“You didn’t see anybody leaving?” the policewoman asked again.
I shook my head. “They must have left before I got here. It’s obvious some outsider was here,” I said.
The room was the
before
picture of the living room. Similarly comfortable furnishings, but neither cool nor fastidious. There were family photos—I recognized several of Hugh, and another of Lydia’s cameo face above a high-necked Victorian blouse. I wondered if she’d adopted a covered-up style because she liked it or because she needed it. There were bookshelves with ornaments and photo albums along with the encyclopedia and assorted volumes.
But the lived-in ambience had been pushed a bit far. Record albums littered the sofa cushions, photos were strewn around, books tossed helter-skelter on tables, chairs, and the floor, drawers open, papers mussed on a desk in the corner.
I have a certain expertise with slovenliness. Enough, at least, to know that Lydia didn’t qualify, even from where I stood at the back edge of the room. “It’s not what a messy person would do,” I said. “No glasses making rings on furniture, no dishes with food remnants, no discarded shoes or clothing. None of the typical droppings that…” That I have been known to leave around, but I didn’t say so.
“Right!” she said, with visible relief. I recognized another guilt-ridden woman who didn’t always hang towels back up or wash dishes immediately. “Although, of course, she could have done it herself, tidily, like it is, trying to make it look like a break-in.”
“Why would she do that?”
The policewoman squinted at me, as if I’d gone out of focus.
“No,” I said. “A cover-up? I can’t imagine Lydia Teller doing that.” And as I said it, I realized how peculiar it was, because what I had truly imagined was Lydia Teller herself. The only things I hadn’t made up were an underlined book, a few photos, and random comments by her acquaintances. I suddenly felt frightened and wanted to go home.
“Can you think where’d she go? Who’d take her?” The policewoman’s expression was cryptic.
“Take her? Why?”
“There are two cars in the garage. Hers and his, unless they had more than one apiece. Doesn’t seem a night for a long wander on foot, does it? We’ll check the cab companies, of course, but I thought maybe you’d have an idea.”
I shook my head. I’d done that so often tonight, I felt like one of those plastic dolls with springs for necks.
Shortly thereafter, I was dismissed, leaving behind my phone number, address, and employer’s name.
There have not been many nights in my life when home seemed more appealing. I nearly dived into my car. I wanted out, and away, and done with it. I had to work hard not to floor it, but I wanted no further business with the police.
My bed and comforter beckoned. If my luck changed, there’d even be a clunker on the late show, a movie whose plot hinged on a quaint old-fashioned defunct morality. Where whether Rock Hudson or Sinatra would seduce an innocent rather than marry her was the single burning issue—and a wedding was the happy ending. Where not even the concept of wife-beating existed. Give me undistilled, one-hundred-percent-proof genuine make-believe, please.
I drove carefully, letting my muscles untwist and unknot one by one. And then, directly behind my right ear, so close I felt its breath and heat, a voice said, “Don’t scream.”
I did anyway.
Twelve
SOME OF MY STUDENTS CLAIM I HAVE EYES IN THE BACK OF MY HEAD. RIGHT then, I wished I did.
I careened wildly, jerked hither and yon, all the while shrieking and babbling and wondering who or what could have hidden itself in the stingy space behind me.
“Please!” I heard.
Another wild carom and scream. What kind of kinky villain said please?
“Hush, now. Calm down.”
Hush?
I once again tried to oxygenate my lungs, then pulled the car over to the first free curbside. Now all was silence behind me; so slowly, one ligament at a time, hand on the door handle, ready to bolt, I turned around.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t take my car. The police would find me, and besides, I don’t know where to go. I saw you through the window. I heard you calling me. You seemed almost familiar. I don’t know. Safe, maybe. A second sense I had, so when I saw you go across the street, to Patsy, and I was sure you were calling the police—it was all I could think of as a place to hide.”
Lydia Teller’s face in the streetlight was frightening, the skin mottled and broken, one eye swollen almost closed. She had moved the plastic container. There wasn’t room for it and a person in the back. It was raining on her. I told her to come up front, and she did, docilely. She was a woman too accustomed to being told what to do.
“Why were you looking for me?” she asked.
“I found your book.”
She wrinkled her forehead, as much as she could with her puffs and bruises.
“The book you underlined.”
