How It Ended Part 10

"How I look, honey?" Marilyn asks.

"Looking bad, looking good," I say.

"This my Madonna look. Those Chursey boys-they love it."

By now I'm sure you've guessed that Marilyn is currently a blond.

The smell gets worse as we approach Was.h.i.+ngton and Gansevoort, which is Marilyn's beat-the warehouses full of dead meat, the prevailing smell of rot inextricably linked in my mind with the stench of urine and excrement and spent s.e.m.e.n. A sign reads VEAL SPECIALISTS, HOTHOUSE BABY LAMBS, SUCKLING PIGS VEAL SPECIALISTS, HOTHOUSE BABY LAMBS, SUCKLING PIGS & & KID GOATS KID GOATS. Whoa! Sounds like that s.h.i.+t should be illegal, know what I'm saying?

With darkness falling, a slow and funky metamorphosis is taking place. Refrigerated trucks haul away from loading docks while rough men in b.l.o.o.d.y ap.r.o.ns yank down metal shutters and padlock sliding doors. The suffocating smell of rotting meat hangs over the neighborhood and, when the breeze blows east off the Hudson, infiltrates the smug apartments and cafes of Greenwich Village-which is the only good thing I can say about this stench.

As the trucks disappear toward New Jersey and upstate, strange creatures materialize on the broken sidewalks, as if spontaneously generated from the rotting flesh. Poised on high heels, undulant with the exaggerated s.h.i.+mmy of courts.h.i.+p, a race of lanky stylized bipeds commands the street corners. They thrust lips and hips at any cars that pa.s.s this time of night, the area not exactly being on the direct route to anywhere except h.e.l.l or Hoboken. Motorists who find their way here cruise slowly down the unlit cobbled streets, circling and returning to scout the sidewalk sirens. Sometimes a car slows to a stop near one of the posing figures, who then leans toward the driver's window to consult, haggle and flirt, sometimes to walk around the car and slip in the pa.s.senger door, reappearing a few minutes later.

The girls of Was.h.i.+ngton Street come in all sizes, colors and nose shapes; and in this light, few of them are hard to look at. One lifts a halter top to expose a pair of taut white b.r.e.a.s.t.s as a red Toyota with Connecticut plates crawls past. It's just barely conceivable that some of these sports who transact for five minutes of s.e.x believe they're getting it straight. But ladies, I wouldn't count on it. I mean if your fiance gets busted down here, you might think about canceling the band and the tent and the cake. Or maybe not. They're probably good family men, most of them. And so long as clothes and makeup stay in place, no one needs to start parsing his proclivities. Sometimes the cops sweep through to meet arrest quotas; johns who find their pleasure interrupted by a sudden official rap on the window almost always act shocked when the cops expose the gender of their s.e.xual partners with a playful tug of the waistband or the not-so-playful rending of a skirt.

The clientele is nothing if not diverse, arriving in limos and Chevys, Jags and Toyotas. Whenever a certain h.o.m.ophobic movie star is visiting New York-a comic renowned for obscene stand-up routines that outrage the gay and feminist communities-his white stretch limousine is bound to linger on Was.h.i.+ngton Street in the small hours of the morning.

I take up a post beneath a sagging metal awning, half-concealed in the shadows, while Marilyn takes out his compact to check on the goods. He frowns. "That salt terrible for my skin. Suck the moisture right out, sleeping every night on a big pile of salt. Even the rats don't like living on salt." Is that because the rats are worried, I wonder, about their complexions? Meantime, near the curb, Marilyn strikes a pose he borrowed from a Madonna video. Just up the street is Randi, who claims he used to play with the Harlem Globetrotters. Wearing a leather mini and a red halter, Randi stands six eight in heels beneath a sign that reads FRANKS SALAMI BOLOGNA LIVERWURST KNOCKWURST STEW MEATS FRANKS SALAMI BOLOGNA LIVERWURST KNOCKWURST STEW MEATS & & SKIRT STEAKS SKIRT STEAKS.

