Authors: Nancy Thayer
People were still skeptical of women who were divorced—but not of men who were divorced. People were still frightened of women who were divorced, as if they held some kind of primitive and tainted power. Women not sanctified by the presence of a husband seemed by no choice of their own to appear to married women with an almost witchlike aura; and women who loved women were considered fallen past witchery and into the black outlands of evil.
But perhaps that was an exaggeration, for Suzanna had friends now who knew her secret and, beyond being happy for her happiness, did not care. These people saved her life.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Ursula Aranguren would say whenever Suzanna got carried away with her fears. “
Everyone
has a gay relative by now. If Madeline moves in with you, this town will buzz like a hornet’s nest for maybe a week or two, and then turn its attention to something else. We’re sophisticated people, after all. Life is too short to squander—live your life!” But Ursula Aranguren did not have children. She could afford to be remarkable.
“I have to admit,” Leigh Findly said, “when you first told me, my first reaction
was fear—I think I thought you might make a pass at me and I wasn’t sure how to handle that. Not to insult you, Suzanna, but you’re not my type! And then I was—wary—for a while. I suppose I thought you might start showing dirty movies in your home or, well, proselytizing. But after all these months, well, I feel fine with you, perfectly comfortable. I’m beginning to understand: you don’t love a woman, you love a person.”
For that was it. Suzanna loved a person, and that person loved her, and the gender of that person was not the point. As the months went by and the emotions deepened past lust and wild exhilaration, Suzanna came to feel that perhaps this person—Madeline—was the person she could spend her entire life with, for kindness and generosity and good humor and mutual respect were all there. They could even argue and resolve the arguments without damaging their estimation of each other or crimping their loose and dear companionship.
It was society, this town, that could provide the hurt that would come, to them or to Suzanna’s children, and nowhere in this town was a group of potential judges gathered in greater numbers than in the very church where Suzanna sat. Her position seemed impossible. She wanted to rise from her pew, to speak her defense before the community, to beg for their charity and support. But she could not do this one thing: she could not trust her neighbors.
She saw no hope. She sat beneath the shining whiteness of the sanctuary’s dome and wondered if she must live in terror all her life.
Reynolds Houston
The chairs in the chancel of the church were antique, carved from rosewood and upholstered with striped rose and gold velvet. They conveyed a majesty that seemed suitable to this territory that supposedly belonged to God. But they were not comfortable chairs; Reynolds Houston thought that perhaps these chairs had been designed in accordance with that ancient pedagogic belief that discomfort of the body sharpened the receptivity of the mind. In any case, Reynolds felt like a stork perched on a thumbtack, and thought he must look as awkward as he felt. There was no way to settle all his long bones gracefully on this little chair. Reynolds, over fifty-four years of life, had learned to discipline his extremely tall and narrow body out of most of its gawkiness; he had learned to dress himself fastidiously. He would never be thought of as a particularly handsome man, but he was distinguished, and knew he was considered elegant. In an attempt to compromise comfort with dignity on such a small space, he now leaned forward, rested his elbows on his knees, and touched the tips of his fingers together so that his hands pointed downward in a V. This posture placed the pressure of his entire upper torso on his shoulders and arms and made it a strain to lift his head—or maybe it was simply that he was so very tired that any posture at all would have weighed him down.
Reynolds was an academic man, a professor of Greek and Latin at the local college, and privately an extremely well-read scholar and philosopher. He was a private man. He had devised a life of solitude for himself, a life limited because of complicated philosophical reasons. But in the past week he had been confronted with a personal dilemma of such magnitude that he had had to ask others for help. He had been presented with a crime committed by one of the most outstanding members of his community, and he was being forced by the strength of his own principles into what seemed to him to be an almost violent act. Certainly by calling attention to this crime he was going to violate another person’s life. But he did not see what choice he had.
Reynolds had built his solitary life on one dream: the perfectibility of man. He tried to be a perfect man himself, and he tried to believe that the people he lived among were striving for the same goal. He had thought it possible that Londonton was a model town, one of the best gatherings of human beings on earth. He had needed to believe that.
Eighteen months ago the people of Londonton had been drawn together in a new and exciting endeavor: they were building a youth recreation center. Quite probably this was Mitchell Howard’s idea, at least at first, for he had been a philanthropic man and a concerned citizen, the sort of man who would notice that the young people of Londonton needed such a place, and the sort of man rich enough to think a building within the realms of possibility. However, Mitchell had died of a heart attack shortly after the first plans for the center were drawn up, and while no one person claimed the center as his own idea, everyone closely involved with the project seemed to feel that he or she had been intimately associated with its inception. It was as if the town itself had had the idea and spread it through the minds of its citizens through the drinking water or the air. At any rate, it was an idea that aroused great enthusiasm throughout the town, and after the first early discussions about it over coffee or cocktails, five men got together and made themselves into a committee in charge of the construction.
On the official Londonton Recreation Center Foundation committee was Jake Vanderson, who was almost as wealthy as Mitchell Howard but not nearly as bright or kind. Still, he donated the land to build on and $100,000 of his company’s money. Gary Moyer, a lawyer, donated his time in setting up the initial contracts. Daniel Weinberg, a local surgeon, and Reynolds Houston were also on the committee. The other member of the founding committee had of course been Mitchell Howard, and when he died, his wife Liza became a nominal member of the committee; it had seemed the only correct thing to do, especially since Liza had donated $150,000 of the Howard money to the rec center fund. But while the other members automatically sent her letters notifying her of business meetings, she never attended any of them, never showed any interest in the center. They let her name remain on the roster listed on the stationery they had had printed up for their money-raising drive.
