The telephone rang.
“You want me to get it?”
“You stopped answering, remember?”
She walked away and picked up the telephone in the living room, her back to
her husband, her voice low, cooing.
Before retiring to Florida, Tommy’s father worked as a bill collector for the
Dominics, looking so clean and bland when he appeared on a doorstep some debtors
mistook him for a Mormon missionary. His street name was “Thomas and his Singing
Hammer,” but the homicide detectives called him Saint Thomas the Philosopher
because in his work he liked to quote the Montaigne the sisters had taught him at
convent school.
The utility of living consists not in the length of days, he recited when he
swung his ham-thick arm behind his head as the sisters had their rulers, but in the
use of time.
Jude was in the third grade when a hardware store that was part of a discount
chain opened up across the street from the one owned by the father of his best
friend. His friend’s father matched their prices and tried to keep his store open by
sitting in on Thomas’ poker table. In a fortnight he ran up a ten-thousand-dollar
chit. Jude’s friend began staying over so often at the Hardy house that he kept two
pairs of pajamas in Jude’s room. On the afternoon of the last day of classes at the
start of the Christmas holidays, his friend’s mother came home from her job as a
biology teacher at the high school, opened the garage door, and found her husband
sitting on the floor, his gelatinous eyes open, slivers of brain sliming down the wall,
in his hand a .32 revolver with its serial numbers filed off she told the police could
not be his.
He never even got drafted on account of he had flat feet. What would he be
doing with a pistol?
The police labeled it a suicide, notwithstanding the revolver was clean of even
the deceased’s fingerprints, notwithstanding every bone in his right hand had been
pulverized to rice grain bits and pounded into the worktable. To the left of the bits of
bone fingernailed grooves gouged the soft pinewood. Near the revolver lay a strip of
masking tape with facial hair on its sticky side, the deceased looking like he had
shaved a square around his mouth into which was stuffed a card hand of aces and
eights, all spades.
Christine hung up the telephone and came back to the door.
“So?” Jude said.
“So I think even if she was seeing someone, it was silly of the doctor to check
himself out.”
A raindrop thudded on the porch roof, solitary as a church bell.
“Why?”
“He was a doctor, for Christ’s sake.”
“A doctor can’t have his heart filleted out?”
“What’s it matter?” Christine said. “He should’ve paid her some humongous
alimony – that would take him maybe a week to earn if he didn’t pay the taxes on it
like you would – and moved on to wife number two.”
“Wife number three.”
“What?”
“She was number two.”
Christine rolled her eyes. “Well, you certainly learned a lot about his married life
in just one afternoon.”
Jude did not answer. Black clouds crossed the horizon, their dark tendrils
following.
“Or was it only one?”
An hour before, Jude had walked the doctor’s widow to the parking lot in the
alley behind his law office. She wore no makeup and none of her jewelry except a
wedding ring she fidgeted off and on her finger. At the door to her pink Jaguar, she
put her arms around Jude’s neck and kissed him on the cheek, and as she drove
away she watched him in the rearview mirror until he had shrunk to a flyspeck.
She and Dr. Sullivan had celebrated their anniversary ten days earlier with her going
on vacation to Nassau without him. They had met the year before when Christine
was working as the seating hostess out at the Oak Tree. Their marriage three
months later gave excuse for some snickers in town, but most respected the girl for
her moxie and said good for her that she could snare a doctor after all she had gone
through.
Her parents had died in a car crash minutes after dropping off her and a sister
with an elderly uncle and aunt, the account of their deaths retold on endless
evenings as their aunt tucked the girls in after returning from her prayer meeting
and tipping back the gin bottle a second time. She swore to them she had heard the
scrunch of steel, the screams in the gasoline fire and had turned away from her front
window where a mile away a pillar of black smoke snaked heavenward and looked at
the girls as they sat in their flannel nighties, drinking hot chocolate and watching the
Lennon sisters sing on The Lawrence Welk Show and knew they were now hers.
Taking the girls in proved no small hardship for an uncle and aunt who
struggled to get by on the miniscule pension Youngstown Sheet & Tube paid for a
forty-foot fall their uncle took where he missed by inches dropping into the bucket
that fed the blast furnace. Yet, while there was much the girls would have liked,
prettier clothes, a fancier car to be seen in, they never suffered want. Though they
were popular, the worst said about them at the time was that for Baptists they knew
how to have fun. Save for his brother who dated Denise when they were seniors. He
told Jude he now found his memories sullied after he learned at a class reunion that
on those nights when he had stayed home to study, Denise found her way into
more than one backseat.
