Voices in the Dark Read online

  “You’re lovely,” he said. Pleasure enlarged his face and further fattened his whole look.

  Beverly Gunner greeted people warmly but tentatively, her manner shy and uncertain. A gift from her husband manacled her wrist and embarrassed her when it drew the attention of Regina Smith, who was shrewd enough to guess that she would have chosen a small packet of understanding over a diamond bracelet.

  “It’s stunning,” said Regina, whose steel smile was a sullen force. Her own jewelry was minimal, exquisitely noticeable by degrees. Her dress left her shoulders bare. Paul Gunner, who had once likened her to a frozen delicacy, suddenly corralled her, but with a subtle shift she avoided the full weight of his kiss.

  By six, the foyer clock striking the hour, the party was in full swing. Guests numbering nearly a hundred thronged the long dining room, where high windows stood deep in the walls. Breezes delivered fragrances from the garden, and trimly uniformed Hispanic women served hors d’oeuvres and wine. Stronger drinks were available at the bar in the billiard room, where a crowd surrounded Crack Alexander, the former ball player who stood five inches over six feet and had gained thirty pounds since retiring. Gripping an imaginary bat, an elbow cocked behind him, the big fellow demonstrated the legendary stance that had earned him super salaries with the Boston Red Sox.

  His wife, Sissy, stood by herself in a short flare of chiffon, her lurid legs fleshy above the knees, her mouth stiffened into a smile to last the evening. She knew she was an afterthought, an insignificant addition to the gathering. Put a drink in her hand and forget her. Only a pretty Hispanic woman with a tray of delicacies took pity on her, pausing frequently to feed her. Then a small semibald man came up to her on springy feet.

  “Excuse me,” he said and reintroduced himself. She had met him before, briefly, another party. He was a mathematics teacher at Phillips Academy, brainy and bespectacled, though in no way intimidating. Inside his neat little beard his grin looked like a woman’s. “What’s it like, Mrs. Alexander, being married to a famous athlete?”

  An anchovy glued to something hot went down hard. Ginger ale, which she drank fast, pricked her nose. Behind her someone was telling a joke, and she flinched as if each burst of laughter were at her expense.

  “I suppose you’ve been asked that a thousand times.”

  Her face, round and wholesome, seemed to contract. “Please,” she said, “could you get me another ginger ale?”

  Kate Bodine, her blond hair negligently bundled back, arrived late, shot smiles at those she knew, and was surprised to glimpse her husband. He was deep in conversation with Paul Gunner, their posture stiff. Harley lacked an eye for art and an ear for music, but he had a sure head for business, and he was Gunner’s lawyer.

  They broke away, and she, lifting her wineglass high and dodging elbows, went to him.

  “I didn’t think you’d make it,” she said.

  “I came here directly.” He was tailored tight in a sober suit uncompromisingly correct. Inside he was diffuse, never one thing she could put her finger on but always a series of hedges, a reservoir of suspicions.

  “How did it go?” she asked.

  “I got tied up. I didn’t see him.”

  “He must be very disappointed.”

  “I’ll make it up to him.”

  “I don’t see how, Harley.”

  “Don’t make me feel more guilty than I do,” he said in a tone to remind her the boy was his son, not hers. His gaze roved; his dark, supple face changed expressions. “I’m going to the bar, do you mind?”

  “Do as you like, Harley.”

  Myles Yarbrough, his nerves shot, his stomach deranged from money losses, sneaked away early. Free of his jittery eye, Phoebe Yarbrough mingled with the weightless gait of a dancer. Voices rose rich and bubbly, eroding an inhibition or two, and she recklessly started a conversation with Ira Smith, his face owlish behind horn-rims, his voice warm.

  “I saw Myles leave,” he said.

  Her eyes absorbed him. Here was a man she could love, perhaps deeply, perhaps forever, but she knew he would not have it. Nor would Regina allow it. They were, if appearances counted, a happy couple. She said, “He has a lot on his mind.”

