Death at Charity's Point (13 page)

Gloria always served me a drink on those Saturdays when I brought the boys home. In nice weather she’d sit me down on a wrought-iron chair on the brick patio out back and wheel out the portable bar she had bought for me for Father’s Day shortly after Joey was born. While she mixed my bourbon and branch she’d chatter about the boys’ school, her photographic assignments, people at the club, just as if we were still married. And I’d contemplate the hours—hell, the months—of labor I had invested in her place of residence. The one thousand six hundred and fifty bricks I had laid one by one in a basket-weave design over the two truckloads of sand, all smoothed and leveled. The twelve azaleas, yellows and oranges and reds, and six rhododendrons I had planted, dug up, and replanted under Gloria’s narrow-eyed supervision, in holes cushioned with a mixture of pine needles and peat moss. The gutters I had oiled, painted, cleaned, torn down, and replaced. The clapboards I had scraped, primed, and painted. The lawn I had mowed, despising every minute of it. And the woman I had laughed with, loved, and reluctantly left.

I felt myself a stranger there. The shrubs had grown. Weeds poked up between the bricks I had laid. The house was a new color. And somehow it all seemed smaller, darker, more claustrophobic than when I had lived there, as if jungle animals might crawl out from under the azaleas in the darkening Saturday evening while Gloria and I sipped our cocktails.

“Did you have a nice day?” she’d ask, in much the same way she used to after I had spent a day pampering clients in Boston, and I’d say, “Oh, sure, just fine,” the way I always had.

And Gloria would say, “The boys are getting big, aren’t they?” and I’d reply, “Oh, yes, they’re getting to be young men,” understanding that what we both meant was that Gloria was doing a splendid job of bringing them up without my help.

Gloria and I had a very polite divorce. “Civilized,” she called it. Gloria was very big on doing things in a civilized manner.

It gradually slipped away. It didn’t happen by design, and in spite of the inevitable tension between me and my sons when we’re together, the emptiness I feel when we’re apart has never subsided. But as they got older it seemed that Billy and Joey had things to do on Saturdays. There were ball games they had to play in, parties to attend, weekends out of town with friends. Gloria remained civilized about that, too, so that I could visit on a Sunday, or even take them to McDonald’s on a Tuesday night. But sometimes it couldn’t be arranged. Maybe I could have pushed harder. But I didn’t want them to resent me, to think of me as an interloper who disrupted their lives. And if we missed seeing each other for a week or two, they didn’t seem to mind.

I minded. I minded when I didn’t see them, and I minded even more that they didn’t seem to.

And now I don’t see them that often. I watched Billy play third base for his high school team a few times, and I went to the banquet at which Joey was awarded second place for his fruit fly experiment. We still go to restaurants together occasionally, but it has become ceremonial, and I wonder that I feel compelled to take them to expensive places now. We are polite, awkward, restrained. We know we like each other, but we can’t seem to feel it.

So now I dread weekends. They remind me of what’s missing in my life.

The Harborside apartment complex rises against the waterfront near the old Commercial Wharf, right off Atlantic Avenue. I live in apartment 6E. Two bedrooms, a living-dining combination, and a closet they call a kitchenette, all for $980 a month. At one end of the living-dining room are floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors which open onto a balcony with a rusting wrought-iron railing. There’s room for two vinyl-covered aluminum folding chairs and a hibachi. I sit on one of the chairs when I want to drink Jack Daniels and watch the sailboats drift on the harbor and think solitary thoughts, which I do almost every evening. I use the hibachi on those rare occasions when I have invited a guest to sample my cuisine. I’m damn good at charcoal cooking, though I find it hardly worth the effort when I’m alone. Usually I feed myself a frozen pizza or a can of Dinty Moore’s beef stew.

I use one of the two bedrooms for sleeping. My double bed is one of the few pieces of furniture I own. I need an extra-firm, orthopedic mattress to keep my vertebrae flexing properly. The rest of the stuff I rent from a guy named Burke who, I think, gives kickbacks to the realtor.

The other bedroom contains most of my worldly possessions: cartons of books I probably will never get around to unpacking, a broken vacuum cleaner, a pair of large speakers—Gloria kept the stereo; I got the speakers—a tool box, a table saw, a ten-speed bike with flat tires, an ironing board. Artifacts, mostly, of my other life.

