Death's Savage Passion (24 page)

She was sitting close to the door, very erect, with her hands folded in what was left of her lap and her face turned to the window. Her best coat, six hundred dollars’ worth of Calvin Klein tweed, had fallen off her shoulders and settled near the small of her back—although it was cold in the car, she hadn’t bothered to pull it more tightly around her. Her thick wiry hair was anchored to the top of her head with butterfly hairpins. The collar of her Brooks Brothers turtleneck looked too tight. The navy blue wool of her maternity jumper was beginning to strain a little in the chest. In one way, she looked exactly what she ought to look like, pregnant: a four-foot-eleven-inch, naturally plump Santa’s elf, surgically attached to a hot-air balloon. In another, she looked like nothing I’d ever thought possible: a Cheshire kitten, maybe, with homicidal tendencies.

On every side of us, there were trees—bare black summer ones and thickly needled evergreens, denuded rose bushes and dispirited hedge shrubs—and the remains of that last heavy snowfall. It was eleven o’clock in the morning, but the sky was gray and thick with clouds, and the temperature couldn’t have been much above twenty. Even with the Jeep’s heater going full blast and layers of shirts and turtlenecks and sweaters and jackets hanging from my shoulders, I was freezing.

“You ought to put that coat on,” I said. “You’re going to get sick.”

Phoebe wiped fog off the window with the flat of her hand, pressed her nose to the glass, and looked out on an outcropping of rock coated with ice.

“I’m not cold, Patience. You wouldn’t be cold either if you’d put on a little weight.”

I sighed. Then I reached into my jacket pocket, found my cigarettes, and got one out. I am six feet tall, and have been since I was fourteen years old. I weigh a hundred twenty-five pounds—a weight I reached at twenty and haven’t been able to overcome since. Telling me to gain weight is like telling the Ayatollah Khomeini to make sense. And Phoebe knew it.

The dashboard lighter popped and I lit up, keeping one hand on the wheel at all times. My brother George can drive without ever seeming to touch the steering wheel, but my brother George is coordinated. I am a one-woman accident factory.

I took a drag on my cigarette, put it into the dashboard ashtray, and pointed to a narrow access road that disappeared into the hills at our right.

“George and Kathy live at the end of that,” I said. “Maybe we’ll go up and cook them dinner some night next week.”

“You’re not going to have time to cook anyone dinner, Patience. You’re getting married.”

“Is that what this is all about? Now you’ve decided you want David to marry you?”

“No.”

“What
is
it about, then?”

“Nothing is about anything, Patience. You’re imagining things. You’ve just got bride’s jitters—”

“I do not have—”

“—and you’re projecting all your nervousness on me.”

“Right,” I said.

“Besides,” Phoebe said, “you couldn’t cook dinner for anybody even if you wanted to. You can’t cook.”

There was a turn I had to pay attention to, so I paid attention to it. Slowing down, I saw a small gray cat run across a field of snow and dissolve into a stand of pines. Waverly, Connecticut.

“Look at this place,” I said. “It could be an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institute.”

“There’s a turn up there, Patience. If you don’t do something, you’re going to run right into that whatever-it-is.”

That whatever-it-is was a roadhouse, and Phoebe was right. Just ahead of us, 109 came to an abrupt end, at least as far as going in this direction was concerned. I pumped the brake and pumped the gas and pumped the brake—in all the wrong places, naturally—and nearly spun us into a ditch. When we finally came to a halt, just beyond the stop sign, we were stretched almost diagonally across the road.

The seat belts locked. Phoebe bit her lip.

“Sorry,” I said.

“Don’t be sorry,” Phoebe said. “Drive slower.”

“I’m only doing about twenty miles an hour.”

“You’re going like a jet plane,” Phoebe said. “I’ve never been in a car going so fast in my life.”

I closed my eyes and counted to ten.
Phoebe’s pregnant
, I told myself.
Her hormones are all screwed up. Be patient. She’s always been patient with you.
I opened my eyes again and stared into the roadhouse’s parking lot, as if it could tell me something.

“Listen,” I said, “would you, by any strange chance of the imagination, want to drive?”

“I don’t have a driver’s license, Patience. You know that.”

“You want to get out and walk?”

“What are you
talking
about?”

