Compromising Positions (8 page)

The rabbi banged his fist down on the pulpit, as if remonstrating me for losing interest in his sermon. “We may be deluged with rumors, besieged by innuendo,” he continued, “nearly strangled by the half truths and smears the media call journalism. But we all know the sort of man Bruce Fleckstein was. We know...”

I sensed, more than felt, a shudder and glanced at Scotty. Her eyes were filled with tears and she opened them wide so the tears wouldn’t run down her cheeks.

“Scotty,” I said softly, “are you okay?” She nodded, staring at the rabbi. “Scotty?”

“I’m fine,” she snapped. At first I was bewildered. The combination of Scotty Hughes crying and irritable was barely believable. She was such a controlled person that normally the most emotion she could show was a big round of applause at a tennis match.

Then I knew. “Scotty,” I murmured, “were you having an affair with Bruce Fleckstein?” She whipped her head around to stare at me and then turned away. I knew I had committed a gross breach of etiquette, but I persisted. “Scotty, this is important,” I whispered. “Did he take any pictures of you?” This time, her whole body turned toward me.

“You?” she whispered.

“No. A friend of mine.” I watched as she rummaged through her pocketbook, obviously looking for the handkerchief she had given to Brenda. I reached into mine and handed her a clean but linty tissue. She pressed it against her eyes.

“Scotty,” I began again.

“I think enough has been said, Judith,” and she turned from me, offering me a bit more of her back than was polite. There was no way I could pressure Scotty, as I had Mary Alice, to give me information.

Mary Alice was so easily manipulated, and Scotty was a bright, self-possessed woman. But Bruce had gotten to her too.

“...that Bruce Fleckstein was a man, a fine man with a fine family, and the memory of his warmth, his humor, his thousand little kindnesses will be our record of his life, our inheritance.” I tuned out the rabbi again and looked around. In a pew across the aisle, I saw my dentist, Dr. Burns. He was a soothing sort, small and quiet, who had Chopin piped into his office.

A few rows in front of him sat a friend of mine, Fay Jacobs. I was startled. How could she know the Flecksteins? Fay and I had met three years before at a NOW conference, where I had led a seminar on women in the New Deal. We began chatting and discovered we lived no more than a mile apart. Fay was in her fifties, short, stocky, and as muscular as a longshoreman, with chopped-off gray hair. She wore no makeup except for bright red lipstick, which invariably became smudged, giving her mouth a kind of pleasing, undefined generousness. She had been teaching history at Shorehaven High School since the late nineteen forties and was totally dedicated to her subject and her students. I adored her.

“As Wordsworth so aptly put it...” the rabbi was saying. Certain that the quotation would not be apt, I glanced away from Fay back to Scotty. Her large, bony hands gripped the arms of her seat, and her eyes were locked on the Eternal Light in a red-rimmed, unblinking stare. Had she come to Baum Brothers for a short goodbye, for a last moment with a lover who had brought passion and spontaneity into her placid, correct life? Or was she simply making sure the corrupt, manipulative son of a bitch was dead?

“‘The Lord is my shepherd,’” I heard dimly. How many women had followed him to the Tudor Rose Motor Inn, bleating with excitement? Would I have? If Marvin Bruce had told me how substantive I was, how thrillingly intelligent, would I have allowed myself to be led to an afternoon’s frolic?

The mourner’s Kaddish, the benediction, and then a brief announcement: “The family will be sitting
shiva
at the home of Mrs. Norma Fleckstein. The address is number fourteen, Fieldstone Road, Shorehaven North.” The “North” added about seventy-five thousand dollars to the price of the house. Every home there had, minimally, a “water vw, central AC, and over 2 acs of beaut. wooded property.”

The frosted-haired woman in front of me turned to her husband: “The home of Mrs. Norma Fleckstein. I can’t believe it.”

“Can’t believe what?” he asked. He was about fifty, with adolescent-length gray hair, dressed in a tan corduroy sport jacket with suede elbow patches. They clashed. She was with it, a Bloomingdale’s lady in a gray cashmere dress and heavy bracelets. He should have complemented her with a snug body shirt and Cardin suit, but instead, as if to emphasize the gulf between them—or to hide his paunch—he had opted for the sincere, professional look. He probably misquoted Buber to his nineteen-year-old girlfriends.

