Chapter 2
Phyllis awoke to a beautiful smiling morning feeling like a schoolgirl on the first day of vacation. She lay snug in her wide soft spool bed in the little jewel box of a house which had once been the gardener's cottage of the Barrett estate. Although the estate itself had, in accord with Pres's father's will, long been converted into a parochial school, the cottage had been willed to Pres and, through Pres's will, to Phyllis. Across the gentle slope of its fall-faded lawn, she could revel in the riotous October colors of the armies of elms and oaks and maples that all but blanketed the town from the air.
Her sense of well-being would endure through the weekend, to diminish steadily Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, with Thursday evening looming ever nearer and gloomier. Back to school again-oops! Back to bed again with Freddy the Freeloader!
This was ridiculous. She was a grown woman with independent means, a woman with no true obligations, either emotional or financial. Why didn't she simply take a trip, a trip long enough to suffice as a permanent break (and brake) in the dismal affair?
Phyllis knew why, even as she uttered the empty question. She had no desire to be a woman traveling alone, a rootless rudderless female sooner or later falling prey to one or more of the males who take such excursions merely with seduction in mind. Or worse, to become one of those pathetic aging females who huddle in groups in the saloons of cruise ships and resort hotels, playing endlessly at canasta, Mah-Jongg or contract bridge, huddling like flocks of fat sheep banded together against the predator who might offer them one final taste of life.
Another look out the window restored her flagging morale, and sight of the blue morocco traveling clock on the bedside table reminded her that she was due at the country club in exactly forty-eight minutes. Her golf date was with Beth Davis, not only her best and dearest friend in Kitteridge, but a lady invariably prompt who grew grumpy when kept waiting more than two minutes.
Phyllis showered and dressed hastily and went downstairs to breakfast before she was fully dry. Hilma, her maid-of-all-work from the Finnish colony in nearby Aylesworth, clucked disapproval as Phyllis wolfed sausage, bacon and an English muffin, gulping her coffee. A fine cook, Hilma did not like to see even her simplest offerings treated so cavalierly.
Reading correctly the expression on her pug-dog face, Phyllis put down her cup and said, "Why didn't you wake me sooner? You know I'm meeting Mrs. Davis at the club at ten o'clock."
"Last time you told me you'd throw the clock at me," said Hilma.
"I may do that anyway." They smiled at one another in mocking amiability based on complete understanding and acceptance of their loose-leafed relationship as mistress and servant.
"Damn!" Phyllis swore as she failed to find a cigarette within reach, Hilma fished a half full pack from the pocket of her apron, offered her one. As she lit it for her mistress, she said, "I think I'll change my brand. You smoke all my smokes."
"No comment." Phyllis took a deep puff, exhaled with a happy sigh, paused just outside the front door as the telephone rang behind her. A half minute later, Hilma appeared in the doorway, clutching the handset with the heel of a hand clamped firmly over the earpiece.
"Who is it?" Phyllis asked.
"A man-from Boston. I think he's a reporter."
"What does he want?"
"He says he wants to talk to you-that it's very important."
Phyllis could think of no reason why she could have become suddenly newsworthy-if, indeed, she was newsworthy. She said, "Tell him I just took off to play golf. Tell him I'll talk to him later. Tell him to go to hell!"
Then she was off in her chrome yellow Karmann-Ghia, making the driveway gravel spurt under her tires as she swung into Oak Street and headed for her game.
Thanks to an approach that put her ball two feet from the cup on the eighteenth green, she emerged one up. It was one of her rare wins over Beth Davis. Beth had, by her own admission, the form of "an astigmatic octopus with the hives" but she had the knack of staying in the fairway and the competitive instincts of a hungry hyena. Phyllis, who played a far stronger, more stylish game, beat her on an average of one time in five. Since their customary wager was lunch at some decent restaurant, Phyllis had picked up innumerable tabs during the past five years, hence was elated over her win. After paying off their caddies, the two women strolled into the ladies' locker room and repaired their sport-ravaged grooming.
As she reached for a face towel Beth growled, "You'd never have made it if your drive on the fifteenth hadn't skipped over the water hazard."
"Oh, come on!" said Phyllis. "I whupped yuh far an' squar. If there's one thing I hate, it's a sore loser."
"If there's one thing I hate, it's a sore winner," said Beth. "Okay, if you must have your pound of flesh, I'll take you to Gerry Mann's."
Phyllis opened her mouth to say she didn't want to go to the Iron Kettle, then closed it lest Beth, an astute interrogator, ask her why.
"What's the matter, Phyl-or shouldn't I ask?"
Phyllis thought, Damn! She said, "You shouldn't."
"You are a sore winner. Would you rather go to Howard Johnson's or the Greek's?"
"Heaven forbid!" Neither woman liked the prefabricated food at the local Johnson franchise-and the entrees served by the Athens Chophouse were invariably awash, if not submerged, in grease and totally unappetizing.
They drove to their destination separately, and Phyllis steeled herself en route against any double entendres Gerry might have ready about her trysts upstairs with Freddy Gardiner. After earlier rendezvous, she had felt no such trepidation, but the dropping of the mirror-mask and the flash of sheer hatred beneath unnerved her where Gerry Mann was concerned-plus the fact that last night was the first time he had intruded on Freddy and herself in any way.
There had been currents in the air, invisible tensions almost palpable, that she neither liked nor understood. She had felt oddly shut out of the conversation between her lover and his friend. Friend, she wondered as a tiny node of near-panic rode the underside of her diaphragm. Friend? She told herself that it was nonsense, that Gerry had been Pres's friend as well, that there had never been any suspicion of her late husband's total heterosexuality.
