A Person of Interest (21 page)

with the significant funds that she stood to receive when she signed the agreement. Everyone knew that Aileen wanted to get back on her feet, to stop living with Warren and Nora, to perhaps find an interesting job at the university, which she’d do easily, as the ugly details of her affair and divorce would remain under wraps. Gaither insisted on full custody only to obtain full control of John’s religious upbringing, and this was a point Gaither knew that Aileen wouldn’t dispute. After all, she was an atheist, as she’d never hesitated to inform the other congregants at Gaither’s church. And going to court for the right to impose atheism on a six-week-old child was a battle Aileen would certainly lose, with even worse repercussions.

What Aileen wasn’t told, and what she wouldn’t learn until after she had signed the agreement (her signature barely hers: the jagged EKG line of a faltering heart), was that Gaither’s lawyer was a congregant, too, a church member from a neighboring state. And Gaither’s new suits had been bought with church money, and little John’s arctic gear, and every other thing Gaither required to start a new life. Aileen learned all this later: ten months later, in October 1965, after her divorce, uncontested and discreet, became final. After she and Lee, bristling like cats in their new too-close quarters, booked University Chapel for the first Saturday in December and then learned from one of the Byrons, all of whom Lee invited—they’d had almost no one to ask—

that Gaither and Ruth had been married at their church, in a packed-to-the-rafters service, the very week the divorce was announced in the

“notices” section at the back of the newspaper. After Aileen understood that it must have been Ruth who fed John his bottles for that week of Christmas. After Aileen married Lee without John in attendance, because Gaither and Ruth felt that Lee was an unwholesome element, and after Aileen realized that without visitation written formally into her agreement, in fact she was not guaranteed visitation at all. After Aileen’s union with Lee, faltering even before its strained solemnization, began faltering more violently and after Aileen fi nally hired her own expensive attorney, with her own regained funds—not to get rid of Lee but to get back her son, no matter how little her new husband might want him.

Throughout all this, Lee had been at best passive, as if Aileen’s loss of her son were the sort of arcane her-side-of-things situation, like a
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great-aunt’s estate, that a husband can comfortably view as no problem of his. At worst he’d been openly hostile. If he wanted a child at all, it was a child of his own. How could she possibly think he should raise Gaither’s son? Gaither cherished the boy, and, what seemed no less compelling, he paid for all the boy’s needs; to Lee this was lucky, for Aileen just as much as himself. He actually said this to her; for a man who had never imagined himself married, let alone cherished lofty illusions about the marital state, he was receiving a swift education in the effortless viciousness to which that state could give rise.

But for all that, he was no less amazed by the other dark fortune he’d realized was his: Aileen actually loved him. He’d become indispens-able to her. He had the power to force her to choose, between himself and her son, and insofar as he declined to assist her, encourage her, comfort her in her grief, he did this. Less with action than with the absence of action.

Might he have risked an appearance of sympathy with her, had he known that the stifled arrangement—Aileen three times a week per-mitted into the house she’d once lived in herself, to kiss and dandle her son, bottle-feed him and change him, shed her tears onto him while he napped, while her former husband taught classes and his homely new wife, the pious, self-righteous prig whom Aileen had so scorned did the cleaning or yard work, or read a book in the kitchen, but never left,
never left them alone
—was destined, as a result of her efforts, to come to an end? Gaither and Ruth did not want Lee in contact with John, and this suited Lee fine. Gaither and Ruth seemed to not trust Aileen; Lee didn’t think it was business of his. His wife, the woman he’d scolded for being married already, the first time they’d met, hated him, saw his traitorousness in its component parts (selfi shness, cowardice) yet was still in love with him, and now also completely dependent—he was all she had left. And so he did not even give her the comfort of mistakenly thinking he hoped she’d succeed.

