“That’s better,” she said. “Mercenaries I understand.”
“So, any thoughts?”
“I didn’t kill him, if that’s what you mean. Not that I didn’t mull it as an option, I was so angry. But I couldn’t have, even if I had the means. Which I don’t.”
I tried my best to look embarrassed by the thought.
“No accusations, not at all. I’m just asking your opinion.”
“The lesson learned is never do business with friends, or their children, and definitely not their idiot sons-in-law.”
“Now I’m a little lost,” I said.
She closed her eyes and slowly shook her head.
“I only got involved with him because of Appolonia, poor thing. Walter sat on the Boston Equity board with her father. Lovely people. Old Brookline.”
An image of them all having dinner in Newton with Abby’s parents leapt uninvited into my mind. Luckily Joyce picked that moment to stop torturing the fig tree and lead me over to one of the dining tables, freshly dressed in a bone-colored tablecloth and short vase stuffed with miniature red roses. A tall woman with a severely receding chin and straight, oily blond hair came out of the kitchen and handed Joyce a sheet of paper, I guessed a provisioning inventory. She stood immobile by the table while Joyce put on her glasses and looked it over. She handed the list back without comment, or even a look at the chinless young woman, who left as wordlessly as she arrived.
Joyce took off her glasses again and dropped them on the table, rubbing her tired eyes with the back of her hand. She let out a breath of exasperation.
“I know it’s impossible,” she said. “Even with her parents gone I really couldn’t bring litigation. I know what I said, but
Walter would think it unforgivably vulgar to sue a friend’s child. A mentally ill child at that. I’m just so angry about the whole thing. To be made such a fool of.”
“So they must have left her pretty well taken care of, with or without Jonathan’s portfolio.”
“Oh my, yes. Greek shipping. You don’t get any better taken care of than that. I always assumed her husband entered the investment field so he could manage her inheritance. Isn’t that what all these opportunists do? I just hope he did a better job for her than he did for me, the insufferable little numbskull.”
I thought I saw the faintest suggestion of a smirk momentarily pass over her face. I realized she’d caught herself amused by a private joke. A joke on herself. Then it was obvious. The loss for her wasn’t financial. It was the damage to her sense of self-reliance. An affront to the posture of invincibility demanded by the people who bred her.
But I was even more taken aback when she reached across the table and touched my forearm with the tips of her dusty, calloused fingers.
“Give the girl a little advice for me, if you will,” she said. “Let the husband’s business die with the husband. It won’t bring him back. Nothing will. Not that I don’t sympathize with how she feels. If Walter wasn’t already dead I’d kill him myself for leaving me.”
Then she tapped my arm again and pulled her hand away.
“Now, if you’ll excuse me,” she said, though without any sign of getting up from her chair. So I thanked her for the help and left her mustering strength for another round with the fig tree, determined as she was to wrestle its leafy little being into utter submission, to better realize its role in her orchestrated existence, irretrievably disrupted by the unscheduled demise of Walter Whithers, for whom the same occasion was probably a blessed relief.
—
Belinda answered the phone.
“Not without the lawyer,” she said.
“Aren’t we past that?”
“His instructions. You remember the number.”
I didn’t, so I had to call information from the pay phone, as far as I knew the last one in Southampton, kept as a profit center in the basement of a burger joint on Job’s Lane. Gabe was eager as always to drop whatever he was doing and run over to Appolonia’s house. A half-hour after talking to him I met him just as he was getting out of a new black Jaguar.
“Quite the collectible,” he said, trying to lean back far enough to take in the full scale of the Grand Prix.
I was going to straighten him out but decided it wasn’t worth the effort. Anyway, he’d already headed into the house, which was good, since it kept something between me and Belinda.
She made us pause in the foyer, then herded us into the living room where Appolonia was already seated, complete with tea tray and a folded-over copy of the
Times
, exposing a half-completed crossword puzzle done in neat black ink. She wore a plain white cotton shirt with the collar pulled up, black Capri pants and sandals. The AC was turned so low I began to envy Gabe’s suit jacket. Or maybe it was just the abiding chill within Appolonia’s crystal enclosure.
