Double Delight Page 6

  “Why, I—didn’t meet him, exactly. I just looked up, and he was there.”

  “Yes? And where was this?”

  Ava-Rose took a deep breath, sitting very straight, and explained, in a halting, rushing, wondering way. “Why, I was leaving Tamar’s Bazaar one night, where, as I said, I rent a little space to sell my things—The Craft of Beauty—and there was this man, this strange bald-headed man, following after me. Tamar told me he’d been hanging around peeking in at me, I never paid him any mind because that’s the wisest strategy—a policeman once told me that, for my own good—pretend you don’t notice, you aren’t scared to death, so they can walk off and be gone. Well!—this ol’ bald-headed man was hiding, waiting till the store closed, and I’d be coming out alone to my car, and I had a crawly feeling up the back of my neck like I knew somebody was following me but I didn’t dare look around!—and next thing I knew, there was T.W. getting off his motorcycle, one of those Harley-Davidsons all shiny black and chrome, T.W. who I’d never laid eyes on in my life coming to my rescue, saying to this man who’d been following me, ‘What d’you want with this lady, mister?’ and I just stood there staring, so surprised I wasn’t even scared! Naturally, the ol’ bald-headed man told T.W. to mind his own business, nothing was going on, he tried to walk away but T.W. stopped him, and they had words, and T.W. punched him in the face, and went kind of wild the way he does when he gets started, so the bald-headed man got beaten pretty badly, on his knees, then on his back, and T.W. was kicking him, and nobody in the parking lot wanted to come near, nor even call the police!—that’s how people are, these days. Oh!”—Ava-Rose was breathless, hiding her face in her hands and speaking haltingly through her fingers—“I knew T.W. was a dangerous man, but I was grateful to him, too, for saving me from that other man. And so—”

  There was a tremulous pause. The defense counsel had removed his glasses, and was rubbing at his eyes.

  What a blunder! Terence Greene, who profoundly disliked the defense counsel, felt a moment’s sympathy for him. In the matter of cross-examination, wasn’t it a rule of thumb that an attorney should never ask a witness a question the answer to which he didn’t himself know? At the defense table, T. W. Binder sat slouched, his gaze downcast and his face heavy with blood. Exposed, now, as a dangerous man, he sat very still, in the midst of courtroom tittering, as if he hoped he might be invisible.

  The remainder of the session passed, for Terence Greene, in a blur of frustration and gathering rage. He could look nowhere but at Ava-Rose Renfrew’s tear-streaked face, he could hear nothing but her low, hoarse voice, though he did not always follow the logic of her words. He did not hear the defense counsel’s words at all—he had blocked them from consciousness. What I would have liked was both of them on trial, the defendant and his lawyer. What I would have liked was to find them both guilty, punish them both.

  That afternoon, when court adjourned, Terence Greene did not drive directly home to Queenston, but took a westward route through Trenton, with the intention, as he told himself, of driving along the Delaware River, north, and then east, in a roundabout way to his home. It was a June day of surpassing beauty: a fair, cloudless sky, a quickening in even the polluted urban air of hope, anticipation. How his blood pulsed! How he longed for—he did not know what! To speak to her. To apologize. My shame as a man, among men.

  Yes, that was it: to apologize, simply. Terence shuddered at the possibility, however remote, that his wife, his daughters, should ever suffer at the hands of a brute like Binder; or be so maliciously treated, in public, by a crass, unscrupulous mercenary like that damned public defender.

  Terence did not know Trenton streets, but he knew the general direction he wanted, to the river. Once there, he would turn north on the River Road, and so swing up and around to Queenston. Not for years had he and Phyllis and the children visited the Delaware Valley, but Terence could recall, with pleasure, Sunday excursions to New Hope and Washington’s Crossing State Park—where, literally, on Christmas eve of 1776, General George Washington had crossed the icy Delaware River from Pennsylvania into New Jersey. Aaron, as a boy, had been intrigued by historical sites; and Terence, even as an adult, found a true romance in them. Phyllis had loved the old riverside inns where, to celebrate special occasions like anniversaries, they’d gone for romantic luncheons.… Now their lives were so busy elsewhere, they had not been to the Delaware Valley, nor as much spoken of it, in years. And of course the children were hardly children any longer, to tolerate any family excursion.

  Dad-dee!—get real!

