The Seeing

Chapter Three

Once she was beyond the iron and stone growth of the city, the countryside was lovely — low, rolling meadows, rugged Quaker meeting houses, church steeples white against the gray skies, and horses and big-horned Santa Gertrudis cattle standing like woolly cut-outs on distant hills. This was horse country — pony clubs, point-to-point races, horse shows, and fox hunting with well-schooled hunters and hounds coursing over a challenging terrain of stone hedges and split-rail fences.

The estate homes in the country dated back to the Revolutionary War, with double chimneys, immaculately tuck-pointed fieldstone walls, kennel runs, and schooling rings.

Eric B. Griffith’s name was on a mailbox in front of a two-story red brick rowhouse, which stood, inside a white picket fence, at the intersection of an unpaved country road and Black Velvet Lane.

Aware that she was being watched from the upper window of the house, Miss Scobey went up a rough flagstone walk and rapped loudly with a brass knocker shaped like a grinning fox-head. The door was opened by a tall man whom Miss Scobey judged to be in his early or middle thirties.

“Yes? May I help you?” the man said.

“Are you Mr. Eric B. Griffith?”

“Now look, if you’re selling something—”

“My name is Elizabeth Scobey. I’m a Social Service worker assigned to juvenile court in Philadelphia. May I come in, Mr. Griffith?”

“Yes, I believe we did receive some correspondence from you, Miss Scobey,” Eric Griffith said. “Actually, my wife Maud takes care of the mail. I find it a bloody bore. Also, we travel a great deal, Miss — Scobey, was it?”

As she nodded, Griffith flexed his hands in front of him and went on talking, a tension in his voice that struck Miss Scobey as being at variance with his casual smile.

“My wife and I are in the stock business, you see. Not bonds and shares but horse-flesh, which requires that we visit tracks, attend the yearling sales, send reports back to our clients, and so forth. Since we’ve been on the move, we didn’t get to your letters until just a few days ago.”

They sat in the living room of the Griffiths’ small home, Miss Scobey on a settee covered with stained rose damask, her hat and gloves beside her. Griffith had not asked her to remove her coat.

The case worker was curious about Eric Griffith — about his nervousness, his quick smiles, his seemingly careless but, in fact, erratic gestures.

He stood by the fireplace, an elbow resting on the mantlepiece in a practiced manner, fingering a black briar pipe he had taken from his tweed jacket. Under the jacket he wore a yellow vest. The collar of his tattersall shirt was spread by the bulky knot of a red wool-knit tie. He was tall and strongly built with large powerful hands, which he kept twisting in front of him in what seemed to Miss Scobey an oddly defensive gesture, considering his muscular bulk and his easy, patronizing manner. He seemed to have taken out the pipe to control his restless hands. His head was narrow, with high cheekbones reddened by weather. The eyes were blue, pale and arresting, but he was losing his fine, blond hair. A widow’s peak was pronounced and sharp, defined by expanses of pink scalp on either side of it. He was not wearing riding boots or even stout walking shoes, she noticed, but laced brown street shoes that were wrong, she thought, with the bulky tweed coat and yellow vest.

Miss Scobey also noticed that she had lost Eric Griffith’s full attention. He continued to smile at her, but every now and then his eyes went past her to a row of bottles on a table in the corner of the room.

“I called your home several times, Mr. Griffith. The first two times I was cut off. The third time I talked to someone at this number, but I’m afraid I didn’t understand him. And he certainly didn’t understand me.”

Griffith smiled and said, “That was probably Jimmy. He cleans up after parties here, puts a good shine on boots, but I’m afraid he’s not at his best with twentieth-century gadgets like the telephone. How-ever, for what he does, he’s a good old boy.”

Griffith put his pipe on the mantle, went to the table that served as a bar and poured himself a splash of whiskey in a squat glass decorated with daisies.

“Would you like a touch of something? I think there’s sherry...”

“No, thank you. Nothing at all.”

“Perhaps we’d better get down to the point.” Mr. Griffith was still smiling, and nothing in his manner or tone indicated a transition in subject. “I didn’t get in touch with you, Miss Scobey, because there was no point in it. I was shocked by my sister’s death, but my wife and I have nothing to offer the child, nothing at all. We’ve never seen Jessica and she probably doesn’t even know who we are. So I thought it best to just leave it that way.”

Although her professional and personal opinions were not important here, a surge of loyalty to Jessica Mallory compelled Miss Scobey to say, “I think that’s unfortunate, Mr. Griffith. Jessica is a most affectionate and intelligent little girl.”

“That’s quite irrelevant,” Griffith said. “The fact of the matter is, if my sister and Daniel Mallory were so keen to bring a child into this world, then they should have made provisions to take care of it.”

Question, Miss Scobey thought: How did he know they hadn’t?

“I advised them to make sure they could handle things before they—” Griffith shook his head and took a sip of whiskey. “Well, that’s beside the point, too. What is important, Miss Scobey, is that Maud and I refuse to be saddled with responsibilities not of our choosing. Is that clear enough for you?”

