Christine Falls: A Novele (21 page)

ANDY STAFFORD FELT LIKE HE WAS ON TRIAL. THEY WERE IN SISTER
Stephanus’s office, he and Claire, sitting side by side on two straight chairs in front of the big oak desk behind which Sister Stephanus was seated. At her back, standing, was the red-haired priest, Harkins, the one who had called at the house that day to spy on them. Another nun, he could not remember her name—she was a doctor, she had a stethoscope around her neck—was standing by the window looking out at the brilliant day, her face lit by the light reflected from the snow. He had explained to them, again, what had happened, how he had found the baby having a fit or something and had given her—he just managed in time to stop himself saying
it
—a shake to try to get her to snap out of it, and how she had died instead. It was all a misunderstanding, an accident. He had been drunk, he had not tried to deny it; that was probably part of the reason why it had happened, that the kid had died. So yes, he admitted it, it was sort of his fault, if an accident could ever be anyone’s fault. Even though she was sitting down, Sister Stephanus looked taller than everyone else in the room. At last she stirred herself, and sighed and said:

“You must try as best you can, both of you, to put this terrible thing behind you. Little Christine is with God now. It was His will.”

The other nun turned from the window and looked at Claire, who gave no response. The young woman had not moved or said a word since they had sat down. She was white-faced and hunched, as if she were cold, and her hands, the palms turned upward, lay lifeless in her lap. Her gaze was fixed on the floor in front of the desk, and she was frowning in concentration, trying to make out, it seemed, something in the pattern of the carpet.

Sister Stephanus went on:

“Andy, your task now is to help Claire. You’ve both had a loss, but hers is the greater. Do you understand?”

Andy nodded vigorously, to show how eager he was, and how determined, to try to undo what had been done. “I understand, Sister,” he said, “yes, I understand. Only…” He jerked his chin up and ran a finger around the inside of his shirt collar. He was wearing his tan checked sport jacket and dark pants, and he had even put on a tie, to make a good impression.

Sister Stephanus was watching him with her wide-open, glistening, slightly staring eyes, eyes that looked as if they had been frozen. “Only?” she said.

Andy took a heavy breath, lifting his chin again. “I was wondering if you’d talked to Mr. Crawford about a job for me. I mean a different job, one that would keep me nearer home.”

Sister Stephanus glanced over her shoulder to where the priest was standing. He lifted his eyebrows but said nothing. The nun turned back to Andy. “Mr. Crawford is very ill,” she said. “Gravely ill.”

“Sorry to hear that,” Andy said, a little too slickly, he realized. He hesitated, getting himself ready. Now was the moment. “Must be tough,” he said in his slow drawl, “Mr. Crawford being sick and all. I suppose the rest of you”—he looked from her to Harkins and back again—“have to take up the slack. Funny, a big operation like the one you have going, yet you never see anything about it in the newspapers.”

There was another silence, then the priest said in that twangy harp accent of his: “A lot of things don’t get into the newspapers, Andy. Even serious accidents aren’t reported, sometimes.”

Andy ignored him. “Trouble is, see,” he said to the nun, “I’ll have my hands full helping Claire here to get over her loss. Have to turn down those long runs up to Canada and the Lakes. There’s the overtime, I’ll lose that.”

The nun glanced at Harkins again and again all he did was raise up his eyebrows. She turned back to Andy. “All right,” she said, “we’ll see what can be done.”

“The point is, Andy,” Harkins put in, “we have to keep these matters between ourselves. We have our own way of doing things here at St. Mary’s, and often the world doesn’t understand.”

“Right,” Andy said, and allowed himself the ghost of a sneer. “Right.”

Sister Stephanus rose abruptly, the black stuff of her habit making a busy, crumpling sound. “Very well, then,” she said. “We’ll be in touch. But Andy, I want you to be clear on one thing. Claire’s welfare now is our first concern—ours, and yours.”

“Sure,” he said, deliberately offhand this time, just to show them, “sure, I understand.” He too stood up, and turned to Claire. “Come on, honey. Time to go.”

She did not respond, but continued staring at the carpet. Sister Anselm came from the window and put a hand gently on her shoulder. “Claire,” she said, “are you all right?”

Claire blinked, and with an effort lifted her head and looked at the nun, struggling to concentrate. Slowly she nodded.

“She’s fine,” Andy snapped, and could not keep an edge of menace out of his voice. “I’ll take care of her. Right, sweetheart?”

He gripped her by the elbow and made her stand. When she was on her feet it seemed for a moment that she might fall over, but he held her steady with an arm around her shoulders and turned her to the door. Sister Stephanus came from behind her desk and led them out.

When the three of them were gone, Sister Anselm said:

“That young woman is not well.”

Father Harkins eyed her worriedly. “Do you think she might…?” He let the question hang.

“I think,” the nun said with angry emphasis, “her nerves are in a bad way—a very bad way.”

Sister Stephanus came back into the room, shaking her head. “Dear Lord,” she said wearily, “what a business.” She turned to the priest. “Did the archbishop…?”

He nodded. “I spoke to his office. His people will have a word with the Commissioner—there’ll be no need for the police to get involved.”

Sister Anselm made a sound of disgust. Sister Stephanus turned her tired gaze on her. “Did you speak, Sister?”

She turned and limped out of the room. Sister Stephanus and the priest looked at each other, and then away. They said nothing.

THERE WAS ICE ON THE FRONT STEPS AND ANDY KEPT AN ARM AROUND
Claire’s shoulders so she would not slip. Since the accident with the kid he had not known what to do with his wife, she was so silent and withdrawn. She spent her time sitting around the house half in a trance, or watching the kiddies’ programs on TV,
Howdy Doody
and
Bugs Bunny
and the one with the two talking crows. It gave him the creeps to hear the way she laughed at those cartoons, a sort of gurgling in her throat, just the way, he supposed, her Kraut cousins would laugh,
hurgh hurgh hurgh
. At night when she lay unsleeping beside him he could feel her thoughts turning and turning in her head, turning on the same damned thing that she could not let go of. She would just about answer when he spoke to her, otherwise she said nothing. One night he came home late and tired out after a run from Buffalo and the house was in darkness with not a sound to be heard. He searched the place and found her in the kid’s room, sitting by the window with the kid’s baby blanket pressed in her arms. He had shouted at her, not so much because he was sore but because of the scare she had given him, sitting there like a ghost in the weird, bluish glow that came up from the snow-covered yard. But even when he yelled she only turned her head a little way toward him, frowning, like a person who has heard someone calling from a long, long way off.

Cora had been the only good thing for him in all of this. She had calmed him down on the night of the accident and helped him get his story straight. Sometimes now during the day she came up and sat with Claire, and more than once he had arrived home to find her preparing his dinner, while Claire, wearing the housecoat that she had not changed out of since morning, red-eyed and with a handkerchief pressed to her mouth, lay on her front on their bed with her feet hanging over the side. There was something about her feet, white on the instep and discolored and callused on the undersides, that gave him a nauseous feeling. Cora’s feet were long and tanned, and narrow at the heel and broad and rounded where the toes started. Cora wanted nothing from him but his hard brown body. She never asked him to tell her he loved her, or worried about the future, or what would happen if Claire found out about the two of them. Being with Cora was like being with a man, except when they were in bed, and even then she had almost a man’s brutal appetite.

They were walking down the driveway of the orphanage when they met Brenda Ruttledge coming in at the gate. She was wearing a big alpaca coat and a woollen hat and fur-trimmed boots. Andy did not remember her from when Claire had bumped into her when they were leaving the Christmas party at Josh Crawford’s place—in fact, there was not much he did remember about that afternoon—and Claire of course was too wrapped up in herself to know whether she recognized someone or not. But Brenda remembered them from the party, the pale young woman with the baby and her baby-faced little husband flushed and in a rage from having drunk too much beer. The young woman looked terrible today. She was gray-faced and gaunt, as if she were in shock, or sick with dread, or grief. Brenda watched them as they passed her by, the wife walking stiff-legged and the husband guiding her with his arm around her shoulders.

