The Childkeeper Read online

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  To Robin

  Acknowledgments

  The characters and situations in this work

  Parents begin by loving

  The Childkeeper

  1

  FRIDAY

  2

  3

  4

  5

  SATURDAY

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  The Childkeeper

  By Sol Stein

  Copyright 2015 by Sol Stein

  Cover Copyright 2015 by Untreed Reads Publishing

  Cover Design by Ginny Glass

  The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.

  Previously published in print, 1976.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher or author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, dialogue and events in this book are wholly fictional, and any resemblance to companies and actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Also by Sol Stein and Untreed Reads Publishing

  A Deniable Man

  The Magician

  The Husband

  Living Room

  The Resort

  Touch of Treason

  http://www.untreedreads.com

  To Robin

  who taught me

  what natural meant

  Acknowledgments

  Editing an editor is like operating on a surgeon who is fully awake and watching every move critically. And so two of my friends, Tony Godwin and Patricia Day, deserve citations for bravery as well as my gratitude for seeing me through the several drafts of this book.

  I am also indebted to Michaela Hamilton for her astonishing first reaction and her subsequent instant replays that were so helpful; to my friend Judge Charles L. Brieant, Jr. for his supralegal brief; and to Edward G. DiLoreto for his advice on police procedures.

  The characters and situations in this work

  are wholly fictional and imaginary, and

  do not portray and are not intended to portray

  any actual persons or parties.

  —FRANZ KAFKA, The Trial

  Parents begin by loving

  their children; as they

  grow older they judge them;

  sometimes they forgive them.*

  (With apologies to Oscar Wilde)

  The Childkeeper

  Sol Stein

  1

  ROGER MAXWELL WAS a man whose time had come. He had learned to enjoy his wife. He began to reconcile himself to the fact that his four children were at times lovable and at other times mischievous. He sent a tax-deductible tithe—but not himself—to church. He tolerated his government. When faced with younger men who were bearded, he felt unfashionable. Yet Roger Maxwell was secure. He reserved himself not for transient lovers or friends, but for himself and Regina, a couple, even by Noah’s standards, deserving of safe passage.

  One day recently, at the bank where he had been employed for more than a quarter of a century, as he was putting some papers into his briefcase to read on the commuter train, he was suddenly summoned into the Directors’ room, where, amidst champagne and congratulations, it was revealed that he had attained a senior vice presidency, the highest rank available to a man totally unrelated by blood to the family that had for six generations supplied the bank with its chief executive officers. If on Roger Maxwell’s way home that day the devil had tapped him on his shoulder and inquired about his remaining ambitions, he would have said only “to live.”

  With his promotion and its attendant raise, Roger could now afford to shuck his no longer suitable house and find his ideal somewhat farther from the city. And so he inquired about for the name of the best real estate agent in the vicinity of Chappaqua and Pleasantville. His friends suggested Stickney’s.

  “Children?” asked Stickney.

  “Four,” said Roger. “One’s away at college, but we’ve got to keep a room for him.”

  “Guests?”

  “Sometimes. Especially the children. They like to have their friends sleep over.”

  “Any preference in styles?”

  Roger wanted to say a solid-brick federal, but he knew Regina didn’t agree, and so he said just, “An older house, with some distinction, and at least two or three acres of ground.”

  Stickney, who had been flipping through his cards, said, “There’re five right now. Could you come up Sunday, say at two?”

  “Of course.”

  “You’ll bring the children?”

  “Yes.”

  Stickney was pleased. Children were part of his strategy.

  The Maxwells’ Chrysler station wagon was taken to the car wash that auspicious Sunday in spring by Jeb, who at sixteen had recently acquired his junior license. And it was Jeb who was allowed to drive the Maxwells to Stickney’s office, to give him, Mr. Maxwell thought, not only practice but a sense of pride. The oldest Maxwell child, Harry, was no longer a child, but a second-year student at Tufts. And so there were five Maxwells who embarked on the Sunday inspection tour, full of hope. Jeb, at the wheel, his parents slightly squeezed in the front seat beside him, and in the back, Theodore, twelve and called Dorry, and the only girl, Nancy, aged nine. For Roger Maxwell, putting away the snow tires, as he had just done, was as sure a sign of the earth’s renewal as the pink and red and white azaleas in bud and bloom that could be seen almost everywhere in Tarrytown. He was glad they could now afford the roomier house that he and Regina longed for. He put his elbow out so that she could slip her arm through his. He could not have been happier.

  Roger glanced to his left. Jeb had his eyes on the road. Good. He remembered how nervous he had been at sixteen when he himself had first started driving. Jeb seemed relaxed, his left elbow resting on the window, his right hand holding the wheel lightly, as if he had been driving all his life. Roger felt safe in Jeb’s hands.

