The Books of Fell (29 page)

Lenny had trained himself not to get angry when Nels tried to tell him how to treat Laura, as he had back at his apartment.

He knew it wasn’t easy for Nels, suspected Nels was half in love with Laura.

“We have to plan the kidnapping,” Nels said. “Start thinking about where we’ll dump our victim, what ransom we’ll demand, that sort of thing.”

“Oh, are we kidnapping somebody?”

“Shhhh. Don’t talk too loud.”

“Who are we kidnapping?” Lenny was amused at the idea that Nels was so plastered. Nels never lost control, never rambled. But here he was back on the old kidnapping theme.

“We’re not kidnapping anyone right away,” he said.

“When are we going to do it?”

“A little under a year from now. We’ll be on a trip.”

“I think you’re traveling in outer space right now.”

“No, I’m not. But I am planning our trip.”

“And we’re going to kidnap someone on it?”

“Yes, Tra La.”

“Who’s the lucky fella?”

“It’s not a fella,” said Nels. “It’s Celeste.”

A dieu was on Dune Road, at the top of a hill overlooking Seaville and the Atlantic Ocean.

I expected Eaton, their butler, to answer the door, but he wasn’t on duty.

Keats’s father did the honors instead.

“Hello, John.” He was in a dark suit, always.

“How do you do, sir?”

Gras, the two-ton dachshund, was growling at my pants cuffs, while Lawrence Keating eyed the suitcase I was carrying, his mouth turned down.

“So!” he said. “I’m told you’re here to rescue the supper party.”

“I think I can,” I said modestly. I knew I could.

“We want to pay you too, John.”

“Oh, no, sir. I’m doing this as a favor to Keats.”

“She tells me you do this sort of thing professionally,” said Himself, sticking a hand down his pocket and rattling his change. “I never designed a house for anyone free of charge.”

I felt like saying, Try it, you’ll like it.

But he wasn’t the type.

I said, “I like to cook.”

“I liked what I did too, John, but I expected recompense.”

Mrs. Keating came rushing out then like a little bird running down a lawn. She was thin and tiny, always very tan and quick to smile. She had on a long, red dress.

“Hello, dear. My my, you didn’t waste any time getting here.”

I was still carrying my suitcase, but I stuck out my left hand and we shook.

“Speaking of time,” Mr. Keating said, “if we’re going to the Stewarts’ before theater, we’d best get started.”

“Sweetheart, I have to show John the kitchen and see what he can make of all that shrimp.”

“Do you have bread and salad greens?” I asked her as we went down the hall.

“Yes, plenty of both. And luscious tomatoes!”

“Then don’t worry … Dessert?”

“We have cookies. We have peaches.”

“Peaches, good! I’ll do peaches with bourbon. You have bourbon?”

“Of course…. The help have the afternoon off, but they’ll be on duty again at seven. This is awfully nice of you, John.”

“Everyone calls me Fell.”

“I know, but I can’t call someone by his last name,” she said. “And at ten o’clock, for entertainment, we’re having one of those ventriloquists from the convention.”

“Was that Keats’s idea?”

“No, we didn’t even think our daughter would be here this weekend. Someone from the club told me about this young Vietnamese. He’s performed at The White House!”

“Fen,” I said. Fen trying out Plumsie!

“Yes, that’s his name, dear. I wish there was someone to put your suitcase up in the guest room.”

“I’ll do that, Mother,” said Keats, rounding a corner wearing an apron and a maid’s cap.

“Darling, what
have
you got on? I thought you were cooking the shrimp.”

“It’s cooked,” she said. “All Fell has to do is shell it.” She took my bag and blew me a kiss.

“Did Mr. Keating speak to you about payment, John?”

“He did, ma’am. And I told him I didn’t want any.”

“Oh, dear, dear, dear. He’d be more impressed if you took something, you know.”

“I’m not trying to impress him,” I said.

“Anymore,” she said.

• • •

After I shelled the shrimp, I made layers of shrimp, onion, lemon, and parsley in a casserole.

Keats was assisting me by sitting on a stool waiting to show me something she said was a surprise.

I’d asked her to let me get things under control first.

“Shall I preheat the oven, Fell?”

“This isn’t going in the oven,” I said. I added more lemon and parsley, also tabasco. Dripped some olive oil over that, and topped it with bay leaves. “This will marinate for four hours, then it’s ready to serve.”

“Men are sexy when they cook.”

“So are women,” I said.

“I think I’ve lost it, Fell.”

“Lost what?”

“My sexual feelings and my sex appeal.”

I was cutting little red new potatoes in half, dunking them in olive oil, ready to pop into the oven in a few hours.

