“I know you and Calvin were lovers all those years ago. It was you he meant when he called for Deenie last week, wasn’t it?”
Her fingers clenched on the arms of her chair, but she nodded. “How did you know? Was it the key to Larchmont that he had kept?”
“That, and some other things. Armand Pelletier left an unfinished manuscript among his papers that pretty well spelled it out.”
“Ah, Armand. I wondered if he would come back to haunt me. He was so passionate about workers’ rights, and for a time I reflected that passionbecause I was passionate and needed some object for my ardor. He was bitter when I left him for Calvin; he accused me of being too fastidious, of needing the fleshpots of Egypt. I told him clean sheets would suffice. But it had more to do with-Calvin was a generous lover, and Armand … took more than he gave. His passions ultimately were for himself alone. With Calvin, too, it was only a way of getting what he himself desired, but I didn’t see that until much later.”
“There was never a question that you would leave your husband?” Involuntarily, I let myself be sidetracked.
“I thought-I had the notion that if I divorced MacKenzie, Calvin and I might marry. But however much Mother hated MacKenzie, she couldn’t stand the scandal a divorce would cause, and before I’d nerved myself to stand up to her-Calvin had married Renee.” She twisted the great diamond on her right hand. “I had gone to Washington when he was called
before the committee. I was in the hearing room. I was one of the spectators. I had gone with the idea that I would surprise him. I loved him; I thought he loved me and that if I declared myself it would be a help to his spirit during those difficult days.”
“And he turned you down?”
She turned her head so I couldn’t see her face. “I never made the offer. He left the room surrounded by lawyers and reporters. I looked for him in his club at the end of the day and they told me where he was dining. When I got to the restaurant, I saw him sitting with Renee-as he had often sat with me-so close the clothes themselves might melt from our bodies. I walked away, walked blindly, walked through the night, thinking only that I must never let anyone know how humiliated I had been. I walked for hours, until I ended up weary in some district I didn’t know. I went into a bar, thinking I would have a brandy and get them to call me a cab.”
She stopped, her fingers still working on her ring. “And saw my husband. With Olin Taverner. As close as Renee had been to Calvin. It was that kind of bar. MacKenzie looked up and recognized me.”
“Your husband was gay? Not impotent? Was that the night you found out?”
“‘Gay’? What a strange word for a man whose homosexuality weighed on him like a Druid’s stone. No, I had known for years. My only surprise was seeing him with Olin. When we married, MacKenzie was often in New York, it was an open secret between him and his parents that he went there to visit homosexual bars. Marriage was supposed to cure him of that as it was supposed to cure me of-lovers and unwanted pregnancies. I suppose I took lovers in the hopes of shocking my mother away from me, but she was far more tenacious than I; she would take me to Europe, to those Swiss sanitoria. After she and Blair Graham married MacKenzie to me, he and I tried for a few years; my daughter Laura was his child. But MacKenzie was miserable in my arms, in any woman’s arms, so we arrived at a tacit understanding: we would present a bland united front to the world and seek our pleasures privately. We were both discreet, and we came to be good friends for a time.”
After another pause, when I thought she would slice her finger to the bone with her diamonds, she said, “And then I met Armand, at a party
Calvin gave for him, a triumphant party, when Armand’s Tale of Two Countries had been on the Times best-seller list for twenty weeks. I started going to organizing meetings with him-but you know that part.”
“Yes,” I said gently. “I know that part. Was Calvin Darraugh’s father?” “I’ve never been sure.” She turned bitter eyes back to me. “It might have been Armand, but I think it was Calvin. It doesn’t matter. Darraugh and MacKenzie loved one another, oh, I think better than most fathers and sons do, even though MacKenzie knew the boy couldn’t possibly be his, and Mother suspected as much. And when MacKenzie died-when I killed him-“
“No!” the exclamation came out, involuntary.
“Oh, I didn’t pull the noose tight. But I let Calvin know what I saw in that Washington bar. My last gift to him as a lover. I thought-it would give him leverage with Olin. And it did.”