The week before George left for college, he and Jude drove out to take Denise
and her sister on a farewell picnic. Behind the tar-papered farmhouse, their uncle had
already laid in a seven-foot pile of coal for a furnace he had not cleaned since his fall.
The next February the house burned down to its sandstone foundation. A son took
in the uncle and aunt, but his wife sniffed something of herself about the girls. They
were much too pretty she said for her to be worrying whether she had married a
man who could resist anything except temptation. If he did not bed one, he would
with the other, no doubt seriatim, and after her hysterectomy she could not again
go out and trap a new one into marriage. She doubted anyway if God made men
beyond forty that randy and stupid.
The girls rented a one bedroom in town. Denise’s sister took a job clerking at
the discount hardware store, and she found employment at the Oak Tree, first
washing dishes, then waiting tables. Once outside the kitchen, Denise raised her
hemline, catching the attention of the owner’s son who suggested to his father that
she was a natural to seat the upscale dinner crowd they wanted to attract. His
father, eyeing her from behind, voiced no demur. A week later when the son and
Denise stepped into the alley to share a cigarette, he laid a hundred dollar bill atop a
stack of liquor boxes and ran along it from a prescription bottle a needle line of
cocaine. A line on Saturday nights became a line a day. Some afternoons she did a
line so she could roll out of bed before her sister came home and began questioning
her about when she was going to come up with her share of the rent for the last two
months.
When his wife moved out with their children, Dr. Sullivan started coming into
the Oak Tree. He had never learned to cook anything more exotic than an egg
sandwich, and he hated going home to a house without children even if he saw them
as seldom as he did his wife. He came in early, having quit surgery because he said
his focus had deserted him with his family. Denise often sat at his table until
customers began to come in, and the two would share a glass of wine from the
bottle she had picked out. As they drank, she liked to kick off her heels and watch
his face blush when she ran a silk-stockinged foot up his trouser leg past his knee.
The first weekend after his divorce, she pressed him into their taking a flight to
Vegas where for a hundred dollars he hired an Elvis-look-alike off a Strip corner to
act as his best man. He hung in his office a picture of the three of them on the steps
of the Love-Me-Tender chapel, he and Denise shoulder to shoulder, Elvis’s arm
behind her, angling down from her waist, he winking into the camera, her eyes
darting to him, smiling. When a month later The Hanna Bank & Trust called to ask
about the checks a dozen bars had cashed on his wife’s endorsement, Dr. Sullivan
closed the account and moved it up to Youngstown.
He soon had to return to surgery, and as he worked late, Denise killed the
hours trying to make friends with the other doctors’ wives. When one after another
failed to return her calls, she caught up with her old ones. She sometimes
telephoned George, who worked the police beat for the Columbus Dispatch,
complaining that marrying skinny-legged-Old-Man-Sulkivan was like caring again for
her invalid uncle and aunt. She questioned him once if he had ever blown coke. When
she asked if he was still there, he told her that every corner hooker he had ever
bought a cup of coffee for seemed always to have gotten there by blowing coke.
So Denise returned to the Oak Tree in the evenings. She put on her midnight blue
gown cut in the back almost to her sacrum and sat at the bar, wearing her Las
Vegas jewelry and drinking champagne cocktails, chatted with Sammie, who, besides
tending bar, earned her extra tips as the go-between with Denise’s dealer. One night
Jude wandered in after finishing a drunk driving trial that ran late when the jury hung
and Judge Biltmore refused to send them home, a night whited out by a blizzard on
which Jude dreaded going home to a cold house.
“Or,” Christine said, laughing, “he could have gotten a little chicky on the side.
Saved on the alimony. What do you think, hon?”
Jude swiveled the whiskey at the bottom of his glass, considered the storm-
darkened night. “So a man discovering his wife is seeing another isn’t sufficient
reason to check himself out?”
Christine’s laugh stilled. She studied the silhouetted figure before her for a long
minute, and when she answered she spoke in a whispery voice out of their past. “No,
of course not.”
