Body Language (26 page)

By now, Hazel’s head was buried in her hands. She wept drunkenly, unable to answer him. The rest of us didn’t move—hell, we could barely breathe. A log popped and sparked. Clearing my throat, I said, “Hazel? What’s he talking about?”

She looked up at me with teary eyes through smeared glasses. Removing them, she attempted to shine the lenses with the lacy cuff of her sleeve, but abandoned the project as hopeless. Her hands fell to her lap, and she stared blankly toward the center of the room. There she sat—the living, aging, nearly blind repository of Quatrain family secrets, the guardian of a closet door that had just been kicked open by Joey.

I heard a rustle at my side. It was Glee digging in her purse, pulling out her steno pad, ready for some shorthand. I shook my head. With a roomful of tantalized listeners, we would not be apt to forget details of the revelations to come.

I prompted, “Hazel? Tell us what happened.”

“When Suzie was a junior in high school,” she began mechanically, as if she had long rehearsed a monologue that she knew she would one day recite, “she got pregnant during Christmas vacation. There weren’t many options in those days. Bringing the baby to term was unthinkable—abhorrent—and abortion wasn’t legal here then. So Suzie’s mother Peggy took her to New York that spring. It was legal. Suzie was fine. But everything was different when she came back. She had missed a big, important dance at school. Her attitude changed. She was different toward men. And she never set foot in Saint Cecille’s again.” Hazel fell silent.

“I knew it,” Glee said under her breath, more to herself than to anyone.

Neil told me, “Our theory was correct.”

Parker added, “It all fits.”

“Mom had an abortion?” Thad mumbled.

I told him gently, “Try not to judge her. I’m sure it wasn’t an easy decision. Single motherhood wasn’t as common then—”

Fiercely, Hazel interrupted, “It
was
an easy decision. I
told
you: Suzie
couldn’t
have that baby. It was unthinkable. Abhorrent.”

Uh-oh. I suggested, “Why don’t you tell us the rest, Hazel?”

She looked from face to face, then smiled bitterly, as if to say, All right, you asked for it. With her tongue pasty in her mouth, she said, “Suzanne Quatrain had an abortion because she had been raped. It happened here, under this very roof, upstairs in the attic great room where she was killed last week. Thirty years ago, she was raped in that same room—on Christmas morning! And the man who raped her, the devil who impregnated her was her
very own brother
, Mark Quatrain, home on vacation from his senior year of college!”

We reacted to this news with an involuntary chorus of gasps and my-Gods, my own mind spinning at the thoroughness with which she further crushed the once-idealized fantasy of my handsome older cousin. But she wasn’t finished. “Is it any wonder,” she continued over our confused babble, “that the family threw that filthy bastard out? They never pressed charges against him—of course not, the shame was too great to be made public—but no tears were shed when he got packed off to Vietnam, and damn few tears were shed when he died there! I’m
glad
he got butchered. They ought to pin a medal on whoever sent him straight to hell. My only regret is what it did to his mother. Poor Peggy’s heart couldn’t take it, and she died shortly after her son did.”

Hazel had finished, leaving us in speechless, sickened disbelief.

Joey, though, was unfazed by the telling of his older brother’s crimes, unable to grasp their gravity. “Parker,” he said, rattling something at the cocktail cart, “the champagne is gone. Can you show me how to make another old-fashioned?”

New Year’s morning dawned bright and bitterly cold, but none of the household saw it. The previous night’s party broke up around two, when Glee Savage excused herself, assuring me she could safely travel the short distance home—she lived only a few blocks away, and the haze of her earlier martinis had long since cleared. The late meal, followed by Joey and Hazel’s revelations, left the rest of us feeling alert and sober by the time we turned out the lights.

Joey and Hazel didn’t fare as well. Joey had drunk far more than usual that evening, and ended up spending the night at the house, recovering. Hazel, who almost never drank, had to be tucked in by Glee before she left. We all speculated whether Hazel would even remember telling us her terrible, long-guarded secrets.

So the house was uncommonly quiet the next morning. Neil and I were the first to rise, shortly before ten. The mood was wrong for sex, and the weather was wrong for running, so we got dressed and went to the kitchen to get the coffee started. Predictably, the door to Hazel’s quarters was closed, and there were no sounds of stirring within. Parker joined us a few minutes later, also dressed for the day—flannel shirt and his usual chinos.

