A Secret Rage Read online

  I peered over at the woman again, trying to recall her face. Now that I knew her story, I thought I detected the lines of care, the grayness, that marked her features prematurely. But I didn’t think I’d seen Sarah Chase Cochran, née Beacham, before. When Stan returned with two full glasses, I took my leave and began circulating through the crowd. Mimi made her way toward me with a man in tow. He was tall and solid, with heavy blunt features and a sensuous mouth. Her face looked more alive, more animated, than it had since I’d come home.

  ‘Nickie, this is Charles Seward, young lawyer-about-town,’ she said lightly. ‘Charles, Nickie Callahan, my oldest and dearest.’ But I noticed that while one small hand lay relaxed on his arm, the other hand at her side was clenched in a tight fist. She was afraid I’d judge him as harshly as I’d judged the others.

  She fluttered off immediately after the introduction, a technique of hers with which I was familiar. I called it (very much to myself) ‘Make Them Seek,’ and I’d never been sure if the practice was conscious or unconscious on her part.

  ‘I’ve heard a lot about you, Nickie,’ Charles Seward said pleasantly.

  He couldn’t know that was my least-favorite conversation opener, of course. I ordered myself to overlook it and find some pluses in a hurry.

  The young lawyer was tall, even taller than Cully, so I knew he was a recent arrival. (Late for Mimi’s party – a minus, unless he had an acceptable excuse.) He was quite an attractive man, I thought. His brown hair was prematurely thin on top, but that gave him an air of gravity becoming to a man of law. His light-blue eyes looked even lighter against his deep tan.

  ‘Have you known Mimi long?’ I asked cautiously. I can converse in platitudes as well as the next person.

  ‘Long enough to wish I was living here with her, instead of you,’ he said. Right to the heart of the matter.

  ‘Whoosh,’ I said, and rubbed my stomach.

  ‘I’ve been waiting four years for that creep Richard to leave. Before that I waited for Gerald to leave. What do you think my chances are?’

  ‘There’s nothing like getting down to brass tacks,’ I muttered. Why hadn’t he stuck to platitudes? ‘Well, do you think you could hold off until I finish college?’ I asked half-seriously. ‘I just moved in, and I hate the thought of changing addresses so soon.’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, without a trace of sincerity. ‘I tried to catch hold of Mimi after she divorced Gerald, but I bided my time, since I thought she needed some breathing space. That bastard Richard hopped in and whisked her off before my eyes. I told myself then that if I got a chance, I was jumping in with both feet. And I have. And I’m sticking.’ He looked unnervingly determined.

  Mimi’s bruised ego made her a pretty susceptible woman right now. I hoped Charles Seward was the right man for her – because with his looks and his flattering determination, I figured Mimi might be a goner.

  Charles grinned at me suddenly, and I blinked. If he wasn’t so set on Mimi . . . I could see the young lawyer’s attraction, yes indeedy.

  ‘Well. Moving right along, are you a native son of Knolls?’ I asked.

  ‘Born and bred. Good family: father, mother, two sisters married to good men. Went to law school, joined my father’s firm. All set. Now all I need is a wife just like Mimi.’

  Now that was a fixation. The Houghton children seemed to inspire them, I observed to myself. I glanced involuntarily across the room to Cully.

  ‘Good luck,’ I said. I didn’t know if I meant it or not. At least Charles Seward came from Mimi’s world – a plus. He saluted me and plunged into the crowd, surely in search of Mimi.

  Make Them Seek.

  I stared thoughtfully after him and wished my wine glass was full.

  ‘What do you think?’ asked a voice somewhere over my head. Cully stood very close behind me. How had he gotten here so fast? He handed me a full glass and took my empty one. He must have taken a mind-reading course for his doctorate.

  ‘I think his chances are good,’ I said soberly. ‘Do you like him?’

  ‘Fairly well. He’s a little too hearty for me. I haven’t been impressed with Mimi’s husbands so far . . . Charles is several degrees better than Richard or Gerald. Mimi didn’t much like my wife, either. It looks like a pattern.’

