Greenwich (14 page)

“And you had a good look at her, of course.”

“Connie, what do I do? Close my eyes? I look, that's all. You know that.”

“I know, I'm sorry, Frankie. I have no right to criticize you. I just lied like a trooper.”

“Better than Clinton, I tell you that.”

“I'll go to confession.”

“Jesus God, Connie, you never done anything wrong in your life. Every week, it's confession.”

“I do things wrong. If I were a good mom, I'd have known that Christie had a date with the Castle boy, and I would have kept her home.”

“Come off that,” Frank said. “You're a good mom, the best, and I love you.”

“Yes, and what are you going to do about Dickie?”

“I don't know. Twenty years ago, I would have beaten the shit out of him, and I guess I'd still be in jail.”

“Twenty years ago, you had just come back from Vietnam, and Christie wasn't even born yet.”

“I thought of suing him and his father, but Abel says that any kind of a lawyer charges at least three hundred an hour—can you imagine? Two hundred seventy dollars more than I make an hour. The kid's spending the night in jail, and that'll teach him something, and I don't want no feud with Castle, and I like his wife. She's dumb but pretty—”

“I never knew a woman you didn't like.”

“Is that bad? I'm Italian, you want me not to like women? I don't come on to them. You know that. And Dickie—what the hell, Christie's all right. I'll just drop the charges. I'll go to mass with you and the kids, day after tomorrow, but no confession. What am I going to tell the priest, that I'm Italian? He knows that.”

Twenty-one

D
ickie sat alone and forlorn in the holding cell at Greenwich police headquarters. It had been a quiet night, and in the course of things, there was little common crime in Greenwich, often no more than a dozen arrests in a week, most of them for drunken driving or petty theft. When it came to millions of dollars, the criminal record was longer and more interesting, but the movers in this increasing list of multimillion-dollar crimes and litigations never saw the inside of Greenwich police headquarters.

Dickie was frightened, because he had no idea of what awaited him. He had tried to glean some information from the two officers who had arrested him, but they were close-mouthed and gave little. The one instance he had experienced in his past was for disturbing the peace, when he and three of his friends had too much beer and had marched down Greenwich Avenue at two o'clock in the morning, when Greenwich Avenue is like a graveyard, shouting and singing at the top of their lungs. Then they were picked up, taken to the police station, where their parents were called to come and get them and pay their fines. This time was different. Dickie knew that he was being charged with assaulting an underage girl. He knew very little about the law, but the word
assault
terrified him. He never read newspapers, but watching network television, he had seen many an assault case punished with years of imprisonment. What would he do if they sent him to jail for five years? Five years was an eternity. He had heard, via TV and film, about young men made slaves of the tougher prisoners, raped and beaten, and sometimes killed. Whether this would happen to him in a Connecticut prison, he did not know, but his imagination ran wild. He was seventeen, too old to be tried as a juvenile? He didn't know.

Finally, past two in the morning, he fell asleep on the hard bench in the holding cell.

Twenty-two

S
ister Patricia Brody, Harold Sellig, and Frank Manelli all had one thing in common: They all had bad dreams, which were sometimes unbearable nightmares. They all woke up in the morning, sweating and shivering.

The dreams of Manelli and Sellig were of Vietnam; the nightmares of Sister Brody were of El Salvador.

Some months ago Sister Brody had spoken about her dreams to Monsignor Donovan, who had a degree in psychology from Fordham University.

“They are nightmares of a sort, but without the distortions that usually come with nightmares. Oh, yes, some distortion, but very repetitive of what actually happened.

“It was in San Salvador, at a school. I was there with three lay workers and six Jesuit priests. You know what happened.”

“Yes, but from your point of view?”

“I was in the school, and the priest and I heard the shots. The lay workers hid in a closet. I remained in the doorway. I was frozen there. I saw one of the Jesuits lying on the ground. He was dead. A priest ran toward him, and there was a burst of fire from another soldier who had an assault weapon. It literally tore him in half. The soldier was no more than twenty feet from the priest. In my memory, things come into focus, one by one. Another Jesuit was on his knees, his palms pressed in prayer, his head bent. Another soldier, standing behind him, was laughing.”

“You remember that bit, laughing?” Donovan asked.

“I'll never forget it. It appeared that everything was happening at once, total insanity. A Jesuit who was with a class came to the door, right beside me, shouting in Spanish, ‘Stop! Stop!' Then the soldier who was laughing emptied his pistol into the priest's head, the whole magazine, and blew the priest's head off. Then they shot the Jesuit standing in the doorway, beside me. They killed six of them—six Jesuit priests, the whole staff of the school.”

“And still you didn't try to run away?”

“I was frozen with fear.”

“And then?”

“And then they raped me. I don't know how many of them—I fainted after it began—and when I regained consciousness, there was blood all over me and dead priests everywhere. I don't know why they didn't kill me, but I suppose that for some reason they wanted a witness to what happened. I spent a week in the hospital, and that was when the dreams began.”

It was three months ago that she told this story to the monsignor. By now, in June of 1998, the dreams came infrequently, yet each time she went to bed, it was with the prayer that the dream would not come. On this Friday night, after the dinner party at the Castles', Sister Brody felt a melancholic sense of peace. She felt that she had helped Sally, and that somehow Sally would begin to find a way. She rarely asked for anything when she prayed, and tonight, as she kneeled beside her bed, her thoughts were quiet.

