Mr. X (93 page)

“Would you want a prenuptial agreement?”

Laurie leaned back and regarded me in a steady, unflinching manner that seemed less measuring than conducted in the light of previous measurements and considerations held up for revision. None of this was even close to being cold or calculating. The quality of her steady regard spoke for her—it declared the terms of her immense attraction. What I saw in her face was sadness suffused with irony, and it struck me that until then I had never so much as imagined the existence of ironic sadness. I felt the pull of a future open to nuances beyond my own reach: at that moment I could not have denied what seemed the central principle of her life, that in the realm of adult emotion range meant more than depth. Like great, cool wings, Laurie’s range extended for miles on both sides. I had taken this capacity for a shield, but it did not fend off or deflect, it took in, and all that it took in increased it. She sat before me, blazing with consciousness.

“I hate the whole idea of prenups,” she said. “What a way to begin a marriage. You might as well buy a Coca-Cola franchise.” Her face settled into a smile of unreadable privacy. “Philadelphia might be good for us. It’s less expensive than Manhattan, and the Curtis Institute is a great music school. Lennie Bernstein went there.”

Like C. Clayton Creech, Laurie reassembled herself without altering her posture or moving any part of her body, then smiled at me and stood up.

Her next words clarified whom she had included in “us.” “You’d visit Philadelphia, wouldn’t you?”

“Better tell Posy to apply to Temple or U. Penn,” I said.

“I can always find another Posy.” Laurie knew that she had shocked me. The administration of the shock was a deliberate acknowledgment of our new relationship. “Especially in Philadelphia. The hard part was finding one in Edgerton.” She kissed my cheek. “Call me before you leave. I need your address and phone number.”

I watched her saunter across the hallway to the staircase.

131

Wisps of fog drifted across Veal Yard. A film of condensation gleamed on the cobbles. In the gray light, the buildings around the square seemed on the verge of departure. On the far side of the fountain, a woman’s black pump stood with its heel lodged between two stones, as if abandoned only minutes before. A woman leaving, a woman walking away with such finality that she had left her shoe in token…. I remembered the eloquence with which Laurie had passed through my doorway and the undiminished clarity of Star’s voice, describing an alto solo in a concert she had seen while pregnant with me.

All at once, grief spoke from every gleaming cobble and wisp of fog, and the world seemed to deepen and enlarge.
Grief
, I thought,
it’s everywhere, how could I have supposed I would ever get away from loss—

Robert’s face vanished backward into a lane.

“Robert!” I called. “I have to—”

On the way to Cherry Street, I kept glancing over my shoulder to find him sprawled across the backseat and opening his mouth to say something funny and cruel, but I was still the only person in the car when I pulled up in front of Nettie’s house. It was a little past 9:00
A.M.
All three of my favorite relatives would be in the kitchen. I got out of the car and looked at Joy’s front windows. The net curtains hung straight and undisturbed. It was too early in the morning for Joy to take up her post.

Nettie and May bustled around the stove, preparing scrambled eggs, bacon, and what smelled like chicken livers. Clark Rutledge sneered up at me from his bowl of pebbles and sugar.

“Good to see you wearing that pretty jacket, boy.”

Nettie asked if I wanted to join them for breakfast, and I said that I was hungry enough to eat anything they put in front of me. I sat down next to Clark.

“They say on the radio Grenville Milton killed himself last night. Care to hear my opinion?”

“Fill me in,” I said.

“It’s a setup, pure and simple. Stewart Hatch has enemies who would stop at nothing to put him in a bad light.”

“Mrs. Hatch must be going through the torments of hell,” Nettie said. “And such a lovely woman. Isn’t she, Ned?”

“One of a kind.”

May ladled eggs and chicken livers onto the plates, and Nettie took a foil-wrapped package of bacon from the oven. Clark pushed his empty bowl to the center of the table. “Left Mr. Hatch holding the bag. That was the point of the exercise.”

“And him with a wife and child,” May said.

“His wife and child are going to get ten or twelve million from a family trust,” I said.

“They will have a roof over their heads,” May said. “I am comforted.”

“I’m comforted to know you’ll have a roof over yours,” I said. “When Stewart Hatch heard about Milton’s suicide, he told his family’s lawyer, Parker Gillespie, all about his Uncle Cordwainer, so you won’t have to worry about that anymore.”

Nettie and May applied themselves to the chicken livers.

“By tomorrow, everyone is going to know he was Edward Rinehart,” I said.

May sank back in her chair and gazed heavenward. “That is a great relief. I may not be an eater, but I am a talker, and silence comes hard to me.”

“What the devil are you gabbing about?” Clark asked.

“Mr. Hatch has released us from our vow of silence,” Nettie said. “It seems we have the boy to thank for that. You’ve done well by us, son, and we are grateful for your efforts on our behalf.”

“I second the motion,” Clark said. “Although I regret that Mr. Hatch is bound for the clink. He was generous to a fault.”

“Stewart Hatch laid out a lot of money to keep you from talking about his uncle. Which is why you couldn’t tell me about Edward Rinehart.”

“Well, son,” said Nettie, “we couldn’t help but know a lot more about Mr. Edward Rinehart than your mother ever did.”

“Because he looked like your father.”

“You could not miss the resemblance,” said May. “And we couldn’t tell her the facts. You can’t talk about a thing like that to an innocent young girl.”

I laughed. “I guess it would have been hard to suggest that her boyfriend was your father’s illegitimate son without actually coming out and saying it, but how in the world did you know he was Cordwainer Hatch?”