Jude shook his head. The storm had broken, and white sheets of rain harried
down the street. Phantoms unloosed. “If on the night they first sat together, clinked
their wine glasses and smiled into one another’s eyes, she had seen in them the
corpse she would one afternoon give her breath, would any of it had differed?”
The wind rose and rippled the pond. Jude sat, his forefinger at his temple.
Christine studied him. “What did she say to you?”
He raised his glass as if to drink, but lowered it again. A black Cadillac had
turned at the corner. It cruised by and slowed for a moment in front then continued
on. It pulled into the last driveway at the end of the street and dimmed its lights. No
one got out.
“Jude?”
“Yes?”
“What did she say?”
Jude pulled at a loose thread hanging from his tie. Its seam slowly unraveled.
“An easy chair in their bedroom was turned to the window, looking out over
the corral where they kept the blooded Arabians he had bought for her last birthday.
On the nightstand stood a bottle of Jack Daniels. One, maybe two shots gone. Next
to it, a notepad with her flight number. Her arrival time. The coroner reckons he killed
himself a few minutes before she found him. Maybe as he watched her car coming
down the road.”
“Did he leave a note?”
“Oh, yes.”
“What did it say?”
He shook his head.
“Jude?”
“No.”
Christine let go a breath. “Well, as this conversation, like so many others, is
going nowhere, I might as well shower. Girls’ night out.”
“Wasn’t that last week.”
“No, you weren’t listening. Last week was some of us celebrating Kathy’s
divorce from her sonofabitchphilandering husband. Not that there is any other
species inhabiting the planet.”
“Oh.”
She disappeared into the darkness of the house. Jude rose and refilled his
glass and came back and watched the rain. Thirty minutes later she returned, doxy
eyed and smelling of the perfume she wore when she came to bed near dawn. She
had on a too-tight skirt and an orange and green sweater that showed off her
breasts. She again had left her wedding ring by his toothbrush. When she leaned
down to peck him on the cheek, she covered with her hand a diamond pendant
pinned above her heart he recognized from a catalog she had dog-eared and left on
the sofa last Christmas, and he had thrown out with the newspaper.
“I won’t be late,” she said. “But don’t wait up.”
She turned on her stiletto heals and went inside. At the door, she looked back,
holding the door open the thinnest of cracks, studied the man at blackness’s edge.
“You going to be ok tonight, Judy?”
“Oh, sure. I think there’s still some pizza in the frig.”
She tapped a plum-shaded fingernail on the screen. “Maybe I should pass on
going out tonight.”
The Cadillac had backed out of the driveway and was driving by their house
again, its headlights out.
“I can if you want me to,” she said softly.
The car stopped at the corner. A cigarette in the back seat reddened and faded.
“Judy?”
He shook his head. “No, that’s ok. You go.”
“You sure? I can, you know. Stay home with you.”
“You need time with your friends.”
“I can have time with them some other night.”
Jude shook his head. “Please leave.”
The nacre paring of a dying moon shown through the clouds. Thinly. Briefly.
“What is it, Judy?”
The air had cooled, and with his words Jude’s breath rose in a gray bouquet.
“He stabbed himself. Standing at the window, he watched her coming up the
road, and with his scalpel he stabbed himself. Dead center in the heart.”
They listened a long time to the hiss of rain.
“When I was a girl, I thought of the past as a thing I could repair. A thing that
existed and the wrongs within it awaited my righting. But what righting is there for a
thing no more? What righting carries a price we are willing to pay?”
Jude said nothing. The windowpanes behind him refracted the staccato
lightning.
“Why did you marry me?” Christine asked. “Why haven’t you left?”
Rainy light from the street lamp fell on Jude’s face. “Because you’re the woman
who loved me. With all your heart. No one will again. Like Doctor Sullivan, I have only
one answer.”
Christine pushed on the screen door as if to come out. The Cadillac headlights
came on, illuminating within their beams the pencil drizzle of rain. She let go the
door. Jude stood. He looked at the glass in his hand and cursed and threw it out
into the night, shattering beside the Cadillac. The driver and rear doors opened. He
went inside as Christine was going out. He waited to hear the deadbolt click home,
and when it did not, he walked back. As he reached for the bolt, the doorknob
turned, slowly, first one way, then the other. Once, twice. Three times.
