The Girl in the Green Raincoat Page 6

“We worked on the primary campaign of Carlton Sickles, yes. But that’s not where we met. We met at the Westview Drive-in the year before. I’m not good on dates, but it was coolish. She wore a lemon-yellow cardigan, only it was pinned to her shoulders with this little chain, with butterflies on either end.”

  He fluttered his hands along his collarbone, trying to evoke the singular magic of it all. A sweater, moored by butterflies! He made it sound as if Judith Weinstein, as she would have been known then, had been dressed by a coterie of talking woodland creatures, like some princess in a Disney film.

  “Are you saying you fell in love at first sight?” This did not fit with what Tess thought she knew of her pragmatic, down-to-earth parents. Love at first sight was for passionate kids. But then—her parents were kids at the time.

  “I bird-dogged her,” her father said proudly. “Snaked her away from her date. Not that night, but later. She was really interested in politics—your uncle Donald had worked on the Kennedy campaign in ’sixty, was recruiting volunteers for the city council races, so, yeah, it must have been spring ’sixty-five—so I pretended to care, too.”

  “Pretended to care?” Tess was scandalized. Her father’s political life had defined him, as far as she knew.

  “Oh, eventually I did get caught up with it, but that was more Donald’s influence. That night I met your mother, I just wanted to find a way to keep her talking to me. So I told her, yeah, I’d love to volunteer, stuff envelopes, knock on doors, do whatever I could. I figured that would get me more time with her.” His fair skin flushed with the memory. “What a way to go.”

  “Politics?”

  “The movie that night. It was What a Way to Go! With Shirley MacLaine. I always liked her. We almost named you Shirley.”

  What’s in a name? Only everything. Tess tried to imagine the life and times of Shirley Monaghan. Who were the famous Shirleys? Shirley MacLaine, Shirley Jones, and—oh God, Shirley Booth. Shirley was Noel Airman’s code, in Marjorie Morningstar, for the first generation of Jewish American Princesses. All things considered, she was happy to be Theresa Esther, mouthful though that was.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen it.”

  “Oh, it’s great,” her father said. “Actually, I watched it on television a couple of years ago, and it didn’t hold up so good. But I still love it. Shirley MacLaine is this woman who wants to marry for love, see? And her mother is pushing her to marry the local rich guy, played by Dean Martin. Remember Dean Martin?”

  “Yes, there’s a channel on cable that appears to be devoted to selling his show on DVD.” These were the kinds of things one learned on bed rest.

  “Anyway, she marries Dick Van Dyke. But he becomes obsessed with getting rich, showing Dean Martin that he has a real work ethic, and he drops dead of a heart attack, leaving her a wealthy widow. Then she marries Paul Newman, a starving artist who ends up getting rich and being strangled by his own painting machines—”

  “Painting machines?”

  “Yeah, they paint in time to music. Also there was a monkey.”

  Also, there was a monkey. This struck Tess as the most trenchant bit of film criticism that she had ever heard from her father, something that could equal Andrew Sarris’s auteur theory. She would run this past Lloyd, the film student, the Tess Monaghan theory of awfulness in movies, summed up by one line: Also, there was a monkey.

  “Then she tries to change her luck by marrying a rich guy, Robert Mitchum—did you know he hit on your aunt Kitty, when she was all of fourteen, one summer at Ocean City?”

  Wake up, Tess said in her head, experimentally. It was something she did when her dreams were disturbing, or simply too weird. Wake up! Apparently she was conscious.

  “But he gets kicked in the head by a bull, when he tries to milk him—he’s drunk, you see—so she marries Gene Kelly and he gets, I think, literally torn apart by his fans, so that’s where she is when she goes to the psychiatrist and he walks in and, bam, she finds love at last.”

  “With the psychiatrist?”

  “Dean Martin. He’s the janitor.”

  Tess phrased her next question carefully. “And you liked this movie?”

  “Honey, it’s the movie I saw the night I met your mother. If it had been one of those Annette Funicello movies, or one of those gory movies by, you know, that guy—”

  “Herschell Gordon Lewis?” she ventured.

