Tiny Little Thing: Secrets, scandal and forbidden love

Caspian, 1964

BOSTON

Eleven o’clock came and went on the tea-stained clock above the coffee shop door, and still no sign of Jane.

Not that he was waiting. Not that her name was Jane.

Or maybe it was. Why the hell not? Jane was a common name, a tidy feminine name; the kind of girl you could take home to your mother, if you had one. Wouldn’t that be a gas, if he sat down at Jane Doe’s booth one day and asked her name, and she looked back at him over the rim of her coffee cup, just gazed at him with those wet chocolate eyes, and said I’m Jane, like that.

Yeah. Just like that.

Not that he’d ever sit down at her booth. When, every day at ten o’clock sharp, Jane Doe settled herself in her accustomed place at Boylan’s Coffee Shop and ordered a cup of finest Colombian with cream and sugar and an apricot Danish, she enacted an invisible electric barrier about herself, crossable only by waitresses bearing pots of fresh coffee and old Boylan himself, gray-haired and idolatrous. Look but don’t touch. Admire but don’t flirt. No virile, young red-blooded males need apply, thank you terribly, and would you please keep your dirty, loathsome big hands to yourself.

“More coffee, Cap?”

He looked down at the thick white cup in the thick white saucer. His loathsome big hand was clenched around the bowl. The remains of his coffee, fourth refill, lay black and still at the bottom. Out of steam. He released the cup and reached for his back pocket. “No thanks, Em. I’d better be going.”

“Suit yourself.”

He dropped a pair of dollar bills on the Formica—a buck fifty for the bacon and eggs, plus fifty cents for Em, who had two kids and a drunk husband she complained about behind the counter to the other girls—and stuffed his paperback in an outside pocket of his camera bag. The place was quiet, hollow, denuded of the last straggling breakfasters, holding its breath for the lunch rush. He levered himself out of the booth and hoisted his camera bag over his shoulder. His shoes echoed on the empty linoleum.

Em’s voice carried out behind him. “I bet she’s back tomorrow, Cap. She just lives around the corner.”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, Em.” He hurled the door open in a jingle-jangle of damned bells that jumped atop his nerves.

“Wasn’t born yesterday,” she called back.

Outside, the Back Bay reeked of its old summer self—car exhaust and effluvia and sun-roasted stone. An early heat wave, the radio had warned this morning, and already you could feel it in the air, a familiar jungle weight curling down the darling buds of May. To the harbor, then. A long walk by civilian standards, but compared to a ten-mile hike in a shitty tropical swamp along the Laos border, hauling fifty pounds of pack and an M16 rifle, sweat rolling from your helmet into your stinging eyes, fucking Vietcong ambush behind every tree, hell, Boston Harbor’s a Sunday stroll through the gates of paradise.

Just a little less exciting, that was all, but he could live without excitement for a while. Everyone else did.

Already his back was percolating perspiration, like the conditioned animal he was. The more vigorous the athlete, the more efficient the sweat response: you could look it up somewhere. He lifted his automatic hand to adjust his helmet, but he found only hair, thick and a little too long.

He turned left and struck down Commonwealth Avenue, around the corner, and holy God there she was, Jane Doe herself, hurrying toward him in an invisible cloud of her own petite ladylike atmosphere, checking her watch, the ends of her yellow-patterned silk head scarf fluttering in her draft.

He stopped in shock, and she ran bang into him. He caught her by the small pointy elbows.

“Oh! Excuse me.”

“My fault.”

She looked up and up until she found his face. “Oh!”

He smiled. He couldn’t help it. How could you not smile back at Miss Doe’s astounded brown eyes, at her pink lips pursed with an unspoken Haven’t we met before?

“From the coffee shop,” he said. His hands still cupped her pointy elbows. She was wearing a crisp white shirt, a pair of navy pedal pushers, a dangling trio of charms in the hollow of her throat on a length of fine gold chain. As firm and dainty as a young deer. He could lift her right up into the sky.

“I know that.” She smiled politely. The ends of her yellow head scarf rested like sunshine against her neck. “Can I have my elbows back?”

