Beacon Street Mourning (13 page)

Michael was kinder than I. He sought to put Augusta's son at ease by mentioning a certain Manhattan crime that had been so much in the news at Christmastime that even the San Francisco papers had picked up on it. Larry claimed insider knowledge—due to his job at the newspaper—and discussed the case with an eagerness that might have seemed to me merely pathetic, had my father not already predisposed me to be on my guard with the young man.

Perhaps because I was thus predisposed, I saw instead in Larry a degree of fascination with evil that bordered on the morbid. When speaking of these matters the young man's unfinished features acquired a look of cunning, and a vivid alertness that both attracted and repelled. I believe Michael saw the same, even without Father to predispose his observations, for Michael steered the conversation back in a similar direction again and again throughout the evening.

In the crime at Christmas—to which I hadn't paid that much attention at the time—a man had been fatally stabbed on the steps of a church and left there to bleed to death, at an hour not long before people began to arrive for the traditional midnight services. No one had been arrested yet. The police had not found a single witness to the stabbing. Larry claimed to have much more information than the police had allowed the newspaper to report, and he proceeded to tell us all about it.

I observed quietly, my former teasing mood forgotten. I became impressed all over again, or perhaps it was more than ever before, by my partner's skill in drawing out the young man, providing him opportunities to say more and more and more.

There was no question in my mind that Larry Bingham was building himself a cage of lies from which there would be no escape—had we any reason to trap him in it, but we did not.

But then, after a while, I saw something else, something that did at last make me feel sorry for the young man: Larry was performing for his mother. She believed every word. She was proud of him. Augusta was the reason for all these lies.

I AWOKE SUDDENLY and came wide awake in an instant, the way one does when something has happened that is out of the ordinary, even if one does not yet know what that something may be.

I groped at the bedstead and found the pull cord for the ceiling light. By my watch on the bedside table it was 3:10 A.M., and the house felt cold as only a house in New England can be cold when there is snow outside and all the fires have been out for hours. My bed was warm but my arm, the only part of my body that I had yet allowed out from beneath the goose-down comforter, was freezing. So, I realized, was the tip of my nose. My ears were all right due to an unattractive but serviceable flannel nightcap with a ruffle—an object that had made me smile when I put it on because it reminded me of my first landlady in San Francisco, Mrs. O'Leary.

I pulled my arm back under the comforter and lay still as a stone, listening. What had awakened me?

Augusta had given me the third bedroom on the second floor of the house. My own old bedroom had been on the third floor at the front, directly over Father's room, but because climbing stairs is not so easy for me at present, Augusta had put me in this guest room, which is near the back stairs. I supposed Larry Bingham probably had my old room now, and for a moment I felt a ridiculous juvenile flash of jealousy, but it quickly passed.

There were three bedrooms on each floor, each separated by smaller rooms that could be used as sitting or dressing rooms, and one of these on each floor had been fitted out as a bathroom.

The room I was in, at the back, was the one on this floor that had given up its extra room for the bath. Augusta's bedroom came next in order, moving from back to front of the house; whether she used her extra room as a sitting room or not I didn't know. My mother had called that little chamber adjacent to the middle bedroom her "quiet room," and when she was in it no one had been allowed to intrude, not even Father, and certainly not I.

Mother had not slept in the room Augusta used now. My parents had been an exception to the general fashion for married people of the times: They had not kept separate bedrooms. Rather they'd slept together in a big bed in the front room where my father now lay. In the single most touching thing my father had done before he married Augusta, he had moved that bed he'd shared with Mother up to attic storage, and had a new bed put into the big front room.

Interesting, and sad, I thought, that he now lay in that new bed alone. I wondered if Augusta had ever shared it with him all through the night. . . and then I wished I had not, and so chased off the thought by returning to the principal matter at hand: What had awakened me?

Listening hard once more, I did not hear anything beyond the ordinary, except for the wind pushing against the windows as if it would like to come inside. And inside, all was quiet.

This house was more solidly built than any of the houses I'd lived in in San Francisco. Sounds did not carry through these walls. When one was inside a room with the door and windows closed, most little disturbances remained outside, unheard and unnoticed. If I wanted to know what had awakened me I would have to get up; there was simply no other way.

I hated the thought of getting up. It would be far more pleasant to snuggle back beneath the warm covers and try to forget that something had awakened me. More pleasant, yes, but not easier. In fact it would be impossible. My curiosity would torture me to pieces, even if there were nothing whatever out of the ordinary to find.

