The Quiet Before

Theron

Wade Pruitt signed on Thursday at ten past ten, in a conference room on the second floor of a building on South Main Street, with a fountain pen that belonged to a dead man.

It was Ansel's father's pen, a heavy black Parker with a gold nib, and the old lawyer produced it from his waistcoat with the air of a priest elevating a chalice. The room smelled of beeswax and radiator dust. A stenographer sat in the corner with her hands in her lap. Wade's own counsel, a flushed young man from Warwick with a ponytail and a Patagonia vest, sat at his client's elbow murmuring objections in the tone of a mother at a piano recital.

"I'd like it noted," he said, "that my client enters this voluntarily."

"It is noted," said Ansel.

"And that no promise has been made as to—"

"It is noted."

"And that—"

"Mr. Dilworth." Ansel lifted a pale eyebrow. "I have been taking depositions since before your father was a Rotarian. I shall be happy to note anything you wish, for as long as you wish, so long as you permit your client to sign before lunch."

Wade signed.

He did it in a shaking, spidery hand, on eleven pages, with his initials at the foot of each. Theron watched him from the end of the table. He watched the dry flutter of the fingers, the beads of sweat at the temple, the exhausted yellow of the face. He felt, to his considerable surprise, no triumph at all. He felt only a gray, far, bone-deep pity, like the pity one feels for a man on a stretcher.

"That's everything," said Wade, setting down the pen. "That's, that's all of it. The dates, the amounts. Kessler's notes. The name of the Pawtucket firm."

"Barrow and Voss."

"Yes."

"And the note with the telephone script."

"It's in the, the appendix." He wiped his forehead. "I hope— I hope you'll tell her. That I'm sorry. That I called. That I was a— That I didn't mean to scare her."

"I shall tell her that you said so," said Theron.

"You'll tell her?"

"On Sunday."

Wade looked at him.

Something moved in the ruined face. It was almost pity. It was almost recognition. He started to speak, shook his head, and bent to gather his coat.

"Good luck," he said.

"I beg your pardon?"

"I think you're going to need it."

He went out, with his lawyer fluttering after him.

…

"It is a sound affidavit," said Ansel.

They were alone. The stenographer had gone with her machine. The door was closed. On the table between them lay eleven pages of heavy cream paper in a folder tied with black tape, and the old man laid his hand upon it with a kind of weary tenderness.

"It names Kessler. It names the payments. It names Barrow and Voss, who will, I think, produce a gratifying record when subpoenaed. It does not name Hale directly. Pruitt never saw him. He saw a scarf." Ansel's mouth thinned. "But it establishes that Kessler, a member of the bar of this state, acting on behalf of the vice-chairman of Wexcombe Marine, bribed a medical administrator to surveil a pregnant woman. It is a violation of the Rules of Professional Conduct. It is a violation of the Rhode Island General Laws. And I should imagine the Disciplinary Board will take an interest."

"But it will not stop the petition."

"It will not."

"Hale is not named."

"Hale is a great deal too clever to be named." Ansel stroked his chin. "He will say Kessler acted on his own. He will say he is shocked. He will wring his hands, and weep a little, and withdraw Kessler with regret. And the petition will proceed on the thirtieth, with a new lawyer, and a new letterhead, and exactly the same grounds."

"Then what is it for?"

"It is for the day," said Ansel, "when you stand in front of Judge Marchetti and say, 'Your Honor, I should like to draw your attention to the character of the petitioner.'"

"That is not nothing."

"It is not nothing. It is not a victory." The old man looked at him over the tops of his spectacles. "Theron. I must say one thing more. I would rather say it now, in this room, with the door shut, than on the sixteenth in a corridor."

"Say it."

"You have done everything right, save the one thing."

"I know."

"You have bribed a man with honor. You have assembled evidence. You have, with admirable ruthlessness, stopped your uncle's scheme in its tracks." Ansel's voice was gentle. "You have not told the woman. And all that you have done will count for nothing if she learns of it from the wrong mouth."

"I am telling her on Sunday."

"Sunday."

"I have told you."

