Baptism in Blood (48 page)

Molly pulled the paper toward her again and folded it one more time. It was now too tightly squashed together.

“Well,” she said.

“Well.” Joey cleared his throat. Then he rubbed his hands together. His hands were fat and white, just like his belly. Molly had a sudden vision of him as a gigantic jellyfish, slick and slimy, curled up on her bed like a piece of animated ooze. She looked away.

“Well,” she said again. “There’s a dinner tonight. At the club. A planning committee dinner.”

“A planning committee for what?”

“A planning committee for a benefit thing. It’s Sarah Lockwood’s committee. I told you about it.”

“Sarah Lockwood,” Joey said.

Molly got out of her chair and went to the sunroom’s wall of windows, to look out on the pool in the backyard. Sarah and Kevin Lockwood lived in the French Provincial with the curlicue roof. They were the people in Fox Run Hill whom Joey liked least. He disliked them, in fact, for all the reasons Molly wanted to know them. Before her marriage, Sarah Lockwood had been an Allensbar, a real live member of real live Philadelphia Main Line Very Old Money family. Sarah had come out at the Philadelphia Assemblies and had her picture in the paper with a crowd of other girls, all wearing white dresses and carrying red roses. Kevin Lockwood was the president of his own brokerage firm in Philadelphia, one so small and exclusive, it didn’t even advertise. There were rumors all over Fox Run Hill that at least one of his clients was a former United States president, and that another was a member of the English royal house.

“I don’t want to go to dinner with Sarah Lockwood,” Joey said. “She makes me uncomfortable. She talks down to me.”

Molly didn’t turn around. “It’s only for a couple of hours. And all the other husbands will be there.”

“All the other husbands are shits. I don’t know why it matters so much to you to hang around with shits.”

“Everybody we’ve met since we’ve moved here is a shit as far as you’re concerned,” Molly said. “We couldn’t have gone on hanging out with bikers forever.”

“We should have had children,” Joey told her. “That’s what would have made a difference. We should have had some kids you could worry about so you could stop worrying about
them
.”

“It isn’t my fault we couldn’t have children, Joey.”

“It isn’t my
fault
either. Jesus Christ. I mean, I did the best I could at the time. I did what you asked me.”

“I asked you to find me someone safe.”

“I found you someone safe. As safe as it got. It was 1962.”

“Other people got pregnant in 1962.”

“Other people died in 1962, from what I hear,” Joey said.

Molly bit her lip. “That was God’s judgment,” she said primly, her teeth clamped together. “This is God’s judgment. We committed a murder and now we’re being punished.”

Molly heard rather than saw Joey stand up. The legs of the chair squeaked against the tile when he moved. Molly made a hot wet mist on the glass of the window in front of her and traced a curving line through it with her finger.

“I know we committed a murder,” Joey said. “You’ve convinced me we committed a murder. That doesn’t mean I have to go to dinner with Sarah Lockwood.”

“It’s at eight o’clock,” Molly told him. “In the Crystal Room at the club.”

“The Crystal Room.”

“It’s just a table, Joey. It’s not the whole room. It’s just us and the Lockwoods and three other couples.”

“And all the women are on this benefit committee.”

“That’s right.”

“Shit.”

The chair scraped again. Joey was putting it back under the table. Molly took a deep breath and turned around. The tears were so thick in her eyes, she could barely see. The muscles in her arms were so tense, they felt like wire.

Joey was standing near the French doors, on his way out.

“I’ll be back at six,” he said.

“You’re always back at six,” Molly told him.

“I’ll go to this damn dinner with you as long as you don’t expect me to talk to anybody.”

“Maybe if you talked to the people here, you’d learn something,” Molly said.

“Maybe if I learned something, I wouldn’t talk to the people here. Maybe if I learned something, I wouldn’t be married to you.”

“Maybe if you learned something, I wouldn’t make you stay married to me,” Molly said.

Joey hesitated one more second at the doors. Then he turned away from her and walked off. He lumbered like an animal past the domed niches and the long columns of plaster cherubs playing among bunches of plaster grapes. The front door opened and shut again. Molly heard the heavy metallic click of the safety lock snapping home. Joey always left and came in by the front door. It was as if coming in through the garage door would say something about him that he didn’t want to hear.

Molly went back to the table and picked up her coffee cup. She brought the cup to the sink and washed it out and put it in the white plastic-coated-wire dish rack. Then she dried her hands off on a dish towel and went through the French doors herself, through the foyer, into the living room.

Now that Joey was gone, she was back to normal. She wasn’t angry. She wasn’t tense. She didn’t feel ready to laugh or cry or kick something. She was just thinking about dinner tonight and Sarah Lockwood and what it would be like to know a debutante. She twirled around a little in front of the fireplace, imagining what she would have looked like in a long white dress, holding a single perfect red rose.

On the coffee table in front of the love seat, there was a stack of antiabortion pamphlets. When Molly saw them, she stopped twirling and picked them up and smiled. Joey got worried sometimes when she talked about abortion. He knew only about the one in New York—he thought that abortion had messed up her insides, making her barren—and he thought she was turning into one of those fanatics, the kind who shot abortion doctors or torched clinics or sat out all night on the Mall in Washington, holding a sign with a black-and-white photograph of a bloody fetus tacked across it.

Molly knew that she was much more likely to torch this house than any abortion clinic. She thought about it often, burning small square pieces of paper in crystal ashtrays, watching the paper blacken and curl, watching the flame twist and rise.

“At least this way you’ll be settled,” her father had told her all those years ago when she was locked in the bathroom of the Fox Run Hill Country Club on the morning of her wedding, refusing to come out. “It doesn’t matter who you’re married to as long as you’re in control of the situation. It doesn’t matter what your husband is if you’re the one who has the money.”

I should have been smarter about it, she thought now. I should have stayed in that bathroom and reduced my wedding dress to rags. I should have refused to go through with it.

It was a strange thing though, Molly thought. Men—both strong men like her father and weak ones like her husband—always made her feel the same thing. They made her feel that she couldn’t ever, ever, ever say no.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

cover design by Heather Kern

ISBN 978-1-4532-9311-9

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