“Must I?”

“You really must.”

Her pocketbook had slipped down her arm. She lifted her left hand away from his clasp and hoisted the strap back up to her right shoulder, and as she did so, the precocious white sun caught the diamond on her ring finger, like a mine exploding beneath his unsuspecting foot.

But hell. Wasn’t that how disasters always struck? You never saw them coming.

Tiny, 1966

When I come in from the beach the next morning, Frank’s father is seated at the end of the breakfast table, eating pancakes.

“Oh! Good morning, Mr. Hardcastle.” I slide into my chair. The French doors stand open behind me, and the salt breeze, already warm, spreads pleasantly across my shoulders.

My father-in-law smiles over his newspaper. “Good morning, Tiny. Out for your walk already?”

“Oh, you know me. Anyway, Percy wakes me up early. Wants his walkies.” I pat the dog’s head, and he sinks down at the foot of my chair with a fragrant sigh. “You must have come in last night.”

“Yes, went into the campaign office for a bit, and then drove down, long past bedtime. I hope I didn’t wake anyone.”

“Not at all.” There’s no sign of the housekeeper, so I reach for the coffeepot myself. “How was the trip? We were watching on television from the living room.”

“Excellent, excellent. You should have been there.”

“The doctors advised against it.”

Mr. Hardcastle’s face lengthens. “Of course. I didn’t actually mean that you should have been there, of course. Air travel being what it is.” He reaches across the white tablecloth and pats my hand, the same way I’ve just patted Percy. “How are you feeling?”

“Much better, thank you. Are you staying long?”

“Just for the dinner tonight, then I have to get back in Boston. Campaign’s heating up.” He winks.

“I’m sure Frank appreciates all your help.”

“He has a right to my help, Tiny. That’s what family is for. We’re all in this together, aren’t we? That’s what makes us so strong.” He sets down his newspaper, folds it precisely, and grasps his coffee cup. “I understand they had plans last night. Frank and Cap and your sister.”

“Did they?”

“Oh, they were in high spirits on the plane from Washington. Nearly brought the old bird down a couple of times. I wouldn’t expect them here until afternoon at least.”

“Well, they should go out. I’m sure Major Harrison deserves a little fun, after all he’s been through. I hope Frank took him somewhere lively. I hope they had a ball.”

“And it doesn’t bother you? All that fun without you?”

“Oh, boys will be boys, my mother always said. Always better to let them get it out of their systems.”

The swinging door opens from the kitchen, and Mrs. Crane backs through, bearing a plate of breakfast in one hand and a pot of fresh coffee in the other. The toast rack is balanced on a spare thumb. “Here you are, Mrs. Hardcastle,” she says.

“Thank you so much, Mrs. Crane.”

As I pick up my knife and fork, my skin prickles under the weight of someone’s observation. I turn my head, right smack into the watchful stare of my father-in-law. His eyes have narrowed, and his mouth turns up at one corner, causing a wave of wrinkles to ripple into his cheekbone.

“What is it?” I ask.

The smile widens into something charming, something very like his son’s best campaign smile. The smile Frank wore when he asked me to marry him.

“Nothing in particular,” he says. “Just that you’re really the perfect wife. Frank’s lucky to have you.” He reaches for his newspaper and flicks it back open. “We’re just lucky to have you in the family.”

Frank’s yellow convertible pulls up with a toothsome roar and a spray of miniature gravel at one o’clock in the afternoon, just as we’ve finished a casual lunch in the screened porch propped up above the ocean.

I’ve promised myself not to drink nor smoke before his arrival, whatever the provocation, and I managed to keep that promise all morning long, so my husband finds me fresh and serene and smelling of lemonade. “Hello there!” I sing out, approaching the car in my pink Lilly shift with the dancing monkeys, flat heels grinding crisply against the gravel. I rise up on my toes to kiss him.

“Well, hello there!” He’s just as cheerful as the day before, though there’s clearly occurred a night in between, which has taken due toll on his skin tone and the brightness of his Technicolor eyeballs. “Say hello to your sister.”