“You’re still sexy,” I said.

“Don’t be flippant. I’m discussing something sincerely with you, or trying to.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m trying to get dinner ready for sixteen people.”

“Eighteen counting Daddy and Mummy…. I really mean it, Fell. I’m bored with sex. The whole idea of it bores me. It even repels me.”

I sighed.

“You don’t want to hear about it, is that it?” she said.

“No, that isn’t it…. I feel the same way sometimes.”

“You do?”

“I just can’t get interested in anyone.”

“Ever again?”

“I hope it isn’t permanent.”

“I have a sneaking suspicion I’ll never again be really interested
that way
in anyone. I’ll probably marry someone I like but I hate going to bed with. It’ll be awful, too, because you don’t like to turn down someone you really like, and yet there’s no way you can stand sex night after night when you’re not horny yourself.”

I recognized a true Keats tirade gaining momentum. Her theme hadn’t changed much. It always centered on her own worthlessness, how she would never amount to anything, blah blah, blah blah. It was the kind of anxiety rich girls suffered from before they jumped into their sports cars and broke the speed limit hurrying somewhere wonderful to shop.

My own mother, who wasn’t rich, got on the subway and headed to Macy’s when she was upset over anything, too.

Keats and my mother just didn’t get upset over the same kind of thing.

“Where is the corn?” I asked.

“Are you listening to me? … It’s right by your feet, under the table.”

“Keats, let’s not worry about ourselves tonight. We’re doing good things here. We’re saving your folks’ supper party. Later we’ll see Fen and the famous Plumsie!”

There were about fifty ears of corn in a box.

“I’ve had this feeling for a year,” Keats continued. “I haven’t been horny for a year! I don’t even have good dreams anymore. I dream in clichés. I’m flying or I’m falling or I’m shopping in my underwear.”

Thank God for the now-and-then nights that brought me dreams of Delia.

Keats said, “Corn is a terrible idea for old people at a party! It gets caught up in their crowns.”

“Your mom and dad are only in their forties.”

“Only? Who wants to be almost fifty, Fell?”

“At least when you’re fifty, this man you’ve married who you like but can’t stand in bed won’t be after you night after night.”

“There’s that,” she said.

“Help me husk the corn,” I said.

“No, I’ve got a surprise, remember?”

“It’s going to keep you from husking corn?”

“From doing anything but reading to you.”

“I thought you were going to assist me?”

“I put the maid’s apron and cap on. I was all set to. Then I thought I’d better lie down and put my feet up for a few minutes, just to rest … and I opened something to read. It’s a journal I found in the suitcase with the dummy’s things. It was under a shelf in his makeup kit.”

“I wonder if Little Jack knows about it.”

“I bet he doesn’t. The Horners didn’t mention it.”

“It must have been Lenny Last’s.”

“It’s more like a story, Fell.”

“It’s more like an excuse not to husk corn.”

“A story about Lenny Last
and Nels
Plummer.”

I made a grab for it. “Let me see that thing!”

“No. I want to read it to you.”

“Who wrote it? Is there a name inside?”

“No name. It sounds like some third party telling about Lenny Last meeting Nels Plummer. It starts at Gardner school, or on the bus going there. I’ve been skipping around a lot. The handwriting’s horrible.”

“Read it,” I said.

“Please. “

“Please.”

Outside on a chaise, Gras was sleeping on his back, all four paws and long dachshund nose sticking straight up.

Beyond him were a dazzling emerald-green pool, rosebushes, a croquet game waiting on the lawn for someone to play it, and, just over the dunes, the Atlantic Ocean lapping at the beach.

I promised myself before the summer was over I’d get Mom and Jazzy out to Coney Island or Riis Park for a picnic.

Keats began to read.

“‘Ruby is my birthstone,’ Laura said. ‘“Someday I want a real ruby.
… Do
they cost …”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Who’s Laura?”

I remembered Mrs. Violet saying how Lenny Last had carried on about her name being Laura, that he’d told her he’d known someone named that, and she was a shrink now.

“Just listen,” Keats said. “They’re at one of the Sevens’ Sunday tea dances: Lenny, this Laura, and Nelson Plummer himself! I’ll start at the beginning of the entry.

“It took Sevens to turn the worst part of any weekend into-the best.”

It took Sevens to turn the worst part of any weekend into the best.

The Sevens’ Sunday tea dance got under way around four in the afternoon. It went until nine or ten, when the boarding-school girls had to catch the last trains and buses out of Cottersville.

The basement of Sevens House was transformed into a grotto. The girls were given blue caps with 3+4 in white letters on the peaks, or 6+1, or 2+5.

