Lying with the Dead (16 page)

“I don’t know what to say.”

“You at a loss for words!”

“I need time to think.”

“At least say you forgive me.”

Having served since childhood as her sounding board and more often as her whipping boy, I’m now expected to grant absolution. I do so, yet ask, “Why are you telling me this now?”

“I don’t want to die with it on my conscience.”

“Haven’t you confessed it to a priest?”

“More than once. He told me it wasn’t fair for you not to know.”

“Fair?” I’m at a loss as to how the term applies in this case. Then it occurs to me that Candy may have known all along. Does this account for her bristliness at what she perceives as my princely advantages? Does she imagine that because of my lack of Mitchell blood, I started off on a pedestal and from that launching pad I winged upward to success?

“What are you thinking?” Mom asks.

“I’m thinking how awful it must have been for you to keep this secret for so many years.”

“Sometimes I worry Tom’s family will squirm out of the woodwork,” she says, “and hit you up for money or embarrass you.”

“I’m not that easy to embarrass.”

She dries her eyes on a cuff of her housecoat. “So you don’t hate me? If my mother did this to me, I’d kill her.”

I nudge her shoulder with mine. “I’d never tangle with you.”

“Who are you kidding? You’re a tough customer. Always have been. When you were little, you were so defiant, you wouldn’t even cry when I whipped you. Candy, she’d start bawling soon as she saw the stick. But you wouldn’t give me the satisfaction.”

“What did you do then?”

“What do you think I did? I beat you harder and harder until you gave in and wailed.”

“I rest my case. You’re the heavyweight champ.” Downstairs, there are three knocks at the door. The signal. The code. Candy and Maury are home. Mom presses a nicotine-stained fingertip to my lips. “Don’t mention a word about this. Neither of them knows. Go down and tell them I’m taking a nap.”

Candy

As Maury advanced through the system at Patuxent, he eventually lived on an open tier. “Open” meaning he had privileges and spent most of the day out of his cell, mixing with the prison population. The Sunday before Christmas, as a special treat, inmates of his status threw a party for their families. Instead of herding into those cramped stalls of bulletproof glass, we huddled in an echoey hallway on furniture that was bolted to the floor. There we snacked on food the cons had pitched in to buy, and washed it down with Kool-Aid. As I sipped mine from a paper cup, I was always reminded of those religious nuts who poisoned themselves in the jungle and I had to swallow quick to keep from gagging.

Recorded carols played over a loudspeaker, and some couples paired off and smooched, petted and felt each other up. Mom claimed to be scandalized. But they were the lucky ones. For the rest of us, it’d be hard to say who looked more sad-sack, the inmates stuck with unhappy wives and squabbling kids, or the ones that didn’t have families and stayed to themselves, glassy-eyed from the jailhouse hooch they secretly brewed.

Like a college boy giving a tour of his dorm, Maury showed us his cell. There, too, the furniture had been bolted to the floor, and the toilet was made of brushed aluminum and didn’t have a seat. It stood right next to the head of his bunk. How he had to have hated that!

From those Christmas parties I remember that Maury had a friend, an older guy, big and rawboned and not bad looking, with dishwater blond hair. Nobody visited him, and he hung out with us, shooting the breeze about how well Maury was doing in group therapy. He almost seemed like a caseworker, not a con.

That has to have been Cole. But when I ask Maury on the drive home, he doesn’t care to talk. Heaving his broad shoulders one last time, he quits crying and just sits there. I’m so upset, I feel like crying myself. The day has turned topsy-turvy, and as usual I don’t have a clue how to reach anybody in this family.

The moment Quinn opens the door at Mom’s, Maury makes a beeline for the kitchen. Pipes groan as he splashes water from the spigot over his reddened face. Quinn glances at me, baffled either by Maury’s behavior or by what Mom has told him.

“You okay?” I ask.

“Tip-top. Mom’s taking a nap. You and Maury have a good time?”

“He visited a friend at Patuxent. I stayed in the car.”

He arches his eyebrows, an expression that’s exaggerated by his high forehead. I can’t guess whether he’s surprised or sympathetic. Maybe he doesn’t know himself. Maury blunders out of the kitchen half-blinded by the paper towel he’s dabbing at his eyes.

“Shall we wait here until she wakes up?” I ask.

“She’s finished for the day.” Quinn collects his coat from the chair and drapes it over his shoulders like a shawl. “Let’s go to your house.”

I had hoped to spend the afternoon with Lawrence. But I appreciate that Quinn might need to discuss what Mom said. We set out in separate cars, and once again he leads in his big, blunt-nosed Chrysler.

The patio in back of my townhouse has been a mess since last summer. I spend so much time at Lawrence’s, I’ve neglected the place. Lawn chairs are stacked haphazardly, dead leaves clutter the grill, and a garden hose snakes across the fieldstones. In the shade beside the fence chunks of rust-colored ice lie scattered like iron filings at a pit mine. Quinn doesn’t need to see this. He’s had more than enough bad housekeeping at Mom’s. I shut the curtains.

