Bloodline (6 page)

“So I buried him,” Clair had said. “This brilliant guy turned into a rotting piece of meat. That's what war does, Jack. Like all those poets who got killed in World War One.” Then Clair recited.

               
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?

               
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

               
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle

               
Can patter out their hasty orisons.

               
No mockeries for them from prayers or bells,

               
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs of wailing shells;

               
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

“What's that?” I'd asked.

“Wilfred Owen. ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth,'” he'd said. “Got killed in the trenches in 1918. He was twenty-five. When I was in high school, Miss Frost, my English teacher, made us memorize ten poems to graduate. That's the only one I remember now.”

“Kind of a funny poem for a Marine,” I'd said.

“Not really.” Clair had replied. “Not at all.”

I found myself thinking about that as Maddy talked. She had called to confirm that I existed. With Dave Slocum involved, this probably was a prudent move. But I found that I'd rather be talking to Clair—that I had less patience for people like Maddy. Maybe I'd been in Maine, my Maine, too long, but she seemed cold and affected. Bright enough, but presumptuous. She seemed to see the kids in this story as pieces in some sort of sociological study. I didn't get the feeling that she would be truly moved by their lives. Or fascinated by them. Or surprised by them.

“So it sounds like you have everything under control,” Maddy was saying. “Oh, I understand from Dave that you worked at the
Times.
Did you know Marla Manstein? She worked on the international desk?”

“Doesn't ring a bell, but it's a big place,” I said. “And I only got as international as Queens.”

“Marla and I went to Smith together,” Maddy said. “Her husband and my husband—now ex-husband, but that's a long story—knew each other from Harvard. The business school.”

“Small world,” I said.

“Yes, it is,” she said brightly. “Even in Manhattan. I lived in New York for a couple of years after Columbia J-school. I must have read some of your stories in the
Times
.”

“Could be.”

I was working for
Ad Age
and then I met my husband, and then I divorced him and now here I am. In politically correct Amherst.”

“A long way from the Upper East Side,” I said.

“How'd you know I lived on the East Side?” Maddy said.

“I guessed,” I said.

Would have put a hundred bucks on it, I thought.

Maddy paused.

“So what brought you to northern Maine?” she said carefully. “I mean, Amherst is a long way from Manhattan. But northern Maine's a real jump.”

“Well, it's not really north. It's more South Central. Like LA. And that's being generous.”

“What does your wife think?”

“I don't have one.” I said. “I live alone on a dirt road in a house full of bats.”

“Yuck,” Maddy said.

Ah, a nature lover.

“Actually, they're quite fascinating,” I said. “Tremendous powers of flight. And carefree. You just empty the guano box once in a while.”

“No wonder you don't have a wife,” she said.

“No wonder at all,” I said.

I sat there at the table, finished my beer, and got another from the refrigerator. I drank half of that one.

“No wonder at all.”

I felt like I'd just sat through an hour of therapy. Confront your feelings. Face the fact that you just didn't fit in on the so-called fast track. Wonder if you fit in on any track. Consider what it is about women like Maddy that make you withdraw. She was pleasant, doing her best to make conversation. But she reminded me of other women, from other times, who had made me feel that ultimately I was just one more prop. The right career. The right clothes. The right restaurants. The right guy.

“This is Jack. He's a reporter at the
Times
.”

“Oh, really. How exciting.”

So women had come and gone, through no fault of their own, with a regularity that I had long ago decided was a sign of some sort of problem with me, not them. I was closer to some than others, but I always felt that the relationships were built on some sort of shifting sand, a shoal that would be eroded with each passing storm until a rift would appear in the barrier beach and the ocean would pour through and dissolve the bond that, just weeks or even days before, had seemed as permanent as bedrock.

I looked at Clair and Mary, cemented together, and I wondered what it was about me that kept me apart. It had happened in New
York, and then when I came to Maine, it had happened again. Her name was Roxanne, and she had been more giving than any other woman I'd known. But when it had come time for me to give something back, something big, I'd said no.

She was a social worker, working with battered kids. Her job had required her to go out every day and stick her head into the maw of families whose only bonds were fear and anger and cruelty. But even that she had approached with a cool conviction, and when she left it, it was with her psyche still smooth and intact.

And the rest of her didn't look bad either.

We'd been drawn together by something that felt very powerful, and, once together, we'd rested easily in each other's presence, even the morning after, which was always the test. Roxanne was beautiful, full of energy and motion, a skier who took life surely, moving through the days like she was carving turns on a mountain someplace. But even that faded, probably because of my darker side, and now that's where she was.

Carving turns on a mountain someplace.

Roxanne had left for Colorado and friends who were more like her. They lived in places like Vail and hung out with the US Olympic Team. They wore the latest brightly colored parkas and traveled widely on the income from their trusts. Alaska. New Zealand. The Italian Alps. They had their kayaks airlifted to the headwaters of remote mountain rivers. They skied off of helicopters. They drank only the best European beers and didn't get hangovers. They were all tanned and good-looking and had perfect teeth.

After months with me, for Roxanne they probably were a relief.

