Shadow Season (9 page)

What else could she say except that it was normal, it was understandable, let’s return to that, let’s revisit that, let’s explore that, your time is up. Roz senses the truth. She understands. She knows he’s waiting and she’s decided to wait alongside him. She has her own mad fantasies, although she’s never shared them. She probably dreams of murder too, or at least great pain. Some of it is her own, some of it is Finn’s, some of it is reserved for others. He’s tried to cut her free but she never leaves. She’s afraid to go it on her own. She’s always needed to stick to a rough man. She’s as confused about love as everybody else. Lately, though, he’s noticed a change in her. She’s both drawing away and asserting herself. It’s a good thing, probably. He suspects she’s going to kick free soon. Maybe she’s found herself a new rough man. Maybe it’s because of this whole Violet situation, maybe it’s just the right thing to do. Five years stuck with a blind asshole is forever. He’s got a very small and petty reason to live, but it’s his and he holds to it selfishly. It’s not time for him to move yet, but when it is, he will spring and strike. His story has it all. Friendship, partnership, mob wars, deception, betrayal, and Finn just doesn’t feel much. Another man would look for answers. But Finn knows there is no answer. Standing beside him are his many ghosts, all his mistakes and lost loves, the dead and the nearly dead and the missing. Finn tilts his chin. The past is cloudy but he feels like he can almost see the future unfolding before him. In the darkness he’s aware and his hands are trembling so badly with the need to do something that they nearly hum. Your time is up.

WHATEVER DUCHESS IS COOKING, SHE’S GOING
heavy on the molasses and lemon. Finn moves to their table in the dining hall, which used to be a restaurant known as the Carriage House back in the hotel days. It stirs his imagination, thinking of late-nineteenth-century travelers stopping at the inn. Captains of industry up from the city heading into New England spending the night, talking politics of the day. It’s not difficult for him to hear coach wheels spinning loosely on bent axles. It’s the kind of thing that makes him drift.

He arcs his chin toward Roz. He’s about to ask where everybody is, but he doesn’t get a chance. She tells him, “Damn it, I forgot something. Back in a few minutes.”

“Forgot what?”

“Back at the store.”

“At the store? Which store?”

“The market.”

“You mean you’re going back to town?”

“Yes. Back in a jiff.”

A jiff? The fuck’s a jiff? “You can’t, it’s a whiteout, isn’t it?” Just walking over from his cottage has left them both breathing heavily.

“It’s not that bad, really, and this is important.”

“What is?”

“I need to get something, make sure of something.”

“Need what?” He moves to grasp her and she dodges him, always so fast on her feet. The girl always in the center of the action. He tries again and misses again. “Make sure of what?”

“Back soon!”

“Wait a second,” he calls. “Roz? Rose!” But she’s gone.

He thinks, This got something to do with the lack of Santas?

A jiff? She’s never said “jiff” in her whole damn life.

Before he can sit, Duchess touches him on the elbow. He knows her hand. She smells of ham and honey. There are subtler scents too. He coasts for a moment on the aroma of brown sugar and chocolate.

She’s got him by a couple of inches. Her voice comes down from above. She says, “Hold on, let me dry your hair before you catch your death from pneumonia,” and pulls out what must be a dish towel, hopefully a clean one. She begins to roughly rub his head with it. He thinks of Harley doing the same thing to him. His neck cracks twice while Duchess snaps him back and forth. “Don’t you think you ought to wear a hat if you go out in the middle of a blizzard?”

Again with the hat.

“I only have two and I don’t like them,” he says, which is true. They’re both wool caps with a poof ball on top. His old man used to wear a homburg on special occasions, dressed to the nines. Finn feels a slight tug of
nostalgia wishing you could get away with that sort of thing nowadays.

“Yeah, those I’ve seen on you were terrible. Made you look like a special child standing on a corner waiting for the short bus.”

“So why didn’t you tell me?”

“Figured you already knew and were just asserting yourself.”

