MY BODY FELT LIKE A clenched fist and I hadn’t been near the Y in a couple of weeks. I parked in LaSalle Court late in the afternoon and went upstairs to the smaller of the two running tracks, the one that’s dished and threatens to pitch you over the railing into the basketball players below. Five minutes of running and any sane commander would have left me for dead. I went downstairs and shot some baskets, grunting with exertion out beyond the circle, sagged down in the dry sauna amid some gentlemen who were just possibly in worse shape than I was, and concluded by collapsing across the rubdown table for about ten minutes. When I left I felt a good deal worse than when I’d entered but I had rinsed Goode and Crocker and Dierker and the whole sad bunch out of my mind for at least an hour. By the time I got back to the Porsche I was thinking about them again.
I was too tired to eat a real meal so I cut some cheddar, sliced an apple, spread out a big slice of Dimpfelmeyer rye bread on a cutting board, put on a sweater, and went out on my balcony. The ball game hadn’t started and WCCO was telling me what a hell of a year 1932 had been. They played Bing Crosby’s recording of “Night and Day” and then told me that on March 1 the nineteen-month-old son of Colonel Charles Lindbergh and Anne Morrow Lindbergh was taken from his crib at the family home in Hopewell, New Jersey. On May 12 the boy’s body, little more than a skeleton, was found in the bushes a few miles from the house. In the end, maybe, you never got far from home. Then Fred Astaire sang, “A Shine on Your Shoes” and I began to nibble my dinner.
There were so many pieces to try to fit together, to interlock, but all I could see or feel—anybody who had talked to the people I had was bound to have the same feeling—was that they all belonged to the same puzzle. It was like having pieces from each of the four corners of the puzzle; none of them seemed to touch. I suppose it was a good example of the untidiness of life as compared to the formal complexity of one of my father’s novels or one of Agatha Christie’s. I sat and munched on apple and damp rye bread and felt like a child crouched dumbly in the playpen with all my toys collapsed around me, not knowing which one to fiddle with next.
I kept thinking back to Archie’s blackboard, wondering how the diverse elements might make a real, visible pattern rather than a felt pattern, the kind I was arriving at by intuition. I could picture the blackboard in my mind but whatever I felt we’d be closing in on was utterly gone. In school geometry class had affected me the same way. It always seemed so pure and logical as the teacher worked through the theorems on the board; I never had a question, never a doubt as I watched the clean little miracle unfold out of her chalky hand. But once I sat down in my room with my homework it never made sense. Somewhere between school and home the logic had gotten lost and I couldn’t produce my own. All I really wanted to do was turn on the radio and listen to My Friend Irma and think rude thoughts about Marie Wilson’s bosom.
What was the pattern? There was the scrapbook. And the dead people: Larry and Tim. Who both spoke with Kim shortly before they died. And the club had known Larry and Kim, if only peripherally. And Carver Maxvill. The mention of his name, a man nobody had seen in thirty years, frightened Father Boyle, General Goode, and James Crocker. I sorted through the stuff in my mind, made entries on filing cards of different colors (my father’s son, yes)—a card for names, for things, for possible motives … I almost forgot to make a name card for Billy Whitefoot, the all-but-forgotten man. “The Forgotten Man” … Franklin D. Roosevelt had made that popular during the 1932 Presidential campaign. The club was meeting up north, snapping their pictures and drinking too much and catching fish and raising hell, and Franklin D. was running for the White House in a wheelchair. Had they cared? Had they really been a part of their times, or just a sprinkling of warts? It was so hard to tell. Forty-odd years ago, who had they been, really? Could they even cast a glance along the track of time and remember?
On the radio Barbra Streisand whacked out another hit from 1932, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” pronouncing it “doime,” and I remembered seeing her at the Blue Angel in the early sixties (or had it been the late fifties? So much for trying to remember how it had all looked in 1932). Of Thee I Sing won the Pulitzer Prize that year and to commemorate the event, just before the 1974 Minnesota Twins took the field against the Kansas City Royals, they played “Wintergreen for President” and I was tapping my feet and humming. I wondered if Archie had seen Charlie Chaplin in City Lights that year. Had he cheered on June 21 when Jack Sharkey decisioned Max Schmeling and brought the heavyweight championship back home? Had he seen Paul Muni in Scarface?
I sat in the dark for a long time listening to the ball game and picking through my memories of everything I’d seen and heard since Hubbard Anthony and I had come back from playing tennis that first day. I tried to remember it all and I came up with one peculiar scrap, one connection between two people who had died: the gray fluff from Timothy Dierker’s slippers … That was what I’d seen sprinkled on the floor of Larry Blankenship’s sad, hollow, echoing apartment. The dirty gray fluff hadn’t been kicked into the corners; it was out in the center of the room … Timothy Dierker had been down to visit Larry Blankenship not long before he died. Did he know what had driven Larry to suicide? Or was it Pa Dierker who had cleaned out Larry’s apartment after the suicide? My problem was that I kept coming up with more questions and whenever I had the glimmering of an answer it would split apart à la Walt Disney and transform itself into several new questions. I finished the apple and cheese, chomped up the rye crust, and opened a can of Olympia. The Twins had just gone ahead on Carew’s double up the middle. It felt as though autumn were definitely in the air.
I decided I’d never get on top of the mess of detail and fact and implication without applying a new discipline to it. A clear mind, a healthy body; God knows what had gotten into me. A diet revision seemed a good place to start and I was peering warily at a half of pink grapefruit, my entire breakfast if you didn’t count the coffee with Weight Watchers sweetener, when the phone on the desk beside me rattled like a snake.
It was Hubbard Anthony. He wanted me to meet him for lunch at the Minneapolis Club and there was a vaguely judicial, oddly insistent quality in his voice. It wasn’t a command but on the other hand it wasn’t a chance suggestion. Clearly, I wasn’t supposed to make my apologies.
