The Man Who Cancelled Himself (50 page)

“They do have tests, darling. If you don’t believe me.”

“Why should I believe you?” I demanded.

“No reason,” she confessed. “None at all. Except that it’s the truth.” She sat back on her haunches and gave me her up-from-under look, the one that gives me goose bumps. “Remember Thanksgiving? That uncommonly warm Indian summer day? I was weeding at the edge of the duck pond, and I slipped and fell in and you—”

“Came to your rescue, as it were. I remember.”

She smiled wistfully. “That’s when it happened, darling. I left for Fiji soon afterward, and … there’s no one else, Hoagy. There never has been.”

I swallowed and took her hand. “Merilee?”

“Yes, darling?”

“You’ve put me through nine months of living hell.”

“Just like old times, wasn’t it?” she asked sweetly.

“I don’t believe I can ever forgive you for this, Merilee.”

“It wasn’t easy for me, either,” she pointed out, pouting. “I suffered, too. Alone, I might add.”

“That, Merilee, was your own choice. Why did you do this to me? To yourself. To
us?”

“I didn’t want you to feel obligated.”

“Bullshit!”

“I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t use that kind of language in the house. Tracy might—”

“We would have worked this out, Merilee. I would have been here for you. You know that.”

“I knew you didn’t want a child.”

“But we would have been together.”

“You’re a decent man, Hoagy. A gentleman. The last of a dying breed. And you would have done the decent, gentlemanly thing. I knew that. But I was the one who wanted her, not you. So I thought it was best to free you of any responsibility.”

We gazed at each other, and I got lost in her green eyes for a moment.

“You’re saying you did all of this for me?”

She ducked her head ruefully. “I guess it does sound like a load of applesauce, when you put it that way.”

“Sounds more like one big publicity stunt. Who thought it up, your press agent?”

She stiffened. “That was low, Hoagy. That was beneath you.”

“I’m not as tall as I used to be. You cut me off at the knees, remember?”

“I’m sick about that, darling. Truly I am. I’d never intentionally hurt you. You know that. But, well, I’ve never been one to do things in a quiet way either. I’m given to the dramatic gesture. There, I admit it, okay? And, well, it just got a little out of hand, that’s all. The media, the speculation … I—I never meant for any of that to happen. I swear.”

“Why the hell didn’t you just set them straight?”

“How could I? No one would have believed me if I said the father was
you.
Not after all of those months of publicity. Merciful heavens, they would have thought I was crazy.”

“You can hardly blame them, Merilee. But why didn’t you at least set
me
straight?”

“Because I made a deal with myself, and I was determined to see it through. I regretted every minute of it, Hoagy. For myself, and for what it did to you. And, God, how I’ve missed you. Every second of every day. There’s no one else, Hoagy. And there never will be. Just you. Only you.” Her eyes searched my face. “Say something.
Please.”

“I don’t believe I can ever forgive you for this, Merilee.”

“You said that already. Say something else.”

“Very well, Merilee.” I got to my feet. “I’ll say something else. I’ll say the last word: Good-bye.”

I walked out of the apartment without looking back. Rode the elevator down. Elbowed my way past the photographers and into the park. I walked. I don’t remember exactly where, or for how long. I was in too much of a daze. I know I sat on a bench, but I don’t recall which bench. Or how long I sat on it. I only remember it was dark out when I finally shook myself and got up.

And went back upstairs to her. To them.

Turn the page to continue reading from the Stewart Hoag Mysteries

S
OMETIMES AS I SLEEP
I hear a creak on the stairs. For a moment I think it is my father on his way down to the kitchen for a glass of milk in the night, and that I am in my old room, snug in my narrow bed. Briefly, this comforts me. But then I awaken, and realize that it is my own house that is creaking, from the wind, and that I am in the master bedroom. She sleeps next to me, secure in the belief that I know what I’m doing. I don’t know what I’m doing.

I wonder if he did. I wonder why he was awake in the night. I wish I could ask him. But it is too late for that. It is too late for a lot of things.

