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Coypright
to The Plaid Adder
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When she saw
the other woman walking toward her, she knew what she had done wrong. That
unhurried stride never altered as she moved between the fieldstone posts at the
edge of the driveway, legs swinging easily in their khaki shorts, faded blue
sleeves rolled up to reveal the sunburned forearms, little wisps of hair
floating free of the ponytail, unconcerned eyes looking roundly out from the
face above the opened collar. Standing on the asphalt in her narrow heels she
listed the mistakes she had made, from the sheer black stockings through which
her pale knees showed to the sharp, cropped haircut to the lipstick that had
been selected with indoor light in mind and the bright yellow tailored jacket
that must be shining in the sun like the lacquered back of a beetle. It was the
wrong look. The city's look.
The other woman continued to approach,
even after she made eye contact. That was a good sign. Quickly, before the
other woman could break the focus and wander off, she stepped forward, heels
clicking on the tarmac. "I'm sorry, I'm afraid I'm going to accost
you--"
It wasn't her usual opening, but it
seemed to have worked; the woman stopped and settled a mildly surprised but
receptive gaze on her. Her listener nodded politely as she introduced herself
and the name of her paper. "I wondered if you might be able to help me.
You've heard about the Frayn infant?"
Courtesy modulated into vague concern.
"Yes, I have."
"I'm doing a story on the tragedy
and I'm trying to find out something about them--background, you know. Did you
know them?"
"I knew about them, sort of,"
the woman answered. "I never met the baby or the parents. I'm sorry, I don't think I'll be much help."
Too bad, but something useful might be
got. "Still, you're from around here, originally?" The woman nodded.
"Do you know what the name of this club is?"
The woman told her, spelling it out
before the reporter asked. "It's Indian, like all the others."
"There are others?"
The reporter's look of dismay brought
out a flustered gesture of assurance. "Don't worry,
I'm sure the Frayns belong here. They live right off the fifth hole."
"Is that right! I couldn't
find the street. I've been walking around for half an hour looking--"
"It's a private road. You wouldn't
get in that way anyway; they have a guard in a little box."
"You're kidding."
"No. New this
year. I always cut through the golf course; that way I don't have to
deal with it."
"How do you do that?"
"If you come with me I'll show you
where their house is." The reporter couldn't believe it. Everyone else had
stared at her like she had brought the plague and told her to get off their
property.
"Oh, thank you--are you sure? I
don't want to get you in trouble."
The other woman shrugged. "It's no
problem. I'm going that way anyhow." She moved off and the reporter fell
in step, still wondering. They passed up the hill between the club buildings,
around the tennis court and past the round cropped oval of the putting green.
On the other side of the asphalt strip pairs of round red, blue and white
markers stuck into the short grass covering the flat top of the mound that rose
like a forehead above the green slope of the first fairway.
The reporter's heels clicked on the
asphalt as she followed her guide down to the end of the path. The other woman
stepped off onto the fringe of thick, dark straggling grass between it and the
fairway. The reporter's heels sank into the dirt, as she had known they would.
She laughed nervously as the other
woman turned around. "Maybe I should go take my chances with the security
guard. It's pretty obvious I didn't come out here to go golfing."
"Oh, don't worry," she
answered. "Nobody'll bother you if you're with me. If they ask I'll just
say you're my guest. They know we belong." The reporter struggled toward
the fairway. "I think I remember our charge number..."
Arriving finally at the edge, she
looked up at the hill with a vague sense of guilt. The grass was short and
thick, combed into long stripes of green and yellower green that ran all the
way from the driving range up to the tufted hillock sprouting a red pole and
its limp green flag. She wondered if it were different kinds of grass or just
something about the light and the way it was mowed. The other woman had
squatted down and was pressing the grass with the palm of her hand.
"It's a thing with me," she
said, without a smile but with a smirk in her voice. "It feels just like a
crew cut." The reporter looked at her as she stood up. "Go on, try
it." The squared ends of the blades were unexpectedly sharp and stiff.
"We better stick to the rough, unless you want to take your shoes
off."
