Windwhistle Bone

by Richard Trainor

  Then he pulled away from me and shook my hand. With his other hand, he steered a little girl forward to meet me. “Cecily, this is your Uncle Ram. This is my brother, Cecily, and his name is Ram.”

  The little girl stepped forward. She was maybe seven, with dark hair cut in a bob and rosy cheeks and dark eyes. She stepped forward and reached out her hand to mine. “Hi, Uncle Ram. My daddy told me all about you. He’s always talking about you and telling me stories about you and him and all the things you did together.”

  I looked into her brown eyes for some telltale hint of something hidden. There was nothing. I shook her hand, pumping it and smiling until she smiled back at me. I saw she had inherited the same gap-toothed grin that I had in my generation of Le Doirs, that Yick had in his, that went back generations before me to Ram the First. I stood there for a moment or so—no much longer than that, I’m sure—utterly transfixed with something like wonder, but far deeper than that. Finally, Fran took the lead. “Come on, Ram, let’s go inside. It’s Christmas.”

  A feeling of warmth began to spread over me as Fran guided me inside through the double doors of hand carved cedar. The feeling lasted a minute or so as I took in the lovingly crafted interior of the house with its Mission-style capital moldings and coffee-colored Italian tile and cherry wood cabinets. Then Fran steered me into the living room off to the side of the kitchen and the thermometer inside me dropped…

  I saw the faces register me, some of them old friends from the long-ago days of Refugio and Endymion, saw them register who it was I was; that I was now among them, saw them see me and register what I’d done and why it was that I’d been so long absent from them. Some of them said my name and raised their glasses to me in some sort of semi-salute or greeting. Some smiled at me—woodenly I thought, and understandably so. Fran made introductions to some of the new faces that I didn’t recognize, and they’d rise and meet me with handshakes. Then I saw them sitting over in a corner by themselves, talking intimately—my brother Peter and a woman I didn’t recognize seated alongside Peter’s ex-wife Kelly—and saw them all register me, their conversation terminating in midstream. When they saw who had entered their sphere, I saw the lights of their eyes dim and their postures stiffen. Standing up quickly, Peter spilled some of his drink, and as he did so, his ex-wife reverted to her former role and went to fetch a sponge, calling, “Hi, Ram,” to me before being of service.

  Peter’s eyes were impenetrable as he greeted me, “Merry Christmas,” he said, his face expressionless. His woman friend edged forward and Peter put his arm around her as he presented her to me. “Ram, this is Gina, my fiancée.” The woman stepped forward and held her hand out gingerly to me. I took it and shook it as she looked toward Peter… For what? Direction, I guessed. Peter stood there looking guardedly and saying nothing.

  “Merry Christmas, Peter… Gina,” I said. Kelly reentered with a sponge and mopped up the spilled drink, talking about some topic related to something that happened to their sons or their son’s spouses, none of which made any sense to me. Peter and Gina took the proffered escape provided by Kelly and retreated back to the conversation that preceded my entrance, smiling briefly as they excused themselves into their world.

  Now, it was I who smiled woodenly, nodding as though I was paying attention to what was being said, pretending even that I understood it, until the recognition of my falsehood hit me full in the face. I flushed in embarrassment and felt myself looking down. The sound was beginning to smear and the faces began transforming. The room dimensions started shifting, and it was another Christmas, sometime in the 1980s in Sagrada.

  “…I told her she was going to have to reschedule the party or get somebody else to cater it because we’d overbooked and Annette was going to be taking all weekend—I mean, really, four huge layer cakes and then we’re supposed to do the very little hors d’oeuvres and cocktail party for them? Excuse me? I mean, please, get real. We’ll do it if it’s a full sit-down dinner for 10, or better yet, 20, but I can’t see the point of asking Annette to kill herself in the kitchen for a little cocktail party, and oh, that reminds me, I’d better check and see how our bird is doing,” said Kelly, breaking eye contact with Fran’s wife, Alana, and me, and taking a quick sip of wine before opening the oven and regarding the progress of the cooking turkey. She poked and prodded it, filled the basting dropper with drippings and squirted the bird twice, then sailed back into the vagaries of the catering business she and her friend Annette ran on the side when they weren’t teaching. I sipped my drink and disengaged from the conversation with Kelly and Alana and turned my barstool to face the rest of the family seated in the living room, having drinks while the television showed a football game. On the couch near me, Fran sat with my mother and her boyfriend talking about Death Valley and a jeep trip they were planning to make in the spring. On the other couch, Peter sat with his two sons, Pete Jr. and Fran Roger, intently studying the progress of the game being televised.

