Lifetime Members

By Peter E. Price Sr.

Lifetime Members focuses on the investigation by Attorney Walter Chauncey Coleman into the violent death of a black migrant worker in Anthracite County, Pennsylvania, and on the various men and women drawn into the orbit of that investigation. In the course of his often reluctant search for the truth in the maze of lies and coverup --- a search that concludes with a second violent fatality--- Coleman learns not only that we are all members, more or less for life, of families, of neighborhoods, of nationalities and religions and social tiers, but also that all memberships come with dues.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 25, 2001
• ISBN: 9781462842735

Peter E. Price Sr.

Peter E. Price, Sr. was born in Chester, Pa., in 1928,and raised in Scranton. He served in the U.S. Navy in World War 2, and graduated from the University of Scranton in 1950. He is married, and the father of a son and daughter, both lawyers, and two grandchildren. He has worked as a schoolteacher, bartender, advertising agent, mailman, editor, indexer, and---most fulfillingly --- as a truck driver in Yellowstone National Park. His hobbies include reading, gardening, friendship, and--- if this book sells--- travel.

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Copyright © 2000 by Peter E. Price Sr.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

Of all the books in all the

book stores in the world, you

had to luck into mine. Here’s

looking at you, kid.

—PE.P Sr.

ONE

First Bridge, Pennsylvania, is a small town—a village, officially and classically—with a sloping Main Street with horse-chestnut trees, and klunky municipal planters filled, in summer, with dusty petunias, and old-fashioned parking meters, most of them reared off center by horse-chestnut roots, that no native has put a coin in in years. There are two churches on Main Street, one on each side of the road, Methodist and Presbyterian (the new, grander Catholic church is two blocks north on Chestnut Street), and a gas station, and an old five-and-dime smelling, not unpleasantly, of mildew where you can still buy cheap dinnerware by the piece, and little packets of hair ribbons, and shoelaces in paper waist wrappers, and Welsh cookies hand-made by the ladies of the Epworth League. There is a small village park with a good-sized gazebo used for band concerts, and a green Spanish American War general with his green saber in the air. First Bridge is too small for a McDonald’s or a whorehouse or bowling lanes, but big enough to have a town drunk and a Veterans of Foreign Wars post where he can get a drink by ten any morning.

First Bridge isn’t on a U.S. or even a major state highway, and it’s a hard half-hour from the interstate. The drivers of the cars and pickup trucks and minivans of Main Street live there, or have business there (or just beyond or before). The occasional tractor-trailer struggling up or riding its air brakes down Main Street is hauling either milk to New York City or garbage to the next county. Or the driver is lost.

Three blocks east of Main Street and running parallel to it is Coach House Lane, and where it intersects with The High Road (formerly, the Mud Road) stands a plain frame building that is, by more or less general agreement, the oldest standing structure in First Bridge. (Its present leasee, Liz Ezekiel, likes to point out that it was only fitting that she rent the old building, she being the oldest reclining structure in First Bridge. That Liz!) No one knows for sure exactly how old the building is, but local tradition has it that it was once a stop on the Underground Railway. A person fortunate enough to be invited into one of the great estates of greater First Bridge—the Hillisons’ Crows Over, say, or the old Bellwall place over on the back road to Oaklandale would almost certainly be impressed by the big-collared men and bonneted women that glare down from the living-and dining-room walls of those dim mansions. It’s not easy to picture these forbidding-looking humans—the founders, the very hewers of First Bridge—unbending sufficiently to help some terrified black fugitive, until it’s recalled that the object of the Railway was to move the coloreds through … keep them on their way. American towns like First Bridge were never Underground Railway destinations; the destination was up in the wilds of Quebec somewhere.

Whatever. The building at the corner of Coach House and The High is a commercial building that has been almost continuously occupied by one entrepreneur or another since at least the end of the nineteenth century. Photographs survive that establish its having been a tavern, a barber shop, and a hardware store, and it has been a gift shoppe/boutique under half a dozen managements up to the present day.

Liz Ezekiel is a Diskway—an heiress, in other words, of one of the original First Bridge settlers. (A Diskway was the first burgess of the community.) The Diskways were Big Coal, like the Ezekiels and the Macmissions and the Stanleys. The coal is pretty much gone now, but the Big Coal money endures. Those folks on the dining-room walls were not given to profligacy, nor—with rare exceptions—are their descendants.

