Promised Land

Chapter 27

It was still raining when we drove back to my apartment to get Pam’s things, and it was still raining when we set out at about eight-thirty for Hyannis. There’s an FM station in Boston that plays jazz from six in the morning until eleven. I turned it on. Carmen McRae was singing “Skyliner.” The rain had settled in and came steadily against the windshield as if it planned to stay awhile. My roof leaked in one corner and dripped on the back seat.

Pam Shepard sat quietly and looked out the side window of the car. The Carmen McRae record was replaced by an album of Lee Wiley singing with Bobby Hackett’s cornet and Joe Bushkin’s piano. Sweet Bird of Youth. There wasn’t much traffic on Route 3. Nobody much went to the Cape on a rainy midweek morning.

“When I was a little kid,” I said, “I used to love to ride in the rain, in a car. It always seemed so self-contained, so private.” There we were in the warm car with the music playing, and the rest of the world was out in the rain getting wet and shivering. “Still like it, in fact.”

Pam Shepard kept looking out the side window. “Is it over, do you think?” she said.

“What?”

“Everything. The bank robbery, the trouble Harvey is in, the hiding out and being scared? The feeling so awful?”

“I think so,” I said.

“What is going to happen to Harvey and me?”

“Depends, I guess. I think you and he can make it work better than it has worked.”

“Why?”

“Love. There’s love in the relationship.”

“Shit,” she said.

“Not shit,” I said. “Love doesn’t solve everything and it isn’t the only thing that’s important, but it has a big head start on everything else. If there’s love, then there’s a place to begin.”

“That’s romantic goo,” Pam Shepard said. “Believe me. Harvey’s preached the gospel of love at me for nearly twenty years. It’s crap. Believe me, I know.”

“No, you don’t know. You’ve had a bad experience, so you think it’s the only experience. You’re just as wrong as Harvey. It didn’t work, doesn’t mean it won’t work. You’re intelligent, and you’ve got guts. You can do therapy. Maybe you can get Harv to do it. Maybe when you’ve gotten through talking about yourself with someone intelligent you’ll decide to roll Harv anyway. But it’ll be for the right reasons, not because you think you’re frigid, or he thinks you’re frigid. And if you decide to roll Harv you’ll have some alternatives beside screwing sweaty drunks in one night cheap hotels, or living in a feminist commune with two cuckoos.”

“Is it that ugly,” she said.

“Of course it’s that ugly. You don’t screw people to prove things. You screw people because you like the screwing or the people or both. Preferably the last. Some people even refer to it as making love.”

“I know,” she said, “I know.”

“And the two dimwits you took up with. They’re theoreticians. They have nothing much to do with life. They have little connection with phallic power and patterns of dominance and blowing away old men in the service of things like that.”

She stopped looking out the window and looked at me. “Why so angry,” she said.

“I don’t know exactly. Thoreau said something once about judging the cost of things in terms of how much life he had to expend to get it. You and Harv aren’t getting your money’s worth. Thrift, I guess. It violates my sense of thrift.”

She laughed a little bit and shook her head. “My God. I like you,” she said. “I like you very much.”

“It was only a matter of time,” I said.

She looked back out the window and we were quiet most of the rest of the drive down. I hadn’t said it right. Maybe Suze could. Maybe nobody could. Maybe saying didn’t have much effect anyway.

We got to the motel a little after ten and found Susan in the coffee shop drinking coffee and reading the New York Times.

“Was it okay,” Susan said.

“Yeah, just the way it should have been.”

“He warned one of them,” Pam Shepard said. “And he got away.”

Susan raised her eyebrows at me.

“Hawk,” I said.

“Do you understand that,” Pam Shepard said.

“Maybe,” Susan said.

“I don’t.”

“And I’ll bet he didn’t give you a suitable explanation, did he?” Susan said.

“Hardly,” Pam said.

“Everything else was good though?” Susan said.

I nodded.

“Are you going home, Pam?”

“I guess I am. I haven’t really faced that, even driving down. But here I am, half a mile from my house. I guess I am going home.”

“Good.”

“I’m going to call Harv,” I said. “How about I ask him to join us and we can talk about everything and maybe Suze can talk a little.”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m scared to see him again. I’d like to see him with you here and without the children.”

I went back to the room and called Shepard and told him what had happened. It took him ten minutes to arrive. I met him in the lobby.

“Is Powers in jail?” he said.

I looked at my watch. “No, probably not. They’ve booked him by now, and his lawyer is there arranging bail and King’s sitting around in the anteroom waiting to go home.”

“Jesus Christ,” Shepard said. “You mean he’s going to be out loose knowing we set him up?”

“Life’s hard sometimes,” I said.

“But, for crissake, won’t he come looking for us? You didn’t tell me they’d let him out on bail. He’ll be after us. He’ll know we double-crossed him. He’ll be coming.”

“If I’d told you, you wouldn’t have done it. He won’t come after you.”

