The Cavanaugh Quest (3 page)

“Upwardly mobile,” I said. “That’s what they’d call it now. Chronic overachiever.”

Hubbard stood up and ejected his cigarette stub into my Cinzano ashtray.

“Well,” he said, “there were those who thought she was a little pushy. Never could see it myself.” He shrugged. “Let’s go. I’m bushed.” He looked it.

By the time I got back a wind with wetness in it had come up and the old wooden swing on my balcony was moving by itself. I kicked off my tattered penny loafers and padded out to watch the storm coming across the western suburbs. The purple clouds reflected darkly in the face of the IDS building and the downtown lights glowed yellow. It was still hot but I could see the rain like a frail curtain hanging on the outskirts of the city.

I was thinking about Larry Blankenship and his wife, Kim, the sad little pile of lifeless flesh which had been the sum of what he’d left behind. Hubbard Anthony had called him a natural victim, a man determined to be a victim, and his wife had called him a loser. That was all I knew about Larry Blankenship and even that clung like a scab on the side of my consciousness. It was seeing the body that did it; take away the body and it would have bothered me no more than any of a thousand other sad stories you’re always hearing somewhere.

Lightning walked across the horizon like a regiment of stick soldiers and I flinched at the crack of thunder. Then the rain began to swish past the balcony and I took a deep swallow of Pimm’s Cup. Headlamps probed at the swirling rain below me and I went inside and put an old Freddy Gardner saxophone record on and went back to my chair hearing the lonely, elegant, sad music. I suppose the music was a stupid idea because it only deepened the mood which had grown so steadily since the sunshiny afternoon of tennis.

But what the hell. I was giving up to it, the sense of reflection, more and more lately. Closing in on forty, I’d decided that life was no longer quite the endless parade of possibilities it once had seemed. Every time I turned around I caught sight of another option being shot to pieces. Still, I was better off than Larry Blankenship. As far as options went, Larry Blankenship was fresh out.

Unhappy marriages are all alike. I wondered if all marriages are unhappy. Probably not, but then you never knew. Kim and Larry, in their upwardly mobile way, had tried to make it on their own. She’d made herself useful at Norway Creek, where no one was upwardly mobile because no one in Minneapolis had found anything higher to aspire to. They must have served as wonderful models for Kim Roderick as she made her move from waitress to tennis instructor. How many passes had the rich made, how many by the sons of the rich? How many tennis lessons had turned into something else?

I’d finished the pitcher and I was thinking like Scott Fitzgerald in his “Winter Dreams” period. Freddy Gardner kept playing, now “Roses of Picardy,” and I was withstanding a mixed-media assault. A woman on another balcony was laughing, a woman who sounded like Anne, from whom I’d stolen the wedding-present pitcher. I hadn’t seen her in several weeks but the laugh was like hers and she had hated my Freddy Gardner saxophone records. Thank God, we’d had no children. Maybe I was lucky, not a victim; Larry and Kim had had a child and naturally there’d been something wrong with it. Naturally. And it had been stuck away somewhere. And his wife had called him a loser and had left him and a while later he blew his brains out in my lobby. It was the saddest story I’d ever heard and the wind had changed, shifting to blow across the park toward me. I was getting wet so I went back inside and left the sliding door wide open to keep me in touch with nature. I was a romantic; Anne had hated romantics. But then she was one of those from the Norway Creek Club who had nowhere left to go, at least not upward. Those people, by and large, are not romantics, are not so afflicted with what is clearly a condition of the middle classes. Kim and Larry probably had had fairly advanced cases. I’d have bet on it.

I didn’t much like the way my mind was running. The thunder was smashing steadily at the city like artillery trained on the enemy campfires and lightning kept going off like rocket fire. I went down the dark hallway, hung a left, took off my clothes, switched off the telephone, turned on the old wicker lamp by the bed, opened the windows, which sent the curtains billowing, and lay down on the bed with
The Baseball Encyclopedia,
which meant that I was afraid of the night.

Two of the most important treasures anyone can find in life are, one, something which can effectively take your mind off yourself and, two, something which can put you to sleep when the nighttime is your adversary. For $17.95
The Baseball Encyclopedia
does both and consequently, dollar for dollar, it is the most valuable object ever devised by man. On page 687 I began rummaging through the career of one of my favorite players of the forties, Bill Nicholson, also known as Big Swish, who played the outfield for the Cubs from 1939 until 1948, when, almost sacrilegiously, he was traded to the Phillies, where he ended his career in 1953.

