Claire and Present Danger (9 page)

If I lucked into a set of names, I’d know where they died, and when, and I could check a local newspaper. A plane crash would make the news, or there’d be at least an obituary, but I had to be lucky. Some entries didn’t even list a last residence or place of final benefits.

I was not lucky. I wound up out of time, with only a headache.

I quickly packed my things, and bid adieu to Ozzie, who grunted back. Feeling ever more frayed and sweaty, wilting in the oppressive humidity, I made my way through the streets, up to my former neighborhood. I was struck by a tidal wave of nostalgia for the row of tiny homes on the narrow cobbled street. Nothing much had changed since I’d moved. In fact, nothing much had changed since Benjamin Franklin probably rode a horse down this street.

My old house had been rebuilt, maintaining its Colonial façade.

It looked to be in the hands of loving tenants, with its cherry-red window box overflowing with geraniums. The hitching post 64

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on the curb had been painted to match the flower box and the front door.

The street was still too narrow for easy passage of cars, impossible for parking. All was as it always had been: houses intended for servants, people who walked, not for cars, which had to be parked on a more modern street or rented garage.

There it was in all its glory. Cute, photogenic, inconvenient, and cramped—and I really missed it and all the people who’d been my neighbors.

I entered the crowded home of my friend Nancy Russell and her mother, a woman whose first name, as far as I could tell was Mrs. I had never called her anything else, except behind her back, when she was Old Mrs. Russell or Nasty Old Mrs. Russell. Or worse.

She has been a longtime burden for Nancy, who, luckily, has a strong back and a sufficiently strong income to hire caretakers much of the time.

In all her ninety years, Mrs. Russell has never had time for most of humanity or even for domestic animals. She believes both species scheme behind her back and exist only to spread disease and plan her downfall.

Except for my cat, Macavity. She adores him and believes him the exception to all her rules. Until she grew truly enfeebled, she was—at her request—the proprietor of Old Mrs. Russell’s Cat Camp for Macavity Pepper.

I would have brought him were it not for this crazy day’s schedule, I explained to both Nancy and her mother. Given that Mrs.

Russell is deaf and refuses to wear her hearing aid, explaining anything to her is strenuous. Aside from arthritic knees and hips that now kept her in a wheelchair, and the hearing loss, she was still forceful, emphatic, and tyrannical, and she made it clear that if it didn’t involve Macavity, she wasn’t overexcited about my presence.

I gave her the Pavarotti CDs. She’d put on her hearing aids for him. I knew she adored him, and I knew she wouldn’t admit it.

And then I made my way through the crowd.

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In truth, I, and probably everyone there, had stopped off en route to our real lives on behalf of Nancy, not her mother. We were here to salute and celebrate her dutifulness and goodness of heart. And also, to secretly, or at least privately, commiserate. Her mother had been a mean-spirited dictator her entire life, and had only moved in with—or on—Nancy when her health was, in theory, failing. But that had been fifteen long years ago. Apparently, Old Mrs. was going for the longevity gold.

It was fun to catch up with local gossip about squabbles among my former and new neighbors. As always, wars began over anything, from one homeowner’s decision to paint his shutters screaming chartreuse to a raid on another’s illegal backyard crop. The people who’d bought the house I’d once rented had paid a fortune, Harvey Weiss said, escalating everybody’s real estate appraisals and taxes. Nobody paid him much heed, not even his petite, preternatu-rally calm wife, who, as always, stood beside him, rolling her eyes at his utterances and saying nothing except, “Oh, Harvey.”

“But the thing is,” Carlie Hopper added, “they turned it into a showplace. Every nook and cranny just so, with the right hue of paint—they used color consultants—and the perfect piece of furniture. And the day the last accent piece was put in place, they split up.”

All this and more was presented like an ongoing chorale—the neighborhood news vendors, cranks, complainers, and gigglers singing their predictable parts. Carlie Hopper found the mari-juana bust the funniest thing, while Harvey Weiss found it further proof of the decline of Western Civilization as he did the very idea of chartreuse shutters. His wife rolled her eyes. “Oh, Harvey,” she murmured.

