Tiny Little Thing: Secrets, scandal and forbidden love

“Honestly, Constance—it’s Constance, isn’t it? There’s so many of you, and you all look alike!”

Constance’s mouth screws into an anus.

I have to bite my lip to hold back a hysterical giggle, because Pepper’s exactly right. They do look alike, the Hardcastles. There’s just this look, a distinctive shape of the eyes, the wild thickness of the hair, the relation of nose to mouth to cheekbones. (Caspian, perhaps, is the only exception—in him, the Harrison genes seem to have triumphed.) On the men of the family, the Look is dashing and gloriously photogenic, redolent of football games and windswept sailboats, apple pie and loving your mother. On the women, the proportion is wrong somehow. Coarse, a bit goggle-eyed. Handsome is the best you can say of any of them.

Or is that ungenerous of me?

Pepper doesn’t care whether she’s ungenerous or not. She doesn’t care that Constance’s poor mouth is about to grow a hemorrhoid.

What would that be like, not to give a damn what the other women think?

I observe Pepper, whose head is tossed back in laughter, exposing the peachy column of her throat to the dying afternoon light. (We’re all out on the terrace now; the house is really too hot.) Pepper, in the very throes of not giving a damn.

It would be fucking wonderful, wouldn’t it?

Yes. It would be wonderful. For a short hour or two, a long time ago, it was wonderful. It was freedom.

I swallow the last of my drink and head into the kitchen to give the orders for dinner.

Dinner, I’ll have you know, is a smashing success, right up until the point when the fight breaks out.

Emboldened by two expert martinis—I usually drink only one—and smothered by the persistent stuffiness indoors, I order the dining room table to be brought out through the French doors onto the terrace, overlooking the ocean. The last-minute change rattles Mrs. Crane, but with a few soothing words and the assistance of the doughty Hardcastle men in dragging around the furniture, the table and chairs are soon set, every fork and wineglass in place, candles lit, bowls of priceless purple-blue hyacinths arranged at even intervals down the center of the tablecloth.

“It’s brilliant!” says Pepper. She floats to her seat. The breeze is picking up, rustling her hair.

“Oh, I’m sure the bugs are delighted.” Granny Hardcastle drops into the chair at Frank’s left and casts me a look.

I turn to Mrs. Crane. “See if Fred can dig out the tiki torches from the pool house, please.” Fred’s the groundskeeper. “I think they’re on the right-hand side, near the spare umbrellas.”

Mrs. Crane is always happy to score a point against Granny. “Right away, Mrs. Hardcastle. Shall I tell the girls to start serving?”

“Yes, please. Thank you, Mrs. Crane.”

The maids start serving, and Frank pours the wine. I take my seat at the opposite end, and Cap, waiting for this signal with the other men, lowers himself into the chair at Frank’s right with only the slightest stiffness. Pepper has somehow negotiated the seat to Caspian’s right, directly across from Frank’s father, and before long the torches are lit, the bugs have scattered, the empty wine bottles are piling up at the corner of the terrace, and Pepper and Caspian have struck up the kind of rapport of which dinner party legends are made.

Well, why shouldn’t they? They’re both unattached. Both attractive and red-blooded. Bachelor and fashionable Single Girl.

“How long is your sister planning to stay?” asks Constance, from two seats down on my left.

I plunge my spoon into the vichyssoise. “Why, I don’t know. Wouldn’t it be lovely if she stayed all summer?”

Constance turns a little pale.

“Sadly, however, she works as an assistant to a certain senator in Washington, and I’m afraid he can’t do without her for long.” I lean forward, as if in conspiracy. “Though I suppose that possibly qualifies as aiding and comforting the enemy, doesn’t it?”

From the other side of the house comes the sound of raucous laughter. The younger Hardcastles are eating dinner by the pool, under the supervision of a pair of gossiping nannies, and the teenagers have quite possibly found the stash of beers and liquors in the pool house bar. I motion to Mrs. Crane. “Could you ask Fred to keep watch over the young ones at the pool? Perhaps lock up the pool house?”

She nods and disappears.

