Chez Cordelia (38 page)

“Cordelia, it's not
sad,
” Megan said tentatively, and then she yelled, “Mommy! Cordelia's crying!”

Martha came upstairs, and I was led away, with Megan wailing behind me, “It's not a
sad
story, Cordelia! It's not fair, you didn't finish!”

The last person I would have chosen to collapse on—except maybe for Detectives Sherman and Toscano—was Martha, but I did. I sat with her on the sofa downstairs and broke down thoroughly, Juliettishly, while she rocked me in her arms. Paul was in the shop with a client—thank God, because I told her everything. I couldn't control myself. It all poured out, the whole story of Danny and Malcolm and Mr. Madox and me, a tale of theft and blackmail and perversion and lies and guilt and death that probably shocked her to the marrow of her fine bones, but she never let on, she just kept her arms around me and let me cry and rant, and never said a word, except words of comfort. She was so nice about it, I wanted to go on—I had a mad impulse to go on—and tell her about Paul and me, as if I were a penitent Catholic and she a ladylike priest in a neat blond bun. I was really going to do it (I'll pack my stuff and get out of here in the morning, I thought, I'll go home to my parents the way Juliet did) when Paul came in, smoking his pipe and smiling. I could tell he'd just made a fat deal, and when I saw him there, looking pleased and then surprised and then concerned and then, almost invisibly, antagonistic, the urge to tell left me, and so, in fact, did my tears. I wiped my eyes and blew my nose while Martha explained to Paul, with a reassuring look at me, that Cordelia was upset by the police visit. I apologized to Martha for my loss of control.

“We all have to break down sometimes,” she said—it was a truism she believed in theoretically but which was not, in her case, true. I was grateful to her, though, for her sympathy. I knew she would keep mum about what I'd told her, and would defend me to the death, because I was her cook, she had chosen me, I was part of the world of the yellow house. I trudged up to my room, without looking directly at Paul, feeling enormous double relief: that I'd gotten so much off my chest, and that I hadn't said anything to Martha about Paul and me. I had a clear intimation that our love for each other was nearly used up, that there weren't many drops left in the bottle—not nearly enough to carry us through. I cried myself to sleep.

The police left me alone after that. Detective Sherman called up once to thank me, and to reassure me that I wouldn't be called as a witness. I asked him what the probable sentence would be if Danny was found guilty, and he said twenty-five years to life for felony murder, but in practice—his disapproval echoed loudly around his words—he might be eligible for parole after eighteen years. “But he could get off,” Sherman said. “There's gonna be a lot of medical testimony, and these psychiatrists never agree.”

“What happens if they prove he's insane?”

“He goes to the state hospital until he's—what do you call it, cured? Sometimes these guys are out in ninety days.”

I asked Sherman when the trial would be, and he said probably not until summer, maybe fall. He told me about motions and counter-motions, but I lost him. I kept wondering how Danny, formerly my adored husband, had changed into one of “these guys,” a murderer who might or might not be insane.

The defense never got in touch with me, and I had to conclude that Danny hadn't mentioned me to his lawyer. I wished I could thank him, and it occurred to me that I might do so by voluntarily testifying for the defense that I had seen him before the murder and had thought him unbalanced. But I was unwilling to climb to those heights of altruism. I imagined the prosecuting attorney and me.

“In what way did he act irrational, Mrs. Frontenac? Can't you do better than that? Can we really take it as proof of insanity that your husband took a few dollars from your wallet? If we could, I'm afraid many of us would have to declare our wives insane.” (Laughter.) That's the way they do it on television.

And I had to admit, along with the prosecuting attorney, that it did look as if Danny was sane at the time of the murder: he had picked out Madox Hardware because he knew the proprietor was a defenseless old man. He hadn't counted on Malcolm Madox being there. He had gone to Hoskins, armed, in a stolen car. (I could see, now, the string of crimes stretching out behind him north from the point where May and her boyfriend had dropped him off.) And he had shot Malcolm Madox, point-blank, through the heart. If his mind had given way, that was when it happened, when he saw what he had done.

