Married twenty-three years to a woman who had given him one child — a daughter — and then redirected her sexual energies toward shopping, facials, ethnic cooking and Indian relief, he had tried everything conceivable to produce a legitimate heir. In the early days, when they were still conjugal, he tried ointments, unguents and evil-smelling concoctions he’d purchased from sideways-glancing clerks in Chinatown. He dressed in costume, read his wife lubricious passages from Lolita, The Carpetbaggers and the Old Testament, consulted therapists, counselors, physicians, technicians, quacks and horse breeders, but all to no avail. Not only did Joanna fail to become pregnant again, she began dodging him at bedtime, in the morning, at lunch and in the immediate vicinity of any of the six bathrooms. He was putting too much pressure on her, she said. Sex had become an obligation, a duty, alternately clinical and perverse, like being in a laboratory one day and a witchdoctor’s hut the next. What did he think she was, a prize bitch or something? It was not long after that she’d discovered the Indians.
Anyone else might have petitioned for divorce, but not Depeyster. No Van Wart had ever divorced, and he wasn’t about to set a precedent. He loved her, too, in his way. She was a striking woman, with her startled eyes, her fine bones and the way she carried herself like a gift on a tray, and sometimes he found himself longing for her as she used to be. There were times, though, when he let his mind wander and pictured her fatally injured in an auto accident or the victim of a malignant virus. There would be a funeral. He would grieve. Wear a black armband. And then go out and find himself a strong-legged fecund young equestrian or acrobat. Or one of the barefooted, brassiereless, vacant-eyed college girls who slipped in and out of the house under his daughter’s tutelage. Fertile ground. That’s what he needed. And if the time should come when he himself was at fault, when the mechanism failed to respond as it should, well, there was always the subzero vault at Trilby, Inc., where a dozen packets of his seed lay sequestered in perpetual readiness.
Depeyster sighed, and had another pinch of dirt. It was too hot for golf — ninety-five already and with the humidity up around the breaking point — and the thought of rigging up the Catherine Depeyster was enough to prostrate him. He glanced at his watch: 1:15. Too early to go home yet, but then who was he fooling? Every last worker at the plant, right on down to the pimply fat girl they’d taken on in the packing room two days ago, knew that he couldn’t tell a muffin from an aximax and couldn’t have cared less. So to hell with them. What he would do, he thought, standing and meditatively stroking the envelope in his breast pocket, was go home for a bite of lunch, an iced tea and the afternoon edition of the Peterskill Post Dispatch Herald Star Reporter, have a nap and then, if it cooled off later in the day, drive by the Crane property and dream that old man Crane had sold it to him.
At home, in the kitchen, slicing a tomato on the mahogany sideboard presented to Pierre Van Wart by the Marquis de Lafayette in 1778 as an expression of heartfelt gratitude for nursing him through a six-week illness, Depeyster glanced down at the headlines of the paper, which lay, still folded, beside him. SCHOOL BOARD MEETS, he read. MURIEL MOTT BACK FROM TANZANIA TREK. The tomato was still warm from the garden. He cut it in thick slabs, peeled a Bermuda onion and dug into the refrigerator for the ham, white cheddar and mayonnaise. RUSSIANS INVADE CZECHOSLOVAKIA. The ancient planks groaned beneath his feet, Virginia ham and pungent white cheese mounted on a piece of corn rye; he sliced the onion, spread mayonnaise and carried plate and newspaper to the cherrywood table that had been in the family for better than two hundred years, DOGS ALLOWED TO RUN WILD. FAGNOLI GARBAGE HIT BY STRIKE. There were salt and pepper on the table in Delft shakers molded in the shape of wooden clogs. He sprinkled the tomato faces with both, and then, glancing over his shoulder, he slipped a hand into his breast pocket for a pinch of dirt. When dusted on the sandwich, it was barely distinguishable from the other condiments.
He unfolded the paper with a snort of contempt. The school board was a joke, he’d always detested Muriel Mott and in fact had hoped she’d be torn to pieces by hyenas at some remote blistering outpost, Fagnoli didn’t affect him and he routinely shot any dog he encountered on the property. As for the Russians, he’d always sided with his old commander, General George S. Patton, on that issue. But down toward the bottom of the page, a lesser headline caught his eye:
LOCAL MAN INJURED IN DAWN ACCIDENT
Walter Truman Van Brunt, 22, of 1777 Baron de Hirsch Road, Kitchawank Colony, was injured early this morning when he lost con trol of his motorcycle on Van Wart Road, just east of Peterskill. Van Brunt suffered a fractured rib and facial confusions in adition the to loss of his right foot. Burleigh Strang, of Strang Ferilizer, came upon the scene of the accident moments after blood all over the place,” Strang said, “and it was so foggy I darn near run him over myself.” Strang is crdited with saving Van Brunt’s life, who doctors at Peterskill Community Hospital say would have bled to
twelve people present. Dr. Rausch, Superintendent of Schools, addressed the problem of individual lockers for members of the girls’ field hockey
quick-thinking and laying him in the bed of his pickup truck and also remembering to bring the detached foot along in the hope that doc tors could save it. Van Brunt is listed in guarded condition.
Van Brunt. Truman Van Brunt. It had been years since he’d heard that name. Years. What was it, fifteen? Twenty? He looked up from the paper, and there in the kitchen, over the onion, the ham and the pinch of tribal dirt, Truman’s face suddenly materialized, just as it had been in 1949, on the night of the riot. The reddish dark hair freighted with sweat and clinging to his brow like a crown of thorns, blood dried at the corner of his mouth, his pale washed-out eyes — eyes the color of river ice — numb with shock. I’ve come for my thirty pieces of silver, he said, and then Joanna was there too, at the door, her smile wilting like a cut flower. She was young, her legs smooth and firm, the kimono clasped across her breast; she didn’t need any makeup. I beg your pardon? she said, and Depeyster was already rising from his chair. Ask him, Truman said, stepping through the doorway to point a finger stained with blood, and then he was gone.
Depeyster shook his head as if to clear it, and then, lifting the sandwich to his lips, fastened on the article again. Truman Van Brunt, he thought. Bad luck and trouble, nothing but. And now here was his son — just a kid — mutilated for life.
He read the article through a second time, then set the sandwich down and peeled back the top slice of bread. Bits of onion clung to the mayonnaise, which had begun to take on a pinkish cast through contact with the tomato. He peppered the whole thing with a talismanic sprinkle of cellar dust, glancing up just as his daughter, Mardi, sauntered into the room.
If she’d seen anything, she gave no indication of it — just slouched toward the refrigerator in a dirty housecoat, last night’s makeup ringing her eyes like greasepaint. She looked haggard, looked like a Harpie, a dope user, a wino. He supposed she’d been out all night again. He had an urge to say something, something sharp and wounding, critical, bitter. But he softened, remembering the little girl, and then, as she bent to peer into the bright depths of the refrigerator, marveling at this creature, with her bare feet and ropes of dark frizzed hippie hair, this bewildering adult, this woman, only fruit of his loins.