The vines still clung to the brick in the sunshine and the hush lay like the soft cloud of tradition on the dining room. Minneapolis is not an old city but it is a wealthy one. The Minneapolis Club therefore purchased its aura of age, turning new into old with a peculiar kind of social alchemy. Money had done a good deal for Minneapolis but it was still a trick, the city was built on a trick; it was a thought which had subtly invaded my thinking years before but I held onto it with the strength born of conviction. I had the feeling that no matter how long Minneapolis lasted, it would still be new, wanting to be old.
Hubbard was tall and elegant in blue summer-weight pin-stripe, a gold collar pin tweezing the long points tight beneath his striped tie. He smelled good, too, as he led me up the stairway and into lunch. He was a perfect reflection of the typical Minneapolis power broker, though somewhat better dressed than the grain barons and the department store princes and computer tycoons. He moved through the room like a saber blade and I followed, a large fellow in need of a diet. It was quiet with the gentle clink of cutlery on china and ice in tall glasses of tea. Beyond, in the dark, polished lounges, there were occasional elderly gents reading the Wall Street Journal or writing odd little notes on the club stationery or sleeping it off in the little compartment tucked behind the library, out of range of families and impatient offices.
“Clear soup and the sole,” Hubbard said thoughtfully, as if it were the day’s big decision. Proudly I required two soft-boiled eggs and two slices of dry whole wheat toast. Hubbard raised his eyebrows, nodded, and sipped his perfect martini.
“Well, we’re surely not here to arrange a tennis date,” I said.
“Hardly.” His eyes settled on a man two tables distant. Thin, sallow, worried in his glen plaid. “Andy Malcolm over there—have you heard of his problems? No? Well, you surely will. In the papers.” Hubbard sighed, wistfully mocking. “He’s about to be indicted—that’s his lawyer he’s about to weep on. Andy, as it happens, has been caught up in his enthusiasms for Mr. Nixon, running in and out of the country with satchels full of cash, ‘laundering it’ as we’ve been learning to say in recent months. At this point in time, Andy’s rather afraid he’s headed for the clink. After golf at Woodhill people will mention his name and chuckle behind their hands … which causes him much distress.” He sipped at the martini and made a sour face. “Crooks of his class really do have a pathological fear of being revealed for what they are. Not overly bright. Can you imagine committing a crime for Richard Nixon? It’s really rather astonishing.”
“Will he go to jail?”
“Good lord, no. Did I give that impression? He belongs there, of course, but we must be realistic. He’ll avert the final disaster.”
Lunch arrived and I sliced open the eggs. A gasp of steam escaped from each one. They required salt and pepper. I could see Andy Malcolm and luckily the sight took away my appetite; he wasn’t laughing or smiling. His face was yellowish and deeply lined, jaw clenched, and he looked as if he had to go to the bathroom. I hoped Mr. Nixon appreciated his sacrifice.
“I got a call from our aging football hero, Jim Crocker, last night, Paul. Threatening more or less to run you over with one of his bulldozers. He demanded a meeting. Have you ever confronted a hysterical fullback, or whatever he was? Even at his advanced age the prospect is alarming.” He chewed a bit of sole and nodded happily. “So I met with him. And Martin Boyle. And Jon Goode. Talk about a cabal, it was remarkably offensive in almost every detail. Their hysteria differed only in degree. Crocker appeared in danger of an apoplectic fit and Boyle was, as is frequently the case, about two-thirds gone—on Irish whiskey, I assume. All”—he sighed—“because of your little social calls … Really, Paul we’re going to have to get you straightened out and the old lads becalmed before they croak out of pure terror and indignation.” More sole disappeared. An egg was gone and I was choking on the odd bite of whole wheat toast.
“Hub, I don’t know what you’re talking about …”
“I shall explain.” He patted his mouth with immaculate linen. “The crux of the matter is Carver Maxvill. You’ve exhumed old Carver and scared them half to death. Yes, I can understand your confusion, yes, and I agree that it is surprising in men of such substance. But they’re not as young as they once were and they’re not cool, as the younger generation would say. The mere mention of Carver Maxvill, as you can see, hardly renders me a basket case … but, by heaven, it bothers them.” He shrugged impatiently. “Damned old ladies … but it’s an exposed nerve and there you are.”
“Well, why?” I asked. “What’s their excuse for behaving so stupidly?” I rustled my own indignation, such as it was, reminiscent of creeping damp.
“All we know—all anybody knows, for that matter—is that Carver disappeared. I’d known him for some time, in law school at the university, and his father, since deceased, was an insurance man. Carver was a nice-enough fellow, no Norway Creek connection—the only one of us who didn’t have—but he was an avid outdoorsman, brought up on The Open Road for Boys and the Scout manual, trustworthy, loyal, friendly, courteous, kind, on and on. He wanted to join us … I convinced the others he was a straight lad, hail-fellow. Actually he was like an F. Scott Fitzgerald character, loved wearing tuxedos, had saucer eyes and a kind of flapperish innocence which appealed to a decidedly lower class of women.” He smiled faintly, tolerantly. “His women ran to waitresses, maids, and the general category of easy girls, as we used to call them, but still and all a good fellow. Anyway, he went up north with us regularly, was a good sport, established himself in a top-drawer firm—Vosper and Reynolds—and was generally an enjoyable companion. Tendency to drink a bit heavily …”
“Was there a lot of hell-raising done up at the lodge, Hub? Heavy stuff?”
“Ah, we were young, Paul. At moments our high spirits got the better of us—nothing of moment but a kind of naughtiness I associate with the twenties and thirties, killed off by the war. The spoiled, idle rich, rubbish like that.”
We took our coffee in the dim library, deserted, smelling faintly of furniture polish and cigars. He went on about Carver Maxvill.
