Letitia Sharpe still played tennis as often as three, sometimes four times a week, depending how she felt. Doubles, of course. She was a member of the Edgemoor Tennis Club in Bethesda, had been for well over sixty years now, as well as the Columbia Country Club her deceased husband insisted they join so he could entertain clients there. Her son Adam was a renown tennis impresario after all and he didn’t come by that from nothing.
In fact, sons Adam and Charlie were the lights of her life. Charlie was the black sheep, of course, but that didn’t bother her at all because black sheep or not, he was charming, lovable and without guile. He’d played tennis too but neither son had been among the greats back in the sixties and seventies, though they had tried. However, Adam had been smart enough to go to law school when he recognized his mediocrity as a player whereas Charlie had simply become a playboy, made possible not by his tennis, at least money-wise, but by the inheritance he received from his father just as his tennis career was winding down. Meanwhile, Adam’s law career was gearing up due to his contacts with many famous old tennis friends who sought his advice and services because they knew and trusted him. As the game was becoming a world-wide phenomenon, Adam became a very well-to-do sports agent and tennis promoter as well as a former pro.
As a tennis entrepreneur, Adam brought the game into the big time from it’s early, exciting beginnings. Wooden rackets gave way to metal and larger sizes and he was at the zenith of his career now. Meanwhile, Charlie was married with three children, had a job as a teaching pro at a swanky resort in North Carolina and was doing very well, thanks at least in part to his older brother’s big time success. The only thing she occasionally hoped was that Charlie’s roving eye had lost some of its intensity, although somehow she doubted it, so she put it out of her mind, something she was good at doing when something or someone didn’t come up to her standards.
She smiled to herself now as she watched a seniors tennis match on the tennis channel. She’d played doubles that morning with her new younger partner at the Edgemoor Club located just down the street from the house she’d lived in for over sixty years now. She and Fred had built it, or rather he had it built for them as he was slowly but surely making a name for himself in Washington as one of the area’s top drawer defense attorneys. He’d started the firm himself, much as they’d built their large, antique brick colonial on a big corner lot in the then growing and eventually premier section of Bethesda. The community and tennis club were called Edgemoor, a name she had been instrumental in pushing when the club was built shortly after they built their house. Although it was a small community within the Bethesda area, it was nevertheless locally envied and admired, particularly by people with money, often the very people who also happened to love tennis.
Of course, Fred had insisted they also join Columbia Country Club on Connecticut Avenue in Chevy Chase. He felt it crucial to have a membership in a convenient prestigious private Club where he could entertain colleagues and clients, as well as Washington’s hoi polloi as his law firm grew in both size and prestige. He would also eventually be invited to join the prestigious Cosmos Club in D. C.
Of course, he had died too young to suit her. A big man, standing six-foot-two and weighing well over 250 pounds as he grew older, he’d not been inclined to deny himself anything in the way of food or drink. Also, he found less and less time to “play” as his workload increased, so he didn’t get much exercise, which for her meant tennis and, in the early years, jogging around the neighborhood with her handsome “boys.”
Well, now here she was 89 years old (“in your 90th year one friend liked to say because she knew it annoyed Letitia, true or not) sitting home most evenings falling asleep in her easy chair after a busy day of maybe tennis and then lunch at the club--a salad, one fresh warm roll, iced tea and a chocolate mint to finish it off. Most evenings, home alone, she had soup and a sandwich, tuna or egg salad, and a small dish of chocolate ice cream, her one real treat.
“You’re thin as a rail, Letitia. For heavens sake, at your age treat yourself,” friends often importuned, usually as they treated themselves, but she had never been into food all that much, liking to say, “Fred eats and drinks enough for both of us.”
“Well,” she often sighed, “at least he enjoyed his life and didn’t suffer the indignities of a long, drawn-out illness, though sometimes I wish he had.”
There is a great loneliness that comes over us at various times of our lives, Letitia thought now, as she cleaned her glasses, finding it harder and harder to even read the captions running across the bottom of her TV screen, never mind hear the words.
