Without Prejudice (6 page)

The litany slowed at last, but before Robert could speak, Lily said, ‘Hey, I found something the other day. I was finally going through all those cartons I’ve been storing for Merrill.’

He remembered; her garage was full of the overflow from the Chicago apartment. Books and pictures and table lamps, which would never have fitted in the smaller Cupertino rooms, but which his father had been loath to throw out. Not his father, Robert thought, correcting himself. It had been Merrill, convinced that she would one day again be living in spacious quarters.

‘What’s that?’

‘A box of stuff that must have belonged to Vanetta. God knows why it’s here. It must have been in the basement back in Chicago, and got shipped with everything else.’

‘What’s in it?’

‘A bible, of course,’ Lily said with a derisory laugh. She had always mocked Vanetta’s Mississippi-born religion.

‘Anything else?’

Lily sighed. ‘Some knick-knacks. And a few clothes. Nothing fascinating. What should I do with this stuff? Throw it out?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Send it to me. I’ll find out if any of her family wants it.’

‘God,’ she said dramatically. ‘It’s a big box – it’ll cost a fortune to mail. Can’t I just send you the bible?’

‘No. Send it all. Send it Fed Ex. I’ll pay.’

Maybe Duval would want Vanetta’s stuff. Robert figured he owed him that much.

2

They left for the dunes Saturday morning, their wedding anniversary, driving as usual, going along Lake Shore Drive and its shoreside string of parks, then skirting Hyde Park, his old neighbourhood, driving through Jackson Park and the Museum of Science and Industry – where each time they went by, Anna would point to its immense front façade and say, ‘You must take Sophie there.’ He’d nod and say, ‘Of course,’ and this time he did wonder why he’d been avoiding his old neighbourhood since his return.

He felt a slight build-up of tension as they joined the Skyway, an ageing highway link between the southernmost tip of Chicago and the decayed industrial hinterland of northern Indiana. As they approached the Skyway Bridge he gripped the steering wheel tightly. He stayed in the middle lane, away from the edge, trying to focus on the grey ribbon of road that rolled like a treadmill under his front wheels.

‘Thanks for the flowers, by the way,’ said Anna. ‘They’re lovely.’

He was about to ask what flowers when Sophie shouted, ‘Look!’ and he jerked involuntarily.

‘Shhh,’ said Anna next to him. ‘Daddy has to concentrate.’

‘I just wanted you guys to see the view.’

‘That’s precisely what your father doesn’t want to see,’ said Anna.

He could imagine the prospect on this clear sunny day: Calumet Harbor hundreds of feet below, with its stale landscape of ageing jetties full of cranes and towers and derricks, stretching out towards the vast fresh blue lake. Behind them, fifteen miles north, the skyline of the city downtown, the Sears Tower jutting up like an upended domino, in picture-postcard clarity. But he didn’t dare look.

He had first been afflicted in New York. He had kept it to himself as best he could, though during those years in Manhattan colleagues must have noticed his unease, seeing him sweating and shaky in some meeting on the thirty-seventh floor; they couldn’t have failed to notice how at its conclusion he’d rush for the elevator, wordless and tense until safe inside and descending.

So what a relief London had proved, where for twelve years he had rarely to venture above the tenth floor of any building. This was well below his fear line – which got triggered around the twentieth floor. From that height (and above) the view of the world below lost any sense of immediate dimension; the result was tremulous panic.

‘Why don’t you like heights, Dad?’ Sophie asked.

Anna answered. ‘Daddy gets dizzy up high, darling. Lots of people do. It’s called vertigo.’

Vertigo? No, it was a mental dizziness of plain fear, which now subsided – they were on the downwards slant of the bridge and he was breathing easier. In just two or three seconds, even if the whole thing collapsed, he would fall on dry land, an irrational but critical mollifier of his terror.

They travelled, insulated by toll road, past small bungalows with tar-paper roofs, and litter-strewn parks and slime-infested little lakes. Even the gold-leaf dome on the Gary courthouse looked shabby and decrepit.

