Mr. X

A small, fair-haired boy with gleeful blue eyes took in my approach from a stroller. His T-shirt bore the image of a pink dinosaur. Babies and small children charm me right out of my socks. I can’t help it, I love that moment when they look inside you and spot a fellow spirit. I waggled my fingers and pulled an idiotic face that had been a big hit with the toddler set on previous occasions. The little boy whooped with delight. The tall, sturdy-looking woman beside him glanced down, looked up at me, then back to the child, who was crying ‘Bill! Bill!’ and trying to propel himself out of the stroller. ‘Honey,’ she said, ‘this isn’t Bill.’

My first impression, that she looked like the female half of a local anchor team, vanished before the acknowledgment of the intelligence that irradiated her striking, even strikingly beautiful, presence. Her beauty and her intelligence were inextricable, and my second impression, standing before her lithe, tawny gaze and smiling at the efforts of her son to escape the stroller and hurl himself at me, was that if she resembled anything at all, it was a blond, particularly conscious female panther. Some quick recognition flashed in her eyes, and I thought she had seen everything that had just passed through my mind.

I would probably have blushed – my admiration was that naked – if she had not almost deliberately released me by attending to her son, allowing me the psychic space to register the perfection with which her dark blond hair had been cut to fall like a veil across her face and the expensive simplicity of her blue silk blouse and white linen skirt. Lined up before the information desk with a dozen shapeless Edgertonians in T-shirts and shorts, she seemed unreasonably exotic. She smiled up at me, and again I saw that at least half of her smooth, shieldlike beauty was the intelligence that flowed through it.

‘He’s a beautiful boy,’ I said, unable to avoid the word.

The beautiful boy was struggling to pull his feet through the straps of the stroller, in the process levering off a blue sneaker with a Velcro strap. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘This man is very nice, Cobbie, but he isn’t Bill.’

I put my hands on my knees, and the boy swiveled and stared at my face. His eyes darkened in confusion, then cleared again. He chortled.

She said, ‘Good, this line is finally starting to move.’

I straightened up and waved goodbye. Cobbie ecstatically waved back, and she met my eyes with a glance that warmed me all across the lobby and outside into the sunlight. Beyond the low stone wall at the far end of the parking lot, the land dropped away to the bank of the slow, brown-gray Mississippi. It struck me that the river crawled along the city’s western flank like an unhappy secret. I wondered if the aunts had old stories from the days when Edgerton had been a river town. Then, foolishly, I started to wonder if I would see the woman I had met in the lobby ever again. What was supposed to happen if I did? She had a child, therefore a husband, and what she represented to me was no more than a convenient distraction from my fears for my mother. It was enough to have been reminded that such people actually existed.

22

Thinking of the nights ahead, I ducked into the gift shop and picked up a couple of paperback mystery novels and some candy. The white-haired volunteer behind the cash register searched the books’ covers for the prices and dowsed a finger over the keys.

Behind me, a childish voice said, ‘You’re – not – Bill,’ and burst into giggles. I turned around to see a familiar pair of dancing blue eyes. He was holding a sneaker in one hand and a new teddy bear in the other.

‘I’m not?’ I smiled at his mother. Her attractiveness seemed more than ever like a shield behind which she could come to her private conclusions about the responses it evoked.

‘We meet again,’ she said.

‘The way this hospital is designed, sooner or later you see everybody twice.’

‘Do you know how to find the intensive care unit? I’ve never been here before.’

‘Third floor,’ I said. ‘Follow me.’

The woman behind the counter counted out my change and slid the paperbacks and the candy into a bag. I moved aside, and the boy’s mother came up to the counter. ‘How much are the teddy bears?’

The woman peered at the child. In high hilarity, the child peered back. ‘Our ICU patients can’t receive gifts or flowers.’

‘It’s for him.’ She groped into her bag. ‘A reward for behaving himself. Or maybe a bribe, I don’t know. Our otherwise completely adorable baby-sitter abandoned us this afternoon.’

The boy pointed at me and said, ‘You’re – not – not – not – Bill!’

‘I am too,’ I said.

The boy clapped the sneaker and the teddy bear to his chest and roared with laughter. Ah, appreciation. I tried to remember his name but could not. He fixed his eyes on mine and said, ‘Bill rides a lawn mower!’

‘No, you ride a lawn mower,’ I said, contradiction being the first principle of four-year-old humor. We left the shop and turned toward the elevators.