“There was nothing untoward or even noticeable about him. Oh, a spot of infatuation with a woman up north who did some cooking for us but nothing to make a fuss over. Then one day, during the war, he simply was gone, taking nothing with him … Do I have an explanation? Only theories. After all, men do take flight, take cover, get swallowed up from time to time. Missing Persons is full of people who’ve never been found. My own feeling is that he’s almost certainly dead. There’s never been the slightest hint that he’s alive. Hypothesis … he probably went slumming and tied one on, got mixed up with the wrong guy’s girlfriend, and got himself killed. I’ve known of drunks who lost consciousness in Minneapolis and wound up dead in Chicago the next day and nobody knows how. He was the kind of irresponsible fellow that sort of thing happens to … fatal flaw and so on. Hell, Paul, he was probably dead within forty-eight hours of his disappearance.”
It reminded me of the Lindbergh baby, in the bush a couple miles from home. Nobody ever gets very far. Hubbard Anthony was probably right. Thirty years of mystery was a waste of time and the man was dead, anyway.
“So why does this set the jolly boys atwitter? Boyle, Goode, Crocker … what’s it got to do with them?”
“Well, it may sound peculiar to you, Paul, but the best excuse for their behavior I can find is just that Carver Maxvill is an irregularity … something that doesn’t fit with the rest of their lives, doesn’t square. Do you know what I mean, Paul?”
“Sounds weak to me,” I said.
“People get old and less resilient, they can’t adapt anymore—that’s what’s happened to these guys. Try to understand. The memory of Maxvill opens up an old sore, something they’d rather not have to think about anymore …”
“Sounds a hell of a lot like guilt to me,” I said.
“Come on, Paul”—he chuckled—“don’t be ridiculous.”
“My explanation makes more sense than yours, that’s all.”
“Perhaps, but mine has the advantage of being true.” He fixed me with a somber stare. “So, please lay off the boys. As a favor to me. I’ve had enough of dealing with elderly hysterics.” He stood up and checked his watch. “All right?”
“All right, Hub.”
He slapped me on the shoulder and we went back outside together. I wasn’t going to get any more of an explanation out of him. I sat alone for a while, squeezed uncomfortably in behind the Porsche’s steering wheel, contemplating a growing rip in the fabric of the top. Ah, so much to do and so little time to do it in.
But Hub, an eminently logical man, hadn’t made much sense. What the hell was he talking about, anyway? Nervous old men; it didn’t stand up; Jon Goode and James Crocker—it was ridiculous. Father Boyle, maybe, but not the others.
I remembered what Kim had said and I tried to fit it into the pattern. It seemed to fit, if I could only jiggle it around, gently, linking it to the rest of what I knew. She said she was fascinated by the past, by the way it reached out and affected the present, how it changed as the years went by and became something new, a different reality from what it once had been. It made a good deal more sense than Hubbard’s explanation.
But how?
What was it about Carver Maxvill, with the saucer eyes and the tuxedo? Had he ever gotten away? Or was he close to home, closer than the old men wanted him? Did Carver Maxvill have something on them? Did he know where the skeletons were buried?
The mention of his name had turned them decidedly green around the gills. And they had been the core of the club. And the club had been somehow entwined, I was increasingly convinced, like a choking vine, with the deaths of Larry Blankenship and Timothy Dierker.
I parked in the newspaper lot, stopped briefly by my desk to throw the jumble of press releases into the wastebasket, and went downstairs to the subbasement to see Orville Smart, head librarian and keeper of the morgue. There were a good many very up-to-date knicknacks throughout the great slablike building but none of them pertained to Smart’s bailiwick, which changed only in the number of dark-green filing cabinets aligned in Kafkaesque rows. There had been talk of converting the entire morgue to microfilm and he never really argued against it; he didn’t push for it, though, so the operations committee kept letting it slide as bright boys in aviator sunglasses and Italian suits yelped their way to bigger budgets. That was fine with Orville Smart. He liked things down in his vault the way they were.
He sat at a green metal desk, looking unhealthy beneath the fluorescent lighting. He was drinking coffee from a cardboard container. He’d made his way through most of a liver-sausage sandwich and looked up, running his tongue around inside his mouth. He wore a striped shirt with a starched collar, the cuffs rolled halfway up his forearms, a narrow black tie carefully knotted with a horseshoe tie clasp, and about a dozen gray hairs were combed across the top of his head. Grant Wood might have painted him.
“Well,” he drawled, looking me over slowly, a visitor from topside. “Don’t see you down here once a year. Nice day, is it?” He always asked about the weather. I’d been to the morgue half a dozen, times and he always asked about the weather. I told him it was a nice day and he bit off a piece of sandwich. I sat down on a metal chair. Aside from a distant whirring sound, it was quiet. “So what is it you’re after? Let me guess. Old movie reviews? Some old theater reviews?” He produced a toothpick and leaned back, staring at me through round rimless spectacles.
“Not this time, Mr. Smart. Something else altogether.” He perked up. “I want to find whatever we’ve got on a disappearance about thirty years ago. Local lawyer named Carver Maxvill, just walked off one day and never turned up again. Slick as a whistle, gone. Mean anything to you?”
He put down his toothpick and belted down the coffee and stood up, about six and a half stooped feet. He looked like an ambulatory parenthesis.
“Mean anything to me?” He cackled, as if such a question were too absurd for serious comment. The past was where he lived. “That’s good! Sure I remember Carver Maxvill, made quite a stir in its day—little pieces followed the lead for about a week, the war was pushing it out of the way. It was winter, the winter of ’44-’45, the Germans broke through the Ardennes just when we figured we had ’em licked …” He blew his nose into a gray handkerchief and shuffled to the first rank of file cabinets, then slowly down the aisle, took a left, and led me to the M’s. The cabinets were arranged alphabetically, the subject matter in manila reinforced folders which grew stained and dog-eared as the years passed.