With a sigh I flung back the bedcovers all at once. If I were going to do this thing I might as well get it over with. As I bundled myself into a woolen bathrobe and threw a shawl across my shoulders for extra warmth, I began to speculate. Most likely while still asleep I'd heard the night nurse, Sarah Kirk, going down to the kitchen by the back stairs to fix a cup of tea. She claimed she never left her patient's bedside, but I didn't really believe anyone could be that faithful.

The slippers into which I thrust my bare feet were so cold I almost yelped. Suddenly I thought about Mary Fowey in her little room up top where Augusta had banished her, getting up in the dark at five o'clock to light fires in the fireplaces all through the house, all by herself. I shivered. It wasn't right; Mary should have had one of the Porters' old rooms.

Since I was going out into the hall, I had to light a candle. There were no electric lights in the upstairs hallways, only in the main hall on the first floor, and a ceiling fixture in each room. My banker father with his idiosyncratic ideas about money had had some interesting places of drawing lines on expenditures. I got the candle lit and replaced its glass chimney, then took the candleholder in my left hand by its curving handle and my cane in my right.

At the door I paused before tucking the cane under my arm long enough to turn the doorknob. If there was any danger outside my door, as more than once had been the case when I'd awakened suddenly in the night, I supposed I could throw the candle in the miscreant's face. I might bash him with my cane, but I rather doubted I could manage that because my legs were
weak. Much of one's fighting strength and balance comes from the thighs—I doubted I could get the firm leverage to strike a good blow. Finally I ignored these distressing thoughts and pulled back the door, which opened inward.

The hallway was black as pitch, save for the strip of light in which I stood, light that cast my shadow before me as if I were a giantess. I advanced a few steps with my candle held high. Such a puny flame. How strange to think that for centuries upon centuries such small lights were all we had against the night.

In mid-hall, outside Augusta's room, I stopped. Had I seen a sliver of light around her doorframe? No, probably not. I listened intently; all I heard was the tall-case clock downstairs— tock, tock, tock, tock; true to her word Augusta had wound it before Father came home. Once more that old clock, which had come from England such a long time ago, was marking time for the Pembrokes and the Joneses.

I told myself I would go a few more steps to Father's room, I'd push open the door, and there would be Sarah Kirk with a steaming cup of tea. She'd raise a finger to her lips and mouth the words "Don't wake your father!" My own breath was coming like steam from my nose and mouth, it was that cold inside; in San Francisco it hardly ever got this cold outside, much less in.

I opened Father's door. Sarah sat in her usual place beneath a reading lamp, and her book was open, as usual. She'd had a cup of tea but it was not steaming; she'd already drunk it and the cup was empty. Sarah was asleep with her book resting on her small bosom, moving gently up and down with the rhythm of her breathing.

Well, who could blame her? Not I.

It was so very, very quiet in this room.

I walked across to Father's bed, the one he'd bought to share with Augusta Simmons: a large bed of dark mahogany
with solid panels at the head and foot, not a four-poster, no canopy, no fancy carving, just good craftsmanship and good wood.

I think I knew before I got there what I would find. Something, some quality of absence within these four walls had already told me.

Father's chest did not go up and down beneath the covers the way the nurse's bosom did beneath her book. His head was turned away from me but his eyes were open. His mouth hung open too.

"Daddy?" I whispered. I hadn't called him Daddy in a long, long time. "Daddy?"

SOME PEOPLE fall apart in a crisis, they dissolve into tearful babble and pointless actions. Others are rendered speechless and paralyzed. Still others are able to perform well, with almost preternatural calm. Women are generally supposed to fall into one of the first two categories, but that is not always the case; nor is it fair to men to expect them always to conform to the third. It is impossible to know, until one finds oneself in more than one real crisis, what one's own pattern will be.

I'd had no crises in my life until I moved to California, and so I was somewhat surprised to find that I was one of those who perform well, with that preternatural calm. I might fall apart later, but while the crisis was in force I always somehow knew what to do and had some confidence I would be able to do it.

But there are limits for everyone—and by its very definition, one cannot find where the limit lies until one reaches it. My father's death was the limit for me. And I went over it, into the frightening unknown beyond.

"Daddy?" I called for the third time. I heard my own voice as if from very far away, sounding small and pitiful and painfully young.