‘Your new best friend is my son Cobbie, and I’m Laurie Hatch,’ she said. ‘My cleaning woman had an operation yesterday, and I wanted to say hello. You’re seeing someone in intensive care, too?’

‘My mother.’ We came to the rank of closed doors, and I pushed the button. ‘Ned Dunstan. Hello.’

‘Hello, Ned Dunstan,’ she said with a feathery brush of irony, and then looked at me more thoughtfully, almost impersonally. ‘I’ve heard that name before. Do you live here in town?’

‘No, I’m from New York.’ I looked up at the illuminated numbers above the doors.

‘I hope your mother is doing all right.’

Cobbie glanced back and forth between us.

‘She had a stroke,’ I said. For a moment both of us regarded the yellow glow of the UP button. ‘Your cleaning woman must be Mrs Loome.’

She gave me an astonished smile. ‘Do you know her?’

‘No, but my aunts do,’ I said.

People had been trickling in from the lobby as we talked. Everybody watched the number above the elevator on the left change from 3 to 2. When it flashed to 1, the crowd pushed to the left. The doors opened on a dense, compressed mob, which began pouring out as the waiting crowd pushed forward. Laurie Hatch moved back, pulling the stroller with her.

Cobbie said, ‘What’s your name?’

‘Ned.’ I watched the light above the elevator on our right flash 2 and change to 1.

The doors of the laden car closed. A second or two later, the others opened to release a cart pushed by a workman. He stared at Laurie, glanced at Cobbie, and gave me a meaningful smirk as I followed them in. I said, ‘Don’t jump to conclusions.’

‘I ain’t concluded, and so far I ain’t jumped,’ he said. We both laughed.

Cobbie brandished the teddy bear. ‘His name is Ned. He’s a bear named Ned.’

‘Oh, Cobbie.’ Laurie knelt down to wriggle the sneaker onto his foot.

Cobbie leaned over the strap of the stroller and in his deepest voice intoned, ‘I ain’t concluded, and so faw I ain’t jumped.’

The car came to a stop, and the doors slid open. Embarrassed, Laurie glanced at me. ‘I don’t know where he gets it from.’ She pushed the stroller into the corridor and turned in the wrong direction. I gestured toward the ICU. ‘He just picks things up and repeats them.’

I looked down at Cobbie. He fixed me with an expression of comically adult gravity and growled, ‘And SOO FAW, I ain’t JUMPED.’

‘He must be part tape recorder,’ Laurie said.

‘He has great ears,’ I replied, still grinning. ‘If he doesn’t make it as a comedian, he could always be a musician.’

‘His father would have a heart attack.’ She startled me with a look so charged with resentment it felt like the touch of a branding iron. ‘We’re separated.’

Both of us looked down. Cobbie was holding the teddy bear’s ear to his mouth and whispering that so far he hadn’t jumped. ‘He’d even hate my bringing Cobbie to St Ann’s.’

‘Doesn’t your husband approve of St Ann’s?’

‘Stewart’s on the board at Lawndale. He thinks you can contract a virus just by looking at this place.’

‘He must know Grenville Milton,’ I said.

She stopped moving and looked at me in dubious surprise. ‘Don’t tell me you know Grennie Milton!’ Chagrin instantly softened her face. ‘There’s no reason you shouldn’t, except that he never goes anywhere except the University Club and Le Madrigal.’

‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘His wife used to be a friend of my mother’s. About five minutes ago, I called to tell her what was going on, and she mentioned that her husband was on the Lawndale board.’

‘Rachel Milton and your mother were friends? Am I likely to run into her in the next five minutes?’

‘You’re in the clear,’ I said.

‘Good. Anyhow, there’s the ICU, dead ahead.’

I swung open one of the big doors to let her pass through. Zwick glanced up from her post and prepared for battle. Beneath the window, a notice I had previously overlooked told me why. ‘Uh-oh,’ I said. ‘Slight change of plans.’ I pointed to the notice. CHILDREN ARE NOT PERMITTED ENTRY.

‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘Darn it. They don’t let kids in there, Cobbie. You’ll have to wait for me. I won’t be more than a couple of minutes, I promise.’

He looked up at her with the beginnings of alarm.

‘I can put you in front of the window, and you’ll be able to see me the whole time.’

‘I’ll stay with Cobbie,’ I said. ‘It’s no problem.’

‘I can’t let you do that.’

‘I want to stay with Ned and Ned,’ Cobbie announced. ‘With this Ned and with that Ned.’

‘First you’re my guide, then you put up with my complaints, and now you’re my baby-sitter.’

