North of Madison, Wisconsin, a freezing rain began to fall. The interstate turned glassy on the overpasses; I had to keep my speed down to stay in control. Except for the occasional giant rig charging through the slush at eighty, we had the road pretty much to ourselves.
Geraldine Graham was snoring lightly in the seat next to me. She had insisted on coming: she still had keys to the cottage-she had found them easily, in a drawer in her bedroom, and put them into a black Hermes bag that rested now at her feet. I tried to force her to stay home, but she said she knew the route, which I didn’t, and more important, at least to her, she needed to make sure Benji and Catherine were all right. “If I’d told you these things last week, they might not be in danger now.”
When I’d reached Anodyne Park, Lisa had answered the bell-bustling, officious: you can’t come in, Madam is resting. I pushed her aside and strode down the hall, opening doors. I found Geraldine dozing on her bed with a reading light on and a book open beneath her fingers.
Lisa darted in under my arm. “Oh, madam, this detective is here, breaking in. Shall I call Mr. Darraugh or Mr. Julius?”
Geraldine sat up with a start. “Lisa! Stop dithering. The detective? Mr. Darraugh’s detective is here? Oh, there you are, young woman. Wait while I collect myself.”
I knelt next to her. “Something urgent has come up. I need your help; I don’t need you to put your clothes on.”
“Grant me the foibles of my upbringing, young woman. I think better while dressed than naked. I will be with you directly.”
I walked impatiently up and down the hall outside her room, but she was, in fact, remarkably quick, despite her age and Lisa’s interference, and in a few minutes was talking to me in her alcove in the sitting room. I told her I was going to tell her things that were utterly confidential and that Lisa could not be a party to them. After a look at my face, Geraldine summarily dismissed her maid. Lisa gave me the kind of expression that makes you glad a handgun isn’t backing it up, but she retreated.
When I heard the door close-and made sure Lisa was on the far side of it-I told Geraldine about Catherine and Benji.
“I know you and Calvin were lovers all those years ago. It was you he meant when he called for Deenie last week, wasn’t it?”
Her fingers clenched on the arms of her chair, but she nodded. “How did you know? Was it the key to Larchmont that he had kept?”
“That, and some other things. Armand Pelletier left an unfinished manuscript among his papers that pretty well spelled it out.”
“Ah, Armand. I wondered if he would come back to haunt me. He was so passionate about workers’ rights, and for a time I reflected that passionbecause I was passionate and needed some object for my ardor. He was bitter when I left him for Calvin; he accused me of being too fastidious, of needing the fleshpots of Egypt. I told him clean sheets would suffice. But it had more to do with-Calvin was a generous lover, and Armand… took more than he gave. His passions ultimately were for himself alone. With Calvin, too, it was only a way of getting what he himself desired, but I didn’t see that until much later.”
“There was never a question that you would leave your husband?” Involuntarily, I let myself be sidetracked.
“I thought-I had the notion that if I divorced MacKenzie, Calvin and I might marry. But however much Mother hated MacKenzie, she couldn’t stand the scandal a divorce would cause, and before I’d nerved myself to stand up to her-Calvin had married Renee.” She twisted the great diamond on her right hand. “I had gone to Washington when he was called
before the committee. I was in the hearing room. I was one of the spectators. I had gone with the idea that I would surprise him. I loved him; I thought he loved me and that if I declared myself it would be a help to his spirit during those difficult days.”
“And he turned you down?”
She turned her head so I couldn’t see her face. “I never made the offer. He left the room surrounded by lawyers and reporters. I looked for him in his club at the end of the day and they told me where he was dining. When I got to the restaurant, I saw him sitting with Renee-as he had often sat with me-so close the clothes themselves might melt from our bodies. I walked away, walked blindly, walked through the night, thinking only that I must never let anyone know how humiliated I had been. I walked for hours, until I ended up weary in some district I didn’t know. I went into a bar, thinking I would have a brandy and get them to call me a cab.”
She stopped, her fingers still working on her ring. “And saw my husband. With Olin Taverner. As close as Renee had been to Calvin. It was that kind of bar. MacKenzie looked up and recognized me.”
“Your husband was gay? Not impotent? Was that the night you found out?”
“‘Gay’? What a strange word for a man whose homosexuality weighed on him like a Druid’s stone. No, I had known for years. My only surprise was seeing him with Olin. When we married, MacKenzie was often in New York, it was an open secret between him and his parents that he went there to visit homosexual bars. Marriage was supposed to cure him of that as it was supposed to cure me of-lovers and unwanted pregnancies. I suppose I took lovers in the hopes of shocking my mother away from me, but she was far more tenacious than I; she would take me to Europe, to those Swiss sanitoria. After she and Blair Graham married MacKenzie to me, he and I tried for a few years; my daughter Laura was his child. But MacKenzie was miserable in my arms, in any woman’s arms, so we arrived at a tacit understanding: we would present a bland united front to the world and seek our pleasures privately. We were both discreet, and we came to be good friends for a time.”
After another pause, when I thought she would slice her finger to the bone with her diamonds, she said, “And then I met Armand, at a party
Calvin gave for him, a triumphant party, when Armand’s Tale of Two Countries had been on the Times best-seller list for twenty weeks. I started going to organizing meetings with him-but you know that part.”
“Yes,” I said gently. “I know that part. Was Calvin Darraugh’s father?” “I’ve never been sure.” She turned bitter eyes back to me. “It might have been Armand, but I think it was Calvin. It doesn’t matter. Darraugh and MacKenzie loved one another, oh, I think better than most fathers and sons do, even though MacKenzie knew the boy couldn’t possibly be his, and Mother suspected as much. And when MacKenzie died-when I killed him-“
“No!” the exclamation came out, involuntary.