She gently commanded Belinda to bring us both coffee before I had a chance to apologize for bothering her again.
“Not at all. It’s nice to have a little company. The underlying purpose of which notwithstanding.”
“You look well, Appolonia,” said Gabe.
She nodded her thanks, but didn’t return the compliment.
“So, Sam, what are you thinking about?” she asked.
“Boston,” I said.
“My beloved city.”
“Brookline, technically.”
“Few realize it’s a separate city, even those who live there. It must have been grand to grow up in Southampton.”
“Grand wouldn’t exactly describe my part of town, but it wasn’t bad. Winters were kind of bleak, especially back when everything shut down after Labor Day and all the summer people went back to Manhattan. Half the lights went out and three-quarters of the stores disappeared. But we dug it anyway. Even the air changed. Like God had flicked a switch to send cool dry wind down from Canada.”
“I think Jonathan was too busy to notice things like wind and air.”
“Overachiever.”
“I suppose.”
“Married you. Some would call that a stretch.”
She finally seemed to notice the tea tray by her elbow. I waited while she squirted lemon into the cup and took a sip.
“That can’t be flattery, so you must have another point.”
“Just came from a chat with Joyce Whithers.”
I don’t know what kind of rise I was trying to get, but all it did was give Appolonia a little smile.
“The restaurateur.”
“And old family friend.”
“The Silver Spoon. Said to be quite good. My parents’ friend, not mine.”
“You knew I’d find out eventually. Would have been easier to just tell me.”
“Excuse me,” said the lawyer, smelling a threat, “somebody catch me up.”
“Later Gabe,” said Appolonia, “I want to get to the heart of Sam’s issue.”
“Not an issue, just a curiosity.”
“Everyone has parents, Sam.”
“Not like yours.”
“Jonathan took care of all the finances, and left me with much more than I originally entrusted him with. So, why does it matter how we started out? What’s the relevance to your,” she paused a moment, “enterprise?”
I fought an impulse to launch into a lecture on the importance of establishing every possible data point before attempting an analysis of a systems failure. Give her the same sensitivity training I gave recent chemical engineering graduates unlucky enough to be cast like frightened émigrés into my Technical Services and Support Division. Tell her about the catastrophic consequences that can accrue from the tiniest fractional quantities that go unnoticed in the statistical dust of an equation until suddenly complexity theory takes hold and before you know it there’s a hole the size of infinity blown in your calculations. Which could mean a hole blown in the side of a gigantic pressure vessel, thereby causing the molecules that comprise other engineering graduates of various vintage to be intermingled with a stream of super-heated, partially deconstructed hydrocarbons.
Instead I took a breath, tried to remember an appropriate verse from the
I Ching
and asked if Belinda could bring me some more coffee. The sudden tension had pushed Gabe out to the edge of his seat, but when I sat back he joined me, though still unsettled.
“You’re right,” I said to Appolonia. “None of my business.”
I was going to tell her about Joe Sullivan, but decided against it. I did bring up my chat with Ivor Fleming, but she said she’d never heard of him. Neither had Gabe.
“I also met Jonathan’s brother, Butch, and his wife.”
Appolonia covered her reaction by dropping her eyes to her lap.
“Ridiculous man, I’m sorry.”
“Not a lot in common, the two of them. Butch and Jonathan.”
“The closest I ever came to arguing with Jonathan was over Arthur. That’s his real name. I never understood why Jonathan was so protective when all he received in return was ridicule and neglect.”
“So not a lot of family get-togethers.”
“Jonathan wanted to have him here for dinner, but I discouraged it. Too much for me. Imagine being in the company of a man who built his entire life in diametric opposition to all that I loved in his brother.”
“Did as well though, financially. Tough to make it in the art game.”
“No lack of brilliance in the Eldridge family. Only a difference in application.”
Gabe had been listening attentively through all this, on the lookout for another sudden change in course. I asked him what he thought to get him back into the conversation.