“Yes, of course, Mr. Griffith.” Opening her handbag, Miss Scobey took out a leather-bound notebook and unscrewed the top of an old-fashioned fountain pen. Griffith watched warily as she dated and initialed a page of her notebook.

“Mr. Griffith, juvenile court has no authority to suggest who may be responsible for Jessica Mallory’s welfare. The court’s only function is to find a suitable home for children such as Jessica, where they will have a chance to grow up in an atmosphere that is loving and stable and permanent.”

Griffith raised his eyebrows skeptically and said, “Well, if that’s true, Miss Scobey, why did you get in touch with me in the first place?”

“Because there is a way you can help, Mr. Griffith.”

“Oh? What’s that?”

“Well, simply by telling us about your own family background, your sister’s education, for instance, medical history, where you grew up, your hobbies, just general historical background that will help us to establish and evaluate a profile of Jessica.”

Griffith, she suspected, was making an effort to control his relief. “Well, along those lines, I’d be glad to help.”

He smoothed his fine, carefully combed hair, the pressure of his hands sharpening for an instant the widow’s peak that furled like a blond flag above his forehead. “I’ll ask Mrs. Griffith to join us,” he said.

As he went to the stairs to call up, Miss Scobey decided he was like a child released from school on a fine spring day. The sullenness was gone from his lips, the defensive anger from his gestures. And there was a buoyant expression on his face as he repeated his wife’s name saying, “Maud? Maudie, would you care to join us?”

At the same instant, Miss Scobey heard the click of high heels on the uncarpeted stairs that led down to the small entrance hall. Griffith poured himself another whiskey and raised the glass to the tall, blond woman who joined them, her eyes narrowing in a near-sighted inspection of Miss Scobey.

“Darling, this nice lady is helping to find a suitable home for Jessica. Miss Scobey, my wife — Mrs. Griffith.”

“How nice of her.” Maud Griffith sat gracefully on a spool-backed chair beside the few glowing coals in the fireplace. “Would you bring me something to drink, Eric? And wouldn’t Mrs. Scopey like something?”

“It’s Miss Scobey, Mrs. Griffith. And thank you, no.”

“Probably all for the best, not drinking on duty. Might drop some of the little dearies on the wrong doorstep,” Maud Griffith said.

“We don’t deliver them like newspapers, Mrs. Griffith. We’re very careful that—”

“Thank you, Eric.” Maud Griffith accepted a drink from her husband and ignored Miss Scobey’s statement.

A fine pair, Miss Scobey thought. Maud Griffith, in her early thirties probably, but dressed a good bit younger than that in a tight red turtleneck sweater and swirling black skirt that revealed her slim but muscular legs. Her hair was blond, her cheeks round and shiny and her lips full but tight over a row of fine, white teeth. Her blue eyes were quite lovely — clear, healthy whites dramatizing the darker pupils — but there was nothing innocent about them. They were so watchful and unemotional that they looked like shiny globes of colored glass.

And Eric Griffith. For all the carefully tucked-in stomach and the shoulders held back like a cadet and the fastidiously arranged hair, the country tweeds and plummy weskit, Griffith’s knees gave him away, Miss Scobey decided, indulging herself in an uncharacteristic but nonetheless gratifying prejudice. They weren’t the knees of a young gentleman or horseman. They were an unsteady base for his tall, large frame; essential joints unstrengthened by exercise, walking or hard work; the knees — in fact — of a spectator striving always to wear the colors of a participant, a man more accustomed to the bleachers than the arena.

Miss Scobey raised her pen as a cue, and cleared her throat.

Eric Griffith seemed to savor the role he was playing, pacing slowly in front of the fireplace, pausing occasionally to deliberate over his choice of expression. He spoke with practiced skill, the words and sentences flowing as easily as if he were reading from a script. But while some of his comments were droll and caustically amusing, Miss Scobey had the impression that a corrosive anger may have been simmering just below the surface of his statements.

The facts that emerged from his rambling and discursive account became more and more rambling as he made a third trip to the bar.

His sister Monica, he explained, was ten years younger than he. They had been raised in a small town on the eastern shore of Maryland. After high school, Eric had attended the University of Virginia. He dropped out after two years because, as he put it, “I couldn’t stand the boredom of classrooms, professors drilling facts into us.”

Miss Scobey noticed an animation in Griffith’s voice and features when he digressed from linear biographical details and veered to a discussion of theatre classes he’d taken at the university and his work with local drama clubs. He had played Marchbanks in The Doctor’s Dilemma and Professor Higgins in Pygmalion, and read the weather reports on the campus radio station.

Yes, Miss Scobey thought, appraising his obvious but rueful pleasure at these reminiscences. He was an actor all right, using practiced dramatic pauses, and his hands and body to compliment them. It was all a performance, except for the anger, and that emotion seemed like a ground swell supporting everything else, powerful currents independent of external circumstances.

“Actually, a Broadway director — his name was Ira Washburn, you may have heard of him — he also worked with Guthrie in Minneapolis — he was kind enough to say that what I lacked in dedication I might make up for with the odd trick or two, or, who knows, with a bit of natural talent.”

