FIFTEEN

I left right after Cade, locking the doors behind me. Kris Ann watched me go in silence.

The Cantwell place was almost black. When I knocked, Etta Parsons answered and led me to the library with an air of cool unrecognition. “Mr. Cantwell will be down momentarily,” she said, and left.

For a while I paced the sitting room. It was the same, yet eerily different. Someone had replaced Lydia’s picture with one that was older and smaller. The effect was uncannily that of a fading presence. Two sliding oak doors sealed the dining room.

I went back to the library.

The evening paper was folded by Henry’s chair. I began riffling the sports section for box scores, as my father had taught me.

“Hello, Adam.”

Henry Cantwell had appeared with two snifters of cognac. I put down the box scores to take one.

“How are you?” I asked.

“Better.”

I wondered. Henry had lost the pallor of the day before, but the hesitance of his movements, a slight dreaminess in the eyes, were like those of a man after his first stroke. There was a rim of loose skin beneath his eyes and the start of slackness in his jawline I hadn’t noticed before. The haircut for Lydia’s funeral made his ears too large. “I’ve been wondering how to help,” I told him. “Sometimes I think people hover when what they’re really doing is relieving their own grief, not a kindness at all.”

Henry gave a thin smile, and his expression turned curious and kind. “Your father was murdered, too, wasn’t he?”

“Yes. He was.”

I glanced around, unsettled by the familiar surface of things: the cognac and quiet, a space in the bookshelf, something being reread in another part of the house. Henry followed my glance to the space. “I’m leafing through Lady Chatterley again,” he said calmly. “Lawrence treats the emotions so well, don’t you think?”

I flushed, managing to nod. Henry swirled the cognac in his glass, seemingly lost in Lawrence’s impotent husband and restless wife. Then he said, “Jason called this evening.” His eyes rose from the glass. “He was raving. But he managed to get across that you were asking about Dalton Mooring.”

“I was,” I said flatly. “Roland called me off. He says it hurts you. I’m afraid I’ve hurt you already.”

He shook his head. “Don’t be. I’ve already faced what my life has come to.” He looked slowly around the room. “When my grandfather built this house, he’d already founded your firm and married my grandmother, whose father owned the bank. He left this house, the firm, and,” he smiled wryly, “a bank for leftover Cantwells. The way most people see it I was farmed out in my twenties. I’ve hated that bank ever since, and done badly. Caring for other people’s money was a responsibility I never wanted, and now—” He stopped to look straight at me. “I failed there, and failed even here. You see, Adam, our marriage was a charade.”

I could think of nothing to say. The light on Henry’s face was yellow and pitiless. “Lydia and I hadn’t been truly married for a very long time. Something in the chemistry, I suppose …” His voice fell off. “It’s so odd—last night I was trying to remember first being with Lydia and all that came back to me was that her shoes always matched her dress. Imagine remembering Kris Ann for something like that.” He shook his head. “The void showed up in Jason: love is learned and Jason had little to learn from watching us. I withdrew and Lydia smothered him as if he were her hope in life. It was a problem for the boy. He fought to be free of her, but she was his obsession.”

Henry paused to stare out the window next to him, black and flat and skyless. “You could see that in his politics and even in his girlfriends. It wasn’t enough for Jason to sleep with someone. His mother had to know, poor boy.” He turned back to me, voice quiet with embarrassment. “I failed them both miserably. So there’s little now that can hurt me no matter what you find, unless Jason had some part in it. And that I can never accept.”

“You may have to. Roland thinks he killed her.”

Henry’s expression was tragic. “That would be too horrible.” He almost whispered. “You see, Jason’s birth was the only reason Lydia and I stayed married. For it to end like this …”

I sipped some cognac. “He does have an alibi, you know. His girlfriend.”

He nodded. “What kind of girl is she, Adam?”

“I don’t know. She seems quiet and not quite formed. Perhaps I’m getting older. But she clearly cares for him.”

“That’s all Jason wanted,” Henry said sadly. “It doesn’t seem much, does it?”

“It doesn’t necessarily seem easy, either.”

“He said you fought. How did it happen?”

“He said something. I lost my head.”

