A Stranger in My Grave (20 page)

The minutes passed, ticking away like heartbeats. It had been a long, cruel day. So many of the days were long and cruel. Carlos was well out of it. He was with the angels by this time. No more candles would be necessary, the priest said. “He will certainly be in heaven by this time,” the priest said. “You mustn't become a fanatic; it looks bad for the church. This has been going on long enough.”

He was right, of course. Things had been going on long enough. . . .

She picked up the phone.

15

Your mother kept her vow, Daisy. We are still apart, you and I. She has hidden her shame because she cannot bear it the way we weaker and humbler ones can and must and do
. . . .

 

On Saturday afternoon
Ada Fielding had lunch at a downtown restaurant with a group of friends. After lunch she found herself being followed into the powder room by Mrs. Weldon, a member of the group whom she didn't know very well and didn't like at all. Mrs. Weldon's large, inquisitive eyes were always hidden by a veil, like windows by a net curtain, and her thin, sharp mouth moved constantly, even when she wasn't talking, as if she were chewing on some little regurgitated seeds from the past.

Adjusting her veil in front of the mirror above the washbasin, Mrs. Weldon said, “How's Daisy?”

“Daisy? Oh, fine, she couldn't be better, thanks.”

“And Jim?”

She wasn't even aware that Mrs. Weldon knew the names of her daughter and son-in-law, but she concealed her surprise, as she had concealed a great many other things in her lifetime, under a slow, placid smile. “Jim is very well, too. He'd planned on going north this weekend to look at some land he's thinking of buying, but he decided to wait until it was cooler. Hasn't it been a fantas­tic year? All this heat and no rain to speak of.”

But Mrs. Weldon did not intend to put up with weather-talk when she'd planned on people-talk. “A friend of mine saw Daisy the other day—Corinne, you've heard me mention Corinne, the lovely girl that lives next door to us—well, not a girl, really, she's almost forty, but she's kept her figure like a girl. Of course she was born skinny; that helps. Corinne saw Daisy just the other day and said she was looking quite peaked.”

“Indeed? I certainly haven't noticed.”

“Thursday, it was. Thursday afternoon, walking along Piedra Street with a young man. I knew it couldn't be Jim. Jim's so blond and fair-skinned, and this man was quite—well, dark.”

“Daisy is acquainted with a great many men,” Mrs. Fielding said casually. “Dark and fair.”

“I meant dark in you-know-what sense.”

“I'm afraid I don't understand.”

“Of course you're not a native Californian . . .” Mrs. Weldon stopped and shook her head helplessly; these nonnative Californians could be very dense. “I meant, this man wasn't one of
us.”

Ada Fielding was well aware of her meaning, but it seemed advisable to feign innocence, to appear imperturbable; there was nothing a gossip enjoyed more than the signs of anxiety, a quick­ening of the breath, a sudden flush, a clenching of the hands. Mrs. Fielding's hands and breathing remained steady, and her flush was hidden by a layer of powder. Only she knew it was there, she could feel it in her cheeks and neck, and it annoyed her because there was nothing to get excited about. Daisy had been seen walk­ing along a street with a dark young man. Very well, what of it? Daisy had all kinds of friends. Still, in a town like this, one had to be careful. There was a difference between being tolerant and being foolish, and Daisy, even with the best of intentions, could be quite foolish at times.

“No, I'm not a native Californian,” she said blandly. “I was born in Colorado. Have you ever visited Colorado? The moun­tain scenery is perfectly magnificent.”

But Mrs. Weldon was not interested in Colorado. “By a strange coincidence Corinne happened to recognize the man. She met him last year when she was in that little scrape with the police. All she had at the bridge party was one teensy cocktail, but when she ran through the red light—Corinne swears it was yellow—the police insisted she was drunk. She had a perfectly dreadful time. It was Saturday, the banks were closed, and her lawyer was out playing golf, and her parents were in Palm Springs for the weekend. And the poor girl is so delicate because she never eats anything. Anyway, along came this young man and bailed her out. Corinne can't recall his name, but she remem­bered his face because he was so good-looking—except of course he was—well, dark.”