“I mean, I can’t believe that just a few days ago it was Bruce and Norma’s house and now it’s the home of Mrs. Norma Fleckstein. That’s what I can’t believe.”

A Baum entered from the wings and asked us to rise again. We did, and the family began to trudge out.

I turned to ask Scotty if she was ready to go. But she had already left. I could see her weaving through the crowd, heading along the side of the chapel to the rear exit. People poured into the aisles, a few looking dazed, a few waving eagerly to friends and neighbors across the chapel. A swelling wave of voices rose after the funereal silence. “How’ve you been?” “God, I hate funerals.” “How was Martinique?” I pushed my way past them and over to Fay Jacobs.

“Judith. How are you?” she asked, beaming at me and adjusting her bra strap. She explained my presence to the woman standing next to her: “Judith is my favorite historian since Commager.” The woman looked a little confused and then decided Fay had told a joke. She laughed and then quickly excused herself.

“Fay, it’s good to see you. It’s been months.”

“I know. Why don’t we have lunch? Come on, Judith, don’t refuse me. I took a personal day and I have all afternoon.”

I thought for a second. “Sure. But I have to pick Joey up at a friend’s house at two-thirty.”

“No problem,” she said. “I feel like pampering myself today. Let’s go some place very quiet and luxurious.”

“How about Quelle Crêpe? They have a decent salade niçoise.” She put on a too-long red plaid coat and buttoned it slowly. Her knuckles were swollen with arthritis and even that simple task was painful for her.

We walked outside, blinking from the bright sunlight, and stood under the canopy, watching the hearse and its escort of limousines and cars. “I didn’t know you knew them,” Fay declared. “They weren’t friends of yours, were they?”

“No. Not really.”

“Then why did you come?”

“I don’t know, Fay. I just shaved my legs and I wanted to wear a skirt and show them off.”

“Judith,” she smiled, “come on. Why?”

“I really don’t know, Fay. The mother of one of Joey’s friends said she was going and I volunteered to keep her company. Just a whim. Curiosity. I don’t know.”

We walked to the parking lot, Fay waving to every other person. She had lived in Shorehaven for so long that she seemed to know everyone. She patronized their stores, taught their children, worked with them at countless fairs and rummage sales.

“How did you know the Flecksteins?” I asked.

“Wouldn’t you rather discuss the revisionist view of Kennedy?”

“No.”

She opened her pocketbook and extracted her car keys. “He went to dental school with my nephew Roger. I suggested to Roger that he practice here, but his little boy had asthma, so they moved out West. But he told Bruce about Shorehaven, and when Norma and Bruce first moved here, I had them over to dinner a couple of times. Mainly to introduce them to some couples of their age.”

“That was very thoughtful of you,” I commented. She smiled and shrugged her shoulders. “Fay, what was he like? Really like?”

“Well, you wouldn’t be able to comprehend him. You lead a decent, uncomplicated life.” She opened the door to her car with some difficulty, unable to get a tight grip on the handle.

“For God’s sake, Fay. What’s this decent business? What are you going to do, explain the situation to me when I grow up?”

She looked up at me, coloring a bit. “I’m sorry. I really didn’t mean to sound condescending. Look, let’s get to the restaurant and I’ll tell you everything I know about the Flecksteins. If you’re interested.”

“If I’m interested? Would I be here if I weren’t interested?”

“All right,” she sighed. “But it’s not a pleasant story. And you’ll see why Bruce didn’t live happily ever after.”

“How many, s’il vous plait?” asked the hostess, a heavy middle-aged woman dressed in a beribboned French provincial costume.

“Deux,” I replied, and followed her across the dark red linoleum floor, embossed in a brick design, to a small table in a corner.

“Ees zees hokay?” she inquired. She had the inept French accent of Americans who have never studied the language.

“Oui,” I answered, and she smiled warmly at us and departed, no doubt pleased because she had carried on a conversation in French.

Quelle Crêpe had opened in the early sixties, when masses of young couples, thousands of little Jacks and Jackies, moved to Long Island from Brooklyn and Queens. Refusing to adopt the suburban Eisenhoweresque style of their neighbors—the crew cut, the circle pin, and the barbecue—they served coq au vin to each other and spent Saturday nights in Manhattan at the theater or the opera. Their sons, it is true, joined the Little League, but physical fitness did have the Kennedy imprimatur. And the ladies—they weren’t women then—marched right by the tea rooms of the Old Wave suburbanites and into Quelle Crêpe, where for a few dollars you could have a glass of wine and a crêpe with fromage or fromage et oeufs or fromage et oeufs et jambon or even fromage et oeufs et jambon et asperges, like a francophile’s Dagwood sandwich.

