Day of Wrath (11 page)

And as the afternoon wore on toward sunset and all those
young, shaken faces began to merge into a single, uncomprehending mask
of grief, I realized that none of them could adequately explain what had
happened to their friend. None of them had ever before experienced the
violent death of one of their own. And if they'd already begun to turn
him into a myth, into something as sweetly silly as his own songs—Bobby
Caldwell, the boy who had lived for love—it was only because they didn't
know any other way to talk about what had happened. They hadn't yet learned
how to think about a death. But death is a quick study. And like sex, it
carries its own vocabulary with it. In a matter of weeks, the words would
come automatically and the event would shrink before them, until one day
it wouldn't mean very
much at all.

Of course, I'd sounded them out. On everything from the
photographs to Bobby's musician friends. And heard nothing new. Not even
about Robbie Segal, although by the time I'd started back to Clifton that
fact had begun to intrigue me.

They didn't really seem to know very much about her, these
gangly, red-faced, unreflective boys. She was a mystery to them—an aloof,
lonely young girl whom Bobby, for some reason, had taken under his wing.
Of course, most girls were a mystery to them at age sixteen. And they had
been Bobby's friends rather than the girl's. But in spite of that, I ended
up thinking there was something more to their confused looks and embarrassed
silences than a normal teenager's uncertainty about the opposite sex. Something
was wrong with Robbie Segal, that was the sense I got of it. They not only
didn't understand her, they didn't like her, either. She was too strange.
Too peculiar. A girl with a secret all her own. No one said it outright.
Perhaps out of loyalty to their dead friend. The closest they got to it
were the code words they used to describe her—words like "cold," "spacey,"
and "far out." And all of them blamed Mildred for her peculiarities, as
if it were self-evident that a teenager's problems were brought on by bad
parenting. They were speaking for themselves, of course.

But, in this case, I detected something hollow in the
explanation, as if, in spite of their disenchantment with the world of
fathers and mothers, even they couldn't quite make Robbie Segal fit the
pattern. It "must have been" her parents was what they were really saying.
Wasn't it always?

I didn't know. But I had my doubts. And not just about
Mildred, who seemed to be as much her daughter's victim as her persecutor,
although I knew perfectly well how hard it must have been for Robbie to
live in that house. But then that house was no different than a hundred
other houses on Canova and Elbrook and Section E Road. Houses in which
the boys I'd talked to lived. Crudgingly. Sometimes despairingly. But lived
nonetheless. Robbie apparently didn't fit into their world any better than
she'd fit into Mildred's. By the end of the day, as I drove back to the
Delores through the blue velvet twilight, I'd begun to wonder where indeed
she did fit—what that beautiful girl-child had run away to.

The boys I'd talked to would have answered, "To Bobby
Caldwell." He'd been her protector and, almost certainly, her lover. She'd
run away to be with him.It was the simplest and, therefore, the most likely
answer. She'd gone to a place where she could be with her lover. Perhaps
to the house in the photograph—the house where Bobby and his musician
friends gathered on the porch to jam and to smoke dope with the man in
the beret. After talking to Hank Lemon, I'd begun to think that that man
might be a musician, too. It helped to explain the look on his face—that
severe, heavy-lidded, devilish stare, which was like a whispered threat
or a kind of swagger. It was the look, I thought, of an over-aged prodigy.
The look of a man whose talents had dissolved into mere powers. It didn't
take much imagination to spin out a scenario involving that man and Bobby
and Robbie Segal. Together in that house with plenty of smoke and pills
and time to kill. And sex in the air like a kind of spell. It didn't take
much imagination to see what could have happened—how violence could have
erupted. But then violent crimes seldom take much imagination to execute.
just a momentary weakening of conscience. A capitulation to impulse. Made
all that much simpler in an environment where impulse was probably celebrated
and encouraged. I could see it, all right. Right through to its bloody
end.

