Not a Creature Was Stirring(20)

He put his fist grip into the pocket of the jacket he had thrown over the back of his chair and said, “Teddy’s here, in case Anne Marie didn’t tell you. He called me last night—woke me up from a sound sleep—trying to find out something about Mother. I think he got fired.”

“Really?” Myra didn’t sound interested. She was fussing with the Dripmaster, making the coffee Bobby had intended to make himself and then forgotten about.

She unhinged the pitcher, carried it to the sink, and started filling it with water. “Listen,” she said, “can I tell you a secret? An absolute, dead dark, don’t tell anyone secret?”

“Yours or somebody else’s?”

“Don’t be nasty, Bobby. I’ve been very good to you, the last couple of years.”

“I’m not being nasty, Myra. You’re just not very good at keeping secrets.”

“I’ve kept yours.”

Myra had kept his secret because it was also hers, and she had no more interest in landing in jail than he did. Bobby didn’t tell her that. He just watched her taking the pitcher back to the Dripmaster and pouring the water through the hole at the top.

When she was done and the pitcher was back in place, she came to the kitchen table and took the seat across from him.

“There’s going to be a divorce,” she said.

“Whose?”

“Mine.”

Bobby blinked. “Dickie Van Damm wants to divorce you?” The idea of Dickie, the stuffiest, most pompous, most antediluvian asshole on the Philadelphia Main Line wanting to divorce anybody was like Ronald Reagan joining the struggle for worldwide Communism. Divorced people weren’t allowed to attend the Philadelphia Assembly, for God’s sake. Dickie mainlined the Philadelphia Assembly.

Bobby groaned inwardly at the awful pun, and Myra started tapping her long glittered nails on the tabletop.

“Of course Dickie doesn’t want to divorce me,” she said. “I want to divorce Dickie. That’s where I have a problem.”

“What’s the problem?”

“I need money, Bobby. I want to file papers January second, and when I do I have to have enough in the mattress to keep me going until I get what I want.”

“What do you want?”

“Half of everything.”

“Naturally.” Bobby sighed. “I told you last week, Myra. If you can keep Daddy out of my hair until New Year’s, I’ll have this thing wrapped up and ready to go. You can take your money and abscond to Tahiti, for all I care.”

“New Year’s.”

“That’s what I said, Myra.”

“And you’re sure.”

“Of course I’m sure.”

“You’d better be more than sure,” Myra said. “The divorce laws aren’t what they used to be. Dickie can fight this and he probably will. And you know Daddy won’t be any help at all.”

“Daddy never is.”

A current of understanding passed between them, a compound of body language and race memory, made up of the thousand and one horrors they had survived together in this house. Then the water started to come through the Dripmaster, shooting a muddy stream into the pitcher, and Myra got up to get them both coffee.

“Did you say you thought Teddy had been fired?” she asked him.

“That I did.”

“That’s interesting,” Myra said. “I wonder what he got fired for.”





3


Upstairs in the west wing, Emma Hannaford was finding it hard to sleep. She was, in fact, finding it impossible to sleep. Unlike her brothers and sisters, she had no consistently terrible memories of Engine House. The one really awful thing that had happened to her here had happened and been done with, except in the minds of the people involved. Emma didn’t see what she could do about that. She preferred to forget the incident altogether, whenever she was able. She felt better concentrating on the good things that had happened to her here. Her relationship with her mother, her relationship with Bennis: in a world where parents were distant figures, always on their way in from or out to parties, she had been lucky enough to have two people who put her ahead of everyone and everything else. When Emma thought about her childhood, she always saw it as the One Brief Shining Moment of the Camelot song. She even knew the moment it had ended, to the minute.

She looked at the glowing face of the digital clock on her bedside table. 6:15. It was too early to go downstairs. Mrs. Washington wouldn’t be in the kitchen for another quarter hour, and she’d be too busy to talk for the half hour after that. It was too early to wake Bennis, too. Bennis had made it quite clear she intended to spend most of the next week conked. Emma sat up and turned on the table lamp, wondering why mornings in winter were always so dark.