Glass Houses(45)

What Elizabeth was thinking about was guilt. There was a lot of guilt in the world, deserved and undeserved. She understood why Henry’s lawyer wanted to be sure Henry was not sent to prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Or crimes, plural, in this instance. Elizabeth had been thinking for hours now about Henry and the Plate Glass Killings. She had asked herself, honestly, whether she could imagine Henry as a serial killer, and the simple fact was that she could. Henry put on a good front about being an alcoholic and a bum, but that was not what was true about him. Margaret believed it because Margaret wanted to. It gave her an explanation for Henry’s behavior that she could live with. People outside believed it because they had no reason not to. They didn’t know Henry in any way that made any difference, and there were a lot of alcoholic bums in the world.

Elizabeth did know Henry, however, and the more she thought about it, the more uneasy she was with the way this whole thing was going. People were making too many assumptions, the kind of assumptions that turned the world upside down. She kept getting flashes of Henry around Conchita. It had been an episode in their lives that she had found so bizarre she’d actually tried to talk to Margaret about it. Margaret hadn’t listened. Margaret never listened. She had her explanation for everything and anything Henry did. It was his mother’s fault. It was because their father had made such a stupid and incomprehensibly tacky second marriage. And what was worse, Margaret was so sure that Henry was addled by alcohol and living on the street, she was convinced that Henry would never do or say anything they told him not to do or say—that the only reason he was in the mess he was in now was that they hadn’t been clear about how they wanted him to behave. But Elizabeth had been very clear. She had talked to Henry face-to-face a dozen times. He always managed to find some avenue she hadn’t covered, some twist she hadn’t anticipated. And there was Conchita. There was proof positive that Henry had stronger emotions, and stronger drives, than he let anyone know about.

Margaret was upstairs somewhere. Elizabeth was in the living room. She tried to gauge the odds of Margaret coming down suddenly and couldn’t. Most of the time, when Margaret got nostalgic, she shut herself away for hours and wouldn’t talk to Elizabeth at all. It was no fun reminiscing to someone who countered your every memory with a bucket of ice water. Sometimes, Margaret couldn’t help herself. She just had to show somebody. She just had to try to get Elizabeth in the mood to remember it all. The problem, Elizabeth thought, wasn’t that Margaret didn’t remember it, but that she did. She just remembered it differently.

She went out into the foyer and stood at the foot of the stairs, listening. Margaret was not moving around. That was a good sign. She went to the back of the front hall and into the little, wood-paneled telephone room there. It was like a booth in an expensive men’s club, circa the thirties, when it was not acceptable to have a telephone in the living room. There was a phone in the kitchen, but she didn’t want to risk it. Besides, she needed the house directory. She wondered what it was like out there, what real people did. Did anybody, even people like Margaret and herself, have house directories anymore?

The house directory was a Rolodex these days. Margaret thought it was tacky, and wouldn’t use it. Elizabeth went through it and found the number she was looking for. What did Margaret want anyway? To go back to the days when they kept numbers in that little wooden spring box that would pop open at the appropriate letter when you pressed a little lever? To get numbers from the Social Register? Elizabeth was fairly sure that this number wouldn’t even be in the Social Register, although she might be wrong. Her own number was in the Social Register, and she would have had to say she was almost the last person on earth to have been willing to keep that up.

The number she dialed was ringing and ringing and ringing. Nobody was picking up. Maybe she was out to dinner. Maybe she was asleep. What had it said on the news this morning? She’d just got back to Philadelphia from being away. Elizabeth tried to remember where she’d been away to but couldn’t.

She got a sudden spurt of inspiration and went through the Rolodex again. Here was why you wanted a Rolodex and not one of those silly spring things or the Social Register. You could always add numbers to the Rolodex. She had added this one just this morning. She got it out in front of her and dialed—was it really right to say you dialed a touch-tone phone?—the only number she had for Gregor Demarkian. It worked.

The phone picked up on the other end; and instead of the baritone Elizabeth remembered from court, she got a woman’s voice.