  They talked about how fast different players ran the 40-yard dash and how much they were paid per year to play football and which quarterback had the strongest arm and which coach was the smartest; their conversation, a closed circle, concerned with the arcana of professional football and its vicissitudes. The referees were on the take and tilting the contest to the teams that the league favored, Peter said, and he was sure of that he said. He knew such things. That was his profession, football was. He was a high school coach and a former college player, and he ran in the same circles as the pro coaches and players, attending their clinics and camps, calling one another at odd hours of the night, interrupting each other’s’ holidays to conference call on upcoming games or drafts, or the various merits or deficiencies of certain agents or lawyers or players or coaches or vitamin supplements or diets or workout programs.

  Like building was for Fran or writing was for me, football was Peter’s abiding passion and anodyne for the pain of our familial past. His love for it bound him to it in an almost matrimonial tie, whose strength and commitment paralleled that of his real marriage to Kelly. Football was his mistress, his matrix and mandala, and within the cleanliness and certitude of its order—its two halves, four quarters, four downs to make ten yards, its fight for control of the line of scrimmage, it’s two teams’ battle for physical supremacy—one of which would eventually emerge in the telling fourth-quarter—and its ultimate outcome, the final score on which one side, for that one Sunday, was the winner, while the other was most certainly the loser—Peter found an ordered metaphor that made sense for him and satisfied him more fully than real life and its inherent chaos did. I sat there watching Peter watch football, thinking about that and thinking how it’d always been so with him for as long as I could remember. I envied him for the certitude he found in it and privately wished that my life had such a dead certain order that could be measured as his was: with a final score and a loser and winner…

  “…so, Ram, how are you doing?” asked Fran, reeling me back from my drifting thoughts about Peter.

  “I’m pretty good. I’ve been really busy lately, back-and-forth between Sagrada and Refugio and LA and San Francisco.”

  “What are you working on?”

  “A bunch of stories, can’t remember them all sometimes. Mostly politics, a travel piece or two, a little film.”

  “And how’s Vera?”

  I looked at Fran and his grin was dissolving. He and Vera still didn’t like one another much, seven years after the fact when she and I became a we, and it was clear he was asking about her just to be polite.

  “She’s in LA getting ready for some films they’re going to be shooting in Europe. Well, one movie and two television movies, I think.”

  “So I guess she couldn’t be here this Christmas.”

  “You never know with Vera, Fran. She could be the next ring we hear at the door.”

  “Yeah, she did that once before didn’t she?”

  I thought back to the time Fran was referring to and flashed at the
recollection. It wasn’t a pretty scene. Fran had some scotch, looked at me, and smiled, and we both started laughing at the memory. It was a Refugio Christmas party at which alcohol was being consumed to excess; an Endymion gathering at a beach house; Vera showed up unexpectedly and took offense at the woman I was talking with and had never met before. Vera gave her a roundhouse right and then dropped me with a straight left when I tried to intervene. She exited with her usual flair, damning us all and flipping us off before turning on her heel and making her exit.

  “That was a wild one, hey?”

  Fran took a drink and laughed and shook his head.

  The doorbell rang and Fran and I looked at one another.

  “Could it be?” Fran asked.

  I shook my head no, but sweat had begun to bead on my brow as I waited for Kelly to see who was there. Then I heard the booming voices of Eric and Annette Rowland, Kelly’s catering partner, who was married to Peter’s oldest friend, both of them teachers like Pete and Kelly.

  Later, I slept in the family room under somebody’s scarf while the family dispensed Christmas cheer and the conversation grew dimmer still to the point where I couldn’t process it anymore…

  …a blond woman was standing in front of me asking me who I was, who I knew here, and what I did.

  “I’m Ram, Fran’s brother. I live over there,” I said, gesturing westward.

  “You mean Calistoga?”

  “No, further west—out on the river.”

  “You mean like Guerneville?”

  “Not quite that far, but, yeah, that general area.”

  “Are you gay?”

  I looked at her, not knowing how to respond. I thought about it for a while, then finally said no, I wasn’t.

  “Not that there’s anything wrong with being gay,” she said. “I was just wondering because there are so many gay people who live over there now.”

  I nodded and sipped my drink.

  “I’m Patty, Patty Marchman. I work with Fran. Well, not with him, really—more like for him… kind of. I’m in public relations.”

  “That’s nice,” I said.

  “What do you do, Ram?”

  “Electronics, I’m an assembler.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  I could see she was searching for something complimentary to say about wiring but couldn’t come up with anything, so I excused myself, wished her a Merry Christmas, and went off to explore the house.