“That's a very interesting story about Corinne's scrape with the police,” Mrs. Fielding said with a small, steely smile. “I must remember to pass it along.”

For nearly a week Daisy had been trying to arrange to have the house to herself, and she had finally accomplished it. Her mother was downtown shopping, Stella had taken the weekend off after Daisy convinced her she wasn't feeling well, and Jim had gone out for a sail in Adam Burnett's new racing sloop. Both the invitation and its acceptance had been engineered by Daisy: Jim suffered from seasickness, and Adam, who wasn't accus­tomed to the new boat, would have preferred a more experi­enced crew, but neither man put up much of an argument.

From the kitchen window Daisy watched Jim's car until it dis­appeared around the first sharp turn of the road that wound down the canyon. Then she went down immediately to the lower part of the house. Here there was an extra bedroom and bath for guests; a lanai decorated in pale green and turquoise which, seen in a half-light, looked under water; Jim's hobby room; and, at the far end of the house off the lanai, Jim's den. The den was filled with various pieces of furniture Jim had made himself, some of it experimental and impractical, all of it modernistic in line. The largest object in the room looked incongruous beside the mod­ern pieces: a huge, old-fashioned rolltop desk which Jim had bought at an auction so that he could study its design and work out an improved version. But the old desk had proved so useful and satisfactory that he'd never bothered trying to improve it.

The rolltop and the drawers were locked, though the key was in plain sight on the windowsill. Daisy thought how typical this was of Jim, to lock everything, as if he felt surrounded by thieves, then to leave the key available, as if he'd decided he had nothing worth stealing after all.

She unlocked the desk while the dog, Prince, stood in the doorway, his tail between his legs, his amber eyes indicating dis­approval of this change in routine. He knew Daisy didn't belong down here in this room, and he sensed her nervousness.

The top part of the desk was very neat, with separate little drawers for stamps and for paper clips, compartments for pencils, current bills, unanswered letters, bankbooks, clippings from out-of-town newspapers advertising land for sale. In contrast to the top of the desk, the larger drawers were crammed with stuff—old letters and postcards, bank statements, half-empty packets of matches and cigarettes.

She began going through the drawers, taking everything out and laying each item on a half-finished free-form table which Jim was making for her mother's cottage. She had no real hope of finding anything, but she kept on searching, her hands moving clumsily as if they were weighted down by feelings of guilt and shame at what she was doing. Jim had always trusted her, and she had trusted him. Now, she thought, after eight years of marriage, she was going through his private papers like a common thief. And, as any common thief deserved, she was finding nothing. The postcards were impersonal, the letters innocent. Already, in her mind, apologies were forming:
Jim dear, I'm terribly sorry. I didn't mean any harm. . . .

At the back of the left bottom drawer she came across a pile of used checkbooks. They were not arranged in order of date. The one on the top was from a year ago and covered a period of four months.

Without expecting to find anything important, she began to turn the tiny pages listlessly, as if she were reading a dull book with lots of characters but no plot. She knew most of the char­acters: the pharmacist, Stella, the owners of the bookstore and dress shop and building supply company, the dentist, the veteri­narian, the gardener, the paperboy. The largest amount, $250, had gone to Stella for wages. The stub with the next largest amount bore the name Ab and the amount $200. It was dated September 1.

She checked the next month's stubs, and here again she discov­ered an identical notation for October 1. When she came to the end of the book, she'd found four of them altogether, each for $200, paid to Ab at the beginning of the month.

Ab. She knew no one by that name, no Abner, Abbott, Abernathy, Abigail. The closest was Adam. Adam Burnett. A.B.

She was not actually surprised at first: it was natural enough for Adam to be receiving money from Jim. He was Jim's lawyer and did all his tax work. But the amount—$200 a month, $2,400 a year for a tax consultant—seemed excessive, and she was puzzled by the fact that Jim had not paid it through his office as a business expense. Was it possible that Jim was paying off a debt, that he had borrowed money from Adam and wanted to keep it secret from his business associates? That he was not as well off as he pretended to be in front of her and her mother?

