Love Nest (22 page)

“You ain’t a kid anymore.”

“The fellow who developed this area had a little bit of taste, not much, but enough. Not like the guys doing it today.”

“You get all kinds.”

“You don’t live here, do you?”

“I visit.”

“Do I know you?”

“As much as I know you,” Roselli said.

The front door of Rita O’Dea’s house opened, and her great head of black hair could be seen. Her voice echoed down through the crisp blue air. “Who is it, Ralph?”

“The cop.”

“I thought so. Tell him to come up.”

“You hear her?”

“Hard not to.” Sergeant Dawson shoved his door open and thrust a leg out. “You know, I’ve always been more concerned about her than about Alfred Bauer.”

Roselli said, “You got good priorities.”

Inside the house, trailing Roselli, Dawson cast an admiring eye on an opulent variety of furniture and hanging ferns. The room he was ushered into was bright from a wall that was all window, through which the outdoors flowed in as if donated by the town. He avoided stepping on a white animal pelt. He did not want to get it dirty, though Roselli tracked over it without a trace. He heard a thump. Rita O’Dea had just dropped into a cushioned chair. She had on one of her more colorful caftans, beaded and braided. “We know each other, don’t we?” she said. “Just that we’ve never been introduced.”

“I’m Sergeant Dawson.”

“I’m Rita. How about I call you Sonny? Take his coat, Ralph.”

“I’ll keep it on.”

“You want coffee, pastry, or something? The pastry’s from the North End.”

“No thank you.”

Roselli said to her, “You want, I’ll stay. Otherwise I’ll go get snow tires put on your car.”

“I’m safe with Sonny. He’s an officer of the law.”

Roselli left. She gestured, and Dawson dropped into a chair near her, his coat open. He could see himself in the gigantic window, where he was part of the snowscape, a stain in the glass. She smiled.

“You here for a reason?”

“I was in the neighborhood.”

“That’s as good a reason as any,” she said. “I always meant to send you a thank-you note, but I never got around to it. I’m talking about Melody, time you could’ve busted her. ’Course if I was you, a man, I’d have given her a break too.”

“That was a mistake,” he said quietly.

“I wouldn’t brood about it. She was one of those girls too beautiful for the world. Actually, you look at me close, that was my problem. Difference is I put on weight. Protection. Now, all these years gone, it don’t matter.”

Dawson was silent.

She said, “A man can’t stand that, you know. A woman being too beautiful. Like an insult to him. Same thing if she’s got too much of a brain.”

He stayed silent.

She said, with a feast of feeling, “ ’Course I had extra protection. A brother. That’s better than a husband. Better than a knife. Did you know my brother?”

“I never had the pleasure. Naturally I heard of him.”

“You’d have liked him. He was a man’s man.”

Dawson again glanced at himself in the glare of the window. He made out a white cat picking its way carefully through the wet and gradually becoming one with the snow, a trick he decided only nature could perform so delicately.

“I feel we can talk, Sonny. Do you mind me calling you Sonny? I can call you Sergeant, you really want me to.”

“Sonny’s good.”

“I like to talk.”

“I like to listen,” he said.

“Sign of a smart man. I knew I was reading you right. I’m going to tell you something you might’ve had your doubts about. I wanted the Silver Bell run straight. Dumb of me to let Bauer do different.”

Dawson stared at her skeptically. “I don’t know you well, but I can’t picture you doing something you don’t want to do.”

She laughed, swishing back her mass of hair. “Maybe I’m a romantic. In the back of my mind I knew he didn’t want to put girls in there just for business reasons. He wanted an excuse to keep Melody near him. Pardon my language, Sonny, but he had a bigger hard-on for her than you did. Dangerous business if you’re married to a woman like Harriet. You know Harriet?”

Dawson gave a faint nod. “I’ve met her.”

“I was a kid, Sonny, my brother took me to operas. I didn’t want to go, he made me. He didn’t want me to be a dumbbell. He took me to a play once, Greek thing. Medea. You know who she was?”

Dawson gave no sign he knew or did not know.

“Harriet could play the part.” She shifted in her chair, sinking back, the white of her legs appearing through the slits of her caftan in smooth rich slices, like cake. “The only woman I’ve had to handle with kid gloves.”

