What I Saw and How I Lied

Chapter 28

I walked all the way downtown to buy the paper. I didn't want to buy it at the newsstand in the lobby. I read it at the deserted bandshell, surrounded by men cleaning up the fallen branches. My blouse was soaked, I'd gotten so hot on the walk, but I shivered as I read.

A fisherman?

It was all in next day's morning edition. Peter wasn't loaded. They found that out pretty fast. He'd never been to college, let alone Yale. He was an only child. All through high school he'd worked summers at a country club in Oyster Bay. That's where he'd borrowed his man­ners from. And the blue convertible. The friend he'd borrowed it from had reported it stolen when Peter had taken it and hadn't returned.

Everything he'd told me about himself had been a lie.

The family friend with the house in Palm Beach? Just a mansion, closed until the season. He'd broken in. A caretaker had found evidence that someone was staying there when he'd gone over to check before the hurricane. A window had been forced. There were glasses left on a sill. Two of them. One of them had lipstick traces. Dark red, the paper said.

The most tempting color since Eve winked at Adam.

By the afternoon edition, the mansion was called a "secret love nest." And Beverly had gone from "attractive blonde" to a suspect.

Peter wasn't who I thought he was. Could it be that Mom wasn't, either?

If everyone was wondering what had gone on between Peter and my mother, wouldn't I be crazy not to won­der, too?

Joe Spooner, the man I'd picked to be my dad.

This man who bent over to turn the key of a neigh­bor kid's roller skate — could he have killed somebody? This man who knew how to tie a bow on the sash of my party dress, who took me for egg creams in Manhattan drugstores for the adventure of it? This man who'd say, after I'd had a fight with Margie, "Aw, kid, you gotta to let bygones be bygones. Here's a dime, go buy yourselves a couple of Cokes."

This man couldn't be a killer.

Killers were in movies.

Killers didn't snore in the bed next to you.

And Mom. Whatever had happened to her with

Peter — which I couldn't, wouldn't think about — she was still my mother. She'd still tucked me in at night, she'd still washed my blouses out in the sink every night even in winter with red cold hands, she'd still groaned every morning when the alarm went off and got up any­way and made my Ovaltine and toast. She was the one who cried hardest when the puppy she gave me for Christmas died of distemper. I remembered that puppy in her lap, his mouth all foam, while she cried a bucket of tears.

She couldn't have been part of it, if it was the thing I kept seeing when I closed my eyes: Joe hitting Peter on the head, Joe pushing Peter into the churning ocean.

Imagine our surprise when we got back from lunch the next day and found Grandma Glad in our room. She still had her going-out hat on, a dark green hat with stiff speckled feathers on one side. Her brown suitcase was on my bed. She sat on the couch, her eyes on the door. Her feet were planted on either side of an old tan leather valise that had belonged to her husband, Joe. "Big Joe Spooner," they used to call him. He died when Joe was eighteen, a big shot who'd left them in debt.

"When were you going to tell me, Joe?" she asked.

"How did you get here?" Joe looked genuinely stunned.

"Eastern Airlines flight to Miami, then I hired a car. When were you going to tell me?"

"You flew in a plane?" This was maybe more shock­ing than her sudden appearance.

"It made the papers in New York. I read about it in the paper. I left messages here, but you never called me back."

"You took a plane?"

"I read it in the newspaper, Joe!"

"I didn't want to worry you, Ma."

"So I can be half-killed, reading it in the paper. I almost fainted dead on the floor, and me alone in the house." Grandma Glad eyed Mom like she was a week-old fish. "You need better help than you've got."

"We didn't do anything wrong," Joe said.

"You're crazy if you don't see that it doesn't matter," Grandma Glad said. "They want to pin it on you. Can't you read the papers? And you don't help matters. What are you talking to a reporter for?"

"He called me. He asked a question."

"I talked to John Reilly," Grandma Glad said. John Reilly was a fat lawyer with a red face. Everybody went to him for wills and deeds and when their kid got caught doing something.

"That shyster," Mom muttered.

"That shyster knows his business. He says don't talk to reporters — you put your foot in it and you can't get it out. You said in the paper you didn't understand why they called the inquest. Dumb, Mr. Reilly said. He said, you say you welcome the inquest."

Joe dropped his head in his hands. "What am I going to do?"

"What's the most important thing down here?"

I couldn't get over it. There Gladys sat, in her navy flowered dress, her Red Cross shoes planted firmly on the carpet. She had gotten some authority somehow, and it wasn't just because she'd talked to a lawyer. Gladys Spooner, sitting in a chair, listening to the radio, looking out the window, gossiping on the porch. All that time, she was gathering information for just this moment to take over.

"The tourists," Grandma Glad went on. "Murder hits the papers and they have to take care of it so the tourists keep coming."

Mom went pale. "It's not a murder. Nobody's calling it a murder."

"They are, and we might as well, too, or else, how are we going to fight?" Grandma Glad said. I hated her for using the word out loud, but she made us all shut up, that's for sure. Once the word was out, we had to face it square. I hated her for it, but she was right.

"I'm sunk," Joe said. "I'm a nobody. They'll pin it on me, all right."

