CHAPTER SEVEN
Biting winds drove a steady drizzle of bone-chilling rain against hapless pedestrians; traffic snarled for miles in every direction; and it would have been worth Peggy's life to catch a cab. Rush hour was at its height, and since the subway was right outside Bloomingdale's anyway, she decided to make her way downtown underground.
Her estrangement from Hal had intensified over the past several weeks, and the affable, affectionate and amusing man she'd known and loved for so long had all but disappeared. In his place was a driven and remote careerist who seemed to her to be totally at the mercy of the demands of his job, and utterly indifferent to all they had formerly shared together.
As the Lexington Avenue train lurched to a halt at Thirty-third Street and Peggy struggled her way out of the car against the damp and urgent crowd that jostled and crushed her, she thought bitterly of the recent quarrels she and Hal had been having over St. Martin's. For reasons she couldn't put into words, but which she felt with the certainty of her entire being, Peggy was convinced that she should get Sam out of there as soon as she could make some alternate arrangement. She couldn't really stick him in a public school at this point—aside from the fact that she herself didn't really want that for him, Hal's burgeoning snobbery simply precluded such a move. It was crazy, really, the intensity of his investment in that school—crazy and frightening, because it just didn't make any sense.
Almost in desperation, Peggy had agreed to have dinner tonight with Sarah Goldenson, Sam's old nursery school teacher. The woman had called her the other day—out of the blue, it had seemed to Peggy—to see how Sam was doing, and Peggy had decided right then and there to get together with her and pour out all of her misgivings and miseries about St. Martin's. Maybe the teacher who had been so good to Sam, and who so obviously adored him, could help her. For some reason, she was almost certain that Sarah Goldenson would not find her growing distaste for St. Martin's at all surprising or uncomprehensible.
Peggy spotted Sarah Goldenson as soon as she entered the restaurant. She'd already taken a table, and her face brightened with a welcoming and somehow comforting smile as Peggy approached her.
After they'd ordered drinks and dispensed with some routine and perfunctory chit-chat, Sarah Goldenson came abruptly to the point. She didn't mean to pry or cause offense, she assured Peggy, but Sam was such a special child, and she'd always been so fond of him, that she just felt she had to let Peggy know that however ridiculous it might seem, she'd been worried about Sam for months. She felt she had to share these feelings with Peggy.
Peggy's vodka and tonic had arrived by this time, and she'd already drained it and signaled the waiter to bring another round. And even though she'd quit smoking years ago, and hadn't even thought about it in as long as she could remember, she now felt a craving for a cigarette that almost left her breathless.
"... didn't get to meet her when she observed at the nursery school," Sarah Goldenson was saying, "but it seemed to me a Miss Putnam from St. Martin's exhibited a rather inexplicable—unsavory, if you will—interest in your Sam, especially since at that point he wasn't even an applicant."
"I'm afraid I'm not following you," Peggy said weakly, as she reached gratefully for her second drink and decided to force herself to nurse it.
"Well, as you probably know, it's common practice for these private schools to send someone around to various nursery schools to observe applicants in their nursery school environment. Since Town and Country sends so many kids on to private schools, we're subjected to a constant round of observers in the fall. Their comments and judgments become a part of each kid's application file. Anyway, one day last October when I was out sick with one thing or another, a Miss Putnam came to observe my class, which was perfectly normal, since a number of the boys had applied to St. Martin's. But about a week later, she called me on the phone and started asking a lot of questions about Sam, particularly about his drawing, which she must have seen him working on while she was there. I just assumed there must be some mistake—I told her Sam Cooper hadn't even applied to St. Martin's. She said she knew that—she'd just been so taken by his talent she wanted to know more about him. At the time I guess I didn't find that all that peculiar—he is strikingly gifted as an artist—but then, when I found out he'd been admitted to that school on such an irregular basis and I thought back on my conversation with Putnam, it seemed to take on a—oh, I don't know—almost sinister quality. And the more I've thought about it, the more concerned I've become. So here I am. If you think I'm out of line—even if you think I'm nuts—just say so, and we'll just go ahead with dinner as if this conversation never took place. But I have to tell you that I know in my gut I'm on to something!"
