On, Off

Chapter 31

In the week that followed Wesley le Clerc’s indictment for the murder of Charles Ponsonby, the mood changed statewide, ardently fueled by television. Public indignation at the existence of a Connecticut Monster grew rather than died down; he was seen as proof of godlessness, decayed morals, absent ethics, a world gone insane under the pressures of modernity, the avalanche of technology. The community was tolerating these genetic sports, allowing them to mature into a new kind of killer; yet no one grasped the fact that they presented as ordinary and law-abiding citizens. Or indeed that they were multiplying.

Wesley had his wish: he had become a hero. Though a large percentage of his admirers were black, many were not, and all of them were convinced that Wesley le Clerc had delivered a justice beyond the ability of the Law. If the pro-white bias of the Law was already dead in some states and dying in others, that was sometimes hard to see. Far easier to see the families of a few of the Monster’s victims appear on a TV program to be asked questions that lacked morals, ethics or plain good manners: How did it feel to look at your daughter’s head encased in clear plastic? Did you cry? Did you faint? What do you think about Wesley le Clerc?

Wesley had been charged with first-degree murder, the premeditated kind, and the only legal argument could be about that premeditation. Having put himself in the limelight, Wesley knew full well that in order to stay there, he had to go on trial. A plea of guilty meant that his only appearance in court would be for sentencing. Therefore he pleaded not guilty, and was remanded for trial without the granting of bail. Outside the court after this hearing, Wesley was accosted by a high-profile white lawyer who introduced himself as the leader of Wesley’s new defense team. A cluster of other white fatcat lawyers behind him were the rest of the team. To their horror, Wesley rejected them.

“Fuck off and tell Mohammed el Nesr that I have seen the true light,” Wesley said. “I will do this the poor black trash way, with a lawyer assigned from the public defender’s office.” His hand indicated a young black man with a briefcase. A faint shadow of pain crossed his face, he sighed. “Could have been me in ten years’ time, but I have chosen my course.”

Once the exaltation of that ride back to the cells in the company of Carmine Delmonico had died away, Wesley had undergone a sea change that perhaps had a little to do with what Carmine had said to him, but a great deal more to do with witnessing from a distance of three feet the life go out of a pair of eyes. All that was left of Charles Ponsonby was a husk, and what terrified Wesley was that he had liberated that unspeakably evil spirit to seek a home in some other body. Allah warred with Christ and Buddha, and he began to pray to all three.

Yet strength poured into him too, a different strength. He would somehow manage to make of this cardinal mistake a victory.

The first signals of victory were there when he was sent to the Holloman County Jail to wait out the months between his crime and his trial. When he arrived the inmates cheered him wildly. His bunk in the four-man cell was heaped with gifts: cigarettes and cigars, lighters, magazines, candy, hip clothing accessories, a gold Rolex watch, seven gold bracelets, nine gold neck chains, a pinky ring with a big diamond in it. No need to fear that he’d be raped in the shower block! No tormenting from the warders either; all of them nodded to him respectfully, smiled, gave him the O sign. When he asked for a prayer mat, a beautiful Shiraz appeared, and whenever he entered the meal hall or the exercise yard, he was cheered again. Black or white, the prisoners and their guards loved him.

A huge number of people of all races and colors didn’t think that Wesley le Clerc should be convicted at all. Letters to the editors of various papers nationwide flooded in. The lines of phone-in radio shows were overloaded. Telegrams piled up on the Governor’s desk. The Holloman D.A. tried to persuade Wesley to plead guilty to manslaughter for a much reduced sentence, but the new hero wasn’t having any of that cop-out. He would go to trial, and go to trial he did.

A trial that went on at the beginning of June, months before it should have; the judicial Powers That Be decided that delaying it would only make matters worse. This wasn’t a nine days’ wonder that people would forget. Do it now, get it over and done with!

Never had a jury been chosen with more care. Eight were black and four white, six women and six men, some affluent, some simple workers, two jobless through no fault of their own.

