Greenwich (2 page)

“What! Please say that again.” She shook her head. “No, don't say that again.”

“Now you're pissed off.”

Herbert Greene sighed and placed his cigar carefully in the ashtray next to the chair. “This is still number one, the first cigar today. If I light it when we come home, remember that. Anyway, Castle's an anti-Semite.”

“Oh, Herb, come on. Sally says she invited Harold Sellig, the writer. He's dying to meet you.”

“Two of us. So it's Jew night.”

“Yes, and since I'm going to be there, that makes it Catholic night. You don't change.”

“What would you like me to change into?”

“I picked up both of your lightweight flannels at the cleaners today. You have a choice.”

“Bless you.” He rose and kissed her. She was five nine. He was six feet and two inches, a skinny, gangly man, with thinning carrot hair and a reddish beard turning white.

“I'll shower,” he said. It was the ultimate surrender, and after he had gone into the house, Mary stood on the porch for a few minutes, looking at the smoking cigar he had left behind and thinking that she'd give a great deal for a cigarette at this moment. Well, she had not smoked for seven years, and she was never going to go through kicking the habit again. When he surrendered an argument, she always felt compassion for him. This month, their marriage would be thirty years old; and all things considered, she decided, it had been good as marriages go. She still loved him, or perhaps she nurtured him; and what was the difference anyway? she wondered.

Her son, David, camé onto the porch as she stood there, tall and gangly like his father, with the same orange hair and blue eyes. He had sported a beard in his junior year in college, which he had shaved off a month ago. Now he kissed her perfunctorily and stared at the cigar.

“Talked him out of it? Can I take it and finish it? It's a shame to waste it.”

“No, you cannot.”

“OK, OK, just asking.”

“Do you want dinner? The fridge is full.”

“You're not eating at home?”

“No, we're dining with the Castles.”

“Oh?”

“What does that mean?”

“Nothing, nothing at all. You're touchy.”

“Am I?” Then she realized that he was quite right. “Well, perhaps. We had a few words about the Castles.”

David nodded.

“And you're not to add to it. Do you have a date tonight?”

“I'm taking Nellie to dinner. I have seven dollars left out of my week's pay, which creates a problem. Now, if you're in the mood to negotiate a small loan?”

“I'm not.”

“Heart of stone,” he muttered. “Who's going to be at the Castles'?”

“Harold Sellig, among others. That's how I got your dad to agree.”

“Mom, work me in, please. I'll bring Nellie. I've been looking for Sellig's new book,
The Assassin
, ever since I first read the early draft he sent Dad. I've called Diane's Books and I've driven the old gentleman at Just Books half crazy. Two bookstores in a town of this size, and both of them small—can you imagine? Now, if I can talk to Sellig—”

“It's not my dinner party, and from what I hear the book hasn't been published yet.”

“I wonder why? Anyway, how about tonight?”

“No way. Forget it,” she said firmly.

Mary kissed him, and then she went into the house and upstairs to change. Herb was tucking the tails of a blue striped shirt into his gray flannels.

Searching through her closet for a dress to wear that evening, she told Herb of her conversation with David. “What shall I wear?” she wondered.

“Anything you can cover with a sweater. They keep that stupid house of theirs cold as an igloo. So he's going out with Nellie Kadinsky. She's something.”

“She's a decent, hardworking young woman. And what's ‘something'?”

“Blond hair, real; blue eyes, cute.”

“I hate that word. Oh, never mind, forgive me. I have nothing to wear. You know, Herb, I've gone through life being a ‘non-cute,' to coin a word.”

“Have I ever complained?”

“Teachers don't wear dresses.” She held up a pink dress. “Do you like this? He tried to touch me for a loan, claims he has only seven dollars for his date tonight. The boy's a senior at Harvard, almost top of his class; and they pay him six dollars an hour to scrape barnacles and paint boats.”

“That's good pay,” Herb said. “More than I ever got at his age.”

