The Maid's Version Part 4

"Which one of us is it sounds to be worse off in the head to you now, Alek?"

Early on an amiable and improvised Sat.u.r.day morning in autumn, I was with Dad at the Woolworth's located in the business section of Main Street. He was sitting in a booth drinking coffee with a man who'd once been our neighbor two doors down, but who couldn't control his jealous temper when he drank and he drank buckets on weekends. He poured concrete and made good money during the warm months. His wife was Mom's best friend and he'd tried to kill her with a switchblade knife in our front yard, got the tip into her one time, high on the arm, before Dad brought him to ground with a baseball bat. Dad whacked him behind the knee, kicked the blade from his hand, then busted him but good when he crawled toward the knife. The man was oh so guilty and admitted it every day and lived now in a rented room above Olmert's News-stand across Main from where we sat. He wanted to thank Dad for keeping his wife alive and him out of prison, some men wouldn't have, and he hoped to find a way to win her back and live again with her and the kids, which could never happen if Dad hadn't whipped him quiet that day. He would always be grateful. They drank a few cups of coffee while I twirled on my stool at the lunch counter and sipped b.u.t.terscotch shake through a straw.

We left the man at the door and walked away from the businesses and on down Main, which was a street made of ruddled bricks that rose and dipped beneath traveling tires and dated from long ago, after both the Spanish and French quit this land and it became American. Old imported-looking row houses with wood gutters or no gutters lined both sides and were rank and ailing places of begrimed brick, with rough folks leaning in the historical doorways or sitting on ruined chairs at the curb to watch traffic jitter past. The Missouri River flowed sixty yards from the street, and there was a small crotchety tavern on the corner with walls that had settled a touch out of plumb during a dozen floods and was the oldest watering hole on this side of the river. Dad said, "Let's pop in a minutea"I've got to take the edge off that joe some."

We sat at the bar. Sunlight leaked in through rectangular windows at the front and shoved in through the gla.s.s half of the back door. Dad had a Stag. Within three sips he knew the barmaid's name was Rita, and he said his friends called him John Paul, and next time she used his name to ask if he wanted another. She lingered near us, relentlessly drying one washed beer mug with a white cloth, and the four or five moony morning tipplers down the rail observed this eager abandonment and were dashed in their wishful thinking.

On Dad's second Stag two b.u.ms came to the back door and opened it to speak. "Rita? Could we get us those beers?" They were heavily powdered on their faces and hands with black dust. It had rained the night before so they'd slept out back in the giant coalbin by the tracks because the bin had a roof and the piled coal held them above ground high from the swoos.h.i.+ng water. They hadn't yet had a morning rinse at the spigot by the depot.

She said, "Did you pick it all up already?"

"You can look if you want, *cause we did."

I slid from my seat at the bar and approached the doorway and said, "Hiya, Bill. Hey, Speed."

Bill stood dusted black in bright light and looked closely to see me in shadow, then said, "It's Derby Street."

Speed said, "Have I ever had any trouble with you?"

"No," I said.

"Keep it that way, then."

"He's the Russky kid from Derby Street."

"Well, now, the Russkies was our allies in a pincher movement when it was good news for me and everybody crossin' the Rhine they was, boy, I'll tell you."

"He's the one brings potato chips in a great big can sometimes."

"That's my favorite kind."

Rita carried them two beers apiece and they both grabbed one in each hand and turned away. I knew they'd head to the thicket visible through the door, where in reasonable weather or foul in desperation, bunches of them lived hidden away along narrow trails curling between the tracks and the river. She said, "See you Monday, gentlemen. You're on your own tomorrow."

Dad stared steadily at me once I returned to the stool and sat. He lit a smoke without need of a single glance at the pack or the lighter, created a gallop from his fingernails tapping the bar, and his eyes didn't leave my face. "You know those characters by name?"

"Sure. That's Bill and Speed." "

I heard you twice the first time, son. Why do they call ol' Freddy the Freeloader, there, Speed?"

" *Cause when, like, teenagers and stuff drive around here they like to slow down and call b.u.ms over to their car and ask for directions or something else to get them close, then squirt shaving cream or throw rotten stuff or dog flops in their faces and laugh and drive away, but Speed can catch them in traffic at the stop signs."

"He can, huh?"

"Bill says Speed is the fastest b.u.m alive."

"When he catches them, then what?"

"He'll whip up on them a little, or at least try to, no matter how many are in the car, and he gets bloodied and kicked around pretty bad sometimes, too, but they likely won't be quick to ask him for directions again."

