Derek was standing by, his hands stuck down in the pockets of his black ski parka, staring at the floor in an attitude of resentful dejection.
“Nordic, they want to build them some apartments on top of this basement,” Butts said. His eyes flicked rapidly between Derek and me as if he hadn’t figured out yet who was the final decision maker. “Funny thing is, if they buy this place, they’ll take my lot next door, too. You see that empty lot when you come in? Had a house on it, burned down. These apartment fellows, they’ll grade it, pave it, use it for parking. Offering me a pretty good deal—this place, plus that lot, too.”
“All right,” I said, and sighed. “How much?”
“For the lot? Half again as much.”
“So we’re really talking about ninety-seven-five.”
“Thereabouts,” he said cagily.
“Do they have zoning for multifamily units?”
Butts pursed his chapped lips and looked canny. “You got zoning for a recreation hall for loonies?”
“Mr. Butts, I’m sure you know even better than we do exactly how this neighborhood is zoned.” Which was one way of getting around the fact that I had a lot of information to gather before recommending this purchase to my trustees at their quarterly board meeting on Thursday.
He nodded sagely. “That young fellow who’s representing Nordic—one of the partners—he’s got his hands on his checkbook, practically got a pen in his hands; you know what I mean. I ain’t gonna be able to hold him off much longer, probably not no longer’n Thursday.”
“Friday,” I countered.
“Noon.”
“Right,” I said, and smiled at him.
“Here.” He began to dig around in the many pockets of his tan trousers until he came out with a silver key on a string. “Tell you what I’ll do—got nothin’ to hide here, you take this here key, let your people in anytime you want, take a look around.” He flipped the key to Derek, who looked startled and nearly dropped it. Derek took out his wallet and placed the key inside. “That way,” Butts continued, “you don’t have to be botherin’ me about nothin’ until you got an offer to make. You got my numbers, home and office.”
“We’ll call you,” I said.
“Look forward to it,” Butts replied, and winked at me.
Derek and I let ourselves out the front door and locked it behind us. The landlord departed via a back door that led to the alley between Ninth and Tenth streets. As we climbed the front steps to ground level again, Derek glanced at me, and, although his tone was dry, a hint of the imp showed itself in his eyes.
“Old George sure liked you, Jenny.”
“I found him pretty irresistible myself.”
When he smiled at that, I felt again a sadness that things hadn’t turned out differently. We paused on the top step. As usual, he seemed to be waiting for me to tell him what to do.
I said, “What next?”
He blinked, glanced at me suspiciously, but then looked around, suddenly seeming to notice our surroundings. “Well,” he said, making a visible effort to bestir himself. “We’re here. As long as we’re here, I guess we could talk to some of the neighbors, and see how they feel about it.”
“Good idea,” I said, with enough enthusiasm to embarrass both of us. He looked away from me and laughed. Quickly, I added, “Which one first?”
He shrugged, but then he pointed right, then left, then right again.
This time when he laughed, it seemed to be at himself.
“We’ll start there,” I agreed.
The clouds were thicker and whiter now, the air was colder and beginning to smell like snow. I set us a smart pace down the sidewalk, partly in response to his sulky, foot-dragging gait. But also because I was beginning to feel a sense of urgency about MaryDell’s project, an urgency I attributed to a suspicious lack of objectivity on my part. It was difficult not to think about what might have happened to my own mother if she’d ever been released from a hospital prematurely. What if she were one of those who needed “safe refuge”? Suddenly, the phrase didn’t sound redundant so much as it did emphatic.
4
The house just to the east of the church basement was a one-story saltbox with a red lacquered door and a bright blue doorknob that were unexpectedly cheerful notes on this drab block. I was prepared to like the owner—basing my judgment solely on those touches of individuality—even before she responded to her doorbell.
She wasn’t, however, as ready to like us.
“No, thank you,” she blurted, and began to close the door on us. “I already belong to a church.”