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  Like her husband, Ira Smith was a Boston lawyer but without the greed that might have propelled him into precarious situations. He headed the firm his grandfather had founded, his life laid out for him the day he was born. “Myles is a big boy,” she said. “Big boys take care of themselves, or at least they should.”

  “Everybody can use help now and then.”

  “I’ll buy that.” Her smile brought out bones while a melancholy twinge made her wonder what he would think if he knew that in her youth she had conducted business out of a Manhattan apartment. Her clients were corporate executives who booked her in advance, flowers arriving before they did. “But I’m not sure Myles would. His pride would get in the way.”

  “I can understand that.”

  His horn-rims reminded her of a client who at Christmas time had given her a glossy catalog of jewelry, no prices listed, and told her to choose something. The order form was in back, coded, so that his company would get the bill.

  “In tough economic times, Phoebe, you learn to live smaller.”

  “As long as others don’t notice,” she said and privately brushed his hand, which had the whiteness and dry hairs of a scholar or a minister. Her fingers latched on to three of his.

  He pleated his brow and spoke softly. “This isn’t wise.”

  “It’s not even possible,” she agreed.

  Lighter on her feet after a second drink, Kate Bodine glided into the company of two bankers from Andover, subtly balanced her attention, and charmed them both.

  Near a marble mantel graced with silver candlesticks, she joined a clutch of aging men and full-bodied matrons. A white-haired man in a cashmere jacket stared at her without restraint, and she edged away to sample a serving dish of choice little meats. Dick English, under an abundance of silver-streaked hair, gave her an extravagant smile, stepped in, and whispered, “When?”

  “Get off it,” she said and moved away.

  Someone stepped on her toe. New arrivals shifted patterns and rearranged scenes, and she sought her husband through a whirligig of heads and faces. Young Turks — go-getters in managerial positions at Raytheon, Gillette, and the like — surrounded him, held him in an eddy of talk.

  Angling out of the drawing room, Kate sought a bathroom and found it occupied. Another was close by, but she went off track looking for it, the heels of her pumps tapping the oak floor of a passageway that abruptly deposited her into a room of period pieces. A large gilt-framed mirror displayed the tarnish of authenticity, chairs looked appropriately fragile, and Germanic faces from another time peered out of photographs. A solitary figure stood near a baroque lamp. Beverly Gunner was smoking a cigarette.

  “Don’t tell. Paul doesn’t like it.” Under the golden shell of hair a smile worked loose. “Is everything all right? Is there enough food?”

  “Everything’s fine,” Kate said quickly.

  “Paul wants it to be perfect.”

  “It always is.”

  “He’ll find something.” The cigarette held high, the smoke escaped like a ghost going out on its own. “He’s too smart for me, Kate. He’s too smart for all of us.”

  “No man is that smart.”

  The cigarette was snubbed out. “He’ll smell the smoke, he always does. Is my face all right, Kate?”

  The skin around the eyes was worn, exhaustion written into it. The thin lips looked as if they had been stamped hard with permanent red ink. Kate said, “You look lovely.”

  “Then we must get back. Let me go first.”

  Kate found a bathroom off the kitchen and used it. The seat was cold. A wall mirror faced in on her, and with a bit of a start she discovered what she looked like sitting on a john. In the lighting, the ivory curve of her hip was bone. The roll was dow
n to its cylinder, and she ripped away the last tissue, more token than whole. At the sink the water ran cold, then too hot. She took out a tube and hurriedly made a mouth as if a camera awaited her.

  Returning to the party, she did a double take. Chief Morgan was standing at the edge of the crowd. Despite a wineglass in his hand, he looked very much an interloper with his searching air and the queerness in his expression. A bit of tattered lining hung loose from his sports jacket. She went to him with a challenging smile.

  “You a guest or a crasher?”

  He drained the wineglass and gave it to her. “I have to talk to your husband,” he said, the words full of weight.

  “James, what is it?”

  He gazed beyond her. “He’s here, isn’t he?”