“You want me to get it?”
“You stopped answering, remember?”
She walked away and picked up the telephone in the living room, her back to
her husband, her voice low, cooing.
Before retiring to Florida, Tommy’s father worked as a bill collector for the
Dominics, looking so clean and bland when he appeared on a doorstep some debtors
mistook him for a Mormon missionary. His street name was “Thomas and his Singing
Hammer,” but the homicide detectives called him Saint Thomas the Philosopher
because in his work he liked to quote the Montaigne the sisters had taught him at
convent school.
The utility of living consists not in the length of days, he recited when he
swung his ham-thick arm behind his head as the sisters had their rulers, but in the
use of time.
Jude was in the third grade when a hardware store that was part of a discount
chain opened up across the street from the one owned by the father of his best
friend. His friend’s father matched their prices and tried to keep his store open by
sitting in on Thomas’ poker table. In a fortnight he ran up a ten-thousand-dollar
chit. Jude’s friend began staying over so often at the Hardy house that he kept two
pairs of pajamas in Jude’s room. On the afternoon of the last day of classes at the
start of the Christmas holidays, his friend’s mother came home from her job as a
biology teacher at the high school, opened the garage door, and found her husband
sitting on the floor, his gelatinous eyes open, slivers of brain sliming down the wall,
in his hand a .32 revolver with its serial numbers filed off she told the police could
not be his.
He never even got drafted on account of he had flat feet. What would he be
doing with a pistol?
The police labeled it a suicide, notwithstanding the revolver was clean of even
the deceased’s fingerprints, notwithstanding every bone in his right hand had been
pulverized to rice grain bits and pounded into the worktable. To the left of the bits of
bone fingernailed grooves gouged the soft pinewood. Near the revolver lay a strip of
masking tape with facial hair on its sticky side, the deceased looking like he had
shaved a square around his mouth into which was stuffed a card hand of aces and
eights, all spades.
Christine hung up the telephone and came back to the door.
“So?” Jude said.
“So I think even if she was seeing someone, it was silly of the doctor to check
himself out.”
A raindrop thudded on the porch roof, solitary as a church bell.
“Why?”
“He was a doctor, for Christ’s sake.”
“A doctor can’t have his heart filleted out?”
“What’s it matter?” Christine said. “He should’ve paid her some humongous
alimony – that would take him maybe a week to earn if he didn’t pay the taxes on it
like you would – and moved on to wife number two.”
“Wife number three.”
“What?”
“She was number two.”
Christine rolled her eyes. “Well, you certainly learned a lot about his married life
in just one afternoon.”
Jude did not answer. Black clouds crossed the horizon, their dark tendrils
following.
“Or was it only one?”
An hour before, Jude had walked the doctor’s widow to the parking lot in the
alley behind his law office. She wore no makeup and none of her jewelry except a
wedding ring she fidgeted off and on her finger. At the door to her pink Jaguar, she
put her arms around Jude’s neck and kissed him on the cheek, and as she drove
away she watched him in the rearview mirror until he had shrunk to a flyspeck.
She and Dr. Sullivan had celebrated their anniversary ten days earlier with her going
on vacation to Nassau without him. They had met the year before when Christine
was working as the seating hostess out at the Oak Tree. Their marriage three
months later gave excuse for some snickers in town, but most respected the girl for
her moxie and said good for her that she could snare a doctor after all she had gone
through.
Her parents had died in a car crash minutes after dropping off her and a sister
with an elderly uncle and aunt, the account of their deaths retold on endless
evenings as their aunt tucked the girls in after returning from her prayer meeting
and tipping back the gin bottle a second time. She swore to them she had heard the
scrunch of steel, the screams in the gasoline fire and had turned away from her front
window where a mile away a pillar of black smoke snaked heavenward and looked at
the girls as they sat in their flannel nighties, drinking hot chocolate and watching the
Lennon sisters sing on The Lawrence Welk Show and knew they were now hers.
Taking the girls in proved no small hardship for an uncle and aunt who
struggled to get by on the miniscule pension Youngstown Sheet & Tube paid for a
forty-foot fall their uncle took where he missed by inches dropping into the bucket
that fed the blast furnace. Yet, while there was much the girls would have liked,
prettier clothes, a fancier car to be seen in, they never suffered want. Though they
were popular, the worst said about them at the time was that for Baptists they knew
how to have fun. Save for his brother who dated Denise when they were seniors. He
told Jude he now found his memories sullied after he learned at a class reunion that
on those nights when he had stayed home to study, Denise found her way into
more than one backseat.