Still nothing, and then a gasp, a searching look. “That book? But that was a while ago.”
“I just found it.” My voice was as low as hers, raised only to cover the sound of passing cars and honking horns. “Two days ago. I’ve been searching for you ever since.”
She shook with long, hard sobs.
“Let me take you to the shelter people,” I said.
She shook her head. “I can’t. They’ll be looking for me now, won’t they? The police? Wouldn’t they have to turn me in?”
I didn’t know how far the shelter’s vow of secrecy went, but I suspected it stopped at homicide investigations. “Mrs. Teller, I want you to know I don’t blame you. When I read that book, I was sick at what you’ve been put through.”
“Don’t blame me for what?”
“Everybody has a breaking point.”
She pushed her body against the side window, away from me. “You think I did it.”
“Well, I—you didn’t?”
She shook her head.
“Then who did?”
She shook her head again.
“How could you not know? You just said you were in the house when it happened, didn’t you?”
She looked up at my scaly convertible top and blinked hard. “You see? That’s just how the police would be, but I don’t know who did it. I don’t!”
“Where were you, then?”
“Upstairs, in the bathroom. Locked.” She put her hands up, as if to cover her bashed face. “Hurt me. I ran up. Locked the door. He pounded and swore and said he’d be back, but I waited and waited, then I thought he’d gone to sleep, passed out like sometimes, and I came out and there he was. On the floor.”
“You didn’t hear anything? A quarrel, a gunshot?”
She shook her head. “I was upstairs, in the bathroom, locked.”
I couldn’t tell if she was in shock or repeating a rehearsed alibi.
“I put on the record,” she said. “I wanted to listen to it forever, then you rang the bell. I couldn’t answer. Couldn’t. I made the music so loud I wouldn’t hear. My son’s a singer. Every school he went to, he starred in their show. In
Oklahoma!
he was Curly.”
“Hugh was in my class at Philly Prep.” I introduced myself, although it felt a peculiar time and situation for the formalities.
“That’s why you seemed familiar,” she said. “That’s why I felt that way about you. He liked you. That’s where he did
South Pacific,
Lieutenant Cable. Oh, yes. ‘Younger than Springtime,’ remember? I have that album, too. I have them all.”
I nearly wept for the image of her sitting in her family-less room, summoning and knowing her son only by other people’s renditions of his musical comedy roles. “How is Hugh?” I asked.
She held her head high, almost defiantly, and then she winced, and slumped. “He’s a good boy,” she said softly. “Being a student isn’t everything. There are lots of talents. Wynn’s too hard on him, so I barely ever see my son—his son—he never can—he—” And she remembered, and stopped talking.
“Come home with me.” The idea set off alarms from my stomach to my brain, but I couldn’t think of any other place to safely deposit her. I couldn’t believe she was capable of violence, and even if she had murdered her husband, it would have been to save her own life. I was sure I had nothing to fear from Lydia Teller, only from hiding her, but I saw no other option. “All right?” I asked her.
She nodded like a prisoner being moved to a different holding pen.
“We’ll think of something,” I said as I drove. “They’ll find whoever did it and then you’ll be free.”
She didn’t seem particularly cheered, but how jolly could a woman with a murdered husband, a messed-up son, and injuries to her face and psyche be?
Her vulnerable gray eyes, old-fashioned face, and waiting silence made me want to protect her, and I couldn’t comprehend how anybody—let alone anybody who theoretically loved her—could bear to hurt her.
“Do you know if anybody else was there tonight?” I asked, trying not to further upset her.
“Of course,” she said. “The person who shot Wynn.”
I nodded. “Patsy Benson said several people—”
Her sigh was enormous, enough to stop me. “Patsy knows everything that goes on in our house,” she said. “Except what really goes on.”
“She said lots of people came and went.”
“I was upstairs, in the bathroom. I’m sorry.”
We reached the end of that conversational alley almost precisely at the moment we reached our destination.
“Home,” I said, pulling up. I hustled her inside. “Your room’s upstairs. The top floor. It’s tiny, with only a fold-up bed. I’m sorry. The bathroom’s on the second floor.” Definitely not four stars, but I did have emergency first aid supplies, which I left with her while I removed my car from my preinternal-combustion-engine street and walked home from my parking lot double-time. I didn’t even bother with an umbrella, since I was already sopping wet and beyond help. I stopped at the drugstore for a toothbrush for Lydia, wondering whether civilization could be reduced to that one essential.
