Summitt

Chapter Thirty-Three

It was after midnight when Selby got to Dorcas Brett’s. Winds off the Brandywine mill-race rocked the trees and caused shadows to leap away from the iron streetlamps.

From behind the heavy door her voice was low and tense. “Yes?”

“It’s all right, it’s me, Harry.”

Tumblers fell, a chain came unlatched. She opened the door. A log burned in the living room fireplace. She wore a tan robe with yellow piping over dark velour pajamas. The sofa was made up with blankets and a pillow. A book was on the floor.

Her phone was off the hook, he saw, the receiver lying beside the cradle. He had tried to call her twice before leaving Philadelphia. Now, even above the crackle of the logs, he could hear the faint beat of the busy signal.

She watched him anxiously as he took off his coat. “What’s the matter, Harry? What happened to you? Your forehead’s bleeding.”

“I bumped my head in a phone booth.”

“Is anything wrong?”

“Everything is fine, everything is great. Relax.”

“Sure. You just happened to be driving by and noticed my lights...”

He lifted the receiver from the desk and placed it in the cradle. “I can’t promise you’ll never get a wrong number, or your sister won’t call to tell you a poodle had pups, but I promise you won’t hear from the Cadle brothers again.”

She stared at the phone, as if testing its strange silence. “You’re sure? You talked to them then?”

“In a phrase from a century when they did things better, I called on them.”

“You know Davic intends to move for a disqualification?”

“I knew that, yes.”

“And you know why?”

“Yes.”

Her dark hair and the firelight made her face seem unnaturally pale, made her high cheekbones stand out.

“Then I guess you know my whole story, Harry...”

“No, because I don’t know what you plan to do.”

“Well, haven’t you at least guessed? That would have been a vote of confidence, of sorts.”

“All I knew is what you told Shana. It was a flip of the coin then.”

“Well, I’ve decided not to run a convenient fever.”

“I’d have taken the odds on it.”

She smiled. “Thanks. I told Lamb — after a speech about team spirit and loyalty and some less subtle crap from Slocum, that I wouldn’t quit. If I don’t take Allan Davic’s flak tomorrow, if I crawl away from it, it would make a lie out of everything I’ve let Shana be put through. So don’t worry... or maybe you should be... but I’ll be in court with her in the morning.”

“I wasn’t worried. Not about you.”

She looked at him, not altogether convinced. “Look, Harry, I’m worried, and scared, and tomorrow Davic’s going to turn the lions loose on us... You’ve been in a fight, it’s obvious. Please don’t give me any more stuff about bumping into yourself in a phone booth. Tell me all of it. Please. You talked to Davic, didn’t you?”

“Yes. First he told me if I tried to pressure him with Emma Green’s deposition I’d be personally subject to serious legal reprisal. His very words. Second, he said that the deposition was inadmissible in this case. I told him I knew that. I told him you d explained it to me. I also told him the matter wasn’t negotiable. I quoted what he’d told me himself about Poland in another context.”

“Harry, would you like coffee? You sound high.”

“I am high. I told Davic if he filed against you tomorrow he’d find fifty copies of the Emma Green deposition stacked in the pressroom and that I’d hand-deliver the original copy to Earl Thomson’s mother in her private suite. I left it up to him. In the end he agreed there was nothing to negotiate.”

She said quietly, “But you didn’t answer my first question, Harry. You do know my whole story—”

“I don’t know anything, Brett. It was your experience, your truth. If you want to share it with me, well, then it becomes ours, I guess.”

She studied him, and either her eyes had become darker or her skin whiter, he couldn’t be sure which.

“That’s a nice way to put it, Harry. Let me get you a drink. A Scotch, isn’t it?”

A row of brass animals stood on the coffee table, tiny antlers and hooves glinting in the firelight. A pack of cigarettes was beside them, but Selby saw no ashtray or matches.

She came from the kitchen with his whiskey and water on a lacquered tray. Seating herself cross-legged on the sofa, she pushed her hair away from her shoulders.

“It’s not just sex, is it, Harry?” She picked up the pack of cigarettes. “That’s a tiresome question, I know, but it isn’t irrelevant. I’m not smoking,” she added defensively. “That’s the phrase the book advises. Not to say you’ve quit, but just that you aren’t. It’s got something to do with the hang-ups you create if you can’t stick to it and start sneaking a few puffs.” She put the cigarettes back among the brass animals. “You’ve got more in mind than one-night stands in motels, right?”

