“Is the English soprano Emma Kirkby?"
"You know her?"
I laughed at the unlikeliness of the coincidence. “I brought that CD with me when I came here."
"That settles it. I'm picking you up at six."
A sign twenty yards down the road marked the boundary of Edgerton, the City with a Heart of Gold. The sign floated nearer, increasing in size. We came to within a foot, to within six inches, to a distance measurable only by a caliper, to nothing. The sign flew past the hood of the car and flattened into a two-dimensional vertical stripe parallel with my head. The air wavered, thickened, and seemed to shimmer up from the highway like a mirage.
• 49
• Helen Janette darted out before I reached the stairs. If the manila envelope in her hand was responsible for the expression on her face, I didn't want to know what was in it.
Like a matching automaton on a Swiss clock, Mr. Tite opened his door and stepped into the frame. The fedora shaded his nose, and the lumpy jaw looked hard as granite.
"A policeman was looking for you this morning." She crossed her arms over the envelope. “I didn't like the idea of plunking a thing withpolice department stamped all over it on my mail table."
"Did he give his name?"
Mr. Tite cleared his throat. “It was a gink named Rowley."
"Lieutenant Rowley was returning this to you." She surrendered the envelope.
OttoBremen boomed out my name before I could get the key into my lock. He was waving at me from the chair in front of his television set, and he looked a lot friendlier than my landlady and her guard dog. I went into his room.
Bremenstuck out a big, splayed hand. "Ned Dunstan, right? OttoBremen, in case you forgot." His handsome mustache bristled above his smile. "Grab a chair."
Bremen's room overflowed with chairs, dressers, little tables, and other things from wherever he had lived before moving to Mrs. Janette's. A cheerful jumble of photographs, framed documents, and tacked-up drawings by children covered the walls. The yellow banner I had noticed that morning hung across the top of the back wall.we love you otto had been printed three times in bright blue letters along its length.
“I guess they love you."
“Isn't that the cutest damn thing?" He looked over his shoulder. " 'We love you Otto, we love you Otto, we love you Otto.' From the graduating sixth-grade class atCarl Sandburg Elementary School, 1989." He lit acigarette."Mrs. Rice, the principal, called me up onstage during the ceremony. Most of those kids, I'd known since you had to take 'em by the hand and sing 'The Teddy Bears' Picnic' to get 'em across the street. I was so proud, I almost burst out of my suspenders."
It was the luxuriant, gravel-bottomed Western voice I remembered from that morning. If OttoBremen had sung "The Teddy Bears' Picnic," I would have followed him across the street, too.
He knitted his hands over his belly and exhaled. "First time any graduating class honored a crossing guard that way. Nine months of the year, I'm the crossing guard at Carl Sandburg." Bremen tapped the cigarette, and ashes drifted toward the floor. “If I had it to do all over again, I swear, I'd get a degree in elementary education and teach first or second grade. Hell, if I wasn't seventy years old, I'd do it now. Say, care for a drink? I'm about ready."
A few minutes later, I managed to get across the hall.
edgerton police departmentwas printed on the front and the sealed flap of the manila envelope Lieutenant Rowley had entrusted to Helen Janette. Inside it was a plastic bag, also sealed, with four white identification bands. A case number and my name had been scrawled on the top two bands. Lieutenant George Rowley and someone in the Property Department had signed the other two. The plastic bag contained a wad of bills. I dumped out the money and counted it. Four hundred and eighty-one dollars. I laughed out loud and called Suki Teeter.
• 50
• The bus dropped me off in College Park two blocks south of the Albertus campus. I walked down Archer Street until I saw the weathered wooden signboard,riverrun arts &crafts, over the porch of Suki Teeter's three-story clapboard building.
The room to the right of the entrance surrounded racks of posters and greeting cards with paintings, graphics, woven tapestries, and shelves of pottery and blown glass; the smaller room to the left doubled as an art-supply business and framing shop. Although she exhibited work by local artists, Suki supported herself mostly through poster sales and picture framing.
"This is the only place for decent brushes and paints in a hundred miles, but I can't afford the inventory I should have," she said. "Everything costs so much money! The roof needs fixing. I could use a new oil burner. Twenty grand would solve all my problems, but I can hardly pay my two part-time assistants. They stay on because I cook them dinner and act like Mom."
In her living room, abstract and representational paintings hung alongside shelves of clay pots and blown glass. "All this work is by artists I show in the gallery, except for that painting on your left."
A dirgelike complication of muddy, red-spattered browns occupied a fourth of the wall.
"What do you think?"
“I'd have to look at it for a while," I said.
“It's hopeless, and you know it. Rachel Milton gave me that painting years ago, and I never had the heart to get rid of it. Can I give you some tea?"
Suki came back with two cups of herbal tea and sat next to me on the yielding cushions. “I shouldn't be bitchy about Rachel. At least she kept in touch with Star, or vice versa. She might even come to the funeral."
Suki's glowing corona glided forward, and she wrapped her arms around my shoulders. I leaned into her aura of mint and sandalwood. She kissed my cheek. The golden haze of her face swam two or three inches back from mine. Her eyes shimmered, intensifying their deep jade green and shining turquoise. "Tell me. You know what I mean, justtell me."
I swallowed ginseng-flavored tea and described my mother's last day and night. At the mention of Rinehart's name, Suki gave me a glance of uncomplicated acknowledgment. Without saying anything more, I told her about Donald Messmer's appearance on the marriage license and my birth certificate.
“It's like I'm walking through a fog. My aunts and uncles act as though they're guarding atomic secrets." A tide of feeling surged through me, and everything else shrank before its necessity.
“I have to getout of the fog. I want to know who Rinehart was, and how this Messmer came into the picture."
She patted my hand and released it.
"Hewasmy father, wasn't he?"
"You look so much like him, it's eerie."
I remembered Max Edison's subtle relaxation when I said that I had come on a family matter. He had known instantly whose son I was. "Tell me," I said, echoing her words. "Please, justtell me."
Suki Teeter leaned back into her cushions.
• 51
• In the autumn of 1957, the more adventurous students of arts and literature at Albertus noted the frequent late-night presence at a rear table in the Blue Onion Coffeehouse of a man whose strikingly compelling face, at once pallid and dark, was framed by his black hair as he bent in concentration, one hand holding apapier mais Gitane cigarette and the other a hovering pencil, over what appeared to be a typewritten manuscript. This was Edward Rinehart. An awed fascination gathered about him.