  “Or Mary Poppins, anything. It could have been a two-hour test pattern and I would think it was the greatest movie ever, because I was sitting in the backseat of a Dodge Rambler, stealing looks at this girl. She ate popcorn so dainty. She never dropped a piece. Everyone—I mean even the Queen of England—drops a kernel or two. My date that night dropped a lot, ended up with hulls in her teeth. Not your mother.”

  “Marriages have been made on less,” Tess said, meaning it. Still, it bothered her that she had been walking around—back when she was allowed to walk—believing that she was formed in the crucible of local politics, a legacy of the Stonewall Club. What a Way to Go! at the Westview Drive-in was a bit of a comedown. “You did go to Stonewall, right? You pretended to be interested in politics to snag Mom, and the lie became true.”

  “The lie became true,” her father agreed, “although we would have been meeting over on the East Side then. That was Donald’s turf, in the day. We worked on the primary. We didn’t have the heart to campaign after Sickes lost to that nut job Mahoney in the primary. And Maryland ended up sending Agnew to the State House.” Her father looked sadder than he did when he thought about the Colts leaving Baltimore, and Tess had always assumed that was the nadir of his adult life. “That was a bad year, ’sixty-six.”

  “Because your candidate didn’t get the nomination?” Tess asked.

  “Because we believed in something and we lost. We were young. Kennedy’s assassination had been hard on us, but we were teenagers, then. In ’sixty-six, we still thought if you worked for the right guy, you won. Then Mahoney, that kook, that every-home-a-castle guy, got the nomination, and it all fell apart. I didn’t vote in the general in ’sixty-six. Then in ’sixty-eight, Bobby Kennedy was killed. The fact is . . .” His voice trailed off.

  “Dad?”

  “I didn’t vote for almost forty years, not until 2004.”

  Tess could not have been more scandalized if her father had confessed an addiction, or even an affair.

  “You were an active member of the party. You did get-out-the-vote. For all I know, you distributed walk-around money.”

  “There was no walk-around money,” her father said, the denial still automatic after all these years. “Besides, none of that stuff means I had to vote.”

  “So in 2000, 2002—”

  “It’s not like there’s a lot of suspense, electoral collegewise, with Maryland. I campaigned for KKT, in 2002.” Tess recognized the shorthand for Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, who had run unsuccessfully for governor. “She sang show tunes on the bus. Oklahoma! Let me tell you, that was a labor of love. And she lost. First Republican in the State House since Agnew in ’sixty-six. But that one, the 2002 race, didn’t hurt. I was old then. Older, at any rate. Too old to get my heart broken, because I didn’t put my heart in it anymore.”

  Her father, ready to leave, first emptied Dempsey’s bedpan, then asked where she wanted the Stonewall sign. Tess said it was better suited to her office, where it could share the wall with her neon “Time for a Haircut” clock. He patted her shoulder, uneasy around her belly, then left her to absorb all that she had learned. Her parents had met not at the Stonewall Club, but a local drive-in, while Shirley MacLaine tried to find love. Also, there was a monkey. Her father, who had always teased her mother about her coordinated outfits, remembered exactly what Judith wore that night, down to the butterfly chain securing the lemon-yellow cardigan at her shoulders, while nary a kernel of popcorn fell, or got stuck in her teeth. Had her very existence relied on that detail? She had seen her mother eat popcorn, and did not recall it as an extraordin
ary feat.

  And Tess had almost been Shirley. Could a name change one’s destiny? She could not imagine Shirley Monaghan sitting here, with a problematic pregnancy and an even more problematic dog, who was gnawing on something in his crate, possibly his own leg. Shirley Monaghan would probably be knitting booties right now, or making her in-utero progeny listen to Mozart.

  Tess Monaghan, by contrast, was trying to figure out how to have another go at the man she now thought of as the Bluebeard of Blythewood Road.

  Chapter 8

  Giving away money was not as much fun as it used to be, Whitney Talbot decided, sitting at her desk and frowning at her in-box.

  The job had been a blast when she started, four years ago. Who wouldn’t like being Lady Largesse, as she had thought of herself, dispensing cash to worthy people and their causes. Plus, she was the boss, a role to which she was temperamentally suited. Really, it was amazing she had ever managed to work for anyone. At the family foundation, the only person to whom Whitney answered was her mother, and she had bent that poor woman to her will long ago. She was the chief, the gatekeeper to millions, someone who funded solutions—and yet she found herself in a perpetually bad mood as of late.

