Bread Upon the Waters (9 page)

“I feel as though I could use a bottle of Scotch,” Strand said, “but I’ll make do with coffee.”

They passed the fat man with the baseball cap at the corner.

“I’ve heard he sells heroin to the kids,” Strand said.

“I’ve heard he sells numbers tickets to them,” Judith said.

“Probably both. Or maybe he’s just a simple child molester.”

“There’re some children in my classes I’d gladly have him molest.” She glanced at Strand again. “You look as though you’re about to come to a slow boil. Has it ever occurred to you that you’re not really cut out to be a teacher?”

“I’d have to consider that,” Strand said thoughtfully.

“I shouldn’t have asked that question.”

“Why not? Recently I’ve been asking it myself.” He didn’t tell quite how recently it had been—since Saturday morning. “I’m of two minds.
There’s
an answer for you.” She smiled. “Wouldn’t it be nice,” she said, “if we actually did have two minds—one to go off and work, the other to sit at home and ponder.”

“Well, there are certain things we can safely say in favor of our profession,” Strand said. “It is underpaid, arduous, unappreciated, dangerous from time to time, and we have long holidays. We can also go on strike, just like the garbage collectors.”

In the coffee shop, over their steaming mugs, Judith said, “All this term, I’ve been trying to decide whether or not to come back next year.”

“What do you mean by that?” Strand poured sugar into his mug.

“Aren’t you afraid of diabetes or getting fat or anything like that?” Judith asked, shaking her head as Strand offered her the sugar dispenser.

“I glory in my health,” Strand said. “It’s the one thing I’m comparatively sure of. Now—are you serious about what you just said?”

“Yes.” Judith nodded slowly, her neatly bobbed black hair, a few streaks of white showing in it, moving gently around her face.

“What would you do if you didn’t come back?”

Judith shrugged and took the coffee mug up to her mouth with both hands, making her look momentarily childish. “Become a veterinarian, maybe,” she said. “Handling wild animals would come easy after what I’ve been going through. Or become a nun. I’m a lapsed Catholic, but for the peace of a convent maybe I could unlapse.”

“Did you ever think of marriage?”

Judith blushed and Strand was sorry he had asked the question.

“Of course,” Judith said. “But the offers haven’t been—well—brilliant.”

“You’re an attractive woman.” As he said it, Strand realized that he almost believed it.

“I’ve been waiting, as the girls say, for Mr. Right to come along. So far,” she said, sounding defiant, “Mr. Wrong has shown up. Several times. I’m a simple woman, but I’m not simple enough to believe that marriage would solve any of my problems. Has it solved any of yours?” she asked challengingly.

“Some,” Strand said. “And created others,” he added, to keep from sounding smug. “Children…” He was about to say “money” but refrained. Instead he said, “There are a lot of places in this world I’d like to see. But on a teacher’s salary you don’t do an awful lot of traveling. I encourage it in my offspring and tell them to bring back photographs. One of my daughters is thinking of going to Greece this summer.” He didn’t know why he had brought that into the conversation.

“I made a tour of the Lake District last summer,” Judith said. “The English teacher’s dream.”

“How was it?”

“Dreary.” Judith laughed sourly. “It rained all the time and I was with a group of English teachers from the Middle West. We discussed Wordsworth for one day and spent the rest of the time on how to present
Hamlet
to teenage children. I didn’t say much. It’s hard to explain that most of the children I have anything to do with have seen murders—real murders—on their own blocks and would gladly kill their uncles, and their mothers and fathers, too, if they had the chance.”

“I must go to Vienna some day with a group of history teachers,” Strand said, “and tell them about the difficulties I have in explaining the position of Metternich at the Congress of Vienna to my classes.”

They both laughed. “Ah,” Judith said, “we’ll both come back next year, won’t we?”

“Doomed,” Strand said. “Obsessed. Though we have our triumphs, don’t we?” He thought of Jesus Romero that afternoon. “Some of them pretty hard to bear.”

“A girl I taught some time back and told she could be a writer had a short story in
Penthouse
last month,” Judith said. “Pretty damned sexy. I hid the magazine from my mother when she came to visit me.”

“Tomorrow will be a better day,” Strand said, finishing his coffee and standing.

