Gossip (40 page)

After Mrs. O’Connor served me coffee and coconut cake, after we ran through the formalities of offering each other sympathy, she brought out the photo album. Like any family album, it was mostly smiles, a routine happiness where the faces expressed less than the clothes or furniture.

A five-year-old boy wore long beads, a clown-smear of lipstick and a gingham dress.

“Halloween,” she explained. “He chose it himself. He wanted to be a hippie girl. Should that have clued us in?”

I was startled she could mention
it.
“Not really. All kids like to dress up.” Would Lady Remington have spoken more kindly of Bill if she’d seen him like this?

Only after that photo did I see Bill in his mother. She had her son’s chestnut eyes. It was disturbing to look up and find his eyes timidly watching me from a small face with lipstick and pale brown bangs. Her hands were tightly clutched in her lap.

Yes, this was what I needed to come down from the thin air of public insanity, I told myself, this was why I’d come today: for the stony privacy of a mother’s grief. I wanted to finish with anger and say good-bye to Bill in sorrow. Here is the home chord, I thought. Here is where I will end the story, if there came a time when I could tell it. Two shy strangers sat in a living room used only for visiting clergy and salesmen and thought their private thoughts over photos of the dead.

An eight-year-old in an Easter suit and clip-on tie. A group photo of a Little League team, Bill looking glum among the happy faces. His father stood at the back, a cocky, beaming coach.

“Oh, he hated baseball. Just hated it,” said Mrs. O’Connor. “He and his father could not see eye to eye on that.”

Bill was an only child. Unlike my family, there were no siblings to relieve the claustrophobia of the album. The photos became fewer. There were many of a dog, a smugly grinning collie.

“Rusty. It broke Bill’s heart when he had to put her to sleep. Billy too.”

She and Mr. O’Connor disappeared from the album. Bill continued to be represented by school pictures, his gawky, skinny face growing into his teeth and glasses. The cute trumpet player in a scarlet band uniform had a full, kissable mouth. He was never fat. I’d assumed he’d been a large, overweight kid, but he didn’t put on height or weight until later. After the pompous photos of high school and college graduation was a print of the picture that I’d seen in the
American Truths,
Bill shaking hands with Ronald Reagan—I recognized Jeb Weiss in the shadows, puffed up like a proud parent.

“He met the president. We were so proud of him. He wasn’t president then. But still.”

The rest of the page was empty, the facing plastic-sheathed page blank, an abrupt white absence. I closed the album and set it on the table. “Thank you,” I said.

“He was a good kid. A real good kid.” She kept her hands knotted in her lap, her elbows pressed to her sides. She blinked at a brightness in her eyes. “I know he liked you very much.”

I shifted uncomfortably. “He told you about me?”

“He said he’d met someone he really liked. When he brought you by the house that night, I knew it had to be you.”

I needed to shift the subject elsewhere. “He talked to you about that part of his life?”

“Quietly. When his father wasn’t around. I knew, and Billy knew that I knew. So all I had to say was, ‘Be careful,’ and he understood what I meant. And all he had to say was, ‘I met someone.’ We’re not one of those families who have to name everything under the sun.”

It was all too familiar. My family was much the same.

“What did you like most about Bill?” she asked. As if there were a hundred things I liked.

I couldn’t give my usual glib answer about sex or kissing. “He was happy,” I said. “Yes. He was cheerful. It was nice to be around someone who was so happy and confident about his future.” It didn’t seem like much/but it was true.

“Yes, he could be happy, couldn’t he? There was a time in school when he wasn’t. But later, when his work took off, he was very happy.” She lifted her chin as she considered that. All emotion seemed frozen inside her, a slight melt leaking now and then into her eyes or voice. If she’d hoped meeting me would enable her to express her grief, my visit must be disappointing.

“I should maybe be heading back,” I said. It was after four. I still had to call Nancy.

“What? Oh yes. Right.” She smoothed her skirt over her knees. “I should take you to the train before my husband gets home. He wouldn’t understand you being here.”

“Probably not,” I said. I didn’t understand either.

She did not get up but sat there frowning, as if trying to remember something else she wanted to say. She gave her head a shake. “Would you like to see Billy’s room before we go?”

I didn’t, but it clearly meant something to her. “Yes. That would be nice.”

