There was no point waiting anymore.
I walked to the front door. The matron with the D. H. Lawrence books was just ahead of me.
“I hope I don’t get arrested for having pornography,” she laughed.
“I’m a lawyer,” I said. “Call me if you need me.”
She giggled naughtily.
It was nearing lunchtime. I decided to stop by my folks’. I started to go get my ragtop.
Somebody said, “Hey. Hey, you!”
When I turned, I saw the girl from Leopold Bloom’s running to catch up with me.
“I overheard what you were talking about with Steve. About Susan Whitney?”
I nodded.
“He had this real battle with her on the phone the day before she died.”
“How do you know it was her?”
“Oh, it was her all right. He was obsessed.
He called her all the time and threatened her. He couldn’t let go.”
I thought about what Eileen had said about this girl and Steve. “Eileen thinks you and Steve are about to have an affair.”
She laughed. Her face was tinted red from the cold. It was a healthy and appealing red. “An affair? Are you kidding? They both give me the creeps. All that melodramatic artsy-craftsy bullshit.” She leaned closer.
“She’s got a stack of romance novels in the back she’s always reading and he’s got a bunch of dirty paperbacks. You hear the crap she gave me about a fifteen-minute break? They don’t know it yet but this is my last day. I’ve got a better job in Iowa City.”
“Well, good luck, and thanks for telling me that.”
She laughed again. “I think it’d be cool if Steve had killed her. At least he would’ve done something with his life. What a douche bag that guy is.” Then, “Say, do you know Maggie Yates?”
The name jolted me. I wondered if she knew about Maggie Yates and me.
But she quickly went on. “I saw Maggie and Susan in the store together a few times. You might ask Maggie about her. She’s kind of crazy, but I like her.”
“Maybe I should look her up.”
“You know where she lives?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I know where she lives.”
I should. I’d slept there often enough.
“Thanks for your help,” I said.
She gave me a pert little salute, cute as hell, and then turned and walked away. Iowa City already had a million great-looking girls.
Why couldn’t she stay here?
Twenty
The colors in housing developments always get me. Orchid and mauve and puce, among others.
Colors I don’t associate with houses. The other thing that always gets me is how many Tv antennas there are. The houses look as if they’re hooked up for direct contact with Mars.
But despite my misgivings about housing developments-ll villages whose dynamics Nathaniel Hawthorne would have understood very well -I was glad for Mom and Dad that they had this place. Mom not only got a new place out of the Knolls but also a garbage disposal, a telephone with an extension in another part of the house, a sundeck and a full basement. Dad got a garage, a big backyard and a look of pride when he sat on the small front porch with his can of Falstaff and listened to the Cubs on the radio.
Personally, I like an older house with fewer neighbors. And a lot less excitement. All the people who bought houses out here lived through the Depression, and most of the men fought in the war. So this is nirvana to them. This is what they dreamed of in the years following the stock market crash, and when they were overseas watching their friends die. And so there’s an edge of desperation here, everybody always telling one another how lucky they are and how happy they are. Steak is the talisman: a family that can have steak twice a week is in good shape. And these days most blue-collar families can eat steak just about as often as white-collar families. It’s as if they’re scared it’ll all go away if they don’t constantly remind themselves of their great good fortune.
Mom and Dad are like that, but not to an obnoxious degree. Every time Mom opens her big new Kelvinator double-door refrigerator, she says, “I just don’t know how I got along all these years without it.” And whenever she carries a load of laundry down to the basement, she stops and looks at me and says, “I wish my mother’d lived long enough to see my laundry room. She’d just go crazy about it.” For Dad, it’s the large shop in the basement. No more cold garages on winter nights; no more leaky roofs that rust out tools. Dad’s got a regular workshop down there and he loves it. You can smell freshly sawn lumber and hear the table saw whining through wood so new it’s sometimes green.
I could smell the soup the minute Mom opened the door. Tomato bisque. Homemade. How could I say no?
Over lunch, I said, “Ruthie isn’t here, is she?”
“Ruthie? She’s in school.” She gave me a funny look for asking such a stupid question.
Mom is pretty. I suppose most boys think their mothers are pretty. But mine really is.
Not that there’s much of her to be pretty.
Eighty-nine pounds and five-foot-one. Dad had to win her away from an accountant named Nesmith. Mom always says it was because of Dad’s curly red locks. She said he had the most beautiful hair she’d ever seen. Dad always looks uncomfortable when she says that. And then Mom’ll get a little teary and talk about what a good man he’s been to her all these years and how she just can’t imagine what her life would’ve been without him. They still dance in the kitchen on Saturday nights, the radio playing the old tunes, Benny Goodman and Harry James and Artie Shaw, and still make out in front of the Tv and jump up like teenagers whenever one of us kids show up.
“So everything’s going all right with her?” I said around a spoonful of tomato bisque. I tossed the words off, as if I was just making conversation.
But now I’d gotten her curious. “Why wouldn’t everything be all right?”
“Just wondering was all, Mom. I saw her over in town a couple of days ago and she looked tired.”
“Oh,” Mom said. She looked satisfied that I’d explained my curiosity. “It’s her grades. You know how hard she studies. She’s got a bunch of tests coming up. So she stays up all night. The poor kid.”
The phone rang. Mom went to the yellow wall phone. “It’s so handy to have a phone in the kitchen.”
I smiled.
It was a friend of hers wanting a recipe. Mom consulted a card file she kept. She read it slowly, giving her friend plenty of time to write down each ingredient.
I was getting groggy. The soup and the kitchen-warmth and the slow way Mom was talking made me want to go upstairs and pick up a Ray Bradbury paperback and read for a while and then drift off to sleep, the way I used to in high school. I’d always been in such a hurry to grow up. Now I wondered if high school was the best time I’d ever have.
When she hung up, she came back and sat down, her shoulder-length dark hair showing inevitable streaks of gray, her sweet little face still wrinkle-free. Dad was the one showing his age and sometimes when I looked at him I felt so sad I had to look away.
“What time’s her last class these days?”
“Ruthie’s?”
“Uh-huh.”
“She usually gets out at two forty-five.”
“Oh.”
“And then heads over to Sheen’s.”
Sheen’s was a clothing store where Ruthie worked two hours after school every day, putting in a full day on Saturdays. Saving for college.
She was watching me. “You know what’s funny?”
“Funny weird or funny ha-ha?”
“Funny weird.”
“What?”
“That you haven’t mentioned anything about Kenny Whitney.”
“Not much to mention.”
“Doris’ husband-Doris down the street here-he’s a cop and he says that the judge doesn’t think Kenny killed his wife.”
“Neither do I.”
“You don’t? How come?”