Life Penalty (6 page)

Gail never told anyone at school about these home productions, embarrassed the way children often are by what they consider their parents’ peculiarities. She wanted
only to be regarded as normal by the other kids, whose parents never answered questions about homework by bursting into song. Carol, on the other hand, reveled in the family theatrics, won the lead roles in all the school musicals, and went on to become a professional actress, struggling for the past decade to make a name for herself on Broadway.

It wasn’t until Gail was almost out of grade school that she realized her father was not the opera singer she had always assumed he was (and had listed as such on all school forms under father’s occupation) but was, in fact, a wholesale furrier. This news came as something of a shock to her, and for a while caused her to think twice before answering any questions at all, even on subjects of which she was very sure. A naturally intense, somewhat anxious child, Gail became increasingly shy as she grew older, possibly a reaction to all the extroverts at home, but more likely because it was simply in her nature to be quiet.

Carol was her opposite. Outgoing where Gail was introspective, mischievous where Gail was cautious, argumentative where Gail was diffident, Carol was like a little tank that rolled over anything and anybody who stood in her path. She did it in the sweetest of ways, however, and nobody seemed to mind, especially Gail, who admired and adored her younger sister. The admiration was mutual, and despite the fact that Carol was almost four years younger, it was Carol who was protective of Gail, and not the other way around. Carol watched out for her and made sure that Gail was not lost amid all the hoopla and noise generated by the rest of the family.

Aside from singing, Dave Harrington was a prolific painter and part-time mad inventor. The recreation room of their home was covered with his exotic, expressionistic works of art. Gail was too embarrassed to bring any of her friends down to this room lest they be frightened away by
the barrage of green and purple faces that would greet them. On one occasion, when Gail had been asked to take the furnace man downstairs to check the oil, he had stumbled across a large bright pink and orange painting of a nude woman, standing with her back to the viewer, her ample buttocks overhanging a large bucket of water in which rested her right foot. The furnace man had looked from the bright pink body of the nude woman to the brighter pink face of the teenager beside him, and asked with a leer, “Is that you?” Later, Gail’s mother confessed that she had posed for the painting. She had also posed, she confided, for another nude which depicted a red-haired woman (Gail’s mother was a strawberry blonde), her pendulous bosom fully exposed, reclining against a bright green background, a small purple dog positioned discreetly in the area of her hips, one of its large floppy ears pointing toward the sky.

The paintings, however, paled in comparison to Dave Harrington’s inventions. Among his many ideas were a chastity belt for dogs, umbrellas that could somehow attach themselves to hats, leaving one’s hands free for parcels, and sunglasses with built-in eyelashes. He swore everyone in the house to secrecy with regard to his inventions, but Gail would have rather died than divulge any of these secrets to her friends, who all seemed to have perfectly normal fathers.

It wasn’t until Gail was divorced from Mark Gallagher and forced to leave her own small daughter, Jennifer, with her parents to go off to work as a teller in a nearby bank, that she realized how truly special her mother and father were. By that time, of course, that phase of her life was over. It had begun with a simple introduction.

“I’m Mark Gallagher,” he had announced confidently, a man who obviously knew who he was, and Gail had
looked up from the book she had been studying to see the handsome, if somewhat morose-looking student of art at Boston University, studying her just as intently.

“I know,” she said shyly, her instincts telling her to get up and run, her curiosity dictating that she stay.

“You know?” He sat down on the bench beside her.

It was a beautiful October day, the trees surrounding them with brilliant shades of red and orange. “Just what do you know?” She said nothing. “How old are you?” he asked. “You can’t be very old.”

“I’m nineteen,” she replied, somewhat defensively. “What’s your name?”

“Gail. Gail Harrington.” She struggled with herself to look directly into his eyes, lost, and focused her gaze on her lap instead.

“What are you so afraid of, Gail?” he asked, his eyes mocking her. “You’re not afraid of me, are you?”