  Dorry and Nancy were chattering away in the back. Dorry was anxious only that they should find a house in a community where he could continue his Little League playing, and hoped that now his father had been appointed Senior Vice President at the home office of the bank, they would at last stay put in a house that his mother found suitable to their circumstances.

  The youngest Maxwell child, Nancy, was gleeful about house-hunting for a special reason. At nine she had already developed a business flair. She could bake her own cookies, which were much tastier than the commercial ones the Girl Scouts offered from door to door once each year. Nancy would put hers up by the dozen in cellophane lunch bags and take them around from house to house, offering them for sale, usually to neighbors or people who knew her family and would be too embarrassed not to buy something, though in some places Nancy had worn out her welcome. If a purchaser of her cookies subsequently met her in the street and said how good they were, Nancy would be at that neighbor’s doorstep two or three times a month, package in hand. She, more than any member of the family, was elated by the opportunity presented by moving the family residence, which would open up a whole new field of prospects. And she was quite certain she could persuade her father to drive her to their old neighborhood every once in a while so she could surprise her old customers with continued service.

  It had been twenty-four years since Regina Maxwell had left her parents’ house in South Carolina. In her memory it had gradually become the pillared mansion she had wanted it to be, of a dimension still to be achieved in a house she shared with Roger and the children. The high excitement of the children affected her. She glanced around at them, remembering how as babies they proved to be inept compared to puppies and kittens who could run about and look after themselves soon after birth. Regina recalled the desperate coaxing, getting Harry to stand without immediately plopping down, and no sooner was Harry running about the house on his own—though you needed eyes in back of your head to watch his constant falling in the direction of the sharp corners of low tables—the cycle started over again with Jeb, and then Dorry, and at last the last, Nancy.

  Yet Nancy was growing so fast, Regina knew that soon her motherhood would be over, all her children would be grown, and she hated hated hated it coming to an end because it foredoomed her life. Despite all the measles, mumps, chicken pox that seemed like token deaths at the time each child lived through the crisis of fever and imagined dangers that the idiot pediatrician insisted on calling normal childhood diseases, it had turned out all right. They were handsome children, their bodies well formed, bright and eager and not horrid the way other children sometimes behaved. She felt wholly justified in her belief that the Almighty took a special interest in the genealogy of certain families. When she compared her children to those of some of her fri
ends, it was as if the defects of the human race had been stayed from her brood, and she credited it to a blending of Roger’s genes with her father’s and her father’s ancestors, who in legend at least were brave and gallant and rich. Regina felt personally blessed to have had Harry and Jeb and Dorry and Nancy conceived in her body, and to have brought them along to this moment, healthy and free of bodily imperfections.

  She was lost in these thoughts as the station wagon left the parkway and wended its way along an unfamiliar country road. Suddenly Nancy squealed, “Hey, look, horses!”

  They were indeed four horses behind a fence, and Jeb cut his eyes to the right for a split second and let the right wheels spin onto the shoulder, which threw up a spray of gravel and sent everyone’s pulse spurting. Jeb instantly got the wagon back onto the asphalt, saying, “Sorry.”

  Neither adult said a word, for which Jeb was grateful. For the rest of the drive he kept both hands on the wheel.

  *

  The Chrysler finally pulled up in front of Stickney’s. Mrs. Maxwell moved to the back seat with the younger children, and Jeb, his muscles aching from the tenseness of this first long drive with the family, stretched out in the back of the wagon as his father got behind the wheel and Mr. Stickney got in beside him to point the way.

  Ralph Stickney’s plan was to show the most unsuitable house first. And so he directed them to the Parker residence, which, predictably, disappointed them all with its ordinariness.

  Regina Maxwell, who yearned for familiar landscapes still, felt her heart fibrillate when they drove up to the second house, an imitation colonial on the outskirts of Pleasantville; it had an imposing circular drive leading up to four white pillars. She thought she saw two magnolias, though there were none on the property, and when she looked at the house a second time, she imagined the voices of darkies that had been the counterpoint of her childhood, a sound in her head that brought her tranquillity whenever Jeb and his friends turned their stereos high. But as her husband pointed out tactfully, for he would never consciously do anything to dislodge his wife’s recollections of her idyllic childhood, the colonial had thirty-two rooms, and how would it be kept in order, this being 1973 and trustworthy servants hard to find and difficult to keep?

  Maxwell lit up when he saw the third house, a federal with thick brick walls. Outside it seemed a fortress, but within, on close examination, the telltale signs of water damage were clear evidence of a roof in need of drastic repairs or replacement; he knew from experience that responsible roofers shunned new customers and that the unreliable others would have to be brought back again and again under duress to fix their own incompetent work. He could not knowingly let himself in for such headaches at a time when he was just settling into a position at the bank it had taken him years of politicking and good work to secure, and heading a department that needed drastic reorganization because of the incompetence of his predecessor.

