Christine Falls: A Novele (13 page)

THE THING THAT ANDY WANTED WAS A CAR. NOT ANY OLD CAR, THAT
some nigger with too much cheap liquor in his veins had finished bolting together one rainy Monday morning in Detroit. No, what he had set his heart on was a Porsche. He knew the very model, too, a Spyder 550 coupe. He had seen one, over near the Common, where Claire had dragged him with the baby to take a walk one day. In fact, he heard it before he saw it, a growling roar that for a thrilling moment turned the Common to savannah and a stand of pin oaks into tropical palms. He turned, all his instincts prickling, and there the beast was, throbbing under a red light at the intersection of Beacon Hill and Charles Street. It was small to be making so much noise, jelly-bean scarlet, with tires a foot thick, and so low to the road it was a question how any normal-sized person could get in behind the wheel. The top was down; he wished, later, for the sake of his peace of mind, it had been left up. The driver was just some Boston guy trying to look like one of those Englishmen in the magazine ads, slick-haired and sissyish, wearing a blue blazer with two rows of brass buttons and a loosely tied gold-colored silk scarf inside the open collar of his white sport shirt. But the girl beside him, she was a knockout. She had kind of an Indian profile, with high cheekbones and a nose that came down in a straight line from her forehead. She was no Indian, though, but pure Boston Brahmin, honey-skinned, with big blue wide-apart eyes, a cruel red mouth the same shade as the paintwork of the car, and a heavy mane of yellow hair that she pushed aside from her forehead with a sweep of one slender, pale arm, letting Andy see for a second the delicate blue shadow in her shaved armpit. She felt his hungry eyes on her and gave him a look, amused, mocking, and about a hundred miles distant, a look that said,
Hey, pretty boy, you get yourself a college education, a rich daddy and an income of a couple of hundred grand a year and a car like this one, and who knows, a girl like me might let you buy her a Manhattan some evening over there at the Ritz-Carlton.

That Saturday he had been out to Cambridge to a used-auto place where there was a Porsche for sale, not a Spyder but a 356. It had looked good, all polished up like a shiny black evil beetle, crouched there among a fleet of chrome-encrusted jalopies, America’s finest, but two minutes under the hood had told him it was no good, that someone had driven the heart out of it and that it had probably been in a wreck. Anyway, who did he think he was fooling? He did not have the dough to buy it even if they offered it to him at a tenth of the asking price. The trip across the river had taken two bus rides there and two back again, and now he was home and in no mood for entertaining callers.

When he turned onto Fulton Street, footsore and mad as hell, he saw the Olds parked at the curb outside the house. It was no Porsche, but it was big and new and shiny, and he had never seen it before. He was looking it over with a critical eye when Claire appeared around the side of the house with a red-haired priest carrying his hat in his hand. Andy did not know why he fixed first of all on the hat, but it was the thing about the priest that he least liked the look of; it was an ordinary black homburg, but there was something about the way that he carried it, holding it by the crown, like a bishop or a cardinal holding that four-cornered red flowerpot thing that they wore saying Mass—he could not remember the name of it but it sounded like the name of a handgun, Italian, maybe, but he could not remember that, either, and was irritated all the more. Andy did not like priests. His folks had been Catholics, sort of, and at Eastertime his ma would lay off the gin for the day and take him and the rest of the kids on the bus down to Baltimore to go to High Mass there in the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen. He had hated those trips, the boredom on the Greyhound, the baloney sandwiches that were all they would have to eat until they got home again, and the crowds of fat-cat harps in the cathedral making the place stink of bacon and cabbage, and the crazy-sounding guys chanting and moaning up on the altar in their weird robes that looked like they were made of metal, some sort of silver or gold, with purple letters and crosses and shepherd’s crooks embroidered on them, and everyone being so holy it would make you want to puke and muttering along with the prayers in Latin that they did not understand a word of. No, Andy Stafford did not care for priests.

This one was called Harkins, and he was bog-Irish to the roots of his oily red hair. He shook hands with Andy and meanwhile gave him the once-over, all smiles and stained teeth but the little yellowish-green eyes cold and sharp as a cat’s.

“Pleased to meet you, Andy,” he said. “Claire here was just telling me all about you.” She was, was she? Andy tried to catch her eye but she kept her gaze fixed firmly on the Mick. “I was just passing,” Harkins went on, “and thought I’d drop in.”

“Sure,” Andy said. If he had just dropped in, how come Claire was in her best green dress with her hair all done up?

“The baby’s going to have a special blessing from the Holy Father,” Claire said brightly. She was still having trouble meeting his eye. What had this sky pilot been saying to her?

“You going to bring her over there to Italy, are you?” Andy said to Harkins, who laughed, those green eyes of his flickering.

“It’ll be a case of Mohammed coming to the mountain,” he said, “although I’m not sure the Archbishop would appreciate the comparison—His Grace will dispense the blessing on the Pope’s behalf.” Andy was about to speak again but the priest turned to Claire, cutting him off, and showing him he was cutting him off. “I’d best not dally,” he said, “for I’ve a few other calls to make.”

“Thanks for dropping in, Father,” Claire said.

Harkins went to the car and opened the door and threw his hat on the passenger seat and got in behind the wheel.

“God bless, now,” he said, and to Andy, “Keep up the good work!” whatever that was supposed to mean, and slammed the door and started up the engine. Firing on only six cylinders, as Andy heard with satisfaction. As the car pulled away from the curb—burning oil, too, by the look the exhaust smoke—Harkins lifted a hand from the wheel and made a rapid movement with his fingers, as if he were sketching something—was that a blessing? The archbishop would have to do better than that.

Andy turned to Claire. “What’d he want?”

She was still waving good-bye. She shivered, for the day was misty and chill. “I don’t know, really,” she said. “I guess Sister Stephanus might have asked him to call in.”

“Doesn’t trust us, huh?”

She heard what he was really saying—honestly, he was jealous of everyone!—and she sighed and gave him a look. “He’s a priest, Andy. He was just paying a visit.”

“Well, I hope he don’t visit too often. I don’t like priests in the house. My old ma always said it was bad luck.”

There were quite a few things Claire could say about Andy’s old Ma, if only she dared.

They went around the side of the house and climbed the wooden stairway. Claire told him Mrs. Bennett was out. “She called up to ask if there was anything I needed at the store.” She smiled over her shoulder at him teasingly. “Of course, I’m sure it was you she was hoping to see.”

He said nothing. He had been watching Cora Bennett. She was no beauty, with that bony face and mean mouth, but she had a good figure, behind the apron she never seemed to take off, and a hungry eye. He had dropped a few inquiring hints as to the whereabouts of Mr. Bennett but had got no response. Run off, probably; if he had been dead she would likely have said so—widows tended to be real fond of their late husbands, Andy always found, until someone turned up who looked a candidate to take the sainted one’s place.

In the house he walked into the kitchenette, wanting to know what there was for dinner. Claire said she had not thought about it yet, what with Father Harkins visiting and all, and anyway she wished he would say
lunch,
which is what folk ate in the middle of the day, not dinner, which sounded so low-class.

“So
Irish,
I guess you mean,” he said over his shoulder, opening a cupboard door and letting it slam shut again.

“No, that is
not
what I meant, and you know it.” Claire had grown up in a village south of Boston, with picket fences and white frame houses and a white church spire pointing up past the maples, all of which she seemed to think gave her a right to her New England airs, but he knew what she came from—German hog farmers who had lost their few acres to the banks in the hard times and moved upstate to try their hand at running a feed store until that failed too. Now in the kitchenette she walked up behind him and had him turn to her and took him by the wrists and made him put his arms around her waist, and then laid her fists on his chest and smiled up into his face. “You know that’s not what I meant, Andy Stafford,” she said again, softly, and kissed him lightly on the lips, a bluebird’s peck.

“Well,” he said, putting on his slow drawl, “I guess if there’s nothing to eat I’m just going to have to eat
you
.”

He was leaning down to kiss her when he looked past her shoulder and saw the bassinet on the table in the living room, and the blanket in it stirring. “Shit,” he said, and pushed her away from him and stalked to the table and violently picked up the bassinet by its handles and headed for the baby’s room.

“She’s asleep!” Claire cried. “She’s…”

But he was gone. When he came back he pointed a shaking finger in her face. “I told you, girl,” he said in a quiet voice, “the kid has her own room, and that’s where she stays when she’s asleep. Right?”

She could see how angry he was: his mouth was twitching at the side and he had that flecked look in his eye. He was still mad over Father Harkins being here—could he really be jealous, of a priest? “All right, honey,” she said, making her voice very slow and calm. “All right, I’ll remember.”

He went to the icebox and got a beer. She could never decide which was more scary, his rages or the way they suddenly ended, as if nothing had happened. He knocked the cap off the bottle and threw back his head and took a series of long swallows, his adam’s apple bobbing in a rhythm that made her think, blushing inside, of being in bed with him.

“That guy,” he said, “the priest—did he say if what’s-her-name spoke to old man Crawford yet?” She looked blank and he waggled the bottle impatiently. “Sister…you know…”

“Stephanus?”

“Yeah, her. She said she’d talk to Crawford about a job for me.”

The baby was trying out a few exploratory squeaks that sounded to Claire like the sounds a blind man would make feeling at something shiny with his fingertips; Andy seemed not to hear.

“I thought,” she said cautiously, “you weren’t interested in other work?”

“I’d kind of like to hear what he has to offer.”

Claire stood, half of her listening anxiously for the baby, who seemed to have changed her mind and gone back to sleep, and the other half considering the possibility of Andy not being on the trucks anymore. They would be like an ordinary couple—
normal
was the first word that came to her mind—but it would be the end of their happy nights alone together, just the two of them, her and little Christine.

SARAH HATED THE SMELL OF HOSPITALS, SUMMONING UP AS IT DID
vivid memories of a childhood tonsillectomy. She could detect the smell even on Mal’s clothes, a mixture of ether and disinfectant and what she thought must be bandages that no number of dry cleanings could remove. She had never complained or even mentioned it—a fine thing it would be for a doctor’s wife to admit she disliked the smell of doctoring!—but he must have seen her once or twice wrinkling her nose, for nowadays he would vanish upstairs to change as soon as he was in the door. Poor Mal, trying to look after everyone, to take care of everything, and getting no thanks. Yet his side of the wardrobe reeked for her of that moment of childhood terror and pain under the doctor’s knife.

When she walked into reception at the Holy Family, carrying her gloves, the smell hit her at once and it was so strong she thought for a moment she would have to turn around and walk out again. But she forced herself forward to the desk and the dragon lady there—why would anyone choose to wear spectacles with pale pink, translucent frames?—and asked if Dr. Quirke might be available. “
Mr.
Quirke, is it?” the dragon snapped. Sarah knew of course it should be Mr., and serve her right for her patronizing assumption that she would not be understood if she did not ask for him as Dr. She would never master the rules, never.

She sat on a hard bench by the wall and waited. Quirke had told the dragon to say he would come up right away. She watched the usual procession of the halt and the maimed, the accident cases, the bandaged children, the shock-faced old, the mothers-to-be struggling along in the wake of their enormous stomachs, being bullied already by the unborn. She wondered how Mal could face these women, day after day, year after year. Quirke’s clients at least were conveniently dead. She chided herself: her thoughts were all of an unrelieved bleakness in these days.

Quirke was loosely gowned in green. He apologized for the delay; one of his assistants was off sick, the place was in chaos. She said it was not important, that she could come back another time, yet wondered silently how there could be such urgency to his work—the dead would stay dead, surely? No, he was saying, no, she must stay, now that she was here. She could see him wondering why she
was
here; Quirke had always been a calculator.

They sat at a plastic-topped table beside a dusty window in the hospital canteen. Down at the serving end there was a counter with rumbling tea urns and glass cases containing triangular sandwiches curled at the tips, and miniature packets of biscuits, and what were called, with what she thought of as stark aptness, rock cakes. Why was it, she wondered idly, when Quirke had gone off to fetch their tea, that hospitals here were so run-down and dingy and uniformly miserable? The window beside the table where she sat looked out on a blockhouse built of bricks the color of old blood, the flat roof of which, apparently made of asphalt, sported at one corner a crooked stovepipe chimney with a cowl, from which smoke was pouring sideways, flattened by the strong October wind. Without her wanting it to, her mind speculated on what in a hospital could require burning that would produce a smoke so dense and black. Quirke returned, bearing mugs of presugared, milky tea, which she knew she would not be able to bring herself to drink. She felt it coming on, that increasingly familiar sense of weakness, of lightness, as if she were somehow floating up out of herself, as if her mind were detaching itself and floating free of her. Was this what they meant in the old books when they spoke of
the vapors
? She wondered how worried she should be about her health. But would not death, she thought, be a solution to so many things? Though she did not really imagine she would escape that easily, or that soon.

“So,” Quirke said, “I suppose this is about Mal?”

She looked at him searchingly. How much did he know? She wanted to ask, she dearly wanted to ask, but she could not bring herself to speak the words. What if he knew more than she did, what if he was privy to things even more terrible than she had learned of? She tried to concentrate, grasping at her scattering thoughts. What had he asked her? Yes: if it was about Mal that she had come. She decided to ignore this. She said:

“Phoebe wants to marry that young man.” She touched the handle of the mug with her fingertips; it felt slightly sticky. “It’s impossible, of course.”

