Now the phone sat, beige and squat, utterly utilitarian. It was, in fact, almost identical to the phone that the Lerner family had installed in the “phone nook” in the Roaring Springs house, although that phone had seemed terribly sleek and modern at the time. Manny and Inez, permissive in most things, felt the telephone was an incursion on family life, and they insisted on having only two extensions, one in their bedroom and the other in the hall. The girls could speak as much as they wanted, but it would be in the hall, with no chair, only the scratchiest of rugs on which to rest.
Vonnie, undaunted by the public venue, sat cross-legged in front of the hall phone as if it were Buddha or Vishnu. She stalked, she paced, she sometimes even put it on the floor and circled it, almost as if it were a campfire around which she was dancing. Fierce Vonnie, who was happy to march under the flag of feminism, saw no irony or contradiction in boy craziness. She was a passionate person, someone who lived a big life with big emotions and ambitions, and reaped big rewards as a consequence. Germaine Greer—the early Germaine Greer, the feminine eunuch posing in her bikini—was her role model. It was hard for Eliza to say Vonnie had been mistaken in her self-image. Never married, largely by choice, she had enjoyed affairs with an impressive assortment of men. Older, younger, richer, poorer. One or two were famous, most were wildly successful, and even the slackers were interesting, creative types. Vonnie had a big life, something out of the novels that Eliza preferred, the ones that managed to be respectable while still being replete with all the lifestyle details—clothes, food, home furnishings—that were disdained in so-called sex-and-shopping novels.
But Eliza preferred her sideline view of her sister’s life. And unlike larger-than-life Vonnie, Eliza had been spared what their mother dubbed the Vikki Carr curse. Part of that was the simple good luck of meeting Peter when she was eighteen and falling into a relationship that, whatever its ups and downs, was pretty much without doubt. But even with her high school boyfriends, she had been…diffident. She almost never called them, for example. Vonnie sneered that Eliza was a throwback, that she was betraying all womanhood with her willingness to let men call the shots. Eliza didn’t think so. She just didn’t have that much to say.
But sometimes she wondered if Walter’s self-help book, the one that had urged women to embrace their “natural” roles, had left more of an imprint than she realized. While traveling with Walter—a euphemism, yet not—they had gotten into the habit of going to yard sales, and he would sometimes let her buy a book, if it was cheap enough. She had picked up a copy of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, of which Walter did not approve, so she had to read it during her brief moments alone, in the bath or on the toilet. She would soak in the tub—and tubs were fewer and far between, once Walter got the tent—and read until the water was tepid. She imagined what Don Corleone would do if she were his daughter, or even the daughter of a friend. He wouldn’t kill Walter, not on her behalf. That would not be justice, as he explained to the undertaker whose daughter had been raped by the two college boys. But they would do something pretty bad to him, she was sure, especially if she asked them to avenge the girl whose body had been found in Patapsco State Park.
She still had the book with her when the state police picked them up near Point of Rocks. At first the book had reminded her of the time with Walter, and she hadn’t wanted to read it. But then her high school boyfriend had said they should watch the film on his family’s VCR, and she’d decided to finish the book first. She had plunged back in, following Michael into his Sicilian exile, feeling a bizarre kinship with him—she had been exiled, too—then on to his wedding night, where he had discovered his young bride was a virgin, and a virgin was the very best thing to be, according to Mario Puzo. She had stopped reading there and forgotten about the book until Vonnie had discovered it during summer vacation, while looking for the latest copy of TV Guide. (It was an article of faith in the Lerner household that Eliza’s bed, the territory beneath it, was a kind of Bermuda Triangle where all sorts of things came to rest.) The book’s spine was broken on the page where Eliza had abandoned it, and Vonnie, emerging from beneath the bed with a few dust bunnies clinging to her hair, as unruly as Eliza’s but not as red, looked at the pages, then at her sister.
“How would he know?” she said. Vonnie was exhausting and infuriating, but also loyal. Eliza, filled with warmth at this memory of her sister, decided to call her for no good reason, although she was almost certain to be dumped straight to voice mail. She began heading downstairs to the den, the coziest spot in the house.
