“It must be a comforting feeling,” I said, “to know you’ve accomplished something in your life.”
“Oh it is, it is indeed. Though, I’ll tell you, uh, what was your name?”
“Mallory.”
“Mallory. I’ll tell you, Mallory, a man feels a little empty at this stage of life, no matter how full it’s been up to then. It’s a kind of a used-up feeling, I guess, and it doesn’t matter how grand your achievements…” (he affectionately patted the glass over the autographed picture of Hoover) “… no matter how grand, you just feel empty.”
I didn’t say anything; it would’ve been a good time to find things out, but I couldn’t make myself ask anything.
Finally, he went on himself: “It’s not so much I miss her-my wife, I mean-it’s been so long ago, and she was a young girl and here I am an old man, but… I don’t have anything left of her and there won’t be anything left of her after I’m gone… nothing of the two of us together… not with Richard gone… and my grandson.”
His mind must’ve been wandering, I thought; Stefan was his nephew, not his grandson.
He went on: “… and Stefan, too, is a loss, I suppose, even if I do feel some bitterness, can’t help but feel some bitterness….”
I had to say something now. Inside me I sealed compassion over, much as someone had mortared the cracks in the old house.
I said, “I suppose you must feel a little bit sad, being the last of the Normans. It’s a lot of tragedy to go through, losing a wife, a son and his wife and daughter, and now your nephew.”
“He shouldn’t have done it.”
“Commit suicide you mean?”
“No, no, boy, that’s not at all what I mean. Under the circumstances suicide was ideal, really. It’s that he shouldn’t have gone bothering that little Taber girl.”
There was fondness in his voice; that stopped me.
“Wasn’t Janet blackmailing you, Mr. Norman?”
“Blackmailing…?” A dry rasp sounded in his throat: his laugh. “No, no, Stefan knew that wasn’t so, or he at least should have. Still, I suppose he meant well.”
“I’m… sure he did.”
“But it was so silly of him, so silly to think she was taking advantage of me. Why, I doubt she even knew of me, I kept in the background so. Stefan should have known better.”
“He should have?”
“Why, of course. He was the one I had contact the girl’s mother, he better than anyone knew how badly I wanted to find the girl, and then how pleased I was when, after several years had dragged by, she turned up again.”
“Why did you want to see her, Mr. Norman? Why would you search for Janet Taber?”
He waved a quavery hand in the air, like the reluctant blessing of a disillusioned old priest. “That doesn’t matter, not now….”
“Oh?”
“She’s dead. And her son’s dead.”
“Her son?” And I remembered Janet’s little boy and his heart trouble and the anonymous benefactor. “You were helping Janet help her son? Did you arrange for his treatment at a clinic in the east?”
He nodded. “But none of that matters. She’s dead. Her son is dead.”
“Her son,” I said.
“Her son,” he said. “Hers and Richard’s.”
I looked out the window; it caught the reflection of the smiling portrait behind us.
“My grandson,” he said. Softly. Softly.
TWENTY-FIVE
Harold was waiting for me at the bottom of the stairwell. He seemed too big to fit within the walls: he was a ship in a bottle and I wondered how it was done. He said, “How’s Mr. Norman?”
“He’s all right. I helped him back to bed.”
“You didn’t make things worse for him?”
“I’m not sure that’d be possible,” I said. “Let’s go somewhere and talk.”
He said, “I sent Rita across the street for some groceries and when she gets back she’s going to fix us breakfast. That should give us time to discuss things.”
“You were expecting this?”
“Of course,” he said. “Weren’t you?”
He led me into the empty living room, where the sun was slanting in through the many odd-shaped, undraped windows like swords stuck in a magician’s box. Our footsteps clomped, but didn’t echo. Harold gestured toward an arched doorway and I went on through it and he followed. We walked across the dead lawn and stopped a few yards from the drop-off. The river was choppy today; a gray barge was riding down to the lock and dam and wasn’t having an easy time of it. There was a crisp breeze and I wished I had worn a jacket.
“Rita says you write mystery stories,” Harold said, looking out toward the river.
“That’s right.”
He looked at me; the one eye bored into me. “You think life’s a mystery story?”
“What do you mean?”
“That tidy. That neat. That easy to deal with.”
I shrugged. “No. But life is like a mystery story, sometimes. Full of secrets somebody’s trying to keep, and can’t. Or anyway shouldn’t.”
He grunted; his breath smoked in the cold air, like the exhaust of a car. “My life isn’t a damn mystery story. Anyway it’s not your damn mystery story.”
“Maybe not,” I said. “But I’m in it.”
He thought about that. Nodded. “I guess you are.”
“Why don’t you tell me, Harold?”
“You’re the mystery writer. You tell me.”
“All right. I’ll tell you a story. It might not be much more than a story, but I’ll give it a whirl.”
He grunted again.
“Once upon a time,” I began, “there was a senator named Richard Norman. And this senator had an affair with a secretary of his called Janet Ferris. It might’ve started at his senate office in Des Moines; but it wound up in Port City, probably in a motel room, during the summer the senator was launching his campaign for national office.”
Harold just stood and listened, impassive as a rock.
“The senator had a wife, too, but she was pregnant at the time-very pregnant. She delivered a baby girl to the senator late that summer. Maybe it was during those last few months of the wife’s pregnancy that the senator finally gave in to the secretary, and what might have started as a simple flirtation turned into something more complex, more complex than just another affair, too. Because the secretary also got pregnant.
“Now I don’t know whether the senator told his wife about the pregnant secretary. I kind of doubt it. But I’m pretty sure he would’ve told his political advisor, monetary backer and guiding light behind everything he did: his father, Simon Norman. The man behind the man. And I’m pretty sure I know how Sy Norman would’ve handled the secretary: he would pay her off to go away quietly and just disappear.
“And she did. She went off to Old Town in Chicago and was a hippie with her hippie husband for a while, quite good and soured on an Establishment she’d briefly believed in. How am I doing, Harold?”