Nothing much had changed. Everything set off Harvey, especially me. When you live on the same block as an obsessive-compulsive who thinks the world’s already too messy, and who also is slightly paranoid and in love with conspiracy theories—and then your house explodes, you’ve definitely crossed his bottom line. Not that it was my fault—no chemistry sets in my basement—but that 66

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didn’t matter. I’d made a mess on his street, and worse, I’d picked up my cat and left the mess behind.

I smiled and listened, learning that Peggy O’Neil’s fifth-grade daughter was now bald because she’d wanted to bleach her hair but, not quite getting the concept, had used laundry bleach.

A young man at the other end of the block—this was told sotto voce and we all leaned close—had pierced places you didn’t even want to think about, but which he, most definitely, wanted to discuss.

Someone’s son had gone off to study hideous contagious diseases in Africa, causing everyone to shudder at the dangers he faced. Harvey, of course, demanded that he be quarantined far from the street before he was allowed back on it. “No telling what he’ll be carrying on him, or in him,” he said with customary emphasis.

“Oh, Harvey,” his wife said. I wish for once she’d say what she meant by that, because I really couldn’t tell, which, of course, was her intent. Was she expressing awe or disdain? Was the end of the sentence really “—get lost!” or variations thereof? Was she asking him to pipe down, or praising his worldview?

“Amanda, you didn’t hear the news, did you?”

The speaker was Pris Shoemaker, an astoundingly dull drama queen I tried to avoid because that’s the way she spoke. You could almost hear kettledrums in her background, insisting that she carried dire news. And she didn’t want to lessen the impact of her message by actually saying it. Instead, you had to do the Pris Shoemaker dance.

“Hear what?” I was supposed to say.

“I nearly fainted when I heard,” she’d then say.

“Heard what?” I’d say . . . and so forth and so on ad nauseam.

She delighted in, wallowed in, the shock and degree of emotion she could produce—even if it turned out to be irritation and anger.

I vowed to show no emotion now, no matter her news.

But this time, she was among people who knew her style, so the woman next to her jumped in and said, “About Lily? She’s—”

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Pris rushed to the point without requiring prompts. “—in the hospital. She”—Pris lowered her voice, although everyone else in the circle already knew what she would say—“tried to kill herself.”

“Oh, no!” The rocket of feeling that shot through me negated any promise to show no emotions. I adored the appealing Lily. She looked like one of those girls who grow up to be supermodels, the girls nobody believes were ever less than stunning. Right now, aside from the dark-rimmed glasses she always wore, she was all arms, elbows, and wild auburn curls. Someday she’d be willowy.

Right now, she was skinny. And funny, and smart in school. What on earth had possessed her?

“Gave everybody quite a scare, but I think she’ll be okay. She’s in treatment. The whole family is.”

“She always seemed a happy kid,” I said. “What happened?”

“Who knows?” Pris said. “They say she left a note that said she wasn’t popular. That nobody liked her. She’s in sixth grade, for heaven’s sake!”

Despite the generalized murmur of concern, Harvey saw one little girl’s breakdown as another crusade for America. “Don’t anybody tell me that it isn’t proof we’re not going right to hell,”

Harvey said. “If they don’t grab guns and mow each other down, then it’s like this—kids driving each other to kill themselves. And adults are no better. It’s like—it’s like—why don’t you talk about the Feders and the Washburns? I’m sure seeing them as a daily example didn’t help Lily.”

“Oh, Harvey,” his wife said.

“For Pete’s sake—don’t act as if—”

I didn’t need to ask what Harvey meant, ridiculous as it was as a motive for a child to try to destroy herself. The Feders and the Washburns were our street’s Hatfields and McCoys. Nobody knew the origin of their feud, only that it never ended, and given that they lived on a narrow street of homes with common walls, and went to work in suits, the fighting took on subtle guises. Window-box plants wilted and died and the demise was blamed on the other 68

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side. Halloween pranks went out of bounds and involved spray paint on front doors. Windows broke. Phones rang in the night.

And one or the other side complained to whomever would listen. If either of those families was in the house right now, I was sure they were complaining to someone.

“Feder killed Washburn’s sapling,” Harvey said.

