Greenwich (5 page)

“Why don't we sit down here and talk?” Sister Brody suggested. “It's so pretty and cool.”

“Yes. Sure. Can I get you a cold drink?”

“Don't trouble, please.”

“It's no trouble. I just press a button and they'll bring me anything I want. I'd just as soon go down to the kitchen or the bar and get it myself, but this is the way Richard wants it done. I do everything the way Richard wants it done. He's very good to me—I mean when he's not angry.”

“I don't want anything, dear. When the other guests come, I'm sure there'll be drinks and things to nibble, but now. I'd just like to sit here and chat.” Sister Brody wore a pale gray skirt and a loose white blouse. Sally was relieved that she wasn't wearing one of those heavy, hooded things that some nuns, she supposed, had to wear.

“What shall I call you?” Sally asked uneasily.

“You can call me Pat or Sister Pat or whatever.”

“That's nice. Thank you.”

Sister Pat rearranged her thinking, sitting and looking at this exquisitely beautiful woman and trying to find an inkling of what was inside of her. Pat Brody was far from being a cloistered nun. She had dealt with women whose husbands had beat them to a pulp, and with women expecting a fifth child with no way of feeding the previous four, and with women whose husbands had walked out and away from every responsibility. She had worked in Guatemala and in El Salvador as well as in the worst slums of New York and Philadelphia; but this was something else entirely.

Now she said to Sally, “I think we should talk about religion. You know, of course, that I'm a Catholic nun. I am what they call a Sister of Charity. I don't live in a convent. I work with people who need help with social and religious problems, a sort of social worker you might say. I am explaining this because I know you haven't had much experience about how the church works. That's why Monsignor brought me here to meet you and talk with you.”

“I understand,” Sally said.

“Do you believe in God, Sally?”

“Oh, yes—yes, of course.”

“Then something must have influenced you in that belief. Do you know what religion your parents had?”

Sally shook her head.

“Are they still alive, my dear?”

Sally hesitated, and then said straightforwardly, “I tell lies. If I tell you the truth, will you promise not to tell Richard?”

Sister Brody nodded. “Absolutely—I promise.”

“I don't know who my parents are.”

“How did that happen?”

“I don't know. When I was two or three years old, I'm not sure, a Mexican family in the Simi Valley found me in an irrigation ditch. They kept me for two years, I think, but they weren't nice to me and I ran away. The police picked me up, as near as I could remember, but no one reported me missing. Most of that part is very confused, and I don't remember it very well. They put me in an orphanage, and I went to school and learned to read—and I ran away. No one wanted to adopt me because I was sickly. I got rides to Los Angeles, and I met men who gave me money and I guess I was sort of a hooker—is this like a confession?”

“No, my dear. I'm not a priest. We're just talking. Now I must ask you something. This Mexican family that found you in the irrigation ditch, did they have you baptized?”

Sally shrugged. “I don't know.”

“And you were never baptized at any other time?”

“No.”

Sister Brody took a deep breath, spent a moment or two in silence, and then said, “Here is what I would suggest—providing that you have thought about being a Catholic and would like to take the step?”

Sally nodded.

“You're sure?”

“Oh yes, I'm sure.”

“Then we will arrange for you to take instructions. Father Donovan will take care of it. He celebrates mass every day at St. Matthew's. The baptism, after you've completed the instructions, is a simple and beautiful ceremony, and then, if you want to go on with it and join our church, we will arrange that for you. Now I must tell you that in the normal course of things, you would go to St. Michael's, which is the parish church for this area. But there's no reason why you shouldn't choose St. Matthew's, and I understand why you might be more comfortable there.”

“Must I tell my husband?”

“No, not if you don't want to, and what you have said to me remains with me. And any time you want to talk to me, call me at the church or leave a message for me.”

A
bel Hunt's son, Joseph, 4.0 average through his freshman year at Harvard, pre-med, sat at the kitchen computer—it was Richard Castle's boast that his was the first kitchen in Greenwich with its own computer—printing out the menus. He observed to his father that this kind of thing might permanently impair the neural structure of his brain. “I don't know,” Joseph said, “whether I am crazy or the rest of the world is crazy.”

