He gripped the receiver, staring at the pebbled wall of the phone booth, and heard his sister say that the police had arrested a boy with a previous record but were still searching for the weapon. “ . . . And I hope you’ll approve of what we’ve arranged with Homan’s, the—well, you know. When will you be back?”
“Tomorrow,” he said, setting a seal on Mary Vaughan. “I don’t know what time, but tomorrow.”
“What does pobrecita mean?” asked Jenny.
Poor little thing. Mary replying falsely that she didn’t know, had also heard it murmured behind them more than once in their jostled progress through the narrow aisles of the market, all converging on the central area with its heaped bins of vivid, outsize fruits and vegetables.
The diminutive would have seemed odd to apply to tall Jenny if simple alarm at this teeming place with its lively vendors and overspill of brooms, straw hats, puppets, salad bowls, bull horns, handbags—just in one short distance—hadn’t given her the appearance of a defensive child. She pretended not to hear the incessant coaxings to look, to buy, so that the stall-keepers pursued her the more assiduously. When Mary said, “No, gracias,” they desisted at once, and that was when the “pobrecita” followed, as though she were in the habit of denying the poor little thing decent sustenance as well.
Gradually, at the sight of other tourists bargaining over carved wooden masks and painted pottery jars as they stepped casually around spilled liquid or trodden lettuce leaves on the uneven concrete floor, Jenny recovered her composure and even a trace of adventure. How much, she inquired of Mary, would one of those curly black iron candlesticks be?
“About two dollars, or two-fifty. Why don’t you ask?”
Jenny did. She had evidently been keeping an ear cocked, because at the two-fifty price she shook her head and said with a firm and practiced air, “Too much.”
“Too much!” Mary recognized this zestful man from the year before, and it was mutual; he dropped an eyelid at her in the midst of dealing with Jenny. From nowhere, like lightning, he produced a candle and thrust it into one of the two holders. “How beautiful, yes? You are never without light. Too much? You are rich Yankee, and I—” he allowed his curly dark head to loll dramatically toward his chest”—am poor man. Big family. Sixteen kids.”
The wrought iron was graceful, like all Mexican work, and Jenny was no match for this seasoned mixture of drollery and reproach. She bought the candlestick, the candle having been whisked thriftily out of it, and watched it wrapped in the ubiquitous newspaper by a fleet little boy who had also appeared where he wasn’t before. She muttered deflatedly as the man went to another stall for change, “I suppose that’s the oldest of the sixteen.”
It wasn’t an observation which required an answer —and, Mary realized a second too late, Jenny wouldn’t have heard one in any case. She had turned her head, seeking the source of a sudden gay burst of mariachi music, and all at once she was as stiff and deaf and dumb as a statue.
Mary followed her gaze, saw only tourists, the back of one of the musicians, the sunny street outside the market entrance. The two men they had passed on their way in still sat at a sidewalk table, lingering over cans of beer and squeezed limes. With a small acceleration of her heartbeat, because they were at the edge of a confrontation, she said directly, “Who was that, Jenny?”
If it were possible for stone eyes to liquefy and achieve color, they would have bent exactly Jenny’s glance. “Who was what?”
And unspokenly, as a week’s cautious cameraderie was wiped out in a matter of seconds, What business is it of yours? It mightn’t be unusual at eighteen to consider that you had passed the point of having to answer to anyone—but Mary thought of the Actons’ very real worry and her own sense of responsibility, and felt a flash of anger at being put in the position of a prying stranger. A passerby bumped into her and apologized, but her eyes held Jenny’s without flickering. “You seem to have seen someone who startled you,” she said levelly.
But the moment got away from her, if it had ever been there. The jaunty stall-keeper returned with change and smiles and flourishes, and Jenny had had time to recover her wits. “That woman in red over there,” she said. “It’s a Siamese cat she’s holding, but wouldn’t you swear it was a monkey?”
Yes, if you looked at it with your eyes shut, thought Mary. It was clearly time, more than time, to stop pretending that there was no issue at stake. She said calmly, driving down a feeling that, like a member of some Satanist cult, she was about to utter a name which should only be pronounced while standing inside protective lines of chalk, “Was it by any chance Brian Beardsley?”
9
IF Jenny had not kept up an uncharacteristic flow of small talk all the way back to the motel, Mary might have convinced herself that she had imagined that instant of focused stillness in the market. She had taken what she considered a decisive plunge, and braced herself for she wasn’t sure what, and she could have gotten just as much drama out of, “Was it Christopher Robin?”
Because, far from any guilty starts or stage astonishment, Jenny had simply drawn her dark brows together, narrowed her formidable eyelashes a little, and said with a puzzled air, “Brian? What would he be doing in Mexico?”
The temptation to vindicate herself—“You’d have to ask your friend Myrna about that, because she’s the one who talked to him last”—was strong, but Mary veered instinctively away from that course. She knew that what she had elicited wasn’t an answer, and in fact might have been a schoolgirl’s parry to avoid a direct lie, but she was shaken. How
