Chapter XIV

Then it was autumn. Not obviously, colorfully autumn, but autumn with just a little edge to the air in the morning and a sudden relief from humidity so that if you had been born in northern New England you knew, without actually seeing a change, that summer had passed. Autumn had come and Lisa and Chris were gone from Cooper Station and practically everybody said that it was just as if they had never come to town in the first place. There had been a little trouble and a few arguments over the Pappases but now they were gone and everything was just as it had always been. If people who had been friends for years had turned on each other over the question of Christopher Pappas, they mended their differences and there was nothing in the fabric of friendship to show that there had ever been a tear in it in the first place.

There was a new teacher at the high school by the name of Thomas Porterfield. Mr. Porterfield was married to a slightly bucktoothed woman who had been a teacher herself before her marriage and who, as Doris Delaney Palmer put it, certainly understood all the problems connected with teaching and living in a town like Cooper Station. The Porterfields were the parents of two children aged twelve and fifteen who had inherited their father’s quiet ways and their mother’s teeth.

“A nice family,” said most of Cooper Station.

“There’s nothing wild and irresponsible about Mr. Porterfield,” said Doris Palmer. “He taught at the same school sixteen years before coming here and the only reason he wanted this job was to get his family out of the city.”

“They’re a nice, quiet family,” said Callie Webster and rented a small house she owned down by the river to the Porterfields.

It was hard to imagine that Chris and Lisa had ever lived in Cooper Station at all. For a little while Christopher Pappas had been like a pebble tossed into the quiet waters of Cooper Station but eventually the pebble ripples had reached the outer edges of town and had disappeared from sight.

In the first days after Chris and Lisa had left Cooper Station, a little smile had hovered on Doris Delaney Palmer’s face whenever she passed Anthony on the street and there had been a wise, all-knowing look in her eyes, and she had stopped him several times to impart news of the activities of the Board of Guardians to him.

“What the hell do I care whom you’ve hired to replace Pappas?” he had demanded.

And Doris Delaney Palmer smiled her little smile and said, “Do forgive me, Anthony, but I did think it mattered to you about who was teaching at our schools.”

That was something else that annoyed Anthony. The way she had started calling him Anthony right after the Pappases had left town. It had always been Mr. Cooper before but suddenly he had become Anthony, her dear friend.

Fuck you, dear Mrs. Palmer, thought Anthony whenever she spoke to him. But he was invariably courteous to her out loud, and what puzzled him was that he did not want to be. He wanted to tell her to go straight to hell and to cut her dead on the street, but after the first time she had called him Anthony and said that she thought the teaching staff at the high school did matter to him, he had found himself tolerating her, even being nice to her, and every time he was more and more annoyed with himself.

Goddamned old bitch, he thought viciously whenever he had to speak to her.

“Tell me, Anthony,” she had asked him chummily, “what do you think of David Strong?”

“I don’t know as I’ve ever given David Strong any thought at all,” Anthony had replied.

“Well, what I mean is, don’t you think there’s something a little queer about him?”

“Dear Mrs. Palmer,” said Anthony. “I’ve never had the time to concern myself with other people’s sex lives.”

Doris’s little smile was already on her mouth.

“No,” she said, “I don’t imagine you have.”

Anthony made himself chuckle. “You are the discerning one, aren’t you?” he asked, sickened with his own coy words.

“Not really,” said Doris Palmer. “Adam says that I’m hopelessly naïve.”

About as naïve as a two-bit whore on a fifty dollar day, thought Anthony savagely, and smiled at Doris.

In his moments of honesty, Anthony admitted to himself that the only reason he tolerated Doris Delaney Palmer at all was to keep her from talking. He knew women of her type. All it would take would be a few innocent-sounding dropped hints and all of Cooper Station would be gossiping about Anthony. He could hear her now.

“We were lucky to get the money to pay off Christopher Pappas,” she would say. “Thank heavens for the few generous public spirited citizens we have left in Cooper Station.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she would say with that infuriating little smile of hers, “but I can’t tell you who it was. I gave my word.”

“Well, as you can imagine, it was someone with means,” she would say. “Three thousand dollars isn’t pin money to most people, you know.”