Because things had gotten pretty dark. A petty little scheme had led to murder. Roxanne wanted to go and to take me with her. But
the worse things got, the more I felt a need to stay. She couldn't understand that, but she'd hung in there with me until the danger had passed. And then she had packed her bags and left. Where I'd once awakened to the feel of her bare back against my chest, now I got an occasional phone call, a postcard from someplace where she'd skied or snorkeled or sailed.

I was home alone, in Prosperity, Maine, wondering when the bats would be ready to hibernate.

They weren't ready that night. It had been warm for September, and they had begun circling at dusk, like props from a Dracula movie. I slept part of the night in the big chair in the living room, then crawled into bed after the bats had gone on their rounds. When they came home, just before dawn, they let themselves in.

The dears.

So I was almost refreshed when l got up. Over tea and a bagel with peanut butter, I finished reading the day-old
Globe,
then watched the birds from the deck for an hour. There was a wood thrush in the brambles at the edge of the yard, and when it finally flitted deeper into the brush, I made my move to the shower. By ten-thirty, I was poised at the edge of the maelstrom of the high school corridors.

Looking for Missy Hewett.

Janice Genest was out, gone to one of those myriad seminars that keep seminar people employed but accomplish little else. I was surprised she had time to waste on such nonsense, but I didn't say this to the guidance office secretary, who looked at me suspiciously through her school-issue red-framed glasses, and, despite the poster over her head, did not seem inclined to wish me a “beary nice day.”

She didn't introduce herself. She didn't smile. She said she didn't know when Genest would be back. When I said I was looking for Missy Hewett, she cooperated only to move me on my way.

To Portland.

“Oh, she's no longer with us,” Beary said.

“Something happen to her?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “She graduated.”

Hallelujah, I thought. A success story.

“Oh, yes,” Beary said. “She's in college, at the University of Southern Maine.”

“In Portland?” I asked.

“Is there another one?” she said.

Pleased with her razor-sharp repartee, Beary finally smiled.

7

O
f course, there was no Missy Hewett in the Portland phone directory. For lack of any other obvious way to make progress on the story, I drove down that afternoon, rumbling along in the truck at a tortoise-like sixty miles an hour in what turned out to be, as usual, a two-hour exercise in humility. As shiny new cars whizzed by me on Route 95, I smiled calmly and congratulated myself for my rejection of the material world.

And kept one eye on the temperature gauge.

There was only one University of Southern Maine, and it was, indeed, in Portland, just off I-95, a few blocks west of downtown. I got off the highway at Forest Avenue, which was conspicuously short on trees, not to mention forests, but did have fast-food places sprouting like sumac on vacant lots. I was hungry, but not that hungry, so I took a quick left off of Forest and drove head-on into academe.

Though it is hard to say exactly where a university starts, the first sign that I had crossed the perimeter was the fact that every available parking space along the drab residential street was filled. Most of the cars were small and had USM parking stickers on the side windows.
The houses, mostly square, plain, post-Victorian, were chopped into apartments, and there were bicycles sprawled on the porches.

This was the right place.

I drove past a couple of big brick buildings, including a long low one that looked like a student union, and a big one that I assumed contained classrooms. Outside the classroom building, a small security van was parked and a campus cop was fitting cars with wheel boots for illegal parking. If you flunked chemistry, they tied cement blocks to your legs.

There were people walking everywhere, and I could see why. I drove past the classroom building, past an open lawn that fronted more big brick buildings. There were people on the lawn, stretched out in the sun, no doubt exhausted from having hiked in from the nearest available parking space, somewhere in the adjoining city of South Portland.

And for this truck, one space wouldn't do.

I drove past the big lawns, past a round modern building that looked like an oil-storage tank with windows but, according to the sign, was the university law school. Beyond the law school, the streets were neat and the houses all had university signs on the lawns, as if the whole neighborhood were for sale. It probably had been at one time, and the university had been buying.

Finally, I found a space in front of a square white house for which the sign read
DEPARTMENT OF CLASSICS
. My old truck was certainly a classic, but even so, it stood out in the long row of little cars like a high school kid trying to hide in a kindergarten class.

“At least try to look academic,” I told the truck, and began the hike back to the center of campus.

I already knew that Missy Hewett wasn't in the Portland phone book. This was probably because she didn't have a phone, but she had to have an address, and somewhere on campus they would have to have it. That meant exploring a few of these brick buildings and hoping that if I stumbled into a calculus quiz, they wouldn't make me take it. Or at least they'd let me use my notes.

Education is a very big business, and as I crossed the big lawn at the center of the campus, the employees and customers were all around me. Kids with backpacks. Professors with canvas briefcases from L.L. Bean. A lot of older students, women in their forties, men older than that, who wore determined expressions, as if they knew what was waiting out there, and it wasn't pretty.

I walked along the lawn, past the big classroom building that turned out to be something to do with nursing. The long low building was next, across a parking lot, and there were lots of people going in and out. It occurred to me that I should have brought a backpack full of bricks just to look the part, but it was too late.

Feeling conspicuously empty-handed, I went in.

The entrance led to a long hallway that was like some sort of indoor bazaar. There were tables set up on both sides. At the tables, people were selling sweaters and posters and handwoven blankets that the sign said were from Guatemala. The blonde-haired, rosy-cheeked girl behind the table was not Guatemalan.