"You have told me on three separate occasions. You told me at Christmas that you would tell her at New Year's. You told me in January that you would tell her when she was stronger. You told me in February that you would tell her on the dock." Ansel closed the folder. "I am an old man. I have had a long life. And I have learned, in the course of it, that there is no such thing as a day on which one will be stronger."

Theron said nothing.

"I will say no more," said Ansel. "I only ask that you consider whether you wish to be the man who waited for Sunday. Or the man who went home tonight."

"She has an appointment tomorrow."

"I know."

"It is the twenty-six-week scan. Her doctor has been concerned about her pressure." Theron's voice was quiet. "I shall not tell her the night before a scan. I shall not put her through that. I shall tell her after, when the numbers are in, when she is well, and calm, and—"

"And Sunday."

"And Sunday."

Ansel regarded him for a long moment.

"Very well," he said. "Sunday."

He rose, with a small cracking of the knees, and held out his hand.

"I shall be at my telephone," he said. "All day. And all night."

…

Dr. Pratt's examining room smelled of rubber, lavender, and the faint ammoniac sweetness of a place where a great many people had been afraid.

It was a small bright room on the fourth floor of Women & Infants Hospital, painted a calm shade of yellow, with a framed print of a heron on the wall and a window onto the roofs of the East Side. There was a padded table, a stool, a sink, a rolling cart. A scale. A blood-pressure cuff, coiled like a gray snake. And a poster, taped to the cabinet, of a cartoon baby in a diaper, with the legend: WEEK 26: I CAN OPEN MY EYES!

Theron stood against the wall, out of the way, with his hands clasped behind him.

He had been invited. He wanted that clear. She had said it in a text on Wednesday, a plain flat unpunctuated line: Dr. Pratt. Friday 9am. I want you there. Don't make it a Thing. And he had arrived at ten to nine, in a gray suit, with a coffee in each hand and a bag of oranges, and sat in the waiting room among six enormously pregnant women and a husband in a Patriots jersey, and read the same page of Fortune for forty minutes.

Now he stood in the corner, and Dess lay on the table, and the doctor moved a gel-slick wand across the hill of her belly while a small gray storm swirled on the monitor.

"There," said Dr. Pratt. "See that? That's the spine. That's a beautiful spine. That's the heart. Four chambers, all accounted for. And—" She tapped the keyboard. "Hear that?"

The room filled with a sound.

It was rapid, wet, and wonderful: a galloping, rushing, stuttering beat, a hundred and forty-odd times a minute, like a horse running underwater. Theron felt it in his chest. It hit him below the sternum with a force he could not account for, and his hands came apart behind his back and he took a step forward, without quite knowing it, and stopped.

"One forty-six," said Dr. Pratt. "Perfect."

"Is that normal?" asked Dess.

"That's ideal. He's a champion." The doctor was a tall, tired, humorous woman of fifty with gray braids and half-moon glasses and an expression of benign skepticism. "Growth is right on the fiftieth percentile. A little over two pounds. Fluid is good. Placenta is posterior, no previa. Do you want to know the one thing I'm going to complain about?"

"Me," said Dess.

"You."

"I knew it."

"Your pressure." Dr. Pratt peeled off a glove. "It's a hundred and twenty-eight over eighty-two. That's not alarming. But it's up from your last two visits, and I don't love the trend. I'd like you to start checking at home. Twice a day, morning and night. And I'd like you off your feet more."

"I work at a desk."

"You work at a desk and you cross town with a duffel bag of oranges."

"They're a snack."

"They're a hobby." The doctor sat down on her stool. "I'm not worried. I'm noticing. In my line of work, noticing is ninety percent of the job. If it climbs, or if you get a headache that won't go away, or swelling in the face or hands, or spots in your vision, you call me. Day or night."

"What would it be?"

"What would what be?"

"If it climbed."

Dr. Pratt hesitated.

It was a very small hesitation. A hair's breadth. But Theron, who had stood at a hundred negotiating tables watching for the moment when a man's eyes went to the door, saw it.

"Preeclampsia," said the doctor. "It's a word you'll hear. It's common, and mostly manageable. It's not a sentence, it's a signal. It means the body's working a bit too hard. We watch, we adjust, we sometimes deliver a little early." She smiled. "But you're twenty-six weeks and perfect. I'm only saying: let's be boring."

