Butterfly Sunday (12 page)

Meanwhile this contemptible jackass had manipulated Ty—of that she was certain—into a miserable marriage. “My father used to say that a man’s secrets are his
doom,” she began. She had gotten the idea if she confronted him with some truths about the situation, she might win him over.

“Ty and our darling Gloria have been inseparable for years.” He took a little step into it. “They had a silly lover’s spat last year, but they can’t argue with destiny. They need each other. They might as well be Pyramus and Thisbe.” Mr. Crockett thought he came across upper-class when he made obscure references. It just so happened that her mama had reared her on mythology. She knew all about Pyramus and Thisbe.

“Pyramus and Thisbe were eaten by a lion,” she replied.

He reddened at the affront.

Leona knew the score. In the first place, everyone who went to high school with Ty and Gloria knew that they had bickered and argued for months before they broke up. Ty had told Leona that his and Gloria’s parents had exerted a lot of pressure on them to date each other, and talked as if they were engaged. Everyone in school knew Ty’s father was the reason he hadn’t already dumped Gloria. He’d made it clear to all his friends he planned to dump her when he got to college, where he wouldn’t have to listen to his parents’ badgering.

For that, Gloria told the whole world she thought Ty was dopey. She was just dating him because he was the best-looking boy in school and he’d look good next to her in the yearbook. Sometimes, if she’d had a few pops of gin at a party, she’d “borrow” another girl’s boyfriend for a frenzied romp in the backyard. She defended her practice, saying that Ty’s loving amounted to an appetizer and she was starved for a T-bone steak.

“There’s lots more fish in the—” Leona’s shriek cut
him off. He was going to make her tell him she was pregnant. He wanted to feign shock, dismay and sympathy and then tuck a few hundred dollars into her pocket as he shoved her out the door. She could also count on the fact that he was going to dangle the money over her head until she made some concession to his theory that there was some real reason to doubt the actual parentage. That would give him the kernel of a half-truth on which to base the lies he would tell about her. He’d fictionalize it into her full confession that this was all a ploy to extort money. Why, his own son had asked him how best to rebuff her lascivious advances. He said she’d been with so many boys, he was afraid he might catch something.

“Mr. Crockett, let me repeat this for you, sir. I don’t want your money. I’m not here to threaten you either, sir. Everywhere I look in this town there’s a hard memory staring back at me. That would be enough to make me leave town for good. But on top of all that, I have no intentions of giving birth to an illegitimate child here where it would have to grow up the bastard of a father who wouldn’t claim it.”

He had an expression of terrified hope. He couldn’t tell whether she was telling him something too good to be true, or whether this was leading to some impossible condition.

“So you want to know why we encouraged him to marry Gloria and not you?”

She detected a slight tinge of sarcasm in the question. The man not only misread, he underestimated her.

“No, sir. Gloria’s father is worth a fortune. Among other things, he even owns the controlling interest in this bank.”

Ty had explained all that to her. His dad was fighting
for his life at the bank. He had enemies on the board. As chairman, Mr. London carried enough influence to protect Mr. Crockett and support his ambitions for moving up to the position of president.

“I’m glad we understand one another,” Mr. Crockett said in a tone that indicated the conversation was over.

“Mister, we’ve got a situation here and I have something to say to you.”

He went red with fury again. All the same, he pretended he was happy to listen to anything she had to say. She laid it out for him with great care. On the first Saturday night in April, a large group of senior class girls including Leona and Gloria had the traditional ladies’ night party—which meant that they all spent the night at one girl’s house. It was a custom observed by the local senior girls, who kept the boys away in order to indulge in their last of many slumber parties since junior high school. Gloria was suffering heavy cramps, as she had the curse.

She was going to leave with her parents the next day at noon. They were going to spend the two-week spring vacation at their family home in Palm Beach. Gloria worked her way down a bottle of gin and confessed that she had a secret lover waiting for her in Florida. The man was twenty-three years old, married, and worked at a tennis club where her father was a member. She said he had taken her virginity when she was fifteen and they always met on the golf course late at night. She finished off the gin and fell asleep crying because she said she loved him.