“Ought to be right here,” he said, toothpick jutting out from his thin, bloodless lips. He pulled the deep drawer out and we discovered a peculiar fact. The Maxvill file was gone.
Orville Smart jabbed quickly through the drawer’s contents, fruitlessly, and stood back, cupping his bony chin in a heavily veined, bony hand. “Real strange,” he mused. “It ain’t there.” He leaned forward, head down, a little vein pulsing high on his white forehead the only sign of concern. He slid out several nearby drawers, checking to see if the file had been misplaced. But I knew it wasn’t going to be there and I felt little prickles of sweat on my neck. The file on Carver Maxvill was gone as surely as he was himself, as surely as Tim Dierker’s scrapbook …
It took awhile for Orville Smart to accept fully the disappearance of the folder. Then he straightened up and looked down at me, eyes quizzical and almost ashamed. “Damned thing’s gone.”
“Where might it be?”
He led me back to the green metal library-size tables, two of them with six chairs at each, said, “See for yourself, no place to hide ’em. No drawers in the tables, no hiding places, the damned thing’s gone. Unless …” He turned back to the sea of cabinets and frowned. “Unless you figure that it could be anywhere, anywhere, from A to Z in the entire system. Golly, that’s too horrible to think about, ain’t it? No, it couldn’t be just stuck anyplace—”
“You’re sure there was a Carver Maxvill file?”
“Oh, hell, yes, that’s like being sure there was a file on Floyd B. Olson or Hubert Humphrey or Kid Cann. Sure there was a Maxvill file. Musta been ten, twelve clippings anyway, counting the morning and evening papers … And we’ve been the only newspapers in town all this time …”
“Would there be a file in St. Paul?”
He shook his head; no he didn’t think so. Like a man treading carefully, away from familiar ground which had betrayed him, he trudged back to his desk. He folded up into the swivel chair and scrounged a Chesterfield from a flattened packet. His fingers were stained yellow with nicotine. He snapped a wooden match on his thumb and lit it, inhaling deeply, cocking his head philosophically. “Been twenty years since I missed a file and that one turned up on the garden editor’s desk upstairs. Just walked out with it, contrary to every rule of man or beast … none of this stuff is ever supposed to leave this room …”
“So where’s your security?” I asked. The sweat on my neck was soaking my collar and my stomach felt funny. Somebody was stealing the remnants of Carver Maxvill.
“Security? What security? Who needs security? Everybody knows the rule—don’t need security. Staffers can come down whenever they need something, they can depend on it to be here. It’s a good rule.” He was looking at the remains of his sandwich, which was growing a bit leathery at the edges of the liverwurst. “It’s always been a good rule.”
“Who can use the files, Mr. Smart?”
“Staff people, writers and researchers and editors—”
“Anybody from the outside?”
“Nope,” he snapped, then backed off, “at least not the public, they’re private files. We get college professors and fellas writing books, they can get permission—”
“From whom?”
“What, permission? From me, of course.”
“How?”
“Well, they call me or they write a request. Sometimes they just come down and ask.”
“Do you just take their word for it?”
“Now, look,” he said edgily, “there’s one file missing in twenty years—golly, in the forty years since I been here, one file—”
“Two,” I said. “And you’re not going to find this one upstairs, Mr. Smart.” He scowled through the smoke. “Do visitors have to sign in? Write down the files they want, to see?”
“Believe me, there ain’t that many visitors, Mr. Cavanaugh. They just ask and I tell ’em where to go. Informal.”
“Do you remember them? If there are so few?”
“Not that few.” He pursed his lips, cigarette dangling, eyes squinting. “If you could give me a name, I could maybe remember it … but I don’t remember every person. Nobody has asked for the Maxvill file in years. I can’t remember anybody ever asking for it …”
“If they were going to steal it,” I said, “they probably wouldn’t have asked for it.”
There was nothing else to do. “Do you remember, or could you check the date of the man’s disappearance?”
“I don’t remember it,” he said. “But I could check upstairs. Montgomery probably covered it, he might remember the dates.”
“Good idea,” I said. “Do it. I’ll get back to you on it.” Montgomery was now an editorial vice-president and I didn’t want to run him to ground, more likely than not at the polo grounds in Hamel. Orville Smart scratched something on a piece of yellow foolscap and picked up a begrimed black telephone. I climbed back into the sunshine, worried, confused. Who was trying to erase Carver Maxvill’s poor life from its meager resting places?
I went home and took a shower, changed clothes, and called Ole Kronstrom’s office. He was gone for the day. He wasn’t home either. On the off chance, I dialed Kim Roderick’s number. It rang several times and she was out of breath when she answered. I apologized for interrupting and I imagined her pursing her lips before she spoke.
“It’s okay, I’d just come out of the shower and was drying off. I just finished a couple of hours of tennis, with Anne, as a matter of fact.” She stopped for air.
“Did you beat her?”
“Oh, yes, but she’s improving, she really is.”
“Look, is Ole there? I couldn’t get him at home or the office, so I thought maybe he dropped in on you.”
“No, I haven’t seen him today. I really don’t suppose I will because this is his boating night. He goes out on the St. Croix on his cruiser one night a week, with some of his cronies—tonight’s the night.” She sniffed water in her nose and the towel muffled her voice. “What did you want to see him for?”
“Just some questions about the club, some people he knew in the old days. Loose ends—nothing important.”
“I’ll bet, nothing important …” But she wasn’t sounding unfriendly, just neutral.
“Look, Kim,” I said, trying to ingratiate myself just enough, “maybe I could talk to you. You’re right, it is important. Or it might be. You never can tell, you might remember something Ole said if I hit the right switch.”
“You know,” she said slowly, after a moment’s hesitation, “you sound suspiciously like a man who hasn’t stopped poking around in other people’s lives. Ouch!”
