Ceremony

To Joan, for whom the sun does in fact rise and set or would if she told it to.

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned…

from "The Second Coming," by William Butler Yeats

"She's a goddamned whore," Harry Kyle said. "And I don't want her in this house again."

"For God's sake, Harry, you're talking about your own daughter," his wife said.

"She's a goddamned whore," Harry said.

"You don't know that, Mr. Kyle," Susan said.

"The hell I don't. I saw her in there hanging all over some guy older than me. I saw what she was doing and she can keep right on doing it, because she ain't coming back here."

"That doesn't make her a whore, Mr. Kyle."

"Don't tell me what it makes and doesn't make, lady. I don't need some goddamned goody two-shoes coming around and giving me a lot of that bleeding-heart mumbo jumbo they teach nowadays."

"Harry," I said.

Susan looked at me. The look said shut up. A lot of people looked at me like that, but to Susan I paid attention. We were standing in the perfect living room of a perfect house in a perfect development in Smithfield. The upholstery was all in powder blue and the rug and walls and drapes all coordinated with it. The furniture was massive Mediterranean oak, probably-dark stained. You could tell they'd bought it all at once. It was a set, a living room set. I was willing to bet my new blackjack that there was a dining room set in the dining room and at least four bedroom sets upstairs. The cellar probably had a cellar set, all coordinated with the furnace.

Kyle was tall and fat with an unhealthy flush to his face and fleshy neck that spilled over his shirt collar. He'd made a lot of money selling insurance, Susan had told me. And he looked like he'd spent half of it on clothes. He wasn't wearing his suit jacket, but the vest and pants were enough to say that the suit had been made for him and probably cost $750. Fat as he was, there was no gap between the vest and the pants.

"I gave that kid every chance," Kyle said. "And she threw it in my face."

His wife said, "Please, Harry."

"I worked my ass off, to get us where we are. And she pulls this, after all she's gotten? She pulls this on me? No thanks. I don't have a daughter anymore, you understand?"

His wife said, "Maybe it was somebody else, Harry." She was thin with a dark face and wiry black hair cut short. Her features were thin and her face was narrow. She was wearing a pink blouse and pants, and pink shoes. Her eyes were red. I assumed she'd been crying. I didn't blame her. Harry made me feel a little teary myself.

"Mr. Kyle," Susan said. "Talk to Spenser. He's an excellent detective. He can find April, bring her home. You can't reject a child simply because she doesn't please you. Let us try."

"Listen to her, Harry," his wife said. "Your own daughter."

Kyle looked at me. "Okay, let's hear your pitch," he said.

"I got no pitch," I said. "I just swung by for a charm fix.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Kyle said.

"Mr. Kyle," Susan said, "April could be in serious trouble. If it really was she you saw in the Combat Zone with an older man, it is important to get her out of there." She looked at me even harder than she had before.

"So what are you crying to me about?" Kyle said. "You're worried about her, you go get her."

"Because I need a home to bring her back to, Mr. Kyle."

"Yeah, you don't mind bringing her back, but you don't want to take her in, do you?"

"Mr. Kyle, she's not my daughter. Whether I wish to take her in, what's more important is that you wish to take her in. Can't you understand that?"

"Hey," Kyle said, "I sold nearly two million dollars in life insurance last year, honey. I can understand a lot of things."

"How much you got on yourself?" I said.

"What's that got to do with anything?" Kyle said.

"If you call Mrs. Silverman honey again, it'll be relevant."

"What are you, some kind of tough guy?" Kyle said. But he didn't say it with very much starch.

"Yes," I said.. Susan put her hand on my arm and squeezed.

"Mrs. Kyle," Susan said, "do you want your daughter back?"

"Yes." She looked at her husband. "Yes, but Harry… I… Could I get you some coffee? And some cake? And we could sit down and try to…" She made a flutter with her right hand and stopped talking.

"For crissake, Bunni, nobody wants any goddamn cake."