How foolish of him not to tell me
, she thought.
I could easily econo­mize. Mother and I got along on a shoestring when we had to. And we usually had to.

The dog, Prince, suddenly let out a bark and bounded noisily through the lanai and up the stairs. Although Daisy could hear nothing from the upper floor, she knew someone must have come into the house, and she began frantically cramming everything back into the drawers. She might have had a chance to finish if Prince hadn't decided that it was his duty to guide Mrs. Fielding down to the den and Daisy.

The two women stared at each other for a moment in the silence of mutual confusion. Then Daisy said awkwardly, “I thought you were going to spend the afternoon shopping.”

“I changed my mind. It was too hot downtown.”

“Oh.”

“It's nice and cool down here, though.”

“Yes.”

“Just what do you think you're doing?”

It was, for Daisy, like a scene from her childhood, with her mother standing over her, strong and angry and, above all, right, and herself cringing and scared and, beneath all, wrong. But she was older now; she knew better than to sound scared or admit she was wrong. “I was looking for something I thought Jim might have put in his desk.”

“Something so important that you couldn't wait until he comes home to ask him about it?”

“On the contrary, it's so trivial I wouldn't bother him about it. Jim has a lot on his mind.”

“You should know. You put it there.”

“Oh, Mother, for heaven's sake, don't. Don't start anything.”

“Something has already been started,” Ada Fielding said harshly. “You started it last Monday morning when you allowed yourself to get hysterical over some absurd little dream. That's how it all began, with a dream, and since then everything's been going to pieces. There have been times when I actually thought you were losing your mind—crying and carrying on, wandering around a cemetery alone looking for a tombstone you saw in a dream, cross-examining us all, even Stella, about a dead Mexican none of us ever heard of—it's sheer madness.”

“If it's madness, it's mine, not yours. Don't worry about it.”

“And now
this
, this sneaking around going through Jim's pri­vate papers, what does it mean? What are you looking for?”

“You know what I'm looking for. Jim must have told you. He tells you everything else.”

“Only because you won't talk to him anymore.”

Daisy stared at a section of the wall, wondering how many times during the past week Jim and her mother had discussed the situa­tion. Perhaps they had a conference about her whenever she was absent, like two doctors in consultation over a very sick patient whose symptoms they didn't understand.
“She's looking for a lost day, Dr. Fielding.” “That sounds pretty serious, Dr. Harker.” “Oh, it is. First case I've ever had quite like it.” “We may have to operate.”
“
Good idea. Splendid. If the lost day is anywhere, it's inside her. We'll dig it out and dispose of it. Can't leave it in there festering.
”

“You seem,” Mrs. Fielding said, “to resent the fact that Jim confides in me.”

“Not at all.”

“Most young women are grateful for a decent relationship between in-laws. Jim and I have many differences of opinion, but we try to overlook them for your sake, because we both love you.” Mrs. Fielding's eyes were moist, and the corners of her mouth turned down as if she was going to cry. She pressed her finger­tips against her mouth to steady it. “You know that, don't you? That we both love you?”

“Yes.” She knew they both loved her, each in a different way, neither of them completely. Jim loved her insofar as she fitted his conception of the ideal wife. Her mother loved her as a projection of herself, but the projected part must be without the flaws of the original. Oh yes, certainly, she was loved. Being loved was not the problem. The problem, when you were the focus of two such powerful people as Jim and her mother, was the loss of spontane­ity, of being able to love.

She thought, suddenly and disturbingly, of Pinata, of the drive back to the city from the cemetery, how old and tormented his face had looked in the dashlights as if he thought no one was watching him and it was safe to show his sorrow.

She turned her head and saw her mother looking at her, and she knew she'd better stop thinking about Pinata. It was fright­ening the way her mother could read her mind sometimes.
But then I am her projection machine. She just sits back and watches the pic­tures, censoring, editing. She can't see Pinata, though. She doesn't even know about him. No one does.
Pinata was hers, locked up in a secret drawer inside herself.