“I’m talking about the fact that you’ve been driving me crazy ever since we left New York. What’s
wrong
with you?”

“Nothing’s wrong with me.”

“Horse manure.”

“I
hate
this place,” Phoebe said. “Did I ever tell you that?”

I stared at her. “No,” I said. “You never did tell me that. I tell you
I
hate it. You come up here more than I do, for God’s sake. You spend more time with my mother than I ever did.”

“Oh, I like your mother all right.”

“So what do you hate?”

“This
place
. This
town
. Waverly, Connecticut.”

“Waverly, Connecticut,” I repeated.

“Money, money, money,” Phoebe said. “Even the air smells like money.”

I got my cigarette out of the ashtray and took another drag. “Phoebe,” I said, “make sense. You’ve got to have more money than ninety percent of the people who live here. Your last book did eight hundred thousand copies hardcover.”

“Eight hundred sixty-five. I know how much my last book did. And that’s not the point, Patience.”

“What is the point?”

“There are
kinds
of money, Patience.”

“Kinds of money.” I stared at the tip of my cigarette. It was growing a long column of ash. “I can’t believe this,” I said. “I really can’t believe this.”

“Everybody in this place has had money forever,” Phoebe said. “Everybody. And your mother’s house is going to be full of people—”

“Including Amelia and Lydia and Tempesta and Ivy—”

“I don’t mean those people. I mean your relatives. Your Aunt Cordelia. Your cousin Elizabeth.”

“My Aunt Cordelia is an idiot,” I said. “And my cousin Elizabeth is a twit.”

“She’s a
debutante
twit.”

“You’re having a nervous breakdown because you were never a debutante?”

Phoebe waved smoke away from her face, stubborn. “And now there’s this bookstore,” she said. “I can just imagine what it’s like. It’s not like I’m coming up here for a nice quiet weekend and your mother’s car is picking me up in Waterbury and I’m going to spend a couple of nights eating Chicken Kiev and—”

“Phoebe.” I took a deep breath. “What’s wrong with the bookstore? You’ve never even been in this bookstore.”

“I know what it’s like, Patience. Trust me.”

“Meaning what?”

Phoebe made a face. “
Intellectual
,” she said. “The kind of place they don’t even sell romance books.”

There was a pick-up truck coming in behind us. I eased my foot off the brake and maneuvered the Jeep into a left turn. It wasn’t a very good left turn, but I didn’t hit anything, and I only slid about half a foot. The road we were on now was wider and better maintained than 109, so I shifted into second.

“This bookstore,” I said, “is called the Chestnut Tree. It’s a very nice place run by very nice people, some of whom I’ve known forever.”

“Out here, everybody’s known everybody forever.”

I ignored her. “I don’t know if they carry romance books,” I said, “because I’ve never checked, but I do know they carry your books, and put them right up front, because I’ve seen them. So you see—”

“Patience, I sell more than anybody in the country except Stephen King. They have to put me up front.”

“If you can’t be rational, you can at least be consistent. If you’re making them money, they can hardly hate you. And they wouldn’t hate you anyway. Besides, I can’t spend two weeks with nothing to read. Especially not these two weeks.”

“Most women enjoy planning their weddings, Patience.”

“Most women don’t have my mother planning them for them. The day before yesterday, she called me at three o’clock in the morning to tell me tea roses weren’t in season this month.”

Phoebe stared straight out the windshield. “Your Great-Aunt Felicia is coming,” she said. “Your mother told me so.”

“Ah,” I said.

“You can hardly call your Great-Aunt Felicia an idiot, Patience. Or a twit.”

Just ahead of us, the road was abruptly ending again, this time in front of a small gas station. To our left, the brick facade of the Chestnut Tree curved like the outer rim of a boomerang, bordered by a tiny parking lot and a collection of well-kept shrubs that flowered pink in warmer weather. Phoebe was right. Nobody could call my Great-Aunt Felicia an idiot or a twit.

I made a left in front of the gas station and another left into the parking lot. “Listen,” I said, “if that old bitch gives you any trouble, just tell my mother. She’s been looking for an excuse to murder Felicia for years.”

