"That's all right," Nettie said. “If you were to fall to the ground and foam at the mouth, I'd feel like a miserable old woman."
The buzzing pulse quieted in my veins; the yellow flare around Clark's chest and shoulders receded back into his jacket. "At Toby's funeral, someone made a comment that made me think Stewart Hatch owned these houses. I always thought they belonged to you."
May frowned. Clark sneered thoughtfully at a flake sectioned from a pork rib. Nettie patted my hand. "Son, you don't have to worry about us."
"Which means, I suppose, that he does own your houses."
"Over the years, our family has done a lot of business with the Hatches. At a time when money was running low, Mr. Hatch became aware of our difficulties, and he stepped in to do us some good."
"What kind of good?"
"Mr. Hatch plans to develop this area. In the meantime, we can stay here for the rest of our lives."
"What if Hatch goes to jail?"
"No matter what happens, we'll be fine."
"We are protected, and we did it all ourselves," said May. "Toby's money is what I call the icing on the cake."
Clark said, "Speaking of dessert, where's that sweet-potato pie?"
"You'll wait until the boy's had his fit," said Nettie. “It isn't your birthday."
•113
•I walked through the kitchen, feeling his hovering presence with every step, and said, "Show yourself, Robert."
I came into the living room. "Did you know Stewart owned their houses? What's going on? He can't develop one block on Cherry Street." I imagined my silent double standing before me, grinning at my perplexity.
Trudging up the stairs, I thought:Four hundred and eighty thousand dollars is just the icing on the cake?
I moved over the landing and shuddered to a halt. Howard Dunstan regarded me with dispassionate curiosity from the end of the hallway. I resisted the impulse to run downstairs. A faint smile played over Howard's mouth. He was enjoying my birthday. Robert and I had eased the boredom of eternity by providing him a drama more entertaining than he had expected.
"Go outside, give your daughters a thrill," I said. “I'm sick of the sight of you."
The expression on his face said,You don't get it, you are missing the point. He turned aside, inclined his head to the window behind him, and faded from view.
I went to the window and looked down. Four people in festive spirits sat at the picnic table. Imbuing his duplicate of the pink extravaganza with an elegant raffishness, Robert spoke to Nettie and made her dimple with pleasure. He looked astonishingly handsome, even as I took in the roaring deprivation I had seen while he cavorted among fireflies and flaming birds.
I moved from the window and saw the door to Nettie and Clark's bedroom. It was half open. Scarcely believing what I was doing, I went into their room. Two freestanding wooden cabinets stood against the back wall, and two upholstered chairs faced me from beyond a double bed with white pillows and a faded yellow coverlet. I felt like a rapist. A tall chest of drawers faced the bed. The room's only closet took up the wall to my right.
The sweet, musty odor of a lavender sachet filtered toward me. Clark's outfits took up half of the rail, Nettie's long, loose dresses the other. Tidy stacks of sweaters and sweatshirts covered most of the shelf above the rail. A manila folder lay an inch back from the edge of the shelf beyond the sweatshirts.
The folder contained a lot of black-and-white photographs. They could have been of Nettie and her sisters arranged tallest to smallest in front of the house onNew Providence Road; of Clark Rutledge striking a pose in high-draped pants; of Star Dunstan beside a nightclub piano, singing "They Can't Take That Away from Me." Looking at them was the only way to clear the aunts of my suspicions. I took out three of the photographs and knew that whoever these people might have been, they were not Dunstans.
A young man in a straw boater propped one foot on the running board of what I thought was a Marmon. In a studio portrait, a girl of perhaps eighteen with straight, dark bangs and wearing pearls, a white, midcalf dress, and gleaming silk stockings smiled at a rolled diploma. Older versions of the same people, he in a three-piece suit, she in a cloche hat, posed behind two boys in sailor suits, one of them not long out of infancy. I slipped the photos back into the folder and took out another. My symptoms surged back into life, promising me a merry ride.
Dressed for the occasion in a doll-like jacket and bow tie, a small boy with bangs like his mother's perched on a photographer's stool in front of a backdrop depicting an Italian hill town. His face was nearly identical to that of the three-year-old Ned Dunstan in the photograph my mother had given me.
I pulled out one of the Edgerton Academy class photos pink-haired Spike had assumed I wished to find. Twenty boys in their early teens stood in three rows on the steps in front of a school. Glowering at the camera from the end of the last row, apart and unhappy, as dark as Caliban, was the image of myself at thirteen.
I walked out of the bedroom to find Robert leaning against the wall, smiling at me. He said, "Nettie and May are a perfect pair of rogues. And I can't say enough about Clark. The man belongs in the Senate. You don't mind my taking advantage of your absence to get acquainted with the family, do you?"
"Would it make a difference?"
Robert looked at the folder and narrowed his eyes. “Is that what I think it is?"
I pushed it toward him. "Take this to the car. I have to get back to the Brazen Head before my attack."
"Can you hold it off that long?"
“I have more control than I used to," I said.
"We're developing all sorts of new skills." Robert took the folder and disappeared.
When I came back out into the back yard, Clark and the aunts looked at me with gratified surprise. "Bounce back faster than a rubber ball, that's what you do," Nettie said.
“It's still on the way," I said. “I should get back to my hotel. But thank you for my birthday party. And I love my new jacket, Aunt May." An unanswered question came to me. "We were talking about Toby. Did they say he broke into a house in Hatchtown?"
"Do they have silver picture frames in Hatchtown?" Clark sneered.
"Nettie said a Hatchtown character saw him outside the place."
"A lowlife named Spelvin claimed to see Toby out in Ellendale. People like him didn't go wandering through Ellendale in those days, not without getting rousted."
"Where in Ellendale?" Electrical current sparkled through my veins.
"Manor Street," Clark said. "Where the mansions went up in the twenties."
"Whose mansion in particular?" I already knew.
"Carpenter Hatch's place," Clark said. “I don't know how a jury decided Toby Kraft could get so down and out stupid."
I faded from the back yard with none of Robert's impressive immediacy.
•114
•Sprawled across the back seat, Robert said, "What do you make of these pictures?"
"You first."
He put on a mock-professorial voice. "These photographs represent approximately fifteen years in the life of an increasingly well-off Midwestern family. We begin with a clever roughneck and the little beauty who had the misfortune of marrying him. In time, the roughneck transforms himself into a stiff-necked dictator, and the bride dwindles into a cringing phantom. They have two sons, seven or eight years apart, who are sent to a horrible school established to reinforce the fantasy that they are landed aristocracy."