Compass Rose (8 page)

“The fire is not … You look slubben … slubbenly.” Miss Perry closed her eyes and clenched her fist. She beat her forearm on her hip, not hard but over and over. She stopped and opened her eyes. “Slovenly.”

It was the feebleness that evaporated Elsie’s spurt of anger. She said, “All right. I’ll take care of everything.”

Elsie got to the bottom of the stairs and sat down. She felt dumb. What did she know that could change anything? How had she ever thought she knew what was going on? How had she imagined that anyone could do anything but mumble a few words about what little they knew? Jack’s lawyer’s words, the doctor’s what-we-know-about-the-brain words, her own wonders-of-nature chirps. They all might as well be Miss Perry exhaling stale poems and Latin prepositions and then a burst of bad temper. Every living thing had a few bubbles of one kind or another going in and out one kind of hole or another. When the in and out was over, it was back to matter. She saw it—particulate matter fluttering down through darker and darker water toward the seabed. A stupor spread through her, weighing down her arms, her chest, her head. She reached across her chest and put her fingers in the grooves of the newel post. They fit smoothly. She rested her cheek on the back of her hand, smelled her skin. She ran her fingertips up and down the grooves until another thought came to her. Not cheerier but on a smaller scale. Dick had told her she was spoiled, called her house “the toybox”—of
course, that had been part of his pleasure as well as his irritation. He should see her now. He should get down on his damn knees and think of her taking care of his baby, taking care of his friend and protector Miss Perry …

The truth was … The truth was she’d be doing everything she was doing anyway. She’d wanted a baby. She’d loved Miss Perry since her first Latin class. She wasn’t bossed into this by Dick. She wasn’t bossed into this by Jack. Maybe this paperwork she was about to do with some bozo protégé of Jack’s—that was something Jack owed her for.

When she opened the door to Johnny Bienvenue she didn’t get a good look at him. He was wearing an overcoat and scarf, and a hat with a brim. He pulled off his glove to shake hands, then turned toward the coatrack. She started off toward the library before he was through hanging up his things, and she was lighting the fire when he followed her in. She said, “I hope you don’t mind the uniform. I haven’t had a minute to change since I got off.”

“You’re a Natural Resources officer, right? Jack calls you the warden of the Great Swamp, but that’s not the official …” He stopped, probably because she was staring at him so intently. The Queens River. He was the man who’d caught the trout, made the fire, and drunk the wine—the man she didn’t arrest. She tucked her hair back and blushed. And then, thinking that she’d thought of him from time to time, when she pedaled her Exercycle or when she fit back into her uniform, she blushed again. “Yes. I mean, no. Warden of the Great Swamp is what the guys at work say. Kind of a joke.” And then more coolly—after all, she’d seen him, he hadn’t seen her—“But I get around other places. The salt marshes. The Queens River.”

But he’d put on reading glasses and started to look over the papers on the desk. He said, “Jack says Miss Perry is recovering. Do you think she’ll be able to manage her affairs on her own?” When Elsie didn’t answer right away, he looked up. He said, “I know. It’s hard to say. Does she strike you as knowing what’s going on?”

“Yes.”

“Does she understand numbers?”

“I don’t know. We talk, but numbers haven’t come up.”

“On this list of books here—gifts to Charles and Thomas Pierce—where do these figures come from?”

“I found the receipts. The first figure is what Miss Perry paid for each book. I called a rare-book dealer and he gave me a rough idea of what they’re worth now—that’s the second figure. The dates I got from her appointment books—Charlie and Tom’s birthdays.”

“But I understand these books are still here.”

“Yes.” Elsie pointed to the glass-paned bookcase. “She gave them reader’s copies. She always said the same thing—it was sort of a joke after a while. ‘If you don’t scribble in this book or tear the paper I’ll give you a new one when you’re grown up.’ What’s in the bookcase are first editions of the same books. Some of them are worth two or three thousand. But Jack told me there’s no problem if the gifts are under ten thousand in any one year.”

“That’s right. But the donor—Miss Perry—said,
‘If
you don’t scribble in them.’ An outright gift has to be unconditional. This wouldn’t be a problem if the total was under ten thousand. But each boy’s collection is worth …” He scribbled on a notepad. “Roughly twenty-five thousand.”