Liz went into business—the first Diskway ever to be In Trade—for a number of reasons, none of them economic: the Ezekiel family that she married into is even more comfortably provided for than the Diskways. Primarily, she was bored. Liz was forty (though she could pass for thirty-five), and effectively alone in the world—childless, and her husband institutionalized for, probably, the rest of his life. As Liz put it, over a cocktail or a bit of crab on Wheat Thin: You can only play so much golf when the weather’s nice, and just so much bridge when it’s rotten—and let’s face it, I’m too old to go peddle my ass up in Scranton.

That Liz. A tiny thing (so she has always been described), with bright black, merry eyes and a neat if not robust figure. And smart. Liz was never a great beauty, so the really great boys didn’t concentrate on her. Growing up she never missed being invited to the Christmas Cotillion and the more important country-club dances, but her escort was always a middle-of-the-line type—the president of the Student Council, say, or the captain of the golf team; never the starting quarterback. At fifteen, Liz began to compensate by taking the top-of-the-line boys out to their cars at intermission and screwing their brains out. Some of that indomitable pioneer spirit that saw to the carving of First Bridge out of the wilderness (complete with hostile Indians, the Underground Railway school insists) lived on in Liz Ezekiel’s ardent little heart.

Liz signed a five-year lease on the building, and while she was having it prepared—new wall-to-wall laid, expensive wood shelving installed, electric service rewired—she concentrated on finding a suitable name for the new enterprise. It happened to be Christmas-party season, which in First Bridge runs from about Pearl Harbor Day to Epiphany. Liz attended all of the parties worth attending, of course, and even a few marginals that, a year earlier, she would have regretted. (Every host and hostess was a potential customer now, after all.)

This is the deal, she would explain to the six or eight or ten people in her immediate vicinity at the Chails’ annual wassail, or the John Strings’ carols’n’caviar, or the Tommy Macmissions’ traditional Manger-Warming. Any man at the party can suggest a name.

No gals, Liz?

Sexist, sexist! I’m going to turn you in to Kathy Lee!

I only deal with men, Liz would say. Although you broads are welcome, too, once the joint opens.

Oh yeah sure thanks a heap good old Liz!

First prize—the name I finally decide to go with—first prize is a night with me at the Holiday Inn, all expenses paid.

Oh Liz c’mon cut it out Liz!

Second prize—runner-up—is a weekend with me at the Holiday Inn! That Liz.

( Tommy won first prize twenty-five years ago, Kitsy Macmission observed drily to the woman next to her.)

The contest was a huge success, the talk of that Christmas season. Even staid old Judge Hillison got into the spirit of the thing, announcing that he had the perfect name—Cetera—but that for him it was first prize or nothing:

At eighty-six, I don’t think I could handle second prize!

That old Judge!

Ab Chail suggested The New Curiosity Shop—He’ll take the cash equivalent if he wins, Morgan Chail announced coolly—and that had a nice ring, but then, Liz cautioned, Who reads Thackeray any more? She finally settled on Chez Liz (pronounced Chess Lee)—her own invention; no prize.

Actually, the judge’s Cetera was my favorite, she admitted to friends. A great name—if the shop were in Princeton, or Provincetown. In Black Brook, they’d think it was a new Italian restaurant, and every Jew in Kosher Heights would be coming up here in their Mercedes to get a price on the veal t-bone!

Black Brook, the Anthracite County seat, is seven miles south of First Bridge, as the crow flies. (That’s not a crow, it’s a seagull that flew too low over Slava Township! goes a local witticism.) On the Anthracite River, Black Brook was once an important coal town along the gritty route of the anthracite seam running, in the Lackawanna and Susquehanna and Anthracite and Schuykill valleys, from Forest City to Mocanaqua and Tower City. Today, most of the coal workings are mined out, but the towns like Black Brook go on, one way or another.

A series of small hills hides First Bridge from the grimy city where most of its residents work, as doctors, lawyers, bank officers, stockbrokers. Specifically, from the peak of the roof of Chez Liz, the two chimney cleaners from Sweepy Time Gals in Waverly, standing tummy to tummy, hands in each other’s jeans pockets, can just make out the tip of the Bumble Bee Colliery in Slava Township, just east of Black Brook on the river.

* * *

At two-thirty on the Friday afternoon of a recent Memorial Day weekend, Liz Ezekiel was on the telephone with her friend Kitsy Macmission. There were two customers in her shop.

