Bitter Truth (14 page)

It didn’t take me long to figure out how it was that Kendall stayed so thin. The painting she had handed me was a landscape all right, an imaginary view painted right from the instructions on the PBS painting shows, with spindly trees and moss-covered rocks and majestic peaks in the background. It was actually pretty good for what it was and it could have proudly held its own on any Holiday Inn wall. “I like it,” I lied.

“Do you, really?” she shrieked. “That is marvelous, simply marvelous. It’s a gift, from me. I insist. I have others if you want to see them. You must. Believe it or not this isn’t even a real place. I dredged the landscape out of my imagination. It’s so much more psychologically authentic that way, don’t you think?”

Something she had said in that first torrent of words interested me. “You mentioned a Franklin Harrington. Who is he?”

“Oh, Franklin. An old family friend, the family banker now. He was supposed to come tonight but had to cancel. I thought you knew. I was sure you did. He’s Caroline’s fiancé. Oh my, I hope I haven’t spilled anything I shouldn’t have.”

“No,” I said. “I’m sure you didn’t.” I turned my attention back to the painting, holding it before me as if I were studying it with great seriousness. “You know what this work reminds me of? That special place that Jackie used to talk about, where she would go in her most peaceful meditations.”

“How extraordinary.” Her eyes opened wide. “Maybe Jackie and I were linked in some mystical way.”

“Maybe you were,” I said. “That would be so cool. You know, sometimes people who are connected in mystical ways can feel each other’s emotions. On the night she died, did you feel anything?”

“To tell you the absolute truth, Victor, I did have a premonition. I was in North Carolina, vacationing, when I felt a sense of dread come over me. Actually I thought it was Edward’s plane. He flew back that morning, for business, and on the beach I had this horrible sense that his plane had gone down. I was so relieved to hear from him, you couldn’t imagine. But that was the day that Jackie died. You think I was getting those horrible images of death from her?”

“I don’t doubt it,” I said.

“How marvelously strange.”

“Tell me, Kendall. What was the business your husband flew north for that day?”

“Oh, some real estate thing. Edward dabbles more than anything else. He’s waiting for the inheritance so that he can buy a football team. He’s just a boy like that. And do you want to know something else very interesting about my husband, Victor? But I have to whisper it.”

“Okay, sure,” I said, anxious to hear whatever other incriminating facts she wanted to tell me about Eddie Shaw.

Kendall looked left down the hallway, then right, then she leaned forward until I could smell the Chanel. “My husband,” she whispered, “is fast asleep.”

And then she bit my ear.

3. Marcia Funebre

When I was alone in my room again, I laid the painting on a tottering old dresser, having successfully avoided laying Kendall Shaw, and once more took my pants off and fell into bed. She had been particularly ardent, Kendall had, which would have been flattering had she not been so obviously hopped up with her diet pills and suffering from some sort of amphetamine psychosis. Upon biting my ear, she performed a talented lunge, kicking the door closed with a practiced side swipe at the same time she threw her arms round my neck, but I fought her off. It wasn’t that I wasn’t attracted — I was actually, I have a thing for women just like Kendall, hyperactive and thin with sharp Waspish features and outdoorsy hair — it was just that it was all so sudden and wrong that I didn’t have time to let my baser instincts kick in before I pulled her off and sent her on her way. I sort of regretted it too, afterward, as I lay in bed alone and waited for my erection to subside. It had been a profitable visit in any event. I had learned Eddie’s whereabouts the night of Jackie’s death, I had gotten a motel-quality painting, and I finally knew exactly who that Harrington was whom I had run into at the First Mercantile Bank of the Main Line. He was Caroline’s fiancé and knowing that made Caroline even more attractive to me in the deep envious reaches of my petty mind, which meant it took longer for me to relax enough to even try once more to sleep. So I lay in the bed, staring at the ceiling, letting the blood flow back to my brain and trying to sort it all out in my mind, when I heard still another knock on the door.

“Oh, Mr. Carl,” said Selma Shaw, Caroline’s mother, through the wooden door. “I have something for you.”

I bet you do, I thought, as I slipped out of bed and grappled again with my pants. I opened the door a crack and saw her standing there with a covered plate in her hand.

“I noticed you didn’t eat much of the dinner,” she said, her voice slipping raw and thick out of a throat scarred by too much of something. “I thought you might still be hungry.”

