Voices in the Dark (36 page)

He stained his underpants with a silent spindrift from his bowels and smiled as if everything happening were forewritten, surprising only to himself. “What are you going to do?”

“A public service,” Soldier said.

The shot knocked him to the ground and gave him the immediate sensation of an everlasting present, the past no longer a burden, the future a fantasy. When he realized he was dying, he felt it in every joint, in the ends of his fingers, in the back of his throat. Tucking in his chin, he peered at the wound, saw beauty in the blood, and felt elevated in status, exalted. When he heard Soldier moving away, his eyes reached out. He wanted someone to watch him go. “Please,” he said.

Soldier took three or four steps and turned. He fired off another shot, which took the lid off Dudley’s head.

17

FOR THE MAN IT WAS LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT. HE WAS A WIDOWER from Vermont, Yankee to his toes, and well aware that there’s no fool like an old fool, but it didn’t matter. When Phoebe Yarbrough walked into the bar at the Ritz, he saw a tulip high on the wand. “Please, join me for a drink,” he said and shed the weight of his years. He kept himself in shape, he told her. He jogged. He awaited the ski season. His face bound in tough leathery skin, he told her he loved the outdoors.

“Yes, I can see that,” she said.

He told her she was beautiful. He said he could not take his eyes off her. He loved, he said, the sound of her name.

“It used to be Frances,” she said.

He was in Boston on bank business and due to return to Burlington in the morning. He might, however, stay an extra day. He quivered with enthusiasm when she agreed to dinner, over which she told him that her stab at marriage hadn’t worked. She was in the process of divorce. Over after-dinner drinks, she said, “Why does childhood outweigh the whole rest of your life? Do you have an answer for that?”

“That’s when everything counts double,” he said.

The next day they strolled through the Public Garden, where each tree was lit with an October color. An American ash stood golden. A sassafras ran from banana yellow to red orange. He took deep breaths, she seemed to take none at all. Her gait was weightless. “I love this time of year,” she said. “The world in glorious ruin.”

He guided her to a bench, where she sat with her legs crossed, her trousers skin-tight satin. He told her he wanted to be married again, a woman to share the years he had left, and he made a proposal that she countered with a suggestion of hard coin. Could he afford her? What, she asked in so many words, was his bottom line? His loneliness and his appetites owned him. “I have a lawyer,” he said, “who can lay it all out for you.”

“Aren’t lawyers wonderful,” she said.

• • •

May Hutchins was in the library. Her hair was streaky, her coat didn’t hang right, and her stomach gurgled, none of which mattered to her. Nor did any of the books. The titles blurred. The faces of magazines glared. A gaggle of girls were acting up in the stacks, and she absorbed their voices without hearing a word, though she suspected one was mocking her. A hand touched her.

“May, are you taking care of yourself?”

The voice was Fred Fossey’s. His hand dropped away because of the look on her face, which welcomed nothing. She backed off, and he regarded her helplessly.

“I thought you’d need me more than ever.”

The words offended her. Her heart racing, she felt she was killing time when she had none to spare. She put on her wool cap and said, “I have to go.”

The air nipped at her. The smash of autumn colors around the green assaulted her eye and made the familiar alien, herself an intruder. Children were splashing through leaves. Who among them would care that she had won the spelling bee in sixth grade? Who would care that in high school she had had a part in the class play?

Women were coming out of the side of the church. When one of them waved, she tugged at her wool cap. She was a lamb outside the fold, a stranger in her own town. Who in the whole of Bensington could fathom the bittersweet loss of her long-ago girlhood and the emptiness of her soul?

In Tuck’s, she went to the deli counter and bought bologna and American cheese, which George Tuck weighed and wrapped and handed to her. Lying in her refrigerator, the bologna would spoil and the cheese would wilt unless she forced herself to eat it.

“I’m s-s-sorry about Roland, May.”

Roland was home. He was in an urn. Could she shake the ashes and tell him she missed him? “I’m sorry too, George.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

“Can you bring him back?”

“I g-guess not, May.”

“Then mind your own business.”