"Harry, I just asked," Mrs. Kyle said.

"Just shut up, will you, and let me handle this."

I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. I looked at Susan. I could see the anger tightening her face, pinching small commas at the corners of her mouth.

Kyle turned to us, an in-charge guy, and tossed his chin at me. "How much you charge?" he said.

"To work for you?"

"Yes."

"Two hundred billion dollars a day."

Kyle frowned. For a moment he'd felt comfortable, talking price. He knew about price. "You being a wise guy?”

"Yes," I said.

"You want the job or not?" Kyle said.

"I would rather spend the rest of my life at a Barry Manilow concert," I said.

Kyle looked at Susan, "I don't know what the hell he's talking about," he said.

Susan looked half mad and half amused. "He's saying he doesn't want to work for you."

"Then what the hell did you bring him here for, for crissake?"

"When I came," I said, "I didn't know you. Now I do. If I were your kid, I'd run away too."

Bunni Kyle said, "Mr. Spencer."

Susan said, looking at me at full voltage, "The girl, the girl needs help. Her father is not her fault."

"Never mind," Kyle said. "The hell with him."

"For me," Susan said, looking right at me. "A favor. For me."

I took in a deep breath. Mrs. Kyle was looking at me. I said to her, "I'll work for you, Mrs. Kyle."

"Like hell you will," Kyle said. "I'm not paying you a dime to work for anyone."

"One dollar," I said to Mrs. Kyle. "I will work for you for a dollar. I'll find the kid and bring her back to you."

"Oh, no," Kyle said. "No you don't. I say no, I mean no."

I put my face into his. His breath smelled of martini and peanuts. "If you don't button it up," I said with as much control as I had left, "I am going to hurt you."

Kyle opened his mouth to speak and looked at me and saw something in my face that made him shut his mouth without speaking. Susan insinuated herself between us.

"Come on, ducky," she said. "Let's go find April." She leaned back against me, pushing me away with her butt. If I hadn't been so mad I'd have enjoyed it. "I'll call you, Mrs. Kyle, the minute we find her." Susan backed us toward the door. Kyle was looking at me, the color of his face deepening to maroon.

"While you're pushing me," I murmured to Susan, "with your seat, could you sway back and forth slightly?"

She gave a harder push.

I said in a falsetto voice, "That's not what I meant." And we left.

"He better not go out during the Thanksgiving season," I said. We were driving in Susan's big red Ford Bronco. It had oversize tires and a low-range option in four-wheel drive. Susan claimed it went through snowstorms and over mountains and gave her a sense that she could conquer winter. "He is a terrible turkey, isn't he?" Susan said. "After we find the girl, can I beat him up?" Susan shook her head. "Slash his tires?" I said. "No." "Soap his windows?"

Susan turned down her street.

"I'm not surprised she's tricking," Susan said.

"The kid?"

"Yes, April. I've been trying to salvage… no, that's not the right word… prevent the wreck she's been heading for since she was in the tenth grade."

"She a senior now?"

"Yes, she's scheduled to graduate in June."

"Besides being the daughter of a major league dildo, what is her problem?"

Susan swung the Bronco into her driveway. "I don't know, exactly. I only get her end of it. I've had a couple of conferences with her parents, but you can imagine how productive that was." She killed the headlights and shut off the engine. It dieseled once and was still. We sat in the car in the dark. "You may have heard it rumored that adolescent children have to reject their parents in order to establish an identity of their own."

"I've heard that," I said.

"I imagine you have," Susan said. "You're still doing it."

"I thought it was just boyish high spirits," I said.

Susan snorted; somehow she made it sound elegant. "Anyway," she said, "in a case like this, where there's a fixed parental expectation and an inflexible parental stance, the rebellion can get to be extreme."

"Jeez, I thought all guidance counselors did was hand out college catalogs and army recruiting pamphlets."

Susan laughed quietly in the dark car. "Actually, what we do most is approve schedules."

