Tiny Little Thing (27 page)

I’m going to leap off the ledge, and I don’t give a damn what lies beneath.

I stick my key in the lock and push it open. A light switches on in the living room, to the right of the hall.

“Tiny, my dear.”

My father-in-law steps through the archway into the entrance hall, followed by Dr. Keene, whose face hangs downward with professional regret.

“Thank God,” says Mr. Hardcastle.

T
he air was even colder than Cap imagined, as he stepped out through the screened porch to the soft sand. He wished maybe he’d stopped to make that coffee after all, but how could you make a decent cup of joe with no electricity, no hot water, and last year’s leftover grounds crusted at the bottom of the can? They’d stop to eat on the way back out. There must be someplace convenient to eat breakfast between here and the Massachusetts Turnpike. They’d take the Mass Pike to Albany and consult a map. Whether to head in a southerly route or stick to the north. Mount Rushmore or the Grand Canyon.

He climbed up the dunes. His feet sank deep into the cold sand, numbing his skin. The sunrise had spread across the horizon now, gold-tipped pink against the washed-out sky, filling the beach with liquid new light. He searched for Tiny’s blanketed shape at the edge of the surf, the small fog of her cigarette, but there was nothing there.

Just the ocean rolling in, wave after wave.

A surge of unreasonable panic overtook him: Could she swim? Had a rogue wave overtaken her somehow? Or had she walked in deliberately, weighed down by the woolen blanket, for some buried reason that Cap, in all the raw and tender discovery of last night, was unable to plumb?

But then he saw her footsteps, hollowed into the sand, heading to the right in a straight, purposeful line.

He scrambled over the crest of the dunes and down to the harder sand of the beach itself. And, yes, there she was, at the end of that long straight line of footsteps, standing now before the house that belonged to his grandmother, the Big House, the one that would pass down to his uncle Franklin and then to his cousin Frank, the heir apparent, future head of the family, who was getting married to a Park Avenue heiress in two or three weeks.

No doubt Tiny was familiar with houses like this, big shingled colonials with sun porches at either end and spacious terraces out back made of Connecticut bluestone. She could appreciate the multitude of chimneys, the elegant weathering of the shingles, the white-ribbed symmetry of the shutters. The understated scale of the place, so that you didn’t quite realize how big it was until you walked through the front door and stood in the entrance, and the generous dimensions of hallway and stairway, of the drawing room (to the right) and the dining room (to the left) stretched out around you.

Not that his mother’s house was shabby, not at all. It was spacious and polished, well upholstered and well equipped. More livable, really; more like a real family summered there, and not a public one. But nothing like the Big House, because his mother was only a daughter and Caspian only a lesser cousin.

Tiny stood before the Big House like a connoisseur, motionless, taking in every detail. She took in a last draw of her cigarette and dropped it into the sand next to her feet. The blanket had slipped below her shoulders, which were bare. He wanted to come up behind her and put his arms around her waist and kiss those bare shoulders, and then pull her into the sand and make love to her right there, on the blanket, in the sunrise.

But before he could reach her, Tiny herself turned in his direction, and the expression on her face startled him.

“What’s the matter?” he called out.

“You knew!” she screamed. She clutched the blanket at her breast with both hands. “You
knew
!”

“Knew what?”

She let go of the blanket with one hand and gestured to the house. “Franklin’s house! His grandmother’s house! You
brought
me here! You brought me
back
to them! You’re
one
of them!”

He planted his feet in the sand and stared at her, dumbfounded. The reddish strands in her hair, lit by the sunrise. The panicked width of her eyes. Her pale lips. He thought, I can make sense of this. I can figure this out.

“Did you think I wouldn’t recognize this place, in the dark? Why didn’t you just take me to Brookline and deliver me like a package?”

Brookline. Franklin. Grandmother.

Wedding. In two or three weeks, he couldn’t remember exactly. At St. James’s on Madison Avenue, reception to follow at the Metropolitan Club. To a well-bred girl from one of the best New York families.

To Christina Schuyler.

“How much did they pay you?” she screamed. “Did they give you permission to sleep with me first? Do they know about
that
, Caspian? Or is that our little secret?”

The pieces of sunrise broke apart from the sky and fell to the sand around him. Above the quiet roar of the ocean came a new noise, a different roar, that of a well-tuned engine revving its way carefully along a narrow road, and four tires crackling against the gravel.

Tiny shrugged the blanket back around her shoulders and turned her face to the circular drive before the Big House, half of which was just visible around the corner of the sun porch.