She only turned the TV on in the evenings, but then only if there was something on she wanted to watch. Otherwise, she preferred to read. She rarely retired before eleven o’clock, though most of her remaining friends of her general age turned the damn thing on first thing in the morning and turned it off when they retired, often falling asleep in front of it, waking to the screen flickering away at some ungodly hour. “It’s company,” they said. “Feels like someone’s home. I leave it on when I go out so when I come home I don’t feel so…alone.”
She never knew why the loneliness came over her, usually at night, and it hadn’t just started after Fred died either. Sometimes she had felt that way when he was alive and at home, something she attributed to his inattention when he was there, his preoccupation with work, which was his hobby as well as his occupation. And, when she did get him to herself, she tended to regale him with stories about what was happening in her life, about the boys or some feud she was having with someone. He always listened dutifully, or so it seemed, but rarely had anything to say even when she asked him. Nor did he talk about his work, which aggravated her, especially when he was working some big case that was splashed all over the papers and the news on TV.
Nevertheless, since he’d died the wash of loneliness sometimes overwhelmed her and she would call Adam or Charlie, whoever she could get, disliking talking to their wives, who always struck her as hostile, not, she believed, wanting to be burdened with her. Probably wished she’d die, she sometimes thought, which of course, was inevitable, but she had no intention of doing so until she had to.
She had no sense that any of these lonely feelings had come out of her childhood. Such thinking just seemed stupid since there was nothing to be done about being ignored and shushed in favor of her older brother. Her boys often told her she talked too much, which may have had something to do with the fact that she had secretly always been pleased that she and Fred hadn’t had any girls she might have had to compete with, nor had she wanted to know the gender of the child she miscarried.
She’d met Fred through her brother who was in the Navy and brought him home on leave one weekend. They’d hit it off immediately, the shy young naval officer intrigued by the smart, talkative gorgeous blond who outplayed them in every game they played that weekend. And it didn’t hurt that Letitia’s father was one of the biggest real estate brokers in the city.
She picked up her New Yorker Magazine now and glanced through it, checking out the tennis match she was only half watching when the TV and lights went out.
“Mother, you need to have the house rewired,” Adam told her during his last visit, popping in unexpectedly, as was his wont.
Once she’d bought a new microwave and when she plugged it in, all the circuits in the house blew. She’d immediately called Adam, partly because he lived not too far away in his huge mac-mansion in Potomac, but also because she knew he’d know what to do. He’d worked one summer as an electrician’s assistant to pay for a trip to the US Open when his father insisted he earn some money instead of wasting all his time on the tennis courts. Eventually he did make some money playing tennis, but by then even he knew it was never going to amount to much so he took advantage of his father’s offer to pay him through any law school he could get into, and luckily it was Georgetown.
So, when the lights went out that night she knew he’d been right and this time she would call an electrician in the morning. Meanwhile, she wasn’t sure what she was going to do right now, except maybe go to bed in the dark, which was when she heard the scraping, breaking sound at her back door. She knew it was the kitchen door because of the glass panes in the upper section. It couldn’t have been anything else.
• • •
When he was angry, the feeling sometimes permeated his whole body, making it feel as if it were encased in a kind of miserable armor. It was like a disease, a sickness, lava from a volcano seeping into the very heart of his being. And, although he had no overt consciousness of it, because it layered everything, there was just a tight feeling and a terrible overpowering sense of needing something. At the very least he wanted relief or release from a kind of miasmic cloud of pure rage centered in his head like an alcoholic high.
It was latent but always at least partly there, coming and going, bubbling and releasing, especially if he had something to do, some job to perform, but not always. It often invaded him at night and then he went on the prowl in an attempt to get away from it, or at the very least alleviate it. And usually he had a destination in mind, one that had presented itself to him at some point. He never really knew when something or someplace would appeal to him, a thought would drift in and out, eventually becoming obsessive. And recently there was the additional excitement of the gun.
He’d found it in his mother’s basement when he was rummaging around, cleaning up for her, a task she’d given him at lunch that week, always looking to keep him occupied, busy—when he was willing. He’d completely forgotten about his grandfather showing it to him once.
“I don’t like you having too much time on your hands, son, it’s not good for you. And, I hope you are taking your meds, darling. It’s bad for you when you don’t take them. Your Uncle said you were…well, not yourself at the work site last week and that makes him nervous for you.”
