The Strangler

52

“Can I help you with those?”

Margaret Daley hefted a brown paper bag from the trunk of her car, a corner of the bag bunched in her fist. But at the sound of the voice she relaxed the bag back down onto the floor of the trunk and turned. The young man on the sidewalk had an amiable appearance, a full-moon face, his cheeks pinked by the cool spring air, a tousle of dirty-blond hair. She guessed he was thirty, maybe a little older. He wore a white oxford shirt and khakis, all very wrinkled-the Brooks Brothers uniform of Michael’s Harvard pals. Is that what he was, a Harvard rich boy? There was a boyish quality to him certainly. Probably one of those men who retain a childish aspect right into old age, a boy in a man’s body. Or maybe, unconsciously, she was just lumping him in with Joe, Michael, and Ricky, who were roughly this young man’s age and whom she could not help regarding as eternal children, and so she saw the kid in him. There was something familiar about the boy on the sidewalk, but she could not place it. Maybe she had met and forgotten him. A friend of Michael’s maybe. She tended to forget. For all these reasons, and out of a reflexive old habit too, she called him dear. She said, “No, dear. I can manage.”

“You sure? They look heavy.”

“They are heavy.”

“Then let me help you! Don’t be silly!” He loped forward and, by hugging the grocery bags against his chest, managed to lift them all at once. “Where to?” he asked.

“I-Are you sure you can carry all that?”

“Of course. ‘Screw your courage to the sticking place, and we’ll not fail.’”

Margaret searched his face. “You’re not from around here. I’d know you.”

“No. But I’m happy to help.”

“Well,” Margaret said, relenting, warming, “aren’t you the gentleman.” She pulled her keys out of her pocketbook and led the young man up the front stairs.

“I like the basketball net out front,” he said in his affable way. His eyes were on her ankles.

“Yes. My children.”

“I’m something of a basketball aficionado myself.”

“Are you?”

“Not a very good player, I’m afraid. More of a fan. But I do love it. That’s the thing, don’t you think? To love whatever you do.”

“I suppose.”

“The people who excel in life, who really leave their mark, that’s what they have that ordinary people don’t: enthusiasm.”

“I guess. I didn’t catch your name.”

“It’s Kurt.”

“Kurt what?”

“Lindstrom.”

“What kind of name is that, dear? German?”

“Swedish.”

“I never met anyone Swedish.”

“Well, my great-grandfather was Swedish, but I’m not. I’m a mutt.” He smiled.

“We’re all mutts. Lord only knows where half the people around here come from.”

“Lord only knows.”

She unlocked the door and swung it open. Not long before, she would not have let a stranger into her house. But now DeSalvo was behind bars. Life had begun to return to normal. She said, “Kitchen’s straight through there, in the back.”

The young man beetled through the living room under the load of grocery bags, eyes flicking left and right, at the living-room sofa, the fireplace, the television, the stairs. In the kitchen he put the bags on the counter and took a moment to scan that room as well.

Margaret, at the kitchen door, said, “Thank you. A true gentleman.”

“May I have a glass of water, please?”

“Sure.”

She indicated with a gesture that he was blocking the cabinet where the drinking glasses were kept, and he stepped aside. She got a glass down for him and filled it from the tap. She felt, or thought she felt, his eyes on her. Her left hand moved to the side of her neck and covered it, a gesture she disguised by pretending to straighten the hair behind her ear. She handed him the glass then moved to the counter opposite, to create a space between them.

“This is a lovely old house,” he said.

“Nothing fancy.”

“Doesn’t have to be fancy to be lovely. How old is it?”

“I don’t know, really.”

“I never got your name.”

“Margaret Daley.”

“Margaret. Lovely. Like the princess.” He sipped. His eyes darted around the room, ticking off the toaster, a heavy cutting board on the counter, a cut-glass vase in the window above the sink. He went to a picture on the wall. “Is this your family?”

“Yes.”

“Three sons?”

“Yes.”

“Very handsome. And this is your husband?”

“Yes. That’s Joe.”

“And where is he?”

“He’s passed away.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry, Margaret.”

Tsk, she said, shrugging the subject away. “Well, thank you for lugging those groceries. I don’t know what I would’ve done.”

His eyes returned to her face then drifted downward so that, by the time he spoke, they seemed to have settled around her chest. “It’s nothing.” He flipped a lock of hair off his forehead. “Anything else I can do? Anything need fixing? Old houses like these, things fall apart. I’m pretty handy.”

“No. Nothing needs fixing.”

“Shall I take a look around, just to be sure?”

“No. It’s alright.”

“Well, then.” He came toward her, reached out, and placed his half-empty glass on the counter beside her, then moved back again. “I guess that’s it, then.”