La Gloan and La Dolan, Liz informed Kitsy.

Say no more, Kitsy said. I’ve met them both, I think. The Gloan woman’s married to Ranse Hillison’s partner, God help us. Strictly Black Brook carpetbaggers.

La Gloan, oui, Liz said, following Eileen Gloan with her eyes. But the Dolan babe’s no Black Brook colleen, if I’m any judge of horseflesh. She’s got a Philadelphia accent, for one thing.

They all have, Kitsy said. Doesn’t mean a thing. Have you seen the new people in the Plymouths’ house? They look like they ought to be out back digging potatoes.

Land of opportunity, Kitsy-baby.

My foot. You just can’t get raspberries any more. And soft-shells? I was at Black Brook Fish yesterday, and Moonface practically laughed in my face: ‘Soft-shell crabs? We were sold out at ten o’clock this morning!’ I was going to fix them for Tommy tonight. Well, that’s all out the window now anyhow: I’ll be in New York tonight, and he’ll be too drunk to know what he’s eating—if he bothers to eat! Liz, it’s just so fucking inconsiderate. (You don’t have anything tacky like a party line, do you?)

No, Liz assured her friend. Fuck away.

Toward the back of the shop, Stacy Dolan was moving nearer to what Liz called her U.PS. Room (You think you’ve had quick sex? Try it with a U.PS. driver someday!). Not much more than a cubbyhole, separated from the shop proper by an old fringed curtain, the room contained a cot (where Tom Macmission now lay) and a nightstand, and the vacuum cleaner and broom that Liz’s cleaning lady from Black Brook used one morning a week. The Dolan woman had wanted an ashtray, a cuteish bedside ashtray—a welcoming gift for a Memorial Day houseguest, a friend of her husband’s

I don’t even know if he smokes. They always smoke. Right? Cigarettes—if you’re lucky. And Liz had directed her to the new shipment of novelty giftware on the top shelf at the extreme back of the store. From where Stacy Dolan was standing now, she could certainly hear Tommy snoring, or—if alcoholic unconsciousness had silenced him—she could certainly smell him: he had reaked.

And you’re sure you haven’t seen him? Kitsy persisted.

Liz permitted just the suspicion of coldness in her response. She was, after all, a Diskway married to a (however fallen) Ezekiel, and Kitsy was, albeit a Macmission by (second) marriage, the product of tradespeople—very successful tradespeople, but trades-people—from up by Wilkes-Barre somewhere.

I already told you that, Liz said, quietly. What, did you expect him to be dropping by here to pick up a salt and pepper or something? Do you two lovebirds exchange on Memorial Day, for Chris’ sake?

No, Kitsy said. It’s just that whenever Tommy gets in over his head, he always seems to go running off to you.

For sisterly advice only, Liz was quick to point out.

For whatever, Kitsy said, levelly and just as quickly.

Excuse me … .

Eileen Gloan, smiling uncertainly, stood by Liz’s desk. She was nicely—cleanly—dressed, Liz saw: a What-they’re-showing-at-Alexander’s pants suit of unoffending mauve. And she wasn’t an unattractive woman, either: a strawy blonde type, though not a stop-traffic blonde. Just a nice light-haired girl in her thirties, with crooked teeth.

Liz excused herself to Kitsy, and, holding her hand over the telephone mouthpiece, smiled up encouragingly at the other woman. Eileen flipped up the hinged lid of the plaster toby she was holding as if to drink Liz’s health.

Could you tell me if this is an antique?

The toby was one of three dozen Liz had unpacked earlier in the week.

Sweetie, she said, you and I should be so young. This time last year that mug was a lump of mud in West New York, New Jersey.

My husband has an antique one, which his roommate at law school gave him when they passed the bar together, Eileen volunteered.

How nice, Liz purred, the cupped telephone in her hand.

But I worry about it getting chipped or something, you know what I mean?

Mmm, Liz said. Help today, right?

I’ll probably take it, I think, but I want to show it to my friend first.

Of course, Liz said. Why don’t you call her over? Incidentally, that mug goes right in the dishwasher with the rest of the crap, and if your husband chips it, why, for twenty-nine ninety-five, who cares? To Kitsy, she said: I’m back.

What are you doing open, anyway? Kitsy asked. I thought you always closed early on hol—

I do! But I’ve got a pair of lezbos up on my roof cleaning the fucking chimney, and I’ve got to wait to pay them before I can close!