Many times, when they had been with Gerry, Phyllis had noted the slight alteration in Pres's tone, the tinge of mockery, the glint of hard-edged humor in his eyes. Only once, when they returned home had she questioned him about the Iron Kettle owner.
Pres had grinned the grin of a little boy caught at something mildly naughty, had said, "Come on, darling! Gerry's such a total fag."
Then he had rolled her on the big spool bed she now occupied alone and they had enjoyed one of their most memorable nights.
He had suggested they play homosexual there in the semi-darkness and, for the first and only time, had gone down on her. She had responded by going down on him and, before returning to normal lovemaking, he had essayed anal intercourse with her-but her virgin butt-hole had been too tight for his head and she had lifted her rump and felt grateful that he had let it slide into its customary orifice.
Afterward, she had said, "When nature rigged it so beautifully, why do so many people want it some other way?"
His reply had been an enigmatic, "Search me?" and, recovering swiftly from the bout just finished, he had rolled her over on her back and, mounting her, given her a thorough, position one fucking. Nor had they ever again sought this sort of variation in the brief course of their marriage. They had talked of doing it, but somehow, when their bodies merged and melted together, his penis had been where it belonged by rights-buried deep in her vagina.
No, she thought Pres was above suspicion that way. But Freddy...
Since Phyllis and Beth did not sit down until almost two o'clock, the old low-ceilinged, raftered dining room was nearly empty. Gerry himself was busy in the rear regions, preparing the menu for the dinner to come. Phyllis felt relieved under the circumstances that he was not on hand when they came in. They ordered the Number 3 luncheon (cream of celery soup, lamb chop mixed grill with watercress, Waldorf salad and choice of desserts...$3.50) and settled down to enjoy themselves with golf-sharpened appetites.
Despite an eighteen-year gap in their ages, Phyllis found Beth Harlow Davis a gas. Broad of beam, gray of hair, with a face like a pickled walnut, the older woman made no pretensions to even a vanished beauty. like Phyllis, she was a widow, although her single son was grown and long departed, and this had proved a strong bond between them, as had the fact that both enjoyed golf, bridge, and a few drinks late in the day.
Also, they both enjoyed good talk-or, rather, Beth enjoyed talking well while Phyllis enjoyed listening to her endless flow of insights into local history and gossip larded with shrewd comment on the larger world beyond Kitteridge.
like Gerry Mann, Beth Davis was a mine of personal information. But there all similarity ended. Where Gerry was sharp, sniggering, malicious, Beth was amused, amusing, tolerant. Her oft-expressed attitude toward this fondness for discussing her neighbors was, "I don't give a tinker's damn what people say about me behind my back, as long as they don't say it to my face. Therefore, I feel perfectly free to talk about other people behind their backs."
The difference between Beth and Gerry in the matter of gossip was, Phyllis reflected, parallel to the difference between a good journalist and a scandal monger. Furthermore, since Beth was Old Kitteridge, her sources were usually both wider and better informed.
Gerry had reported merely that Hogan's daughter had returned pregnant from college and refused to name the father of her child-to-be. Beth not only knew his name and lineage and the fact that he desperately wished to marry the girl, but that the senior Hogans were putting up an adamantine battle against it because the boy was not only an undergraduate militant but of Jewish descent as well.
Beth revealed also that Mrs. Holmes Abbott had lifted the Meissenware statuette satyr from Miss Colton's shelf because it filled a gap in a set of outrageously erotic porcelain figurines that were kept locked in a special room of her huge turreted mansion. The others, it seemed, had been purchased abroad and poor rich Mrs. Abbott did not dare buy such a statuette in Kitteridge lest her hobby be "misunderstood."
She informed Phyllis, also, that poor shell-shocked Zach Citron had been the one to howl for help after sex-starved Miss Thorpe had decided to take full advantage of the rare opportunity fate had placed on her doorstep.
Phyllis, laughing, said, "I suppose it all just goes to remind us again that you can't tell what people are by their usual behavior."
"If you're trying to say that you can't read a book by its cover, you're right on the button," said Beth. "I don't see why you're afraid of using cliches."
"I'm not. It's just that an English teacher I had at Finch used to tell us, 'If you can't say it differently, say it straight.' "
They lingered over their coffee and then Beth suggested, "Since you're coming over for cocktails, why not come now and kill what's left of the afternoon? Besides, I can use an extra pair of hands."
"Okay," said Phyllis. "I'll call Hilma."
"You do that while I visit the powder room," said Beth, rising and shaking down her green golf skirt.
Phyllis dialed her own number on the pay phone under the front stairs, hung up when she got a busy signal, thinking, That's odd-Hilma never uses the phone.
She fished out her dime and turned, nearly bumping into Gerry Mann. He had come up behind her silently, appeared close to the combustion point from some great inner excitement.
"Phyllis," he half whispered, "I've got to talk to you."
"So talk to me."
"Not here-not now. This is vitally important. Oh-and incidentally, congratulations."
Phyllis uttered a resounding, "Huh?"
"Could I drop by your house tonight after I close the restaurant?" he asked.
She hesitated, reflected that she had little to fear from Gerry Mann either physically or in reputation, said, "I guess it will be all right."
He looked at her hard and once again the screen fell from the mirror-face and blue, canary-quick eyes. This time they revealed no hatred but bafflement and something very close to fear. He said, "How can you take it so calmly?"
Again Phyllis could only reply with a, "Huh?"
Then Gerry's mask was in place again and Beth was advancing upon them. There were quick pleasantries and then the two women were off in their separate cars to Beth's fine old house set at the lawn-swept rear of the old Cadwal-lader estate, overlooking the placid surface of the Kitteridge River and the easy rise of Revolutionary Hill from the marshy meadows beyond.