Christine Falls: A Novele (11 page)

IT WAS NOT EXACTLY WHAT CLAIRE HAD BEEN HOPING FOR, THE TOP
half of a two-family house on Fulton Street, but it was a world away from the places they had been living in since they were married, places that were not much better than flophouses, and she knew she could turn it into a home; best of all, it was hers—theirs—for it was all paid for, with nothing owing to the bank, and they could fix it up whatever way they liked. It was gray clapboard with a steep roof and a nice porch at the front with a swing. They had the three rooms upstairs, as well as a kitchenette and bathroom. The living room was full of light, and there was an arched window in the gable end, like the window in the alcove of a church, that looked right into the heart of an old walnut tree growing at the side of the house where squirrels hopped and skittered. Mr. Crawford’s man had sent over the painters from the body shop in Roxbury, and she had been allowed to choose the colors herself, buttercup yellow in the living room, white for the kitchen, of course, and a cool, pale blue for the bathroom. She had not been sure about the shade of candy pink she had picked for the baby’s room, but it looked fine, now that it had dried. The store had promised to deliver the crib this morning, and Andy had arranged for their things to be brought over from the old place on a flatbed by one of his buddies in the afternoon. For now she was enjoying the look of the rooms before they were filled up. She liked the emptiness, the space, the way the sun fell slanting on the wall here in the living room, the way the polished maple floor rang clean and solid under her heels.

“Oh, Andy,” she said, “isn’t it just the prettiest place? And to think, it’s all ours!”

He was on one knee in a corner, jiggling a loose power socket in the wall there. “Yeah,” he said without turning, “old Crawford has a real big heart.”

She went and stood behind him, leaning her hips against his back and draping her arms around his shoulders, savoring his strong, metallic smell that she always thought of as blue, the jukebox blue of spilled machine oil or a sheet of pliant milled steel.

“Come on,” she said, reaching down past his shoulders and patting his chest with her two hands, “don’t be such a sourpuss.”

She was about to speak again, to tell him how handsome he looked in the dark pants and the sport jacket, but just then the baby in the bassinet behind her woke up. Claire was secretly thrilled at the way the baby’s—Christine, she must get used to thinking of her by her name—at the way Christine’s thin, rising wail, like the sound of a flute or some high instrument like that, already affected her, causing something to move in her stomach and making her heart beat faster and more heavily, as though it was a fist thumping softly inside her chest. “What’s wrong with baby then, hmm?” she whispered. “What’s the matter? Don’t you like our nice new housey?”

She wished her mother could be alive to see her now. Daddy would only laugh, of course, and wipe the back of his hand across his mouth, as if to wipe away a bad taste.

She smiled at Andy and snuffed up a deep breath through her nostrils. “Smell that,” she said. “Fresh paint!”

Andy was balancing on one leg, pulling on a boot. “I’m hungry,” he said. “Let’s go get a hamburger.”

She said all right, although she did not want to leave yet, wanted to stay and get used to the place, to let it soak into her. There was a short hall beside the kitchenette with a sort of French door at the end of it that opened onto a set of rickety wooden stairs leading steeply down into the yard at the side; this would be their front door. Andy went first, descending the stairs sideways and holding her by the elbow to steady her as she followed with the baby in her arms. This was one of the things she loved most about him, the easy, graceful way he had of being helpful, not just to her but others, too—women in stores, children, the one-armed old man at the gas station out on the turnpike who looked after the pumps; sometimes Negroes, even.

The backyard was brown after the dry summer and the grass crackled under their feet and gave off dust that smelled like wood ash, and crickets the same color as the grass clicked their hinged back legs and sailed away from them on all sides. There was nothing in this part of the yard, only a gnarled peach tree, its leaves gone already, and an old overgrown dug patch where someone must have raised vegetables, long ago.

“Well,” Claire said, with a rueful laugh, “this is going to take some rethinking.”

“What gives you the idea it’s going to be ours to rethink?” Andy said.

He was looking past her toward the house, and she turned and saw a tall, thin-faced woman standing on the porch, watching them. Her no-color hair was pulled back and tied in a tight ball at the back of her neck. She wore a brown apron.

“Why, hello there,” Claire said, going forward with the baby in one arm and a hand outstretched. It was a strategy she had devised for meeting new people, always to make a move right away, before her shyness had time to stop her. The woman on the porch ignored the hand she was offering and she quickly took it back. “I’m Claire Stafford,” she said.

The woman looked her up and down and was obviously unimpressed with what she saw. “Bennett,” she said. When she shut her mouth her lips made a straight, colorless line.

