Tiny Little Thing

  “I can’t imagine.”

  “Your sister Pepper.”

  “Pepper?”

  “Yep. She hopped a ride with us from Washington. Staying with a friend tonight.”

  “Well, that’s strange,” I say.

  “What, staying with a friend? I’d say par for the course.” Again, the laughter. So much laughing. What a good mood he’s in. The adrenaline rush of public success.

  “No, I mean coming for a visit like this. Without even saying anything. She’s never been up here before.” Which is simply a tactful way of saying that Pepper and I have never gotten along, that we’ve only cordially tolerated each other since we were old enough to realize that she runs on jet fuel, while I run on premium gasoline, and the two—jets and Cadillacs—can’t operate side by side without someone’s undercarriage taking a beating.

  “My fault, I guess. I saw her at the reception afterward, looking a little blue, and I asked her up. In my defense, I never thought she’d say yes.”

  “Doesn’t she have to work?”

  “I told her boss she needed a few days off.” Frank’s voice goes all smart and pleased with itself. Pepper’s boss, it so happens, is the brand-new junior senator from the great state of New York, and a Hardcastle’s always happy to get the better of a political rival.

  “Well, that’s that, then. I’ll see that we have another bedroom ready. Did she say how long she was planning to stay?”

  “No,” says Frank. “No, she didn’t.”

  • • •

  I wait until ten o’clock—safe in my bedroom, a fresh vase of hyacinths quietly perfuming the air, the ocean rushing and hushing outside my window—before I return my attention to the photograph in the manila envelope.

  I turn the lock first. When Frank’s away, which is often, his grandmother has an unsavory habit of popping in for chats on her way to bed, sometimes knocking first and sometimes not. My dear, she begins, in her wavering voice, each r lovingly rendered as an h, and then comes the lecture, delivered with elliptical skill, in leading Socratic questions of which a trial lawyer might be proud, designed to carve me into an even more perfect rendering, a creature even more suited to stand by Franklin Hardcastle’s side as he announced his candidacy for this office and then that office, higher and higher, until the pinnacle’s reached sometime before menopause robs me of my photogenic appeal and my ability to charm foreign leaders with my expert command of both French and Spanish, my impeccable taste in clothing and manners, my hard-earned physical grace.

  In childhood, I longed for the kind of mother who took an active maternal interest in her children. Who approached parenthood as a kind of master artisan, transforming base clay into porcelain with her own strong hands, instead of delegating such raw daily work to a well-trained and poorly paid payroll of nannies, drivers, and cooks. Who rose early to make breakfast and inspect our dress and homework every morning, instead of requiring me to deliver her a tall glass of her special recipe, a cup of hot black coffee, and a pair of aspirin at eight thirty in order to induce a desultory kiss good-bye.

  Now I know that affluent neglect has its advantages. I’ve learned that striving for the telescopic star of your mother’s attention and approval is a lot easier than wriggling under the microscope of—well, let’s just pick an example, shall we?—Granny Hardcastle.

  But I digress.

  I turn the lock and kick off my slippers—slippers are worn around the house, when the men aren’t around, so as not to damage the rugs and floorboards—and pour myself a drink from Frank’s tray. The envelope now lies in my underwear drawer, buried in silk and cotton, where I tucked it before dinner. I sip my Scotch—you know something, I really hate Scotch—and stare at the knob, until the glass is nearly empty and my tongue is pleasantly numb.

  I set down the glass and retrieve the envelope.

  The note first.

  I don’t recognize the writing, but that’s the point of block capital letters, isn’t it? The ink is dark blue, the letters straight and precise, the paper thin and unlined. Typing paper, the kind used for ordinary business correspondence, still crisp as I finger the edges and hold it to my nose for some sort of telltale scent.

  DOES YOUR HUSBAND KNOW?

  WHAT WOULD THE PAPERS SAY?

  STAY TUNED FOR A MESSAGE FROM YOUR SPONSOR.

  P.S. A CONTRIBUTION OF $1,000 IN UNMARKED BILLS WOULD BE APPRECIATED.

