Looking for Rachel Wallace

19

The main entrance to the Boston Public Library used to face Copley Square across Dartmouth Street. There was a broad exterior stairway and inside there was a beautiful marble staircase leading up to the main reading room with carved lions and high-domed ceilings. It was always a pleasure to go there. It felt like a library and looked like a library, and even when I was going in there to look up Duke Snider’s lifetime batting average, I used to feel like a scholar.

Then they grafted an addition on and shifted the main entrance to Boylston Street. Faithful to the spirit, the architect had probably said. But making a contemporary statement, I bet he said. The addition went with the original like Tab goes with pheasant. Now, even if I went into study the literary influence of Eleanor of Aquitaine, I felt like I’d come out with a pound of hamburger and a loaf of Wonder bread.

By the big glass doors a young woman in Levi’s and rabbit fur coat told me she was trying to raise money to get a bus back to Springfield. She had one tooth missing and a bruise on her right cheekbone. I didn’t give her anything.

I went through the new part to the old and walked around a bit and enjoyed it, and then I went to the periodical section and started looking at the Globe on microfilm to see what I could find out about the Belmont Vigilance Committee. I was there all day. Next to me a fragrant old geezer in a long overcoat slept with his head resting on the microfilm viewer in front of him. The overcoat was buttoned up to his neck even though the room was hot. No one bothered him.

At noon I went out and went across the street to a Chinese restaurant and ate some Peking ravioli and some mushu pork for lunch. When I went back for the afternoon session the old man was gone, but the broad with the missing tooth was still working the entrance. At five o’clock I had seven pages of notes, and my eyes were starting to cross. If I weren’t so tough, I would have thought about reading glasses. I wonder how Bogie would have looked with specs. Here’s looking at you, four-eyes. I shut off the viewer, returned the last microfilm cassette, put on my coat, and went out to a package store, where I bought two bottles of Asti Spumante.

I was driving up to Smithfield to have dinner with Susan, and the traffic northbound was stationary a long way back onto Storrow Drive. I deked and dived up over the Hill and down across Cambridge Street past the Holiday Inn, behind Mass. General and got to the traffic light at Leverett Circle almost as quick as the people who just sat in line on Storrow. The radio traffic-reporter told me from his helicopter that there was a “fender-bender” on the bridge, so I turned off onto 93 and went north that way. A magician with the language—fender-bender, wow! It was six when I turned off of Route 128 at the Main Street-Smithfield exit. Out in the subs most of the snow was still white. There were candles in all the windows and wreaths on all the doors, and some people had Santas on their rooftops, and some people had colored lights on their shrubbery. One house had a drunken Santa clutching a bottle of Michelob under the disapproving stare of a red-nosed reindeer. Doubtless the antichrist lurks in the subs as well.

Susan’s house had a spotlight on the front and a sprig of white pine hanging on the brass doorknocker. I parked in her driveway and walked to her front door, and she opened it before I got there.

“Fa-la-la-la-la,” I said.

She leaned against the door jamb and put one hand on her hip.

“Hey, Saint Nick,” she said, “you in town long?”

“Trouble with you Jews,” I said, “is that you mock our Christian festivals.”

She gave me a kiss and took the wine, and I followed her in. There was a fire in her small living room and on the coffee table some caponata and triangles of Syrian bread. There was a good cooking smell mixed with the wood-smoke. I sniffed. “Onions,” I said, “and peppers.”

“Yes,” she said, “and mushrooms. And rice pilaf. And when the fire burns down and the coals are right, you can grill two steaks, and we’ll eat.”

“And then?” I said.

“Then maybe some Wayne King albums on the stereo and waltz till dawn.”

“Can we dip?”

“Certainly, but you have to wait for the music. No dipping before it starts. Want a beer?”

“I know where,” I said.

“I’ll say.”

“White wine and soda for you?”

She nodded. I got a bottle of Beck’s out of her poppy-red refrigerator and poured white wine from a big green jug into a tall glass. I put in ice, soda, and a twist of lime, and gave it to her. We went back into the living room and sat on her couch, and I put my arm around her shoulder and laid my head back against the couch and closed my eyes.

“You look like the dragon won today,” she said.

“No, didn’t even see one. I spent the day in the BPL looking at microfilm.”

She sipped her wine and soda. “You freebooters do have an adventurous life, don’t you?” With her left hand she reached up and touched my left hand as it rested on her shoulder.

“Well, some people find the search for truth exciting.”

“Did you find some?” she said.

“Some,” I said. Susan drew a series of small circles on the back of my hand with her forefinger. “Or at least some facts. Truth is a little harder, maybe.”

