From the Corner of His Eye (19 page)

On this Monday evening, with both Phimie and the sun having traveled into darkness, Celestina sat down to dinner with her mother and her father in the dining room of the parsonage.

Other members of the family, friends, and parishioners were all gone. Uncanny quiet filled the house.

Always before, this home had been full of love and warmth; and still it was, although from time to time, Celestina felt a fleeting chill that couldn’t be attributed to a draft. Never previously had this house seemed in the least empty, but an emptiness invaded it now—the void left by her lost sister.

In the morning she would return to San Francisco with her mom. She was reluctant to leave Daddy to adapt to this emptiness alone.

Nevertheless, they must leave without delay. The baby would be released from the hospital as soon as a minor infection cleared up. Now that Grace and the reverend had been granted temporary custody pending adoption, preparations had to be made for Celestina to be able to fulfill her commitment to raise the child.

As usual, dinner was by candlelight. Celestina’s parents were romantics. Also, they believed that gracious dining has a civilizing effect on children, even if the fare is frequently simple meat loaf.

They were not among those Baptists who forsook drink, but they served wine only on special occasions. At the first dinner following a funeral, after the prayers and the tears, family tradition required a toast to the dearly departed. A single glass. Merlot.

On this occasion, the flickering candlelight contributed not to a romantic mood, not to merely a civilizing ambience, but to a reverential hush.

With slow, ceremonial grace, her father opened the bottle and served three portions. His hands trembled.

Reflections of lambent candle flames gilded the curved bowls of the long-stemmed glasses.

They gathered at one end of the dining table. The dark purple wine shimmered with ruby highlights when Celestina raised her glass.

The reverend made the first toast, speaking so softly that his tremulous words seemed to bloom in Celestina’s mind and heart rather than to fall upon her ears. “To gentle Phimie, who is with God.”

Grace said, “To my sweet Phimie…who will never die.”

The toast now came to Celestina. “To Phimie, who will be with me in memory every hour of every day for the rest of my life, until she is with me again for real. And to…to this most momentous day.”

“To this momentous day,” her father and mother repeated.

The wine tasted bitter, but Celestina knew that it was sweet. The bitterness was in her, not in the legacy of the grape.

She felt that she had failed her sister. She didn’t know what more she could have done, but if she’d been wiser and more insightful and more attentive, surely this terrible loss would not have come to pass.

What good was she to anybody, what good could she ever hope to be, if she couldn’t even save her little sister?

Candle flames blurred into bright smears, and the faces of her good parents shimmered like the half-seen countenances of angels in dreams.

“I know what you’re thinking,” her mother said, reaching across the table and placing one hand over Celestina’s. “I know how useless you feel, how helpless, how small, but you must remember this…”

Her father gently closed one of his big hands over theirs.

Grace, proving again the aptness of her name, said the one thing most likely, in time, to bring true peace to Celestina. “Remember Bartholomew.”

Chapter 30

THE RAIN THAT HAD
threatened to wash out the morning funeral finally rinsed the afternoon, but by nightfall the Oregon sky was clean and dry. From horizon to horizon spread an infinity of icy stars, and at the center of them hung a bright sickle moon as silver as steel.

Shortly before ten o’clock, Junior returned to the cemetery and left his Suburban where the Negro mourners had parked earlier in the day. His was the only vehicle on the service road.

Curiosity brought him here. Curiosity and a talent for self-preservation. Earlier, Vanadium had not come to Naomi’s graveside as a mourner. He had been there as a cop, on business. Perhaps he had been at the other funeral on business, too.

After following the blacktop fifty feet, Junior headed downhill through the close-cropped grass, between the tombstones. He switched on his flashlight and trod cautiously, for the ground sloped unevenly and, in places, remained soggy and slippery from the rain.

The silence in this city of the dead was complete. The night lay breathless, stirring not one whisper from the stationed evergreens that stood sentinel over generations of bones.

When he located the new grave, approximately where he’d guessed that it would be, he was surprised to find a black granite headstone already set in place, instead of a temporary marker painted with the name of the deceased. This memorial was modest, neither large nor complicated in design. Nevertheless, often the carvers in this line of business followed days after the morticians, because the stones to which they applied their craft demanded more labor and less urgency than the cold bodies that rested under them.

