Requiem for a Realtor (3 page)

“I gather he's a friend of yours,” he said.

“He's my dentist.”

“Then he can't be a friend.”

Perhaps ten seconds went by before she smiled. Did her smile owe something to Dr. Jameson's skills? “Oh, he's a friend, too. I don't know why I began to confide in him about Stanley. But he wasn't a friend then, just a dentist.” Another smile. “He was explaining an X-ray to me, showing me why I didn't need a root canal, and suddenly I burst into tears. What was the point of trying to keep my looks if my husband didn't care?”

Her words evoked a tender scene. She supine in the dental chair, a bib under her chin to guard against drooling and perhaps concupiscence as well, David Jameson in his pale green dentist coat, holding the X-ray to the light, and suddenly she is in tears. Not an ideal spot for a dentist to be in, a sobbing woman in his chair, her pain obviously more emotional than physical. It seemed extenuating. Jameson's comforting, at least initially, might have been prompted by professional panic. For that matter, Phyllis Collins's manner of dress and the streaked hair and the rest of it might be part of a pathetic effort to keep her husband.

“And you became friends?”

She nodded. “I could talk to David. Relatives, women friends, I just couldn't bring myself to tell them about Stanley. My mother never really forgave me for not marrying in the Church. And my brother Bob always hated Stanley.”

“Does he live in town?”

He did. Bob Oliver.

“And Dr. Jameson told you about canon law?”

“And I, like a fool, told Stanley. But two can play at that game, can't they? If we were divorced I could get really married in the Church, couldn't I?”

“Do you have someone in mind?”

“You know David, don't you?”

“I see.”

“We've kidded about it is all. But sometimes it seems the solution. I want so much to have children and Stanley has vetoed that.”

Did she dream of a little line of Jamesons, all with enhanced smiles? Did he? It is a temptation for the celibate to find the amorous complications of the laity amusing, but, of course, they seldom really are. The statistics on unchurched marriages in the Archdiocese of Chicago were alarming. Not that sacramental marriages represented the solid rock they once had, but at least in them the vows made for some kind of check against folly. The Collinses were at a dangerous age—perhaps all ages are dangerous, but when forty comes and youth seems to be slipping away, there is an impulse to want to return to square one and begin all over again, as if life were a game that can be played and replayed over and over. But marriages can weaken when only one spouse wanders, and that puts the other in a tragic position. Still, Father Dowling had difficulty seeing Phyllis Collins as such a tragic figure.

One of them, Stanley or Phyllis, had come to him to get some kind of endorsement to dissolve their wobbly union, but which one was it?

“Perhaps if I talked with you and your husband together.”

“He would never talk to a priest.”

“But he has.”

“What do you mean?”

“He was here on Monday.”

“Stanley!”

“Yes.”

Her eyes widened, more in fright than surprise. “What did he tell you?”

“You don't expect me to answer that. That is why it would be best if you both came together.”

“He wouldn't listen to you.”

“But you don't know what I would say.”

She was confused. She no longer regarded him as an ally against outrageous fortune. “I think I can guess what he would have said.”

“If you came together there would be no need of guessing.”

For a half hour they hashed over what she had said, while Father Dowling considered that she provided him with a reason for believing her husband's accusations. Would she have invented her accusations against Stanley? He couldn't think so. The two of them had gotten themselves into a mess, a mess to which David Jameson had suggested a legalistic solution. A little learning is a dangerous thing indeed. Canon law assumed the theology of marriage, without which it was merely a set of rules. And David Jameson had obviously become an interested party as he dispensed his ill-digested lore to the weeping wife. What a solution he must have seemed to Phyllis. And to himself.

Finally she left, her tale having been told, if not with the upshot she must have expected. Father Dowling returned to his study and lit his pipe and reviewed the session with Phyllis Collins. There was a tap at the door and Marie Murkin looked in.

“I thought she had gone.”

“As you see.”

Marie waited expectantly, but she could not really think he would tell her about Phyllis's visit.

“She was certainly all dolled up.”

“Was she?”