His story on the stand was that he hadn’t planned a thing beyond the hat – that a surge in the crowd had put him where he ended – and that he didn’t remember firing any gun, couldn’t even remember having a gun on his person. The fact that the deed was immortalized on videotape was irrelevant; all he had ever meant to do was protest the treatment of his people.

The jury opted for unpremeditated murder and strongly recommended leniency. Judge Douglas Thwaites, not a lenient man, handed down a sentence of twenty years’ penal servitude, twelve before a chance of parole. About the verdict expected.

His trial took five days and ended on a Friday, marking the climax of a spring that the Governor, for one, never wanted to see repeated. Demonstrations had turned into riots, houses burned, stores were looted, gunfire exchanged. Despite the fact that his disciple Ali el Kadi had turned on him, Mohammed el Nesr seized his chance and led the Black Brigade into a minor war that ended when a raid on 18 Fifteenth Street in the Hollow produced over a thousand firearms. What no cop could work out was why Mohammed had not moved his arsenal well ahead of the raid. Save for Carmine, who thought that Mohammed was slipping, and knew it; even his own men were beginning to admire Wesley le Clerc more.

The Black Brigade’s fate notwithstanding, it became clear a week before Wesley’s trial opened that it was going to become a gigantic mass demonstration of support for the slayer of the Monster, and that not all who planned to march to Holloman were peacefully inclined. Spies and informers reported that 100,000 black and 75,000 white protesters would take up residence on the Holloman Green at dawn on the Monday that Wesley’s trial was to start. They were coming from as far away as L.A., Chicago, Baton Rouge (Wesley’s hometown) and Atlanta, though most lived in New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts. A gathering place had been designated: Maltravers Park, a botanical gardens ten miles out of Holloman. And there, from Saturday on, the people assembled in many thousands. The march to Holloman Green was scheduled for 5 A.M. on Monday, and it was very well organized. The terrified inhabitants of Holloman boarded up store windows, doors and downstairs windows, dreading the urban war that was sure to come.

On Sunday morning the Governor called out the National Guard, which trundled and roared into Holloman at dawn on Monday to occupy the Green ahead of the marchers; troop carriers, armored vehicles and massive trucks shook building foundations as all of Holloman huddled, wide-eyed, trembling, to watch them grind by.

But the marchers never came. No one really knew why. Perhaps it was the prospect of a confrontation with trained troops deterred them, or perhaps Maltravers Park was as far as most had ever wanted to go. By noon of Monday, Maltravers Park was empty, was all. The trial of Wesley le Clerc went on with less than five hundred protesters on Holloman Green amid a sea of National Guards, and when the verdict was announced on Friday afternoon those five hundred went home as meekly as lambs. Was it the official display of official force? Or had the mere act of congregating satisfied those who came to Maltravers Park?

Wesley le Clerc didn’t waste time worrying or wondering about his supporters. Transferred to a high-security prison upstate on Friday night, the following Monday Wesley petitioned the prison’s governor for permission to study for a pre-law degree; this smart official was pleased to grant his request. After all, Wesley le Clerc was only twenty-five years old. If he gained parole on his first try, he would be thirty-seven and probably possessed of a doctorate in jurisprudence. His criminal record would prevent his being admitted to the bar, but the knowledge he would own was far more important. His speciality was going to be the U.S. Supreme Court. After all, he was the Monster Slayer, the Holy Man of Holloman. Eat your heart out, Mohammed el Nesr, you’re a has-been. I am The Man.

Chapter 32

Carmine and Desdemona were married at the beginning of May, and elected to honeymoon in L. A. as the guests of Myron Mendel Mandelbaum; the facsimile of Hampton Court Palace was so enormous that their presence was no embarrassment to Myron or to Sandra. Myron was theirs for the asking, whereas Sandra floated on cloud nine in oblivion. A little to Carmine’s and Myron’s surprise, Sophia decided to like Desdemona, whose hypothesis was that her new stepdaughter approved of the no-gush, matter-of-fact way her new stepmother treated her. Like a responsible, sensible adult. The omens were propitious.

