The Cavanaugh Quest (8 page)

“Sure,” I said. “What is it?”

He spread the pages flat; black-and-white snapshots, some slightly yellowed, held in place by little black pasted-down corner pieces. I’d seen the album before, as a child, and later checking on pictures of my mother. Archie was not the dramatic type: He’d left her pictures where they’d always been, bearing her no grudges but merely glad to be rid of her.

“Pictures we took up at the lodge. All these fellows you see as old men now, me and the rest of them, this is the way we looked back in ’33, ’34. You were just getting yourself born, Paul.” He pointed to the first picture, upper left, left-hand page, and began telling me about them, identifying the men and what they were amusing themselves with on those long-ago summer days when they went up north to get away from it all.

I wasn’t really listening but I was getting enough, like background music, and I was thinking about the men. There was the picture of Hub with the slicked-back hair, the shadows on his face, the bony shoulders square and taut. Archie was smiling remotely, squinting from behind round, silver-rimmed spectacles, looking up from a book as he lay in a striped canvas chair.

Ole Kronstrom and Jonathan Goode bulked large and white in swimming suits which clung tightly to their wet bodies. They stood in the sand near the water, fishing poles in their hands, shadows black on the beach.

Martin Boyle in a sweater and a white shirt stood beside a four-door Pontiac sedan, his foot on the running board, a hand raised in salute to the photographer. A dog of no discernible known breed stood at his feet, staring up at him. Timothy Dierker sat behind the wheel, framed in the window, his face in motion, mouth open, saying something. James Crocker, the football star overflowing his trousers ten years later, looked down into the camera from atop a ladder where he was painting a wall of the lodge. He waved his paintbrush, carelessly letting white paint drip down the handle of the brush.

They appeared to be men from another age, another century; I didn’t know anyone who went off that way anymore, hunting and fishing and away from their wives. I didn’t know men who gathered in groups of any. kind; a night out with the boys, it seemed an anachronism, the way nobody wrote like Robert Benchley anymore. It seemed unbelievable that those men could still be alive. They looked out from an innocent, pre-World War II past, sealed away like relics in a tomb. They didn’t look curious or amused or even very intelligent. But they did look privileged, almost without care, in a way that was unheard of anymore. Arrogance of a subtle sort; the arrogance of innocence.

“Why are you laughing, Paul?”

“I’m not. It just makes me smile, that’s all. Long time ago. People looked different then. Not just their clothing. The people themselves. Do you see it?”

He shook his head. “How can I? I’m one of them.”

He slipped a finger under the next page and slowly turned it over. More pictures: the lodge, the boys.

“Do you still go up there?”

“Hell, no,” he scoffed. “My God, I outgrew that a long time ago …”

“Lost interest in hunting and fishing?”

“I never was much for that stuff. Did you ever go fishing, Paul? Sitting in a boat in the middle of a lake? It’s like
An American Tragedy.
You begin to understand why Montgomery Clift wanted to push Shelley Winters out of the boat. He was bored.” He sat down in the captain’s chair by the typewriter table. “I used to take books up there, read all the stuff there was never time to read at home. Sinclair Lewis, John Galsworthy, Willa Cather, got hooked on S. S. Van Dine and Agatha Christie …” He sighed, reaching for the cigar humidor on the corner of the desk. “It was really quite a civilized group at the beginning, surprisingly so, I suppose.” He gave in and withdrew a cigar, stared at it appreciatively.

“It stopped being civilized?”