Peggy was now in the grip of an anxiety so powerful she felt that it must surely be emanating from her body like some visible substance. But surely neither she nor Sarah Goldenson should allow themselves to disintegrate into infantile irrationality over this whole business. When you thought about it, their fears and suspicions not just about St. Martin's but about Sam's "gift" itself—for Peggy knew without having to be told that Sarah Goldenson felt as she did that there was a literally uncanny power to Sam's drawing—seemed both ludicrous and deranged. But no. It simply was no use to try to pretend that this was "all in her head." But what to do? Somehow she had to get Sam out of Putnam's clutches—he'd never set foot in that school again. And as for Hal's complicity in all this—if complicity there was—she'd get to the bottom of that, too. Her son's survival was at stake. She was convinced of that now. Nothing and no one could prevent her from doing everything in her power to safeguard him.
***
The next morning she walked right in. With Sam's hand in hers, his grip tightening when they came into view of the school, Peggy strode up the marble steps, through the doors, and into the large, domed space that functioned as an anteroom. It was empty of anyone who looked official, but it was crowded with boys moving in all directions, some of the older ones pausing to gape as if her presence contaminated the air.
When she bent down to speak to him, she could see Sam's eyes darting frantically to the side, real fear grabbing at the flesh of his face so that his cheeks seemed to sag.
"Now look, honey," Peggy said softly, "there's absolutely nothing to this. I'll have a little chat with Miss Putnam, and everything will be hunky-dory, I promise. You just show me the way, okay?"
He pulled her along to a hallway that gave off to their left. The light was weak in here, but even so Peggy could see large, brooding portraits of somber, white-haired men peering down at them from heavy gilt frames. A curious odor, like that of wood smoke mixed with a sweetish fragrance—lavender, perhaps, or frankincense—hung thick in the corridor like some meaty, sluggish mist. Small boys passed silently by in both directions, their well-shod feet stepping reverently as they negotiated the gleaming parquet floor.
Sam came to a halt before a wide, paneled door. There was a white card fitted into a brass slot, the slot screwed into the door at a level where a small boy would have no trouble seeing it. Inked onto the card in flowery, embellished script there was the number One and the letter P.
Sam tugged at Peggy's hand as if to warn her, as if to say this was it.
She glanced at her watch. She had to hold her wrist closer to her face to read the time in the light that came foggily from overhead.
It was eight minutes to eight, exactly three minutes before the first bell.
Peggy knocked lightly, waited, and then she smiled confidently at Sam and pushed open the door.
***
Three rows of wide-eyed faces—their heads all turning on the stalks of their necks like standing birds shifting their attention in unison—gawked fiercely in Peggy's direction.
Gently she coaxed Sam forward, and then she took a step inside after him.
"Go to your seat," Peggy said, and again pushed at the door.
It swung all the way back on its well-oiled hinges, presenting a view of the head of the class—the portable blackboard, the massive oaken desk, the teacher as tall sitting as Peggy was standing, her blonde hair pulled back into a bun skewered by a sharpened pencil and her eyes rimmed by the perfectly round spectacles which rested ponderously on a nose that was a snout.
It was the same nose Sam had drawn, and it seemed to be sniffing the air for Peggy's scent.
"Why, you must be Mrs. Cooper!" the woman said evenly, as she pushed back her chair and stood up to her huge, raw-boned height. "How nice of you to visit us!"
The woman came forward and extended her hand. "I'm Miss Putnam. Class?" the woman said, slowly turning her face to the rows of staring boys. "This is Samuel's mother, Mrs. Cooper. Will you say good morning, please?"
It was like a choir of carefully rehearsed voices.
"Good morning, Mrs. Cooper!"
Peggy turned to face them, scanning the room for Sam's desk.
It was there, at the far end of the very last row. It was the same desk where the boy in the drawing . . .
She could not finish the thought.
"Thank you, class," Miss Putnam called out commandingly in reply. "Now you will please compose yourselves while Mrs. Cooper and I visit together before first bell."
When she turned to face Peggy again, Peggy saw the eyes—vapid, virtually colorless, like small balls of frosty ice.
"Shall we step outside?"
Peggy felt herself drowning in the woman's piercing gaze. The room seemed suddenly airless, a chamber that could not support life—as if everything, the elements themselves, had drowsily raced away from her and left her suspended in a dream that was now gliding irresistibly toward its bad part, hard surfaces melting into something soggy, vivid hues spilling into a gluey cataract of grey, deathly paste.
She was numb, and she thought she was going to faint. She said, "Of course," and when she spoke, the words were muffled and she heard them swiftly sucked away. She felt herself staggering slightly as she attempted to move her body in the right direction, nearly losing her footing entirely as she marched out the door in the wake of the tall, angular figure of the first-grade teacher.
***
"Now, then," Miss Putnam was saying, her voice pitched so low it was like a priest's intoning the sacrament, "was there something in particular you wished to see me about?"