“Ouch what?”
“I don’t know, I lost my rhythm today, started hitting my forehand badly. I picked up a blister, first one since last January—I got into some bad habits then, too. It’s like a golf swing getting out of square, damn it. Anyway, I just peeled it back … Does sucking it help?”
“Beats me,” I said. “Look, it’s not your past I’m poking into, and I’d certainly rather talk to you than Father Boyle and the rest of the Wild Bunch … it’s you or them. Have mercy.”
She laughed, high, clear. “Do you remember, you threatened to ask me for a date the first time we talked. Is that what you’re doing now?”
“Almost.”
“Well, I must be interested,” she said. “I read your book yesterday, the one about the Caldwell murder. It was hard to find, I finally got the paperback at Savran’s on the West Bank. I also picked up six of your father’s Fenton Carey stories at Shinder’s, they must have a dozen different titles. You’re quite a family. It’s scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr. C?” She didn’t offer an opinion, holding that back in the reservoir of her remoteness.
“So I get another interview?”
“Sure, if you’ll buy me a lemonade. I’ll meet you in an hour at the Cheshire Cheese, in the Sheraton-Ritz. Bye.”
I caught myself reflecting that I was making headway with her and that snapped me to. What the hell did I mean by headway? What made me think in those terms, that I was trying to get someplace with her? She was a difficult woman with a curiously undefined past, open to misinterpretation, and without known antecedents. It didn’t make any sense. Except that the simple fact of her existence was a gauntlet, a challenge to break through her reserve.
At six o’clock we were sitting on white wrought-iron chairs at white wrought-iron tables on one of the little balconies dangling above the Sheraton-Ritz swimming pool. Sheila was down below with a long-handled squeegee pushing puddles of water toward the drains, then moving the featherweight lounge chairs back against the wall. The sun was angling into Kim’s eyes; her sunglasses were conservative in shape but constructed of hundreds of layers of delicately shaded colored plastic. The shadows of the balcony supports were long, slicing across us like penciled streaks. She sipped her lemonade through a straw, a bright red cherry floating on top of the ice cubes.
“Watching her reminds me of the job I used to have at Norway Creek,” she said. “I can remember evenings just like this, putting a terry-cloth jacket over my swimming suit, cleaning up and rearranging once everybody was gone.” She looked over at me, smiling thinly. I couldn’t see her eyes. “It was such a long time ago, going on twenty years ago. There was a time, wasn’t there, when the very idea of something happening twenty years ago was inconceivable. Now it’s turning out to be pretty conceivable after all. I used to have a kind of net for fishing stuff out of the pool, leaves and tennis balls and sandwiches … Labor Day weekend, that was always the last really busy time of summer, and then it wouldn’t be long until we drained the pool for good. Long time ago.”
“Billy,” I said. “I suppose he’d be mowing the golf course.”
“That’s right. Another life, light-years away.”
“But only a couple of miles from where we’re sitting. Space and time, two entirely different stories. Sometimes I think people never get very far away from where they start after all.” The lemonade was watery, not sweet enough. No taste, from some frozen concentrate; lemonade was like a lot of things they didn’t make the same anymore.
She wasn’t afraid of silences and she didn’t seem to mind my watching her. She was wearing a gray linen dress with a camel-colored sweater around her shoulders. She wore a turquoise necklace and the gold tank watch with the sapphire on the winding stem caught the sunlight. Her arms and legs were tan and bare.
“The past really does interest you,” I said.
“It’s always changing,” she said. “You’re right, it intrigues me. History of any kind.”
“But you won’t discuss your own history.”
“Not interesting at all.” She pursued her lips as if to elaborate, then didn’t, and sucked on her straw. She sat there, relaxed, but composed, drew her sweater about her as the sun ducked lower. Sheila lowered the umbrellas on the tables, scraped chairs along the cement. “What is it you wanted to talk to Ole about?”
“The man I mentioned before, Carver Maxvill. Did I mention him to you?”
“I don’t recall.”
“Well, has Ole ever said anything about him? Try to remember, Carver Maxvill …”
“I don’t have to try. He’s the man who disappeared a long time ago.” I nodded. “I’ve heard Ole mention him, not recently, but in a conversation. We talk a great deal and I suppose the disappearance of a man you know is the kind of thing you might bring up in one context or another. I can’t remember when, it was casual, you know … just a reference.”
“Did he ever suggest why? Or give a character description, maybe about drinking or chasing women? Anything that comes back to you …”
“No, I’m sure not.” She took off the sunglasses and focused her searching eyes on me. Her headband, holding every dark hair right where it was supposed to be, matched her turquoise necklace. She folded her long arms beneath her small breasts, which rose so slightly beneath the pale linen. “Look, Mr. Cavanaugh”—and she made a point of the formality—“what is it you’re after now? Whenever I begin to trust you, think you’re a nice, slightly nosy fellow, you start coming on again with all this picking around in the refuse.” There was so little overt charm in her; in that respect she defied femininity, the wiles and stratagems. It appealed to me but, as a product of my own times, I was pitched off balance by it. Which, when you thought about it, wouldn’t have been such a bad stratagem.
“I’m leveling with you,” I said. “I’m not digging around in your life, I’ve told you I’m not.” I didn’t know if that was true but I pretended. “But I am still kicking around in the ashes of the old hunting and fishing club. I am, I am, I am … I admit it. But I don’t know why it should bother you … Kim.” That last was a sort of tentative afterthought I immediately regretted; her sympathy was not to be won quite so easily and I knew it.
“But why, why, why?” she mimicked, without a smile.
