Before Robbie left, McManis took me aside, stating tersely, “We expect the usual Academy Award performance.” He made no apology for not trusting Robbie, and Feaver, when I spoke to him alone to impart the warning, required none. His mind was on Magda, anyway.
“I want you to realize something,” he told me, pausing to impart a stark look. “I did the right thing in the first place when I didn’t tell these guys about her.”
AT HER DOOR, Magda Medzyk grabbed her housedress by the throat and looked both ways down the hallway before letting Robbie in. With the weight of the case, Robbie couldn’t keep from swinging his arm, and as a result they were both in and out of the fish-eye. But you could have seen from the street she was worried. Given the tight look of her hair, I imagined that she’d spent the time while Robbie was on the way taking down her pin curls. They stood in the dim front hall of her apartment.
“I hope this is really necessary? I’m so uncomfortable, Robert. I can’t believe I allowed you to talk me into this. I was hoping I was mistaken, but I have the papers right in my briefcase. A motion was filed this afternoon. Did you realize you’re at issue before me?”
“Hey, I’ve talked you into a lot of things you think are terrible.” Stepping forward, he set the briefcase down and was momentarily out of sight. But Magda’s voice was clear.
“No, absolutely not! Not now. Really,” she said. More quietly, she added, “My mother’s asleep right down the hall.” She’d stepped back into the picture again and cast a desperate look over her shoulder. In the fun-house mirror distortions of the lens, I could see the apartment behind her, a railroad flat with heavy dark furniture in the living room, including a console TV with a thirteen-inch screen, the likes of which hadn’t been manufactured in at least a decade. As they moved off to the kitchen, the image bounced along impossibly on the monitor in the surveillance van. We were parked beneath one of the grand century-old elms that rose in the parkway in front of the hulking three-story tenement. The sound also took on a bit of a buzz under the kitchen’s fluorescent lights as Feaver tried to make conversation. She cut him off abruptly.
“It’s probably best, Robbie, if you just state your business.”
As he pretended to wrench the cover story from himself, she sank down to a wooden spindle chair by a small table. He had some trouble here, Robbie told Magda, referring directly to the motion McManis had filed. It hadn’t been the way they made it sound, he’d never trump up a case that way, but he’d beaten the tar out of Moreland over the years and the insurance company wanted him. They were cutting a deal already with Herb Hall to roll over against Robbie. If she granted this writ, Robbie said, the company would sue him, instead of Hall, to recover everything it had paid out. Then, once they’d picked a million bucks out of his pocket, they’d turn him over to BAD and the Prosecuting Attorney. He’d be lucky to stay out of Rudyard, and the only thing of value in that license on his wall would be the frame.
Robbie had set the briefcase down on the kitchen counter and we had a good view of the scene. He was opposite Magda at the small maple table where she and her elderly mother had dinner each night. With his long hands, he reached toward her and tossed his head about in distress. She listened at first with her hand over her mouth. By the time he had finished, she refused even to look at him or to speak.
“I need this, Magda. And I’ll make it okay, for you. I’d want to. No number’s too high. But this is my life, Magda. This is my whole screwed-up life passing before my eyes. You can’t let these bastards take it from me. I mean, for Chrissake—”
“Not another word.” With her face averted from Feaver and the camera, her voice was somewhat disembodied. Even so, a sound of despair choked out of her with the effort of speech. “When you called, while I was waiting—” She stopped. “I actually prayed this had nothing to do with your case. I prayed. I actually called upon the Mother of God. As if I deserve her mercy. I have only myself to blame, don’t I?”
“Magda, come on. Stow the melodrama. I’ve been before you a lot in the last ten years. You’ve ruled for me.”
“And against you. You know better, Robert. You know much better. I won’t have you sit here pretending you don’t understand the magnitude of this. Of what you’re asking. This isn’t business as usual and you know that.” Merely contemplating it forced her to look away from him once more. “Oh, God,” she said. “God.”