Gary Moyer had spent a few days studying the municipal and state statutory requirements on public buildings, and he had decided very quickly that in order to save a lot of red tape and hassle, the five members of the committee should join together to form a private charitable organization; this way it would be tax-exempt, and the five members of the committee would be free to make certain decisions without the interference of public officials. One of the main reasons the five decided to form in this private way was to preclude the necessity for putting the job of building the center out to bid. Every man on the committee knew just which contractor he wanted to build the center, and they were
unanimous on this, they wanted no discussions, no competition: they wanted Ron Bennett.
Ron had been building houses and small buildings in Londonton for as long as anyone could remember, at least twenty years, and what he built was of fine quality, and lasted, and they were buildings to be proud of. He was a good man, a good worker, he was the best, and he was one of them, a real member of the community. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that if he built the center it would be built with the best quality and the least money that was possible. They appointed Ron contractor; he estimated the cost of the center at around six hundred thousand dollars. Mitchell and Jake gave their vast donations, and the members of the committee set out to raise the rest of the money from the town itself. It was an exciting time for the town, a time when everyone who lived there felt a surge of belonging, a surge of civic pride; and almost everyone, rich and poor, contributed what he could.
On June 3, half the town had turned out to watch the mayor of Londonton shovel the first load of dirt from a plot of ground next to the Blue River. The earth was broken, the building begun. That day and in the long summer days to come, people from Londonton, young and old, would stroll by to lean against a tree or a pile of lumber, watching the foundation being dug, the cinder blocks being placed, the giant grinding machines lifting the earth and replacing vacant space with man’s materials. In its own way, the building of the rec center stirred within the hearts of the Londonton population a communal pride and warmth of the same sort that barn-raisings had caused a century before.
Reynolds, too, often stopped by to watch the construction. He would never use the rec center, which was to be devoted exclusively to the children of the town, but even so it was a building of great importance to him—he saw it as a monument to human achievement and accomplishment. He had helped raise the money; now Ron Bennett and his men were raising the walls, and this building would stand for years as a haven for the community’s children and a hallmark of the community’s optimistic affiliation.
Now all of that had changed.
Last week Reynolds had attended a formal dinner for the local alumni of the college. Seated on his left had been Ben Martin, who owned a large hardware store in Southmark, thirty miles from Londonton. There were two small hardware stores in Londonton, but if one wanted something more elaborate than a few nails or a garden
hose, it was necessary to make the thirty-mile drive to Martin’s Lumber and Building Supply in Southmark. Much of the lumber and other materials for the rec center were coming from Martin’s. Ben Martin and Reynolds knew each other only slightly, but they were amiable men, made more amiable by the excellent meal and abundant wine and cordial reunion atmosphere. As they finished their desserts, and before the speaker was introduced, they discussed the new rec center.
“Tell me,” Ben said, bending closer to Reynolds and dropping his voice, “is Ron Bennett having some personal trouble? Perhaps I shouldn’t pry.”
“Personal trouble? I don’t think so. Why do you ask?” Reynolds replied.
“Oh, it’s nothing. I shouldn’t talk shop here. But on a lot of Ron’s orders, he’s been returning about half of the materials. It’s not like him to make such big mistakes on estimating what he’ll need. Last month he ordered sixty thousand feet of copper pipe and returned more than half of it. Well, it’s of no consequence.”
It
was
of consequence to Reynolds, who appreciated that he was a bit of an old maid busybody but could not help being curious and worried. He had never liked to let minor problems go unsolved, because they could blossom into major problems if left untended. He knew that Ben Martin’s words would buzz at him unless he settled the matter to his own satisfaction. So the next day, last Sunday, he walked to the town hall, let himself in with his own key, and went into the office where Ron kept the blueprints and financial records for the rec center.
Reynolds did not turn on a light. It was sunny enough outside and bright enough inside to see without artificial help, and he did not especially want any passersby to know someone was there. He had a perfect right, every right, to be doing what he was doing; still, he felt clandestine. This was, he suspected, an unsavory task, and he was not even sure what he was looking for. But he thought he had found it when he came upon the bill submitted in Ron Bennett’s handwriting for sixty thousand feet of copper pipe—and, after a thorough search, found no corresponding credit slip.
The committee paid Ron in portions as the work progressed and different stages of the building were complete, so that the few checks that had been written out to him already were large: forty thousand dollars, eighty thousand dollars, sixty-five thousand dollars. Ron in turn paid his workers and the various establishments from which he bought his materials: Zabski Steel, Martin’s Lumber and Building Supply, Mazani Window and Glass. Reynolds was in fact the man who glanced at Ron’s itemized bills
and made the check out to him. Now he studied the figures more carefully and realized, with a slight chill, that of the six hundred thousand dollars allocated for the building, over three hundred and fifty thousand had already been spent. How could that be possible? The swimming pool had not been started yet, the heating system was not in, nor were any of the interior walls. Ron had been complaining of inflation—everyone had been complaining of inflation—but surely this was unusual. He wondered how it fit in with Ron’s recurrent mistakes in ordering supplies at Martin’s.
Reynolds was bewildered, which was a state of mind he had never enjoyed. And he was uncomfortable, and wished he had not sat next to Ben Martin at the alumni reunion. But Thursday, he drove over to a small town between Londonton and Southmark to visit the owners of Zabski Steel. He entered a rather grime-covered metal building and, feeling conspicuous in his three-piece tweed suit, asked for Mr. Zabski. After much shouting, a man in a greasy navy blue coverall appeared.
“Mr. Zabski?” Reynolds said. “I’m Reynolds Houston, from Londonton. I’m on the committee that’s in charge of the rec center building.”
Mr. Zabski was not impressed. “What can I do for you?”
Reynolds realized that no insidious subtlety would work with this man: he had to make the plunge.
“We paid you for forty-five thousand dollars’ worth of hot tar and gravel and other roofing material, and then we returned almost half of it.”