“And their mother was there, too, wasn’t she?” I said, testing it out. “Fay…Elias.”
“Her. You’d think a family could decide on a last name, wouldn’t you? Who does she think she is, barging in on our dinner hour with those two oafs, claiming to be his true family, like I wasn’t real, like Hugh wasn’t real, making things worse than they already were!” Lydia began to cry. “First the man with the lawsuit, then them! One fight after another!”
Oh, I wish, I wish she had stuck to her locked-in-the-bathroom, don’t-know-a-thing story, had remained my unsullied, blameless heroine. I wish, I wish I could find the person to believe.
She tightened her lips and looked out from exhausted eyes. I felt terrible, for both of us.
“Actually,” she said, “I was upstairs just about the whole evening, like I said. Up and down for a while, then just up there. I knew I was safe until the people left. He never hurt me when people were around.” She scowled and clutched her purse even more tightly. “Except if the person was Hugh,” she added in a whisper. “But of course, that’s different. Hugh’s family.”
That went right up there among the most chilling sentences I’d ever heard.
“So I’m sorry if I confused you before by saying I was in the bathroom, because of course I was, but not maybe every minute. Not exactly.”
I thought of the Greek philosopher Diogenes, who’d traveled with a lantern in search of an honest man, and who’d then founded the Cynic sect in Athens. Lydia was probably one of the people he interviewed along the way.
“If they hadn’t descended on him like locusts, none of this would have happened. You had to know how to handle him.” She looked very sad again. “Not that I did.”
She needed counseling, needed to get it straight where responsibility and guilt should be assigned. As soon as I was positive she wasn’t going to kill me, I’d mention it.
“Like vultures, they were, after his flesh. Picking, picking.” She looked at me carefully. “That’s another reason I went into the bathroom. I couldn’t stand them, and I knew Wynn couldn’t and that he’d be furious.”
“Was anybody still there when you went upstairs for good?”
She nodded. “All of them. Except maybe the teacher about the lawsuit.” She wrinkled her forehead in thought. “No, maybe he was there, too. I can’t remember. I was barely downstairs at all.”
“Was your husband for sure still alive when you locked yourself up?”
“Please.” Again her eyes welled up and over. “This feels like the police again. When I came downstairs way later, he was…” She shrugged and released the pocketbook long enough to brush away the tears. “You believe me, don’t you? I thought you believed me!” Her voice was low, but with a desperate edge of hysteria.
“You never heard the gun go off?”
“Please.” She shook her head.
Of course she’d heard it. I simply couldn’t figure why she wouldn’t say when, or by whom, unless as I increasingly feared, she had herself fired it. “Go home,” I said softly. “You need rest. And I need to get back to work.”
She nodded.
But next period, while my class had a pop quiz on “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” I looked out my window and Lydia was still there, out among the homeless waiting for shelter. Or for me, she’d said. I automatically leaned forward and opened my mouth, as if to call out, although whether to warn her or to frighten her away I couldn’t have said.
Twenty-One
IF YOU SIT DOWN AND FIGURE IT OUT, YOU’LL FIND ONLY A HANDFUL OF HOURS during all of high school when learning is possible.
Ninth grade drowns in a hormonal swamp. As has been mentioned, twelfth grade is a wash. In any grade at any time, attention spans snap when atmospheric conditions are too exciting, as when it rains or snows, or does neither and is perfect, including all of spring. All Mondays are lost to laments at another week’s beginning, and all Fridays are treated as early weekends. During first period, students are too bleary to think; during the period before lunch, they’re too hungry to think; and during last period, they’re exhausted. Days and sometimes weeks are spent preparing for and recovering from vacations, and in those few slivers of time with no other excuse for goofing off, kids get sick.
The flu was the excuse-of-choice for half the senior class today. There was a big concert at the Spectrum tonight, and they needed to be rested for it.
The loyal remnants of the class and I were reviewing, at their request, the mechanics of assembling their term paper notes. I launched into a well-worn monologue. “The researcher is a detective,” I said. “The question that needs answering is the mystery, and clues are scattered all over. The truth is in fragments, pieces that in themselves might not seem relevant or important. The research sleuth finds and assembles the pieces until they form the whole picture and answer the question.”