The reporter decided it would go faster
that way, and anyhow on grass this manicured there would be few hazards. Even
so, she kept to the margin next to the other woman, who was hugging the border
bewteen the strange, bristling grass of the fairway and the scraggly tangle
that led off into the trees on the other side. Fat white cumulus clouds drifted
above the rolling green hillside and its shaggy top. The woman's feet in their
square leather shoes moved over the plush carpet with the same easy stride. The
reporter decided to get what she could out of this woman before she
disappeared.
"They brought the child out here,
I guess."
"Oh, no, I doubt it," she
answered, surprised. "He was what, one year, two years..."
"Thirteen months."
"No, that's too young."
"But they would have, later."
"Yes," said the woman as they
moved out toward the center of the fairway and the crest of the hill.
"Yes, I'm sure they would have. That's something you can use, I
guess--what he would have had if he'd grown up. Yeah, they'd have brought him
here, put him out in the playground by the pool and then when he got old enough
he'd have been in golf clinic and on swim team..."
It was a good idea, actually. The
reporter made a note to remember it later. "And tennis too,
probably."
She was starting to regret taking her
shoes off; scaling the hill and its uneven slippery thatch was harder in
stocking feet. The woman paused for her. "Yes," she said
matter-of-factly. The reporter decided to round the side and approach the top
more gradually. "No sailing, unless they also belonged
to the yacht club. But everything else."
The reporter looked at her, but she was
squinting into the sun, unperturbed and somehow unreadable. "It's a
shame," the reporter ventured, gazing from the top of the hill back over
the swath of green.
"Yes, it is." She was looking
at the irregular oval of manicured green surrounding a sharp-edged round hole
punched into the side of the hill. It was an unremarkable statement, made
without vehemence or irony, but it still sounded odd somehow. "Don't step
on the green, we're not supposed to."
They skirted its edge. "Why not?"
"It's bad for the grass or
something to walk on it without golf shoes."
Down the other side of the hill
and gratefully onto a cracked asphalt strip. "For the
golf carts," the woman explained. From the strip she could see the second
fairway, a narrow ribbon winding between ranks of thick, giant oak trees and
disappearing behind a thicket of branches and leaves as it made a left hand
turn. "We can cut through the trees this way." Mottled splashes of
filtered sunlight slipped flickering across the woman's head and shoulders as
they made their way under the trees. Watching her move unconcerned between the
old wrinkled trunks, the reporter said, "You mind if I ask you a few
questions?"
"I guess not, but I can't tell you
much." They emerged onto the second leg of the fairway, which swung
leftward across a level plain toward an abrupt hillock. A ring of irregular,
open pits full of white sand surrounded the green like a necklace of teeth.
"As I said, I didn't know them."
"But you live here."
"Not for...oh, not for
seven, eight years. I'm visiting."
"I'm not doing a fact piece,
really. The facts everybody's got. This is a kind of a reflective essay type
thing."
The woman looked surprised. "I
thought they hadn't determined that yet."
The reporter laughed,
a short sarcastic bark. "It's clear enough what happened."
"I suppose it is." She walked
forward.
"I don't think there's any doubt
about it. They released the autopsy results. Multiple blows with a heavy blunt
instrument."
"No, I know that, but I
mean..." She sighed. "Well, I suppose everyone's agreed it was
her."
"You mean you don't think it
was?"
The woman's shoulders jerked as if
throwing something off. "No, I guess I do."
"You don't sound convinced."
They were approaching the scalloped
sides of the raised mound. The reporter looked over one ragged lip into a pit
of whitish-gray sand, drifted and pitted by what must have been raindrops.
"Look out."
She had almost stepped onto the
upraised prongs of a rake lying on its back in the grass near her. The woman
picked up the handle and drove it spike first into the ground, the handle now
pointing into the air. "Almost turned yourself
into a cartoon."
The reporter laughed after she got it.
"What's that thing doing here anyway?"
"It's to rake the traps." She
gestured toward the pits. "Your ball lands in there, you climb in and chip
it out onto the green, then you rake it
afterwards."
They moved around toward the other side
of the green. "Do you not think it was the babysitter?"
"Oh, I'm sure it was the babysitter,"
she said. "It's just...well."
"Well what?" The reporter
looked carefully in front of her now as she picked her way around the sand
pits.
"Well, just that I used to babysit
for peoples' kids, growing up here."
"So?"
