Duplicate Keys (39 page)

Susan shrugged. The wardress approached, and Susan stood up. The wardress led her away. As she was about to disappear, though, she stopped and looked at Alice. And Alice was betrayed by the furious desire for some loving word that would change the situation from horrible to tragic. Susan said, “Some of those long bobby pins. Send me a package of those long bobby pins, okay?”

Alice nodded.

B
ENEATH
his casual manner, Noah seemed a little startled when he came to meet them, but the distracted way he greeted Rya made it clear that it was not precisely she who startled him, that his surprise was a personal condition only tenuously related to his exact circumstances. He seemed glad to see them, although even as he looked at them affectionately, he seemed not to be listening to what they had to say. He declared at once that he was fine, before they asked him, and complimented Rya idly on her dress, which he hadn’t seen since last summer, but still he seemed startled. Alice thought that such a condition might last for a long time, even become permanent. She gave him a sisterly kiss on the cheek, and he hugged her suddenly, tightly, with real feeling. She had not always liked Noah. Tears came to her eyes.

As they looked for a taxi that was going to take them back to Manhattan, Noah reminded Alice very much of a little boy of a certain age, perhaps eleven or twelve, elated and confused, but determined not to show either. His face was arranged, his gait was arranged, his remarks were arranged to give no evidence that his arrest, indictment, arraignment, and confinement had been any different from a gig in Bridgeport or a weekend in the Catskills. This air of false resolution made him look very handsome, both older and younger than usual. Alice glanced at Rya, wondering if she noticed. Rya looked small, stooped slightly by the weight of the scenery. She was not looking at Noah. Alice pursed her lips and shook her head. “Another beautiful day,” said Noah. “Especially out here near the water.”

“The air is lovely,” said Alice.

“So,” he said, “it was Susan.”

“Yes,” said Alice.

“I didn’t think of that. I heard the shots, you know, when I was outside the door. I didn’t think of Susan. I thought one of them did it. I thought sure that was it.”

“Who did you think it was?”

Noah shrugged. “I thought Craig was crazy enough to do it, but I guess I thought Denny would have a motive.”

“But what about the weapon? The police never found a weapon.”

Noah smiled and shrugged. “I don’t know. Besides, you never know what the police have found.” Thinking of Honey, Alice nodded, and said, “How did they find the cocaine at your place?”

“By process of elimination, I suppose. I just grabbed it at the last minute, because I didn’t want Denny to get in trouble.”

“With Susan?”

“Who else?”

There were no cabs, and so they sat on an old bench, waiting for the bus. A breeze blew briskly off the water. “This smells great,” said Noah. He was grinning. Rya took some pins out of her hair and put them back in. Noah looked at her, then looked toward Manhattan, or what would be the Bronx, Alice guessed, then took Alice’s hand. Alice shivered, suddenly afraid, and looked quickly toward Rya, who was gazing at the planes coming into LaGuardia and taking off. Noah’s hand tightened on Alice’s, became painful. After a long moment, Noah groaned, “Oh, God!” and then burst into tears. Alice bit her lip and blinked. Rya, as if viewing everything from a distance, slowly turned her head and watched in amazement.

Noah cried for a long time, holding tightly to Alice’s hand, only to Alice’s hand. The bus did not come. Rya sat perfectly still and Alice tried not to look at her, tried not to signal in any way what she thought Rya should do. Once Rya opened her mouth and closed it again, then, after a few minutes, she spoke. “Why are you crying, Noah?”

Noah perfectly took her meaning, which Alice saw was really to inquire, not to challenge. Of course he would be crying, but it was important to know what aspect of his recent experience was most vivid to him. Noah caught his breath, was unable to speak, caught his breath again. Finally, he said, “It’s intolerable to be alone like this.”

Neither Rya nor Alice exclaimed that he was not alone, that they were with him. They exchanged a glance, and Alice realized that Rya, too, acknowledged the depth of their threefold solitude, and had no answer for it. Alice looked toward the Bronx, and she felt suddenly like a stone, about to be carried with a great show of purpose toward millions of other stones. In fact, though, belying her movement, there would be nothing among those stones for her, and no promise that she would ever again cease being a stone herself.

