Venom and the River (15 page)

“Right where you told me to put it. And don’t worry about spending time on Ida May and your grandfather. I’ve heard all I can bear to hear on the subject. I’m here early because I couldn’t get any work done in the cottage. I thought if I sat where my boss could see me it would go better. I’m sorry to barge in on you. Geneva said it was okay to come in.”

He flipped a hand. “Doesn’t matter. Just finishing up another round of sad phone calls. You think you get used to the bad news from friends, but no. Who are your closest friends, Leigh? Hometown? College? Work?”

“Work, I suppose. Other writers. Though…” Though along with the house, career, and Emily, Chase had also by default been awarded the friends they’d acquired in the business, every single one taking Chase’s lead and backing far away from her after the scandal. “I’ve been pretty unrooted for a while. Makes it hard to keep up with people.”

“Sorry to hear that.” He gestured toward the chair opposite his. “Hell, let’s not think about sad things. I’m glad you’re here, but don’t count on getting much done because I feel like talking. Helps clear out the blue thoughts. Heard from Sonny about the car?”

“Had a message yesterday; they’re waiting on one more part.”

“Use mine, anytime.”

“You’ve offered before, Terry,” Leigh said. “It’s very generous but it’s not necessary because I can pretty much walk everywhere in town.”

He nodded. “And Geneva gets your groceries while you stay with Tucker. She told me. That’s a nice break for her. It’s not easy being so young and a single mother in a strange town. Shut up with me, to boot. Not so fun for you to be shut up, either, but I’m glad because you’re making good progress on the book.”

“I’m not entirely cloistered, Terry. Last night I was even asked out on a date. A very casual date, but still. First one in years.”

Oh, it was too easy to catch his interest, the old gossip. It was almost cruel to go any further. “Phil Chesney.” Leigh opened her backpack and pulled out the laptop. She flipped the lid, turned it on, and only when it had whirred and flashed an opening screen did she glance at him again.

He stared out the window, hands air-tracing the oak tree. “Nice man, Phil. Not much ambition, of course. He could be a professor at one of the top universities, but he stays here with the DNR and his little water testing station.”

“It’s just a different type of ambition, Terry.”

He nodded, acknowledging the point. “He must have told you he was once married to my daughter, otherwise I doubt you’d have mentioned his name. I loved going out on the river with Phil. The man may have grown up in Greenwich, Connecticut but he turned into a real Mississippi River rat. That’s the big reason Delia walked out. She might have eventually been reconciled to living in Pepin, but she got tired of trying to make him presentable, at least by her standards.”

“I’ve met Kate Patterson too.”

He wagged a finger. “That one broke my only boy’s heart, so I don’t forgive her so easily. Phil’s different. I wouldn’t mind seeing him again but I just never got in touch when I moved back.”

“Kate’s very nice, as is her partner.”

He shrugged. There was a long silence that she left alone, suspecting the memories so obviously stirring would eventually jar loose some comment. Finally: “I hear they make good pizza down at their café. Geneva won’t let me eat pizza. Too much sodium and fat. What the hell difference does it make now? I suppose Phil told you that I’m a short-timer. I know Delia’s been in touch with him.”

“He didn’t tell me much at all, Terry. Just that he’d been married to your daughter.”

He raised his eyebrows at the evasion, but let it rest. “What’s planned for the date?”

“To go hear music at a bar called Chester’s.”

“Oh lord, that place was unsavory back when I was too young to drink.”

“Apparently there’s a good blues band there some nights, and I like that sort of thing. I spent too many years working in Chicago not to have fallen in love with crummy little bars and the blues.”

Another damn slip. She closed her eyes, lightly rubbed her keyboard with her fingertips. Between Marti’s blackmailing and her own loose mouth, she’d be lucky to finish this job and leave town with the second half of the generous fee.