She walked up Pleasant Street to her house. The vinyl siding, installed seven or eight years ago, still looked new. When she was gone her children would sell the house, which was just as well. After a few years in the ground, who in town would remember her? Fred Fossey perhaps, but he no longer counted.

She started up the front path where the Boston fern, glorious throughout the summer, had fallen to rust. Out back, dying sunlight fell on the gazebo, and for a stunning second she thought she glimpsed Dudley through the latticework. With a sudden chill she rummaged through her bag for the door key and couldn’t find it, which didn’t matter. She hadn’t locked the door. She opened it and stepped in.

“Roland, I’m home.”

• • •

Beverly Gunner, home from Hanover House, had her hair recut and reshaped. She had a facial. She had lost ten pounds and bought a dress of the sort she’d never worn before. It was autumn. She was summer seeking a second bloom.

The first time Chief Morgan took her to dinner at Rembrandt’s,

she stumbled on the way to the table and would have fallen had Morgan not caught her. Seated, she said, “This is like a first date.” Gradually, under his attention, along with a glass of wine, she relaxed. The conversation led gently to her state of mind. Gone were the dreams in which the pull of gravity was threatening, consuming her with the fear she would not awake. “I’m really in good shape,” she said, “mentally, physically, and financially. As long as Paul stays alive the money’s mine, all mine. I’ve been feeling quite greedy and enjoying it.”

The second time they dined together, same restaurant, same table, she spoke of feelings left unexpressed for years. When she mentioned her daughter, her eyes filled, but then she went on to other things. She felt comfortable with Morgan. Voices ringing loud at the next table drew them closer together. He listened to each word she said. Waiting for her coat, she stood in a way that gave drama to her new figure. An air of seduction hovered close when he helped her into her coat, but neither made a gesture. They valued the friendship too much to disturb it.

Her sons were boarding students at the academy, but one weekend they came home. Gustav avoided her, but Herman was affectionate, and had he a tail he’d have swept it from side to side. He was too big to sit on her lap, but he seemed to want to. He settled for a place on the arm of her chair, where she told him how his great-grandfather had driven salesmen from the door by removing his glass eye and querying the length of them with his good one.

“You never told me that story before.”

“You had other things to amuse you,” she said.

They both went quiet when Gustav entered the room with something behind his back, which he revealed presently. It was a knife from the kitchen. He didn’t raise it, but he held it ready. His eyes were his father’s, and in time his weight would be. She smiled at him.

“Are you going to kill me with that, Gustav?”

His lips puckering, he began to cry.

• • •

Harley Bodine, charged with conspiracy in a homicide and free on bail, was on leave from his law firm and working daily with the nationally known trial attorney who was preparing his defense. A possible witness for the defense was Mary Williams, who was prepared to testify that her companion, whereabouts unknown, was a gentle soul incapable of violence. The attorney, focusing his gaze upon her, pondered the possibility of Dudley’s reappearing. Mary’s eyes closed for a moment. In her bag was a month-old newspaper clip about frustrated attempts to identify a man found slain in an alley off South Street. Her silence seemed to satisfy him.

The Essex County district attorney was banking on the recovery of Anthony Smith, who had twice undergone major surgery for head injuries. The district attorney needed Anthony to identify Dudley’s photograph and to place him at the scene. The trial was scheduled for next month but was expected to be delayed. No trial date had been set for Regina Smith, whose mental condition at Bridgewater State Hospital was deteriorating.

The district attorney had read Chief Morgan’s report and for the present was not pursuing its deeper implications. Paul Gunner, brain dead, was on a life-support system at a clinic in Stoneham.

• • •

Sitting with Soldier in a narrow glassed-in café on Newbury Street, Mary Williams gripped a glass of Perrier and grieved over the fact that Dudley lay anonymously in a pauper’s grave, Fairview Cemetery, Boston’s Hyde Park section. Her voice shallow, she said, “I’ll wait a couple of years and have him reburied in a proper place.”

“That’s not smart,” Soldier said.

“I’ll wait five years, then.”

“Better wait till I’m dead.”

Drinking German beer from a frozen metal mug, he cramped his stomach and then imagined his own funeral blazoned with flags and resounding from a volley of rifle shots. Mary clenched the Perrier glass and stamped her prints on it, as if leaving evidence.