Junior assumed the dead girl had come from a family of stature in the Negro community, which would explain the stonecarver’s accelerated service. Vanadium, according to his own words, was a friend of the family; consequently, the father was most likely a police officer.

Junior approached the headstone from behind, circled it, and shone the flashlight on the chiseled facts:

…beloved daughter and sister…

                           Seraphim Aethionema White

Stunned, he switched off the flashlight.

He felt naked, exposed, caught.

In the chilly darkness, his breath plumed visibly, frosted by moonlight. The rapidity and raggedness of his radiant exhalations would have marked him as a guilty man if witnesses had been present.

He hadn’t killed this one, of course. A traffic accident. Wasn’t that what Vanadium had said?

Ten months ago, following tendon surgery for a leg injury, Seraphim had been an outpatient at the rehab hospital where Junior worked. She was scheduled for therapy three days a week.

Initially, when told that his patient was a Negro, Junior had been reluctant to serve as her physical therapist. Her program of rehab required mostly structured exercise to restore flexibility and to gain strength in the affected limb, but some massage would be involved, as well, which made him uncomfortable.

He had nothing against men or women of color. Live and let live. One earth, one people. All of that.

On the other hand, one needed to believe in something. Junior didn’t clutter his mind with superstitious nonsense or allow himself to be constrained by the views of bourgeois society or by its smug concepts of right and wrong, good and evil. From Zedd, he’d learned that he was the sole master of his universe. Self-realization through self-esteem was his doctrine; total freedom and guiltless pleasure were the rewards of faithful adherence to his principles. What he believed in—the only thing he believed in—was Junior Cain, and in this he was a fiercely passionate believer, devout unto himself. Consequently, as Caesar Zedd explained, when any man was clearheaded enough to cast off all the false faiths and inhibiting rules that confused humanity, when he was sufficiently enlightened to believe only in himself, he would be able to trust his instincts, for they would be free of society’s toxic views, and he would be assured of success and happiness if always he followed these gut feelings.

Instinctively, he knew he should not give massages to Negroes. He sensed that somehow he would be physically or morally polluted by this contact.

He couldn’t easily refuse the assignment. Later that year, President Lyndon Johnson, with strong backing from both the Democratic and the Republican Parties, was expected to sign the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and currently it was dangerous for clearheaded believers in the primacy of self to express their healthy instincts, which might be mistakenly perceived as racial prejudice. He could be fired.

Fortunately, just as he was about to declare his gut feelings to his superior and risk dismissal, he saw his potential patient. At fifteen, Seraphim was breathtakingly beautiful, in her own way as striking as Naomi, and instinct told Junior that the chance of being physically or morally polluted by her was negligible.

Like all women past puberty and this side of the grave, she was attracted to him. She never told him as much, not in words, but he detected this attraction in the way she looked at him, in the tone that she used when she spoke his name. Throughout three weeks of therapy, Seraphim revealed countless small but significant proofs of her desire.

During the girl’s final appointment, Junior discovered she would be home alone that same night, her parents at a function she wasn’t required to attend. She appeared to reveal this inadvertently, quite innocently; however, Junior was a bloodhound when it came to smelling seduction, regardless of how subtle the scent.

Later, when he showed up at her door, she pretended surprise and uneasiness.

He realized that like so many women, Seraphim wanted it, asked for it—yet had no place in her self-image to accommodate the truth that she was sexually aggressive. She wanted to think of herself as shy, demure, virginal, as innocent as a minister’s daughter ought to be—which meant that to get what she wanted, she required Junior to be a brute. He was happy to oblige.

As it turned out, Seraphim
was
a virgin. This thrilled Junior. He was inflamed also by the thought of ravishing her in her parents’ house…and by the kinky fact that their house was a parsonage.

Better still, he was able to have the girl to the accompaniment of her father’s voice, which was even kinkier than doing her in the parsonage. When Junior rang the bell, Seraphim had been in her room, listening to a tape of a sermon her father was composing. The good reverend usually dictated a first draft, which his daughter then transcribed. For three hours, Junior went at her mercilessly, to the rhythms of her father’s voice. The reverend’s “presence” was deliciously perverse and stimulating to his sense of erotic invention. When Junior was finished, there was nothing sexual that Seraphim could ever do with a man that she had not learned from him.

She struggled, wept, pretended disgust, faked shame, swore to bring the police down on him. Another man, not as highly skilled at reading women as Junior, might have thought the girl’s resistance was genuine, that her charges of rape were sincere. Any other man might have backed off, but Junior was neither fooled nor confused.

