The wicked redhead, p.22
The Wicked Redhead, page 22
“But Ollie was promoted. The Bureau gave him an award.”
“Don’t be stupid, Mrs. Marshall. You know better than that.”
She turns her head to the window and smokes quietly for a moment. One leg crosses languorously over the other, draped by yards of old blue cotton, while some hazy morning light surrounds her profile like an old Dutch painting. (Except for the cigarette, I guess.) She tips ash out the window, which is cracked open a few inches to allow the air inside. “The party’s not for weeks,” she says. “Not until the wires are off Billy’s jaw.”
“Then maybe we can arrange something sooner.”
“Nobody’s out here yet, except us. The houses don’t start filling up until the end of May.”
I rise from the sofa arm and walk a slow semicircle into her line of vision. She doesn’t see me, however. Just stares right through the region of my waist, eyebrows fixed at an angle of deep concentration, while that gentle sunlight bathes her face back into a state of youthfulness. “Mrs. Marshall, you drew me all the way from Florida to keep company with one son. I imagine you’ll find a way to attract a few dull bankers from Manhattan in order to help me save the other one.”
She casts me a wry look. “And what exactly am I supposed to do with these poor fellows, once they’re here? Lock them up in the stables until they confess?”
I reach for the paper on the desk and force it back into her hand. “Don’t worry. You can leave that one up to me.”
2
BILLY’S DOCTOR recommends fresh air and exercise, and I aim to give Billy plenty. As soon as I’ve had my word with Mrs. Marshall, I head downstairs to encourage him outside for a walk.
After an early promise of sunshine, the clouds now edge across the sky like a spill of cream. The lawn is made of that brave, wide-bladed grass that doesn’t mind a little salt in the air, and Billy and I trudge down its length in the general direction of the two girls, Marie and Patsy, who play at some game near the shrubbery that separates garden from dune. Billy moves with a clumsy, shambling gait, as if he can’t quite get his limbs to properly obey him, so I take one arm and pretend he’s supporting me. “Doesn’t that breeze smell delicious,” I say, inhaling deeply to demonstrate.
Billy makes a noise of assent.
“Just imagine your brother out there, sailing across all that water. And those ships lined up, out to sea.” I lift my hand and point. “Just outside United States waters, a whole line of them all the way to Florida, filled up with rum. Floating warehouses, waiting for darkness when the customers come. I wonder how much liquor is bobbing about out there, on the horizon.”
Billy hazards some guess, which is muffled by the wires.
“Millions of gallons, I’ll bet.” I sigh. “And poor Anson, trying to capture it. He hasn’t got a chance. People are going to drink, aren’t they?”
Billy says a word that sounds like Anson?
“Ollie, I mean. You know that’s how he introduced himself to me, back at Christopher’s last January. Do you remember?”
“Yesh.”
“Names stick, I guess.”
Without warning, Billy stops and turns toward me. His eyes are soft and gentle, as appealing as a puppy’s. He places one hand against my stomach and says, “Name?”
“Oh, Billy.” I brush his hand away. “Don’t be silly. There’s—”
His discarded fingers grasp my elbow. He kind of wobbles a little, standing there, fixed upon me with a look of terror that makes me feel as if I’ve swallowed poison.
“There’s no need to think about names yet. It’s so early. Bad luck.”
From across the lawn, a girl shrieks—I think it’s Patsy—and the sound carries across my ears like the memory of a long-ago childhood.
“We’ll talk about it later,” I say. “We’ll talk about it when you’re better. There’s no point even thinking about these things now.”
Another happy shriek reaches us, and Billy turns his head toward the sound. He says something, and I wish I could understand it. Wish I could pick out the words. It’s easier indoors, when there’s no ocean and no wind, no music of little girls playing. When we sit together in a quiet room, I can hear him better, and sometimes even make sense of what he says.
3
BILLY CAN’T smile, not with his mouth, but when we reach Patsy and Marie his whole face tends to brighten. I help him lower himself to the grass and arrange his arms and legs, and Marie climbs happily into them. Grabs the wire around his jaw, making him wince.