“No,” I said quickly, and smiled as ingratiatingly as George Butts. This neighbor was a tall, thin redhead in blue jeans, a paisley shirt, and braids, whom I guessed to be about thirty years old. “We’re not selling salvation, at least not directly. My name’s Jenny Cain, this is Derek Jones, and we represent the Port Frederick Civic Foundation. We’re studying the building next door as a possible site for a recreation hall for former mental patients. We’d like to know how you feel about those plans.”
I braced myself for a barrage of hostility.
She reopened her door and shrugged. “It’s okay.”
“Is it?” My surprise made me stupid.
“Everybody’s gotta be somewhere.” Her tone was philosophical. A small child, a girl, thrust her face between her mother’s knees. The woman smiled and was suddenly pretty. “I guess the only thing is, I do have a couple of these monsters, and I wouldn’t want anything to, um … you know. I guess I’d like some kind of assurance the patients won’t do anything crazy.” She laughed when she realized what she’d said. “I mean, I’m an artist, so I understand normal crazy. And I don’t mind gentle crazy. But I could get a little nervous about crazy. You know what I mean?”
I nodded, making no promises.
“Listen,” she added, “I don’t really belong to a church, I just said that to get rid of you. Oh, God …” She clapped her ringless left hand to her mouth in embarrassment. “I mean …”
We were all smiling inanely at one another as Derek and I turned to go down her front steps. The sound of children’s giggles followed us down the front walk. When their mother closed the front door, it was as if she’d shut the lid on a merry music box. Derek and I were once again surrounded by the still, white silence of impending snow. But it’s only October, I thought.
“Wonder if she’s married,” Derek murmured.
“I didn’t know you liked kids, Derek.”
“Sure, if they’re accompanied by a pretty mother.” He stuffed his hands in his coat pockets again and glanced back at the bright red door. He seemed to have perked up a little. “Hell, she’s probably taller than I am.”
“That’s okay,” I said, “her children are shorter than you are.”
He shook his head in mock disgust.
“You never paid me nearly enough, Jenny.”
It was the first hint of ambition I had heard from him in months.
* * *
We walked past the church basement, past the vacant lot, toward the tiny, shabby saltbox to the west. No red door there, or blue knob, just unpainted wood and a general air of decay and neglect. After we knocked—the bell was only a wire hanging out of a hole—it took the occupant a long time to respond. In fact, we would have thought nobody was home, except that strange clumping noises alerted us to the presence of someone within. Gradually, the clumping got louder as it seemed to draw closer to the door. I had the feeling then of being observed through a peephole. We must have appeared respectable, because two bolts slid back, a lock turned, and the door opened a crack. A rheumy blue eye peered out at us through a hole in a thick metal chain, and a thin, querulous voice demanded, “What do you want?”
I repeated my spiel, turning up the volume in case our questioner was hard of hearing.
The chain dropped, and the door opened to reveal a tiny, elderly woman leaning over an aluminum walker that was two-thirds her size. Her hair, thin and
gray, was contained by a hairnet, and her stockings were rolled up just below her knees. She was wearing grubby white terrycloth mules on her feet and a blue flowered nylon housedress that zipped up the front. Her hands were arthritically deformed, but they gripped the walker as if it were a shield against our invasion of her home. With her head bent to the right, her tiny, unbelievably wrinkled face peered up at us like a mole’s through a hole in the earth. The old lady was suspicion personified, but she said strongly, “Come in!”
Her house, which was suffocatingly warm, suffered from the same decay that afflicted the outside, but here, you could smell it—dust, unswept carpets, dirty dishes, unmade beds, medicine, and old age. But that alone wasn’t what caused us to stop dead just inside her door, and to stare. The weird part was that we were being stared back at—by dozens, maybe even hundreds of little piggy eyes. She had amassed a staggering collection of porcelain pigs of every description, and nearly every one of those porkers had been turned so that it faced the front door. There were pigs everywhere—on tables, shelves, on top of her television, on the bare wood floor, even suspended from the ceiling, hung by their little piggy necks. It was like walking into an overcrowded, weirdly silent sty. Or slaughterhouse.
