"I'll walk out with you," Vinnie said. "You never know about Gerry."
CHAPTER 17
LENOX is two hours west from Boston on the Mass Pike. Paul and I rode out in the afternoon with Pearl leaning against the backseat, staring out the side window, alert as always for any sign of the elusive Burger King. It doesn't take long on the Mass Pike to get away from the city and into what Massachusetts probably looked like in Squanto's day. Subtract a few houses here and there that back up to the turnpike west of Framingham, cancel out an occasional Roy Rogers or food fuel stops, and the landscape is mostly low hills and woods, punctuated often enough by bodies of water that looked very brisk under the blue autumn sky. The hilliness allowed for some variety to the trip, allowing as it did for mild scenic vistas as the highway crested one low rise and you could see it curving gently up another hill a mile and a half ahead. It wasn't Arcadia, but it wasn't the New Jersey Turnpike either.
"She probably never should have had a kid," Paul said to me near Grafton.
"Ever?" I said.
He shrugged. "Who knows ever?" he said. "But she wasn't ready for one when
I was born."
"How old was she?"
"Twenty. She got pregnant when she was nineteen and she married my father to have me. She was going to enter her junior year in college."
"But she didn't," I said. "Because she had to stay home with the baby."
"Yeah. She went down to Furman, my father played football there."
"I know," I said.
"And they lived in-what did they call them then? The on-campus housing?"
"Probably still called them Vets Apartments then," I said.
"Yes," Paul said. "That's right. When I was a little kid I used to think it
meant vet as in veterinarian, and I couldn't figure out why they called it that."
In the backseat Pearl made a loud sigh and turned around once and resettled at the opposite window. I put my hand back and she gave it a lick.
"I was always afraid she'd leave me," Paul said. "As long ago as I can remember, I was afraid she'd just run away and leave me and I'd have to go to the home for little wanderers."
"Your father?" I said.
"He barely counts," Paul said. "It's like he wasn't there. My childhood memories are almost empty of him."
"What are they full of?" I said.
There wasn't much travel midday, midweek, going west. I was doing seventy in the right-hand lane on the theory that cops always look for speeders in the passing lane. A trucker going eastbound flashed his headlights at me and I slowed as I crested the next hill. There was a two-tone blue state police cruiser parked sideways on the median strip with a radar gun. I cruised serenely past him at about fifty-seven.
"Fear," Paul said. "Fear of being left. I was thin and whiny and had colds all the time and I used to cling to my mother like a cold sore. She couldn't stand it. She'd try to get me away from her so she could breathe and of course the more she tried the more I clung."
I nodded. I could hear the therapist's voice in Paul's, and behind the calm exposition of past events, the pain and lingering fear that engendered the pain. I wished Susan had come with us.
"Hard on both of you," I said.
"Sometimes she would actually hide under the bed," Paul said. "But I'd find her. She could run, but she couldn't hide."
"Too bad your father wasn't around," I said. "Be easier if you'd had more than one person bringing you up."
"He couldn't stand either one of us," Paul said. "Maybe at first he could, or did, or thought he ought to. I think my mother and he actually loved each other, whatever the hell that quite means. But they shouldn't have got married. They just" Paul seemed wordless. He shook his head, put his hands up in a gesture of bafflement. "They just shouldn't have gotten married" He stared straight ahead for a moment. Pearl leaned forward and snuffled at the back of his neck, and he put his hand up absently to pat her muzzle. "Or had me," he said.
"But they did," I said. "But they did."
CHAPTER 18
THE Tailored Lady was a boutique off Church Street in downtown Lenox. It was in a sort of shopping center, where private houses had been converted to stores in which you could buy turquoise jewelry and Icelandic sweaters. The woman who ran it wore a blue blazer over a green turtleneck sweater.
She was very polite, but she couldn't tell us anything at all.
"I'm sorry," she said, "that I can't be more helpful. I could find my copy of the American Express receipt, but it would merely duplicate what you have."
"You don't remember if she was with anyone?" Paul said.
She smiled and shook her head. Matching the sweater and blazer was a Black
Watch plaid skirt. Her blonde hair was caught back and tied with a little
Black Watch ribbon.
"There are so many tourists," she said. "It's the start of the foliage season, and"-she smiled as if she were saying something daring-"the fall getaway time. A lot of women come in for lingerie." She paused as if weighing the propriety of what she said. "Usually there are men with them." She glanced demurely down at her Cobbie Cuddlers shoes.