“Don’t bet on it,” Judith Quinlan said, as she stood, too.

There was nobody in the apartment when Strand got there, and he took advantage of Leslie’s absence to take a nap. He felt exhausted and it was delicious to fall asleep.

He awoke with the feeling that someone else was home.

It couldn’t have been Leslie or she would have come into the bedroom. He smoothed the bedcover so that she wouldn’t see that he had been napping and put on his shoes and went into the hallway. He could hear dishes being rattled in the kitchen and went in there. Caroline was sitting at the table drinking a glass of milk and eating a piece of cake. He saw from the white cotton collar above her sweater that she had been playing tennis.

“Hi, Daddy,” she said. “Join me?”

Strand looked at his watch. “I’ll wait for dinner.”

“I couldn’t,” she said. “I’d swoon with hunger.” She put a big hunk of cake in her mouth. It had soft chocolate icing and she licked the smudges off her fingers. “Yummy,” she said.

He sat opposite her, smiling, vicariously enjoying her appetite. “If people can have chocolate cake,” she said, her mouth full, “I can’t understand their going for cocaine. Oh, I met our friend again.”

“Which friend?”

“Mr. Hazen. He came around to the courts. He sure looks a mess. Like a lopsided cantaloupe. That ski hat. It must have been knitted by a blind Norwegian troll.”

“Be kindly, Caroline, please,” Strand said.

“He’s okay, though. Really. He said he came to make sure I got home safely. He said he didn’t want me to get into any more incidents. That was some incident the other night.
Mother!
I’d still be playing, only he kept looking at his watch and fretting. We had a nice talk on the way home.”

“Did you?” Strand said. Somehow, the thought that a busy man like Hazen would take the time to walk a seventeen-year-old girl across the park made him uneasy. He remembered what he had said to Judith Quinlan when they had passed the fat man in the baseball cap at the street corner—“Maybe he’s just a simple child molester.” It was just a joke, of course, but child molesting itself was no joke and older men in all walks of life were not immune from the disease. He himself had been deeply troubled by a lovely high school friend of Eleanor’s who was constantly around the apartment. He had to make a conscious effort to keep from touching her and he had to hide what he felt when she kissed his cheek in greeting and he was tortured by the most realistic and explicit erotic dreams about her. He was not the sort of man to go beyond these involuntary excursions, but who knew what sort of man Hazen really was? People didn’t go around wearing signs that read “Child molester.” And he had to face the fact that Caroline was no longer a child but fast becoming an attractive young woman. He knew he couldn’t say anything of this to Caroline, but if there were any developments that looked ominous he would speak to Leslie, whose instincts were more dependable than his. “What did you talk about?” he asked Caroline.

“A lot of things.” Caroline took another chunk of cake and washed it down with the milk. “He watched me and he commented on the way I played. I was surprised. He knew what he was talking about.”

“He was an athlete when he was young and he belongs to the Racquet Club.”

“Is that so,” said Caroline, unimpressed. “Anyway, he said I was pretty good, and that I should try to get more spin on my second serve and hit my backhand flatter and I agree with him one hundred percent. He asked me if I wanted to go in for tennis seriously—you know, coaches and training and all that jazz—and I told him no, I wasn’t good enough, I’d never make it and I’d just eat my heart out getting put out of tournaments in the first round. He said that was wise, we should recognize our limitations. On a tennis court,” she said grimly, “it’s no big deal recognizing your limitations I told him, and he laughed.” She laughed. Then she became more serious. “What did I intend to do with my life, he asked. He doesn’t mind asking questions, does he?”

“What did you tell him?”

Caroline gave him a sidelong, covert glance, hesitated, as though she were about to say something, then changed her mind.

He was conscious of a lie, a subterfuge. It was not like Caroline. She was not a secretive girl. She had gone through the usual choices as she was growing up—ballet dancer, actress, nurse—but that was only until she was about twelve. Since then she had been content, it seemed, merely to pass in school and play tennis when she could. He was surprised that she had spoken as openly as she had with Hazen. She was a shy girl who spoke very little and guardedly, except with the family; she had few friends, all of them girls, and he knew from Leslie and Eleanor that she thought boys were making fun of her when they made any advances and fled from them.