He was accustomed to her verbal zig-zags, these seemingly erratic detours. “That’s true, but I wouldn’t rule out the motels altogether.”

“You’re serious, you’re serious about this at any rate, so let me try to explain why the motels might be okay but more might be difficult.” Drawing a deep breath, she said, “You’ve got a lot locked up in your past, Harry. Come and sit here with me, please.”

He sat beside her and she touched the scar on his cheek-bone. “I told you that things heal over, that the pain goes away, but I don’t think you really believe that. The wind on the water in Spain, the colors... that’s the perfect place, sealed off in your memories. It belongs to you and nobody else is allowed to go there, not even to visit. It wouldn’t matter if we just shared a motel room and a drink. I could think about something else if you wanted to tell me how beautiful it was back there with her. But if we were serious, I’d feel second class. I’d hate that. I d start looking for what was wrong, the bad weather, the rainy days...”

“Brett, if you’re accusing me of being loyal to my past, I can’t argue about it. But if you don’t want a permanent relationship, don’t blame it on the phantom lady in Spain.”

Her hand strayed to the cigarettes. “Friendly psychiatry, Harry? Behind the battered facade of the All-Pro whatever—”

“For Christ’s sake, let’s be honest about this. Tell me what you’re thinking and feeling.”

“I can’t, goddammit.” She uncrossed her legs in a single fluid movement and began pacing. Picking up the cigarettes, she broke open the pack with a clumsy gesture. Flakes of tobacco sifted over the brass animals. “I want to tell you what I m feeling. I’m not afraid of much when I’m with you, I’ll say that. But if I could put things unemotionally in a clear precise way...” She dropped the pack of cigarettes and sat down again. “I can lecture about my feelings, but that’s just a suit of armor. I can quote laws and statistics about rape like a sociology professor, use antiseptic sentences, draw diagrams on the blackboard with chalk...” (Selby realized she was close to tears.) “But when I talk and think about it personally I start to stutter or cry or get mad... I have, it seems, a need to please people and a need for privacy, which turns them away... I’m trying, Harry, bear with me... Look, I found nothing unusual in my father’s occasional dissatisfaction with me and my sisters for not joining the Green Berets or something to avenge the fallen warrior I was named after, Paul Dorcas, a college classmate of his who died of pneumonia at Fort Ord, Kansas, during basic training.” She looked down at her hands. “Do you know what the hell I’m talking about, Harry?”

“I think maybe you’re inching up on telling me what happened with Toby Clark. Well, I’m telling you that still belongs to you and nobody else. It’s your pain. You can do what you want with it.”

“You really are a nice man, Harry... and wouldn’t it be nice if more people felt that way. But some kinds of pain are as public as a sidewalk.” She brushed impatiently at her eyes. “All right, I won’t — stutter or get mad. No stats or lectures. I was hurt like Shana was, but not as brutally or sickeningly. And I was nineteen, I have five years on her and so could put things in a little more perspective. A little... I’m still not sure how I feel. I admire Shana tremendously for giving her testimony. That’s what takes guts. Telling your story at high noon in the village square, knowing the skeptical grins you’ll get. I have trouble talking to you in my own living room. You noticed I said I was hurt? That’s what I say after nine years, like it was a tennis elbow or a twisted ankle.”

For a moment she stared into the fire, then... “All the other girls got out of the pool on time that night. I’d been studying hard, or something, I wanted to swim a few more laps and relax. But then I was alone in the pool and it was dark except for the door of the dressing room. A light was on in there. It filled the hall and made a tunnel to the pool. But I didn’t want to go into the dressing room and take off my suit. Why not? That interested the police. Why didn’t I want to go into the clean, well-lighted dressing room? My father was curious about that, too. The reason was I knew someone was in there. Someone who shouldn’t be. So then the question was, how had I known? And if I’d known, why had I gone in there? Had I been looking for him? My father thought those questions were reasonable. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. That’s what people would say, he told me. He felt a trial would only make things worse.”

Brett pulled a pillow over her legs. “Those brass animals were a gift.” She nodded at the figures on the coffee table. “I’ve had them since I was Shana’s age. For years I had dreams about that pool, the smell of chlorine and the bright lights in the dressing room. When I saw Shana that first time at Vinegar Hill, it seemed I was reliving both our experiences.” Brett’s body was rigid, except for her hands moving restlessly on the pillow.