Through the soup course and the appetizer, the scene is one of convivial amity, ripe with wholesome feeling, perfumed with hyacinth, lubricated by a crisp white wine and the warm undercurrents of a family welcoming home its prodigal son. The breeze surges in from the Atlantic, soft with humidity. The tomato aspic is a perfect balance of sweetness and acidity, the shrimp firm and white pink. To my right, Frank’s handsome younger brother Louis keeps up a stream of earthy conversation. To my left, Pepper’s laughter rises to the pale evening sky. Nearby, Constance’s diamonds glitter atop her leathery collarbone, having caught the light from a nearby torch.

I look at her and think, pagina.

The shrimp and aspic are cleared away. The bottles of red wine are placed, already open, on the table. I signal to Louis at my right, and Louis signals to Frank’s cousin Monty, across the table, and together they pour out the wine, one by one, filling every glass.

When they’re done, Frank rises to his feet, clinks his glass with his fork, and smiles at me down the long reach of the Hardcastle table.

“Ladies. Gentleman. In-laws.” He grins at Pepper. “Outlaws.”

“Hear, hear,” says Louis.

“First of all, I’d like to thank my lovely wife, Tiny, for arranging this wonderful dinner here tonight, this dinner that brings us all together, decently clothed for once. Tiny?” He picks up his glass and gestures in my direction.

I pick up my glass and gesture back.

“Hear, hear,” says Pepper. “To the miraculous Tiny!”

The chorus of agreement. The crystalline clinking. The works.

“And now, for the real business of the evening. Not quite two years ago, the man seated next to me, whom we all know, though he wasn’t around as much when we were all kids, army brat that he was …”

Caspian turns his shorn head and says something to Frank, something in a low voice that I can’t quite pick up at this distance, though Pepper tilts back her head and laughs throatily.

“All right, all right,” says Frank. “Anyway, this kid grew up into a soldier while we were all going to law school, to medical school, and it turns out he’s got a lot of Hardcastle underneath that unfortunate Harrison exterior. …”

Another muttered comment from Caspian, and this time all the men around him laugh, though Pepper—yes, Pepper—actually looks a little mystified.

“Anyway, as I said, and seriously now, while we were home, stateside, safe and sound, our cousin Cap here was fighting for his life, for our lives and freedom and way of life, way off in the jungles of Vietnam. Fighting against the enemies of freedom, fighting against those who would see America and all it stands for wiped from the face of the earth. While we gentlemen were safe abed, to paraphrase, he put himself in danger every day, under fire every day, and one day last year all hell broke loose, and—well, we all know what happened that day. As of yesterday, the whole country knows what happened that day.”

The last traces of jocularity dissolve into the evening air, which has just begun to take on the bluish tinge of twilight.

I look down at my empty plate. My shadow is outlined on the gossamer porcelain.

“Cap,” says Frank gravely, from the other side of the table, and I close my eyes and see an unscarred Caspian, a pair of trustworthy shoulders in a shaft of May sunshine, drinking coffee from a plain white cup. “Cap, there’s no way to thank you for what you did that day. What you sacrificed. Medals are great, but they’re just a piece of metal, a piece of paper, a few speeches, and then everyone goes home and moves on to the next thing. We just want you to know—we, Cap, your family—we love you. We’re proud of you. We’re here tonight because of you, and whenever you need us, we’ll band up for you. The whole gang of us. Because that’s what we do, in this family. Cap? Come on, stand up here, buddy.”

I force myself to look up, because you can’t have Franklin Hardcastle’s wife and hostess staring down at her plate while Franklin Hardcastle polishes off the toast to the guest of honor.

Frank stands at the head of the table, and his arm climbs up and over the trustworthy shoulders of his cousin, who stares unsmiling and unfocused at a point somewhere behind me. “Cap. To you.” Frank clinks Caspian’s glass.

The chorus starts up again, hear hear and clink clink, and then Louis stands up and claps, and we all stand up and clap, until Caspian raises his wide brown hand and hushes us with a single palm.

“Thank you for coming here tonight,” he says, all gravel and syrup, vibrating my toes in their square-tipped aquamarine shoes. “Thank you, Tiny, for the superb dinner. Thanks for the speech, Frank, though I really don’t deserve it. We’re all just doing what we have to do out there. Nothing heroic about it. The real heroes are the men I left behind.”

He breaks away from Frank’s encircling arm and sits back down in his chair.

For some reason, I cannot breathe.