“I’ll show you out.”

“Alright.” He waved his arm, inviting her to lead him through the kitchen door.

“No, no, please. After you.”

She had stepped closer now, within arm’s length-the kitchen was small-and again he reached out toward her. “This is lovely.” He lifted the pendant of a necklace she wore, a gold crucifix with ornate scrollwork. She felt his hand at the open neck of her dress. The edges of his fingernails scratched across her skin, then the coarse crusted skin of his knuckles came to rest on her collarbone, dry and cool at the hollow of her throat. “Where did you get this?”

She leaned back a little but decided that the boy was just being inappropriate, not threatening. It would be a relief to have him out of the house but, projecting herself a few seconds into the future, she did not want to remember his visit as frightening in any way. He had done nothing to alarm her, and so her apprehensiveness seemed to be just old-age anxiety. She shooed it out of her mind. She was not old. Not some vulnerable, helpless, brittle old woman. There was also, of course, the hint of a sexual offer in his touch, but she was too old for that, and he was rather effeminate, probably a homo. She could hear her three sons ridiculing her for even suggesting a much younger man had made a pass at her. So she consciously decided not to be put off by his gesture, but to ignore it. She lifted the pendant out of his hand and slipped away from him, through the kitchen door. “Never mind where I got it,” she said. “I don’t remember anyways.”

“Too bad. I thought my mother might like one just like it.”

“I don’t remember where I got it.”

She reached the front door and held it open for him. She was relieved to have the open door beside her, the street noise, daylight. They were not quite so alone now.

“I’m sorry, Margaret. Did I say something wrong?”

“No.”

“You seem upset.”

“I just have things to do.”

“Alright, then.” He extended his hand, with the pink palm turned halfway up, for her to shake. “It was very nice meeting you. Maybe I’ll see you again somewhere. Around the neighborhood, maybe.”

She regarded his hand a moment before shaking it once, curtly. Its warmth surprised her. “Maybe.”

He made another of his amiable grins and went off down the stairs with that queer loping stride of his.

She closed the door and, quietly, lest he hear, she slid the chain-lock into its groove.

Margaret tended to see in her three sons very specific aspects of her husband, so that, like a triptych or a tailor’s three-sided mirror, together the boys formed a picture of their father. Joe’s temper and Ricky’s sneakiness-both qualities were inherited from her husband, though in him they had been just facets. Michael’s melancholy had been his father’s, too, though again Joe Senior had managed it better. Fully expressed in Michael, Margaret did not know quite how to respond to it. She had a tin ear for that sort of thing, and she knew it. But she could not help seeing how attractive Michael’s involution was. It was the Irishest thing about him, that melancholy, maybe the only genuinely Irish thing-though he was vindictive, too, which she also admired-and she felt that even when he made good-when he finally got married and moved to the suburbs and “passed” for a Harvard Yankee the way some coloreds passed as white-he would still have that Irish fatalism in him, that little bit of unsmiling Dorchester to stain him forever.

It was to Michael that she confided her unease about that odd boy Kurt Lindstrom. She waited till evening to phone him, and she related the story in an offhand way-“…oh, the strangest thing, dear…”-which was her habit. Fortress Margaret did not betray her upset; even her husband’s sudden death had been endured without keening or self-pity. But in her indirect way, she signaled something was not right. Michael’s reaction surprised her. He ordered his mother to go next door immediately and call Joe to come get her. Michael was going to speak with Lindstrom himself, to set him straight. Maybe he would bring Ricky along, too. The decisions and the tone were so far out of character, Margaret did not know what to make of it. In their brief conversation, Michael never did inform her who on earth this Kurt Lindstrom was.

That she followed his orders anyway, without question, and that Joe then did the same, seemed momentous to Margaret. Without discussion, the captaincy of the family was passing to diffident, moody Michael, who wanted it least and who, Margaret had always assumed, was the least fit for it. She remembered him at four years old when he had got sick with spinal meningitis. The doctor had set his chances at fifty-fifty. She could still picture Michael in his hospital bed, arching his back in agony like a small animal. He had survived, of course, which his father interpreted as a sign of the little boy’s strength. Margaret read it the other way: her middle son was fragile, weakened. The runt of the litter, bracketed by her two indestructible mastiffs. Now Michael was the one issuing orders to her.

And Margaret herself? She was not old, not yet, but she was-what? Obsolescent. Irrelevant. Her sons did not come to her for advice anymore; they did not want her opinions. If Joe Senior had been alive…well, no sense in thinking that way. What if did not matter, only what is. So the time had come to start taking orders from her boys. Okay, then. Alright. So be it. But she meant to share this thought with Brendan sometime: It was murderous, ruthless, the way younger generations rose up to displace older ones.