“Did I do right, Soldier?”

“You didn’t do wrong, let’s put it that way.”

She looked out at the street, headlights beginning to flash, and said, “It gets dark so early now. Long nights scare me.”

“What do you think eating alone used to do to me?” His hand reached across the table and touched her. “But we got each other now, right?”

She thought of the winter that lay ahead and the long wait for spring to reinvent itself. Looking at Soldier with a sense of gratitude, she forced affection into her smile. “Right,” she said.

• • •

On a day off Kate Bodine visited an art gallery on Newbury Street and viewed representative works of several local artists, all of the human figure, none of which pleased her eye. One was an acrylic of Christ with ghostly genitalia. Another, Manet-like, was of a woman sitting on a park bench with her legs open, as if for public consumption.

“No one has painted a female nude as Matisse did,” said an authoritative voice behind her. “He captured the rhythms of a woman’s body. He came the closest to bringing out her being.” Turning, she looked into the face of a man with a silver mane of hair pampered to perfection. “Someone should do you,” he said.

She stepped away gracefully and found her way to the bathroom, which was walled with mirrors, startling her. It was the second time in her life she was viewing herself on a toilet. She looked distracted, unguarded, vaguely sacrificial. Someone jiggled the doorknob. “It’s occupied,” she said forcefully.

The authoritative voice said, “Take your time.”

She left the bathroom quickly, the gallery even faster, and took a cab to her apartment building in Brookline. A security guard manned a desk in the lobby. A painting of a meadow imbued with the calm of a Corot hung on the wall. The elevator whisked her to an upper floor. Inside her apartment, she telephoned Chief Morgan.

“When are you going to visit me?” she asked.

He arrived an hour later. He looked tired, older, as if a year or two had passed since she had seen him, and she wondered whether he was coming to a similar conclusion about her.

She had put food on the table, but they ignored it. In the bedroom she felt all of him, for he made love with his whole body, the momentum carried up from his toes. When they finished, she lay sprawled with an arm hanging over the side.

“James.”

“What?”

“That was swell.”

“You wouldn’t kid me?”

“I wouldn’t know how.”

Much later, the darkness total, she tried to wake him, which took some doing. His sleep was deep, as if he had gone without it for some time. His arm found her and drew her close.

“Do you think we could make a go of it, James?”

His hand drooped over her head, seemed to clasp it. “Let’s talk about it in the morning.”

“We could see each other off and on. Why don’t we try that?”

• • •

Late in the evening at Hanover House, too restless to sleep, Isabel Williams slipped on a robe and went to Hilda Gunner’s room, where a single lamp burned weakly, the shadows profound. Mrs. Gunner, wearing a flannel nightshirt, occupied a club chair, her cockled legs firmly crossed. In a low voice she said, “I told him not to get any ideas. I’ve been buggered enough.”

“Then what’s he doing here?” Isabel said sharply.

Mr. Skully was ensconced in the other club chair, a sallow hand on the curve of his cane, which rested between his pajama’d legs. His leather slippers were slit to accommodate the bulges in his feet. A clock radio, tuned low, was playing old standards. After the first bar or two, Mr. Skully knew what was coming and who would sing it.

“ ‘Mona Lisa,’ “ he said. “Nat King Cole.”

“He’s lonely,” Mrs. Gunner murmured. “He can’t sleep.”

Cords pulled at Isabel’s throat as she raised her chin. “We’re all lonely here, Mr. Skully. What else is new?”

Gripping his cane, he sank deeper into the chair. In his prime, he could leap abysses. Now he couldn’t take a straight step. From the trenches in his face, he said, “They never come to see me. Not one of them.”

“He’s talking about his sons,” Mrs. Gunner said.

“Tell me about it,” Isabel said, lighting a cigarette. “The only one of my daughters comes to see me is the weird one, and she’s taken up with another lunatic. The guy shaves his head and wears jungle clothes.” Ruby lipstick splotched her cigarette. Picking up the ashtray kept out for her, she drifted into shadows and sat on the edge of Mrs. Gunner’s tightly made bed. “The one before him was the Grim Reaper posing as Little Boy Blue.”