A Crime in the Neighborhood (27 page)

“She pushed me,” he said almost plaintively, fingering his boutonniere. “She knew I was attracted to Ada. For years she said, ‘Admit it, isn't Ada the sexiest of all of us? Isn't Ada the one men want?' But you know, Marsha, I never would have done anything about it. I don't think I would have. Your mother, though.” He shook his head, then tried to smile because Aunt Fran was taking our picture with her Kodak. When she was done and had turned away, he said in a soft fast voice, “Your mother almost made me feel that something was wrong with me if I
didn't
have an affair.”

Perhaps this is true. My father was essentially a quiet person, except at the piano. I remember how he rocked from side to side, sometimes crooning to himself. Sometimes he let his fingers drift over the keys, making up riffs and sad, discordant refrains. If you called him in to dinner while he was playing the piano, even tapped him on the shoulder, it would take him a moment or two to look up. And then when he did, you were never sure if it was really you he was seeing. He was the type who requires a push. And that afternoon at the pizza parlor, I decided to give him one.

Steven reached for the saltshaker and began to spin it on the table. Our waitress passed by carrying a tray of ketchup bottles. Behind us, the old lady in the yellow pantsuit had started to cough again.

“A boy got killed in our neighborhood,” I said.

Everyone turned to look at me.

“He got killed behind the mall. People thought Mr. Green did it. Mr. Green was our neighbor,” I told my father.

Once I'd opened my mouth, I couldn't close it again. I spoke faster and faster, trying to remember everything that had happened since my father had been gone. It seemed that if I could tell him everything, without leaving anything out, then he would understand what had happened. And if he understood what had happened, it was possible that he might have an excuse for it, or a reason, and perhaps it would all suddenly seem all right.

I told him about Boyd Ellison lying on the hillside behind
the mall, and the crowds of people who went to stand there; and how Mr. Green had invited the whole neighborhood to a cookout but nobody went except my mother, who brought him a pineapple and forgot to wear her shoes; and that Mr. Green had moved away because of what I said about him; and that a tall detective came to our house and asked me questions; and that my mother had hit me and that she had made Aunt Fran and Aunt Claire stop calling her; and that Roy and Tiffany were dolls who never wore clothes and Roy had pins in his eyes. I said that Mr. Green had tried to talk to me in the backyard one day when I was alone. I said the Watergate burglars were morons.

I could hear myself speaking and I knew what I was saying, but by the end I think I realized that I wasn't saying anything anyone else really wanted to understand. In fact by the end I'm not sure I was actually saying words at all.

“Hush,” said my father, looking around the restaurant. “Marsha, honey, please. Stop it.”

The twins stared at me. Finally Steven said, “Nuts,” and drew a spiral around his ear with his finger.

“No,” said my father, reaching over to pull his hand down.

We all sat for a while longer at the table, looking out the window at the cars coming and going. Julie got up to go to the bathroom. Our waitress, who had a perfect blond ponytail and spotty skin, came to take the bill and the money my father had laid out. She said, “Can I get you anything else?” in a tone
that meant she hoped we would say no. A few more people came into the pizza parlor, a man in a Redskins T-shirt, a woman with a baby, two teenage girls carrying shopping bags. They passed our table and glanced at us, then looked away.

The Night Watch kept up their patrols for another month or so, then gradually people became less afraid—or more used to being afraid—and the pairs of fathers stopped circling the block and went back to watching
Monday Night Football
. Perhaps it was the excitement around Mr. Green's arrest; it satisfied everyone to have someone arrested, even if he turned out to be the wrong person.

Now when neighbors got together to drink coffee or sip iced tea they were more likely to talk about George McGovern or the Watergate break-in or foreign affairs. Although it seems to me that our neighbors never again visited one another as frequently as they had before the murder. After those first few weeks of frantic interest, people stopped asking each other if they had heard anything new. All of Mrs. Lauder's bake-sale signs eventually disappeared, to be replaced here and there by campaign placards. Boyd Ellison himself was growing more and more indistinct, until after a
while he simply faded into his name. Even I got tired of counting over the meager facts I knew. He was a short blond boy with a square head. He once asked to wear my glasses. He sat in our basement tying knots. He tortured an insect with a pocketknife.