‘Gary Indiana, Indiana,’ sang Sophie, who had loved
The Music Man
DVD he had brought home. Then she stopped and leaned forward, her face right behind the back of his driver’s seat. ‘What’s wrong with Indiana, Daddy?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Mom says you have a . . . what do you call it?’

‘Prejudice,’ said Anna firmly.

‘Prejudice. Against Indiana.’

He shrugged, unable to explain a lifelong bias, probably fostered by the drives like this he’d endured as a child on the way to Michigan – his father had called Indiana the New Jersey of the Middle West. Nor could he explain the odd American fixation with states, how it shaped a sense of identity only second to belonging to the country as a whole.

To Robert, Indiana meant not only the ineffably drear landscape he was progressing through now, but also a southern expanse of rattlesnake-infested flatlands, which were probably no different from those of Illinois but were, well, in a different state.

The concrete jungle gradually gave way to suburb, then farmland fields of young corn as they moved east towards the Michigan border. He glanced at Anna, whose sunglasses perched on her forehead like a headband. She was wearing a summery outfit of white jeans and flowery cotton shirt, and she turned her head to the window as they passed a Victorian farmhouse, a graceful rectangle of slim white pine boards topped by a high-pitched gable. Then he remembered. ‘What flowers?’ he asked.

‘Huh?’ she said, glancing back. ‘Oh, you know, the flowers I got at the office yesterday. A day early, but very nice.’

‘Was there a card with them?’

‘No, but I wasn’t going to tell you. The florist must have screwed up.’ She stretched an arm out and kneaded his shoulder. Increasingly, he found he got stiff while driving – his back, his shoulder, his knees. Not yet fifty, he feared his father’s arthritis, and the prospect of twenty, maybe thirty years of pain.

He exhaled, trying to keep his voice calm. ‘I didn’t send you flowers.’

‘Really?’

‘I guess you’ve got a secret admirer.’ Robert knew he could be hypersensitive, but figured who wouldn’t be, with an ex-wife who had already run off with a man twelve years her junior?

Anna took her hand away. ‘Well, it wasn’t Philip, if that’s what you’re thinking,’ she said sharply.

‘I didn’t say it was, honey. I just know it wasn’t me. Anyway, how do you know who it was or wasn’t?’

‘Because I rang the florist’s, to see if they’d left the card out by mistake. They couldn’t find any trace of the order. They said the flowers must have been bought and delivered by the customer himself. Philip’s in Washington, visiting the embassy, and why would he be sending me flowers anyway? He’s my
boss
. I assumed it was you.’

‘No,’ he said, and glancing at Anna could see she was mystified. Leave it, he told himself, happy to know it wasn’t Philip.

The Schwaggers had been meat-packer magnates in Chicago’s heyday as the cattle capital of America, and had built an immense mansion in the extravagant style of a French chateau on the shores of the lake, five miles from the Indiana border with Michigan. This had burned down in the 1920s, and been replaced by two large houses, one for each Schwagger heir, large squat shingle-style houses that sat on the dunes above the sandy beach. An original coach house remained on the property, and it was this small but elegant building that Robert and Anna had taken on a long-term rental from the Poindexters, owners of one of the two houses and descendants of the original Schwaggers.

The coach house was nestled in a curve of the drive. It had no view of the lake, but was only 250 yards or so from the water. A handsome, blue cedar-shingled structure with dormer windows upstairs, it had been converted to a residence fifteen years before, and done in some style – you entered into a large kitchen, then walked past a staircase along a book-lined corridor into a two-storey living room with a railed gallery running around three sides. Upstairs there were three bedrooms; they had already promised Sophie that some weekend she could bring a friend to stay. ‘If she gets one,’ Anna had said six months before, though now her worries about Sophie’s move to an American school had long subsided. Their daughter’s small private school was full of foreigners, or foreign blood – Guatemalan and Chinese adoptees, Indian children from the near North Side, a pair of French twins.