Down Gansevoort, at the edge of the district, the neon sign of a fas.h.i.+onable diner emits a pink glow. So very far away-this place where the a.s.sholes I went to college with are tossing back colored drinks and discussing the stock market and interoffice gropings. Like my former best friend, George Bing, who wanted to be a poet and works for an ad agency in midtown. We roomed together at NYU, which I dropped out of after two years because I was way too cool. After George graduated, we'd meet for drinks at the Lion's Head or the White Horse, where he thought he was slumming and I felt like an interloper among the gentry. So excited when he first walked in as a freshman-with a fake ID from a store on Forty-second Street-that Dylan Thomas had guzzled his final drinks practically where we were sitting, he gradually, over the years, decided that the Welsh bard had wasted and abused his talent. I mean, sure, George admitted, he was great, but what was so bad about being comfortable, taking care of your health, eating sensibly and writing copy for Procter & Gamble in between cranking out those lyrical heart's cries? And I'm on my best behavior, nodding like an idiot coming down off something I smoked or snorted and hoping the bartender won't remember he threw me out three months before. And eventually, I think, it became too embarra.s.sing for both of us. I stopped calling, and Lord knows I don't have a phone now, except maybe the open-air unit on the corner of Hudson and Twelfth. Actually, it's been a relief to quit pretending.

Farther down Was.h.i.+ngton Street, a trio of junkies builds a fire in a garbage can, although the night is hot and steamy-the heat of the day, stored up in the concrete and asphalt, coming off now, cooking everyone slowly like so much meat. These guys, after they've been on the street a few years, they never really get warm again. The winter cold stays in your bones through the long stinking summer and forever, like a scar. The old farts wear overcoats and boots in August. That way, you don't have to change clothes for winter.

I'm just fine in my black T-s.h.i.+rt and denim jacket, which doubles as a blanket, thanks. Be off the street before that happens to me. When I paint my masterpiece. Franks salami bologna.

A red Nissan slows to a stop. Marilyn sashays over to the car and schmoozes with the driver, turns and waves to me. I come out of the shadow to reveal myself in all my freaky emaciated menace, moon white face and dyed black hair, my yellow teeth in their bleedy gums. Marilyn zips around to the pa.s.senger side and climbs into the car, which makes a right and slows to a stop a half block down the street, where I can still see it. Farther on, a b.u.m in an overcoat parks his overflowing shopping cart on the sidewalk and peers in the window at the brightly lit diners eating steak frites.

Eventually, Marilyn comes back from his date, adjusting his clothes and checking his makeup in a compact, just like a model. That's what he calls it-a date. He hands me a damp, crumpled fiver. I don't want to think about the dampness. I want to sc.r.a.pe the bill off my palm and throw it into the stinking street, but Marilyn's all excited about being back at work and planning for the future. He's talking about how it will be after the operation, when he gets married and moves to New Chursey. I want to slap him and make him understand that it's the land of the living dead. It's not real, not like this fabulous life we're living here on Gansevoort Street. The flesh they grill on their Webers out in Morristown comes out of the very warehouses against which we bravely slouch.

At least Marilyn will be spared the ordeal of having a rotten suburban brat who will grow up to resent and despise him for being a boring, submissive housewife.

As the night deepens, business picks up and I nearly become accustomed to the layered stench, the several octaves of decay. The old men sharing a bottle around the fire pa.s.s out and the fire dies. I skulk over to Hudson and buy myself a bottle of blackberry brandy to keep my motor running. A dealer strolls by offering c.o.ke, crack and smoke. At first I think, No, I'm on duty, but the second time he comes by I have twenty dollars in my pocket from Marilyn, and I buy a little rock and fire it up, tickling my brain, making me feel righteous and empowered-I'm here, I'm cool, I'm feeling so good, I'm back on my feet and the future is mine; if I can just smoke a little more of this, I'll keep from slipping back, just a little more to maintain, to stop this fading, this falling away from the perfect moment that was here just a minute ago, to hear that perfect tune in my deep brain, that masterpiece.

