“I saw the photo you took at Jack Kerouac’s grave,” I said.
She squinted quizzically. “And just where did you see that?”
“At Chick’s house,” I said. “He told me you were Gordon’s old girlfriend.”
“He told you I was Gordon’s girlfriend?”
“You weren’t Gordon’s girlfriend?”
“Later on I was. When that photo was taken I was still Chick’s girlfriend.”
“Oh my.”
She poured the silverware out of her white linen napkin and spread the napkin across her lap. “What can I say? It was the Age of Aquarius.”
“And it was a long time ago,” I said. “Why wouldn’t Chick want me to know you were his girlfriend?”
“Maybe because he was still married to his first wife at the time,” she offered.
Penelope was a good fifteen years younger than me. By the time she was in the picture-with Gordon and Chick and others at the college-I was long out of it. “Exactly what years are we talking about here?” I asked.
“I started seeing Chick my junior year,” she said. “The fall of
1968.”
I did the math in my head while the waitress brought our little blue teapots in for a landing. Gordon and Chick were both just a year older than me. In 1968 they would have been thirty-four. Penelope would have been just twenty or twenty-one. “And you were still with Chick in the summer of 1970?” I asked. “When the three of you went to Massachusetts to visit Kerouac’s grave?”
There was a residue of bitterness behind her smile. “He gave me the heave-ho a couple weeks after we got back,” she said. “Cleared the deck for the fall semester.”
“And you started seeing Gordon?”
“Not right away,” she said. “I went home to Mount Gilead for a few months, but missed the big wicked city.” We both laughed, as anyone who’d spent time in Hannawa would do. “Then I came back, got a crappy job, and eventually bumped into Gordon.”
I asked the obvious question: “It didn’t bother Chick that Gordon was dating his old girlfriend? Age of Aquarius notwithstanding?”
“It was a little weird-for all three of us. But by then Chick had another gullible undergraduate on the side. And Gordon and I were in love.”
Our Spam and eggs arrived. We started shoveling the fluffy eggs and little cubes of fried pork like a couple of lumberjacks. “Actually in love?” I asked. It came out a little more sarcastic than I wanted. But she was not offended.
“As much above the neck as below it, surprisingly,” she said.
Well, I sure wondered what she meant by that! As you know, my head was filled with all those suspicions about Gordon and Chick’s sexuality, and how their relationship, whatever it had been, might have something to do with Gordon’s murder. “Surprisingly, you say?”
I got the exact opposite answer I expected. “Naturally, I’d always found Gordon physically attractive,” she said. “But you know what an egghead he was. All those philosophical soliloquies that used to bore me to tears when I was with Chick were suddenly loosening me up better than a rum and Coke.”
That was enough sex talk for me. For the moment at least. “So what eventually happened between you and Gordon?”
“I moved in with him-that’s what happened. For three less-than-wonderful weeks.”
“Not the love nest you expected?”
“Not the pig sty I expected.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “You committed the cardinal sin of a new relationship. You cleaned his apartment.”
She nodded like a fisherman’s bobber. “And I threw out his damn pine cones.”
“You threw out his pine cones?”
“The ones Jack Kerouac gave him. It all seems so silly now.”
“Jack Kerouac gave Gordon pine cones?” I squeaked. We’d both finished our Spam and eggs and were down to nibbling on the decorative orange slices.
“Little baby pine cones. No bigger than the tip of your little finger. A cocoa can full of them.”
I almost jumped up on the table and tap danced. I was learning more during that breakfast with Penelope Yarrow than I’d learned all spring talking to my old beatnik friends. And while lots of intriguing little pieces were coming together in my mind, I had the good sense to play dumb. “So when you threw out his pine cones, Gordon popped his cork and threw you out?”
“Not right away. But when we couldn’t find them at the dump-”
“What dump was that, dear?” I asked.
“That one on Wooster Pike,” she said. “We crawled around in the snow for a week looking for those blessed pine cones.”
I wasn’t just puzzled. I was flat out thrown for a loop. I’d known Sweet Gordon for fifty years. I’d been one of the founding members of the Baked Bean Society. I’d been there when Jack Kerouac came to town. And I’d been there through a thousand wine-inspired reminiscences of that famous visit. But I never knew about those pine cones! The question for me now, of course, was why I never knew about them. And maybe more importantly, did any of my other old beatnik friends know about them? I talked Penelope into sharing a piece of carrot cake with me.
“Did you know they were Jack Kerouac’s pine cones when you threw them out?” I asked.
“Good Lord, no,” she said. “That cocoa can was just one more piece of junk gathering dust on his window sill. Along with the empty beer bottles and dried up violets.”
I’d only been married to Lawrence for six years. But it was long enough to know that when it comes to the perceptions of men and women, you’re dealing with two distinct species. Where a woman sees a window full of junk, a man sees a well-ordered shrine. “And just how did Gordon react to your overzealous housekeeping?”
Penelope had the little frosting carrot on the end of her fork, deciding if she should surrender to temptation and eat it, as if that tiny half-inch of green and orange sugar was a time bomb packed with ten thousand calories. “A lot of yelling and screaming at first,” she said. “Then he sort of went catatonic. He curled up on his couch and put a pillow on top of his head. ‘Do you have any idea what you’ve done?’ he kept asking. In a low whisper. Like a Hindu mantra. ‘Do you have any idea what you’ve done? Do you have any idea what you’ve done?’”
If she wasn’t going to eat that damn carrot, I was. I scraped it off her fork with mine, and popped it in my mouth. She thanked me with a wide smile. I pressed on. “Do you remember much about the cocoa can?”
“It was a cocoa can.”
Since buying all those cans from Mickey Gitlin, I’d had Eric do a little research for me. “Was it a Hershey’s can? There were lots of different brands in those days. But Hershey’s is what most people bought.”
Penelope grinned with embarrassment. “In my mind I see it as a Hershey’s can-those silver letters on the brown background-but that was a long time ago.”
I nodded sympathetically. “Wait until you’re my age. You won’t be able to trust half your memories. But for the sake of discussion we’ll have to assume your mind is telling you the truth. Now, was it a real old can? An antique?”
Her eyes went back and forth like one of those Krazy Kat clocks. “I think it was just a regular cocoa can. I doubt I would’ve thrown it out if it looked real old or valuable.”
“That’s a good point,” I said. “Can you remember if it was made out of tin or cardboard?”
“Tin I guess. Why?”
“For a couple reasons,” I said. “First, it would help date the can. The real old cocoa cans were made out of tin. Then during World War II when metal was scarce the sides of the can were made out of cardboard, with a tin top and bottom. And it easily could have been one of those World War II cans. According to what Gordon told you, Kerouac found it in 1956. Just eleven years after the war ended. That’s not a long time for a can to be in a kitchen cupboard, let alone in a fire tower in the middle of nowhere. So if it was cardboard, it could have rotted in the dump along with the pine cones inside.” Now I contradicted myself. “Of course from what Gordon’s graduate assistant tells me, under the right conditions things made out of paper can survive underground for years and years.”