  Terence could envision, in his mind’s eye, the broad, placid, yet swift-flowing river, shimmering like phosphorescence on the far side of the grubby city. His heart swelled with an emotion he did not understand.

  He was driving on a street called Pennington Avenue, but there was a confusing divide, and, after several blocks, a street sign caught his eye: HOLYOAK.

  Holyoak!—forbidden territory.

  Quickly Terence reasoned that, so long as he was a considerable distance from the Renfrew residence, there was no danger. He was miles away, surely—in the 800-block.

  This was a working-class neighborhood of rowhouses and small shops, on the edge of a slum. Blacks, Hispanics, a smaller number of whites on the street. The next block, and the next, brought him deeper into what appeared to be a black ghetto; then, abruptly, there was a railroad underpass, and, on the other side, an urban wasteland of warehouses, railroad yards, small factories, rubble-strewn vacant lots. Miles passed. What were the street numbers, here?—Terence could not see any. On his right was a grim little fortress of a building—the Chimney Point Youth Detention Home—but it seemed to have no number. On his left was a fire-damaged boarded-up Methodist church. Then came a stretch of weathered woodframe houses and bungalows set back in scrubby lots; then a fairly busy intersection, with an Abbott’s Ice Cream, Ace’s Tavern & Family Billiards, Hunan Take-Out, 24-Hour Laundromat. A semirural residential block, and, to the left, a vast weedy cemetery; atop a leafy wooded hill, a gaunt, aged building, apparently no longer in use, made of dirty buff-colored bricks, with several tall, blackened chimneys.

  Chimney Point. Forbidden territory.

  Now Terence was in the 100-block of Holyoak Street. He saw, ahead, that the street came to a dead-end: In the distance there was a vague liquidy glitter that could only be the Delaware River. So Holyoak wasn’t a through street! He would have to turn around and go back the way he’d come.

  He was excited, his breath quickened. A pressure like a band around his chest as if he were in the presence of danger. Why have I done this?—why such a risk?

  Afterward Terence would recall how the car’s momentum had borne him forward; as if, somehow, the car were his body, and he, behind the wheel, whoever he was, had surrendered all volition and all responsibility.

  Rapidly the street numbers ran down. Terence’s gaze was riveted to a barnlike woodframe-and-stucco house set back in a lot on the left. Even amid its rundown neighbors this house stood out: ramshackle and derelict, yet distinctive, the kind of house to make you smile, like an illustration in a child’s story book. Hers?

  Though he knew it was risky, Terence could not resist braking his car to a stop in front of the house. (Was he conspicuous, here?—in the new-model silver BMW that was Phyllis’s choice?) The house was old, its original structure probably built as long ago as the previous century; even the additions were old, in need of repair. A badly weathered slate roof upon which moss grew in patches; a crumbling redbrick chimney; three windows on the first floor, and three windows on the second—several panes repaired with plywood, and the first-floor shutters painted a bright robin’s-egg blue, while the second-floor shutters remained a rotted-looking gray, unpainted for decades. On a sagging front veranda were household cast-offs, an old upholstered sofa, a small squat refrigerator, a television set. Along the veranda’s rain gutters and coiled about its posts were strings of lights not yet taken down from Christmas. Was that a number
33, in glow-in-the-dark glitter, nailed beside the front door?

  Close about the house, obscuring parts of the first-floor windows, were overgrown trees, shrubs, flowers, weeds—a garden behind a leaning picket fence, gone wild in the front yard. Trumpet vine, sunflowers, blooming thistle, wild rose, and domestic rose grew in lush profusion, with, here and there, an unexpected lawn ornament of questionable taste—a brilliant pink flamingo tilted on one stick leg, a bug-eyed pickaninny eating a slice of watermelon, a miniature elk. There was a badly rutted driveway curving about to the rear of the house, and beside it, sunk in weeds, an ancient Studebaker convertible coated in rust.

  And if someone sees me? If—somehow—I, the juror, am found out?

  Terence was leaning out his car window, squinting in the sunshine, his heart beating painfully hard. So this was 33 Holyoak, the home of Ava-Rose Renfrew, the place of the “aggravated assault”! In the waning but still bright air it quivered with warmth, a pulsing secret life. Individual panes of window glass winked. The robin’s-egg blue shutters were defined with the hard-edged clarity of a child’s crayon drawing. Terence was thinking nervously that, if someone appeared, if Ava-Rose Renfrew herself appeared, seeing him, he would press down hard on the gas pedal, drive into the turnaround at the end of the street, and escape.