"I don't know if I want you knowing those sorts too well, son."

"Dad, Bill and Speed aren't the ones who steal our milka"don't you ever even once in a while wonder about Grandpa Buster?"

"No."

"Never?"

"Your grandpa Buster was a b.u.m."

"Just because you're a b.u.m, it doesn't mean you're bad."

"You're right, son. It doesn't. I stand corrected. It absolutely does mean you're a b.u.m, though." He tossed a few dollars on the bar and scooped his cigarettes, left the change. Rita said, Come back soon, John Paul, and he winked like he might and led me to the door and out. He squinted in the sunlight, yawned, stretched, yawned. "I've got two G.o.ddam tests coming this weeka"Modern Business Theory and Shakespeare, and Shakespeare's the one I'm worried about."

"We haven't got to him yet."

"That flowery fart has things to say, but he sure doesn't make it easy to get what he means." We walked along the old warped street toward our wheels and paused to stare at the river when we were between buildings and could see the water and all the way across to the next thicket. "But when you do get it, it was worth the trouble." Dad slid into the Mercury wagon on his side and me on mine. It started right up at the turn of the key, which was an only occasional result, and we pulled into traffic to drive six blocks up Derby Street to home. At the first stop sign Dad paused with his foot on the brakes and stared ahead in reverie down the uneven bricks of Main. "I think I like Speed."

Trains have haunted the nights in West Table since 1883 and disrupt sleep and taunt those awakened. The trains beating past toward the fabled beyond, the sound of each wheel-thump singing, You're going nowhere, you're going nowhere, and these wheels are, they are, they are going far from where you lie listening in your smallness and will still lie small at dawn after they are gone from hearing, rolling on singing along twin rails over the next hill and down and up over the next onward to those milk-and-honey environs where motion pictures happen for real and history is made and large das.h.i.+ng lives you won't lead or even witness are lived.

On the cold night of November 10, 1933, James Dunahew hid inside the Glencross garage, knife drawn and opened, blowing on his hands for warmth, cap pulled low, listening to repet.i.tive mockery from the G.o.ddam singing trains. When Arthur Glencross arrived home late he did not park inside the garage but left the car on the driveway and turned toward the front steps. James rushed from the garage back door. Glencross began to woozily turn to the sound of movement and James tripped the man, shoved him onto his back and fell upon him, stabbed his blade high in the body. He stabbed twice and Glencross looked up into his face and said, "Oh." The man did not resist past the sighed "Oh," and James shoved his small blade through the heavy overcoat a third time and the blade bent. He had intended to become a murderer this night but recoiled when engaged in the act, repulsed by the feeling in his hands and the forlorn grunts from his own chest and the shock delivered him by Glencross's abject acceptance of the a.s.sault. There was no blood visible on the coat. James never said a word, but withdrew his blade and started to stand, then dropped again and pulled the black leather gloves from the wounded man's hands. He raised upright and looked at Glencross where he lay, pulled the gloves on and nodded one time, then ran toward the singing rails, boots stomped on the street with loosened soles flapping, breaths gray as ash tossed into the air behind, and was gone from this town forever.

Two days later Alma came unstuck and wailed to pieces in public. Glencross received fourteen st.i.tches at the Bogan Hospital and told Sheriff Bob Jennings that he'd been cut by two pasty-faced men with severe northern accents who'd driven away in a white coupe he'd never seen before, but he told Alma the truth and she broke. She broke and yawped accusations at the town in general and the gentry by surname and released blanket lamentations for all the needlessly dead during one full day and most of a morning. That knife in his hand was not aimed to kill by James alone, and the guiltiest are amongst us without shame at themselves or respect for others every minute, hour, day, world without end, amen. Mrs. Glencross was the concerned citizen who contacted the Work Farm and helped the caretakers track Alma through the cold-snapped flurrying town, trying to guess where mad sorrow runs, until finding her atop Sidney's grave (for which Mrs. Glencross, guided by unspoken guilt and honest anguish, had secretly paid) facedown with snowflakes resting on her back.

At the Work Farm she fell more deeply into the hole, the blue hole that beckons beneath all our feet when lost for direction or motive for moving at all, the comforting plummet past common concerns and sensate days, down the blue gaping to the easy blue chair that becomes ruinous for its comforts provided in that retreated s.p.a.ce, and it takes from years to forever to garner enough replenished zip for the stalled occupant to merely stand from the soft blue avoidance, let alone walk back to the hole and climb toward those known perils of the sunlit world.