And yet . . . and yet. Bobby Caldwell didn't seem like
a completely satisfactory reason to me. Not for this one. Not for this
beautiful girl with a secret. If I'd read Bobby's pals correctly, this
one had wanted something more than a teenage boyfriend who wrote her pretty
songs. This one had wanted something that even Her friends couldn't figure
out. Or so I thought. Maybe it was just wishful thinking. Maybe I wanted
to make her into someone stronger and more buoyant than she really was—someone
who could fly above and away from the world of Eastlawn Drive. Because
secretly I liked the idea that the other kids didn't understand or approve
of her. Secretly I felt a kinship to the girl I'd conjured up out of scrap
and rumor and my own past. Secretly, I ' think, I wanted her to make her
escape good—to disappear into an anonymous freedom, unhampered by Mildred
or Bobby Caldwell or the man in the beret. Or by me.

Only I also knew that, in this
world, the compass of experience always points away from the heart. That
true north was always tougher, less satisfying, and more ordinary than
any wish or hope. In this world, banality was the rule, as drained and
circumspect as a traffic fine. In this world, she was most likely sitting
on that porch right now. Or buried under it.

It was almost dark by the time I got back to the Delores—the
four-story U-shaped apartment building I'd lived in for at least an eon.
I parked the Pinto in the tar lot and sat there for a moment, watching
the last of the sunset bleed away into the firred hilltops. Outside the
night air smelled strangely of lilac and automobile exhaust—the gas station-in-the-countryside
smell of spring in Cincinnati. I walked through the bouquet, past the budding
dogwoods in the front yard and the leafy rosebushes, upstairs to my two-and-a-half
room apartment.

I checked the answerphone as soon as I got inside. But
there weren't any messages for me—not even from Mildred Segal. For a
second, I toyed with the idea of calling her myself, to make sure she was
holding up. I toyed with the idea, then let it go. At that moment, there
wasn't anything I could do to make Mildred feel all right—except to tell
her another lie.—And I was too old for those kind of lies. Too old to
promise anyone that I could make it better again. Not that she would have
believed me, any more than she had believed me earlier that afternoon.
She'd trusted the impulse behind what I'd said—the desire to help—but
she hadn't believed the words.

She'd had no reason to believe them. Besides, they conflicted
with her own fantasies of guilt and retribution—with her feeling that
the whole affair was a punishment visited upon her for her failures as
a mother.

Mildred Segal was a shrewd, resourceful, surprisingly
resilient woman who had run her life as she'd run her home—with stern,
compulsive economy. For years, she'd taken comfort in the very nature of
that economy—in the regular balancing of small risks and small gains.
She'd lived the life of Eastlawn Drive more exactly than the best burgher
could have done, putting her trust in the neat, clean display of her house
and the careful ordering of her affections. It was a ledgerbook existence;
kept in the neatest of hands; and it would probably have seen her through
old age, if Bobbie hadn't run away.

That had thrown all her accounting off. That had made
her economy seem like a kind of hubris—which, in fact, it was. And now
she sat like a Greek in a tragedy, waiting for the gods to punish her for
her way of life. And there was nothing I could say or do to alter that
judgment. To be honest, I had thought she deserved it.

But part of me was beginning to feel a kinship to Mildred,
too. Because part of me had been brought up to lead the same minimal kind
of life—a life in which virtues and price tags were all jumbled together
in the same box. I'd been fighting against that part since I'd come home
from the war. Mostly successfully. Though, every now and then, I slipped.
Who didn't slip? It was so much easier to live a life in which you're told
the cost of every thought or act in advance, in which every idea is a received
idea and every impulse is carefully weighed on the scale of public opinion
before being acted on.

With me, the tenets of Eastlawn Drive had been transmuted
into a cranky pessimism; with Mildred, they'd become a conscious, unexceptioned
creed. But we shared those tenets, nonetheless—I reacting against them,
she believing in them. We were kin just as her daughter and I were akin
in a different way.

