Chapter 1
At 11:57 p.m. of October 11, the old man died. At 12:17, in the study directly beneath the chamber of death, bull-necked, florid-faced J. J. O'Brien, his personal attorney, began the reading of the last will and testament.
The mood of the eleven assembled members of the family of Salvatore Raffielo Carini who listened to the reading was neither sorrowful or reverent. It was rather a mood of wary anticipation sauced with relief at the passing. There was even an undertone of ribaldry in the conditioned air.
One of the granddaughters, plump, platinum, bitter as green marsala, summed it up perfectly when she leaned toward the husband seated beside her and whispered, "Who'd have thought the old bastard would die in bed-alone?"
like everyone else present save J. J. O'Brien himself, she was utterly unaware of the time-bomb concealed in her grandfather's last testament.
At the exact moment death came for the "Archbishop of Crime" as Salvatore Carini was not infrequently labeled by the Boston newspaper, Phyllis West Barrett, too, was dying in bed. But Phyllis was not alone...
As Freddy Gardiner methodically took his limited pleasure of her body, Phyllis Barrett felt increasingly like a corpse pressed into service by some latter-day Krafft-Ebing necrophiliac. Nothing ... nothing ... nothing ... The evermore meaningless ritual went on, as always with Freddy right on top in the evermore dreary missionary position-old number one-his stiff little prick plunging in and out of her hole with the uninspired regularity of a metronome.
A limerick, sniggered over a dozen years earlier at boarding school, drifted into Phyllis's mind....
There was a young plumber named Lee, who was plumbing his girl by the sea. When she said, "Stop your plumbing. I hear someone coming." Said the plumber, still plumbing, "That's me!" But certainly, Phyllis West Barrett of 70 Oak Street, Kitteridge, Massachusetts, just eighteen miles as the crow flies from the Jamaica Plain villa in which Salvatore Carini was simultaneously rattling in death. Unlike the lucky plumber of the limerick, Phyllis was definitely not coming-nor had she enjoyed orgasm with Freddy in lo! many a dreary moon.
The factor in their romance-romance?-that most troubled Phyllis was that Freddy didn't give a damn whether she came or not. His concern was solely with getting his own rocks off. As a lover, Freddy was a plumber of the worst water. He was romantic as a codfish cake left over from the traditional New England Sunday morning breakfast-considerate as a cormorant erotic as an iron deer standing stiff and stupid before an ugly old house in West Acton-slow as Christmas, though it only seemed that he came but once a year.
When, at last, the tip of his penis spurted to flood her vagina with his thin semen, Phyllis disentangled herself from his embrace and trotted, nude, to the adjoining bathroom. She took the Pill, of course, but as always felt impelled to rinse her body of every trace of her partner. There was also need for her to be alone, to collect her Freddy-fragmented self, to reassemble some portion of her identity.
Staring at her mirrored reflection, she thought, How did I ever get into this mess? How am I going to get out of it?
The first question was a put-on and she knew it. She knew perfectly well how she had drifted into her three-year affair with Freddy-and why. They were both unassimilated objects a-float on the small puddle of upper-case Kitter-idge-she a young Vietnamese war widow, he was victim of emotional warp inflicted by an invalid mother whose family tree was not only studded with the great names of Puritan Massachusetts but, Phyllis suspected, included direct descent from tyrannosaurus rex.
Starved for passion at a woman's most passionate age, her reactions to his lovemaking during the early stages of their affair had been affectionate and uninhibited. At first, Freddy's responses had seemed to match hers, but little by little he had whittled them down to this once a week one-shot in a bedroom of one of the exquisitely restored guest suites above Gerry Mann's Iron Kettle, the one good (and expensive) restaurant Kitteridge could boast.
Each Thursday night I die, she thought, wondering what she was becoming-wondering what had become of the warm and loving young woman she once had been, of the warm and loving young woman she still outwardly was, wondering how much longer she could hope even to retain the outer husk of what had been Phyllis Garrett.
As for her getting out of it, that might prove difficult. She had been letting things drift too long, waiting hopefully for something to happen-something like the death of Freddy's mother or his having to leave Kitteridge on business (other men got sent all over the map, didn't they?) or for a new and obviously wonderful man to turn up and simply preempt her.
Otherwise, any move she might make involved a risk of damage to her amiably established niche in the centuries-old stratification of Kitteridge society. And, damn it! she loved the fine old town and her place in it and hoped desperately that Kitteridge loved her.
A final glance at the mirror ... Damn it, I'm only twenty-eight! Then the chilling remembrance of having uttered the same thought into the same mirror when she was only twenty-seven, and only twenty-six-yes, and only twenty-five.
Before that, there had been Pres and all the love and warmth and excitement and sweet sex that she could happily have endured, followed by the hideous empty cavity of early widowhood. Before that? Who cared?
How long had she and Pres been married? Phyllis knew the answer exactly-two years, seven months, three days, fourteen hours before his departure to serve in the undeclared war-then another ten months, twenty-nine days, six hours until he was declared dead in some desolate jungle of what was, in her childhood, still Indo-China.
Now she wondered if this too brief period receding ever more rapidly in time, this single long lovely weekend of flaming fun and foolishness whose memory continued to make jelly of her guts, was to be the only oasis of fulfillment in what was becoming the sexual desert of her adult life.
There had been sex before Pres. of course. Few girls as attractive as Phyllis West even wish to grow up in this era without making due sacrifice to Priapus. But while none of her pre-Pres loves had been unpleasant and at least two were meaningful, it was Pres who had opened the physiological floodgates. It was Pres who had turned her on.