"I'm very good at boring."

"I've seen your chart. It's the best-kept in the building."

Dess laughed.

Theron did not. He stood quite still against the wall, with the sound of the small galloping heart still ringing in the bones of his chest, and the word preeclampsia dropped like a stone into the well of his mind, where it settled, cold, among the others.

…

"You went white," said Dess.

They were in the elevator. It was a slow, ancient, rattling car, with a brass rail and a smell of floor wax. She stood with her back to the wall, a hand on her belly and a lollipop from the nurse's station in her mouth. It was a green one. She sucked at it with an air of grim defiance.

"I did not."

"You went white as a sheet. You looked like the poster."

"I was moved by the heartbeat."

"You were moved by the preeclampsia. I could see you filing it." She pulled the lollipop out. "You're doing the thing. The brooding. The 'I shall address the contingency with a binder.'"

"I have never owned a binder."

"You have seven. They're in your office. Marjorie told me."

"Marjorie is a traitor."

"Marjorie is a saint." She poked his lapel with the lollipop. "Listen. It's a number. It's one twenty-eight. It's not even high. The only thing that makes it high is that she's looking at it. She's the type who would flag a cloud."

"She has excellent judgment."

"She has a hobby." The elevator shuddered and stopped. "Don't make a binder."

"I shall make a file."

"Theron."

"A small one."

She laughed again, and the doors opened, and they stepped out into the lobby among the pushchairs and potted palms. But he saw it as she turned away: the quick, bright, effortful quality of her laughter, which was different today. She was too light. She was too steady. She touched his arm every few steps, and met his eyes a fraction of a second too long, and did not once say a word about her mother.

She has been to Fall River, he thought. She has been to see her mother and she is not telling me.

She is not telling me because she is waiting for Sunday.

She is keeping her word.

And I am keeping mine.

And we are two honest people, standing in a hospital lobby, being perfectly quiet.

…

He read to her that night.

It had not been his idea. It was the doctor's. Off your feet, she had said. Early to bed. Something soothing. And Dess, who obeyed medical orders with the tight-lipped literalism of a Marine, had come home at six, taken a bath, and lain down on her sofa in the gray robe with her ankles on three cushions and her pressure cuff on the coffee table, a blue-and-white digital monster that wheezed and clicked.

"A hundred and twenty-four over seventy-eight," she announced.

"Excellent."

"I'm a model of virtue. I'm a saint. I'm going to lie here until I rot."

"Would you like me to read to you?"

"Read what?"

"I do not know. What have you got?"

She waved a hand at the bookshelf.

It was an improvised affair of orange crates and planks, crammed two deep with paperbacks, mostly mysteries, a few romances with cracked spines, a shelf of insurance manuals, and, tucked in at the end, a battered green library copy with a missing jacket. He drew it out. He turned it over. It was a children's book, in a faded cloth binding, with a drawing of a mole on the cover in a tiny velvet jacket.

"The Wind in the Willows."

"Joelle gave it to me. For the baby. She said I had to start reading to him in the second trimester, it's good for the brain." Dess shut her eyes. "I got to chapter two and fell asleep. It's very soothing. Everybody's so polite."

"I know it."

"You do?"

"My nurse read it to me. When I was seven, and had the mumps." He sat down in the chair that she'd pulled up beside the sofa, a lumpy corduroy armchair that he had come to regard with a peculiar affection. He opened the book. "She did the voices. I am afraid I am not capable of the voices."

"Do it anyway."

"I shall be a disgrace."

"I want to hear it."

He looked at her.

She lay on the sofa with her eyes closed and the lamplight on her face, in the gray robe, with her hair in a loose dark braid across one shoulder and her feet propped on cushions, and her hand spread over the curve of her belly like a woman keeping a candle alive. Her face was thin, he noticed. Thinner than at Christmas. There were faint blue hollows beneath the eyes.

He cleared his throat, and began.

"'The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home.'"

