Voices in the Dark (34 page)

“Age is a disguise,” Reverend Stottle said. “When you enter the kingdom of heaven, you can tear the mask off and be that girl again.”

“When I die,” Drinkwater said, “what are they going to do for me in heaven? If they give me my teeth back, I’ll settle for that.”

May put her glass aside and brought her hands together under her chin. “My daughter’s upset because I had him cremated.”

“It was your choice,” the reverend said.

“My son is even more upset. He won’t speak to me.”

“You can’t please everybody.”

Drinkwater said, “There are some who say you come back.”

“Reincarnation is just another word for recycling,” Reverend Stottle said. “So it’s quite possible.”

May’s head swayed to one side, as if overtaken by consuming passivity. “I was a giddy piece of ass, that’s what I was.”

Drinkwater pretended he hadn’t heard. Reverend Stottle said, “The idiot exists in all of us.”

“A woman does what she has to do, even if it’s wrong. You men wouldn’t understand. Too many differences between us.”

“The only difference, May, is between the legs. Everett and I have stubs, you have an ellipsis.”

“What’s an ellipsis?”

“This is getting a bit thick,” Drinkwater said, and cleared his throat. “I think caskets should be womb-shaped so that the deceased may be placed in the fetal position. This would not only return the person to his beginnings but suggest the anticipation of rebirth.”

May put her hands to her head. “You were right the first time, Everett. This is too much.” She stretched an arm. “Will one of you help me up?”

Drinkwater was the gentleman, though the effort put a strain on his back. A kind of strangeness came over May, who stood flat-footed, her gaze inward.

“When you lose your mate,” she said, “you have nothing to look forward to.”

Reverend Stottle, on his feet, said, “Only if you let yourself think that way.”

Her face was in sunlight streaming through two windows. Emotions had obliterated one mask and were revealing another. “Please,” she said, “the two of you get out of here.”

• • •

The bed was cranked up, hiking Paul Gunner’s head and shoulders. His left arm drooped uselessly while the right struggled for strength. “Let me help,” Harley Bodine said and gripped the wrist. With supreme effort, the pen loose in his curved hand, Gunner affixed a signature, little more than a hen track, to a redrawn will, to which the male nurse was a witness. Bodine notarized it. The nurse left.

“I have no patience for this,” Gunner murmured. His large, loose face lacked texture, as if the essential oil were gone from the skin. “About the other matter.”

“You’d better be sure about that,” Bodine said.

“You have it on paper?”

“Yes.”

“You fix it up, tighten the language.” The voice swerved away from itself, then straggled back. “If I could do it in equations, I wouldn’t need you.”

“You’ll need me even more afterward,” Bodine said. “For the boys.”

“They’ll carry on my name. Gustav has my brain.”

Bodine lowered the top of the bed, which was like lowering a shrine. Gunner’s pajamas were gold-trimmed, the breast pocket monogrammed. Bodine said, “You understand I can’t implicate myself.”

“Time comes, just put it in my hand.”

Bodine’s expression, remote, impersonal, softened. “The least I can do,” he said.

• • •

The three of them, early risers. From her studio window, with a morning song of emotion, Mary Williams watched the sun creep through the Boston sky. It was like paint on a canvas. Her mood altered when she heard Dudley go out, a whistle on his lips. Moments later, his regimen of push-ups and sit-ups cut short, Soldier came into the studio.

“He goes out, where’s he go all day? What’s he do?”

“He has friends,” she lied, for truth was an enemy. It could wrap you into a bundle of nerves.

“One of these days he won’t come back. Somebody will run him over.”

That was merely one of several scenarios, by far not the worst, running through her mind. The worst could wake her in the night, only Soldier to cling to. She said, “One of these days it’ll be over.”

“You got me, Mary. Forever, if you want.”

“What’s ‘forever,’ Soldier? Ten years, twelve?”

“I take care of myself. You want, I’ll live to be ninety. I could go to a hundred.” He stepped toward her, his head rearing out of a gray athletic shirt, his jaws shaved close. “There’s another factor. With me, you’re a woman. With him, you’re not. You want to deny that?”

Much later in the day, she walked the length of Charles Street and around the corner to the Harvard Gardens, where the bar was busy and most of the booths occupied. She caught sight of a nurse’s uniform in a rear booth, strode to it, and slipped into the opposing seat. “I’m Mary Williams. Thank you for being here.”