“She makes him nervous,” he said, reaching for the last roll in the basket. They were having their weekly lunch at her club, something he looked forward to mainly for the food. “Are there anymore?” he asked, gesturing at the empty basket with the roll in his hand, knowing there were as he carefully buttered the last one he’d taken.
“Oh, there’s that nutty Letitia Sharpe,” his mother said, nodding at a far table occupied by four women wearing various types of tennis attire, mostly white.
“Which one?” he asked, gesturing at the waiter and holding up the empty bread basket.
“The really skinny one with the long neck and page boy style gray hair—so ugly and outdated--and, as usual, she’s doing all the talking—I avoid her at all costs. She just loves to find a subject and then lecture you on it.”
“Lecture?” he queried.
“She never agrees with anything you say. She’ll ask if you’ve seen some movie she’s seen, or read some story in the paper, and no matter what you say, she argues with you.” His mother laughed shortly. “She’s very competitive. I used to play tennis…against her…and she was just ugly, and not as good as she liked to believe she was. She loved to lob and was determined to win…”
“Did she cheat?” he asked, grabbing a hot roll from the basket the waiter brought them, only half listening to her.
“Oh, no, she didn’t cheat, she called the lines close, but nobody thought she was trying to take a point from them that way. She just intimidated everybody, always told you afterward what you did wrong, how you should have played. Her sons were both good so I guess she thought she knew something the rest of us didn’t.”
Noreen shook her head and turned back toward him. “Now, let’s talk about you,” she said, leaning toward him intently, her dyed red hair spiking out at the sides, brown eyes drilling into him. They felt like spears to him and he shuddered, looking away, eyeing the table of four women his mother had been talking about, his attention falling on the thin, gray-haired one who was talking and gesturing while the other women sipped their wine, eyes averted.
• • •
Noreen had been an obedient child, like her own daughter Pilar. Not that she had much choice. Her parents, of course, controlled everything, even though they were deeply involved in the family business and, while her four bachelor uncles were alive, were also totally immersed in family itself. Her father, a loner, tended to live in his own world, leaving the personal part of their life mainly to his wife because in fact she gave him no choice and he preferred not to make waves. He’d started his own landscaping business after coming home from the war, a country boy born and raised in Southern Maryland who migrated to Washington to work with his brother. Eventually his brother decided to go back to their Southern Maryland roots while Walter stayed and built the landscaping business on his own.
Walter met Sonia doing a landscaping job for her parents and after dating for six months she jumped at the chance to marry the handsome military hero, at least in part to get away from her parents. When they died, her four brothers invited Walter to join forces with their building materials and auto parts business and he agreed after they said they wouldn’t interfere with him and his particular area of expertise, which suited everyone just fine.
Sonia, by the time she met Walter, was considered an old maid, so shortly after they married they had two children, Noreen and Grant, They sent Noreen to private Catholic schools, although they were none of them particularly religious, and as soon as he was old enough Grant was introduced to the family business, which he took to like a duck to water.
“Must be in the genes,” one of Sonia’s four brothers commented the first time Grant put together a car engine they’d given up on.
When Sonia and her brothers inherited their parents’ large tract of property in old Chevy Chase, the brothers ceded their share of the land to her and Walter, building them a Sears Roebuck house with the understanding that the brothers would spend holidays and other special occasions there until or if one of them married, but none of them ever did.
And, until Noreen ran off with Santos Ortega right out of high school at the tender age of 18, the family settled into a routine that brooked no interruptions in the form of change.
The uncles went after the young elopers, of course, once they realized what had happened, but when they learned that she was pregnant, they had to settle for the new member of the family. Santos was an illegal immigrant who they had been hired to take care of the house and property in Chevy Chase. He was, as they used to say, “a handsome devil” but he was also a hard worker, something they appreciated. He could fix anything, which pleased Noreen’s parents because they were both so busy as their businesses grew that they had little time for anything else, which was also why they never noticed Noreen’s attachment to the young man until it was too late.
Her brother Grant noticed but it didn’t bother him because he liked Santos who was always happy to show him how to do something or just play catch with him on weekends.
The first time Noreen kissed Santos was in her father’s basement workshop where she’d gone to get a jar of canned cherries her mother wanted. Santos was working on the dog house her father had asked him to help him build, a huge, yellow hardwood edifice for the German Short-haired pointer one of their customers had given him because he was leaving town and couldn’t take the animal with him.
