Blacklist

CHAPTER 19

I sat in my car, shaking. When I was a student I had daydreamed about being held in Calvin Bayard’s arms. The nightmarish way my old fantasy had come true made me sick to my stomach. The man who’d stood up so valiantly to the Walker Bushnells and Olin Taverners of America now derived pleasure from watching the cook boil milk. It was too much. I couldn’t bear it.

My eye caught a movement at one of the front windows. Ruth waiting for me to leave. I found a bottle of water in the backseat and drank it down. Not the pint of rye Philip Marlowe would have used, but it steadied me just the same.

I drove slowly down Coverdale Lane. At Larchmont Hall, I pulled in through the gates, trying to regain my composure. In the twilight, the whitewashed brick looked more than ever like the prop to a Gothic novel. But my Gothic ideas about why Renee Bayard had dug a moat around her husband were wrong: she merely didn’t want people to know he had Alzheimer’s.

Maybe Calvin really had somehow gotten hold of a key to Larchmont Hall. Maybe he did wander over there, and Catherine really did follow him-and was protecting him and the family secret. But why keep it a secret? Was it Renee’s own pain he couldn’t bear her husband’s diminishment and

didn’t want the world to know? Or were there majority publishers at Bayard who only let Renee hold the CEO spot because they thought Calvin was guiding the reins behind scenes? I couldn’t make sense of it.

I got out of the car and walked up the drive to the pond. I couldn’t see much in the growing dusk, but the sheriff’s deputies hadn’t treated this like a crime scene. No tape, no signs of any investigation. Only the scarring along the grass where I’d dragged Marcus Whitby’s body showed that anyone had been here.

I looked at the water in distaste. The dead carp was starting to bloat. I’d come back tomorrow with a wet suit and crawl along the bottom, in case Whitby’s keys, or some other personal item, had fallen out of his pockets, but I wouldn’t enjoy doing it.

I got in my car and continued down Coverdale to Dirksen. It wasn’t until I found myself staring at the pink brick of Geraldine Graham’s condo that I realized I’d headed away from the tollway. Darraugh had asked me to drop the investigation, so I was dropping it-but it would be rude not to pay a farewell visit to his mother.

The guard at Anodyne Park’s entrance approved my admittance. This time, the maid Ms. Graham had imported from Larchmont Hall let me into the apartment. She took my jacket, then asked me to wait in the entryway while she checked with “Madam.” A comedown from my wait at the Bayard mansion-not even a chair, let alone a view of the woods. There was a painting, a small piece, soft pinks and greens that resolved itself into a mountainscape as I examined it.

The maid returned and escorted me out to the sitting room, where Ms. Graham sat drinking coffee from an elaborate service. Perhaps when her maid was with her she couldn’t escape her mother’s rituals. I began to understand why she might relish living alone in her great age.

“That will be all, Lisa.” Ms. Graham dismissed the maid and looked at me over the rim of her coffee cup. “So, young woman, you won’t come when I send for you, but you do show up unannounced on your own whim?”

“Darraugh told me to stop the investigation into your old home. Did you know that?”

“He phoned this morning to tell me.” She bit off the words.

“Did he explain why?” I walked over to the sideboard and poured myself a cup from the Crown Derby pot.

“He’s always disliked Larchmont enough not to want to invest energy in its care. I think he suspects I made up lights in the attic as a way of forcing him to pay attention to the place. Or maybe to force him to attend to me.”

The bitterness in her fluty voice made me ask, “Why didn’t Darraugh want to keep it? Was it unpleasant for him, growing up there?”

She gave me what I was starting to think of as her Queen Victoria look: subjects will remember that they cannot interrogate the monarch. After a moment, she said stiffly, “Darraugh has never enjoyed country life.”

My eyebrows went up. “He had to spend his boyhood getting up to slop the pigs, which gave him a lasting disgust for the sights and smells of the country?”

“You’re impertinent, young woman.”