Franks bologna et cetera.

The buzz has slipped away like a heartbreakingly hot girl at a bar who said she'd be back in a minute, promise. Leaving me oh so very sad and cranky. Where is the G.o.dd.a.m.n dealer?

The traffic in and out of the diner picks up around four, when the clubs close, yellow cabs pulling up to dispense black-clad party people like Pez, the hip boys and girls who are not yet ready for bed. I buy a so-called quarter of alleged toot and snort it all at once, thinking it will carry me further but more slowly than smoking rocks.

Marilyn gets eleven dates for the night, a cavalcade of perverts representing several states, cla.s.ses and ethnic groups, including a Hasidic jeweler with long Slinky side locks that bounce up and down as he bucks to fulfillment in the front seat of his black Lincoln, a construction worker still wearing his hard hat, in a Subaru with Jersey plates, a guy in a stretch limo who tells Marilyn he's in the movie business and tips twenty.

The Lambs of G.o.d van cruises up, pulls over beside us. The priest says, "Top of the morning, Marilyn." He looks surprised, not necessarily happy, when I slink out of my vampire shadow.

"h.e.l.lo, Father," says Marilyn. "You looking for some fun tonight?"

"No, no, just checking to see that you're not ... needing anything."

"Fine thanks, Father. And you?"

"Bless you and be careful, my child." The priest guns the engine and pulls away.

"Very nice, the father, but shy," says Marilyn, a note of disappointment in his voice. "I think maybe you scare him off."

"The shy shepherd," I say.

"I stay at that Lambs of G.o.d shelter one night and he didn't ask me for nothing," says Marilyn, as if describing a heroic feat of selfless ministry. "That day he just cop a little squeeze when I'm leaving. Food pretty decent, too." We watch a car go by slowly, the driver looking us over from behind his sungla.s.ses. He seemed about to stop, then peeled out and tore down the street. After a long pause, Marilyn says, "My very first date was a priest, when I was an altar boy. He give me some wine."

"Sounds very romantic," I say, recalling my own altar boy days in another life. In awe of my proximity to the sacred rituals, I didn't smoke or swear and I confessed my impure thoughts to the eager priest behind the screen until my thoughts trans.m.u.ted themselves to deeds on Mary Lynch's couch one afternoon, which I failed to mention at my next confession, suffering the guilt of the d.a.m.ned as I slunk away from the confessional booth. When lightning failed to strike me through the days and weeks that followed, I began to resent my guilt and then the faith that was so at odds with my secret nature and, finally, to exult in my rebellion. And as I turned away from my parents and the Church, I created my own taboo-venerating cult. Which perverse faith I am stubbornly observing here at five in the morning at the corner of Gansevoort and Was.h.i.+ngton.

Another car cruises by slowly, a junkyard Buick with two guys in the front seat. Twos are potentially dangerous, so I decide I'll show my flag and talk to them myself. I tell Marilyn to stay put, then saunter over to the car. The driver has to open the door because the window won't roll down. Two small Hispanics in their fifties. "Twenty-five apiece," I say, nodding toward Marilyn. "And you stay on this block." Finally we agree on forty for two.

I wave Marilyn over and he climbs in the backseat, and I'm just leaning back against the building, lighting a smoke, when Marilyn comes howling and tumbling out of the car, crawling furiously as the car peels out, tires squealing on the cobblestones. Marilyn flings himself on me and I hold him as he sobs. "Es mi padre," "Es mi padre," he wails. he wails. "Mi padre." "Mi padre."

"A priest?" I say hopefully.