For two years she sat facing a yellowish wall in a room without decoration. The room held another woman who stared at the opposite wall and they sat that way without speaking to each other but speaking often, ate when spoon-fed and slept sitting in their chairs. In 1935 Alma developed pneumonia and the doctor gave up but her body didn't. The Work Farm cook, Miss Daiches, who'd been in service for many years to the Etchieson family on Grace Avenue, and had during that time often relaxed for a spell amongst maids gathered at the Greek's, began to pull Alma to her feet daily and make her walk and spit heavily into the hallway spittoons. Kate Daiches walked her down the hall and back, and down and back, and after weeks walked her down the stairs and back, and by the next spring she'd walk her outdoors around the two-acre garden maintained by the less damaged residents. Alma spoke in streaks but not sensibly until on a garden walk in June, with dew dampening her feet she stopped and pointed at a wooden stake standing with a vine fallen over slipped string loops and draped limply to ground, and said, "Them *maters want tyin' up."

Within three months of that utterance she was helping Kate Daiches in the kitchen. The residents admired her fairy-tale hair but not in their soup, so Alma began the ritual daybreak brus.h.i.+ng and brus.h.i.+ng and pinning she would repeat daily for the rest of her life. She did at first help only with those aspects of cooking that did not require the use of a sharp knifea"boiled water, washed produce, tore lettuce, pulled the strings from string beans, measured mola.s.ses, sugar or meal, mixed and rolled biscuit dough, washed dishes and put eating utensils on the table. She worked grief out through her fingertips and before the next summer began to hum as she worked.

It was Kate Daiches who told Alma in the kitchen as they sh.e.l.led peas that autopsy X-rays revealed Freddy Poltz, when found blown into the alley, had two bullet wounds behind his left ear. Mr Etchieson, the inquiry cochairman, used to gab plenty during c.o.c.ktail hour at his home amongst friends and he even had the X-rays in his desk and shared them with esteemed guests who questioned his a.s.sertion. Half the country club crowd had seen the proof of murder and remained mum in public. Eventually she'd snuck a look at the stark images and saw that the slugs had been closely s.p.a.ced and remained obvious and lodged inside Freddy's skull. Kate had always wished she'd tracked Mae after she'd been so meanly chased out of town and shared this fact, but hadn't. She did at night search her soul through self-recriminations stated sharply while staring into a mirror, then on the holiest of days raised her chin and asked Mr. Etchieson about Freddy's murder and had been rebuffed and soon after informed that her services were no longer required. But she thought Alma should know and the town should know and wished she had the courage to spill the beans herself, and she did not, but knew who did when well.

"And you are getting well."

After being returned to town by July Teague, one of the first things Alma shared with her new employer was an account of the bullet holes. July already knew of their existence and she and John Teague had been shown the X-rays at a frolicsome summer party on a gin-soaked night that turned both somber and charged with suspicions as they stared and calculated the significance of two bullets behind the ear. Alma and July told each other all they had to tell, or most of it, anyhow, and soon Alma became aware that she'd been hired as an ally in the pursuit of answers as much as she had been for domestic ch.o.r.es. The women got along well on the instant, and Alma settled into a life that though familiar in many details felt fresh on her skin, then went looking for John Paul.

She had been told by John Paul and others that he lived now with the Roos.h.i.+an, so she asked the exact whereabouts and went there. The old man and the boy and the old woman were at work in the great garden. Alma laid a hand on the top strand of the barbed-wire fence near where they crouched and told John Paul what was most on her mind. "I don't care ever to hear any more talk that you take money from the hand of that man Glencross."

"I caddy for him. At the country club. You get paid for that."

"Caddy for somebody else, can't you? There's other rich men golf."

"Arthur pays me double what the other cheapskates pay, and tips big fat tips, too."

"He's Arthur to you now, is he? Pshaw! I'm still tellin' you to keep away from his company from now on, for good."

"No."

"For good."

"No."

"You're my son, and I'm tellin' you."

"Can't you see I've got work to do? Mr. C and me and Masha need to weed all these rows and get it done before dark."

"I'm tellin'a""

"Tell me *til you're blue in the face, Mom. I don't much care."