After a groggy round of good mornings and our first few sips of strong coffee, we began the inevitable postmortem of Hazel’s tell-all, keeping our voices low in case she was awake. Parker told us, “The abortion angle came as no surprise—everything we knew already pointed to it. But the rest really blew me away. I don’t know
when
I finally got to sleep.”

“Same for us,” said Neil, pausing to stifle a yawn. “Mark and I lay there talking about it till God knows when.”

I nodded wearily. We had already spent too many sleepless hours rehashing Hazel’s revelations, and I was not inclined to immerse myself in them again, at least not so early in the day. “I’m going to get the paper,” I told them.

Topping off my old
Chicago Journal
mug, a porcelain remnant of my former life, I excused myself and walked to the front hall. Fortunately, the
Dumont Daily Register
had landed right at the threshold, and it took only a second to retrieve it from the arctic air that had settled overnight beyond the door. Hefting the paper, I noted that it was an unusually slim edition, even for a Saturday, traditionally a sapless advertising day. That, combined with slow news and a holiday morning, left little to print.

I carried the paper to my den, spread it open on the partners desk, and sat down to read it, slurping from my mug. Page one was filled with inconsequential wire-service stuff, nothing of local interest—for the first time in a week, there wasn’t even mention of Suzanne’s murder. With no motivation to turn the page, I slumped back in my chair, sipped more coffee, and gazed at the room vacantly, slipping into thought. The setting reminded me of another New Year’s Day, thirty-three years earlier, the morning my boyhood trip to Dumont drew to a close.

I got up early that day to pack, and the house was quiet. Uncle Edwin and Aunt Peggy had been to a big party the night before—the party he had cleaned his tuxedo for—so I was surprised, when I came downstairs and set my suitcase in the hall, to see my uncle sitting at the big two-sided desk in his den. He was dressed really nice, as always, and was reading the morning paper—the
Dumont Daily Register
, it was called. I went to the doorway and said hello.

He looked up from the paper. “Good morning, Mark! Ready to head home?”

“Right after breakfast,” I told him.

He swallowed some coffee from a pretty cup that he put back on its saucer. “I’ll drive you to the bus, okay?”

“Sure!” Even though it wouldn’t be a very long ride, I looked forward to another trip in his big imported sedan. “Thanks.”

He glanced back at the newspaper. “Nothing much happening in the world today. Johnson’s escalating troop strength in Asia again. Hippies are still on the march. Same old same-old,” he said, whatever that meant.

In the kitchen, Hazel made my breakfast and told me that she’d miss me. When Aunt Peggy came downstairs, she looked sick. “I just wanted to tell you good-bye, dear.” Her voice was croaky. “Have a safe trip, and give your mother my love.” Then she went back to bed. My older cousin Mark never even got up (he must have gone to a party of his own), so I didn’t get to see him—I was hoping he’d muss my hair again, and I just liked the way he looked. Suzanne and Joey came down to eat, and Joey seemed really sorry that I was leaving. Then Uncle Edwin appeared in his topcoat, jangling his keys, saying, “Time to get going, Mark. Let’s catch a bus.”

In the car, I noticed that my uncle was in much better shape than my aunt. The party, or something, must have agreed with him. He talked about enjoying the cold morning. He even whistled now and then as he drove. Then he reached into a pocket behind the car seat and pulled out my folder—the little stories that he’d asked to read the night before. “You wouldn’t want to forget this,” he told me. “You’re a fine writer, Mark. Keep working at it.”

There weren’t many people waiting for the bus, not on New Year’s morning. Uncle Edwin carried my suitcase, setting it next to me on the pavement. Scrunching down so we could talk eye-to-eye, we said all the good-bye stuff, and we hugged. With his arms still around me, he said, “You’re a very special young man, Mark. You’re not at all like the others.” Then he kissed me—right on the mouth.

Some dozen years later, he would repeat himself, almost word for word, when he kissed me at the grave of my mother, Edie Quatrain Manning. That was the last time I saw my uncle Edwin.

