The Edge of Doom (20 page)

Kate felt herself unmoved by this speech; in fact, she felt further hardened against him, angry at being doled out plaudits rather than, well, rather than what? An admission of his idiocies? Perhaps he was right; perhaps her being there had saved him.

“I still wonder,” she said to Jay, “why you lied about Charles shooting that guard; why you testified against him knowing he hadn’t shot the guard? Have you a tidy explanation for that?”

“Oh, yes,” Jay said. “That’s the easy part to answer. You see, I know he shot the guard because I saw him do it. I was there.”

Kate looked stunned. “Why didn’t Charles tell us that?”

Jay stood up. “Because no one was ever to know I had been there; I would have been charged as an accomplice. As it was, I just spoke of him in the past. Let me get you some tea. Then I’ll tell you the whole story, nothing omitted, nothing untrue, no excuses.”

“I’ll help you get the tea,” Reed said, rising.

The two men went into the kitchen, leaving Kate to walk to the window and stare out at the garden where they had waited for Jay to receive them, leaving Kate to some minutes’ solitude, leaving her time to collect herself.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Do thou . . . examine me upon
the particulars of my life.

When Reed and Jay returned with the tea tray, Kate had regained her seat.

“Sorry; there aren’t any cookies,” Jay said.

“Let’s not pretend this is a tea party,” Kate said. “So you and Charles agreed to let you pretend you’d had no part in the robbery. Why didn’t Charles tell me that during the scene in the ice cream parlor? It would have been an excellent piece of dialogue.”

“He didn’t tell you, and Charles didn’t want me to tell the court at his trial, because he would have had no chance at an acquittal if it was known that I saw him shoot the guard, rather than that I knew him well enough to be certain he had shot the guard. As it turned out, he wasn’t acquitted, but he might have drawn a stiffer sentence had my testimony been altogether honest.”

“How did you happen to be there?” Kate had determined to keep the caustic quality out of her voice, but she had not wholly succeeded.

“May I start at the beginning?” Jay asked. “The whole story over again, but with a few more flourishes. Yes,” he added, looking at Reed, “and a few more facts. No omissions, I promise. But I hope you will permit me some attempts at explanation. Not justification, I promise; just self-analysis.”

They all sipped their tea. Jay began to speak while still seated, still holding his cup, but he soon put the cup down and began walking back and forth in the room. Kate recalled their long detention on the stools, and did not object to his perambulations. That he was able to pace was, after all, something to be grateful for, something which must never have been far from his consciousness.

“Just as Charles decided that, with revenge in his power, there was no point in, like Shylock, trying to exact it, so I have in the last days examined my life freed from whatever compulsion or obsession has, as I now see, been the guiding motive behind everything. Behind the whole of my life. Everything I told you before, though not untrue, was tinged with madness. It is as Claudius said of Hamlet: ‘There’s something in his soul O’er which his melancholy sits on brood.’ I’ve been reading
Hamlet
; another obsessed soul.”

Kate wanted to say that Hamlet was not an obsessed soul, but this was hardly the moment. Anyway, there would never be agreement about Hamlet; he would always speak to those in danger of acting less nobly than they knew. Jay, it was clear, was confessing, not to Kate and Reed, but as one confessed to an agent of God qualified to bestow absolution.

“What became clear to me is that my whole life, since I left your mother, was driven by anger. The object of my anger shifted onto other targets, but its source was the same. I wanted to make anyone I could reach, anyone I could envy, feel that same hopeless anger. Oh, there were calmer years, particularly during the restoration work. But even there, the pettiness, the selfishness of those affected by our work fed my outrage though they had no part in the loss of Louise—your mother,” he added, as though Kate might not know of whom he spoke. Kate thought how here, as in the ice cream parlor, it was she who was being addressed, she who was the intended listener.

“I helped my friend to steal the Shakespeare picture of Prospero and Miranda out of anger. And it was anger that allowed me to join Charles in his biggest theft of all, the one in which he shot the guard. We had run into one another by chance. But have you noticed, we only say ‘by chance’ when the outcome of that chance seems destined, not accidental? Anyway, he urged me to come along on this job. Again, a small museum, smaller anyway than the huge ones. Again, a strike against the rich, that sort of thing. His persuasions hardly matter. It allowed me to give vent to my anger. It was an assault against the Fanslers and their narrow, tidy, safe world. Not that I would have admitted that at the time; no, my motive, if I questioned it at all, was to reclaim art for those who deserved to own it. I know this makes no sense; I’ve come to see that I was ready to take revenge on life by any means offered.