He studied his wife as she slipped into the pink dress. It was loose and very simple, hanging from her shoulders, gathered with a sash at the waist. He enjoyed watching her, seeing her, being around her—never entirely used to the fact that she had put up with him for thirty years, good years most of them, put up with his cigars, his cantankerous nature, his bitter wit, his unwillingness to have more than two children, his refusal at the very beginning to be married by a priest, his agnosticism—and for all of that, he had agreed, with almost no argument that she could raise both their children as Catholics, though David now chose to be a Jew. He bridled when someone compared her to the Kennedy women; he had no love for the Kennedys, but she did have the same high-bridged, strong nose and jaw, the same almost-ebony eyes and hair and long-boned frame; and he believed firmly that she and all the other black Irish were descended from the Spanish sailors stranded on their shore when the Armada was destroyed. He had corresponded with a noted Spanish historian, who held that there was no one in Spain who did not have a cupful of Jewish blood, even though as a linguist he was an enemy of that kind of thinking and as a Jew he was lackadaisical at best and immune to all of Mary's arguments that a man could not live properly with no religion at all. When he first met her, at an undergraduate mixer at Harvard, she had said, “I'm Mary O'Brien,” to which he responded, “I'm Herb Greene, and I'm Jewish,” to which she said, “Thank God, and I'm glad you got that off your chest.”

“That dress is wonderful,” he said, now in Greenwich thirty years later. “Absolutely wonderful.”

“I have a cashmere sweater that goes with it. You're right. The Castles do live in an igloo.”

Two

F
rank Manelli drove his truck along the Castle driveway and parked in front of the Castle's four-car garage at exactly 5:30. The Castle estate, as Richard Castle liked to call it, consisted of only five acres, but the very large house that dominated that five acres was commonly known as The Castle in the Back Country. The Back Country in Greenwich is that part of the township which lies to the north of the Merritt Parkway. While there are several other enclaves in Greenwich where the very wealthy live, none are as large or as consistently wealthy as the Back Country area.

Manelli was headed for the servants' entrance when Sally Castle emerged from the kitchen door, exclaiming, “Thank God, thank God! Oh, Frank, I was ready to put my head in the oven and end it all. I called you at ten, I called you at twelve.” She was bereaved, but not angry. Sally Castle was Richard Castle's second wife, his trophy wife, as it was put around town; but if someone had called her that to her face, she would have smiled and nodded; she had once told Mary Greene she did not mind the appellation, although in truth, she resented it.

Sally was good-natured to a fault, and gentle. At nearly forty, she was still lovely to look at, slender and long-legged with strawberry blond hair that fell to her shoulders and fine blue eyes. Herb had once remarked to Mary that Sally had been gifted with everything but brains, and she was proof that one could survive very well in our society with an IQ of 90 or so. She had once whispered to Mary that she had never stayed in school long enough to take an IQ test and Mary had asked her not to mention it to anyone else.

Richard Castle had a son, Dickie, by his first wife, who had left him and the child for an adequate sum of money and a house in California. She told him to keep his money or shove it up his ass, yet she took it, spending most of it on liquor and dope. The marriage to Sally was now seven years old, and Sally still appeared to adore Richard and still basked in his approval. Sally was a Valley Girl, born and beach-trained in California, married and divorced in turn by a director and then by an actor. When she faced un-solvable problems or the minor disasters that on occasion daunted her, she fell into a pleading, beseeching manner that some men found irresistible.

Frank Manelli did not find it irresistible. “I know, I know,” he said, “but I start my day with a program, Mrs. Castle. I try to give everyone a time. But it's like when you go to the dentist. He tells you nine o'clock, and then he got a patient in his chair with twenty cavities. I never know what I'm gonna find, maybe easy, maybe two hours' work.” He was a large, burly man in a stained T-shirt, and Sally would shudder a bit with the thought of anyone going to bed with that huge mass of bone and muscle.

“But you are here, thank God,” Sally said.

“Where is it?”

“The powder room. That's why I was so disturbed. My powder room. We have six guests coming to dinner tonight, and my powder room is an obscenity. I'm almost ashamed to show it to you.”

