Back in my car, I could hardly summon the energy to drive. Prude, she’d called me. Was that really me? Next to Marcena, I felt like some large slow object, maybe a rhinoceros, trying to do a pirouette around a greyhound. I had an impulse to go home and spend the day in bed, watching football and feeling seriously sorry for myself and my beat-up body, but when I got home the old man was packed up and ready to go to Max’s. He had a large casserole filled with his wife’s recipe for sweet-potato pudding. He had brushed the dogs until their coats shone, and tied orange bows around their necks—Max had said the dogs could come as long as they behaved and as long as I repaired any damage Mitch did to his garden.
In the evening, when we’d eaten the way one always does on these holidays, and I was in the garden with the dogs, Morrell limped out to join me. He didn’t need his cane for short periods now, a hopeful sign.
With the crowd inside, and me watching the football game while Morrell talked politics with Marcena’s father, we hadn’t really spent any time together today. The sky was already dark, but the garden was protected by a high wall that kept the fiercest of the lake winds at bay. We sat under the trellis where a few late-blooming roses produced a feeble sweetness. I tossed sticks for the dogs to keep Mitch from digging.
“I’ve been jealous of Marcena.” I was astonished to hear myself say that.
“Darling, not to be indelicate, but a Siberian tiger in the living room is less obvious than you are.”
“She takes so many risks, she’s done so much!”
Morrell was astounded. “Victoria, if you took any more risks, you’d have been dead before I ever met you. What do you want? Skydiving without a parachute? Climb Mount Everest without oxygen?”
“Insouciance,” I said. “I do things because people need me, or I think they do—Billy, Mary Ann, the Dorrados. Marcena does things out of a spirit of adventure. It’s the spirit, that’s what’s different between us.”
He held me more tightly. “Yes, I can see that—she must look as though she’s free, and you feel too tightly bound. I don’t know what to say about that, but—I like knowing I can count on you.”
“But I’m tired of people counting on me.” I told him the image I’d had, the rhino and the greyhound.
He gave a loud shout of laughter but took my hand. “Vic, you’re beautiful in motion, or even when you’re lying still—not that that happens very often. I love your energy, and the grace you have when you run. For Christ’s sake, stop being jealous of Marcena. I can’t imagine you casually helping Bron Czernin rig a lethal device in his back kitchen and then not telling the cops because you didn’t want to ruin your big story. And it’s not because you’re so damn conscientious, it’s because you use your brain, okay?”
“Okay,” I said, not really convinced, but ready to drop the subject.
“Speaking of jealousy, why does Sandra Czernin have it in for you?” Morrell asked.
I felt my face turning crimson in the dark garden. “When we were in high school, I helped play a very nasty practical joke on her. My cousin Boom-Boom invited her to the senior prom. My mom had just died, my dad was kind of clinging to me, didn’t want me dating, and Boom-Boom had said I could go with him. But when I found out he was taking Sandra and I’d be like a fifth wheel, I really lost it. We’d already had some disagreements, she and I, so the prom felt like a total betrayal to me. She slept around, all us girls knew that, but I wouldn’t acknowledge that Boom-Boom did, too. She used to be pretty, in a soft, Persian cat kind of way, and I suppose, well, never mind that. Anyway, I was furious, and—and my basketball team and I, we stole her underpants out of her locker when she was in the pool—we used to have a swim program at Bertha Palmer. The night before the prom, we broke into the gym and shinnied up the ropes and hung her pants from the ceiling, with a big red S drawn on them, next to Boom-Boom’s letter jacket. When Boom-Boom found out it was me, he didn’t speak to me for six months.”
Morrell was roaring with laughter.
“It’s not funny!” I shouted.
“Oh, it is, Warshawski, it is. You are such a pit dog. Maybe you don’t have a spirit of insouciance, but whatever your spirit is—it keeps a lot of people on their toes.”
I figured he meant it as a compliment, so I tried to take it as one. We sat in the garden until I was shivering in the chill air. After a while, we went back to his place with the dogs—a Loop-bound guest volunteered to drive Mr. Contreras home. We huddled in bed much of the weekend, two sore and fragile bodies, bringing each other such comfort as this mortal life affords.
On Monday, I had a call from Mildred, the Bysen family factotum, to say they had cut a check for Sandra Czernin and were messengering it down to her. “You might like to know that Rose Dorrado started work this morning as a supervisor in our Ninety-fifth Street store. And Mr. Bysen feels he’d like to make a special gesture to Bertha Palmer High, since that’s where he went to school. He’s going to build a new gym this summer, and, next winter, he’ll install coaches for both the girls’ and the boys’ basketball teams. We’ll be holding a press conference on this down at the school this afternoon. We’re creating a whole new program for teens called the ‘Bysen Promise Program.’ It will help teens keep a Christian focus through athletics.”