“This second museum theft with Charles went off just fine; the guards were stupid, easily fooled, and the pictures were not protected with individual alarms. Charles, as you might guess, was by this time highly efficient at stealing paintings. He was going to ask for ransom as usual in this case; so he told me. He offered me a small portion of the proceeds, which I refused; profiting from my anger was not to be thought of. And then another guard appeared; it was not clear where he had come from at the time—that all came out in the trial—but he had a gun and was about to call the police while keeping his gun turned on Charles. I wasn’t there at that moment; I soon appeared, however, and distracted the guard for a moment. It was the chance Charles needed; he shot him. He had never injured anyone before; it all happened so quickly. I had to be sure he didn’t shoot anyone else; he had to be put away for the sake of society. That’s what I told myself. I need some water; does anyone else?”

Kate and Reed shook their heads, as Jay went into the kitchen. They heard him turn on the tap and drink; he refilled the glass, carried it into the living room and, putting it down, went on with his pacing and his story.

“I didn’t testify against him to keep him from further crime; at least, that was hardly my main excuse. There was also the fact I learned later that he had not intended to demand ransom for the painting; he planned to sell it through the illegal art market, where enormous sums might be made. But the truth is I was furious at him for telling Fansler about, well, about you, Kate. I wanted a way to inflict injury on him, and I found it. Please don’t think I wasn’t appalled by the death of the guard. When you come to see that your whole life has been a case of one motive beneath all motives, that doesn’t mean that the more obvious incentives for one’s actions are altogether false.”

“Of course not,” Reed said, to say something. Kate seemed lost in thought.

“That’s it, really. That’s what I had to say. Charles wasn’t supposed to be paroled; I wasn’t expected to leave Witness Protection. I never supposed that we would meet again. I also didn’t grasp that he could become as obsessed with my betrayal as I had become with your mother’s. Nor did I admit that your mother had reason in defense of our behavior; not my reason, but reason nonetheless. That’s it, then. No, that’s not quite it; there was, I learned after you left the ice cream parlor, one other hidden rage: Charles’. When his marriage was revealing itself as a disaster, and I was passionately in love, he envied me. We were old friends; he had always said I was too straight to be believed; he used to say I gave the concept of virtue a bad name. And then, when I found a love, a woman I could share all my life with while he had been entrapped by clever sham, by artificiality, his envy expanded. Those are the motives that entrapped and condemned us both.”

“What now?” Reed asked, after some minutes of silence.

“For me, some attempt, somehow, at restitution. But how? Direct restitution is seldom possible, but one can turn where help is needed. Charles is both more and less fortunate. He did not shoot me, which redeems him; he told me, however, that he had hated me almost from the day of his wedding, when he saw me and your mother meet. I pointed out how long ago that was. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and for you, it is as powerful a moment as though it had been yesterday.’ I can’t make it up to you, Kate. There is nothing to make up except my ill-timed appearance so late in your life, and the dangers I unintentionally brought with me; no evil motives there. I can’t make it up to the Fanslers; your brothers did me no harm; your father and mother are long dead.”

“Why did you reappear then?” Kate asked.

“I liked walking in on your brother Laurence and giving him the shock of his life. My reasons were not good, but I don’t think he believed me; not at first, not without irrefutable evidence, which rather lessened the shock. Why did I want to meet you? I never intended to place you in danger; you must believe that. But perhaps I guessed, or hoped, or dreamed that meeting you might bring me peace. It did, but not quite as simply as I had anticipated. Shall I get us more tea?” he asked after a pause.

Kate said that she would like a hot cup of tea. Reed gazed at her with some concern. He could not tell how rocked she had been by these revelations. It was hardly fair of Jay to use her as a confessor, but who else was there? He had already told them enough of the story so that he did not have to start at the beginning. He could speak of his revelation, his new understanding, his breakthrough one might call it, to those already at home in the context of his life.

