Commonwealth

  Two older women in their best church dresses and no hats leaned against one another in the frame of the open kitchen door. When Fix looked over they gave him a wave in unison.

  “Bar still open?” the smaller one said. She meant to sound serious but the line was so clever she hiccupped and then her friend began to laugh as well.

  “My mother,” Fix said to Cousins, pointing to the one who had spoken, then he pointed to the other, a faded blonde with a cheerful, open face. “My mother-in-law. This is Al Cousins.”

  Cousins dried his hand a second time and extended it to one and then the other. “Bert,” he said. “What’re you ladies drinking?”

  “Whatever you’ve got left,” the mother-in-law said. You could see just a trace of the daughter there, the way she held her shoulders back, the length of her neck. It was a crime what time did to women.

  Cousins picked up a bottle of bourbon, the bottle closest to his hand, and mixed two drinks. “It’s a good party,” he said. “Everybody out there still having a good time?”

  “I thought they were waiting too long,” Fix’s mother said, accepting her drink.

  “You’re morbid,” the mother-in-law said to her with affection.

  “I’m not morbid,” the mother corrected. “I’m careful. You have to be careful.”

  “Waiting for what?” Cousins asked, handing over the second drink.

  “The baptism,” Fix said. “She was worried the baby was going to die before we got her baptized.”

  “Your baby was sick?” he asked Fix. Cousins had been raised Episcopalian, but he had let go of that. To the best of his knowledge, dead Episcopal babies were passed into heaven regardless.

  “She’s fine,” Fix said. “Perfect.”

  Fix’s mother shrugged. “You don’t know that. You don’t know what’s going on inside a baby. I had you and your brothers baptized in under a month. I was on top of it. This child,” she said, turning her attention to Cousins, “is nearly a year old. She couldn’t even fit into the family christening gown.”

  “Well, there’s the problem,” Fix said.

  His mother shrugged. She drank down her entire drink and then waggled the empty paper cup as if there had been some mistake. They’d run out of ice, and the ice had been the only thing to slow the drinkers down. Cousins took the cup from her and filled it again.

  “Someone’s got the baby,” Fix said to his mother, not a question, just a confirmation of fact.

  “The what?” she asked.

  “The baby.”

  She thought for a minute, her eyes half closed, and nodded her head, but it was the other one who spoke, the mother-in-law. “Someone,” she said without authority.

  “Why is it,” Fix’s mother said, not interested in the question of the baby, “that men will stand in a kitchen all day mixing drinks and juicing oranges for those drinks but won’t so much as set a foot over the threshold to make food?” She stared pointedly at her son.

  “No idea,” Fix said.

  His mother then looked back at Cousins but he only shook his head. Dissatisfied, the two women turned as one and tipped back out into the party, cups in hand.

  “She has a point,” Cousins said. He never would have stood back here making sandwiches, though he felt he could use a sandwich, that he wanted one, and so he poured himself another drink.

  Fix returned to the business of the knife and the orange. He was a careful man, and took his time. Even drunk he wasn’t going to cut off his finger. “You have kids?” he asked.

  Cousins nodded. “Three and a third.”

  Fix whistled. “You stay busy.”

  Cousins wondered if he meant You stay busy running after kids, or, You stay busy fucking your wife. Either way. He put another empty orange rind in the sink that overflowed with empty orange rinds. He rolled his wrist.

  “Take a break,” Fix said.

  “I did.”

  “Then take another one. We’ve got juice in reserve, and if those two are any indication of where things are going most of the people here won’t be able to find the kitchen much longer.”

  “Where’s Dick?”

  “He’s gone, ran out of here with his wife.”

  I bet he did, Cousins thought, a vision of his own wife flashing before him, the shrieking bedlam of his household. “What time is it, anyway?”

  Fix looked at his watch, a Girard-Perregaux, a much nicer watch than a cop might be wearing. It was three forty-five, easily two hours later than either man would have guessed in his wildest estimation of time.

  “Jesus, I should get going,” Cousins said. He was fairly certain he’d told Teresa he would be home no later than noon.

  Fix nodded. “Every person in this house who isn’t my wife or my daughters should get going. Just do me a favor first—go find the baby. Find out who has her. If I go out there now everybody’s going to want to start talking and it’ll be midnight before I find her. Take a quick walk around, would you do that? Make sure some drunk didn’t leave her in a chair.”

  “How will I know it’s your baby?” Cousins asked. Now that he thought about it, he hadn’t seen a baby at the party, and surely with all these Micks there were bound to be plenty of them.

  “She’s the new one,” Fix said, his voice gone suddenly sharp, like Cousins was an idiot, like this was the reason some guys had to be lawyers rather than cops. “She’s the one in the fancy dress. It’s her party.”

  The crowd shifted around Cousins, opening to him, closing around him, pushing him through. In the dining room every platter was stripped, not a cracker or a carrot stick remained. The conversation and music and drunken laughter melted into a single indecipherable block of sound from which the occasional clear word or sentence escaped—Turns out he’s had her in the trunk the entire time he’s talking. Somewhere down a distant hallway he couldn’t see, a woman was laughing so hard she gasped for breath, calling, Stop! Stop! He saw children, plenty of children, several of whom were pulling cups straight from the unwitting fingers of adults and downing the contents. He didn’t see any babies. The room was over-warm and the detectives had their jackets off now, showing the service revolvers clipped to their belts or holstered under their arms. Cousins wondered how he had failed to notice earlier that half the party was armed. He went through the open glass doors to the patio and looked up into the late-afternoon sunlight that flooded the suburb of Downey, where there was not a cloud and never had been a cloud and never would be a cloud. He saw his friend the priest standing still as stone, holding the little sister in his arms, as if they’d been dancing for so long they had fallen asleep standing up. Men sat in patio chairs talking to other men, many of them with women in their laps. The women, all the ones he saw, had taken off their shoes at some point and ruined their stockings. None of them was holding a baby, and there was no baby in the driveway. Cousins stepped inside the garage and flipped on the light. A ladder hung on two hooks and clean cans of paint were lined up on a shelf according to size. There was a shovel, a rake, coils of extension cord, a bench of tools, a place for everything and everything in its place. In the center of the clean cement floor was a clean navy-blue Peugeot. Fix Keating had fewer children and a nicer watch and a foreign car and a much-better-looking wife. The guy hadn’t even made detective. If anyone had bothered to ask him at that moment, Cousins would have said it seemed suspicious.

  About the time he started really looking at the car, which seemed somehow sexy just by virtue of its being French, he remembered the baby was missing. He thought of his own baby, Jeanette, who had just learned to walk. Her forehead was bruised from where she had careened into the glass yesterday, the Band-Aids were still in place, and he panicked to think he was supposed to be watching her. Little Jeanette, he had no idea where he’d left her! Teresa should have known he wasn’t any good at keeping up with the baby. She shouldn’t have trusted him with this. But when he came out of the garage to try and find her, his heart punching at his ribs as if it wanted to go ahead of hi
m, he saw all the people at Fix Keating’s party. The proper order of the day was returned to him and he stood for another moment holding on to the door, feeling both ridiculous and relieved. He hadn’t lost anything.

  When he looked back up at the sky he saw the light was changing. He would tell Fix he needed to go home, he had his own kids to worry about. He went inside to find a bathroom and found two closets first. In the bathroom, he stopped to splash some water on his face before coming out again. On the other side of the hallway there was yet another door. It wasn’t a big house but it seemed to be made entirely of doors. He opened the door in front of him and found the light inside was dim. The shades were down. It was a room for little girls—a pink rug, a pink wallpaper border featuring fat rabbits. There was a room not unlike this in his own house that Holly shared with Jeanette. In the corner he saw three small girls sleeping on a twin bed, their legs crossed over one another’s legs, their fingers twisted in one another’s hair. Somehow the only thing he failed to notice was Beverly Keating standing at the changing table with the baby. Beverly looked at him, a smile of recognition coming over her face.