It was a quiet, even, careful voice, a little stiff. He made no attempt at the voices. He read in the tone he used for reading aloud a contract to an illiterate client, with a clear, deliberate courtesy, as if every word were something that must be handed over intact. But as the page turned, and the Mole threw down his brush, and the sun came out, and the river appeared before him, bright and fat and moving, something in his throat began to loosen.

"'Never in his life had he seen a river before,'" he read. "'This sleek, sinuous, full-bodied animal, chasing and chuckling, gripping things with a gurgle and leaving them with a laugh—'"

"You're doing a voice," murmured Dess.

"I am not."

"You are. It's the river's. It's all plummy."

"It is the author's. He is a plummy man."

"Keep going."

He kept going.

He read for an hour. He read through the picnic and the Rat and the boat, and Mr. Toad and the caravan, and the long, dark, frightening passage in the Wild Wood. His voice grew warmer. The room grew dim. The radiator hummed. Outside the window, across the yard, a lamp came on in the third-floor window of number 14, and he thought, with a sort of absent wonder, I am not there. I am here. In the chair. In the light.

Somewhere in the Wild Wood, she fell asleep.

He did not notice at first. He read two more pages before he heard the change in her breathing: the long, slow, even rhythm, the small catch at the end of each breath. He stopped. He looked up. The book lay open on his knee.

She was sleeping with her mouth slightly parted and her head tilted back against the arm of the sofa. Her hand had fallen open on her belly. And under it, quite visibly, in the lamplight, the cloth of the robe was moving: a slow, rolling, deliberate swell, as of a small body turning in its sleep.

He sat motionless.

He sat for a very long time.

Then, very quietly, so as not to wake her, he reached out and laid his palm over her hand. The cloth was warm. Beneath it, against his fingers, a small hard heel nudged once, twice, at the exact cadence of a page being turned.

"Hello," he whispered.

The heel moved.

"I have a great deal to tell you," said Theron. "Not tonight. But soon. I should like you to know that I am going to tell your mother the truth. And that I shall do it badly. And that she will be right to be angry." He swallowed. "And I should like you to know, before anyone else tells you, that I wanted you. I did not know it. I did not plan it. I thought you were a legal instrument. And then there was a heartbeat on a screen, and I discovered that I was a man who would die for a person he had not met."

The heel pushed against his palm.

"That is all," he said. "That is the whole of it. I shall not say it when you can hear."

He sat with his hand on her belly and his head bowed.

The tremor had gone from his wrist. It had been gone for hours. He thought, vaguely, that it would never come back, and was ashamed of the vanity of such a hope.

Across the room the clock on the mantel struck ten.

He did not hear her breathing change.

He did not see her eyes open, a crack, in the gloom, and fix on the ceiling.

He did not see her lips move, silently, around a single sentence.

…

At some point he must have slept.

He woke in the armchair at a quarter to six, with a crick in his neck and the book face-down on his chest. Gray light was creeping through the blinds. The robe on the sofa had been replaced by a blanket, a patchwork quilt of faded blue and yellow, which she had drawn up to her chin. Her face was turned to the wall. She was still asleep.

He rose. His knees cracked. He folded the blanket where it had slipped, and tucked it in about her shoulders. She stirred and muttered something. He stood looking down at her in the half-light, at the dark braid and the small, fierce, stubborn chin, and thought: I will wake her at eight. I will make the coffee. I will say: Dess, there is something. And I will tell it from the beginning.

Not tomorrow. Not Sunday. Now.

I have no plan. No binder. No file. I have a sentence, and a woman, and an hour.

Ansel was right.

There is no such thing as a day on which one is stronger.

A strange peace came over him.

It was the peace of a man at the top of a high board, with the water lying blue and far below, who has stopped asking whether he can and merely leans. He drew a breath. He let it go. He crossed the room on tiptoe, and went into the kitchen, and filled the kettle at the tap.

The telephone rang.

It was his own, in his coat pocket. It buzzed against his hip like a trapped wasp. He lunged for it, so as not to wake her, and stood in the narrow kitchen with the kettle in one hand and the phone in the other and looked at the screen.

It was a number he knew.

It was a Newport number. A landline. The number of a house with forty-one clocks.

Hale.

He went out on the landing.