The other phone rang, full-throated, robust. It had no answering machine, no voice mail, another decision on which Verizon had fought with her. It would ring forever if Eliza allowed it. Phones never rang that way anymore. It was one of the interesting things about older movies, where phones might ring six, seven, eight times, or—in that one gangster movie of which Peter was so fond—something like thirty-seven times. Nowadays, phones rang maybe three or four times, then rolled over to voice mail, or got picked up by answering machines, or—
She picked up on the seventh ring, almost hoping it was news about her car warranty or mortgage or credit card. The automated voice gave her a moment of hope. But this time, the voice was asking if she would accept a collect call from Walter Bowman.
She said she would.
“Elizabeth?”
“Yes.”
There was an echoing metallic sound that seemed to go on and on. “Excuse me,” Walter said, and the noise grew louder, swelled, then fell back, ending with a few faded clangs.
“What was that?” She had intended to ask him as few questions as possible, to put the burden of conversation on him, but her curiosity got the better of her.
“Oh, one of the guys went down to Jarratt and got a stay, so we’re kicking him back in.”
“Kicking—?”
“We kick the doors, in solidarity, when a man gets a postponement. Although I have to tell you, I don’t really have much for this particular fellow. He’s managed the trick of being both the meanest and dumbest man here.”
She was nonplussed. It felt like the polite conversation a salesman makes as he settles in, getting ready to launch into his pitch. She wanted to blurt out: What do you want? Get to it, stop stalling. Before she could ask, her cell phone buzzed from her pocket. She glanced down at its screen. Iso’s school.
“Walter, can you hold on? There’s another call coming in on my cell and…”
She did not want to explain why the call could not be ignored, but nor was she happy when Walter said: “Sure, I understand. You’ve got young kids.”
“My husband told me he might need me to pick him up at the airport today,” she lied, with a promptness that made her rather proud. The old-fashioned phone could not be muted, so she walked out into the hall, determined that Walter not overhear the conversation with Iso’s middle school.
It was the principal. “Can you come in, Mrs. Benedict? We have a…situation.”
“Is Isobel hurt? Sick?” In her worry, she couldn’t help using her daughter’s full name.
“No, just something to discuss before it becomes a problem. And we know that Iso’s brother is in elementary school, so we thought it would be easier to have you come in now, rather than complicate your life with after-school detention, which means Iso would miss the bus.”
“Detention?”
“Only if it were warranted and it’s not.” A pause. “Yet.”
She walked back to the beige phone, tried to think what she could say. “Walter, I’m sorry, but this is urgent—”
“Sure, sure,” he said. “We’ll catch up later. We have a lot to talk about.”
As anxious as she was about Iso and the unspecified situation, Eliza couldn’t take Walter’s invitation to end the call. “Do we? Do we really have that much to discuss?”
“I think so,” Walter said. “And although I know you doubt this, it will be mutually beneficial, Elizabeth. Really, you have to believe that I h
ave nothing but your best interest at heart. I’m doing this for you.”
She said good-bye, grabbed her purse and her keys, headed out to the garage, and then, almost as an afterthought, dashed back inside and threw up in the powder-room toilet.
22
TRUDY TACKETT WAS IN HER CLOSET, taking careful inventory of her clothes, a biannual ritual in which she banished the warm-weather months and welcomed the cold ones by sorting, folding, and mending, as needed. Also eliminating. As needed. She was ruthless about culling things. She had to be. Trudy had been exactly the same size since her wedding day forty-four years earlier, with the exception of her many pregnancies, and clothing had a way of mounting up. She reversed the process every April, although not with the same sense of satisfaction. She liked the arrival of the shorter, colder days, which seemed to pass more quickly than their summer counterparts. A June day required so much of a person. Enthusiasm, cheer. She didn’t doubt that seasonal affective disorder was real, but wasn’t it also possible to suffer from a surfeit of sun? Here in her closet, Trudy was glad for the lack of natural light, even if it meant missing the occasional grease spot, or navy masquerading as black.