“Both,” Abel replied shortly. “You're on vacation. I do this all year round on every night off. I get four hundred dollars for cooking dinner for some demented Greenwich millionaire. That's the world you live in.”

“Yes. And in Boston, there's an old black lady who spends the winter on an iron grate, because some hot air seeps up through it. I give her a dollar when I can get there. I came there once, and she had six inches of snow over her.”

“She doesn't have three kids in college on a chef's salary.”

“I'm on scholarship.”

“That's your payoff for being a smart-ass nigger. Your sisters are normal, not smart-ass.”

“I hate that word.”

“Then don't use it.”

“I don't. Let me go over this before I print it out. First course: crabmeat ravigote.” He spelled it out. “Is that right?”

“Seems to be.”

“Second course, trout amandine with beurre blanc and capers. I spell it
a-m-a-n-d-i-n-e
—right?”

“I keep reading,” Abel said, “about these poor little black kids a kind and gentle government sends to college and they can't even spell.”

“You got me,” Joseph replied. “Escalope de veau finished with shallots and white wine. I don't take French. You want to be a doctor in this besotted land, you study Spanish. I'm trying to read your handwriting. Asparagus tips, mélange of baby carrots, zucchini, and pattypan squash. What on earth are pattypan squash?”

“The little white things that look like land mines.”

“Risotto with chanterelles, morels, and truffles.”

“So far so good,” Abel said.

At this point, Josie, the regular Castle cook, had entered the kitchen and was listening with all the admiration she felt for her occasional substitute and his good-looking son.

“Mesclun salad with fresh raspberries and raspberry vinaigrette. Dessert—tarte Tatin, crème fraîche, chocolate-dipped sorbet berries. How do I put in this business of grapefruit gratinée with fresh mint? Can I just print it at the bottom?”

“The bill at Hay Day,” Josie snorted, “was larger than my week's pay.”

“Not my problem, baby,” Abel said, grinning at her.

Seven

Y
ou know,” Herbert Greene said to his wife, driving across Greenwich from Old Greenwich over and into the Back Country, “he's not going to give you anything for the library. He doesn't know what a library is. He doesn't know what a book is.”

“Why must you always be so damn judgmental? You really don't know the man. You've only met him a couple of times.”

“He's rich, he's pretentious, he's ignorant, and he beat the shit out of his last wife.”

“How do you know that?”

“Seth Ferguson told me about it.”

“He shouldn't have.”

“Why not? Seth's a doctor, not a priest.”

“He treats Sally well.”

“Yes, he gets a medal for that.”

“Herb,” she said firmly, “be nice tonight. I'm asking you to do that for me. Sally is so excited that you agreed to come, and it's going to be interesting. Harold and Ruth Sellig will be there and Monsignor Donovan and Pat Brody—you know her—”

“Come off it! You mean Castle's invited a Catholic priest and a nun to dinner at his house! Come on! Why?”

“Sally invited them. I mean she just brought it up, telling Richard that she happened to run into them, never expecting any positive response from him, and then to her amazement, he said, Sure, invite them to dinner.”

“That is really amazing,” Herb agreed. “I've heard that Donovan is a brilliant and thoughtful man. All right, you win. I'll be properly behaved and controlled.”

“And one more enticing bit. Abel Hunt is cooking the dinner.”

“Who is Abel Hunt?”

“You don't know? Of course, you wouldn't know. You abhor the clubs, but I teach at the Central Middle School and I hear things. He's the chef at the Hill Crest Club, and on his night off he'll do dinner for one or another local tycoon. He's cooking for the Castles tonight, and you just might enjoy it.”