“He has an instinct for hurt. It’s ruined sensitivity, I’m afraid.”

I shrugged. “I pushed him too far. I shouldn’t have.”

“You’re all right, I hope. You look bruised.”

“I’m okay. I boxed some at the CYO when I was a kid and it kind of came back.”

“Stay away from him,” Henry said seriously. “I mean that. He’s an unstable man, full of jealousies you don’t know anything about.”

“He managed to get some of that across.”

“So it seems.” Henry’s voice was tentative. “Adam, why did you ask about Dalton Mooring?”

I hesitated. “Nothing hard. Just little things, times they were together. Is it possible, Henry?”

He rocked back and forth in his chair. “It’s possible,” he finally said. “It never struck me particularly, but at the club they would always dance.” He closed his eyes, as if to see them dancing. “He’s known her for a long time,” he murmured. His eyes opened. “Adam, I want you to check this out.”

I shook my head. “Roland absolutely forbids it.”

“But I have to know.” He pointed at the newspaper. “You’ve seen the headlines, I’m sure. All day reporters have called or just pounded on the door. I can’t keep on living under this shadow.”

“Rayfield’s got toll slips, you know. They prove your call to Lydia was twelve minutes, not two.”

He looked chagrined. “I suppose I was foolish. We’d fought, you see. Sitting there, I just couldn’t talk about it.”

“You shouldn’t have been there at all. But now you’d better tell me what was said.”

“Nothing, really. Just”—his mouth twisted—“accumulated disappointments. Personal things. Nothing about the will.”

“You’re sure.”

“Yes.”

“And after that you just stayed there.”

He nodded. “Yes. Please, Adam, I need your help on this.”

I hesitated. But Henry’s voice had a desperate edge. “You’re the client,” I finally said. “It’s your job to tell Roland what you want, and who.”

“I will,” he said flatly. Finishing the cognac, he dabbed his lips with a cloth napkin. “Is that any better—you and Roland?”

“Worse. We had a blow-up tonight. I’ve committed heresy by thought, word, and deed.”

“That’s a problem with Kris Ann, isn’t it?”

“It can be.”

Henry’s face hardened. “What Roland did to Kris Ann was a terrible thing. It was unnatural—I don’t mean literally, but psychologically. I remember talking to her after her mother died. She was maybe seven or eight, wide-eyed and a little sad, and beautiful even then. She was talking about Margaret’s death like a child does, not quite understanding, and then she said Roland had told her that she could take her mother’s place and then they’d never need anyone else. She seemed excited and a little disturbed. God knows it disturbed me.

“Later it disturbed me more. Roland never showed interest in remarrying. Instead he devoted himself to becoming a local power and running Kris Ann’s life. He sent her to private schools and all those lessons—piano, dance, everything but art—as if he wanted to starve the thing she really cared about. And more and more he began to substitute her for her mother, using her as hostess, taking her to dinner, making her the central figure in his life, as he was in hers. Love or ego, whatever it was, he was too central. The result was rather sad: at times, Kris Ann would seem self-confident and even precocious, and then she’d shrink in his presence, as if he could turn all that off like a switch. I wouldn’t be surprised if on some level she resents him terribly.”

“If she does, I wouldn’t know it.”

“But then you’re very close to it, and you don’t know the background. Kris Ann grew up always comparing young men to her father, who intimidated them. Gradually the local boys learned to shy away. That had to be very difficult for her. One thing Lydia and I agreed on was that we were glad you came along. We thought perhaps you were strong enough to give Kris Ann a chance. I still think that.”

I shook my head. “It may be too late. I should never have moved here.”

“Roland takes over lives. I wanted to tell you that he needed you close because you were the one he couldn’t get rid of. But I didn’t know you then.”

“God, Henry, I wish you had.” I fumbled for a cigarette. “What was her mother like? Krissy hardly mentions her.”

He leaned back, empty snifter cupped in his hands. “Margaret was very much a lady, pretty in a delicate way and rather passive. That’s not an unusual choice in domineering men. She treated Roland like he hung the moon, which is what he wants. As for intellect or vitality, I’m afraid Kris Ann owes those to Roland. In any event, Margaret became ill with cancer and just withered away. And that left Kris Ann with Roland.”