She hired the lawyer, who deeply regretted her signature on the agreement, as well as the year she’d let pass before she’d had “second thoughts.” But he was guardedly optimistic and sent a letter to Gaither’s lawyer stating that the agreement would now be contested. On her usual Tuesday, Aileen drove to her son’s, proud and frightened; the letter had been put in the mail on the previous Friday. There was a
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chance Gaither’s lawyer hadn’t gotten it yet or, if he had, hadn’t yet informed Gaither. By what signs would she know? Would Ruth be different, as she let Aileen in, would she not as she always did open the door without words or eye contact, promptly turning her back, as if Aileen were the maid? Or would Gaither be there instead, having canceled his classes, so he could lash her with Yahweh-like fury for her awful transgression?

She must have mounted the two steps to the porch in her usual roil of anger and dread and deep longing, to see her baby, to hold him, all this heightened, made even more clamorous, by her new sense of coming combat. This time she was ready. She pressed the bell, and as it rang through the house, she remembered herself, her pregnancy just beginning, sunk like a secretive stone in the house’s deep shadows, the drapes drawn against the blinding sunlight. If someone came to the door, she stayed still; no slit in the drapes for a caller to peer through, no danger that she might be discerned. The steps would retreat down the walk, and she’d again be alone.

Even before she’d noticed that the drapes were gone from the windows, she’d felt the tone of the bell hurtling somehow differently—

unrestrained—through the house. She put her face to the window so quickly she smacked her brow on the glass. Inside was as dim as always, but she could see it was empty.

Lee had known then that the battle was won. Not because Gaither and Ruth had absconded with John, but because, once Aileen was back home and had sobbed several hours on the phone to Nora, she then sat in the kitchen for several more hours and sobbed all alone. She did not bring her grief to her husband. She had realized she shouldn’t.

13.

ON HIS WAY BACK FROM THE PARK, LEE’S ENTRAILS

churned with mortification. After having so easily vanished three decades ago, why would Gaither allow Lee to pounce on him now? The return address on Gaither’s letter hadn’t been the careless oversight of an old man finally losing his cunning. The only old man who was
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losing his cunning, if he’d ever had any, was Lee. He had the confused sense that his letter to Gaither had been opened and read and laughed at before being resealed and returned. At a stoplight he almost tore it open, as if by doing so very quickly he might glimpse the trailing edge of Gaither’s tall, ambling body as it slipped once again out the door of the years, the face hidden, perhaps just the hem of a cardigan sweater or the beveled-down heel of a worn walking shoe indicating the vanishing owner, like the tip of a tail. But behind him an impatient car honked: the red light was somehow turning yellow again. He lurched through the intersection, the letter untouched on the seat beside him, and it was still there when he turned very slowly through the faux-pillared entrance into his subdivision and then off the winding main road and onto his street.

He had moved into this subdivision more than ten years before, his house one of the first to be built, although it looked more as if it had been dropped ready-made off the back of a truck. In the time since, for all the gasping labor he’d put in, a man deep in his sixties still stubbornly rolling out sod, hacking conical holes for frail shrubs, tipping wood chips from a forty-pound sack, his yard had never taken root in the earth, and his house had never taken root in his yard. There was a misbegotten, Frankensteinian quality to his failed landscaping that made his heart sink whenever he rounded the bland curve of Fearrington Way and his house came into view. His neighbors hired landscaping companies so that their houses were afloat amid clouds of forsythia or azalea or holly depending on the season of the year, but Lee had always loved caring for plants, with the contrary result that his yard appeared neglected and derelict because he continued to tend it himself. And after a decade he still knew none of his neighbors to invite them inside, where they would have seen his wildly thriving indoor plants, which were on the point of taking over his kitchen. He solaced himself with this thought as he rounded the curve and his yellow scrawny yard became visible, and with it an unfamiliar sedan sitting in his driveway.

It was considerately parked to one side, so that Lee was able to pull up beside it and, if he’d wanted to, push the button on his garage-door opener and continue inside. Instead he turned off the engine and emerged, aware of his letter to Gaither, left behind on the seat. Apart
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from the post-office ink, there should be nothing so different, as the result of its circular journey, about the thin envelope Lee had sealed with such grim resolution and put in the mail just a few days before.