“A teacher gave me those little animals for memorizing something or other. Coleridge, I think... ‘The Ancient Mariner.’ I couldn’t find my towel that night. I’d dropped it beside the pool when I went in. I walked around trying to find it, but trying not to look down the lighted hallway to the dressing room. It was cold and my suit was sticking to me. Finally, I got my nerve up. I made myself walk into that bright corridor. I decided it was my imagination after all. The dressing room was empty. I had my suit off and the clothes basket out of my locker before I heard the door click shut behind me. It was Toby Clark. He worked at the school with the maintenance people, washing windows, cutting lawns. He told me he knew I’d waited for him. Then he said he wouldn’t hurt me. I tried to get away. How hard I tried was another thing the detectives were interested in. I hit him and he knocked me down. What was lucky about being nineteen and having read some books,” she said dryly, “was that I knew he was looking for an excuse to get angry. He needed that, and by resisting, I gave it to him. He tried to rape me. He hurt my arms and my hips and my pelvis and cut my mouth. Something stopped him or distracted him. Strangely enough, or not so strangely, come to think of it, it was a church bell ringing, the college chapel sounding the hour.”

Selby took her hands. “Let me get you a glass of milk or a drink or something. You better get to sleep.”

“I drove myself to the police station that night...”

Her voice was steady and quiet; she apparently hadn’t heard him.

“I told a detective what happened. I signed a charge sheet. They picked up Toby Clark at his rooming house and called the Bryn Mawr Hospital and my father. Toby Clark told the police he’d been in the dressing room picking up towels because he thought everyone was gone. Then I’d come in and laughed at him and pulled off my bathing suit. The detectives asked more questions. Fortunately my arm was in a cast and my lips were badly swollen. That was a plus,” she added bitterly. “But a captain suggested to my father that we should probably drop the attempted rape charge. Which we did. My father was glad to, I realized. Toby Clark was given a suspended one-year sentence for simple assault. He was also fired, which some of the university staff thought was a rotten thing for a poor young man just starting off in life. Some of them wrote letters for Toby, character references, pointing out that he was a good worker. That s what the Cadles got hold of. The Bryn Mawr police reports.” She sighed. “What I’d said, what he’d said, the charges filed against him and dropped by a privileged, hysterical — Toby Clark is dead, by the way. He was shot in a woman’s apartment in Fresno, California, four years ago. He was forty-two. We’d all thought he was about our age.”

Selby rubbed her shoulders. Her muscles, tight as coiled springs, loosened some under the pressure of his hands.

“You’re something else, Brett. You actually dredged up that nightmare to help Shana.”

“Yes... in a way... I told her about the pool and the darkness as a sort of metaphor to let her know I understood. I didn’t tell her about Toby Clark. I wouldn’t add that to what she’d been through.”

“But you still went into court each day knowing those bastards at the defense table, including Earl Thomson, knew about Toby Clark.”

“That wasn’t courage, Harry... It might have been just the opposite. A way of escape, doing something for Shana I hadn’t been brave enough to do for myself.”

“You can play Freud on yourself, I’m telling you that I think it took tremendous guts.”

“Whatever... Harry, the thing is, I want Shana to be able to come to terms with her anger.” She tightened her grip on his hands. “Anger doesn’t give you confidence. It doesn’t make you a better or nicer person. When I was fourteen I knew I was attractive. I didn’t care whether I was or not, I knew I was. It was just a comfortable fact. I didn’t mind being wrong or taking chances. I could be reckless and make a fool of myself if I wanted to. But the kind of anger I’m talking about changes all that. You become an expert in limitations. You’re afraid you won’t be believed or liked or accepted, so you retreat into anything that’s secure, even if it’s restricting or deadening. You find yourself specializing in dull economies... not risking honestly felt passion. They say you’ve been profaned, you feel like a victim of some new and awful original sin.”

“Maybe there’s something that’s still too important for Shana to give up, something she won’t talk about. I can understand her fear... your talk about Spain makes me afraid I won’t know all the old campfire songs.”

She brushed at her eyes. “I could buy a used Camelot, but I’d want to knock some walls down and—”

“Don’t talk anymore,” he told her. “That’s enough now.” He took the pillow from her, plumped it up and turned down the blankets, then went into the kitchen and turned on the lights.

The rear garden was dark, with reflections shimmering on the shrubs. He opened the refrigerator and took out a carton of milk. In a cupboard he found saucepans. He filled one with milk and put it on the stove. Maybe she did know more about pain than he did. But he knew how love between people ended. It ended in pain. People got tired of each other or betrayed each other or died. Someone was left with the pain.

