Jane Haddam - Gregor Demarkian 12 - Fountain of Death (2 page)

The car made a turn and another turn. Tim Bradbury pushed a few buttons on the dashboard and music began coming out of the tape deck. It was surprisingly soft stuff, old Joni Mitchell, and not the driving heavy metal Frannie would have expected.

“Listen,” Tim Bradbury said, “are you really hyped on Christmas? Is Christmas your thing?”

“Is it my thing? I don’t know. I like it. Why? Don’t we celebrate Christmas at Fountain of Youth on the East Coast?”

“Oh, we celebrate it,” Tim said. He made another turn, onto a well-lit block this time. The houses were bigger here and more neatly kept. “The thing is, we’re not making a big deal about it this year. I mean, not as big a deal as we used to. It wasn’t working out.”

“What wasn’t working out?”

“The promotions. Magda said it was too much like vacuum cleaners. You know, women don’t like their husbands to give them vacuum cleaners for Christmas. It’s kind of an insult. Like the husbands see the wives as just maids.”

“Oh.”

“Magda said it was the same way with the work-out memberships,” Tim went on. “It was like the husbands were telling the wives they had big butts and better do something about them. It was a kind of insult.”

“Oh,” Frannie said again.

“So we’re not doing Christmas this year,” Tim said. “We’re doing New Year’s instead. We had a whole campaign made up at an advertising agency in New York. ‘A New You for the New Year,’ Simon says it’s going to be the key to taking us really national. What do you think?”

What Frannie thought was that maybe she shouldn’t have come back here. Maybe she should have stayed out in California and let her life fall apart. “A New You for the New Year.” As a slogan, it had a lot to be said for it. Frannie could certainly use a new Frannie, for the New Year or any other time. She could use a whole new universe, with none of the people she already knew left in it.

“That’s Prospect Street up there, isn’t it?” she asked Tim Bradbury, and when he nodded, she settled down a little. Prospect didn’t look all that much different from the way she remembered it. More of it seemed to belong to Yale, but the Yale it belonged to was being very good about Christmas decorations. A building with a sign out in front of it that identified it as the Charles A. Hamilton Anthropological Laboratory had a pine tree in its front yard decked out in hundreds of colored lights. Frannie didn’t know if the Charles A. Hamilton Anthropological Laboratory belonged to Yale or not.

“The thing about New Year’s,” Tim said, as they drove up the steep hill toward Albertus Magnus College, “is that it’s the perfect holiday for a work-out studio. Everybody’s always making New Year’s resolutions. Everybody’s always trying to change their life. Simon says there aren’t a dozen people in any hundred thousand who really like the way they are. Do you know Simon?”

“I know who Simon is,” Frannie replied.

“Everybody is going to know who Simon is pretty soon,” Tim said. “They’re doing a profile on him in
Forbes
magazine. ‘The Selling of a Way of Life,’ it’s called. We’ve got an advance copy up at the house. It’s the only thing that makes me feel okay about not being able to get out to California. I mean, everything that’s really happening for the studio is happening out here.”

“It sounds like it,” Frannie said.

“I like the whole concept anyway,” Tim said. “Changing your life. Changing yourself. So many people are stuck in really destructive patterns. It’s nice to know you can always have a second chance if you want to do a little work for it.”

“Mmm,” Frannie said, and then she noticed that Albertus, being a Catholic college, was really done up for Christmas. There were colored lights everywhere. There was a life-size crèche on the grass at the front just inside the gate, with a life-size Mary and Joseph inside it.

Sometimes, Frannie thought, you don’t get a second chance. Some things come without second chances built into them. The way the world worked, these were always the things you most wanted to be able to take back and do over again.

Out on the street, the asphalt was wet and shiny under streetlights whose globes were grease free and clear. The houses were getting larger and more elaborately gingerbread. College girls were walking in groups, dressed from head to toe out of J. Crew and L.L. Bean catalogs.

