Tiny Little Thing (26 page)

This time, Scott’s voice is clear. “I love you.”

There is a long silence. Scott’s face is vague in my memory, next to the iridescent Josephine. I recall dark hair, dark eyes, an aloof smile, eyebrows that hooked at the ends. A nose that seemed to condescend to me, the candidate’s mere wife. How does Scott look right now, to my husband’s enraptured eyes?

“I love you, too,” Frank says, in a wholly different tone than the comforting
I love you
s that I, Christina Hardcastle, his wedded and lawfully bedded wife, receive from him daily. As if the sentence originates from some section of Frank that lies against his heart. And then, in despair: “I can’t help it. I can’t. I can’t stop.”

I sit absolutely still, absorbing Frank’s shame. The floorboards creak; the clothing rustles. There is a rush of water from the bathroom, and footsteps. “Thanks,” someone says, I can’t tell whom. I wipe my wet face against my skirt.

A silence begins, long and intimate.

“I’m sorry,” says one of them, I don’t know how much later. I think it’s Scott.

“It’s not your fault.” Definitely Frank.

“I should just quit. Quit the campaign and go to work in another city. Another fucking
state.
”

“Maybe you should.” More silence, and then: “No, don’t. Scott, no.”

“Come on.”

“Scott, no. I’m done, I can’t. My wife. I just can’t.”

But they do anyway, whatever it is they do. Quieter this time, voluptuous, while I stare at the thread of daylight and inhale the sweaty woolen scent of Scott Maynard’s suits, enrobed in shock, waiting and waiting for them to finish. I need to vomit. The tears have dried up by now, and the sinews have thawed, but I’m still trapped in my tiny closet, unable to leave.

•   •   •

I
’m standing in a telephone booth on Cambridge Street. I don’t know how I got here. I remember crawling across Scott Maynard’s floor and throwing up in his toilet. Shock. My limbs stiff. I remember brushing my hair with his hairbrush, splashing my face with his water. Closing the window, turning the lock on the knob before I closed it. Stairs. Caspian’s blue convertible Ford, sitting around the corner, as if nothing’s happened.

Then a blurriness of driving, the streets of Boston passing before my eyes.

I stare through the glass at the gray walls of Massachusetts General. A doctor walks by, dressed in blue-green scrubs, holding a cup of coffee. I think of Vivian’s husband, a pediatric surgeon of what they call
exceptional promise
, who will soon be completing his residency at St. Vincent’s in Greenwich Village. Mums frets that he’ll be offered some brilliant post somewhere else, somewhere across the country where you can’t get a decent martini. A handsome man, Vivian’s husband, a really nice guy, saving kids’ lives left and right. She calls him Doctor Paul sometimes, like it’s some sort of private joke between them, and he laughs and kisses her when she does. He worships her, really. Vivian, my incorrigible sister Vivian, thoroughly in love and married and respectable. Who’d have guessed? She writes a regular column in the
Metropolitan
now, a real must-read, sly and gossipy and elegant. Maybe you’ve seen it. They have a rambunctious one-year-old boy, on whom Mums dotes with an improbably idolatrous devotion, and another baby due this winter. A sunny apartment near Gramercy Park, not too far from the hospital, a few blocks away from our cousins the Greenwalds. A lovely, leafy, luxurious corner of Manhattan.

Why the hell did I ever leave New York City? At least in Manhattan, the queens aren’t afraid to let you know it. You don’t end up marrying them by mistake.

Then my brain goes static again, unable to bear the strain. I pick up the receiver, slip a dime through the slot, and ask the operator to put me through to the
Boston Globe
switchboard.

“Jack Lytle,” he says brusquely.

“Mr. Lytle. It’s Christina Hardcastle.”

“Jesus. Yes. Hello. What can I do for you?”

“I need to speak to you, Mr. Lytle. In private. Is there somewhere we can meet?”

An instant’s pause. “Where are you?”

“On Cambridge Street. Across from the hospital.”

“Whoa. All right. Everything okay?”

“Everything’s fine.”

“I’m driving in from Dorchester. Can we meet somewhere on Charles Street in twenty minutes? There’s a coffee shop on the corner of Chestnut.”

“I . . . I hate to put you to any trouble.”

“No trouble at all. I was about to head downtown anyway, this dinner of your husband’s.”