Back in Holloman not all was quite so propitious. As if the Hug hadn’t suffered enough sensations and scandals in the last few months, its dying throes produced yet another when Mrs. Robin Forbes complained to the Holloman police that her husband was poisoning her. Interviewed by the newly decorated detective sergeants Abe Goldberg and Corey Marshall, Dr. Addison Forbes rejected the accusation with scorn and loathing, invited them to take samples of any and all foodstuffs and liquids on the premises, and retreated to his eyrie. When the analyses (including vomitus, feces and urine) came back negative, Forbes crated his books and papers, packed two suitcases and left for Fort Lauderdale. There he joined a lucrative practice in geriatric neurology; such things as strokes and senile dementia had never interested him, but they were infinitely preferable to Professor Frank Watson and Mrs. Robin Forbes, whom he filed to divorce. When Carmine’s lawyers contacted him about buying the house on East Circle, he sold it for less than it was worth to get back at Robin, asking for half. After a harrowing struggle deciding which daughter was more in need of her, Robin moved to Boston and the budding gynecologist, Roberta. Robina sent her sister a sympathy card, but Roberta was actually delighted to have a housekeeper.

All of which meant that Desdemona was able to offer Sophia tenure of the tower.

“It’s quite divine,” she said casually, not wanting to sound too enthusiastic. “The top room has a widow’s walk – you could use it as your living room – and the room beneath would make a tiny bedroom if we chopped off a bit of it to make a bathroom as well as a kitchenette. Carmine and I thought that perhaps you could finish high school at the Dormer, then think about a good university. Who knows, Chubb might be coeducational before you’re old enough to begin your degree. Would you be interested?”

The sophisticated teenager shrieked with joy; Sophia flung her arms around Desdemona and hugged her. “Oh, yes, please!”

July was just about to turn into August when Claire Ponsonby sent a message to Carmine that she would like to see him. Her request came as a surprise, but even she hadn’t the power to spoil his sanguine mood on this beautiful day of blossoms and singing birds. Sophia had arrived from L. A. two weeks ago and was still trying to decide whether to have wallpaper or paint on her tower’s interior walls. What she and Desdemona found to talk about amazed him, as indeed did his once starchy wife. How lonely she must have been, scrimping and saving to buy a life that, judging by the way she had taken to marriage, would never have satisfied her. Though maybe some of it was due to her pregnancy, a trifle in advance of her wedding day; the baby would be born in November, and Sophia couldn’t wait. Little wonder then that even Claire Ponsonby had not the power to mar Carmine’s sense of well-being, of a rather late fulfillment.

She and the dog were waiting on the porch. Two chairs were positioned one on either side of a small white cane table that held a jug of lemonade, two glasses and a plate of cookies.

“Lieutenant,” she said as he came up the steps.

“Captain these days,” he said.

“My, my! Captain Delmonico. It has a good ring to it. Do sit down and have some lemonade. It’s an old family recipe.”

“Thanks, I’ll sit, but no lemonade.”

“You wouldn’t eat or drink anything my hands had prepared, would you, Captain?” she asked sweetly.

“Frankly, I wouldn’t.”

“I forgive you. Let us simply sit, then.”

“Why did you ask to see me, Miss Ponsonby?”

“Two reasons. The first, that I am moving on, and while I understand from my lawyers that no one can prevent my moving on, I did think it prudent to inform you of that fact. Charles’s station wagon is loaded with the things I want to take with me, and I’ve hired a Chubb student to drive it, me and Biddy to New York City tonight. I’ve sold the Mustang.”

“I thought Six Ponsonby Lane was your home to the death?”

“I’ve discovered that nowhere is home without dear Charles. Then I received an offer for this property that I just couldn’t refuse. You might be pardoned for thinking that no one would buy it, but such is not the case. Major F. Sharp Minor has paid me a very handsome sum for what, I believe, he intends to turn into a museum of horrors. Several New York City travel agents have agreed to schedule two-day tours. Day one: bus up at leisure through the charming Connecticut countryside, have dinner and spend the night at Major Minor’s motel – he is refurbishing it in style. Day two: a conducted tour of the Connecticut Monster’s premises, including a crawl through the fabled tunnel. Feed the deer guaranteed to be waiting outside the tunnel door. Stroll back to the Monster’s lair to see fourteen imitation heads in the authentic setting. Naturally a sound track of screams and howls will be playing. The Major is gutting the old living room to seat thirty diners and is turning our old dining room into a kitchen. After all, he can’t have a chef preparing lunch on an Aga stove while people are watching it move in and out. Then bus back to New York,” Claire said levelly.