  Every Maxwell in the car knew at once that the fourth house, a sprawling clapboard dwelling in five wooded acres, just did not look like an abode suitable for a Senior Vice President of an important bank. It was roomy enough, and the isolation from other houses was in this day of encroachment an asset, but the clapboard exterior spoke of working-class taste. Inside, the rooms were boxy. Ralph Stickney cut the inspection short and hurried them to the Simeon King house.

  *

  Legend had it that when Simeon King, whose business was railroads and whose joy was hunting big game in the north woods, examined the architect’s plans, he ordered the ceiling of the third story removed. He wanted to simulate a hunting lodge inside the house in a two-story space clear to the peaked roof of the attic to accommodate not only bunk beds but also the preserved carcasses of a female brown bear, a ten-point deer, a moose, and some smaller animals, including a mountain wildcat that had been shot. The taxidermist had excelled himself in immortalizing them because, like all merchants and artisans who dealt with Simeon King in the early years of the century, he dreaded the man’s displeasure.

  One day in 1933, Simeon King, said to be seventy-eight at the time, was sitting in a wing chair in his living room, reading the morning newspaper he loathed because it failed to print the news he willed to see in it, when a sudden severe pain in his head heralded a stroke. He was removed by volunteer ambulance to Brigham Memorial Hospital, the operating room of which had been built with funds donated entirely by Simeon at a time when the tax advantages of such beneficence were minuscule, and the gift had been received by the trustees as a genuine good deed.

  The operating room was of no use in Simeon’s case. The senior neurologist at Brigham solicited the advice of the man he had studied under, who gladly came when he heard the victim was Simeon King, and together they examined both the patient and the test results and came to the concerted conclusion that the stroke had been massive, disabling, and irreversible.

  Simeon King, who had stalked large animals as if he were their master, now had an uncontrollable body, capable of only an occasional involuntary shudder. His mind, which had been characterized as incisive at Groton and Yale and subsequently by his competitors, could not cause his tongue to form words. His eyes communicated with the imprecision of an infant. He was incontinent as to both urine and bowels. Despite round-the-clock nursing care, the odor about him was pervasive; it offended Simeon’s descendants, who came for a brief visit and did not return; it offended his wife, who remembered her love for him only when she was out of his presence and could recollect better times. Even the young doctor in residence, who had been instructed by the hospital’s management to pay special attention to the patient in Suite A, found Simeon disgusting. He could have kept him alive for some weeks longer, but found no encouragement among members of the King family, who were solicitous about the inconvenience, and inquired casually about the likely cost. The young doctor sensed the inevitable. He was also weary from attending patients who could be helped. It is not known whether by commission or omission he snuffed the flicker of Simeon King’s soul.

  Simeon’s assembled relatives, anxious to resolve the estate, now openly expressed their distaste for the hunting of animals, and urged the attorneys to dispose of the house that lodged them. His widow did not choose to oppose them, and began inquiries about living conditions in Palm Beach, where house servants might obey her instructions despite Simeon’s absence.

  Stickney’s, the real estate agency used by knowledgeable families in that part of Westchester, took on the white elephant only because its geographic location fell within what the elder Stickney considered to be his exclusive territory. The market for big houses was slack in the trough of the Depression, and Stickney was embarrassed whenever he had to open the door to the upstairs room and explain that the widow King had promised to get rid of the stuffed animals when she moved after the house was sold.

  In fact, the man who eventually bought the house was a wealthy stockbroker named Sudliffe, who had sold short in 1928 and 1929. Sudliffe kept the animals on so that when he took clients or friends on a tour of the premises he’d have an excuse for mentioning that Simeon King himself had shot the beasts. Once the stockbroker’s children were all bartered away to college or marriage, Sudliffe and his wife moved to a smaller house. The truth is that Sudliffe had never felt the house to be his. Everyone referred to it as the Simeon King house, and Sudliffe was delighted that his wife found a place built just two years previously by some executive whose company had shifted him elsewhere.

  The Simeon King house changed owners several times during the next four decades, the Wentworths, the Hamiltons, the Searles, but all of its successive inhabitants resented living in a house that persisted in being known by the name of its original owner. When they moved away, it was presumably to find a home of their own. The Stickneys, father, son, and now grandson Ralph Stickney, didn’t mind; they collected a commission each time the house changed hands.

  *

  What a striking contrast the huge Tudor was to the house the Maxwells had just seen. Its magnificent proportions were outlined against silver maples in full leaf. The bluestoned driveway, crunching under the tires, itself portended luxury no asphalt roadway could convey. The door to the house was massive, as if to provide room for giants to enter. And once inside, the entrance hall, with its polished marble floor, seemed too fine to walk on, though straight ahead the curving grand staircase beckoned them forward.