"Then all those shattered windows in that poor woman's house were from a Little League team run amok?"
"Lovey, I must apologize for all this," Kay broke in.
"No need, my dear. No need. I must say that I now understand why your dear mother was so relieved when you married Major Armstrong. It is so nice of you to remember your friends who have not been as fortunate as yourself in their climb up the ladder."
"You old bitch!" Kay snapped. Now it was Kay's turn to get angry. She opened her mouth to say more, but turned on her heel and ran out the door into the rain.
"Kay! Wait!" I ran after her, grabbing her elbow as I caught her at the corner.
"Take your hands off me! Don't you dare touch me!" She whirled around to slap my face. I deflected the blow with my arm. "I don't know what you're talking about, or what information you have, but you weren't on a story, Marcus. We were having lunch, plain and simple. Do you have to ruin everything?"
"Kay, I'm sorry, it's just that—" People on the street stopped to stare at us. I glared at them, until they averted their eyes and began walking again.
"Lovey's probably on the phone to my mother, right now." Kay ran her fingers through her red hair nervously. "By the time I get home tonight, Mother will have the whole story built up into some torrid affair! Do you realize what you've done?"
"I could live with an affair."
The force of her slap knocked me back a step. The rain on my face made it sting even more.
"Don't be so stupid, Marcus!"
"Jesus Christ, I was only kidding!"
"I wasn't! Get the hell away from me!" She turned sharply and began to run.
"Kay, please!"
Sensing I was close on her heels, she quickly hailed a taxi.
"Wait!"
The cab slid into traffic even before she had the door closed, the driver glaring at me as if to say, “Don’t try anything buddy.”
Thunder rolled overhead, sending the rain down in sheets. I pulled the collar of my raincoat close around my neck and walked miserably back to my car.
* * *
That night, I knocked on her door. The rain was still pouring. My head was drenched, and icy drops were running down my neck. I watched through the door as Kay tied a light seersucker robe around her as she came down the wide mahogany stairs. Her red hair was pulled back from her face with a brown plastic barrette. She recognized me in the cut glass of the heavy door and jerked the door open angrily.
"What do you want now, Marcus?"
"I wanted to apologize for the scene with Lovey McNair."
"You got me out of the tub." She ushered me in. "You could have called."
"I had to apologize to you in person."
The shell of The Perfect Hostess enveloped her. "I'm sorry. I'm not being very polite. I was pretty horrible, too. Give me your coat." She pointed toward two French doors to the right of the stairway. "The living room is right through there. Go on in and sit down. I'll hang this up where it can dry and make you an old-fashioned. That will warm you up."
"Sounds wonderful."
I made myself comfortable on the Federal blue couch, flanked on each end by antique butler tables and matching brass lamps. Two leather, wingback chairs sat squarely facing the couch from each side of a pale blue rug. In front of me, a polished Queen Anne table held a model jet fighter and an oversized book on Air Force history. Overhead, a large, restored crystal chandelier illuminated a black marble fireplace ornate with scrolls and swans.
The walls above and beside the mantel were filled with the major's achievements. Military medals were interspersed with photographs of his glory days on the Air Force Academy football team. Apparently the only thing the major needed to do was flash his perfect teeth and boyish good looks, and somebody at the Pentagon rewarded him for it. There were plaques from former squadrons and a photo of him shaking hands with Ronald Reagan, one gunslinger to another.
It was perfect, all too perfect, and as cold as the cover of a design magazine.
"My God," I said to myself.
"That's what Paul calls his ‘I love me’ wall. Impressive isn't it?" Kay padded across the living room and handed me my drink.
"I didn't come here to talk about Major Golden Boy."
"Paul. His name is Paul. He is not his rank." Kay curled into the opposite corner of the couch, playing with the maraschino cherry in her glass.
"Yes, well, I came to apologize for what I said to you about having an affair. If you want me to apologize to McNair, I'll do that too."
Kay sipped her drink silently, shifting herself more comfortably into the blue corner.
"Would you like to try it again sometime?” I continued, desperately. “We'll do it right: dinner, not lunch, someplace out of town if you like. I'll make sure McNair is nowhere near the place, before we even walk in."
Kay's blue eyes softened. "Thank you. I accept the apology and the dinner invitation. Paul's letter had me a bit off center. I apologize for my behavior, too."
"Apology accepted. So what did the letter say, anyway?"
"I'm not ready to talk about that, just yet." Kay chased the cherry around the bottom of her drink, with her index finer. She wiggled her shoulders further back into the blue cushions, exposing the top of her bare thigh, and sucked the alcohol from her finger. My heart caught in my throat.
