Stone 588 (9 page)

The Aunt Libby problem was not on Springer's mind now, as Audrey, at the wheel of the BMW, turned off at exit 3 of the Major Deegan to take the Cross County Parkway. Springer was lost in one of his favorite pastimes: stealing from Audrey. This day she was wearing the palest of blues. Her oversize linen blouse was deep at the neck and gave a side view of the beginning of a breast. Her wrap skirt parted high in front, offering the inside of a thigh.

Audrey glanced and caught him at it.

"You're spiffy." He smiled and concentrated some on her hair. There was a lot of red in her hair, especially in certain lights, as though she'd sprinkled shining cinnamon all through it. That went beautifully with her skin, creamy and fine-textured, which was advantageous for her eyes, their irises as green-bright as underwater moss contained within hoops of black. There was an elegant quality to her face. Her nose was so straight and nicely narrow it was suspect, her chin well-defined but not aggressive. Her upper lip was fuller, giving her mouth constant expression, innocence on the verge of seduction.

A painstaking woman, was the impression of her most frequently assumed. Especially by other women. Surely she was given to vanities, centered a major portion of each day on herself. How otherwise could the complexion of her neck and face be so flawless, she remain so slender, appear so well-dressed?

Actually, Audrey was one of those rare fortunates who could look superb without much effort. A beauty ritual such as a facial masque was for female play, not something to be taken seriously. Usually she wore only minimal makeup, an outline here, an exact smudge of shading there, a few strategic powdery fluffs with a fat brush. Her slenderness was natural and, at least for the time being, perpetual. If she gained a little it didn't show. She never bothered to get on a scale. Because she was slim and tall, clothes looked well on her, and, although she kept one eye on the latest fashions, she didn't kowtow to their extremes. She took hints but there was no need to tell her what to wear, not when she could throw on almost any old thing and be smashing to some degree. Her sense of style seldom failed her. It amazed Springer, whenever on the spur of the moment he suggested going out, how quickly she got ready. Often she had to wait for him.

Her hand moved with the steering wheel. The ring on her second finger caught sun. It was a cabochon sapphire of ten carats set in plain yellow gold. Not the finest quality sapphire, but a Ceylon chosen by her for the very reason that it was worth less: its washy blue color. The flare it threw diverted Springer from the knob of her ankle. He looked out and realized they were now on the Hutchinson River Parkway with all its swoops and swerves. He leaned across and kissed Audrey on the neck and simultaneously got a look at the speedometer. It indicated twenty over the posted limit. Not to worry, he told himself, Audrey was intuitive when it came to lurking police cars. She also had Aunt Libby for a fix.

Audrey turned down the volume on a Bruce Springsteen and asked, "Do you ever get existential anxiety?"

"Such as?" he stalled, trying to decipher it.

"When you're bored."

"I don't get bored."

"Never?"

"Not any more."

She didn't accept that. "Practically everyone at one time or another feels he's not enjoying life and it's not life's fault."

She could be testing, he thought. He'd be vague. "I suppose."

"Then you've had the feeling?"

"Have you?"

"No fair answering a question with a question. Know what Nietzsche said?"

"Which Nietzsche?"

"He said. Even the gods get bored and can't do anything about it."

"Nietzsche and God were talking over a couple of beers and God complained that he didn't know what to do with himself."

"I'm serious and you're being a smart-ass."

Springer looked out and saw they were passing by the Maple Moor Country Club, a section of it that was occupied annually by a large flock of wild geese. Four stylish golfers were pulling their bag carts along the fairway, stepping with care among the goose droppings.

"Well?" Audrey prompted.

What was she getting at? Why was boredom on her mind? Maybe she was coming in obliquely. "Are you trying to say we're getting predictable?" For his comfort she took too long to reply.

"I think I've enough curiosity about you to last a lifetime."

That was how he liked to hear her talk.

"Besides," she went on, "you've got boredom all wrong. Boredom's not bad. It's a healthy nudge in the direction of a move ... a more highly charged life."

"So let's have a little boredom, is that it?"

