Does that sound arrogant on my part? Well, believe me, it’s happened. In the last year especially, after I hit it big with my books, I suddenly became visible to men who hadn’t seen me before. I met them at signings, charity events, even Greg’s functions. Most were subtle, but others were frank. I think, one said, that it has to be every man’s dream to be hooked up with a woman who can keep him in style. Can you believe he said that? Naturally, I told him that I wouldn’t be caught dead with a man who wanted to be “kept,” and he quickly slunk off, but I’m sure he wasn’t alone. I was worth more money this year than last. There were some men to whom that mattered.
It didn’t matter to Tom. He fit into my life as a friend in ways that I knew would outlive my return to Washington in the fall. He was going to be a permanent friend. But nothing more.
Had I not been preoccupied, I might have spent the entire trip wondering why that was so, and I might have come up with a handful of possible reasons. But I was thinking about my mother’s journals, feeling close to her in ways I hadn’t even felt at the cemetery, close in ways I hadn’t felt in years.
I know I’m supposed to be reading about market trends, she had put down in her neat script, but the bulletins sitting here on my desk will have to wait. I just finished reading Annie’s book for the second time, and it was even better than the first. She’s such a talented writer. Maybe if I had been as talented as she is, I would have succeeded as a writer. But no. It takes more than talent. It takes drive. Annie has that.
I always knew that about Annie, but for the longest time I didn’t know where the drive would take her. She could have gone in so many different directions, and a lot of them would have been self-defeating. But she took one of the good roads, which put her in a good place, and she did it no thanks to me. I didn’t give her the attention I should have. I suspect she took to writing when she was a teenager in part to get my attention. Well, she has. I’m more proud of her than I can say.
I mean, what do you do when you read passages like that? You sit there in a public place, beside a person who is attuned to your moods, and you bite the inside of your lip to create pain as a diversion, because otherwise you’ll break down and cry. But you can’t stop reading, can’t stop feeling, can’t stop wishing your mother were still alive so that you could talk about these things.
So you read on, but you have little nuggets of new knowledge tucked in a corner of your brain, and it suddenly occurs to you that if the plane takes off with you and your journals, and something unspeakable happens, everything will be lost. So you wait until the last minute, until you can see the airline personnel preparing to board passengers with children or those who need extra help. Then you buy privacy by moving off to the side, and you take out an insurance policy by calling Sabina’s cell phone.
“How’s Phoebe?” I asked.
“Feeling okay. I have her home.”
“At your house?”
“No. At Mom’s. The nurses agreed that she’d be better in the place that’s most familiar. Besides, I’m still annoyed at Ron.”
“Still not talking?”
“Nope.”
“Oh, Sabina.”
“It’s okay. I believe in this cause, Annie. I look at Phoebe, and I see just this little bit of improvement, and I know it’s only the beginning. I think we’re doing the right thing.”
“I know we are—know it for fact. I found our proof.”
I heard a gasp on the other end, then a breathless, “What?”
“That March Friday when the Middle River Women in Business met at the Clubhouse? Phoebe was there. Mom, the would-be writer, was the unofficial scribe of the group, but she had inadvertently picked up the wrong folder on her way out of the store to the meeting. She called Phoebe, who brought over the WIB folder, and it only made sense that she should have something to eat while she was there, so she ended up staying through the rest of the meeting.”
I could hear tempered excitement in Sabina. “How do you know this?”
“Remember Mom’s journals? The ones she kept on the shelves at the store?”
“Those were Gram’s journals.”
“Nope. Mom’s.”
“Are you sure? I haven’t seen them lately.”
“I know. Phoebe moved them. I hadn’t seen them either and completely forgot they were there until last night.”
“And it says all this inside? In Mom’s handwriting?”
“Mom’s handwriting, with the entry clearly dated.” The general boarding was starting. I could see Tom rise and glance my way. “I have to run, Sabina. Is this good news?”
“It’s great news!”
“So if the plane crashes, you’ll know what to ask Phoebe when she comes to—”
“The plane won’t crash.”
“—and if she still can’t remember, have her hypnotized.”
“The plane won’t crash!”
“And the best?” I said as I hoisted my backpack to my shoulder.
“There’s more?”
“The Northwood board is meeting Monday at four. I’ve been invited. Is this cool?”
We had climbed through broken clouds, leveled off at thirty-three thousand feet, and left New Hampshire airspace, heading south, when I heard from Grace. I was startled. So much had been going on that she and I hadn’t talked in a while. I truly thought I had left her behind.
Why are we here? she asked, sounding disgruntled. I nearly died once on a flight from Dallas to Atlanta.
That was in 1961. Aircraft were entirely different then.
Why couldn’t we drive? I would have much preferred that. This is not where I want to be.
We couldn’t drive because it takes too long. Besides, if not here, where?
New York. I always loved the Plaza. I want to go back there. Pay your money, and they love you. They don’t care how frumpy you look. I could be myself there. Or Paris. I love Paris, too. Or Beverly Hills. I could live in any one of those places.
