FOURTEEN

I was sitting at the kitchen counter with my hand in a bucket of ice water when Kris Ann arrived from teaching. She smoothed back a damp tendril of hair, glancing quickly around, and saw me.

She started. “Adam, what happened?”

I raised the swollen hand. “I fought with Jason Cantwell.”

She turned white. “Here?”

“No. I went to his apartment.”

She stared at me in silence. Then she took my hand, turning it gently from side to side. “I think you’d better see a doctor.”

“I’m going to.”

She rested my hand on the counter. “How did it happen?”

I told her, beginning with Jason’s girl and finishing with the fight. She listened without speaking or moving. Then she went to the kitchen table and sat staring out the window, quite still. In an undertone, she asked, “What else did Jason say to you?”

“That’s all, Krissy. It was enough.”

She turned to me, questioning. Finally, she said, “You should never have gone there,” and lapsed into quiet, unapproachable.

It was strange. Alone at the counter, I began missing her, even though she was four feet away—missing some better times we’d had: staying up in school to smoke dope and smile at old movies, perhaps sitting outdoors at a Paris café inventing lives for passersby, or talking in the beach house late at night with the windows open and heavy gulf air smelling of salt.

The images were freeze frames perfectly captured and imprinted on my mind. Like her eyes the first time we made love. Silver light through my apartment window had crossed her face. Her hair, soft and thick and clean smelling, fell back on the pillow. Just before it happened, she stiffened and then touched my face, eyes large with questions. Slowly, her arms closed tight around me.

It was sweet and intense.

Afterward we lay damp against each other, content to say nothing. Suddenly she grinned. She couldn’t stop. I buried my face in her hair and we began laughing together out of pure crazy happiness.

When we had stopped, she said, “You’re beautiful.”

“And you.” I was serious now.

She drew some strands of hair over her lip in an absurd mustache. “And if I weren’t?”

I brushed it away. “Then you’d have to make your own clothes.”

She smiled, knowing how I felt. The newness of things imposed its own wisdom. We didn’t talk about it.

Later she was looking around the apartment, not shy. Her walk was lithe and gliding, and I thought then that she carried the South inside her, and in her eyes and the brownness of her skin.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

I was reaching in the closet for a shirt. “Laying out clothes for tomorrow.”

She looked intrigued. “Can’t you just get up and dress?”

“You’re spoiled,” I grinned. “In the morning you can stumble out to hunt through that mess in your closet for something to wear, and cut English Lit if you can’t find it. But my job starts at seven and nine’s my first class.”

“Prrretty compulsive.”

“Gets me an extra fifteen minutes sleep.” I turned to see her leaning over my bureau. “You okay?”

“Uh-huh. Just taking out my contacts.”

She finished and began walking toward me in the semidarkness with short, myopic steps. I smiled and reached toward her. “Don’t you have glasses?”

“A naked lady in glasses? That’s obscene.” Our hands clasped. “Besides, they’re thick.”

I laughed, pulling her to me. “I think I can live with it.”

I felt her smile against my shoulder. “I’m not scared now,” she murmured. “It was good for me, Adam. Gentle. I needed it gentle.”

“I know.”

We went together to the bed, and lay down again.…

The phone rang. Kris Ann rose from the kitchen table to get it.

“Hello, Daddy. Yes, he’s here.” She listened, taut, then asked, “Can you stay for dinner?” She paused, answered, “It’s fine, really. See you then,” and hung up.

She turned to me. “He sounds upset.”

“So I gather. Nice you invited him to beard me in our own home.”

“Which he bought us.”

“I’d forgotten that.” I glanced at my hand. It was various shades of purple. “I’d better have this checked. Your father knows where the bourbon is. Just lock the doors until he gets here, okay?”

Her brow knit. “Don’t make a scene with him. Please.”

“I don’t think that’s up to me.”

Her look at me was long and thoughtful. Then she turned away as if speaking to herself. “Why are you doing this, Adam? Why are you doing this now?”

Her question lingered in the silence. I left for the doctor’s.

When I got there an officious nurse gave me a form to fill out. I did that, still remembering how Kris Ann and I had begun to learn each other, after that first night.

We were together often, doing everything and nothing. I would tease about her debutante party, watching amused as she accepted service at the cheap diner I could pay for with the ease of manner that suggested we had just come in from riding, when more likely we were fresh from making love. Lovemaking left her shamelessly hungry, and she would stalk from our bed to the refrigerator, ripping through my leftovers with noises of mock disappointment until we had to go out. “This isn’t a refrigerator,” she said one evening, “it’s an aluminum mine,” and after that she had stocked the kitchen with food and spices and begun cooking fine dinners of pasta, served by candlelight at my kitchen table, with red wine. She’d learned pasta from a book, she told me, because it wasn’t southern, and she was full of questions about the way I’d lived: about my home and father and how I’d made it since, about the steel mill I’d worked in and the ore boat with the drunken captain that I’d served on one summer, running ore from Minnesota to the docks in Cleveland. My job now was our dishes, but sometimes we would look at each other and leave them. One night, afterward, she lay on my shoulder, absorbed in her own thoughts. “It’s funny,” she finally said.