I followed her up a short flight of carpeted stairs. We entered a boy’s bedroom, but cleaner and neater than any boy would keep it. The room jumbled together different ages of Bill, a sort of Bill museum. Cowboys chased cattle through the folds of a curtain. His Towson State diploma hung over a spotless desk; he had lived at home while he went to college. A striped bedspread covered the narrow, solitary bed.

Mrs. O’Connor stood in the door, shyly watching me, as if waiting for me to understand what this room meant. Motherly grief? Eternal love? It suggested that she expected Bill to come home any day.

I went to the bed. There were actual sheets and blankets underneath. A crazy idea came to me, a ludicrous impossibility, but I lowered my face to the pillow. I sniffed the bedspread, then drew back the spread and smelled the pillow-case. It was clean, with no scent of a sleeping head.

“I still launder them every week. When I do our own bed.” She spoke apologetically, as if finding it natural that I’d want to smell the ghost of her son.

Of course he was dead. I’d seen the police photos. But Bill had such a persistent life after death—on tape, in print, in Internet—that for a split second I’d wondered if his people had faked his death, conveniently disappearing him after his confession, making an artificial martyr of Bill just as my people had done to me.

I sat on his bed, shaken and embarrassed, glancing at the books on the shelf fixed into the wall over his desk: college texts, Ayn Rand paperbacks with concave spines, some Mencken, a laptop, a one-volume Shakespeare.

“The terrible things they said about him,” said Mrs. O’Connor. She stood by the door, caressing a trace of dust off the top of the dresser. “That he hated women. He didn’t. He loved me, I think.”

“He did,” I said. “He told me himself how much he loved and admired you.”

“Really? He said that?” She sounded close to tears; she closed her eyes. When she opened them again, she could not look at me but gazed forlornly at the bookshelf.

I couldn’t tell her that Bill’s problem may have been that she was the only woman he knew and loved. I shyly followed her gaze and found myself looking at the laptop. A battleship gray laptop with an air force emblem in the corner.

I stood up and went to it. I eased it off the shelf. It was a Powerbook, with the same decal that I’d seen at the Plaza Hotel. I carefully set the machine on the desk. “This was Bill’s?”

She stood very still, watching me without alarm or surprise. “Oh yes. He must have left it here his last visit.”

“The police said it was stolen.”

“Did they? You sure? Maybe it was his other computer.”

I lifted the lid. I turned it on and an electric piano chord chimed. The earlier thought lingered—he is still alive—while my new knowledge slipped into place.

I rolled the mouse and found the file. The direction on how to use a chatline came up. “Thersites,” I said.

“I beg your pardon?”

I looked at her. “Thersites,” I repeated. I spelled the word for her. “
You
,” I said.

“Whatever do you mean?”

My heart raced but I remained cool and careful. I would not scare her off this time. “You and I spoke. On a chatline. Last month. I thought I was talking to a ghost. But it was you.”

She swallowed. She looked down. “I was curious. And I missed him. I wanted to know what his life was like. For a week or two, I used to plug it in and visit around and talk to people. After his father went to bed. When I couldn’t sleep. Excuse me. My throat’s quite dry. Would you care for something to drink?”

She turned and hurried down the stairs.

I remained at the desk, rolling the mouse and letting myself think the rest of it: Mrs. O’Connor knew I didn’t kill her son because she’d known all along who had.

I heard her voice down below, whispering on the phone. I went out to the hall, then stepped slowly down the stairs, hoping to make out what she was saying. Before I could, she’d hung up.

I found her in the kitchen, standing at the wall phone by the breakfast nook, her eyes blank, her face very pale.

I don’t want to know, I thought, I don’t want to know.

“So you and I spoke by computer,” she said. “Small world. Small, small world,” she chanted brightly. “And now we meet eff to eff. Face-to-face? Right?”

“Who killed him, Mrs. O’Connor?”

She lowered herself into a chair. “Nobody killed him.” She tilted her head against the yellow flowers on the wallpaper. “It wasn’t like that. It was an accident.”

She was so distraught that I wanted to take her hand, but couldn’t. I slipped into a chair facing her and said, “Accident?”