"Are things not well between you and the major?"
Kay ignored my question. "How's Jess?"
Once again, I let her lead me. "He's fine. He was surprised, when I told him that photo was you."
"I'm sure he was." Her voice low, Kay leaned forward and gently brushed my cheek with her lips.
I drew her to me and returned the kiss, once, twice, three times, savoring the taste of whiskey on her lips. When she didn't push away from me, I unfastened her barrette and buried my face in her hair, drinking in her sweet, clean perfume, exalted she would still want me.
"Hold me."
I couldn't believe it. Here was the dream I had waited for so long. I was holding my long-ago Kay James in my arms again. She tightened her hold around my neck, bringing her body completely against mine. We kissed once more.
"We shouldn't do this," she whispered into my neck.
"I know." I kissed her forehead, then her cheeks, her chin, and the hollow of her neck. Gently, the seersucker fabric parted, and my hand slipped tentatively over her warm breast. Beneath my fingers, I could feel her nipple harden as Kay inhaled in pleasure. Here she was, in my arms, and she obviously wanted me.
A dam burst inside me, and guilt flooded in. Regretfully, I sat up and sighed.
"Would a happily married woman be doing this?" I whispered.
Kay opened her eyes and brushed a few stray hairs from her forehead. The lights from the chandelier shot sparkles from the diamonds in her wedding band. A wistful smile played across her lips.
"You're right. This is getting out of hand." Kay rose up on her elbow. "Let me get your coat."
I sighed again and picked up a small photograph from the end table beside me. It was the major, kneeling on the wing of his F-16, his red helmet under his arm, giving the photographer a thumbs-up.
What an all-American ego, I thought in disgust.
Kay returned with my coat. Without words, she pulled her barrette out of the couch and pinned her flaming hair back in place.
"I suppose I owe you another apology for acting like an animal—again?"
"No, we're both responsible for what went on here." Kay laid her cool hands on my cheeks. "There's a lot of upheaval in my life right now. It was good to just have you hold me."
"You're very precious to me, Kay."
"Does that mean we're still on for dinner?"
I smiled. "Sure."
I slipped out the door and into the night. The rain had stopped, and the full moon glowed silver through swiftly moving clouds. As Kay shut the door behind me, I heard a small voice:
"Mommy, who was that?"
"Nobody, honey. Now go back to sleep."
* * *
The most lasting memory of my father will always be his hands, big, thick, workingman's hands that always had grease under the nails and in the lines of the knuckles. One thick hand would sometimes squeeze my face; often it was the only physical contact he made with me, throughout my life. Sometimes those fingers squeezed my face in affection, although it was in anger, more often than not.
There was the time I told him I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. His greasy hands squeezed my face so hard I thought my pudgy boyhood cheeks would kiss each other across my nose.
"I'll have no pansy-assed fairy writers in this house. You understand that, boy?"
Boy. That's all he ever called me. I guess he assumed that any creative endeavor indicated some sort of deviant sexual behavior and that his son would not be the real man his father wanted him to be. Continued threats were not enough to make me quit. From then on, I wrote in secret and hid my manuscripts under my mattress.
When I finished college and his garage became more successful, my father became a grudging contributor to the arts in our little town. His contributions were made in the same spirit that someone would contribute to cancer research to keep the disease from crossing his own threshold.
Both my parents were unschooled Kentuckians from the hills of Appalachia who moved up Route 23 North in search of work in southern Ohio. Neither of them graduated high school. Still, in spite of her abbreviated education, my mother loved Roman history. Its profound effect on her showed in her children's names: I was her only son, the philosopher-king, Marcus Aurelius Henning; my sister was Caesar's perfect wife, Calpurnia.
I was meant to be the family's success story. I wasn't, not in my father's eyes, anyway. I inherited my mother’s love of reading, words, and the glory that shone in history’s past. Poor math skills kept me out of the fields my father had chosen for me. I lasted one quarter as an accounting major and five weeks as an engineering major, before he gave up in disgust, and I changed to a double major in English literature and journalism, graduating with a cum laude diploma in my right hand and a job offer at a small Missouri daily newspaper in my left.
“You’ll never make any money,” he spat out at graduation. “I got kids straight out of high school mechanics programs making more dough in a week than you’ll ever see in a month.”
His disgust was never so vocal as the time I left Missouri. I would always be his personal failure, and nothing I could do, not even the story of a lifetime, would fix that. Spending my days as I did writing up poetry readings and engagements, I never would gain that.