Manelli hefted his bag of tools, stepped over to his truck, and reached in for a plunger. Then he followed Sally Castle to the front door and into the house. The entry was broad and spacious, the powder-room door to the left as one entered; a trickle of water coming through under the door.

“Josie, Josie,” Sally wailed.

Josie, a wan young black woman in a maid's uniform, came running to her call.

“Get some towels, please, Josie, and stop that dreadful stuff before it reaches the rug.” And to Manelli, “Can you just go in without me, Frank. I can't stand the smell. It's the toilet. I tell them not to use the powder room, but they do.”

Manelli nodded, but waited a moment until Josie returned with an armful of towels. He took one from her and entered the powder room, closing the door behind him. His guess had been correct; the toilet had overflowed, and there were soft feces on the floor. He sighed, drove the plunger into the toilet several times, heard the suction break, and watched the water run down. He flushed the toilet, using the plunger as the water ran into the bowl. Then he used the towel to gather the mess. He flushed the toilet again to make certain that it was working properly. Then he stood in the powder room for a long moment, regarding his face in the mirror.

“Shit,” he said softly. “Shit and more shit.”

Josie was still mopping the floor when he emerged from the powder room, plunger in hand.

“Did you fix it?” Sally pleaded.

No, he thought, no, she didn't do this to fuck you out of your mind. She's got to be thirty-five or more, and she don't know how a fuckin' toilet works.

“I fixed it,” he said. “Someone dropped a sanitary napkin or a paper diaper into the toilet. You can't do that with this toilet.”

“But, Frank, we have no infants here.”

He shrugged and held up the plunger. “You know what this is?”

She shook her head.

“OK. I'll show Josie how to use it. I'll leave it in the kitchen. I'll bring this towel in there.”

She nodded. “Thank you, Frank, You saved my life.”

He knew where the kitchen was. He knew everything in the house that had water running through it. What he didn't expect to find in the kitchen was Abel Hunt, working at the huge eight-burner stove.

“Fired?” he asked Abel. “Or did you switch to cooking for the rich?”

“I always cook for the rich. The poor can't afford decent food, much less cooks.”

“I'm covered with shit,” Frank said sourly. “Where can I wash?”

“Try that sink over there,” he said, pointing. “The club is having a ‘Japanese Night' with a special chef doing the honors, so I pick up a few bucks off the books here and there.”

Abel Hunt was a big man, six foot two inches and weighing in at two hundred and fifty pounds, a black man, dark as coal. The Hunts lived four houses away from the Manellis, in a section of Greenwich township called Chickahominy, a neighborhood that would have rated as decently lower middle anywhere else but in Greenwich, and where in the lunatic real-estate market of the nineties, a house could still be purchased for less than half a million dollars, and a black family or two could be found.

Hunt had been born in South Carolina, which in his opinion, gastronomically speaking, was the first state in the Union. At Chapel Hill, he had refused a football scholarship, graduated among the top ten in his class, working his way through college as a short-order cook; and then, refusing an offer from General Motors to become what he called “a well-paid showcase nigger,” he had taken off for Paris via a thousand-dollar scholastic prize and enrolled himself at the Cordon Bleu. He supported himself with nightclub gigs, playing a tin whistle, and it was there that he met Delia, a lovely coffee-colored singer from New Orleans, whom he married.

Offered a job as a pastry chef at the Hill Crest Club in Greenwich, he accepted it. Now, twenty years later, he was head chef at a salary of seventy thousand a year.

Frank Manelli was drying his hands at the sink when Josie came into the kitchen wing with her mess of wet towels. Frank handed her the plunger, telling her to keep it handy. “You get a toilet won't flush down, Josie, just drive this plunger into it, slow and firm. That'll save me a trip out here to the Back Country.”

Josie nodded. Both Abel Hunt and his assistant, Joseph, his nineteen-year-old son, who had just finished his first year as a pre-med student at Harvard, were smiling—slightly it must be said—and Frank said to them softly, “I don't like these people no better than you, Abel, but Jesus, to just let that toilet flush the shit all over the floor—”

“I'm a cook.” Abel shrugged. “Anyway, there isn't a plunger in this whole stupid house. And I don't use the powder room.”