Voices in the Dark (19 page)

8

BEVERLY GUNNER ENTERED HER HOUSE LIKE A STRANGER AND avoided mirrors. God knows what she looked like. She had put on lipstick but had not done her hair and had ruined her dress. In the sun room, where a pruned ficus mushroomed its pointed leaves, she gazed out at the pool. Her sons were floating belly up on rubber rafts, though she saw only one clearly, her vision blurred, as if an eyeball had sprung loose. With painful and strenuous effort, she forced the shrunken pumps from her swollen feet and let out two hurt cries of relief, the first the fiercest.

She entered the kitchen from one wide entrance, her husband from the other. Wearing only pajama bottoms, he looked more maternal than masculine. Shambling on slow, fat feet, he burst open a cabinet door and plucked out a glass. Without looking at her, he spoke first.

“I’m not going to ask what last night was all about.”

“You’re wise not to,” she said in a tone never used with him before. She stood near the breakfast nook and saw that the boys had fed themselves. The milk had been left out, a spill of it on the table, next to the skins of two bananas. Spoons had been left clunked in their cereal bowls. The box was thrown on its side, as if they had fought over it.

His back to her, her husband gulped orange juice. His rear end was massive and eternal. When he faced her, he said, “You look like hell.”

She said, “What did you do to Phoebe Yarbrough?”

They took note of each other, he with his mouth drawn down. Seconds passed. “What did she say?”

“You hit her.”

“That’s her story.”

“You broke her cheekbone.”

“She’ll be all right.” He put aside the empty juice glass and tugged at his pajama pants. Sizable nipples depended from the mush of his chest. “You want to hear what really happened?”

“I don’t trust you.”

“She came on to me.”

She smiled in the abstract behind too much lipstick. Her dress hung heavy on her. “I’ve never trusted you.”

“Things about Phoebe Yarbrough you don’t know,” he said.

“And don’t want to know.”

“In New York she was a call girl. That’s what Yarbrough married. A fancy whore.”

She turned away from him. “That’s what I wish I had been,” she said, with certain crashes inside her head, tilted thoughts exploding like spilled dishes, through which she heard him snort.

“You don’t have the body.”

In high school, sought after, she had almost allowed a fellow to have fun with her. He was later killed in Vietnam. She wished she had given joy to him. Looking back, she was sure she had.

“But I like what you’ve got,” he said, his face increasing.

She sheered away when the edge of his hand sought the groove of her rump. “Don’t touch me,” she said and watched his face burn.

“You’ve got nothing without me.”

She had her grandmother’s jewelry, inexpensive pieces embossed with memories, and pictures of her daughter handled always with love. Her smile was back, still in the abstract. “And I have nothing with you,” she said.

• • •

Sunlight trembled on the grass. Carrying a tray of buttered toast, coffee, and juice, May Hutchins saw that Dudley was not in the gazebo but behind it. When she realized he was urinating, she stopped in her tracks, turned her head, and waited. A small bird, blurred by its speed, flew by like a bullet.

“Good morning,” she said when, decent, he made his way toward her with an easy step. “Did you sleep all right?”

Indeed he had, he told her, and with much appreciation took the breakfast tray from her hands. The toast was oatmeal bread, and from inside the gazebo he nodded his satisfaction. He sat on the cushioned bench he had slept on, with the tray balanced nicely on his lap, as if he were accustomed to tea time with women who made of him. She had absolutely no fear of him, though Roland had voiced reservations.

“I looked in on you earlier,” she said, “but you were dead to the world.”

“I heard you,” he replied, “but I didn’t want to open my eyes yet.”

A wasp flew at her, and, in swiping at it, she discovered a curler dangling from the back of her head. Swiftly she dislodged it and clenched it inside her fist. “My husband says you can use the garden hose to wash up. I left soap and towel on the step.” Then, hesitantly, she added, “You can bathe all over. We won’t look.”

“Nudity doesn’t embarrass me,” he said. “I’ve been an artist’s model.”

She wasn’t sure she believed that, though neither did she disbelieve it, for he said it in such a natural and offhand way, as if his experiences were well beyond the scope of hers. Hers were bound and gagged in Bensington, her only adventures abortive ones with Fred Fossey, who was no prize but whose attentions touched a need. Her eye spotted the library book she had delivered to his cell.