“It was a joke! Maybe when she started saying it, when Charlie was six or seven, maybe she meant it then. I was there for their birthday—not this year but before—and Miss Perry laughed and the boys laughed. The reason she was giving books this way was that if she’d said to the boys’ father that she was going to pay for them to go to college, he’d have said no. He’s very …” Elsie saw them, saw the day, Miss Perry catching a flounder, reciting a bit of Beatrix Potter. Dick and the boys, not May, May was fixing the cake, Miss Perry and Dick and the boys in the skiff. The late-afternoon light on the water, the summer-green spartina. A year later, the boys’ next birthday, they were at Charlie’s baseball game, Miss Perry innocently attentive, May rigid with pain.

Elsie sat down, closed her eyes. She saw May. She saw May looking at her. She felt May. She felt a space in herself fill up with cold astonishment. And then a sense of desolation—as if she were May looking at her house after the hurricane, the broken corner posts, the roof sagging, the wall gaping open, the things inside strange, hers but not hers.

“Are you okay?”

Elsie said, “Just a minute.”

“We can do this another time.”

“No. Let’s go on.”

Elsie looked at one of Miss Perry’s appointment books, found the dates of Charlie’s and Tom’s birthday party. “There. Look at that one. ‘Gave Charlie Pierce
Sailing Alone Around the World
by Joshua Slocum. First edition, mint. Gave Tom Pierce
Two Years Before the Mast
by Richard Henry Dana. First edition, good condition.’ ”

Then she started crying. It was a sudden burst, her body bent forward, her face jerking in her hands, the appointment book at her feet.

When she half recovered and was wiping her cheeks with her fingertips, she heard herself say, “I’ve never cried. I mean, I’ve never cried in uniform.” That was a bit of babble that normally would have made her laugh. At least she stopped crying. She said, “Oh, God. You must think I’m …”

“No, no. I can guess it’s been …” He bent down to pick up the appointment book from the floor. His hair was cut short or the half-curls would have been ringlets. He pulled a small packet of Kleenex from his briefcase. He puzzled over how to open the cellophane. He had thick fingers, a heavy, broad face. A general width—when he finally broke the wrapping and pinched out an edge of Kleenex, she felt as if she was being tended to by a bear.

He said, “I guess you’ve felt a lot of strain. Jack said you’re like a daughter to Miss Perry. So look. I can take the appointment books and the Everett Hazard folder, xerox them. We don’t have to wrap everything up right now.”

Elsie didn’t want him to go. She wanted him to sit by the fire and pay attention to her. She said, “Let me just look in upstairs. You’re going … where? Woonsocket? And that reminds me. Phoebe Fitzgerald wants to talk to you.”

“Oh, yeah. The tenant.”

“I could make you a cup of coffee. For your drive. You can smoke your pipe if you’d like.” He looked surprised but said, “I’m only going to Providence. But sure. A cup of coffee’d be nice. Black.”

When she came back he was looking at the books in the boys’
bookcases. She put his coffee on the table between the two armchairs facing the fireplace. She sat down in one of them, tucking her legs under her, a kittenish pose she hadn’t struck for a long time. He sat in the other armchair, planted his feet. “So tell me something about Miss Perry,” he said. “But first tell me how you know I smoke a pipe. Some sort of Sherlock Holmes thing? Or was it something Jack told you? Probably not Jack. He doesn’t notice details. At least not about men.”

“Oh?” Elsie was surprised by this bit of spin on his serve but was pleased to bat it back. “Of course, that’s true of men in general.”

“I don’t think so. But let’s not get into one of those men-in-general talks. The pipe …”

“I’ll tell you a little bit about Miss Perry. We’ll get back to the pipe.” He stretched out his legs. So this wasn’t going to be one of her old daredevil encounters, nothing like her fantasy of wading across the Queens River, having him at her mercy.

She told him school stories, about being Miss Perry’s prize student in Latin and natural history. A glimpse of herself as a tomboy. “My sister was the great beauty, so I took to the woods.” He raised his eyebrows but didn’t make a courtly objection. “I would have been just sullenly thrashing around, but Miss Perry took an interest. Just asked a question or two at first. Then asked me to take her to where I’d seen something extraordinary. The first thing was a lady’s slipper. On the way she pointed out other things. One time she slit open a little swelling on a twig and inside there was a nymph.”