Jesus, the sarcasm! Carmine sat listening entranced, glad she couldn’t see his open mouth.

“I thought you didn’t believe any of it.”

“I don’t. However, I am assured that these things do exist. If they do, then I deserve to benefit from them. They are giving me the chance to make a fresh start somewhere far from Connecticut. I’m thinking of Arizona or New Mexico.”

“I wish you luck. What’s the second reason?”

“An explanation,” she said, sounding softer, more like the Claire he had sympathized with, felt liking for. “I acquit you of being the brutish cop stereotype, Captain. You always seemed to me a man dedicated to your work – sincere, altruistic even. I can see why I fell under suspicion of those dreadful crimes, since you continue to insist that the killer was my brother. My own theory is that Charles and I were duped, that someone else did all the – er – renovations in our cellars.” She sighed. “Be that as it may, I decided that you are gentleman enough to ask me some questions as a gentleman should – with courtesy and discretion.”

Victory at last! Carmine leaned foward in his chair, hands clasped. “Thank you, Miss Ponsonby. I’d like to begin by asking you what you know about your father’s death?”

“I imagined you’d ask me that.” She stretched out her long, sinewy legs and crossed them at the ankles, one foot toying with Biddy’s ruff. “We were very wealthy before the Depression, and we lived well. The Ponsonbys have always enjoyed living well – good music, good food, good wine, good things around us. Mama came from a similar background – Shaker Heights, you know. But the marriage was not a love match. My parents were forced to marry because Charles was on the way. Mama was prepared to go to any lengths to snare Daddy, who didn’t really want her. But when push came to shove, he did his duty. Charles came six months later. Two years after that, Morton came, and two years after that, I came.”

The foot stopped; Biddy whined until it started again, then lay with eyes closed and snout on its front paws. Claire went on.

“We always had a housekeeper as well as a scrubwoman. I mean a live-in servant who did the lighter domestic work except for cooking. Mama liked to cook, but she detested washing the dishes or peeling the potatoes. I don’t think she was particularly tyrannical, but one day the housekeeper quit. And Daddy brought Mrs. Catone home – Louisa Catone. Mama was livid. Livid! How dare he usurp her prerogatives, and so on. But Daddy liked having his own way quite as much as Mama did, so Mrs. Catone stayed. She was a gem, which brought Mama around – I imagine that Mama must have known from the start that Mrs. Catone was Daddy’s mistress, but things were fine for a long time. Then there was a terrible – oh, just terrible! – quarrel. Mama insisted that Mrs. Catone must go, Daddy insisted that she would stay.”

“Did Mrs. Catone have a child?” Carmine asked.

“Yes, a little girl named Emma. Some months older than I,” Claire said dreamily, smiled. “We played together, ate our meals together. My eyesight wasn’t very good, even then, so Emma was a tiny bit my guide dog. Charles and Morton detested her. You see, the quarrel happened because Mama discovered that Emma was Daddy’s child – our half sister. Charles found the birth certificate.”

She fell silent, foot still stirring Biddy’s ruff.

“What was the result of the quarrel?” Carmine prompted.

“Surprising, yet not surprising. Daddy was called away on urgent business the next day, and Mrs. Catone left with Emma.”

“When was this in relation to your father’s death?”

“Let me see…I was nearly six when he was killed – a year before that. Winter to winter.”

“How long had Mrs. Catone been with you when she left?”

“Eighteen months. She was a remarkably pretty woman – Emma was her image. Dark. Mixed blood, though more white than anything else. Her speaking voice was lovely – lilting, honeyed. A pity that the words she said with it were always so banal.”