Why didn’t you get what’s-her-name, Dottie String’s daughter? She’s a partner with some girl up in the Abingtons, they’re doing everybody’s chimneys these days!

That’s who I have, for Chris’ sake! Cathy String and her old roommate from Skidmore, and I hope they replaced the mattress when that pair matriculated!

Liz!

Not that the apple fell very far from the tree. Did you ever go for a leak at a party when Dottie String wasn’t already there? She’s the phantom of the Goddamned ladies room, Kitsy!

Among the cute little ashtrays at the back of the store was one that Liz had almost taken for herself as she was unpacking the shipment. It was little more than a shallow bisque shell, painted blue to simulate water. Seated on the upcurved edge of the shell were two smiling, red-nosed old fishermen, shoulder to shoulder and obviously the worse for frequent recourse to the XXX-labeled jug at their feet. Their poles sagged in their hands, so that the tips of the poles grazed the surface of the pond (saving the designer the problem of dealing with fishing line, for one thing). Liz had found herself smiling at the two old soaks, almost nostalgically: the quiet, disreputable good time they were having was something she had only hazily inferred from the greater world enclosing the world of First Bridge in which she lived.

Stacy Dolan had picked up the ashtray, and was smiling at it in exactly the same way.

—so fucking inconsiderate, Kitsy was saying again. Hilly’s been supposed to fly over to Gstaad tomorrow, to spend the holiday with Tinker, only now it has to be today, for some mysterious reason. Tommy was on the phone all morning with Kennedy; he finally had to get Ab Chail to call a vice president of TWA, they were in Andover together or something. Anyhow, now I’ve got to drive Hilly and his friend from prep school to Kennedy today. In the holiday traffic, I don’t even let myself think about it, so that he can catch a flight tonight, and then drive back to Manhattan so the friend can get a train back to Massachusetts! In a rental car yet, because Tommy doesn’t want the Mercedes taken out of the garage for some other mysterious reason, and the brakes are shot on the minivan (I’ve been after him for a month to take care of that!), and he’s off drunk somewhere in the Jag!

Maybe he’s at the Club, Liz suggested, innocently. It’s Memorial Day weekend, remember, with the election and all, and everybody’s in town. Maybe he stopped for a drink—

And why? That’s what’s got me so fucking pissed, Liz! If only he’d tell me (which I only happen to be his wife), if only he’d tell me what’s going on! To say nothing of Hilly’s stepmother! This is all about Hilly, I can tell that much, he’s in some kind of trouble again, that’s why they’re shooing him off to Tinker a day early! But will he talk to me about it? Bull shit! Not Tommy; not good old Tommy. Pours himself another bourbon—he’s really starting to get a problem, Liz: Tommy’s drinking isn’t social any more, I don’t know whether you’ve noticed. The other night we were having dinner at the Club, and I excused myself to the ladies room— Run into Dottie String?

This isn’t funny, Liz—at least, not to me it isn’t. When I came back, he was gone, so I figured he was in the men’s room, but after about ten minutes or so, and Jean Hillison giving me her Goddamned I-feel-so-sorry-for-you,-dear smile from the next table, I checked the grill room, and there he was at the bar with Jiggs Catherine. Just the two of them, shoulder to shoulder, and Liz, the Lord forgive me, the first thought that came to my mind was, ‘Look at those two old drunks!’

Kitsy began to cry, and Liz felt a stab of pity. Look, Kits, she said gently, you and Tommy still have that deal at the Plaza, right? Liz, I—

Shhhh now, quiet down—shhhhh, shhhhh, shhhhh, settle down and listen to your old Auntie Liz. First, call Bob Bower over at Black Brook Buick; he’ll have a new car, gassed up and ready to go, in your driveway in half an hour. (Shhhhh!) Get in the car, and head straight for the Plaza. Okay? (Shh.) Let the doorman worry about the car. Put Hilly on the shuttle— Shuttle?!

"That’s right, shuttle, right to Kennedy, he can’t go wrong.

Pin his ticket to his shirt if it’ll make you feel better. Jesus, Kitsy, he’s eighteen years old!"

I suppose … .

Then tomorrow, the roommate can catch a cab down to Penn Station, and be on his way home to Boston.

Lincoln.

I thought Lincoln was in Nebraska.