W
hen Ruth Sellig called Sally Castle, earlier that day, and told her that her father faced a serious operation that same day, Sally was both bewildered and upset. Since all of Sally's attitudes toward a father were theoretical, gleaned for the most párt from TV and films, she felt she had to respect Ruth's last-minute cancellation. On the other hand, she knew that Richard would be irritated by an uneven number of dinner guests, and when Richard was irritated, he became mean and directed his venom at Sally. The cause of the venom could be large, small, or nothing at all. Sally rummaged through her acquaintances for a possible replacement, someone who was alone and free this evening and would not let pride stand in the way of such a last-minute invitation. She did not know too many people who might stand in for Ruth Sellig; as a matter of fact, there was only one she could think of, Muffy Platt, whose husband worked for the Swiss Union Bank and was abroad in Switzerland most of the time.

And Richard liked Muffy. Once, at the club, Sally had stumbled on Richard and Muffy in an embrace, with Richard's hand up her short skirt, fondling her ass, but neither of them noticed Sally and she was able to slip away unseen, greatly relieved that she did not have to deal with their awareness of her knowledge. It was not that Sally was indifferent to this sort of thing on Richard's part; she simply knew no way of responding to it, and therefore she ignored it.

Nor did it change her attitude toward Muffy, even though it bewildered her. Her two previous Hollywood marriages were short-lived and cruel. She married because she so desperately needed to be loved and protected, and she had used her beauty almost without ever realizing that she was using it. Once she had spoken to Ruth Sellig about the incident with Muffy, asking Ruth, “Can I continue to be her friend?” a question to which Ruth had no answer.

“How can anyone live like that?” Ruth had asked her husband.

And to that, Harold had no answer.

P
eople who knew the Selligs and observed how easily they lived with each other fell back on the cliché that opposites attract, but this was an idle and somewhat obvious conclusion. Ruth Sellig was tall, slender, and dark, with dark eyes and close-cropped gray hair. Her features were well-defined, her nose small, nothing effusive about her, her brown eyes searching rather than inviting, and only in her full, wide mouth any hint of passion lying somewhere in her tight, well-controlled body. Her husband, Harold, was a full three inches shorter, plump; a sandy mustache; sandy, whitish hair around a bald pate; good-natured; open to anything and everything; blue eyes peering out of metal-rimmed glasses; originally from Flatbush, Brooklyn; a Rhodes scholar with a sort of English accent, which he had cultivated assiduously after a year at Oxford. He had done a long tour in Vietnam—the most unlikely member of the armed forces ever enlisted—as a naval historian on an aircraft carrier off the coast; and while this resulted in a book, still unpublished, he was somewhat ashamed of the fact that his days ashore amounted to less than a month.

Ruth had remarked to her father that she never spent a boring hour with her husband. Frequently his way of thinking drove her up the wall, but at least it was never the expected.

The manuscript, which he had persuaded her to take with her to the hospital and to read once again while she waited through the hours of the operation, contained the quality of being both the expected and the unexpected—unexpected when she first read it years ago and very much expected now. He had begun to write it after the Vietnam tour was over, and as he explained to her, “I am going to write an autobiography of an assassin, and I am going to call it ‘The Assassin,' because no one in Greenwich, which is absolutely a capsule of the United States in every way I can think of, would ever dream of being in the shoes of an assassin.”

Her reaction was summed up in one short word, “Oh?”

“Just oh?”

“What else can I say, Hal?”

“You don't think Greenwich is a capsule of the U.S. today?”

“I never thought about it,” Ruth replied.

“What is Greenwich?”

“You really want me to play this game with you, Hal?”

“If you will, humor me.”

“All right. Greenwich is a town in Connecticut that borders on New York State. It is partly a commuter suburb and partly a local financial and big-business center. It contains a number of very rich people, a lot of middle-class people, and our own share of the poor. It is a well-kept decent town with excellent schools and a very low crime rate, and no assassins that I have ever heard of.”

“Exactly,” Harold said.

Ruth sighed. “And therefore,” she said patiently, “you're going to write the autobiography of an assassin and base it on Greenwich, Connecticut. Do I follow you?”

“Yes.”

“Each to his own,” she said, and left it at that.