Brenda had expected America to be different from home, the people happier, more forward-looking, friendlier, but they were just the same as her own folk, just as angry and petty-minded and afflicted. Or maybe it was just Boston that was like that, with so many Irish here, still with their race memories of the Famine and the death ships. But she did not like to think of these things, of home, and her being here, and lonely.

The door was opened by the same young nun with the prominent teeth who had opened it the last time she was here, when she’d brought the baby. She thought of asking her name but did not know if it was allowed to ask such a thing; anyway it would not be her own name but that of some saint Brenda had never heard of before. She had a nice face, small and round and jolly-looking; well, they would soon knock the jollity out of her, in this place. She too, like the couple on the drive, showed no sign of remembering Brenda. But then, probably she had opened the door to hundreds of people since Brenda had last been here.

“I wonder if I could see Sister Stephanus?”

She was afraid the nun would ask her what her business was, but instead she invited her to step into the hall and said she would go and see if Mother Superior was in. When she smiled her teeth stuck out and two babyish dimples appeared in her fat little cheeks.

She was gone for what seemed a long time, then came back and said Sister Stephanus was not in at present. Brenda knew she was being lied to. Embarrassed, she avoided the young nun’s not unkindly eye.

“I just wanted to ask about—about one of the babies,” she said. “Christine is her name.”

The young nun answered nothing, only stood with her hands clasped one upon the other at her waist, smiling politely. Brenda supposed she was not the first courier—would that be the word?—to come back here to St. Mary’s inquiring after a baby. She recalled the cockney purser on the boat when she was coming over who had warned her about getting attached to the child. He had barely glanced at their papers, hers and the baby’s, then sat back in his chair behind his desk and looked at her bosom with the hint of a weaselly leer and said, “Believe me, I’ve seen it happen, time and again, girls going out, some of them hardly out of school, by the time they hit Stateside they think the baby’s their own.” But it was not that she felt an attachment, exactly, she thought now, walking back down the driveway, only she still found herself thinking about little Christine, and remembering the funny feeling in her insides when she first took the baby in her arms that evening on Dun Laoghaire pier. The couple she had met here on the drive, where was their baby today, she wondered? She saw again the woman’s shocked white face and dead eyes, and she shivered.

PHOEBE HAD SLEPT FOR MOST OF THE FLIGHT OVER, WHILE QUIRKE
with bitter determination had got drunk on complimentary brandies liberally plied to him by a frisky-eyed stewardess. Despite the five hours they had saved flying westwards it was dark when they arrived aboard the Clipper, and Quirke was resentful of the whole day he seemed to have missed out of his life, a lost day that was nonetheless more significant now than so many others he had lived through. From the airport they took a taxi to Penn Station, slumped away from each other against their respective windows, both groggy in their own way. The train was new and sleek and fast, although it smelled much the same as an old steam train. In Boston they were met at the station by Josh’s driver, a dark, slight young man who looked more like a boy got up in a chauffeur’s uniform, a smart gray affair complete with leather leggings and a cap with a shiny peak. He smelled of hair oil and cigarettes. His name, he said, when Quirke asked, was Andy.

An icy rain was falling, and as they drove across the city Quirke peered through the murk at the lighted streets, looking for remembered landmarks and finding none. It was twenty years, and seemed a thousand, since he had last been here, he and Mal, two tyro medical men working—masquerading, more like—as interns for a year at Massachusetts General thanks to the strings that had been pulled for them by the Judge’s old pal Joshua Crawford, a freeman of this city and father of two lovely and marriageable daughters. Yes, more like a thousand years.