It was odd, I thought, how easily I acquired families
how quickly I discovered relations in the most unlikely people. Or perhaps
that was just another side effect of my bachelorhood or of my job. Perhaps
those "extended" families of mine were the only ones I'd ever have. At
least, that was the way it was beginning to look as I got closer and closer
to forty.

I sat on the Danish sofa in my living room, sipping a
cold beer and pondering that depressing thought. I hadn't eaten since breakfast,
and being hungry wasn't improving my mood. Eat and forget, I told myself.
I flipped on the Globemaster, walked into my cubbyhole of a kitchen, and
scrambled some eggs in a cast-iron skillet. I ate them right out of the
pan, with a couple more beers for chasers. But I didn't really feel any
better until Frances Shelley called at eight.

"I've run the check, Harry," she said.

"And?"

"Maybe we better talk about it in person. There's something
else I want to tell you. Actually there's someone I want you to meet."
But from the way she said it, she didn't sound as if she were looking forward
to the rendezvous.

"If it has anything to do with your personal life, Fran
. . ."

"It's all right," she said quickly. "I can handle this
if you can. I'm going to introduce you to a friend of mine a very good
friend. She may be able to help you."

"All right," I said. "Where do we meet?"

"Do you know the City View Tavern in Mt. Adams?"

I said that I did.

"Then let's meet there. My friend lives right up the street."

"I'll meet you there in a half hour."

"
And Harry?" she said in an unhappy voice. "My friend.
. . she may want some money." She almost choked on the word. "Oh, Christ,
I hope I'm doing the right thing."

"I'l1 bring some cash," I said. "And I'll be on my best
behavior?

All right," she said. "I'll see you in a half hour."
 

IT WAS A SHORT TRIP TO MT. ADAMS FROM THE DELORES—no
more than fifteen minutes—and once I got above the expressway and into
the park on the northeast side of the hill, I could smell the springtime
in the air. The late April smells of wet earth and green, budding trees.
The park was full of blue hyacinth and the grape-like clusters of flowering
locust. I coasted past the reflecting pool beneath the Playhouse and up
onto Ida, where the night sky was powdered with faint yellow light. Every
evening, a blonde haze hung above the hill—the distillation of all the
bar lights and restaurant lights and house lights on the hill's ritzy peak.
Half-way down the slope,  the money stopped and the lights began to
go out.

I crossed the Ida Street viaduct, skirting the bright
St. Gregory and Celestial tenderloins, and coasted down Monastery into
the dark hinterlands. Oregon ran east off Monastery—a narrow, cobbled,
gaslit street, heavily forested on the hillside and lined, on the city
side, with boxy, two-story, frame-and-tar board apartment houses.

A few of the buildings had widow's walks on their flat
tin roofs and black decorative shutters on their facades; but for the most;
part, they were thoroughly run-down homes—poor cousins to the A-franies
and high-rises on the crest of Mt. Adams.

I found a parking spot on the hill side of the street,
beneath a budding mulberry tree, locked the Pinto, and walked down the
block to the City View Tavern. I hadn't been near the City View since I
was a college kid, when the combination of cheap beer, local color, and
quaint surroundings had seemed irresistible. Twenty years later, the place
looked exactly like what it was—a store-front bar on a run-down street.
The inside hadn't changed much since my college days: small paneled tap
room, decorated with Kiwanis posters and framed photographs of the inclined
railroad that used to run past the bar on its way up to Celestial Street;
round metal tables with cork tops that smelled vaguely of beer and of disinfectant;
small, polished wooden bar, behind which rows of whiskey bottles glowed
in the overhead light; and, through the rear door, an open-air deck overlooking
the city, with its own complement of tables and festoons of Christmas tree
lights winking steadily through the night.

It wasn't a busy evening at the City View. A couple of
old men in light jackets and rayon pants were sitting on the bar stools,
staring into their shot glasses. And a plump teenage girl with a pugnacious
face was coaxing music out of a pinball machine on the side wall. I ordered
a beer from the bartender and carried it through the rear door, out onto
the terrace.