They stayed that way and would until after the war, John Paul not comforted by his mother's presence, her known obsessions and rages had kept him in such wringing turmoil, and Alma said too often how sorrowful she was that her youngest boy had any truck at all with the man who done for his own aunt Ruby, who loved him so, and all those others who died innocent, too. There were meetings of mother and son and occasional meals, but no ease could be found between them. On every Christmas Day John Paul received Alma's standard gifts of two pairs of bib overalls and a can of tooth powder to see him through the upcoming year. He might not speak to her for weeks at a time and that distance came to be accepted with relief by both.

John Paul loved the Cherenkosa"Mr. C was the only father figure he ever lived with or learned from and Masha an encouraging presence, long on understanding and seldom crossa"and the love was returned. They survived on meager cash and always would but knew how to fend well, and John Paul gave them most of the money he earned. They never asked for money, and if he had none to offer for a week or two or three they didn't bring the subject up or even hint. The evenings were spent with pots of tea, books, and knitting, Mr. C reading literary cla.s.sics or ancient history in Russian, Masha knitting something warm for the cold days that were already present or soon enough coming. John Paul would on occasion in these quiet moments catch wind of a po' boy raid, melons or cobs or squash being s.n.a.t.c.hed from the garden, and the first time he hopped up to run toward the voices and give chase, but was stopped. Mr. C had raised a weathered and large-knuckled hand and said, "Is okay they take not too much, boy. Let them be away and eata"you are never been hungry?"

After Pearl Harbor was bombed, and as the nation mourned coast to coast and recruitment centers stayed open until midnight to process stampedes of enlistees, both Cherenkos pleaded with him not to rush off to this fresh war and die for some vague and inflamed notions he'd never even examined. Mr. Cherenko had known violence and killing, terror and flight. He'd been a hopeful worker standing in peaceful protest outside the Winter Palace in early January of 1905, and witnessed hundreds of his own slaughtered, shot down in the snow by the army, falling everywhere dead or wounded to be bayoneted by fellow peasants in uniform, but survived that debacle in the blood-dappled snow and saw a few more that went similarly before escaping the country during December of that same year, and now had precious little regard for military actions of any announced purpose no matter how pure or just the rationale sounded to the ear. But John Paul heard no ambiguity in the American bugles and their call to duty, and finally they asked if he'd at least graduate high school first, plenty of chance to then go over somewhere that isn't home and die for Rockefeller, Henry Ford, J. P. Morgana"all wars always about land and gold, boy. All.

"Not this one."

"All."

On Graduation Day, they both took to bed after the ceremony to lie in shadows and darkness and didn't come out, not the first morning or the second, and he made okroshka for them, delivered the bowls bedside without comment, and on the third morning they had breakfast ready when he woke.

There are snapshots of John Paul taken in China, of himself and other swabbies in various seaport dives and cathouses, a local woman with arms draped over him from behind, one sitting on each knee, and empty beer bottles crowd the tabletop upon which he might rest an elbow, sailor's hat askew, an agog grin on his dimpled, pleasured face. In some poses he and the women have misplaced the majority of their clothing, and though in every one of them he'd recovered his skivvies before the image was made, some of the women chose not to don a solitary st.i.tch. In a few he is fully uniformed and dangerous looking, standing on a gangplank, wearing a thick web belt and a forty-five pistol in a black holster, twenty-two or -three years old and off to deliver the military mail onsh.o.r.e in Tsing-tao or other raucous and luring ports. World War II was over, but his service was not, and he was married by then but s.h.i.+pped with all human needs accompanying to the other side of the world, and he stashed his wedding ring inside his ditty bag for safekeeping when going ash.o.r.e. (I had to protect the photographs when Mom caught me studying them at around age fifteen and tried to rip the entire alb.u.m from my hands to burn in the yard, and she still searches for it with matches in her pocket whenever she visits and thinks I'm asleep.) On s.h.i.+p at night, seven thousand miles from home, John Paul watched forces of Mao Tse-tung and Chiang Kaishek blasting artillery at each other in the distant hills, making the night pulse with low crescents of light chased by faded booms. In the months ahead the pulsing crescents came closer, refugees crowded toward the docks in crowds larger than he'd ever seen or would see and more desperate, and eventually he could watch orange tracers flying after sundown, hear small-arms fire crackling amidst heightened pleas from the cornered refugees, and it was time to pull anchor.