Dawson felt a coldness, as if the outdoors were truly coming in. “What’s the message?”

“Time will tell.”

The coldness crept deep. “You lied to me. You weren’t being a romantic. You’ve got a brain like your brother’s. You make things happen.”

“Sometimes,” she said softly, “I just let things happen.”

“You want it all.”

“I always did. It’s how I got fat, Tony used to tell me.”

He shivered. “What I don’t understand is why you’ve told me these things.”

“Goes back to what I was telling you. I came here to live clean, quiet, be respectable. I’m joining the December Club. Mrs. Gately don’t know it yet, she’s sponsoring me. I got to make a note of that, remind myself to tell her.” She heaved out a smile while shifting again in her chair. Her legs were as white as milk. “You see, Sonny, sad to say, I belong in this town now more than you do. I got the bigger investment.”

“Terms of money only.”

“What else counts?” she said, and there was a long silence from him, an odd expression on his face. “You tired, Sonny? You angry about anything? You shouldn’t be. I’m a fair woman takes care of her friends. One of these days I’m going to need somebody new to look after me. Poor Ralph, you know, isn’t going to live forever.” She patted herself under the left breast. “Bad ticker.”

“Then he shouldn’t be shoveling.”

“Someone has to do it.”

“Who is he, or what is he?”

“He was my brother’s bodyguard.”

“Some bodyguard.”

“He had no choice. Sometimes you don’t.” Her face all of a sudden went hard, as if she kept a deep accounting of wrongs perpetrated against her. Then, matter-of-factly, she said, “Hit came from high above, like God did it.”

“You offering me a job?”

“No,” she said, “but it’s something for us to think about.”

“I don’t shovel.”

“Maybe you wouldn’t have to.”

He pulled himself to his feet, his legs tired where least expected, in the back of the calves, as if he had been running. His jaw felt heavy.

“I’m scared to death to get on jetliners. Maybe you could do that for me. Run errands. You carry a piece. I could use that too. Play your cards right, you could become invaluable.”

“I don’t like your humor, Mrs. O’Dea. I don’t much like you either.”

“I grow on people,” she said, watching him close his coat and move toward the glass wall as if he could step through it. “If you’re leaving, that’s the wrong way. Makes you look like you’re coming in.” Her smile, large and indulgent, swelled up at him in the glass. “Something I meant to ask you. Last August I guess it was, maybe September, Melody wanted to know if I’d teach her to cook. Said it was for you. Next time I saw her she said she didn’t want to learn anymore. How do you figure that?”

He turned from the window, lips peeled back as if to sing. “Who killed her?”

“Why you asking me?”

“Somebody must know.”

“That’s something even time might not tell you.”

H
er absence acted harshly on him. He missed her presence across the supper table while hating the brooding stillness of the house and the way each evening darkness fell upon it as if from the swing of an ax. He missed the way she had entered a room and brightened it, enlivened it, and sometimes he missed her as he did the Saturday suppers of his childhood, the mere notion of which could cause him to lust for a lavish plate of homemade kidney beans flavored in juices and salt pork, brown bread on the side. Yet, a week later when she phoned in an excited voice to tell of her job, he was cool, his manner not unlike that of a cynical parole officer. He said, “I didn’t realize you had office skills.”

“I don’t, Sonny, but I’m learning. Mrs. Foss, she’s the secretary, is training me. She’s a grump, doesn’t know what to make of me, but I’m winning her over. Yesterday we had lunch together at Lem’s. I looked for you.”

He felt a surge of jealousy. “Rollins is Bauer’s lawyer. Is that how you got the job?”

“I swear it isn’t. Mrs. Gately recommended me.”

“Same thing.”

“I thought you wanted me to get a job. A real one. This is real.”

“I didn’t mean in Andover.”

“Where, Sonny, the North Pole? Would that be far enough away from you?”

“It’s not that,” he said. “It’s just that you’re doing it wrong. All wrong.”

“Then tell me how to do it.”

“A clean break.”

“This is as clean as I can make it, Sonny.”