When I was home again,
while water boiled for tea, I filled
two brandy snifters—without asking Lydia whether or not she needed it. If she didn’t, I’d drink hers, too.
She didn’t give me the chance. With shaky hands around the snifter, she downed hers like medicine while I explained my working hours and the rather obvious requirement that she not answer the phone or make any calls. I showed her where my small stock of food was located and promised to buy more. I warned her not to feed Macavity every time he feigned starvation. Showed her the idiosyncrasies of the toaster oven and TV, and then I was done, too poor to afford any more quirky appliances.
Lydia gave my house tour the attention due something much more complex. A weak smile flickered across her face. I could see how exquisite the once-upon-a-time-happy Lydia must have been. She had an old-fashioned face, oval with a small pointed chin and heavy-lidded almond eyes. At least, she had that beneath the swellings and discolorations. She was small-boned and would have looked fragile even without evidence of abuse. She should have been cherished.
“Thank you,” she said. “You make me feel safe.” And then she inhaled so sharply, it sounded like a swallowed sob.
I hugged her, gently, so as not to press on her injuries. She was definitely no longer a creature of my imagination. The kettle whistled, and I busied myself fixing a tray while she sniffled and blew her nose. She stood near the room divider and lifted, of all things, the zillion ways to get a guy tome. She flipped through it, and as much as it is possible for a wry smile to play over swollen and livid lips, one did.
“We work so hard to win their affection,” she said softly. “Pervert ourselves, deny ourselves. Look at this telling you to take up a hobby you don’t like, join a club or a church without personal meaning—read magazines you couldn’t care less about—” She pushed it aside. “Men complete the job, but we start it. Don’t,” she said. “Look at me and don’t.”
I promised I wouldn’t. I didn’t even explain the stupid book’s origins. We settled down in the living room. I pulled the curtains in an attack of paranoia, as if a Lydia-hunting posse were likely to charge down my little street.
The geometric completeness of baroque music is as effective as tranquilizers, at least for me, so I put on a Bach three-part invention, and after a long, almost comforting silence, Lydia spoke.
“I grew up in Africa,” she said. “My parents were naturalists. For what seemed half my life, they studied wildebeests. Gnus, by other names. The wildebeest has an odd disease. It starts to run in circles and can’t stop. The circles get smaller and tighter, and on they go till they’re more or less spinning. And then they drop. That’s what my whole life feels like.
“I tried so hard, but nothing was enough. Nothing was right. A speck of dirt, or dinner a minute late, or overcooked, I talked too much or not enough, I was too dumb, or too loud, or laughing too much or not enough, or Hugh, poor dear, was…anything. Just was. Angry at him from the day he was born.”
For once, Macavity was not perverse. He studied Lydia, saw a need and filled it with little cat feet gentling their way onto her lap, and then an audible purr. For that, cat, pâté tomorrow, I promised. Lydia smiled with the parts of her face that still could. “Wynn wouldn’t allow pets,” she said. “They’re messy, like people.”
She spoke without animation, almost as if she were reading a text that she still found confusing. I wanted to cry, to rush back in history and unmake it, to do something, but she’d said she felt safe, and she sounded as if she believed it, and I was afraid of disrupting whatever peace she had hold of.
“My parents died in a plane crash when I was sixteen,” she said at one point. “I came back to the States and my grandmother took me in, but when she died two years later, that was it for family. And then Wynn appeared…” She was silent again for a long while. “He wasn’t that way then. He was strong, you know. Had high standards and all, but not cruel. I don’t know what happened. I had never seen men shout at women that way, let alone hit them. I thought it must be my fault. I told a counselor that my husband got mad a lot. She said I had to try harder. She knew Wynn, said what a nice man he was. I knew nobody would believe me. Thought I was crazy. Depressed all the time and lying about why I couldn’t be where I should be because how could I say my lip’s split, I can’t breathe, he strangled me, my shoulder’s dislocated. Half the time I didn’t even believe it myself. He told me I had fallen against the stove, tripped into the wall, and I wanted to believe him even though the more he drank, the clumsier I got.