Then Cooper Station would begin to wonder. It hadn’t been Nathaniel Cooper, certainly, for he had fought to keep Pappas. Jim Sheppard didn’t have that kind of money and if Doris Delaney Palmer did, she wasn’t about to part with a nickel of it. It was common knowledge in town that Doris Palmer would argue over the price of a pound of hamburger. Well, who did have three thousand dollars to throwaway? Anthony Cooper? But why would Anthony Cooper want to get rid of the Pappases? He’d been having himself a time all summer with Lisa Pappas. Everybody knew it. Why pay to get rid of a good thing? Unless there was trouble. And if there was trouble, who was to make it? Christopher Pappas? Never. He was the prototype of all cuckolded husbands. The last to find out, if he ever found out at all. Then what kind of trouble? Trouble with a woman in Cooper Station meant one of three things: the husband had discovered his wife’s infidelity, the wife had run off with her lover and abandoned her children or the woman was pregnant by the lover. And since it was obvious that neither of the first two was the truth, then it would follow that Lisa Pappas was pregnant with Anthony’s child.

No, thought Anthony wearily, he’d keep on being polite to that bitch Doris Palmer. Just supposing the doctor was wrong and he wasn’t going to die, he might want to settle down permanently in Cooper Station, and if and when he did, he wanted to do it in comfort and dignity, as the last of the Coopers, the heir to a decent name and a respectable fortune. He definitely did not want to become a legend.

“Anthony Cooper? Huh. Respectable enough now in his old age, but I remember when he was younger.”

Anthony could hear the voices of the town and he kept right on putting up with Doris Palmer even while he laughed at himself and called himself the most improbable victim of blackmail on Earth.

The thing that Anthony would never have admitted out loud, either in Cooper Station or with his circle of New York friends, was that he enjoyed being a Cooper of Cooper Station. Out loud, he scoffed often and openly.

“The Coopers?” he would say to whatever pretty woman he happened to be with. “Don’t be impressed, my dear. A decadent lot, we are. My Uncle Nathaniel and my Aunt Margery stay up there in that big house of theirs, locked away from the world and each other by their idiot child, and here I sit, drinking my life away and writing only to keep myself in liquor. Oh yes, I have to work for a living, you know. Textiles are dead in northern New England. Everything’s moved down South except the Cooper Mills and they’re losing money hand over fist.”

He never mentioned that although the Cooper mills were not what they had once been, the money that had been accumulated by his father and grandfather and wisely invested was more than enough to keep any future Coopers for all time and keep them very well.

“No,” Anthony often said, “I’m the last of them and it’s a good thing, too.”

But Anthony enjoyed being a Cooper. He enjoyed being the young heir, the one Cooper who had gone away and made something of himself apart from the mills and he enjoyed it when interviewers and book reviewers mentioned that he was of an old New England family, a respected, old, wealthy family, a family with roots and traditions and a name to be upheld.

Anthony didn’t want Cooper Station saying,. “The last of the Coopers? Don’t be funny. Down country somewhere there’s a Greek schoolteacher’s wife with a child by Anthony Cooper. That’s where the last of the Coopers is. Not here.”

Then a week after Lisa had gone, Anthony met Polly Sheppard on Benjamin Street.

“Hello, Anthony,” she called from across the street in that high, carrying voice of hers. She crossed over to meet him, the same Polly who had been so cool toward him when Lisa had still been around.

“How are you, Anthony?” she asked, all smiles.

“I’m fine, Polly,” he replied suspiciously. Ever since his first encounter with Doris Delaney Palmer after the Pappas incident, he had been suspicious of nearly everyone he met.

“Jim and I were talking about you just last night,” said Polly.

I’ll bet you were, thought Anthony bitterly.

“We were wondering if you’d like to come to dinner one evening next week,” said Polly. “We’re both terribly interested in writing, you know.”

“Is that so?” said Anthony. God, how he hated people like her.

“Yes. When I was in college, I wrote a novel,” said Polly and laughed out loud at herself. “I never did anything with it, though.”

Oh, Christ, thought Anthony. The next thing I know she’ll ask me to look it over for her and tell her what I really think. And to forestall her he asked her the question he’d really wanted to ask in the first place.

“Have you heard from Lisa?”

“As a matter of fact, I had a letter from her just the other day,” said Polly.

Anthony waited, but she did not offer to tell him what Lisa had said.