A cab came, carrying a woman and a small boy. Rya stood up first and stepped forward, then turned halfway to wait for them. Alice bent down to retrieve her purse, which had slid under the bench. The sun was shining brightly, and it was almost hot. Noah took a deep shuddering breath and stood up. Just then there was a piece of broken pavement, and Noah stumbled. Alice put her hand out, but it was Rya who grabbed his elbow so that he didn’t fall down. Noah smiled. Alice was suspicious of any hope for them, but on the other hand, never before had she seen Rya even notice anyone else’s problems, much less try to help with one. The woman assisted her little boy out of the cab and looked around suspiciously. Alice smiled at her, and then they were in the cab, speeding back to Manhattan.

S
OON
enough she was at the gate of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. She was not willing to say that it was Henry she wanted to see—she would not, for example, have gone over to his apartment, but when she catalogued her alternatives for the empty afternoon, shopping reminded her too much of Susan, work seemed a bore, there were no movies she wanted to see, and she had no friends to visit. Only the Botanic Garden, with its deserted paths and grandly organized exotica seemed alluring. She stood at the gate, though, for a long time, unable to go in, although she could see that there was no Henry weeding or pruning among the ivies and crab apples of the formal walk. She was not merely afraid of
an embarrassing encounter, although, standing there, she strongly felt the garden to be Henry’s preserve, she was more afraid, oddly afraid, of intruding upon the garden itself, as if she would be unwelcome. A group was going in: an older black man in work clothes carrying his lunch, an extremely fat woman who had to be helped through the turnstile, a teenager with a baby. Alice followed them. Anyone, after all, could go in. The man sat down on one of the benches and a truck full of equipment drove by, but otherwise the upper walks were empty. It was not until she had strolled there for a while that Alice realized how populated and jangling her life had been for the last few weeks. More importantly, it was she herself who seemed an intrusion upon it. A discomfort she had felt, like a burr in her side, had goaded her closer and closer to Susan, closer and closer to Honey, so that, in the end, she had succeeded in inserting herself in the picture. When she thought about Susan, her embarrassment was so profound that almost any other pain seemed preferable to it. And embarrassment was exactly what she had always assumed their friendship would preserve her from.

At the end of the formal walk, she turned sharply left, along the upper walk, where she and Henry had not gone. Spread below, as in an amphitheater, were the rows of cherry trees, fully leafed out now, the lilacs, almost faded, and straight ahead, the rose garden, surrounded by a picket fence, which was just coming into bloom. The roses were so profuse, so colorful, and so fragrant, even a hundred feet away, that it seemed startling that no one was viewing them, that they should have such a self-contained existence even here, in the middle of millions of people. Alice was not a particular lover of roses. Usually she found them fragrant, but too garish, too full of blooms or too blank without them, unable to bear up their own richness. Her favorite flowers were more modest—daffodils, lilacs, lavender—but from this distance, the velvety reds, flashing yellows, and glassy whites seemed to break up the light of the summer sun into its various elements and cast it back far more brilliantly than any other flower ever
could, seemed not exactly of the earth, but of space and air itself. Alice stood still for a long time, until a man came and sat near her on the bench. Afraid that he would say, “Pretty, huh?” or something equally compromising, she turned and walked down the hill toward the lilac bushes.