Peggy looked up as if taken by surprise. She tried to meet the woman's eyes, not to flinch from their strangely fixed stare.
"I know I must be interfering," she began, striving to maintain some kind of control over herself and speak deliberately, precisely, decisively—but everything inside her seemed to wilt under the cold fire that came from those glaced eyes. "I mean, I know there's some kind of rule about parents bothering teachers near the beginning of school."
"Nonsense!" Miss Putnam exploded. "Perfect stuff-and-nonsense!" She smiled as if together they shared an amusing conspiracy. "My dear Mrs. Cooper," Miss Putnam said, lowering her face close to Peggy's, "if I may hazard to say it, I sometimes think the headmaster's rules are as stuffy and dated as he is. But let's let that be our little secret, shall we?"
Peggy tried to return the woman's smile, but her face was frozen stiff. She knew it was her turn to say something, and yet she wasn't quite sure what the words should be.
"Was it something regarding Samuel?" Miss Putnam was saying helpfully as Peggy was still trying to organize her thoughts. "He's such a charming young man, so well-conducted and eager. I daresay he's looking forward to a superbly constructive year."
Peggy swallowed and lurched ahead. "It's about his drawing, Miss Putnam, if you'll forgive me—because, you see, last night—well, last night he was very upset. What it was is that he somehow got the idea that here at St. Martin's he was going to be told what to draw."
"Told what to draw?" she repeated, as if Peggy were addressing her in some foreign language. "Really, Mrs. Cooper, what an extraordinarily curious complaint. I'm sure St. Martin's is as supportive of genuine creativity as any school in the city, but we do have a specific way of presenting all the disciplines—from art to arithmetic and everything in between."
"But Sam was so upset last night. I didn't get the impression he was rebelling against disciplined instruction. I got the impression he was being terrified by some form of coercion." Even as she said it, Peggy felt and heard the absurdity of her own words. Would she have backed Sam up if he'd wanted to use a comb instead of a bow during his Suzuki violin lessons?
But the old battle-axe seemed to be bending over backwards to make things easy for her. "Mrs. Cooper," she was saying earnestly, "believe me, it takes a lot of our finest pupils a bit of a while to adjust to the structure of St. Martin's. But in the end, most of them come around. Believe me, it's a very warm and supportive world here—but it's based on order. We do have very definite ideas about the way things should be done. The more students and their parents come to share our point-of-view, the better off everyone is all around."
Peggy struggled to say something, but she felt the words skidding back down her throat. Instead, she nodded and did her best to maintain some semblance of dignified composure.
Just then the school bell split the air. "I want to thank you for coming in," Miss Putnam said as she pushed open the door. "Please feel free to call on me at any time you have any questions or problems about Sam's situation here." Now that the harsh light flooding out from the classroom had thrown her face into sudden shadow, her eyes were hidden behind her glasses.
It was as if the woman had become invisible except for the huge silhouette her formidable body subtracted from the back-scattering light. But when Peggy's eyes adjusted, she saw it again, so shocking in its pig-like shape that it seemed like something added to the young woman's face, a false nose Miss Putnam wore as a harmless kind of joke.
"Yes, of course," Peggy managed to say before the glaring light disappeared behind the closed door and she stood all alone in the murky gloom of the corridor, the school bell still raging in her ears as if its terrible scream were a contagion the mind itself could catch.
***
She took the subway to Fifty-ninth Street—but as she stepped off the train, she understood that she was too distraught to work. She ducked into a phone booth on Lexington, called her assistant, and told him she was too sick to come in, realizing as she uttered the lie that it was now the truth. She dropped in another dime and telephoned Hal. When his secretary put him on, Peggy hurried through her speech as if reading from a script and then hung up before he could blurt out some excuse.
She said, "I'm coming right over and you've got to make time," hung up, jerked open the door, and started picking her way through the pedestrians that jammed the sidewalks in front of Bloomingdale's and Alexander's.
She headed south to Forty-seventh Street before turning west toward the Avenue of the Americas, scarcely noticing the deep layer of black overcast that was forcing the day from the skies. As she walked, her thoughts fluttered between spasms of rage and panic overlaid by a queer shrinking feeling, as if she herself were a child obliged to call out Good morning! in chorus and be subjected to the "discipline" of that unbelievably creepy woman.
Desperately, she sought to get a purchase on her emotions, to reduce fear and anger to something more manageable—appropriate concern, unspecific anxiety, a mother's normal range of unfocused worries. Vainly, she tried sifting through the little data she already had—but painstakingly as she proceeded, examining it item by item, in the end what she knew was like that screwy contraption her dad had contrived, all noise and flailing lights, a commotion whose chaos left you with nothing but a drink of sickeningly sweet, ruby-red water and the afterlight of a turbulent luminescence still shimmering in front of your eyes.
FORGIVE
There was no making any sense out of any of it. You either swallowed it or you didn't.
Forgive what? What had Hal done that called for forgiveness? Failing to come home before Sam went to bed? Or something unimaginably worse?
She heard the ugly distortion of city thunder now, and for an instant it diverted her attention. But as she cast her eyes down to the street again, it all came back to her, the inked facsimile of the first-grade teacher aloofly contemplating a roomful of boys, one of them—Sam!—lying dead.
***
Peggy hastened through the echoing lobby, nodding absently to the starter as she turned in at the bank of elevators that served Arista's floors. She got off at twenty-one, half-waved to the receptionist, and headed for the entryway that led to the Corporate Affairs section.
Hal's new office door was closed.
Peggy raised her fist to knock. But then she changed her mind.
He sat with his back turned, his feet propped up on the couch that stood behind his desk, the telephone receiver crooked between his shoulder and chin, one hand lifted to the top of his head, his fingertips combing back and forth through his curly, thatch-colored hair.
Instinct, suspicion, curiosity—Peggy couldn't say what made her do it. But she left the door ajar and stepped gingerly across the carpet, seating herself in the chair placed closest to his desk. She considered what she was doing, and it pierced her with shame. Yet she persuaded herself it really wasn't that she was trying to keep her presence unannounced—it was just that she was doing her best not to make any unnecessary noise. Wouldn't it be intrusive, an interference to his work if she called out, "Hal, I'm here"?
But she listened. She listened as if her ears were fingers that could reach out and snatch up his words. What she heard was his mild Midwestern voice murmuring clipped replies to whatever the other party was saying, and it maddened her not to hear that, too.
"Yes."
"Yes."
"Sure."
"You can count on it."
"I understand."
"Right."
"That's okay."
"Yes, it's for the best."
"She was?"
"Of course."
"I understand."
"I'm grateful—believe me, I am."
"Good-bye."
He replaced the receiver, sighed wearily, and then swiveled around in his chair, his face registering something more than surprise when he confronted Peggy sitting just feet away.
"You might have knocked."
"I'm your wife," she said. "Do you have something to hide?"
He brought his elbows forward onto the top of the desk and laced his fingers together.
"What has hide got to do with it? For Christ's sake, Pegs, it's a mere formality."
"Formalities between husbands and wives?"
Suddenly she had to urinate. It didn't seem possible to hold it. She crossed her legs and jammed the toe of her shoe under his desk. She squeezed her thighs together hard.
"All right." he said, dropping his hands from their pose. "A courtesy, then. For God's sake, let's not fight."
"Forget it," Peggy said.
She saw the rain hit, blow against his window. It splattered over the glass as if sprayed by a hose full-force. Like a cue to a child straining over the toilet, it made the pressure in her bladder worse.
"It doesn't matter," she said, trying to recapture her thoughts. "What matters is why I'm here, and it has nothing to do with what you choose to keep secret from me." As soon as she said it, she wondered if it was true. But then she shook off the thought like a dog breaking his muzzle free of cobwebs.
He smiled. He spread his hands as if to shrug.
"Pegs, honey—I honest to God don't know what's happening to you. All I know is something is."
She saw the smile as a smirk, the gesture as a lie.
"It's not me, Hal. It's you," she said.
She felt she was competing against the clock now, a runner pitted against the speed of his own heartbeat. The rain, Hal, the weight of the scalding fluid that thundered for release, everything stood like a colossal wall between her and the undoing of the drawing Sam had made of his Miss Putnam and the class.
"I want Sam out of that school. We have to withdraw him. We have to do it right away."
"Oh, Jesus fucking Christ, Pegs. Let's not start on that again." His face closed down, and he hunched himself forward, his manner serious, grave, his mien that of the person elected to be the grown-up in the room. "Let me lay this on you one more time. I want that school for my son. I want him in the world St. Martin's represents; I want him to have the kind of education it provides; I want him to go to the kind of college it prepares kids for; and most of all, I want you to get off my goddamned case about it. People all over this city would kill to get their kids into that place, and all you can do is piss and moan about it. Really, Peggy, I think you're coming a little unglued. There is absolutely no reason for any of this bullshit you're slinging at me!"