He shakes his head violently against my shoulder and suddenly raises his face and starts apologizing for getting makeup on me, wiping at my jacket, still crying. "I ruin your jacket," he says, crying hysterically. It's all I can do to convince him that I don't give a s.h.i.+t about the jacket, which started out filthy anyway.

"Are you sure it was ... him?" I say.

Gulping air, he nods vehemently. "It the first time I see him in three years," Marilyn says. He's sobbing and shaking, and I'm more than a little freaked-out myself. I mean, Jesus.

Finally, when he calms down, I suggest we call it a night. I make him drink the rest of the blackberry brandy and walk him back to the dock in the grainy gray light. As the sun comes up behind us, we stand on the edge of the pier and look out over the river at the Maxwell House sign. I can't think of anything to say. I put my arm around him and he sniffles on my shoulder. From a distance we would look like any other couple, I think. Finally I suggest he get some sleep, and he picks his way across the rotting boards back to the salt mountain. And that's the end of my career as a pimp.

A year after this happened, I went back to look for Marilyn. Most of the girls on the street were new to me, but I found Randi, the former Globetrotter, who at first didn't remember me. I do look different now. He thought I was a cop, and then guessed I was a reporter. He wanted money to talk, so I finally gave him ten, and he said, "I know you. You was that crackhead." Nice to be remembered. I asked if he'd seen Marilyn and he said Marilyn had disappeared suddenly: "Maybe like, I don't know, seems like a year ago." He couldn't tell me anything else and he didn't want to know.

About a year after that, I spotted a wedding announcement in the Times Times. I admit I'd been checking all that time-perusing what we once called the "women's sports pages"-like an idiot, occasionally rewarded with the picture of a high school or college acquaintance, and then one fine morning I saw a picture that stopped me. Actually, I think I noticed the name first; otherwise, I might not have stopped at the picture. "Marilyn Bergdorf to wed Ronald Dubowski." It would be just like Marilyn to name himself after a chic department store. I stared at the photo for a long time, and though I wouldn't swear to it in a murder trial, I think it was my Marilyn-surgically altered, one presumes-who married Ronald Dubowski, orthodontist, of Oyster Bay, Long Island. I suppose I could have called, but I didn't.

So I don't really know how that night affected Marilyn, if it changed his life, if he is now officially and anatomically a woman, or even if he's alive. I do know that lives can change overnight, though it usually takes much longer than that to comprehend what has happened, to sense that we have changed direction. A week after Marilyn almost had s.e.x with his father, I checked myself into Phoenix House. I called my parents for the first time in more than a year. Now, two years later, I have a boring job and a crummy apartment and a girlfriend who makes the rest of it seem almost okay. I'd be lying if I said there weren't times I miss the old days, or that I don't breathe a huge sigh of relief when I climb on the train after a few hours spent visiting my parents, or that it's a gas being straight all the time, but still I'm grateful.

You think you're living a secret and temporary life, underground, in the dark. You don't imagine that someone will drive up the street or walk in the door or look through the window-someone who will reveal you to yourself not as you hope to be in some glorious future metamorphosis, but as you find yourself at that moment. Whatever you are doing then, you will have to stop and say, "Yes, this is who I am. This is me."

1992.

The Debutante's Return The call came at six in the morning, as she was returning home from a party that had lasted far too long, if no longer than several others she'd recently attended. This one had started at a nightclub on Fourteenth Street and ended on a rooftop in SoHo. She counted ten rings while she was fumbling with the locks on her apartment door, and another two before she reached the bedroom. Messed up as she was, she had a pretty clear idea of what the call would be about.

"You best come home," Martha said. "You mama done had another stroke."

She didn't remember the rest of the conversation. She was sitting on the bed with the telephone cradled in her lap when a strange man appeared in the doorway. "Nice place," he said. "You got any vodka?" Apparently, she'd brought him home with her. He was wearing a pearl gray fedora and a white silk scarf. She was surprised to find herself with a man in a fedora, and even more surprised at the sudden impulse to tell him not to wear it indoors.