“Tender memories stirring?” Phoebe inquired slyly from her side of the car. He had not realized that she had been watching him. He said nothing. “What’s the matter?” she asked, in a different tone. She was fed up with his moodiness; he had been in some kind of sulk the whole way over.

Quirke turned his eyes to the window again and the shining city sliding past. “What do you mean, what’s the matter?” he said.

“You’re different. No jokes anymore. I’m the one who’s supposed to be in a mood. Is it that fall you took?”

He was silent for a time and then said:

“I wish we could…”

“What?”

“I don’t know. Talk.”

“We are talking.”

“Are we?”

She shrugged, giving up on him. He could feel the driver’s eye watching him in the mirror.

THEY CROSSED SOUTH BOSTON AND HEADED OUT ONTO THE HIGHWAY.
North Scituate, where Josh Crawford had his mansion, was twenty miles down the coast, and soon after Quincy they were on narrow back roads where the sea mist hung under the trees and the lighted windows of isolated houses shone yellow and mysterious in the darkness. There had been snowdrifts still in Boston but down here, on the sea’s edge, even the verges were clear. They passed by a white-steepled church standing on a rise, ghostly and somehow anguished in its empty-windowed solitude. No one spoke, and Quirke, the brandy glow now turned to an ashen burn, had again the eerie sense of detachment that came over him so often these days: it was as if the big car, wallowing effortlessly around these bends on its plush suspension, had left the road and was being borne aloft on the dense, wet darkness toward some secret place where its passengers would be lifted from it and spirited silently away without trace. He pressed a finger and thumb to his eyes. His mind was not his own, tonight.

When they turned in at the gates of Moss Manor a pack of penned dogs began to howl somewhere on the grounds. Approaching along the drive they saw that the great front door of the house was standing open and someone was in the doorway, waiting to greet them. Quirke wondered how the precise time of their arrival had been made known to the household. Perhaps the car had been heard, or its lights seen, as it rounded some bend up the road. Andy the driver rolled the big machine in a sweeping half circle on the gravel and stopped. The person in the doorway, Quirke saw, was a woman, tall and slim, wearing a sweater and slacks. Phoebe and he stepped out of the car, the driver holding the door for Phoebe. A miasma of exhaust smoke lingered in the heavy, damp night air, and from far off came the hollow moan of a foghorn. The dogs had fallen silent.

“Welcome, voyagers,” the woman called to them, in a tone of dry amusement. They walked forward and she reached out and took both of Phoebe’s hands in her own. “My,” she said, in her low, husky, southern-accented drawl, “look at you, all grown up and pretty as a picture. Have you got a kiss for your wicked step-grandmother?”

Phoebe, delighted, kissed her swiftly on the cheek. “I don’t know what to call you,” she said, laughing.

“Why, you charming girl, you must call me Rose. But I suppose I mustn’t call you a girl.”

She had deliberately delayed turning to Quirke, giving him time, he guessed, to admire her flawless profile and the swept-back wings of her auburn hair, the high, unmarred brow, the noble line of the nose, the mouth turned down at the corners in an ironically regal, lazy smile. Now at last she delivered to him languidly a slim, cool hand, a hand, he noted, that was not as youthful-seeming as the rest of her. “You must be the famous Mr. Quirke,” she said, letting her eye wander over him. “I’ve heard a great deal about you.”

He sketched a swift, half-serious bow. “Good things, I hope?”

She smiled her steely smile. “’Fraid not.” She turned to Phoebe again. “My dear, you must be exhausted. Was it a dreadful journey?”

“I had Mr. Cheerful here to keep my spirits up,” Phoebe said, with a grimace of comical disgust.

They moved into the wide, high hall, and Andy the driver came in behind them with their bags. Quirke looked about at the animal heads on the walls, the broad staircase of carved oak, the dark-beamed ceiling. The atmosphere in the house had a faintly tacky feel, as if many coats of varnish had been applied a long time in the past and had not quite dried yet. Twenty years ago he had been impressed by the mock-Gothic awfulness of Moss Manor; now that ghastly splendor had to his eye a certain dinginess—was it the wear and tear of time, or just his general disenchantment, that had dimmed the former grandeur of the place? No, it was the years: Josh Crawford’s house had grown old along with its owner.