The things I really care about I store in the living room where I can keep in touch with them. That’s where I have set up my fly-tying table and my cabinets of bucktail, wood duck breasts, neck hackles, tinsel, yarn, thread, and hooks. I keep my felt-soled waders there, too, and my rack of split bamboo rods, and the shelf for my reels. And in the corner, where I can pull out the five iron or the putter, stands my bag of MacGregor M.T. Tourneys.

I spent most of Saturday morning in my bathrobe reading law and smoking Winstons at the table near the sliding glass doors. Around noon I dropped a couple of sport coats off at the dry cleaners and walked back the long way. Then I mixed myself a tall Carnation Instant Breakfast for lunch, putted into a glass on the rug for fifteen or twenty minutes, showered, and took a nap. When I woke up I opened a can of Schlitz and tied a few Quill Gordons on number sixteen hooks while the Red Sox lost a close one to Baltimore on the tube, which I rolled behind me so that I could listen to Ned Martin and the crowd noises without being distracted by the picture.

I thought briefly of piling my waders and gear into the car and driving to the Squannicook in time for the evening hatch. But inertia is the curse of my middle age. So I had another beer.

Later, I changed into a jacket and tie and treated myself to a steak at the Scotch and Sirloin and watched the young people play mating games. I got home early and fell asleep to an old movie which had been advertised as an “early Bogie,” but in which Bogart had only a bit part.

A typical, exciting Saturday in the life of the bachelor attorney.

Sunday I devoted to Mrs. DeVincent’s case. Believe it or not, there are precedents in Massachusetts judicial history on the custody of Labrador retrievers. The DeVincents had five—the dam and her four pups. Jenny DeVincent, my client, wanted me to argue that she should retain custody—that was
her
word, not mine—of all five dogs, on the grounds that the puppies shouldn’t be separated from each other or from their mother. Jenny’s husband, Jack, countered that the dogs were personal property, like automobiles or jewelry, and should be divided equitably.

I happened to know that all Jack wanted was the mother, who would swim the Klondike to retrieve a wounded duck, and I figured we could settle the whole thing out of court after we danced around the issues for a bit.

The DeVincents did not disagree on issues such as alimony or their eleven-room house in Dover or the boat or the three Mercedes. I suspected that, had their children not been adults, the dogs still would have been the main point of contention between them.

I understood that sort of thing. Marriages fell apart over major issues. It was the little things like Labrador retrievers which came along to eliminate the chances for repair.

I understood it well. I had lived it myself. The solution, I decided years ago, was to avoid having major issues in the first place, and if that meant avoiding major relationships, as it seemed to, I figured it was well worth it.

Hell. I was single, middle-aged, and I had a date on Sunday night. What more could a man want?

R
INA PRESCOTT WAS WAITING
for me in the foyer at Gert’s when I arrived. She wore a pale green blouse with a round collar buttoned to her throat, a full, patterned skirt, and little gold hoops in her ears. She had on no other jewelry. The only makeup I noticed was a touch of green on her eyelids. She shook my hand, grinned, and said, “This is the first time I’ve relaxed in a month. My Midsummer Nightmare is over. Time for a drink.”

There was a different crowd at Gert’s on Sunday night from the one I had seen at the noon meal a few weeks earlier—several families with small children, a few couples dressed for the theater, one old man sitting at a corner table with his napkin tucked into his collar, hunched over a heaping bowl of pasta. Conversation hummed at a lower decibel level than at noontime. The clink of silverware, little bursts of loud talk, now and then a public, controlled laugh, the clang of pots and pans when the kitchen door swung open, and, over invisible loudspeakers, the lilt of violins, Respighi—all melded into a comfortable, warm background that invited intimacy.

We were led to a table against the wall by a slim young man with one gold earring: He seemed to glide around on ball bearings. “I’m Charles, your waiter this evening,” he said, in an incongruously deep voice. “Would you care for a cocktail?”

Rina had Cutty on the rocks, and I settled for Jack Daniels the same way. Charles oozed away.

“So. How did it go?” I asked her.

“Oh, good, actually. It
was
good. The kids came through. The usual slips. You know. The curtain got fouled up on one of the props and when we tried to open it at the fifth act it ripped. Elliott was ripped, too, when I told him. ‘That’s a thousand-dollar curtain,’ he screamed. I told him the kids would sew it up, but he wasn’t mollified. And, you know, we had the predictable missed cues. But none of the audiences noticed, I’m quite sure. They were great, the audiences. I’m still on adrenaline. In case you didn’t notice.”