Gradually, if a little grudgingly, Robert had grown to like this weekend place, particularly the beach, which was never crowded and was layered by bottomless soft sand. Outside the coach house they had a small garden, but the illusion of a large one – there was only lawn and trees between them and the two big houses at the end of the drive. There was a garage, useful during winter, which had a spartan bedroom above it, with a tiny kitchen and bathroom.

‘We can put my mother there,’ said Anna, since she was threatening an autumn visit. Anna didn’t like her, once describing her mother as a suburban housewife with the soul of a shopkeeper – tight-fisted, pessimistic, critical of her daughter. For someone with such
Poujadiste
views, Anna’s mother had been curiously unambitious for her daughter. Robert got along well enough with her, but he could sympathise with Anna’s resentment. Her father had been the supportive one, pushing her to do well at a comprehensive school where it was the norm to give up, encouraging her to go to university (Goldsmith’s in London) where she had read politics and, Robert learned from a chance meeting with a former tutor, been one of the best students of her year. Robert had never met Anna’s father, who had died soon after retiring. Anna claimed the prospect of spending days with his wife had literally been too much to bear.

When they arrived it had turned overcast and even Sophie didn’t want to swim. They spent the afternoon puttering – Anna planting irises in a new bed by the garage, while Robert read manuscripts, with half an eye on a TV baseball game, and Sophie spent her allowed weekly two hours on his laptop playing games. For dinner he grilled chicken on the barbecue Anna and Sophie had given him for his birthday, managing not to burn it. He liked to cook at the weekends; during the week he made supper if he got home first, but then it was a chore.

They went early to bed, keeping a hall light on for Sophie, whose bedroom was at the far end of the corridor. Anna was reading a spy thriller while he scanned through the detailed accounts Andy Stephens had given him. This was the dull but worthy side of the job – he was much more interested in the actual books the press published – and by the time he had finished he was tired. In a moment Anna put down her book and turned off the light.

‘How’s it going then?’ she asked, her voice floating through the dark.

‘How do you mean?’

‘Those are your results, aren’t they?’

‘Yep. They’re pretty good.’

‘You don’t usually have accounts to read these days. Not like London.’ This was true. He got to spend much more time actually reading what they planned to publish. ‘You like that, don’t you?’

‘Sure,’ he said laconically.

‘I mean, it’s better than just looking at numbers all the time.’

What was she getting at? Was she asking if he was happy they had moved to Chicago? His relief that she was so obviously satisfied with the move had masked, even to himself, his own ambivalence.

But he didn’t want a heavy conversation now, so he took her literally, saying, ‘Some of the books are pretty dull – like the local history stuff. A history of Lake Superior isn’t going to compete with Nick Hornby for publishing excitement. But a lot of it is actually pretty good. And I guess it helps that I’m a Midwesterner when it comes to all
The Role of Michigan in the Spanish-American War
stuff.’

‘And you’ve always got Coach Carlson,’ she said, then giggled. Anna found it as comical as Robert that the memoirs of a football coach were the press’s most commercial prospect.

They had taken Sophie to one football game back in November, on a cold crunch of a day, when the wind from the lake shivered the bones and kept the three of them huddled together in their mediocre seats behind one end zone. Sophie had cheered indiscriminately each time anyone had scored – usually the university, who had trounced a weak Wisconsin team, 47–10 – while Anna consumed the lion’s share of the cherry brandy he’d brought in a hip flask. Once home, both Anna and Sophie said that though they had had a swell time, they would be happy to wait a few years before going again.

‘Actually, I’m not sure we do,’ he said. He described his phone call with Balthazar, and the agent’s clear suggestion that he would move the book.

‘He can’t do that.’ She sounded indignant on his behalf, a loyalty he admired but which wasn’t always helpful: it was hard enough keeping his own feelings in check without having to moderate hers.

‘I was surprised, I have to admit. After all, Carlson initially came to us; it’s not as if he was wooed. Dorothy Taylor signed him up and she’s never let me within a mile of him.’