Tiny Little Thing

  “And that’s the trouble, isn’t it?”

  I finish my water and stub out my cigarette. “Can I ask you a question, Mr. Lytle?”

  “I guess it’s only fair.”

  “What’s the point of all this? Why are you looking into my husband’s personal affairs?”

  He shrugs. “Because I’m a journalist, Mrs. Hardcastle. It’s what I do.”

  “But you’re the only journalist following this particular story.”

  Lytle picks up his spoon and taps it against the side of his coffee cup. “You know, here’s the truth. I feel for the guy. I really do. I know you’re too mad to look at all this from his side . . .”

  “Oh, I can see it from his side, all right.”

  He angles his eyebrows at me. “But it’s not easy, when the great ambition of your life stands in perfect one hundred and eighty degree opposition to the natural urges of your own body. When you have to hide your true self from everybody, including your own wife. Because at some point, the bill’s going to come due. You’re going to have to pay, one way or another.”

  “I doubt that’s even occurred to Frank,” I say. “He’s a Hardcastle. When you’re a Hardcastle, everyone else pays.”

  Lytle finishes his coffee in a gulp, crushes out his cigarette, and reaches into his pocket. “Can I give you a lift somewhere? You don’t look so good. You need to eat something. Call up a friend, have a good cry.”

  I touch my cheek. My fingers are cold; the skin beneath is hot. “I’m fine.”

  He lays a couple of quarters on the table and straightens his immaculate dinner jacket. The look he casts me is warm with pity. “Don’t forget, Mrs. Hardcastle. You’re holding all the cards. You can make Frank or break him. Don’t let those bastards make you think you’re the one caught in the corner, here.”

  I don’t know what expression I return Jack Lytle for this little piece of practical advice, but he answers with a shrug and a shake of his head. He glances down at the two quarters on the table, sweeps one of them back into his pocket, and sends me a conspiratorial wink.

  “Unless they’ve got something on you, of course.”

  • • •

  In the phone booth again. It takes ages to get Caspian on the line. “He’s in the shed,” I’ve told Mrs. Crane, and then I have to describe the shed and its location, have to tell her to look for Pepper if she can’t find Caspian. Pepper will know where he is. I beat my dime against the metal side of the telephone, waiting for the operator to tell me to deposit more money.

  “Tiny?” His voice is urgent. “What’s the matter?”

  “I need you to tell me something, Caspian. The truth. Did Frank invite himself to the medal ceremony, or did you ask him? I mean, did the Hardcastles invite you back, or the other way around?”

  There is a yawning chasm of a pause.

  “Tell me quick, Caspian. I don’t have a lot of spare change.”

  “They asked,” he says. “And I said yes.”

  “Why did you say yes, Caspian? You have to tell me.”

  “You already know why I said yes.”

  “I need you to tell me, Caspian. In words.”

  He speaks quietly. I picture him in the library, talking into the corner so the walls will absorb his voice. “Tiny. The truth? Because I missed you, missed you worse than I missed my leg. Because I was worried sick about you. Because I figured that since I wasn’t any closer to getting over you, after two goddamned years, the next best thing was to be near you. Even if I couldn’t touch you.”

  “To watch over me.”

  “Yes.”

  The operator tells me to deposit another dime. I obey, with shaking fingers. I lean my head against the top of the box and let out a heavy tear-soaked breath.

  “Tiny? Are you all right? Where are you?”

  “Caspian, listen to me. I don’t deserve you. I don’t deserve your love and your loyalty and your goodness. I made the worst mistake in the world, but I’m going to make it up to you. I’m going to deserve you this time. I’m going to be strong, so strong and brave you won’t even recognize me. And then I’ll come back and tell you how much I . . .”

  “What are you talking about? Tiny, what’s happened? Where are you?”

  “I’m in Boston. I’ll see you in the morning, all right?”

  “Tiny! What’s going on?”

  “I’m leaping, Caspian. I’m leaping off the ledge.”

  Click. I’m out of dimes.