Quirke frowned, and she could see him readjusting his thoughts, his strategies: Phoebe, then, not Mal. “Impossible?” he said.

She nodded. “And needless to say, there’s no talking to her.”

“Tell her to go ahead and do it,” he said. “Tell her you’re all for it. Nothing more likely to put her off the idea.”

She thought it best to disregard this also. “Would you speak to her?”

He leaned back in the chair and lifted high his head and looked at her along one shallow side of his flattened nose, nodding slowly, grimly. “I see,” he said. “You want to persuade me to persuade Phoebe to give up her inconvenient boyfriend.”

“She’s so young, Quirke.”

“So were we.”

“She has all her life before her.”

“So had we.”

“Yes,” she said, pouncing, “and look what mistakes we made!” The fierceness was gone as quickly as it had come. “Besides, it wouldn’t work. They’d make sure of that.”

Quirke raised an eyebrow. “They? You mean Mal? Would he really want to destroy her happiness?”

She was shaking her head before he had finished speaking, her eyes cast down. “You don’t understand, Quirke. There’s a whole world. You can’t win with a whole world against you, I know that.”

Quirke looked out the window. Clouds the color of watered ink were roiling on the far horizon; it would rain. He was silent a moment, studying her with narrowed eyes. She looked away. “What is it, Sarah?” he said.

“What?” She tried to be offhand and airy. “What’s what?”

He would not let go; she felt like the quarry borne down on by a single, relentless, huge hound.

“Something’s happened,” he said. “Are you and Mal—?”

“I don’t want to talk about Mal,” she said, so fast it might have been not a sentence but a single word. She put her hands on the table before her, beside her gloves, and looked at them. “Then there’s my father,” she said. He waited. She was still frowning at her hands, as if they had suddenly become an object of fascination. “He’s threatened to cut her out of his will.”

Quirke wanted to laugh. Old Crawford’s will, no less—what next? Then he had a sudden, unnervingly clear image of horse-faced Wilkins, his assistant, waiting for him in the lab—Sinclair was having one of his strategic bouts of flu—and shivered at this glimpse of the world of the dead, his world.

“What about the Judge?” he said. “Why not get him to talk to Phoebe, or to Mal—to your father, maybe, too? Surely he’d knock sense into them all and make them solve it?” She gave him a pitying look. He said, “There will have to be a solution, one way or the other, in the end. I say it again: tell her she can marry him, urge her on. I bet she’ll give Bertie Wooster the old heave-ho.”

Sarah would not smile. “I don’t want Phoebe to be tied down in an early marriage,” she said.

He laughed incredulously. “An early marriage? What’s this? I thought it was because Carrington is a Prod?”

She was shaking her head again, her eyes on the table. “Everything is changing,” she said. “It will be different in the future.”

“Oh, yes, in a hundred years’ time life will be beautiful.”

She shook her head stubbornly. “It will be different, in the future,” she said again. “Girls of Phoebe’s generation, they’ll have a chance to escape, to be themselves, to”—she laughed, embarrassed by what she was about to say—“to live!” She lifted her eyes to his and shrugged one shoulder, abashed. “I wish you’d speak to her, Quirke.”

He sat forward so abruptly her gloves on the table seemed to shrink back from him, clasping each other. How lifelike they looked, Sarah thought, a pair of black leather gloves. As if some otherwise invisible third person at the table were wringing her hands.

“Listen,” he said impatiently, “I have no time for that chinless wonder Phoebe has set her heart on, but if she’s determined to marry him, then good luck to her.” She made to protest but he held out a hand to silence her. “However, if you were to ask me to speak to her, for you—not for Mal, or your father, or anyone else, but for you—then I would.”

In the silence they heard the rattle of raindrops blown against the window. She sighed, then rose and picked up her gloves, banishing that other, invisible, anguished sharer of her troubles. As if to herself she said, ruefully, “Well, I tried.” She smiled. “Thank you for the tea.” The two mugs stood untouched, a crinkled wafer of scum floating on the faintly quaking surface of the gray liquid. “I must go.”

“Ask me,”
Quirke said.

He had not risen, but sat sideways at the table, poised and tense, one hand on the back of his chair and the other flat on the smeared tabletop. How could he be so cruel, playing with her always like this?

“You know I can’t,” she said.

“Why can’t you?”

She gave a laugh of mild exasperation. “Because I’d be in your debt!”

“No.”

“Yes!” she said, as vehement as he. “Do it, Quirke. Do it for Phoebe—for her happiness.”

“No,” he said again, flatly. “For you.”