In his six years at sea he saw great vistas and the back rooms of irresistible dumps from Nova Scotia to Hong Kong, had his most miserable hours in the Alaskan Sea, got into a fistfight at the Blue Room in New Orleans with members of Les Brown's Band of Renown, and encountered scenes of biblical squalor and horror in Chinese circ.u.mstances. He'd strangely never been hurt or truly terrified during the actual war, luck of the draw, though in the postwar years abroad he did on three occasions (Tsing-tao, Tsing-tao, and Halifax) reckon he was about to be stabbed or stomped to death but each time somehow wiggled off the hook and came out okay. If ever John Paul cried once as an adult, it would've been in 1946 when a letter arrived from July Teague telling him that when a savage hailstorm pa.s.sed at twilight both Cherenkos rushed into the garden to rescue tomatoes before they were pulped by flying ice and caught summer pneumonia, then died at home within hours of each other during the first week of August.

Alma would have been the very first Gold Star Mother in West Table (that distinction went to Mrs. Lee Haas, who lost her only children, Jeremiah and Samuel, in the early months of war when the Marblehead was. .h.i.t, and Mr. Haas, fatigued and disoriented from battering grief, fell asleep on the divan in the parlor still smoking a cigarette and completed their ruin) had the government known the necessary details, but it was not until 1945 that a cable arrived announcing that Seaman First Cla.s.s James Maurice Dunahew had perished from his injuries on the island of Guam, on or about December 10, 1941. James had gone away with no word of him received (he likely thought a prison sentence awaited him at home and silence would spare Alma from speaking necessary lies to conceal his whereabouts) until word of his death. In the third year after V-J Day John Paul wandered into a San Francisco nightspot near Union Square and met a bartender who'd been a sailor on Guam and a prisoner in j.a.pan and asked if by chance he'd known his brother. "The men called him Asiatic because he'd sailed in those waters and farther over three or four years, maybe five, and liked all those places around there a whole h.e.l.l of a lot, which not everybody does. Plenty asked the navy to send them somewhere else, but he asked to stay. Asiatic had been in long enough to be plenty salty, you know, and came running down to the beach with only a carbine, like the rest of us had, when maybe five hundred j.a.ps were storming ash.o.r.e. Some men wanted to lay down on the sand and surrender right off the bata"don't make the j.a.ps angry, since we didn't have much to fight with, anyhowa"a few didn't, though, and started shooting, and Asiatic was one of them. The fight a just went pitiful, sailor. No other way to put it. There was a little bunch of marines and a little bunch of us, and a He was alive when they took us, but a you don't want to know."

"I enlisted in forty-twoa"I can stand to hear whatever is true."

"I'll only say this much, buddya"the j.a.p officers had swords."

"What'd he do? Tell me."

"Asiatic bucked when they shoved him around," the man said, and made a whoos.h.i.+ng sound while drawing a hand across his neck.

If ever John Paul Dunahew cried twice as a man, the second time was that night. He received his discharge papers at Treasure Island and rode those singing wheels on twin rails back to West Table in early summer of 1948, but he never told Alma that her firstborn son had been taken prisoner and beheaded on a faraway beach where the soft air smelled of tropical flowers and coconuts dangled, or that he'd missed the Cherenkos far more than he had her.

Joe Breen didn't fish. Joe didn't hunt. Joe didn't play balla"baseball, football, basketballa"he wouldn't even give a try at any game that featured a ball. He didn't do the things people expected an Ozark boy to like doing, and that was noticed, especially by other boys, some of them mean. Joe read his way through the books on the wall at the public library, spent hours drawing pictures on butcher's paper or cardboard, some of them shocking for the shrewd revelations of personality he managed to make manifest in a sketched face. He wandered the rivers and creeks collecting stones, dolomites, quartz, the occasional geode, and shoved them all under the bed in his room where they scarred the hardwood floor, scars yet visible there. When a hog was slaughtered by Dad, he didn't ask to hold the knife or blood bucket, had important homework to do elsewhere, and when Mom s.n.a.t.c.hed a chicken head off in the yard and tossed it to the cat, he kept his eyes on a blade of gra.s.s and waved away floating pin feathers. He could keep his own company and amuse himself for long spells, an unusual specimen of boy sitting under the apple tree alone, ever alone, but quite content keeping company with a rock or b.u.t.terfly, garden slug or anthill.