The nurse, Lydia, said, “Your call surprised me.” The work-worn uniform gave her a vague resemblance to a rumpled bride. Her hair, blends of brown, was whipped back and gripped in the snarl of a rubber band. “That’s white wine if you want it. I don’t have much time.”

“I won’t waste it. Was Soldier good to you?”

“You want me to give a reference, is that it?”

The other booths were noisy. She didn’t want to raise her voice, so she leaned over a wineglass, nearly tipping it. “I need to know. Was he good to you?”

“He knew where he stood with me. He filled a temporary need, and then he got on my nerves.
I
wasn’t good to him.”

She trusted the face and, entranced by the hard play of bones, wished she could sketch it. Maybe later, from memory. “Thank you,” she said.

Lydia gathered herself to go. “What is it, Mary Williams? You in love with him or something?”

She took out money for wine neither of them had touched. “I don’t want to be alone.”

“Then you could do worse.”

• • •

His car on the blink, Anthony Smith was one of many waiting on Main Street near the academy for a Boston bus. It was a soft and sunny, irresponsible day, slightly breezy. A student he knew distorted the corner of his mouth with a hooked finger to amuse his girlfriend. Two faculty wives, slight of figure but robust in voice, were sharing thoughts. Beyond them all, a man he didn’t know but had seen on campus, a new teacher perhaps, smiled at him. Then the bus came.

He met his stepsister in South Station, where she arrived from Connecticut by Amtrak. She flew into his arms, her overnight bag tumbling between them. They kissed, they hugged. “Did you miss me, Tony?” He’d missed her much more than he’d thought he would. He’d missed her the way he would have one of his arms. “Do you have a place for us?”

“Marriott Long Wharf,” he said. “We can walk there.”

The room was high up, and the large window overlooked the murk of the harbor, the white stillness of pleasure boats, the ribbed archways of Christopher Columbus Park, the beaded glitter of traffic on the Central Artery, and the shooting sapphire lights of a police cruiser. Patricia said, “I don’t want ever to lose you. Don’t let them do anything.”

He saw a loveliness he’d taken for granted and sought to make amends. His hand in her clothes stuck to her like a stamp. “You’re letting the hair grow back.”

“Summer’s over.”

“I do love you,” he said in a tone that left no doubts, no questions.

“Then why did you keep me guessing so long?”

A push landed him slant-wise across the quiet cobbles of a down comforter. Her knees bestrode him. Sloping over him with palms planted on his chest, she ground against him as if the joy of life were overwhelming, every piece of it encased in the urgent. She rode him with her eyes clamped shut, her nostrils flared, and her jaw shoved to one side. When she collapsed upon him, she shed tears — happy ones, she said, but they alarmed him, heightening a sense of responsibility.

Her hair covered a pillow when they made love again, he the aggressor this time, with the same air of necessity she had shown. Afterward, they went straight off to sleep, nothing to disturb them except an unremembered dream or two.

It was evening when they rode the elevator to the lobby. On their way to the dining room they passed a man sitting on one of the leather couches, a magazine in his lap. Patricia glanced back and poked Anthony.

“Did you see how he stared at us?”

Anthony looked over his shoulder, narrowed his eyes, and said, “He was on the bus with me.”

• • •

Ira Smith played golf that afternoon and played it badly. When he teed off, the ball failed to make head against a stiff breeze. Shots usually made he missed. Everything was off, his step, his rhythm, his reaction, as if something had untuned him. He stuffed an iron into the bag and quit early. Much pressed upon him. He suspected his wife of having poured sugar into the gas tank of his son’s car, the engine rendered useless. Worse, he suspected her of infidelity, but did not want to confront her. He was reasonably certain that if guilty she would not deny it.

He let an attendant take away the motorized cart and his bag of clubs. A maple full of leaves shook some loose and yielded birds. Curving overhead, dipping a wing like an oar, a small pleasure plane was carried by a current. On his way into the car lot, he glimpsed Myles Yarbrough’s sun-scraped face and saw no way to avoid him.

Looking up, sweeping back his thinning hair, Yarbrough said, “When I was a little kid I used to wonder if airplanes did harm to the sky. You know, if the propellers tore holes.”