In a hotel, I said to make sure I understood what she was saying.
Why not? Hotels are the best. You don’t have to cook or clean or make your bed, and no one faults you for it.
That’s all fine and good, I reasoned. But for how long? You can’t live permanently in a hotel. Hotels are cold.
And towns like Middle River aren’t? Oh boy, do you forget fast. I’ll take a cold hotel any day over that. Get tired of one hotel, you move on to the next. It’s a gypsy’s life, but I like it.
You hated it, I argued. You were miserable. You were alone, even when there were people around, so you filled the void with booze. Y’know, Grace, maybe your problem was that gypsy’s life. Maybe you would have been better off staying in one place and putting down roots.
Weeds have roots. I wanted better.
That’s right. The grass was always greener somewhere else. You were like your mother that way, always itching for something more. Well, maybe you didn’t know what you had. Maybe if you’d let people get to know you, they’d have accepted you. Maybe you could have made friends. Yes, yes, I know. You had friends, but really only ones who reinforced your separateness. You expected friends to be loyal to a fault, but that doesn’t happen right away. It takes time. Maybe if you’d made the effort, you’d have built the trust. You’d have been part of a community. You wouldn’t have been such an outsider.
“Annie?” My arm was jiggled “Annie?”
Eyes wide, I looked quickly at Tom. He was seated beside me, regarding me with concern.
“Are you all right?” he asked. I nodded, but he said, “You were looking fierce. And you were moving your lips.”
“Was I?” I asked, mortified. “Oh dear. I’m sorry. It was an imaginary conversation. Argument, actually. Writers do this kind of thing a lot.” I waved a hand. “But done. Over. Forget it happened. Please?”
“Can I help with the argument?”
I smiled and shook my head. “Not this one.”
“Then the other,” he said, and I knew what
he meant.
“Time to put our money where our mouth is?” I asked.
He nodded. “That’s why I’m here.”
It was why we were both here, though that particular meeting would take place on Sunday morning. Saturday was for our personal agendas. When we landed at Reagan National, we got in the same cab, but after dropping me at the condo, Tom continued on to meet his own friends.
Was I thrilled to be in the condo? Not a hundred percent.
But you guessed that, didn’t you? You knew that the place would look different to me, that its familiarity would represent only half of what was fast becoming the rooted part of my life. You knew I wouldn’t be able to walk in that door and not think of James or Phoebe or Sabina or the backyard willows that overlooked the river.
That said, it was so, so good to see Greg when he finally hobbled into the condo with Neil. But if I had expected that he would be bedridden, I was mistaken. Recent surgery notwithstanding, Greg had adapted to the use of crutches with the same ease with which he did most physical things. Yes, there was discomfort. He had been told to expect some swelling and had been advised to keep the foot elevated, but he tired of that quickly. Truth be told, the downer of breaking his leg couldn’t begin to compete with the upper of having summited, and that was what he talked about for much of the afternoon. He had more film cards than I could count, and he showed me every shot he took. He claimed he had deleted dozens of bad shots along the way. Had he not done that, I shuddered to think how long we’d have sat there on the sofa, tucked together—me, Greg with the elevated leg, and Neil—looking into the monitor of Greg’s camera while he went from image to image with a corresponding narration of the trip—shuddered to think of not finishing in time for me to tell him all of my news, shuddered to think of not finishing in time to allow for leisure—because I wouldn’t have missed Saturday night for the world. All Greg had to say was that he wanted to go out, and I was the concierge planning it all.
We started with wine and cheese on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, because this had always been a fun adventure of ours. We had the cheese in a baggie and the wine in a thermos—I know, I know, not the way to treat good wine, but (a) this wasn’t good wine and (b) the wine wasn’t the point. The point was feeling that we were elevated physically and spiritually, just that little bit above the city, and from there we went to our favorite restaurant, a burger place in Georgetown where we were known enough so that the waitstaff catered to Greg’s casted leg.
Had it not been for that leg, we might have gone to a succession of bars after dinner. Instead, we settled for an old standby in Dupont Circle, where we could drink beer, watch the Orioles battle the Yankees on the plasma TV on the wall, and reconnect with people we knew. Like Neil, these were originally Greg’s friends, but I had long since been accepted as one of the guys, which meant laughter, good talk, and total ease. It was a dark-wooded and discreet place; there might be hand-holding or a hug here and there, but an outsider would be hard-pressed to know who was with whom. And I wasn’t the only woman present, because women in the know who wanted a carefree night understood that even beyond the friendship, the laughter, and the beer, the neat thing about being in a gay bar was that there was no risk of being hit on.
That said, it was not an entirely shock-free night for me—and please don’t jump to conclusions here. You know my sexual orientation. You know it quite intimately by now. What you don’t know—because I didn’t know, didn’t guess, should have suspected but was too preoccupied with my own world—is the sexual orientation of Tom.
