Mr. X

‘One more. Suki Teeter.’

‘Yeah, call Suki. Talk about jugs, she was the champ. She and your mom, they liked each other. Bye.’

The former jug champ’s telephone rang six times, then twice more without the intervention of an answering machine. I was about to hang up when she answered on the tenth ring. Suki Teeter was no more given to conventional greetings than Toby Kraft.

‘Sweetheart, if you’re looking for money, too bad, this is the wrong number.’ The underlying buoyancy in her voice made a little self-contained comedy of the time she had taken to answer, the unknown caller, her financial condition, and anyone straitlaced enough to take offense.

I told her who I was.

‘Ned Dunstan? I can’t believe it. Where are you, in town? Did Star give you my number?’

‘In a way,’ I said. ‘I’m calling from St Ann’s Community.’

‘Star’s in the hospital.’

I described what had happened that morning. ‘Before the stroke, she said to call her friends and let them know if there was an emergency. Maybe you’d like to come here. It might do her some good.’ Without warning, sorrow blasted through my defenses and clutched my chest. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean to do this to you.’

‘I don’t mind if you cry,’ she said. ‘Is she conscious?’

The question helped me climb back into control. ‘When she isn’t asleep.’

‘I’ll be there as soon as I put myself together. Who else did you call?’

‘Toby Kraft. And I have one other name. Rachel Milton.’

‘Really? I’m surprised. Maybe they stayed friends, I don’t know. Rachel sure as hell dropped everybody else. Ned? I hope we can spend some time together.’

In a voice made of honey and molasses, the woman who answered the Miltons’ telephone told me that she would inform Mrs Rachel she had a call, and who was it from? I gave her my name and added that I was the son of an old friend. The line went dead for a couple of minutes. When Rachel Milton finally picked up, she sounded nervous, impatient, and bored.

‘Please let me apologize for the time you’ve been waiting. Lulu went wandering all around the house trying to find me when all she had to do was use the intercom.’

I was almost certain that she had spent two minutes deciding whether or not to take my call.

‘Is there something I should know?’

After I explained, Rachel Milton clicked her tongue against her teeth. I could practically see the wheels going around in her head. ‘I hope you won’t think I’m terrible, but I won’t be able to get there today. I’m due at the Sesquicentennial Committee in about five minutes, but please give your mother my love. Tell her I’ll see her just as soon as I can.’ The wish not to be unnecessarily brusque led her to say, ‘Thank you for calling, and I hope Star has a speedy recovery. The way I’m going, I’ll probably wind up in the hospital, too!’

‘I could reserve you a room at St Ann’s,’ I said.

‘Grenville, my husband, would kill me. He’s on the board of Lawndale. You ought to hear him get going on the federal funds pouring into St Ann’s Community. They should be able to raise King Tut from his tomb, is all I can say.’

After Rachel Milton hung up, I shoved my hands in my pockets and followed the corridor past the glass wall of the gift shop. A few men and women in bathrobes sat on the padded benches on the side of the immense, gray lobby, and half a dozen people stood in a line before the reception desk.

A small, fair-haired boy with gleeful blue eyes took in my approach from a stroller. His T-shirt bore the image of a pink dinosaur. Babies and small children charm me right out of my socks. I can’t help it, I love that moment when they look inside you and spot a fellow spirit. I waggled my fingers and pulled an idiotic face that had been a big hit with the toddler set on previous occasions. The little boy whooped with delight. The tall, sturdy-looking woman beside him glanced down, looked up at me, then back to the child, who was crying ‘Bill! Bill!’ and trying to propel himself out of the stroller. ‘Honey,’ she said, ‘this isn’t Bill.’

My first impression, that she looked like the female half of a local anchor team, vanished before the acknowledgment of the intelligence that irradiated her striking, even strikingly beautiful, presence. Her beauty and her intelligence were inextricable, and my second impression, standing before her lithe, tawny gaze and smiling at the efforts of her son to escape the stroller and hurl himself at me, was that if she resembled anything at all, it was a blond, particularly conscious female panther. Some quick recognition flashed in her eyes, and I thought she had seen everything that had just passed through my mind.