“Because it’s a mystery.” I waited. “Because Tim Dierker is dead and Carver Maxvill’s name scares hell out of everybody and scrapbooks and newspaper files are being swiped. I’ve waited for a pattern to form, the indication of another presence, a person on the other side … I’ve waited, I’ve talked the ears off people and I’ve listened hour after hour, I’ve tried to tie things together, get a feel for what’s going on beneath the surface. Today, this afternoon, down in a room like Jack Benny’s vault, I got convinced—”
“And how did that come about?” She liked substantive talk, not shy smiles. I got a glimpse of white teeth.
“Somebody has gone to the trouble of stealing a file from the newspaper morgue. First time in twenty years or so, according to the keeper of the files, that one has left the room at all, let alone been stolen. It fits into a pattern, it makes an assortment of facts and suppositions take a shape, because it was the file of clippings about Carver Maxvill. Why and who … it’s a mystery, kid, and the sap is rising.”
A laugh bubbled out and she winked. I swear she did. “Oh, he is, is he?” She touched my hand for an instant and quickly leaned back. “This fascination with mysteries, it runs in your family, I assume?”
“My father’s the expert. I’m a critic who happened to write a book about a murder.” It was perceptibly cooler; gooseflesh prickled on her long dark arms.
“But Fenton Carey is a newspaperman. Perhaps he’s your ideal—are you trying to live up to your father’s expectations?”
“No, I’m more in the tradition of Steve Wilson of the Illustrated Press.”
“Never heard of him.”
We drove the few blocks to the riverbank and ate dinner at the Fuji-Ya, where you sit on the floor and hope your socks don’t have holes in them. We watched nighttime come to the river, hiding the junk piles and warehouses and drunks across the little dam and rapids. The food was fine, shreds of this and that steamed before your wondering eyes and shrimps that seemed mysteriously to have exploded. You weren’t hungry an hour later either; you were hungry the moment you finished eating. But there was the plum wine, a good deal of it. We drank glass after glass, eyes meeting fretfully, talking in spurts separated by lengthy, calm silences.
“You said you didn’t want to disappear,” I said. “How’s it coming?”
“Very well, thank you. Each day I’m more aware of my own existence.”
“History. You’re going to teach?”
“Law school,” she said. “That’s the scheme at present. I’ve got the right kind of mind for it, organized, analytical, daring when I think I can pull it off. Courtroom work, at least the idea of it appeals to me.”
“To have gone so far, that appeals to you, too. I’m beginning to know you. You’re proving all sorts of things. You’re way beyond validating your own experience.” I sighed into my plum wine and she held up her empty glass.
“I never, ever do things like this,” she said. “You may not believe that, but it’s true. I can’t remember ever, in my entire life, going out to eat and drink with a stranger, on the spur of the moment. I’m a planner, a plotter, and besides that I’ve had almost no opportunities.” Our wine was replenished. “It is fun, I really can’t deny it. It’s not me, but then behavior can change, even if your nature can’t.” She smiled openly for the first time, her nose crinkling and her large eyes squeezing together. She put her hand over her mouth, somewhat surprised at herself. I hoped she wasn’t going to frighten herself and come to earth.
“How did you come to Norway Creek?” I said.
“I’ve told you, I don’t like to talk about my past …”
“Where are you from?”
“A little town up north—now that’s it, no more, or you’re going to become Mr. Cavanaugh again.” She stared off through the glass wall into the night and I leaned back against the bamboo or whatever it was. Lights flickered on the far shore, past the black river. But she went on. “I’m a different person from the one I was born.” She hiccuped quietly. “I don’t want to sound like a fanatic, but I look on myself as reborn, dating from the moment I realized that I had better be the most important person in my own life, not in someone else’s life … I’ve truly changed the course of my life, more than most people, I’ve decided to get somewhere. I care what I think about me. I know what I was and what I am, I know what people have said about me … and I have made myself not care what they say.” She took a long swallow of plum wine and I blinked. The wine was getting to my eyes and the base of my well-worn skull. I was hot; but I knew I should be paying attention to the recitation. “You’ve already talked to Darwin McGill and Anne, they must have given you a clue or two to some of the stages I’ve gone through, surely Darwin had a story to tell …”
“Yes,” I mumbled, “he told me about one incident …”
“He ripped my blouse and brassiere off,” she whispered, her eyes flat, the sparkle suddenly extinguished. “He stood there looking at my breasts, grunting like a pig, and it shocked him when I wouldn’t be frightened by him, or ashamed, or try to cover my breasts. He grabbed me and I felt his erection against me and I just chilled him … I was the sort of girl then, or in the position then, that men thought they could have, handle, use … I had to work hard, I had no money, no status, I was nobody … but that’s only the way it seemed to people like Darwin McGill. And he discovered he was badly mistaken. Did he tell you that?”
“Indeed he did. You taught him a lesson, no doubt of that. He tells me he’s dying, by the way.”
“I’m desolated,” she said tonelessly, her glass newly full.
“Are your parents still living?”
“Absolutely none of your business. And I’m going to feel terrible in the morning.”
We went outside and walked slowly toward the river. The cool breeze took the punch out of the night, the change that had been building. I put my arm around her shoulder.
“And Anne told you I’m frigid, didn’t she?”
“She said she thought you might be. Or that you think you are.”
She shrugged. “It doesn’t matter.”
“We’re kindred spirits,” I said lightly.
“What do you mean?”
I turned her around and we walked beneath the dimly glowing windows of the restaurant where the kimonos passed quietly.
“That’s why you’re willing to talk to me. You sense that we’re alike. Somewhere, like an electronic probe plunged into our brains, we’ve been wounded. I know where it happened to me, when, how, and why. About you, that’s something else again …”
“Oh,” she said as we were getting into the Porsche. She was wrapped up in her own life; she didn’t care about mine and I didn’t blame her for that. She was, or seemed to be, utterly egocentric, private. Her control; it wasn’t necessarily a sham, but it was a calculation, a conscious effort. Envying it, I admired her. We drove in silence back to Riverfront Towers. I pulled into the curving drive. The doorman waited inside, secure.