“Rowdy. Predictably, the jolly boys decided that what the hell was the point of getting away from it all if you behaved yourself? So a good deal of drinking was getting done and that was terribly boring and then the stag films with the naked guys in the black socks and Lone Ranger mask and the inevitable horsing around with ladies of the night … also boring. I was trying to get away from women and now, all of a sudden, they were talking about importing them.” He lit a cigar. “And that was when I bowed out. Later we moved to Chicago and that was that.” He beckoned for the album and I handed it to him. “I’m not a sentimental man,” he said, “but I get a little twinge when I see these pictures. No point in denying your humanity, is there? We were a lot younger then and time has had a go at us since … I can remember the days up there, cold beer and a good book and lying in the sun. Well, you can’t get ’em back once they’re gone. As I suspect you’re discovering, my boy.” He looked down at the album. “It was a nice lodge, big fireplace, lots of wicker furniture, big old oscillating fans on tops of bookcases, nice screened-in porch, rocking chairs … Kept it nice and clean. That’s what she did.” He put his finger on a group picture, a brunette standing on the porch with the men grouped somewhat formally by her side. She looked as if she’d been taken by surprise, hustled out of the kitchen in her apron and snapped abruptly before she’d slid her public face into position. Archie was at the far left, looking away from the happy scene. Tim Dierker was smiling stiffly next to the woman, looking as if he were afraid he might touch her accidentally. The men all looked a bit self-conscious but the woman had a reserved, boys-will-be-boys expression of tolerance. She had an oval face and a widow’s peak pointing at a straight, handsome nose.

“Who was she?”

“I can’t remember her name. She came to the lodge from the town and kept house while we were there, did the dishes, got rid of the empties, generally tidied up.” He closed his eyes and leaned back. “Nope, I can’t remember her name. But it was a long time ago, Paul. Almost as long as you’ve been alive. So why should I remember?”

“Who took the picture?”

He looked at it. “Must have been Ole. He’s the only one of us not in the picture.”

I decided to quit fighting it and go he down in a lawn chair. But I stopped at the French window. Archie was putting the album back on the shelf.

“I understand you saw her last week.”

“Who?”

“Kim. Blankenship’s wife.”

“Yes, I did. Playing tennis with what’s-his-name, the pro at the club. She was giving him a run for his money.”

“Has she changed much?”

“From when?”

“I don’t know—from when you first saw her?”

“Who knows? I saw her often enough so that any change was a gradual one. But she’s not the kind of woman who lets herself go. Minimal change, I’d say.”

When I woke up, the sun had slid well below the treetop level and the long shadows had a furry purple color, like giant caterpillars stretched out across the lawn. I was stiff and had a headache. There was a green light hanging in the evening down by a boathouse. The days were getting shorter as August pressed on. I went inside. Julia was drinking iced tea in the long living room, curled at one end of a pale-gray modern sofa. The only light came from the see-through glass ginger jar beside her. Dusk had settled across the room and crickets made the only sound. She looked up and smiled faintly.

“Feel better?” she asked. She put her book down; it dealt with the peculiarly successful marriage between Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West.

“Just a little worse, actually.”

“Iced tea in the pitcher on the cart.”

I poured a tall glass and added lemon and sugar, slid into a chrome-and-leather director’s chair. My mouth tasted like an army had used it for a latrine all evening.

“Archie’s gone. His Sherlock Holmes meeting.”

“Right.” I drank some iced tea. “What about Kim? What do you think? Was she a monster?” I was too tired to chat.

“Well, yes and no, Paul.”

“Come on, Julia, what the hell does that mean?”

“Everybody’s a monster to someone. Don’t you think? And everybody has his own monster. So, yes and no.”

“Why did he kill himself, then?”

“Love or money, those are the usual reasons, aren’t they?”

“But which?”

Julia shrugged. “Why not ask Kim?”

After I popped three Excedrin I kissed her forehead and flung myself recklessly into the hot night.

D
ARWIN MCGILL WAS A HANDSOME
man but something had gone wrong in the vastness behind his large brown eyes. His skin looked like a very expensive piece of luggage, dark brown from the sun and unnaturally smooth, but puffed out from too much time spent in the bar at Norway Creek, which was where I found him. The room was dim and almost empty with the big
Casablanca
ceiling fans slowly rotating above us and the doors thrown open to the patio, pool, and putting green beyond. A few members sipped at tall ones in frosted glasses outside and a couple of teenagers splashed in the pool, the underwater lights casting ominous shadows across their faces and flinging rippling shadows against the thick oaks bordering the golf course. McGill looked up as I sat down on the stool beside him, nodded, crooked a finger at the bartender.

“Jack,” he said, “another gimlet for me and …” He glanced at me.

“Gin and tonic,” I said, and Jack went away. It was cool in the bar and the sweat on my neck was drying. “How’s it going, Darwin?”

“The way it always goes,” he said grimly, a slight slur in his speech. “Spend all day in the sun chasing whitey, get too damn tired and dehydrated for a man my age, and take all night replacing the sweat with gin.”