  • • •

  I’m standing before the door of my house on Newbury Street. My wedding gift from the Hardcastles. I’ve driven here in Caspian’s blue Ford convertible, driven here like a madwoman with the top down, my hair flying, and the numbness is gone, the shell of brittle fear, and I am alive, alive, alive.

  Alive and furious. I will change into my most smashing gown, swipe on my brightest lipstick, fasten on my most glittering jewels, and drive straight back to the Harvard Club. Before I can change my mind, before the Hardcastles can find me and change my mind.

  I’m going to leap off the ledge, and I don’t give a damn what lies beneath.

  I stick my key in the lock and push it open. A light switches on in the living room, to the right of the hall.

  “Tiny, my dear.”

  My father-in-law steps through the archway into the entrance hall, followed by Dr. Keene, whose face hangs downward with professional regret.

  “Thank God,” says Mr. Hardcastle.

  Caspian, 1964

  The air was even colder than Cap imagined, as he stepped out through the screened porch to the soft sand. He wished maybe he’d stopped to make that coffee after all, but how could you make a decent cup of joe with no electricity, no hot water, and last year’s leftover grounds crusted at the bottom of the can? They’d stop to eat on the way back out. There must be someplace convenient to eat breakfast between here and the Massachusetts Turnpike. They’d take the Mass Pike to Albany and consult a map. Whether to head in a southerly route or stick to the north. Mount Rushmore or the Grand Canyon.

  He climbed up the dunes. His feet sank deep into the cold sand, numbing his skin. The sunrise had spread across the horizon now, gold-tipped pink against the washed-out sky, filling the beach with liquid new light. He searched for Tiny’s blanketed shape at the edge of the surf, the small fog of her cigarette, but there was nothing there.

  Just the ocean rolling in, wave after wave.

  A surge of unreasonable panic overtook him: Could she swim? Had a rogue wave overtaken her somehow? Or had she walked in deliberately, weighed down by the woolen blanket, for some buried reason that Cap, in all the raw and tender discovery of last night, was unable to plumb?

  But then he saw her footsteps, hollowed into the sand, heading to the right in a straight, purposeful line.

  He scrambled over the crest of the dunes and down to the harder sand of the beach itself. And, yes, there she was, at the end of that long straight line of footsteps, standing now before the house that belonged to his grandmother, the Big House, the one that would pass down to his uncle Franklin and then to his cousin Frank, the heir apparent, future head of the family, who was getting married to a Park Avenue heiress in two or three weeks.

  No doubt Tiny was familiar with houses like this, big shingled colonials with sun porches at either end and spacious terraces out back made of Connecticut bluestone. She could appreciate the multitude of chimneys, the elegant weathering of the shingles, the white-ribbed symmetry of the shutters. The understated scale of the place, so that you didn’t quite realize how big it was until you walked through the front door and stood in the entrance, and the generous dimensions of hallway and stairway, of the drawing room (to the right) and the dining room (to the left) stretched out around you.

  Not that his mother’s house was shabby, not at all. It was spacious and polished, well upholstered and well
equipped. More livable, really; more like a real family summered there, and not a public one. But nothing like the Big House, because his mother was only a daughter and Caspian only a lesser cousin.

  Tiny stood before the Big House like a connoisseur, motionless, taking in every detail. She took in a last draw of her cigarette and dropped it into the sand next to her feet. The blanket had slipped below her shoulders, which were bare. He wanted to come up behind her and put his arms around her waist and kiss those bare shoulders, and then pull her into the sand and make love to her right there, on the blanket, in the sunrise.

  But before he could reach her, Tiny herself turned in his direction, and the expression on her face startled him.

  “What’s the matter?” he called out.

  “You knew!” she screamed. She clutched the blanket at her breast with both hands. “You knew!”

  “Knew what?”

  She let go of the blanket with one hand and gestured to the house. “Franklin’s house! His grandmother’s house! You brought me here! You brought me back to them! You’re one of them!”

  He planted his feet in the sand and stared at her, dumbfounded. The reddish strands in her hair, lit by the sunrise. The panicked width of her eyes. Her pale lips. He thought, I can make sense of this. I can figure this out.