After he hung up, he went into the bathroom and shaved, though he had nowhere to go, nothing in mind. He considered phoning the neighbor Norma but decided against it, recalling her anger the last time he had seen her, the foulness hurled at him from the open window of her car. He thought of other women he had known, but they were married now or remarried, most no longer in town. He wiped the mirror clean with a towel. His hair looked dead, and he feared a comb would not rouse it. Under the shower, he washed it and for the first time in a long time wondered seriously and deeply about the number of years left to him on earth. Drying himself, he figured it did not matter as long as the number stayed shadowed. That way there would always seem time for everything.

The telephone rang. It was Melody again.

“It doesn’t make a difference what kind of job I have, does it? I mean, it wouldn’t change anything between us, would it?”

He wondered where she was calling from, for her voice seemed far away, interference on the line, now and then a pip.

“Sonny.”

“Yes, I’m listening.”

“If I hadn’t been a whore, would you have me?” Then she laughed. “But if I hadn’t been one, we wouldn’t have met. And I wouldn’t have liked that.”

He decided she was in Boston, for he heard occasional sounds in the background, roommates, the sudden rise of music.

“Sonny, have you read
Rain
?”

“What?”

“It’s a story in a book Sue lent me. Or maybe it was Nat. I forget who wrote it. I’m not good on authors’ names, are you?”

“No,” he said.

“It’s about us, Sonny, or it could be. I don’t want it to be.”

“I’ve never read it.”

“You should,” she said. “You definitely should, but you won’t. Would you like me to come see you?”

“It’s late,” he said, and the words felt alien on his mouth, as if a stranger had stuck them there.

“You’re right of course. You’re always right.”

He slept fitfully that night, waking in the middle of it with what he felt was a cold footprint on his heart. Early in the morning, not much after dawn, crows screeched as if they were clawing somebody to death. He crawled out of bed and stumbled to the window to make sure it was not so.

She called him again a couple of weeks later to tell him that the leaves were turning, that the trees around William Rollins’s house were scarlet and gold. One maple in particular, she said, looked like a firestorm. He said, “What are you doing at his house?”

“I have a key, Sonny.”

He went stone quiet, his mind as near a blank as he could make it.

“It’s not what you think,” she said quickly. “It’s like it was with us — except for that one time.” He wanted no details, but she went on. He could not stop her, her voice rising as if she were talking to somebody a little deaf. “He’s looking for a mother, Sonny, but I’m too young. So he says a sister will do.”

“Is that what you want?”

“You know it isn’t.”

“He sounds sick.”

“He isn’t. He’s a good man. He wears a nightshirt of soft cotton. Ticking. He looks so old-fashioned in it. For years he’s wondered about himself. I tell him it’s all for nothing. Needless, I mean. We all need people in different ways. Except for you, Sonny. At least that’s what you like people to believe.”

A week passed, and he did not hear from her. At the station he shut the door of his cubicle, rang up Attorney Rollins’s office, and asked for her. The secretary, Mrs. Foss, said that Miss Haines no longer worked there, which took him aback.

“Where is she?”

“I don’t know. Who is this?”

“A friend.”

“I can’t help you.”

“It’s important.”

“Would you like to speak with Attorney Rollins?”

He disconnected. That evening he drove by Rollins’s house several times, slowly, hesitating near the drive where a small light bit out some of the darkness. Her car was not there. Once, through a lit window, he glimpsed Rollins with a drink in hand. He considered calling the Boston number but did not.

One night he dreamed of her. Her eyes were two dark secrets in a perfectly pale face. She did not look like herself but like a girl he had had a crush on in eighth grade, Lucy somebody, her father a farmer when the town had farms.

Portions of Ballardvale Road flamed with sumac and fire bush. Leaves covered his garden, and he raked them up. Each night turned colder, the moon brighter. Then, when he had half-succeeded in forgetting her, she phoned. The hour was late, and he felt an enormous distance between them. “I just washed my hair,” she said.

“That’s why you called?”

“No, to see how you’re doing.”

“You left your job,” he said.

“Some time ago.”

“Why?”

“Wasn’t for me.”

His spirits flared and his face brightened from hearing her voice. He visualized the luster of her washed hair. He tried to sound offhand. “So what are you doing now?”