O
NE OF THE REASONS
my parents continued to live in Waverly—instead of moving down to Greenwich, say—was that Waverly wasn’t a divided town. Down on the Gold Coast, the demarcation between rich and poor is a thick stone wall. The rich have their own schools, their own stores, their own parties, their own clubs. They talk to each other, and no one else. Born rich in Greenwich, you could reach adulthood without ever having come in contact with anyone who made less than a quarter-million a year, and with all your illusions intact. Of course rich people are better than poor people. Of course there’s something special about you, just because your daddy went to Yale and your mother never looks at the price tags when she shops at Coco Chanel.

In Waverly, rich people send their children to public grammar schools, right along with everyone else. By the time I was twelve, I not only knew everyone in town, I knew my limitations. My father might have inherited a lot of money, but I hadn’t inherited his athletic talent. If you threw a baseball at me, I was as likely to hit the catcher, or a tree, as to make it to first base. I might look like a WASP princess, but I didn’t know how to flirt, and I wasn’t good at putting boys at their ease. Mary Allendar could do both those things, so it didn’t matter that her nose was a funny shape and her feet were a little too big. Nothing mattered but performance, and I didn’t perform well. For years after I stopped spending time in Waverly on a regular basis—right through boarding school, college, graduate school and the start of my career as a writer—I cringed every time I went to my mailbox. My eighth grade graduating class put out a newsletter. The newsletter made my deficiencies plain to see. Mary Allendar became Miss Connecticut and then first-runner-up in the Miss America pageant. Jane Alice Carr—daughter of the town drunk—got a scholarship to Radcliffe and a scholarship to the University of Chicago graduate school and then a job as chairman of the history department at Swarthmore. Kevin Dormer’s science fiction sagas sold better than my true crime books ever would.

I got out of the Jeep, slammed my door, and started around back to help Phoebe out. Tommy Dick was just pulling into the gas station across the way, and I waved. He got out of the car, squinted in my direction, and waved back. He looked like a real cop, instead of the rural watchdog the town wanted him to be: six four, two forty, bulked up like an overstuffed grocery bag. He even managed to look dangerous, and at a distance. He had a scar down the left side of his face, a legacy of three tours of duty in Vietnam, that made people think he spent a lot of time in knife fights.

I got Phoebe’s door open, held out my arm, and said, “Behave yourself. Those are nice people in there.”

Phoebe snaked her head backwards. “Someone you know over there?”

“The town cop. When he was eight and I was five, he buried my legs in the mud bottom at Squantz Pond. I nearly drowned.”

“There’s no such thing in the universe as Squantz Pond, Patience.”

“Out.”

Phoebe said “umph,” did a little jump action, and landed neatly on the asphalt. Then she looked the Chestnut Tree up and down, back and forth, and made a little grimace. “Don’t tell me,” she said. “It’s a replica of the college bookstore at Vassar.”

“The college bookstore at Vassar is in a great big pile of bricks called Main Building.” I slammed her door. “And if anybody should feel insecure in this town, it’s me. Will you please get moving?”

“If you go in there and buy the new Anne Tyler and four novels by South Americans I’ve never heard of, I’ll never forgive you.”

She went clumping toward the main doors. I wrapped my scarf more tightly around my neck and followed her, wondering if that last crack meant I wasn’t going to be allowed to buy the new Anne Tyler at all. I wanted the new Anne Tyler. Of course, I wanted some semblance of peace and quiet over the next two weeks even more, so I might be willing to restrict my book buying to the paperback original productions of Lydia Wentward and Ivy Samuels Tree. It was a hard choice.

Phoebe had gone inside by the time I reached the doors. I went in after her, wiping my boots first on the mat on the sidewalk and again on the mat in the vestibule. Then I went into the store proper.

I found Phoebe standing to one side of the doors, looking at the double bookcase that rested against the desk and that was the first thing customers saw when they came in. The case held only hardcover books, only new releases, and only what the store considered especially commercial or especially recommendable. It was February, so recommendable was winning out over commercial. Phoebe’s latest was there, among the books on the left side, but everything else in the case was “intellectual” to a fault. There was the new Anne Tyler. There was a novel by Gore Vidal. There were slim volumes by Bobbie Ann Mason, Ann Beattie, Raymond Carver and Alice Hoffman. I winced.

Phoebe folded her arms across her chest. “Well?”

“It’s February, Phoebe. You’re the only commercial writer I know who comes out with books in February.”