I looked at her smile and then at the plate and then back at her smile and realized that I actually was hungry so I let her in. Selma Shaw was a tall, falsely blonde woman, so thin her joints bulged. Her face was as smooth and as stretched as if she were perpetually in one of those G-force centrifuges they use to train astronauts, and her smile was a strange and wondrous thing, a tight, surgically sharp rictus. She stepped to the bureau to put down the plate and noticed the painting there.

“So Kendall’s been here already,” said Selma, her smile gone.

“She wanted to show me one of her paintings.”

“I assume that was not all. I wish Kendall would be more concerned with taking care of her husband than rushing to the third floor to show visiting artists her trashy little pictures. But,” she said, her voice suddenly brightening, “enough of that dervish.” She spun around almost gaily and smiled once more. “I assumed you were being too polite to eat, worried about the strange surroundings, so I had Consuelo make you up a sandwich.”

“Thank you,” I said, truly grateful. I hadn’t eaten much at dinner, Selma was right about that, but it wasn’t out of politeness. We had eaten in the dark, cavernous dining room of Veritas, stared at by stern brown portraits on the walls, the only bit of color the blue-and-white marble of the fireplace that looked to be carved from blue cheese aged too long. The food that Consuelo had served in the dark room had fallen to the far side of vile. A spiky artichoke, a bitter greasy salad, overcooked asparagus, undercooked potatoes, fatty knuckles of mutton with thick stringy veins snapping through the meat like rubber bands. There had been pickles of course, a platter of pickles fresh from the factory, and Dr. Graves, on my right, had advised me that pickles were always served at Veritas. The only light in the dining room had come from candelabras on the table, which, blessedly, were dim enough to make it difficult to see what the muck it was we were eating, but I saw enough to turn my appetite. I tried to look at least interested in the food, pushing it around on my plate, actually swallowing a small spoonful here and there, but when something in the bread pudding crunched between my teeth like a sharp piece of bone I figured I had had enough, spitting my mouthful into my napkin and dropping the napkin over my silver dessert plate in resignation.

“I hope you don’t mind me putting you all the way up here on the third floor,” said Selma Shaw, “but we weren’t expecting so many people to be forced to stay over because of the flood. There are not so many rooms available to visitors anymore. We’ve closed down the east wing to guests because my husband is a troubled sleeper and he finds it difficult to rest with anybody in close proximity to him during the night. Me included.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t get to meet him.”

“Don’t be. I love him dearly, of course, he’s my husband, but he can be a very difficult man. Childhood trauma will do that.”

“What kind of trauma?” I asked.

“Oh, it’s a terribly sad story,” said Selma. “Too depressing for a rainy night like this. Do you really want to hear it?”

“Yes, actually.”

“Well, make yourself comfortable at least,” she said, almost pushing me onto the bed and sitting right beside me. The bed creaked beneath us.

She crossed her legs and put her left arm behind her so that her upper body was turned toward me. She was wearing a clinging black dress that sparkled in the dim light and the sharp points of her breasts gently wiggled at me from beneath the fabric.

“I won’t bore you with the details, but in a horrible mistake Kingsley, my husband, shot his father to death on the back patio of this very house on a dark, rainy night much like this one.”

Her brown eyes were looking straight into mine, as if in warning. I blinked twice, thinking that what Caroline had successfully avoided talking of during the ride to Veritas her mother had blurted to me with nary an excuse, and then I shifted away from her as politely as I could.

“Needless to say,” she continued, “it has scarred my husband terribly. This house used to be so grand a place, I am told, a marvelous place for parties. But that was when Mr. Reddman was still alive. He knew how to run a house. My husband has let the house go. I’ve done what I could to maintain it but it is so difficult, almost as if it has become what it was always meant to be, as if its essential character is becoming exposed with all the leaks and warped floors and the browning wallpaper. Is it any wonder, then, that I spend much of my time away? Would you spend all your life here if you had a choice, Mr. Carl?”

“No,” I said, shifting away from her a little more.

“Of course not, and still they carp. But enough talk of Kendall and my husband’s sad past, both subjects are entirely too morbid. Tell me about you and Caroline. She said you are lovers.”

“So she did.”

“You know of course that she is engaged,” said Selma and on the final syllable her right hand, which had been floating in the air as if held high by a marionette’s string, dropped lightly onto my knee.

“Yes, I do, Mrs. Shaw,” I said, looking at her hand. While her face was stretched taut and young, her hand had the look of a turkey foot about it, bone-thin, covered with hard red wrinkles, tipped by claws. I tried to deftly brush her hand off as if it had fallen there by mistake, but as I performed my gentle brush her fingers tightened on my knee and stayed put.