“Oh, I didn’t pull the noose tight. But I let Calvin know what I saw in that Washington bar. My last gift to him as a lover. I thought-it would give him leverage with Olin. And it did.”
My eye was on the clock. I tried to hurry her, to get to the point where she’d tell me a place Calvin might have taken his granddaughter. Geraldine wouldn’t be rushed. She was telling me a tale she had rehearsed so many times in her mind it had worn a groove there. Now, her first chance to say it all out loud after all those years of silence, she could only tell me the story as she’d memorized it.
“It was all on account of the Committee for Social Thought and justice’s legal defense fund. Olin had learned that Calvin supported it, and he was on Calvin like a dog to a rabbit. They’d despised each other for so many years, you see.”
“You gave the fund money so Calvin’s name didn’t appear?” I prompted her, trying to curb my impatience.
She smiled sadly. “Yes. Those were the days when I would do very nearly anything Calvin demanded. He told me that if he gave to the fund directly, Bayard Publishing couldn’t operate freely during those bleak blacklist days.
“Since then, I’ve come to see-Calvin was generous, and handsome, and spoiled, and cowardly. He couldn’t face hardship-but I only realized that later. What mattered at the time to me was that my mother found I had written checks for him to the legal defense fund.” Once again she turned to look at the portrait.
“When I told Calvin that she was going to give her shares in the press to Olin if I donated more money to the fund, Calvin turned to Augustus Llewellyn. Llewellyn was a fellow traveler back then, I knew that from my months with Armand. When I withdrew, Calvin got Llewellyn to donate a great deal of money into the fund. But it was money Calvin actually contributed himself by creating loans for Llewellyn to start his business. Calvin was quite pleased with his own cleverness. We lay in my great bed at Larchmont one night while he laughed and told me about it.”
She shut her eyes, holding her breath for a long moment. “I’ve never known exactly what happened between Olin and Calvin after that first committee hearing. No one ever talked. We live by secrets in New Solway, they are our meat and breath. I assumed that Olin went to Llewellyn because his name was on the checks, you see, the checks written to the legal defense fund. And I supposed that Llewellyn told Olin he would give him the name of the ringleader, if he didn’t have to go to prison himself, and if his name never appeared. But Augustus Llewellyn must have reported Calvin’s involvement to Olin. Who else could have known?
“When Olin confronted him, Calvin in turn revealed Kylie’s and Armand’s names-they were prominent in the Committee for Social Thought and justice, back when we met so often at Flora’s bar. Calvin would have turned them in, perhaps he would have turned even me in, to avoid public disgrace himself. A part of me knew that. The part that wasn’t still painfully in love.”
“Did Renee know this about Calvin when they married?” I ventured. “I think Renee suggested that Calvin trade Kylie and Armand for his own safety,” she said with surprising calm. “She would never have seen it as a betrayal of principle, you see, but as an organizational necessity. I think that now; at the time, I only saw that she was twenty and I was fortyfive, and I made one last effort to bind Calvin to me. I told him about-Olin and MacKenzie. I left a note in his club on my way to the train station.
“I went up to New York City so that I could be alone for a time, away from Mother’s eyes. And also so I wouldn’t have to face MacKenzie. He was a good man, MacKenzie, and I knew I had done a terrible thing in betraying him to Calvin.” Her mouth worked.
“The committee halted their investigation into Calvin that afternoon, while I was sleeping in my suite at the Plaza. I assumed Calvin and Olin came to a `gentleman’s agreement.”’ She gave the phrase a savage inflection.
“Olin would cease and desist, Armand would go to prison, Kylie would lose her job and Calvin would keep Olin’s affair with MacKenzie to himself-that would have ruined Olin in the fifties, you see. I made all of these assumptions because MacKenzie returned to Larchmont and hanged himself. Neither of us knew that Darraugh was sent home unexpectedly from Exeter.”
She looked at me bleakly. “Of course-Renee knew everything. About me and Calvin, about Olin and MacKenzie. And she flaunted her knowledge to me, in those subtle ways one can in a closed community. I was never more thankful for anything than when she and Calvin bought that apartment in town.”
I went to the kitchen and brought her a glass of water. “Ma’am, I didn’t mean for you to tell me so much, or to have it be so upsetting for you. But you see, I think Olin told this story to Marcus Whitby. And I think Marc went to Renee for her version. Marc was working on a long project on Kylie Ballantine, and he was a careful journalist; he wouldn’t print such a story without hearing the Bayards’ side. Renee killed him, in an efficient way. She gave him bourbon dosed with phenobarbital, and when he fell into a coma, she drove here to Anodyne Park, where she borrowed a golf cart, and drove him to your old pond. Now-I’m afraid she’ll kill the Egyptian boy if she gets to him before I do.”
Geraldine drank the water. “And you think I can stop her? I showed no capacity for that when I was younger and more vital.”
“I’m wondering if Catherine ran away to some place that was important to her and her grandfather. I desperately need to know-it may be too late already now-but-was there some private special place that you and Calvin cherished?”
Her mouth twisted in a sardonic smile. “Many special places, all by necessity private. But-I suppose-his family used to own a hunting lodge near Eagle River, up in northern Wisconsin. When the North Woods became a national forest in the thirties, the family had to give up their land, but Calvin’s father worked out an agreement where the family could keep
the lodge for private use for twentyfive years. The agreement must have expired about the time Calvin married Renee.
“The lodge is where we held the committee benefit that caused so much questioning in Congress. And it’s where Calvin and I used to go sometimes in the fall. Besides the great lodge, which would sleep thirty people, there was a cottage in the woods behind it. We were happy there, in a place where we could-be intimate without wondering who was outside the bedroom door. I think Calvin took the girl up there when she was younger.,,
It was a long shot, but it was my only shot. I got to my feet and braced myself for the long drive north.