Aunt Nettie surged out and came to a halt with her hand still on the door. ‘Did I pick a bad time to go to the washroom?’

‘Don’t be silly, Aunt Nettie. This is Mrs Hatch. She’s visiting Mrs Loome. We met downstairs, and I offered to stay with her son while she goes in. Laurie, my aunt, Mrs Rutledge.’ I could not keep from grinning at the absurdity of having to explain myself.

‘Hello, Mrs Rutledge.’ Laurie contained her sense of the ridiculous better than I. ‘If your nephew hadn’t led me up here, I would never have found the way.’

Cobbie chose this moment to come out with ‘I ain’t concluded, and SOO faw I ain’t JUMPED!’ He sounded a little like Kingfish on the old Amos ‘n’ Andy programs.

Laurie Hatch moaned something that might have been ‘Oh, Cobbie.’ Nettie transferred her indignation to the boy and almost immediately relented. ‘Out of the mouths of babes. Honey, what’s your name?’

‘COBDEN CARPENTER HATCH!’ Cobbie shouted. He fell back into the stroller, giggling.

‘That’s a mighty important name.’ She turned magisterially to Laurie. ‘I’m sure Mrs Loome will appreciate your visit.’

Smiling at her cue, Laurie patted her son’s head and left us.

‘Mrs Hatch must be a good-hearted person.’ It was her way of apologizing. With a smile at Cobbie, Nettie sailed off.

Through the window, I could see Laurie Hatch approaching Mrs Loome’s cubicle and Aunt May stumping toward the nurses’ station. I hunkered beside the stroller. Dinosaurs were Cobbie’s favorite animals, and his favorite was Tyrannosaurus rex. Aunt Nettie reappeared and went back into the ICU. Aunt May gave the nurses’ station a close inspection, leaned over the counter, and snatched a stapler off a desk. She shoved the stapler into her bag.

‘Oh, my God,’ I said, realizing what Vince Hardtke had witnessed. ‘Oh, my GAHD!’ Cobbie chanted. ‘Oh, my GAHD, my mommy is coming.’

Aunt May moved down the counter and took a pad of paper and a pencil from another desk.

Laurie came through the doors. ‘Did you two have a nice time while I was gone?’

‘How is Mrs Loome?’

‘She’s recovering well, but very groggy. I’ll come back when they put her in a regular room.’ Her eyes sparkled, and she gave a little laugh. ‘Did your aunt make you feel like you were back in high school?’

Whatever I was going to say disappeared into a sudden whirlwind of physical sensation. A woman’s body was swarming over mine. Hair slid across my face, and teeth nipped the base of my neck. An odor of sweat and perfume swam into my nostrils. Laurie’s smile faded. The hands hanging at my sides kneaded the buttocks of the woman on top of me. A breast offered its nipple to my mouth. My tongue lapped the nipple. The woman above me tilted her hips, and I began moving in and out of her.

‘Ned, are you all right?’

I tried to speak. ‘I’m not …’ I clapped my hands to my face, and the woman entwined around me turned to smoke. I lowered my hands.

‘I’m sorry.’ I cleared my throat. ‘Yes, I’m all right.’ I wiped my handkerchief across my forehead and gave Laurie what I hoped was a reassuring look. ‘I guess I didn’t get enough sleep last night.’

‘I don’t want to leave if you’re ill.’

I wanted overwhelmingly to be left alone. ‘I’m restored,’ I said. ‘Honest.’ I went to the outer door and opened it for her. Still puzzled, Laurie got behind the stroller, and tendrils of consciousness seemed to extend toward me. I remembered thinking that she looked like a great glowing golden panther.

‘The look on your face – it was like you were eating the most delicious ice cream in the world, but it gave you that ache in the middle of your forehead. Pleasure and pain.’

‘No wonder you thought I was sick,’ I said.

23

Okay, I was stressed out, I told myself. At a time when thinking about anything but Star’s plight made me feel guilty, a good-looking stranger named Laurie Hatch had unknowingly pushed my buttons and induced a ten-second meltdown. On the other hand, maybe I was heading for another bizarre crack-up. Dr Barnhill’s perfunctory update faded in and out of focus. Over the top of his Martian head I glimpsed the entry into the ICU of a woman who would have been perfectly at home on the corner of Tenth Street and Second Avenue, and the sight of her reddish brown hair bushed out around the kindly, roguish moon-face floating above an opalescent tunic buttoned from waist to neck over loose black trousers made me feel better even before I realized who she was. Suki Teeter looked like a visiting maharanee. Dr Barnhill scurried up the aisle, and the maharanee rustled forward in a manner that suggested the chiming accompaniment of many little bells.