There are twenty-two people seated around the baronial dining room table of the Big House, and all of them are quiet: so quiet you can hear the teenagers squealing secrets by the pool, you can hear the bugs singing in the dune grass.

Until Constance’s husband, Tom, throws his napkin into his plate.

“Goddamn it,” he says. “I can’t take it anymore.”

“Tom!” snaps Constance.

“No. Not this time.” He turns and tilts his head, so he can see down the row of Hardcastle cousins and in-laws to where Caspian sits, staring at a bowl of hyacinths, as if he hasn’t heard a thing. “I’m sorry, I know you lost a leg and everything, and you probably believe in what you’re doing, God help you, but it’s fucking wrong to award a medal in my name—because I’m a citizen of this country, too, man. I’m an American, too—award a fucking medal for invading another country, a third world country, and killing its women and children just because they happen to want a different way of life than fucking capitalism.”

The silence, frozen and horrible, locks us in place.

“I see,” says Caspian, absorbed in the hyacinths.

Frank rises to his feet. His lips are hung in a politician’s smile, so slick and out of place it makes me wince. “Tom, why don’t you go back in the house and take a little breather, okay?”

“Oh, come on, Frank,” says Constance. “He’s allowed an opinion. Tom, you’ve had your say. Now calm down and let’s finish our dinner.”

Tom stands up, a little unsteady. “Sorry, Connie. I can’t do this. I can’t sit here and eat dinner with you people. You fat, satisfied pigs who give medals to fucking murderers—”

“Jesus, Tom!”

“Now, Tom …” I begin.

He turns to me and stabs a hole in the air between us with his rigid index finger. “And you. Sitting there in your pretty dress and your pretty face. You’re a smart girl, you should know better, but you just keep smiling and nodding like a pretty little fascist idiot so you can get what you want, so you can smile and nod in the fucking White House one day …”

Somewhere in the middle of this speech, Caspian wipes his mouth with his napkin and stands up, sending the chair tumbling to the stone rectangles behind him. He walks down the line of chairs and yanks Tom out of place by the collar. “Apologize,” he says.

The word is so low, I read it on his lips.

Tom’s face, looking up at Caspian, is full of vodka and adrenaline. “Why? It’s the truth. I can speak the truth.”

“I said. Apologize.”

Just before Tom replies, or maybe too late, I think: Don’t do it, Tom, don’t be an idiot, oh Jesus, oh Caspian, not again. I think, simultaneously, in another part of my head: Dammit, there goes dinner, and also: Should we try serving afterward or just put everything in the icebox for a cold buffet tomorrow at lunch?

“Oh, yeah? And what are you going to do if I don’t? Knock me out in front of everyone?”

Caspian lifts back a cool fist and punches him in the jaw.

Caspian, 1964

Well, hell.

If it were just Caspian occupying that diner booth, he’d be on the guy’s ass in a second, two-bit potbellied crook waving a gun like that. Wearing a goddamned suit, for God’s sake, like he was a wiseguy or something.

But Tiny.

He reached across the table, grabbed her frozen hand, and slid the engagement ring off her finger and into his pocket. She was too shocked to protest. She stared at the crook, at flustered Em trying to open the cash drawer.

“Get down,” he muttered.

She turned her head to him. Her face was white.

“Get down!”

The man waved his gun. “Hey! Shut up back there!”

From underneath his mother’s protective body, the little boy started to cry.

“Shut that kid up!”

The boy cried louder, and the man fired his gun. The mother’s body slumped.

Em screamed, and the man lost his cool, flushing and sweating. “Shut up! Shut up!”

Em tried to dodge around him, to the mother on the floor covering her boy, but he grabbed her by the collar and held the gun to her forehead. “Nobody move, all right? Or the waitress gets it. You!” He nodded to the frozen-faced couple in the first booth. “Put your wallet on the table! Right there at the edge!”

Em squeaked. Looked right across the room at Cap and pleaded with her eyes.

Damn it all.

Cap reached for Tiny and shoved her bodily under the table. In the next second, he launched himself down the aisle toward the man, who spun around and hesitated a single fatal instant, trying to decide whether to shoot Cap or to shoot Em.

As Cap knew he would. Because only training—constant, immersive, reactive training—can counter the faults of human instinct.

Or anyway. Cap was willing to take the chance.