  J. SMITH

  PO BOX 55255

  BOSTON, MA

  Suitably dramatic, isn’t it? I’ve never been blackmailed before, but I imagine this is how the thing is done. Mr. Smith—I feel certain this soi-disant “J” is a man, for some reason; there’s a masculine quality to the whole business, to the sharp angles of the capital letters—has a damning photograph he wants to turn into cash. He might have sent the photograph to Frank, of course, but a woman is always a softer target. More fearful, more willing to pay off the blackmailer, to work out some sort of diplomatic agreement, a compromise, instead of declaring war. Or so a male perpetrator would surmise. A calculated guess, made on the basis of my status, my public persona: the pretty young wife of the candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Massachusetts, whose adoring face already gazes up at her husband from a hundred campaign photographs.

  Not the sort of woman who would willingly risk a photograph like this appearing on the front page of the Boston Globe, in the summer before my husband’s all-important first congressional election.

  Is he right?

  The question returns me, irresistibly and unwillingly, to the photograph itself.

  I rise from the bed and pour myself another finger or so of Frank’s Scotch. There’s no vodka on the tray, under the fiction that Frank’s wife never drinks in bed. I roll the liquid about in the glass and sniff. That’s my problem with Scotch, really: it always smells so much better than it tastes. Spicy and mysterious and potent. The same way I regarded coffee, when I was a child, until I grew up and learned to love the taste even more than the scent.

  So maybe, if I drink enough, if I pour myself a glass or two of Frank’s aged single malt every night to wash away the aftertaste of Granny Hardcastle’s lectures, I’ll learn to love the flavor of whiskey, too.

  I set the glass back on the tray, undrunk, and return to the bed, where I stretch myself out crosswise, my stomach cushioned by the lofty down comforter, my bare toes dangling from the edge. I pull the photograph from the envelope, and I see myself.

  Me. The Tiny of two years ago, a Tiny who had existed for the briefest of lifetimes: not quite married, slender and cream-skinned, bird-boned and elastic, silhouetted against a dark sofa of which I can still remember every thread.

  About to make the most disastrous mistake of her life.

  Caspian, 1964

  BOSTON

  Eleven o’clock came and went on the tea-stained clock above the coffee shop door, and still no sign of Jane.

  Not that he was waiting. Not that her name was Jane.

  Or maybe it was. Why the hell not? Jane was a common name, a tidy feminine name; the kind of girl you could take home to your mother, if you had one. Wouldn’t that be a gas, if he sat down at Jane Doe’s booth one day and asked her name, and she looked back at him over the rim of her coffee cup, just gazed at him with those wet chocolate eyes, and said I’m Jane, like that.

  Yeah. Just like that.

  Not that he’d ever sit down at her booth. When, every day at ten o’clock sharp, Jane Doe settled herself in her accustomed place at Boylan’s Coffee Shop and ordered a cup of finest Colombian with cream and sugar and an apricot Danish, she enacted an invisible electric barrier about herself, crossable only by waitresses bearing pots of fresh coffee and old Boylan himself, gray-haired and idolatrous. Look but don’t touch. Admire but don’t flirt. No virile, young red-blooded males need apply, thank you terribly, and would you please keep y
our dirty, loathsome big hands to yourself.

  “More coffee, Cap?”

  He looked down at the thick white cup in the thick white saucer. His loathsome big hand was clenched around the bowl. The remains of his coffee, fourth refill, lay black and still at the bottom. Out of steam. He released the cup and reached for his back pocket. “No thanks, Em. I’d better be going.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  He dropped a pair of dollar bills on the Formica—a buck fifty for the bacon and eggs, plus fifty cents for Em, who had two kids and a drunk husband she complained about behind the counter to the other girls—and stuffed his paperback in an outside pocket of his camera bag. The place was quiet, hollow, denuded of the last straggling breakfasters, holding its breath for the lunch rush. He levered himself out of the booth and hoisted his camera bag over his shoulder. His shoes echoed on the empty linoleum.

  Em’s voice carried out behind him. “I bet she’s back tomorrow, Cap. She just lives around the corner.”