I shook my head. “Come on. Everything that happens is blamed on the other one. Hurricanes and heat spells. Stuff happens, that’s all.”

“Sure, but grudges like they’ve got—they never die. People are meaner than ever. It’s a fact!”

Things Harvey felt always became facts. If he said so, then the fact was, people were holding more grudges today than they did fifty years ago. I also knew what the next step in his reasoning would be. It was always the same.

“It’s the pollution,” he said right on cue. “It’s the stuff we’re poisoning ourselves with. Makes us crazy.”

“Romeo and Juliet’s families managed to keep a feud going in unpolluted air. And how about Cain and Abel?”

Harvey snorted disdain and waved my comments away. “You shoot industrial waste up into our—”

I looked at my watch, said, “Oops!” and backed away.

Harvey and Pris and eternal feuds had cured my nostalgia for neighborhoods lost. I made my way to Nancy, who knew I couldn’t stay long, and we made a date to get together soon. She was a good human being who’d built a career importing tribal artifacts and jewelry. It had involved lots of adventures and opportunities to be away from her mother. But on the domestic scene, she’d spent way too long with the wrong man—a married wrong man who, after fifteen years, was still promising to leave his wife any minute now.

It’s fairly awesome what stupid things smart women do about the opposite sex. What lies we listen to and tell ourselves. Nancy could drive a hard bargain with an Indonesian hill tribesman and she could argue price with someone in the markets of Morocco 69

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without knowing either one of their languages, but she never once understood Mr. Wrong’s lies. She had her part-time man, her full-time mother, and a few good trips a year. Maybe that made her more contented than she chose to let on.

As for me, I was feeling overblessed with lives and people. The day already seemed at least a week long, and I could barely remember its beginnings. But I had miles to go before I could rest. Still ahead: Beth and an evening of eating for a good cause.

It almost made me want to hang around Harvey a little longer.

70

Seven

IHEARDthe excited din while I was still in the elevator, and I admit to a frisson of terror before embarking, a reversion to a nearly forgotten childhood shyness. It didn’t feel easy facing a roomful of women I didn’t know, women with cash reserves and a sense of privilege I didn’t have. I immediately credited the un-seen crowd with a sophistication I in no way shared, and to make matters worse, that gloss suddenly became the only important quality a woman needed. It was a variation on the showing-up-naked-onstage nightmare. I had shown up unpolished.

I knew my all-purpose suit was grossly wrong, my shoes impossibly out of fashion, my haircut inferior. Not a one of these things 71

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had mattered to me twenty minutes ago when, in fact, I was feeling pretty fine, nor would they in a few hours or the rest of my life, but they did right now.

Maybe this was an aftereffect of hearing about Lily’s attempted suicide, because it was a very junior high sort of anxiety.

I took a deep breath and stepped out of the elevator.

The women were attractive, well-groomed, affluent looking, and animated. They were undoubtedly lovely people I’d like to have met one at a time, but wedging my way into a crowded party of strangers is not my favorite leisure-time activity. What conversa-tions I manage taste like Styrofoam bonbons—light, bland, and in-digestible. With all the generalized good-natured cocktail chatter and glitter of dress up, enormous parties seem more about maintaining the appearance of having a good time than actually having one. I often wonder about the faces on the society pages, the people who make merry nonstop, sometimes for a cause and sometimes simply to overcelebrate an opening, a birthday, a launching or just their own wealth—night after night with the same people.

Only the outfits change. Do they love one another that much?

Find one another endlessly fascinating?

Another of life’s mysteries I never expect to unravel. But it wasn’t a mystery why I was here. I’d escaped such events most of my life, but I hadn’t escaped family obligations or sisterly affec-tion. Along with two of her friends, my sister Beth had followed her bliss, turning her homemaking and entertaining organiza-tional and creative skills into a package called As Needed: Event Planning and Coordination for Individuals and Corporations.

The business had been slowly building, but tonight’s event was its biggest coup, not only because of the event itself, but, Beth had explained, because of the contacts it could provide.

None of that would have dragged me here. Nor would Beth’s assumption that these events were part of “growing up” and facing my future as a serious—i.e., married—woman. That attitude would normally get her nowhere except in trouble with me, but this 72