“Who the hell asserts themselves with stupid-looking hats?”

She clucks. “Not for me to question how you empower your own self.”

“I wasn’t empowering myself with a wool hat.”

“No,” she says, “not with that poofy ball on top. Not that way. But you should’ve told me sooner. It’s Christmas, I would’ve bought you something different, something you’d like. You a fedora man?”

Finn thinks about it. “I don’t think so.”

“Nuh, I’m not sure I like ’em either. Not since Harlem, about ’73 or 4. Men knew how to wear a fedora back then. It was all in the tilt. So I’ll consider it some. You think I want to trudge all over creation, up to your office and out to your little house just to spoon-feed you chicken broth? Clean your dirty balled-up tissues? Carry you to the bathroom when you got the runs?”

“I can’t imagine you would, no,” he says, although she’s already done it for him three years running. He catches the flu. He hates hats. He likes broth.

“It’s fine for you and Roz, of course. I don’t mind ministrating to you two. But Judith, she’s another one trying to empower herself in stupid ways.”

“Say what now?”

“Oh, you heard me. You damn well heard me”

Even while her hands are on him, combing his wavy hair down with her fingers, he sees her stirring pots. He can’t get close enough to look inside and check what she’s cooking. He wants to see just what the hell would need so much goddamn stirring. He doesn’t know where the image of a black cook comes from, some old Technicolor film probably, or a commercial from the seventies, but it’s so ingrained that he can’t shake it.

Duchess takes his wrist and pulls him down to his chair. She sits beside him and says, “And instead she’s left hurt even worse than before, and sitting in a pool of her own tears. Or vomit. She’s taken to drinking Irish whiskey. You know how many times I’ve had to clean her up lately?”

Not the sort of thing they should be discussing out in the open, but she’s past the point of trying to mask her indignation. There’s a real bitterness there. Her rage speaks to his rage.

“Duchess—”

“Isn’t that my way?” she asks. “Don’t I always give my best?”

“You do.”

“You think I’m selfish because I have expectations?”

“No.”

“Everyone else does. And none of them, not one can say I left them freezing their fool heads off—”

“Hey now—”

“—or lying with their face half in the toilet, with their bloomers around their knees. Nobody can say that.”

“Nobody would want to either.”

“They sure as hell wouldn’t! That’s exactly what I’m talking about!”

A painful lament has wedged itself in her voice, a sound he’s never heard from her before. She’s right there in front of him, solid and unmoving, but he still sees her with a big ladle, running around from pan to pan.

The idea of Duchess, a cornerstone of the academy, unhappy here makes him worried in a way he hasn’t felt in a lot of years. He imagines her reaching out and shaking the pillars down around their heads.

“I heard about your granddaughter being turned down at St. Val’s,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

“They told her it was her grades.”

“And you don’t believe that’s the reason.”

“I think it’s simpler to keep a black teenage girl who has a baby from attending the academy, even if she deserves to get in, than it is for the admissions board to face up to the grief they’ll get from the rich white-bread snobs who think the stink of the streets will rub off on them. She’s an A student. So how can it be her grades?”

There are already eight black students at St. Val’s, eight Asians, and a pair of sisters from Mexico City who speak in richly textured accents that remind him of East Harlem. So Finn doesn’t think that racism is quite the dress of the day that Duchess is making it out to be. The country-club set might stick up their noses and pass white-bread snooty comments, but they do that everywhere, to everybody. And the blue-collar parents might bitch and piss a little if their property values are directly affected, but he doesn’t think they give a shit if their daughters sit side by side with a black girl.

He knows the game, senses it at work all the time,
it’s always there, but doesn’t feel it at St. Val’s any more than anywhere else.

“How’d she do on her entrance exams?”

Duchess lets loose a breath she’s been holding in for days. It warms his face. “She didn’t do too well on them, I admit. But she learned from her mistakes, studied extra hard, and was hoping to retake them. But she’ll have to wait until next year. Not next semester, but next year.”