“No,” Gail answered, terrified.

“Do you want to come up and see my etchings?’ he asked, and promptly burst out laughing.

“I see enough etchings at home, thank you,” she replied, resolutely serious.

“Oh?”

“My father’s a painter,” she said, and then looked back at her lap, wondering why she had told him that. She had never told anyone that before.

“Has he ever painted you?” Gail shook her head. “I’d like to paint you.”

“Why?”

“Because you have a very attractive quality about you, a stillness you surround yourself with that I’d like to try to capture on canvas.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“Because …”

“Because what?”

“Why do you want to paint
me
?”

“I already told you. A more interesting question is why you don’t want to let me?”

“I don’t know you.”

“And you don’t like what you don’t know?”

“I just don’t think I’m your type, that’s all.”

“Who said anything about type? I don’t want to make love to you. I just want to paint you.” He paused to let this last line take effect. “For such a shy kid, you’re pretty conceited.”

Gail shook her head, embarrassed now more than ever, wishing he would go away, terrified he might. “All right,” she said finally, when it became obvious that he would say no more. “All right,” she repeated, nodding her head up and down. “All right.”

Mark Gallagher had overwhelmed and frightened Gail. She felt the danger of the man even as she walked along the street beside him. He radiated a certain static that manifested itself most clearly in his paintings, wild moving swirls of violent color. Unlike her father’s art, which was primitive, almost childlike, but innately well balanced, there was no discipline to Mark’s work, no structure, no limits. One color ran into another. The combination of hues was no less disturbing, even alarming, setting one color into conflict with its nearest neighbor, almost deliberately undermining what with a little more thought could have been a much more satisfying painting. But Mark Gallagher was not a man given to a great deal of thought, and he was interested in satisfying only himself. His portrait of Gail was strange and otherworldly, frightening in its lack of definite boundaries, her skin spilling out into the background of the wall behind her.

When Mark was called up before the draft board—and he threatened vociferously to flee to Canada if he were
drafted—he was turned down on the grounds that he was hopelessly,
dangerously
color-blind. For Mark the knowledge that he was not producing for others the vision his mind was creating, and that his erratic genius was the result of a physical handicap and not a product of any wayward artistic spirit, caused him to abandon painting. He turned instead to photography. Portraits and landscapes. Black and white only.

Very early in the marriage Mark took to spending more time than he should with several of his subjects, and after half a decade of grand gestures and casual infidelities (he bought her a baby grand piano with the money he had made from a number of the subjects with whom he was carrying on affairs), Gail called it quits. She had never confronted him with any of his indiscretions; it would have been too painful. Instead, she busied herself with taking care of Jennifer and with her piano playing. When she moved out, she took only those two things, and for a long while, her life was shared only by her baby and her baby grand.

Mark supported his daughter whenever he could, but his earning power had always been erratic at best, and he tended to spend money as soon as he got it, if not before. Gail’s feeling when she abandoned the marriage was one of relief, not regret. And while the first few years following their divorce had been fraught with the customary tension common to former spouses, the years soon brought a certain calm and mutual affection. By the time Gail married Jack Walton, she and Mark could legitimately refer to each other as friends.

Her first encounter with Jack had been completely different.

“There’s a man here with a problem.”

Gail had looked up from her desk at the nervous teller who stood before her. “What is it?”

“We bounced one of his checks for insufficient funds and he claims he had more than enough money in his account to cover it.”

Gail, who had recently been promoted to the role of supervisor, took the passbook from the teller’s hand and studied it. “He seems to be right,” she said, glancing at the somewhat gruff-looking man waiting patiently on the other side of the counter. “I’ll talk to him,” she said, approaching him with a smile, unaccountably nervous, liking him even before they were introduced, though she was unable to pinpoint why.

Jack Walton was shorter and stockier than Mark had been, but bigger somehow, occupying more space. He reminded her of a Viking, she thought, despite the fact that his hair was brown as opposed to blond, and he had no beard. He just looked … capable, she decided, as if there was nothing he couldn’t handle.