I took a small triangle of Syrian bread and picked up some caponata with it and ate it and drank some beer.

“It’s hard to hug and eat simultaneously,” I said.

“For you that may be the definition of a dilemma,” she said.

She sipped at her wine. I finished my beer. A log on the fire settled. I heaved myself off the couch and went to the kitchen for more beer. When I came back, I stood in the archway between the living room and dining room and looked at her.

She had on a white mannish-looking shirt of oxford cloth with a button-down collar, and an expensive brown skirt and brown leather boots, the kind that wrinkle at the ankles. Her feet were up on the coffee table. Around her neck two thin gold chains showed where the shirt was open. She wore them almost all the time. She had on big gold earrings; her face was thoroughly made up. There were fine lines around her eyes, and her black hair shone. She watched me looking at her. There stirred behind her face a sense of life and purpose and mirth and caring that made her seem to be in motion even as she was still. There was a kind of rhythm to her, even in motionless repose. I said, “Energy contained by grace, maybe.”

She said, “I beg your pardon?”

I said, “I was just trying to find a phrase to describe the quality you have of festive tranquility.”

“That’s an oxymoron,” she said.

“Well, it’s not my fault,” I said.

“You know damn well what an oxymoron is,” she said. “I just wanted you to know that I know.”

“You know everything you need to,” I said.

“Sit down,” she said, “and tell me what you found out in the library.”

I sat beside her, put my feet up beside hers and my arm back around her shoulder, leaned my head back on the couch, closed my eyes, and said, “I found out that the Belmont Vigilance Committee is a somewhat larger operation that I would have thought. It was founded during the Korean war by English’s father to combat the clear menace of Communist subversion in this country. Old man English managed to stave off the commies until his death in 1965, at which time the family business, which as far as I can tell is anti-Communism, passed into the hands of his only son, Lawrence Turnbull English, Jr. There was a daughter, Geraldine Julia English, but she went off to Goucher College and then got married and dropped out of things. Probably got radicalized in college, mixing with all those com-symp professors. Anyway there’s Lawrence Junior, Harvard ‘61, and his momma, who looks like Victor McLaglen, living in the old homestead, with fifteen million or so to keep them from the cold, running the committee and spreading the gospel and opening new chapters and stamping out sedition as fast as it springs up. The committee has chapters in most of the metropolitan colleges, some high schools, and most neighborhoods across the Commonwealth. Ninety-six chapters by last count, which was 1977. They sprung up like toadstools in the Boston neighborhoods when busing was hot. There’s chapters in South Boston, Dorchester, Hyde Park, all over. Lawrence Junior was right there on the barricades when the buses rolled into South Boston High. He got arrested once for obstructing traffic and once for failing to obey the lawful order of a policeman. Both times his mom had someone down to post bond by the time the wagon got to the jail. Second time he filed suit alleging police brutality on the part of a big statie from Fitchburg named Thomas J. Fogarty, who apparently helped him into the wagon with the front end of his right boot. Case was dismissed.”

“And that’s what English does? Run the Vigilance Committee.”

“I only know what I read in the papers,” I said. “If they are right, that seems to be the case. A real patriot. Keeping his fifteen million safe from the reds.”

“And the daughter isn’t involved?”

“There’s nothing about her. Last entry was about her marriage to some guy from Philadelphia in 1968. She was twenty.”

“What’s she do now?” Susan said. She was making her circles on the back of my hand again.

“I don’t know. Why do you care?”

“I don’t—I was just curious. Trying to be interested in your work, cookie.”

“It’s a woman’s role,” I said.

She said, “I spent the day talking to the parents of learning-disabled children.”

“Is that educatorese for dummies?”

“Oh, you sensitive devil. No, it isn’t. It’s kids with dyslexia, for instance—that sort of thing.”

“How were the parents?”

“Well, the first one wanted to know if this had to go on his record. The kid is in the eleventh grade and can’t really read.

“I said that I wasn’t sure what she meant about the record. And she said if it were on his record that the kid was dyslexic, wouldn’t that adversely affect his chances of going to a good college.”

“Least she’s got her priorities straight,” I said.

“And the next mother—the fathers don’t usually come—the next mother said it was our job to teach the kid, and she was sick of hearing excuses.”

I said, “I think I might have had a better time in the library.”

She said, “The coals look pretty good. Would you like to handle the steaks?”

“Where does it say that cooking steaks is man’s work?” I said.

Her eyes crinkled and her face brightened. “Right above the section on what sexual activity one can look forward to after steak and mushrooms.”

“I’ll get right on the steaks,” I said.