Cap followed her gaze to a bright yellow roadster, which rounded the end of the oval and stopped at the verge next to the ocean path. Without having laid eyes on it before, he knew the car belonged to Frank. Fast, sleek, elegant, well-bred. A suitable car for an heir apparent. For a prince in waiting.

But the figure that rose up from the driver’s side didn’t belong to Franklin S. Hardcastle, Jr. No flash of golden hair glinted in the sun, no broad white-shirted shoulders propped open the door. Instead the hair was dark, like Tiny’s, and the shoulders were covered by a navy-blue jacket that Cap knew, without being close enough to see, was made of fine wool bouclé and trimmed in white.

“Tiny!” called Mrs. Schuyler, across the new dune grass and the untouched sand. “Thank God.”

T
he photograph on the front page of
The Boston Globe
is enough to rend your heart, if you have the kind of heart that isn’t pickled in vodka and finished off with a squeeze of lime.

NO
IMPROVEMENT
YET
IN
CONDITION
O
F
CANDIDATE
’
S
WIFE
,
reads the sorrowful headline, and below it, poor Franklin Hardcastle, Jr., sits in a hospital waiting room, the really anodyne kind with the white walls and the beige plastic seats and the yellow plastic flowers. His blond head is cradled in his hands. His handsome face is craggy with worry. It looks as if some naughty newspaper photographer broke into the hospital wearing doctor’s scrubs, and snapped the devastated Frank unawares, but Mrs. Vivian Schuyler of Fifth Avenue, New York City, knows better than that. She wasn’t born yesterday. She flips right past the front page and keeps on going until she reaches the society column. The familiar names there are so reassuring. This is what’s permanent. This you can count on.

The taxi makes an abrupt right turn. Mrs. Schuyler looks up—she’s never troubled with motion sickness, not her—to find the neat white columns and tidy green lawn of the Woodbridge Clinic looming through the windshield. “Here already,” she says. “What a clever fellow you are.”

The driver grunts through his nose and stops under the porte cochere. Mrs. Schuyler hands him a worn ten-dollar bill and opens the door herself. A pair of flashbulbs explode nearby, but she’s been expecting them, and doesn’t flinch.

“Mrs. Schuyler! Mrs. Schuyler! Is there any update on your daughter’s condition?”

She takes off her sunglasses and smiles vaguely at the men and their cameras. “I’ve just come to visit my daughter. I know as much as you do.”

The portico is wide and clean, studded with trim potted boxwoods. Outside the shelter of the overhang, a few urns of scarlet geraniums soak up the August sunshine. The overall effect is one of precision and conspicuous good taste, the sort of place to which you could turn in relief when your well-bred daughter-in-law has a nervous breakdown, a fit of fashionable hysteria.

The driver places her small blue suitcase next to her feet. “Thank you,” she says, and lifts it up. “No need to wait.”

As she approaches the front door, the reporters fall back. No doubt they’ve been given a perimeter of decency to observe. From inside, she hears a faint pair of heated voices, not quite shouting. She puts her hand on the knob and swings it open, and another flashbulb pops over her shoulder.

The voices halt midargument. Mrs. Schuyler steps across the threshold, suitcase in hand, and looks from one astonished figure to the other, comely nurse and broad-shouldered visitor.

“Why, Major Harrison,” she says. “What a lovely surprise.”

•   •   •

A
s Mrs. Schuyler expects, the private waiting room of the Woodbridge is furnished with considerably more luxury than the public one, and Major Harrison fills every inch of it.

“Do stop pacing,” she says, taking out a cigarette. “I never figured you for the pacing type.”

“I’m not.” He stops and turns to her. A tasteful watercolor decorates the wall behind him, a beach at sunrise. The contrast between delicate beach and bristling soldier is almost too much to bear.

“I don’t suppose you have a light,” she says.

“They’re not allowing visitors. I’ve been arguing myself hoarse with that damned nurse. They’ve got her in a room somewhere, and only Frank and his father are allowed in. And that doctor, Dr. Keene. Pepper’s arguing with
him.
She talked her way past the nurse this morning and Keene had her thrown right back out.”

“That’s my girl.” She finds the lighter in her pocketbook and puts her cigarette between her lips. Major Harrison bends forward and takes the silver Zippo from her hand and lights her cigarette absently, without thought. “Thank you,” she says, just as absently.

He resumes his trailblazing on the Oriental rug. “I’m going crazy. They say they’ve had to sedate her, that she’s not even coherent. Something’s up, something’s happened, and I can’t figure out what. She called me two nights ago—”

“Called
you
?”