I smiled. “I know you’re not always this way.”

“Yeah, well, I’m sorry about how I acted that day. But he should know better than to interrupt a rehearsal.”

Charles brought our drinks. “Care to order now, sir?” he asked.

I lifted my eyebrows, and she nodded. “What’ll you have, Miss Prescott?” I said.

“I think, for one thing, I’ll have you call me Rina, if that’s okay,” she said. “What do you recommend, anyway?”

I shrugged. “Feel like fish or Italian?”

“Either, m’lord. Order for us, please.”

“That’s not very liberated of you.”

“I’m so liberated that that doesn’t bother me at all,” she said. “You can hold a door open for me, hold my chair, taste the wine. That symbolic stuff is okay. When you’re really liberated, you don’t mind being treated like a woman, is how I figure it.”

I nodded and turned to Charles. “The scallopine, then. We’ll start with an antipasto. Big carafe of house red. Cheese and espresso afterwards. And,” I added, pointing to our cocktail glasses, “please do this again for us.” I looked at Rina. “Okay?”

“Marvelous.”

Charles permitted himself a small smile of approval and rolled away.

“I appreciate your calling me,” I said. “I hope you didn’t mind.”

She looked down into her drink. “I
am
liberated, if that’s what you mean. I don’t mind calling a man. And if you hadn’t asked me out I probably would’ve asked you. I always get wigged out right before a performance, and all I can think is, if I don’t get the hell out of here I’m going to start throwing things. The idea of having a date—boy, that sounds old-fashioned, ‘date’—anyway, the idea of getting away from there and doing something reasonably civilized with somebody totally disconnected from dear old Ruggles kept me sane through the whole thing. You can’t believe how refreshing it is to talk with somebody other than another teacher or an adolescent. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.” She shrugged and grinned. “But to talk to somebody from the real world. All caps. THE REAL WORLD. Besides, I owed you an apology. And I did say I’d call.” She lifted her glass and downed the remainder of her Scotch. The ice cubes clinked against her teeth. She pursed her lips and sucked one into her mouth. “So I called,” she mumbled around the ice cube. “Okay?”

She crunched the ice loudly.

I smiled at her. “Yes. Okay.”

“What was it you wanted to know about poor George?”

“I don’t know, exactly,” I said. “Why would he take his own life? Or did he really take his own life? How well did you know him?”

“He was a friend. All of us there are friends.” Rina paused as Charles set our second round on the table and deftly filched our empty glasses. “Most of us, anyway, are friends. It’s a small school, we’re thrust together a lot. We live together. It’s like a family. There are the feuds, the jealousies, but also the dependencies. We’re like siblings. I mean, I know George liked oatmeal for breakfast with big chunks of brown sugar on it. But I don’t know a thing about his sex life. I know he detested television but secretly watched football on Monday nights. But I don’t know whether he squeezed his toothpaste from the end or the middle. I’d guess the end, though.”

“Did his suicide surprise you?”

She hesitated. “It surprised me, of course. If he’d had a heart attack or gotten hit by a car, that would have surprised me, too. Naturally. But—well, you think back on it, you try to figure it, and you say, ‘Yeah, he could have.’ You know? He was a melancholy person. No real joy in his life, at least none that any of us could see. We’ve all talked a lot about it. Jenny Wolcott, she’s taken it hard. I think she had a little thing for George. Father figure, maybe. He could be that way with women. Not a sexual bone in his body.” She squinted at me. “Is that mixing a metaphor?”

“Sexual bone? Hmm. Maybe. Maybe not.”

“Anyhow, I guess, yeah, he could have. Of the people I know, I’d say George was one who might kill himself.”

“And the others feel that way?”

She shrugged. “More or less.”

“Binh too?”

“Mr. Binh doesn’t tell us peasants what’s going on in his head. He’s too busy being inscrutable.”

“Inscrutable?”

“Aha! You caught me. Prejudice, right? Or at least, guilty of a cliché.” Rina frowned at me. “Don’t get me off on the subject of Alexander Binh. He walked all over George to get that Dean’s job. George should have had it. He deserved it. By seniority, if nothing else. But Binh played it cozy with the buffoon—Elliott, that is. Persuaded Elliott that if he, Alexander Binh, didn’t become the Dean, Ruggles would be guilty of racial discrimination. So Elliott gave the job to Binh. Which, it seems to me, itself is a clear case of racial discrimination. Don’t you agree?”