  It was fortunate that someone hooted for Cully to return to the bar, since I had no idea what to say to that I’d already opened my mouth to try, though; and it wasn’t wasted effort. Alicia Merritt flew up to me, and we shrieked at each other for a while. I also got to visit – a little – with her husband, Ray, whom I dimly remembered as the boy who’d called Alicia every night long-distance while we were at Miss Beacham’s.

  Ray was a light-complexioned, sandy, solid type: Alicia’s paperweight, I thought, inspired by the wine, He didn’t seem overwhelmingly glad to see me. He’d always been one to mistrust the different, I recalled.

  After the Merritts joined Jeff Simmons’s coterie, I went back into general circulation, from time to time going down the hall to the kitchen to get more munchies for the table.

  About midnight, the crowd seemed to be thinning out. Time for the babysitters to go home, I guessed. Cully had abandoned his post to talk to his father and Ray Merritt. Elaine was being mooned over by a youngish bachelor coach from the college. Mimi’s red dress wasn’t hard to spot; but Charles Seward wasn’t looming over her, to my surprise. When we met by chance in the kitchen, Mimi told me rather proudly that he’d be working all weekend on a court case for Monday, and had left to plunge back into his preparations; so I mentally excused Charles for being late. Stan and Barbara said a slightly tipsy goodbye, and it seemed that Theo and Sarah Chase Cochran had already left. I’d never gotten over to her corner to meet Theo’s wife, and I chided myself. As I was totting up the remaining guests, I saw Elaine neatly detach herself from the young coach and collect Don.

  My facial muscles were aching from my hostess smile. I rubbed my cheeks as I surreptitiously began to check nooks and crannies, tracking down the glasses that people leave in such odd places. I took a few back to the kitchen as unobtrusively as possible, and there was trapped by a professor who wanted to talk about the Romantic poets, apparently with a view to getting my mind on the general subject. After I smiled him out the front door with a hearty handshake, I found a few more glasses and plates and exchanged chatter with a few more people.

  So when I considered it later, I decided it was about forty-five minutes after the Houghtons left that the phone rang. I happened to be blotting up a ring on the hall phone stand, an old-fashioned arched one built into the wall. I lifted the receiver automatically and said hello.

  ‘Nickie? Nick?’

  Elaine Houghton. ‘Yes, ma’am?’

  ‘I have something kind of nasty to tell you, now. You and Mimi lock up extra careful tonight, you hear? A friend of mine who rents her garage apartment to Barbara Tucker just called me, and the police are over there. Barbara Tucker got raped tonight.’

  ‘But she was just here,’ I said stupidly.

  All the party drained out of my system. I found myself staring at the ring on the painted wood as if it were proof the news wasn’t true. ‘Maybe she just got burglarized?’

  ‘No. There’s an ambulance,’ Elaine said crisply. ‘Besides, the police told my friend Marsha. I’m quite sure. Goodbye, now.’ She hung up.

  I was close to the improvised bar just inside the living room. Cully was there, for once making himself a drink. I wobbled over to him and put my hand on his back. He turned sharply.

  ‘What?’ Then, more urgently, he said, ‘Nickie! What’s wrong? Who was that on the phone?’

  ‘Oh, Cully. Oh, Cully,’ I said out of a fog of alcohol, exhaustion, and shock. ‘Poor Barbara. He’s gotten Barbara Tucker.’

  Mimi had sensed trouble with her built-in hostess antenna, and she arrived at the bar in a swish of red, her face stern at the spectacle of two people being upset and serious at a party. So I was able to tell them both what Elaine had said.


  I thought of the woman on the sidewalk in front of my apartment building in New York, and wondered what was so different here, after all.

  5

  EIGHT O’CLOCK in the morning was a horrible time to schedule anything, much less Chaucer. I was almost stumbling on my way to the English building, trying desperately to wake up and look alert. I wanted to start briskly and keep the momentum going.

  All the dreariness of registration, fee payments, orientation, book buying, had led to this first full day of classes. I was actually beginning the completion of something I’d quit years before.