She led him to the kitchen, opened the freezer, and handed him the frosty bottle of Absolut. "Take it," she said, maneuvering him out into the hallway. Before he quite knew what was happening, she'd pulled the front door shut and locked him out.

Somehow, this time, she knew the party was over, that she was finished with all that. But she had second thoughts when she arrived that afternoon at the Nashville airport, where everyone seemed fatter and slower and the air was shockingly sultry with humidity. Stepping off the plane was like being enveloped in a steaming-hot towel. She remembered once again why she'd fled north in the first place.

[image]

She looked frailer than ever in the hospital bed, with onion-paper skin and protruding bones. One side of her face seemed to be frozen. "I'm here, Momma," Faye said when her mother's translucent eyelids fluttered open.

"Bunny, it's you."

"It's me, Momma."

"You look tired. Where's your father?"

"Daddy's not here, Momma. You're in the hospital."

"The hospital? But won't he be worried?"

"We're all worried about you. You gave us a scare. Now get yourself better so we can take you home."

"Who's feeding Bugsy?"

It took Faye a moment to recall Bugsy, a wheaten terrier run over when she was four.

"Martha's taking care of everything back home."

Faye moved back into her room in the so-called New House, a Tudor pile her grandfather had built in the twenties after subdividing the old family property. The old house, aka the Big House, completed a few years before the Union army took over the city and dispossessed her great-great-grandparents, was now a museum. Its replacement, Faye's childhood home, had once stood in splendid isolation on a sea of bluegra.s.s, but in recent years the suburbs had engulfed the property, now a mere five acres, with ranch houses and split-levels. Her brother was all in favor of selling it, but their mother insisted on staying put, and Faye had strenuously defended her position, yet given this new turn of events, she didn't know that she could hold him off much longer. In fact, it soon became clear that he'd already begun taking the place apart.

Martha cataloged the missing pieces. "Mr. Jimmy come in with a U-Haul last night and took away three carpets, a chifforobe, the dining room table and all the chairs. He say Miss Jordan ain't gonna be givin' no dinner parties nohow."

Faye was glad she'd already decided to stay, knowing it would take all of her strength to protect her mother and to keep her brother at bay. They'd already had the nursing home discussion, and Faye adamantly refused to see her mother shut away like that. Her memory might be failing, but she had Martha to take care of her, and it wasn't as if they lacked the resources to keep the house running. While she sensed this debate would now turn ugly, Faye was determined. She realized her position was more than a little ironic, since more than once she'd expressed the wish that the stupid house, with all its bad plumbing and bourbon fumes and family secrets, would burn to the ground so they could all just get on with their lives. Here in the self-proclaimed Athens of the South, she hated all the nostalgia mongering, the pedigree parsing, and the casual racism of her brother and his friends. She'd gone to college in Ma.s.sachusetts, which her grandfather derided as "the Yankiest state in the Union," and then moved beyond the pale to New York. She returned from time to time, but she'd truly believed when she left at eighteen that she was leaving for good. All of which saddened and mystified her mother, who was, to no small extent, the focus of Faye's apostasy.

Sybil Hayes Teasdale was everything the South expected its daughters to be, and everything that Faye wished to escape. She wore white gloves whenever she left the house, and on those rare occasions when she could be persuaded to speak ill of others, the worst curse she could muster was "common." The Hayes family had achieved prominence in South Carolina before Sybil's grandfather decamped to the more fertile cotton land of the Mississippi Delta, where he made and lost several fortunes and served two terms in the Senate. Her father attended Vanderbilt long enough to acquire a suitable bride, Dottie Trammel, whom he carried back to the Delta plantation. Sybil's most vivid childhood memories centered around the flood of '27, when she and her mother spent two days atop a levee outside of Greenville, waiting to be rescued. Eventually they were picked up in a rowboat and carried to safety. But her father, who stayed behind to help coordinate relief efforts, drowned trying to save one of his men, or so the story was told. Dottie took her daughter and moved in with her parents in Nashville, and while the Trammels always honored the heroic memory of their son-in-law, there was an almost palpable sense of relief that their daughter had returned to civilization.