“Are you up to giving me a tennis lesson?” I asked. “Season’s almost over. There’s not much time left I’m going away for a holiday …”
“Yes, so am I.”
“Well,” she said, “we’ll see. Maybe.” She got out of the car, motioning me to stay put. She stopped on my side, a safe distance away. “Good-bye. And thank you for dinner.” An almost smile glittered in the night and she clutched the sweater tight, making her shoulders seem narrow and her hips broader. “I enjoyed it. I think.”
I nodded but she didn’t see me. She’d turned and was gone. She didn’t look back.
I fell asleep with My Little Chickadee, watching W. C. Fields fight off the redskins with a slingshot which kept bouncing back and striking his forehead. Turning away from an argumentative Margaret Hamilton, he muttered, “I hope she doesn’t get any more violent … I haven’t the strength to knock her down.” I thought about Kim, sleepily, and chuckled happily, eyes lowering, feeling young again, a nipper once again … As he bathed, he said, “Reminds me of the old swimming hole, when I was a nipper … that was where I caught malaria, what a foul summer that was … the summer the Jones boys murdered their mother … I remember her well, carrying the wash on her head …”
I slept badly, just skirting the edges of consciousness all night, and woke early, yawning. There was a peculiar anticipation in the blood. After my grapefruit I trundled off in the Porsche, fancying I could smell her next to me. Romantic twaddle, I told myself.
The two cracked flights of stairs leading up to Father Boyle’s home seemed to be getting longer and steeper. There was a thick morning fog sitting on Prospect Park, obliterating the neighboring houses and the tower. He stared at me through the screen door, taken by surprise, his face veering between fright and surprise. He’d known Hubbard would warn me off; he hadn’t expected to see me again. His eyes squinted, the broken veins on his cheeks stretching.
“Good morning, Father,” I said. “I just wanted to stop by and apologize for the other night. Have you got a cup of coffee?”
Trustingly, believing me, he swung the screen door wide and let it slam behind us. I followed him to the kitchen, marveling at what a friendly word can do and how badly people want to hear one from time to time. Takes the sting out. Useful for a liar, too.
He was still shuffling about in baggy tweeds, thumping the knobbed blackthorn stick, and his stubbly white whiskers seemed to have gotten stuck at half an inch. The kitchen reeked of bacon grease and a crusted frying pan sat on the gas stove. He motioned me to a booth in the breakfast nook and I squeezed in behind the oilcloth-covered table. He brought mugs of coffee. The warm cream from a jug on the table separated the instant it hit the hot coffee, forming nasty little gray clots floating in all directions. He lumbered back, muttering, and laboriously got himself opposite me, wheezing. A plate of eggs with mushrooms and onions had cooled and hardened before him; he chipped at the remains with a fork. He slurped coffee and picked his binoculars off the oilcloth and peered out the window beside us.
“There’s a finch out there,” he growled, “in the patch of fog just beyond the birdbath. Don’t see him often, the wily finch.” I saw a flicker of movement in a looming bush. On the table next to his plate were several soiled, oily-looking copies of Penthouse and Playboy, a ceramic Hamm’s beer ashtray with a cigar ground out in the bear’s grinning face. “Harmless enterprise, bird-watching,” he said, “but I’m strictly the backyard variety. No field trips and hiking through brambles for this old specimen …” He put the binoculars down on the Penthouse and rubbed his eyes. When he took his hands away his eyes stared dully at me, slightly glazed, and I wondered if he’d been at the booze already or if the night’s painkillers were still working.
“I am sorry about the other night. I had no intention of upsetting you.”
“Ah, yes,” he remembered, “you’re the young philosopher, the Conrad man … Still chewing on the idea of evil, are you?”
“Not especially. I told you what I thought. What Conrad thought.”
“So you did. I was blaming the Devil for mischief, aha, and you believed that … let me get it right, you believed that ‘men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.’ Is that it? Have I got that?”
“You have.”
“Well,” he mused, slyly poking at the mushrooms, “I’ve been thinking about it and it’s quite possible that you’re in the right and I was … copping out, as my young university friends say. After, all, when you can blame the Devil, man’s load is substantially lightened. And if I can blame the Devil for my sins, all the better. It all comes down to the old question we’ve been debating since the year one, free will. Are you responsible for your acts or can you say, along with Mr. Flip Wilson, the devil made me do it?” He wheezed, staring at me, sucking in air, face turning florid, hand gently patting the table. “Perhaps men can be driven to any evil act … to survive, to protect themselves. Perhaps.”
“What happened with Goode and Crocker?” I asked. “I was called to account by Hubbard Anthony and it isn’t that I can’t take my medicine, but I wish I knew what it was that made everybody so angry.” I was innocent; I’d come to my priest for counsel.
“Goode and Crocker, we’re all old, time is running out …” He blinked, trying to focus the empty, glazed eyes on me. “They came to see me, with the wind up, telling me you’d been to see them talking about Carver Maxvill, that I’d told you about him.” He waved a white hand. “Yelled at me, told me to keep my mouth shut and not to talk to you anymore, I’d only make a mess of everything … Can you credit that, I’d make a mess of everything? Hail Mary, what next? Told me not to rake up the past—” He broke off, chuckling, shaking his head. “I told them it was bound to happen sooner or later but I got to wheezing and they outyelled me. Farcical, those dumb bastards yelling at me … well, maybe they’re right, maybe it will stir up a mess, but if it does, what difference does it make, what real difference? We’re all gonna die, even the young ones, everybody dies, so what difference does it make? What is there to be afraid of here? It’s afterward, then’s the time to be afraid, and keeping it quiet here isn’t gonna do any good afterward, anyway … Oh, yes, they’re fearful men, afraid of what’s long gone, dead and buried.” He swilled cold coffee and worked the binoculars again, sucking in breath. The fog was lifting very slowly and the finch was visible, considering a short flight to the birdbath.