“What kind of medicine do you practice, Dr. Walton?” she asked him after the error had been straightened out.

“I’m a veterinarian,” he smiled. “Do you have any sick cats that need taking care of?”

It was Gail’s turn to smile. “I’ll get one,” she said.

A year and a half later they were married, and Gail had never, for an instant, regretted her decision. Just as she had known from the first minute she laid eyes on Mark Gallagher that he was wrong for her, she knew Jack Walton was right. Despite the roughness of his features, the surprise with which they seemed to come together on his face, he had gentle blue eyes and a smile that sent creases to his forehead.

Gail startled all her friends by immediately abandoning her job and staying at home to be a full-time mother to Jennifer, who, like herself, had always been a nervous, intense little girl. She seemed to blossom under Gail’s patient, quiet supervision, and, as with her second marriage,
Gail had never for a moment doubted that her decision to stay at home was the right one. Jack made every effort to befriend the initially recalcitrant girl, and eventually his persistence paid off. They became the best of friends, a factor which helped when, a little more than a year later, Gail found herself pregnant with Cindy.

Everything about Cindy, from the moment of her birth, was different than it had been with Jennifer in much the same way that Gail had been different from her own sister. While Jennifer’s birth had come after twenty-eight hours of painful labor, with Mark out somewhere getting drunk in a nearby bar, Cindy’s delivery, assisted by Jack, had been relatively easy, and the infant proved to be one of those babies who did everything right at just the right time, making things that much easier for Gail and that much more difficult for Jennifer, who took an instant dislike to the new arrival. Still, with almost ten years separating the two girls, the problems were not what they could have been, and Gail had always been grateful. Every year became easier, passing more quickly than the last, it seemed, as times changed and people moved on to other places and other lives.

Her parents eventually gave up on the cold New Jersey winters and, aided by her father’s retirement, moved down south, where they had occupied the same Palm Beach condominium for the last four years. Her mother constantly rearranged the furniture (Gail was never sure where anything was liable to be from one visit to the next) and contented herself with long walks on the beach. Her father, who still liked to sing and paint—although he had grown disillusioned with the world of inventions—was considered something of an eccentric by the other more conservative residents in the building. He had discovered the bliss of the Sony Walkman and
now tuned most of them out with one switch of a button, wearing his radio like a hearing aid whenever he decided to lie out by the pool. At first, his loud singing along with the music disturbed some of the other sun worshipers, but those who didn’t enjoy Dave Harrington’s impromptu concerts soon learned to sit at the other end of the pool; those who did, and their numbers increased over the years, formed their own little coterie around his chair. His groupies, Lila Harrington would laugh, referring to the mostly wealthy widows who were her husband’s most adoring fans.

Carol had settled in New York after obtaining a degree in theater arts at Columbia, and had achieved a modicum of success in the theatrical worlds on and off Broadway. Her name often appeared on the backs of original cast albums if rarely out front on the theater marquee. She had never married, moving from one man to another at fairly regular two-year intervals.

Even Mark Gallagher had developed into a different man in the years since his marriage to Julie-steady, successful, monogamous. Or so Gail had thought until Lieutenant Cole had called to tell her that her ex-husband had been eliminated as a suspect, that he had furnished the police with the name and address of a woman with whom he claimed to have spent the better part of the missing hour between his two appointments, and that this woman had verified his alibi. Gail wondered if Julie knew about the woman, and felt a keen sense of disappointment as she remembered the old hurts from her previous marriage.

Gail had watched the passage of time and the changes the years had brought with a calm, even detached amusement. She had seen friends switch partners and ideals, exchange one cause for another, and complain bitterly about children who were exact duplicates of themselves.

Somehow, despite the daily atrocities she read about in the newspapers, she had grown up with the idea that people living in the free world got as good as they gave, that ultimately one ended up with exactly what one deserved.