Her father's death could only have exacerbated that innate southern consciousness of loss and nostalgia, while her mother's family, whose respect for the proprieties was profound, raised her with an exaggerated sense of the perils beyond the family threshold, as if she herself were in imminent danger of being sucked under by muddy torrents. Later, as she started to blossom, this peril was identified as male lasciviousness; she was sent to a finis.h.i.+ng school in Switzerland. Returning to Nashville at the age of eighteen, she became the object of intense compet.i.tion among the eligible men of her generation, who vied to be named one of the six escorts at her debutante ball, held the following spring at the Belle Meade Country Club. Faye's father was not among the chosen, the Teasdales having fallen out with the Trammels over a failed business venture-but he spent the next three years wooing Sybil. Theirs was a storied romance, the beauty with the tragic past and the scion of one of the town's great families, and they were inseparable for the forty-five years of their marriage, although Faye remembered her father as something of a tyrant when it came to his demure and fragile spouse. She'd loved him wholly but was glad she was his daughter, rather than his wife. Even with a staff of six at his disposal, Hunt had demanded constant attention and service from Sybil, and he'd seemed always to be pounding the table and raging against some perceived shortcoming on her part.

Faye had come away from her childhood less than impressed with the inst.i.tution of marriage. These feelings were reinforced as the sixties gave way to the seventies and their minister at St. George's began railing against free love and women's lib, both of which sounded pretty appealing to teenaged Faye.

Sybil never seemed to feel her oppression as acutely as Faye thought she should, so instead of blaming her father, Faye blamed his wife for her slavish adoration, adding this sin to the tally of grievances against her mother, along with the injunction against blue jeans, and her constant endors.e.m.e.nt of "ladylike" behavior. She would have liked to dismiss her mother as a hopeless prude, but on several occasions she had surprised her parents in the act. Sat.u.r.day afternoons, after her father's golf game, were consecrated to conjugal sport; Faye and the staff were strictly forbidden to enter the master wing between two and four, and her mother inevitably emerged from her "nap" all glowing and kittenish.

After Hunt collapsed on the fourteenth hole at Belle Meade in the middle of one of his famous tantrums, Sybil seemed to shrink and fade. Faye had come home for the funeral and stayed as long as she could bear it. Though she knew she should feel greater sympathy for her mother and greater grief for her father, at that time all she could think about was getting back to her life in New York. But in the intervening years something within her had changed. Maybe she was simply tired of running. Or maybe her mother's helplessness, along with her brother's eagerness to stick her in a nursing home, had finally awakened her sense of filial duty.

When her brother arrived with the U-Haul that evening, she saw the car and trailer from her room upstairs and went down to confront him. He was in the entry hall with Walter, his longtime yardman, and they were examining the grandfather clock in the entry hall. He looked up, surprised, not having heard her descend the carpeted stairway. "Sis, you scared the s.h.i.+t out of me. Whatever brings you here?"

"Mainly the fact that Momma had a stroke."

"It's a d.a.m.n shame is what it is," he said. "But I can't say it's a surprise. I saw this coming a mile away. She's been failing for the past year. I talked to the doctor this morning and he says she needs full-time care." Faye had forgotten how much she disliked his voice, the lazy pace and occasional crackerisms. Neither of their parents had ever spoken like that. But despite the trips to Europe and four years at a boarding school in Connecticut, Jimmy had somehow managed to become a good old boy, the kind of guy who attended c.o.c.kfights and tossed the N N word around. Perhaps that was his way of rebelling against his heritage and upbringing. word around. Perhaps that was his way of rebelling against his heritage and upbringing.

