The Dog Collar Murders (10 page)

Of course Hanna’s house wasn’t a mess at all when we arrived. With its polished wood floors, woven rugs on the walls and clean-smelling pine furniture it looked like many homes I’d been to in my youth. Like thousands of people in Seattle Penny and I had Norwegians in our closet. Our great-grandfather, Harald Nilsen, had been born in Stavanger, had made his way over by boat to Seattle and had run a thriving dry goods store in Ballard. Later generations had drifted over to the University District and Ravenna and the dry goods store had become a hardware store and then a pet shop; still, some of the old customs had remained. Our father had been (to our great embarrassment) a member of the Sons of Norway and had liked to eat brown goat cheese on buttered rolls for lunch and fish in white sauce with potatoes for dinner. He’d always celebrated the 17th of May, Norway’s Constitution Day, with Aquavit and herring and
kransekake
, a tall pyramid of hard, anise-flavored coils. He’d shepherded the family to Norway once and always dreamed of spending another vacation sailing the fjords. Our mother, who had some Norwegian relatives still living in Telemark but who was mainly a confused blend of Irish-Scottish-German, thought the whole thing about the old country was far too sentimental. She always said she’d rather cruise the Amazon than the Gjeranger Fjord.

She never would now. He never would now.

It must have been the atmosphere of death in the house, like a thin layer of dust over everything, that made me feel as if I were going to cry. I didn’t know why we were here with these strangers on such a private occasion.

Hanna dragged Penny into the kitchen to help her make coffee and I was left in the living room with the relatives. An awkward silence sat down with us.

“It was a good service,” said Hanna’s father. He had a quiet deep voice, a kind but distracted look. “I thought a very good service. Lots of people.”

“I don’t know, Erik,” said Mrs. Marsh. “There were a lot of people I expected to see there that I didn’t. David, for instance.”

“Well, he’s remarried, you know. I wouldn’t suppose he’d come if he’s remarried. Didn’t he send flowers? That’s all you can expect, if he’s remarried.”

“And that Pauline,” Mrs. Marsh continued. “Making such a scene, coming late like that.”

“Yes,” Erik Sandbakker said. “Hardly considerate. But it was a very good service. I don’t think we could have expected David to come. Now that he’s remarried.”

“It’s not that I minded Loie turning into a you-know,” said Mrs. Marsh. “But Pauline is just too hopeless for words. I don’t really understand what she and Loie had in common. Loie was so clever, publishing that book and getting all that attention.” She suddenly turned to me, her chest inflating under her wool suit, “You know she was on Phil Donahue once, dear.” Then she continued, “My opinion is that Pauline resented Loie awfully. There are a lot of people who resented Loie when she was growing up—Loie was so bright and big for her age. She could talk at one, she was reading when she was four. Why, you resented Loie sometimes, didn’t you, Hanna?” she asked her niece, who was carrying a very Scandinavian-looking tray with a red ceramic matching coffee service and some kind of biscuits—oat cakes, I bet—layered with thin, caramel-colored strips of goat cheese.

Hanna blanched slightly. “Whatever makes you say that, Aunt Edith? Loie and I were
years
apart, our interests were completely different.” She set the tray down with a crack and poured the coffee.

“Only three years apart, darling,” Edith Marsh remonstrated. “The two of you were so sweet together, remember Erik? Hanna would follow Loie around like her little slave, remember?”

“She was so bossy,” Hanna muttered.

“It was Hanna who gave Loie her name.” Mrs. Marsh’s large face had gone soft and she looked at Hanna as if she were looking at a little girl. “Because Hanna couldn’t pronounce Chloe. You could hear her following Loie around, crying in that dear little voice of hers, ‘Loie, Loie, where are you Loie?’ ”

“
Please
, Aunt Edith,” Hanna said, but her aunt went on, tears welling in her eyes,

“Don’t you remember that time, Erik, when the two families went to the ocean and little Hanna got completely out of her depth in the water and Loie marched right in—she was only seven but she was so big for her age—and she plucked Hanna up and dragged her to the shore. Saved her life really.”

“Don’t, Aunt Edith! Please don’t.” Like an overwrought heroine, Hanna had collapsed over a chair and was sobbing wildly. “Not today! I really can’t bear it.”