“Then it sounds like a perfect first date. I’m glad you didn’t say no on my account. And I’ll spare the two of you the dilemma of whether to talk about me or pretending that you haven’t. I’m sick, Leigh. Time is short, that’s what they tell me. Of course, at my age time is always short, but the doctors at Mayo say it’s more than that.”

“I’m sorry, Terry.”

“All in all, it’s a good thing, as long as we get this book done, because chances are I’ll go like that!” He snapped his fingers. “They tell me it’s likely the heart will just shut down. Not a bad way to exit, wouldn’t you say? I’m ninety, I’m mobile, more or less on top of things, and I’m in daily contact with two beautiful women. I’m luckier than most.” He pointed at the phone. “When you came in I’d just finished up talking with my old pal Rob. His wife had a mild stroke last winter. She lost her speech, but it was coming back. Now they think maybe she’s had another little stroke and she’s not doing so well. Feeling defeated, Rob says. She’s just so blue, he says. I can’t stand to think of her like that. She was always so spirited. Most beautiful woman I’ve ever laid eyes on. I loved just being in the same room with her. She had this yellow suit…a Chanel…Christ, Leigh. Every day we all wonder what’s next? Who’s next? You get tired of wondering that, Leigh. You get damn tired of losing your friends. I’m sorry you’ve lost touch with yours. Hell of a thing.”

She scrolled through her mental file. “Rob Cooper, the Minneapolis flour company heir. One of the boys that went east to school with you. He ran your first campaign for Congress.”

Terry nodded. “Lord, we had fun with that race. Then the next year he went east to help with another one, a special election. That’s when he met Sylvia. What a woman. I’m not going to let go of her yet. I hate to think of this world without her.” He tapped his chest. “Gallbladder cancer, and it’s spread to the heart of all places. Won’t be long. But we’ll get this book done, right, Leigh? No more getting distracted by those silly children’s books?”

“I’m working hard on your story, Terry.”

“Even if I don’t make it, you’ll finish the book, promise me that? The money’s there, you’ll get paid, don’t worry about that.”

“I’ll write your story, Terry. And I count on doing it with you.”

“It’s a story all right. Oh what a life! I was a shy skinny boy from Pepin, Minnesota and look at all that happened, more than I dared dream. One thing I did dream about didn’t happen, of course. That’s where I need another promise, Leigh. There’s something we’re not putting in the memoir, even though I suppose it’s obvious to you now. Not a word in the book about how all these years I’ve been in love with my best friend’s wife. How pathetic is that!” Their eyes met. He nodded. “Yes, just like Granddad: thwarted love.” He rubbed his chin and stared into middle distance.

“Did you and Sylvia have an affair?”

He shook his head. “Not a chance in hell of that. I never would have risked losing Rob’s friendship. Besides, she was utterly faithful. Besotted, both of them, for over sixty years now. That sort of love passed me by, Leigh. I don’t want it mentioned because the unrequited, unfulfilled lover is not the image I want to leave behind. Promise me? No hint of all that.”

“It’s a political story, Terry. And I need to get back to it.”

The methodical tap-tapping of her typing quickly lulled him into sleep. She watched him for a while, the short puffs of his breathing lulling her into a trance. Finally, she closed her computer and put it in her backpack. She pulled down several volumes from his bookcase, tucked those under her arm and left him alone, letting herself out of the house by the front door.

*

Leigh finished reading just as the sky above the trees across the river was beginning to darken to a dusky purple. A few yards away from where she sat cross-legged on a rock, a bird dove toward the water and then flew up, a fish clamped in its beak.

Terry’s diaries lay scattered on the rock. She gathered them into a stack on her lap and counted the green Post-its. Twenty four entries in the four volumes, the years selected at random. April 29, 1958:
S was there, wearing the yellow Chanel she knows I love.
February 11, 1959:
NY on UN business. Escorted S to noon concert at Met. Heaven!
November 7, 1962:
White House state dinner. Jackie so arch, cool, clearly pissed at S’s elegance, glamour. Upstaged by a housewife from Minnesota!

