“And I haven’t done that yet,” Molly said.
“Not yet.”
60.
Miriam Fiedler lived on Sea Street a mile and a tenth past the Crowne Estate School in a shingle-style house with a large veranda. Jesse sat with her on the veranda and told her what he knew of her and the Crowne estate.
She looked at him as if he were speaking another language as he talked. When he was through she said nothing.
“What I want to know is where the money went,” Jesse said. “You used to be rich.”
She still looked blankly at him. And then, almost as if she were merely the conveyance for someone else’s voice, she began to speak.
“That was before I married Alex,” she said.
There was no affect in her voice. It sounded like a recording.
“I was forty-one,” she said. “My first marriage…”
They were each sitting in a wicker rocking chair. Neither of them was rocking. Jesse waited. Miriam didn’t say anything. It was as if she had forgotten what she was saying.
“And Alex?” Jesse said.
“He was a year younger,” Miriam said, “forty. He, too, had never married. I soon realized why.”
Again silence. Again Jesse prompted her.
“Why?” Jesse said.
“Alex is homosexual,” she said.
“But he married you.”
“For my money,” Miriam said.
“Which he spent?” Jesse said.
“Generally on his boyfriends,” Miriam said.
They sat quietly in their rocking chairs. Motionless. Looking at the slow unspooling of her story.
“He travels,” Jesse said after a time.
“Yes.”
“But he doesn’t work,” Jesse said.
“No.”
“And you pay.”
“He tries not to embarrass me,” she said. “That’s worth something.”
“Why not divorce him?” Jesse said.
“Then he would embarrass me.”
Jesse frowned.
“Embarrass?” he said.
“I cannot stand to be thought a dupe,” Miriam said. “I cannot stand having it revealed that I have been married all these years to a man who would only have sex with young men.”