  “Did you think I wouldn’t recognize this place, in the dark? Why didn’t you just take me to Brookline and deliver me like a package?”

  Brookline. Franklin. Grandmother.

  Wedding. In two or three weeks, he couldn’t remember exactly. At St. James’s on Madison Avenue, reception to follow at the Metropolitan Club. To a well-bred girl from one of the best New York families.

  To Christina Schuyler.

  “How much did they pay you?” she screamed. “Did they give you permission to sleep with me first? Do they know about that, Caspian? Or is that our little secret?”

  The pieces of sunrise broke apart from the sky and fell to the sand around him. Above the quiet roar of the ocean came a new noise, a different roar, that of a well-tuned engine revving its way carefully along a narrow road, and four tires crackling against the gravel.

  Tiny shrugged the blanket back around her shoulders and turned her face to the circular drive before the Big House, half of which was just visible around the corner of the sun porch.

  Cap followed her gaze to a bright yellow roadster, which rounded the end of the oval and stopped at the verge next to the ocean path. Without having laid eyes on it before, he knew the car belonged to Frank. Fast, sleek, elegant, well-bred. A suitable car for an heir apparent. For a prince in waiting.

  But the figure that rose up from the driver’s side didn’t belong to Franklin S. Hardcastle, Jr. No flash of golden hair glinted in the sun, no broad white-shirted shoulders propped open the door. Instead the hair was dark, like Tiny’s, and the shoulders were covered by a navy-blue jacket that Cap knew, without being close enough to see, was made of fine wool bouclé and trimmed in white.

  “Tiny!” called Mrs. Schuyler, across the new dune grass and the untouched sand. “Thank God.”

  Mrs. Vivian Schuyler, 1966

  The photograph on the front page of The Boston Globe is enough to rend your heart, if you have the kind of heart that isn’t pickled in vodka and finished off with a squeeze of lime.

  NO IMPROVEMENT YET IN CONDITION OF CANDIDATE’S WIFE, reads the sorrowful headline, and below it, poor Franklin Hardcastle, Jr., sits in a hospital waiting room, the really anodyne kind with the white walls and the beige plastic seats and the yellow plastic flowers. His blond head is cradled in his hands. His handsome face is craggy with worry. It looks as if some naughty newspaper photographer broke into the hospital wearing doctor’s scrubs, and snapped the devastated Frank unawares, but Mrs. Vivian Schuyler of Fifth Avenue, New York City, knows better than that. She wasn’t born yesterday. She flips right past the front page and keeps on going until she reaches the society column. The familiar names there are so reassuring. This is what’s permanent. This you can count on.

  The taxi makes an abrupt right turn. Mrs. Schuyler looks up—she’s never troubled with motion sickness, not her—to find the neat white columns and tidy green lawn of the Woodbridge Clinic looming through the windshield. “Here already,” she says. “What a clever fellow you are.”

  The driver grunts through his nose and stops under the porte cochere. Mrs. Schuyler hands him a worn ten-dollar bill and opens the door herself. A pair of flashbulbs explode nearby, but she’s been expecting them, and doesn’t flinch.

  “Mrs. Schuyler! Mrs. Schuyler! Is there any update on your daughter’s condition?”

  She takes off her sunglasses and smiles vaguely at the men and their cameras. “I’ve just come to visit my daughter. I know as much as you do.”

  The portico is wide and clean, studded with trim potted boxwoods. Outside the shelter of the overhang, a few urns of scarlet geraniums soak up the August sunshine. The overall effect is one of precision and conspicuous good taste, the sort of place to which you could turn in relief when your well-bred daughter-in-law has a nervous breakdown, a fit of fashionable hysteria.

  The driver places her small blue suitcase next to her feet. “Thank you,” she says, and lifts it up. “No need to wait.”

  As she approaches the front door, the reporters fall back. No doubt they’ve been given a perimeter of decency to observe. From inside, she hears a faint pair of heated voices, not quite shouting. She puts her hand on the knob and swings it open, and another flashbulb pops over her shoulder.