“What did you tell Mr. Hazen?” Allen repeated.

“I told him I intended to grow up,” Caroline said, almost defiantly.

“Did he laugh?” Strand asked.

“He doesn’t laugh much, Mr. Hazen,” Caroline said. “He said he was very much impressed with Eleanor. Naturally.” She spoke without a trace of jealousy, as though she accepted the fact that Eleanor was the star of the family. “He said if there were more young women like that there’d be no need for the Equal Rights Amendment or magazines like
Ms.
They must have had a real heart-to-heart conversation in the taxi. He didn’t mention Jimmy.” She scowled, as though she considered this a slight to her brother. “Has
he
got any children?”

“Three,” Strand said. “A boy and two girls. Approximately the same age as you three.”

“It’s funny, he never said a word. Do you go around bragging about us?”

“Bragging isn’t the word,” Strand said. “I mourn your mother’s fecundity.”

“I bet,” Caroline said, smiling. She got up from the table and leaned over and gave Strand a kiss. “Oops,” she said, “chocolate on the foredeck.” She took out a handkerchief and wiped the chocolate off, then put the remains of the cake in the refrigerator and tossed the empty milk carton into the trash basket. “He’s going to call you tonight, he said.”

“What for?”

“He wants to invite us all out to the country this weekend. He has a house on the beach in East Hampton with a pool and a tennis court and everything. It sounds super, doesn’t it?”

“Super,” Strand said.

“He says there are some good players I could have a game with and if anybody wanted to ride, there are horses nearby. He said he’d pick us up in his car Friday afternoon and get us back Sunday night.”

“Your mother has lessons on Saturday morning.”

“Once, just once,” Caroline said, “she could let those brats play baseball or smoke pot or look at television on Saturday morning. Just once.”

“We’ll talk it over when your mother comes home.”

“I’ll tell you the one thing that’s wrong with you and Mother,” Caroline said. “You’re too conscientious.”

“Perhaps you’re right. Now you’d better go in and take your shower before your mother gets home.”

“Righto,” Caroline said cheerily and started out of the kitchen. Suddenly she stopped. “Oh, one more thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Mr. Hazen said he talked to one of his partners at the office and his partner convinced him he ought to report the crime, that’s what he called it, the crime, to the police. He’s already done it, he said something about his civic duty, and that he wasn’t thinking clearly the night it happened. He said that there’d probably be a detective around to ask me questions. How do you talk to a detective?”

“I’m not an authority on that,” Strand said. “I’ve never talked to one that I know of.”

“I hope he’s a young one,” Caroline said and started off again, but Strand stopped her.

“Caroline,” he said, “don’t tell your mother about the detective.”

“Why not?”

“Because probably it’ll never happen and it’s no use reminding her of what Mr. Hazen calls the incident. She may not have looked it to you, but she was terribly upset about you Friday night and I know she’s started to worry about your going into the park even during the day.”

“Okay, Daddy,” Caroline said. “She’s your wife.”

“By the way, Caroline, did you thank Mr. Hazen for the racquet?”

“Of course,” Caroline said, with dignity. “I’m not a
complete
savage. Profusely.” Humming, she went down the hall toward her shower. Strand rinsed off Caroline’s plate and glass and knife and dried them, to hide the predinner malfeasance from Leslie. As he put them away he wondered if he ought to go to the nearest precinct house and tell whoever took charge of those things to please not send any detectives to the apartment, it had been too dark for his daughter to have recognized any of the boys involved and she was preparing for her final examinations and he’d prefer it if she weren’t distracted for the time being. He had a hunch that with all the major problems the police had to cope with in the neighborhood they’d be only too glad to file the report and forget it.

He heard the phone ringing and went into the foyer to answer it. It was Eleanor.

“How was the weekend?” he asked.

“Green,” she said. “I slept and the others drank most of the time. The people I was staying with know the Hazens. Correction on my first report about your friend. He
had
three children. The boy died. O.D.’d.”

“What?”

“O.D.’d. Overdosed. Heroin. Five months ago. Everybody was away for the weekend and he left word with the help he didn’t want to be disturbed. They didn’t disturb him and when they finally broke the lock into his room it was all over.”