“I’m tired,” Maury announces, and vanishes into the guest room and closes the door so that we barely hear him moaning.

Quinn wanders into the kitchen. I don’t know why there rather than the living room that I’ve tried to make cozy with throw pillows and crocheted blankets. He shrugs off his coat and flops on a chair at the Formica-topped table.

“Coffee?” I suggest.

“You’re positive you’re not hiding any alcohol?”

“Not unless you’re up for vanilla extract.”

“It may come to that. I’ll have coffee if it’s not too much trouble.”

“No trouble. It’s instant. I bet you drink latte or cappuccino.”

“I drink Irish whiskey.”

“You’re outta luck.”

I spoon up the Maxwell House, microwave the water, and fetch half-and-half from the fridge and sugar from the cupboard where I stash it away from the ants. The entire time, Quinn stares at the tabletop like it’s a mirror. I don’t know what he sees, but I see a man who’s had a lousy day.

Plunking the cup in front of him, I lower myself onto a chair and ease my leg out straight. He grins at some private joke. “‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad.’”

“You’ll hear no argument from me,” I say.

“‘They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had and add some extra, just for you.’”

From the rhyme, I gather he’s reciting a poem. Does he always have to depend on a script? His memory bank is chock-full of quotes, but they don’t tell me anything more personal than Maury’s strangled silences do.

“Say hello to your left-handed half-brother,” he wisecracks. “I assume you’re up to date on the revised family genealogy.”

“I have a pretty good hunch.”

“And it never dawned on you that I might have been grateful for a heads-up?”

“There’s only so much of Mom’s dirty work I’m willing to do. She begged me to call and blindside you with the news—like it wasn’t her responsibility and this was something I could deal with long distance. I told her to count me out.”

He samples the black instant coffee and grimaces. Spooning in sugar, he says, “So I had to fly all the way from London to learn I’m a bastard.”

“And to visit Mom and help me decide what to do with her.”

“At this moment, I don’t think you want to hear what I’d like to do with her.”

“I don’t blame you. I’d be mad too.”

“It might interest you to know that I’m under the court-mandated care of a shrink for anger issues.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I had some public outbursts this winter. Fights that made the newspapers.”

“That’s terrible, Quinn. I never thought you were the type. Has counseling helped?”

“Hard to say. The analyst is of the opinion that my rage is misplaced. But what am I supposed to do? Slug Mom?”

With no cream or sugar, my coffee tastes as bitter as bile. “You did shove her once.”

He shakes his head; he doesn’t recall.

“She was hitting me,” I prompt him. “Who knows why? You were a teenager. I must have been about thirty. She was slapping me in the face and you pushed her away and held her back. You were my hero.”

“What did she do then?”

“Kicked you in the shins.”

“What the hell’s wrong with her? She’d probably claim the poem has it ass-backward, and it’s kids that fuck up Mom and Dad.”

“Not that it helps, Quinn, but I was damned upset when she told me you had a different father. No daughter likes to learn that her mother has round heels. But honestly, you can’t blame her for wanting some love after all that Dad dragged her through. He could be a real bastard.”

“She told me that more often than not she’s the one that slapped him.”

“He didn’t have to hit her. He hurt her in other ways.”

Quinn doses his coffee with cream and more sugar, still hoping to make it bearable. “When she was winding up to throw me her beanball,” he says, “she warned me I’d hate her, I’d never forgive her. I told her not to worry; it wouldn’t change a thing. I didn’t admit what I already feel about her.”

“I’m not sure I want to hear it. No matter what, she’s our mother.”

“Yeah. O dear Mother Night.”

“Stop it, Quinn. I know you’re hurt. But this doesn’t help.”

“I can’t quit asking myself what else she’s lied about. You know her, the way she lets out bad news piecemeal. She never just makes a clean breast of things.”

“Now, you know she wouldn’t stand for any talk about breasts,” I try to joke him out of his mood. “She warned me to keep my legs crossed. ‘If you get pregnant, don’t bother coming home. I’m not raising any bastards for you.’”

“And here she was raising one of her own. Me!”

“When I asked about the facts of life, she acted like it was a mortal sin. I mean, asking was a sin. Doing it was out of the question. She advised me never to get completely naked in front of a man, not even my husband, because that ruins the romance. I suppose she thought I should wear a sock or a glove on my wedding night.”

“She’s like some bog-trotting nun,” Quinn exclaims. “All she ever told me about sex is you sort of roll around. If that’s how she and Dad did it, God knows how we were conceived.”