“You’re just down,” I said. “You’re in fantastic shape.”

“Bullshit.” He frowned, rattled the remains of ice cubes in his glass while waiting for the fresh one. “Bad news today, I’ve got good reason to be down … Liver’s gone bad, Paulie, and you know what that means. Doctor tried to break it gently. Botched it, of course.” He sighed and waited while Jack put our drinks down on club coasters. “I cried for thirty-five minutes and then gave a lesson at eleven o’clock. He said I didn’t have to cut out the booze—it wouldn’t make much difference one way or the other—but a bit of moderation might be in order.” He gave me a sour little grin. “How can men be doctors, having to give people the bad news?”

“Well, they get to give them the good news, too,” I said.

But he was in a mood and not to be cheered; was it as bad as he seemed to think? I’d always found him a jock, utterly outside of my sphere of caring, but it was disheartening to hear the dribs and drabs of his story while my mind was full of Blankenship and Kim. My mind wandered, with my eyes, across the room with its glossy tables and padded, leather-backed chairs, the potted palms, the dusty Moroccan architecture, all arches and whatnot. Anne and I had finished more evenings in the room than was good for us, a fact which put us well into the company of so many of our friends whose marriages had come undone.

“My wife has left me, y’know. Called me a chaser, called me a cradle robber. Said I’d be hanging about school yards and offering them candy soon. I couldn’t believe my ears, the stupid woman.” He yawned. “I’ll never forgive her for leaving me, for beating me to it. She was a mistake from the beginning … You’re not married anymore, are you?”

“Nope.”

“This place is turning into a goddamn singles bar,” he reflected. “The only married people are the old ones.” An eye gleamed at me. “Do you figure there’s a lot of wife swapping or ex-wife-swapping going on here?”

“My God, I don’t know. I sure as hell don’t want a wife, my own or anyone else’s.”

He clasped my arm. “You tell ’em, Paulie.” He sipped his drink and added sorrowfully, “I spend most of my time in the pro shop now, nothing to go home to, not even an argumentative bitch. Funny how you can miss even a bitch …”

McGill’s relationship with his wife had been stormy for as long as I could remember, something the members sometimes chuckled over. She was always accusing him, not only in private, of messing about with the women and girls he coached. She may well have had grounds, too, but no one ever made a scandal and Darwin inevitably rode out any marginal squalls. If he hadn’t been such a fine player and teacher, he would probably have been fired; he was good, though, and personally well liked, so he survived the years. He must have been fifty-five.

“What do you know about Kim Roderick?” I asked. “You taught her the game, didn’t you?”

He nodded, glass to his lips. “She picked it up quick and kept getting better. If she were fifteen years old today, what with all the indoor courts and improved competition, she might have made the tour, the Slims or something. TV would have picked up on her because she’s so pretty, and she’s got the personality to win, kind of a Rosemary Casals game, short but strong, good musculature, hits a big overhead, death on lobs.” He was talking like a pro now and I could see his mind recalling her making the shots. “Not too fast but she gets into good position, goes for the winners, very fast reflexes. And on top of that she’s a fucking killer. She’s in her mid-thirties now but she’s still got that nasty quality … a lousy loser, let me tell you.”

“You still play with her?”

“Yeah, matter of fact, I do. She beat me last week, ran me back and forth all day, wore me out, and then just beat hell out of me. I know exactly what Riggs felt like in the Astrodome … The expression on her face never changed, it was like she was doing an exercise. I’ve known women who screwed that way, mechanically, never show the slightest emotion.”

We were on our next drink and the mood was right. “Did you ever sleep with her?”

“Oh, hell, no—not for want of trying, though. Hell, Paul, you know how it is, she worked for me, I saw a lot of her every day, I couldn’t help putting a little move on her every now and then. You really can’t blame me, can you? That’s one of the best things about a job like this. Then, before you know it, it’s your life, not just your job, and there’s nothing you can do about it and your liver gives out …”

“What was she like then back when you were making your moves?”

Darwin McGill’s hair was dark and wavy, flecked with gray, and he slid strong dark fingers through it like an old movie star. He grinned, remembering, and shook his handsome head, flashed the white teeth.