Once satiated, what she desired was a reason to deceive herself into believing that she was not a slut, that she was a victim. She didn’t
really
want to tell anyone what he had done to her. Instead, she was asking him, indirectly but indisputably, to provide her with an excuse to keep their passionate encounter secret, an excuse that would also allow her to continue to pretend that she had not begged for everything he’d done to her.

Because he genuinely liked women and hoped always to please them, always to be discreet and chivalrous and giving, Junior did as she wished, spinning a vivid account of the grisly vengeance he would take if ever Seraphim told anyone what he’d done to her. Vlad the Impaler, the historical inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula—thank you, Book-of-the-Month Club—could not have imagined bloodier or more horrific tortures and mutilations than those that Junior promised to visit upon the reverend, his wife, and Seraphim herself. Pretending to terrorize the girl excited him, and he was perceptive enough to see that she was equally excited by pretending to be terrorized.

He added verisimilitude to his threats by concluding with a few hard punches where they wouldn’t show, in her breasts and belly, and then he went home to Naomi, to whom he’d been married, at that time, less than five months.

To his surprise, when Naomi expressed an interest in romance, Junior was a bull again. He would have thought he had left his best stuff at Reverend Harrison White’s parsonage.

He loved Naomi, of course, and never could deny her. Although he had been especially sweet to her that night, if he had known that they would have less than a year together before fate tore her from him, he might have been even sweeter.

As Junior stood at Seraphim’s grave, his breath smoked from him in the still night air, as though he were a dragon.

He wondered if the girl
had
talked.

Perhaps, reluctant to admit to herself that she had yearned for him to do everything that he’d done, she had slowly been inflamed by guilt, until she convinced herself that she had, indeed, been raped. Psychotic little bitch.

Did
this
explain why Thomas Vanadium suspected Junior when no one else did?

If the detective believed that Seraphim had been raped, his natural desire to exact vengeance for his friend’s daughter might motivate him to commit the relentless harassment that Junior had endured now for four days.

On second thought—no. If Seraphim had told anyone she’d been raped, the police would have been at Junior’s doorstep in minutes, with a warrant for his arrest. No matter that they would have no proof. In this age of high sympathy for the previously oppressed, the word of a teenage Negro girl would have greater weight than Junior’s clean record, fine reputation, and heartfelt denials.

Vanadium was surely unaware of any connection between Junior and Seraphim White. And now the girl could never talk.

Junior remembered the very words the detective had used:
They say she died in a traffic accident.

They say…

As usual, Vanadium had spoken in a monotone, putting no special emphasis on those two words. Yet Junior sensed that the detective harbored doubts about the explanation of the girl’s death.

Maybe
every
accidental death was suspicious to Vanadium. His obsessive hounding of Junior might be his standard operating procedure. After too many years investigating homicides, after too much experience of human evil, perhaps he had grown both misanthropic and paranoid.

Junior could almost feel sorry for this sad, stocky, haunted detective, deranged by years of difficult public service.

The bright side was easy to see. If Vanadium’s reputation among other cops and among prosecutors was that of a paranoid, a pathetic chaser after phantom perpetrators, his unsupported belief that Naomi was murdered would be discounted. And if every death was suspicious to him, then he would quickly lose interest in Junior and move on to a new enthusiasm, harassing some other poor devil.

Supposing that this new enthusiasm was an attempt to uncover skullduggery in Seraphim’s accident, then the girl would be doing Junior a service even after her demise. Whether or not the traffic accident was an accident, Junior hadn’t had anything to do with it.

Gradually he grew calm. His great frosty exhalations diminished to a diaphanous dribble that evaporated two inches from his lips.

Reading the dates on the headstone, he saw that the minister’s daughter had died on the seventh of January, the day after Naomi had fallen from the fire tower. If ever asked, Junior would have no trouble accounting for his whereabouts on
that
day.

He switched off the flashlight and stood solemnly for a moment, paying his respects to Seraphim. She had been so sweet, so innocent, so supple, so exquisitely proportioned.

Ropes of sadness bound his heart, but he didn’t cry.

If their relationship had not been limited to a single evening of passion, if they had not been of two worlds, if she had not been underage and therefore jailbait, they might have had an open romance, and then her death would have touched him more deeply.