“Why don't people dress their age?”

“Have I ever complained?”

Marie stiffened. “About what?”

“Never mind.”

“No, tell me.”

“I was thinking of clerical clothes, Marie. The same in youth and middle age and afterward.”

“Oh.” She tugged her coat sweater about her.

“I like that sweater.”

“This old thing?”

“There is something clerical about it.”

“If you don't want to tell me, don't.”

“But I just did.”

After she left, he felt remorse. He had to curb his teasing of Marie. She was a good woman. At the moment her solid predictability seemed the rock on which civilization was raised.

6

Bob Oliver had come late to journalism, or vice versa. He had tried sales, even real estate after punishing months spent cramming for the licence exams, but all he had gained was a bad joke. “I specialize in houses and lots. Bawdy houses and lots of beer.” Ho, ho. He didn't have the buddy-buddy gift of his brother-in-law, Stanley. Eventually, he had sense enough to get out of a line of work where he would always run a distant second to Stanley. One Realtor in a family is enough anyway. He went into food and found it boring. Finally, he parlayed his college English major into a job at the
Fox River Tribune.
Not much of a job, but it sounded important. Even Stanley was impressed.

“Why don't you write a piece on Stanley?” Phyllis urged him.

“Too much like incest.”

Incest was one thing Stanley wasn't guilty of, but only because he had no sister. Phyllis seemed totally unaware of her husband's reputation.

Bob did drop by the agency to see if there was any way he could write the story. The only one in the office when he got there was Susan Sawyer, and she responded to the possibility of a story on the agency with such enthusiasm that Bob never got around to telling her he was the brother of her husband's partner. Thought of that way, it seemed pretty remote anyway.

“Of course, you'd have to focus on George.” She gave him a meaningful look. “Some partners are partners in name only.”

He had taken that to be a remark on her marriage, and that made him more vulnerable to her charms than he might otherwise have been.

After she gave him a tour of the office, she put a hand on his arm. “This is not the place for an interview.”

“What would you suggest?”

The bar at the Radisson, as it happened, adding to Bob's supposition that he was talking to a disenchanted spouse. Having a drink with her would probably be the end of the story anyway. He certainly didn't intend to write it to Susan Sawyer's specifications.

“You know an awful lot about the business,” he said when they were settled at a table, out of the afternoon traffic of the bar.

“I'm an agent, too, you know.”

“I did a little real estate myself for a time.”

“And repented?” Again she put her hand on his arm.

“You have to do something bad in order to repent.”

She found this funny. Bob in turn found her fascinating, in a middle-aged sort of way. A little stocky for his taste, but she had a way of leaning toward him when she spoke that suggested intimacy. The next time she put her hand on his arm he covered it with his own. That was the end of talk about real estate. Instead he got the story of her life. All the dreams of her girlhood seemed to have come to naught.

“Why does marriage have to be the end of everything?”

“Is it?”

“Aren't you married?”

“No.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

They were holding hands now, the ones that weren't on their drinks. Susan was drinking martinis and not holding them too well. The happy hour crowd was convening when they left. Her car was at the agency, and, outside, Bob talked her out of driving and offered to take her home. He saw her to the door and accepted her invitation to come in.

“I would say for a nightcap, but it's too early for that.”

“Not unless you intend to take a nap.”

Suddenly she was in his arms, her mouth pressed to his. The sequel was not something Bob cared to dwell on. She was voracious, and, when he finally left, he felt used. Susan was the kind of girl who would lead if you danced with her. One thing was definite, he was not going to write a story about the Sawyer-Collins agency. Not having told her that Phyllis was his sister seemed vaguely duplicitous, but all in all a plus. In the following weeks, she left several messages for him at the
Tribune,
but he ignored them. He should have enjoyed it when she complained about Stanley, but he didn't. She wasn't much easier on her husband, the man who had thwarted her youthful promise. Bob's abiding impression was, poor George Sawyer.