“No,” Sonia said, when she saw the dog, but when her usually acquiescent husband bowed his head and in a low voice said, “Yes, yes,” she had been so startled that she stared at him open-mouthed.
“I’ll build an outdoor dog house for her and she’ll be fine,” he added, and after a moment she just shrugged and went back to what she was doing. And, as it turned out, the dog took a liking to Sonia, often sitting or lazing by her side or nearby when she was doing the laundry, working in her vegetable garden, or just reading the newspaper on the porch in the morning. So after a while Gretchen was allowed inside.
When Santos saw Noreen standing near the entrance to the fruit cellar where they kept the canned goods, he gestured for her to come over, which she did, and he simply bent over and kissed her on her heart-shaped lips, and that was the beginning. She began meeting him regularly, surreptitiously, in the basement, but it was in the woods behind the big yellow dog house that they finally came together in an intimate way. And, in her naïveté, she soon found herself pregnant. It was inevitable.
A few days after she graduated from high school they ran off to Ellicott City, Maryland where they were married by a Justice of the Peace, then continued on to Ocean City where her uncles found them on the beach at the popular Maryland seaside resort.
The thing was, until later, they all liked Santos. So they adjusted to the reality and settled the couple in a one bedroom apartment just off Georgia Avenue, provided them with a car so Santos could continue working for them wherever they needed him and, for a while, a couple of years after Pilar was born, they were happy.
• • •
Noreen took up gardening in the small plot behind their ground floor apartment and, in the beginning, Santos often spent his free time playing with Pilar and visiting the in-laws. Later he began meeting Mexican immigrant friends who worked for construction companies around the area, men who were hired out on a daily or weekly basis from street corners they were known to occupy while waiting for employers to come along and hire them for a day or a week.
But, when Noreen got pregnant with their son, things started to go downhill. He was always smiling and charming around the family, but was less and less inclined to work with his former diligence, arriving late and leaving early, or not showing up at all. So, believing he needed more supervision, Sonia and Walter insisted the couple move back into their house to which they had added two extra bedrooms and a bath.
Santos at first refused, but when Noreen’s parents stopped paying the rent on their apartment they were forced out because he refused to pay it.
Andrew was born in Holy Cross Hospital and a year later Santos disappeared, came back once, spent some time with the family doing odd chores around the house, but then he left for good. They never made any inquiries about him, knowing his illegal status and by then disenchanted with him. Also, because he had managed to take a fair amount of their money with him. Walter and Sonia both had money-under-the mattress mentalities and Santos took full advantage of knowing this, so they simply acquiesced to the situation knowing, as an illegal, he could not afford to come back because this time they would certainly turn him in.
“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” Sonia fumed, and by then Noreen had fallen out of her adolescent love for Santos, especially when his abuse both of her and little Andrew escalated, though he never touched Pilar.
“You’re fat and ugly,” he said when she reproached him for his absences and the way he handled Andrew. He also took the money her parents gave her for living expenses in white envelopes twice a month. And the sex, always a constant had become rougher and rougher until she took to sleeping in the second bedroom with Andrew behind a locked door, a wooden hatch across the top so he couldn’t break in without making a racket. She left Pilar in their bedroom with him because he favored her or ignored her, depending on his mood.
“To hell with you,” he whispered across the dining room table one night shortly before her parents got home from work. “I can get more and better any time I want, and do,” he said, smiling over Andrew’s dark head while Pilar sat with her head down playing with her food. “And none of them are ugly or fat or stupid,” he added.
“Good,” she said, smiling back, and he would have slapped her, an angry scowl descending over his handsome face, but the front door slammed open and Sonia and Walter could be heard arguing about something. So he sat back in his chair and stared at her malevolently, smiling pleasantly when his in-laws entered the kitchen.
Shortly after that he took the money he knew they had hidden away around the house and disappeared for good, after which, to the whole family’s surprise, Noreen morphed into a slender, clothes conscious young woman who had no further interest in anyone except her children and her immediate family.