  “I know you,” she said.

  She had startled him, or her beauty startled him again. “I’m sorry,” he said. He put his hand on the door.

  “You’re not going to wake them up.” She tilted her head towards the girls. “I think they’re drunk. I carried them in here one at a time and they never woke up.”

  He went over and looked at the girls, the biggest one no more than five. He couldn’t help but like the look of children when they were sleeping. “Is one of them yours?” he asked. They all three looked vaguely similar. None of them looked like Beverly Keating.

  “Pink dress,” she said, her attention on the diaper in her hand. “The other two are her cousins.” She smiled at him. “Aren’t you supposed to be fixing drinks?”

  “Spencer left,” he said, though that didn’t answer the question. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been nervous, not in the face of criminals or juries, certainly not in the face of women holding diapers. He started again. “Your husband asked me to find the baby.”

  Finished with her work, Beverly rearranged the baby’s dress and lifted her up from the table. “Well, here she is,” she said. She touched her nose to the baby’s nose and the baby smiled and yawned. “Somebody’s been awake a long time.” Beverly turned towards the crib.

  “Let me take her out to Fix for a minute,” he said. “Before you put her down.”

  Beverly Keating tilted her head slightly to one side and gave him a funny look. “Why does Fix need her?”

  It was everything, the pale pink of her mouth in the darkened pink room, the door that was closed now though he didn’t remember closing it, the smell of her perfume which had somehow managed to float gently above the familiar stench of the diaper pail. Had Fix asked him to bring the baby back or just to find her? It didn’t make any difference. He told her he didn’t know, and then he stepped towards her, her yellow dress its own source of light. He held out his arms and she stepped into them, holding out the baby.

  “Take her then,” she said. “Do you have children?” But by then she was very close and she lifted up her face. He put one arm under the baby, which meant he was putting his arm beneath her breasts. It wasn’t a year ago she’d had this baby and while he didn’t know what she’d looked like before it was hard to imagine she had ever looked any better than this. Teresa never pulled herself together. She said it wasn’t possible, one coming right after the next. Wouldn’t he like to introduce the two of them, just to show his wife what could be done if you cared to try. Scratch that. He had no interest in Teresa meeting Beverly Keating. He put his other arm around her back, pressed his fingers into the straight line of her zipper. It was the magic of gin and orange juice. The baby balanced between the two of them and he kissed her. That was the way this day was turning out. He closed his eyes and kissed her until the spark he had felt in his fingers when he touched her hand in the kitchen ran the entire shivering length of his spine. She put her other hand against the small of his back while the tip of her tongue crossed between his parted teeth. There was an almost imperceptible shift between them. He felt it, but she stepped back. He was holding the baby. The baby cried for a second, a single red-faced wail, and then issued a small hiccup and pressed into Cousins’s chest.

  “We’re going to smother her,” she said, and laughed. She looked down at the baby’s pretty face. “Sorry about that.”

  The small weight of the Keating girl was familiar in his arms. Beverly took a soft cloth from the changing table and wiped over his mouth. “Lipstick,” she said, then she leaned over and kissed him again.

  “You are—” he started, but too many things came into his head to say just one.

  “Drunk,” she said, and smiled. “I’m drunk is all. Go take the baby to Fix. Tell him I’ll be there in just a minute to get her.” She pointed her finger at him. “And don’t tell him anything else, mister.” She laughed again.

  He realized then what he had known from the first minute he saw her, from when she leaned out the kitchen door and called for her husband. This was the start of his life.

  “Go,” she said.

  She let him keep the baby. She went to the other side of the room and started to arrange the sleeping girls into more comfortable positions. He stood at the closed bedroom door for one more minute to watch her.

  “What?” she said. She wasn’t being flirtatious.