When Jay returned with the cups of hot tea—the house did not seem equipped with a teapot, or perhaps he didn’t know how to use it—they sat quietly, recovering, as though they had taken part in a particularly strenuous athletic event; a race, perhaps. There was nothing meaningful to say.

Soon Kate and Reed rose and said they must be going. Jay walked with them to the door.

“How long can you stay in this apartment?” Reed asked.

“I’ve a while longer. Then, who knows. Perhaps I’ll just move from apartment to apartment, subletting for months at a time. I’ve never, at least not before or after the Witness Protection Program, been any good at putting down roots. I suppose it’s significant that only when I was not myself, but living as a quite other person, that I achieved a somewhat rooted, conventional life. Enough already.” He smiled.

“And how will you two be?” he asked.

“We have roots,” Reed said. “We will go home and cultivate them.”

“Does one cultivate roots?” Kate lightly asked; she always quibbled about word usage.

They laughed. Reed and Kate both were thinking that what they had assumed to be Kate’s roots had turned out not to be quite as they supposed. But they had no intention of getting into that subject now. Saying goodbye once more, they walked down the hall toward the elevator; they heard the door of Jay’s apartment close behind them.

“What I want,” Kate said to Reed in the elevator, “is a swinging singles sort of bar. We’ll sit on stoolsand pretend we’ve only just met and are indulging in the sort of chatter people who have just met indulge in.”

“So be it,” Reed said, and taking her hand, placed it under his arm as they strolled along.

EPILOGUE

Good plays prove the better by
the help of a good epilogue.

Jay did find another apartment to sublet when his lease was up; he seemed no closer than he had ever been to wanting his own home, or his own furniture. The places he rented were well-enough equipped and comfortable; that casual, marginal way of life suited him. As Reed pointed out to Kate, he might not have had the most honest of résumés, but he certainly had an impressive collection of references as a tenant.

For Kate and Reed, life too settled down, though in their same apartment with the same furniture Laurence had found so shabby. Janice had, at Laurence’s insistence, called Kate and offered to help her redecorate, but Kate refused, she hoped not ungraciously. The ostentatious evidence of wealth had never appealed to Kate. Perhaps she carried this too far, or perhaps this was the only indisputable evidence of Jay’s genes. And unlike the Fanslers, whose wealth hardly needed displaying, she did not believe that there were any fashionable standards of dress and decoration that one ignored at one’s peril.

As to their relation with Jay, in time that became a family sort of thing, intermittent, often spontaneous. They, or Kate alone, met with him now and then on Sunday afternoons. Sometimes they sat around and talked; often, even in winter, Kate and Jay walked with Banny in the park. When some legal question arose in Jay’s life, he felt able to ask Reed for advice; the advice was gladly given.

As Kate had quoted to Reed: “Things past redress are now with me past care.” By which she meant, she told him, that it all seemed now like a dream. Nor was there any need to talk of all or any part of what had happened from the day of Jay’s appearance to the present moment. In New York, that city of wanderers and of friends passing, without design, in and out of intimacy, neither the unheralded appearance of an aging relative nor his exact relation to Kate seemed to require explanation.

In all the meetings between the three of them, or any two of them, they did not speak of the past, except as occasional anecdotes illuminated the exchange of the moment. Indeed, Kate was pleased to note, their conversation was light, ranging over many subjects, movingeffortlessly from one topic to another.

What had gone before was, as Prospero had cautioned, the stuff of dreams.

ENDNOTES

To return to the corresponding text, click on the reference number or “Return to text.”

^*1
Robert Sabbag, “The Invisible Family,” 11 February 1996.
Return to text.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Amanda Cross
is the pseudonymous author of the bestselling Kate Fansler mysteries, of which
The Edge of Doom
is the fourteenth. As Carolyn G. Heilbrun, she is the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities Emerita at Columbia University. She has served as president of the Modern Language Association as well as vice president of the Authors Guild. Dr. Heilbrun is also the author of
Writing a Woman’s Life
,
Hamlet’s Mother and Other Women
,
The Education of a Woman: The Life of Gloria Steinem
, and the
New York Times
Notable Book
The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty.