Mystery

“I’m so sorry that happened to you,” she said. “Do you ever blame me?”

“Blame you?” He pulled a chair nearer and sat beside her. A tingle passed through his body with the realization that his mother was really talking to him.

“You couldn’t say I was much of a mother.” Gloria wiped her eyes with her napkin and sent him a look of such rueful self-awareness that she seemed momentarily like another person altogether: a person he seldom saw, the mother who really was present from time to time, who could see him because she could see out of herself. “I never wanted anything bad to happen to you, and I couldn’t protect you, and you were nearly killed.” She wadded the napkin in her lap.

“Nothing was your fault,” Tom said. “And after all, it was a long time ago.”

“You think that makes a difference?” Now she appeared slightly irritated with him. He felt her focus move away from him, and the person she might have been began to fade out of her face. Then he felt her make a conscious effort of concentration. “I remember when you were little,” she said, and she actually smiled at him. Her hands were still. “You were so beautiful, looking at you sometimes made me cry—I couldn’t stop looking at you—sometimes I thought I’d just melt, looking at you. You were perfect—you were my child.” Gloria slowly reached for his hand and touched it almost shyly. Then she drew her hand back. “I felt so incredibly lucky to be your mother.”

The look on his face caused her to turn away and buy a moment of self-possession by sipping her tea. He could not see her face.

“Oh, Mom,” he said.

“Just don’t forget I said this,” she said. “It’s the truth. I hate being the way I am.”

What he needed, how much he needed it, made him lean toward her, hoping that she would hug him or at least touch him again. Her body seemed rigid, almost angry, but he did not think that she could be angry now.

“Mom?”

She turned her head sideways and showed him her ruined face. Her hair dripped across her cheek, and a strand clung to her lip. She looked like an oracle, and Tom froze before the significance of whatever she was going to say.

Then she blinked. “You want to know something else?”

He could not move.

“I’m happy you’re not a girl,” she said. “If I had a daughter, I’d drown the little bitch.”

Tom got to his feet so quickly he nearly overturned his chair, and in seconds was out of the room.

The day crawled by. Gloria Pasmore spent the afternoon in her bedroom listening to her old records—Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Glenroy Breakstone and the Targets—lying on the bed with her eyes closed and smoking one cigarette after another. Victor Pasmore left the television set only to go to the bathroom. By four-thirty he had passed out, and lay back in his recliner with his mouth open, snoring, in front of another baseball game. Tom took another chair, and for thirty minutes watched men whose names he did not know relentlessly score points against another team. He wondered what Sarah Spence was doing, what Mr. von Heilitz was doing behind his curtained windows.

At five o’clock he got out of the chair to change the channel to the local news. Victor stirred and blinked in his chair, and woke up enough to grope for the glass of watery yellow liquid beside the recliner. “What about the game?”

“Can we see the news?”

Victor swallowed warm whiskey and water, groaned at the taste, and closed his eyes again.

Loud theme music, an even louder commercial for Deepdale Estates on Lake Deepdale, which was “another Eagle Lake, only two miles away and twice as affordable!”

Tom’s father snorted in genial contempt.

A man with short blond hair and thick-rimmed glasses smiled into the camera and said, “Things may be breaking on the island’s most shocking murder in decades, the death of Marita Hasselgard, only sister of Finance Minister Friedrich Hasselgard, who also figures in today’s news.”

Tom said “Hey!” and sat up straight.

“Police Captain Fulton Bishop reported today that an anonymous source has given police valuable information leading to the whereabouts of Miss Hasselgard’s murderer. Captain Bishop has informed our reporters that the slayer of Marita Hasselgard, Foxhall Edwardes, is a recently released former inmate of the Long Bay Holding Facilities and a habitual offender. Mr. Edwardes was released from Long Bay the day before the slaying of Miss Hasselgard.” The picture of a surly, wide-faced man with tight curling hair appeared on the screen.

“Hey,” Tom said, in a different tone of voice.

“Whuzza big deal?” his father asked.