Following her gaze, munching toast, he said, “I haven’t finished it yet.”

“Take your time.”

This thing she had with Fred was rudimentary, some touching here and there when she allowed it, though always quickly putting a stop to it. She was unconvinced that sex was the means to what she wanted, which was an edge against slipping too fast into old age. She said, “Are they looking for you?”

He dunked a piece of toast into his coffee, which he had lightened with the real cream she had provided. She wished now that she had served him eggs, not store-bought, but fresh from Tish Hopkins’s chickens.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I won’t tell.”

She returned to the house. It was Saturday, but Roland, readying to leave, had a job to do in Andover. Spotlessly clad in his electrician’s coveralls, he personified competence except when he clicked his teeth. Her thoughts on leaving him had always been lame, clubfooted, dink-toed, never a full stride.

“I don’t like leaving you alone, him still here,” he said, a worry line scoring his rosy face.

“Don’t talk rubbish. There was anything to worry about, he wouldn’t be loose. Besides, I can tell a person by his eyes.”

“That may not be the best way.”

“Go,” she said, and he did.

In the bathroom she heard water charging through the pipes and knew that her guest was using the hose. In the mirror, while inspecting the small parts of her face, she looked for a wrinkle that appeared only when she was melancholy. It wasn’t there. She restored her hair with a brush and brought color to her cheeks with pinches. When the pipes went silent, she pictured him rubbing himself down in one of her better bath towels. She felt bad that he would be getting back into the same clothes.

She gave him ample time to get decent and let the screen door slam behind her to give him warning. The grass sparkled where he had dropped the hose. The soap was on a rock and the wet towel draped over a currant bush, but he was nowhere in sight. Looking into the vacancy of the gazebo, she frowned at the cluttered breakfast tray but brightened when she saw the Thornton Burgess book, a slip of paper marking his place. He would, most certainly, be back.

• • •

Cool to her daughter, ice to her stepson, Regina Smith confronted neither but chose to hold her tongue, control her rage, and bide her time, none of which was easy. At the breakfast table she watched Patricia try to play eye games with Anthony, who was wise enough not to reciprocate but not clever enough to hide his unease. She grimaced over her coffee cup when Patricia announced that they planned another day at the beach. Frowning at Anthony, she said, “Watch the way you drive. You have my daughter’s life in your hands.”

Twenty minutes later they were gone.

She phoned her husband, who was busy but never too busy to talk with her. Washington, he said, was stifling. The war memorials, he joked in a weary tone, were sweating bullets, and Republicans, among whom he was a moderate one, were under a state of siege. And the business that had brought him down there was a royal mess, worse than he had expected. None of this was what she had called about.

“Listen to me,” she said and rushed out her story in a bitter voice that expurgated nothing, for the image of the crime was lurid in her mind. Vivid was her stepson’s rearing bottom, the cheeks pinched together, creating the tight focus from which the rest of his body sprang. She said, “I want him out of here.”

“We’ll straighten it out when I get back.”

“I’ll call the academy,” she said, her head at an angle, her hand sweeping back her dark hair. “I’m sure there’s room in one of the dorms. If not, maybe that teacher, Pitkin, can take him in until the school year.”

“That’s something to deliberate, not necessarily to act upon. I don’t excuse any of it, but — ”

“You’re not listening, Ira. I want him
gone.
“

“Regina, we’re talking about my son.”

“Not at all. We’re talking about my daughter. She’s number one and always will be. I made that plain when we married, did I not?”

“It would seem Patricia was complicit,” he said in his lawyer’s voice, which infuriated her, as if he expected Patricia to yield to cross-examination. Again she pushed back her hair, a sense of traffic in her head, thoughts coming and going.

“She’s fifteen, Ira. Complicity is irrelevant.”

“And Tony’s sixteen. Surely that’s relevant.”

She dared pursue it no more, for she was pitched high, in danger of saying things that would make yesterday remote and tomorrow unimaginable. “When will you be back?”

He wasn’t sure. He spoke with a heavy sigh. “I’m dealing here with a felony.”

“So am I,” she said, though not for his ear. Quietly she had disconnected.

