“All I can tell you is I honestly don’t know where he is, Keefler.”
“Mister Keefler.”
“Mister Keefler.”
“Try it again, with a little more snap, professor.”
“Mister Keefler.”
“That’s better. You saw him last on the twenty-fifth of July?”
“That’s right.”
“Try it again, with a sir.”
“That’s right, sir.”
“You’re coming along nice, professor. You’re certain you haven’t seen him since?”
“I’m positive... sir.”
“What are all those papers, Bronson?”
“Class work, sir. English themes.”
Keefler stood up, reached over and took the top paper. Jill Grossman’s work. He read it, frowning, his lips moving, for about twenty seconds. Then he tossed it contemptuously on the desk. “Good god, is that what you teach them? What the hell is it about?”
“I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”
“Different people don’t understand different things. Think the parents of those kids would understand about you? About your old lady, maybe? The record says she was a lush, a part-time waitress and a part-time whore that got herself froze to death in an alley in the Sink.”
Lee’s hand was on his knee, hidden by the table top. He looked up at Keefler’s smile and, keeping his face blank, he closed his hand into a hard fist. He could hear the sound it would make against that slack smile, and he could feel how it would jolt all the way up to his shoulder. He had the feeling that Keefler knew exactly what was coming, and had known just how to push him over the edge. But at that crucial moment he heard the muted yelp of tires and the bang of springs and shocks as Lucille drove the old Plymouth into their driveway in her normal frantic fashion.
“This your wife now?” Keefler asked. Lee nodded, not quite trusting himself to speak. Keefler sat down. Lee felt weak and sick with reaction. Keefler said, “You stay put, professor. She’ll come on out here by herself, won’t she?”
“Yes. She’ll come out here.”
“What else? Come on, get it up.”
“Sir.”
He heard Lucille coming through the house, heard the clack of her clogs on the hardwood in the hallway, the softer sound of her steps on the rug. She came out onto the porch, saying, in a whining voice, “Honey, you just gotta do something about the car. When I stopped to let Ruthie off, it stalled and I...” She stopped as she saw Keefler. Lee saw her quick and expert appraisal of him, saw her arrive at the immediate conclusion that Keefler could be of no interest to her, saw her face change into the look of hauteur and indifference she reserved for everybody she considered the least bit inferior.
“Lucille, this is Mr. Keefler. He’s Danny’s parole officer.”
And the look of indifference was gone, and Lee saw a curious alertness about her. “How do you do,” she said, very politely.
“Hi, Lucille,” Keefler said, remaining stolidly in his chair. Lee had screened the porch a year and a half ago, and he had left the original railings. The screen was about eight inches beyond the railing. Lucille moved over and sat on the railing, long round legs straight, crossed at the ankles. She wore her dark blue swim suit, a short pale blue beach coat of thick terrycloth over it, and wooden clogs with white straps. Her hands were shoved deeply into the big pockets of the short beach coat, and the collar was turned up. Her hair was the coppery dark of old pennies, and coiled tightly, the coils no larger than coins, hair fitting her head closely with a look of spirit and bravery like a Roman youth. She was, Lee thought, almost unchanged by three years of marriage. Her perfect face had babyish blandness, large blue eyes set very wide, elfin snub of a nose, lips wide and heavy, teeth a bit too small and of a perfect white. She was now, as she had been three years before, one of the most provocative looking women he had ever seen. The life of her seemed so very close to the sensitive and unflawed satin of her skin. It was visibly warm in the pulse of her throat, in the lucent blue of veins at temple, wrist and ankle. Her long legs seemed to have extra curvatures, tender hollows, velvety paddings which, in other women, were but the hints of what here, in her, was almost too graphically expressed.
She usually kept her hands out of sight. They were small hands, but thick through the palms, with very short fingers. The nails were deeply nibbled and ugly.
Now she had her perfect summer tan, a honeyed luminescence that seemed more a glow of gold from beneath the skin than a deepening of color of the skin itself. The whites of her eyes were blued with her perfect health. There had been a little change. Her waist did not nip in above the sweet abundance of hips with quite such a startling contrast; there was a tiny roll of fat around her middle. There was a fullness under her chin, a small pad that unfortunately made it slightly apparent that there was not a great deal of chin in the first place. Her round high breasts were larger, the tissues less firm. And there were two tiny brackets of discontent around her mouth.
He remembered a time last May when she had been at the school to meet him and had somehow missed him, and he had been hurrying to catch up with her when he spotted her a half block ahead, walking toward home, walking with her short quick steps, hips swinging in wine linen slacks. As he had come up behind two boys who were following her, keeping pace with her, he heard one of them say, with thick-throated fervor, “Damn! She’s really built for it.”
That phrase had remained in his mind because it had been, in a curious way, an index of his self-betrayal. In the very beginning she had been the perfect delusion. Blinded by that magical face and body, he had read into her all the things he wanted to find. Her wide-eyed look was honesty. Her farm background and the office job in Battle Creek denoted energy and integrity. He detected an undertone of seeming cleverness in her most banal remark. Her automatic sexual hunger could not be anything but love.
He could not believe that a face and body of such perfections could contain a third-class mind. He told himself that her environment had not given her a chance to grow. When he talked she looked at him with shining eyes and rapt attention that could only come from a superior intelligence and from a sensitivity that had never been given a chance to develop. He would develop it. He would take delight in her growth.
He had been stubborn, and it had taken a year before he could see her clearly and know how poor had been the bargain he had struck. As the first child and only daughter of the Detterichs she had been grievously spoiled. She had been that rarity — a beautiful baby, a beautiful child, a beautiful adolescent. In a world where beauty was so highly prized, it was only necessary to be looked at and admired. She had learned that she was a great prize, and that it was inevitable that she would be given all the good things of the world. By someone. Her parents gave all they could. She was never given chores. She never made her own bed, or cleaned her room. In school she had been an indifferent scholar, a bland dreamer without intellectual resource. In her dreams she was a famous actress, or singer, or movie star. But never was there any effort to implement these dreams.
Even the job, he learned, had been a phony. She had dropped out of high school in the middle of her junior year, and for the next two years had done absolutely nothing, rising at noon, washing her hair, lounging around the farmhouse, waiting only for dusk and the inevitable car in the drive, the peremptory honk, the long evening date. Boredom had finally driven her to Battle Creek. After a six weeks’ course at a business school, during which she had learned very little, she had gone to work for her uncle, her mother’s brother, a general agent. Lee remembered the way Uncle Rog had said, “Seel dressed up the office pretty good.” And chuckled. “Hard to keep the boys out working on prospects. Used to be if you wanted to lose anything for good, have Seel file it.”