  “Maybe the billiard room, I’m not sure. James, tell me what it’s about.”

  “I think it should come from him.” He edged past her. “Don’t worry, I’ll track him down,” he said, and for a wild second she imagined him scampering on all fours with his nose to the floor.

  She tried to follow him, but others got in the way. Regina Smith touched her arm and said, “We must see more of you and Harley.” She nodded and weaved, heads bobbing around her.

  She still had the chief’s empty glass and placed it on a table. Strong fingers gripped her arm. “Kate, I’m sorry,” Paul Gunner said. The words and the tone frightened her, and she pulled away, bumping shoulders with someone. Then she saw the stricken air of her husband.

  “Harley,” she said, bearing down.

  Chief Morgan edged back into the double doorway of the billiard room, where he became a shadow. Her husband stood in bright light, his arms slack, as if the movement had gone out of them for good.

  “My son is dead,” he said.

  2

  IT WAS THE HEART OF SUMMER, THE DOG STAR ADDING ITS HOT breath to the sun’s. On Beacon Street, traffic was packed into a heated whole. From a tall window in the cool of her studio, Mary Williams gazed down at it with a sadness that had to do with other things. When she turned to the man behind her, the endless brow of his shaved head shined in her face. With a smile, he stripped down to his Jockey shorts and tensed his stomach into curling muscles, which he displayed challengingly.

  “You can’t hurt me here. I see the punch coming, I can take it every time.”

  “Why would I want to punch you?” she said.

  “You’d be surprised those who’d like to.”

  She watched him flex his arms, the muscles ropes, not a bit of him wasted. His presence was pronounced and emphatic, which made him seem taller than he was. His nude head was the bone handle of his body. The only evidence that he was approaching sixty was the netted skin around his deep-set eyes, like the wingscape of butterflies.

  “Where’s the fag?” he said, and she stiffened.

  “Don’t call him that. I’d find it offensive even if it were so.”

  “Did he leave you?”

  “He’s away for a while. He’ll be back.”

  “A guy like that, you don’t know what he’ll do.”

  “You don’t know anything about him,” she shot back.

  “I got eyes, that’s enough.”

  Bending, he unzipped a rugged gripsack and pulled out a set of camouflage clothes, which was what she wanted to capture him in. His name was Eaton, but he called himself Soldier. Nearly twenty years out of the army, he still imitated the life.

  “I shouldn’t need more than an hour,” she said and watched him reclothe himself into a warrior and blouse his pants with stretched condoms square-knotted at the ends.

  “I got the cap,” he said. “Do you want me to put it on?”

  “No need,” she said, her gaze fixed on him. His ears lay flat as if in babyhood and beyond they had been taped. A violet hue burned through his suntanned scalp. His temple pulsed.

  “Where do you want me?”

  She stationed him in the strong light from the windows, where he stood in a way that looked hostile, not exactly what she wanted. “Relax. Act as though you were waiting in a line.”

  “I was doing that, I wouldn’t relax. I’d want to get to the front.”

  “Okay. Be that way.”

  She perched herself on a high chair, with a sketch pad in her lap and a collection of charcoal pencils in the pocket of the paint-smeared shirt she wore over shorts. Her feet were bare, the toes curled over a rung. Quickly, the edge of her hand scuffing the rough paper, she began sketching him but without verve or confidence, without the fire with which she could pretend she was Goya etching madness, Munch darkening a scream. She tore the sheet from the pad, tossed it aside, and started afresh.

  He winked at her. “I like it better when you do me in the raw.”

  With quick strokes she strove to capture from his stance someone lonely, displaced, and rootless, but produced only caricature. Her nerves were out of order.

  “You got nice toes,” he said, “but you ought to paint the nails. Give ’em character.”

  Her pencil concentrated on his face, weathered and shatterproof, and on his deep-set eyes, which could go conveniently vacant, immunizing him from criticism and insult. Every line in his brow seemed to have a purpose that defied translation. She was better doing women. Women she understood.