• • •

Smoking a furtive cigarette, Beverly Gunner spilled an ash and walked it into the carpet without compunction, without constraint. She was in an airy front room, the walls pale blue, the moldings white, her own shadow more company than she wanted. She was still in yesterday’s dress, which now seemed to be some sort of uniform, as if she had entered a battle and bore wounds. The seam in the right underarm was ruptured, and the hem in back hung short.

Her posture was slack until a sound from the outside jerked her to attention. Her cigarette stub she buried in the moist soil of a potted plant flourishing on a pedestal. At the window she saw an old car with the town seal on the side and recognized the man stepping out of it. Good, she thought, Phoebe has pressed charges, and the police chief has come to make an arrest.

When the bell rang, she didn’t move. She waited, her breath half held, and finally, after two more rings, her husband went to the door. She heard pieces of their voices. The chief wanted to come in.

Of course he could come in. He could read Paul his rights and then take him away, and the boys too, in handcuffs if necessary. She reeled. The possibility of a new life touched her down to her toes.

She heard the door close. What were they saying? Submerging her thoughts, she tried to attend only to the voices, particularly the chief’s, but Paul’s, fat and intrusive, kept getting in the way.

“What did you say your name was, Chief? Moran?”

“Morgan.”

She slipped across the room to hear them better, but they were moving away. The chief was being led to the study, where her husband could flump himself into a club chair, brim over it, and act like the lord of a manor, though she imagined the chief would soon have him back on his feet. After a few moments she crept after them.

The door to the study was ajar. Peering through the crack, she saw the roundness of her husband’s head and glimpsed a quarter of the chief’s face, which she found reassuring, though she wished he would speak louder. She listened hard.

Her husband said, “What’s your interest? It didn’t happen here.”

Of course it did. Where else would he have dared to do it? The formal rigor of his voice had nothing to do with the truth. She stood straight, with her hands pressed to her thighs.

The chief said, “Are you satisfied it was an accident?”

It was no accident! He had split Phoebe’s face, cracked a bone, and her face, tended to at the hospital in Lawrence, was swollen and bandaged. Good God, Chief, don’t be taken in!

“She was clumsy, mentally and physically,” her husband said. “Look here, this is not something I enjoy discussing.”

“I understand.”

“No, you don’t. But I understand where you’re coming from. I know about your business with Bodine, which I consider cruel and suspect on your part.”

What was this about? Something was going over her head and curving away from her. Paul, with no allegiance to the facts, was muddling things the way he did when she tried to speak her mind. In the end it was she left muddled.

“What disturbs me the most about you, Chief, is your business with Bodine’s wife.”

This was getting out of hand. What did Kate Bodine have to do with it? She could see most of the chief’s face now, and it was no longer reassuring but blank and harmless. Disappointment came up on her like phlegm in her throat.

“My suspicion,” Paul said, “is you’re performing for her.”

“May I speak with your wife?”

“Absolutely not. You’re not going to upset her the way you have Bodine.”

She felt she was being drawn to the center of something unsavory, and she remembered a blood uncle whose kisses had left slaver on her young mouth. She ran a hard hand across her lips as if it were there now and found herself remembering silly things, like the grit on her teeth after eating spinach and the stain in her urine after enjoying asparagus.

“Three years my wife’s still not herself.”

Three years? Then she understood, and her face went hard and tight as if to stem bleeding. It wasn’t Phoebe the chief had come about. It was her baby. It was Fay.

• • •

Dudley appeared in the garden as if blown in, and the Reverend Mr. Stottle, who relished intangibles, put aside the pad of paper on which he had composed Sunday’s sermon and gestured from his canvas chair. “Watch your step.”

A fiercely green creeper threw tentacles at Dudley’s sneakered feet. The thorns of rosebushes endangered the path. “I’m a bird on the wing,” he said.

“Then you’ve flown the coop,” the reverend said, in a marvelous mood from the balance in his life, the worldly ingrained in the ether. Earlier he had intruded upon his wife’s privacy and found her deliciously vulgar in bra and bloomers. If Dorothea Farnham had not chosen that moment to ring up on garden club business, he would have exerted himself with a gluttony usually reserved for young lovers. Picking from a plate, he said, “Help yourself. My wife made them.”