Mr. Crockett was turning pale and almost seemed to shrink before her eyes as Leona continued. He saw where she was headed. It was obvious he considered it a dangerous destination.

Now she explained what she had learned from Ty. After spring vacation Ty had run track, as Mr. Crockett knew. The track coach was a Spartan about maintaining his regimen, and that included no dates or spending time with girlfriends during the four-week season. However, Ty did see Gloria every day during school hours. There was one big scene between them during lunch hour, which everyone within half a mile overheard. Gloria was hysterical, shouting at him, hitting him in the chest, calling him names. Her period was over a week late. Ty was, in all innocence, trying to reassure her by reminding her that they hadn’t even held hands in six weeks.

The loud breakup in early June was all for effect, according to Ty. Gloria had come home from Florida carrying her married paramour’s child. She was trying to characterize Ty as a liar who was trying to shirk his responsibilities. Gloria had admitted the truth to half the girls in the senior class. One of them had been with her when she made the call to Florida to tell her grand passion he had to marry her right away. The man denied any acquaintance with her and ignored her hysteria. He stonewalled her threats to call his wife by suggesting in a polite tone that she consult her local clergyman.

Always the loyal son, Ty had dated Gloria in order to please his parents. However, as Mr. Crockett well knew, he wasn’t about to hand his future over to a girl who was cold enough to use him to hide her promiscuity.

“I fear you’ve gotten your facts twisted there, Miss Clay.”

“Sir, Ty loves me. Why have you forced him to abandon his own child in order to marry a woman he hates and play father to another man’s child?”

Mr. Crockett didn’t have an answer. There wasn’t
one that wouldn’t incriminate him. She and Ty knew his parents wouldn’t take their marriage well. They’d accuse Leona of trapping him. They’d try to find a way around it. They’d bribe or threaten or do whatever they thought might work regardless of who it might hurt. Ty and Leona had been braced for all that. Something had happened. Something monstrous enough to persuade Ty to take on a life of unhappiness while abandoning her and a child they both wanted. Someone behind a door or under a woodpile or lurking in a hallway, someone was in more trouble than Leona was at the moment. Over and over she heard her father that day in church, “tormented by secrets …”

“Mr. Crockett, this has to do with your secrets, doesn’t it?” She was bluffing of course, stalling, grabbing at straws. Then to her amazement Mr. Crockett’s sudden pallor told her that he believed she knew all about it.

“I understand you,” he said after a long silence. Then he stood up.

“Excuse me a minute, Miss Clay.”

For the next twenty minutes she heard his officious feet scurrying up and down the marble floor of the corridor, slipping in and out of half a dozen offices where soft, obedient voices replied in the affirmative. High heels scampered, metal file drawers clicked open then whooshed shut and clicked open again. It was like listening to an eerie radio drama without words. Strange how unnecessary words became as indiscriminate voices high and low blended with scrapes and bumps and hard leather on stone, the tempo increasing, the pitch rising as throats tightened in fear.

It had an element of familiar dread, like waiting in church while the deacons removed the starched cloths
from the communion cups and plates, knowing the symbolic cannibalism of drinking blood and devouring flesh was coming. It echoed coercion as each employee initialed his involuntary complicity, dreading the inevitable day when his own ink would document his felonious cowardice for a jury of his peers.

Strange, too, how the thief caught red-handed and accused (“… you have some deep problems …”) denies what is incontrovertible and then, like a windup toy dog lifting its hind leg at the turn of the key, he duplicates his crime in a mad attempt to escape prosecution for his original sin.

Leona had seen nothing to which she could testify in court. Yet her heart knew she had seen Mr. Crockett in action. His light frenzied steps sped up to the door. Now he paused. She could hear his heavy breath. Now with enforced reserve, a slow hand twisted the knob and his shadow fell on her like a pall. He took a business envelope from his inside coat pocket and withdrew a stack of new one-hundred-dollar bills. It was two thousand dollars.

“No!”