  Since the registrar’s office was situated on the ground floor of the English and Administration building, I passed Theo Cochran’s open door on my way down the hall. The fluorescent light was gleaming on his bald head. He looked up as I passed and gave me a little wave. It was nice to see a friendly face among the herd of strangers, all depressingly younger than I.

  To say I was nervous was an understatement. Mimi had been giving me rah-rah speeches for days, after I’d finally admitted how scared I was about learning to study all over again, being pitted against younger minds, handling the workload poor Barbara had so cheerfully assured me I could bear.

  Right classroom? I checked the room number on the door against that on my schedule. Right classroom, yes indeedy. I hesitated for a second. Then I grabbed my courage with both hands and pushed open the door – to be met by an audible gasp from a little guy wearing a Led Zeppelin T-shirt who was sitting in the first row of desks. That exaggerated gasp focused everyone’s attention on me. I stared back at their smooth faces. Had I done something wrong?

  ‘Wow!’ said cocky little Led Zeppelin just as loudly as he had gasped. ‘You are some kind of woman, woman.’

  From sheer relief I started laughing, and after a second the others joined in. Even Stan Haskell chuckled from his post by the desk.

  I sobered when I saw him. My amusement disappeared abruptly, as did his when he saw me watching him. He was grayer. The summer had gone from his face as surely as it was fading in Knolls. In a week, Barbara’s shy lover had passed to the other side of middle age, too early and too fast.

  I pitied him and I was angry with him; but I had resolved that on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from eight to nine he was going to be Dr Stanley Haskell, my professor in Chaucer, period. I had to take this class. I had my own life, I told myself. My own goal. I had to stop thinking about Barbara Tucker. So I slid into a desk, whipped out a pen, and opened the virgin notebook I’d labeled ‘Chaucer.’

  * * * *

  Mimi, bless her heart, was ready with a glass of wine when I got home. I’d been studying in the library until five-thirty, when hunger rousted me out. Mimi’s big push had been in the previous weeks, when she’d been assembling committees, organizing the year, and smoothing ruffled faculty and staff who ran atilt during the anxious preopening month. She would have a brief lull now, she had explained.

  ‘How’d it go, Nick?’ she asked sympathetically.

  ‘Oh boy, oh boy. I’m going to have to work my tail off, Mimi.’ I threw myself down on the couch and accepted the wine gratefully.

  ‘Well, you knew that.’

  ‘Sure. But knowing and doing are two different kettles of fish.’

  ‘Did you see Stan?’ She settled opposite me, and Mao arrived to jump in her lap.

  ‘Yes, first thing this morning.’ I told her about my resolution.

  ‘You’re going to have to do that, all right. But what a bastard. I just can’t think of any other word for him, Nick.’

  ‘Well . . . yes. But I don’t think he dropped Barbara like a hot potato because he’s a basic bastard. Do you see what I mean?’ Attila materialized on the arm of the couch. I took a long sip of my wine and tickled the cat below his chin. He began cleaning my knuckles ardently. Maybe he’d missed me today? More likely he was hungry. ‘You know I don’t know them well, not nearly as well as you do. But I think he just can’t talk about it to her. And if he can’t talk about that crucial thing, they can’t have a relationship. He can’t even stand to see Barbara, he can’t face any part of what happened to her.’

  ‘Why not?’ Mimi had been especially sensitive to disloyalty ever since Richard left her.

  ‘I guess he just can’t.’ I lit a cigarette. ‘When I saw them together I thought they were a matched set, and you say they were in love for at least two years. But I guess Stan’s just weak, or something.’

  ‘Like it was her fault!’ Mimi interrupted.

  ‘I’m not defending him,’ I said gently. ‘I’m just trying to understand, because I need to. I have to stay in the class.’

  ‘I’m not mad at you. I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘But you know how broken up Barbara is, and Stan acting like this is all she needs, right? Now is when she needs him most. Now is when he bows out. Remember how she kept asking?’

