She yanked her fragment of a robe around her and stalked back indoors. Dexter seethed at her vanity and his own impulsiveness. It was a weakness.
He tossed his cold coffee onto the rocks and went inside. In his dressing room, he removed his gat from its ankle holster and locked it in the cabinet he kept for that purpose. He hung his trousers and jacket in the closet, threw his shirt into a corner to be laundered, and stood at the sink in his Sulka undershorts, washing with cold water. Then he entered his musky, sunken bedroom. The lush expanse of the bed he and Harriet shared was a repudiation of the barracks-style sleeping arrangements favored by her Puritan forebears. He heard her breathing and slipped into bed beside her. The light from the dressing room caught on the wingspan of her cheekbones, her sultry mouth. Very pretty, his Harriet. Distractingly pretty—why had he supposed her daughter would be any less so? She was composed even in sleep; it was Dexter’s job to discompose her. He’d been doing it since she was sixteen, begging to come along on his liquor runs, which he’d interrupted to fuck her by moonlight in Long Island pumpkin fields, her debutante dresses bunched over her head, full of leaves. A night’s worth of aggravation had gathered inside him like racehorses twitching at a starting gate. This would do for action, it always would. He was on top of Harriet before she was even awake.
“Morning, baby,” she said in the husky voice that had been so unnerving in her youth, before she’d grown into it. “Rude awakening.”
“Long night,” Dexter said.
*
Before Mass the next morning, the new deacon took Dexter aside to discuss the bell. It had an “invisible crack” that not only compromised its sound but might result in a break, a fall, a crushed parishioner. Clergy always assumed Dexter would be an easy mark for church improvements, sin being inherent to his livelihood. Already there had been a chipped altar slab, new robes for the choirboys, and now this bell, which sounded fine to him. In fact, he wouldn’t have minded if they’d rung it less.
“I’m surprised, Deacon,” he said as they stood in a bushy nook outside of Saint Maggie’s. “A church not twenty-five years old.”
“During the Depression, we made no improvements at all,” the deacon murmured.
“Not so. Your predecessor, Deacon Bertoli, tapped me for vestments and a new chalice, not to mention those stations of the cross wall hangings in the apse.”
“Your generosity has sustained us,” the deacon intoned, eyes downcast.
Dexter studied him in the frank sunlight: a young man, pouches under his eyes, a flush at odds with the season: booze, probably. Less common in wop clergy than Irish but certainly not unheard of, especially in a celibate. Having built his career on the force of human appetites, Dexter could only shake his head at Rome’s mad insistence that its priests leave unsatisfied the most primal urge of all. Bertoli played the ponies; Dexter had run into him twice at Belmont and once at Saratoga during his “faith retreat.” He’d been transferred to a city without a racetrack. And now his replacement, a wino, wanted higher-quality ink than he could afford on the pittance they paid him. Who could blame him?
Dexter paid no attention to the sermon. He didn’t give a fig about religion; he’d tethered himself to Saint Maggie’s to fend off any possibility of being roped into Episcopal worship with his in-laws. All those Puritans, God help him. If you had to spend an hour in church, let it be gory, incense-drenched Catholicism. He found Mass a good time to mull over business. Today he wondered what to do about Hugh Mackey, the debt-ridden dealer who was trying to blackmail Heels. Heels was the most genial gee in the world until he got sore, and he was starting to get sore.
After Mass, when the requisite neighborly mixing had taken place outside the church, Dexter piled his family into the Cadillac for the long drive to his in-laws’ house on Sutton Place. He’d barely pulled the car away when the twins began fencing with twigs. “Daddy!” Tabby shrieked. “Make them stop!”
“Boys,” Dexter said sharply, and the twins fell still. A current of amusement flickered between them always, like a telegraph.
“At the hunt club yesterday,” Tabby said, “they hit their jai alais by the terrace until people made them stop.”
“Don’t be a tattletale,” Harriet said.
“We were quiet,” John-Martin said resentfully.
For reasons that eluded Dexter, his sons liked to enter promotional contests, usually at picture theaters. They tap-danced, turned somersaults, hung from bars upside down, and whistled through their teeth. When successful, they brought home bugles or harmonicas or roller skates—items they already owned or could easily afford. Dexter feared they were constitutionally unserious.
“The hunt club doesn’t consider jai-alai-ing a sport, eh?” he couldn’t resist needling his wife. “Not in the same category as the steeplechase?”
“There haven’t been races in years,” she said. “As you know.”
As a girl, she’d gone to those steeplechases with her mother, who had hoped Harriet would find a husband of suitable pedigree—ideally, a Brit visiting for the Oxford-Cambridge-Rockaway team matches. “It’s just a bunch of old stoves getting stinko and leering at polo players” had been Harriet’s early description of the Rockaway Hunting Club, and she and Dexter had made a point, on their rare visits, of exercising their marriage vows in at least one new location. But in recent years, Harriet had grown inexplicably fond of the place. Now she went often, sipping pink ladies with the same old stoves she once mocked, listening to their doddering tales of meeting Queen Victoria as debutantes. She’d taken up golf. All of it bothered Dexter in some indefinable way.
“We should never have gone,” John-Martin grumbled. “We don’t fit in.”
“Play polo,” Dexter said. “You’ll fit in just fine.”
“We don’t have horses,” Phillip reminded him.
*