  “Some party,” he said.

  “Tell me about it.”

  In one sense only had Fix been right to send him out to find the baby: nobody knew him at this party and it had been easy for him to move through the crowd. It was something Cousins hadn’t realized until now when everyone turned their head in his direction. A woman as trim and tan as a stick stepped right in front of him.

  “There she is!” she cried, and leaned in to kiss the yellow curls that feathered the baby’s head, leaving a wine stain of lipstick. “Oh,” she said, disappointed in herself. She used her thumb to try to wipe it up and the baby tightened her features as if she might cry. “I shouldn’t have done that.” She looked at Cousins and smiled at him. “You won’t tell Fix it was me, will you?”

  It was an easy promise to make. He’d never seen the tan woman before.

  “There’s our girl,” a man said, smiling at the baby as he patted Cousins on the back. Who did they think he was? No one asked him. Dick Spencer was the only person who knew him at all and he was long gone. As he cut a slow path to the kitchen he was stopped and encircled over and over again. Oh, the baby, they said in soft voices. Hey there, pretty girl. The compliments and kind words surrounded him. She was a very good-looking baby, he could see it now that they were in the light. This one looked more like the mother, the fair skin, the wide-set eyes, everybody said so. Just like Beverly. He jostled her up in the crook of his arm. Her eyes would open and then close again, blue beacons checking to see if she was still in his arms. She was as comfortable with him as any of his own children were. He knew how to hold a baby.

  “She sure likes you,” a man wearing a gun in a shoulder harness said.

  In the kitchen a group of women sat smoking. They tapped their ashes in their cups, signaling they were done. There was nothing left to do but wait for their husbands to tell them it was time to go home. “Hey there, baby,” one of them said, and they all looked up at Cousins.

  “Where’s Fix?” he asked.

  One of them shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “Do you have to go now? I’ll take her.” She held out her hands.

  But Cousins wasn’t about to turn her over to strangers. “I’ll find him,” he said, and backed away.

  Cousins felt like he had been walking in a circle around Fix Keating’s house for the last hour, first looking for the baby and then looking for Fix. He found him on the back patio talking to the priest. The priest’s girl was nowhere in sight. There were fewer people outs
ide now, fewer people everywhere. The angle of the light coming through the orange trees had lowered considerably. He saw a single orange high above his head, an orange that had somehow been overlooked in the frenzy to make juice, and he raised up on his toes, the baby balanced in one arm, and picked it.

  “Jesus,” Fix said, looking up. “Where have you been?”

  “Looking for you,” Cousins said.

  “I’ve been right here.”

  Cousins nearly made a crack about Fix not bothering to try and find him but then he thought better of it. “You’re not where I left you.”

  Fix stood up and took the baby from him without gratitude or ceremony. She issued a small sound of discontent at the transfer, then settled against her father’s chest and went to sleep. Cousins’s arm was weightless now and he didn’t like it. He didn’t like it one bit. Fix looked at the stain on the top of her head. “Did somebody drop her?”

  “It’s lipstick.”

  “Well,” said the priest, pushing out of his chair. “That’s it for me. We’ve got a spaghetti supper back at the church in half an hour. Everyone’s welcome.”

  They said their goodnights, and as Father Joe Mike walked away he grew a tail of parishioners who followed him down the driveway, Saint Patrick marching through Downey. They waved their hands at Fix and called goodnight. It wasn’t night, but neither was it fully day. The party had gone on entirely too long.

  Cousins waited another minute, hoping that Beverly would come back for the baby like she’d said, but she didn’t come, and it was hours past time for him to go. “I don’t know her name,” he said.

  “Frances.”

  “Really?” He looked again at the pretty girl. “You named her for yourself?”

  Fix nodded. “Francis got me into a lot of fights when I was a kid. There was no one in the neighborhood who forgot to tell me I had a girl’s name, so I figured, why not name a girl Frances?”

  “What if she’d been a boy?” Cousins asked.