Philip looked at him in surprised speculation. “Four, five weeks. Nancy called them in the middle of the day, hoping he was out in this little workshop he rented on Sherman Boulevard. But Kalendar answered, said he had no idea where she was. Myra, that was her name! Dumb bitch, you have to feel sorry for her, hitching up with a guy like that.”
“Still, there was the heroism thing.”
Philip laughed. “The first time Joe Kalendar got famous. We’re getting close to Shady Mount Hospital. Turn left. Let’s drive north for a while.”
Tim thought that Philip wanted to wind up on Eastern Shore Drive, where the spectacle of mansions inhabited by people whose children were legacies at Brown and Wesleyan would further divert him from the reality of his situation. He was looking for distraction, not Mark. Philip had given up; now he was merely waiting for the police to find the body.
“Happened back when I was first getting to know Nancy. The summer I was nineteen, 1968. Of course, you wouldn’t know anything at all about this stuff, you were away killing Commies for Christ, weren’t you?”
Tim smiled. “Most of the guys in my platoon liked to call ’em gooks.”
“Slants,” Philip said. “Slopes.”
“You know, you could always tell people you were there.”
“Sometimes I do,” Philip said.
“I’m sure,” Tim said. “Anyhow, Kalendar saved the lives of two children?”
“The story was all over the local paper. The house next to his, a plug shorted out and bang, electrical fire. It was like six in the morning. It takes about ten minutes for the whole house to fill up with smoke. Joe Kalendar happened to be messing around in his backyard, and I guess he smelled the smoke or something.”
“He’s messing around in his backyard at six o’clock in the morning?”
“Maybe he was having a fresh-air pee. Who knows?”
“Who lived in the other house?”
“A black family—two little girls. Guy was a bus driver, something like that. Later on, he said Kalendar basically hadn’t given him the time of day since he moved onto the block, but what he did proved that blacks and whites could get along fine, at least in the city of Millhaven. That bilge was exactly what people wanted to hear. Especially then, one year after the big riots—Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee. People lapped it up, turned Kalendar into a symbol.” He smiled. “Of course, Kalendar had no time at all for black people.”
“What did he do, rescue the children?”
“Both of them. The parents weren’t even out of bed when he hit the door. Wasn’t for Kalendar, everybody would have died of smoke inhalation. According to the bus driver, he smashed down the door and bulled straight in. He’s shouting, ‘Where are you? Where are you?’ The kids more or less run into him, or he runs into them. He grabs them and hightails it out the door.”
“Were the parents still in bed?”
“Standing right in front of the door, trying to figure out what to do next. Dazed and groggy and all that, but I hardly think the bus driver was Mensa material anyhow. Kalendar ran back in and slammed into him and his wife and shoved everyone outside.”
“So he saved them all.”
“You could see it that way. Kalendar didn’t want to stop there, either.”
“He thought more people were still inside?”
“The bus driver told the reporter that Kalendar was fighting to go back in when the police and the firemen showed up and restrained him. All this came out all over again when he got arrested, that’s the reason I remember it.”
Tim turned left onto the pretty street called An Die Blumen, making his way toward the lake. Barely pretending to look for Mark, Philip let his eyes drift over a little knot of teenage boys and girls walking east, carrying tennis rackets and soft Adidas and Puma bags. They had the bland confident good looks produced by wealthy parents, private schools, and a sense of entitlement.
“I wish I could afford to live around here,” Philip said. “Instead of that dopey Jimbo Monaghan, Mark could have friends like those kids. Look at them—they’re completely safe. They’re going to go through life laughing and carrying tennis rackets. And do you know why? Because this is a long way from Pigtown.”
Tom Pasmore had grown up around the corner from where they were, and his childhood, Tim knew, had been neither safe nor stable. He turned onto Eastern Shore Drive, and Philip swiveled his head to look at the great mansions. In one of them, a man had murdered his wife’s lover; in another, a millionaire given to black suits and Cuban cigars had raped his two-year-old daughter; in another, two off-duty policemen acting as paid executioners had murdered a kind and brilliant man.
“Jimbo wasn’t good for Mark,” Philip continued.
“You’re kidding me.”
“Believe me, I know kids, and those two were not in the mainstream. To be honest, they were a couple of losers. And if you ask me, they were getting way too close. You could see it in the music they liked. They didn’t listen to normal people. All that airy-fairy stuff gave me the creeps.”
12
On the night Mark first broke into the abandoned house, the lost girl, who was the girl she had declined to rescue, came again to Nancy Underhill. Her son had left for the evening, and Philip had vanished into his “den,” where he would remain until 10:00 P.M., at which time he would emerge, announce that he was going to bed, and look at her as if any deviation from his schedule was an indication of questionable thought processes. At 10:30 on the dot, he would sit bolt upright in bed and listen for the sound of Mark either opening the front door or walking from the backyard into the kitchen. If he failed to hear Mark return before his curfew, he would instruct her to “work out” a suitable punishment for “your son,” then lie back, roll over, and, having fulfilled his duties as CEO of the Superior Street Underhills, return untroubled to sleep.
She had been seated on the davenport with her legs beneath her and a cold cup of coffee before her on the table, staring at, but not seeing, a rerun of
Instead of a scene in which an actor named Ray Romano was pretending to argue with his father, Nancy was looking at something else entirely, a scene that replayed itself across the screen of her inner eye. Nancy’s scene took place not in a fictional Long Island living room, but in the kitchen of a quick-and-dirty tract house constructed by a shady contractor named James Carrollton, then in the second year of a three-year stretch for tax evasion. Standing in for Ray Barone, sportswriter and father of three, was Nancy Underhill, a suburban housewife, still childless after two years of marriage; and before Nancy was Myra Kalendar, the wife of her terrible cousin Joseph, who in adolescence had spirited the neighbors’ dogs and cats away to distant lots, doused them with lighter fuel, and set them on fire. Joseph had referred to this activity as “making torches.”
Myra sat across the table in the tacky suburban kitchen and begged for help. Myra had no friends. She could talk to no one but Nancy. Joseph would kill her if she went to the police. She begged not for herself, but for the daughter who since birth had been Joseph Kalendar’s private project and plaything. In the year of the appeal, Lily Kalendar was six years old and a secret from both the state and the school board. Until this moment, she had been a secret from Nancy, too. Joseph took his daughter out of the house only at night, to conceal her from the neighbors. The one time Lily had managed to go outside during the day—to escape!—she had hidden in the alley, and her father had gone crazy with rage and worry. When he smelled smoke, he saw that it came from the house of a black neighbor with two daughters Lily had often seen playing in their yard; he assumed that his daughter had fled there. On his return, coughing and red-eyed and reeking of smoke, Lily had crawled weeping out of hiding, begging for mercy.
Instead, Myra said, she got the beating of her life. Her father loved her, she was the love of his life, and her disobedience would cost her dearly. And after that, Joseph had built a special room to hold his beloved daughter and a special wall to hide the room. But that was only two of many modifications Joseph had made to their house.