I was there, I whispered to myself.
I knew him
.

His parents moved to Virginia, and gradually I stopped circling past their house, with its red Japanese maple in the front yard and pulled window blinds.

Mrs. Sperling made Mr. Sperling put locks on the downstairs windows and took to answering the door by first looking through the newly installed peephole. The Lauders put up a stockade fence around their backyard. The Reades bought a German shepherd. And the Morrises died, one after the other.

By then we had moved away.

Not long ago I asked a lawyer at the Justice Department, a friend of a friend, if he could find out if the police ever caught the man who murdered Boyd Ellison. He said he would call someone he knew at the F.B.I. A few days later he phoned me to say the case was still open. Apparently every time a child is murdered in a wooded area, the Montgomery County police see if they can link it to Boyd Ellison's murder. They're still looking for a pattern, he told me. Even after twenty-five years.

“Couldn't it have been an isolated incident?” I said.

My friend's friend thought not. “No one has the impulse to
do something like that just once,” he said. “It's like a guy who cheats on his wife. Once he's done it and gotten away with it, he's going to do it again.”

I said it didn't seem like the same thing to me at all, but I thanked him and hung up.

These days whenever I drive through my old neighborhood, which isn't often, I always note that it hasn't changed much. Spring Hill is almost exactly as I remember it, a quiet green place in the summertime, full of neat lawns and hedges and shaggy maples that shade the sidewalks. The houses look a little older and smaller, and more established; trees I remember as saplings are now two stories tall, and in some cases ivy has completely covered a wall or a fence. But children still ride their bicycles back and forth or teeter by on Rollerblades. Men and women who look like the children's parents weed their flower beds or wash their cars. It looks like a safe enough place, even a hopeful place. A few weeks ago when I drove by on my way to visit a client I saw election bumper stickers and a couple of lawn signs. It's that time again.

Our old house no longer belongs to the people we sold it to, or even to the people who bought it from them. When I last passed it, a couple about my age was standing on the lawn with two little boys; the woman had red hair and a disagreeable mouth, but her chubby blond husband had a nice face and he was smiling as one of the little boys tugged at the grass with
a toy rake. For some reason, they had decided to paint the house chocolate brown—perhaps a heat-saving measure?—which has given it a squat brooding look. Next door, the Lauders' house still looks the same, although someone has torn out most of the front yard and put down asphalt. Four cars were parked there when I last went by. The Morrises', the Sperlings', and the Reades' houses have all undergone a renovation or two—a set of sliding glass doors, a breezeway, a new garage—without altering their original appearance much. Even the Ellisons' house isn't really different from what I remember; it could be just another three-bedroom split-level on a quarter acre.

Oddly enough, of all the houses in the neighborhood only Mr. Green's house, what was so briefly his house, has really changed. A second floor has been added, and a mansard roof. The marigolds are gone, replaced by an ambitious attempt at a Japanese garden, complete with mossy rocks, a tiny cement goldfish pond, and a little black iron pagoda near where he used to set his sprinkler. And that enormous old copper beech in his backyard is no longer there, dead from some blight or fungus or chopped down by the new owners, who seem intent on small-scale landscaping.

I was surprised at how much I missed that copper beech. You never quite expect a tree to disappear, especially such a big one. It was probably over a hundred and fifty years old, maybe the last tree left from when Spring Hill was simply a hill, and malls and subdivisions hadn't been dreamed up yet. I
remember how wide its canopy used to seem, and the bright color the leaves turned in the fall. The whole street seemed slightly unbalanced by its absence, like a row of books when one in the middle has been pulled out. Every time I drive by, I expect to see it. And every time I have to realize again that it's gone.

Once I actually stopped and parked for a few minutes across the street from Mr. Green's house. For years, I could keep myself awake at night simply by picturing the way he had looked that summer morning when he came back from the police station, gripping his briefcase, the outline of his undershirt showing through his wrinkled white shirt. Every time I thought of him I would feel a kind of hot suffocating panic that made me sit up and throw off my blankets, and only after turning on the lights and reading magazines for a while could I push him back south to wherever it was he went.