Yes, Tom. Tom Martin from Middle River. To this day I don’t quite know why I looked up at that particular moment. But my eyes penetrated the dim light in the bar and spotted Tom, standing with a group on the other side of the room. He was every bit as discreet as Greg, his arm linked with that of a friend in a way that might have been casual had we been in, say, Paris, where physicality between men was more common. But not here in D.C. This linked arm had meaning, but it was understated, and I’m sure it was done that way for the very same reason that Greg took such care with his public image, including living with me. To be outed as being gay might negatively impact the career of a man like Greg, who was seen as something of a sex symbol to women in the heart of America. Likewise, to be outed as being gay might negatively impact the career of a man like Tom, whose dedication to his retarded sister and to his patients had endeared him to the heart of Middle River.
Tom looked around. When I asked him about it later, he admitted to feeling a prickle at the back of his neck when his eyes met mine. Even through the dark I saw a moment’s panic. That was what compelled me to worm my way through the crowd to where he stood. By the time I got there, he had separated himself from the man he was with and was awaiting my judgment. I imagine that in those brief minutes he saw his career roll to the edge of a precipice and hang by a thread. Middle River could accept a bachelor doctor. A gay one? Not now. Not yet.
If he feared me, then he had underestimated me. But then, he was so stunned to see me that he didn’t see me with Greg. Had he done that, he’d have understood.
I wrapped an arm around his neck and held on tightly. “This explains so much—how comfortable I felt with you from the start, how much you reminded me of Greg, why there was a lack of sexual chemistry between you and me.”
“Are you disappointed?” he asked.
I drew back. “Yes, but not in you. I’m disappointed that Middle River hasn’t the goodness to accept people who are different.”
“But they are good people, Annie. If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t be there.”
Which was one of the things I was coming to love about Tom. He had a big heart, certainly bigger than mine. I was quick to judge; if I could learn tolerance from him, he would prove a valuable friend.
I was up early the next morning, first running through familiar streets in the familiar heat, then going on from there to all the other familiar things that I loved—to brunch with Jocelyn and Amanda, to iced coffee with Berri and John (whom I liked a lot, by the way), to iced tea with another friend. I interspersed all this with errands for Greg and with stops at favorite places, like the Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian, the Tidal Basin, the shops at Adams-Morgan.
I didn’t stay long at any one place or with any one person. There was too little time. But I felt a need to see and hear and feel all that had come to mean so much to me in the last fifteen years. I was crowding it all in, waging a campaign of remembrance, because I was starting to fear that I had forgotten that these things mattered. When I was in Middle River, the town was all-consuming. Here, now, I needed to remind myself of all that I loved that Middle River couldn’t provide.
We met at the condo at two in the afternoon. There were Greg and I, and there was Tom, who, after our unexpected meeting, had spent a while with us at the bar the night before. Neil arrived at two, taking time from preparation for his return to court the next day to give us legal advice on the victims’ behalf. Nancy Baker, who was a pharmacologist at the EPA and a lawyer herself, was also there. She and Tom had known each other for years. They had been discussing the mercury issue since Tom first suspected a problem at Northwood. Her role was to advise us, strictly as a friend, on where the government would stand, should word of this get out.
For two hours, we went back and forth. I learned what I needed to know so that I could be better informed at the board meeting the next day. I won’t bore you with the details, but when Tom and I were finally back at Reagan National for our return flight, I turned to a fresh page in my mother’s journal and made my list. The prospects were quite bleak.
First, Northwood could not be prosecuted for violating regulations for the abuse of toxic waste, because the statute of limitations had expired.
Second, according to the files Nancy had checked, Northwood was in complete compliance with current regulations, which ruled out new criminal charges.
Third, if illegal dumping could be proven to hav
e occurred, civil charges could be brought in the form of a personal injury suit by either individuals or a group, but this would require proof of mercury poisoning in every one of the plaintiffs.
Fourth, the waters were muddied by fish containing high levels of mercury. For years, the state had posted warnings to residents of Middle River not to eat what they caught. For years, th’other side had ignored the warnings, choosing possibly dangerous food over no food at all.
Fifth and finally, the only chance of criminal charges being brought against Northwood was if it could be proven that illegal dumping had resulted in one or more deaths. That would constitute murder. There was no statute of limitations for murder.
“It’ll never happen,” Tom advised from my shoulder, where he had been reading my list as I wrote it. “Making the connection between illegal dumping and any one particular death will be impossible to prove. We don’t know for sure that your mother had mercury poisoning. We can surmise it, based on Phoebe’s case. But even if an autopsy were to prove that there was mercury in Alyssa’s body at the time of death, she didn’t die of it. She died of asphyxiation after a fall down the stairs.”
“That’s a technicality,” I argued.
Our flight was called.
“She was sixty-five,” Tom countered, tucking a magazine in the outside pocket of his leather duffel. “She might have fallen on her own. Omie was eighty-three. Older people often get pneumonia. In time their bodies wear out and their hearts stop. Was this because of mercury? It’s circumstantial evidence, Annie.”
Looking for Peyton Place Page 35
