People Like Us by Dominick Dunne Read Free Book Online

Eliza, dead now, cancer, claimed it was she who had given Aunt Mary the name Tante, but Gus knew it was he. He could even remember exactly when, on the day in French class he had first learned the phrase
la plume de ma tante
. It became the name the whole family called her. Unmarried, by choice, she had always been called Aunt Mary until then, and there were stories that she had once wanted to be a nun buther father had discouraged her from that calling. Even she grew to enjoy the name and signed postcards to them from her endless travels, “Love, Tante.” Old now, ninety, she no longer knew him when he visited her, and each day he expected the call that would tell him she was dead.
    Three and a half hours out of New York the bus pulled to the side of the road near the Connecticut-Massachusetts border, and Gus descended onto the icy highway. A car, described to him in advance as a six-year-old Oldsmobile, was parked near the sheltered bus stop. From behind the wheel he saw the driver make a gesture toward him, and he stepped toward and entered the car.
    “Mrs. Haber?” he asked.
    “Mr. Bailey,” she replied.
    She was Chinese. It had not occurred to him that she would be Chinese. Her handwriting, in the letter she had written to him, asking him to come, reminded him of Peach’s handwriting, suggesting good schools and thrifty wealth. Her voice, when he had responded to her letter by telephone, was unaccented and American, and her name, Faith Haber, certainly gave no indication of an Oriental background. In the car, driving to where they were going, for the reason he had come, he was able to postpone the subject at hand by eliciting from her that she was from a Chinese banking family in Honolulu, had gone to a school there where Peach had gone during the year her parents almost divorced but didn’t, and then to college in New England where she had married the brother of her roommate and later divorced him. Gus liked vital statistics and had an ability to draw them out without direct questioning.
    “That was a terrible story you told me on the phone about your daughter’s death, Mrs. Haber,” said Gus, when the car pulled into the parking lot.
    “That was a terrible story you wrote about your daughter’s death, Mr. Bailey,” said Faith Haber.
    “Listen, call me Gus.”
    “Call me Faith.”
    “Did they catch the guy?”
    “No.” For an instant their eyes met in the darkened car. Gus reached over and touched Faith’s hand, which still gripped the steering wheel.
    “He stabbed her twenty-six times,” said Faith Haber. “I have never been able to walk into her room again.”
    Inside the hired room of a church hall where Faith Haber led him, he met the other parents who had suffered the same grievous assault on their lives that he and Peach had suffered. Folding chairs had been arranged in a circle, and the room smelled of the coffee brewing in a small urn plugged into the wall. He wondered, as he always wondered, what he could do to help them, what it was these groups expected from him when they asked him to come, ever since he had written about Lefty Flint, who killed his daughter, Becky.
    Faith Haber sat next to him and told about her daughter’s murder, and the parents next to her told about their son’s, and the single father next to them about his son, and the couple next to him about their daughter. On the other side of Gus sat a woman too numb with grief to tell her story, so recently had it happened, and Faith Haber told the tale for her as the woman sobbed uncontrollably. Gus held her hand.
    “No one really understands,” said Gus. “All our friends are helpful and loving during the time of the tragedy, but then they withdraw into their own lives, which is only natural, and soon you can see a glaze in their eyes when you bring it up because they don’t want to talk about it anymore, and it is the only thing that’s on your mind. That’s why these groups are so helpful. No one really knows what