The Tight White Collar (27 page)

“Here you are, Mrs. St. George,” he would say, opening the door of the police cruiser with a flourish and taking off his hat.

“My deepest thanks,” Irene would reply grandly. “Good evening, Mr. McGrath.”

“I'm sorry as hell, Lisa,” said Johnny McGrath. “I always liked your mother. At least it was quick, this way. Her neck was broke and she died right off the bat.”

“Thank you, Mr. McGrath,” said Lisa quietly. “We'll drive up this evening.”

“Got her over to Breton's funeral parlor,” said the police chief. “Figured you'd want it that way. Old man Breton took care of your Grandma and Grandpa.”

“That's fine, Mr. McGrath,” said Lisa. “Thank you again.”

“My, she's a cool one,” said McGrath to a lounging policeman after he had hung up. “Never said if and or but. Didn't even act surprised, much less broken up.”

“Well,” said the policeman, whose name was Oscar Roullier, “I don't see how anybody could get broken up over an old drunk like Irene St. George.”

Johnny McGrath was shocked. “Well, for Christ's sake, it was her mother!”

“Yeah,” said Oscar Roullier.

Lisa and Christopher Pappas arrived in Cooper's Mills at seven o'clock in the evening and went directly to the Pappas's fruit store.

“Hi, Pop,” said Chris as he and Lisa entered.

The old man looked up. “Oh,” he said sourly. “It's you.”

“Who'd you expect?” asked Chris.

“I dunno,” said Costas Pappas. “I thought maybe you two had got too fancy living down there in Mass. to bother comin' home to bury her mother.” He indicated her with a jerk of his head toward Lisa. “Your mother's out back if you care,” he said to Chris.

Nothing changes, thought Chris Pappas as he and Lisa walked toward the back of the store. His father and mother would go to their graves with the idea that their only son had somehow failed them by breaking out of the pattern they had set. The store still looked as it had always looked. Junky, over-crowded and slightly dirty. Just like his father, thought Chris wearily. And he knew he would find his mother the same way.

Thank God, we got out, thought Chris and squeezed Lisa's arm. We would have died here, and died young, from dirt and boredom and the wanting of something better.

“My son,” said Aphrodite Pappas.

“Hello, Ma,” said Chris and bent to kiss her yellowish cheek. “How are you?”

“I'm good enough,” said Mrs. Pappas, then she leaned away from Chris and looked up into his face. “But you,” she said, “you're gettin' skinny.”

Lisa sighed. It was what her mother-in-law always said whenever she saw Chris. He could have weighed three hundred pounds and she would still have said it.

“How are the children?” asked Mrs. Pappas by way of greeting to Lisa.

“They're fine,” replied Lisa.

She and Chris had something to eat and then went directly to the funeral home to conclude the arrangements that Johnny McGrath had started. When that was over, they returned to the Pappas's and went straight to bed and even when Lisa realized that Chris's father and mother had not uttered one word of regret about Irene's death, she still could not cry for her mother.

She lay on her back next to Chris and the smell of spring came through the open bedroom windows, heavy with scent. She moved a little and Chris's hand found her breast.

“I love you, baby,” he said against her temple.

Lisa's heart started to pound. She did not respond, but this time she didn't move away.

His fingers rubbed gently until her nipples hardened and stood up under the thin material of her nightgown.

“You've got the most exciting pair of tits in the whole world,” said Chris, slipping her nightgown down over her shoulders. His mouth found hers and he kept one hand over her heart, reassured by its beating that she was just as aroused as he. “Be my little French girl,” he whispered, stroking her.

Lisa turned her head away. “This isn't right,” she said and pushed at his hands halfheartedly. “Chris, don't. This must be a sin. Tonight of all nights. My mother is dead.”

“But you still want it, don't you?” asked Chris.

And it was true. Already she could feel herself beginning to pulsate, ready for the moment when he would enter her. Her mouth was hungry for him and her hands reached down to find him, to begin their strong stroking.

“Baby,” he whispered as she sent him to heights of excitement he'd never known. “Where did you learn tricks like this?”

She continued to caress him in the ways that Anthony had taught her.

“You're the one who brought home the Kinsey Reports,” she whispered against his abdomen. “I really profit from what I read,” and she laughed a little.