“Caroline has known Franklin Harrington for years and years,” said Selma Shaw, not in any way acknowledging the ongoing battle over my bended knee, “ever since Mother Shaw brought him to this house as a boy. They took to each other so quickly we had always assumed their marriage. Caroline, of course, has dallied and so, I am told, has Franklin in his way, but they will be married despite what any of us would prefer. You should be aware of that as an unalterable fact. Destiny, in this family at least, must always have its way with us. Even love must yield. No one knows better than I.”

“Could you move your hand off my knee, Mrs. Shaw?”

“Of course,” she said, loosening her grip and sliding her hand up my thigh.

“That’s not what I meant,” I said, standing up.

Before I could get cleanly away, Caroline’s mother goosed me.

“What is going on here?” I said, perhaps too loudly, but I believe my pique was understandable. “Are you all crazy?”

“It’s just Caroline,” she said, laughing. “She is so prone to exaggeration. Come sit down, Mr. Carl,” she said, patting the bed beside her. “I’ll be good.”

“I’ll stand, thank you.”

“You must think me a pathetic old witch.” She lifted her face to me and paused, waiting for me to inject my protestations. When I didn’t say a word she laughed once more. “You do, don’t you. Such an honest young man. Caroline always knows how to find them. But before you judge me too harshly, Mr. Carl, consider how noxious I must appear to myself. I wasn’t always like this, no, not at all, but the same forces that have rotted out this house have turned me into the wondrous creature you see before you. You’re better off without any of us, Mr. Carl.”

“I just came for dinner,” I said.

“Oh, I know the attraction, heavens yes. Just as Mother Shaw, may she rot in peace, brought Franklin here for Caroline, she brought me here for Kingsley. She had that way about her, of taking destiny by the hand and turning it to do her will. I had no intention of staying. It was a part-time job, to read to her son in the evenings, that was all. He was forty already and had difficulty reading for himself. I was only twenty and still in school, but already I believed I knew what I wanted. You want to know how pathetic I really am, Mr. Carl, know that this was what I wanted, this house, this name, this life, from which now I run to France to escape whenever I am able. The French say that a man who is born to be hanged will never be drowned. I was born to be rich, I always thought, in the deepest of my secret hearts. And see, I was right, but I suppose I was born to drown too.” She stood, and without looking at me, walked to the door. “Do yourself a favor, Mr. Carl, leave tomorrow morning as soon as the road clears and don’t look back. Leave tomorrow morning and forget all about what you think you want from Caroline.”

She closed the door behind her. I stared at it for a moment and then my stomach growled. I stepped to the bureau and whisked off the cover of the plate. It was a sandwich all right, but beneath the stale bun the slices of tongue were so thick I could still see the whole of the muscle lolling between the slabs of teeth in the mouth of its cow, brawny, hairy, working the cud from one side of the mouth to the other. I went to sleep hungry.

4. Allegro con Fuoco

I had thought about keeping the bedside lamp on the whole of the night to discourage any other unwelcome visitors, but I found it hard enough to sleep in the must and damp of that room, with the splat, splat splat, splat of leaking water dropping into the chamberpot and the groans of that ancient house collapsing ever so slowly into itself, so I turned out the light and, while lying in the darkness, I thought about Claudius Reddman, grand progenitor of Reddman Foods. His legacy seemed a dark and bitter one just then, except for the wealth. One daughter dead, another run off, the third widowed by her own son’s hand, and all the while Elisha Poole railing drunkenly at his ill fortune before silencing his wails at the end of a rope. Then there was the grandson, Kingsley Shaw, shooting his father on the portico of the house on a rain-swept night. Then there was the ruin that was Selma Shaw, brought to the house by Grandmother Faith to be Kingsley’s wife and doomed to become the living embodiment of all her false expectations. And, of course, there was the house itself, reverting to a wild and untamed place filled with decay, like some misanthrope’s heart. It was almost enough to have me swear off my desperate search for untold amounts of money. Almost. For I was sure if I was ever to be given the gift of glorious wealth I would do a better job of handling it than the Reddmans. A bright airy house, filled with light, maybe a converted barn with a tennis court, clay because I was never the swiftest, and a pool, and a gardener to mow the acres of lawn and care for the flowers. And there would be parties, and women in white dresses, and a green light beckoning from across the sound.