The Seeing

Chapter Eleven

Eric Griffith’s eye and interest were caught by a magnificent thoroughbred whose name he fancied: Yankee Drummer. It was a scene handsome enough to dispel his gloomy thoughts — the turf in Ireland, splendid crowds in tweeds and bright silk scarves, ladies carrying walking sticks, gentlemen with binoculars, placards showing the current odds above the betting stalls, and horses parading toward the race course at the Curragh.

Eric sat in a doctor’s waiting room — a depressing annex with wicker furniture, artificial green plants and botannical prints on the walls — reading Town and Country magazine. It was winter-dark outside, the streets noisy with traffic. A black woman with two small children sagging against her knees looked stolidly at the details of a large red kidney, which faced her at eye level from a medical layout on the opposite wall.

Eric and Maud had been driving to the country from Philadelphia when the pain had struck, starting at the base of her skull and fanning out into her shoulders. He had tried to persuade her to stick it out until they got home where a brisk rub and a whiskey might put things right, but oh, no, she wouldn’t have that, she thought she was dying as usual (naturally, since she’d had that damned foolish dream again last night), and so here they were in a strange doctor’s office, Maud closeted with some old black medicine man, while he sat with kids staring at him like zombies, his nerves twitching for a drink.

Thank God for small favors. In a dusty heap of Ebony magazines and old comic books, with a couple of Popular Mechanics and Modern Screens tucked among them, Eric had found a recent copy of Town and Country with pictures of good-looking people and horses to distract him from his simmering resentments.

In grim defiance of a “no smoking” sign on the wall, he lit a cigarette and made a point of dropping the match on the floor. Feeling that he had evened some unspecified score, Eric inhaled the acrid smoke and casually turned the page.

Almost immediately he gasped, the smoke choking him as he fought for breath. A name leaped out at him from the caption under a picture: Jessica Mallory. The girl stood with a group of men holding the halter of the same horse he had admired on the preceding page, Yankee Drummer, international industrialist Andrew Dalworth’s entry in a spring race at the Curragh.

Eric Griffith felt the irregular stroke of his heart as he stared at his niece’s face, his eye switching from the men around her down to the copy to identify them: the grinning young fop with a beard was a Dr. Julian Somebody, and there was Andrew Dalworth himself — tall, reeking of privilege, the wind in his rusted white hair, a big hand on Jessica’s shoulder — and then a beefy country boob in a tweed cape and derby hat, a lawyer named Ryan. All of them were up for the weekend from Easter Hill...

Eric experienced a spasm of anger so intense and acute that it was like physical pain. He clamped his teeth against an impulse to spit at their pictures. Instead, perversely, he forced himself to stare at the photographs, absorbing like gall the look of complacent privilege, the strength and power of the men grouped around his niece, his dear sister’s only child, his very own flesh and blood...

She was tall and slim, the top of her head nearly level with Dalworth’s shoulder, casually at home with the trappings of the race meet, with stewards in boots and tall hats, jockeys saluting with their bats, owners with the colors of their stables pinned to handbags and scarves. Yes, little Jessica was right at home there, he thought, using in his mind a word he despised and resented: she “belonged” to that exclusive world. His own blood niece. A pretty child, blooming into young girlhood. How old was she? When had the social worker come to see him and Maud? At least six years ago. And what the hell was her name? All Eric remembered was that she was stocky, disagreeable, and making damned little effort to conceal her disapproval of them. A Miss Scoffey, Scorbey, something like that. Silly woman, holier than thou, getting her jollies with moral superiority, an arrogant “I’ve Found Jesus!” sticker on the back bumper of her cheap blue car. Well, now that you’ve found Him, he thought, tuck it in a side pocket, and he blew a plume of smoke into the face of the little black boy who had come closer to him smiling tentatively. If that visit had been six years ago, that would make Jessica — what? The little boy backed away, his head again on his mother’s knee.

Eric looked at the caption of the pictures and saw a phrase that answered his question: “Eleven-year-old Jessica—” And never a word from her in all that time...

And it was while these roiling thoughts of disloyalty and unwarranted loss simmered in his consciousness, that he heard the doctor’s mushy voice saying, “Ma’am, I can’t find a thing wrong that some aspirin and hot tea won’t set right...”

“You don’t understand. The pain isn’t constant, it comes and—”

“But to be on the safe side...” The voice was bland and dismissing. “I’ve written this prescription for a muscle relaxer.”

The doctor’s receptionist, a black lady with a spray of artificial flowers pinned to the shoulder of her white uniform, smiled and said to Eric Griffith, “Eighteen dollars, sir.”

And when he drew out his checkbook, she smiled even more pleasantly and pointed to a sign that said, “No checks.”

The ride to Chester County over the Philadelphia Pike through Media was a dismal one. It was a time of year Eric hated. Even though the countryside was lost in darkness, the headlights on curves revealed winter-black trees and limbs shining wet with the first humid, thawing winds of March.

“Eric, I’m sorry,” Maud said. Over the hiss of the tires Maud’s voice was muted and mildly desperate. “Maybe it is nerves, as you say, but the pains are real. I’m frightened, Eric.”

“Everybody’s frightened of something, Maud.” He patted her knee. “It’s just a question of getting used to it.”

“It’s not easy,” she said. “That’s what you never understand.”

“Of course, it’s not easy. But if you don’t stand up to it, it’s just that much harder.”

“Oh, bull!” she said, in a harder voice. “When have you ever stood up to anything?”

“Goddamn it, let’s not get into that. We’ll both feel better when we’re home.”

“I almost smothered this morning. I thought my fingers were bleeding trying to open that door...”

