On, Off

Paola found out about Marian, she should have buttoned her lip and kept Walt on as a meal ticket. Instead, she’ll be raising four kids on alimony peanuts, because she sure can’t work. Walt is not about to give her a cent more than he has to, so he’s going to sell the house. Since it’s encumbered by a mortgage, Paola’s share will be more peanuts. Adding to Walt’s troubles is Marian, who is pregnant. That means Walt will have two families to support. He’ll have to go into private practice, which is a genuine pity. He does really good research.”

“You’re a pragmatist, Mrs. Smith.”

“Someone in the family has to be.”

“I’ve heard a rumor from several people,” he said slowly, not looking at her, “that the Hug will cease to exist, at least in its present incarnation.”

“I’m sure the rumors are true, which will make the decisions easier for some Huggers. Walt Polonowski, for one. Maurie Finch for another. Between Schiller’s attempted suicide and finding that poor little girl’s body, Maurie Finch is another broken man. Not in the same way as Bob, but broken all the same.” She sighed. “However, the one I feel sorriest for is Chuck Ponsonby.”

“Why?” he asked, startled at this novel view of Ponsonby, the man he had simply assumed would be the Prof’s heir. No matter how the Hug changed, Ponsonby would surely survive the best among them.

“Chuck is not a brilliant researcher,” Eliza Smith said in a carefully neutral voice. “Bob has been carrying him ever since the Hug opened. It’s Bob’s mind directs Chuck’s work, and both of them are aware of it. A conspiracy between them. Apart from me, I don’t think anyone else has the slightest idea.”

“Why should the Professor do that, Mrs. Smith?”

“Old ties, Lieutenant – extremely old ties. We come from the same Yankee stock, the Ponsonbys, the Smiths and the Courtenays – my family. The friendships go back generations, and Bob watched quirks of fate destroy the Ponsonbys – well, so did I.”

“Quirks of fate?”

“Len Ponsonby – Chuck’s and Claire’s father – was enormously rich, just like his forebears. Ida, their mother, came from a moneyed Ohio family. Then Len Ponsonby was murdered. It must have been 1930, and not long after the Wall Street crash. He was beaten to death outside the Holloman railroad station by a gang of itinerants who went on a rampage. They beat two other people to death as well. Oh, it was blamed on the Depression, on bootleg booze, you name it! No one was ever caught. But Len’s money had vanished in the big crash, which left poor Ida virtually penniless. She funded herself by selling the Ponsonby land. A brave woman!”

“How did you come to know Chuck and Claire in particular?” Carmine asked, fascinated at what could lie behind public facades.

“We all went to the Dormer Day School together. Chuck and Bob were four classes ahead of Claire and me.”

“Claire? But she’s blind!”

“That happened when she was fourteen. Nineteen thirty-nine, just after the war broke out in Europe. Her sight had always been poor, but then she suffered retinal detachments in both eyes simultaneously from retinitis pigmentosa. She literally went totally blind overnight. Oh, it was a terrible business! As if that poor woman and her three children hadn’t gone through enough already!”

“Three children?”

“Yes, the two boys and Claire. Chuck’s the eldest, then came Morton, and finally Claire. Morton was demented, never spoke or seemed to realize that other people lived in the world. His light didn’t go out, Lieutenant. It was never switched on. And he had fits of violence. Bob says that these days they’d diagnose him as autistic. So Morton never went to school.”

“Did you ever see him?”

“Occasionally, though Ida Ponsonby was afraid he’d fly into one of his rages and used to shut him up if we came over to play. Mostly we didn’t. Chuck and Claire came to Bob’s or my house.”

Mind reeling, Carmine sat battling to maintain his calm, to keep the strands of this incredible story separated as they must be – a demented brother! Why hadn’t he picked up that there was something wrong in the Ponsonby menage? Because on the surface there was nothing wrong, nothing wrong at all! Yet the moment that Eliza Smith said three children, he knew. It began to fall into place. Chuck at the Hug, and mad brother somewhere else…Aware that Eliza Smith was staring at him, Carmine forced himself to ask a reasonable question.

“What does Morton look like? Where is Morton now?”

“Looked like, was, Lieutenant. Past tense. It all happened at once, though I guess there was a little time in between. Days, a week. Claire went blind, and Ida Ponsonby sent her to a blind school in Cleveland, where Ida still had family. Somehow there was a link to the blind school there – an endowment, I think. It was difficult to get into a blind school back then. Anyway, no sooner had Claire gone to Cleveland than Morton died, I think of a brain hemorrhage. We went to the funeral, of course. The things they inflicted on children in those days! We had to tiptoe up to the open casket and lean in to kiss Morton’s cheek. It felt clammy and greasy” – she shuddered – “and it was the first time in my life that I smelled death. Poor little guy, at rest at last. What did he look like? Chuck and Claire. He’s buried in the family plots at the old Valley cemetery.”

Carmine sat with his hypothesis demolished to ruins. No way in a fit Eliza Smith was making any of this up. The Ponsonby tale was true, and all it amounted to was a well-attested fact: that some families, for no reason that made sense, suffered whole strings of disasters. Not accident prone: tragedy prone.

“Sounds as if there’s a weakness in the family,” he said.

“Oh, yes. Bob saw that in medical school, as soon as he’d done genetics. Madness and blindness ran in Ida’s family, but not in the Ponsonbys. Ida went crazy too, a little later on. I think the last time I ever saw her was at Morton’s funeral. With Claire in Cleveland, I didn’t visit the Ponsonby house anymore.”

“When did Claire come home?”

“When Ida went completely mad – not long after Pearl Harbor. Chuck and Bob were never drafted, they spent the war years in pre-med and medical school. Claire had been in Ohio for two years – long enough to learn Braille and find her way around with a white stick the way blind people do. She was one of the first ever to have a guide dog. Biddy’s her fourth.”

Carmine got to his feet, devastated by the magnitude of his disappointment. For one moment he had genuinely thought it was all over; that he had done the impossible and found the Ghosts. Only to discover that he was as far from the answer as ever.

“Thanks for filling me in so well, Mrs. Smith. Is there any other Hugger you think I should know about? Tamara?” He took a breath. “Desdemona?”

“They aren’t murderers, Lieutenant, any more than Chuck and Walt are. Tamara is one of those unfortunate women who can’t pick a good man, and Desdemona” – she laughed – “is British.”

“British says it all about her, huh?”

“To me it does. When she was a kid, they starched her.”

He left Eliza at her front door and plodded back to the Ford.

However, there was one thing he could do, should do: see Claire Ponsonby and find out why she’d lied to him about the date of her blindness. And maybe too he just wanted to see her – look at the face of a living, breathing tragedy. Father and the family fortune lost when she was five, sight when she was fourteen, all her freedom when, at sixteen, she had to come home to care for a demented mother. A job that lasted about twenty-one years. Yet he had never felt the slightest vibration of self-pity emanate from her. Some woman, Claire Ponsonby. Only why had she lied?

Biddy started barking the moment the Ford turned into the driveway of 6 Ponsonby Lane; Claire was at home then.

“Lieutenant Delmonico,” she said in the open doorway, holding Biddy’s collar.

“How did you know it was me?” he demanded, entering.

“The sound of your car. It must have a very powerful engine because it rumbles while it’s idling. Come into the kitchen.”

Through the house she went without as much as brushing a single item of furniture, into the over-warm room with the Aga stove.

Biddy lay down in the corner, eyes fixed on Carmine.

“She doesn’t like me,” he said.