Nettie and May swung around with the stateliness of ocean liners and moved toward the curtain.

‘You have to be Suki Teeter.’ I held out my hand.

‘Honey-baby, please.’ She engulfed me in a hug. Her hair gave off the faint, pleasant odors of peppermint and sandalwood. ‘I would have been here earlier, but I practically had to recite the “Gettysburg Address” to get my car out of the shop!’ She stepped back. ‘I’m so glad you called me. And you’re sort of … sort of incredibly … My God! You’re a marvel, that’s what you are.’

‘You’re a marvel, too.’ The glow of Suki’s benevolent face intensified. Her wide-set, literally sparkling eyes were of two different colors, the right one a transparent aquamarine and the left as green as jade.

‘Tell me everything.’

I had nearly finished when Nettie swept the curtain aside and billowed out, May a step behind her. ‘Aunt Nettie,’ I said, ‘have you ever met Star’s old friend Suki Teeter?’

‘We met. You flicked cigarette ashes all over my porch.’

Suki said, ‘I’m very sorry about Star, Aunt Nettie,’ and went into the cubicle.

Minutes later, Nettie’s head snapped forward, and she seemed to turn to stone. ‘Now I have seen it all.’

‘What?’

Nettie scorched me with a look of the sort usually described as ‘baleful.’ ‘You called Toby Kraft.’

‘I thought he should know,’ I said.

Coming toward us in an ugly plaid jacket too heavy for the weather was a man with a gray, pockmarked face, Coke-bottle glasses, and a body like a cigar butt. His white hair swept back to a few inches above his shoulders, George Washington-style. Beneath the sweaty, savagely tiny knot of a defeated necktie curled the collar points of a shirt that appeared to have been worn for a week straight.

‘Who’s next?’ Nettie asked. ‘Mr John Dillinger?’

‘Why, that’s Toby Kraft,’ May said. ‘He must talk to the Devil himself.’

Suki Teeter parted the curtain, and my aunts moved sideways in unison. Sorrow had erased Suki’s normal radiance. She wrapped her arms around me. ‘Call me tonight, will you? Call me before that, if anything changes.’ She wiped her eyes without taking them from mine. The peculiarity of their coloring suggested that I was looking at two people contained in the same body.

Suki broke away and began moving up the aisle. Toby’s eyes, the size of eggs behind his thick glasses, focused on the front of her tunic.

May said, ‘Push those manhole covers off his nose, he looked any harder.’

Close up, Toby’s face looked like cottage cheese. ‘A good sport, that girl. Loyal as the day is long. Hiya, kid. Great to see you. Thanks for calling.’

He held out a fat white paw liberally covered with silver fur. ‘Isn’t it great to see this kid?’ The aunts did not respond. He released my tingling hand. ‘I wish I could look like the kid here for twenty-four hours. That’s all I ask – twenty-four hours. Hell, at least I got all my hair. How’s Star doing?’

I gave him a brief description.

‘What a lousy deal.’ He smoothed his hand over his hair. ‘I’ll let her know I’m here.’

May said, ‘I’ll come with you.’ She took his arm, and the two of them disappeared through the curtain.

‘Aunt Nettie,’ I whispered, ‘you must know that your sister is taking things from the nurses’ desks. What’s going on?’

She gave me a glance more aggrieved than angry and pulled me toward the end of the room. ‘Let me tell you some things you ought to know. What your Aunt May does is none of your business. She’s a magpie. That doesn’t hurt anybody. What did you see her take?’

‘A stapler,’ I said. ‘Some pencils and paper. But it doesn’t –’

‘These people, if they want writing supplies, they go to the storeroom and get for free what would cost us ten dollars at the store. May helps level out the balance. And you’re a Dunstan. You have to stand by your own people.’

I couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

Nettie’s force-field lost most of its intensity. ‘Now let me set your mind at ease. My sister might be slow on her feet, but she still has fast hands. May’s the best magpie in the world. Has been ever since Queenie passed away.’

‘Queenie?’

‘Queen of the magpies. How do you think she got that name? Your grandmother could leave a store, a color television set under one arm, pulling a dishwasher on a handcart with the other, and the manager would hold the door and wish her good morning.’

We returned to cubicle 15 in what must have appeared to be harmony. Nettie radiated the satisfaction of one who had accomplished a difficult task, and I was managing to hold myself upright.