“My husband and I—” She took a deep breath. “My husband, Bill. He was furious when Billy told the world what he was. You have to understand. He’s a different generation. He’d been singing Billy’s praises to his pals when the book came out. He was so proud that Billy was going to be on Ted Koppel. But when Billy did what he did—Lord. It was all I could do to stop him from jumping in the car that night and driving straight to Billy’s with blood in his eyes. He was humiliated, furious over what people would think of
him.
He already knew. We never talked about it but he knew. Ever since we came home one weekend and found Billy with some white trash he’d picked up on his paper route. Which had been awful. Just awful.”

Her eyes focused on air, as if she saw a movie there. Bill had never hinted that his hustler idyll ended badly. Her voice continued in an affectless, hypnotic whisper.

“‘Right is right and wrong is wrong, and you don’t shout your wrongs from the rooftops.’ That’s my husband’s philosophy. We went over the next night. When he’d cooled down. Just to talk. Just to let Billy know we were displeased. And it would’ve gone fine if Billy had showed some remorse. But he was
proud
of what he’d done. Proud?” She couldn’t understand it. “You should know. My husband is a loving man. But he has his pride. He has his temper. They were at it like cats and dogs. Bill shouting. Billy sneering, throwing more fuel on the fire. But I was able to calm them. Just barely. I told Bill it wasn’t the end of the world, and Billy he should see his father’s point of view. It looked like it was over. I thought it was over when Bill asked what the TV people were like. I went to the kitchen and washed Billy’s dirty dishes, to calm my nerves, I was so upset.

“Then I heard them at it again. In the bedroom this time. I froze. I couldn’t move a muscle. Even when I heard the pounding, an awful, awful pounding, I just stood there, heartsick. Then I heard Bill shout, ‘Get up. Stop playing possum. Get up. Get up.’”

She whispered the words that must have been shouted.

“I ran in. Bill stood in the room pointing his finger and shouting, ‘He called me a loser. The little … B called me a loser.’ That’s all he could say for himself, standing over Billy on the floor. ‘Tell him to get up. Tell him he can’t scare me.’ He said it over and over while I got down and shook Billy and felt for a pulse or breath or something. I still had on the rubber gloves from the kitchen. I didn’t think to take them off, like I was afraid to touch him. Bill couldn’t understand what he’d done, beating his son’s head against the wall. If only it hadn’t been such an old apartment! The walls so thick and solid.” She drew a sharp, pained breath. “He’d grabbed him by the scruff of his shirt and slammed him against the wall. Over and over. Until something—broke. His face was all—” Her trembling hand touched her own face. “Billy had hit his face against the wall before the side of his head started banging it. His face was all blue and dead-looking.”

I sat bolt upright in the chair. My hands were ice cold, my skin drawn tight, my hairs stood out like nerves. I whispered, “And then you and your husband made it look like a robbery.”

“We had to. It made sense at the time. It did!” she insisted. “What else could I do? I couldn’t let Bill go to prison. I’d lost my son. Did I have to lose my husband too?”

“So you took the TV and suitcase and jewelry and—” It was so cold-blooded, so ruthless. “And you undressed him? You took off his clothes to make it look like sex?” Nausea filled my throat as I pictured it: the man and wife stripping their son’s corpse.

She screwed her eyes shut. “It made sense! It’s what he told us to do. It makes me sick to remember it. It made me sick then. My own son, who I undressed a thousand times when he was a baby? To undress him for that?”

Her pain was so deep that it put her outside judgment. Split between horror and pity, I suddenly caught what she’d said.

“He? What he, Mrs. O’Connor?”

Her eyes popped open. “My husband,” she said. “It was my husband’s idea.”

“No. You said ‘told us.’ How did your husband know to make it look like a trick?”

Her neck muscles tightened. “How should I know? I never knew he could kill his own son. Married to him thirty years and yes, he had a temper and could hit. But I could never imagine that.”

But I knew who’d told them. I could make a good guess.

“And you’ve told nobody?” I said.

“No. Oh, a priest. In confession. Not my own but a different parish. I said someone I loved killed someone else I loved and I was protecting them, but someone else was accused of the crime.”

“What did he say?”

“He told me to go to the police. For the sake of my soul and the innocent man. But I couldn’t. Not yet. When you called today and said you were free, I thought: It’s over. Nobody else’ll get hurt. Everything’ll be all right. But it’s not all right or I wouldn’t have found myself hoping you’d figure it out.”