A maid in a dark-blue uniform appeared; she had mousy hair and mournful Irish eyes.

“Deirdre here will show you to your rooms,” Rose Crawford said. “When you’re ready please come down, we’ll have a drink before dinner.” She laid a hand lightly on Quirke’s sleeve and said with what seemed to him a smiling sarcasm, “Josh can’t wait to see you.”

They moved to the foot of the staircase, the maid padding before them; Andy the driver had already gone ahead with their suitcases.

“How
is
Grandpa?” Phoebe asked.

Rose smiled at her. “Oh, dying, I’m afraid, dear.”

THE UPPER FLOORS OF THE HOUSE WERE LESS OPPRESSIVE AND SELF-CONSCIOUSLY
grand than the downstairs. Up here the hand of Rose Crawford was evident in the dark-pink walls and Empire furnishings. After they had deposited Phoebe in her room the maid led Quirke to his. He recognized at once where he was, and faltered on the threshold. “My God,” he muttered. On a chest of drawers of inlaid walnut stood a silver-framed photograph of Delia Crawford as a girl of seventeen. He remembered that picture, he had made her give him a copy of it. He lifted a hand to his forehead and touched the scars there, a habit he had developed. The maid was watching with some alarm his reactions of surprise and dismay. “I’m sorry,” he said to her, “this used to be my wife’s room, when she lived here.” The photograph had been taken at some debutante ball or other and Delia wore a tiara, and the high collar of her elaborate gown was visible. She was looking into the camera with a kind of amused lasciviousness, one perfect eyebrow arched. He knew that look: all through those love-drunk Boston months it used to spark in him such extremes of desire for her that his groin would ache and his tongue would throb at the root. And how she would laugh at him, as he writhed before her in his blissful anguish. They had thought they had all the time in the world.

When the maid had gone, shutting the door soundlessly behind her, he sat down wearily on the bed, facing the chest of drawers, his hands hanging limply between his knees. The house was silent around him, though his ears were humming even yet from the relentless grinding drone of the aircraft’s engines. Delia’s sardonically tolerant eye calmly took him in, her expression seeming to say,
Well, Quirke, what now?
He brought out his wallet and took from it another photograph, much smaller than the one of Delia, badly creased and torn along one edge. It was of Phoebe, taken when she too was seventeen. He leaned forward and tucked it into a corner of the silver frame, and then sat back, his hands hanging as before, and gazed for a long time at the images of the two of them, the mother, and her daughter.

WHEN HE CAME DOWN HE FOLLOWED THE SOUND OF VOICES TO A
vast, oak-floored room that he remembered as Josh Crawford’s library. There were high, glass-fronted bookcases filled with leather-bound volumes that no one had ever opened, and in the middle of the floor a long reading table with a top that sloped on either side, and a huge, antique globe of the world on a wooden stand. In the fireplace that was the height of a man a wood fire was blazing on a raised, black metal grating. Rose Crawford and Phoebe were sitting together on a leather-covered couch. Opposite them, on the other side of the fireplace, Josh Crawford was slumped in his wheelchair. He wore a rich silk dressing gown and a crimson cummerbund, and Oriental slippers embroidered with gold stars; a shawl of Persian blue wool was draped over his shoulders. Quirke looked at the bald, pitted skull, the shape of an inverted pear, to the sides and back of which there clung yet a few lank strands of hair, dyed a pathetic shade of youthful black; at his loosely hanging, raw, pink eyelids; at the gnarled and rope-veined hands fidgeting in his lap, and he recalled the vigorous, sleek, and dangerous man that he had known two decades before, a latter-day buccaneer who had made a rich landfall on this still piratical coast. He saw that what Rose Crawford had said was true: her husband was dying, and rapidly. Only his eyes were what they had always been, shark-blue and piercing and merrily malignant. He lifted them now and looked at Quirke and said: “Well well, if it isn’t the bad penny.”