He closed the apartment door behind him, softly, with the latch held in his fingers, and stood on the cold boards of the stairwell in his shirtsleeves, with the gray dawn leaking through the skylight. A drip fell somewhere. He put the phone to his ear.

"Uncle."

"My dear boy." The voice was warm, sleepy, indulgent. "I hope I haven't woken you."

"What do you want?"

"I merely wished to say good morning. And to relay a courtesy." A rustle, as of a newspaper. "Albert has been rather anxious. He felt, on reflection, that it would be unkind to let Miss Rourke be surprised by the process server on the sixteenth. An unpleasant business, a stranger in a raincoat. He thought it far more civil to deliver a courtesy copy. In advance. By hand."

Theron did not move.

"Where?"

"To her door, I believe."

"When?"

"At about ten minutes to six."

The skylight went white. Then, below him, from the foot of the stairs, from the dim narrow vestibule of number 13, there rose a sound. It was the sound of an old brass doorbell, one long, deliberate, patient ring, followed, a moment later, by the slow creak of a door.

"I know why you have not told her," said Hale softly. "I have always known, dear boy. It is a very human thing. It is the reason your father never told your mother about Isobel. It is why I never told Constance about Geneva. We are Wexcombes. We do not confess." The old, tender, terrible voice sank. "We merely wait to be found."

"Hale—"

"Good morning, Theron."

The line went dead.

Theron stood on the landing.

Down in the vestibule, on the cold tile, in the gray light, he heard a second voice, thin and dry and precise, saying something he could not make out. Then Mrs. Ferreira's, high and indignant, in two languages. A short exchange. The slap of a slipper on the stair. The door of the street opening and closing on a rush of cold, and the soft expensive purr of an engine pulling away from the curb.

He closed his eyes.

Not Sunday, he thought.

Not now.

Not me.

The slippers began to climb. They came up slowly, with a stop on the half-landing, a wheeze, the rustle of quilted cloth. A small round figure in a plum-colored housecoat rose into view at the turn of the stairs, with a hairnet over her curlers and a large manila envelope held out before her at arm's length, like a dead fish.

"Mr. Wexcombe," said Mrs. Ferreira. "You are up early."

"Good morning, madam."

"I was sweeping the step, as I do, before the pigeons. A man was at the door. A small man. In a raincoat. He said it was for Miss Rourke. He said it was by hand." She sniffed. "I told him she was asleep. He said he would leave it on the mat. I said, it is six in the morning, you will leave it with me, and I will see that she gets it in a Christian manner."

"That was kind."

"It was not kind. It was nosy." She came up the last step and stood looking at him, and the shrewd black eyes under the hairnet traveled over his shirtsleeves, his bare throat, the phone in his fist. "You look like someone has died."

"No one has died."

"Then you look like someone is about to."

Behind him, the door of the apartment opened.

He did not turn. He heard the latch. He heard the hinge. He felt, on the back of his neck, in the cold of the stairwell, the soft rush of warm air from the room, and the faint smell of lemon and sleep and lavender soap. And a voice, a little rough, a little cracked, said:

"Theron? Who's at the door at six in the morning?"

Mrs. Ferreira looked past him.

Something went across the old woman's face. It was quick, and complicated, and it was gone before he could read it. She held out the envelope. Her hand was not quite steady.

"For you, querida," she said. "By hand."

Theron turned.

Dess stood in the doorway in the gray robe, with her braid half undone and a crease from the sofa cushion printed across one cheek. She looked puzzled and rumpled and young. She looked at him, and at the envelope, and back at him, and in her face he saw the faint beginnings of a smile, the sleepy startled pleasure of a woman who has woken to find the person she loves on her landing.

Then her gaze dropped to the envelope. And he watched the smile, very slowly, stop.

On the front, in a heavy black typeface, under the embossed crest of the Superior Court of the State of Rhode Island, there were five words, and a name.

IN RE: ESTATE OF CHRISTOPHER CALDER WEXCOMBE.

Petition of Hale Wexcombe, et al.

Served upon: JANE DOE, Mother of the Unborn.

She put out her hand and took it.

"Dess," said Theron.

"Hang on."

"Dess. I must—"

"Hang on," she said again, quite gently. "Please. I'd like to read it first."