She must be thirty-five, Claire guessed, but she gave an even older impression. Claire wondered if Mr. Bennett was about, or if there was a Mr. Bennett. “Pleased to meet you,” she said. “We’re moving in today. We were just up there, getting the feel of the place.”

The woman nodded. “I heard the baby.”

Claire held out the bundle in her arms. “This is Christine,” she said. The woman ignored the baby; she was squinting at Andy standing back in the dry grass with his hands in the seat pockets of his jeans and his head on one side, and the look in her eye warmed a half a degree or so, Claire noted. “That’s my husband, Andy,” Claire said. She lowered her voice to a woman-to-woman level. “He’s a mite put out,” she said. “I think he thinks the place is on the small side.”

She knew at once it had been the wrong thing to say.

“That right?” the woman said coldly. “Guess he’s used to grander quarters, is he?”

Andy must have seen from the angle of Claire’s back that she needed rescuing. He came forward with his widest grin.

“Howdy there,” he said, “Miss…?”

“Bennett,” the woman said. “Mrs.”

“No!” He lifted a hand in mock amazement and opened wide his velvety brown eyes. Claire watched him with an amusement in which there was only the faintest touch of jealousy. His charm knew no shame, and always worked, however obvious the lies he told. “Well,” he said to the woman, “I’m mighty glad to make your acquaintance.”

He stepped up on the porch and she let him take her hand, having wiped it first on her apron.

“Likewise, I’m sure,” she said.

Claire saw how he held her fingers in his a moment before releasing them, and how her tight lips twitched into a smile.

There was silence then between the three of them. Faintly, like the rumbling of far-off thunder, Claire felt the first beats of a headache starting up. The baby flexed its arm, pressing out the blanket as if it—she—Christine—also wanted to reach out to this hard-faced, long-boned woman. Claire drew the warm bundle more tightly to her breast.

Andy slapped his hands against his hips. “Well,” he said, “I guess it’s about lunchtime.” He waited a second, but if he expected the Bennett woman to invite them in then he was disappointed. “Let’s go get something to eat, honey,” he said. “I’ll fetch my billfold.”

He went off up the wooden stairway two at a time. Claire smiled at Mrs. Bennett and turned to follow him. The woman said:

“I hope that baby ain’t a bawler. Noise carries easily, in these tiny little houses.”

QUIRKE COULD NOT REMEMBER THE LAST TIME HE HAD BEEN IN THE
hospital chapel, and he was not sure what he was doing here now. The doors, giving off the corridor that led to radiology, struck an incongruous note, with their fancy handles and the two narrow panels of stained glass that some rich old lady had paid to have installed a couple of years previously in memory of her married daughter who had died. The air in here was always cold, with a special sort of cold not to be felt elsewhere, but which Quirke associated, unaccountably, with the vase of lilies that had stood every summer on the altar of the chapel in Carricklea—he used to believe it was always the same bunch, miraculously undying—into the bell of one of which he had one day dared to put his hand, and the chill, clammy, flesh-like feel of which he had never forgotten. The Holy Family chapel was small, without pillars or side alcoves, so that there was no avoiding the beady eye of the little oil lamp with the ruby-red globe that burned perpetually before the tabernacle. It was there at noon that Quirke found Mal, kneeling with hands joined and head bowed before a statue of St. Joseph. He went forward quietly and sat down in the seat beside where Mal knelt. Mal did not turn, and gave no sign to acknowledge his presence, but after a minute or two he crossed himself and sat back on the seat with a sigh. They were both silent for a time; then Quirke lifted a hand and made a gesture indicating the statue, the sanctuary lamp, the altar with its gold-embroidered white cloth, and said: “Tell me, Mal, do you really believe in all this?”

Mal considered. “I try to,” he said. He looked sidelong at his brother-in-law. “And you—what do you believe in?”

“I was cured of believing in things a long time ago.”

Mal gave an amused little sniff. “You love to hear yourself saying things like that, don’t you,” he said. He took off his spectacles and rubbed a finger hard into one eye and then the other and sighed again. “What do you want, Quirke?”

Now it was Quirke’s turn to consider. “I want you to tell me about Dolly Moran’s death.”

Mal registered no surprise. “I know less about it than you, seemingly,” he said. “I’m not the one going about poking my nose into places where it’s liable to get cut off.”

Quirke gave an incredulous laugh. “Is that a
threat,
Mal?”

Mal gazed before him stonily.

“You may think you know what you’re doing, Quirke,” he said, “but believe me, you don’t.”