“Poor little thing,” said Polly. “It couldn’t have been easy for her.”

“What does that mean?” asked Anthony, annoyed almost beyond endurance with Polly’s phony expression of sympathy.

“Well, the moving and all. Getting settled in a new place and Chris starting a new job and putting the children in school and everything. And of course, feeling the way she does must have made it all the harder.”

“What do you mean, feeling the way she does?” asked Anthony and for the first time in his adult life, he felt a twinge of concern for someone else.

“Why, she’s sick for hours every single morning,” said Polly. “It’s been like that with every single baby she’s carried. She gets morning sickness and there isn’t a thing Jess could do.”

“Why not?” demanded Anthony and felt a quick rage toward the doctor. “They’ve got cures for practically everything else.”

“I know,” said Polly. “And they’ve got some kind of drug for that, too, but it just doesn’t take on Lisa.”

And then, very slyly Anthony thought, Polly let him have it.

“You didn’t seem surprised when I mentioned Lisa being pregnant,” she said. “I didn’t think she’d told anyone but me. Even Chris doesn’t know, or at least he didn’t when they left here.”

Anthony could think of nothing to say, and Polly went on.

“Will you come for dinner next Tuesday?” she asked. “I’d love to have you look at my novel. For kicks, I mean. You’ll probably get a big laugh out of my scribbling.”

“Yes,” said Anthony, helplessly, “I’ll come.”

It was deadly. Jim Sheppard was a typical suburbanite.

“Have one of these!” he said, extending a glass toward Anthony. “Man, this’ll put hair on your chest.”

Anthony sipped his Martini.

“Ten to one,” said Jim proudly.

They had roast beef for dinner and Anthony wondered if anyone in Cooper Station ever served anything to guests except roast beef, potatoes and green peas. The wine was a rose that almost made him gag and when it was over Polly dragged out her bulky novel as if serving him up some rare dessert.

“I’ll take it along home with me,” said Anthony. “I’m too full of food to start in on it now.”

Polly giggled. “I suppose you’ll laugh your head off,” she said. “I never showed it to anyone but Lisa, and Jim, of course, before we were married. Lisa liked it and said I ought to get it published, but I never bothered to try.”

Again, Anthony felt the unfamiliar twinge.

What the hell is this? he thought.

But he didn’t have a ready answer. He only knew that when he had thought of Lisa reading Polly’s novel and trying to make deep remarks about it, he had felt a stab of pain. In a quick second he had seen her bent over the manuscript, her long hair falling across her face the way it did when she was preoccupied. And he remembered the way she nibbled at the thumbnail when she was reading.

I’ll have to read this in a hurry, he thought, and then we’ll have a good laugh over it.

And then the ache hurt him again and he thought, What am I thinking? Lisa and I are never going to laugh together about anything again.

“Of course, it isn’t as if I took Lisa’s comments seriously,” Polly was saying, as if nothing could possibly have passed through Anthony’s mind since she had last spoken. “Lisa was a sweet enough girl, but she was always reading beyond her depth.”

Anthony felt his jaw clench as if the simple action would lock out memory and pain. He could remember Lisa with her forehead wrinkled a little, her fingers twisting a bit of her long hair.

“I don’t know, Anthony,” confessed Lisa. “Dostoevsky is supposed to be a great writer and all that, so I guess there must be something wrong with me. He just doesn’t reach me.”

Anthony laughed. “What do you mean, he doesn’t reach you?”

“Well, I just can’t believe that life is all that sad and full of his kind of people. All grubby and futile and all that. Maybe all those Russians were like that. I tried to read Tolstoy once, and he was all sad and futile, too.”

“I have to be going,” said Anthony, and Jim Sheppard came to the door with him.

“Listen, Anthony,” he said, “if you have to let Polly down about her book, do it as gently as you can, will you?”

“Sure, Jim,” said Anthony and thought later that he would have said anything at that moment just to get away.

He went home and started to drink in earnest and after about an hour, he began Polly Sheppard’s novel. He finished it at two o’clock the next morning and was, as he put it, ready to commit suicide over the thought that anyone could string words together that badly. The novel was called Pagan’s Way and it was full of bold, handsome men and women with big breasts that were continually being handled by the flashing-eyed men who took a quick roll in bed and then were off to more feats of derring-do. Except that Polly Sheppard never came right out and said that. She was an asterisk writer and Anthony reflected that all that was missing was for Polly to have written the line about drawing a curtain of gentleness over the ensuing scene. But Lisa had liked it, just as she liked all novels full of sex and action and brave deeds.