“Please, Magda. Think about this. Magda, look, you don’t know what goes on around you. You’ve never stopped to notice. You don’t have any idea.”
“And I don’t care to know.” Her sharpness seemed to surprise even her, and she planted her mouth on the heel of her palm.
He went on pleading until she covered her ears.
“Go,” she said weakly. “Go.”
Even then, he begged—she had to, had to—until she had finally lost even the power to tell him to stop and her head of tight graying curls appeared to droop in assent.
“Thank you,” he told her. “For seeing me. For doing this. Thank you.” He repeated that a dozen times more. When he came around the table to embrace her, she recoiled with her thick arms held aloft. In the last frames before he jerked the camera off the counter, she was bunched in her simple frock, virtually formless in her grief.
“She’s gonna do it,” said Alf in the van, while Robbie was on the way down. I had reached the same melancholy conclusion myself. McManis and Evon both nodded.
But Robbie had a judgment of his own. Once inside the Mercedes, Feaver had apparently taken hold of his briefcase, bringing the lens right up to his face. On the monitor, his features flattened monstrously in the fish-eye. But he didn’t want anyone watching to miss a word.
“That’s the worst fucking thing I’ve ever done in my life,” he yelled. Then, I took it, he’d hurled down the camera, because the screen first jumbled, then went completely black.
31
THE NEXT MORNING, WHEN EVON CAME TO pick up Feaver, he was gone.
She’d waited fifteen minutes for him at the foot of the drive, her car window opened to the sweet morning air. Eventually, she went up to the house. Punctuality was normally his sole reliable virtue.
The home care worker was new. Elba had returned to the Philippines for two weeks for her niece’s wedding, and her place had been taken by Doris, a stooped African-American woman who looked as if she needed assistance herself. She had no idea where Robbie had gone, other than having heard him depart in the middle of the night.
Evon had told herself that she would never feel sorry again for Robbie Feaver. But as she’d watched his silhouette plunge wearily toward his door last night, that resolve had eroded. The truth about Feaver was that he wasn’t actually anything he said he was. Not one thing. He wasn’t a lawyer, obviously. And he’d never amounted to dip as an actor. He wasn’t even a husband, if that meant keeping to your commitments seven days a week. But his answer to all of that was that at least he was a friend. That’s what he’d told her when she demanded to know what mattered. His friends. And as punishment for getting caught in one of history’s all-time whoppers, Sennett with his treacherous genius had pointed his shotgun at Robbie and brought him to his knees, making him look down both of the dark barrels and find out that even the one thing he said for himself was no truer than the rest.
Maybe he’d just gone out to get drunk, she figured now. Or to stare at the river.
After another half hour she realized he’d probably run.
She called McManis from a nearby pharmacy so she could use a wire line. Jim was silent so long she had to ask if he was there.
“He couldn’t run,” Jim said finally. “He wouldn’t leave his wife.” McManis stopped then. “Christ. You better get back and make sure she’s still there.”
She raced back down the clean suburban streets. He’d run! What had Jim said? There was never a bottom with his type.
When she arrived, Robbie was in the driveway, just emerging from the Mercedes. He walked slowly toward her.
It was probably the first time she’d seen him looking sloppy. He was unshaven. His hair was stirred up and his face seemed withered by lack of sleep. A placket shirt hung limply over the belt line of his fancy slacks. He was clearly not heading to the office. From the dullness of his eyes, she thought she’d been right in the first place, that he was drunk, but he was moving too well. He turned his head to follow some thought as if it were a butterfly before his attention fell to her again.
“My mother died,” he said, “last night. She had another stroke. She was DOA at the hospital, but they went through some stuff in the E.R.” He flopped up a hand from his side, acknowledging the futility of those efforts, and somehow it landed on Evon’s. It seemed almost accidental, but he permitted himself a brief squeeze before letting go. He looked off toward the apple tree in the yard that was heavy with pink blossoms and made a face. The stroke had been on the other side, he said, so he figured it was, all in all, better this way.
