bowl more lines. And maybe the uneasy business of renting shoes made people think of alcohol as a disinfectant. Stall and his wife found a table as far away from the nearest lane as possible, and he went to the bar for Maureen’s Coke and his own bourbon and water. Sarah Leaf had said she was drinking whiskey and Stall figured misery loved company. They sat, sipped, and when he could sneak a peek without offending Maureen, Stall watched the ball game on the blurry television above the bar. The Yankees were pole-axing the White Sox, as usual.
“So how do you think she’s taking it?” Maureen twirled her glass in its little pool of moisture on the table.
“Based on one phone conversation, I’d say she’s taking it pretty strangely, but I don’t know. I’ve never been a widow.”
Maureen drank some Coke. “She’s not a widow yet, she’s in shock. She won’t be a widow for a while, and then we’ll know how she’s taking it.”
Sarah Leaf entered the bar blinking her eyes after the harsh August sunlight of the parking lot. The bright smile on her face reminded Stall of the look he had once seen on the face of a distant cousin who had just been discharged from the county asylum for the insane. Sarah waved and walked toward them fast. Stall stood and so did his wife. Maureen hugged Sarah Leaf first. Maureen’s hug was hard and close, two women exchanging messages that men could never parse.
Stall hugged Sarah more formally and held a chair for her. “What can I get you?”
“I’m drinking rye now,” Sarah Leaf said, her voice crisp, her words not at all slurred. “Maddie and I went right through the bourbon. On the rocks, please, with an ice water back.”
Stall headed for the bar. On the way he thought, Why have we been chosen for this? We didn’t know them all that well.
The Leafs and the Stalls had attended parties at each other’s houses and a lot of other houses too. In the ebb and flow of social gatherings, they had washed up together on sofas and in hallways for conversations of all kinds, ranging from kids to real estate to which doctors delved into which human mysteries in this small university town. When Maureen and Sarah had put their heads together, Stall supposed they had talked about the usual womanly, housewifely things. Maureen had never told him what they talked about.
When he and Jack talked, it was about their research, students they shared, and sometimes about their colleagues. Reserved was the word Stall would have chosen to describe Jack, reserved in all things, and he supposed others might describe Tom Stall in the same way. Was this one of the reasons that he and Jack had been able to talk easily and enthusiastically about their work and to go no further? Never into anything personal, just a few comments about kids, cars, sports, and wives? Stall had liked Jack Leaf and, had he asked himself about it, he probably would have realized that he’d have liked to get to know the man better. Perhaps his own reserve had made him defer an approach to Jack, put off the day when he might say, Hey, Jack, let’s have lunch and talk some more about that flow you see from poets like Bradstreet and Whittier to Eliot and Stevens. Waiting for the bartender to pour, Stall shook his head and thought, It’s too late for that now.
Maureen and Sarah Leaf were deep in conversation when Stall set Sarah’s drinks on the table. “So I told her,” Sarah was saying, “she might be able to beat me at gin, but I could drink her under the table. And then, you won’t believe this, the old broad winked at me real big and said, Try me. Just you try me, and that’s when I went for the bottle of Old Overholt.”
Maureen put her hand on Sarah’s on the tabletop. “Oh my God, the chairman’s wife. Who knew?” Stall recognized well the expression on his wife’s face. It was, Get me out of here.
He sat and took a healthy sip of his bourbon. “So,” he said, “Old Lady Harding turns out to be the secret sister of Tugboat Annie?”
“Nothing secret about it,” Sarah Leaf said. “She’s a daytime drinker.”
Stall was thinking, Maybe just with you, with a recent widow, maybe just in a crisis and very rarely, but he doubted it. Whole vistas of Amos Harding’s hard life opened up to Stall. Suddenly, he felt sorry for the man.
“Maybe,” Maureen squeezed Sarah’s hand, “she just knew what you needed.”
“And sacrificed herself to it.” Sarah threw back her head and laughed. “I see. I get it. Mrs. Amos Harding is the village voodoo princess who knows exactly what I need to get through my grief. Well, let me tell you something, kids. You don’t get through a thing like this.”
And so the conversation turned from a kind of hysterical levity to grim platitudes. Stall and his wife sat mute while Sarah Leaf talked about how her life had changed forever, about the two boys, off at tennis camp together, still living in blissful ignorance of their father’s . . . what was it? A rejection of them? That was how they would see it, Sarah said. And they would spend the rest of their lives wondering what they had done to cause the father they had loved and who had loved them to take his own life. No, to throw it away. Her voice ground on mechanically as she stared straight ahead, occasionally sipping whiskey. Finally, she just stopped. “I hope I’m not boring you two.”
Maureen took the plunge that Stall would not even have considered: “Why did he do it, Sarah?” She leaned forward and looked deeply into Sarah Leaf’s eyes, and Stall knew that the two women had crossed again to the terrain where men could not follow. His wife was asking a widow what signs to look for in a husband, what signals came from the masculine side of Marriageland, that could tell a woman when her husband might jump out a window.
Sarah finished her rye and took a sip of cold water. “Jack was unhappy. Underneath it all, he was a very troubled man.”
Jack Leaf, Underground Man.
Sarah Leaf was a trim, athletic woman who played tennis in a league with faculty wives and served as secretary of the Garden Club. She never looked flustered, never too busy, never anything but in charge. She kept an immaculate house, was a good cook and hostess, and played excellent bridge. She wore slacks (rarely skirts and dresses), flat shoes, and blouses that showed off the lovely arms she had earned from hours on the tennis court. The effect, Stall thought, was a little masculine, a little like the Katharine Hepburn of Pat and Mike, but Sarah had a pretty face and there was no mistaking the come hither that came into her eyes sometimes late at night at parties when she’d had one too many. She was sexy in a sleek, hard way. Sexy like a fast car or an expensive hunting rifle.
Sarah and Jack had not been what people called a loving couple; they didn’t hold hands or stand with their arms linked, or anything like that. Stall could not remember ever seeing them touch, not even the stray drifting of fingers across a shoulder as one passed the other in a narrow hallway. He had said nothing to Maureen about his talk with Connor and the photos of Jack. Now he sat thinking, What kind of life did this woman have with a man who could go to a bus station men’s room, a man who lived double? They must have talked about Jack’s other life. Must have come to some kind of accommodation so that life could go on. Life with its placid surface of kids, tennis, teaching, bridge, and literary criticism.
Stall invaded the feminine front. He entered at his peril, but he needed to know some things, and Sarah Leaf seemed in the mood to talk. “Was Jack in any kind of trouble? Anything with money?” Were the people who took the pictures blackmailing him?
That was when Sarah Leaf lied, and Stall knew it and he thought Maureen did too.
Sarah said, “Money? He liked to spend it. Jack liked nice clothes. I’m sure you noticed that. But, uh, no, no, he