“My goodness,” I said, stunned.
I knew, I absolutely knew without even looking at him, that Derek was restraining an overwhelming urge to snort. Please, I thought, just let us get through this without making asses of ourselves. That was an unfortunate choice of metaphors, however, since it brought barnyards to mind, which nearly brought a chortle up my throat. I knew it would be polite to compliment her extraordinary collection, but I couldn’t, I just couldn’t. I knew I’d never make it past, “My, what a nice …”
She introduced herself as Mrs. Grace Montgomery.
“Sit there,” she commanded, pointing to an overstuffed sofa with a cruelly twisted index finger. Walking carefully among the pigs, Derek and I followed her instruction. I still didn’t dare to look at him.
She lowered herself into an armchair so faded with time that you almost couldn’t tell that it had originally been upholstered to match the sofa. Her face puckered with the pain of movement.
“I’ve hardly slept since I heard they might put that insane asylum next door.” Her voice was high, quavering, agitated. “We’ll be killed in our beds, I know we will, I’m just so upset about this I can’t eat or sleep.” She pointed to a scrapbook on an end table at my side. “I want you to look at that, girlie.”
Nobody had called me “girlie” in thirty years. I’d nearly forgotten the word existed. I picked up the scrapbook and opened it. Taped to the first page, there was a yellowed newspaper clipping about an old murder. The dateline on the clipping was February 17, 1977, San Francisco, California. The tape that affixed it to the page was also yellowed and curled with age—like the clipping itself and the old woman who’d put it there.
“Do you see that, do you?” Her agitated voice rose nearly to a sob. She was extraordinarily upset. Any impulse I had to laugh, because of the pigs, had already vanished. Hers was the kind of deep, abnormal, irrational fear that demands serious attention. “That man in San Francisco there, he stabbed that old woman on the street! He was crazy, they knew he was crazy, but they let him out! And look, turn the page!”
I did, and discovered a clipping about a murder in Texas. Also 1977. Houston. I turned more pages and found clippings on every one—all stories about violence committed by people who were alleged or judged to be insane at the time of their crime. The pages of the old scrapbook were frayed, as if Mrs. Grace Montgomery spent her days thumbing through them.
I passed the book over to Derek.
“You see, do you?” Angry, frightened blue eyes glared at me from the wizened little face. “There’s that girl who went crazy in that shopping mall, shot up the place, killed three innocent people, her mother knew she was crazy, tried to get the girl committed, but they let her out anyway! Just look, just look! My book’s full of them! And I have more, more here….” With her arthritic fingers curled under, she patted a small pile of clippings that lay on a table beside her chair. Beside them lay dainty, fili-greed scissors, which I wondered at her ability to use. “This is proof. This is proof of what I say. I’m not some old kook. No, no, this is real life, this is what happens when you let the government turn those people loose on our streets. Well, I won’t have it on my street! I’ve lived here all my life, right here in this very house. I was born here and married here, I lost my babies here, and I’ll die here, too. But not too soon! Not at the hands of a murdering lunatic. I’ll die at God’s will, not the devil’s!”
I watched in dismay as she began to cry. Tears found their crooked way down the eroded cheeks, then into the corners of her mouth.
“Oh, Mrs. Montgomery,” I said, feeling helpless in the face of her frantic, miserable paranoia.
“It’s bad enough to be old and live alone.” She wiped angrily at her tears with the backs of her crippled hands. “Nobody to talk to, take all my meals alone with only my dear piggies to keep me company, but this, this! I tell you I can’t bear to think of it, I can’t bear it. You’ve got to stop it. Tell them they can’t do this to me.”
I tried to comfort her, but she was past all hearing. When it was clear there wasn’t anything we could say to make her feel better, Derek and I made our careful way out of her house. This time it was the sound of bolts shooting home, instead of children’s laughter, that followed us down the front walk.