“So I’ve been told.” I pulled up a chair and faced her across the piecrust table. “I have this idea about people who live with enormous wealth and great position-that because they get exactly what they want when and how they want it, they believe they’re entitled to privilege. And I imagine such people think the rest of us exist only at their pleasure. That means it’s all right to summon us in the middle of the night, or lie to us, or do whatever else takes their fancy at the moment, because to them our lives have no existence away from their orbit.”

I heard a gasp in the background and realized the maid was listening. Geraldine Graham herself produced a blistering look from her clouded eyes. “Do you truly imagine, young woman, that I have had exactly what I wanted when and how I wanted it? If so, you have shockingly little understanding of family life.”

I was startled: I had braced myself for a diatribe that would end with her ordering Darraugh never to work with me again. Now I remembered the unhappy faces in the newspaper photos of her wedding.

“Your parents bullied you into marrying MacKenzie Graham,” I said calmly. “You didn’t feel able to stand up to them.”

Her lips trembled with more than the uncertainty of old age. “My mother was not the kind of person one stood up to easily”

I looked at the frosty blue eyes in the portrait behind her head. They could have wilted ferns in the Amazon.

“You and your husband didn’t want to start a life together in a house away from your mother? Was Larchmont that important to you?” Geraldine Graham paused. When she spoke again, it was more to herself than to me. “My husband and I had so little in common that it was easier for us to stay with Mother than to try to live alone someplace else.”

“Do you keep her portrait up there to remind yourself every day that she humiliated you?” I asked.

“You are impertinent, young woman,” Geraldine Graham repeated, but this time with a touch of wry humor. “You may pour me more coffee before you leave. Rinse the cup with hot water first,” she added, as I picked up the coffeepot.

I looked at her through narrowed eyes: what she wanted when she wanted it. Before I pushed my luck by uttering the thought aloud, Lisa bustled around the corner into the room and took the cup from me. She poured hot water from a small pot into the cup, swirled it, and emptied the slop into a bowl before refilling Geraldine’s cup.

Ignoring Geraldine’s implied command to leave, I refilled my own cup-without going through the rinse cycle-and leaned against the sideboard. “I’m still trying to figure out what brought Marcus Whitby to New Solway. I thought he might have gone to see Calvin Bayard, not realizing how ill Mr. Bayard is.”

Her hand stopped with the cup midway to her lips. “How ill is he? Renee has discouraged visitors.”

“He seems to have Alzheimer’s. He knows who he is, but not who he’s talking to.”

“Alzheimer’s,” Geraldine repeated slowly. “So the neighborhood gossip has been correct, for once.”

“Why would Ms. Bayard keep his condition so secret?” I asked.

“With Renee Bayard, one never knows why she does what she does, but it is always safe to assume she is enjoying her power over all our lives-over Calvin’s, in keeping him locked away-over his old friends, keeping us from visiting-probably over all the employees at the publishing company.” She pressed her lips together in resentment.

“Calvin and I were friends from earliest childhood, and she has kept me from him most successfully all these years. So if your Negro writer was hoping to see Calvin, Renee would have made sure he wasn’t able to do so. Why do you imagine your Negro wanted to talk to Calvin?”

I recited my piece on Whitby’s interest in Kylie Ballantine and her contract with Bayard. To my surprise, Geraldine knew Ballantine.

“Calvin took an interest in her work. When he was enthusiastic, he wanted everyone to share his interests, so we all drove into the city to watch her dance. He bought art from her and we all had to follow his lead and buy one of her African masks. When she gave a recital, we all drove to the city to watch her dance. In 1957, 1 think it was, or perhaps ‘fifty-eight. He had just brought Renee out here, I remember. I was prepared to feel sorry for her, a little patronizing toward her, twenty-year-old bride of an older, domineering man. What a mistake that was!”