“Be gentle.” Pepper climbs out of the passenger seat, all glossy limbs and snug tangerine dress, and eases her sunglasses tenderly from her eyes. “Pepper’s hung, darling.”

Do you know, I’ve never quite loved my sister the way I do in that instant, as she untangles herself from Frank’s convertible to join me in my nest of in-laws. A memory assaults me—maybe it’s the tangerine dress, maybe it’s the familiar grace of her movements—of a rare evening out with Pepper and Vivian a few years ago, celebrating someone’s graduation, in which I’d drunk too much champagne and found myself cornered in a seedy nightclub hallway by some intimidating male friend of Pepper’s, unable to politely excuse myself, until Pepper had found us and nearly ripped off the man’s ear with the force of her ire. You can stick your pretty little dick into whatever poor drunk schoolgirl you like—or words equally elegant—but you stay the hell away from my sister, capiche?

And he slunk away. Capiche, all right.

Pepper. Never to be trusted with boyfriends and husbands, mind you, but a Valkyrie of family loyalty against outsider attack.

I step forward, arms open, and embrace her with an enthusiasm that astonishes us both. What’s more, she hugs me back just as hard. I kiss her cheek and draw away, still holding her by the shoulders, and say something I’d never said before, on an instinct God only knows: “Are you all right, Pepper?”

She’s just so beautiful, Pepper, even and perhaps especially windblown from a two-hour drive along the highway in Frank’s convertible. Disheveled suits her, the way it could never suit me. Her eyes return the sky. A little too bright, I find myself thinking. “Perfectly all right, sister dear,” she says, “except I couldn’t face breakfast, and by the time we crossed the Sagamore Bridge I was famished enough to gobble up your cousin’s remaining leg. No matter how adorable he is.”

I must look horrified, because she laughs. “Not really. But a sandwich would do nicely. And a vodka tonic. Heavy on the vodka. Your husband drives like a maniac.”

“Make it two,” says Frank, from behind the open lid of the trunk, unloading suitcases.

“But where is Major Harrison?” I can’t bring myself to say Caspian, just like that. I feign looking about, as if I’d just recognized his absence from Frank’s car.

“Oh, we dropped him off already, next door. That’s a lovely place he’s got. Not as nice as yours.” She nods at the Big House. “But then, his needs are small, the poor little bachelor.”

“Well, that’s a shame. I was looking forward to meeting him at last.”

Frank ranges up with the suitcases. “That’s right. He missed the wedding, didn’t he?”

“Oh, I can promise he wasn’t there at your wedding.” Pepper laughs. “You think I’d forget a man like that, if he were present and accounted for?”

Even battling a hangover, Pepper’s the same old Pepper, flirting with my husband by way of making suggestive remarks about another man. I take her arm and steer her toward the house, leaving Frank to trail behind us with the suitcases. The act fills me with zing. “But he’s still coming for dinner, isn’t he?”

Franks speaks up. “He’d better. He’s the guest of honor.”

“If he hasn’t come over by six o’clock,” says Pepper, “I’d be happy to pop next door and help him dress.”

Guests first. I lead Pepper upstairs to her room and show her the bathroom, the wardrobe, the towels, the bath salts, the carafe of water in which the lemon slices bump lazily about the ice cubes. I’m about to demonstrate the arcane workings of the bath faucet when she pushes me toward the door. “Go on, go on. I can work a faucet, for God’s sake. Go say hello to your husband. Have yourselves some après-midi.” She winks. Obviously Mums hasn’t told her about the miscarriage. Or maybe she has, and Pepper doesn’t quite comprehend the full implications.

Anyway, the zing from the driveway starts dissolving right there, and by the time I reach my own bedroom, by the time my gaze travels irresistibly to the top drawer of my dresser, closed and polished, it’s vanished without trace.

Frank’s in the bathroom, faucet running. The door is cracked open, and a film of steam escapes to the ceiling. I turn to his suitcase, which lies open on the bed, and take out his shirts.