Two years ago, Evon’s father had gone in for bypass. Her mother and she and five of her sibs, all the girls and one of her brothers, sat together nearly six hours in the contour chairs of the surgical lounge. In her anxiety, her mother had been herself, only more so, carping about the nurses and going from child to child finding fault. Evon had decided to leave, had actually gotten to her feet, when the doctor came out to tell them that her father hadn’t made it.
He had been a large red-faced figure, with thick arms and a substantial belly straining the buttons of a gingham shirt. His thick fingers were calloused, the nails always cracked and never free of dirt. He smelled of the land at all times. She had known him mostly as a presence. He spoke little, even when he was sitting around joshing with the neighbors. He treated her mother kindly, but with the same somewhat distant air they all experienced. He was uncomfortable with feeling and always wanted to be away from it, safe in the realm of chores and routine. He’d split with his own family when Evon’s mother quit the Church. He spoke to his brothers occasionally, but not his parents. In her entire life, Evon couldn’t recall his mentioning his mother or father more than twice. How had he done that? He was gone, never fully known, and yet he still reared up in her dreams and thoughts countless times a day, and always with a lingering twisted pain, as if somewhere in her something had been torn up by the root.
Robbie said he had already called Mort, who was working on the funeral arrangements. Now he had to tell Rainey. Before he started up the driveway, he asked Evon to go to the office, to take care of the mail and help Mort reschedule the deps and other appointments for the next few days.
“No problem.” She had no will left to rebuke him.
He looked at her pathetically, unwilling to move. She realized what he wanted. In the house, his wife would not even be able to lift her arms to him in consolation. She reached out, just to touch him, but he flowed toward her and swarmed her in an embrace, which she reluctantly returned.
“You’re a tough cowpoke. You’re gonna make it. You let me know what I can do.”
He didn’t let go of her, even then. He had begun to burble. When he stood back, he grabbed his lip and continued to cry, his face crushed by the pain.
“She was just so much,” he said. “She was so much.”
News of the death had circulated through the office by the time she got there. There was a dismal air that seemed to go beyond mere respect for the boss. Mort was on his way out to sit with Robbie at his home, and asked Evon to follow up on several details related to cases. He stood at the opening of her cubicle. He was in his suit but his tie was already removed, an emblem that business as usual had been suspended.
“How’s he going to take all this?” Mort asked her. He, too, appeared on the verge of experiencing his famous vulnerability to tears. “It’s too much,” Mort said. He sobbed then and smashed his face into his hand, but could not move, desolated by Robbie’s future.
The funeral was the following day. Jews traditionally buried with speed, Eileen explained. Everyone from the office was going, so Evon was spared any decision.
Mort phoned as she was leaving her apartment. “We have a big problem,” he said. Doris, the home care aide, had not shown up. Robbie had suspected from the start that the job was too much for her, and the notion of a hundred people traipsing through the house for visitation had apparently pushed her beyond her limit. Mort had sent Robbie off to the funeral home, promising to handle this, but he had called a number of agencies and none of them could produce someone before the early afternoon.
“My mom was a nurse,” Mort said, “so she could do it, but you know, I think he’d really want her there. Considering the circumstances. I can call one of his cousins, but I thought you might be able to think of somebody. Lorraine’s sleeping most of the time now anyway, but it would be nice if it’s somebody she’s met.”
She could tell Mort was angling. His cagier side grew more apparent each day. He kept minimizing what he was asking. There was less than an hour to the funeral, the service wouldn’t last long, and a number of people would then return to the house. There seemed no way to say no, and he thanked her enthusiastically when she finally offered. But she felt exasperated once she put down the phone. She decided to call back and wriggle out. It didn’t really fit the cover. People would wonder, wouldn’t they, about Robbie’s girlfriend caring for his wife on the day of his mother’s funeral? No, she saw then, they wouldn’t. They would think that’s Robbie Feaver all over.