• • •
He didn’t remember when he decided to follow her. Maybe at lunch that day with his mother. What he decided, the way he always did, was to watch a house he wanted to enter, or, in this case, the woman, find out where she lived and how, with no particular motive—at least at first.. There was something about the woman that raised his hackles. This happened with him from time to time. He wasn’t sure why, but physically he could feel his body tightening at the sight of someone, or in this case, her, a sensation he hated because it was so intensely uncomfortable.
The only thing he’d said to his mother as she turned away from looking at the table of four women, was, “Is she…are they here often?”
“Letitia is, Lord yes, at least every time I’m here she is. What else does she have to do? At her age spending money isn’t even important because she’s got everything.”
“Like you,” he said, which was when she drilled him with her hazel eyes, something she’d been doing for as long as he could remember, especially when she
was upset with him for upsetting her mother, his overbearing grandmother. And sometimes it seemed to him she blamed him for his father leaving, though he knew she’d been happier after Santos left. He didn’t know why he thought that though because he’d been too young to remember much of anything about his father. There was just a vague sense of foreboding. Maybe he just wanted to believe that she resented him because of his own ambivalent feelings about her.
• • •
A few weeks after that lunch with his mother, he parked near the Country Club’s tennis courts and eventually saw the woman, Letitia, a name that had stuck in his craw like a burr. As before, she was talking up a storm, like a cawing crow he thought, and when she climbed into her pink Mustang convertible and whizzed out onto Connecticut Avenue, paying no attention to the traffic, he followed her, which wasn’t too difficult considering her car and his personal affection for that Vintage model. When she turned onto Bradley Boulevard and eventually Wilson Lane, then made a left after about six blocks into a section of the Edgemoor community, he wasn’t surprised when she swung into a long driveway leading to a classic antique brick colonial sitting majestically on a large corner lot. She’d probably lived there since it was built he thought, which inexplicably made him angry. The deep yard was beautifully maintained, neatly trimmed azalea bushes all across the entire front of the house, a two-car garage off to the right. But she didn’t bother to drive into it, coming to an abrupt stop short of the garage door and climbing out nimbly enough for an old woman. (“She’s almost 90 for God’s sake,” his mother had sneered, as if somebody who played tennis and ate salads for lunch at that age deserved to be sneered at.) She made her way around the house, pausing periodically to examine her flowers and shrubs, bending over to yank out a weed here and there.
He watched her as he slowly drove by the house, then back again once, finally heading home, the image of the house and the woman firmly entrenched in his mind. Later, he wandered around his own house for hours, no lights, like a ghost in the dark, eyes blank, moving slowly, clearly on automatic pilot, not thinking. Finally he went downstairs, collected the gun he’d found in his mother’s basement which he now kept in a trunk of his own making, still wrapped in the same dirty towel his grandfather had used. Then he headed out to his old green Dodge and made his way back to “Letitia’s” house.
He parked a block away, in front of a darkened house considerably smaller then hers and headed back to her house. It had lights on in what he believed was her living room, a faint light flickering from what was probably her TV.
When these spells came on him, he didn’t let his mind interfere with his actions. He knew they usually occurred when he’d gone off his meds (“I forgot to get the prescription refilled,” was his excuse) and he didn’t really care. He simply needed to do something when the pressure built up in his body, anything to relieve
the antsy, unpleasant feeling surging through him like lightening flashes in a storm, which sometimes went on for hours. Until he did something to mitigate the surges and that usually took the form of movement, action of usually an intense nature.
He did not think practically anyway. He knew that. Acting on impulse directed by some inner urge that simply moved him in whatever direction that felt right. And, since “Letitia” had been on his brain like a consuming fever ever since seeing her at lunch with his mother that day, he found himself at the woman’s back door, gun, rope and tape in his pockets this time. The rope and tape had been the perfect accompaniments the last time, both of which he’d cadged from his uncle’s store room. The gun just felt like a security blanket, sort of fun.
What surprised him after he broke the window in her side door in order to reach inside and unlock it was that the door was already open.
“Stupid woman,” he muttered, as he opened the door and stepped into the dark kitchen, dark not because the light was out but because he’d pulled the electric wires loose from the side of the house, having hoisted himself up on a trellis to reach them. His work for his uncle had prepared him for such knowledge and since it was an older house, it was a fairly simple thing to do. No need to get into her basement and turn off the fuse box as he had the first time. Besides, he’d never have been able to climb through Letitia’s basement windows as he had in the other house because they were too narrow even for him.