"So..." Behind the green and
the traps was another fairway, this one squatter and wider. They had left the
oak trees behind now and the terrain opened up; she could see parts of several
different fairways thrown like rugs across the smooth gradual hills between
staggered columns of blooming cherry trees, whose round pink clustered tops ran
in dotted lines along the boundaries between them. The woman struck diagonally
across one fairway toward the broken pink border.
"It made me nervous. You're, what,
fifteen, and these people leave you with their children as this sort of
insurance policy. They figure nothing will happen to them as long as someone's
there. And nothing ever does. But you sit there in that big, dark house with
the kids asleep upstairs until midnight, one, whenever..." It seemed
strange to the reporter that both the face and the tone should still be so
matter-of-fact. "You, the dark, and a million creaks and
bumps and unidentified noises. I'd read about SIDS--you know, sudden
infant death--" The reporter nodded. "Some nights I'd go up there
every half-hour to make sure the kid was still breathing. And he always was,
but every time you go up the stairs you think, Christ, what if he's not, what
if he's died."
"But this wasn't..."
"Oh, I know, I know, it's just--I
don't know." She stopped in the middle of the sward, hands in her pockets.
"I just--well. If it had happened, if one of those kids had died while I
was there, it would have been my fault." She looked at the reporter. "Not
really, not in terms of logic or the law or anything, but still, it'd have been
my fault. Blood guilt on my head for the rest of my life.
For three bucks an hour?"
"I don't see how it's the
same," the reporter said, following her under the pink canopy of cherry
blossoms.
"It isn't. But...well. See, if it
had happened, if the kid had died, that would have been all I could think of.
Not how sad it was that the kid was dead, but that it was my fault--the guilt
just coming down and crushing me. Inescapable guilt--it'd just blot everything
else out."
"So?"
"So...so I don't know."
The woman crossed quicker through the
blooming trees and drifted across the next fairway. Hands in her pockets, head
lifted, walking slowly but with long and firm strides toward a single cherry
tree that broke the middle of the lawn, the woman reminded her of something, an
image seen on a wall or in a train somewhere. When the woman paused and turned
to wait, it came to her. A tourist ad, with a tweed-hatted
rustic in a green field. Visit
"You look like a shepherd,"
the reporter said, toiling up to her.
The woman laughed. "It's all the
grass." As the reporter caught up, she moved on. "Only place around
you'll see this much grass in one place. No sheep, though." The reporter
smiled. "Be nice if there were some. Make the place productive, and make
the game more interesting. Everybody wins."
The bark of the cherry tree was
unexpectedly dark, almost a burgundy color, a smooth shiny surface laid thin
over bumps and whorls in the wood beneath. "Would the babysitter have come
here?"
The woman reached out to trail her
fingers across the bark as they passed under the cherry tree, her head brushing
through the leaves of one low branch and knocking petals into the disturbed
air. They were still floating when the reporter passed through the same spot,
ducking her head. Her hair now slightly more awry, the woman gave the answer
over her shoulder. "Oh, I don't think so, unless they brought her with the
kid. She wouldn't have belonged."
"But she was from around
here," the reporter said.
The woman looked taken aback. "Oh,
then I guess maybe she might have. I assumed she was from out of town."
"Because of what she
did?"
"Because of how they're
going after her."
"How do you mean?"
"I mean..." Turning to face
her and walking backward awkwardly for a moment, she shrugged. "Oh, I
guess really I was just doing what they're all doing." She turned her back
and moved ahead faster. "If she were from out of town, you know, she'd
have a reason. It'd make it political. But you're right," she continued,
although the reporter had not had time to respond, "my own prejudices
coming out, trying to make the thing make sense."
She kept walking, up the center of the
manicured slope under the eye of the sun. "What do you mean,
political?"
The woman shook her head, annoyed at
herself. "Resistance, you know, a strike against what she could never
have...of course that can't have been the reason."
"Since she's from around
here."
"Even if she wasn't. There can't
have been a reason."
"There must have been a
reason."
"No," said the woman,
cresting the hill and turning to walk along the ridge, weaving under and around
the trunks of the trees that marked it. "They'll find one eventually
because they have to but there isn't one. There can't have been. What kind of
motive can you have for bludgeoning a thirteen month old baby to death that's
not even yours?"
"Well, it's not something you can
rationally justify, I admit, but she is a teenager."
"It doesn't matter. There is no
reason,there is no explanation."