“So your mother fired her while your father was away.”

“Yes, but I think there was more to it than that. If we children had only been a little older, I could tell you more, or if I, the girl, had been the eldest – boys are not observant when it comes to emotions, I find. Mama could frighten people. She had a power about her. I talked to Charles about it many times, and we decided that Mama threatened to kill Emma unless the two of them disappeared permanently. And Mrs. Catone believed her.”

“How did your father react when he came home?”

“There was a screaming fight. Daddy struck Mama, then ran out of the house. He didn’t return for – days? Weeks? A long time. Mama paced a lot, I remember. Then Daddy did come back. He looked ghastly, wouldn’t even speak to Mama, and if she tried to touch him, he struck her or flung her off. The hate! And he – he cried. All the time, it seemed to us. I daresay he came home because of us, but he dragged himself around.”

“Do you think that your father went looking for Mrs. Catone, but couldn’t find her?”

The watery blue eyes looked into a blind infinity. “Well, it’s the logical explanation, isn’t it? Divorce was quite condoned even then, yet Daddy preferred to have Mrs. Catone as a servant in his house. Mama for keeping up appearances, Mrs. Catone for his carnal pleasure. To have married a mulatto from the Caribbean would have ruined him socially, and Daddy cared about his social status. After all, he was a Ponsonby of Holloman.”

How detached she is, Carmine thought. “Did your mother know that the money had gone in the Wall Street crash?”

“Not until after Daddy died.”

“Did she kill him?”

“Oh, yes. They had the worst fight of all that afternoon – we could hear it upstairs. We couldn’t make out all that they shouted at each other, but we heard enough to realize that Daddy had found Mrs. Catone and Emma. That he intended to leave Mama. He put on his best suit and drove away in his car. Mama locked the three of us in Charles’s bedroom and left in our second car. It was beginning to snow.” Her voice sounded childish, as if the sheer force of those memories was pushing her backward through time. “Round and round, snowflakes swirling just the way they do inside a glass ball. We waited for such a long time! Then we heard Mama’s car and started banging on the door. Mama opened it and we rushed out – oh, we were dying to use the bathroom! The boys let me go first. When I came out, Mama was standing in the hall with a baseball bat in her right hand. It was covered in blood, and so was she. Then Charles and Morton came out of the bathroom, saw her, and took her away. They undressed and bathed her, but I was so hungry I’d gone down to the kitchen. Charles and Morton built a fire on the old hearth where the Aga is now, and burned the baseball bat and her clothes. So sad! Morton was never the same again.”

“You mean that until then he’d been – well, normal?”

“Quite normal, Captain, though he hadn’t yet gone to school – Mama didn’t let us start until we were eight. But after that day Morton never spoke another word. Or admitted that the world existed. Oh, the rages! Mama was afraid of nothing and no one. Except for Morton in a rage. Rabid, uncontrollable.”

“Did the police come?”

“Of course. We said that Mama had been at home with us, in bed with a migraine. When they told her that Daddy was dead, she went into hysterics. Bob Smith’s mother came over, fed us, and sat with Mama. A few days later we found out that our money had gone in the crash.”

Carmine’s knees were aching; the chair was far too low. He got up and took a turn around the confines of the porch, saw out of the corner of his eye that Claire Ponsonby was indeed ready to go. The back of the station wagon, parked in the driveway, was overstuffed with bags, boxes, a matching pair of small trunks that dated to an era of more leisure and style in travel. Not wanting to sit down again, he leaned his rump against the rail.

“Did you know that Mrs. Catone and Emma died that night too?” he asked. “Your mother used the baseball bat on all three.”

Claire’s face froze into a look of absolute, genuine shock; the foot that had been teasing the dog flew up as if it jerked in a seizure. Carmine poured a glass of the lemonade, wondering if he should try to find something stronger. But Claire drank the contents of the glass thirstily and recovered her composure.

“So that was what became of them,” she said slowly, “and all the while Charles and I continued to wonder. No one ever told us who the other two were, just talked of a gang of hoboes who went on a killing spree. We assumed Mama used their activities to hide her own deed, that the other two were gang members.”