I
WAS CHANGING TRACY’S
diapers at four o’clock in the morning when Thor Gibbs showed up. Not the height of glamorous living, I’ll give you that one. And definitely not some thing I thought I’d ever be caught doing for any midget human life form, particularly my own. But, hey, you want the whole story, you’re going to get the whole story—poopy and all.

It was his bad black ’68 Norton Commando I heard first. I heard its roar from miles away in the still of the country night. Heard it grow closer and closer, then pause. Then came the crunching of gravel as he eased it up the long, private drive that led from Joshua Town Road to the farmhouse. Silence followed. This didn’t last long. Silence was always brief when Thor Gibbs was around.

“How the hell are you, boy?” he asked me, standing out there on the porch. He was not alone.
She
was with him, sitting on the bike untangling her mane of windblown hair with her fingers.

I stood in the doorway holding the baby, a towel thrown over the shoulder of my Turnbull and Asser silk dressing gown to guard against the seven different categories of discharges Tracy was capable of producing—the standard six plus one more for which there was still no known scientific classification. “About as well as can be expected,” I replied.

He threw back his head and roared like a lion. “Same old Hoagy.”

“Quality, you’ll find, never goes out of style.” I glanced up at our bedroom window, which overlooked the herb garden and was open. “Better hold it down or we’ll wake Merilee.”

“And we don’t want to do that, do we?” Thor boomed, grinning at me mischievously.

“Not if we know what’s good for us.”

“Never have, Hoagy. Never have and never will.” He stuck his finger in Tracy’s tiny palm. She gripped it tightly, giggling and cooing at him. A born flirt. Then again, as David Letterman was so fond of pointing out, Thor Gibbs had a way with small children. “Christ, she has Merilee’s eyes.”

“And you, Thor?”

“Me, boy?”

“How are you?”

“Still kicking.”

That he was. Thor was seventy-one that year, but it was hard to imagine it, looking at him. The man still possessed such remarkable vigor, such charisma, such
power.
Always, it seemed, he had drawn on an energy source that the rest of us could only wonder about. He was a big man, burly and weatherbeaten, with scarred, knuckly hands and a bushy gray beard and that trademark gleaming dome of his. It was Thor who had made the clean-head look all the rage among fifty-something white-collar professionals in quest of their lost hormones. He had a huge neck and chest, dock ropes for wrists and a mouthful of strong white teeth, one of the front ones still missing from a bar fight in Key West with Hemingway, which made him look even more ornery and disreputable than he. He wore a fringed buckskin vest over an old Irish fisherman’s sweater, jeans and cowboy boots, a bracelet of hammered silver and turquoise. His posture was erect, his stomach flat, his electric-blue eyes clear and bright. The man didn’t even seem the least bit tired.

She
did. Clethra sure did. Little Clethra, Thor’s eighteen-year-old stepdaughter—and lover. She was making her way slowly toward us now, yawning and shivering and looking rather miserable. Or maybe she was just a little bit overwhelmed by it all. After all, she had just stolen her own mother’s celebrated husband and dropped out of Barnard so as to run off with him who knows where. And Thor had just destroyed his marriage to her celebrated mother, Ruth Feingold—that’s right, the feminist—so as to run off with her, this girl he’d raised as his own since she was three, this girl who was fifty-three years younger than he. Face it, at that particular moment in American history, Thor Gibbs and Clethra Feingold were right up there among the oddest, the sleaziest, the most notorious couples of all time. Bigger than Woody and Soon-Yi. Bigger than Joey and Amy. Bigger than Jacko and Lisa Marie.
Big.
And here they were, standing on Merilee’s porch by the light of a silvery moon. Harvest moon, as it happened.

“Where are you headed, Thor?”

“Here,” he replied simply.

“Here?” I cleared my throat and tried it over again, minus the surprise. “Here?”

“Rode all night. We have to talk, boy. But first …” He put his big arm around Clethra. She snuggled into him, her teeth chattering. “I want you to say hello to my …”

“Yes, what is it you call her now?”