In Massachusetts, too. Kitsy seemed to be considering. "But tomorrow? What am I supposed to do with him tonightΓ

«Tonight, you ball his fuckin’ brains out in the Plaza! It’s beautiful! (This is the cute one Hilly had over at the Chails’ cookout, right?)"

After a few seconds of silence, Kitsy spoke in a cold voice:

You’re not always as funny as you think you are, Liz. If you should run into Tommy, I’d appreciate it if you had him call home.

Click.

Sighing, Liz replaced the phone in the cradle. Just try and help someone, and that’s the thanks you get! was the punchline when she recounted the conversation later that day. For now, she returned her attention to Stacy Dolan.

Stacy held the ashtray in both hands, turning it as carefully as if it were a piece of Spode. It was perfect. The two gentlemen were obviously old, old friends, and Walter Coleman and John had been born on the same floor of the same hospital in the same week, Sadie Dolan had told her a dozen times.

Stacy was wearing a knee-length skirt, and something brushed the hem now, something alive pressed gently against the fabric: something too insistent to be an insect. She felt her stomach churn, as the possibilities—rat; cat; old dog—clicked off in her mind, but it wasn’t a rat, it was a hand, a man’s hand (noting the parted curtain now), on her thigh inside her skirt, and Stacy stood frozen by revulsion and terror, as the hand moved up inside of her thigh to her crotch, and tightened and the man with the hand, mumbled something she couldn’t understand … killed … niggers, and which wouldn’t have made much sense to her even if a sober Tommy Macmission had spoken the words more clearly:

Liz, Liz, Hilly’s gone and killed one of Goodie Bellwall’s niggers.

TWO

The summer after the spring that Bobby O’Malley died, it seemed to Stacy Lyons that everyone in southeastern Pennsylvania had a solution to the problem of what she was to do with the rest of her life. She needed, after all, To Cope. One Got On, after all, with One’s Life, even after the starkest tragedy. X—down from Connecticut for the funeral, of course, radiant in Navy blue linen (with leukemia, there’s time to shop)—had even quoted the Millay that Stacy and Bobby had loved: ’Life must go on, though good men die.’ Playing right into her sister’s hands, of course: Stacy completed the couplet: ’Life must go on. I forget just why.’

Nevertheless, in the death-grip of her grief, Stacy still recognized that she would have to do something, and she listened politely and even attentively to the anthology of solutions. X, of course, would take her back to Connecticut with her—soak her in the Sound, wrap her in good, hot Connecticut sand with her nieces and nephew. Sail. Eat crabs, and drink too much beer, and partypartyparty with X and Richard’s summer friends. And … who knew?

You’re only nineteen, Stace, X reminded her kid sister. And Bobby wouldn’t have wanted you to become a living shrine.

I’ll come for a week, before school starts, Stacy said. I promise. For Ellie’s birthday, and I’ll bring one of those impossible cakes from Shomer’s. But that’s it. A week.

X was about to reply, but Stacy shrank back into the frozen inviolability of her grief, ending the conversation.

Stacy did not tell her sister that a week was about all she could take of X’s husband, Richard, with his Latest Jokes from the Big City, and his triple daiquiris, and the long, lean, patrician hands that seemed to be able to locate and caress a visitor’s butt as easily—and as innocently!—as they found the drool-tufted throat of the family spaniel. (At nineteen, Stacy had no way of knowing that she didn’t have to tell her sister any of this.)

Iggy, for her part, called to invite Stacy to join her and Wyatt in New Zealand, New Caledonia or wherever it was they were off to for the summer. Ron, a trust-fund baby (sanitary napkins), made underwater movies that Iggy painstakingly edited and which no one bought, but who cared? Iggy would have been stunned if Stacy had accepted, but there was no possibility of that: Wyatt, in his way, was even more deadly than Richard, and she’d inevitably be locked up underwater with him most of the time. Stacy declined with the obligatory thanks.

For his part, the Sergeant proposed a grand European tour, which could be made to dovetail neatly with a consulting contract the firm had recently entered into with the Spanish government. Even Maman, to whom enthusiasm was vulgar, seemed to warm to the idea.

Mary Ursula worked very hard at Miss Melvin’s this year, she pointed out. They were having cocktails on the patio. A trip abroad would be an appropriate graduation gift.

I seem to recall that I worked very hard at Miss Melvin’s two years ago—and graduated with honors, I might add!—and no one suggested—

You didn’t work very hard, because you didn’t have to work very hard, Maman—never trumped—interrupted. You have the mind for studies that Mary Ursula lacks, unfortunately—which is why your refusal to return to Marymount is so distressing, incidentally. Maman sighed briefly. You don’t reward a champion, Mary Anastasia; you reward the dray horse with the heart of a champion.