Suddenly she lurched forward in her chair, held out a hand to Carmine imploringly. “Tell me all of it, Captain! What? How?”

“I’m sure you were right in thinking that your father told your mother he was leaving her to start a new life. Certainly he had found Mrs. Catone and Emma, but when he went to meet them at the railroad station it was for the first time because the Catones were derelict. No money, not even any food. The two thousand dollars he was carrying probably represented all he could rake up to make that new start,” Carmine said. “They were hiding out in the snow, which makes me think that your mother did have the ability to frighten people badly. Poor man. He told your mother too much, and three people died.”

“All these years, and I never, never knew…Never even suspected…” Her eyes turned to his face as if they could see, gleaming with emotion. “Isn’t life ironic?”

“Would you like me to get you a drink drink, ma’am?”

“No, thank you. I’m fine.” She drew up her legs and tucked them under her chair.

“Can you tell me a little about your life after that?”

One shoulder went up, the mouth went down. “What would you like to know? Mama was never the same again either.”

“Did no one on the outside try to help?”

“You mean people like the Smiths and Courtenays? Mama called it sticking their noses in where they weren’t wanted. A few doses of Mama’s rudeness worked better than castor oil. They stopped trying, left us alone. We got along, Captain. Yes, we got along. There was a small income that Mama supplemented by selling land. Her own people helped, I think. Charles went to the Dormer Day School, so did I, and she paid the fees regularly.”

“What about Morton?”

“Some education officer visited, took one look at him and never came back. Charles told everyone he was autistic, but that was for the benefit of the stickybeaks. Autism doesn’t happen the day your mother murders your father. That’s a psychiatric horse of a profoundly different color. Though we were fond of him, you know. His rages were never directed at Charles or me, only at Mama and any strangers who came calling.”

“Did it surprise you when he died so unexpectedly?”

“Better to say that it shocked me witless. Until this one, 1939 was the worst year of my life. I’m sitting at my books studying and a grey wall comes down – wham! I’m blind for life. One visit to the eye doctor, and then I’m on a train to Cleveland. No sooner do I get to the blind school than Charles calls me to say that Morton is dead. Just – fell down dead!” She shuddered.

“You seem to imply that your mother wasn’t quite mentally stable before January of 1930, but obviously she hid it well. So what happened at the end of 1941 to trigger real dementia?”

Claire’s face twisted. “What happened just after Pearl Harbor? Charles said he was getting married. All of twenty years old, but approaching his majority. In pre-med at Chubb. He met some girl from Smith at a dance and it was love at first sight. The only way Mama could break it up was to pull out all the stops. I mean, she went stark, raving mad. The girl fled. I volunteered to come home to look after Mama – almost twenty-two years, as it turned out. Not that I wouldn’t have done even more for Charles than a tedious thing like that. Don’t assume I was Mama’s slave – I learned to control her. But while she lived Charles and I could not indulge our love of food, wine, music to the full. Between you, Captain, you and Mama have ruined my life. Three precious years of having Charles all to myself, that’s the sum total of my memories. Three precious years…”

Fascinated, Carmine found himself wondering if what Danny Marciano reckoned was right. Had brother and sister been lovers?

“You disliked your mother very much,” he said.

“I loathed her! Loathed her! Do you realize,” she went on with sudden fierceness, “that from Charles’s thirteenth to his eighteenth birthday he lived in the closet under the stairs?” The rage evaporated; a frightened spark flickered in her eyes, vanished as her hands went up to fumble with her tongue. “Oh. I didn’t mean to say that. No, that was something I didn’t mean to say. It got past me. Past me!”

“Better out than in,” said Carmine easily. “Go on. You may as well now you’ve said it.”