His eyes were used to the dark now, although there was a full moon so there was some light, and when she appeared like a ghost in the kitchen doorway leading, no doubt, to her dining room, he snapped on the flashlight he’d taken from his other victim and pointed it directly into her face, causing her to gasp and fall back a step.
“What? Who…” she stammered, as he rapidly moved toward her before she could get her wits about her. She was wearing a long, pale, old lady nightgown and some kind of floral wrapper around her scrawny shoulders.
“Now, listen,” she said, in a high, screechy voice, seeming to recover herself. “You’re in trouble…” but trailed off when he produced his gun. Then, when she opened her mouth to shout--he could tell by her body language that was her instinct--he hit her on the head with his weapon.
She crumpled to the floor like a rag doll so it was relatively simple for him to tape her mouth then run the rope around her sinewy wrists, pull her legs up in the back and tie the rope around her ankles so she was completely helpless, leaving him to wander freely around her house, picking up this and that with no particular intent.
He wasn’t really curious. This was just something he was driven to, not because he needed anything but because the action gave him a thrill and it had only recently occurred to him that he might pawn some of the things he’d acquired in other houses. So, when he saw she had strewn some jewelry in a bureau drawer in the master bedroom, he pocketed some of it, but then became intrigued with the tennis trophies that lined two long book shelves hanging on one wall.
Pausing, he studied them for a while, then hefted one that looked as if it might be silver, and smiled to himself. He would keep this as a trophy for himself, like it was his own. After all, he’d earned it hadn’t he? Breaking in here?
“Yup,” he muttered, a wave of satisfaction sweeping over him at what he’d done, what he was doing even as the tight angry feeling in his body seemed to subside, release like a fat rubber band breaking suddenly, allowing the blood to flow like a river after a storm.
Hefting the trophy under one arm, he threw a few more pieces of jewelry taken at random into his pocket, then let himself out the same way he’d come in, dancing around her now squirming body lying half in the kitchen and half in the dining room, looking like a deer dying in the road. He didn’t look directly at her as he rubber-soled his way to the back door, stepping gingerly around the broken glass, his mind already back in his car heading for home and sleep, bringing with it a sense of relief that always came over him after one of these escalating adventures. It particularly pleased him to have added living beings to his nocturnal ventures.
Everything fell into place when he got home, his victim forgotten like the frogs he used to stone that he found in the creek behind his grandparent’s and now his mother’s house, his sister’s squeamish screams goading him on until his grandmother appeared like a black apparition to lug him kicking and screaming back to the house where she kept a wooden hair brush for punishing the children. Usually him, punishing him much as he’d punished the frogs, only he usually managed to kill the creatures whereas all he was left with, after she made him hold out his hands to be pummeled with the brush, were a few stinging welts and bruises. Nothing he couldn’t tolerate.
• • •
The phone kept ringing all morning but no matter how she struggled, the rope only seemed to tighten. So after a while all she could do was lie there and wait, the Lord only knew for what or who but surely someone would eventually come looking for her. One of her tennis partners, maybe, when she didn’t show up for her doubles game, or one of her sons or daughters-in-law wanting something. They always seemed to want something even though they didn’t need anything. She never really knew when her youngest might show up since he loved fast cars and often took a notion to head up to Washington, sometimes with his wife, but mostly not, where he always managed to convince her he needed money.
But in the end it was her nosey neighbor working in her yard on Letitia’s kitchen side of the house who noticed the broken window in the side door and, curious (she was a nosey bitch with nothing better to do then watch her neighbors’ comings and goings,) edged her way around the fence Letitia had put up in an attempt to keep away the woman’s prying eyes, and peered into the kitchen like a curious cat. Squinting through the broken window, she finally saw Letitia lying now in the middle of the kitchen floor where she’d managed to wriggle herself, and screamed.
But, instead of rescuing Letitia, she backed away, hurriedly returned to her house and called the police.
“He didn’t have to hit me on the head with his ugly gun,” she complained later, touching the hairline bruise at the top of her forehead.