“You could say I’m counseling.”

“What does that mean?”

“Exactly?”

“Exactly.”

“I’m being good to Alfred’s son.”

He stiffened in the instant. “You’re always being good to somebody.”

“It’s not like you think.”

“It never is,” he said, enduring a stomach spasm. “I already know too much about the kid, so don’t tell me any more.” But he knew she would, at her own pace, as if it were his duty to listen, his obligation to understand. Once he tried to interrupt her, but she kept on, her voice touching him in the vitals, on the raw. Finally she finished, and he felt a languor come over him. “They’re using you,” he said.

“Harriet, not Alfred. But that’s OK.”

“Doesn’t it make you feel dirty?”

“Were we dirty, Sonny?” A pain broke loose inside him and roamed at will. She said, “Love and kindness can’t be dirty, can they?” He had no answer, for it was the wrong question.

He said, “Are you back in the business?”

“No.”

“It sounds like it.”

“I can’t help how it sounds.”

He thought back to when he was a child sitting with his parents in a pew in Christ Church, no complications, seldom a shadow, all the faces of the congregation plump and simple, rosy and pure. Or so it had seemed.

“Sonny, I’ve come to a decision. I think you’ll be proud of me.”

“What is it?”

“I won’t bother you again. I promise.”

• • •

She returned to William Rollins’s house to retrieve some things she had left behind. She tossed an unused flask of hand lotion and a half-read paperback mystery into her denim shoulder bag. Rollins accompanied her into the guest room and pushed open the accordion doors of the closet where he had hung her rain slicker among his mother’s dresses, which his eyes caressed. Here and there he rattled the wooden hangers as if to stir life into the finer garments. “I wish you’d look through them, there might be something you want.” He seemed all at once too large for his voice. The words trickled out of him. “She was your size, you know. Exactly.”

She did not bother to point out his memory lapse. One evening a few weeks ago, at his urging, she had tried on two of the dresses, each too full in the bosom and too high in the waist. He, however, had slipped easily into one of his father’s suits, a near-perfect fit, four pennies in one of the pockets, along with a single ticket stub from an Andover movie theater that no longer existed.

He said, “She was like you with your rich skin. She never had to put paint on her face or tint on her eyelids. A little lipstick was plenty. She never used perfume, only plain soap and water, and whatever man she was meeting would know she was going to smell good all over. My father said she had the gift of eternal youth, and whenever she had a bad day he joked that the gods were jealously taking revenge. He never questioned her, even when he had indisputable cause. There wasn’t a bone in her body he couldn’t have broken if he’d put his mind to it. Instead, he worshiped her.”

He stopped talking to rest his fingers against a throbbing throat muscle, and she used the time to extricate the slicker from its hanger and drape it over her arm.

“I’m running off at the mouth, aren’t I?” he said. His face was flushed. “It’s the first time I’ve felt embarrassed with you.”

“You needn’t be.”

“I know that,” he said. “I’ve always known it.”

He walked with her down the stairs and opened the front door and followed her out. She lowered her head as her hair flew back heavily in the wind. The Mondale sticker on her little car reflected its colors on her hair.

Rollins said, “He won’t win, you know. He doesn’t have a chance. Most people are like me and the sergeant. We’ll all vote for the other fellow.” His eyes were abstracted, as if there were little correspondence between what he was saying and what he was thinking. “Fantasies, you see, are what we live on, the sergeant no less than I. And Alfred Bauer more than most.”

She opened the car door and tossed the slicker inside. When she turned back to him, he smiled slightly, his Adam’s apple shifting over the loosened knot of his necktie.

“You must be careful. So much of my mother is in you.”

“Is that bad?”

“Yes,” he said. “You’re a fantasy people can touch.” His smile turned mordant, unforgiving. “I’ve often wondered about that accident. Whether my father could have avoided the truck.”

She set herself to leave, a hip leaning into the car. He reached out quickly, snared one of her hands, and gripped the fingers as if to crush them.

“You’re free to come back anytime, any hour.”

“I probably won’t.”

“I know,” he said and frowned. “What will you do?”

“What I always do,” she said, and withdrew her hand the instant he began to hurt it.