My poor baby, thought Anthony and before he could stop himself he was weeping.

But the next morning he had his excuses ready. He’d become drunk, a lot drunker than he had thought and he’d gotten maudlin over a dumb little broad whom he’d taught to be good in bed. That was all there was to it and he’d make damned sure it didn’t happen again.

Maybe I was a little in love with her for a while, he told himself. If you can call sex love. But that’s long over and done with. So I had a little summer fun. There’s no need to make a federal case out of it. It’s over and she’s gone and I’m damned lucky to have escaped as easily as I did.

He returned Polly’s novel and told her exactly what he thought of it.

“It sounds like something an overly romantic college girl would write,” he said unkindly. “For Christ’s sake, Polly, burn this before anyone gets hold of it by mistake. It’d be terribly embarrassing.”

Polly’s face flushed angrily and Anthony laughed.

“What’re you mad at me for?” he asked. “You said yourself you were giving it to me just for laughs. Well, I laughed all right. It was a riot.”

“Lisa didn’t laugh,” said Polly and tried to laugh now herself. “She thought it was great.”

“What does Lisa have to do with it?” demanded Anthony, angrier than he had been in a long, long time.

“Why, nothing,” said Polly. “It’s just that she’s the only person I ever showed it to, except Jim, and he’d be prejudiced, of course. All I meant was that Lisa’s was the only outside opinion I ever had about it. Until you. And of course, Lisa wouldn’t count, really. She was never very bright. I mean, she was a sweet girl and all that, but she’s never been anywhere or done anything.”

The crafty, sly look came into Polly’s eyes again, the look Anthony had seen there before, and the look he had seen in Doris Delaney Palmer’s eyes.

“And now there she is, poor thing, pregnant again,” said Polly with her false sympathy. “Now I don’t imagine she’ll ever get to go anywhere or do anything. She’ll be more tied down than ever with a new baby coming.”

Anthony longed to slap her face but he merely smiled.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “Lisa was dumb all right.”

“I’ll say,” said Polly in a tone that seemed to imply that now that she and Anthony were in agreement about something, they were close friends. “If she hadn’t been rather stupid she’d never have let herself be caught the way she did. Certainly she and Chris can’t afford another baby.”

“If Lisa hadn’t been so dumb,” Anthony went on as if Polly hadn’t spoken, “she would have advised you to write about something you know.”

They were alone in Polly’s big, countrified kitchen, with its fireplace with a false Dutch oven and its wide-board floor. Anthony looked around and sipped at the beer Polly had given him when he had come in. He looked at Polly in her slacks and open-necked shirt, one leg flung casually over the arm of her chair. Phony, he thought. Phony colonial house, phony country wife and phony friend.

“Why don’t you write about some of the more interesting relationships between husbands and wives?” said Anthony.

Polly laughed. “I’m afraid I don’t know much about things like that,” she said. “I’ve always lived a rather insulated life as far as the grimier things are concerned.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Anthony suavely. “Take infidelity, for instance. That would make interesting reading, properly written up, of course.”

He saw fear in her eyes and knew what she was thinking.

How much had Lisa Pappas told him?

“I don’t know what you mean,” protested Polly.

Anthony laughed out loud. “Polly Sheppard,” he said, “you’re a complete phony. You know goddamned well what I’m talking about.”

So Lisa had told him everything. Polly slammed her beer glass down on the kitchen table.

“I’m no phonier than you are,” she said coldly. “You knew Lisa was gullible and you led her on, making her believe that you were in love with her, sleeping with her, even getting her pregnant. Oh, yes,” said Polly viciously. “Don’t bother to deny it. She told me herself that the baby was yours.”

Anthony put down his glass next to hers, then he stood up and bowed slightly.

“My dear Polly,” he said. “Before you go about looking for skeletons in other people’s closets, wouldn’t it be wiser to clean out your own?”

“You bastard,” said Polly softly.

“My dear,” replied Anthony, “you know the old cliché about how it takes one to know one.”

“That goes for phonies, too,” said Polly, wanting and getting the last word.