He began to quiver under her touch. “Baby,” he said, “read them again if it makes you like this.”

“We're awful,” she whispered against him, but her legs were already spreading themselves for him. “Awful.”

“She's dead,” whispered Chris harshly into her mouth. “She's dead and we're alive.”

The tip of him was touching the maddeningly elusive, excitingly secret place deep inside her and she could feel it starting.

“Alive,” she whispered. “Alive. Think of the wonder of that.”

And then she could not talk at all. She could merely raise herself up to meet him in the agony of giving.

No, she thought sleepily, later, May was no time for dying. And for the first time since she and Chris had left Cooper Station, she went to sleep without a single thought for Anthony.

It was a quick, simple funeral for Irene St. George, with a Low Mass at the Catholic Church and no one there besides Chris and Lisa but Irene's old drinking buddies from the Happy Hour Café. They shed their beery tears and left as soon as the Mass was over without going on to the cemetery for which Lisa was grateful. She and Chris buried Irene alone and when it was over they got into their car and drove back toward Cooper's Mills.

“We'll have to stay over another day, I suppose,” said Lisa. “I'll have to see what arrangements she made about the house and her things.”

Lisa looked out of the window on her side and suddenly she wanted to go home.

“Look,” she said, “we could see Mr. LaPlante, now, couldn't we? He's always in his office after lunch. He was her lawyer and he must know what she wanted done.”

“We could try him,” said Chris.

“Let's go,” said Lisa. “Then we could go right home. I'm lonesome for the kids.”

Maurice LaPlante was a stocky, white-haired French Canadian who smoked small cigars and drank wine at breakfast. Lisa had never liked him but Irene had thought him a fine old gentleman and had said so often.

“You don't find them like Maurice LaPlante anymore,” she had told Lisa. “He's a gentleman of the old school.”

Well, perhaps he was, thought Lisa, to Irene. But most of Cooper's Mills regarded him as just another old soak who'd seen much better days. In any case, thought Lisa gratefully, her business with him had not taken long. Irene's house and its rooms of stiff, well-kept and little-used furniture now belonged to Lisa.

“The house is in good repair,” said Mr. LaPlante, “and the taxes are all paid up to date. She was never one to let things go, your mother. Kept her place right up.”

“Well, what are we going to do with it?” Lisa asked Chris. “We have about as much use for a house in Cooper's Mills as nothing at all.” Chris shrugged and Lisa turned toward the lawyer. “Put it up for sale,” she said. “The furniture, too.”

Mr. LaPlante put up a restraining hand. “Don't be so quick,” he warned. “Take a ride over there and look at the place. Maybe there'll be something you'll want for yourself. Some souvenir. Don't be so quick.”

“All right,” sighed Lisa. “I'll go.”

It was agreed that Chris would go back to the Pappas's and repack the suitcases while Lisa went on alone to Irene's house.

“It won't take me long,” she told Chris. “We'll be able to get started early.”

The house looked as it had always looked. Drab, dark and unfriendly. Lisa took the key from under a loose board in the porch floor and let herself in. Then she went dutifully through every room in the house. She even took note of the loose carpeting on the stairs where Irene must have caught her heel before she fell, and still she felt nothing. No sorrow, no pang of loss. There was nothing for her here. Nothing she needed or wanted. It was as if she had never lived here at all.

“Aren't you even sorry for her?” Anthony had once asked Lisa about Irene.

“No. Why should I be?” Lisa had asked, genuinely puzzled at his question.

“Because she hasn't had much of a life, really,” said Anthony. “Why do you suppose she drinks?”

“For the same reason you do, I suppose,” said Lisa. “Weakness. And the mistaken idea that there is a solution to anything in a bottle.”

“Not all of us look for a solution, my love,” said Anthony. “Some of us ask only for a measure of solace.”

“Maybe so,” retorted Lisa, “but I wouldn't want momentary comfort at the price of the next day's bomb of a hangover.”

“You're a nasty little Puritan,” said Anthony and reached for her.

“That's what you think,” replied Lisa.

They had made love then and the subject of Irene was forgotten. It never came up again between them.