  “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, Em.” He hurled the door open in a jingle-jangle of damned bells that jumped atop his nerves.

  “Wasn’t born yesterday,” she called back.

  Outside, the Back Bay reeked of its old summer self—car exhaust and effluvia and sun-roasted stone. An early heat wave, the radio had warned this morning, and already you could feel it in the air, a familiar jungle weight curling down the darling buds of May. To the harbor, then. A long walk by civilian standards, but compared to a ten-mile hike in a shitty tropical swamp along the Laos border, hauling fifty pounds of pack and an M16 rifle, sweat rolling from your helmet into your stinging eyes, fucking Vietcong ambush behind every tree, hell, Boston Harbor’s a Sunday stroll through the gates of paradise.

  Just a little less exciting, that was all, but he could live without excitement for a while. Everyone else did.

  Already his back was percolating perspiration, like the conditioned animal he was. The more vigorous the athlete, the more efficient the sweat response: you could look it up somewhere. He lifted his automatic hand to adjust his helmet, but he found only hair, thick and a little too long.

  He turned left and struck down Commonwealth Avenue, around the corner, and holy God there she was, Jane Doe herself, hurrying toward him in an invisible cloud of her own petite ladylike atmosphere, checking her watch, the ends of her yellow-patterned silk head scarf fluttering in her draft.

  He stopped in shock, and she ran bang into him. He caught her by the small pointy elbows.

  “Oh! Excuse me.”

  “My fault.”

  She looked up and up until she found his face. “Oh!”

  He smiled. He couldn’t help it. How could you not smile back at Miss Doe’s astounded brown eyes, at her pink lips pursed with an unspoken Haven’t we met before?

  “From the coffee shop,” he said. His hands still cupped her pointy elbows. She was wearing a crisp white shirt, a pair of navy pedal pushers, a dangling trio of charms in the hollow of her throat on a length of fine gold chain. As firm and dainty as a young deer. He could lift her right up into the sky.

  “I know that.” She smiled politely. The ends of her yellow head scarf rested like sunshine against her neck. “Can I have my elbows back?”

  “Must I?”

  “You really must.”

  Her pocketbook had slipped down her arm. She lifted her left hand away from his clasp and hoisted the strap back up to her right shoulder, and as she did so, the precocious white sun caught the diamond on her ring finger, like a mine exploding beneath his unsuspecting foot.

  But hell. Wasn’t that how disasters always struck? You never saw them coming.

  Tiny, 1966

  When I come in from the beach the next morning, Frank’s father is seated at the end of the breakfast table, eating pancakes.

  “Oh! Good morning, Mr. Hardcastle.” I slide into my chair. The French doors stand open behind me, and the salt breeze, already warm, spreads pleasantly across my shoulders.

  My father-in-law smiles over his newspaper. “Good morning, Tiny. Out for your walk already?”

  “Oh, you know me. Anyway, Percy wakes me up early. Wants his walkies.” I pat the dog’s head, and he sinks down at the foot of my chair with a fragrant sigh. “You must have come in last night.”

  “Yes, went into the campaign office for a bit, and then drove down, long past bedtime. I hope I didn’t wake anyone.”

  “Not at all.” There’s no sign of the housekeeper, so I reach for the coffeepot myself. “How was the trip? We were watching on television from the living room.”

  “Excellent, excellent. You should have been there.”

  “The doctors advised against it.”

  Mr. Hardcastle’s face lengthens. “Of course. I didn’t actually mean that you should have been there, of course. Air travel being what it is.” He reaches across the white tablecloth and pats my hand, the same way I’ve just patted Percy. “How are you feeling?”

  “Much better, thank you. Are you staying long?”

  “Just for the dinner tonight, then I have to get back in Boston. Campaign’s heating up.” He winks.

  “I’m sure Frank appreciates all your help.”

  “He has a right to my help, Tiny. That’s what family is for. We’re all in this together, aren’t we? That’s what makes us so strong.” He sets down his newspaper, folds it precisely, and grasps his coffee cup. “I understand they had plans last night. Frank and Cap and your sister.”

  “Did they?”