“This alcove would make a wonderful dressing room,” the real estate agent had purred to Trudy almost two decades ago, but it was Terry who had taken those words to heart and hired a company to transform the space. Most women would envy that kind of spousal devotion, and Trudy was grateful for it in an absent, distracted way. She did remember being bemused that the closet designer had included a small bench upholstered in tufted velvet. Trudy liked clothes well enough—obviously, someone had shopped for this wardrobe—but she didn’t want to sit in her closet and commune with them, for goodness’ sakes. And she couldn’t imagine why else one would have a bench in a closet, even a clever little one such as this, with storage hidden under its bland beige seat, round and pale as a mushroom, or Miss Muffet’s tuffet.
(What’s a tuffet? Holly had asked when she was five, looking up from an ancient copy of Mother Goose, Trudy’s own. A hassock. What’s a hassock? A tuffet. Holly had laughed. Holly had been the only person who glimpsed that side of Trudy, the girly silliness that had never found a place in the hypermasculine, rough-and-tumble Tackett family. Terry and the boys joked the way they played games—fast, rough, loud, on point. Until Holly arrived, Trudy was the straight woman, the dowager. Once Holly left—well, there wasn’t much to joke about.)
But now the time had come that Trudy sometimes needed that bench, that hassock, that tuffet, to put on slacks, hose, shoes, all the things she had once slipped on while standing on one leg, nonchalant as a crane. Her balance was no longer reliable, and her lower back was prone to going out over the smallest indignities. I’m deteriorating, she told Terry cheerfully. She imagined her body covered with little Post-its, each one marking a specific area of decline—the creaking knee, the popping hip, the stiffening shoulders. She pictured a suit of Post-its, sharp yellow edges riffling in the breeze, at once stiff and pliant. She would like such a suit, an outfit that would announce her edges to the world.
She gathered the pastel clothes of spring and summer, imprisoning them into plastic garment bags, shoving them to the rear of the closet as she brought forward the darker, more somber clothes of fall and winter. She brushed the collar of a moss green suit, which still had the tags attached. She had purchased it at Saks five years ago for one express purpose and would not wear it until that day came.
The suit was for Walter Bowman’s execution. This fall. She was going to wear it this fall. November 25. The third time would be the charm.
She had planned the entire day in her mind, down to the smallest detail. Lord knows she had time enough to do it. They would drive down to Jarratt in Terry’s car. It was her understanding that they could avoid the press, watch in camera, but she wouldn’t mind if it didn’t work out that way. She could walk past the protesters with her head held high, speak briefly to the reporters with appropriate solemnity. She would not even wince at the inevitable questions about her feelings. The fact was, she wasn’t sure how she was going to feel. Exhausted, primarily, wrung out by the necessity of seeing this through. Granted, very little had been required of her over the past twenty-two years. The prosecutors—Bowman had outlasted three of them—had done their jobs well, persevering through two appeals and a retrial. It had been her choice to attend every day, to make sure that the jurors and judges knew how much Holly was missed, mourned. That was all she had done, sit and wait. Still, Trudy felt like a woman she once knew who spent every plane trip tugging at her armrest, as if to keep the plane aloft. She arrived everywhere with throbbing pain from wrist to elbow, but she arrived, didn’t she? Prove she was wrong.
After the execution—Trudy had a plan for that, too. She and Terry were going to drive straight to Richmond and check into the Jefferson Hotel. The next morning, they would visit Holly’s grave in—oh, infelicitous name—the Hollywood Cemetery. Terry had generations of family there. It was a beautiful place, almost too beautiful, with tourists forever tromping through to see the graves of presidents, including Jefferson Davis, and the statue of the black dog that stood vigil over one little girl’s grave. When Holly was first interred in the family mausoleum there, Trudy had thought it would be unbearable, sharing her annual visits with the disinterested tourists. She had found she didn’t notice them at all.