Everyone got up in consternation and went over to her. I took it to mean that Penny and I should quietly depart and leave them to their memories.

We slipped out.

D
EATH WAS SOMETHING PENNY
and I never talked about. We hadn’t talked about it since that day five years ago when the phone had rung unexpectedly in each of our homes and the police had informed us both that our parents had died in a head-on collision. Instantly orphans at an age when most people we knew were just beginning to re-evaluate their adolescent and post-adolescent family quarrels and allegiances, we lost ourselves in details about the house and the business so we wouldn’t have to mourn.

So much was still painful. Like my knowing that Penny had always been Dad’s favorite, two minutes older than me but for all that the biggest, the brightest, the bossiest. Dad thought she could do anything and, in his eyes, she could. I compensated by growing smaller and weaker so I could really be the little sister and take my place in the family cosmology. I was a reader, and often sick. I was Mama’s baby, and some of the happiest days of my childhood were spent at home, with a not very bad sore throat and a pile of Nancy Drews.

Penny knew that I used to hate my father sometimes, and maybe that was why we didn’t speak of him much now. We were far likelier to talk about our mother, when we talked about our parents at all. Yet Dad’s absence left a hole in Penny’s life. He’d always been there to applaud her social and scholastic successes. He’d expected the world of her; when she started studying biochemistry he’d immediately expressed his belief that she’d win the Nobel prize someday. I knew she felt terribly sad he would never know she’d married a nice man and had a baby daughter.

If our parents had lived it’s quite likely that Penny and I would have gone our separate ways, meeting for holidays and special occasions. One or the other of us might have moved away from Seattle; it probably would have been Penny. The irony and the wonder of our parent’s death is that it pushed us together into an intimacy we’d only had as young children. We’d taken over their printing business, we’d immediately moved together into their house. We’d been each other’s support and mainstay, because it was so clear:
We were all we had left.

But during the last year things had changed. Our differences at the moment seemed so much more apparent than our connections. Although on the surface Penny appeared much more actively political than I was, I saw her trip to Nicaragua as having reinforced her role as a responsible citizen. Perhaps that was unfair; perhaps I felt guilty for not having gone myself. The real issue between us was conventionality. It was as if we had resurrected childish roles—Penny the Meeter-of-Expectations. Pam the Secret Rebel. I knew Penny didn’t really accept my becoming a lesbian, just as I didn’t really accept her becoming a wife and mother.

And we still never talked about death.

“What’s Hanna really like?” I asked Penny as we made our way down to Market Street in search of a bus that would take us back to the funeral home to pick up our cars.

“It’s funny,” Penny said meditatively. “That scene in there reminded me a little of our first day in Nicaragua. I mean, her crying. We’d just gotten to the hotel and everyone was exhausted but excited, Hanna more than most. She had always been a very strong supporter of the Sandinistas, was really eager to go there, to work. And then we got there, unpacked, were just ready to go down to have dinner—and she completely cracked. She started crying and kind of raking at her arms like that, and saying she didn’t know why she was here, she wasn’t supposed to be here—things that really didn’t make sense.”

“But crying because your cousin has been murdered and because your aunt reminds you she saved your life when you were four or five—surely that calls for extreme emotion.”

“Of course it does,” agreed Penny. “I’m just saying there’s something that reminds me—like an almost hysterical, out-of-control self-hatred—I don’t know. Someone gave her a tranquilizer that night in Managua and the rest of the six weeks she was absolutely great. She worked very hard, her Spanish was brilliant, she was good-tempered and so on. It was just that first night.”

“Did anything—anyone—say anything to set her off?”

“I don’t think so.” Penny shook her head. “Or if they did, it seemed so trivial that I didn’t remember it.”

Penny had to go back to the print shop and feed Antonia but I decided to take the rest of the day off. I’d been shaken by the whole experience—the service, Loie’s family, Hanna breaking down, Pauline’s bitterness. I decided to go up to the Espressomat and talk to Hadley. Maybe she’d have some ideas about where to go from here and whether I should even be pursuing any of this.