"That's why it's such a
tragedy." The woman didn't answer. "You don't think it was a
tragedy?"
The woman stopped by a tree trunk to
wait for her to catch up. "Yes, of course, it's a tragedy."
And that, she realized, was the
difference. That was why this woman had been willing to talk to her. She meant
it as she said it, yes, it's a tragedy. But at the same time she wasn't sad.
"But you don't seem to think
so."
It was a rude thing to say, and she
realized that immediately. But this was another thing this strange woman took
it into her head not to mind. She turned her sunspotted face into the light and
the eyes narrowed slightly on either side of the burnt red nose.
"I've been away so long," she
said. "You can't expect the same reaction. I mean, of course, it's sad, it's terrible for anyone to lose a child, anywhere, for
any reason, let alone this way. But children die all the time. That, in itself,
doesn't become a tragedy. Not here, anyway. To them, see, this is more than the
death of a child, and to me it isn't."
"What more could it be?"
Instead of answering, the woman moved
down the ridge into the green bowl that cupped the fifth green in its sheltered
hollow. The ribbon of pink-budded trees stretched out along the encircling
ridge, flapping and tearing in the breeze. The reporter followed her.
"What more could it be?"
She had to pick her way carefully; the
ridge was steep and her feet were constantly threatening to slide out from
under her. "To lose its life here so young, and when
this would have been such a wonderful place to be a child."
"Yes," said the woman,
stopping by the edge of the green and watching the reporter descend by inches. "Yes, exactly. This is the perfect place to be a child.
You can't help being a child. I become a child as soon as I cross my family's
threshold. So is my family. So are they all. People never grow up here, nothing
changes."
"Well, I can tell you for sure
that's wrong," the reporter shot back. "I know all the people who
cover the suburbs for us. Stuff happens here. All kinds of
stuff."
"All right, sure, things happen,
divorce, alcoholism, cancer, hatred, abuse, the descent into madness, it all
happens here, I won't claim it doesn't, but still--" From the bottom of
the hollow she looked up at the reporter, still negotiating the slope.
"But still, this is the Hundred Acre Wood, this
is the enchanted place at the top of the forest. And what's childhood, except
knowing that nothing will ever change? And the family, of course, for the
family the tragedy is the death of the child, but for everyone else--it's the
end of childhood that's the tragedy. Since I left--" To illustrate,
perhaps, she threw her arms out, indicating the sweep of the green walls around
her and the crown of leaf and petal lacing the top of the ridge. "The
Soviet Union has fallen,
The reporter stopped halfway down the
slop, staring at her. She laughed, nervously, but then started again wtih a
shrug and a helpless glance around her.
"Because it always will be,
because no blast can rock a place like this. Safe, always,
forever, until the revolution comes and probably even after that. And
now death punches its fist through a cedar shingled roof and changes all
that."
The reporter had reached the edge of
the green now, and stood a few feet away from the other woman, not quite
believing that she was really there, at the edge of the fifth green, watching a
woman in a blue Oxford shirt and khaki shorts talking about death and childhood
to the trees and the grass, apparently, as much as for her benefit. Her
disbelief was infectious, perhaps. The woman dropped her arms, turned, and
pointed quite prosaically up the opposite side of the bowl toward the tops of
some oak trees that rose on the other side.
"That's the Frayn house in through
there," she said. "Over the ridge and when you look into the woods
you'll see it. It's big enough, you can't miss it. I doubt they'll talk to you
but the house itself is worth a paragraph of description, maybe two. I cut
through here."
The reporter nodded. "Thanks for
everything."
"No problem," she said.
"It was on my way." The speckled calves flashed under the cuffs of
her shorts as she climbed up the other side of the bowl and disappeared under
the screen of cherry blossoms.
A wind rose in the branches above her,
pushing a tattering cloud off the face of the sun and flooding the bowl with a
thin yellow light she had stopped expecting. With a faint tightening of the
throat, the reporter looked around for the best way to proceed. There didn't
seem to be an obvious path. The spot the woman had gestured to disappeared. Instead all the
reporter could see was a band of squat, thwarted trees thrusting their knotted
arms out from stained dark sides to twist their shaking fingers into a
tightening rope ringing the steep-sided valley within whose livid, writhing
walls she was suddenly a prisoner.
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