I phoned Humphrey a few weeks later, and he said the police had been in to see him. “I gave them an earful, you better believe. I told them they'd be better off going after the Pope than my little Delia,” he chuckled, and then we talked about cooking. “You learn all you can up there,” he advised me, “and then you move on. If you want to open your own place, you've got to rev up to cooking for a crowd. That's a whole new can of tomatoes.”

I began to think, all that winter and early spring, about getting a real job as a cook. I wouldn't have, quite so soon, if all had been well between Paul and me. Before Christmas, we'd been talking, aimlessly but with excitement, of what we might do. He had a book-dealer friend out in Portland, Oregon, whom he thought of going into partnership with. Paul had been to Oregon and liked it; the crime rate, and the pollution levels, and the apathy quotient were among the lowest in the nation.

“What's an apathy quotient?” I asked him.

“It's a measure of whether anybody would come to help you if you got mugged on the street.”

“I thought there weren't any muggers in Portland, Oregon,” I said, but it wasn't a subject he could joke about. He held on to my shoulders and looked at me and said, “Delia, will you go with me? Leave your family and everything, and go to Oregon with me to live?”

I didn't want to move to Oregon, but I wanted to be with Paul, so I answered, “Let's get our lives straightened out first, Paul, so we can be together, and then we can decide where to live.”

“You're right, you're right,” he said. “First things first.” But his gaze went over my head, far away. He was thinking of the safe streets and clean air of Oregon, while I wasn't thinking any further than the divorce court.

But that was before Christmas. After the police visits, things changed between Paul and me—subtly changed. It wasn't that he believed I was guilty of anything. He knew me better than to think I could really be implicated in murder and armed robbery. The trouble was that he knew I was keeping something back. I suppose he assumed it was something that affected
us
—some clandestine contact with Danny, or a lingering affection for him that was making me shield him from the police—but he knew, at any rate, that I wasn't telling him the whole truth. I kept wondering why I didn't, and I remembered seeing him, the night we met, make a conscious decision to trust me, and to tell me about the firing-squad incident. I couldn't do the same. I didn't know why I held back the truth from the man I loved, but I did, and it altered our relationship, and as spring came we both knew the stuffing had been knocked out of our love, and that our time left together was short.

There had never been any desperation in our affair when it had only Paul's marriage to Martha to blight it; we rose above that joyfully because we loved each other. But when we saw that our love wasn't, after all, limitless, a kind of troubled frenzy became part of our lovemaking. There wasn't much lazy talking, even when we had the time. We pounded our bodies together, and scratched and bit each other, and sometimes the sounds we made were more sorrowful than ecstatic. It was, in a way, horrible, and yet we kept seeking each other out. We couldn't get enough of each other.

I made a list, one day when an unexpected late snowstorm pushed spring back a week or two. I was up in my room, the snow struck sharp against the windows, and in a mood that was half misery, half anticipation, I wrote:

List of Regrets

1. marriage

2. love

3. honesty

4. small expectations

I studied that list for a while, especially the last item. Before me, in my bookcase, was the copy of
Great Expectations
my father had given me years ago—dark green, with the title in gold on the spine. That's the ticket, I said to myself. Maybe I should read it—knowing I wouldn't. But I'd make my expectations great.

Bits of another list drifted through my head, but I wasn't yet ready to write it down. I looked again at the “List of Regrets”; it was also, I knew, a “Good-bye List.”

When the snow began to melt, Paul took me out for driving lessons. Martha thought I should learn; it was inconvenient that I always had to be driven to the market for groceries. Besides, she said, if I intended someday to be a successful chef with my own place, I should know how to drive a car—I couldn't very well hire a chauffeur to drive me to the fish market every morning. I thought this was a good point, and though I'd never much thought about it before, I became eager to learn to drive.