It was a feint in the dark that had failed to connect, and nobody—not even Gaither, Lee reminded himself—had seen Lee lose his balance from making the lunge. And yet he was trembling as if the envelope held Gaither’s scalding riposte; his hands could hardly hold his keys, and his heart felt overworked in his chest. The strain of this noncon-frontation with his old nemesis wrecked his feeble defenses against last night’s insomnia, and his vision was filled with fatigue spots again.

Through their spreading stains, he could see that the driver of the other car, now emerging also with an overbroad smile like the work of an earthquake across the solemn landscape of his face, was the FBI agent from the mail room, Jim Morrison. There was a passenger, a woman, perhaps in her late thirties, wearing a belted shirtdress and sunglasses, which she pushed onto the top of her head as she also emerged. From the far side of both vehicles, she seemed to gaze at Lee in the chill, confi rming manner of a doctor turning eyes on a patient after grimly perusing his chart, and Lee was startled into an awareness of how he must look, an old man stumbling forth from the tomb of regrets with their cobwebs all over his clothes. In the foreground Jim Morrison was amiably bearing down on Lee with a long arm extended again, as if their encounter a few hours before had made them old friends, and in the beat before their palms were reunited, Lee tried to will his unperspiring and steady. It didn’t help that any conjunction of law enforcement with his home tended to bring out an obsequious, stammering side of himself, even if he had summoned the policemen himself. He could never seem to lay hold of the easy self-righteousness with which his neighbors demanded the arrests of teen Halloween egg throwers or drivers who sped past the Child at Play sign.

The handshake had taken place, but because Lee had so earnestly labored, fumbling through so many layers of enmeshed meditation, to bring it off carelessly, it had probably lasted too long or broken off too abruptly, and his palm had turned damp after all. “Go ahead and put your car away, Professor,” Jim Morrison said, as if noticing nothing of Lee’s disordered state. “And let me introduce my colleague, Special Agent Shenkman. We had a lunch hour to kill and thought we’d grab
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a chance to talk now, if it’s all right with you. It would be very helpful.

Of course we won’t keep you long. I know the college is holding a memorial service at four.”

“That’s okay,” Lee said. “I wasn’t planning to go to the service. I’m not feeling well. I didn’t sleep well last night.”

“Would another time be better?” The commanding projection of Morrison’s brow was surprisingly mobile; it formed a wrinkle of kindly concern. The woman’s face hadn’t changed.

“No, no,” Lee protested. “Now is fine. Please. I hope I can help. . . .”

They fi led into the house through the rarely used front door, Lee apologizing, as he had resolved he would not, for the absence of furniture in the front room. “Redecorating,” he meant to say vaguely, but instead he said, fibbing only in terms of the time frame, “I’ve just been divorced.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Jim Morrison said. “No apologies are needed, Professor. This is a very nice house. We envy you, me and Agent Shenkman. Living out of hotels like we do half the time.” Something else was the matter now, too: a ball of dread in his gut, the body’s urgent warning, an ache as piercingly narrow as the range of its causes was broad and diffuse. It was as easily the product of fatigue as of Gaither or Michiko, and yet as Lee closed the door, it took the form of the eyes of his neighbors, converging upon him like spokes, following him courtesy of the undraped front-room windows as he led the two agents past the sofa-leg holes in the living-room carpet and the pictureless hooks on the walls, through the untabled dining room into the kitchen, where the blinds were all open. Here were his indoor plants, almost dancing with health in the blazing sunlight. Lee had an impulse to lower the blinds, but doing so at the height of the glittering day was sure to make him seem strange. And so he put on the teapot, his neighbors’ gazes perhaps slicing through him like alarm-system la-sers, while Agent Morrison politely quizzed him on the local amenities. The agent imagined there had to be
some
decent place for a burger.

The agent liked jogging, but not on concrete—were there any nice paths? Lee submitted to this interrogation eagerly, for the helpful distraction from the pain in his gut, but then found he was practically mute. Though he had lived here for twenty-five years and spent much
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