"Dray horse? Urso? Getting a bit hippy, I grant you, mother—but dray horsef

With Maman, one took one’s pathetic little snippets of cheer when one could.

Plus, Stacy added, Chickie is never going to let Urso out of his clutches that long. No way, Jose.

I beg your pardon?—rendered in classic iced Maman.

It’s an expression, mother; only an expression.

Perhaps the most dispiriting aspect of the whole thing was Stacy’s awareness of its inherent theatricality. Young Man of Exceptional Promise (read: Money) Succumbs to Dread Disease at Nineteen; Distraught Girl Friend—at least they had resisted, without talking about it, the vulgarity of a movie-magazine doomed engagement—Distraught Girl Friend Sputters/Flutters to Adjust. To Cope. Sympathetic Parents/Clergy/Sisters/Even Inlaws (Get that cute little keester of yours up to Connecticut on the double!) Go All Out to Soothe/Smooth. It wasn’t that her feelings for Bobby, alive and dead, were in any way less than genuine: Stacy was truly dying inside, like the heroine of the tawdriest jukebox ballad. It was just that death had cast her, willy-nilly, in a Meaty Role.

Whatever, Stacy had no interest in Europe—or at least, not in the Europe of her parents: the cloying private tours (the bishop would see to those) of musty cathedrals, and Dressing for Dinner, and Maman s inevitable epiphanies (Lourdes! Bernadette, nous sommes ici!), and trying to keep the gondoliers out of Urso’s panties. No, Bobby was dead, and Stacy was all through with that kind of shit. Sorry, Maman, but Miss Lyons regrets, merci beaucoup en tout cas.

The bishop, finally, made his presentation over lunch at Bookbinder’s, where the old dear could savor the snapper soup and enjoy Manhattans discreetly served in a coffee cup.

"I’m risking my reputation, you understand, by lunching with a ravishing brunette. On the other hand, maybe they’ll be too shocked to insist I come to their tables to bless their stone crabs.

Which they’re about to eat, he added, thoughtfully.

Mary Anastasia, the old man began, and Stacy perceived the phantom miter materializing atop his sparse grey curls, no one understands the mystery of death. Not you; not me; not the Holy Father, in Rome; not … .

It was twelve-thirty on a Wednesday, and all about her Stacy felt the electric tension of deals going down. At the next table, four men in expensive suits and Penn ties seemed to be plotting together over their steaks. (Ordering a steak in Bookbinder’s is equivalent to playing bridge in a bordello, the Sergeant had once observed. (Maman had not been amused.)) At a farther table, over against the wall, a fortyish redhead in a mauve hat with veil, and a black beauty mark appliqued on her right cheek, was saying something naughty (Stacy knew) to the delightedly rattled mammal across from her. A man obviously not her husband. But somebody’s. God Bless them, Stacy thought. Three months ago at twenty to one on a Wednesday afternoon she and Bobby would have been in bed together in the O’Malleys’ gatehouse. (No one bothered them: with what do you threaten the dead?) And now, here she sat slurping snapper soup and trying not to think of Bobby or of the ridiculous turtles strangling in the cargo nets on TV (she and Bobby had cried together, sent a check), and trying to concentrate on the words of a beloved old fraud of a prelate who’d had one more cup of coffee than he needed.

"Acceptance is the answer, Mary Anastasia. Acceptance, and trust in the infinite goodness of God. I’m not claiming that that’s much of an answer, but it’s all the answer any of us is likely to get in this vale of tears.

Splash more sherry?

Smiling, Stacy had recalled the bishop and the Sergeant drinking Jack Daniels and water in the Sergeant’s study a night or two after the latter’s return from an extended trip abroad.

I oversaw the building of a seminary in Provence, Charles, and what amounted to an elaborate brothel in Indonesia, her father had said, turning his highball glass in his fingers, and damned if I can make out the difference—speaking for the firm.

Damned if you can’t, Keith Lyons! the old man had thundered. Speaking for Christ Jesus!

