“I write novels. Short stories, too, but novels, mostly.”
Mr. Battley found that he had another question after all. “Has any of your stuff been published?”
“All of it’s been published. Eight novels and two short-story collections.”
Now at least a fraction of the principal’s attention had been snagged.
“Would I know any of your work?”
“Of course not,” Tim said. “You wouldn’t like it at all.”
Mr. Battley’s mouth slid into an uneasy smile, and his eyes cut away toward his underlings. In a second he was gone. On the other side of the space he had occupied, Philip Underhill and Jackie Monaghan stood deep in conversation, their backs to their sons. The boys were a couple of feet closer to them than Tim, but even Tim could hear every word their fathers said.
“Wasn’t Nancy related to this weird guy who used to live around here? Somebody said something about it once, I don’t remember who.”
“Should have kept his mouth shut, whoever he was,” Philip said.
“A murderer? That’s what I heard. Only, there was a time when people called him a hero, because he risked his life to save some kids.”
Mark swiveled his head toward them.
“I heard they were black, those kids. Must have been one of the first black families around here. It was back when they weren’t accepted the way they are now.”
Tim waited for his brother to say something revolting about acceptance. At the time he’d sold his house in the suburbs and bought, at what seemed a bargain price, the place on Superior Street, Philip had been unaware that the former Pigtown was now something like 25 percent black. This had simply escaped his notice. It was Philip’s assumption that the neighborhood would have remained as it had been in his boyhood—respectable, inexpensive, and as white as a Boy Scout meeting in Aberdeen. When the realization came, it outraged him. Adding to his wrath was the presence of a great many interracial couples, generally black men with white wives. When Philip saw such a couple on the sidewalk, the force of his emotions often drove him across the street. No black people of either gender had bothered to drop in for the “reception,” as Tim had overheard Philip describing the gathering.
“I’d say we’re still working on that acceptance business,” Philip said. “To be accepted, you have to prove you’re worthy of acceptance. Are we in agreement?”
“Absolutely.”
“When I have my vice principal’s hat on, I am scrupulously fair. I have to be. I never make any decision based on race. Here in the privacy of my own home, I believe I am entitled to my own opinion, however unpopular it may be.”
“Absolutely,” Jackie repeated. “I’m with you one hundred percent. Don’t say any of this stuff to my wife.”
Their sons looked at each other and began to back away.
“But whatever you hear about my wife’s family—my
His face white, Mark silently glided around the two men and vanished into the kitchen. Jimbo followed, looking stricken. The men never noticed.
When Tim flew back to New York the next day, it was with the sour, unpleasant feeling that Philip might after all have driven Nancy to suicide.
Half an hour before they landed at La Guardia, a delicious aroma filled the cabin, and the flight attendants came down the aisle handing out the chocolate-chip cookies. Tim wondered what Mark was doing and how he felt. Philip was incapable of doing what was right—the boy might as well have been all alone. Tim’s growing anxiety made him feel like hijacking the plane and making it return to Millhaven. He promised himself to send the boy an e-mail the minute he got home; then he promised himself to get Mark to New York as soon as possible.
The
House on
Michigan
Street
PART TWO
4
A week before Tim Underhill’s initial flight to Millhaven, his nephew, Mark, began to realize that something was wrong with his mother. It was nothing that he could quite pin down, nothing obvious. Unless her constant air of worried distraction had a physical origin, she did not appear to be ill. Mark’s mother had never been an upbeat person, exactly, but he did not think that she had ever before been so out of it for so long. As she went through the motions of preparing dinner and washing dishes, she seemed only half present. The half of her taking care of things was pretending to be whole, but the other half of Nancy Underhill was in some weird, anxious daze. Mark thought his mother looked as though all of a sudden she had been given some huge new problem, and whenever she allowed herself to think about it, the problem scared the hell out of her.
On a recent night, he had come home shortly before eleven P.M. after being out with Jimbo Monaghan —“being out” a euphemism for the one activity that had compelled him during these past days—hoping not to be punished for having missed his curfew by twenty minutes or so. Ten-thirty was a ridiculously early hour for a fifteen-year-old to have to be home, anyhow. In he had come, twenty minutes past his curfew, expecting to be interrogated longer than he had been AWOL and ordered into bed. However, Mark did not take off his shoes or tiptoe to the stairs. Some unacknowledged part of him regretted that the living room was dark except for the dim light leaking in from the kitchen, and that neither of his parents was ensconced on the davenport, tapping the crystal of a wristwatch.
From the foyer he could see a light burning at the top of the stairs. That would be for both his benefit and his parents’ peace of mind: if they woke up to see that the hallway was dark, they would know he had come home, and they could perfect the scolding he would get in the morning. The dim yellow haze in the living room probably meant that either his father or his mother had grown sick of lying in bed and gone downstairs to wait for their errant son.
He moved into the living room and looked through to the kitchen. Curiouser and curiouser. The kitchen did not appear to be the source of the light. The floor tiles and the sink were touched by a faint illumination leaking in from the side, which meant that the overhead light in the downstairs bathroom was on.
Riddle: since the upstairs bathroom is right across the hall from their bedroom, why would one of his parents come downstairs for a nocturnal pee?
Answer: because she was downstairs already, dummy, waiting to give you hell.
That light spilled into the kitchen meant that the bathroom door was either completely or partially open, thereby presenting Mark with a problem. He made a little more noise than was necessary on his journey across the dining room. He coughed. When he heard nothing from the region in question, he said, “Mom? Are you up?”
There was no answer.
“I’m sorry I’m late. We forgot what time it was.” Emboldened, he took another step forward. “I don’t know why my curfew’s so early anyhow. Almost everybody in my class . . .”
The silence continued. He hoped his mother had not fallen asleep in the bathroom. A less embarrassing possibility was that she had gone upstairs without switching off the light.