“Don’t strain yourself. There’s nothing going on. She trusted me, that’s all. I’d finally won
that
back, at least.” He braces his hands on his hips and speaks to the wall.

“Does her husband know?”

“What the hell am I supposed to say?
I was your wife’s lover, the one she ran away with for the night, right before your wedding? The one she ditched to marry you, after all?
”

“And you still love her.”

He sinks one hand in his short hair. “You have no idea.”

Mrs. Schuyler finds the ashtray on the corner table, hiding in the lee of an enormous vase of fragrant yellow roses. “She didn’t ditch you, Major Harrison. If that makes it any easier. During the drive back to Boston, she asked me if you’d known who she was, all along, and I said yes. I told her you’d already split for San Diego and left her to Frank.” She shrugs. “All my fault.”

She braces herself for an explosion of rage, but it doesn’t arrive. Instead he sighs, puts his hand at the back of his neck, and shakes his head. “Yeah, I figured.”

“Well, I thought I was doing the right thing. I thought it was for the best. I didn’t know you from Adam, and I knew Frank and the Hardcastles, and I knew Frank loved her, really loved her, and I thought she’d be happy. That she’d found her true calling. Of all my girls, she was the one who could pull it off.”

“So much for maternal instinct.”

“Indeed.” Mrs. Schuyler fills her lungs slowly and blows the smoke back out, taking time to think. Major Harrison shifts position to look out the window at the smooth green lawn, eyes keen, as if he’s scouting out some disputed enemy territory. She drops her gaze to his legs and tries to remember which one is human and which is machine. She certainly can’t tell from here. A strapping man, Major Harrison. Full of vengeful purpose right now, as still as marble, breathing in her smoke without a flinch. She can’t blame Tiny for wanting him. Why
has
he come back, after all? Just to screw his cousin’s wife again, or something more? What a mess, what a goddamned mess. She should have seen it coming. Tiny never was like her mother, was she? She can’t just conduct a nice simple pleasant affair, no one gets hurt, no one’s life turns upside down, no one gets dragged to the Woodbridge Clinic in the middle of a congressional campaign. “Do you have any idea what happened?” she asks. “When she called you the other night?”

“She was in Boston.” He pauses and looks at her at last, green-eyed and livid, and even she, Mrs. Vivian Schuyler of Fifth Avenue in New York City, whose taste runs elegantly to Russian princes and other women’s husbands, even
she
can’t quite keep her bones from shivering.

Major Harrison continues. “Pepper says someone was blackmailing her, someone who’d gotten their hands on some photographs I’d taken two years ago—”

“Oh, for God’s sake. You kept
photographs
?”

“These particular photographs I hadn’t even developed. I’d mailed the film back to her, to her apartment on Dartmouth Street, just before I left for San Diego.”

“Well, it so happens she never returned to that apartment, Major Harrison. She came straight back to New York with me until the wedding, and the movers boxed everything up and sent it to Newbury Street.”

“I see. An inside job, then. It figures. This goddamned family.”

Mrs. Schuyler leans back against the sofa and dangles her arm over the side. A pretty reproduction it is, a genuine imitation Chippendale, upholstered in green and smelling of old roses. The rest of the room follows suit. You might be in a Beacon Hill mansion, except that the furniture on Beacon Hill is the real deal, as old as ancestors. To be perfectly honest, Mrs. Schuyler is just beginning to prefer a cleaner look, herself. Just beginning to get a little impatient with the past, with all the old habits that have come so naturally before. She was born into a family much like the Schuylers—much like the Hardcastles, for that matter, at least the Hardcastles before Granny brought in all that lovely money—and she’s slept on some century-old bed or another since the hour she was born. (At home, of course, because hospitals, like sexual fidelity, were terribly middle-class in those days.) “Don’t worry,” she says. “I can deal with the blackmail later. The point is, why did she break down? There must have been something, something specific.”

“Frank was stepping out on her.”

“Well, of course he was. Did she think he wouldn’t?”

He makes a strange sound, a strangled groan, and whips around with astonishing agility to pound his fist against the wall. Not so hard that it goes through, but hard enough to make Mrs. Schuyler jump on her Chippendale cushion. He growls: “I could
kill
you all, sometimes. What you’ve done to her. All of you.”

“Do you think I don’t know that?”

“She just wanted to please you,” he says. “She just wanted you to be proud of her. Just a little bit, that’s all she asked.”

“I was proud. I am proud.” She turns away and stubs her cigarette into the tray, stubs and stubs, long after it’s gone out and turned blurry in her eyes.