When my father had been a professor at the University of Chicago I had frequently gone to Wrigley Field, where the green vines grew thick on the outfield walls. Nicholson had been a six-foot, 200-pounder with a reputation as a home-run hitter, though his totals don’t realize that World War II baseball was sort of a make-do-with-what-you-could-find proposition. When I was ten years old, in 1944, and when Nicholson was thirty he led the National League with 33 home runs, 116 runs scored, and 122 runs batted in. I’d never heard of anybody quite like Bill Nicholson before and one day while I stood watching some teenagers play baseball on a vacant lot I heard one of them refer to the one who was batting as Big Bill Nicholson. I felt my heart jerk and I swallowed hard, inconspicuously edging around the sun-bleached grass until I could see if this guy really was Bill Nicholson; after all, the Cubs had an off day before Brooklyn came in and maybe this was how he spent his spare time. But it wasn’t Bill Nicholson, of course. It was a big muscular kid with boils on the back of his neck and he could hit hell out of the ball. But he was a long way from being Bill Nicholson.

It was thundering again and rain was spraying through the window onto my bare feet. The huge volume had slipped down on my lap and my eyelids felt as if somebody were rubbing sand into them but my brain hadn’t cut out yet. I was still thinking about Larry Blankenship and wondering why it all works out for some people and doesn’t work out at all for others. It was a train of thought which could drive you crazy and maybe nothing really worked out for anybody. Maybe that was why everybody got so tired.

I
HAD SHOWERED BUT WAS
still in my underwear and gaping robe when I went to fetch the morning
Tribune
from the hallway. Her voice came like the muffled caw of a bird; everything about her was birdlike, the sharp darting nose, the gray feathery hair, the overquick jerks and snaps of her head. “Why, Paul”—quick breath, mouth snapping shut between words, eyes poking about in a random pattern, flighty—“how are you this morning?” It was her perfunctory way of getting to whatever was really on her mind. She was rubbing her nose with a Kleenex, ready to begin the next remark.

“I’m fine, Mrs. Dierker,” I said, “just getting my paper.”

She always looked as if she’d only just that moment come across a conspiracy of some significance. I’d known her all my life, through my parents. The Dierkers had recently sold their elaborate Lake of the Isles mansion and moved into the building, waiting for the end. Harriet Dierker looked as if she had a way to go.

“Well, I’m so upset I don’t know what to do …” She twisted her hands, an elderly woman acting like a child, tailoring the performance to her audience. “Tim just sits there and eats his Rice Krispies, dribbling cream on his Pendleton robe, telling me to calm down—it’s so frustrating, so upsetting. And he’s not at all well, you know. There’s been something particularly bothering him lately.”

I looked bland. She always sounded the same, whether discussing the weather or a natural disaster.

“You’ve heard about what happened yesterday, haven’t you?” Her voice eased out in a long phony chord of consolation, exaggerated. She didn’t really care, I’d always thought, but pretended that she cared. She was the Spirit of Gossip; she would have fitted well
into The School for Scandal.

“Ah …” My mind wasn’t really connecting yet. I was trying to hold my robe together. “I don’t know …”

“In the lobby, Paul,” she said accusingly, “Larry Blankenship killed himself!” She found another Kleenex in her alligator bag. She was wearing a striped Peck & Peck knit, lime green and yellow and blue, with matching blue shoes. She always looked like that, perfect in a rather hideously premeditated way.

“That, yes, I heard about that.”

“Such a tragedy,” she said reprovingly, as if I weren’t properly saddened. “He couldn’t have been more than forty and he had every reason to live …” She was edging toward my doorway, and it was inevitable. I asked her if she’d like to join me for my morning coffee. She said she certainly would and she could use a few minutes, sitting down, ignoring for the moment her own doorway not more than thirty feet away. But her husband was behind that door, dribbling cream on himself.

I’d put the fresh-ground coffee into the top of the Braun Aromaster before my shower and it was steaming and ready. I poured two mugs and we went out onto the balcony, where the morning sun had dried the green Astroturf. The world looked fresh and clean. It was nine o’clock and Minneapolis was moving below us.

“Shot himself in the head, poor man,” she began again, determined to get on with it, and I didn’t stop her. It was all coming back to me and I was curious. She repeated what I already knew about the circumstances of the suicide, item for item; she always had her sources. Her sorrow, her pity, they were all on the surface, in gestures and movements of her eyebrows and vocal intonations which conveyed another strong message: Somehow Harriet Dierker was above and impervious to the problems of lesser mortals. She sorrowed for them as she would for a dog struck by a bus.