She made a bitter face. “Ballantine was in her fifties the night I saw her, but she still moved like a young woman. I didn’t care much for the dance. It was African, and I’ve never cared greatly for African art or music: it all sounds like boomlay, boom! to me. But heaven lent her enough grace for me to admire past the sound.”

“It’s a pity Mr. Whitby didn’t have a chance to talk to you.” I returned to my seat. “He might have found your recollections useful. Had Ballantine been blacklisted during the McCarthy hearings? Was that what brought her to Mr. Bayard’s attention?”

Geraldine Graham slowly shook her head. “I don’t know, young woman. It was about that time that my husband died, and Mother and Darraugh were-I remember the evening at the ballet because it was vivid, but much else that year is gray in my mind.”

I would dearly have loved to know what Mother and Darraugh had done. Fought in a loud, unrefined way about MacKenzie Graham’s death was my guess. After a decent pause to show respect for her unhappy memories, I pulled the picture of Whitby and his sister out of my bag.

“You notice a lot around you. Did you notice him?”

Geraldine Graham took the photograph from me and picked up her magnifying glass to study it. Her hands were misshapen by age and arthritis and they trembled. She laid the picture on her lap and held the glass with both hands.

“I’ve never seen him, but Lisa might have. She is always here in the evenings to help me with my meal and my night routine.”

She picked up a bell on the table next to her, but Lisa had remained in earshot and came in before Geraldine could ring it. “This is the man who drowned in our pond, Lisa.” She handed the picture to the other woman. “The detective is wondering if we saw him here on Sunday.”

Lisa took the picture over to the window and looked at it closely. “Not on Sunday, madam. But I believe he was here, perhaps a week ago. I can’t be sure, I see so few black men, but it looks like a man I noticed when I left you after lunch.”

“When was that?” I asked.

She pursed up her lips, trying to remember. “It would have been the day I washed Madam’s hair, because I realized I had brought the shampoo bottle with me. I was standing there by my car, wondering should I go back up, or could it wait until the morning, when he pulled in across the way from me. I felt foolish standing there looking at the shampoo, so I got into my car.”

“So when was it?”

“I always wash Madam’s hair on Monday, Thursday and Saturday.” She seemed surprised that I wouldn’t know that.

“So which was it?” I asked.

She paused again to think. “The Thursday, it would have been.”

“A week ago! But why would he have come here, if it wasn’t to see you, Ms. Graham?”

Geraldine Graham surprised me again. “If he was that interested in this dancer, and if she had been blacklisted, perhaps he went to see Olin. Olin Taverner, I mean. He lived here, after all.”

Taverner, of course. He’d been one of HUAC’s hatchet men, after all. And now he, too, was dead, so I couldn’t ask him about Marcus Whitby. Or Kylie Ballantine.

“How well did you know Mr. Taverner?” I asked.

“Well enough. We grew up together. He was my cousin.”

I vaguely remembered now, from that 1903 newspaper I’d read: Geraldine’s mother had been somebody Taverner before she married whoever Drummond. “Mr. Taverner’s death must be quite a loss, then. Did you see much of him while he lived here?”

“Very little.” Her voice frosted over again. “Consanguinity does not necessarily breed intimacy. I was sad to know he died only because it ended a chapter in my own life.”

I tried to rearrange my ideas. If Whitby had come out here to see Taverner, instead of Calvin Bayard, it put him closer to Larchmont Hall. But I couldn’t see why Taverner would have met him there, or sent him there. I asked Ms. Graham if Taverner had lived alone.

“I wasn’t in close touch with him, but I assume he had someone to look after him. Lisa will know.”

Lisa, when summoned again, knew the name of Taverner’s attendant, how many hours a day the man had worked, and even what he’d said and done on finding the old lawyer’s dead body.