“Why, that was Joy,” said May. “You know how she sits in that window day after day. One evening, she called up and said, ‘May, I just saw that scalawag Cordwainer Hatch waltz into our sister’s house with Star hanging on his arm.’ That was the one and only time Star had him over to meet her family. I put on my best coat and hat and hurried across the street quick as a bug. Right after they left, I called Joy and said, ‘Joy, that young man must have fallen off our family tree, but his name was not Cordwainer Hatch.’ And Joy said to me, ‘Honey, you’re wrong as you can be. He must be passing under an assumed name by reason of his scandalous reputation.’ ”

“How did Joy know he was Cordwainer?” I asked.

“Joy spent three whole months working in that house,” Nettie said. “She was eighteen years old. It was the Depression, you know, and while we were still comfortable from the sale of our land out of town, it was all you could do to get a job. Carpenter Hatch advertised for a girl of good character willing to do household work, and Joy interviewed for the position. She said she wanted to get out of the house, can you imagine? To think of her now, you can hardly believe it.”

“Carpenter Hatch hired her?” I asked. “Didn’t he know who she was?”

“If you ask me, he liked the idea of a Dunstan girl changing his sheets and cleaning his bathroom. Joy started at the end of October. Cordwainer was in boarding school at the time. His parents were forced to send him away, you know.” Nettie nodded in a beautiful imitation of sympathetic sorrow. “One day while rearranging the contents of Mrs. Hatch’s dresser drawers, Joy came across some photographs the lady had hidden from view. She noticed the resemblance between the boy and our late father. It was not long after that she was let go.”

“Hatch fired her because of something she said?” Then I understood what Nettie had told me. “No, Joy wasn’t rearranging Mrs. Hatch’s dresser drawers, she was redistributing their contents. She was a magpie, like Queenie and May.”

“Though not up to our standard,” May said. “All the same, Mr.
Hatch could never prove anything, but his suspicions settled on her, and then it was farewell, job.”

“She told you what she had seen, and you saved it up. When did you have these helpful discussions with Stewart Hatch?”

“When was that, Clark?” Nettie asked.

“Around 1984 or ’85. Mr. Reagan was in the Oval Office. Like the man said, it was morning in America.”

“I suppose you had gone through the money Carpenter Hatch paid for the property on New Providence Road.”

Nettie said, “Clark put a large sum into cranberries.”

Clark informed me that the cranberry was a fruit of remarkable versatility. Its juice, health-giving and enjoyable by itself, appeared in several popular cocktails. Rendered into sauce, the cranberry appeared on every table in the country, come Thanksgiving. A note of regret accompanied this recital of the cranberry’s virtues.

“Unfortunately,” Nettie said, “the cranberry did not render us into millionaires.”

“The man I dealt with could be called a common criminal,” Clark said. “Though he was as smooth as silk.”

“So you had a talk with Stewart Hatch.”

“For the purpose of presenting him with a real estate opportunity,” Clark said.

“And one of the terms of your agreement was never to divulge what you knew about Edward Rinehart.”

“Which is what makes us so happy to be frank and open now,” Nettie said. “You came along and hit us with that name Rinehart, that was a
shock
. We had no choice, son, we gave you the best advice we could.”

“I am completely impressed. You blackmailed Stewart Hatch into giving you a fortune.”

“ ‘Blackmail’ is not a pretty word,” Nettie said. “We reached a business agreement. All of us walked away happy, including Mr. Hatch.”

“How much did you squeeze out of that crook?”

For once, Clark’s smile bore no resemblance to a sneer. “A handsome sum.”

“I bet it was.” In spite of everything, I was delighted with these three old hoodlums. “You’ve been living off Hatch money for years and years, haven’t you? First you sold the land, and then you sold them a secret. I’m proud of you. The Dunstans
have never exactly been law-abiding citizens, but the Hatches were a lot worse.”

“Neddie?” May set down her knife and fork on a plate that looked as though it had been steam-cleaned. “Now that we can be frank and open, I want to ask you a question. Mr. Rinehart, as he was called then, perished while in prison. I can’t quite see how you came upon his real name.”

“Now it’s my turn to make a confession,” I said. “I had to borrow those photographs Aunt Nettie was storing in her closet.”

“Isn’t that interesting?” May said. “I have to say, I never did understand why Mrs. Hatch asked me to magpie them out of the library. It was a piece of cake, though. Those people wouldn’t notice if you took the clothes right off their backs, especially Mr. Covington.”

“You remember, May,” Nettie said. “Mrs. Hatch told us that Ned had remarked upon your talents, and deep in her heart she had the feeling that those pictures would help us to get back our own precious photographs.”

“Why, that’s right,” May said. “She did. We never did get them back, though. Maybe we should visit the library again.”

“Both sets of pictures are in my car,” I said. “I’ll give them to you in a minute. If you send them back to Hugh Coventry, they’ll be perfectly safe.”

“Isn’t that nice?” Nettie said. “Mrs. Hatch is a very
attractive
person. She reminds me of those girls on the news who look straight into the camera and say, ‘Earlier today, three children were ripped to pieces by tigers during an excursion to the county zoo. Details after these messages.’ And I liked her little boy.”

“Me, too,” I said.

Nettie turned to May. “I met Mrs. Hatch’s son when we were comforting Star at St. Ann’s. He was so comical! That little boy leaned over the front of his stroller and told me, ‘I ain’t jumped to any conclusions, Mrs. Rutledge.’ I could hardly believe my ears.”