Ceremony (11 page)

I put everything back and went out and down the stairs. There was nothing more to do there. I went back and checked the French doors to be sure they were latched. Then I put my coat on and went out the front door, which locked behind me. I took the spare keys to a Sears store and had copies made. Then I went back to Poitra's place, unlocked his front door with my duplicate, returned his spares to the middle drawer, and left.

It was dark. I'd been in there for maybe six hours and it felt as if I'd been gone for the winter. I got in the MG and started it up and let the motor idle while I thought. In the dark November night the car was cold. When the engine warmed up I put the heater fan on. One of the things I thought about was the fact that Poitras seemed to be heavily invested in teen sex and that he was Executive Coordinator of the Student Guidance and Counseling Administration. Another thing that I thought about was that he must have more than his state salary coming in to support the life-style he maintained. In Massachusetts that's not unusual. In Massachusetts people don't do state work for the salary. It's the fringe benefits-rapine and pillage-that attract the best and the brightest here.

Susan and I lay in bed in her house on Thanksgiving morning. It was sunny outside the window, and it looked like it wouldn't be cold. I looked at the bedside clock. 7:35. No sound. The room was whitewashed and furnished with colonial pine, and the full flood of sunlight made it almost dazzling in its simple brightness.

Susan said; "You think it's too early to open the champagne?"

"We could mix it with orange juice and argue for vitamins," I said.

Susan took my hand under the covers and we lay quietly on our backs amongst the flowered sheets and pillows. "What does Hawk do on Thanksgiving?" Susan said.

"I have no idea," I said. "Probably has honey-roasted pheasant served to him by an Abyssinian maiden with a dulcimer." "You are peculiar," Susan said. "You trust Hawk with your life or mine. You expect him to risk his life for you -I know you'd risk yours for him-and you don't even know what he does on Thanksgiving. Did you think about inviting him out for dinner?"

"Hawk?" I said.

"Yes." "Have Hawk for Thanksgiving dinner?"

"Certainly. Doesn't he have holidays?"

"Suze," I said. "You just don't have Hawk for Thanksgiving dinner."

"Why not?"

"Well, it's…" I tried to think of the right way to say it. Hawk and I both knew and we knew without having to say it or even think it. "You know how in medieval landscape painting the artists would often include an allegorical representation of death to remind us that it is always present and imminent?"

She nodded.

"That's like inviting Hawk to Thanksgiving dinner. He'd be the figure in the landscape, and that would compromise him. Hawk would not want you to invite him."

"That doesn't make any sense," Susan said.

"It would to Hawk," I said.

Susan was quiet, her hand in mine, our bodies close together. Then she said, "It's where you lose me, this arcane male thing. It's like a set of rituals from a religion that no longer exists, the rules of a kingdom that disappeared before memory. It can't be questioned or explained, it simply is-like gravity or inertia."

"I know," I said.

"I realize it's a source of strength for you," she said, and turned her head from profile to full face, lying close to mine on the pillow, "but you pay a high price for it too, and so does Hawk."

"Hawk higher than I do," I said.

"Because of me?"

"Yes. I have you. He has no one."

"He has you," she said.

I said, "He and I are part of the same cold place. You aren't. You're the source of warmth. Hawk has none. You're what makes me different from Hawk."

"How different?" she said. Close to me her eyes were enormous.

"I'm here for Thanksgiving dinner," I said.

"Yes," she said. "You are. Let's get to it."

I said nothing about Mitchell Poitras and Amy Gurwitz and the Department of Education. It was just Susan and me today, and I would wait till tomorrow for anything else.

Susan started the coffee and I built a large fire in the den. We squeezed a small pitcher of orange juice and shared it while .I mixed up some johnnycake batter and dropped spoonfuls of it onto the hot griddle. Johnnycake is made with white cornmeal and is somewhere between cornmeal mush and a pancake. It may be an acquired taste, but Suze and I were nothing on a holiday if not authentic. We ate the johnnycake with butter and maple syrup in front of the fire in the den and drank coffee.

"Pilgrims," I said.

"Speak for yourself, John," she said.

"Did you know that Priscilla Alden's maiden name was Mullins?" I said. "Incredibly, no," Susan said.