“Did Mr. Taverner have a family? Children or other relatives?” Geraldine Graham gave another involuntary glance over her shoulder at her mother’s portrait. “He never married. His-tastes-ran in other directions than women. It was one of the things that made Calvin particularly angry during the fifties, Olin’s hypocrisy”

I tried to add this to the bewildering array of information I was getting. Taverner had been gay, but in the closet. Maybe Whitby had uncovered Taverner’s secret and-what? Taverner, afraid of disclosure, had murdered Whitby, rolled him over to the Larchmont pond, then come back here and died of a heart attack brought on by his exertions? The notion made me smile, which drew Geraldine’s sharp attention and a demand for the “source of my amusement.”

“Sorry, ma’am, I wasn’t laughing at you, just my own absurd ideas. I went to the Bayard house before coming here, because my first thought had been that Marc Whitby wanted to talk to Mr. Bayard. The staff said he hadn’t been around. Should I believe them?”

“Ruth Lantner,” Geraldine Graham said. “She’s what I had in mind when I said I didn’t want a staff managing me. She and her husband run Calvin and Renee Bayard, oh, they do it well, they’ve been with Calvin since the boy was born. Edwards. One of those old family names people like to give their children. No odder, I daresay, than Darraugh calling his own boy MacKenzie, although Mother tried to change his mind at the time. I remember Mrs. Edwards Bayard-she and my mother had famous feuds. My mother thought she was a hypocrite, with her extraordinary causes and habits-she didn’t allow any alcohol or tobacco in her house, although her husband’s behavior was an open secret in our milieu. Mrs. Edwards thought Mother was an odalisque. Whereas Mother was something far more dangerous.”

I was tempted to follow this historical byway: What had Mr. Edwards Bayard’s behavior been? But I kept to the main topic. “Would Ruth Lantner lie about Whitby coming to the house?”

“Oh, don’t ask me about servants’ characters. I don’t know her well. I daresay she would lie to protect Calvin, probably Renee as well.”

So she expected Lisa to lie to protect her. Which meant if Geraldine Graham was hiding something about Whitby, or Bayard, Lisa would back her up. How nice and feudal.

“I met the Bayards’ granddaughter the other day,” I said.

“Catherine? That’s a sad story, the mother dying when the baby wasn’t a year old. The boy, Edwards, fell apart for a time under the blow. I will say in Renee’s favor that she took on raising her granddaughter without a murmur. What kind of job has she made of it?”

I smiled. “Catherine’s a lively, ardent young person-who so far has run rings around me. And she’s extremely close to her grandmother. Catherine says Calvin wanders over to Larchmont at night.”

“He does; How astonishing.” She gave a dry laugh. “Perhaps in the secret recesses of his mind he is trying to escape Renee.”

“Catherine says her grandfather has a key to Larchmont Hall, that he uses it to let himself in there at night. Is that possible? When I asked Darraugh, he became angry and hung up on me. Why?”

Ms. Graham put her down cup, her jaw working. “Do you have children, young woman? No? They are a mystery. You bear them in your body, you watch over them, but they grow up as strangers. Darraugh’s anger is one of those mysteries to me.”

Once again she danced away from talking about Darraugh and Larchmont. I reverted to the key: Would Calvin Bayard have one?

“I should be most surprised. But we live in a very odd world. Are they looking after him properly? How did he seem?”

“The nurse seems competent. He looks physically fit. He thought I was

his wife. He clung to me and called me `Deenie.’ I always admired himthat was hard.”

Ms. Graham’s hands shook as she picked up her cup. Coffee slopped over the edge and onto her aqua silk skirt. “So clumsy,” she murmured. “The thought of Calvin with his wits wandering is truly unsettling. Send Lisa to me on your way out, young woman.”

My exit cue. I didn’t need to summon Lisa: the maid continued to hover within earshot. As I let myself out, I could hear her clucking soothingly to Geraldine Graham, mother calming infant. The smell on Mr. Bayard’s clothes, urine and talc, came back over me in a shuddering wave. That we all come to this, no matter how far or fast we run, we come to this, not away from it.