  The voices halt midargument. Mrs. Schuyler steps across the threshold, suitcase in hand, and looks from one astonished figure to the other, comely nurse and broad-shouldered visitor.

  “Why, Major Harrison,” she says. “What a lovely surprise.”

  • • •

  As Mrs. Schuyler expects, the private waiting room of the Woodbridge is furnished with considerably more luxury than the public one, and Major Harrison fills every inch of it.

  “Do stop pacing,” she says, taking out a cigarette. “I never figured you for the pacing type.”

  “I’m not.” He stops and turns to her. A tasteful watercolor decorates the wall behind him, a beach at sunrise. The contrast between delicate beach and bristling soldier is almost too much to bear.

  “I don’t suppose you have a light,” she says.

  “They’re not allowing visitors. I’ve been arguing myself hoarse with that damned nurse. They’ve got her in a room somewhere, and only Frank and his father are allowed in. And that doctor, Dr. Keene. Pepper’s arguing with him. She talked her way past the nurse this morning and Keene had her thrown right back out.”

  “That’s my girl.” She finds the lighter in her pocketbook and puts her cigarette between her lips. Major Harrison bends forward and takes the silver Zippo from her hand and lights her cigarette absently, without thought. “Thank you,” she says, just as absently.

  He resumes his trailblazing on the Oriental rug. “I’m going crazy. They say they’ve had to sedate her, that she’s not even coherent. Something’s up, something’s happened, and I can’t figure out what. She called me two nights ago—”

  “Called you?”

  “Don’t strain yourself. There’s nothing going on. She trusted me, that’s all. I’d finally won that back, at least.” He braces his hands on his hips and speaks to the wall.

  “Does her husband know?”

  “What the hell am I supposed to say? I was your wife’s lover, the one she ran away with for the night, right before your wedding? The one she ditched to marry you, after all?”

  “And you still love her.”

  He sinks one hand in his short hair. “You have no idea.”

  Mrs. Schuyler finds the ashtray on the corner table, hiding in the lee of an enormous vase of fragrant yellow roses. “She didn’t ditch you, Major Harrison. If that makes it
any easier. During the drive back to Boston, she asked me if you’d known who she was, all along, and I said yes. I told her you’d already split for San Diego and left her to Frank.” She shrugs. “All my fault.”

  She braces herself for an explosion of rage, but it doesn’t arrive. Instead he sighs, puts his hand at the back of his neck, and shakes his head. “Yeah, I figured.”

  “Well, I thought I was doing the right thing. I thought it was for the best. I didn’t know you from Adam, and I knew Frank and the Hardcastles, and I knew Frank loved her, really loved her, and I thought she’d be happy. That she’d found her true calling. Of all my girls, she was the one who could pull it off.”

  “So much for maternal instinct.”

  “Indeed.” Mrs. Schuyler fills her lungs slowly and blows the smoke back out, taking time to think. Major Harrison shifts position to look out the window at the smooth green lawn, eyes keen, as if he’s scouting out some disputed enemy territory. She drops her gaze to his legs and tries to remember which one is human and which is machine. She certainly can’t tell from here. A strapping man, Major Harrison. Full of vengeful purpose right now, as still as marble, breathing in her smoke without a flinch. She can’t blame Tiny for wanting him. Why has he come back, after all? Just to screw his cousin’s wife again, or something more? What a mess, what a goddamned mess. She should have seen it coming. Tiny never was like her mother, was she? She can’t just conduct a nice simple pleasant affair, no one gets hurt, no one’s life turns upside down, no one gets dragged to the Woodbridge Clinic in the middle of a congressional campaign. “Do you have any idea what happened?” she asks. “When she called you the other night?”

  “She was in Boston.” He pauses and looks at her at last, green-eyed and livid, and even she, Mrs. Vivian Schuyler of Fifth Avenue in New York City, whose taste runs elegantly to Russian princes and other women’s husbands, even she can’t quite keep her bones from shivering.