  He said, “I know somebody could give you a nice pedicure.”

  “I don’t want a pedicure, Soldier. I just want to get this right.”

  “You’ll never get me right. I’m nobody you ever knew.”

  “You’re commoner than you think,” she declared, shutting the sketch pad and slipping off the chair. “But you’re right, it’s not working. Maybe the next time.”

  “Tell me the problem,” he said, “maybe I can solve it.”

  She pattered to a table, where she opened a leather bag and extracted bills from a wallet, half the usual amount, which she offered up. “Will this do?”

  “Yeah, I’ll accept it.” He deposited the money into a deep pocket. “I know the problem,” he said. “Your friend’s not here, right?”

  She took herself to a window and gazed at the traffic, which the city endlessly sucked in and dribbled out. Sometimes her head hurt thinking about it. Pedestrians herded themselves along a crosswalk, their steps quick and their eyes wary, for the change of lights did not guarantee safety. Without turning, she said, “Your girlfriend, Soldier, I’d like to meet her.”

  “You would, huh? Why?”

  “I’d like to do her.”

  “It’s not her thing.” He came up behind her and caressed her back with the heel of his hand. “You’re sad, aren’t you? How long has he been gone?”

  “Two weeks,” she said.

  His breath closed in on her. “You got different bedrooms. How come?”

  “That’s none of your business, Soldier.”

  “Don’t get mad, I’m just asking. When will he be back?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, unable to muffle the worry in her voice or cloak the tension in her shoulders. He rubbed her back in a circular motion. Leaning over, he brandished his unwanted face.

  “You know what I like best about you?” His lips went to it. “This little mark on your cheek.”

  She stepped away, nerve-worn, uncertain, vulnerable, all of which heightened her sense of the absurd. His splotchwork of clothes presented farce rather than force. His arms hung long. He was not tall, only middling.

  “You want me to go, just say so.”

  Her mind veered from one thing to another as she flung a final look out the window. “There’s no rush,” she said.

  • • •

  Holly Pride at the library may have been the first to take note of the fellow, his appearance scruffy then but not yet derelict. When he breezed through the twin doors, she knew he was no townie and surely no resident of the Heights, but where others might have seen merely untidiness and eccentricity, she went beyond the stubble and rumpled clothes and surmised refinement and poetry, a story within a story.

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sp; “May I help you?” she asked when he approached the desk, bringing with him a bath of air, hot and humid. She was ready to rummage shelves for him, but all he wanted was a street map of the town, which she provided with a timidity that arose at vital times, a curse to her, a bit of amusement to him. Seated at a secluded table, he pored over the map and later scanned the town’s ill-written weekly, The Crier.

  Only she seemed struck by him. Fred Fossey, the part-time veterans affairs officer, was deep into a war book and never looked up. Other patrons ignored the stranger, but occasionally, with bent brows, Fossey glanced at them.

  He stayed an hour and in leaving thanked her with the sort of smile into which she could have read anything. Shifting to a window, she watched him ambulate the green, pausing to admire the rockery of flowers lovingly maintained by the Bensington Garden Club. She was sure he would return the next day or soon after, but he didn’t.

  He did, however, reveal himself in the leafy little neighborhoods beyond the green. Mildred Crandall, the town clerk’s wife, answered a knock at the back door and laid eyes on him when his appearance had deteriorated to whisker and grime. He astounded her because she had not seen tramps in Bensington since Depression days, when her mother had hurried them away with table scraps. She sent him walking with a powdered doughnut cocooned in plastic wrap.

  May Hutchins let him sit a spell in her gazebo, where she served him a bowl of high-fiber cereal weighted with strawberries and drenched in low-fat milk. He wore a signet ring she hoped was not stolen. The best time of day, he told her, is when the dew is still on the grass. “Yes,” she said, “I’m an early riser too.” A robin’s egg, he went on, is more precious than a pearl. She shied away from the unpleasant odor that flew up at her but relished his words.