Back on the sidewalk, Derek opened his mouth to speak. I could almost see the flip words forming on his tongue.
“No,” I warned him.
“Hell, she’s as crazy as any mental patient, Jenny.”
“So we shouldn’t take her any more seriously than we do them?”
He started to reply, then smiled slightly. He knew he was caught in the trap of his own paradox. “Right.” He sighed, deeply, as if he were letting out a lot more than carbon dioxide. His shoulders had been tightly bunched under his black jacket, but now they relaxed a little. “Jesus, I hate being fair-minded. It kills all my best jokes. It’s unmasculine, you know? Hell, I should have been a lawyer—lawyers don’t have to be fair, they only have to be good.”
He was cussing more than he usually ever did on the job. I had a feeling he was beginning to let go of it now, of the job, of his relationship to me, of whatever image he’d had of his future at the foundation.
“That sounds like my old Derek,” I blurted.
He flushed and said quickly, as if to avert a discussion he didn’t want, “Okay, Mother Teresa, what next?” It came out sounding hard and sharp.
I was heartened to hear him display a little spirit, even if it was only prompted by his attraction to the red-haired artist in the house on the other side of the basement. Sex had always been the best stimulant for Derek. He used to do his best work when he had a steady woman friend. Maybe that was the problem, I mused briefly, because as far as I knew, it was a long time since he’d been in love. There’d been plenty of women, but not much love. Maybe if I fixed him up with a nice—or not so nice—woman, maybe that would—
Oh, stop it, I thought, this is ridiculous. Sex is not a perk. The boss does not pimp for the employees.
“Let’s try one more, Derek.” I pointed to the house across the street, a run-down, two-story saltbox with a “For Sale” sign in its scrubby front yard. “I want to know if the recreation hall is chasing them away.”
5
Across the street, the young man who answered our knock confused us at first with agents of a somewhat larger bureaucracy.
“You from the city?”
Before we could figure that out and then deny it, he pointed a dirty finger at us, and laughed snidely.
“Don’t be bringin’ us any more of your effin’ notices,” he said. “I got enough of your effin’ notices to paper the effin’ bathroom. I’ve sold your effin’ notices, lady, along with this house. You want it painted? You want i
t a-lume-i-num sided? You want gold-effin’-plated plumb-in’? You want the weeds cut down? You tell the new owner to do it, baby, ‘cause I ain’t responsible no more.” He raised the long-necked beer in his hand and drank from it, all the while holding my eyes with the sly, laughing look in his own. “Sold!” he exclaimed, and then he blew a toot on the mouth of the beer bottle.
It takes a rare and cavalier disregard for the opinions of others to use any form of the, as mothers say, “F-word” that many times on first meeting.
“We’re not from the city,” I told him. I was tempted to insert his favorite adjective, but I restrained myself.
“I ain’t joinin’ no church, either.” He tooted on the bottle again. This was one happy fella. Viewed through the brown mesh of his screen door, he looked shabby and ill cared for, like his house. His breath—like the open trash bags on his front porch—smelled of beer and last week’s lunch. He had a languid, lazy diction that slid over consonants, and his lank greasy hair curled low over his forehead. He appeared to be in his late twenties, but he hadn’t outgrown his teenage acne. His fingernails were bruised, horny, and framed in black grease. When I explained our mission, he acted as if he couldn’t care less about what happened to this neighborhood.
“Hell, like I said, we’ve already sold this place,” he said blithely. “We just ain’t got up the ‘Sold’ sign yet.” At that moment, a very pregnant blonde who looked about sixteen walked up behind him and stared at us—or rather, at Derek—over the young man’s shoulder. She was beautiful in a sluttish way, and silent—although the slow, small smile that she directed at Derek, was expressive enough. The young man said, “This place is too big, we can’t afford to keep it up—hell, nobody could.” He glanced back over his shoulder at her and laughed. Her mouth curved in an amused, sly smile. I felt the joke had somehow been at our expense, but whatever it was, I didn’t get it.