I make to pull her hand free, but Billy brushes me away.
“Don’t mind,” he says mushily.
So I tell Marie to be careful, and the next second she’s running off anyway. The nanny sits nearby in a camp chair, darning a short black stocking, and her eyes move swiftly back to her work when I catch her staring at Billy’s face.
“She’s such a lovely little girl,” I say.
“Funny,” Billy says.
“Funny?”
He makes some motion to his face. “Ferry.”
For a moment, I wonder why he’s comparing his baby sister to a boat, and then I realize my mistake. I follow his gaze to Marie, whose thick black hair flies out behind her as she chases Patsy around the shrubbery.
“Oh! I see what you mean. With that round face of hers, and those eyes. My mama would have said she was uncanny.”
Billy nods.
“Must have been a real shock, when Mrs. Marshall told you to expect another sibling. Can’t imagine what she was thinking, at her age. Youngest already in college. Although maybe it was a surprise to her, too?”
He doesn’t reply. His hand, which had slipped into mine, now moves to pluck at the grass. Plucks and misses. Then catches one, but he can’t quite grip it hard enough between his thumb and forefinger, so it slides free between them.
“And your father.” I chuckle loudly. “He must have been fair proud of his night’s work!”
“I certainly was,” says a crisp voice behind me, and if I had been sitting on one of those nearby dunes, I guess I would have commenced to bury myself in the sand, right there. Instead, I start like a chicken and spring to my feet.
“You!” I gasp.
He holds out his hand. “You must be Miss Kelly.”
Mr. Marshall is much older than his wife. He might be seventy, by the softness at his jaw and the faint brown spots on his skin. All the same, he’s a handsome fellow, made of tarnished hair and solid, elegant bones, and I like the passionate blue of his eyes, which remind me of Anson’s. I take his hand and manage a reasonable tone of voice. “I am delighted to meet you at last, Mr. Marshall.”
He covers our linked hands with a firm, dry palm, and those blue eyes meet mine with perfect sincerity. “No more delighted than I am. Billy?” He turns to his son, who’s staring at the shrubbery as if nothing’s happened. “Billy?” he says, more loudly, placing his hand on Billy’s shoulder.
Billy makes the same start I did, and do you know, it never occurred to me until now that Billy can’t hear properly, since my stepfather threw his brass knuckle fist into the side of his face. Never once did I imagine that maybe Billy can’t understand me any better than I can understand him.
I bend into the grass and help my Billy-boy to his feet, and my hands are shaking a little, my stomach sick. The air seems to boil on my skin. Not this, too, I think.
Lord Almighty, not this, too.
Before Billy can arrange himself to greet his father, a little voice shrieks Daddy! and a streak of black hair crosses the grass to throw itself against Mr. Marshall’s legs. He staggers back a step or two—not entirely in jest—and bends to lift her into his arms.
Why, he might be her grandfather, I think, as I compare her round, satiny cheek to his, made of leather.
And then I take in her black, wild hair, her straight eyebrows, her full lips, the shape of her nose, the strange, pale aquamarine color of her eyes, and I think something else again.
4
HERE’S ANOTHER thing about the rich: this Prohibition they voted in, all those businessmen and politicians screaming about how America ought to be a godly, sober nation, they didn’t really mean it. Not for themselves, anyway.
Now, I don’t happen to know whether the Marshalls spoke or spoke not in favor of the Eighteenth Amendment when it came to pass across the land, state by state. Whether they were among those who insisted that liquor was the blight of humanity, and all our ills might be cured by the simple act of commanding your fellow citizens to dry out. What I do know is this. Mr. and Mrs. Marshall never did fix to stop tippling their own tipple, not even when dry words became dry law, not even when their own son swore an oath to defend that law. And they didn’t.
The first thing that nice Mr. Marshall does, as the sun begins to tumble downward behind all those clouds and the scent of dinner to waft from the direction of the kitchen, is he offers me a drink, just as if the year were still nineteen hundred and nineteen and nobody ever yet heard of Izzy and Moe. Hospitable fellow, Mr. Marshall. I don’t wish to offend him, so I say yes. Gin and tonic all right, he says, or something stronger? I say a gin and tonic is just fine, thank you. He pours one for me and one for him and yet another for Mrs. Marshall, who drifts in from nowhere wearing a silk dress the color of mashed peas and complains about the heat. Mr. Marshall says it’s just muggy, that’s all. Unseasonably muggy.