* * *
My father’s assurance of my continuing failure still rang in my ears, as the next day's violent thunderstorms gave way to oppressive heat and outrageous humidity in Jubilant Falls. The editorial staff dragged through the day, with sweat running in rivulets down our faces and slowing the computer systems to a crawl. Jess wiped the moisture from his forehead and leaned over my desk.
He had all those good looks that ensured success: tall with high cheekbones, dark hair, perfect teeth, and a John Kennedy, Jr., poise and assurance that came from knowing you were the best there was, at least in your family's eyes.
New female reporters and staff members often swooned over him – his crackling gray eyes never missed a new haircut or a nice dress. Not that these compliments were any kind of a come-on; he was married to his high- school sweetheart, Carol. They had a daughter named Rebecca, and Jesse Foster Hoffman was as much a candidate for an interoffice romance as the Pope. Over lunch in the employee break room, I confided to him the details of my lunch with Kay, but not all of the details of my visit at her home. He didn’t respond, sitting and silently shaking his head as he chewed on his ham sandwich.
"You're not planning to see Kay again, are you?" he asked.
"What is it to you, if I do?"
"She's married, and her frigging husband is in the trenches someplace! If I knew some guy was dancing around Carol while I was gone, I’d—”
"Shit, Jess, keep your altar-boy self-righteousness to yourself! Kay is a consenting adult. If she doesn't want to see me again, I'm sure she'll tell me."
"If Kay were my wife..."
"You’d still be paying alimony! You just don't like her, pure and simple. If she were the Virgin Mary, you wouldn't like her."
"That's not it." The phone rang at the desk next to mine. Automatically, Jess answered it. "Newsroom, Hoffman. Yeah…just a minute…he's right here." He covered the mouthpiece with his hand. "It's Kay. For you."
"Speak of the devil," I smirked.
Jess rolled his eyes and handed me the phone.
I had no idea how my life was about to change.
Chapter 2 Kay
“Marcus, I have a client here that you might be interested in talking to."
Tapping my red fingernails on my desk blotter, I smiled at the ragged scrap of humanity sitting on the other side of my desk. Tucking an uncontrolled auburn curl behind my ear, I leaned the receiver against my shoulder.
"Oh, yeah?" Marcus asked, at the other end of the line.
"Her name is Elizabeth Kingston. She's been coming to the center for about six months now, and she's running into some trouble with her landlord that can't seem to get resolved."
"So? Tell her to get a lawyer."
“Legal Aid hasn't got the staff, and she hasn't got the money to pay for one."
"So, what's the problem?"
"She said she can't get repairs done, and she's concerned for her kids."
"This isn't my normal beat, Kay."
"I don't have anyone else to call."
"Okay, I'll be right over."
The phone went dead.
It had taken me too long to cultivate this thin veneer of serenity. I had a client who needed help from a system that couldn't or wouldn’t give it to her, and Marcus was my last hope. I couldn't let all those turbulent feelings for him come bubbling out into the sunlight, even for the short time Paul was overseas. Exposure was too dangerous.
People die from exposure, too.
I learned that later.
* * *
I introduced Marcus to Elizabeth, who only nodded in greeting. As he took her hand, Marcus blanched briefly at the diagonal scar running from her nostril to her upper lip. I was used to her strange appearance: her bony arms, the Goodwill store clothing, and stringy hair. But each time I saw other people's reaction to her, my heart broke all over again, and I knew I had to help her.
"Elizabeth has had a substandard repair of a congenital harelip and has had no speech therapy." It was hard for me to lay the facts of this poor woman's life out on the conference table as if she were a cadaver under examination. "Elizabeth, tell Marcus about the problem you're having at your apartment."
I heard her words as if for the first time, each honking sibilant making her words almost unintelligible. She couldn't make the system work for her; the system wouldn't take time to decipher her mangled language.
"I'm sorry. Can you repeat that?" Marcus asked.
I cringed.
Oh, God, Marcus, please. Don't.
She slammed a bony hand down on the arm of the conference room chair. Once again, the words were honking and incomprehensible to him. I knew what she was saying: “Rats. I’ve got rats in my apartment.”
She ran her fingers across the table.
"Rats?" he asked, taking over the interview.
She grinned toothlessly at his comprehension.
"Have you contacted your landlord?"
She nodded.
"How many times have you talked to him about the situation?"
She held up four fingers.
"And he has not taken any action? No traps? No exterminators?"
She shook her head.
"How do they get into your apartment?"
I cringed again as she spoke even slower; Marcus still couldn’t understand.
"You mean the window is…is broken? And the rats climb through the open window to get into your apartment?"
Elizabeth nodded, relief crossing her bony face that someone had finally understood.
Marcus looked across the table at me. "Absentee slumlord?" he asked.