  It was then that he noticed a movement on the roof of the house, toward the rear. A human figure?—two figures? Two young girls in tiny bathing suits, sunbathing?

  Terence did not mean to stare quite so openly, craning his neck. Perhaps he was thinking—he, the father of daughters, and in any case a person who never hesitated to offer his help if help seemed needed—that there might be danger; that the girls were younger than they were. They had not yet noticed him, lying on their backs on the sharp-peaked roof, with identical straw hats over their faces; their bodies were thin, flat-stomached, with tiny breasts and long lanky legs; both wore red bikinis the size of handkerchiefs. Terence blinked up at them, until a barking dog, close by, distracted him, and drew the girls’ attention—one sat up, snatching her straw hat off her face, and the other sat up, snatching her straw hat off hers, and both, seeing Terence Greene, a stranger in a fancy silver car parked in front of their house, began to wave at him, giggling.

  Were the girls twins?—perhaps thirteen years old? At this distance they looked identical, and each, with flyaway mica-glinting fair-brown hair to her shoulders, uncannily resembled Ava-Rose Renfrew.

  Hastily, Terence started up his car. The girls called out to him in high-pitched teasing voices—or was it to the dog now lunging, as he barked, at the front left tire of the BMW? Terence heard a cry of “Mister!”—unless it was a cry of “Buster!”

  The dog was a burly wooly-brown mongrel with a German shepherd’s face and a husky’s deep chest; its legs were stumpy for its body, and its tail, perhaps a foot long, was a wildly thumping rod. Its barks and yips were impassioned, whether in hostility or overwrought friendliness, with an oddly human-sounding quaver. Terence muttered, “Go away, damn you! Please!” as he started up his car. He propelled the car forward, to the abrupt end of Holyoak Street (beyond was a vacant lot, overgrown with weeds and littered with trash, including parts of cars and tires, through which a vague path led down to the river), made a sharp turn, with an alarming squeal of his tires, and started forward again, but the dog was caught beneath the front part of the car, or seemed to be caught; there was a sickening thump as Terence pressed down on the gas pedal desperate to escape; he heard the girls screaming now on the roof of 33 Holyoak and he heard the dog’s shrieks and he wanted to escape but could not: could not bring himself to leave an injured animal: so, panicked, greatly confused, knowing only that he was very likely in serious trouble, and had brought this trouble upon himself, Terence stopped the car, opened the door, looked out to see—to his immense, incalculable relief—that the burly dog was all right, evidently, having scampered out from beneath the car before the tires went over it. Still barking, with that curious human-sounding quaver, the dog stood in the middle of the street, unharmed, glaring at Terence with amber-bright eyes.

  Terence drove swiftly away. In the rearview mirror, the dog’s reproachful image grew smaller, and smaller, until it disappeared into the distance.

  Never. Never again.

  Such reckless, needless behavior—never.

  By the time Terence returned home, it was 6:20 P.M.

  There were cars in the driveway: guests for cocktails.

  He’d forgotten completely that Phyllis had invited the Montgomerys and the Classens over for drinks, before going out to dinner at the Queenston Country Club. There was a $500-a-plate benefit dinner for a local charity—the Save-Our-Schools or the Feed-the-Homeless?

  Terence wandered out onto the rear terrace, where his wife and friends were sitting. He was disheveled and perspiring, with the look of a man who has traveled a long distance and no longer knows where he is. Phyllis and the others glanced up in surprise.

  Matt Montgomery said, with a chuckle, “There he is!—the man of the hour.”

  “Terry, what on earth—? I’ve been worried!” Phyllis cried, more sharply than Terence might have wished. “You’re late.”