I took to it as readily as I took to cooking. Behind the wheel of the Volvo, with the world spread out before me, I felt as if I could do anything. The gears made perfect sense to me, and changed easily under my hand. Instinctively, I knew you watch the road and not the front of the car—the thing both Paul and Martha had told me was the hardest part for them to catch on to. It wasn't until I learned to drive that I saw how deprived I'd been all those years, how you're almost an amputee without a car. Even short trips, places in Gresham I used to walk to, I drove to in the Volvo, for the sheer exhilaration of it, the glamor of leaning your elbow on the windowsill and putting the radio on loud and feeling your hair blow in your face. I loved making turns, the way I'd lean to one side and the car would follow me. And the special satisfaction of successful parallel parking could put me in a good mood all day. I think I must have got out of driving what I used to get out of loving Paul—speed, excitement, risk—but in the car I had the extra advantage of control.

Once, while we were out in the car, Paul and I were overtaken by the desperate lust that was always in the air between us, and we parked the Volvo by a stretch of state forest. We walked deep into the woods and made love in a clearing full of soft early grass and saxifrage. It was a warm day, the sun beat down on us, Paul's sweat dripped in my face, and when we stood up we were both grimy from the April mud. At one time, this encounter would have made us happy—the craziness of it, and the mud, and the eerie beauty of the silent woods in the middle of the afternoon. But we drove home almost without speaking and went to our separate showers.

Although we no longer talked much together, certain things became clear to me, and I know they did to Paul, too. He wasn't ready to leave Martha, for one. And I didn't love him enough to push it, for another. These two facts were intimately connected. If he had been more independent, more of a doer, less of a dreamer—
less weak
was how I tried not to put it—I would have encouraged him more. And if I had encouraged him more, he would have left her. And if all these ifs had been realities, I would have loved him enough to trust him with the facts about Danny's killing of Malcolm Madox. And all would have been well. Chez Cordelia and Lamb House Books would have merged into some lovely, unique conglomeration of good smells and rare bindings.

This did not, of course, happen, and as spring thrived and mellowed it became obvious that it wouldn't, and I thought about leaving. Martha surprised me by announcing that she had been offered a job teaching some cooking courses that summer at the arts worshop where she had her weaving lessons, and she thought she might take it.

“I've never had a real job,” she confessed, as if the fact surprised her.

“You're a great teacher, Martha,” I said. “Take it.” And then, reluctantly—because I knew she was about to say how much more she'd have to depend on me to keep her house running if she went to work—I told her I was going to look for a job myself.

She wasn't happy about it. “I've learned so much from you, Martha,” I said. “But now I've got to see if I can do it for a living.” When she protested, I quoted Humphrey. “He says I've got to learn to cook in quantity—restaurant cooking.” Martha had a great respect for Humph since she'd traveled down to New Haven to check out the food at Grand'mère, but his views didn't impress her.

“You're rushing it, Cordelia,” she said. “You've only been here, what, seven months? That's hardly an adequate apprenticeship.” I didn't point out that I'd been doing most of my learning from cookbooks since she had abandoned me for weaving and lunching and antiquing, but she seemed to realize it herself, because her voice got a shade less frosty and she said, “If nothing else, you've got me here to give you a critique on your cooking every night. Cordelia, I really don't think you're ready to face the great world.”

I thought I was, though, and I began, furtively, to read the help-wanted ads every day in the Hartford
Courant
. If Martha caught me at it, she said, “Oh, Cordelia, for heaven's
sake.
” She felt, I think, that I had in some way betrayed her. (If she only knew, I thought, that this was the end of my betrayal of her, not the beginning.) She said once, “I didn't spend all that time training you so you could walk out on me.”

“We agreed it would be temporary, Martha,” I said. “You couldn't expect me to be a mother's helper forever.”

“Nobody's talking about forever, Cordelia,” she said—just as Paul had, under similar circumstances. “But this is so
soon,
” she complained.

“Don't let her push you around,” Mrs. Frutchey said to me one morning while she cleaned the oven. She wore a scarf tied around her nose and mouth to keep out the ammonia fumes, and the words came out muffled but firm. “She's just a spoiled brat. She's had her money's worth out of you, don't you worry.”