"I'm not sure,” I replied. “She's got more to tell you."
Elizabeth threw me a hurtful look.
Further conversation was slow difficult work. Elizabeth had to repeat answers three or four times before Marcus could understand what she was trying to tell him. I refrained from helping, just so he could see how helpless she really was.
She managed to tell him the toilet didn’t work, that she’d contacted her landlord on multiple occasions, but had received no response. Her status as a welfare mother of two children didn’t seem to carry much weight with getting things done.
As the strange, halting conversation ended, the sound of Marcus's pencil scratching on his notebook echoed through the room.
"You've got to help her." I said. “Nobody else will.”
He sighed and nodded. "Let's go take a look at your place, Elizabeth. I think we may have a story."
* * *
Elizabeth lived on one of the dark, twisted, south side streets, in an old clapboard house divided up into four apartments. The sagging steps creaked painfully, as Marcus, Elizabeth, and I climbed to the porch. Boards were missing between the graying slats. Like old soldiers who could no longer make formation, they fell at an angle into the crawl space below.
Elizabeth opened the front door, and I gagged at the stench of urine in the hallways. By the time we got to her second-floor apartment, the stench of human waste was even stronger, bringing water to my eyes.
Marcus noted everything he saw, rapidly firing questions at my client as we worked our way up the stairs. I had never seen him work; except for the few times he covered one of Mother's society functions. Now, an intimidating ferocity enveloped him. If he had any sympathy for Elizabeth, it wasn't showing as he shot rapid-fire questions her way.
“Does everyone have problems with their plumbing? Does it always smell this bad? How come you never spoke up before now? What was the deciding factor in coming forward?”
Marcus seemed to understand her speech now.
“I got drunks hanging around. They pee on the porch at night. It always, always smells bad. Nobody here’s got the nerve to go up against the landlord, we stays quiet and pays rent,” she answered.
“What made you decide to come forward?” he repeated.
“A rat walked across my baby’s bed one night. I said I wasn’t going to live like this anymore.”
Elizabeth unlocked the ragged door to her apartment, and two little faces appeared.
"This here's Aaron. This 'un's Priscilla."
The children were fairly clean, considering their abysmal surroundings. The boy looked like he was about eight, with dishwater blonde hair and hard, blue eyes. I knew from the orphans I had worked with when Paul and I were first in Korea it would be a battle to keep Aaron from a life on the streets, if we didn't start now. Elizabeth depended on him too much, and it showed. It would be long before he found an easy way to bring money into the household through selling drugs or theft. He’d be in the justice system and his mother would see him only on prison visiting days, if we didn’t do something soon.
Priscilla, with her curly, black hair and her honey-colored skin, was probably about kindergarten age. Neither child spoke, as we entered.
Their surroundings weren't fit for a dog.
Elizabeth had taped cardboard over two, broken windows in the front room; the paint was peeling, but there were scratch marks where she had attempted to scrub them clean. In the hallway where Aaron slept on a folding cot, the bare brown wall was exposed, but again showed where Elizabeth had tried to clean it. The battered linoleum showed the same attention.
Priscilla had the luxury of the one bedroom, but the one broken window was taped over with cardboard. Rats had eaten through a corner.
Marcus roamed the apartment quickly.
"Is he from the welfare office?" Aaron asked, suspiciously.
Elizabeth shook her head.
"Ssshhh."
"You say you have contacted your landlord repeatedly, and he has refused to make repairs?" Marcus asked sharply.
She nodded.
"Who owns this place? Where do you pay your rent?"
"I go to Detroit Street, the big brick building with all the winders."
"You don't know the number?"
"Don' look for no numbers. It’s next to Hawk’s." Her chin lifted defensively. "I give my money to the man sitting behind the desk. Four doors from the elevator."
"Do you have a receipt from the last time you paid your rent, Elizabeth?" I asked. "Can I see it?"
She fished through a pocket and handed me a tattered receipt.
"Aurora Development Corporation is your landlord?" I asked. "That's one of the biggest businesses in town."
"It's right downtown." Marcus looked over my shoulder. "Close to the paper."
He took the receipt from me. I felt his hand brush mine, and I closed my eyes as his familiar scent encircled me.
"Can I keep this?" he asked Elizabeth.
She nodded.
"Thanks. Sit tight, and either Kay or I will get back in touch with you. I need to get a photographer. C'mon Kay."
I took my client's bony hands in mine. "He's going to help you, Elizabeth. Right, Marcus?"
"I've got to get back to the newsroom. Let's go."
* * *
"What do you think?" I asked, as we drove through the twisted South Side streets.