Maybe Doreen and Hugh and the grandparents were right after all. If she went back to Rochester, where she at least had relatives, if not friends, and relatives she got along with, she would be eating fresh strawberries right now, and the first oakleaf lettuce. Later in the summer, she could go fishing with Hugh and Doc, who still had the confidence to eat what they caught. Going home wasn’t necessarily a defeat. Thirty-year-olds settled near their parents every day, and viewed it as a matter of coming to their senses, bolstering up the disintegrating American family, or even out-growing all of those spurious resentments that had driven them away in the first place. If you could freely return to the geography of your parents, after embracing to your heart’s content the most dangerous, exciting, and alien landscape imaginable, didn’t you thereafter have everything? Weren’t you then forever both small town and cosmopolitan, experienced, and yet reaping the abundant fruits of innocence? They seemed very alluring just then, the lives that her living ancestors had led; not just Doc, who had spent three years in Europe during the First World War, two of them before the Americans came in, patching up the wounded, and then come back to Minnesota to practice, and become a friend of the Mayos, but Pop, too, who’d had a little fortune once, only an inconsiderable, small town accumulation, but he’d lost it by speculation, and then made some of it back again by his dogged but hungering avoidance of speculation. Her grandmothers had their own stories, more personal and more shadowy, since the essence of being a grandmother is to have been perfectly virtuous and a sterling example for a little girl all of your life, but after all, their lives were of a piece, as were those of Doreen and Hugh, lives that lasted so long and were so continuous that every subterranean force set in motion by inheritance
or chance had the opportunity to grow, flower, and subside. Her relatives seemed actually to have learned something from their long existences, which was perhaps why Alice had always liked them. They had not been battered by random events into numbness, as Alice felt in danger of being. Each of her forebears had a peculiar and fully branched inner life. Maybe that was the great compensation for living in the Midwest, in a climate as routinely cruel as Minnesota’s.

It was then that she saw Henry’s back as he disappeared into the brush of the native plant collection. She didn’t think he had seen her, but she turned quickly and hurried toward the Japanese garden and the promenades of the greenhouse. About Henry she was also embarrassed, although it was the commoner embarrassment of having met kindness with rudeness, of having acted inconsistently and probably stupidly. Obviously it was only right to apologize to him sometime, and it would be all too easy to put off such an apology until the interval itself would amount to still another discourtesy. It now seemed bizarre that Henry had offered her such quick and passionate love only a few days ago. It probably seemed bizarre to him, too. It was marvellous in a way how completely her passion for him had been a part of the murder. At least, she didn’t feel it now. She surveyed the water lilies, not liking them particularly, but struck by the luminosity of the pale lavender ones. In the annual beds, varieties of marigolds, nicotiana, and begonias had been set out, just as they would soon be in her mother’s and grandmother’s flower gardens at home. Alice wondered if Henry had helped. She thought of Susan that morning, of her kindness that was merely kindness, and her toes curled with mortification. Still, such embarrassment was good if it served as a prophylactic against another abject relationship. Wasn’t it better, for the time being, to be loveless than to do it again a third time? She contemplated calling Jim Ellis for a moment, but finally didn’t want to do that either. That, too, was a relationship she was finally out of, that should be left to grow and branch and vine freely without even a shadow of her presence.
And there was nothing exotic or especially interesting about it, after all, was there? It was just a marriage like millions of others. Jim’s most recent poems hadn’t even been concerned with it.

Alice wandered past the children’s garden and out the zoo entrance. She had begun to feel hungry enough to think of lunch, but not hungry enough to yearn for it. Still, there was a diner across the street.

Although the pastrami was lean and its juice had seeped tangily, with the mustard, into the fresh, warm rye bread, she pushed it away after the first half, wiped her mouth, and concentrated on her Coke. It had plenty of ice, and after sucking off all the sweet syrup, she began to crunch the pieces of ice one by one. The waitress came by and offered her dessert, but she shook her head and pointed to the sandwich. “Take that, too. It’s good, but I’m just not hungry.” She smiled, and the waitress smiled back at her. She looked out the window and wondered what to do with the rest of the afternoon. It was only three-twenty.

Behind her, Henry’s voice said, “I thought that was you. What are you doing out our way?” Without an invitation, he sat down. He was carrying a cup of coffee. Alice said, “No lunch?”

“I ate around eleven.”

“I was in the garden, actually. I didn’t see you.”

“You must have seen the roses.”

“They’re lovely.” He was wearing dirt-covered overalls and he saw her looking at them. He seemed, after all, very familiar, and their affair, though dreamlike in retrospect, bore all the self-consciousness and constraint of a real and no longer new relationship. Alice said, “I ought to apologize—”

“Me, too.”

The last thing Alice wanted Henry to do was apologize. She said, “What for?”

He looked at her, not exactly enthusiastic about going on. “Well. For being pushy, like you said.”