“Hello, Josh.”

Quirke came forward to the fire and Josh noted his limp and the bunched dead patch of flesh under his left eye where one of Mr. Punch’s or fat Judy’s steel-tipped toecaps had left its mark.

“What happened to you?”

“Had a fall,” Quirke said. He was growing weary of that same old pointless lie.

“Oh?” Josh grinned on one side of his leathery face. “You should be more careful.”

“So everyone tells me.”

“So why don’t you take everyone’s advice?”

Rose, Quirke could see, was entertained by this little tussle. She had changed into a sheath of scarlet silk and matching scarlet shoes with three-inch heels. She blew cigarette smoke toward the ceiling and lifted her glass and waggled it, making the ice cubes chuckle.

“Have a drink, Mr. Quirke,” she said, rising from the couch. “Whiskey?” She glanced at Phoebe. “What about you, my dear? Gin and tonic? If, that is”—turning to Quirke—“it’s permitted?”

“Why are you asking him?” Phoebe said airily, and put out the tip of her tongue at Quirke. She too had changed, into her formal, blue satin dress.

Quirke said to Rose:

“Thank you for putting me into Delia’s room.”

She looked back from the table where the drinks were, glass and bottle in hand.

“Oh, dear,” she murmured vaguely, “was that hers?” She gave a shrug of regret that was patently fake, and then frowned. “There’s no ice, again.” She went to the fireplace and pressed the button of a bell that was set into the wall.

“It’s fine,” Quirke said, “I don’t need ice.”

She handed him the whiskey and lingered a moment, standing close in front of him. “My goodness, Mr. Quirke,” she murmured so that only he could hear, “when they told me you were big they did not exaggerate.” He smiled back at her smile, and she turned away with an ironic little twitch of her hips and went to the drinks table again and poured a gin for Phoebe, and another bourbon for herself. Josh Crawford from his wheelchair greedily watched her every movement, fiercely smiling. The maid came and Rose requested her brusquely to fetch more ice. It was plain the girl was terrified of her mistress. When she had gone Rose said to Crawford:

“Honestly, Josh, these waifs and strays you make me take in.”

Crawford only laughed. “Good Catholic girls,” he said. He winced at something happening inside him, then scowled. “This damned fire’s too hot—let’s go into the glasshouse.”

Rose’s mouth tightened and she seemed about to protest, but meeting her husband’s look—the scowling jaw, those cold, fish eyes—she put her bourbon aside. “Whatever you say, darling,” she said, making her voice go soft and silky.

They progressed, the four of them, along corridors cluttered with expensive, ugly furniture—oak chairs, brass-studded trunks, rough-hewn tables that might have come over on the
Mayflower
and, Quirke thought, most likely had—Quirke pushing Crawford in his chair and the two women following behind.

“Well, Quirke,” Crawford asked, without turning his head, “come to see me die, have you?”

“I came with Phoebe,” Quirke said.

Crawford nodded. “Sure you did.”

They arrived at the Crystal Gallery and Rose pressed a switch and banks of fluorescent lights high above them came on with a series of faint, muffled thumps. Quirke looked up past the lamps at the weight of all that darkness pressing on the huge glass dome that was stippled now with rain. The air in here was heavy and sultry and smelled of sap and loam. He thought it strange that he did not remember this extraordinary place, yet he must have seen it, must have been in it, when he was first here with Delia. All around, polished leaves of palms and ferns and unblossoming orchids hung motionless, like so many large, intricately shaped ears attending to these intruders. Rose drew Phoebe aside and together they drifted away among the crowding greenery. Quirke pushed the wheelchair into a clearing where there was a wrought-iron bench and sat down, glad to rest his knee. The metal was clammy to the touch and almost warm. Keeping this space heated over a winter, he reflected idly, probably cost the equivalent of what he earned in a year.