"There is!" She was screaming.
When she saw him jump out of his chair and come quickly around the desk, she couldn't help herself—she recoiled in fear. But then she saw he was only going to close the door.
He returned to his place behind the desk, shaking his head from side to side and puffing out his cheeks as if nothing else could possibly express the magnitude of his shock.
"You realize this is an office? You realize you're making a spectacle of yourself in my goddamn office?" he hissed, his voice barely rising above a whisper.
"I'm sorry," she said. "Really, Hal, I—"
"Maybe you should see someone. Maybe, what with the move and everything, we've both been under too great a strain."
"No," she said. She got to her feet. When she stood up, it was as if her swollen bladder had to be lifted after her, hauled up an impossible distance. "No," she said again, "you don't understand."
"Then make me understand," he said, looking up at her.
She studied his face, tried to read the truth in his eyes. Was he really pleading with her? Or was it all a monumental con?
"Where did you get that necklace?" she suddenly asked.
She saw him look back down at his desk as though the answer was somewhere among the chaos of papers that covered it.
"It's a long story," he said. "I'll tell you when you've calmed down."
She said nothing. She turned her face to the window, to the fury of the rain against the glass.
"I've got to go," she said.
"You'll get drenched. At least wait until it eases up."
"I can't," she said.
She was at the door when he stopped her, called her name. She turned to face him again. He looked so different to her now, so changed, not Hal at all anymore.
Without another word, she stepped out into the hall.
She hurried to the ladies room—and stayed there fifteen minutes, long enough for him to give up if he'd gone looking for her at the elevators. Maybe it was the crazy thoughts that rush through your head when pent-up urine finally rushes from your body—but as she yanked down her pantyhose and briefs and then let go, she had the queerest feeling that it was Miss Putnam he'd been talking to when she'd caught him murmuring into the telephone.
***
The streets were awash. The instant she stepped off the curb to search the uptown flow of traffic for a free cab, a delivery truck cut in close to her and splashed a wave of water over the front of her dress. She was soaked through—drenched, just as he'd said.
Peggy stood for a moment, limp with feelings of impotence and frustration, like a child in a world of grown-ups who all rode cozily in cabs. Then she gave up and set off to work her way home by subway, drying out by the time she'd made it to the Ninety-sixth Street stop, getting soaked again as she walked the block and a half to her building.
She pressed the button for the elevator, stepping away from the puddle that was forming at her feet and starting a new one just as big. When she got off on eight, she waited until the elevator door had shut behind her, and then she stripped out of her things, dropped her clothes on the vestibule floor, and fished her keys from the bottom of her handbag.
With one naked foot she held the door propped open while she reached back and bundled her wet things under her arm. She left her shoes in the foyer, carried everything else to the little laundry room off the kitchen, and then, shivering slightly, she retraced her steps, cursing Hal when she saw the empty suitcases still lying in the hallway that led to the back. He knew she wasn't strong enough to lift them onto the top shelf of the storage closet. He knew he had to do that for her!
FORGIVE
She used to think she could forgive him anything, forgive him for leaving a million suitcases lying on the floor. But maybe there were some things too terrible to forgive.
She hadn't yet reached the doorway to their bedroom when she heard it—and stopped dead in her tracks. At first she thought it must be the rain, a kind of trick the rain played against the fancy brickwork that bordered he windows. But then, a second later, she realized that neither water nor wind could make a sound like that, and that it was coming from inside the apartment itself.
She stood listening, trying to hear it over the pounding of her heart, the roaring sussuration of her breath.
It was rhythmic, a steady, muted swinging sound, as of something moving relentlessly back and forth in the bedroom. The rocker! It must be the bentwood rocker at the foot of the bed! Yes, that was it—there was someone in there in the rocking chair, someone rocking back and forth.
She crept closer, her toes inching along the bare floor, her naked body inclined as far forward as she dared. When she got as far as she needed to look and make sure, she stopped and held her breath.
She could just see it around the edge of the door frame now, the tip of one wooden arc rising and falling, the toe of a shoe dark against the light field of new beige carpet.
She started inching back, her breath stopped in her chest, her arms crossed instinctively over her breasts.
The telephone in the kitchen! Or no, just get out; don't risk it. The elevator. Ring for the elevator! But she was naked.
She wanted to turn and run, scream, do something fast. She kept moving backward, the tiniest, quietest steps . . .
The voice stopped her. It was a man shouting.
"Is someone there? Pegs, kitten, is that you?"