Thor’s blue eyes twinkled. “My woman.”

“It’s nice to see you again, Clethra.”

She stared at me blankly. One of her more common facial expressions, I was to discover. She said, “Like, do we know each other?”

“It’s been a while. You had just graduated to big-girl pants the time I saw you.”

She rolled her eyes at me, unimpressed. Another common expression.

I shifted Tracy, cradling her into me. “I sure wish I could make up my mind, Thor.”

He frowned. “About what?”

“Whether to hug you or hit you.”

Thor raised his massive chin at me. “How about giving me a glass of sour mash and some eggs? And maybe just a little understanding, for old times’ sake.”

“I can do that. Come on in.”

We went on in. Clethra made right for the glowing embers in the front parlor fireplace and warmed her chubby white hands. I threw another hickory log on, poked at it and got a good look at her. The most sensational homewrecker since Amy Fisher was a small, moonfaced girl, rather pretty, with big brown eyes and a plump, heart-shaped mouth that she painted blue. Or maybe that was from the cold. She wore a gold ring in her right nostril. Her tangled black ringlets cascaded all the way down to her butt. It was a nice, ripe butt. In fact, Clethra Feingold was nice and ripe all over. Possibly she would end up shaped like her mother when she got older. Right now she was as luscious as a basket of fresh fruit, desirable in the old sense of the word, before spavined waifs like Kate Moss became our feminine ideal. An aged black leather motorcycle jacket fell carelessly from her shoulders, rather like a shawl. She wore a gray sweatshirt under it, a pair of baggy jeans torn at the knees and heavy, steel-toed Doc Martens. The look was part punk, part hip-hop and all fake. She was a product of the Dalton School and the Ivy League, not the street. But street was all the buzz that season. As for the sulky expression on her face, that went with being eighteen and always had. Same with the upper lip, which she kept curling at me in distaste, much the way Ricky Nelson used to when he sang. I didn’t know if Clethra sang. I didn’t want to know.

Lulu, my basset hound, marched right over and showed the little vixen her teeth. Lulu doesn’t care for homewreckers. Never has.

Clethra widened her eyes. “Like, does she bite?”

“Only people she knows real well,” I assured her. “Total strangers she’s just fine with.”

She shrugged at this and looked around at the parlor. She did not seem impressed. I didn’t expect her to be. It wasn’t huge or flashy. Center chimney colonials tended not to be in 1736, which was when the place had been built by Josiah Whitcomb, a shipbuilder by trade. The recessed cupboards and drawers flanking the stone fireplace, all of them of butternut, were Josiah’s doing. So was the chestnut paneling and the wide planks of cherry on the floor. The rest we had brought with us. The Shaker tall clock made and signed by Ben Youngs in Watervliet, New York, in 1806. The Shaker meeting room bench and ladder-back rockers, the baskets filled with Merilee’s newly harvested lavender and artemisia. The muzzle loader over the fireplace, which had belonged to her great-great-grandfather, Elihu, and was five feet long and weighed over forty pounds. The paintings of dead pilgrims, all of them Merilee’s ancestors. The worn leather sofa that was our only concession to modern comfort and my bony backside.

Clethra took it all in, slowly, as if she were computing its resale value piece by piece. “I’m, like, you don’t have a TV,” she noted with some dismay.

“It’s in the corner cupboard.”

“How come?”

“So we don’t have to look at it when we’re not looking at it.”

“Whoa, that makes, like, zero sense, homes,” she informed me with an insolent toss of her head. Bashful with her opinions she wasn’t. This, too, went with being eighteen. “Like, you
know
it’s in there, right? So isn’t
hiding
it just, like, totally bogus or what?”

“Or what,” I suggested. This was me being pleasant. Or what passes for pleasant from me at four
A.M.

She fished a Camel out of her jacket pocket and stuck it between her teeth, reaching for a match on the mantel.

“Please don’t light that,” I said.