“It’s my fault, too, I guess. I never fought back. I never should’ve let you drive away with her. I should’ve broken down the door.” He looks up, toward the door of the waiting room, which is closed. “I should break down her door right now. I don’t believe for a minute she’s sick. They’ve taken her, Mrs. Schuyler. That doctor, Dr. Keene. Pepper says he was at Cape Cod the day before, trying to get her to go away with him. Tiny knows something, and they don’t want her to talk.”

“Knows what?” says Mrs. Schuyler, as innocently as she can, though her heart is beginning to jump now, her heart is launching into her throat at the words
They’ve taken her
.

What, exactly, does Tiny know?

Major Harrison is staring into his large hands, which fist and flex before him, like the primitive brute he is. Not that Mrs. Schuyler minds a little primitivism, now and again. “I don’t know, exactly. But right before she left for Boston, she was asking me about—”

“About what?” Mrs. Schuyler untangles her long legs and leans forward on the sofa. “About what, Major Harrison?”

“There was an incident at Harvard, the year before she met Frank. Nobody ever talks about it. It was hushed up pretty fast. But I’ve had my suspicions.”

Mrs. Schuyler spreads out her hands, palms down, and stares at her fingers. She’s relieved to see they’re not shaking. Her gloves are still on, her white cotton summer gloves that protect her complexion from the sunshine. Liver spots are so unseemly, such a telltale sign that one’s not as young as one was. That one’s charms are wearing as thin as one’s aging skin. “Have you, now,” she says quietly.

His shoes scrape against the floor. “Why? Do you know something?”

“I know a lot of things, Major. It’s part of my job. Also”—she looks up—“I happen to be dear friends with the ex–Mrs. Franklin Hardcastle, Senior. Tiny’s mother-in-law.”

“Aunt
Liz
?”

“Oh, you know her name, do you? Yes, she was exiled to New York, as you’ll recall. She lives a few blocks down. We have lunch. She’s a lovely woman. A better woman than I am, not that I mean to damn her with faint praise, as the saying goes.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Yes, so you see, I believe it’s rather important that we—”

The door swings open and hits the opposite wall with a soft bang.

“Mrs. Schuyler!” exclaims Frank, darting across the rug to take her hand. At the same instant he touches her fingers, he notices Major Harrison standing next to the wall, tall and silent. His head swivels, not quite sure which to address first: Mrs. Schuyler’s hand or his cousin. “Cap? What are you—” He looks back at Mrs. Schuyler. “I didn’t know you knew each other.”

“Oh, we go way back, the two of us,” she says. “How are you, Frank? How’s my daughter?”

“Better, I think. The sedatives seem to be working, thank God.” He casts another glance at Major Harrison, a glance of weary curiosity. His skin is pallid, his eyes strained. Even his hair has given itself up to worry, lying lank and unpolished against his skull. “She was hysterical before. Hysterical, paranoid, trying to escape. The way she fought those orderlies, I couldn’t believe it. She thinks Dr. Keene wants to murder her. I’ve never seen her like this. I don’t know what to do.”

Major Harrison makes a noise in his throat.

“I’m sorry.” Frank shakes his head. “How do you know each other again? What’s— Is something going on, here?”

Major Harrison swings his fist out sideways to meet the wall. “She’s not sick! For God’s sake! Don’t you see what’s happening? You’re her husband, you’re supposed to take
care
of her!”

A flush spreads over Frank’s cheeks. “I
am
taking care of her! What the hell are you talking about? What the
hell
do you know about my wife?”

“More than you think!”

“What are you even
doing
here, Cap?” Frank turns to face his cousin and assumes an aggressive stance. His hands turn into fists.

Major Harrison says coldly, “I’m concerned for her. As her friend. As someone who knows what this family is capable of.”

“And what the hell does
that
mean?”

Mrs. Schuyler rises. “Gentlemen. If you don’t mind, I believe I’d very much like to visit my daughter.”

•   •   •

D
r. Keene is very, very regretful. “I very much regret that Mrs. Hardcastle isn’t in any condition to receive visitors.” He waggles his unremarkable head back and forth.

“Nonsense,” says Mrs. Schuyler. “This is not a parlor on Beacon Hill. She’s not receiving
visitors
. I’m her mother, and I want to see her.”

“That’s not possible, I’m afraid.” He rests his hand protectively on the doorknob behind him. He intercepted them only a moment ago, when Mrs. Schuyler was just inches from the door herself, and interposed his slim white-coated body between the two—door and woman—with expert grace, as if he’s been accustomed to these sorts of maneuvers for all of his professional life.