"I think maybe the only thing we lack is some danger."

"Living is dangerous."

"I mean danger in the ordinary sense."

"Give me a for-instance."

She considered a few things such as sky diving and cliff climbing but they were too commonplace. "It just seems living would be appreciated more if some risk of survival were de rigueur. "

Springer decided it was only driving talk. Going along with it, he went tough. "Have you ever put it all on the line?"

"No," she was sorry to admit.

"Want to?"

"Yeah."

"Okay. How about botulism? This weekend we'll have some peaches my mother canned three years ago."

Up went Audrey's chin. Her lips tightened. "I just stopped loving you," she announced.

Springer didn't react.

After a few miles she turned to him with a smile and told him, "I'm loving you again." It was her contention that love was full of such stops and starts, might as well admit it.

"I'm hungry," Springer said.

"Eats are in the back."

"All I had for breakfast was a bagel." Springer reached to the rear seat for a brown-paper shopping bag. He placed the bag on his lap and from it brought out a couple of devil's-food Twinkies. He tossed those back in and rummaged around in the bag among some Goldenberg Peanut Chews, a cylinder of Pringle's potato chips, Goobers, Good & Plentys, a box of Sweet 'n Swinging donuts, a tangle of strawberry red laces, a Bloomingdale's bag containing a dozen Mrs. Fields macadamia and butter-sweet chocolate chip cookies, and so on. He should have known. For her a feast of quick food was no less enjoyable than eight courses at Lutece. After a junk-food binge she would sometimes expiate by putting herself through what she called a cleanse, which meant eating nothing but watermelon, for example, for two or three days.

"Christ, Audrey, I need something solid . . ."

"Give me a Devil Dog, will you?"

"There aren't any Devil Dogs." Springer was rankled. His blood sugar was low and his stomach was crabbing.

"I know for certain I bought some Devil Dogs."

Springer dug roughly in the bag and found what she wanted. He used his teeth to tear the comer of its cellophane wrapper, peeled the wrapper away, and handed to her the piece of chemically loaded devil's-food-like cake. She went right at it.

"I need something I can get my teeth into," he grumbled.

"Have a Big Jerk," she suggested.

He refused silently. Tossed the shopping bag of stuff into the back. However, five miles later he was tugging with his teeth at a tough pepperoni stick and wishing he could assuage himself with the promise of a marvelous home-cooked meal at their destination. His mother, however, was a dreadful and unimaginative cook. About her best effort was instant cocoa.

The BMW went ten miles farther up major highway 684. There it turned off at exit 6 and got onto lesser Route 35 for a little more of New York before it crossed over into Connecticut and the town of Ridgefield. In a hilly estate area, set back on a winding road between Ridgefield and Wilton, was High Meadow Clinic. Audrey got a small squeal from the tires as she turned in at the entranceway and proceeded up the crunching drive.

Janet Springer was seated on the front steps of the once-private mansion. She'd been waiting, watching for the car, and she stood quickly when it came into view. She'd taken care with her appearance for the occasion, had on a neat tailored suit of beige wool and appropriate high-heeled pumps. Gathers of a small French-blue silk square peeked from the breast pocket. Her hair was clean and held back from her face by a perfectly placed banette. She was also wearing an excited smile.

She kissed and held first Springer, then Audrey. Springer went into the clinic and signed her out. He loaded her three pieces of luggage into the trunk of the car. "Are these all?" he asked.

"For now," Janet said. "We'll be sending for the rest."

She sounded so positive about that. Springer thought. She'd said in her letters and telephone calls to him that she'd undergone a change for the better but she hadn't elaborated, and he took that to mean she herself didn't altogether trust it. Apparently she was more sanguine about it now. As the car went down the drive she didn't even look back at High Meadow, and during the forty-five-minute trip to Sherman she was excited only to a normal extent over the prospect of going home. She gazed out appreciatively at the passing countryside and made easy contributions to the conversation. She wasn't asked and she didn't volunteer what had brought about her transformation.