Bob did a feature on dentists instead, full of lore on orthodontics fed him by Dr. David Jameson, who seemed to mean it when he said that everyone has a natural right to a perfect smile. The dentist himself seemed pretty grim, but he was helpful, and Bob had cast him in the starring role. The story established Bob Oliver as the paper's human interest wiz. Once a week, he canonized some local figure, and hopeful subjects began to come to him. Most of them should have paid advertising rates for the boost Bob gave them. He always insisted on Sylvia Woods as his photographer. Her lens was as flattering as Bob's prose, and he began to think of her as Rosalind Russell to his Cary Grant in
His Girl Friday,
but there was no day in the week when she was his. None of his overtures introduced an operetta starring the two of them.

“Do all photographers have negative thoughts?”

“Only in the dark room.”

“That's what I had in mind.”

Her disdainful look would have turned a lesser man into a monk. What hurt was that she was susceptible to Stanley.

“He's your brother-in-law?” It was the first time Sylvia was really interested in anything he said. “You ought to do a piece on him.”

“You sound like my sister.”

“At most.”

Disappointment did not dull his hopes. He told Sylvia what kind of husband Stanley was, but this seemed to pique her interest rather than the reverse. Were there any women nowadays like his sainted mother? She had been crushed when Phyllis got married in a civil ceremony, and until she died prayed a nonstop novena that her daughter would get her marriage blessed.

“It won't last,” Bob assured her.

“I want it to last. But as a real marriage,” his mother had said.

When Phyllis told him about the money Stanley was due to get when he turned fifty, Bob wanted the marriage to last, too. That would be compensation enough for Stanley's running around. What a crock that someone like Stanley was in line for an inheritance, even if he did have to wait for years until he got it.

Phyllis and their mother were more or less reconciled during Mrs. Oliver's last illness. Her dying wish was that her daughter should have her marriage blessed by the Church. Bob mentioned it to the Franciscan who came to give the last rites, expecting him to think of Phyllis's situation the way his mother did, but the friar just smiled indulgently.

“Will you talk to her, Father?”

“This may not be the best time.”

Bob had thought of doing a story on permissive priests, but knocking people wasn't the style of his features.

At the paper, Bob shared an office with three other writers, but he had come to find the press room at the courthouse more congenial than the city room at the
Tribune.
It was more like an old movie set, hungover types hung over the keyboards of their computers, the air blue with cigarette smoke, an atmosphere of resentful and cynical discontent. It was one place where Bob Oliver felt unequivocally successful in his profession. The court reporters envied them. He found them fascinating company, feeling somewhat like Dante touring Purgatory. And Tuttle the lawyer was usually there, looking for an ambulance to chase. It turned out that Tuttle knew all about Stanley's inheritance.

“How come you know about it?”

“I looked it up.”

“How much is it?”

“Lots.”

“Real estate?”

Tuttle punched his arm. Maybe he didn't know how much Stanley was due to get. Bob asked him how you looked up something like that, and he spent an afternoon with the lawyer going over the will of Frederick Collins. Well, it was hard to put an exact figure to an amount that was always growing larger. He tried to overcome his resentment by thinking that Phyllis would also benefit. In the meantime, she should do what she could about keeping her looks. He suggested she do something about her teeth.

“What do you mean?” But she half-covered her mouth with her hand when she spoke, as she usually did.

“Get them straightened. You have a natural right to a perfect smile.”

He gave her a photocopy of his feature on dentists. “Tell Jameson you're my sister. He owes me.”

7

The visit with Father Dowling had gone well, not that Stanley Collins was surprised; he had a gift with people. It was that, rather than ambition, that carried him as a Realtor, maybe not with the results his partner would have liked, but how could you sweat it out day after day when you knew that you were going to come into money no matter how unsuccessful the agency was? Besides, if anything happened, George would do all right. In the manner of partners, George Sawyer and Stanley Collins had taken out hefty insurance policies on one another, just in case. The premiums were paid by the agency, of course, but even so George grumbled that Stanley didn't carry his weight. Their arrangement was fifty-fifty, no matter the source of their profits, the lion's share of which were always due to George.