Then at the midpoint in senior year a way-tall, sway-necked goof of a brainy girl moved here from Wisconsin and was put into his history cla.s.s, and Joe Breen had a beginner girlfriend before Friday. n.o.body knows how it happened. She must've leaned his way and said something that started them up, because Joe was unlikely to start any conversations with anybody. His mother saw the couple holding hands on the square before she'd heard the girl's name; Molly Steinkuhler. They took to mooning around town everywhere, love-stunned calves that couldn't get enough of licking away on the skins of each other. It could be an uncomfortable romance to watch or hear up close. Very soon most folks accepted as fact that they would marry, though that a.s.sumed certainty hadn't actually been mentioned (Joe was eager to attend the Missouri School of Mines and Metallurgy in the fall, while Molly had been accepted into Lindenwood College) by either of the young lovers.

They were both so ill made for the social ramble that folks who cared felt nervous for them when they did go out to join the human parade, afraid one misfit or the other might spill a drink that stained a popular girl's dress, or during a fast song, trip by accident someone given to sneered and eminently repeatable sarcasm, or that mean boys who'd arrived stag would come up with a rough prank and spring it on Joe in front of Molly, make him shrink to nothing in her eyes, and his own. But the misfit couple wanted to do what others do, go out on a beautiful Sat.u.r.day night and dance in a crowd, and Joe and Molly did, they did dance, danced as long as the music lasted and still are said to be cutting a rug among friends whenever that Black Angel s.h.i.+mmies.

Arthur Glencross wandered the many rooms of his house and felt dead to himself in each. He wept at windows in the more remote chambers when alone at first, and made excuses if caught by Corinne, Ethan, or Virginia, but within weeks stopped offering even halting, incomplete excuses for weeping while standing at windows so strangely, and in the following year on a night of wet black streets and fog that seemed to relay a message for him alone composed in weather, told his expectant and hovering wife: With all the splendid sinning that had gone on between them, it was somehow Ruby in her simplest and most open moments that took his heart and came to mind every hour of every daya"those gone-now-forever respites spent spooned together and drowsing in a rented bed, his best parts at rest and touched to her rump, his fingers at her cleaving, the sun dipping to the west sending light through the blinds in bright slats that climbed the walls like a limber staircase. But when the door closed behind they again must not from this time until the next know each other by face or name if they crossed paths or anybody asked.

Corinne said only two large words in response: "I know."

"She smelled good and different in a way that only she did."

"I know what the girl smelled like."

"She knew things."

"I don't doubt that she did."

"She could tease me and have me like it. At the Arlington, one time, the races were rained out because a thunderstorm moved in to settle, and rain was coming down in sheets, rattling the windows, the afternoon gone black, and she became an imp the way she would, curled her hair around a finger, then wanted to dance the Charleston in that room without clothes on, and did, did dance that way, so funny, and a she modeled her new hat with a rained-on windowpane for a mirror, naked girl in a hat, standing so brazen at the window to the street seeing herself in the gla.s.s, and you know what she said over her shoulder? She said, *Arthur, it seems like if you really loved me it wouldn't be raining today.'

"I said, *It's not raining a drop in here.'

" *Oh? Well, I love you, too.'

"And we a we just a Ruby made so many hours turn to magic, Corinne, gloriously hot-blooded magic and all kinds of slick a and pleasing a to touch, and those hours are when I felt altogether alive, the only times, ever a ever a and they are spun to a memories I can't let go of and wouldn't want to, either."

"You can have all those memories, Arthur." Corinne approached in the unlighted room and hugged him from behind, squeezed him at his middle, rested her face against his back. "But please stop weeping where the children can see."

He gave himself to his work at the bank and welcomed the winged loneliness that darted into and out of his chest at any time of the day, in any setting, any company. His drifting at those moments came to be expected of him, one of his oddly winning traits, to disappear briefly in spirit from the table and return abruptly, speaking to the subject at hand. He put in long, long hours and gave himself little rest. Rumors about him and the Arbor Dance Hall had begun before the ma.s.s funeral and have never quite faded away and shouldn't. Certain segments of the town found the rumors to be an enhancement, presenting Glencross as a man with some intriguing qualities, being given to wayward romance and possessing volcanic potential. It gradually became known through social contact that he had no burn scarring on his arms at all, but did appear to have a small round divot above his right elbow. Canoe trips, the country club dressing room, swimming pool parties, all venues served to discredit publicly at least one part of his claimed story. He showed no protective modesty on those half-clothed occasions, left his unburned skin on view to be noted and discussed by peers later over drinks.

Corinne said, "Do you want everyone in town to know?"

"That wouldn't be prudent, would it?"

"Darling, put something on and ease my mind."

"It's too late for all that to matter."