By the time Evon arrived in Glen Ayre, Mort had gone off to the funeral parlor, leaving his wife, Joan, behind. She was a tiny, thin woman, pretty in a way, but drying up and bowing just a bit in the hormonal retreat of oncoming middle age. She was dressed in black crepe and pearls and had been setting up coffeepots for the crowd that would arrive here from the cemetery. She showed Evon what Mort had shown her about Rainey’s care, as he’d been instructed by Robbie. There was no telling what had been forgotten or misinterpreted in the many retellings. But the basics were apparent. The bedpan. The Sustacal in the kitchen for Rainey’s lunch. When Evon realized moments later she was alone with Lorraine, she nearly sent a scream rebounding through the empty house. My God, what if she killed her? Then she sealed off all of that like the hatches in a submarine on the verge of descent.
Rainey slept for nearly half an hour after Evon arrived. She was wearing a full oxygen mask now, a transparent plastic shape covering her mouth and nose. Her breathing was growing more shallow every day. She had no energy to leave the bed, and Evon knew that soon she would be engirded in something called a cuirass, a negative-pressure device to assist in drawing air into her lungs. But that could put off only so long the ultimate crisis of whether she would allow the installation of the mechanical ventilator. Robbie remained hopeful of persuading her as the time for decision drew nearer.
When Rainey woke, Evon reminded her who she was and swung into place the hospital tray that held the computer mouse and its pad, lifting Rainey’s fingers onto it. Lorraine was far more adept with the speaking machine than she’d been only a few weeks ago. She scrolled through lists of words, clicking rapidly.
“Oh I Know Who You Are,” the bleating boy’s voice said. Even without any emphasis, there was something ominous in the choice of words. Evon had no idea what to do if Rainey began to pelt her with the kind of abuse she sometimes hurled at Robbie. He said he’d actually turned off the volume on the speakers on a couple of occasions, but she had no right to be so callous. She busied herself instead. She pulled the covers back on the bed and buttered Lorraine’s flaccid arms with almond-scented lotion, but Rainey was not about to be put off.
“He Is Such A Great Liar,” Rainey said. “Do You Know What He Says About You?”
Evon stopped. A clutch of devastated feeling was already gathering in her chest.
“He Says You Are A Lesbian.”
Evon laughed, longer than she might have but for the relief.
“I am.”
Expression remained alive in the submerged de
pths of Rainey’s eyes, which contracted somewhat in doubt.
“He Talks About You.”
“We work together. We’re friends. Robbie has lots of friends.” Evon found a pillow and pulled Rainey to her side and put it behind her. She’d seen all of this done with her grandmother. Her skill was amazing to her, the ease and naturalness of it once she started. At the side of the bed, she placed her face near Rainey’s on the pillows.
“We aren’t lovers,” she told her.
Even with her body wrecked, Rainey clearly craved to believe her, but she had been hardened by the disappointments Robbie regularly delivered. Rainey circled there in the ruinous back-and-forth of doubt and longing.
Evon read to her for some time. Robbie had begun Mitigating Circumstances, and Evon went through several chapters. No doubt she was a poor substitute for Robbie and his stagecraft. Even to herself, she barely sounded more dramatic than Rainey’s voice machine and she was not surprised when Rainey dropped off again. She awoke with a pathetically contained shudder that reached only her right arm and foot. Her eyes sprang open and the palest rasp of sound emerged from her, almost certainly meant to be a scream. Evon could feel the pounding when she touched Lorraine’s cheek.
“I Dream I’m Dead. All The Time.”
Evon closed her eyes, caught on the barb of her own dread. It came back to her a second, like some bitter, regurgitative mess rising with a hiccup.
“That must be frightening,” she said.
“In Some Ways.” Lorraine took her time in thought, then described the dream. She had seen her mother-in-law. “We Were Wearing The Same Hat. It Had A Peacock Plume On The Front.” Rainey paused for several breaths amid the bare whooshing of the oxygen tank. “But Then I Wanted To Take It Off. And Realized I Couldn’t. That Was Frightening. But It’s Not Usually That Way. They Say Dreams Are Wishes. Have You Heard That?”