“What the hell is wrong with them, letting him out on bail. You got no right to screw around with my life like that.”

“He won’t come after you, Shepard. Your wife’s waiting for you in the coffee shop.”

“Jesus, how is she?”

“She’s fine.”

“No, I mean, like what’s her frame of mind? I mean, what’s she been saying about me? Did she say she’s going to come back?”

“She’s in the coffee shop with my friend Susan Silverman. She wants to see you and she wants us to be there and what she’s going to do is something you and she will decide. She’s planning, right now, I think, to stay. Don’t screw it up.”

Shepard took a big inhale and let it out through his nose. We went into the coffee shop. Susan and Pam Shepard were sitting opposite each other in a booth. I slid in beside Susan. Shepard stood and looked down at Pam Shepard. She looked up at him and said, “Hello, Harv.”

“Hello, Pam.”

“Sit down, Harv,” she said. He sat, beside her. “How have you been?” she said.

He nodded his head. He was looking at his hands, close together on the table before him.

“Kids okay?”

He nodded again. He put his right hand out and rested it on her back between the shoulder blades, the fingers spread. His eyes were watery and when he spoke his voice was very thick. “You coming back?”

She nodded. “For now,” she said and there was strain now in her voice too.

“Forever,” he said.

“For now, anyway,” she said.

His hand was moving in a slow circle between her shoulder blades. His face was wet now. “Whatever you want,” he said in his squeezed voice. “Whatever you want. I’ll get you anything you want, we can start over and I’ll be back up on top for you in a year. Anything. Anything you want.”

“It’s not up on top I want, Harvey.” I felt like a voyeur. “It’s, it’s different. They think we need psychiatric help.” She nodded toward me and Suze.

“What do they know about it or us, or anything?”

“I won’t stay if we don’t get help, Harvey. We’re not just unhappy. We’re sick. We need to be cured.”

“Who do we go to? I don’t even know any shrinks.”

“Susan will tell us,” Para said. “She knows about these things.”

“If that’s what will bring you back, that’s what I’ll do.” His voice was easing a little, but the tears were still running down his face. He kept rubbing her back in the little circles. “Whatever you want.”

I stood up. “You folks are going to make it. And while you are, I’m going to make a call.”

They paid me very little heed and I left feeling about as useful as a faucet on a clock. Back in the room I called Clancy in the Suffolk County D.A.’s office.

“Spenser,” I said when he came on. “Powers out of the calaboose yet?”

“Lemme check.”

I listened to the vague sounds that a telephone makes on hold for maybe three minutes. Then Clancy came back on. “Yep.”

“Dandy,” I said.

“You knew he would be,” Clancy said. “You know the score.”

“Yeah, thanks.” I hung up.

Back in the coffee shop Pam was saying, “It’s too heavy. It’s too heavy to carry the weight of being the center of everybody’s life.”

The waitress brought me another cup of coffee.

“Well, what are we supposed to do,” Harv said. “Not love you. I tell the kids, knock it off on the love. It’s too much for your mother? Is that what we do?”

Pam Shepard shook her head. “It’s just… no of course, I want to be loved, but it’s being the only thing you love, and the kids, being so central, feeling all that… I don’t know… responsibility, maybe, I want to scream and run.”

“Boy”—Harv shook his head—“I wish I had that problem, having somebody love me too much. I’d trade you in a goddamned second.”

“No you wouldn’t.”

“Yeah, well, I wouldn’t be taking off on you either. I don’t even know where you been. You know where I been.”

“And what you’ve been doing,” she said. “You goddamned fool.”

Harv looked at me. “You bastard, Spenser, you told her.”

“I had to,” I said.

“Well, I was doing it for you and the kids. I mean, what kind of man would I be if I let it all go down the freaking tube and you and the kids had shit? What kind of a man is that?”

“See,” Pam said. “See, it’s always me, always my responsibility. Everything you do is for me.”

“Bullshit. I do what a man’s supposed to do. There’s nothing peculiar about a man looking out for the family. Dedicating his life to his family. That’s not peculiar. That’s right.”

“Submerging your own ego that extent is unusual,” Susan said.

“Meaning what?”

Shepard’s voice had lost its strangled quality and had gotten tinny. He spoke too loudly for the room.

“Don’t yell at Suze, Harv,” I said.

“I’m not yelling, but I mean, Christ, Spenser, she’s telling me that dedication and self-sacrifice is a sign of being sick.”

“No she’s not, Harv. She’s asking you to think why you can’t do anything in your own interest. Why you have to perceive it in terms of self-sacrifice.”

“I, I don’t perceive… I mean I can do things I want to… for myself.”

“Like what?” I said.

“Well, shit, I… Well, I want money too, and good things for the family… and… aw, bullshit. Whose side are you on in this?”

Pam Shepard put her face in her hands. “Oh God,” she said. “Oh God, Jesus goddamned Christ,” she said.