  Part of the problem was a paradox inherent in philanthropy. When the economy tanked, the demands grew, even as the principal shrank. The guilt engendered by the exponentially multiplying “Nos!” squeezed satisfaction from a now scarce crop of yesses. Just today a woman had pitched an interesting idea about trying to help the city’s poorest households use the local farmers markets. The earnest young woman had thought about her plan, deciding it wasn’t enough to provide transportation and ensure that more stands took WIC vouchers and food stamps. Poor women from East and West Baltimore needed to be taught how to prepare the foods they were likely to find, how to let the seasons guide what they put on the table, a big adjustment for rich and poor in today’s instant-gratification world.

  “Once they learn to eat things like squash, eggplant, and kale, that will create support for our next phase, mass community gardens in which they raised their own vegetables,” the woman said.

  “Kale?” Whitney had echoed, wrinkling her nose.

  “It’s your bowels’ best friend.”

  “I don’t think that’s the way we want to sell this,” Whitney said. She took stock of her applicant. The woman was wearing a fitted suit, one that must have been custom-tailored to provide such a perfect fit, and quite striking shoes—oxfords with killer heels. Her résumé showed an interesting combination of ivory tower academic work and hands-on restaurant experience. Yet Whitney didn’t like her.

  Sandwiches arrived and the woman regarded hers skeptically, pulling apart the bread and even sniffing the mayonnaise.

  “I never eat tomatoes this late in October,” she said. “They’re almost certainly shipped from Florida, or Mexico. And are you sure this bread is whole grain? The term is used quite loosely, I’ve found.”

  Whitney decided then not to take the project to her board. It was a good idea, but the woman’s attitude was all wrong. For the people she was trying to serve, a slice of tomato, whatever its origins, would be an improvement over lake trout, chicken boxes, and fries. Kale, eggplant—those would be a hard sell. Even whole wheat bread was viewed with distaste and suspicion in Baltimore’s poor neighborhoods. Whitney had spent enough time in local soup kitchens to familiarize herself with the kitchens’ day-to-day needs, and she knew that most diners refused to touch even the heel of a loaf of white bread. This self-important young woman was too rigid to achieve what she wanted. Sorry, kettle, she wanted to say, this pot thinks you have the right plan, but the wrong temperament.

  Instead, she rushed through the lunch and told her she would be in touch, then spent the better part of an hour on the phone with an emergency homeless shelter that always seemed to be reeling from crisis to crisis. “You have to develop some kind of long-term financial plan,” Whitney urged, not for the first time, playing ant to the director’s harried grasshopper. “Every year, donations drop off in summer, and every autumn you act surprised. I’m sorry that your hot-water heater broke, but we’re not a checking account. We want to develop programs, not fund capital expenses.”

  The director—portrayed in the local media as a saint who cared nothing for herself—cursed Whitney with admirable creativity, managing to invoke her mother, skin tone, and even the contours of her rear end, which did run to flatness. Ah well, one nice thing about cell phones was that they couldn’t be slammed down, merely closed with a click.

  Truth was, this was a better day than most. The real problem was that she was bored. And she wasn’t a very good sport about being bored, which might explain why she had attended two colleges, then raced through three jobs before settling in at the foundation, barely in her thirties at the time. She had so loved being Lady Largesse. She didn’t think such things ever got old. But they did. Everything did.

  Hmmmm, perhaps that was Don Epstein’s problem as well. Beautiful woman after beautiful woman. Only his wives didn’t get old, come to think of it. Not a one had made it past forty so far.

  She had to admit, Tess seemed to be onto something, even if the rest of the world had moved on, unable to sustain interest when the other celery-green shoe failed to drop. As Sherlock Holmes had said to Watson, to lose one wife was tragic, two was careless, and three—well, Holmes hadn’t had a word for that, as Whitney recalled. Of course, she was Watson to Tess’s Holmes, if not as fatuously admiring of her friend. Besides, this Watson had a little more mobility than her Holmes just now, and a few ideas of her own about how to track down someone who might kick up a fuss over the missing Carole Epstein. That was what they needed, right? Someone who was willing to make some noise.