“Am I fearful?” He grinned sourly, beneath the glasses. “What the hell would I be afraid of?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “and I wondered. You seemed frightened, not just upset, when I left the other night. What had I done?”
“I was tired. Looking at all those pictures from the old days, your father and Hub and all the rest, Carver and Rita, it made me remember the old days. Wait till you’re old, young man, and you’ll see, you’ll feel the terrible loneliness that comes with snapshots from long ago … The Dorian Gray effect, seeing yourself and your chums, young and alive, knowing full well that you’re old and half dead now or just plain dead …”
“Who’s dead? You guys all still know each other—”
“Tim,” he reminded me sourly, “Carver, Rita …”
“Rita?”
“The cook, housekeeper—”
“She’s dead? You know that?”
He looked startled for a moment, then the sluggishness returned, the malicious grin. I wondered if he were wholly sane; he seemed fine at first, then wandered off the road.
“What are you jumping on that for? She’s as dead for me as Carver is—who knows if either one of them is dead? I don’t see them, so as far as I’m concerned, they’re dead as the birdbath, you get me?” He smirked, working his mouth, shaking his head at my stupidity. “Don’t jump on me like that. You sound like General Goode at his most … military.”
I leaned forward on the oilcloth.
“What went on up there at the lodge?” I asked quietly, driven by my own Devil, curiosity, whatever name it went by. The inability to leave well enough alone. “You must have seen it or been informed—did it get a little rough? Ole said it got a little raw.”
He guffawed. “Ole. He knows nothing! He says it got a little raw …” He shook peculiarly, rumbling, wetness seeping like rheum in the eyes of an old dog.
“Well, forget Ole, then,” I pressed on. “But for you as a priest, wasn’t it difficult for you to see what was going on?”
“Are you—you, of all people, not even a Catholic! Are you presuming to tell me my responsibilities as a priest? Should I have turned my back on them and their pursuits, left them to it? Or was my responsibility to remain at hand, to act as a reminder, a governor? No simpleminded questions, please!” He took the cigar butt from out of the bear’s face and snapped a kitchen match on a ragged thumbnail, puffing until the flame burned through squashed ash to tobacco. It smelled like my worst fears.
“What was going on? Why did Carver’s name scare everybody?”
“I don’t know what you mean … what was going on?”
“The women, the gambling?”
“You lascivious fellow,” he said reprovingly, as if the misbehavior were mine. He was slipping away from me, candor evaporating with the fog.
“But I keep wondering why Maxvill gets to you guys the way he does … What could you feel so guilty about? You, a priest …”
He got out of the booth and beckoned me to follow him, out the back door onto his narrow patio, where the old lawn furniture was rusting beneath paint blisters. The finch was perched on the chipped birdbath. Everything about Father Boyle’s house and life seemed chipped, damaged, ready for the junk heap. He picked up a rake, poked at the long wet grass, a soggy brown paper bag.
“The priesthood,” he rumbled, gravelly in his chest, “two views of that calling. Either a priest, familiar with sin as he is, should be particularly prey to guilt, on intimate terms with all of his own sins however small … or, leading a good and moral and helpful life, he should be, in his saintly wisdom, impervious to it. The problem,” he wheezed, gasping, “the problem is that he this priest of ours, is human and vulnerable and frail. At best, not an easy position. In any case, what evidence do you have that I have a damn thing to be guilty about, anyway?” He stopped, puffing, and looked up the hill. “Fog’s going. There’s the Witches’ Tower.”
“What do you call it?”
“Witches’ Tower, that’s what everybody calls it. Please, don’t ask me, why, Mr. Cavanaugh. It’s just what they call it.”
“So you don’t feel guilty.”
“I don’t think about guilt any more than I have to. But you have to realize that the boys in the club were just getting away from it all, a little misbehavior’s no cause for lifelong guilt. They never got out of control …”
“Your presence was a restraining influence, I suppose?”
“You might say so.”
“Sort of the club chaplain, so to speak?”
“So to speak.”
“Which brings us back to Carver Maxvill, doesn’t it?”
“You, perhaps. Not me.”
“But what was it about him? What did he do?”
Boyle, beyond my reach now, laughed chummily. “Now, talking about Maxvill was what got me into trouble in the first place, wasn’t it?” He pushed the rake into a mat of grasses and trash along the bottom of the fence, pulled outward, fetching up a tin can. He wheezed with the effort.
“You mentioned Rita—your housekeeper. Was she the one Maxvill got entangled with? Maybe a little jealousy among the old lads?” My mind was overworked; for an instant it all seemed plausible.
“How should I remember? Really? Child’s play.” He poked with the rake and a bunny leaped from the mound of sweet, wet grass, ran across our path and under a bush. “How should I remember who might have made a pass at the cook, a thing like that? I think her morals were, perhaps, in question, but it was so long ago and what difference could it possibly make to anyone? It gives me a headache.”
“So it was a long time ago,” I said. “What’s thirty, forty years, in the scheme of things? A wink in the eye of time, right? Could he still be alive? Maxvill?”
“Could? What a word. Of course, he could … he could also be the Christ of the Bottomless Pit, the Wrath of the Lamb, or the Paraclete of Kavourka. But I don’t think so … I think he’s probably dead.”
“If he’s dead,” I said, “do you think he’s in Heaven, Father?”
He stopped his pacing and leaned on the rake, a grin spreading across his Irish face. He didn’t look as if he were absolutely all there: He wore the expression of a man who had opted out; he wore it like a new suit and he was getting used to the fit.
“No, I shouldn’t think he is,” he said calmly. “I sometimes wonder if anybody gets to Heaven, Mr. Cavanaugh.”
I never saw Father Boyle again.