I would probably have blushed – my admiration was that naked – if she had not almost deliberately released me by attending to her son, allowing me the psychic space to register the perfection with which her dark blond hair had been cut to fall like a veil across her face and the expensive simplicity of her blue silk blouse and white linen skirt. Lined up before the information desk with a dozen shapeless Edgertonians in T-shirts and shorts, she seemed unreasonably exotic. She smiled up at me, and again I saw that at least half of her smooth, shieldlike beauty was the intelligence that flowed through it.

‘He’s a beautiful boy,’ I said, unable to avoid the word.

The beautiful boy was struggling to pull his feet through the straps of the stroller, in the process levering off a blue sneaker with a Velcro strap. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘This man is very nice, Cobbie, but he isn’t Bill.’

I put my hands on my knees, and the boy swiveled and stared at my face. His eyes darkened in confusion, then cleared again. He chortled.

She said, ‘Good, this line is finally starting to move.’

I straightened up and waved goodbye. Cobbie ecstatically waved back, and she met my eyes with a glance that warmed me all across the lobby and outside into the sunlight. Beyond the low stone wall at the far end of the parking lot, the land dropped away to the bank of the slow, brown-gray Mississippi. It struck me that the river crawled along the city’s western flank like an unhappy secret. I wondered if the aunts had old stories from the days when Edgerton had been a river town. Then, foolishly, I started to wonder if I would see the woman I had met in the lobby ever again. What was supposed to happen if I did? She had a child, therefore a husband, and what she represented to me was no more than a convenient distraction from my fears for my mother. It was enough to have been reminded that such people actually existed.

22 (#ulink_4bdab4a8-1517-5a72-a7c8-2e86bb3fdb90)

Thinking of the nights ahead, I ducked into the gift shop and picked up a couple of paperback mystery novels and some candy. The white-haired volunteer behind the cash register searched the books’ covers for the prices and dowsed a finger over the keys.

Behind me, a childish voice said, ‘You’re – not – Bill,’ and burst into giggles. I turned around to see a familiar pair of dancing blue eyes. He was holding a sneaker in one hand and a new teddy bear in the other.

‘I’m not?’ I smiled at his mother. Her attractiveness seemed more than ever like a shield behind which she could come to her private conclusions about the responses it evoked.

‘We meet again,’ she said.

‘The way this hospital is designed, sooner or later you see everybody twice.’

‘Do you know how to find the intensive care unit? I’ve never been here before.’

‘Third floor,’ I said. ‘Follow me.’

The woman behind the counter counted out my change and slid the paperbacks and the candy into a bag. I moved aside, and the boy’s mother came up to the counter. ‘How much are the teddy bears?’

The woman peered at the child. In high hilarity, the child peered back. ‘Our ICU patients can’t receive gifts or flowers.’

‘It’s for him.’ She groped into her bag. ‘A reward for behaving himself. Or maybe a bribe, I don’t know. Our otherwise completely adorable baby-sitter abandoned us this afternoon.’

The boy pointed at me and said, ‘You’re – not – not – not – Bill!’

‘I am too,’ I said.

The boy clapped the sneaker and the teddy bear to his chest and roared with laughter. Ah, appreciation. I tried to remember his name but could not. He fixed his eyes on mine and said, ‘Bill rides a lawn mower!’

‘No, you ride a lawn mower,’ I said, contradiction being the first principle of four-year-old humor. We left the shop and turned toward the elevators.

‘Your new best friend is my son Cobbie, and I’m Laurie Hatch,’ she said. ‘My cleaning woman had an operation yesterday, and I wanted to say hello. You’re seeing someone in intensive care, too?’

‘My mother.’ We came to the rank of closed doors, and I pushed the button. ‘Ned Dunstan. Hello.’

‘Hello, Ned Dunstan,’ she said with a feathery brush of irony, and then looked at me more thoughtfully, almost impersonally. ‘I’ve heard that name before. Do you live here in town?’

‘No, I’m from New York.’ I looked up at the illuminated numbers above the doors.

‘I hope your mother is doing all right.’