“Oh! Were you invited?” My voice is bright with small talk. I lift my gloved fingertips and tap an arpeggio against the glass.

“Well, you know. They like to have press there at some of these speeches.”

“Well, that’s . . . that’s very nice. I’ll see you in twenty minutes, Mr. Lytle.”

“Can I ask what this is about, Mrs. Hardcastle?”

“No,” I say. “No, you may not.”

•   •   •

J
ack Lytle orders coffee. I order water and ask him if he has any cigarettes. He tosses me the pack and lights us both up.

“You sure you want to hear this?” he says.

“I think I know what you’re going to say, if that’s what you mean.”

He looks long, then back at me. “All right. The way I hear it, Frank Hardcastle was summoned to the office of the dean of Undergraduate Studies in March of 1960 to answer rumors that he was having an affair with a professor.” The coffee arrives. Lytle adds cream and sugar—a lot of sugar—and says, as if it needed saying: “A
male
professor.”

“I see. And?”

“And that’s all. No official reprimand, no public record of any kind. Everyone in the dean’s office at the time denies a meeting ever occurred.”

“So it might be a rumor.”

He sucks on his cigarette. “It might. But I’d say my source is pretty solid.”

“You can’t tell me who it is?”

“No. Sorry.”

I play with the tips of my gloves, which lie alongside my pocketbook on the Formica table, a little dirty from the phone booth. The cigarette burns between my opposite fingers. I think, This is like a play. I’m some actress playing Christina Hardcastle onstage. This isn’t really
me.
This can’t possibly be
my
life. If I just keep going until the end of the scene, keep playing my part, the curtain will drop and the audience will applaud and I can go back to my real life. Back to Cape Cod, where I will start the whole summer all over again.

Even better: back to Boylan’s Coffee Shop, where I will start the past two years all over again.

Lytle observes me for a moment, the seasoned journalist, and then speaks up into the silence. “Any reason you’re coming to me now?”

“Yes. But I’m not going to tell you.”

“Fair enough.”

I look up and meet his gaze. “So. I suppose the rest of the story, the thing you’re trying to establish, is that the Hardcastles paid everyone off to make the story die. They had the professor deny everything, Frank deny everything, anyone who had any knowledge of the affair deny everything.” I lay the cigarette, untouched, on the edge of the ashtray. The smell is making me somewhat ill. “Then they set about looking for a girlfriend. For a . . . I don’t know. What’s the word? I’m sure there’s a word for me.”

He clears his throat. “A beard.”

“A beard. That’s it. And Frank threw himself into it, got himself a reputation as a ladies’ man, because it isn’t as if he’s not attracted to women at all. He just . . . He just . . .” My throat pinches down on the words.

“He just likes men more,” Lytle says quietly, flicking ash into the tray.

“I’ll bet they hand selected me,” I say. “Then they groomed me for it. They made me think I needed
them
, instead of the other way around.”

“You’re perfect for the role. Perfect in every way.”

“They were so grateful to me. As long as I behaved myself, as long as I went along with everything, they were so grateful.”

“Well, they would be, wouldn’t they? Everything depends on you.”

I fall back to my gloves, my pocketbook.

“So what are you going to do about it, Mrs. Hardcastle? You’ve got a pretty big decision to make. A crossroads, as we hack writers like to put it.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Can I ask you a question? Do you love your husband?”

“That’s a very personal question.”

“It’s relevant, though, isn’t it?”

Behind the counter, the waitress is eyeballing us as she wipes away at some smudge next to the register. Her hair is pulled back in a cap; her lipstick is a little too bright for the fluorescence above. I think of Em, the waitress at Boylan’s who always knew how warm I liked my apricot Danish, who never blinked an eye when I asked her if she knew where Caspian lived. “Always knew you had taste,” she said, that was all.

I never did go back to Boylan’s, after the wedding. I wonder what Em is doing now.

Lytle stirs his coffee and watches my face, patient as a slender clean-cut Buddha in a formal dinner jacket. Oh, damn, he’s good at this, isn’t he?

Well, then. Answer the question. Do you love your husband, Mrs. Hardcastle? Do you love Frank?

I speak softly to the Formica. “I think so. I did, anyway. I do. I love him, I always have, just not the way . . . I think . . .” I look up again. “I think he’d make a wonderful congressman. I really do.”

“And that’s the trouble, isn’t it?”