“Years later Charles told me she’d caught him masturbating. It sent her into a frenzy. She shrieked and screeched and spat and bit and punched – he never would fight Mama back. I fought back all the time, but Charles was the rabbit under the cobra’s spell. She never spoke to him again, which broke his poor heart. When he came home from school or from Bob Smith’s, into the closet he went. It was a big closet with a lightbulb in it. Oh, Mama was so considerate! He had a mattress on the floor and a hard chair – there was a shelf he could use as a table. She passed in a tray with his meal and removed it when he’d finished. He made water and had his bowel motions in a bucket he had to empty and wash out every morning. Until I left for Cleveland, it was my duty to give him meals, but I wasn’t allowed to speak to him.”

Carmine was gasping. “But that’s ridiculous!” he cried. “He went to a very good school – it had counselors, a principal – all he had to do was tell someone! They would have acted at once.”

“To tell wasn’t in Charles’s nature,” Claire said, chin up. “He adored Mama, he blamed Daddy for everything. All he had to do was defy her, but he wouldn’t. The closet was his punishment for a dreadful sin, and he chose to take his punishment. The day he turned eighteen, she let him out. But she never spoke to him.” A shrug. “That was Charles. Perhaps it enables you to see why I still refuse to believe that he did any of those terrible things. Charles could never have raped or tortured, he was too passive.”

Carmine straightened, flexed his fingers, a little numb from gripping the rail too tightly. “God knows I have no wish to add to your sorrows, Miss Ponsonby, but I do assure you that Charles was the Connecticut Monster. Were he not, your fresh start in Arizona or New Mexico would not have been funded by Major F. Sharp Minor.” He moved to the steps. “I must go. No, don’t get up. I thank you for all that, it solved a puzzle that’s tormented me for months. Their names are Louisa and Emma Catone? Good. I know where they’re buried. Now I’m going to give them a monument. Do you know if Mrs. Catone professed any religious beliefs?”

“Spoken like a dyed-in-the-wool policeman, Captain. Yes, she was a Catholic. I suppose I ought to contribute to the monument, as Emma was my half sister, but I’m sure you’ll understand if I don’t. Arrividerci.”

Chapter 33

Claire Ponsonby continued to sit on the porch long after Captain Carmine Delmonico had gone.

Her eyes roamed over the trees that surrounded the house, remembering how Morton spent the hours upon hours of his unschooled days. He dug a tunnel because he knew that one day a tunnel would come in handy. While he worked he thought, his body developing the skinny toughness of one who worked harder than he ate well. Oh, Charles loved him! Loved him even more than he had loved Mama. Taught him to read and write, gave him genuine erudition. Charles, a brother who understood the ineluctable completeness of brotherhood. Sharing the books, trying valiantly to share the labor. But Charles feared the tunnel so much that he couldn’t bear to be in it for very long. Whereas Morton was never more alive than when in the tunnel, digging, gouging, burrowing, dragging out the soil and stones which Charles spread around the trees.

Thus had the sharing begun. Charles thought of the Catone Room as a surgeon’s paradise a thousand feet in the air. Whereas Morton knew the Catone Room was the tunnel’s orgasmic flowering under the silent heaviness of the ground. Morton, Morton, on, off. Blind worm, blind mole in the darkness, digging away with a magic button in his mind that could switch his eyes on or off. On, off, on, off, on, off. Diggety-dig, on, off.

Now let me see…That oak was where we buried the Italian from Chicago after he laid our terrazzo floor. And that maple is sucking up syrup from the plumber’s plump remains; we hired him in San Francisco. The carpenter from Duluth is moldering near what must be the last healthy elm tree in Connecticut. I can’t remember where we buried the rest, but they don’t matter. What an excellent servant is greed! A secret job for cash in hand, everybody happy. Nobody happier than Charles as he doled out the cash. Nobody happier than me, taking it back after I swung the mallet. Nobody happier than both of us poking and prying through the cooling orifices, channels, tubes, cavities.

Not that we needed to take the cash back. What we spent on the Catone Room over the endless years while we waited for Mama to die was a pittance compared to the amount of cash Mama brought back from the railroad station in two small, elegant trunks that January of 1930. Daddy, fool enough to lose all his money in a stock market crash? Hardly. His investments had been converted to cash well before that. He installed a little bank vault (its door came in handy later on) in the wine cellar and put the cash into it until his detective found Mrs. Catone. Thank you, dear Captain Delmonico, for filling in the spaces! Now I know why he emptied the vault, put its contents into those two trunks, and loaded them aboard his car for the trip to the railroad station.

