Reunion at Red Paint Bay - By George Harrar Page 0,22
the hallway. “You brought that man into our house when I specifically warned you I never wanted to meet him.”
“How could I know you’d be home early?”
“That’s not the point,” she said, her body visibly shaking. “A person like that is toxic, and I didn’t want him anywhere near our lives. Now his disgusting hands will be playing the piano I never wanted to sell in the first place, the one I learned on and Davey learned on.”
“You agreed it was taking up too much space, and it’s not for him anyway. He’s refinishing it for his sister who has three kids so they can have music in their lives.”
“So he’s a music-appreciating rapist with a heart of gold. I’m touched.”
Simon shook his head at her. “Why are you getting so hysterical over this?”
“Don’t use that word on me,” she said. “Every time Freud wrote about an hysterical patient it was a woman.”
“Okay, I take it back, you’re not hysterical. But why are you so upset? He made a mistake and served his sentence.”
“Because women who are raped don’t get a few years’ term they can serve and then they’re free.”
“So David deserves a life sentence? Or is that too good for him? Perhaps he should be strung up on the Common.”
“Don’t be sarcastic.”
“I’m serious. I really want to know—what’s the proper sentence for a rapist?”
Amy thought for only a moment. “Shame, Simon, and that man doesn’t have any.”
He sits on the wide-planked porch of the Bayswater Inn watching rain pelt the water. At times the wind changes direction and blows the thick drops far enough sideways to reach him under the broad roof. He doesn’t stir, even when the inn’s owner, Peter McBride, approaches him with a mug filled with a brown liquid, topped by whipped cream.
“Compliments of the house, Mr. Chambers,” the innkeeper says as he holds out the tall glass. “It’s the specialty of the inn—we call it the Tonic. My grandmother used to say if this doesn’t cure what ails you, nothing ails you.” The man takes the mug and paper napkin. “The secret is using Jameson whiskey and untreated Vermont cream, no chemicals. Don’t stir it in. Drink through it.”
He sips the sweet cream until the coffee pours through with a jolt of whiskey. He wipes his mouth on the napkin, leaving a dark smudge, which he folds out of view. “I’m not a coffee drinker,” he says, “but this is very nice.”
The wind whips the halyard on the flagpole, making them turn toward the curving driveway. “I could listen to that all night,” McBride says. “I’ve always thought the best sounds on earth are a foghorn, a waterfall, and the rattle of the halyard against a flagpole.”
“And the whistle of a train,” the man says, “one going away from you.”
McBride moves behind his guest and takes hold of a large black handle, which he turns with some effort. The blue-striped awning begins rolling up, inch by inch. “Sorry,” he says, “can’t chance a gust ripping through it. You might want to move inside.”
“A little rain never hurt anyone,” he says. But forty days and nights of it, that extinguished virtually every living thing. Six chapters after creation, God washed away humanity, repenting that He had made it. To whom does God confess?
McBride leans against an empty Adirondack chair. “I’d sit out with you if I could, but we’ve got a lot of work to do before the school reunion here next week. Things get pretty chaotic for a few days. I hope you won’t be put out.”
“It won’t bother me at all,” the man says, a most agreeable guest.
He remembers the music most of all—the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth, the strange meditation of violins and harp that always accompanied wakes at the Bays-water Inn. It seemed to him like music that didn’t want to end, as if the notes were bunching up at the edge of a cliff, refusing to be shoved over. He was the body watcher at so many viewings when he was a teenager that it took years to get the haunting melody out of his head. And now it has come back as he crosses the dining room toward the Viewing Room, a small outcropping off the west wing where the bodies of Red Paint’s most prominent citizens are laid out in their ornate coffins. He could have brought Jean here in her sleek bronze casket, surrounding it with large pots of white lilies. But what if no one came