“Things will work themselves out, in time.”
“Mom?”
“Um-hum.” I was fiddling with her hair.
“I do love him so!”
Caro had tossed her head like a horse who’s impatient for the race, and I thought, Slow down, my darling, you have your whole life to live. But of course things are so much clearer when you’ve a few years under your belt, and I was so determined that she shouldn’t make the same mistakes I once did. That’s a natural instinct in all mothers, isn’t it?
The Bach toccata and fugue died in mid-melody, and the silence of the present crashed in upon me. “Must we have this squalling late at night as well?” Willie said. He’d turned off the stereo. The artist’s passion was something for which he had no understanding. Consequently, it was a threat to him, and his innate fear took the form of impatience. I recognised that and, for years, had forgiven him.
It seemed we must talk again. “How clearly I can recall the boys Caro brought home, one after the other,” I said. I put my forehead against the thin pane of glass as if trying to melt through. “Abusive alcoholics, slack-jawed drug users with their greasy hair and their groping hands, grimy thrill-seekers with their tattooed scalps and their motorcycles.” I felt so close to the rain, to being washed clean as a newborn kitten. “You know, it got to the point where I was sure she was doing it to torture us.”
“Rubbing my face in the vileness of the world,” Willie said.
“It was just as bad for me.”
“Really?” He lifted an eyebrow. “But, Persis, my dear, you already had intimate knowledge of these vermin.”
I smiled thinly at him. What else was there to do? Serenity was my watchword tonight.
“They made my skin crawl just looking at them,” he went on, just as if he hadn’t hurt me. “That junkie-“
“Yes. You were quite out of control that night.”
“Whatever beating I gave him he deserved,” he said. “Bringing drugs into my house.”
“If the police hadn’t come… You nearly killed him, Willie.”
“And if I had, the world would have been a better place.”
He believes it, I thought as I watched him make himself a drink. He always made himself a drink when he was working himself up to a difficult moment, either at home with me, or at the office with clients.
I continued to speak of Caro. “I doubt you know it, but I kept track of all her men friends. Because in some way each one was a reflection of her-or, at least, of what she was trying to do.”
“And what was that?” Willie’s tone was that of a professor who must put himself through the tedious task of listening to his students’ fatuous theories before getting on with the real meat of the course.
How well I knew that tone of voice! He’d used it time and again since I’d been seventeen, when he’d begun to train me. And how I had needed training! Apart from breaking into the local high school at night to play the piano in the auditorium, I had no happy memories of my early years. Not surprising. Falling in with evil, I had no identity, no self. I had felt lost, a traveller in the midst of Grand Central Terminal with neither direction nor destination. That seemed long enough ago to be another lifetime.
“Caro had got the scissors out and was busy cutting the umbilical between child and parents,” I said.
“You’re wrong,” Willie said angrily, as if all along he knew I would be. “She’s saved that particular horror for tonight.”
I stood without moving until Willie had to acknowledge my presence. It was a trick. “The way to most effectively put the spotlight on yourself,” he had drummed into me, “is through understatement. In this case, stand perfectly still.” The first time I’d attempted it, at a party he’d taken me to, I’d seen how right he was.
When I had his attention, I took his old-fashioned glass away from him. “Oh, don’t be so melodramatic, Willie.” I kissed him several times, lightly as an arpeggio. “Face it. Eddie is different. He’s the first real man her age she’s cared about.”
“Don’t misunderstand me. I have no doubts about the depth of her feelings.”
“Then take it from a woman,” I said. “Eddie loves her.”
“You’ve deduced this from what? Talking to Caroline, I suppose.”
“And simple observation.”
“Oh, yes. To be sure. He drives a Mercedes 500SL and wears made-for-measure clothes. The perfect man for our only child, isn’t that what you think?” Willie had the impression that I coveted success as others prized diamonds or love. He was absolutely certain of this judgment because he had made me this way. It was his own image, but like most powerful men he didn’t recognise it. Why had he done it? An enigma wrapped in a conundrum. Until you understood the man. What seemed on the surface perverse, was simply the basic instinct for self-preservation. He knew if he allowed me to fully surrender to my music he would come in a poor second. Willie had never come in second in his life, and he wasn’t about to start with me.
“But you and Caroline are seeing what Eddie wants you to see.” He slapped the papers of Yates’s report so hard against his thigh that I jumped. “He’s a monster. A fucking evil wind.”
What did he want me to say? I knew, so I said just the opposite. “Willie, let her go. I promise she will not love you the less for loving Eddie. You’re her daddy. My God, you make damn sure she still calls you that. You’ll always be her daddy.”
“You stupid cow, you still don’t get it!” he shouted. Seeing the reaction in my white face, he forced his voice down. “This isn’t about me. And, except in a minor way, it isn’t even about her.” He shook his fist. “If she stays married to him it’ll end in tragedy, and Caroline will be irrevocably damaged. Maybe worse. She could wind up dead.” Into the shocking silence, he said, “I should’ve seen it, but I didn’t.”
I looked down at the sheets of folded paper he still held out, and my eyes fluttered closed. “All right, go ahead,” I whispered. “Tell me.”
“This is the report of Yates’s second investigation,” Willie said.
Yates came only to the house, never to Willie’s office. He arrived mostly late at night, at a ghostly hour, and always when Caroline had been out. But every once in a while he’d show up early in the morning, when the sky was still a pearlescent gray, yearning for the sun. At those times, I could hear his deep, raspy baritone as he reported to Willie in the study. Afterward, I would serve him coffee while Willie was upstairs getting ready to helicopter into Manhattan.
“First of all,” Willie went on now, “Eddie’s a goddamned fake. His last name’s not Bennett. It’s Bendarenski.”
“So what? Many people shorten their names. I suppose he isn’t an art dealer either.”
“Oh, he imports artwork from all over and sells it here, just the way it seems,” Willie said, as if he couldn’t care less. “Only, some of the crates he gets contain more than paintings and sculpture.”
I stared at him. “Like what?”
“Like drugs.”
“Drugs?”
“Kilos of it,” he said. “Cocaine, heroin, you name it, he sells-“
“Stop it!”
Willie seemed momentarily astonished by the force of my voice.
“This just isn’t true. A mistake has been made. I know it!”
“Believe me, Ross Yates doesn’t make mistakes.”
I shook my head violently. “But we’ve met some of his clients. You know who they are-fabulously rich, famous-everyone knows them.”
“Apparently, they don’t know enough about them.”
“Dear God!”
With a sob, I collapsed to my knees. My tears fell onto the strewn papers.