Hadley was still at Best Printing they told me when I came in, but they were expecting her soon. I took a copy of an old
off our backs
over to a table by the window and sat down with a decaf mocha. One of the great advantages to being Hadley’s girlfriend was that I got my coffee free.

It was a pleasant, quiet afternoon. I read about women’s struggles in different parts of the world for a while, then turned to the letters page. There was one from a woman prisoner, another from an author who disagreed with a review of her novel and one from Loie Marsh. It was brief and to the point—she disassociated herself completely from an article published about her in a women’s magazine. The writer had never contacted Loie directly, but had pieced the article together from second-hand reports from other people and other sources. She especially wanted to say that she had never said that the American Civil Liberties Union was entirely composed of sadomasochists:

“Probably no more than half are into S/M.”

Suddenly I jumped up and dashed out the door. A familiar figure had just crossed the street and was heading down the block. I might not have recognized her features, but I could certainly remember the set of those hunched hurrying shoulders. She was still carrying her flight bag.

“Pauline,” I called after her.

She jumped like a cat whose tail has been stepped on and almost hissed.

“What do you want?”

“I’m Pam—I talked to you at the service this morning. I thought you might like a cup of coffee.” I gestured to the Espressomat.

“Well,” Pauline hesitated. Her slumping was probably habitual but her evident exhaustion made it worse; her neck had practically disappeared. Her face looked like a crumpled piece of paper someone had balled up and thrown away. “I could use a cup of something. Tea.”

I took her back with me to the cafe and ordered her a pot of Earl Grey.

“You must be feeling pretty rocky,” I sympathized, only partly with ulterior motives. She did look like she needed a friendly ear. “Do you feel like talking about it?”

“I don’t know,” she said, pushing her stringy beige hair out of her pinched little face. “I don’t know what I’m doing, just walking around. Do you realize that this is the first time I’ve been in Seattle? Loie and I were together eight years and this is the first time I’ve ever seen where she grew up. It’s so typical somehow.”

“You two must have gotten together fairly soon after Loie left Seattle.”

“We did,” said Pauline and for a moment she permitted herself a small smile. “I met her right after she’d moved, at the first Boston Women Against Pornography meeting she came to. She swept me off my feet… She had so much
conviction
.”

Pauline sighed nasally. “Loie immediately became our main speaker. I helped her write her talks and speeches. She was nervous at first, she said she was a better performer than a writer—she used to be able to joke about it. Then people said she should write articles. I helped her with them too. Then an agent came long and asked if she’d ever thought of writing a book. Up to then we hadn’t thought—I hadn’t thought—of ‘mine’ and ‘yours.’ It was for the cause of women against violence against women, it didn’t matter who said it first.

“That was my idealism—then. I knew better than anyone that Loie’s thinking was muddled, that she couldn’t organize her thoughts, that her logic was faulty. She was naturally dramatic, though, and she could be so… moving. Me, on the other hand—I’m a clear, rational thinker. I did the rewording, the rewriting, the polishing. They were all, the articles and the speeches, joint efforts. When the book was suggested, Loie asked for my help. The way she explained it was that it really didn’t matter whose name was on the cover, that the agent had only come to Loie after hearing her speak, that everyone would know my ideas were equally valid and that naturally we’d split the royalty income from the book.” Pauline grimaced. “Naive, wasn’t I?”

“Did you split the royalties?”

“Well, we lived together and shared expenses. Meaning, Loie lived with me and I supported her on my teacher’s salary—I used to teach English at a private girls’ school. We had a joint checking account anyway—so the advance and the first couple of years of royalties went right into that account. At first it was wonderful. We bought a house and I quit my job to manage Loie’s career. I knew it was Loie’s name that sold the book—as well as the fact she went on the talk shows and did so well. I could
never
have been interviewed on TV. I would have died of nervousness. But I still got to travel with Loie and meet people and participate in the movement.”

Pauline lifted the lid of the teapot and stared at the sodden Earl Grey dregs. “I didn’t realize the extent to which the feminist movement is a product of the media. Lots of movement women claim not to be part of the patriarchal, capitalist structure—to have developed alternative values. Bullshit! Feminism is a word and image based construction like anything else—it thrives on symbols—it makes people into symbols and people make themselves into symbols to accommodate it.