F
rank Manelli awakened at four in the morning, the usual time, whimpering, his knees drawn up in a fetal position, and Connie put her arms around his huge bulk and whispered to him, “It's all right, Frankie. I'll never let anything hurt you. It's all right, my baby. It's all right, and God watches over us.”

“Sure, sure, honey.” He relaxed, and in a few minutes he was asleep again. But Connie found it difficult to go back to sleep. She lay beside the warm body of her husband, wondering, as she had a hundred times before, why God and the Mother of God, whom she loved so much, had allowed this to happen, had sent a generation of young men into hell, with a punishment that would never end.

H
arold Sellig did not sleep that night. He dozed now and then, but for most of the night he was involved with his thoughts. He loved Seth Ferguson, and he tried to think of his life with Ruth without the old doctor. No more long discussions about the wonders of the human body, no more reflections on the nature of the universe, no more of the comfort of having a father, of the feeling that both he and his wife were children of the same father. Harold had never in his life asked anyone for money. After the navy, he reached a point when they were broke; they never said a word to Seth or even allowed him to suspect, but it was Christmastime, and on that morning they found a small box under their tree with five hundred-dollar bills in it. They argued about it, but Ruth convinced Harold that if they returned it, Seth would be hurt beyond measure.

And now, Seth was dead.

Like most people without church or religion, Harold Sellig spent a great deal of time speculating about God. Since Seth was no more a believer than he was, they felt a freedom to discuss God that most religious people lacked. God, like money, was something one never mentioned. One of Seth Ferguson's hobbies had been the early Greeks and the golden age of Athens. The Greeks of that time also argued about the gods, but they solved the perversities of chance and nature by creating a set of myths that gave the gods of Greece all the inconsistencies of human beings, all the jealousies and rivalries that they knew as a part of mankind's makeup.

Unfortunately, as Harold pointed out to Seth, monotheism put an end to that, although Seth countered with the fact that the small gold caduceus that his wife had given him when he graduated from medical school was the winged staff of the god Mercury—oddly enough the symbol of his profession.

They both stumbled over ethics, and tonight, half awake, Harold brooded over ethics. Why does a good man die so meaninglessly? Why are half a million people in Africa murdered by people so indistinguishable from themselves? The trouble was that, like so many disbelievers, he had come to the conclusion that there had to be a mind, a force, an intelligence—but what kind of an intelligence? Could Seth Ferguson's death be as meaningless as the death of an ant he stepped on? Harold had written a book about the ethics of mankind and had woven a net of guilt around the citizens—mostly very ordinary citizens—of the town he lived in, Greenwich, Connecticut. It was a pretty town, a decent town, well-kept, reasonably well-managed, perhaps with more than its share of wealthy people, but with middle-class people and very poor people as well. Seth had liked the manuscript and agreed with the concept—but who else? His wife, Ruth, rejected it, lumping it together with the widely held Afro-American accusation that every white was a racist.

Seth had said to him, “If this idea of yours, Harry, ever gained real acceptance, it would shake the world.” But that was a sort of intellectual hubris. Nothing shook the world.

A week from now, no one but he or Ruth would even mention Dr. Ferguson.

People died, and if the dying was not close, nobody actually gave a damn. The newest theory was that there were too many people for a small planet. That was why so few of the rich in Greenwich cared about HIV. They gave much more money for other diseases in this Republican stronghold. HIV victims voted Democrat, anyway.

Then he threw that kind of thinking away. Ruth, lying beside him, had taken a sleeping pill, and now she was pressed up against him, her arm over his shoulder. The faintest light of dawn was in the sky.

He dozed off at last, and he dreamed. It was the day after the Tet offensive, and the black body bags were lined up as far as he could see, far into the distance, piled up over the broken buildings and the smashed tanks and guns.

Twenty-three

L
arry, whose full given name was Latterbe in honor of a Civil War ancestor, Colonel Vernon Latterbe Johnson, was a meticulous man.

He was meticulous about everything. In his younger years and even in his childhood, he was neatly dressed, with a round face, blue eyes, and carefully combed corn-silk hair. People remarked that he had an innocent face. He grew into a tall, muscular six-footer, but he maintained the round face and the look of innocence. Thus, through his adolescence, he escaped blame for a number of things that he did. He also kept his weight down, and in college, he played football. He went to a small southern college. In a more prestigious school, he might well have graduated into a professional football player.

His father was a lawyer in the small southern town where Larry had been born. Larry spent two years working in his dad's office, and then, instead of going on to law school, Larry ran for sheriff. He was easily elected, and he served successive two-year terms. In the course of his first term, two men attempted to rob the local bank. Larry intercepted them as they came out of the bank, one of them holding an ancient hogleg six-shooter. Larry killed both of them with three shots. He had practiced with his .45-cal-iber automatic pistol for hours, and even though it was discovered the old six-shooter did not even have a firing pin, Larry was hailed as a hero and he received excellent coverage all over the state.

Larry felt a strange exultation in killing. It made him feel good, better than he had ever felt before: It made him feel like he had taken a snort of coke, something he had done occasionally, yet a practice he kept under strict control. He was much too meticulous to ever become an addict. During his second term, he was out in the woods hunting, when he came on a local black man fishing. Larry knew the man and did not like him, considering him one of those “uppity niggers.”

“What are you up to, Cal?” Larry called out to the black man.

He turned his head to see Larry, and replied, “Fishing. Can't you see the rod in my hand?”

“Don't get snotty with me. Stand up and turn around.”

Cal stood up and turned around.