"Or that a guy writing at the time referred to Miles Standish as Captain Shrimp?"

"Much like yourself," Susan said, and grinned at me that fallen-angel grin-the one that Eve must have grinned at Adam.

"Ah," I said, "how quickly they forget."

The fire settled more densely, the logs feeding each other's intensity like mutual enemies. The newspaper came. Susan got both the Globe and the Herald- American. We took turns reading through them, Susan much more quickly than I. We fueled the fire once or twice and returned to the couch in front of it, feet up on the old sea chest that Susan used as a coffee table, spines bent, sprawled on the cushions with our thighs touching in warm torpor. Susan went to shower. I asked her not to use all the hot water. She said she wouldn't. -I read the sports page. Already, barely a month after the World Series, there was talk of a baseball strike. There were ten contract renegotiations. The Red Sox had decided not to pay anyone, and everyone was threatening to be a free agent. It read like The Wall Street Journal. If 1 were a player, would I want six trillion dollars? Yes. I guessed I would. Did 1 find it interesting? No, I did not. Has the game changed? Say it ain't so, Joe.

Susan appeared in half an hour wearing jeans no tighter than the skin on a grape and a white oxford shirt with a button-down collar and cowboy boots, smelling of perfume and shampoo and soap. I inhaled. "Sensual," I said, "but not too far from innocence."

"Far enough," Susan said. I went to shower and shave and put on clean clothes. When I came back we went to the kitchen and began Thanksgiving dinner. Johnny Hartman was on the stereo. The sun was halfway to zenith and made the tile kitchen glisten. The cooking steamed the windows a bit, filtering the sun slightly and making the brilliance of the kitchen a bit muted as we progressed. At noon Susan brought out a bottle of Dom Pdrignon 1971, which we shared as we cooked. The barrel-bodied Lab appeared at the back door and scratched to come in. Susan put down a bowl of water and she drank noisily and long. When she finished she looked expectantly at Susan, her ears a little forward, her tail in a slow scimitar wag. Susan took a round dog biscuit from a box in the cupboard and gave it to the Lab.

"Just one," she said. "You're on a diet," The dog took the biscuit to the other side of the kitchen, wolfed it down, and lay down with a heavy exhalation and a solid thump. She lay on her side against the back door with her feet toward us and her tongue out and appeared to go to sleep. "Whose dog is that?" I said.

"People down the street."

By two o'clock dinner was nearly done, and Susan went to set the table while I did the last few tricks, and at 2:30 we sat down to dinner in Susan's dining room with a white linen tablecloth and pink linen napkins and champagne in a silver cooler. It was Susan's good English china and the silver she'd gotten for a wedding present from her ex-mother-in-law. The tall tulip-shaped champagne glasses I had bought her. I'd bought four, but mostly we used just two and drank champagne alone. Sonny Rollins was spinning softly in the background. We didn't insist on complete authenticity.

We began by eating hot pumpkin soup and then some cold asparagus with green herb mayonnaise on a bed of red lettuce. After that we each had half a pheasant with raspberry vinegar sauce and a kind of salon pilaf that Susan made from white and wild rice with pignolia nuts. For dessert we had sour cherry cobbler with Vermont cheddar cheese, and after we had finished with the last of the champagne and I had embarrassed myself with a second serving, we took coffee and Grand Marnier into the den and drank it in a near stupor on the couch before the' dwindling fire with the football game on the televi- sion. Susan hated football, so we turned the sound off. She had three back issues of The New Yorker and read a series on psychoanalysis that had run there, or pretended to, while I watched the Lions and the Packers, or pretended to. With a last desperate effort I got some more wood on the fire and then settled back on the couch. In fifteen minutes Susan's head rested against my shoulder, her mouth slightly open and her breath shifting occasionally into a faint snore. Before halftime my chin was against my chest and my cheek was pressed against the top of Susan's head.

It was dark when we woke up. The fire barely shimmered on the hearth. A newscast was progressing silently on the TV screen and Thanksgiving Day was nearly past. They ran the local college and high school football results on a crawl, and as the mesmerizing sequence went on it was like a rehearsal of small-town Massachusetts: clean-lined white buildings around a common, square brick schools, cheerleaders with pony- tails and chunky thighs, and parents in pride and contentment watching the children play. "Nice day," Susan murmured. "For some," I said. "Not for most?" "Pretty to think so," I said.