“That’s standard, Duchess.”

“Maybe so, maybe not—”

“It is, trust me.”

“—and she’d be an asset to this academy. She’s got plenty to offer.”

“I believe you.”

“Her extracurricular activities list is three times as long as your pecker.”

“Hey now!”

“And none of this French club or cheerleading shit, like some of these girls. My baby was out there truly helping people. She’s assisted in homeless shelters, rehab clinics, worked with abused women and the mentally challenged. Crack babies. She’s made a difference in the world. That girl has a heart inside her that drives her to comfort others less fortunate. And she takes care of her own child all the while.”

“What’s her name?” he asks, seeing Duchess really slapping those big wooden spoons around now, banging enormous skillets and pans like drums, steam rising and kinking her hair even more. Her face drips with sweat. Her lips are contorted. She looks up and spots Finn
standing there watching her, and she glowers at him, vicious, unyielding.

“My granddaughter is Ruby. She’s sixteen. Her own baby is Gem, and she’ll be one at the end of January.”

It gets Finn smiling, but his smile doesn’t lift Duchess’s mood. He figures that she’s not only upset because Ruby was denied entrance to St. Val’s, but also because Duchess wants her own family close by. It gets lonely here. Duchess, like Judith, like all of them maybe, has reached a turning point.

“They’re in the Bronx?” he asks.

“With my daughter, Lady. Did I ever tell you how I wound up here?”

She’s given him two different versions, and they bear no resemblance to each other. He’s decided they’re both lies. Anyone worth a damn has secrets.

He says, “No.”

“Yes, I have. Two or three times, in fact. Isn’t that right?”

“My memory’s not what it used to be.”

“Like hell. I’m guessing it’s only gotten better. Anyway, you want to hear the truth? The real truth?”

“No,” Finn says, which is the truth.

It doesn’t stop her. She’s got a need to confess. It’s his own fault. He’s drawing the venom from her, like sucking at a snakebite.

He wonders, Where the fuck is everybody? What did Roz forget at the store that was so important? He puts out a hand because he wants to pat Duchess’s shoulder, make contact, calm her a touch if he can. Show some support. But she shifts aside so he can’t reach her,
the big spoons held up like knives, ready to thrust into his chest.

“It’s not much of a story. Judith’s son, he was in rehab a few years back, down in the Bronx Psychiatric Center, and I was cooking for those people. She liked the food and thought I’d make a fine addition to the school. There it is. Sounds so…so
coincidental
it would almost be funny, forgetting about all the drug addicts and how I used to hand out methadone like a side dish with most meals.”

“What the hell was her kid doing down in a Bronx psych hospital?”

“I’m supposed to know that? I don’t know that. You want to know that, you go ask her. Can I go on?”

“Sure.”

“Well, thank you. Now I’m here, a great-grandmother who’s nowhere near her babies. That hurts, that hurts in a way I just can’t explain, you understand?”

“Yes, I—”

“Stop interrupting. You don’t have kids so maybe you can’t see your way. My point being, I worked hard in my life, harder than most. Taking care of my parents, my man, my child, and each one of them giving up on life in their own ways. Every one of them trying to throw their lives down the sewer. But I held strong.”

She’s right. It’s not much of a story. A common drama, an average tragedy just like everyone’s. When you boiled it down to the highlights you realized that you were where you were because you took a left turn instead of a right. Because you ran a stop sign. Because you went back for your wallet. Your father didn’t come
home. Your mother burned the milk. You stayed over too long. Told the white lie. Fudged the report. Skimmed off the top. Read between the lines. Didn’t pay the ticket. Couldn’t take the shot.

“You should be proud,” he says. It’s bullshit, and he knows how trite it sounds even before the words are off his lips.

“I am proud, but I’m also angry because my baby girl Ruby has worked hard all her life, and I don’t want her to have to go my route. I don’t want her to have to run into someone on a mental hospital food line who takes a chance on her to get somewhere. She deserves to make it on her own.”