“I know Christine Falls didn’t die of an embolism,” Quirke said, quietly at first, “as you claimed she did, in that false file you wrote up. I know she died having a child, and that her child was stillborn, as you told me, but that it disappeared, or was disappeared, without a trace. I know I told you Dolly Moran kept a diary and that the next day she was tortured and had her head smashed open. Tell me these things are not connected, Mal. Tell me my suspicions are groundless. Tell me you’re not up to your neck in trouble.”

Quirke was surprised at himself. Where did it come from, all this anger? And what injustice was he protesting—the one done to Dolly Moran, or to Christine Falls or Christine Falls’s child, or to himself? But who had been unjust to him, or injured him? It was not he who had died amid the blood and screams of childbirth, or had his flesh burned or his head cracked open. Mal was obviously unimpressed. He made no reply, only gave a brisk nod, as if something had been confirmed, and stood up. In the aisle he genuflected, and rose again and turned to go, but paused. The somber suit gave him a faintly ecclesiastical aspect; even the dark-blue bow tie might have been the elaborate neckwear of a prelate of some ultramontane faction of the church. His expression when he looked back at Quirke was one of cold amusement mingled with a pitying contempt.

“I’ll tell you this, Quirke,” he said. “Stay out of it.”

Quirke, still seated, shook his head. “I can’t,” he said. “I’m in it, up to my neck, just like you.”

Mal walked out of the chapel. After a while Quirke stood up. The red eye before the altar flickered and seemed to wink. He shivered a little.
The cold heaven…

ANDY STAFFORD LIKED THE NIGHT RUNS BEST. IT WAS NOT JUST THAT
the rate of pay was better or that there was less traffic on the highway. Something about that high dome of darkness all around him and the headlights of the big twelve-wheeler cutting through it made him feel in control of more than just this Crawford Transport truck with its load of roof shingles or auto parts or pig iron. What all he did out here was up to nobody but himself. There was only him and the road and some heartsick hillbilly on the cab radio twanging away about hound dogs and lonesomeness and love. Often, standing in the forecourt of a deserted gas station or stepping out of the late-night smoke and fry smells of a roadside hamburger joint, he would feel the breeze on his face and seem to smell clean, sage-scented air coming to him like a message just for him all the way from out West, from New Mexico or Colorado, Wyoming, maybe, or even the high Rockies, all those places he had never been to, and something would well up in him, something sweet and solitary-seeming and full of promise for the day to come, the day that was already laying down a thin line of gold on the horizon before him.

He got onto the turnpike, then ran through Brookline and down across the deserted south city. When he turned onto Fulton Street he cut the engine and let the rig run smooth and silent down the soft incline of the road to the house, the freewheeling tires warbling under him on the asphalt. Mrs. Bennett—
“You can call me Cora”
—had already started making comments about him parking the truck outside the house, only to Claire, of course, never to him. He swung down from the cab, the muscles in his arms and across the saddle of his shoulders aching and the seam of his jeans wedged like a hot wet lariat rope between his legs. All the houses on the street were dark. Someone’s dog started a halfhearted baying but soon shut up. It was still an hour to dawn and the air had a bite but he sat down anyway on the porch swing to rest a minute and look up at the stars, his hands clasped behind his neck, which was already tingling and beginning to unstiffen. The swing creaked on its chains and made him think of nights in Wilmington when he was a kid, sprawled on the porch like this to smoke a cigarette stolen from the pack in the bib pocket of his old man’s overalls, the smoke harsh and cutting in the cool night air and tasting of all forbidden things, racetrack beer and sour-mash whiskey and girls’ juices, the very taste of what it would be like to be grown up and all the hell away from Wilmington, State of Delanowhere. He laughed to himself. When he was there he’d dreamed of being somewhere like here, now he was here and dreamed of being back there. That was how it always was with him, satisfied noplace, always hankering after other towns, other times.

He stood up and walked around by the side of the house, past what he knew was Cora Bennett’s bedroom, and climbed the wooden stairs and let himself in at the French door. There was still that damned smell of new paint that sometimes almost made him sick to his stomach; he thought he could catch the baby’s smells, too, the usual milk and damp cotton, and the poop that stank like horse feed. He had not bothered to turn on the light and a sort of grayish mist was seeping in from the eastern sky, and he could see the thin, mean-looking spire of St. Patrick’s Church over on Brewster Street outlined against the dawn with the morning star, the only one remaining now, sitting plumb on top of the weathervane. His mood was growing darker the more the morning got light. He wondered, as he had begun to do lately, how long he could stay in this town before the itch to move on got so bad he would have to scratch it.