"Well, I'm here now. And she's got Martha."

"Well, sure, but what happens when you skip back to New York? I'm talking about professional care. What she needs is a real facility."

"I'm not skipping back to New York. And Momma doesn't want to go to a home. She's already got one."

"You're going to take care of her? Come on, now, sis. When did you get so d.a.m.n interested? I can't even remember the last time you visited."

"It was last Christmas, actually."

"Well, we're deeply honored to have you back."

"What are you doing with the clock?"

"Just going to have it fixed. d.a.m.n thing hasn't worked right in years."

She watched as they wrestled the clock out the front door, feeling paralyzed and impotent, as if stuck in one of those dreams where speech wouldn't come. After all these years, she was still intimidated by her brother. He was twelve years older and had always treated her like a child, with a mixture of sarcasm and condescension. He had once, when Faye was seven, stuffed her beloved cat Twinkie in the dryer and turned it on, forcing her to watch as the terrified cat tumbled through what seemed to her like a hundred revolutions, until her screams finally brought Martha to the rescue. She watched now as the car rolled away down the long gravel drive, furious with herself for letting him steal the clock.

Over the years in New York, Faye spoke with her mother weekly and even more often with Martha, the housekeeper who had lived with the family for more than forty years and who had originally served as Faye's nanny. Sybil, she'd said, was living increasingly in the past, even before this latest stroke. The physical effects were blessedly minimal; she retained most of her mobility and speech. The doctors were less certain about her mental processes, though reluctant to speculate.

"But there's no reason we can't take care of her at home, is there?" "She needs to be watched pretty closely," Dr. Cheek said. "I'd recommend hiring a nurse, at least for the first few weeks. But at this time I see no need for inst.i.tutional care."

"I'd be happy to stop by and check up on her," the younger, good-looking doctor said. He seemed to be flirting, but she had to remind herself that this wasn't New York, that the mean temperature of normal social interactions was much warmer here. Quite possibly, Dr. Harrington was simply demonstrating the dedication and concern appropriate to his profession. Faye was so used to deriding the ritual politesse her mother so cherished, she had to remind herself good manners weren't necessarily insincere.

"Where are we going?" her mother asked for the third time, as they pulled off the interstate.

"We're going home, Momma."

"As soon as we get there, I want you to march up to your room and change out of those horrible dungarees. You look as if you're reporting for work on a road crew."

"They're called jeans."

"I know what they are. And they're not appropriate attire for a young lady."

"It's the eighties, Momma."

"I don't want your father to see you in that outfit."

Faye said nothing. She had decided to wait till they were settled in to address this subject.

But when they arrived home, Sybil wanted to see her roses. She seemed utterly lucid. "What's happened to the clock?" she said as soon as they walked in.

"Jimmy's taken it to be fixed."

"It hasn't worked in twenty-seven years," she said. "Why should he fix it right now?"

Her denuded dining room, meanwhile, was concealed behind pocket doors. Faye walked with her up to the master bedroom, which she hadn't entered in years. Everything was more or less as she remembered it from her childhood-the hand-painted wallpaper from Switzerland that offered up a series of fantastical Chinese vistas; the king-size bed with its upholstered headboard, the feather mattress and box spring ordered specially from the same firm that supplied Claridge's, which Hunt claimed had the most comfortable mattresses in the world; the white vanity where her mother had attempted to teach her the rudiments of makeup. On the other side of the room was her father's dressing table, with monogrammed leather stud boxes, a sterling cigarette lighter, an ivory comb, a tortoise-sh.e.l.l cigarette case, a souvenir ashtray from Augusta National, seven golf trophies and a small gallery of framed family photos. The silver was all bright and polished, as it had been during his lifetime. She wondered if the pearl-handled revolver was still in the top drawer.

"It's so nice to have you home," Sybil said.

"It's nice to be here."

"Have you been making friends at school?"

"More friends than I know what to do with."