He aimed for the gun first, knocking it out of the wiseguy’s hand in one swift strike of his elbow. He howled. Em fell free. Cap reached back for a killer punch to the man’s saggy jaw.

Jingle, jingle. The door swung open. Cap released the punch regardless. The man dropped like a sack of vanquished flour.

Cap turned to the door, expecting to see a flood of dark blue, Boston’s finest, but instead there’s another man in a dark suit and a brown fedora, pointing a gun straight to his chest.

The lookout.

“Hands in the air.”

Cap lifted his hands slowly. He couldn’t see the back booth from here. He cast out the net of his senses, hearing and smell and touch, the vibration in the air, searching for some sign that Tiny was still crouching unseen underneath the table, where he left her. Her three-carat engagement ring still sat in his inside jacket pocket. A stupid place to put it, but what else was he going to do?

“Take off his hat.” The lookout nodded to the man in the first booth, whose wallet sat on the edge of the table.

“His hat?”

“Take it off. Nice and easy.”

The gun was pointed straight at Cap’s heart. This man knew what he was doing, didn’t he? Not like the fleshy idiot lying motionless on the floor. Why was this one, the competent one, stuck with lookout duty? Lookout was the idiot’s job.

Cap reached for the hat and lifted it gently from the man’s head.

“See? That wasn’t so hard. No one needs to be a hero. Now put the wallet in the hat.”

Cap picked up the wallet and dropped it in the hat.

“Atta boy.” The man raised his voice. “Now, all of you, take your wallets out of your pockets and put them on the table. Nice and easy, so this nice man here can put them in the hat.”

There was a second of shocked silence.

Where the hell were the police? Hadn’t someone called from the kitchen in the back?

The man fired his gun into the ceiling. “Now!”

A shower of plaster fell on his shoulders. A woman screamed, a faint pathetic little noise. He pointed the gun back at Cap. “No funny business, either!”

Okay, then. Keep the man’s focus right here, on Cap, until the police arrive. No one gets hurt, that’s the main thing.

Let the police take care of it, Cap. Don’t be a hero. We don’t need a hero, here. Just a regular guy to keep the gun occupied, to drag his feet until the police saunter on up.

The man jiggled the gun. Under his fedora, a faint sheen of sweat caught the light.

“Go on. Next booth. Keep it moving.”

Cap dragged his feet to the next booth. The woman there, a woman in a cheerful yellow suit, dropped a little coin purse into the hat with shaking fingers.

“Open the pocketbook, lady,” said the man at his side.

“But …”

“Open the pocketbook.”

She unhooked the clasp and opened her pocketbook.

Someone was whimpering behind him. The little boy. Mommy, Mommy, he whined.

The man nudged Cap with his gun. “Empty it out.”

Cap took the pocketbook and shook it out over the table. A wad of Kleenex, a tube of lipstick, a battered compact, a pen, a couple of rubber bands. A neat roll of dollar bills, the housekeeping money.

“What have we here,” said the man. He picked up the roll and dropped it neatly in the hat. “Next.”

Two more booths, three more wallets. The whimpering was getting louder now, accompanied by a low and constant moan, the boy’s mother. The only sounds in the coffee shop, except for the gravelly hum of some electric appliance he’d never noticed before. He and the crook were getting closer to the booth in the corner now, where Tiny was hiding.

Where the sweet hell were the police? Cap glanced at the door.

“Lady! What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

Cap turned his head, and Jesus H. Christ.

There she was, Tiny idiot Doe, shoeless, crawling as silently as a berry-red cat across the floor toward the heap of whimpering child and moaning mother.

Afterward, Cap found Tiny in the kitchen, cradling the little boy in a soft woolen blanket. God knew where she found it. He’d gone to sleep against her shoulder, slack and blissful, his eyelashes like tiny feathered crescents against his pink cheeks. Above, a single bare bulb cast a glow over them both.

Cap swallowed back the ache in his throat.

“His grandmother’s here. Police want you.”

She turned her pale face toward him. “How’s his mother?”

“Ambulance took her. I think she’s all right. I’ve seen worse.” A hell of a lot worse. “Looks like the shoulder. No organs.”

She rose to her feet, lifting the sleeping boy without a sign of effort. Stronger than she looked, Miss Tiny Doe. “Will you take him?”

“Sure. If you want.” He held out his arms. “You okay?”