“Oh, sure, nymph. Like a maggot or a grub. Good bait for trout.”

“So you’re a trout fisherman.”

“When I was a kid, Grandpère used to take me. Now it’s rare.” The
r
s in
grandpère
were trilled French-Canadian rather than lightly gargled French-French.

“Did you grow up speaking French?”

“Some. My father’s family’s from Trois Rivières. They speak Quebecois. You hear it about half the time in Woonsocket—
au coin
. When the governor gives a speech up there in our corner, I do the introduction in French and English.”

She said, “So what are you doing here? This little job …”

“I’m a lawyer. And I owe Jack. He tell you I worked for him? I’m not the kind of guy Jack usually hires for his firm. I didn’t make partner, but I learned a lot in five years. Now I run my own shop—an office in Woonsocket and one in Providence. Run-of-the-mill cases, but I’m seeing more people.”

“So, being a governor’s aide—how does that fit in?”

“I’m not ruling out doing something in politics.”

“ ‘I’m not ruling out’—that usually means someone’s dead set on it. I hope you don’t imagine Miss Perry’s a moneybags who’ll bankroll your campaign.”

He smiled. “You look a lot like your sister, but you talk a whole lot different.”

Elsie felt both flattered and stopped. He sat there smiling pleasantly. She wondered if he was really so at ease. She wasn’t used to being the one who wondered. She wondered if he was at ease because there she was in her uniform, a state employee, and he was a big cheese. She said, “So, if you get stopped for speeding, you let the cop know you work for the governor? Is there some little something on your license plate?” She held up her hand and said, “Never mind. I don’t know why …” She gave up the idea of playing her little trump card—trout, fire, wine. She felt her edge grow dull. She’d relied on that edge for years. When she was at Sally and Jack’s she was the daring gadfly. In the woods she had her badge. And although she’d worked at being just-folks, one of the guys, she had to admit she’d never quite given up the privileges of class. She’d denounced them when she saw them in someone else, most usually in Jack. She sometimes thought that her life had leached them out of her. She sometimes thought that the whole idea of class was fading, the radioactive emissions were weaker and weaker. Nothing like the Boston or Newport of a hundred or fifty years ago. But deep inside her, sometimes hidden even from herself, there was a trace. One of the chief privileges was the assurance of being the final judge of all other claims of worth—money, power, beauty, fame, intellect, or even good works. She’d used it—it wasn’t just her sassy talk or body that set men off. Her college English prof had imagined he was fucking Daisy Buchanan. The striving lawyers at Jack and Sally’s parties,
not quite as literate, still sensed an allure of risk. When they were through she might turn on them, remind them that sex was pleasant enough but now that she was herself again she could see they weren’t quite the thing.

And now—as if her bursting into tears in front of this bearish man was as physically intimate as fucking—she’d felt the old urge to put him in his place. And she’d started—“I hope you don’t imagine Miss Perry’s a moneybags …” The breezy way she mentioned money, the poke at his ambition from her position above ambition, the backward tilt of her head as if she’d finally bothered to pay attention. (One of the minor privileges—no one was really there—of course there were always people around, but no one was really there until you decided to notice.)

She didn’t have it in her anymore. She hadn’t debated it, hadn’t examined her conscience. In fact, she’d been about to make another entrance in that role. Performance canceled.

She hadn’t crossed the Queens River because she’d looked like the Pillsbury Doughboy. With all her Exercycling and her fish-and-vegetables diet she was on better terms with her body—she didn’t mind that her feet were a half size bigger, her hip bones a bit wider, and of course her breasts bigger.

He was staring into the fire. Without looking up he said, “No, it’s okay. I ask myself that. I’m as suspicious of my ambition as I am of anybody else’s. I won’t give you the speech about caring what happens to people. But is there a part that wants the applause? The deference? The special treatment?” He shrugged. “I can’t say there isn’t some of that. But so long as it stays in the corner … The part of myself I question more is curiosity. I applied to Jack’s firm out of curiosity. What would I see in there? What would I see
from
there?”

“And what did you see?”

“At first work was work. But after a while I saw they didn’t want to change much. They work hard, but it’s to keep things in order. They’re less corrupt than some of the state politicians because they aren’t desperate. Why should they be? They’re sailing along in a big ship. You know Jack. Half of what he says is like he’s the captain of a big ship.”