We declined the proffered menus and ordered our salads and coffee. Fay ran her arthritic fingers through her massacred hairdo and smiled.

“So?” I asked.

“So? You want to know about the Flecksteins?”

“Everything.”

“Well, Judith, ‘everything’ is a little beyond me. I made certain never to cross over the barrier of intimacy.” Our salads arrived. Fay carefully picked out the anchovies and put them on the side of her plate. “Well, the most interesting thing was that there was nothing interesting about either of them.” She paused.

“What do you mean?” I inquired.

“Well, they weren’t uninteresting, in the sense of being stupid or dull. Bruce was quite pleasant really. The first time they came over, he chatted with everybody and even managed to sound interested in Lou Sherman—he’s on the board of the North Shore Historical Society. Well, Bruce asked him a lot of questions about the history of Shorehaven, and Lou was quite voluble. But I don’t know why, it wasn’t anything Bruce actually said, but I knew he really wasn’t interested in what Lou was saying.”

“You mean he was just trying to make a good impression?”

“No. More than that. It was as if he felt that a little bit of local history might someday be useful to him. So he let Lou give him a short course, and he filed it somewhere in the back of his mind. I don’t know, there was something about him...”

“What?”

“Wait a second.” She speared a piece of lettuce and tuna fish. “It was as if he were programmed for niceness. He was pleasant to everyone, interested in everyone, to the same degree.”

“Who else was there that evening?”

“It was so long ago. Let me think. The Shermans, the Burnses.”

“The dentist?” I asked.

“Yes. And Joe and me. I think that was all.” Joe, Fay’s husband, a vice-president of a local bank, was such a quiet, pallid man that I often had to be reminded that he existed.

“All right,” I said, “what about Norma? What’s she like?”

“Nice.”

“Nice? From what you said at the funeral home, I was expecting a little more than ‘nice.’”

“Well, she was. She had the same sort of pleasantness he had, a kind of controlled friendliness to everyone. I remember thinking she was very attractive for a basically ordinary-looking woman. Very well groomed and beautifully dressed, and they didn’t have much money then. But there’s nothing more to tell about her. She asked all the right questions—about the schools, which temple to join, things like that. And she did all the right things.”

“You mean she didn’t pick her nose at the dinner table.”

“No,” Fay grinned. “Only over hors d’oeuvres. But you know what I mean. She brought me a nice little house gift. She talked with everyone. She sent me a thank you note.”

“Do you think,” I asked, holding a wrinkled black olive between my thumb and forefinger, “that she seemed a little bland because she was nervous or shy? Being new in the community?”

“I think that might have had something to do with it,” Fay conceded. “But it was odd. Nothing else came through. Usually, like the first few days of school, when kids are on their best behavior, you can pick up a lot about them. Their quirks just seem to pop to the surface. I can always tell the intelligent ones and the ones who have personal problems and the ones who will spend the whole term just taking up space. But with Norma, well, she was what she was.”

“And what was she?”

“Nice. Attractive. Polite. Reasonably intelligent.”

“How did she relate to her husband?”

“She adored him. That was obvious. Every time he spoke, she would concentrate on every pearl that dropped from his lips. I mean, if he had announced he was going to the bathroom, she would have thought that was terribly clever and very profound.”

“And how did he act toward her?”

“He seemed devoted to her, did all the things a model husband should do, smiled at her, lit her cigarettes.”

Our coffee came and by tacit mutual consent we took a break, although I was still unclear why Fay was so disturbed by the Flecksteins; there had to be more. For a few minutes, we chatted about her honors class, a seminar of high school seniors studying the Civil War.

Then Fay asked: “Would you like more coffee?”

“Yes. And more about the Flecksteins.” She looked at me and shifted uncomfortably in her chair. “If they were so terribly ordinary, why didn’t you like them? What happened?”

“Well, it’s hard to say when it started. Oh, I know. About a week after the party, Jean Burns called me, ostensibly to say thanks. But she started asking all sorts of questions about Bruce, and about his relationship with Norma.” She stopped for a minute. “Judith, this is to go no further.”