"You're not a nobody," Grandma Glad said fiercely. "He was a nobody."

I started to cry, but nobody paid attention, even when I had to put my hands over my mouth so that the noise wouldn't go out into the hall. Peter was there in the room with me suddenly. I could see the golden hair on his forearms, the way he twisted his mouth when he was trying not to smile at me. A nobody. He was still so clear and so alive and so much him. There was so much Peter inside me I felt sick.

Dead. My stomach twisted as it hit me again. Dead.

"I told you not to marry her," Grandma Glad said. It was like me and Mom weren't even in the room. "I told you she was trouble. I said she'd run around on you."

"Yeah, and you kept on saying it, even when Joe was overseas and I was working to put food on your table!" Mom said.

"Working." Grandma Glad sniffed. "Is that what you call it? Is that what you were doing with that Coldidge fellow?"

"Coleridge," I said. My voice was all choked and wavery. "His name was Coleridge." I couldn't stand hear­ing her. I had pushed evil away, I had tried to keep everything straight, and even though everything was horrible, she'd walked in the door and brought evil in.

"This isn't helping any," Joe said. "We can't fight each other. Not now."

"I'm going to get you out of this, Joey," Grandma Glad said.

"What about me?" Mom asked, her voice quiet. "You going to leave me in the soup, Gladys? You going to pin it on me and let your boy go free? This is Christmas for you, isn't it? Wrap me up and hand me over with a big fat bow."

That stopped my crying. Mom had put her finger on it, all right. That was the possibility in the room, and I wasn't even seeing it.

Grandma Glad hesitated. She let Mom swing on the rope for a while.

"Ma?" Joe said.

You could tell she was about to eat some week-old brussels sprouts because they were the only things in the icebox. She didn't want the taste of what she was about to say in her mouth. "What happens to you, happens to my boy," she said to Mom. "I'd let you stew in the soup if I could. But I can't."

"I'm crazy about you, too, Gladys," Mom said, and she blew out cigarette smoke right in her face.

I gave up my bed that night to Grandma Glad and bunked on the couch. Joe pushed it closer to the bed so Grandma Glad could get out to the toilet on the other side in the middle of the night if she had to.

The couch smelled like cigarettes and mildew. It was small, and I had to stick my legs up on the arm or curl up in a ball to be comfortable, which I wasn't.

I woke up to whispers in the middle of the night. For a second I didn't know where I was. I stared at the blinds for a minute, trying to remember. All I saw were clouds glowing, like the moon was trying to bust out from behind.

Grandma Glad sat on the edge of the bed, Joe right next to her. I could have touched her red slipper, touched her big toe with its thick yellow nail. If I wanted to.

It's funny how adults are. When they think a kid is asleep, they never expect you to wake up and listen.

"You don't ever let them know that you knew about her and him," Grandma Glad said. "If it comes out, you didn't know."

"She says it's all lies. She says he chased her, but she put him off. She liked the attention, she said. I was busy with the Grayson fellow, trying to swing a deal. Is that a crime? It was Evie he went after, she said."

"You never were a chump, Joe. Don't start now. How do you think she got along all those years?"

I wanted to leap up and scream at her that it wasn't true. I knew that. I knew Mom. All she had was her reputation. She wouldn't give them the satisfaction of having gossip about her, she said. That's why she dragged me to church every Sunday and nodded and smiled to the ladies as we walked up in our hats and white gloves.

I had been thinking of the wives of the men who whistled as Beverly Plunkett went by, of them being the gossips. That wasn't the enemy for Mom. All the time, her enemy had been waiting. Her enemy was sitting in the green chair in the living room.

"She says I neglected her."

"You were building your business. Nobody did as good as you after the war."

"I haven't been a saint, Ma. When I was overseas —"

"You were a soldier. A hero. You made your way, best you could. Now stop it, Joey. We've got to get this straight, now. Reilly says to hire a lawyer. He gave me a name. Things aren't always on the up-and-up, you know. If we know the right people, maybe we can close this down. That's what he says — without coming right out and saying it, mind you. If you spread the green, he said, certain people will look the other way. I came down with eight thousand."

"Ma!" Joe's voice burst out, and she shushed him.

"We'll only use it if we have to."

"That's all the money I've got in the world. It's going to buy us a dream house."

So Joe had cash, all this time. He could have paid Peter, and he didn't. He wanted his dream house instead. He wouldn't give that up. But Grandma Glad knew about the money.

So many lies around me. Enough lies to fill ten houses.

"Forget the house — this is your life. You saw your chance in the war, you took it, you made something of yourself. Just like your dad."

"Pop died broke."

"Hush your mouth, the man did his best. You'll make it through this. We'll try for the police chief. A bribe here and there. Maybe the judge. Reilly says to ask our lawyer when we get one, and he'll give us the straight deal. But don't ask until we have to."

The shadows moved apart. Joe went back to his bed. Grandma Glad took off her robe and got back into her bed. I kept my eyes almost closed. I watched her pull the covers up to her chin.

I didn't understand. There was so much I didn't get.

But one thing shone through, like the moon through the clouds, silver now painting my blanket.

She told him this and that and what they were going to do and how bad my mother was.

But never once did she ask him if he did it.