“Yes. I just don’t want to see the police, that’s all.” She laid the child in his arms, taking care as the small head transferred from her slim shoulder to Cap’s. She tucked the blanket around the little boy and wiped away a small smudge of dried blood from his forehead. “Careful.”

“You have to see the police, you know. Give a statement.”

She hesitated. “Are there reporters there?”

“They’re not letting them in. But, yeah, they’re outside the door.”

She unbuttoned the cardigan from around her shoulders and stuck her arms through the holes, one by one, putting it on properly. The flush was returning to her skin. “Can the police come back here for their statement?”

“I don’t see why not. I’ll tell them you need some quiet.”

“And are they finished with you?”

The boy stirred, made a small noise in his throat. Cap hoisted him up higher to get a better grip. “I’ll probably have to go back to the station later for more questioning. Because of everything.”

Everything. Cap’s instant reaction when the second man turned toward Tiny, the swift strike to his arm, the struggle for the gun, the snap of bone. Capitulation. Sending Em to the phone to call the police, because the kitchen was empty; the cook and his assistant had fled through the open back door. Waiting, waiting, trying to keep everybody calm while the police came. Tiny taking the child, calling for help for the mother, taking out her own handkerchief and showing someone how to hold it on the wound. Jesus, what a morning. He was getting a headache now, the hangover of battle. Like the melancholy you got after sex sometimes, the departure of adrenaline, leaving only yourself and the paltry contents of your soul.

“I see. Yes, of course you will. Thank you,” she said, as an afterthought. “Thank you for … well, for saving us. It could have been so much worse.”

He studied her wide-open eyes, the length of her eyelashes. She looked sincere, and humble. No frostiness now, here in the kitchen of Boylan’s Coffee Shop.

“You’re welcome,” he said, and walked back into the dining area.

The grandmother let out a cry when she saw him. She rushed forward and engulfed the boy into her arms, without so much as a word to Cap. Not that he minded. He could take Tiny’s thanks, but not a stranger’s. He kept his hand on the boy’s back until he was sure the old lady had him firmly, and then he turned to one of the cops standing around with notepads.

“Well? Do you need anything else?”

“Yeah, we’re gonna need you down at the precinct, buddy. Standard procedure.”

“Can you give me a lift?”

“Sure thing.”

Another cop walked up. “I thought you said the broad was in the back.”

“Yeah. The kitchen. Red dress.”

The cop shrugged. “She’s not there now.”

By the time Cap turned the corner of Marlborough Street, it was nearly three o’clock in the afternoon, and the sun hit the fourth and third floor windows of his parents’ house in six blinding rectangular patches. A slight figure in a berry-red dress sat at the top of the stoop, hands folded neatly in her lap. She rose at the sight of him.

“I thought you’d never get here.”

He slung his camera bag to the pavement and fished for his key. “How did you find me?”

“The waitress told me. The dark-haired one.”

“Em? Huh. Wonder how she knew.”

Tiny didn’t reply. She stood on the top step, watching him as he climbed. He tried not to look at her, though his body was light with relief at the sight of her slim figure, the gentle swell of her hips beneath the fabric of her dress. He stuck his key in the lock. “Are you coming in?”

“No, I just … I just wanted to have …” Her voice was breathless with nerves. “Have a word with you.”

“More comfortable inside. You look like you could use a drink.”

She paused. “I don’t really drink.”

“A good time to start, I’d say.”

Unexpectedly, she laughed. A beautiful laugh, deeper and heartier than you’d think, a tiny girl like her. Her brown hair had come a bit disheveled. The curls fell more loosely about her ears and the top of her neck, so you could run your hands right through them, testing for strength and silkiness, right before you leaned in and kissed her.

As if she caught the drift of his thoughts, she lifted one hand to her head. The back of her arm was smooth-skinned and taut, an athlete’s arm. Honed by tennis, probably. Or golf. Girls like her played golf, didn’t they? In pink argyle sweaters.

Her laughter faded, but the smile remained. “All right, Caspian. I guess you’re not going to bite.”

He opened the door and stood back to usher her through. “Only if you beg me.”

Tiny, 1966

Tom waves away his wife’s anxious fingers and holds the bag of ice to his jaw. “You see? He proved my point. Just a killing machine, paid for by our own tax dollars.”