Now we’re both laughing. Like a lot of our conversations that lurch back and forth between kidding and almost crying, the point is in danger of being lost. After I’ve had another bitter sip of coffee I ask, “Seriously, Quinn, are you all right?”

“I don’t know. At first it didn’t sink in. Now I feel like I’ve had a collision with a chainsaw. Mom just keeps hacking away—cutting you off at the ankles and the knees until you don’t have a limb to stand on.”

“She promised me she’d tell you who your father is.”

“She did after a little coaxing. Said it was someone named Tom Trythall.”

“Never heard of him.”

“Maybe he worked with her at Safeway. The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker,” he mutters. “It could be anybody. And why should I believe she told me the right name? It’s a family tradition. She admits her mother lied about everything including her name.”

“Why would Mom lie about this? She could simply have kept it to herself.”

“Same reason she does everything,” he says. “Her never-ending need to run the show. Before she told me about Trythall, she suggested I check out the cedar chest. There were piles of photographs and birthday cards and baby teeth.”

“I know. We looked through them a few days ago.”

“Then you must have seen the folder with Maury’s confession and case records.”

“No. We stuck to the pictures.”

“Maybe she went back and slipped it in for me to read.”

“Well, she did mention that you’re doing your memoirs.”

“So she’s what? Lending me a hand with my research? Come on, Candy, level with me. What’s going on here? How long have you known Dad wasn’t my father?”

“Only since last week. But I always thought there was something different about you. You weren’t like other kids. You weren’t like Maury or me.” I take his manicured hand in mine. “You were smarter, better looking, more lovable.”

“All because of Tom Trythall, the missing link.” His eyes crinkle at the corners as they do on camera when his character grudgingly breaks into a fake grin.

As I totter to my feet and clear off the coffee cups, my leg throbs. “Will you do me a favor? I’d like to see Lawrence. Some weeks we’re so busy at the office, Sunday’s the one day we have to spend together. Would you mind keeping Maury company tonight while I go to his place?”

“You don’t trust Maury on his own?”

“It’s not that. I don’t want him to feel deserted. You could sleep in my bed. Or on the couch.”

“I’d rather take him out to a restaurant, then back to the Hilton. My room has two king-size beds. And there’s a minibar. You go to your happy place, I’ll go to mine.”

As I pass his chair, I lean down and kiss his cheek. “Thanks.”

On the road to Lawrence’s house, I drive faster than the speed limit, faster than my cautious nature normally allows. But after a day with Mom, Maury, and Quinn, I feel liberated and lighthearted. Although I didn’t own up to it with Quinn and have difficulty admitting it to myself, I feel strangely relieved that he and I didn’t have the same father. When he left home and became so successful, it was like a reproach. If he could do it, why couldn’t I? Now I think I’m not inferior. I’m simply from different stock.

When I first visited Lawrence’s farm, it stunned me that such properties still exist in the overbuilt corridor between Washington and Annapolis and Baltimore. I had never seen anything like it except in
My Weekly Messenger
. Required reading for every parochial-school kid in the fifties, the
Messenger
was a comic book of Bible stories and uplifting articles that carried an ongoing serial about a family that fell on hard times in the city and retreated to the country where life was cheerful. They renovated a broken-down farmhouse and raised chickens and a cow, and Mom and Dad and Buddy and Sis bonded through hard work and prayer. They grew vegetables, produced plenty of fresh milk and eggs, ate hearty meals, and said grace before and after each one. Gradually the worn-out father and frazzled mother regained their health and love, and the kids became happy again.

Because Mom lived in constant fear that our house would be repossessed and we’d wind up on the street, I prayed that we’d move to the country and farm our way to recovery. I kept the idea to myself, however. After she slapped me silly that time for drawing up a budget, I didn’t dare say a word about my secret dream.

Then miraculously, half a lifetime later, I met Lawrence and that dream came true. Crunching over the gravel road onto his land, I spot his house, a rambling white brick colonial on a rise above the river. Big trees grow out front, oaks and maples, bare in this season, and a barn shelters his Volvo and a sit-down lawnmower. The lights are on upstairs and down, and the brightness makes me feel warm and welcome. I’m home.

I let myself in, and Lawrence calls from the kitchen. “Is that you, honey? I’m fixing crab cakes.”

I hurry to him without taking off my coat. As in those dreams where I dance or run or swim with no thought of my bad leg, I’m graceful, flawless. Hugging him from behind, I kiss his neck and his ears.

“Whoa!” he says. “Careful or I’ll lose track of how much Old Bay I’ve added.” He’s stirring the crab meat in a bowl. “How many can you eat?”

“I’m starving.”

“I’ll cook us two apiece.” He lights the flame under a frying pan. “Now five minutes on each side and—”

“I can’t wait that long.” I’m nibbling his ears.

“You must have had a good day.”

“No, a hard one. Now what I want is a hard man.” I giggle at my own bawdiness.