The last was said with clear distaste. “I’ve always wondered,” I said, “how it is that you and he are friends.”

His mouth was a bitter line. “I suppose we’re playing out something that began when we were young. I admired his sureness then. Perhaps I was even flattered that he seemed to cultivate me. After a time he came here so often he was like family. My father was quite taken with him. Eventually Roland became my father’s protégé at the firm, and I was eased out to the bank. I think now that Roland had always had that in mind: he wanted money and power very badly. But he was charming, worked like the devil for his clients, and more and more my father came to rely on him.” Henry sounded almost bemused. “I still saw him, of course, though not so often. But by the time my father died he’d been handling our family’s affairs for several years and it just went on from there. As I said, Roland takes over lives …”

The sentence died off. Carefully, Henry added, “I may ask too much, pitting you against Roland with Kris Ann in between. He’ll do anything to keep the upper hand.”

“You should worry about yourself. Roland says I’ll end up getting you indicted as a jealous husband.”

“I’ll take that chance. It’s your career that concerns me, and your marriage.”

I lit the cigarette. “Our marriage is what we’ve made it. As for my career, what good has that ever done anyone? We sit down there filling up time sheets so that every month we can send bills to the x-many corporations who pay for big houses we don’t really need. Hell, you’re one of the few clients I like or even think about.”

He smiled wispily. “What else would you do?”

I shrugged. “I used to know, when I was a kid. I don’t anymore.”

His smile vanished. “Permit me, Adam. I’ve done badly with Jason, I know, but please, don’t live one of those lives of ‘quiet desperation.’ Find out what it is you want.”

“Right now I want to help you. There’ll be time for the rest.”

He gave me a complex look of gratitude, worry, and relief. “You’re certain?”

“Of course. There is one thing, though. About Rayfield, do you know of any reason for him to have feelings about you one way or the other? Run-ins with Jason, even?”

He paused. Then he shook his head and answered tonelessly, “It makes no sense to me, Adam.”

His voice was tired. I decided he’d had enough. “I should be getting back to Kris Ann.”

“You should. Especially now.”

I stood, began to leave, then stopped. “About you and Lydia—”

“Yes?”

“It’s just that I’d never have guessed.”

His smile was wan. “Then I suppose we succeeded—on one level.”

“I’m sorry it wasn’t more, Henry.”

“That was never meant,” he said gently. “Here, let me see you out.”

We walked through the silent house, past the dining room. Opening the door, he said, “I hope you know, Adam, how much I appreciate this.”

I placed a hand on his shoulder. “No need. God knows how many reasons I have to help.”

The cool clear look he gave me said he understood perfectly. “Don’t worry about Roland,” he said. “I’ll tell him myself.” We left it there.

I drove off, absorbing what I’d seen and heard. There was something inconsolable about Henry Cantwell that seemed to reach beyond Lydia to the core of his life and steep him in a terrible calm. I figured he had faced the worst, and told me everything.

I began thinking of Henry and Lydia and Jason until, suddenly, I wanted to talk with Kris Ann—of my own parents, of Cade and her, and how the flaws of one generation could run through the next like a bad inheritance, if you let them. But I found her sleeping amidst a black tangle of hair almost phosphorescent in the moonlight, the revolver lying next to her. I put it in the drawer, and gently closed it.

Downstairs, restless, I roamed the house until I saw the book I had borrowed, Grangeville: A Southern Tragedy, next to a chair in the sunroom. I picked it up and began turning its pages.

After a moment I sat. Four hours passed in smoking and reading by one dim lamp. I hardly noticed.

It was beautifully written. The author drew me into the warp and woof of the past: Grangeville in the thirties, a courthouse and some red brick buildings in north Alabama, its people embittered by the Depression and the loss of a railroad yard, scratching crops from red clay mostly rock and sand. The town’s eccentric Republican past, back through the Civil War. The irony that few blacks had ever lived there, just a handful.

One sweltering summer day in 1937, an old farmer with a shotgun had found one of them in his barn, mounting a white girl with her dress pulled up. A second black was there: the blacksmith, the first man’s brother. A man with a wife and son.