  A blur of greetings, handshakes, kisses on the cheek—Hedy Montgomery, a stylish, good-looking woman of forty who always seemed to be suppressing nervous laughter; Matt Montgomery, tall and tanned and vigorous and handsome, with his endearing smile and steely handshake (Matt had won his township office in the April election, and was planning, Phyllis said, excited, to run for mayor of Queenston next); Lulu Classen, a sweet beige woman with a breathless manner; and Mickey Classen, who seemed embarrassed for Terence, and whose handshake was limp and fleeting. Phyllis, smiling hard, leaned on tiptoe to brush her lips against Terence’s cheek, and asked in an undertone, “Damn it, Terry, where were you?” and Terence said, “I was lost, I’m afraid,” and his friends laughed, Matt Montgomery the heartiest, and Phyllis said incredulously, “Lost? Lost in Trenton?” and Terence said, with a sigh, running both hands through his thin, dry hair, “Yes, I’m afraid so—lost in Trenton.”

  Because I believe in Justice. Because I believe I can be the enforcer of Justice, if I am so empowered.

  Hettie’s boy. All grown up.

  It was with a sense of guilty excitement that Terence returned to the Mercer County Courthouse the next morning. And a sense of purpose, determination.

  Terence and his fellow jurors had been told by the judge that the trial would probably end that day, or the next. Already, oddly, Terence felt a sense of regret; of imminent loss. As if, in this brief space of time, he’d already lived a significant part of his lifetime—commuting each morning to this city in which he knew no one, and no one knew him; driving south, not north, on Route 1, amid a tide of traffic that bore him onward with quickening urgency, as he had not felt in years commuting by train to Manhattan; turning into the parking garage and pointing at the green JURY DUTY pass on the dashboard of the BMW.

  “Yes, I’m on official business—I’m a juror.”

  Entering the courtroom, an hour later, in his place as fifth juror in the lineup, Terence felt a peculiar sense of dread and anticipation: as if, entering the courtroom by this particular door at the rear, taking his place in the jury box, he were trespassing in a sacred space.

  But who would stop him, now he was here?

  Terence was disappointed that Ava-Rose Renfrew would not be returning—she’d finished her testimony the day before. It remained now for the grave young prosecutor to present his three remaining witnesses to the court.

  And what a surprise: The first witness, “Holly Mae Loomis,” great-aunt of Ava-Rose Renfrew and a coresident of the house at 33 Holyoak, turned out to be the hefty, ruddy-cheeked old woman from the Mill Hill Tavern, in the quaintly prim pillbox hat!

  Except, this morning, Holly Mae Loomis wore a peach satin cloche hat that covered most of her brassy dyed curls. Her cotton dress was a billowing affair printed with bright green parrots;
though she wore chunky orthopedic shoes, her stockings were sheer, and green-tinted. Like pretty Ava-Rose, Mrs. Loomis spoke with the open, frank, smiling air of one confident she will be believed.

  Mrs. Loomis told the identical story her great-niece had told—of the “bursting into” the house by the defendant; the “mean, crazy” attack on the stairs; the rest. During the cross-examination, when the defense counsel slyly tried to confuse her regarding the precise sequence of events, and questioned whether, in fact, she had even been in the house at the time, Mrs. Loomis lifted her fleshy chin, and glared at him, and exclaimed, in a dramatic manner, “Why! Are you suggesting, young man, that I am prematurely senile?—or, what is more insulting, that I am a liar?” The woman’s rouged face and air of outrage suggested a stage comedienne of some past era, Ethel Merman, perhaps. Several members of the jury laughed, Terence Greene the most heartily. Even the judge could not resist a smile.

  The defense counsel’s face, already oily with perspiration, reddened. In an abrupt, despairing gesture, he pushed his horn-rimmed glasses up against the bridge of his nose. His voice was a hoarse croak—“No further questions, Your Honor.”

  Next, the young prosecutor called “Charlton Heston Renfrew”—another time, to Terence’s astonishment. For this young nephew of Ava-Rose Renfrew’s, a resident too of 33 Holyoak Street and an eye-witness to the beating, turned out to be the husky blond teenager from the Mill Hill Tavern. He wore, for his appearance in court, the same tight-fitting sports coat he’d worn the other day; his Phillies baseball cap was stuck in one of the pockets.

  There was a moment’s comic flurry as, before the bailiff could swear in Charlton Heston Renfrew, the judge had to ask him to please remove the gum he was so vigorously chewing. A sheriff’s deputy took the wad from him in a tissue, with a look of controlled distaste, and carried it away.

  The prosecutor began, “Charlton Heston Renfrew, will you tell the court your age, please, and your relationship to Miss Ava-Rose Renfrew—”