“The comput—?” Andy seemed startled, but then he grinned again and said, “How come?” Walking back over to the sofa, he said, “Computer doesn’t like me?”
Wally followed, and they took their seats again, Wally saying, “It wasn’t so much you, Andy. It was mostly Tom the computer was worried about.”
“Smart computer,” Andy said, and frowned, thinking it over. “Do we let Tom in on this?” he asked himself. Absentmindedly he picked up a cheese and cracker, pushed it into his mouth, and talked around it. “In some ways it’s simpler,” he said, more or less intelligibly. “We can talk up front with each other. On the other hand, I can see Tom getting a little testy.”
“That’s what the computer and I thought, too,” Wally agreed.
Andy swallowed his cheese and cracker, thinking. “I tell you what we say,” he decided.
Wally leaned forward, all ears. Well, mostly ears.
Andy reached for another cheese and cracker and pointed at himself with it. “I told you,” he said. “I decided the only way to get good input from you was to give you the whole picture. So I explained to you how Tom had been involved in this robbery years and years ago, brought in to it by bad companions and all, and how now he’s old and not wanting to be a robber anymore, and how he was let out of prison, and all he wants to do is retire, and this money’s all he’s got for his golden years, so we’re all getting together to help him get it back. Because, by now, whose money is it, anyway? So that’s what I told you. Right?”
Wally nodded. “Okay, Andy,” he said. “But, Andy?”
“Yeah?”
“Is, uh,” Wally said. He craved a cracker piled with cheese. “Is, uh,” he said, “any of that the truth?”
Andy laughed, calm and innocent and obviously easy in his mind. “Why, Wally,” he said. “Except for leaving out the part where Tom continues to be a homicidal maniac, it’s all the truth.”
NINETEEN
Myrtle Street slowly turned the crank of the old-fashioned microfilm viewer, and on its metal floor all the yesterdays of Vilburgtown County crept languidly by, recorded for posterity in the pages of the County Post. From the year before Myrtle’s birth up till the year Mother married Mr. Street, the cake sales and high school dances and Boy Scout meetings inched inexorably past, the Town Council sessions and selectman elections and volunteer fire department fund raisers leisurely unwound, the fires and floods and severe winter storms floated through (sapped of all urgency), the automobile accidents and burglaries and the one big armored car robbery out on the Thruway all popped into view and faded like sudden puffs of smoke. But through it all there wasn’t the slightest hint of the identity of Myrtle Street’s father.
In the week since Edna had blurted out that astonishing sentence—“That was your father in that car!”—Myrtle had thought of nothing else. Suddenly she burned with the desire—no, the need—to know her true origins. But Edna was no help at all. After that initial sudden outburst and that quick (equally startling) string of profanity, Edna had shut up like a safe on the subject, had refused to talk about it, had refused even to let Myrtle talk about it. Clearly she regretted that flare-up, that window into the past she’d inadvertently and briefly opened, and was waiting only for that out-of-control moment to be forgotten.
Well, it wasn’t going to be forgotten. Myrtle had the bit well and truly in her teeth now and was determined to learn everything. From knowing nothing, she wanted to know all. Her earlier complacence now astonished her. She’d always known, of course, that Gosling was her mother’s maiden name, that Street was the only other name Edna had ever possessed, and that she herself had entered the world long before Edna and Mr. Street had ever met. She had known it, but she’d never actually thought about it, wondered about it, followed through the implications. And now?
Now, she had to know. The window was open, and there was no shutting it. If Edna wouldn’t talk, there had to be another way. Myrtle had two elderly female cousins in the area, one a widow in a nursing home in Dudson Falls, the other an old maid still in her family’s farmhouse (though without the farm acreage) outside North Dudson. Myrtle had tried talking to both of them this last week but had gotten nowhere. The frustrating thing about trying to deal with doddering oldsters was that it was impossible to know for sure whether they were lying or merely feeble-minded. Both old ladies had sworn ignorance of Myrtle’s male parentage, though, so that was that.
What else was there, what other way to learn about the past? Twenty-six years ago. Who was spending time then with Edna Gosling, already thirty-six years of age and chief librarian at the Putkin’s Corners municipal library? It was really too bad the Vilburgtown Reservoir had drowned Putkin’s Corners a few years later; there might have been clues there. Well, they were unreachable now.
And the County Post seemed to contain no clues at all. No photos of the younger Edna Gosling on the arm of this gentleman or that at VFW Post clambakes or Dudson Consolidated School reunions, no “and passenger Edna Gosling” in stories of automobile accidents, no “accompanied by Miss Edna Gosling” in social-page wedding reports.
What else had Edna said about the man she claimed to be Myrtle’s father back there at her first startled instant of recognition? “It couldn’t happen, but it did,” she’d said, meaning, presumably, that she hadn’t believed the man would—no, could—ever return to this part of the world. Because she’d thought he was dead? Out of the country? Permanently hospitalized? But then she’d called the man, as Myrtle remembered it, a “dirty bastard son of a bitch.” Was that because he’d left her, pregnant and unwed, so many years ago?
If only Edna would open up!
But she wouldn’t, that’s all. But there was nothing. And now it was nearly six o’clock, time for Myrtle to leave work and go pick up Edna at the Senior Citizens Center. Having finished going through for the third time the papers covering the year before her birth, Myrtle sighed, fast-cranked the roll of microfilm back onto its reel, put it away in its box, said good evening to Janice (the employee who would steer the library through the twilight hours), went out to the employee parking area behind the library, got behind the wheel of the black Ford Fairlane, and drove across town and down Main Street to where Edna stood irritably on the curb, waiting.
The clock on the Fairlane’s dashboard assured Myrtle she wasn’t late, so Edna’s irritation was simply at its normal level of background static and nothing for Myrtle to worry about. Therefore, she had a welcoming smile on her face as she pulled to the curb before the dour old lady and pushed open the passenger door, calling, “Hello, Mother!”
“Hm,” Edna commented. She stepped forward to climb into the car, then glanced up over its top at a passing vehicle and suddenly shouted, “Goddamn!”
Now, “goddamn” was not something Edna said. It certainly wasn’t something she ever shouted, and it absolutely positively wasn’t something she would shout in the middle of the public street. Astounded, Myrtle gaped at her mother as Edna clambered into the car, slammed the door, pointed a trembling and bony finger at the windshield, and cried, “Follow that son of a bitch!”
Then she understood. Peering out, seeing a clean new tan automobile driving away from them down Main Street, Myrtle said, “My father again?”
“Follow him!”
Myrtle was, God knows, willing. Putting the Fairlane in gear, she pulled out onto Main Street just about a block behind that tan car, with only one other automobile in between. Weaving left and right to see past that intervening car, she could make out that the tan car was a new Cadillac Sedan de Ville, with MD plates. Myrtle, waiting impatiently for a chance to pass the extraneous car, said, “Is my father a doctor?”