He sat down in the living room and eased himself out of his boots, then tore off his work shirt. With his arms still lifted he sniffed his armpits; pretty high, but he did not want to bother with a shower; besides, Claire always said she liked his smell. He went on tiptoe in his socks into the bedroom. The shades were pulled, allowing in no chink of dawn light. He could make out Claire’s form in the bed but could not hear her breathing—he liked it that she was a quiet sleeper, when she slept and her headaches were not keeping her awake. Feeling his way about the still unfamiliar room and trying not to make a sound, for he did not want her to wake yet, he got out of the last of his clothes with impatient haste and naked approached the bed and carefully lifted the covers.

“Hey there,”
he whispered, putting one knee on the side of the mattress and leaning down to the form lying there,
“how’s my baby girl?”
There were two, separate stirrings, and two voices, one of them Claire’s, which murmured a blurred “What…?” and the other making an urgent, wet, sucking sound. He reared back. “Jesus Christ!”

It was the kid, of course, lying beside Claire and sucking on its fist. Claire pulled the child from her and sat up, confused and half frightened. “Is that you, Andy?” she said, and had to clear her throat.

“Who the hell did you think it was!” He was lifting the sopping, hot infant out of her arms. “You expecting somebody else?”

She realized what he was doing, and made a grab for the baby.

“She was crying,” she said plaintively, “I was just getting her back to sleep.”

But he was already on his way out of the room, moving through the darkness like a glimmering ghost. She fell back on the pillow, moaning faintly, and thrust a hand into her hair. She tried to see what time it was but the clock on the bedside cabinet was turned away. The baby’s diaper must have leaked, and there was a big wet patch on the front of her nightshirt. She knew she should take it off but she did not want to be naked when Andy came back. It was too late, or too early, for what she knew he would want, and she was tired, for the baby had woken her twice already. But Andy did not notice, or ignored, the wet spot and the faint ammoniac smell, and took the nightshirt off her himself, making her sit up and lift her arms and pulling it roughly over her head and throwing it behind him on the floor.

“Oh, honey,” she began, “listen, I’m—”

But he would not listen. He stretched himself on top of her, forcing her legs apart—his kneecaps were icy—and was suddenly inside her. He smelled of beer, and his lips were still greasy from something he had eaten. She felt chilled, and reached out beside her and found the edge of the bed covers and pulled them over his rhythmically arching back. She could hardly feel him, she was so tired and distracted, but even so she started to slip and slide along with him, and had that familiar, faintly panicky sensation, as if she were sinking slowly, languorously, underwater.

“Honey,” he whispered in her ear, in a hoarse, distressed, lost voice that made her hold him more tightly to her, “oh, honey.”

She heard it before he did, the baby winding out into the dark like a party streamer her thin, demanding, unignorable cry. Andy went still, and lay on her, rigid, his head lifted.

“Jesus,” he said again, and smacked a fist hard into the pillow beside where her head was. “Jesus H. Christ!”

And then, just as she was becoming afraid, he began to laugh.

IN THE MORNING HE WAS STILL IN A FUNNY MOOD. SHE WAS HANGING
sheets on the clothesline he had rigged up temporarily for her between a thick branch of the walnut tree and the newel post at the top of the wooden staircase—Mrs. Bennett had said nothing yet about this arrangement; she had some kind of a newfangled electric dryer herself—when he came creeping up behind her and grabbed her around the waist with a whoop and lifted her high off her feet and swung her in a circle. She would have been glad to see him happy but she was not sure this was happiness. He had kind of a wild look in his eye, as if he had been running real hard and had just now come to a stop. When he set her down she was out of breath herself. With the fingers of one hand he pushed aside the collar of her shirt. “Hey,” he said softly, “what’s this here?” There was a hickey the size of a silver dollar on the side of her neck. “Now, where did that come from?”

“Oh,” she said, turning away from him to hang another sheet, “some big old brute came sneaking into my bed sometime around dawn—didn’t you hear him?”

“Why, no. I slept like a baby. You know me, honey.” He put his arms around her again from behind and ground his hips slowly against her. His arms were like two hot steel cables. “Tell me,” he whispered, his mouth hot too against her ear, “what else he do to you, this big old brute?”

She turned, laughing in her throat, and he slipped his arms higher and put his hands on her shoulder blades and pulled her hard against his chest, and she put her open mouth to his and he drank her sweet breath and their tongues touched. A breeze came from somewhere, maybe the faraway Rockies again, and caught the wet sheet on the clothesline and wrapped it briefly around them. Kissing, they did not see, in a downstairs window of the house, a thin-lipped face and a pair of cold eyes, watching them.