Drink gin and tonic and talk about the weather, that’s what rich people do.
Except Billy. Billy sits stiff in his chair wearing a fine black dinner jacket (the women wear silk, the men wear dinner jackets, even out here at the end of Long Island, in a house set upon the beach) and his gold-dark hair brushed sleek from his face. His right hand grips a sweaty gin and tonic, into which his papa has stuck a straw for convenience. I can see he’s tired. I rustle over in his direction and brush my knuckles against his temple, the way my mama used to do to me when I felt poorly. His skin burns my fingers, which are chilled from the icy glass. He takes my hand and holds it there, and his eyes turn up at me, all imploring, while Mrs. Marshall’s gaze settles upon the back of my neck.
“Awfully close in here,” I say. “Might we open a window? The doctor says Billy needs fresh air.”
Mr. Marshall rises affably from his armchair—the one in which he’s only just settled—but I stop him just as affably and head for the tall French windows myself. There are several to choose from. The room stretches maybe thirty feet west from the center hallway, and nothing but glass separates you from the lawn and beach and ocean. During the middle of the day, a set of bright yellow curtains shields the upholstery and the atmosphere from the sun, but someone’s dragged them all open now, and though the wood’s swollen from heat it gives way eventually. The damp salt air seeps in. I open the next window too and lean against the frame. The weather today might have been unnaturally warm and muggy, like the summer is shaking itself off for a trial run, but the ocean’s still chilly enough to cool the breeze rushing onshore as the evening settles in. To the west, the clouds turn pink above the high gray dock that stretches into the Atlantic, shielded by a jetty of solid rock. The sight of it makes the hair prickle on my arms and my head. Not two months ago, I made landing there with Anson in the middle of the night, and that small white house near the swimming pool? We rested inside until dawn.
“I’m selling Tiptoe,” Mrs. Marshall says behind me, in the voice of a grand announcement.
“Tiptoe?”
Mr. Marshall sounds so shocked, I detach myself from the dock and the little white house and turn to the room. Mrs. Marshall’s propped against the back of a sofa, gazing out another one of the windows, and her long legs cross at the ankles to bare a section of elegant white calf. The gin and tonic dangles from her fingertips, by some miracle of physics. The expression on her face I can’t describe. Cheeks flushed, eyes half-lidded. Like she’s dreaming about something that excites her.
“Yes, Tiptoe,” she says. “I find I haven’t the time to work her as I should. A mare like that, she’s wasted on me. As I am now, anyway.”
“But Tiptoe! You can’t be serious.”
“Of course I’m serious.”
Billy makes some noise of concern, and to this Mrs. Marshall turns her head. “It’s all for the best, darling. I’m going to have a little party. Ask a few friends over, the ones who’ve been begging to buy her since I first started showing her. A little friendly competition never hurts the price, I’ve found.”
“That’s hardly the point.”
“Oh, don’t look like that, darling. It’s time. Why, I’ve hardly ridden her at all since Marie was born. You must have been counting the expense of keeping a horse like that, when nobody’s making any proper use of her.”
“Damn the expense, Theresa. She isn’t any more costly than the rest of the stable, is she? And she makes you happy. My God, you adore that animal.”
Behind me, a faint, low drone interrupts the soft pulse of the surf. I cant my head toward the water, away from the gentle argument between the Marshalls, and it seems to me that this noise is really a pair of noises, circling around each other. I squint out to sea, searching for some speck of movement, but the flat, fading light absorbs every detail.
“I’ve outgrown her, really, or maybe she’s outgrown me. In any case, sold she must be, and I won’t hear any objections. I’ve made up my mind. We’ll have a nice little picnic on Saturday to show her off—”
“Saturday? But that’s only a few days away.”