After she killed him Mama transferred the trunks to her car; we looked inside them and stole them while her clothes and the baseball bat were burning merrily. While I hid them in my tiny appendix of a tunnel, Charles began a tunnel more to his liking, burrowing into Mama’s mind. Over and over he whispered to her that the Catone affair was a figment of her imagination, that she hadn’t killed Daddy, that Catone rhymed with atone and Emma was a book by Jane Austen. When she needed money we gave it to her, though we never told her where the trunks were. Then after that traitor Roosevelt abolished the gold standard in 1933, we took Mama and the trunks to the Sunnington Bank in Cleveland, where, since her family owned the bank, we had no trouble exchanging the old bills for new ones. In those Depression days many people preferred to hoard their money in cash. And by then she was the helpless puppet of two demure boys scarcely into adolescence.

Getting the money home again wasn’t easy, on, off. Someone in the bank talked. But Charles masterminded our strategy with all his extraordinary brilliance. When it came to logistics and design, Charles was a genius. How am I going to replace him? Who will understand except a brother?

Home again, Charles’s tunnel into Mama’s mind concentrated on the money, how Roosevelt had stolen it to fund his plot against everything our America stood for, from liberty to letting Europe stew in its own well-deserved juice. Yes, both our tunnels grew, and who is to say which of them was the more beautiful? A tunnel to insanity, a tunnel to the Catone Room, on, off.

I hope Captain Delmonico is satisfied with my tale of love gone wrong and mania run amok. A pity that woman of his turned out to be so resourceful. I was so looking forward to a special session with her, flaying her Olympian heights while she watched it happen in a mirror. You can’t keep your eyes closed all the time, Desdemona, on, off. Still, who knows? Maybe some day, one day, it will happen. I would never have settled on her had I not conceived such a fascination for Carmine the Curious. But since for all his curiosity he isn’t prescient, on, off, he never asked the questions that might have turned the key in his dogged brain.

Questions like, why were they all sixteen years old? The answer to that is simple arithmetic, on, off. Mrs. Catone was twenty-six and Emma was six and that makes thirty-two but we only wanted one Catone so divide by two and the number is – sixteen! Questions like, what could lure a young do-gooder to her delicious fate? The answer to that lies in the quality of mercy. A blind woman weeping over her guide dog’s broken leg. Biddy does a wonderful broken leg act. Questions like, what is the significance of a dozen? Sun cycles, moon cycles, motor cycles…The answer is asinine. Mrs. Catone had a habit of saying “Cheaper by the dozen!” as if it were an illumination at least as blinding as God. Questions like, why did we leave it so late in our lives to start? An answer trapped in the web of Oedipus, of Orestes. Killing Catones may be cheaper by the dozen, but no one can kill his mother. Questions like, how could Claire be a part of it, yet who else was there than Claire? The answer to that lies in appearances. Appearances are everything; it is all in the eye of the beholder, on, off.

Mama never had a little girl. Just three boys. On, off, on, off. But she craved a little girl, and what Mama wanted, Mama got. So she dressed the last one of us as a girl from the day of his birth. People believe what their eyes tell them, on, off. Up to and including you, Captain Delmonico. We Ponsonby boys all look like Mama: we make passable females but namby-pamby males. None of Daddy’s thrusting masculinity. Oh, how he used to give it to Mrs. Catone! Charles and I watched them through a hole in the wall, on, off, on, off.

Dearest Charles, always thinking of ways to serve my needs. It would have been so much harder after Claire went blind if he had not been inspired to dress me in Claire’s clothes and send me to Cleveland, on, off. As soon as I arrived there, he put a limp rubber pillow over Claire’s face and Morton the Mole became Claire the Blind. On, off, on, off.

Darkness at last. My true milieu, on, off. Time for Morton the Mole to seek a fresh field to tunnel in.