It was Pres who had made a woman of her. It was Pres who, using his prick as a tuning fork, had made her responses wildly and erotically rhapsodic. It was Pres, also, whose unaccountable wish to fly in Vietnam, to die in Vietnam perhaps, had left her lorn and trapped in an emotional dead end long before the urges of her body could wither and fade-urges he himself had prompted with the magic of his lovemaking.
She felt close to tears of self-pity and said, "Oh, for Christ's sake..." and gave herself a mental kick in the pants and walked, naked and very nice, from the bathroom.
Freddy, already attired with anal-pattern precision, sat in the flowered chintz armchair too small for him and puffed on his pipe while Phyllis scrambled into her clothes.
Whenever they went to bed together, Freddy's garments were always neatly folded or hung up, while hers lay heedlessly tossed on floor and chairs and bureau. Glancing at him corner-wise as she pulled her blue wool dress down over the still-svelte opulence of her body, she felt an impulse to cry, "Darling, if you can't be an ideal lover, I'll lay odds you'd make an ideal housekeeper."
She resisted the impulse, having small desire to add injury to the weekly insult he offered her in bed, completed dressing in silence. Nor did Freddy speak until she reached for her handbag. Then, standing up, tight-assed, he said, "Ready, dear?"
At the foot of the narrow, uneven staircase, Gerry Mann hailed them and asked them to join him in a nightcap. The Iron Kettle owner-operator was a pale blonde Vermonter who had turned up in Kitteridge a dozen years before and had purchased the pre-Revolutionary Reuben Craig house and converted it into the excellent restaurant it was.
He was seated in an authentic Hitchcock chair at an authentic antique desk, apparently going over his accounts with an authentic ballpoint pen. He said, rubbing his pale blue eyes, "If I keep this up much longer, I'll go blind. Come on in and sit down, sweet sinners."
There was no refusing him for the simple reason that he knew too much about their affair and possessed the fer-de-lance tongue of so many homosexuals. Not that their affair was a mystery to the rest of Kitteridge, but it remained a tacit one. Some of the more naive local matrons insisted that Gerry Mann was merely a sweet, sensitive, young man, but Phyllis knew better. She had no brief for or against the breed, but she did not like the freely offered use of the bedroom upstairs for their weekly trysts. She'd have preferred the anonymity of any reasonably comfortable motel between Boston and Worcester.
But Freddy had brought her to Gerry's for their third Big Deal (the first two had been in Phyllis's own bedroom, and Freddy had feared the inevitable parked-car gossip that must ensue) and thereby set a precedent. He was not the sort of man to break a precedent short of its continuation costing him something-say five or ten dollars for motel room rental.
Over vodka Collinses, the men chattered while Phyllis sipped and considered them in silence. She felt detached, twilight-sad, as though she were a casual passerby who had happened to stop at the Iron Kettle and was listening without much interest to the conversation of two strangers at the next table.
Somberly, she weighed them-Gerry, the bright, effervescent surface that reflected but never revealed, a mirror-man with canary-quick eyes and too facile gestures, delivering local gossip with glee that fell just short of giggles.
The too pretty daughter of Hogan, the liquor store owner, had come home pregnant from college and refused to name the unlucky father-to-be ... rich, eccentric old Mrs. Holmes Abbott had been caught red-faced with a Meissenware satyr concealed in her ample bosom, a satyr not only glossily impotent but unpaid for when lifted from a shelf in Miss Colton's bookshop ... poor Zach Citron, whose World War Two battle fatigue had made him a sporadic exhibitionist, had displayed himself in the doorway of prudish Miss Thorpe, the high school English teacher, with his dong gift wrapped by a large pink satin bow...
" ... and they say it took her ten minutes to stop looking and call the police!" Gerry concluded.
Freddy said, "They'd better put him away again. Any man crazy enough to try that with Miss Thorpe has got to be really crazy. She's seventy-two years old. I know, because my mother...."
Phyllis tuned him out, wondering again as she watched his talking face how she had ever managed to delude herself into believing this stodgy, dull, young-old man attractive. At first, she had worried that he would not offer her marriage, now she was afraid that he would and might somehow pressure her into acceptance.
She thought, 'No, no, a thousand times no!" said the female centipede crossing her legs.
She heard Gerry saying, " ... over the twelve-thirty news just before you came downstairs. Old Sal kicked the bucket around midnight. You can bet there'll be all kinds of hell to pay."
Freddy said, "The more they kill each other off, the better it is for the rest of us."
"The trouble is," said Gerry, "they have a nasty way of spilling over when they shoot it out. This isn't Chicago in the Twenties. They're in everything now."
"Especially old Sal Carini," said Freddy.
"Who's he?" Phyllis asked.
Two pairs of eyes rested on her with astonishment, and the silence was as pregnant as Hogan's unlucky daughter. Finally, Freddy said, "Sal Carini has been running the Boston underworld since they got rid of the Gustin Gang."
"Who are the Gustin gang?" Phyllis felt bewildered and increasingly annoyed at being treated like a halfwit. As a native New Yorker, she had never concerned herself with such minor-league matters as the rackets and racketeers of Boston.
"Just be thankful you never knew them, darling," said Gerry, "or Sal Carini, the man who had them destroyed in various, highly unappetizing ways."
Ever since she had met him, five years ago, Phyllis had felt oddly uncomfortable in Gerry Mann's presence without knowing why. Now she knew. For an instant, the reflecting mirror slipped and something of what lay beneath glittered out at her from the pale blue, canary-quick eyes.
Why! she thought. He hates me ... he's always hated me!
Minutes later, driving home with Freddy, she felt chillier than the frost-laden October air. What had she done to earn the hatred of Gerry Mann of all people? The question plagued her until shortly before two o'clock, when sleep finally claimed her in the big double bed she had shared so happily with Pres and still slept in.