"Well, the only thing standing in my way is Jess. He could give the story away to the crime reporter, John Porter, or he can give it to the city government reporter, Addison McIntyre, although I don't think he will. Or he can say the whole thing is not worth a story at all."
"He wouldn't!"
"He's the editor. He can do any damned thing he wants."
I looked over to see Marcus chewing the end of his pencil. "But I gave you the story and I want you to do it!"
"Who owns Aurora Development?"
"I don't know. I know they also developed all those God-awful, garish homes on the north end of town. I didn’t know they had any rentals, much less anything that run down."
"Another option is to sit on it for a day until we find out. It's close, a couple blocks down from the paper," he mused. "Basically, what happens with these things is that a judge establishes an escrow account, and the tenant pays the rent into the account until the repairs are made. I could walk down tomorrow and pay a visit. I could present the problem to the rental agent, and everything would be taken care of. A place that big doesn't want publicity like that."
"What if it doesn't work?"
"Then Jess can't turn down a front-page story, even if I've done all the leg work."
"What if Jess doesn't think it's a story? What happens then? She's absolutely helpless. She can't read anything above the most basic kids' books yet, and she can barely talk. If the system won't help her, and the paper won't expose that, she's back to square one."
Mother's words echoed in my head: "Kay, I don't understand why you waste your time with those kinds of people."
"Because I'm here to make a difference," I replied. "Because I have so much, and they have so little."
"What are you doing tonight?" His question shook me from my thoughts.
"Why?"
"We can do something in the interim for her at least until Jess makes up his mind about the story. I can get a couple of bags of groceries together pretty easily."
"I have some hand-me-downs from the kids." I pulled Paul’s Porsche behind Marcus’s old Ford that was parked at the curb in front of the literacy center.
"They'll say we're getting too involved," Marcus whispered, as he leaned across the seat, close enough that I could smell his mix of cologne and cigarettes.
"Who cares?" I smiled, feeling pulled into his orbit.
"See you tonight, then?"
"Wouldn't miss it."
"Great." He winked and jumped out of the car.
A match dropped into the dark night of my soul, and I knew why I loved him all those years ago…and why I shouldn't go with him tonight.
* * *
What was it about me that always made me choose the wrong man?
Later that afternoon, I lay across my bed, amid newly laundered stacks of Andrew and Lillian's outgrown clothes. The kids were playing in the yard; their laughter, along with the repetitive folding, made me pensive and thoughtful.
First, there was that disaster with Grant, followed in a couple of years by another disaster, Paul. Of course, no one except me thought he was a mistake. Especially Mother.
"If this marriage ends in divorce, too, you'll only have yourself to blame," she had whispered the day of my wedding, as she pretended to fuss with my veil. "I am aware that we all make mistakes," she continued, her whisper loud enough to carry all the way to the altar. "And I am willing to completely forget that little to-do with Grant Matthews. But this, Kay! You couldn't have done better, even if I had picked him for you myself! If you do anything to ruin this marriage, there is something seriously wrong with you."
There’s nothing like a mother's love.
She made it sound as if I just bought the prize pig at the Plummer County Fair. Thank God an usher stepped in to escort her to her seat. I wanted to run from the church in tears. Maybe I should have.
Paul and I had met on a blind date in the officer's club at Symington Air Force Base, which sat across the county line in Evener County. We had been set up through a mutual friend of mine, Kate Miner, who worked civil service there. He had seen a photo of Kate and me – we were roommates at college – but I never knew what he looked like.
“It makes for a little suspense,” Kate had giggled. “Don’t worry, this guy’s an Adonis, a god. After all you’ve been through, I think you deserve one like this.”
I slipped into a seat, at a table in the darkened corner of the bar. In a few minutes, I saw blonde perfection in a flight suit break from the knot of uniformed men surrounding him at the bar and pull a photo from a pocket on the leg of his flight suit. Glancing at it, Michelob in hand he scanned the tables, and I waved. In two steps, he was beside me.
“Hello, I’m Paul Armstrong,” he said, as he offered a strong hand. He had green eyes sharp as an eagle’s and an air of untapped strength and danger that made me weak in the knees, even though I was sitting down. “You must be Kay James, Kate’s friend.”
I don’t remember what blather had escaped from my mouth. Something, no doubt, that had made me seem like I’d never spoken in English before, or was really in need of a brain transplant.
He had slid, panther-like, into the chair beside me. My eyes took in his perfectly sculpted face, his broad shoulders that held embroidered silver captain’s bars Velcroed on each shoulder, and broad chest with another patch with his name, Paul ‘Bear’ Armstrong.