“What’s funny?”

“I don’t know. It’s just that sometimes I think that life is this giant maze, very dark, with people wandering through it bumping into each other and going on, groping for that thing or person that will make the difference—you know, get them to the end—and it’s all so much chance. Look at us. We start at different places, you in Cleveland, me in Alabama, from people who are nothing alike, and then enter the maze to go through all the things that make us the way we are now and deliver us by sheer coincidence to a bad party in the middle of twelve thousand people, and by the time we’ve met maybe these same experiences mean that we’re people who can’t help each other, that at some point we’ll have to go on alone, bumping into more people and things. I mean, it’s hard to know when you’ve gotten to the end, isn’t it?”

I looked up at the ceiling. “For some people, I suppose.”

She rolled over, head propped on her elbow. “Adam, did any of what I just said make sense to you?”

I grinned. “Infinite sense.”

“Then how can you sound so blasé?”

“Because I know.”

“Know what?”

I turned to see her face. Her eyes were deep and dark and serious. I reached out, touching the nape of her neck, and said softly, “Because I know the maze ends here.”

For a long time she looked at me, seeming hardly to breathe. Then as if on impulse she stretched to pull me out of bed. “Come on.”

“Where?”

“You’ll see.” She tugged harder. “Hurry up.”

I began laughing. “Okay, okay. I’ll go quietly.”

We dressed and went down to campus with the key to the stark, unfurnished room that held her paintings, where she had never taken me. Beneath one bare lightbulb was an easel covered with white muslin. She went to it, removed the muslin, and turned.

Beside her was an oil of my face, each feature carefully drawn from memory. It was so much like my father I felt a kind of frisson.

Kris Ann studied me closely. “Do you like it?”

“It’s incredible.”

I couldn’t move my eyes from the painting. Then she stepped in front of it. Slowly, without speaking, she unbuttoned her blouse until it lay on the floor beside her. “Make love to me, Adam. Please. Right here.”

We did that. I held her for a long time after.

That Saturday we packed my car with her dishes and dresses on hangers. In the country we found a spool bed and mattress, and for Cade’s sake ordered his and hers telephones to go on either side.

The next week Cade called her, to invite us down …

When I came back from the doctor’s she met me at the front door. “Daddy’s here.”

“I can hardly wait. Incidentally, it’s not broken.”

“What isn’t?”

“My hand. Where is he?”

“In the sunroom.”

She looked tense and wooden, the look I remembered from when I’d come to Cade’s that first time, every southern gentleman’s notion of the perfect son-in-law, an Irish Catholic northerner, and broke at that. The pinstripe I’d worn on the flight down was my only suit and I was somehow sure that Cade would know that. He rose from the living-room couch to shake my hand, conveying ease and power in a cardigan sweater. I began feeling like a dress-up doll with sweat glands. Kris Ann stood to one side, watchful and unnaturally quiet.

“That’s a long trip,” Cade had smiled. “Would you like a drink?”

“Yes, thanks. Any kind of whiskey.”

“Good.” He brought two bourbons. We sat at opposite corners of a couch set in front of a Chinese wall hanging and surrounded by antiques I admired for a moment. When I glanced back to the room Kris Ann had disappeared.

“It’s good to finally meet you,” Cade was saying.

“And you, too, sir.” I flinched inwardly at the sound of “sir,” waiting for him to wave it away. He didn’t.

“You’ve done quite well in law school. I’m impressed.”

“Krissy’s biased.”

Cade scowled as if he didn’t like the sound of “Krissy.” “I happen to know she’s right. You’re fifth in your class and on law review.” He saw my puzzlement. “The Dean’s an old classmate,” he explained. “I hope you don’t mind.” He sounded quite sure I wouldn’t, or wouldn’t say so.

I shrugged. “I guess I’d mind more if I were bottom quarter.”

“A good answer. With those grades you can write your own ticket. It all depends on what you want.”

Late sunlight through his window warmed the rich colors of the rug and suffused Cade’s bookshelves with a kind of glow. It seemed a good room to discuss good futures. “The justice department has an honors program, in its antitrust division.” Whiskey warmed me to the subject. “Antitrust is a growing field, and the government gives you more responsibility, earlier. I think I’ve got a pretty fair shot.”

Cade balanced his glass in both hands. “Justice is a useful connection,” he said judiciously. “But I’ve seen government ruin young lawyers through lack of training.” He paused, then said abruptly, “Adam, I’d like you to visit our firm. I can set up appointments tomorrow, if you’d like.”