My life seemed bound to his in a way I couldn't explain and didn't want to. The closest I could come was the feeling that somehow what I'd done to him had made me
his
child, and that one of these days he would figure it out and come back for me.

Yet eventually all that guilty fear was replaced by something quieter, until as I sat in the car by myself that afternoon, staring at a house that could never have been his, I could honestly say I wished him well. I hope he found a nice place to live somewhere in the country. I can almost see him tending a vegetable patch in back of a little wooden house, weeding around
his melons and tomatoes, wearing a straw hat, although he must be an old man by now. Sometimes I imagine myself driving down south, to Tennessee or Georgia, and just by accident finding his house. He would be in the yard leaning on his hoe, wiping his pink face with a faded blue bandanna. For a minute or so we would stare at each other, as you do with people you recognize but can't name, then he would give me a short nod.

But whenever I carry this fantasy much further it begins to get tangled up with explanations from my therapist and my own excuses, and Mr. Green and his hoe disappear along with everything I meant to tell him.

Two days after he met us at the pizza parlor, my father drove to Cleveland, his hometown, where the brother of a cousin's husband gave him work in an insurance company. In a funny way, I never expected him to stay in town. Which didn't mean I was glad to see him leave again, only that I wasn't surprised by it. He called us once a week that first fall, usually on Sundays; he was lonely, I think. Then slowly he called less frequently, until we heard from him only around our birthdays and on Christmas and Thanksgiving, or when something in particular made him think of us. Usually we went to visit him for a week or two in the summer. It wasn't the best way to conduct a relationship, but it wasn't as bad as some I've heard about. He put all three of us through college.

Ada came back that September as well, but like my father she didn't stay long. All we heard from her was a single note to my mother, scratched in pencil on the back of an old receipt, slipped through the letter slot one afternoon when no one was home. It said: “I'll call you.”

But instead she went to Milwaukee to stay in Aunt Fran's big brick Tudor near the lake. According to Aunt Fran and Aunt Claire, Ada spent most of her time sleeping on the living-room sofa. As I passed through our kitchen one afternoon that fall, just before we moved to the house we would be renting in College Park, I heard the familiar sound of my mother defending Ada on the phone.

“You know Ada, she's always had a different metabolism than the rest of us,” she was saying, slapping the phone cord rhythmically against the floor. “Well, maybe she's sleeping so much because she has the flu.”

But that very afternoon, Ada woke up from a long nap, threw some clothes into a paper grocery sack, and walked out Aunt Fran's front door. She walked straight to the bus station, bought a ticket to San Francisco, and for the next two years or so, vanished.

No one heard a word from her. Aunt Fran and Aunt Claire hired a private detective. They took out small advertisements in five California newspapers:
ADA. WHERE ARE YOU? MUCH LOVE
. Although they were furious that Ada had left so theatrically, without even a note—like a child, they said, or a crazy
woman. “You know Ada,” they repeated to each other, but now in a questioning tone, because clearly neither of them did.

When they heard from Ada again, it was by Christmas card in 1974, a woodcut of a nude Madonna with lopsided breasts sitting on a tree stump; she sent one to each sister. By then she was living in Mendocino, up on the northern California coast. She had married a carpenter, who built a little frame house for them not far from the ocean, and she had her own tailgate business making macramé handbags and plant holders, which she said wasn't “Art,” but she could sell them to tourists.

“I often think of you,” Ada wrote in lavender ink to my mother.

And perhaps she still does, although that was years ago and I don't believe my mother ever wrote back to her. Or maybe she did write back and decided to keep whatever answers she got to herself. That would be like my mother. But as far as I'm concerned, Ada has disappeared. People can do that. I think that's the worst thing I have had to face as I head into middle age, the years when disappearance begins to be commonplace, when it's no longer such a dramatic thing to lose someone. “I haven't heard from him in years,” we say. “She died a while ago. We had fallen out of touch.”