Two pigeons landed on the windowsill. I forgot to mention that learning also stops for wildlife, however prosaic the species. I droned on above the giggles of my students, ignoring them and the pigeons, who had mistaken my sill for a motel. Luckily, from what I’ve unwillingly observed, pigeon foreplay is pretty much for the birds, so it wasn’t all that long before the hope of tomorrow was watching me again.
But their bored faces made it clear that after the avian live porno show, an illustration of how to cross-reference a note card was an anticlimax in several senses.
“Then we break the topic down into its questions, its subcategories, so that when we find an interesting tidbit, we can decide where it belongs, and can see where we need more information…” My voice dribbled off, but the class didn’t seem to mind, so I stopped a moment and thought.
Unlike my students, I was really listening and hearing. My familiar detective-research paper analogy had suddenly struck me, and I mentally filled three-by-five cards, trying to put together my own clues.
Somebody coughed, and I returned to teaching, discussing coding the cards so they’d know who said what, then moved to coding cards for the sub-subjects on their outlines. “Say there’s a category called Arguments Against or Evidence Proving whatever—the existence of Atlantis, or Elvis, or reincarnation,” I said.
Evidence. What would go on those three-by-five cards? The book. The corpse. The bullet. The motive. The beatings of Lydia Teller.
I went on automatic pilot, answering a question, even making sense, I think; but my mind was now fixed on what had started this nightmare: the beatings of Lydia Teller and what might have ended it, the last beating of Lydia Teller.
At what point during the night of the murder had it happened? Lydia said that Neil’s lawsuit and Fay’s claims and Adam and Eve’s harassment pushed Wynn to the explosive point, that he hurt her. But she also said he wouldn’t do it in front of anybody. So she was beaten after they left, after she claimed to be locked upstairs.
Neither Neil, nor Fay, nor Adam and Eve had mentioned bruises, not even after the news said that Lydia Teller had often been victimized. Surely, even if everybody else were oddly oblivious, Eve Wholeperson would have seized on such an obvious case of brutality.
“Allow for surprises,” I told my class. “For information not on your outline, something you couldn’t have anticipated, something that doesn’t agree with what you thought was so. Be flexible.” There was a collective, tolerant sigh. The assumption that they would rush off to a dusky stack where they’d make discoveries in obscure texts was ludicrous, but we humored each other because we all knew it was an inflexible given of the curriculum that I present this to them.
They listened, their minds undoubtedly on tonight’s concert. And I spoke, my attention stuck on Lydia’s bruises.
Dead men don’t beat their wives. Wynn Teller had vented his frustration with his life, his double whammy of professional and personal pursuers, on Lydia, and then he’d been killed.
Somebody doubled back. Or somebody new entered.
Or, what made the most sense, Mackenzie had been right all along and Lydia, beaten and desperate, pulled her grandfather’s gun off the wall and well and truly ended her misery.
The class snickered. I realized my hand was up, the chalk still on the board where I’d written
Neil
and
Fay
with arrows pointing at them, and
hurt after?
and
lying?
For the rest of the hour, I tried not to chew gum and walk at the same time. Except when I kept teaching and looked out the window one more time. And again saw a woman with a royal-blue coat and a gray, unpretentious car, and all too probably, a gun in her black leather purse, waiting.
Waiting for me.
* * *
The Not-a-Garage Sale began its preview at the end of the school day. Philly Prep was justifiably afraid the students wouldn’t reenter the building on the weekend and would spend their allowances elsewhere. So Friday afternoon was dedicated to their wallets. To my astonishment, the students willingly accommodated this cynical ploy, behaving as if the sale were a treasure hunt. Tim Clark showed me his favorite earring—a fly-fishing lure—discovered at the sale a year ago. Mirri Langdorf said this was where she’d found her Spanish mantilla. “My signature accessory,” she added with pride. Sackett Smith had discovered an ancient camera with a bellows. It didn’t work, he explained, but it was so radically great he kept it on the dashboard of his car.
The book stall was to the right of music, another lonely category where round black disks of varying rpms waited in vain to be adopted. Records and books had become collectible oddities. I had become old.