But now I sat in his chair, at his desk, in his den, under the roof of the stately Prairie School house he once built with his partner, the man with whom he cofounded the Quatro Press. In an ironic twist of history, if not quite fate, his home was now my home—his desk, my desk. These thoughts led me to the letter he had written to me before he died, stowed safely in the credenza near the desk. Responding to the urge to read it again, I fished a little brass key from a pile of paper clips in an ashtray on the desk, then unlocked the cabinet door. The letter was propped where I left it, next to the box of Suzanne’s dossiers delivered by Elliot Coop the previous afternoon.

I immediately lost interest in the letter, which I had read dozens of times, and focused on the files, which I had not yet read, but meant to. Pulling the heavy box from the cabinet, I nudged the door closed with my knee and carried the files to the low table in front of the fireplace.

Settling on the sofa there, I lifted the folders from the box and discovered that they were already arranged into three bundles, which I placed on the seat cushion next to me. The two smaller bundles were labeled
SUSPICIOUS
and
ABOVE SUSPICION
. The other bundle, largest by far, was labeled
INCONCLUSIVE
. Intrigued, I went directly to the “suspicious” files, pulled the first, and opened it.

Parker’s theory was correct. It was, in fact, a dossier on a Vietnam veteran, a survivor of the ambush that supposedly killed Mark Quatrain. It included a sketchy biography of the man’s upbringing before being drafted, then a detailed account of his activities and whereabouts during the thirty years that had passed since his honorable discharge. The thick file took some twenty minutes to read in its entirety. The report concluded that this subject was “suspicious” because he had family ties to central Wisconsin, but, otherwise, there was nothing in his background to suggest that he was really Mark Quatrain, back from the grave.

Perusal of the next dossier, equally detailed, revealed only that the veteran was “suspicious” because, like Mark Quatrain, he had been an accomplished athlete who also held an honors degree in English. They had graduated from different colleges, however, and there was nothing to suggest that the subject’s academic records had been falsified.

The files seemed less interesting now, so I ceased reading them in full. Skimming the next several, still from the “suspicious” bundle, I found nothing to convince me that Mark Quatrain was still alive and had assumed another identity. Immersed in this fruitless research for an hour or so—it was nearly noon—I was interrupted by a commotion in the front hall.

Roxanne Exner and Carl Creighton had just arrived from Chicago, and I was too absorbed in my reading to hear them when they pulled into the driveway. Neil and Parker were now greeting them at the door. So I packed all the dossiers back into their box—including those labeled inconclusive and above suspicion, which I had not yet opened—and returned them to the cabinet, locking them away for future study.

Emerging from the den into the hall, I saw at once that I had not underestimated Roxanne’s attention to her travel wardrobe. Carl was hefting the last of the luggage in from the porch, and its quantity suggested a stay of a month, not a weekend. A disconcerting thought: Was this a sign not of vanity but of foresight on Roxanne’s part? Had she come prepared to stay awhile, assuming I’d need her at hand to defend me against the overzealous maneuvers of a hotdog DA?

“Long time no see,” she told me, shrugging out of her fur as I stepped forward to give her a kiss.

Eyeing the Christmas nutria she dragged on the floor, I asked her, “Wasn’t it a bit warm for that in the car?”

Carl answered for her, “We had the air conditioner on. And it’s
still
ten below.”

We all shared a laugh as Neil and Parker stacked luggage at the foot of the stairs. Neil turned to ask everyone, “Hungry? Hazel set up a makeshift buffet in the kitchen. After last night, we’re lucky to have lunch at all.”

“I’m surprised she’s even
up
,” I told him. “How is she?”

Parker answered, “Wobbly, but functioning. No signs of life from upstairs yet.”

“Good God,” Roxanne wondered aloud, “what’d we
miss?
”

“’Twas a night to remember,” Neil assured her. “Let’s talk about it in the kitchen.” And he led the way back through the hall.

Hazel had set out makings for sandwiches, various sweets, and a potful of noodly soup, made ahead yesterday, simmering on the stove. Her door was closed, and I asked, “Won’t we bother her?”

“She said not to worry about it,” Neil told me. “She’s just fixing herself up.” Under his breath, he added, “Frankly, she’s got her work cut out for her.”

Roxanne repeated, “What’d we
miss?
”

As Neil and Parker began constructing absurdly thick sandwiches for our new arrivals, I related events of the previous night, inching toward Hazel’s postprandial revelations.