"Old Harry doesn't strike me as a flexible and understanding guy," I said.

"No," Susan said, "he's not. In many ways he's typical of this town. A bit more extreme, a bit more unloving, but essentially he's left a very much different kind of social circumstance, maybe the first generation to go to college or wear a suit to work. They've moved away, people like Harry Kyle. Moved away from the old neighborhood both literally and figuratively. The old rules from that neighborhood don't apply here. Or people like Harry Kyle don't think they do. They don't know the new rules, so they latch on to the conventions of the media and the assumptions of the magazine ads and the situation comedies. They try to be like everyone else, and what makes it so hard is that everyone else is trying to be like them."

We got out of the car and walked in the dark evening to Susan's back door. It was ten days till Thanksgiving, and the air was cold.

Susan's kitchen was warm and smelled faintly of apples.

She snapped the overhead light on from a switch by the back door. "Want some supper?"

I was rummaging for beer in the refrigerator. "Yes," I said. "Want me to make it?"

"No," she said. "I've got to learn sometime."

I sat at the kitchen table and drank beer from the bottle. "Pilsner Urquell," I said. "Do you have a rich lover?"

"I thought you'd like to try it."

I drank some more. "Yum, yum," I said.

Susan took some potatoes from a drawer and began peeling them at the sink.

"So," she said, "what's wrong with April Kyle, you ask?"

"She doesn't get on with her parents, you answer."

"Yes," Susan said. "Lucky I've got all that Harvard training." She put the point of her paring knife into a peeled potato and spun it, gouging out the remnant of an eye. "It's not that what they wanted for her was so bad -it was that it was so inflexible, and she wasn't consulted. They wanted her to be a cheerleader, to work on the yearbook staff, to get good grades, to go out with football captains, to attract a husband they could be proud of."

I finished my beer and went to the refrigerator and got another. I noticed with a sense of fast enlarging contentment that there were ten more bottles after this one.

"Shouldn't you drink good beer like that from a glass?" Susan said.

"Absolutely," I said.

Susan finished peeling potatoes. She sliced them and went to the refrigerator and got out a bundle of scallions. "Where was I?" she said.

"You were telling me how the Kyles wanted their kid to be Doris Day."

"Yes, and April decided against it. By the time she got to high school and I began to deal with her she was already in among the burnouts. She was smoking grass, forging absentee excuses. According to her file she had her period every two or three days. Grades were bad, she was inattentive and somewhat defiant in class. I assume that all of this caused lots of yelling, and maybe some slapping, at home. She'd be grounded for weeks at a time, and as soon as she got out of the house she'd do it worse."

"How'd you do with her?"

“I could talk to her."

"You could talk to Yasir Arafat," I said, "and he'd think he was having a nice time."

"But that's all. I think she liked to come talk with me.

It was better than being in class, and it was better than being picked up and driven home after school and made to stay in your room and not watch TV. She seemed to enjoy talking with me. But I don't think I had any influence on her behavior at all." She was chopping the scallions. "Then two weeks ago she dropped out of school and yesterday her mother came to me for help."

"Who do I talk to?" I said.

"I'll take you over and introduce you to the local police." Susan put the chopped scallions in another bowl. "They can give you some information, I suppose. And the burnouts-there's a kid named Hummer… real name is Carl Hummel, but no one calls him that. He went with her, sort of, and he's… leader is too strong a word, but he's the most important kid in her circle."

Susan broke six eggs into a bowl and whipped them up with a fork. She put one dash of Tabasco sauce into the eggs, and two tablespoons-she measured-of my beer.

"Hummer a bad kid?" I said.

She poured a little oil in a fry pan and put the potatoes and scallions in. "Depends on your definition," she said. "By the standards you and Hawk are used to, he's Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. But for Smithfield, he's pretty bad." The potatoes began to sizzle in the pan. "Would you pour me a little wine, please, cutie pie?"