The week before George left for college, he and Jude drove out to take Denise
and her sister on a farewell picnic. Behind the tar-papered farmhouse, their uncle had
already laid in a seven-foot pile of coal for a furnace he had not cleaned since his fall.
The next February the house burned down to its sandstone foundation. A son took
in the uncle and aunt, but his wife sniffed something of herself about the girls. They
were much too pretty she said for her to be worrying whether she had married a
man who could resist anything except temptation. If he did not bed one, he would
with the other, no doubt seriatim, and after her hysterectomy she could not again
go out and trap a new one into marriage. She doubted anyway if God made men
beyond forty that randy and stupid.
The girls rented a one bedroom in town. Denise’s sister took a job clerking at
the discount hardware store, and she found employment at the Oak Tree, first
washing dishes, then waiting tables. Once outside the kitchen, Denise raised her
hemline, catching the attention of the owner’s son who suggested to his father that
she was a natural to seat the upscale dinner crowd they wanted to attract. His
father, eyeing her from behind, voiced no demur. A week later when the son and
Denise stepped into the alley to share a cigarette, he laid a hundred dollar bill atop a
stack of liquor boxes and ran along it from a prescription bottle a needle line of
cocaine. A line on Saturday nights became a line a day. Some afternoons she did a
line so she could roll out of bed before her sister came home and began questioning
her about when she was going to come up with her share of the rent for the last two
months.
When his wife moved out with their children, Dr. Sullivan started coming into
the Oak Tree. He had never learned to cook anything more exotic than an egg
sandwich, and he hated going home to a house without children even if he saw them
as seldom as he did his wife. He came in early, having quit surgery because he said
his focus had deserted him with his family. Denise often sat at his table until
customers began to come in, and the two would share a glass of wine from the
bottle she had picked out. As they drank, she liked to kick off her heels and watch
his face blush when she ran a silk-stockinged foot up his trouser leg past his knee.
The first weekend after his divorce, she pressed him into their taking a flight to
Vegas where for a hundred dollars he hired an Elvis-look-alike off a Strip corner to
act as his best man. He hung in his office a picture of the three of them on the steps
of the Love-Me-Tender chapel, he and Denise shoulder to shoulder, Elvis’s arm
behind her, angling down from her waist, he winking into the camera, her eyes
darting to him, smiling. When a month later The Hanna Bank & Trust called to ask
about the checks a dozen bars had cashed on his wife’s endorsement, Dr. Sullivan
closed the account and moved it up to Youngstown.
He soon had to return to surgery, and as he worked late, Denise killed the
hours trying to make friends with the other doctors’ wives. When one after another
failed to return her calls, she caught up with her old ones. She sometimes
telephoned George, who worked the police beat for the Columbus Dispatch,
complaining that marrying skinny-legged-Old-Man-Sulkivan was like caring again for
her invalid uncle and aunt. She questioned him once if he had ever blown coke. When
she asked if he was still there, he told her that every corner hooker he had ever
bought a cup of coffee for seemed always to have gotten there by blowing coke.
So Denise returned to the Oak Tree in the evenings. She put on her midnight blue
gown cut in the back almost to her sacrum and sat at the bar, wearing her Las
Vegas jewelry and drinking champagne cocktails, chatted with Sammie, who, besides
tending bar, earned her extra tips as the go-between with Denise’s dealer. One night
Jude wandered in after finishing a drunk driving trial that ran late when the jury hung
and Judge Biltmore refused to send them home, a night whited out by a blizzard on
which Jude dreaded going home to a cold house.
“Or,” Christine said, laughing, “he could have gotten a little chicky on the side.
Saved on the alimony. What do you think, hon?”
Jude swiveled the whiskey at the bottom of his glass, considered the storm-
darkened night. “So a man discovering his wife is seeing another isn’t sufficient
reason to check himself out?”
Christine’s laugh stilled. She studied the silhouetted figure before her for a long
minute, and when she answered she spoke in a whispery voice out of their past. “No,
of course not.”