The warmth turned sluggish in me. Cade raised a mollifying hand. “I gather Kris Ann hasn’t mentioned this, but you’d be doing me a favor to consider it, and not just because you’re seeing my daughter. You’ve got brains and ambition and those are things no large firm can afford to overlook.” His voice turned easy and comfortable. “Besides, any interview is good practice.”

“It’s just that I never thought to live here.”

Cade nodded as if that were natural and reached for my glass. “Let me get you a second drink.”

He limped off while I tried to construct an answer. I was still puzzling when he returned with the fresh drink. He paused to look out the window, then jerked the drapes closed with sudden violence, like a man hanging a cat. He handed me the drink, asking, “How does it stand between you and Kris Ann?”

I hesitated. “Fairly serious, I think. At least I am.”

Cade settled back in the corner and took one sip, tasting it on his lips and eyeing me thoughtfully. Then he spread his arms in an avuncular, confiding gesture. “You’re adults, of course. I only ask because Kris Ann’s always lived here. The South is home to her, and of course she’s been spoiled—perhaps more so because her mother died and I’ve tried to make up for that. But I wonder whether you’d be handicapping yourself were you to ask her to move to a strange place and leave what she’s had.”

I was feeling uneasy. “I guess that’s up to her.”

Cade seemed not to hear. “After all,” he went on, “there are other differences.”

“Such as?”

He glanced carelessly around the room. “Just that the two of you are used to different things. And of course there’s the Catholic business.”

“The Catholic business?”

He gave me a probing glance. “You don’t think being of different faiths is a problem?”

I wondered why responding was so hard: I only went to Mass at home, and was home rarely. I paused, then said, “I’ve sort of let that lapse.”

“I see.” He was cheerful again. “I don’t mean to pry, you understand, but I do worry. Perhaps someday you’ll be a father, too.”

“I hope so.”

“Then you’ll consider my offer?”

I looked past him at the books and antiques. “I’ll talk to Krissy,” I finally said.

“Fair enough.” He broke into the wide-as-the-plains smile I would later see him flash on clients like a sudden gift. “Let’s have another drink, Adam.”

“Let’s do this on the porch,” I told him now.

Cade sat drinking in our sunroom, under an antique brass fan Kris Ann had salvaged from an old hotel. He rose with a long upward glare and followed me outside.

Cade took the wicker couch facing the house and set his glass on a low marble table as I sat opposite. Kris Ann’s plants hung from the canopy behind him, and beyond that our front grounds sloped gently to the street.

“Dalton Mooring called me.” Cade’s voice was soft with anger.

“Did he now?”

Cade leaned slowly forward. The skin near his eyes seemed tight with the effort of self-control. “Mooring threatened to sue us for slander. What you’ve done is the single most stupid and irresponsible act ever committed by a member of this firm.”

“Mooring won’t sue, Roland, and you know it.”

A vein pulsed in Cade’s forehead. “You can guarantee that.”

“I can. First, because I haven’t slandered anyone. Second, because a slander suit only spreads the slander. Third, because to the extent I suggested that he was Lydia’s lover it’s probably not slander at all.”

“Jesus Christ.” Cade slammed his fist on the table and the drink slopped over. “Just how do you figure that?”

“It’s easy enough. The police found semen on Lydia, Henry was out of town, and Jason’s her son, for God’s sake. There’s no sign of a break-in, which probably means a lover. The Cantwells’ yardman saw a car like Mooring’s several times in the past month, and Jason found Mooring there alone with Lydia. Mooring’s known her for twenty-five years, he’s got a wife that drinks and was jealous of her, and, if you believe Jason, Lydia and Henry weren’t sleeping together. Yesterday I heard that two weeks before she died Lydia was quizzing a friend on how to get a divorce. Plus, the one civic thing Mooring seems to do gave him an excuse to see her. Which he used.”

“You call that evidence?”

“I call that funny. And when I tried it out on Mooring he did everything but act normal.”

A slight breeze blew the cocktail napkin from Cade’s lap. He snatched it back. “Your theory’s a disaster.”

“How so?”

“Because it leads the police right back to Henry, as Mooring was kind enough to point out. You’ve taken a client with no alibi and found him a motive to go with it: a potential lover.”

“It also gives us at least one more potential killer. We could use one. The police and media have ganged up on Henry, and Jason has an alibi.”

Cade glanced at my hand. “Yes,” he said coolly. “You’d better tell me what happened with Jason. And don’t leave anything out.”

I described our talk. Cade listened, intent and nearly motionless. When I got to the fight, Cade cut in. “And that’s all he said?”

“That’s right.”

“Jesus,” Cade exploded. “And for that you picked a fight with a madman. We don’t in this firm go around brawling, or insulting people like Dalton Mooring. We couldn’t survive. After seven years you still have no mature concept of your responsibilities. I helped build this firm, dammit, and I won’t let you tear it down just because you had the good luck to marry my daughter.”