Indeed the cemetery proved to be the one place where her sadness fit, a jewel in the perfect setting. Grief was allowed there. Back in the world—first in Middleburg, now in Alexandria—people kept making the mistake of thinking she might be happy again. Trudy had tried, she really had. She was a polite person, and politeness meant making others feel better even if it made you feel like shit. But it was exhausting, impossible. No, the cemetery was the only place where she was allowed to be. Even its distance, a solid two-hour drive on the best of days, proved a blessing, a bubble of time long enough for the transition back to the world where she didn’t fit. “You have so much to celebrate,” insisted well-meaning friends, referring to her sons and their children, all healthy and happy. That is, her sons were healthy and their children, who had never known Holly, had no problem being happy. Trudy was grateful for those blessings, but they felt like coins tossed in a fountain, wishes that came true only if one believed in the magic of wishes. She wouldn’t have minded if the cemetery were another hour or two down the road. It would have given her that much more time to be unapologetically miserable.
Trudy had thought a lot about journeys, how the speed of transportation had transformed essential passages. Her ancestors had arrived in the New World in the eighteenth century, on ships that had required months to make the journey from France to Charleston. Her own parents had taken an ocean liner to their European honeymoon, a trip so leisurely that the clocks had advanced only an hour per day. If you thought about it, shouldn’t most newlyweds have a week at sea, in the unreality of a state-room, to prepare for the all-too-real reality that was marriage? Trudy and Terry Tackett—How cuuuuuuuuuuuuuuute, her Sweet Briar roommate had caroled when Trudy returned from her very first date, knowing she had met the man she would marry—had only a weekend at the Waldorf-Astoria. He was an army surgeon who had to go straight back to work on Monday.
A weekend, a week, a month, a year at the Waldorf-Astoria would not have been enough to prepare Trudy for the life she was thrust into at twenty, when she dropped out of college to marry Terry. She was part of the last generation to do such things. Vietnam was on the horizon, although it wasn’t called Vietnam yet. The next thing she knew, she was in Germany, then at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio and babies, sons, were arriving with alarming speed. Terrence III, Tommy, Sam. Terry had wanted to call him Travis, after one of the heroes of the Alamo, but Trudy decided that the T thing had to come to an end at some point. Too cuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuute. They were, as a family, constantly on the verge of being dangerously, enviably cute. She saw it in their Christmas cards, in the macho contentedness of their h
ousehold, where bones broke and teeth got knocked out and digits were almost severed, yet everyone persevered, thrived even. Her sons were like something from a science fiction novel; nothing could hurt them. She came to believe that a head could get cut off and a new one would grow back in its place.
Then three miscarriages and, finally, Holly, born when Trudy was thirty-three. To say the family doted on Holly was inadequate, to say that they worshipped her would be blasphemous, and Trudy was still a good Catholic then. Holly was one of those golden children who made cranky strangers smile. Outgoing, bubbly, sweet. Her father and brothers had been overly protective, seeing molesters everywhere even when she was a pudgy grade-schooler. But Trudy had always worried that Holly’s appeal was larger, transcending sex. She was like a little puppy that everyone wanted to cuddle, hold, possess. A person who had never been tempted to break a single rule might want to steal this child. Trudy, separated from Holly, even for a moment, in a grocery store or shop, would worry that her daughter had been spirited away by someone enchanted by her company. Trudy had been—not glad for the miscarriages, never glad, but resigned to the idea that it wasn’t a bad thing, the age gap between the boys and Holly, the fact that she was the only girl. No female, no age peer, should ever have to have been in competition with Holly. Trudy was happy to be her handmaiden, the nurse to her Juliet, but a girl close to her age would have resented her.
Elizabeth Lerner almost certainly had.
Her inspection of her closet done, her bedroom reordered, Trudy trudged off dutifully to her daily walk. It was a glorious fall day, and Old Town Alexandria was its most precious self. Scarlet and gold leaves drifted to the sidewalks, almost as if the town were a theater set and someone was leaning out of the sky with a box of silken fakes, throwing them down at suitable intervals. The day, the neighborhood, shone—shop windows gleaming, delicious smells wafting from the restaurants, people strolling aimlessly, as if they had no greater responsibilities than to acknowledge the loveliness of it all.
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