We were having leftover cherry cobbler for breakfast on Friday morning when I asked Susan about Mitchell Poitras.

"Oh, sure," she said. "I know Mitch."

"He's living in a very expensive town house on Beacon Street with Amy Gurwitz," I said.

"Poitras?" Susan said. It always irked me when she called people by their last name. One of the boys. Tough as a ten-minute egg. Wasn't my job to tell her how to talk, so I sat on the irksomeness.

"The very same," I said. "And he has a studio and lab set up for making porn films and tapes of very young girls and boys."

"Poitras?"

"Mitchell Poitras," I said. "I gather he hadn't put that down in his curriculum vitae."

"My God, are you sure?"

.`Yep." "How do you know for sure?" she said.

"I burgled his house Wednesday while he and Amy were off celebrating the harvest."

"But how did you think… yes, of course, because that's where you found Amy and she used to be a friend of April's and you had nothing else to do. Why in hell didn't you mention him to me before?"

"Until I found evidence that he worked for the Department of Education I had no reason to think you might know him," I said.

"Mitchell Poitras?" Better I thought. "But, Jesus Christ, do you realize who he is?"

"Letters say he's Executive Coordinator, comma, Student Guidance and Counseling Administration."

Susan nodded.

"It's a job that gives him access to every disturbed kid in the state-access to psychological profiles, teacher reports, principal evaluations, guidance recommendations, often police material. My good sweet Jesus," Susan said. Her mind could integrate very swiftly.

"What big teeth you have, Granny," I said.

"Yes," she said. "Like finding out your baby-sitter is a werewolf. You say he has facilities to make these things?"

"Yes. Not just a collector, a producer. A distributor."

"A collector would be bad enough," Susan said.

"Now, my dear, consenting adults in the privacy of their home…

"Not for a man doing what he does. That's bullshit if you're Poitras. But to produce… could it be the wrong man?" "Ugly fat guy," I said, "dresses like he's got a charge at Woolworth's."

Susan nodded. Her face was sharp with concern. "What are you going to do?"

"Eventually I'm going to blow the whistle on him, but first I want to see if he knows where April is."

"Eventually?"

"I didn't hire on to clean up the state," I said. "I hired on to find April. First things first."

"But-"

"No," I said. "Don't give me the well-being-of-themany-against-the-one speech. The many are an abstraction. April is not. She rode in my car. I'm going to find her first."

"One of the rules," Susan said. There was no smile when she said it.

"Sure," I said.

"How much is it for April?" she said. "How much for you?"

"Doesn't matter," I said. "It's a way to live. Anything else is confusion." Susan sat and looked into her coffee cup. "I disapprove," she said.

I nodded.

"But it's yours. There are things you disapprove of that I do anyway," she said.

I nodded again.

"So first you find April, and then you…" She made a twisting gesture with her right hand, turning the palm up and quickly down again.

"Then I air out the Student Guidance and Counseling Administration," I said.

"Yes," she said. "And in the meantime I might do some research." "See whether Poitras recruits?" I said. She nodded. "I'll bet he does," I said. She nodded again.

By Monday night we knew that Poitras almost certainly recruited, and on a pretty good scale. I spent Monday staring alertly at his town house on Beacon Street. Susan spent Monday on the phone to people she knew in high school guidance offices around the state. In nearly every case of a dropout, male or female, there was clear evidence of contact with Poitras.

"Either he met the students during crisis intervention sessions," Susan said to me on the telephone, "or at coordinative evaluation conferences or he's been a resource person during attempts at therapeutic redirection."

"You are, I hope, quoting," I said.

"You mean the jargon? You hear it so much you get used to it."

"Talking like that will rot your teeth," I said.

"Never mind that. I checked back in my own files on

Amy Gurwitz and April Kyle. He talked with both of them not long before they dropped out."

"How long?"

"Well, it's hard to say," Susan said. "A kid doesn't just one day drop out. First he or she starts to cut classes and that increases in frequency and after a while it blends into having left school. He spoke to both of them within two weeks of the missing persons report to the Smithfield police-that we could be precise about."