Stevie Wonder and The Beach Boys came through the speakers, Bobby Vinton and The Four Seasons, and a new group called The Beatles, singing “Love Me Do.”

It was at the last Sevens’ Sunday tea, the day before graduation, when Nels got Lenny and Laura to go out back, to the white Cadillac, for a surprise.

Lenny had worked hard to keep it running well and looking even better. He rented it out for proms and Saturday-night trips to Philadelphia. In winter it had been protected by a shed Lenny’d made for it in the Sevens parking lot.

After they piled into it, Nels said, “Guess what Celeste gave me for graduation…. Psychoanalysis!”

“That’ll costa fortune!” Laura said.

“She’s the moneymaker of the family,” said Nels.

The late-afternoon sun was starting down in a pink sky. The campus smelled of honeysuckle and roses.

“I thought you were supposed to pay for your own analysis or it wouldn’t work,” said Lenny.

“You are,” Laura said.

“Psychoanalysis is just the care of the id by the odd,” said Nels.

“Oh, Gawd, I’ve got to write that down!” Laura laughed.

“That’s all it is,” said Nels. “The care of the id by the odd.”

“We heard you the first time,” Lenny said.

Laura said, “Lenny? What’s bugging you?”

“Tra La doesn’t have my golden tongue,” said Nels. “It’s hard to be average when your best buddy is superior.”

• • •

But both boys knew what was bugging Lenny.

It was Nels’s crazy idea to kidnap Celeste and ask for a $50,000 ransom.

Lenny could have the money. The money didn’t matter to Nels. What he wanted was to destroy Celeste.

He said what he wanted was to have his sister back. “How do you know she won’t just get another dummy?”

“She won’t. There isn’t another Celeste — and she’d never settle for less. No. Without her, she’ll retire.”

“Is that what you want? You want her home with you?”

“Home. Back. Yes.”

“Does she have that much money, Nels?”

“Don’t worry about my sister. She’s still got every cent she inherited from my father, and she’s my heir, too. Fifty thousand is peanuts to Annette!”

“But what if she won’t pay it?”

“She will.”

“She could go to the police!”

“The ransom note will warn her that going to the police means the end of Celeste.”

“But Nels, how are you going to — ”

Nels would cut him off. “Let me take care of the details, Lenny. I’ll come to you when I’m ready.”

• • •

Both boys knew how much $50,000 would mean to Lenny at that point in his life.

He could marry Laura and put her through medical school, the one thing she wanted most.

Otherwise she’d be shipped off to Oral Roberts’s new university. Since she was a pastor’s daughter as well as an A student, she’d been offered a scholarship there.

Lenny would be stuck in New York City, trying to get a job doing anything, waiting for the lucky break that’d head him toward Broadway. Some actors never got there.

Nels was planning to take some courses at Columbia, nothing strenuous, and live at home. He’d be around to remind Lenny he’d had his chance once and he’d let it slip through his fingers. Too bad, hmmm?

The scheme made Lenny nervous, angry, hopeful, afraid, and not too sure Nels’s love for his older sister was all that brotherly…. Was that any business of Lenny’s?

• • •

Lenny had crawled into the backseat of the Cadillac while Laura sat in front with Nels. Even though Nels never drove a car, he liked to be in the driver’s seat.

Nels snapped on the radio, and the Drifters came through it singing “Ruby Baby.”

“Ruby is my birthstone,” said Laura. “Someday I want a real ruby…. Do they cost much, Nels?”

Notice who she asked.

She knew Lenny wouldn’t have a clue.

“They’re not as expensive as diamonds,” said Nels. “You should have both.”

Laura laughed. “Hear that, Lenny? When your rich Aunt Martha dies, I want a ruby and a diamond!”

Months ago, Lenny had started mentioning an Aunt Martha, saying he hoped she’d live through her heart bypass, that the money she’d leave him would never be worth the loss.

Nels had told him he couldn’t just wake up one morning $50,000 richer without some explanation to Laura.

• • •

Next to Lenny on the backseat were three boxes, wrapped in white paper and tied with gold ribbons.

“After tomorrow,” said Nels, “we have to stop wearing things with Sevens on them. School’s out.”

Laura covered the gold 7 around her neck protectively. “I’ll never stop wearing this. It’ll always remind me of the first time I ever came to The Hill.”

“Laura, take off your cap,” Nels said. “Tra La? Would you pass around those packages on the backseat?”

“I hope these aren’t graduation presents,” Laura said. “I don’t have anything for you, Nels.” “You’re not rich and I am.”

Lenny was taking Laura to her school prom and the party after, in a Philadelphia hotel suite. He had saved enough to pay for the satin gown she had wanted and her father had told her was “the devil’s creation.”