“Never met the man. Jonathan retained me to help institutionalize their mother. That’s how I came to know Appolonia,” he added, looking over at her. She smiled a crooked little smile, but didn’t return his look. “But I hear he goes in for society parties. Sounds like fun.”
Appolonia gave a sound of contempt, subtle, but clear enough to make Gabe wish he’d kept his mouth shut.
“Artists and petty celebrities, people like Arthur, are kept around as court jesters,” she said. “Given all the trappings of acceptance, but in reality they’re little more than house pets. Jonathan could have steered him away from all that, but he couldn’t be bothered with brotherly advice.”
Growing up, all I had was an older sister who might have looked after me when I was little, I don’t remember. We got along okay. There was rarely conflict or competition. We operated in separate orbits, unified only—along with our mother—in the common determination to stay clear of my father’s random expulsions of noxious rage.
“The mother’s still around,” I said, as the recollection came to me. “In a home somewhere.”
“Somewhere being here,” said Appolonia. “The Sisters of Mercy home in Riverhead. But not terribly relevant to your inquiry, either, if you’ll forgive me, since she’s completely gone over to mental illness.”
I knew the place. It was where my own mother died from Alzheimer’s. Maybe they were roomies for a while. Mrs. Eldridge might have been the one who always stopped me in the hall to ask where she was and how she got there. Perplexed, but graciously polite every time. I would give her the best answer I could, which would satisfy her till the next time she saw me, when we’d do the whole thing all over again.
“It was always terrible for Jonathan to see her that way. I never met her, of course, but he’d try to give me an idea of what she used to be like. He said she often confused him with Arthur, which naturally irritated me no end. Arthur was his father’s name, too, which didn’t help. It’s too cruel.”
When I told her about my mother’s Alzheimer’s I wasn’t trying to make a sympathetic connection, but that was the effect.
“Then you understand,” she said softly.
Gabe spared us his own family history, thank God. My mood, always at risk around Appolonia, was sinking badly under the increasing heft of the conversation. I couldn’t take much more.
“I think we’ve bothered you enough for one day,” I told her, making a move to get out of my chair. Gabe looked at me as if to say, speak for yourself, pal.
“I said it wasn’t a bother,” said Appolonia, “but I won’t keep you.”
“I have a few things I should probably go over with you after Sam leaves,” said Gabe, with a touch more officiousness than probably intended.
“Of course. And I have something to add before you go, if it’s all right,” she said to me.
I was partway out of the living room by this time, and about to give everyone an inane little wave before bolting for the door.
“Sure.”
“I met Jonathan a year after my parents died. Were killed, actually, in a private plane en route to Martha’s Vineyard, just like the young Kennedy son years later. A socially adroit departure, don’t you think?”
I thought of my father in the men’s room at the back of the bar in the Bronx, dying on the floor while his killers brushed off their polyester slacks and straightened their ties in the grungy mirror.
“I don’t think they care on the other side.”
“I was never a particularly courageous person, protected as I was, but to all appearances normal enough. Out and around in the world. Took the Green Line to the market, skied, once even rode a Ferris wheel. My circle considered me vivacious.”
She pointed her index finger straight into the side of her head.
“Something switched off up here the instant I saw those two policemen at our front door, never to switch on again. If I find it hard to discuss my parents, I’m sorry. You seem to
want to know everything, so there you have it. I’ll leave the determination of relevance to you.”
After the chilly atmosphere of Appolonia’s house the air outside felt luxuriously thick with heat and humidity. Eddie was glad to see me, and seemed no worse for the wait.
I decided to spend the rest of the day and evening sitting in the one Adirondack chair not stained with Sullivan’s blood, drinking vodka and letting Eddie retrieve tennis balls out of the bay. During that whole time nobody tried to punch me, lie to me, enthrall me or disrupt my powers of perception with clever illusions, so I guess I made the right decision.
A
MANDA CALLED UP
to me when I was just about to muscle a four-by-eight sheet of half-inch plywood up onto the rafters of the addition. All I could do was grunt back until the thing was laid down and tacked in place.
“Shouldn’t you get some help?” she yelled.