He had heard this particular dream of hers a thousand times. When Maud was eleven years of age, she had been sent to visit relatives in Sea Island, Georgia — an older cousin married to a retired navy commander. They were a childless couple and quite well off, with an ornate beachside home, a cook, a maid, and a gardener who changed into a white jacket at night to serve drinks. One afternoon when her relatives were out playing bridge, Maude had slipped into a walk-in closet to try on her cousin’s furs and ballgowns. The maid, seeing the closet door open, had closed and locked it, trapping Maud inside. She had been terrified of the darkness and the frightening feel of fabric against her cheeks, the brush and scratch of chiffon and sequins, the dusty smell of old furs, and the cold rasp of rhinestone shoebuckles across her knuckles. She had given in to panic, screamed for help. Maud had always been convinced that the maid had locked her in deliberately. The maid was a sallow-faced, jealous little darky resenting that she had to serve and pick up after Maud, who was only a few years younger than she was. No one heard her cries (or Coralee ignored them), and it wasn’t until seven o’clock that night when the commander brought what he called “a dressing drink” up to the bedroom that Maud was released, at which time she was in a state of shock, eyes rolled up in her head, her pulse pounding at an alarming rate. A doctor was called and he put her into a deep sleep with sedatives.

“I wish to God we could get away somewhere, Eric,” she said, looking out at the black, dripping trees. “Someplace where there’s sun and we could rest.”

“Damned little chance unless my luck improves. I had the long shot yesterday at Hialeah. I doped that race backwards and forward and I knew Adios was ready. I was on the phone to Sam, fifty on the nose, when I realized I had no stake, that I had to bet the favorite.”

He slammed the steering wheel with the palm of his hand. “If I weren’t always so goddamned strapped for cash, Maud!”

“Somewhere only for a week, to get the smell of that perfume out of my head. When I think of that lying little bitch Coralee...”

“Forget it. Until I hit a streak, we’ll stay right here. Unless you want to tap your ex, Tony Saxe, for ten fun-filled days in Miami.”

“He’d like me crawling to him for a favor.” Maud snuggled deeply into her wool coat, hugging herself with her arms, feeling suddenly small and pitiable and lonely. It wasn’t only the memory of the closet she was terrified of. And her resentment wasn’t directed solely at the thought of Coralee’s smirking lies (“If’n I’d hear Miss Maudie, ah’d let her out surely, ma’am.”). It wasn’t that. It was the simple awareness of death that had been driven into her consciousness like a heavy, cold spike, not as something vague and dark at a comfortable distance, but as a thing that lived beside and within her. It was the casual inevitability of death that had been forced on her in those hours in the dark closet, the air soft with perfume and terror.

The only specific against it was money, Maudie thought — sunshine, clean winds, being taken care of. She had a fantasy of someplace high in Switzerland, a chalet on a lake, a place where there were saunas, health clubs, masseuses. Fur lap-robes and real old fashioned marvelous doctors, not the golf-playing creeps and their crowded waiting rooms here in the United States, but doctors who made house calls, chalet calls, she thought, arriving at any hour in business suits and purring brown Mercedes-Benzes, prepared to listen to you, to give you tests, to hold your hand, to stay as long as you wanted them to and to tell you at last, over a glass of champagne, that you were blooming fine, just fine.

She was jarred from the reverie by the slap of Eric’s fist on the steering wheel. She looked at him and saw that his jaw was set in a hard line, muscles bunching at the corners. The wind from a cracked rear window swirled furiously around her and the noise of the tires had grown louder. The speedometer needle was touching seventy.

“Hey, luv! Watch it.” She looked at him closely. “What’s got you so stirred up? Certainly not that eighteen dollars...”

“Here, look at this.” He took the issue of Town and Country from his pocket and shoved it onto her lap. “Just take a look at the pages I’ve turned down.” Perplexed, Maud hunched forward on the seat and opened the magazine to the thumbed-over pages, placing it below the faint light from the dashboard clock.

“Well, well,” she said, her eyes running across the pictures of the spectators at the Curragh and at Jessica Mallory surrounded by important-looking ladies and gentlemen. “Why, it’s your niece, Eric.” She smiled at the pictures but there was an expression of rueful envy in her expression. “She’s come up in the world, I’d say.”

“Yes, indeed. The Curragh, that’s one of the finest race courses in Ireland.”

“Now, who’s the chap with the nice brown beard?” She glanced down at the caption. “Dr. Julian Homewood. I could take him on toast, Eric. He’s sexy looking.”

“That’s my Maud. I was all eyes for the horse. Good-looking animal. Sixteen hands at the least.”

Maud read from a caption. “The Andrew Dalworth party, up from the Dalworth country home, Easter Hill, in Connemara, with the Dalworth stables entry, Yankee Drummer.”

Maud settled back in the seat and let her hands rest on the open magazine in her lap. She looked at Eric’s tense profile, eyebrows drawn together in a frown, the wind touching his fine, thinning hair.

“Listen, old pal,” she said, a stir of amused excitement in her voice.

He knew that tone. “What is it, Maudie?”

“I just had a thought.”

“The usual?”

She poked his arm and said, “A few variations occurred to me. I’ll light a fire in the bedroom and you bring up some drinks... You’ll think better when you’ve had a chance to relax.”

They drove on in silence until they turned onto the gravel surface of Black Velvet Lane. With the rasp of the tires on the tiny stones, Eric heard another sound, dry and whispering. When he glanced at Maud, he saw that she was carefully tearing the picture of Jessica Mallory and the Easter Hill crowd out of the magazine.