  “Oh, they were in high spirits on the plane from Washington. Nearly brought the old bird down a couple of times. I wouldn’t expect them here until afternoon at least.”

  “Well, they should go out. I’m sure Major Harrison deserves a little fun, after all he’s been through. I hope Frank took him somewhere lively. I hope they had a ball.”

  “And it doesn’t bother you? All that fun without you?”

  “Oh, boys will be boys, my mother always said. Always better to let them get it out of their systems.”

  The swinging door opens from the kitchen, and Mrs. Crane backs through, bearing a plate of breakfast in one hand and a pot of fresh coffee in the other. The toast rack is balanced on a spare thumb. “Here you are, Mrs. Hardcastle,” she says.

  “Thank you so much, Mrs. Crane.”

  As I pick up my knife and fork, my skin prickles under the weight of someone’s observation. I turn my head, right smack into the watchful stare of my father-in-law. His eyes have narrowed, and his mouth turns up at one corner, causing a wave of wrinkles to ripple into his cheekbone.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  The smile widens into something charming, something very like his son’s best campaign smile. The smile Frank wore when he asked me to marry him.

  “Nothing in particular,” he says. “Just that you’re really the perfect wife. Frank’s lucky to have you.” He reaches for his newspaper and flicks it back open. “We’re just lucky to have you in the family.”

  • • •

  Frank’s yellow convertible pulls up with a toothsome roar and a spray of miniature gravel at one o’clock in the afternoon, just as we’ve finished a casual lunch in the screened porch propped up above the ocean.

  I’ve promised myself not to drink nor smoke before his arrival, whatever the provocation, and I managed to keep that promise all morning long, so my husband finds me fresh and serene and smelling of lemonade. “Hello there!” I sing out, approaching the car in my pink Lilly shift with the dancing monkeys, flat heels grinding crisply against the gravel. I rise up on my toes to kiss him.

  “Well, hello there!” He’s just as cheerful as the day before, though there’s clearly occurred a night in between, which has taken due toll on his skin tone and the brightness of his Technicolor eyeballs. “Say hello to your sister.”

 
“Be gentle.” Pepper climbs out of the passenger seat, all glossy limbs and snug tangerine dress, and eases her sunglasses tenderly from her eyes. “Pepper’s hung, darling.”

  Do you know, I’ve never quite loved my sister the way I do in that instant, as she untangles herself from Frank’s convertible to join me in my nest of in-laws. A memory assaults me—maybe it’s the tangerine dress, maybe it’s the familiar grace of her movements—of a rare evening out with Pepper and Vivian a few years ago, celebrating someone’s graduation, in which I’d drunk too much champagne and found myself cornered in a seedy nightclub hallway by some intimidating male friend of Pepper’s, unable to politely excuse myself, until Pepper had found us and nearly ripped off the man’s ear with the force of her ire. You can stick your pretty little dick into whatever poor drunk schoolgirl you like—or words equally elegant—but you stay the hell away from my sister, capiche?

  And he slunk away. Capiche, all right.

  Pepper. Never to be trusted with boyfriends and husbands, mind you, but a Valkyrie of family loyalty against outsider attack.

  I step forward, arms open, and embrace her with an enthusiasm that astonishes us both. What’s more, she hugs me back just as hard. I kiss her cheek and draw away, still holding her by the shoulders, and say something I’d never said before, on an instinct God only knows: “Are you all right, Pepper?”

  She’s just so beautiful, Pepper, even and perhaps especially windblown from a two-hour drive along the highway in Frank’s convertible. Disheveled suits her, the way it could never suit me. Her eyes return the sky. A little too bright, I find myself thinking. “Perfectly all right, sister dear,” she says, “except I couldn’t face breakfast, and by the time we crossed the Sagamore Bridge I was famished enough to gobble up your cousin’s remaining leg. No matter how adorable he is.”

  I must look horrified, because she laughs. “Not really. But a sandwich would do nicely. And a vodka tonic. Heavy on the vodka. Your husband drives like a maniac.”

  “Make it two,” says Frank, from behind the open lid of the trunk, unloading suitcases.