He was certain he had her. He smiled with omnipotent disdain as he slipped the money back into the envelope and pressed it hard into her palm. Then he removed a revolver from his desk drawer and cocked the trigger. He pointed it at her.

“If you ever come near me or my son again, I’ll kill you.”

Her mind reeled with the possibilities. If she lunged or laughed or made any sudden move, she knew he would kill her. There were strong odds he was going to kill her regardless of what she did. She couldn’t understand why she wasn’t afraid.

Maybe she was too tired and beaten to care. Maybe her prospects had dimmed to the point that living didn’t look that much better than dying. A person’s life wasn’t the one you read about in the newspaper. Life wasn’t all about the wars and disasters and revolutions that made the headlines. Life was a matter of the secrets that ruled people, themselves and others. Each life was a scraping and trudging caravan over a meaningless desert until you either died of loneliness or went berserk from it and got yourself killed for harming others.

It seemed to her that every few seconds a spinning tunnel swallowed the room. It was her first experience of death as an outside force, an entity that approaches. It had been summoned by the preparation of the bullet and chamber. Her perception of all this was instantaneous. She rose very slowly, keeping her eyes on the shining pewter gun barrel. She understood at once and completely the living power of acquiescence. A voice in her head taught her the plain truth of the matter. The gun was God. God was the gun. She hated communion, but she had always loved God. She dropped her head to show Him respect. Then she stood. When she had removed all trace of defiance from her eyes, she let them show Mr. Crockett that she regarded him as all-powerful. She turned and opened the door and walked into the corridor. She heard him drop the gun into his desk drawer.

The chief of police had been a lifelong friend of her father’s. She told him everything. Then she handed him the two thousand dollars, which Mr. Crockett had stolen.

Later that afternoon the chief brought Mr. and Mrs.
London to see her. Things started very badly. Leona had assumed they would be as despicable as Mr. Crockett. After all, they had accepted his son as restitution for all the money he had stolen from their bank. Or had they? She had expected them to treat her with canny wariness. She was sure they would wear the same haughty air of superiority Mr. Crockett had shown her. Yet they seemed taken aback by her resentful manner. She kept making oblique remarks to get them to address the situation, but neither indicated any awareness of where she was leading them. In fact, after an uncomfortable twenty minutes, Mr. London finally admitted he had no idea why the chief had brought them to see her. The chief asked Leona to start from the beginning and tell the Londons everything she had told him.

It was a shock to realize how little they knew about Gloria. Like a lot of parents, the Londons turned out to be much nicer than their daughter. They were typical of rich people with only children. They were too afraid of losing their daughter’s affection to teach her anything. It became painfully obvious that the Londons had believed their daughter’s lies. They didn’t seem to know that blind faith in a child’s veracity teaches him to lie without guilt. Mrs. London turned gray when Leona told them about Gloria’s married lover in Florida. She kept her calm, though. When Mrs. London grilled Leona in the obvious hope of spotting a crack in her story, it was from concern for Gloria, and much more sad than malevolent.

The Londons left Leona’s house in a state of deep despair. Yet they had both demonstrated the largesse to hug Leona, and offer to help her in any way they could. Of course they could, but she didn’t feel she should say
it. They could unchain Ty from their daughter and send him back to her. Leona sat vigil in the heavy quiet of the house that was still redolent with illness and death, keeping watch, as it were, for some sign of hope that her actions would bring Ty home.

She had taken some encouragement from the Londons. Their character would lead them to insist on the right thing. Did they want their daughter to live all those lies with a husband who not only despised her, but wasn’t even her baby’s father?

The situation with Mr. Crockett was more clouded.

It had begun to appear as if he had been the driving force behind Ty’s marriage to Gloria. If that was true, then Mr. London hadn’t blackmailed him. When the chief came by one afternoon to tell her the Londons were making inquiries on several fronts, she asked his opinion and he said that Mr. London had confided that he and his wife had reservations about Ty. They suspected Mr. Crockett had pushed his boy into dating Gloria. In matters relating to the bank Mr. London had the utmost faith in Mr. Crockett to verify that Mr. London was conducting his own secret audit. He didn’t expect to uncover any impropriety.