Now, standing in Irene's living room, Lisa found herself wondering. Perhaps it had been true about Irene, she thought. Perhaps she had needed solace more than anyone had ever imagined.

I guess she wanted it all, thought Lisa. The fur coats and the diamond bracelets and the handsome men in an adoring group at her feet. And instead of the Paris trips and the iced champagne, she'd gotten Wilfred St. George and Cooper's Mills and the Happy Hour Café. She felt a sudden kinship with Irene.

Lisa sat down on one of the uncomfortable, plush chairs that still, after all these years, made her feel itchy and ill at ease. She lit one of the cigarettes which, in her lifetime, Irene had considered so grossly unladylike.

“For heaven's sake, Lisa,” she had said. “Are you going to go about with one of those things stuck in your mouth like a mill girl? For heaven's sake, Lisa, remember who you are!”

Lisa finished her cigarette and squashed the butt in the same place she had put her ashes. In the dirt around a rather obscene-looking rubber plant that Irene had kept on a stand in the living room.

Lisa knew who she was all right, she thought as she locked the front door of the house behind her and replaced the key. She was Lisa Pappas, and she wasn't going to waste her life regretting. She was married to a good man who was going places. A man who would never run off and leave her to fend for herself and her offspring as Wilfred St. George had done. She'd never wind up as a town character as Irene had done because if she wanted something she'd go after it. She wouldn't sit on her behind in a beer joint and wish false wishes that had no hope of coming true.

Her hands felt very strong on the steering wheel of the car as she pulled away from the curb in front of Irene's house and headed for the Pappas's.

She was a happy, contented woman, she told herself. A woman in a hurry to get back to her husband, her home and her children and she smiled a little as she thought of what Anthony Cooper would have had to say about her present state of mind.

“You'll wind up with a passle of brats and memberships in the P.T.A., a select, snobbish bridge club and the Ladies' Aid.”

And it was true, thought Lisa. She would go back and join the best bridge club in Gammon's Landing and she would go to every P.T.A. meeting with Chris. Furthermore, she would bake two cakes for the Ladies' Aid cake sale next week and they would bring the best prices of all the cakes there.

So there, Anthony, she thought, as she parked in front of the fruit store. I may be all you said I'd be, but I like it that way.

Less than half an hour later, Lisa and Chris had said their goodbyes to Chris's sullen parents and were on their way home. They could have avoided Cooper Station by taking the new turnpike that bypassed the town but they did not.

“Hasn't changed much, has it?” remarked Chris as they drove down Benjamin Street.

“No, and it never will,” replied Lisa. “Thank God things worked out the way they did and we got out of here.”

“You were pretty upset at the time,” said Chris and smiled.

“It just goes to show that things do work out for the best,” said Lisa. “I wonder what ever happened to Doris Delaney Palmer. How I hated that bitch.”

“She'll go on forever,” said Chris. “Her kind always does. She could ride roughshod over the whole world and wind up without a trace of regret on her face.”

Lisa laughed. “You know something funny?” she asked. “I've never been able to picture Doris Palmer as anything but full grown and wearing that iron corset of hers. I can't picture her in bed with anybody, let alone poor Adam Palmer, and it seems almost obscene to think of her having a baby.”

“Maybe Adam thought so, too,” said Chris matching her laughter. “And that's why they never had any kids.”

They drove past Polly Sheppard's big colonial-style house and Chris didn't slow down.

“Are you sorry about Polly?” he asked. “I kept thinking she'd show up for the funeral.”

“So did I,” answered Lisa and sighed. “No, I can't say I'm sorry. I guess we just sort of outgrew each other. You know, Polly was never really too bright in spite of that fancy college education of hers. She had a narrow mind, just like everybody else in Cooper Station.”

“Are you sorry about anything?” asked Chris, and for just a moment a chord sounded in Lisa.

Come live with me and be my love.

It might have been fun with Anthony, she thought. For a little while, anyway. New York and a nice apartment and interesting nightclubs and Europe next year. But what about when it was over? And it would have been over soon. Anthony would have tired of her easily as a steady diet. What was it he used to say? You'll never be a gourmet's delight, my love. You're too much. Like too much dessert or a heavy wine with the meat course. Of course, he'd been joking, but just the same he would have wearied.