Stacy thanked them all, meaning it, and made her own summer plans: three weeks after Bobby’s funeral, she drove up to Penn one afternoon and enrolled in the summer program. Admissions had closed the week before, but at her insistence the bishop made a telephone call—though not before wondering aloud what was wrong with Villanova—and Stacy was permitted to register. She selected Introduction to Chaucer, in Bobby’s honor and memory, and Basics of Computer Programming in a rather surprisingly sensible recognition of the fact that, whatever she decided to do with the rest of her probably long life (the Lyonses were notoriously long-lived), she would almost certainly do it in part electronically. A computer, after all, told her brother-in-law Richard where to place the advertisements for his soups and soaps; a computer oversaw the safe submersion of Iggy and Wyatt in their diving bell; even the carefully unworldly bishop (Manhattans aside) depended upon the statistics output by a computer to tell him which of his congregations needed a shot in the arm, motivation-wise. Who was little Stacy Lyons, Girl Widow, to try to struggle against such a titanic current? Walking out of the registration building into the banal hell of a Philadelphia summer afternoon, Stacy felt better—and guiltier for it—than she had felt in months.

The Sergeant immediately approved of the Penn idea, to Stacy’s surprise. For one thing, their daughter’s gloom was getting to the Lyonses. (We won’t even be able to visit London if she’s along, the Sergeant had whispered late one night, after too many brandies. Too many bobbies! Maman had almost guffawed!) But for a much more important reason, her enrollment seemed a sure sign that their daughter was coming out of it … getting a grip on things (finally getting her shit together—Urso, sotto voce). The Sergeant had only one stipulation: since driving back and forth to the city was out of the question (You have to drive to Jersey to find a parking spot in Philly!), Stacy would have to depend upon public transportation, and—Philly being Philly, and home to You Know Who—she would enroll in a martial arts course over in Lower Merion that the Sergeant had heard many good things about. A girl at the office had taken the course, and now confidently strolled down Broad Street at midnight in her miniest mini (Maman looking up, briefly, quizzically, from her Inquirer) without concern.

(I think the girl in the office is Michele, Urso confided to Stacy when they were alone. The ash-blonde? From Media? The one with In Case of Rape, This Side Up tattooed on her boobs?)

Stacy was at first incredulous. The thought of leaping about in one of those white robes, hacking at the air and grunting, was absurd. Still, the Sergeant was paying for Penn, which gave him certain rights, and—who knew?—it might be diverting. God knew she had got a bit lumpy/dumpy in the course of a year devoted to reading poetry, crying, and—less and less frequently as Bobby’s internal screws tightened—making love; a little ritual sweating couldn’t hurt. So Stacy signed up for the karate course: three nights a week for five weeks. All females. (One would have preferred ‘all ladies,’ Maman despaired. But these days, one accepts what one gets. Maman was about as accepting as a cobra, Stacy thought, but she kept the thought to herself.)

Stacy was surprised to find that all of her fellow initiates but one—a terrified keypuncher from Ridley Park who never came back after the first week—were black, as was the instructor, or master, Alex. Alex was a magnificent specimen—Stacy hated herself for thinking of him in that way, like a thoroughbred horse, but that was the image that came through. The sweat glistened on his ink-black body like rain on asphalt, she mused. (Everyone who reads Keats consistently ends up playing with poetry, and she and Bobby had been no exceptions.) Alex had been a defensive halfback at Penn State, and well-regarded, but passed over in the draft. (Was that like being drafted during Passover? Stacy wondered, giddily, seated in his small office with her first ever black acquaintance, conscious that she was wearing nothing but her underwear under the skimpy robe, and superconscious that Alex might not even be wearing that!). Consequently, he had found himself, a few Junes back (he had a dizzying smile; Stacy clutched at the front of her robe), with a diploma in physical science but with very lean job prospects.

Semipro ball—maybe—for awhile, Alex told her. McDonald’s. The Air Force. Killing people, one way or another.

He flashed the fantastic smile, and Stacy could see that it was a part of his equipment—one of his resources as a healthy, carnivorous male. Bobby’s smile had been wan and winsome, even when he was in perfect health. A tennis player’s smile. Alex’s smile was the undisguised signal of a tackler about to make his move.

Nevertheless, Stacy smiled back. Clutching the robe.

Alex had called her into his office after class to tell her how well she was doing, and to recommend advanced training after the course concluded. He had had his eye on her from the start, he admitted—and they both laughed at that.

Also, he said, gently, if you’re not having a serious relationship, I’d like to take you out some night.

No.

"Why not? I already taught you enough to whip my ass, I was to put a