Jude shook his head. The storm had broken, and white sheets of rain harried
down the street. Phantoms unloosed. “If on the night they first sat together, clinked
their wine glasses and smiled into one another’s eyes, she had seen in them the
corpse she would one afternoon give her breath, would any of it had differed?”
The wind rose and rippled the pond. Jude sat, his forefinger at his temple.
Christine studied him. “What did she say to you?”
He raised his glass as if to drink, but lowered it again. A black Cadillac had
turned at the corner. It cruised by and slowed for a moment in front then continued
on. It pulled into the last driveway at the end of the street and dimmed its lights. No
one got out.
“Jude?”
“Yes?”
“What did she say?”
Jude pulled at a loose thread hanging from his tie. Its seam slowly unraveled.
“An easy chair in their bedroom was turned to the window, looking out over
the corral where they kept the blooded Arabians he had bought for her last birthday.
On the nightstand stood a bottle of Jack Daniels. One, maybe two shots gone. Next
to it, a notepad with her flight number. Her arrival time. The coroner reckons he killed
himself a few minutes before she found him. Maybe as he watched her car coming
down the road.”
“Did he leave a note?”
“Oh, yes.”
“What did it say?”
He shook his head.
“Jude?”
“No.”
Christine let go a breath. “Well, as this conversation, like so many others, is
going nowhere, I might as well shower. Girls’ night out.”
“Wasn’t that last week.”
“No, you weren’t listening. Last week was some of us celebrating Kathy’s
divorce from her sonofabitchphilandering husband. Not that there is any other
species inhabiting the planet.”
“Oh.”
She disappeared into the darkness of the house. Jude rose and refilled his
glass and came back and watched the rain. Thirty minutes later she returned, doxy
eyed and smelling of the perfume she wore when she came to bed near dawn. She
had on a too-tight skirt and an orange and green sweater that showed off her
breasts. She again had left her wedding ring by his toothbrush. When she leaned
down to peck him on the cheek, she covered with her hand a diamond pendant
pinned above her heart he recognized from a catalog she had dog-eared and left on
the sofa last Christmas, and he had thrown out with the newspaper.
“I won’t be late,” she said. “But don’t wait up.”
She turned on her stiletto heals and went inside. At the door, she looked back,
holding the door open the thinnest of cracks, studied the man at blackness’s edge.
“You going to be ok tonight, Judy?”
“Oh, sure. I think there’s still some pizza in the frig.”
She tapped a plum-shaded fingernail on the screen. “Maybe I should pass on
going out tonight.”
The Cadillac had backed out of the driveway and was driving by their house
again, its headlights out.
“I can if you want me to,” she said softly.
The car stopped at the corner. A cigarette in the back seat reddened and faded.
“Judy?”
He shook his head. “No, that’s ok. You go.”
“You sure? I can, you know. Stay home with you.”
“You need time with your friends.”
“I can have time with them some other night.”
Jude shook his head. “Please leave.”
The nacre paring of a dying moon shown through the clouds. Thinly. Briefly.
“What is it, Judy?”
The air had cooled, and with his words Jude’s breath rose in a gray bouquet.
“He stabbed himself. Standing at the window, he watched her coming up the
road, and with his scalpel he stabbed himself. Dead center in the heart.”
They listened a long time to the hiss of rain.
“When I was a girl, I thought of the past as a thing I could repair. A thing that
existed and the wrongs within it awaited my righting. But what righting is there for a
thing no more? What righting carries a price we are willing to pay?”
Jude said nothing. The windowpanes behind him refracted the staccato
lightning.
“Why did you marry me?” Christine asked. “Why haven’t you left?”
Rainy light from the street lamp fell on Jude’s face. “Because you’re the woman
who loved me. With all your heart. No one will again. Like Doctor Sullivan, I have only
one answer.”
Christine pushed on the screen door as if to come out. The Cadillac headlights
came on, illuminating within their beams the pencil drizzle of rain. She let go the
door. Jude stood. He looked at the glass in his hand and cursed and threw it out
into the night, shattering beside the Cadillac. The driver and rear doors opened. He
went inside as Christine was going out. He waited to hear the deadbolt click home,
and when it did not, he walked back. As he reached for the bolt, the doorknob
turned, slowly, first one way, then the other. Once, twice. Three times.
