And then, insidiously, it began. On Thursday evening, Louise Holcombe called them with some distressing news. Their bi-monthly bridge game set for the next evening would have to be cancelled. Tina, their oldest daughter, had fallen down a treacherous set of basement stairs, fracturing her arm.
Bannen overhead his wife make the suggestion that they have their game the following Friday night. There was some discussion of the matter. Hanging up, Peggi told Krieg the Holcombs would think it over. Bannen himself thought it over and the conclusion he reached wasn’t encouraging.
Why, he asked himself, should a bridge game be cancelled because of a broken arm when all eight arms of the participants were healthy? The Holcombs had other reasons for cancelling out, like two daughters in the same house with a sex maniac.
The cancellation by the Holcombs continued to plague Bannen all the next day until the second straw was lifted into the ill wind blown into his life. It came in the form of conversation overhead by Bannen as he sat alone drinking coffee at a table in the college’s Student Union cafeteria. Four male voices at a nearby table were in discussion.
“You can never tell about guys like that, man. Definite personality deterioration.”
“A latent schizoid if I ever saw one. By day, ye olde. mild, professorial-type, but when the sun sinks behind the hills—”
“...woifman liveth!”
“Man like, I got a ten-year-old sister. Just knowing a creep like that is living around Cresthill...”
“They oughta put on a couple extra squad cars in Maidenbower Park. Guys like that just drool over parks.”
“...and Shell Shoal Beach... if you catch my meaning.” Bannen got up from his seat and when he came to the table where the rumors were being exchanged he stopped. One of the foursome Bannen recognized. It was a freshman in his nine o’clock class in Moral Philosophy. The other three seemed not to know who Bannen was, but the fourth made deadly sure they did by saying, in an exaggerated way, “Good afternoon, Professor Bannen.”
“Prosser.”
Mark Prosser’s mouth was working rapidly, as if it were trying to hook on something pertinent to say. Finally, it did.
“That, er, was a fine lecture this morning, sir.”
“You mean, I suspect, the comparison of the moral philosophies of Demosthenes and Cicero.”
“Y-yes sir. Really heavy stuff,” said Mark Prosser.
“Well, I’m pleased you’re getting into it. Because I’m toying with the idea of a quiz for Monday. I trust you’ll favor Sullivan Library or Hale Dorm over the Brass Bear Tavern this weekend and be sufficiently ready to dig it.”
“Dig it. You’re really up on the lingo, sir.”
“And you are correspondingly up on ours. Lingo is of my generation.”
Only Prosser seemed amused by all this light humor, and even his was false, tense laughter. The others at the table were staring at Bannen with condemning eyes like three Cicero’s pronouncing on him a sentence of death without vital due process of law.
Valiantly, Bannen made one last stab to break the icy stores bearing down on him. “And Prosser, not that I believe in giving students preferential treatment, a scoop in your case might help you bring up your grade point. Tuesday’s theme assignment will be a thousand word treatment on the repercussions of Cicero’s penchant for condemning to death and exile Roman citizens, without benefit of legal representation or public trial.”
One of the four saw what Bannen was obliquely driving at and lowered his head. But the denser Mark Prosser only grinned and stammered, “T-that’s good of you to tell me about the theme before hand, sir. I’ll get to work on it this weekend.”
Professor Bannen smiled weakly. He was sure the topic of the theme had already slipped out of Prosser’s feeble mental grip.
That evening after dinner, as Barmen sat in the living room carefully preparing his hinted quiz, the phone rang. Peggi answered it.
“What? Who is this, please?”
Bannen stopped his work, listening.
“You have no right to say a thing like that! Stop it, stop it! Who is this?”
With awkward speed, his wife put up the phone. When Bannen asked her about the call, she averted her eyes.
“A... a girl,” she told him.
“What girl? What did she want?”
“She said she was a friend of another girl. She... she...”
“Go on, Peg. She what?”
There was a deep sigh audible to Bannen across the room. “She said you made certain remarks to her girlfriend.”
“Who said that? Did she give a name?” asked Bannen.
“No. She didn’t even mention her own name. She said you asked the other girl to... to get into your car. She said you asked her girl friend to go with you to Shell Shoal Beach.”
Krieg Bannen tried to be casual, though his insides were shaking themselves into pieces.
“Just some kid fooling around with the telephone,” he said.
“But she knew your name, Krieg. And she mentioned the license plate and make of your car.”
“My name’s in the phone book, Peggi. And my car’s parked out front quite a bit. Probably a neighbor girl playing telephone roulette just to kill a dull Friday night.”
“But if it was a neighbor girl, you’d think I’d have recognized her voice,” Peggi said tensely.
“I wouldn’t worry about it. The kid is probably high and dry without a date. Either that or she’s been forced into a stint of baby sitting with Little Brother Melvin the Terrible, who every ten minutes bites an ankle and chucks the cat up on the roof. So the sitting sister decides to take out her frustrations on someone else. Believe me, Peg, the best thing to do is forget the whole thing.”
“I suppose you’re right, Krieg.”
“I know I’m right.”
If Bannen expected the one call would be the end to it, he was only wishing through his hat. Two more calls came that evening. The first was from the Graysons, informing them that the Paddleball Tournament for Sunday had been cancelled. And the second came from Frank Berrucci who, in a troubled nervous tone told Bannen weekend business had come up unexpectedly and that their scheduled cruise through the San Juans would have to be postponed.
They passed the remainder of the evening in painful, suspicious silence. Peggi washed in the basement, cooked mysteriously in the kitchen and obviously avoided the living room.
And that evening for the first time in his memory, she turned her back on him in bed.
It was the next afternoon and Peggi was just returning from her weekly Saturday session at the beauty parlor. “Krieg what’s happening?” she said.
Bannen was at the kitchen table, eating a salami and Swiss cheese sandwich and studying in a volume of philosophy translated from the third century Greek. “What do you mean what’s happening, Peg?”
“Only something like the end of our social life,” Peggi told him seriously. “This morning at Ardella’s Beauty Shop, Grace Callahan treated me like an escapee from Plague Island. And Louise Holcombe told me that she and her husband couldn’t, make it for bridge next Friday night, either. And that’s not all, Krieg. A little bit later, I saw. Julie Holcombe coming out of Tassit’s Drugs on the mall. I mean, a fractured arm is something very difficult to hide, Krieg, and Julie Holcombe wasn’t sporting so much as a bandage.”
“Maybe it was the other Holcombe girl who had the fracture,” Krieg said.