And One to Die On(38)

For Carlton Ji, the insidious part of all this was how much it made him want to be like these people, and how hard he tried to rewrite his life to fit the paradigm their lives all seemed to fit. He had actually grown up in fairly pleasant surroundings, in one of the nicer suburbs on Long Island, with a father who worked full-time as a banker and a mother who worked part-time as a research biologist at a small chemical company. He had three brothers and a sister, plenty of pocket money without having to work for it, and the kind of high school career that leaves more happy memories than the other sort. Second cousins coming in from miserable apartments in the city and endless hours of after-school work in the family restaurant looked on his life with awe. For some of them, the mere fact that he had his own room that he had to share with nobody else, that he could just go into and shut the door, meant that he was being brought up like an imperial prince. Carlton never paid any attention to these second cousins, because they made him uncomfortable, and because he could never get over the feeling that their lives were somehow their fault. Other people had come over from Asia, and from worse places, too. Other people had had to start small. Why did it seem to be only his second cousins and their parents who never got anywhere with it?

For Carlton Ji, everybody was responsible for his own fate, unless he was being sabotaged by his dysfunctional family. In Carlton’s own case, his family got him every time. That was why, no matter how brilliant he had tried to be at the dinner table tonight, Bennis Hannaford hadn’t paid the slightest bit of attention to him.

Everybody else went into the living room for liqueurs after dinner—except for Tasheba Kent, who was looking extremely tired and extremely frail—but Carlton drifted off on his own, feeling disenfranchised and disgruntled. The best thing to do with a mood like this was to express it. The problem with expressing it was that that was likely to get him into trouble. Business etiquette had not been invented with the emotional health of the whole human being in mind. Carlton wandered down to the library and looked in on the exhibits. The man from town who was supposed to be guarding the room looked him over once or twice, as if he were a sea slug, but did nothing to stop him from going in. Carlton looked over the loot on the three tables and decided it bored him. Tasheba Kent’s table had a lot of jet-black fans and beaded dresses. The dresses on Lilith Brayne’s table ran more to pastels. Cavender Marsh’s table held not much of anything. By the 1930s, when Cavender Marsh had been famous, movie stars were no longer living their lives in a sea of props. Or maybe they were, but the props were subtle ones, that didn’t become famous in and of themselves. Carlton thought about the sale, at auction, of “the last cigar Charlie Chaplin ever chewed on in a movie,” and decided that people were just plain crazy.

He left the library by the far door and found himself in a narrow service hall. The hall was lined on both sides by plain wood doors. Carlton opened one and found a laundry room. He opened another and found a pantry. He opened a third and found a lot of old trunks, some with broken sides and shattered clasps, piled up inside and on top of each other with no concern for order or logic. Voices floated down to him from the living room, deep and courteous, high-pitched and discontented.

“I think it’s a tort, behavior like that,” Hannah Graham’s voice was saying. “I think you ought to be able to sue somebody over that.”

Carlton ought to have been surprised that Hannah Graham was back in the fold, after that grand exit with the thrown napkin, but he wasn’t. Hannah Graham was the kind of woman who would always make her way back to the fold, because she was the kind of woman who couldn’t stand thinking that something interesting might be going on without her.

Carlton went to the end of the hall and opened the door there. He found a small square landing with stairs leading up to the left and another door, directly opposite to the one he was coming through. He went to that door and opened it. He groped around on the wall and turned the light switch on. This room was a kind of walk-in medicine cabinet. Three of the four walls were lined floor to ceiling with shelves, and these shelves were crammed with bottles. A lot of bottles contained vitamins, bought in bulk quantities from a mail-order house. “AS ADVERTISED IN PREVENTION MAGAZINE!” the labels on these bottles said. Carlton found enough vitamin E to drown in and enough vitamin A to poison a rabbit farm. He found so many combinations of B vitamins, he began to wonder if the B’s had some nonnutritional usefulness, like being good for polishing silverware. One of the other shelves was full of aspirin and acetaminophen in as many different brands as possible. Another shelf had painkillers like Advil and Motrin. Another shelf was full of antibiotics, in spite of the fact that they were supposed to be available only by prescription. Carlton got down on his knees and looked at the shelves closest to the floor. Two of them had nothing on them at all. The third contained prescription blood pressure medication made out to Cavender Marsh. Carlton Ji picked up one of the bottles and found out that it was both full and well past its expiration date. Obviously, somebody in this house, Geraldine Dart if not Tasheba Kent and Cavender Marsh themselves, had found a way to get around the laws and stockpile their prescriptions.