He’s an efficient packer, my husband, and most of the clothes have been worn. Hardly an extra scrap in the bunch. I toss the shirts and the underwear in the laundry basket, I fold the belt and silk ties over the rack in his wardrobe, I hang the suits back in their places along the orderly spectrum from black to pale gray.

I make a point of avoiding the pockets, because I refuse to become that sort of wife, but when I return to the suitcase a glint of metal catches my eye. Perhaps a cuff link, I think, and I stretch out my finger to fish it from between Frank’s dirty socks.

It’s not a cuff link. It’s a key.

A house key, to be more specific; or so I surmise, since you can’t start a car or open a post office box with a York. I finger the edge. There’s no label, nor is it attached to a ring of any kind. Like Athena, it seems to have emerged whole from Zeus’s head, if Zeus’s head were a York lock.

I walk across the soft blue carpet to the bathroom door and push it wide. Frank stands before the mirror, bare chested, stroking a silver razor over his chin. A few threads of shaving cream decorate his cheeks, which are flushed from the heat of the water and the bathroom itself.

“Is this your key, darling?” I hold it up between my thumb and forefinger.

Frank glances at my reflection. His eyes widen. He turns and snatches the key with his left hand, while his right holds the silver razor at the level of his face. “Where did you get that?”

“The bottom of the suitcase.”

He smiles. “It must have slipped off the ring somehow. It’s the key to the campaign office. I was working late the other day.”

“I can go downstairs and put it back on your ring.”

He sets the key down on the counter, next to his shaving soap, and turns his attention back to his sleek face. “That’s all right. I’ll put it back myself.”

“It’s no trouble.”

Frank lifts the razor back to his chin. “No need.”

By the time I’ve emptied the suitcase and tucked away the contents, careful and deliberate, Frank has finished shaving and walks from the bathroom, towel slung around his neck, still dabbing at his chin.

“Thanks.” He kisses me on the cheek. His skin is damp and sweet against mine. “Missed you, darling.”

“I missed you, too.”

“You look beautiful in that dress.” He continues to the wardrobe. “Do you think there’s time for a quick sail before dinner?”

“I don’t mind, if you can square that with your grandmother. Naturally she’s dying to hear every detail of your trip. Especially the juicy bits afterward.”

He makes a dismissive noise, for which I envy him. “Join me?”

“No, not with the dinner coming up, I’m afraid.” I wind the zipper around the edge of the empty suitcase. Frank tosses the towel on the bed and starts dressing. I pick up the towel and return it to the bathroom. Frank’s buttoning his shirt. I grasp the handle of the suitcase.

“No, no. I’ll get it.” He pushes my hand away and lifts the suitcase himself. It’s not heavy, but the gesture shows a certain typical gallantry, and I think how lucky I am to have the kind of husband who steps in to carry bulky objects. Who invariably offers me his jacket when the wind picks up. He stows the suitcase in the wardrobe, next to the shoes, while I stand next to the bed, breathing in the decadent scent of hyacinths out of season, and wonder what a wife would say right now.

“How was the drive?”

“Oh, it was all right. Not much traffic.”

“And your cousin? It didn’t bother him?”

Frank smiles at me. “His name is Cap, Tiny. You can say it. Or Caspian, if you insist on being your formal self.”

“Caspian.” I smooth my hands down my pink dress as I say the word.

“I know you’ve never met him, but he’s a nice guy. Really. He looks intimidating, sure, but he’s just big and quiet. Just an ordinary guy. Eats hamburgers, drinks beer.”

“Oh, just an ordinary beer-drinking guy who happens to have been awarded the Medal of Honor yesterday for valiant combat in Vietnam.” I force out a smile. “Do we know how many men he killed?”

“Probably a lot. But that’s just war, honey. He’s not going to jump from the table and set up a machine gun nest in the dining room.”

“Of course not. It’s just … well, like you said. Everybody else knows him so well, and this entire dinner is supposed to revolve around him. …”

“Hey, now. You’re not nervous, are you? Running a big family dinner like this?” Frank takes a step toward me. His hair, sleeked back from his forehead with a brush and a dab of Brylcreem, catches a bit of blond light from the window, the flash of the afternoon ocean.