Time ought to make things better, Frannie thought, and-distance ought to make them fainter, and after a while she should be able to look out on a street or a day or a woman walking in a park without feeling that her stomach was full of glass and iron shavings, that she wanted to double over and die. That was what ought to be happening, but it wasn’t happening. She had come three thousand miles across the country, and it had done her no good at all.

What would happen to her if nothing did any good? she wondered. How would she get along? She had accepted this job. She didn’t know if she was going to be able to do it. She couldn’t imagine standing up in front of a couple of dozen women, bouncing on and off a little plastic step and making it look like it mattered.

“We’re just up the hill here and to the right.” Tim’s determinedly cheerful voice filled the car the way helium filled a balloon.

Frannie had to stifle the impulse to break his neck, and wreck the car, and take off on her own again.

M
AGDA HALE HAD NOT
been named Magda when she was born. She had been named Margaret Jean, after her father’s two sisters, and from the beginning she had known what that was supposed to mean for her.

“Margaret is a good plain name,” Magda’s mother always said. “Jean is much too French. She’s never going to know what kind of person she’s destined to be.”

Actually, Magda Hale had always known quite well what kind of person she was destined to be. She knew everything there was to know about destiny by the time she was five, because her mother was addicted to the idea. Susan Burnham Hale was a True Believer without a True Religion to anchor her. She drifted from spiritualism to mesmerism to Theosophy to astrology the way the other women on their block drifted from one brand to another of dishwashing detergent. This was back in 1942, in Kettleman, New York, where Magda grew up. The men were all away in the War and the women and children were wedded to their radio sets, hoping for a scrap of cheerleading or news. Susan Hale had been a Seeker long before this. She had worn a little net sack around her neck under her wedding dress, containing two slivers of garlic, a sprig of rosemary, and a half-drowned nettle plant. She had attended the christening of her own daughter with a juju bag stuffed inside her purse. She had bought the juju bag from a lady she had gone to in New York, who claimed to be a gypsy fortune-teller and a voodoo expert as well. If Susan had known anything at all about voodoo, she would have known that the woman had to be lying. Magda didn’t think her mother would really have cared. What mattered to Susan was not the efficacy of the magic. Susan didn’t believe that anything was truly effective against Fate. What mattered to Susan was the rigid, unyielding nature of the universe itself. Everything was set in eternity and in advance. No amount of effort or talent or will or hope or prayer had any effect at all against the blind force of the universal will. If Susan had been a Christian, she would have been a Calvinist. She would have believed that God destines the great majority of people to hell before they are ever born and that nothing on earth was strong enough to thwart His omnipotent destructiveness.

Magda Hale’s universe was not rigid, or unyielding, or controlled by destiny. It was a very fluid place where actions very seldom had consequences and no deed was so irreversible that it could not be undone. Magda Hale had a horror of all things final. The idea of death made her sick to her stomach—not because it meant the end of consciousness, but because there didn’t seem to be any way to escape from it. Escape, to Magda, was the key. Life and death, good and evil, health and disease, none of it mattered in itself to Magda. All that mattered was the extent to which any part of it was inevitable.

“You’re going to be a plain woman when you grow up,” Susan Hale had told her daughter. “You’re just going to have to learn to live with it.”

Standing in the middle of this large room with its formal bar on one side and its collection of mock-French empire chairs on the other, Magda didn’t think there was anyone left on earth who would have called her plain. She was a small woman, but she was very slender and very delicate. She looked, her husband Simon Roveter sometimes said, like a high-fashion line drawing from the 1920s come to life. In spite of the fact that she didn’t have the stature, she had the composition. Everything about her was elongated and tapering. Even her face was long and thin. Magda made it look longer and thinner by wearing her hair piled on top of her head. She made her eyes look wider and bluer by ringing them with eyeliner and highlighting them with pastel powders. She made her lips look fuller by painting them past their natural outlines. She left nothing to chance, and because she didn’t, she never had to bend to the will of her mother’s all-powerful nature.