A retort came to my tongue and died there. “The point is,” I finally said, “that without Jason as a suspect, Henry’s in trouble.”

“My God, you’re fresh from fighting with Jason and you still think he couldn’t kill?”

I shrugged. “I suppose it’s possible. He’s violent, his feelings about Lydia are a tangle of pathology, and the girl’s his only alibi. That has a strange look to it: she’s mother, lover, and cheerleader all rolled into one. But incest is hard to accept.”

“I’ve known Jason since he was a child,” Cade said coldly, “and I assure you that he could kill his mother and the rest of it, too. All it would take is something to make him feel that Lydia had abandoned him. Like that will.”

“That’s wading pretty deep in the Freudian slime.”

“Christ.” Cade gave me a slow, disgusted look. “Did you see Lydia’s picture?”

I rested the cold drink on my hand. “Is that why you gave Kris Ann the revolver?” I asked. “Or to make some other point?”

“She should be able to protect herself.” His voice was contemptuous. “With you out stirring up Jason and God knows who else, I’m damned glad I did. He’s insane and now you’ve gone out of your way to draw his attention. Someone has to protect my daughter from your own carelessness.”

I flushed. “I’ll let her keep it, for now. But the next time you want to introduce guns into my house, ask first. Ask me.”

Without answering, Cade took a long sip of his drink, watching me over the rim until he put it down. In a tone of polite inquiry, as if continuing another conversation, he said, “Nothing’s worse than being poor, is it?”

I looked at him, surprised. “I don’t know. There are a lot of things I haven’t tried.”

“Nothing’s worse,” he repeated. “That’s why you came here.”

“I came here for Krissy.”

“But you’ve stayed, Adam. You didn’t like being poor any more than I did.” Cade got up and began pacing stiffly. “You know how I felt when my daddy lost everything? Like I’d been weeded out. The sad truth is that if you make it, most people don’t care how, but if you’re poor, well now, they just pity you and shake their heads.” His voice took on a rolling, angry cadence. “Hell, with money you can even get away with being liberal. But if you’re poor and liberal, people just think you’re peculiar. Oh, they’ll never be sure whether you’re a liberal because you’re poor or poor because you’re a liberal, but they’re damn sure it’s one or the other.

“Now you wonder why I tell you this.” Cade stopped to glower at me with a strange, transcendent rage. “It’s because I don’t ever intend to see my daughter beholden. I love her more than you could ever understand. I have no wife, no son to call my own, but by God I have Kris Ann. And I’ve always planned that she not need anything.

“But life has a way of surprising you. You can’t plan for everything. Lately some of my investments have gone a little sour. So I might need your help now.” His voice turned sarcastic. “You might even have to be a little bit of a success. That’s why I can’t let you ruin Henry Cantwell. Because if you turn up something that gets Henry indicted you’ll not only destroy my friend but your own reputation. And then you couldn’t find work as a bootblack.”

“Henry’s not your ward, Roland. And neither is Kris Ann, like it or not.”

Cade reddened. “I’m taking you off the Cantwell case. Tomorrow you’re going to march to your office, close the door, and start preparing for that Stafford trial.”

“All for Kris Ann and Henry.”

“For them, and for the firm.”

I shook my head. “No, Roland, it’s mostly for you. I’ve heard that speech about loving Kris Ann one too many times, when you’ve done your damnedest to leave her without any sense of herself outside of your world. That’s not love and never has been. It’s ownership.”

Cade was very still, as if holding back. Then, with a thin smile, he said softly, “But you didn’t take her north, did you, Adam?”

I stood. “You miserable sonofabitch—”

Kris Ann opened the front door to announce dinner, saw our faces, and stopped in mid-sentence. Cade murmured, “We’ll finish this at the firm,” and then looked to Kris Ann and said in a different voice, “We’re coming, honey.”

Dinner was better than the conversation. I ate in silence while Cade asked Kris Ann about her tennis and her cousin’s baby. Watching her was painful. Her gestures were sharp and nervous and her smile came late and left nothing behind. When Cade purred, “The next few weeks Adam’s to be quite busy on our Stafford case,” she lapsed into silence, as if at some unspoken punishment for her choice of a husband.

Finally I cleared the dishes, something I did when the maid wasn’t there. Kris Ann liked cooking, but hated to clean. When we’d first been married she would throw things in the dishwasher still dirty, so that they’d come out with traces of last night’s dinner baked on, like the evidence of some geologic period. When I’d joke that the progress of her cooking would be preserved in layers, for posterity, she’d grinned back and said dirty dishes weren’t her metier. So I’d taken them on again, while she drank coffee and offered me solemn advice. It had all been very droll, once.

I was alone in the kitchen when the phone rang.

“Adam,” the familiar voice said. “Can you come by?”