Springer could not recall ever having seen his sister when she wasn't either too far up or down or in the erratic shift between. It was one of his old hopes that she would somehow come out of it, and, of course, he loved seeing her this way. But he wasn't convinced. During the ride home he put his arm over the back of the seat and she put her hand in his hand, clasped it instead of squeezing it desperately.

Home was on a bend of Connecticut's Route 37 where the countryside opened above the Housatonic Valley. The dirt drive from the road to the house was potholed from the winter and spring storms. Maples mingled their branches to form arbors over it. The place had been a working farm before Willard Springer had bought it in 1930. There were still remnants of those farming days around, but now all that was grown was in a twenty-row vegetable garden out near the principal barn.

The heart of the house was two hundred and fifty years old. It was originally a modest saltbox with small low-ceilinged rooms arranged around a center chimney. Over the generations and various owners, it had been added on to in almost every direction so it was now large and somewhat of a hodgepodge. The land of the place was fifty acres, some of it woods but most of it inclined fields and meadows that a dairy farmer neighbor mowed twice a year for hay so they always looked either lush or tended.

Matilda Springer came around from the side of the house to greet them. Janet stood beside the car and presented herself to her mother. Mattie, which was what she preferred being called, gave Janet a welcoming hug, then held her at arm's length. She looked steadily into Janet's eyes for a long moment, one eye at a time, apparently examining them. She seemed relieved by what she saw. She hugged Janet again, acceptingly this time, and told her, "So many people have been sending you their healing light."

Janet nodded compliantly.

Mattie welcomed Springer and Audrey with an exchange of kisses and led the way into the house. "You'll have to overlook the mess," she said, offering no excuse for it. That was something Mattie always said, although the house was always clean, just somewhat scattered and patinaed from being thoroughly lived in. Mattie had the taste but not the time or inclination for any homes-and-gardens projects. Abandoned bird's nests that she'd found blown from trees were placed inside on many of the windowsills. Some contained stream pebbles smooth as eggs. A huge carved and gilded Buddha sat presidingly on the piano.

Springer carried Janet's luggage upstairs to her room. Then he and Audrey got settled in. Their space was as remote as possible from the house proper, a rectangular-shaped shed with a cement floor that had a shallow gutter along one side of its length. Except for the gutter and a couple of galvanized steel pipes that extended just above head height from beam to beam, there was no evidence that it had at one time been a slaughtering shed. A full bath had been built on. There were stretched and gathered curtains on the windows, a woven grass rug on the floor, and a white mattress spread on the bed. The walls wore watercolors and racks and shelves for fishing rods and tackle. A pair of French doors opened to the shoulder of a wide sloping field.

After changing into jeans and a shirt, Audrey went to be with Mattie. It always seemed to Springer that Audrey wasn't quite his Audrey when she and Mattie got together. He sensed a league of sorts between them that he would never be asked to join. No doubt gender had something to do with it, but also there was the tie of the way they regarded the meanings of life and the impermanence of death. To their way of thinking nothing was impossible, the laws of physics were often easily mutable, pre-existence and reincarnation were fundamental, and anything could be unequivocally decided with the use of a pendulum. Numerous times Springer had sat and withheld comment while in complete accord they discussed something such as bilocation, the appearance of a person in more than one place at the same time. Springer reasoned that if he tried to make one logical point he would be held in at least temporary contempt. So he just left them at it. No harm to him. Besides, when it came to spiritual concepts he had no strong personal beliefs. Who knew what the hell was really what?

For a couple of hours he wandered around the farm, finding memories. Then he drove the five miles down to New Milford and had a steak and fries at a cafe on Bank Street. It was dark when he returned home. He expected Audrey and Mattie would be well into a metaphysical tete-a-tete, but he found Audrey in the boucherie, as they called it. She was fresh out of a bath and had on a silk-charmeuse floor-length kimona. She gave him a brief but communicating kiss. He headed for the shower.

She leaned against the bathroom doorway and said, "At the clinic they gave Janet every kind of test."

"How do you know?"

"Janet told us. She had Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventories, thematic apperceptions, Szondies, Rorschachs, EEGs by the dozens. The works."