“Oh, it’s no trouble. I’ve called Rubin already. He’s got plenty of stock. We want the guests sauced, of course; they’ll pay more that way. And it won’t be a large crowd. Terribly select, just a few fellows I’ve handpicked . . .”
A thin white wake appears at last, maybe a half mile out to sea, growing steadily from left to right. I clench my hand around the window frame and lean forward, holding my breath still in my chest, while Mrs. Marshall continues in her drawling, beautiful voice.
“. . . Charles Schuyler, of course. He’s mad for that mare. Your cousin George. And Ben Stone.” She pauses and calls out to me. “You might know Mr. Stone, Geneva dear. He’s a partner at Sterling Bates.”
I snap back to her. “Benjamin Stone?”
“Yes. And Harry Lyme. Perhaps you’ve heard of him as well?”
“Sounds familiar, I guess.”
“Good. You’ll have someone to talk to, then.” She lifts herself away from the sofa and sets down her glass—now empty—next to a lamp of blue-and-white porcelain. Makes her way toward me, smiling. “I was thinking it might be a lovely way to introduce you to some of our friends. A small, intimate gathering like that. Since you’re going to become one of the family, after all.”
Her expression is as smooth as milk as she approaches me, her eyes bright and happy. Her arm loops through mine. She smiles earnestly into my suspicious gaze. Behind her, the clouds part, and a brilliant setting sun casts a halo over the top of her head.
“Sure,” I say. “Why not?”
“Won’t it be lovely, Billy? Oh, Billy. Just look at your Geneva. Isn’t she splendid? That marvelous hair, all lit up by the sunset . . .”
Outside the window, the drone amplifies into a roar. I pull my arm away from Mrs. Marshall’s grip and turn back toward the sea, where a motorboat now arcs elegantly in the direction of the dock. I climb over the window frame into the grass and commence to run. When the heels of my shoes sink deep and catch on the turf, I pause to kick them off. Mrs. Marshall calls out behind me, but I pay her no more mind than I might pay to a traffic cop. Dress tangles in my legs. I lift up the skirt and go on running, grass to stone terrace to beach, sand flying up my stockings, breath scraping my throat, while the motorboat slings against the dock and a man leaps nimbly onto the beaten wood.
5
I DO SOMETIMES wonder if I dreamt up that entire night, the night I spent with Oliver Marshall in the little white house set by his mama’s Southampton swimming pool. After all, I was near dead from exhaustion and shock; Anson was wounded and also improbably half-drunk, by the legal prescription of the doctor summoned out by Mrs. Marshall. So maybe we only imagined we lay together; maybe it was all fever and delirium and longing, and we woke up sharing a memory that did not exist. And the hours have passed, the days and weeks have passed and we haven’t lain together since, we are cut in twain, and now I cannot recollect all the details I once thought I should recollect forever. I can no longer count the number of our kisses, and the peculiar sound of my name in his throat has faded away.
But I do know this for certain, like I know the beat of my own heart: the exact shape of his shoulders against the white pillows of that bed, a sight that burned right through all the layers of my skin and bones and membranes to lay itself upon the matter of my brain, the way a hot iron brands the hide of a steer.
And I know another thing, as this fellow on the Marshalls’ dock straightens away from his motorboat, holding a coiled rope in his right hand. I know those shoulders now silhouetted against the dying sun don’t belong to the man in my bed that March night, the man for whose sake I have dashed across lawn and sand, for whose sake I might dash across the ocean itself if ever I could.
6
I PULL UP short, maybe ten yards away from the base of the dock. Can’t see the man’s face, on account of the sunset behind him to the right, but his hair’s dark and his figure’s lean, and he’s wearing some kind of long, light coat over a white shirt.
“Hello there!” he calls out, over the noise of the breaking waves. “Mrs. Marshall send you?”
“You might say that.”
He sets to knotting his rope snug about one of the stout pilings holding up the dock. “Everything’s here. Nice case-a Dewar’s, came in from Nassau last night. There was a shipful of Perrier-Jouët got stopped by the Coast Guard, but my fella gave me his last case when I said you was my favorite customer.”