She’d missed them the first time she’d read through the diaries, missed the connection, the aggregation.

May 13, 1962
: Damn it Rob, do me a favor and die!

What would it feel like to live with an unfulfilled longing that powerful? To live, like his grandfather had lived, with love just out of reach. The thwarted lover.

She supposed it explained in part Terry’s three divorces, the string of uncommitted relationships with younger women, possibly even the coolness between father and children.

Terry Bancroft had been a major part of many important world events in the first forty years after the Second World War. His final memoir wasn’t entirely a vanity project; he had something worth telling, if only to remind those still interested what had happened and why. The book she was writing was going to be good, better than the standard Wise Old Man memoir and for a week or two it would receive some press and applause. When it happened she’d be happy to step back and let the spotlight shine on him.

And of course she’d grant his wish to leave out the fact of his unrequited love for his best friend’s wife. Why not? But if she left out that single detail with its rippling effect in his life story, would the book be any more honest than the columns she’d doctored with false information? Wasn’t the omission simply another kind of lie?

“What was ever true?” Chase had shouted during that final conversation. Oh, how angry he’d been.

“What was ever true,” she whispered, a finger sliding across a green slip and into the pages. June 20, 1958.
Gave speech at university, then out to Coopers’ for dinner. S. taught the kids how to make pasta.

A faint shout broke into her reverie. Was someone calling for her? Oh shit, she thought. Marti had probably dropped by to hound her about Ida May’s letters.

Or was it Phil Chesney? She gathered the diaries and rushed up the nearly overgrown path through the trees toward the cottage, slightly embarrassed at the urgency with which she moved but not slowing until she reached the wire fence. Then she tossed the books over, picked up a stout stick, lay on her back and wiggled through as she held up the lowest strand of sharp wire up with the stick.

Geneva stood at the door. She was furious. “You wore him out, I hope you know. He napped all afternoon and then he woke in a foul blue mood and wouldn’t eat supper and wouldn’t talk to me and just went on up to bed. I don’t know what you two worked on today, but it was too much. You can’t make him work so hard.”

Leigh unlocked the door and walked in. “I didn’t realize he was that tired. Yes, we talked, but he had things to tell me. That’s part of writing the book.” She set the diaries down on the desk and closed the door behind Geneva.

“At least you’re being honest about the book now. Anyway, I didn’t come down here to complain about you wearing him out, though that’s a plenty good enough reason. I knew you had to be hiding here working and not answering the phone because where else do you ever go? You got a phone call up at the house, and I hope it’s not bad news. I’m sorry for the bitching if it is. You didn’t answer your cell and you didn’t answer here, so she called the big house. I have no idea how she got that number; it hasn’t been listed for years. It was an older woman and she had a really stiff, formal way of talking, like either she’s the queen of something or she thought she had to make things very clear to me because I’m an idiot.”

“Who called?”

“Mrs. Daniel Putnam from Columbia, South Carolina, and that’s just how she said it. You’re supposed to call her; she said you have the number. It’s something about your daughter.”

12.

Emily stood between two security guards on the sidewalk outside the airport terminal. Leigh resisted the impulse to honk at the station wagon that had stopped abruptly in front of her to pick up three red-hatted women who’d bolted in front of traffic with two carts loaded with suitcases. She waited, letting cars behind her go around, while she watched her daughter talk and laugh with the two young men who’d probably been assigned to nab her as soon as she’d exited the plane. Chase’s mother had assured her that there’d be no chance Emily could escape. “Daniel’s made some calls,” she said. “Everything’s taken care of.”

Leigh didn’t doubt that. She knew the kind of calls her former father-in-law could and would make the moment he encountered something he disliked, disapproved of, or needed to fix. A rule-breaking granddaughter sent home from a church mission trip who didn’t show up on the flight home would receive his full attention, especially once it was determined she’d skipped the last leg of her trip back to certain punishment and instead got on a plane to make an unannounced visit to the disgraced mother in the Midwest.