“What made it all the worse is that he’d just started his new job, he’d just moved in here, oh, my …   and he had that lovely new Thunderbird, the green one parked down by the fountain. Everything seemed to have finally gotten all straightened out for him.” She pursed her lips. “And he was finally free of that woman!” The expression on her face reminded me that birds are killers. Only a few days before, I’d stood by the bird sanctuary at Como Park and watched a graceful, terrible swan rip a baby duck to pieces while the mother stared frantically, helplessly on.

“Which woman is that?” I asked, sipping my milky coffee and watching the morning duck inspection far below in the pond.

“His wife, of course, that Kim person—oh, she was lovely to look at, beautiful, but, Paul, she was the sort of woman the word ‘bitch’ was invented for …”

“Really?” There was no need to prod her. She was moving ahead under her own power.

“Worse, Paul, worse—you wouldn’t understand, no man could unless they’d known such a woman. A hellion. A witch!” She was working herself up to some pinnacle of ladylike disgust but words failed her and she made an alert, quick face of undisguised revulsion.

“Hub Anthony said some people thought she was a little pushy, maybe,” I said, “but he couldn’t see it himself. Said she was always making herself useful—”

She shivered as if Hubbard’s frailty made her flesh crawl.

“Oh, Hubbard Anthony should know! He certainly should know!”

“What do you mean? What are you implying?”

She clammed up; she always did when someone stood up to her line of accusation, innuendo, half truth. She knew she’d gone too far and switched back to the subject of Kim Blankenship with awesome, practiced ease.

“Did you know her, Paul?”

“No. But I understand my father did, and your husband, as well as Hub. I never knew her. I never knew Blankenship, for that matter.”

“Well, you were away much of the time, weren’t you?” She dabbed the corner of her mouth with a paper napkin. “And Larry’s world was quite different from yours—business, accounting, the sort of thing you never got involved in. Larry wasn’t sophisticated, no big college, none of the advantages,” and she went on in the Horatio Alger vein while I wondered why she was being so defensive about him. She sounded as if she had a stake in him, as if he were something like a son and I was the enemy who had cast some near aspersion on his background.

“But he was a good boy and when he came down to Minneapolis—let’s see, it must have been 1952 or 1953, I’d think—he showed up at the plant asking Pa for a job, wanted to go on the road and learn the business by selling paint.” She cocked her head like an aging parrot, watching a memory scurry along the edge of time like a mouse behind the sideboard. “I remember Pa coming home that day and telling me about this young man with white socks and a blue suit—that always appealed to Pa, that the boy dressed the same unfashionable way he did himself. He’d come in and looked around the offices and it was lunchtime and the secretaries all happened to be out and Larry saw Tim’s name on the office door, Timothy Dierker of Dierker and Company, and he figured this must be the fellow to see, the big mucky-muck, he called him …” Her eyes were developing shiny tears and I supposed she really was remembering. “He walked right in on Pa and Pa was so surprised and impressed that he gave him a job. Oh, if Dan Peterson hadn’t finally come into the office off the road, there wouldn’t have been a job but Pa always said he’d have found him a job, he liked him that much.” She sighed spitefully. “Oh, he’d never met her at that point … but, you know, Paul, it must have been foreordained even then because it was just about that time that Ole Kronstrom began giving Helga problems—Helga was his wife, one of my best friends, and Ole was Pa’s partner in Dierker and Company.” She was turning it over in her mind, like a marginal worm. “Yes, it was just about the time that Larry Blankenship came to work for Pa that Helga told me that she thought Ole was going through the change—she thought he was running around with girls; she saw him winking at the waitresses out at Norway Creek … it was hard for me to believe at first because Pa had never been one to engage in that sort of smutty thing. But wives know their husbands best, Paul”—she touched my arm to underline her contention—“and it turned out that she was right, Ole was beginning to chase …” She sniffed righteously. “Working his way up, or down, if you see what I mean, to that Kim Roderick, who was just nothing, nothing but a waitress herself at Norway Creek, a waitress out to catch a rich man.” It was difficult to tell which upset her more, Ole’s infidelity or the fact that it had been committed with a waitress. The Dierkers had never really gotten used to having a lot of money, even though they were the second generation in paint, but while Tim never took it very seriously Harriet was self-consciously moneyed—unsure of her grammar and schooling and antecedents but sure of her power over underlings, all those who didn’t have as much money and were defined in their own minds by the lack of it. Largesses, noblesse oblige—she loved to take those poses but only if you were well behaved and knew your place. Larry Blankenship had but Kim Roderick apparently hadn’t.