Skeleton Key(123)

“She’d come to dinner at your house and then she wouldn’t invite you back,” Jennifer said. “Ever.”

“She didn’t have enough money to entertain,” Peter said.

Jennifer brushed this away. “It wouldn’t have had to be anything elaborate. I never do anything elaborate myself. It’s a waste of time. But anybody can afford a nice little buffet with drinks on the side. Really. She wouldn’t have had to go to any trouble.”

“Champagne cocktails hardly cost anything at all,” Marian said.

Peter stood up. The waiter would be by in a moment, but he didn’t want to sit still just this once. A champagne cocktail at the club cost four dollars. Even if you assumed the price was inflated, that was still not nothing at all.

He got to the bar and asked for another Perrier and lime. It was much too early to be drinking actual alcohol, but some of the women were doing it. They drank tall, fancy drinks with plenty of soda in them and thought of it as not really drinking. He got his Perrier and lime and looked back at them. Marian was wearing tennis shoes and white ankle socks. Jennifer was wearing a print skirt and a cotton sweater. They all got their clothes at the same places. They all looked alike. He loved that about them, that they were so much of a type, that they didn’t bother much with individuality.

“Individuality,” Peter’s first debutante girlfriend had told him, “is very middle-class.”

The doors to the bar were propped open with solid walnut doorstops. Peter looked up as Deborah Candleman came running through them, looking breathless.

“They’re coming out,” she said to nobody in particular and everybody at once. “They’re coming right down the hall.”

Peter didn’t think a single person in the bar sat still. Marian and Jennifer were on their feet so fast, he didn’t even catch them moving. The crowd surged at the doors and then out of them. The hall in question was in the back, and there was a back door there, and they didn’t want to miss anything. Peter followed them very slowly, not sure what he wanted to do.

There was a window in the hall outside the bar. Standing at it, it was possible to see the other door, the one Sally Martindale would be coming out of, and the parking lot beyond it Peter stood at the back of the crowd and looked out on the leaves. The other door opened then and Sally came out with Ruth Grandmere’s arms wrapped around her shoulders. Sally was staring at the ground and hugging herself tight She was taking steps so small, it was as if she were walking on bound feet.

“Oh, look,” somebody said. “Doesn’t she look upset?”

“Well, she ought to look upset,” somebody else said. “Stealing all that money. She ought to look more than upset”

“She won’t go to jail for it though,” the first somebody said. “They never do in cases like this. She’ll just get to pay it back.”

“If she has it.”

“They’ll work out a payment plan.”

“They don’t want embarrassing stories about the club in the newspapers.”

“She didn’t belong here anyway. Anybody could tell that. She was just a nobody from the Midwest somewhere and then she married money.”

Peter took a long pull on his Perrier and lime. Out in the parking lot Sally Martindale was trying to get into her car. All her muscles seemed to be stiff. She was having trouble folding herself into a sitting position. Her face was white. Even at this distance, he could tell that her eyes were red.

“Oh, look at the crocodile tears,” one of the women said. “Isn’t that just like her, the deceitful little cheat.”

Peter went back to the bar, and found his table, and sat down.

He was suddenly feeling violently sick to his stomach.





3


Bennis Hannaford had not meant to turn it into a neighborhood meeting, or an Armenian American convention, or whatever it had become. She had only wanted to have Father Tibor with her if she had to have a biopsy, and that was why she had called him and asked him to come. Now he was here, but so was Donna Moradanyan Donahue and Lida Arkmanian and Hannah Krekorian and even Sheila Kashinian, who had been driving the nurses at the nurses’ station totally berserk for nearly half an hour. Sheila Kashinian wanted to redecorate the ward, in primary colors, to make it more cheerful for the patients.

“It really wouldn’t take anything at all to get it done,” she kept saying, in that Philadelphia-accented grating caw of hers, loudly enough so that they could probably hear her down in surgery.

The good thing was, the doctor would only allow two people at a time in Bennis’s room with her. That meant that Tibor and Donna were right here at her bedside, but the rest of them were down the hall. They would all want to come down and talk to her eventually, but Bennis thought she would deal with that when the time came. If she could deal with anything. She was washed out and weak. She was so exhausted, she sometimes dropped off in the middle of conversations she was having herself.