I had little to do besides watch America’s youth find accoutrements, which I did for as long as I could. Then I decided I had more important things to stare at, like Lydia, presumably still out there waiting for me. I asked Charlie Pickles, a sort of seller at large, to cover for me.
I peeked into the office as I passed it. Helga, still at work, gazed affectionately at her computer screen. Maybe she was delving in that mysterious
ogzmic
file of hers. I turned the corner toward the staircase and, for perhaps the first time in history, my reaction to Helga was a smile.
But a short, aborted one that turned into a choke and came out a rasp that had meant to be a scream. I was hammer-locked from behind. I kicked backward—with difficulty, as I was on the first step—and twisted my entire body away. The hand let go and I fell, hard, onto the steps.
“Did I scare you?” Neil Quigley looked surprised and goofier than ever, holding a Mylar balloon that said IT’S A BOY!
“Congratulations,” I gasped. My feet were every which way and my rear end hurt. I stood and limped to the marble foyer, from which I could more easily escape.
He reached in his topcoat pocket. I put my hands up over my face and pushed at the glass inner door. “Here,” he said, putting something in my hand. I stared at a thick cigar that you just knew was particularly odiferous. It had a wide baby-blue band repeating the balloon’s message.
If you ask me, there’d be more justification for exclamation points and amazement if there were a greater variety of possibilities. If there were a chance of giving birth to a halibut, a Corinthian pediment, or even a full-grown man. But with a fifty-fifty probability, a mere two choices, why such astonishment? “And the baby’s at Jefferson,” I said.
“What?”
“Where’s your baby?”
“Did you expect me to have him on me?” He patted his pockets and laughed nervously. I got some satisfaction because my question apparently frightened him the way various characteristics of his did me.
“Well?”
“I expected you to ask his name, or his size, or how Angela’s doing,” he said.
“Well, I’m asking
where
Angela’s doing.”
“She’s still in the hospital.” He looked very troubled.
“How come Jefferson?” I backed another step away.
“Mandy?”
“We went to Lankenau. You had me drive you there. It’s not even in the same direction. How come?”
“Oh, boy,” he muttered. He offered me another cigar, but I declined. “I’m embarrassed. Her allergy doctor’s at Lankenau, and her first G-Y-N was there, and I drove her there a million times, but two months ago, when things got complicated, she switched to a specialist at Jefferson and she took the bus for those appointments, and yesterday I…a failure of memory?” His shoulders slumped, so that with his balloon, he looked like a sad clown painting on velvet. “I acted like a dope, didn’t I? And it was worse after you left—you should have seen me insisting she was there, practically storming the maternity ward.” He laughed, then grew solemn. “Angela didn’t think it was funny. How Daddy Went to the Wrong Hospital is going to be the first story she tells the kid.”
As soon as he said the word
daddy,
he blushed. “He’s a cute little guy,” he added softly, and he blinked hard.
I knew that daddies could kill, but the odds were against a sentimental one carrying a Mylar balloon, who couldn’t remember which direction to head under stress. Still. “What color is your car?” I asked. His cohort might have been a clear thinker.
Neil’s turn to back off. “Green, same as ever. Do other men have their cars painted while their wives are in labor? Is it a custom I forgot?” He smiled nervously.
I smiled for real for the fist time.
“Look,” he said, “I can’t help noticing that bruise on your forehead. What happened? Has a doctor seen it? You’re—forgive me but you’re acting pretty weird.”
“Me? I’m fine, but you’re pretty weird, not even telling me his name and who he looks like and whether he has hair and how much he weighs and how Angela’s doing.”
The baby had amassed an amazing amount of statistical data in his two hours of life. I aimed Neil toward the gym, fleetingly remembering that I had meant to do a Lydia check, but deciding that if she was freezing out there, she could continue to do so. There was a gratifying burst of applause when Neil entered carrying his balloon.
I returned to selling books and watching the new father hand out cigars. I’m glad it wasn’t Neil, I thought as I transacted a sale. I always knew it couldn’t have been. But of course, I had also always known it couldn’t have been Lydia, because it was too horrible to think of a life so trapped that the only way out leads to prison. I didn’t want it that way, but I was beginning to accept it.