Toby came out rubbing his fingers over a quilted cheek with what in him passed for melancholy. ‘Keep in touch, you hear? I want to know everything that happens. Your momma worked for me when you were just a squirt, did you know that?’

‘I remember,’ I said. ‘How did the estate deal go?’ His eyes hardened, and I added, ‘The one you were telling me about.’

‘Oh, yeah. We’re moving, definitely.’ He gave me a sidelong look and strolled to the counter. ‘You staying at Nettie’s?’

I nodded.

‘If it gets tight over there, I can find you a room in a good clean place, no problem. And if you could use a couple extra bucks, maybe I’ll want some help in the shop. On account of you remind me of your momma.’

‘I’ll keep it in mind,’ I said.

He nodded, and I nodded back, as if we had agreed on a business deal. Toby put a hand on my shoulder and pulled me down into a miasma of smoke and hair gel. ‘Between you and I, you spot May doing something which it might seem out of character for an old lady like her? Turn a blind eye. Word to the wise.’

‘She already swiped everything that wasn’t nailed down,’ I said.

Toby batted the side of my head and chuckled.

‘Nettie said it runs in the family.’

‘Queenie, the woman was a virtuoso.’ He raised his furry hand to his mouth and kissed the tips of his fingers.

24

Dinner consisted of the same sandwiches, pickles, and potato salad as lunch. Clark negotiated a white pebble onto his fork and said, ‘Heard about you, boy.’

I waited.

‘Remember my mention of Piney Woods? I ran into Piney this afternoon. Six hundred dollars, he said.’

‘Is that right?’

‘A fellow named Joe Staggers and three of his friends are looking to get it back.’ Clark sent me another yellow glance. ‘These are Mountry boys. You don’t want to mess with boys from Mountry.’

‘Uncle Clark,’ I said, ‘the next time you run into Piney Woods, do me a favor. Tell him I didn’t take six hundred dollars off someone named Joe Staggers. I never met anyone named Joe Staggers. I don’t play cards, and I’m tired of hearing about it.’

Clark dipped his fork into the potato salad. ‘I did tell him some of that. Piney said he’d give out the same story himself, if it was him.’

Before the change of shift, I wandered up to the counter and noticed that the duffel had been partially unzipped. On one of her predatory rambles through the unit, May had opened the bag and nabbed whatever caught her magpie eye – she didn’t know it was mine. I knelt down and took out the blazer, which had been shoved back in by someone even less worried about wrinkles than me, and sorted through my clothes. Nothing seemed to be missing, including the Discman and the CDs. I went to the desk.

‘Nurse Zwick,’ I said, ‘did you see anyone touch my bag? Or open it up?’

‘Only you,’ she said.

After 7:00 P.M., a nurse said that Mrs Grenville Milton had sent a bouquet, but since flowers were not permitted in the ICU, it was being held downstairs. I told her to give it to the children’s ward.

Clark dropped into a chair and fell sonorously asleep.

Star kept rising toward clarity and fading back. My aunts told her she needed sleep. I thought my mother needed to talk to me, and that was why she never let go of my hand.

Around 9:00 P.M., Nettie poked her head around the curtain and whispered, ‘May, Clyde Prentiss has two visitors. You have to see them to believe them.’

‘Maybe it’s his gang,’ May said, and hustled out.

The arrival of two uniformed policemen and a plainclothes detective at cubicle 3 that afternoon had roused them into an investigative flurry. Prentiss’s history of wrongdoing ranged from petty larceny, in my aunts’ book merely a technique of economic redistribution, through assault with a deadly weapon and conspiracy to distribute illegal substances, to the big-time villainy of armed robbery, assault with intent to kill, and one accusation of rape. That he had been acquitted of most of these charges in no way implied his innocence. Hadn’t he been shot by a night watchman while attempting to flee through a warehouse window? Hadn’t his accomplices made their getaway in a pickup truck laden with microwave ovens? Added to his transgressions was that world-class felony, the breaking of his mother’s heart. Nettie and May would have hammered a stake through Clyde Prentiss’s own heart in an instant, and they were not about to pass up an opportunity to inspect his partners in crime.

Star clutched my hand. ‘Do you want to tell me about my father?’ I asked.

Her eyes bore into mine. She opened her mouth and uttered a succession of vowels. She gasped with frustration.

‘Was his name Robert?’

‘Nnnn!’

‘I thought that’s what you were telling me before.’

She summoned her powers. ‘Not Rrrr. Bert.’ She spent a few seconds concentrating on her breathing. ‘Edwuh. Edward.’