Except she’d always read these big paperback historical novels with women in low-cut dresses kissin men without their shirts on, and the trade name for those books was Golden West—it said so on a little foil strip at the top of every one. And it all at once occurred to me that she’d been born in a little town called Gaylord, Missouri. I wanted to think it was somethin else—Galen, or maybe Galesburg—but I knew it wasn’t. Still, her daughter mighta named her dress business after the town her mother’d been born in… or so I told myself.
“Miz Claiborne,” Greenbush says, talkin in a low, sorta anxious voice, “Mrs. Donovan’s husband was killed in an unfortunate accident when Donald was fifteen and Helga was thirteen—”
“I know that!” I says, like I wanted him to believe that if I knew that I must know everything.
“—and there was consequently a great deal of bad feeling between Mrs. Donovan and the children.”
I’d known that, too. I remembered people remarkin on how quiet the kids had been when they showed up on Memorial Day in 1961 for their usual summer on the island, and how several people’d mentioned that you didn’t ever seem to see the three of em together anymore, which was especially strange, considerin Mr. Donovan’s sudden death the year before; usually somethin like that draws people closer… although I s’pose city folks may be a little different about such things. And then I remembered somethin else, somethin Jimmy DeWitt told me in the fall of that year.
“They had a wowser of an argument in a restaurant just after the Fourth of July in ’61,” I says. “The boy n girl left the next day. I remember the hunky—Kenopensky, I mean—takin em across to the mainland in the big motor launch they had back then.”
“Yes,” Greenbush said. “It so happens that I knew from Ted Kenopensky what that argument was about. Donald had gotten his driver’s license that spring, and Mrs. Donovan had gotten him a car for his birthday. The girl, Helga, said she wanted a car, too. Vera—Mrs. Donovan—apparently tried to explain to the girl that the idea was silly, a car would be useless to her without a driver’s license and she couldn’t get one of those until she was fifteen. Helga said that might be true in Maryland, but it wasn’t the case in Maine—that she could get one there at fourteen… which she was. Could that have been true, Miz Claiborne, or was it just an adolescent fantasy?”
“It was true back then,” I says, “although I think you have to be at least fifteen now. Mr. Greenbush, the car she got her boy for his birthday… was it a Corvette?”
“Yes,” he says, “it was. How did you know that, Miz Claiborne?”
“I musta seen a pitcher of it sometime,” I said, but I hardly heard my own voice. The voice I heard was Vera’s. “I’m tired of seeing them winch that Corvette out of the quarry in the moonlight,” she told me as she lay dyin on the stairs. “Tired of seein how the water ran out of the open window on the passenger side.”
“I’m surprised she kept a picture of it around,” Greenbush said. “Donald and Helga Donovan died in that car, you see. It happened in October of 1961, almost a year to the day after their father died. It seemed the girl was driving.”
He went on talkin, but I hardly heard him, Andy—I was too busy fillin in the blanks for myself, and doin it so fast that I guess I musta known they were dead… somewhere way down deep I musta known it all along. Greenbush said they’d been drinkin and pushin that Corvette along at better’n a hundred miles an hour when the girl missed a turn and went into the quarry; he said both of em were prob’ly dead long before that fancy two-seater sank to the bottom.
He said it was an accident, too, but maybe I knew a little more about accidents than he did.
Maybe Vera did, too, and maybe she’d always known that the argument they had that summer didn’t have Jack Shit to do with whether or not Helga was gonna get a State of Maine driver’s license; that was just the handiest bone they had to pick. When McAuliffe ast me what Joe and I argued about before he got chokin me, I told him it was money on top n booze underneath. The tops of people’s arguments are mostly quite a lot different from what’s on the bottom, I’ve noticed, and it could be that what they were really arguin about that summer was what had happened to Michael Donovan the year before.
She and the hunky killed the man, Andy—she did everything but come out n tell me so. She never got caught, either, but sometimes there’s people inside of families who’ve got pieces of the jigsaw puzzle the law never sees. People like Selena, for instance… n maybe people like Donald n Helga Donovan, too. I wonder how they looked at her that summer, before they had that argument in The Harborside Restaurant n left Little Tall for the last time. I’ve tried n tried to remember how their eyes were when they looked at her, if they were like Selena’s when she looked at me, n I just can’t do it. P’raps I will in time, but that ain’t nothing I’m really lookin forward to, if you catch my meanin.
I do know that sixteen was young for a little hellion like Don Donovan to have a driver’s license—too damned young—and when you add in that hot car, why, you’ve got a recipe for disaster. Vera was smart enough to know that, and she must have been scared sick; she might have hated the father, but she loved the son like life itself. I know she did. She gave it to him just the same, though. Tough as she was, she put that rocket in his pocket, n Helga‘s, too, as it turned out, when he wasn’t but a junior in high school n prob’ly just startin to shave. I think it was guilt, Andy. And maybe I want to think it was just that because I don’t like to think there was fear mixed in with it, that maybe a couple of rich kids like them could blackmail their mother for the things they wanted over the death of their father. I don’t really think it… but it’s possible, you know; it is possible. In a world where a man can spend months tryin to take his own daughter to bed, I believe anything is possible.
“They’re dead,” I said to Greenbush. “That’s what you’re telling me.”
“Yes,” he says.
“They’ve been dead, thirty years n more,” I says.
“Yes,” he says again.
“And everything she told me about em,” I says, “it was a lie.”
He cleared his throat again—that man’s one of the world’s greatest throat-clearers, if my talk with him today’s any example—and when he spoke up, he sounded damned near human. “What did she tell you about them, Miz Claiborne?” he ast.
And when I thought about it, Andy, I realized she’d told me a hell of a lot, startin in the summer of ’62, when she showed up lookin ten years older n twenty pounds lighter’n the year before. I remember her tellin me that Donald n Helga might be spendin August at the house n for me to check n make sure we had enough Quaker Rolled Oats, which was all they’d eat for breakfast. I remember her comin back up in October—that was the fall when Kennedy n Khrushchev were decidin whether or not they was gonna blow up the whole shootin match—and tellin me I’d be seein a lot more of her in the future. “I hope you’ll be seein the kids, too,” she’d said, but there was somethin in her voice, Andy… and in her eyes…
Mostly it was her eyes I thought of as I stood there with the phone in my hand. She told me all sorts of things with her mouth over the years, about where they went to school, what they were doin, who they were seein (Donald got married n had two kids, accordin to Vera; Helga got married n divorced), but I realized that ever since the summer of 1962, her eyes’d been tellin me just one thing, over n over again: they were dead. Ayuh… but maybe not completely dead. Not as long as there was one scrawny, plain-faced housekeeper on an island off the coast of Maine who still believed they were alive.