John Casey - Compass Rose

When she half recovered and was wiping her cheeks with her fingertips, she heard herself say, “I’ve never cried. I mean, I’ve never cried in uniform.” That was a bit of babble that normally would have made her laugh. At least she stopped crying. She said, “Oh, God. You must think I’m …”

“No, no. I can guess it’s been …” He bent down to pick up the appointment book from the floor. His hair was cut short or the half-curls would have been ringlets. He pulled a small packet of Kleenex from his briefcase. He puzzled over how to open the cellophane. He had thick fingers, a heavy, broad face. A general width — when he finally broke the wrapping and pinched out an edge of Kleenex, she felt as if she was being tended to by a bear.

He said, “I guess you’ve felt a lot of strain. Jack said you’re like a daughter to Miss Perry. So look. I can take the appointment books and the Everett Hazard folder, xerox them. We don’t have to wrap everything up right now.”

Elsie didn’t want him to go. She wanted him to sit by the fire and pay attention to her. She said, “Let me just look in upstairs. You’re going … where? Woonsocket? And that reminds me. Phoebe Fitzgerald wants to talk to you.”

“Oh, yeah. The tenant.”

“I could make you a cup of coffee. For your drive. You can smoke your pipe if you’d like.” He looked surprised but said, “I’m only going to Providence. But sure. A cup of coffee’d be nice. Black.”

When she came back he was looking at the books in the boys’ bookcases. She put his coffee on the table between the two armchairs facing the fireplace. She sat down in one of them, tucking her legs under her, a kittenish pose she hadn’t struck for a long time. He sat in the other armchair, planted his feet. “So tell me something about Miss Perry,” he said. “But first tell me how you know I smoke a pipe. Some sort of Sherlock Holmes thing? Or was it something Jack told you? Probably not Jack. He doesn’t notice details. At least not about men.”

“Oh?” Elsie was surprised by this bit of spin on his serve but was pleased to bat it back. “Of course, that’s true of men in general.”

“I don’t think so. But let’s not get into one of those men-in-general talks. The pipe …”

“I’ll tell you a little bit about Miss Perry. We’ll get back to the pipe.” He stretched out his legs. So this wasn’t going to be one of her old daredevil encounters, nothing like her fantasy of wading across the Queens River, having him at her mercy.

She told him school stories, about being Miss Perry’s prize student in Latin and natural history. A glimpse of herself as a tomboy. “My sister was the great beauty, so I took to the woods.” He raised his eyebrows but didn’t make a courtly objection. “I would have been just sullenly thrashing around, but Miss Perry took an interest. Just asked a question or two at first. Then asked me to take her to where I’d seen something extraordinary. The first thing was a lady’s slipper. On the way she pointed out other things. One time she slit open a little swelling on a twig and inside there was a nymph.”

“Oh, sure, nymph. Like a maggot or a grub. Good bait for trout.”

“So you’re a trout fisherman.”

“When I was a kid, Grandpère used to take me. Now it’s rare.” The r s in grandpère were trilled French-Canadian rather than lightly gargled French-French.

“Did you grow up speaking French?”

“Some. My father’s family’s from Trois Rivières. They speak Quebecois. You hear it about half the time in Woonsocket— au coin . When the governor gives a speech up there in our corner, I do the introduction in French and English.”

She said, “So what are you doing here? This little job …”

“I’m a lawyer. And I owe Jack. He tell you I worked for him? I’m not the kind of guy Jack usually hires for his firm. I didn’t make partner, but I learned a lot in five years. Now I run my own shop — an office in Woonsocket and one in Providence. Run-of-the-mill cases, but I’m seeing more people.”

“So, being a governor’s aide — how does that fit in?”

“I’m not ruling out doing something in politics.”

“ ‘I’m not ruling out’—that usually means someone’s dead set on it. I hope you don’t imagine Miss Perry’s a moneybags who’ll bankroll your campaign.”

He smiled. “You look a lot like your sister, but you talk a whole lot different.”

Elsie felt both flattered and stopped. He sat there smiling pleasantly. She wondered if he was really so at ease. She wasn’t used to being the one who wondered. She wondered if he was at ease because there she was in her uniform, a state employee, and he was a big cheese. She said, “So, if you get stopped for speeding, you let the cop know you work for the governor? Is there some little something on your license plate?” She held up her hand and said, “Never mind. I don’t know why …” She gave up the idea of playing her little trump card — trout, fire, wine. She felt her edge grow dull. She’d relied on that edge for years. When she was at Sally and Jack’s she was the daring gadfly. In the woods she had her badge. And although she’d worked at being just-folks, one of the guys, she had to admit she’d never quite given up the privileges of class. She’d denounced them when she saw them in someone else, most usually in Jack. She sometimes thought that her life had leached them out of her. She sometimes thought that the whole idea of class was fading, the radioactive emissions were weaker and weaker. Nothing like the Boston or Newport of a hundred or fifty years ago. But deep inside her, sometimes hidden even from herself, there was a trace. One of the chief privileges was the assurance of being the final judge of all other claims of worth — money, power, beauty, fame, intellect, or even good works. She’d used it — it wasn’t just her sassy talk or body that set men off. Her college English prof had imagined he was fucking Daisy Buchanan. The striving lawyers at Jack and Sally’s parties, not quite as literate, still sensed an allure of risk. When they were through she might turn on them, remind them that sex was pleasant enough but now that she was herself again she could see they weren’t quite the thing.

And now — as if her bursting into tears in front of this bearish man was as physically intimate as fucking — she’d felt the old urge to put him in his place. And she’d started—“I hope you don’t imagine Miss Perry’s a moneybags …” The breezy way she mentioned money, the poke at his ambition from her position above ambition, the backward tilt of her head as if she’d finally bothered to pay attention. (One of the minor privileges — no one was really there — of course there were always people around, but no one was really there until you decided to notice.)

She didn’t have it in her anymore. She hadn’t debated it, hadn’t examined her conscience. In fact, she’d been about to make another entrance in that role. Performance canceled.

She hadn’t crossed the Queens River because she’d looked like the Pillsbury Doughboy. With all her Exercycling and her fish-and-vegetables diet she was on better terms with her body — she didn’t mind that her feet were a half size bigger, her hip bones a bit wider, and of course her breasts bigger.

He was staring into the fire. Without looking up he said, “No, it’s okay. I ask myself that. I’m as suspicious of my ambition as I am of anybody else’s. I won’t give you the speech about caring what happens to people. But is there a part that wants the applause? The deference? The special treatment?” He shrugged. “I can’t say there isn’t some of that. But so long as it stays in the corner … The part of myself I question more is curiosity. I applied to Jack’s firm out of curiosity. What would I see in there? What would I see from there?”