Conspiracy Theory(3)

Somewhere out on the street, around to the front of the church where he couldn’t yet see, two women were talking. Their voices were high and light and giggly. Their steps on the pavement were sharp, as if they were wearing very high heels. I should have worn a hat, he thought, superfluously. He didn’t own a hat.

Then he turned around and did something he had never done before on Cavanaugh Street.

He locked his door.





2


All the way back from New York in the car, Anthony van Wyck Ross had been considering the advantages of poverty. It wasn’t sentimentality. He had no use for Hallmark card emotions, or Lifetime movie epiphanies, or those Great Morals taught by shows like Leave it to Beaver and Dawson’s Creek. He only knew what Hallmark and Lifetime were because, unlike most men in his position, he had taken the trouble to find out. But then, Tony Ross was not like most men in his position, and his unlikeness had been evident almost from the beginning. “He’s a throwback,” his mother used to say, vaguely, to the sort of people who came to their lodge in Maryland for the hunting. He’d liked hunting the way he later found he liked all blood sports. He had a natural instinct for the kill. What he couldn’t stand were the hunt breakfasts that came afterward, the long dining room lined with buffet tables, the longer ballroom with its doors propped open to let in the cold damp of the spring morning, the endless Bloody Marys. He sometimes amused himself, idly, by trying to pinpoint the exact moment when he had realized that at least half his parents’ friends were almost drunk almost all the time. It was like walking around among people who lived permanently in a mist—and what worried him was that, if they were anything like his mother, they might live in that mist even when they weren’t drunk. By the time he was ten years old, stupidity enraged him. There was some part of him that could not believe it wasn’t deliberate. By the time he was twelve, he had mapped out his life with the kind of precision and attention to detail that would have done credit to a general of the army in the middle of a major war. That had been the last straw in a long history of straws between himself and his mother. She had always disliked him. When he entered puberty, she started to hate him, and the hate lasted—hot and resentful and mean—until the day she died, at eighty-six, of a ruptured appendix. She was in the house at Bryn Mawr at the time. He was in London, at a private meeting with the prime minister, the American ambassador, the Belgian ambassador, and two representatives of the Rockefeller banking interests in Europe. When the call came, he’d seen no reason to take it.

The reason he was considering the advantages of poverty, at the moment, was that he wanted to murder his wife. He wanted to do it right here, right now, as they sat, without having to think twice about the implications of the scandal that would follow—or even of the possibility of any scandal at all. The car was bumping along the roadway in the right lane, moving carefully, staying within the speed limit. It wouldn’t do to be stopped for speeding, and it was always necessary to be careful with other drivers on the road. Resentment was out there, just beneath the surface, waiting to erupt. Charlotte was playing with the pearls she always wore around her neck during the day. It was an atavistic custom that belonged more to their parents’ generation than their own, but Charlotte was nothing if not atavistic. The skin along the edges of her jaw sagged. Celebrities and jet-setters got face-lifts, but women of good family from the Main Line did not. The single square-cut diamond on her left hand and the plain gold wedding band behind it were the only rings she wore. No woman of her background would wear more, just as no woman of her background would wear earrings that dangled. In traditional religious orders before the travesty of Vatican II, there were nuns called “living rules,” women whose behavior so perfectly conformed with the order’s rule of life that it could be re-created just by recording the things they did and how they did them. Charlotte was a living rule for the Philadelphia Main Line, the part of it that wasn’t supposed to exist anymore, the part of it that wasn’t supposed to matter. She did not live under the delusion that she was an anachronism.

She was waiting for him to say something. Tony was aware of that. He was also aware of the fact that he would not say something. It wasn’t to his advantage, and there wasn’t any point. The privacy shield that cut them off from the driver was closed. The windows of the car were tinted darkly enough so that nobody on the outside would be able to see in unless they pressed their faces directly to the glass. Tony looked down at the copy of Civitas Dei he had in his hands and wished he’d brought a book light. It was rude to read in front of other people, but he never cared if he was rude to Charlotte.