He put the glass of milk on the table beside the brass animals. Brett was lying slack as a spent child, one narrow foot trailing off the sofa. Her hair was curled and damp at the temples. She was breathing deeply, each breath stirring strands of hair across her cheek and throat. When she listened and talked her features were irregular, swiftly expressive. But in repose, they were exquisitely proportioned. He realized he had never heard her laugh.

He straightened out her arms and legs, put the covers over her and tucked them around her. He was surprised how light her body was. He sat on the edge of the sofa and looked at the shine of her tumbled hair on the pillow. Watching the rise and fall of her chest, he remembered how touching it had been to look at his children sleeping...

He leaned over to kiss her forehead, and she raised her chin without opening her eyes and kissed him on the mouth. Her arms went around his shoulders and drew him down to her, her lips opening.

He held her very tight, and when she pulled back, saying only his name, he felt the place inside him that had been cold and empty so long beginning to fill with a rush of expectation, and a longing for the profound warmth that was almost always too much to hope for, but never too much to accept and believe in...

A silver light glistened on the dewy shrubs in the rear garden. Selby looked out and saw the trees beyond the house moving against a still dark sky. A river wind created a shrill but musical sound on the windows.

He made fresh coffee. Pulling on his duffel coat, he poured a second cup. Sipping it, he looked at a bulletin board beside an herb rack. A quotation was typed on the back of a business card partially hidden among messages and recipes. It read: “He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days without taking a fish.”

He poured orange juice into a glass and filled another cup with coffee. As he looked for a tray, her light footsteps sounded on the stairs. She wore a short white robe.

“I was going to bring up a tray,” he said. “I thought you’d sleep until the alarm went off.”

She put her head against his shoulder. “Look at the garden,” she said. “The light, I mean. I’ve never seen it so clear. On the other hand, I’ve never seen the river mist so... misty.” She laughed, and Selby was almost startled by the sound, so strangely unfamiliar and exciting coming from her.

“You’re a nice person to be with,” she said quietly. “I’d like to walk with you somewhere for a long time and talk until there wasn’t anything left to talk about. Then just go on walking.”

“You’d get very tired,” he said.

“We’d stop then. Sit on the beach and watch the waves.”

“What about winter? How are you and skiing?”

“I’ll have you know I spent most of my growing-up life in Maine, Harry. I liked cross-country better than downhill. Maybe I had more stamina than nerve. I learned to ski on a hill behind our house. That’s one advantage of having older sisters. They taught me, and I was pretty good. Why?”

The phone rang then, sending its shrill insistent demand through the early stillness. Brett’s hands shook suddenly. Coffee splashed into her saucer.

Selby took the cup from her. “It’s okay, it’s a wrong number or the poodle’s having pups. I’ll get it.”

It was a woman’s voice, a familiar one. He remembered mascara and spiky eyelashes as he listened to Victoria Kim say, “I’m calling for Senator Lester, Mr. Selby. Hold on a moment.”

Selby covered the phone and waved to Brett, who was watching from the doorway. “Pick up the extension...”

“Here’s Senator Lester,” Victoria Kim said.

Brett had already lifted the receiver in the kitchen.

“Selby? I’ve been here since we got the word, St. Anne’s in Philadelphia. A deputy chief called us. The Easton girl was in the operating room then. They’ve transferred her to intensive care now—”

“What happened?”

“They think she tried to kill herself, Selby. Looks that way now. She wrote your name out for an intern and spoke it clear enough to a nurse. She jumped — well, they’re not sure, jumped or fell from the terrace of her apartment. Hit a railing or ledge couple of floors down. Selby, if she wants to see you, it could be important to us. How soon can you get here?”

No mention of Jarrell, no mention of Summitt City or of Simon Correll, still the evasions and omissions.

“Will she be okay—?”

“Sorry, no... the doctors say too much is damaged. I’ll arrange a police escort to pick you up.”

“Never mind, I can get there faster on my own.”

He hung up. Brett stood in the kitchen doorway, small and bare-legged, still holding the extension.

“Tell Shana where I am and good luck,” Selby said. “Call me at St. Anne’s at your recess.” He opened the front door and turned up his collar against the raw river winds. “You were right, you know. It was the first thing I noticed. The light this morning, it was clear as I can remember it. Now lock this door after me.”