  I didn’t want to remember our visit to Barbara. I’d suffered with, and for, Barbara Tucker as much as our limited acquaintance would allow, since I’d so naturally liked her at first meeting. Now I was weary of the pain and fear her situation had given me.

  But I couldn’t help remembering. I heard again her bewildered voice asking Mimi if she knew why Stan hadn’t been by. That had been the day after the rape, when Barbara was still disoriented and in pain.

  When Stan had dropped her at the door, she told us, they’d both been sleepy from too much to drink. Stan started back to his own place to collapse. Barbara had climbed the steps to the front door of her garage apartment as usual – probably making a lot of noise, since she was clumsy from the bourbon.

  The man had already broken in the back door. He was waiting for her in the dark. When she’d reached to turn on the light, she had instead touched an arm.

  We could scarcely bear to hear it, but Barbara went on and on in a shaky voice. She had finally fainted. After the rape. When he hit her on the jaw.

  But it wasn’t over when she’d come to. It wasn’t over for a while. Now it would never be over; never. That was what had shaken me to the core, so painfully that I’d recoiled from Barbara. What had happened to her could not be mended, healed, shoved aside, bought off, glossed over. It was irreparable.

  In New York, I’d known women and men who’d been robbed on the street or burglarized. But by chance I’d never been close to anyone who’d been the victim of a personal and violent attack by another human being.

  Like Heidi Edmonds, Barbara had never seen her attacker’s face. She hadn’t the slightest idea of what he looked like: eyes, hair, build, or anything.

  But he had called her Barbara.

  Mimi and I agreed later, once we’d gotten home and calmed down a little, that his knowing her name might mean a great deal, or nothing at all. If he’d been stalking her (Stalking? In Knolls?), he’d have easily found it out. On the other hand, he might be someone she knew well. She seemed sure of it. And that was so unthinkable that we just blotted it out.

  6

  TWO MONTHS went by while my thoughts were turned to my books. Those weeks were so full of adjustments and assignments requiring all my concentration that the outer world just had to get along without my participation.

  Alicia dropped by from time to time, and we went to dinner at her house. Ray seemed to like me more now that I was doing something as ordinary as finishing college. Whenever I talked about my life in New York, though, those pale eyes would flicker.

  Mimi and I met Cully at the Houghtons’ for a Sunday brunch. It was an uncomfortable meal. Mimi and Elaine sniped at each other from the underbrush, and Don still had that gleam in his eye that made me uneasy. Cully, too, was at his dryest that day. He said his counseling load at the college was much heavier than he’d expected – a lot of freshman students were already having qualms about attending college at all. They were homesick. He and I seemed to have established some kind of truce. The talk and feel of things between us was easier and more relaxed. I caught him watching me at odd moments, and devel
oped the notion that he was beginning to see me as a rounded human being, not just a beautiful dodo. But that was the only bright spot of the meal.

  I decided to ruin the day good and proper, so I called my mother. She’d been to church, come home, and started drinking. Jay wasn’t there. She tried hard to sound sober, but I knew she wasn’t. However, she was proud of my going back to college, and she managed to ask correctly after the Houghtons and send a polite message to them. Mother also said one curious thing. She told me, quite out of the blue, that she hadn’t told Jay where I was.

  I was going to have to think about that.

  Before I went to sleep that night, I decided that Jay might have dropped a hint to Mother, God knows why, that he’d gotten rough with me all those years ago. It also occurred to me that it had been a long time since I’d known Mother to hold off drinking long enough to get dressed and go to church. I tried to cancel that thought; I pinched myself in punishment. I would not hope.

  Time ran through my fingers as my life with Mimi settled into a comfortable routine. Having two separate floors to live on made that much easier. We didn’t collide in the bathroom, we didn’t keep each other awake with lights or music or studying. Our most serious disagreement was the great debate about when to put the garbage out – the night before pickup was due, so we wouldn’t have to surge out in our bathrobes at the crack of dawn, but the dogs often got it; or early in the morning, in which case the dogs still might get it, but not if we watched to shoo them off. We solved this knotty problem by alternating garbage duty instead of sharing it.