“You wouldn’t look silly. Not to me you wouldn’t. I love to see you do that,” she said. “You know what I’m doing now, don’t you?”
“Yes. Yes, I do. I surely do. But I’m not going to listen anymore,” he said. “Besides, I thought you were baking.”
“Ummm. I am.”
“I’m gonna hang up on you. Before I make a fool of myself in public. I’ll come by later,” he said. “I’ll come by and make a fool of myself in private. If that’s okay by you.”
She assured him that, yes, it was fine by her, and they said goodbye and hung up. Wade sighed heavily, and the two boys looked over at him and stared for a second.
“Hello, Wade,” the taller one said. “Getcha deer yet?”
“Nope,” he said. “I give up hunting five years ago, boys. Give it up for women. You oughta try it. Great for your sex life,” he said, and he hitched up his pants and headed out the door, his mind refilling with the golden light cast by his image of Mel Gordon’s wife.
The office of J. Battle Hand was on the first floor of a white Federal town house on South Main Street in Concord. It had snowed only a few inches in Concord the day before, and then it had rained, which had washed away the accumulated snow, but it was cold under a low dark-gray midafternoon sky, as if it were going to snow again, and the sidewalks were smeared here and there with half-frozen puddles.
Wade was unused to sidewalks and made his way carefully from his car to the steps of the building, up the steps and in, where he passed a door that announced the presence of a women’s health center, whatever the hell that was, and an accountant’s office, and walked to the back, where he entered a carpeted outer office and was greeted by a smart-looking young woman with a boy’s haircut and one dangling earring and long thin arms. She looked up from her red typewriter and smiled at him.
He took off his cap and wished suddenly that he had changed his clothes before coming down from Lawford. Maybe he should have worn his sport coat and necktie and his dress pants. He felt huge and awkward in the room, all thick neck and wrists. Country.
The young woman raised her eyebrows, as if expecting him to tell her what he had come to repair. The furnace? A broken water pipe on the second floor?
“I… I got an appointment,” Wade said. “With Mr. Hand.”
“Your name?” She stopped smiling.
“Whitehouse.”
She checked a pad on the desk, punched a key on the phone and said into the receiver, “A Mr. Whitehouse to see you.” Then silence, and she hung up and got up from her desk and motioned for Wade to follow her.
She was tall, as tall as he, and wore a black-and-white-checked miniskirt and smoky stockings that made her legs look slender and firm. Wade followed her calves and the backs of her knees, and they led him into a second office. The woman told him to take off his coat and sit down and said that Mr. Hand would be right with him. She offered him a cup of coffee, but he declined, because he knew his hands were trembling. Then she left him, closing the door behind her.
There were two dark-green leather chairs and a matching sofa in the windowless room, and the walls were lined with the red and blue spines of thick books. There was a second door, in the far corner of the room, and Wade settled into the chair that faced it and waited. His toothache was clanging away, but he felt pretty good.
After a few seconds he began to hope that Mr. Hand, for unknown reasons, would not appear and that somehow Wade could sit right where he was forever, outside of time, safely beyond his past and just this side of his future. He was warm enough and comfortable enough, and there was an ashtray on the low table next to him, so he could smoke. Which he did.
He was halfway through the cigarette, when he heard a click, and the door swung open and in, and to his astonishment a person in a wheelchair entered. It was a rubber-tired wheelchair with a tiny electric motor powering it, all chrome bars and spokes. The man driving the chair was slumped off to his left, flicking buttons on a control box with the fingers of his left hand. He brought the chair swiftly through the doorway, turned it abruptly, as if it were a remote-controlled toy car, toward Wade, then drove it forward to within a few feet of Wade’s chair, where it stopped suddenly and parked.
The driver looked like a ventriloquist’s dummy dressed in a dark pin-striped suit. His head was disproportionately large, and his face, in alarming contrast to the slumped inertness of his body, was bright and expressive. He had dark hair, gray at the temples, a square sharply defined forehead and brow and large pale-blue eyes. His skin was waxy white and taut, like paper-thin porcelain, the skin of a person who has long endured great pain, and when he smiled to greet Wade, it was almost a grimace, which seemed to require a mighty and consciously engaged physical exertion, as if he had to will his facial muscles to move one at a time.
But move they did, and when they did, his face lit up with intelligence and, Wade thought, humor. Maybe the man had deliberately prepared this surprise, had costumed and masked himself and sat in his wheelchair for hours behind that door waiting for Wade to arrive. Wade wanted to laugh out loud, to say, “Wow, hell of a getup there, Mr. Hand! Happy Halloween and trick-or-treat and all that, eh?” He wanted to reassure the man that the masquerade had worked, that he was indeed surprised, and he was scared too.
“Mr. Whitehouse,” the man in the wheelchair said. “Good to meet you.” It was the same voice Wade had heard on the phone, a deep baritone, smooth and cultivated.
Wade shifted his cigarette from his right hand to his left and started to extend the right, then plopped it back onto his knee. He swallowed and said, “Howdy.”
“I heard you had some serious snow up your way yesterday.”
Wade nodded, and the man went on. “There’s practically two different climates between here and there. What is it, forty, forty-five, fifty miles, and when you get snow, we get rain. At least till mid-December. Then we both get snowed on. I think I prefer the snow, though, to this dreary rain,” he said.
“Yeah,” Wade said. “Yeah, I prefer the snow.” He lapsed into silence again.
“Do you ski?”
“No. I never did. I never did try that.”
“Well,” the lawyer said, suddenly looking serious. “Let’s talk about this suit you’re proposing, shall we?” With his right hand he wrestled a yellow legal pad from a slot on the side of his chair onto his lap, drew a pen from his shirt pocket and prepared to write.
But Wade was not ready to talk about Lillian and Jill yet; in fact, he had almost forgotten why he had driven down here in the first place. He wanted to know what was wrong with Hand, what injury or disease had made off with his body. He wanted to know what the man could and could not do, how he could work as a lawyer, for God’s sake, or how he managed to drive a car, get dressed, cut his food. How he was with a woman.
He had never seen a man like this up close, and now he was about to hire him to do a very complex and mysterious job for him. Wade was about to place himself in a dependent relation to a man who said he preferred snow to rain but surely could not go out in the snow, a man who, even with his fancy rubber-tired battery-powered chair, could not get around in the stuff, but who nonetheless had built a huge vacation house on the side of a mountain where it snowed six months a year. He was a cripple who lived on a goddamned ski slope!
He suddenly thought of Evan Twombley, an overweight city fellow with his new gun up on Parker Mountain in the snow, hunting for a deer to kill and then getting killed himself. He thought of Jack Hewitt, lean and in all the necessary ways expert, moving swiftly, silently, through the drifts and brush and over the rock-strewn trails of the mountain, with the fat red-faced man struggling along behind. This man, J. Battle Hand, in the world of normal men and women, was like Twombley in the snowy woods, and Wade was like Jack somehow.