Ira exchanged his prescription sunglasses for his horn-rims. Yarbrough fell in stride with him.

“I’m stupid about so many things. To this day, I don’t know how ocean water can support the weight of a ship.”

“I used to know,” Ira said, “but I’ve forgotten.”

Yarbrough rubbed his forehead, a rusted surface of faint freckles. He looked as if he needed a drink of water. “Phoebe said she saw you. I guess you know everything.”

“I’m a lawyer same as you, Myles. Everything’s in confidence.”

“I guess you think I’m a fool.”

“There are all kinds of fools. You could be one kind and I another.”

They approached their cars. Yarbrough drove a Jaguar he could not afford but felt he owed to himself. “But you must wonder why I married her. The thing is, Ira, it was different. It was like playing with fire.”

Not that far away, oblivious of the world, Anne Lapierre and Dick English were engrossed in conversation. A headband gave Anne a girlish look, adding to her considerable appeal. English obviously enjoyed looking at her. Her eyes were promises. Her lips were never quite together.

Yarbrough said, “I want to keep her, I really do. Do you think I have a chance?”

“Don’t ask me what you know I can’t answer.”

“I’m just trying to ride it out, it’s all I can do.”

“Occasionally that’s enough.”

Anne, the sun blazing in her red hair, noticed them and waved, but only Myles waved back. Ira felt queer in the face and light in the head. Eyes brimming, he saw too much.

Yarbrough said, “What would you do?”

“Exactly what you’re doing,” he replied.

• • •

When Chief Morgan arrived at the police station, Meg O’Brien had a mouthful from a sandwich and struggled to speak. She half rose from her desk and gesticulated. Sputtering, she said, “Get over to the Heights … been a shooting.”

His heart sank. “Where in the Heights?”

She told him the number, the name. She wiped mayonnaise from her upper lip and added, “Eugene’s already there.”

“What next?” he said, not to her.

He drove with a wind up Ruskin Road to the Heights and swerved through the Gunners’ stone gateway and up an avenue of tapered arborvitae. Sergeant Avery’s cruiser was parked between an Infiniti and a BMW. The cruiser was leaking oil. The Infiniti bore an M.D. plate.

As Morgan approached the front entrance, Sergeant Avery came out of it. The man behind him, tailored smartly, looked every inch a doctor. Sergeant Avery said, “Ambulance just left, Chief. Guy named Gunner shot himself.”

The doctor stepped forward. “You’ll excuse me.”

Morgan grabbed his arm. “Tell me about it.”

“Mr. Gunner had suffered a serious stroke and was depressed. That’s it.”

“If he had a stroke, how’d he manage to hold a gun?”

“Not very well,” the doctor said and pulled free. “In a manner of speaking, he’s still alive.”

“If you can call it that,” Harley Bodine said from the doorway and stepped out with a cold smile.

The doctor pushed on. Sergeant Avery stood with his hands in his pockets. Morgan let his arms dangle.

Bodine said, “I feel sorry for the both of you, him more than you. Poor bastard doesn’t know how to die.”

• • •

He was back the next morning, sitting in Christopher Columbus Park, the air festive. Stainless steel pushcarts under umbrellas of flaming colors dispensed ice cream, popcorn, croissants, German sausages. Peddlers hawked leather goods, handcrafted jewelry, silk scarves, pocket tabulators. From the street a bannered car with a roof sign and speaker promulgated a political candidacy. A breeze from the harbor smelled human. Dudley reckoned they would sleep late and was right. At noon they emerged from the Marriott. He bought a croissant and followed them.

With silly abandon they cut through traffic surging through the streets under the steel fretwork of the Central Artery. Dudley had to dodge cars to keep them in sight. He figured they’d head for Quincy Market and was wrong. They went all the way to Summer Street and walked it to Washington. The boy had the build of a runner, the girl a healthy robustness that made him think of things to eat. He ate the croissant while they window-shopped Filene’s.

On busy Bromfield Street they stepped into the doorway of the Massachusetts Bible Society and talked quietly, deep into each other. They looked melancholy, in need of a laugh. Poised across the street, shielded by a streaming sidewalk crowd, Dudley saw love in their faces, beauty in their youth. In their melancholy he read a relationship not unlike his and Mary’s. When they stepped from the doorway, the girl drew her arm through the boy’s.