting together that puzzle. He wasn’t working on the bad guy around the home, but on the public figure in high office. Wasn’t trying to hang out the dirty laundry, but to hammer out the whole truth.
Even now in his clean suit, with a long and thoughtful draft before him, with a half-decent breakfast in his belly and a plan for getting rid of the gun—even now, Kit could feel the worm on his back. The doubt. That too was part of the alacrity he’d woken up with, the energy that had rocked out of solving a small mystery or two. For starters, Kit fretted over explaining what he still had to do. It wasn’t going to be easy, once he got to the office. But worse than that, harder on him, were these ghostly vagues in his testimony. To him the work remained a mockup. Words words words. Popkin might accept it, maybe even the Grand Jury, but someone in his own line of work could put their finger on the weak spots in a minute.
MEMO
To: Kit the Employee
From: Kit the Editor
One, what’s this “no doubt” in your close? “No doubt” the Senator’s covering up some peccadillo from years ago? Original sin? So, you got a paper trail on that? You got the apple? Don’t you know, you’re not going to find a cancelled check? Haven’t you heard, paying off pols is strictly a cash business?