  She dialed the foundation’s sole full-time employee, the much put-upon Marjorie.

  “Marjorie—” she began in a wheedling tone.

  “Don’t give me anything else, I can barely keep up with what I’ve got,” Marjorie snapped. At the foundation for twenty years, she had come to think of its funds as her money, with Whitney a cheeky interloper.

  “Just one little thing. I’d like a quick background check on one of the women who visited me today, Carole Epstein.”

  “I know your calendar and I watch the news. This isn’t foundation business.”

  “It could be. We’ve worked with abused women, have we not?”

  Marjorie sighed. “Do you have her Social?”

  “No, but I have her last two addresses.” Quickly, she plugged Don Epstein into Switchboard.com, where his information still carried the Gibson Island address. She read that aloud, adding the Blythewood one from memory. “It’s her work history I really want. Try the name Carole Massinger as well. That’s her maiden name.”

  The world was full of loners, as Whitney well knew, being one herself. But it was hard for even a loner to get through life without acquiring a friend or two. Proximity was an interesting phenomenon. Put two people close together, over time, and they would form a bond. She and Tess had become lifelong friends through the random lottery of the housing system at Washington College. Carole Epstein must have held a real job at some point. Her sister had died a decade ago; Carole was married to Don Epstein for less than eighteen months. She hadn’t been supporting herself as a handbag designer for all that time.

  As it turned out, she had spent at least part of the time selling handbags at Nordstrom, according to Marjorie, quitting only a few months before she married Epstein.

  “I’m going to the mall,” Whitney announced. “Foundation business.”

  “Nice work if you can get it,” Marjorie groused. “Bring me a smoothie, if you remember. After all, I don’t get to bolting out on a whim.”

  Whitney was the kind of person who attracted sales ladies. Funny, as she was actually rather cheap, in the WASP tradition, and would never dream of paying the prices demanded by today’s handbags. Three hundred dollars, five hundred dollars. A thousand dollars! In Baltimore, yet.
She got her handbags for free, raiding her mother’s closet and grabbing the least froufrou items. On her last foray, she had taken a Hermès Bolide, and the sharp-eyed saleswomen in Nordstrom circled her hungrily, sure that a woman who carried such a purse was juicy quarry indeed.

  Whitney allowed their advances, letting first this one and that one approach. After sizing them up for the better part of an hour, she settled on the most determined clerk, a plump-cheeked little beauty who didn’t seem to hear the word “No.” Although young, she was quite the breezy pro.

  “How long have you worked here?” she asked, examining a Marc Jacobs bag known as the “Patchwork Gennifer.” The “Gennifer” was unforgivable, the $1,500 price tag unfathomable.

  “Three years,” the saleswoman said, substituting a slightly less flamboyant Burberry bag, which Whitney could almost imagine carrying—if the decimal point moved one column to the left. Give the woman props: She was like the mother of a young child, quick to distract her charge from an unpleasant sensation by substituting another. Don’t want the lolly? Here’s a binky.

  “So you knew Carole Epstein?” A blank look, another quick bag substitution. Kate Spade this time. Warmer, Whitney thought. Warmer.

  “Perhaps you knew her as Carole Massinger?”

  “Oh, yeah,” the woman said, and there was some kind of emotion to it, but Whitney wasn’t sure she could identify it. “Kiki. Did she use to wait on you? Because she is gone.”

  It was unclear if the woman knew just how gone Carole was. But she must. Although the story had lost its momentum, it dominated the local media for a week or so.

  “How does Carole become Kiki?”

  A shrug, another bag sliding down Whitney’s arm, another bag sliding up. Dooney & Bourke. “I don’t know. She asked to be called Kiki one day. No skin off my—do you like metallics?”

  “No,” Whitney said. “Was she a friend?”

  “I liked her, but, you know.”

  Whitney chose to translate this sentiment as: We worked together, we were friendly, I wasn’t her bridesmaid. Bridesmaids! Carole might have been Don Epstein’s third wife, but he was her first husband. Had she gone whole hog on the wedding? That could lead to friends, distant family. Whitney made a note to ask Tess if the marriage license indicated a proper church wedding or a courthouse quickie.