I finish my water and stub out my cigarette. “Can I ask
you
a question, Mr. Lytle?”

“I guess it’s only fair.”

“What’s the point of all this? Why are you looking into my husband’s personal affairs?”

He shrugs. “Because I’m a journalist, Mrs. Hardcastle. It’s what I do.”

“But you’re the only journalist following this particular story.”

Lytle picks up his spoon and taps it against the side of his coffee cup. “You know, here’s the truth. I feel for the guy. I really do. I know you’re too mad to look at all this from his side . . .”

“Oh, I can see it from his side, all right.”

He angles his eyebrows at me. “But it’s not easy, when the great ambition of your life stands in perfect one hundred and eighty degree opposition to the natural urges of your own body. When you have to hide your true self from everybody, including your own wife. Because at some point, the bill’s going to come due. You’re going to have to pay, one way or another.”

“I doubt that’s even occurred to Frank,” I say. “He’s a Hardcastle. When you’re a Hardcastle, everyone else pays.”

Lytle finishes his coffee in a gulp, crushes out his cigarette, and reaches into his pocket. “Can I give you a lift somewhere? You don’t look so good. You need to eat something. Call up a friend, have a good cry.”

I touch my cheek. My fingers are cold; the skin beneath is hot. “I’m fine.”

He lays a couple of quarters on the table and straightens his immaculate dinner jacket. The look he casts me is warm with pity. “Don’t forget, Mrs. Hardcastle. You’re holding all the cards. You can make Frank or break him. Don’t let those bastards make you think you’re the one caught in the corner, here.”

I don’t know what expression I return Jack Lytle for this little piece of practical advice, but he answers with a shrug and a shake of his head. He glances down at the two quarters on the table, sweeps one of them back into his pocket, and sends me a conspiratorial wink.

“Unless they’ve got something on
you,
of course.”

•   •   •

I
n the phone booth again. It takes ages to get Caspian on the line. “He’s in the shed,” I’ve told Mrs. Crane, and then I have to describe the shed and its location, have to tell her to look for Pepper if she can’t find Caspian. Pepper will know where he is. I beat my dime against the metal side of the telephone, waiting for the operator to tell me to deposit more money.

“Tiny?” His voice is urgent. “What’s the matter?”

“I need you to tell me something, Caspian. The truth. Did Frank invite himself to the medal ceremony, or did you ask him? I mean, did the Hardcastles invite you back, or the other way around?”

There is a yawning chasm of a pause.

“Tell me quick, Caspian. I don’t have a lot of spare change.”

“They asked,” he says. “And I said yes.”

“Why did you say yes, Caspian? You have to tell me.”

“You already know why I said yes.”

“I need you to
tell
me, Caspian. In words.”

He speaks quietly. I picture him in the library, talking into the corner so the walls will absorb his voice. “Tiny. The truth? Because I missed you, missed you worse than I missed my leg. Because I was worried sick about you. Because I figured that since I wasn’t any closer to getting over you, after two goddamned years, the next best thing was to be near you. Even if I couldn’t touch you.”

“To watch over me.”

“Yes.”

The operator tells me to deposit another dime. I obey, with shaking fingers. I lean my head against the top of the box and let out a heavy tear-soaked breath.

“Tiny? Are you all right? Where are you?”

“Caspian, listen to me. I don’t deserve you. I don’t deserve your love and your loyalty and your goodness. I made the worst mistake in the world, but I’m going to make it up to you. I’m going to deserve you this time. I’m going to be strong, so strong and brave you won’t even recognize me. And then I’ll come back and
tell
you how much I . . .”

“What are you talking about? Tiny, what’s happened? Where are you?”

“I’m in Boston. I’ll see you in the morning, all right?”

“Tiny! What’s going on?”

“I’m leaping, Caspian. I’m leaping off the ledge.”

Click.
I’m out of dimes.

•   •   •

I
’m standing before the door of my house on Newbury Street. My wedding gift from the Hardcastles. I’ve driven here in Caspian’s blue Ford convertible, driven here like a madwoman with the top down, my hair flying, and the numbness is gone, the shell of brittle fear, and I am alive, alive,
alive.

Alive and furious. I will change into my most smashing gown, swipe on my brightest lipstick, fasten on my most glittering jewels, and drive straight back to the Harvard Club. Before I can change my mind, before the Hardcastles can find me and change my mind.