Until now. The room Magda Hale was standing in was the formal living room of a house on Edge Hill Road in New Haven, Connecticut. The house belonged to one of the minor investors in the Fountain of Youth Work-Out Studio, whose wife had decided to give a supper party for no good reason Magda could tell. Magda Hale was not a party animal. She did not entertain or allow herself to be entertained unless there was a business reason for it. She didn’t understand why so many people wanted to waste their time standing around in stuffy rooms drinking bad wine with people who bored them. She only knew that people did want to, and that sometimes she had to keep them company to keep them from getting unhappy.

She had been standing in this same place in this same room for almost half an hour when it started, a pain in her left leg that felt like a needle traveling jaggedly through a vein. She was holding onto a glass of mineral water that she had barely touched. She was talking to three middle-aged women—two lawyers and an academic in Yale’s English department—who looked frumpy and big bottomed and definitely annoyed at her. All three of these women had once been members of the Fountain of Youth Work-Out Studio. All three of them had quit the Studio and stopped working out at least a year before. All three of them looked it. That’s what happens when you let yourself go, Magda told herself, shifting from one leg to the other to try to get rid of the pain. That’s what happens when you let nature take its course. Even the clothes these women were wearing had been affected. The lawyers were wearing beige evening suits that looked like they could have come off the rack at K-mart. The academic was wearing one of those drop-waisted dresses that were supposed to disguise oversize hips, but never did.

“What I can’t understand,” the academic was saying, “is why you don’t realize what effect institutions like Fountain of Youth have on the lives of women in America.”

“I don’t think Fountain of Youth has that kind of effect yet,” Magda said pleasantly, shifting legs again. The pain was getting worse instead of better. “Maybe after this new campaign, when we go aggressively national—”

“Magda thinks the effect Fountain of Youth has on the women of America is positive,” one of the lawyers said.

“I don’t see what’s supposed to be positive about being told we’re supposed to look seventeen for the rest of our lives,” the other lawyer said. “And all those bean sprouts and steamed vegetables on rice. I don’t see what’s so wonderful about making six figures a year and eating like a graduate student.”

“I didn’t eat like that when I was a graduate student,” the academic said. “I drank twelve cups of coffee and smoked two packs of cigarettes a day.”

“I slept with a lot of people I didn’t like very much,” the first lawyer said. “I thought I was supposed to.”

The pain in Magda’s leg had settled in, a long thin line of it that seemed to be bolted to Magda’s ankle, knee and hip, like a crepe paper banner held to a wall by carefully spaced thumbtacks. Magda put all her weight on her other leg and lifted the one that hurt off the ground.

“It’s the attitude I’m interested in,” Magda said, thinking that these three women were all at least fifteen years younger than she was, and that they all looked older. “You can go about your life just accepting things as they come, or you can take charge of yourself. I prefer to take charge of myself.”

“But you can’t take charge of everything,” the second lawyer objected. “We all have limitations. There isn’t anything any of us can do about getting old.”

“I think there is,” Magda said.

“Magda has very good genes.” The first lawyer made a face. “Most of us get wrinkles in our forties. Magda just sails on through.”

“That may be all well and good for Magda,” the academic said sharply, “but what do you think happens to all those women out there who are trying to be just like her? They probably don’t have very good genes. The only way they’re going to save themselves from having wrinkles in their forties is to resort to surgery.”

“I have never advocated resorting to surgery,” Magda said. “You know that.”

“I know that women are never really going to be equal until they are allowed to get old just like men,” the academic said. “I know that every organization like Fountain of Youth that is successful enough to ‘go national,’ as you put it, puts equality back another twenty years.”

“It makes all the young women feel they were right about us all along,” the first lawyer said. “We’re old and over the hill. They don’t have to listen to us.”

“But you don’t have to be old and over the hill,” Magda said. “That’s the whole point of Fountain of Youth. You don’t have to be old unless you want to be.”

The pain was now so bad, Magda was having a hard time trying to see—and it didn’t matter at all that she was putting no weight on the leg that hurt. The leg that didn’t hurt was getting tired. Magda looked around for something to lean against and couldn’t find anything. There was a green leather couch and a matching club chair in front of the fireplace, and all those chairs along the wall, but nothing close enough for her to grab.