Maud Griffith yawned lightly, then frowned as if an unpleasant thought had occurred to her. She began to massage her knee with the tips of her fingers.

“I think I’m in a draft, Eric.”

“A fat lot Washburn knew—” Griffith went to the bar and refreshed his drink. Then he stared at his wife, and it seemed to Miss Scobey he was returning with some reluctance to present pressures and irritations. “Well, it’s always something, isn’t it, luv?”

With an edge to her voice, his wife said, “I haven’t felt well all morning.”

“Oh, good God!” Eric said. Obviously exasperated, he stared about the room, focused on a small knit afghan on the sofa, scooped it up and dropped it without ceremony across his wife’s slender legs. “I trust that will do until we can helicopter in a team of specialists from Johns Hopkins.”

The narrative continued. Griffith and his sister, Monica, hadn’t been close. After marrying Maud Mercer Saxe, Griffith had moved to Chester County while his sister was in her last year at Bryn Mawr.

“Saxe was, is the name of my first husband,” Maud said with a small smile. “Don’t you think Miss Scobey should know all about that, dear?”

“No, I don’t think that’s necessary,” Griffith said with a curious intensity.

“But shouldn’t an adoption agency want all those gossipy details?”

Without glancing up from her notebook, Miss Scobey said, “Please go on, Mr. Griffith.”

“Of course, Mallory knew a good thing when he saw it. My sister had an adequate job, took care of everything, finances, the house, the child, which left Mallory, the boy genius, free to invent God-knows-what-kind-of mouse-trap to bring the world to his door. Monica came into a few thousand dollars on her twenty-first birthday and that went down the drain, too. Mallory was one of your wild Irish dreamers, head in the clouds, hitching his fortune to any star or crystal ball that came down the pike.”

Maud tucked the afghan about her knees and said, “So naturally, they left nothing for little Jessica.”

Miss Scobey made a question mark in her notebook. How had Maud Griffith known that?

“The least they could have done is take out flight insurance,” Griffith said, and to that comment Miss Scobey added another question mark.

Something occurred to Miss Scobey then — the unpaid loan Monica Griffith had made to someone around her twenty-first birthday.

Miss Scobey had a shrewd idea what particular drain that money had gone down. “It’s not important, but I’m curious, Mr. Griffith. What does your middle initial stand for?”

“Boniface. B for Boniface. I was christened Eric Boniface Griffith.”

“It was his father’s notion,” Maud said with a little laugh. “The original Boniface was the first of the big spenders.”

Miss Scobey closed her notebook. “Thank you, Mr. Griffith. I won’t bother you any further.”

“Tell me, Miss Scobey. Why were you interested in my middle initial?”

“I was just curious,” Miss Scobey said, rising and turning toward the door.

“I don’t believe you,” Eric Griffith said, and his anger was closer to the surface now, raw and ugly in his eyes. “I know why you’re here. You can’t fool me with your talk of Jessica’s welfare.” He mimicked Miss Scobey’s words in a hard, unpleasant voice. “ ‘We just want something loving and stable and permanent—’ ”

“That happens to be the truth, Mr. Griffith.”

“You’re snooping around here for money,” Eric pointed a long, bony finger at Miss Scobey. “Trying to put the squeeze on good old Boniface. Sure, I borrowed two thousand dollars from my sister but only to cut them in on a Daily Double at Belmont Park that would have made us all tens of thousands.”

“Mr. Griffith, believe me. The juvenile court isn’t interested in these details.”

“I did everything I could to help them. She was my sister, practically my baby sister.” There was a sudden glint of tears in his eyes, something lost and forlorn in the sag of his shoulders. Turning, he braced himself with a hand against the mantle, a gesture so mannered that Miss Scobey couldn’t guess whether the tears and emotions were genuine. “I taught her to dance when she went to her first cotillion... she wore little white gloves. But I won’t be pressured this way, I won’t be made responsible for things that don’t concern me!”

Maud Griffith followed Miss Scobey out the front door and down the flagstone walk to her car.

When Miss Scobey was behind the wheel, Maud — Griffith said, “Let’s make sure this doesn’t happen again.” Her hands held the car door open and her bright eyes stared coldly down into Miss Scobey’s. “If I wanted a child, I’d make one of my own. Just remember that. So don’t you ever try again to unload Jessica Mallory on this doorstep. Find another warm, stable home for the little dear.”

Miss Scobey hardened her jaw and looked at Maud Griffith with sharp disapproval. “That will be my pleasure, Mrs. Griffith.”

“Good,” Maud said and slammed the door shut.

Miss Scobey put her car in gear and drove with unaccustomed speed down the narrow dirt road that would take her out to the Philadelphia Pike. She was thinking with angry anticipation of Monday morning when she would have the satisfaction of typing out her notes and appraisal of these strange creatures who lived on Black Velvet Lane.

Maud Griffith stood watching the Volkswagen with its “I Found Jesus!” sticker centered on the rear bumper below the license plate. When the car disappeared at the first intersection, she turned and walked briskly up the path to the house.

Her husband stood smiling in the open door looking to where the small blue car had turned out of sight behind a screen of bare poplar trees.