They were prodded with shotguns to the small jail, the first man saying he’d paid her three dollars and that his brother, the blacksmith, had come to warn that sleeping with a white girl was no good. The blacksmith swore to that, and it was known that other men had paid her. But the girl said she was raped. A mob gathered in front of the jail shouting for the blacks. Her white customers stopped talking, joining the frenzy of a town whose real enemies could not be punished.

Within two weeks the men were on trial for rape before Lydia Cantwell’s father and an all-white jury. Judge Hargrave ruled out evidence of prostitution. Three days later the blacks were found guilty and sentenced to death. In a riptide of publicity, against all reason except politics, clemency was denied. In January 1939, appeals exhausted, both men were electrocuted.

I finished too wrung out to look back at the pictures. But, two cigarettes later, I did.

The trial had been well covered. Judge, jurors, spectators, and accused had been amply photographed, and the writer had chosen with care. White spectators in bow ties or overalls stared from history’s fever swamp, dim eyes seeing nothing of how time would view them. Lydia’s father presided from his hand-carved bench, mouth a dutiful line. Northern newsmen in hats were there for another glimpse of the Sahara of the Bozart. The two black men leaned away from their white lawyer. Outside the spired courthouse the family of the blacksmith, Moses McCarroll, waited. A wife and a small boy.

I stopped there. There was something wrong with the picture. Something else.

I went to the kitchen and pulled a glassine bag of marijuana from the cabinet. Then I got a bowl and strainer and set them with the bag on the kitchen table. I sat down, opening the bag to put some of the brown, dirt-smelling dope in the strainer. I rubbed it back and forth until only seeds were left and the dope was fine powder in the bowl. Then I went to a drawer for the roller, put in powder and paper, licked the paper, and rolled a joint the size of a Lucky Strike. I did that twice. Then I pushed the excess powder from the bowl to the bag, and put away bag, roller, and paper. The two joints went with me to the porch.

There was nothing outside but crickets and a moon and wet, dank air. I lit a joint, lay back on the wicker couch, and smoked and slipped away into the second joint, and then the crickets were all around me …

I was trapped. The pictures roared around dark corners in an express train of white streaks and flashes. The back of my eyes and neck hurt like too much whiskey but the pictures wouldn’t stop.

Lydia Cantwell’s blue shoes matched her dress, but her tongue came from a rictus smile. Then a black man twisted with orange lightning while a small boy watched and I stood back. The man kept on shaking until my father threw me the baseball, beneath the elms in back.

It was all right, I remembered that. I could even feel the stitches as I threw it back to him, though he was quite pale. “You’ll be a pitcher, then,” he said.

But I knew now. “No sir, I want to be a policeman. Like you.”

My father looked concerned and held the ball. “But why, Adam?”

“Because I want to know the truth.”

Before he could answer, the police were at the door and my mother screamed that he was murdered. It was funny. It was happening again and still I couldn’t cry. Then Cade said I could have the dark-haired woman if I did as my mother said. The champagne turned bitter in my mouth.

It was cold now and there was noise from the gnarled bushes next door. I had to kill the noises, but couldn’t move. My vertebrae had snapped. Footsteps stamped the leaves and branches. Henry Cantwell with no eyes quivered with orange lightning that lifted him out of sight as someone laughed. I knew the laugh but couldn’t place it. The fish swam away. The black boy followed alone.

The noise came closer. They would kill me now. There was nowhere to go and I had to tell my father I was sorry—

I awoke just before morning when the night is like thin smoke. The sweat had dried cold on my face. There was no one in the bushes.

I got the bag of dope and threw it out.

Kris Ann was still asleep. I laid out some clean clothes on a chair and went for a run. The morning was bright and clear and filled with nothing but facts.

I came home, showered, and drank coffee with Kris Ann without speaking of Henry, or us. Then I crossed the backyard to the car.

I was behind the wheel before I saw the scrap of paper crumpled beneath the rubber blade of my windshield wiper. I got out and lifted the blade to unfold it.

It was Kris Ann’s picture, from the newspaper. A pencil had etched harsh age lines by her eyes, nose, and mouth until she was a wrinkled old woman. There were holes where her pupils had been.