I put the candle down on the bedside table carefully, the
way I'd been taught, because candles can start fires. I propped against the wall a stick I found in my other hand—I couldn't think what it was for. Then I walked around the bed, holding on tight because my legs were all wobbly. I felt the mahogany footboard cool and slick with wax under my fingers. I needed to look into my father's eyes, but he wouldn't turn over, so I had to go to the other side of the bed.

A part of me knew he was dead, but another part of me kept shaking her head and insisting he was only asleep with his eyes open. It was very, very important, yes, yes it was, to look into his eyes because the eyes are the windows of the soul, and so I had to look in and see if my daddy's soul was still in there.

But it wasn't. I looked in his eyes and nobody looked back. His soul wasn't there. I couldn't find my daddy anywhere, he was gone. Gone away. Flown away. Too soon, no warning, not fair, he'd been getting better. But he was . . . just. . . gone.

I crawled into the big bed to lie with my dead father, because I didn't know where else to go, what to do. Maybe I had some dim hope he might come back again. But he didn't come, and after a while I fell asleep right there in the big bed.

Dr. Cosgrove came but I wouldn't open my eyes because I didn't like Dr. Cosgrove. He talked and talked at me—his voice was so annoying, like the buzzing of a horsefly; and just like those flies, he wouldn't go away no matter how hard you shooed him. He made me drink something that tasted nasty, and after that I didn't hear anything at all, or see anything at all. I went off somewhere inside my head. Which was what my daddy had done, he went off somewhere too, didn't he? Only he didn't come back . . .

MY MOUTH felt like a sandpit—I needed water in the worst way. I forced my eyes open. Sick, I must be sick. "Fremont."

I knew that voice. "Michael?"

He was there, bending over the bed, his arm going behind my head and helping me to sit up.

"Water," I said, "please." My head felt very odd. Aside from being dry as the desert, there was an unidentifiable, bitter taste in my mouth.

Michael poured water into a glass from a pitcher on the bedside table. He held the glass to my lips and helped me drink, but soon I had the glass in my own hand and was swallowing gratefully on my own.

"It's too dark in here," I said. "What time is it? Have I been sick?"

"Apparently you are unusually sensitive to laudanum, or he gave you a greater dose than he claimed he did. It's almost eight P.M. You were given the laudanum by Searles Cosgrove sometime early this morning, before anyone called me. You've been asleep for more than twelve hours."

"Oh. Laudanum? Well, no wonder. I don't know how I react to that stuff; I never had it before."

"Do you remember what happened?"

I rubbed my forehead because my head hurt, and although one knows intellectually that rubbing it is not likely to make a headache go away, or to make remembering easier, still one does it. And I suppose it did feel good. However, overall I felt so bad that it would take much more than forehead-rubbing to make an improvement.

"I remember Dr. Cosgrove," I said slowly, "he—he was very annoying, he kept talking at me and wouldn't leave me alone. I wanted to swat him like a fly."

Michael smiled. He took the glass from my hand, sat down on the side of my bed, and bent me forward a little so that he could rub my back.

"And he did make me drink something that tasted horrible. I suppose it was the laudanum. But why would he do that?"

"Ah, Fremont." Michael's arms went around me and he pressed my head to his shoulder. Then he began to rock me gently, back and forth, back and forth.

And I began to remember.

Tears leaked from my eyes. I didn't cry, didn't sob, didn't have the cathartic experience that real crying can produce. I just leaked tears.

"Father died. Didn't he, Michael?"

Michael continued to rock me. "Yes, Fremont, your father is dead."

IT WAS MORNING when I awoke the second time. I felt more clearheaded. Weak, but in control of myself. And I remembered everything. Not in great detail, but enough: Father died and for a while I'd been like a child again, wanting him back, not knowing what to do . . . and then the damn doctor had drugged me out of my mind.

That made me angry, and the anger gave me strength. I sat up, ready to go on with the day, and with my life. There was much to be done.

Michael sprawled in an uncomfortable position half on and half off the fainting couch that was a part of this guest room's furnishings—a more useless article of furniture I cannot imagine, as it is too big for sitting and too small for lying. How he could sleep like that I did not know.

I smiled, remembering how kind he had been to me last night.

There is one thing about being in love with a spy: they are very easy to wake up. Michael will wake if you look at him for more than a second or two, and he did.

"I am perfectly certain you should not be in here with the door closed," I said.