“Don’t be silly.”

He puts his hands around my shoulders. “You’ll be picture-perfect, honey. You always are.” He smells of Brylcreem and soap. Of mint toothpaste covering the hint of stale cigarette on his breath. They were probably smoking on the long road from New York, he and Pepper, while Caspian, who doesn’t smoke, sat in the passenger seat and watched the road ahead. He kisses me on the lips. “How are you feeling? Back to normal?”

“I’m fine. Not quite back to normal, exactly. But fine.”

“I’m sorry I had to leave so soon.”

“Don’t worry. I wasn’t expecting the world to stop.”

“We’ll try again, as soon as you’re ready. Just another bump on the road.”

“If you tell me you’re just sure it will take this time,” I tell him, “I’ll slap you.”

He laughs. “Granny again?”

“Your impossibly fertile family. Do you know, there are at least four babies here this week, the last time I counted?”

Frank gathers me close. “I’m sorry. You’re such a trouper, Tiny.”

“It’s all right. I can’t blame other people for having babies, can I?”

He sighs, deep enough to lift me up and down on his chest. “Honey, I know this doesn’t make it any better. But I promise you we’ll have one of our own. We’ll just keep trying. Call in the best doctors, if we have to.”

His kindness undoes me. I lift my thumb to my eyes, so as not to spoil his shirt with any sodden traces of makeup. “Yes, of course.”

“Don’t cry, honey. We’ll do whatever it takes.”

“It’s just … I just …” Want it so badly. Want a baby of my own, a person of my own, an exchange of whole and uncomplicated love that belongs solely to me. If we have a baby, everything will be fine, because nothing else will matter.

“I know, darling. I know.”

He pats my back. Something wet touches my ankle, through my stocking, and I realize that Percy has jumped from the bed, and now attempts to comfort my foot. Frank’s body is startlingly warm beneath his shirt, warm enough to singe, and I realize how cold my own skin must be. I gather myself upward, but I don’t pull away. I don’t want Frank to see my face.

“All better?” He loosens his arms and shifts his weight back to his heels.

“Yes. All better.” But still I hold on, not quite ready to release his warmth. “So tell me about your cousin.”

“Cap.”

“Yes, Cap. He has a sister, doesn’t he?”

“Yes. But she’s staying in San Diego. Her girls aren’t out of school for the summer until next week.”

“And everything else is all right with him? He’s recovered from … all that?”

“Seems so. Same old Cap. A little quieter, maybe.”

“Anything I should know? You know, physical limitations?” I glance at my dresser drawer. “Money problems?”

Frank flinches. “Money problems? What makes you ask that?”

“Well, I don’t want to say anything awkward. And I know some of the cousins are better off than the others.”

He gives me a last pat and disengages me from his arms. “He’s fine, as far as I know. Both parents gone, so he’s got their money. Whatever that was. Anyway, he’s not a big spender.”

“How do you know?”

“I went out with him last night, remember? You can tell a lot about a man on a night out.”

Frank winks and heads back to the wardrobe, whistling a few notes. I look down at Percy’s anxious face, his tail sliding back and forth along the rug, and I kneel down to wrap one arm around his doggy shoulders. Frank, still whistling, slips on his deck shoes and slides his belt through its loops.

Don’t settle for less than the best, darling, my mother used to tell me, swishing her afternoon drink around the glass, and I haven’t, have I? Settled for less, that is. Frank’s the best there is. Just look at him. Aren’t I fortunate that my husband stays trim like that, when so many husbands let themselves go? When so many husbands allow their marital contentment to expand like round, firm balloons into their bellies. But Frank stays active. He walks to his office every day; he sails and swims and golfs and plays all the right sports, the ones with racquets. He has a tennis player’s body, five foot eleven without shoes, lean and efficient, nearly convex from hip bone to hip bone. A thing to watch, when he’s out on the court. Or in the swimming pool, for that matter, the one tucked discreetly in the crook of the Big House’s elbow, out of sight from both driveway and beach.

He shuts the wardrobe door and turns to me. “Are you sure you won’t come out on the water?”