  It was huge for a three-bedroom, with three great rooms up front—the living room and dining room and kitchen—and three bedrooms. Fran’s study was in the back, down a long hall. In back of that was the master bedroom. In the hallway were some built-in bookcases, and on one of them were a number of framed family portraits. In one of the old looking antique frames were a series of shots of my mom: her high school portrait with a Louise Brooks bob; a family portrait when she was maybe nine or ten with her parents, formally dressed and stiffly posing; wedding portraits of her and my dad with bridesmaids and groomsmen; and the one that I loved best, when she was somewhere in her late teens, posing by a motor boat on a lake in the Adirondacks and showing off her long legs. She was lovely then when she was fresh and the world seemed full of promise for her. I scanned the other photos in the bookcase and saw shots of Fran and Maria at their wedding and shots of Peter and Kelly when they were still married, and shots of Eli, Fran’s son, and Fran Roger and Peter Jr., Peter and Kelly’s kids, the most recent generation of Le Doirs. In the back of the next to bottom shelf, I came across the only one where I was pictured. It was a family portrait of Fran and Peter and my mom and I that was taken when I was maybe ten, when my dad was no longer a part of our family. I looked at it for a long while, registering the expressions we wore then and seeing in them the distances that had been predetermined for us by then. Peter’s jaw was firmly set and the smile he wore didn’t mask his discomfort, his eyes cold and blank; his posture stiff. My mother was dressed in a chic spring suit and all made up with a fresh hairdo, but her mouth was grim and the look in her eyes was tired and lusterless. Fran was soft-eyed and diffident with a nonplussed stare looking directly back at the camera, a shy and abstracted presence, there in body but absent in spirit, as though he’d been summoned for an appearance, paid to show up and put on a sport coat and pose with these people he’d never met before. As for me, I was smiling my crooked gap-toothed grin with eyes gleaming in merriment incongruous to the horror and pain that we were engulfed in by then…

  …or maybe the expression was a leftover trace of the happiness that was ours before the mildew fell on the bud; a brief recollection of what once was captured for posterity, a pose recorded for archival purposes before the memory of it completely faded, which it did within a year of that photo. I looked at the picture for a long time, and the memory of that day and how we were then washed through me for a while, and I nodded to it and said something to myself that could have been a prayer for the dead and dying or even the still living Le Doirs. “So long, it’s been good to know you.” Then I moved down the hall through Fran’s office, exited the glass doors to the patio, and sat on a chaise alongside the pool facing west, looking at the black flanks of Mount St. Helena…

  I lit a cigarette and watched black-rimmed clouds gather and bunch along the crest of the ridge. A west wind picked up and blew its icy breath down on me. I saw the first raindrops fall on the pool, then snowflakes fell and I was no longer here again.

  …we sat around a knotty pine table in front of a fireplace with flames roaring, feeding wrapping paper from presents onto it, listening to Bing Crosby and Perry Como sing Christmas songs. Outside the rented cabin, snow was falling and piling in drifts. Dad and Florence, his new bride, had rented the cabin for a week and picked us up at Mom’s, three days before, to take us for the holidays, bringing along the old Christmas records from Hazel’s, maybe as a reminder from Christmases past when our family spent the holidays there with Hazel and Brent and my uncles Paul and Yick and Freddy and the Monsignor; he had even brought the Mortimer Snerd record that I loved and had to imitate before I was allowed to open my presents. We sat there on the living room floor of the cabin, ripping off wrappings and bringing forth the beautiful gifts inside them—bulky imported ski sweaters from Norway and chess sets and fly fishing rods and flannel pajamas and expensive books, thanking them as we tore into them and holding them up next to us for my dad and his new wife to see. And when we did, they’d smile and Dad would nod while his wife would offer comments of how well that color looked on Peter or how Dad knew how much Fran loved to play chess, and now he and my dad could play that evening, or how these were the nicest and warmest pajamas, Macy’s had this Christmas, Ram, and how they would keep the chill off me. Then we raised our glasses of stiff eggnogs that my dad had mixed and toasted to the happy holidays of this old new family tradition, the flames leaping with a new pile of spent wrappings placed atop them…

  …then that scene shifted and smeared to the last Christmas we’d spent with my dad, just months before I’d met Vera, when snow was falling outside his high-rise apartment window in Sheepshead Bay. Fran and I in jeans and boots with hair past our shoulders, counter-pointed by Peter and his polo sweater with rugby club insignia, Adidas, and Fu Manchu mustache. He was seated alongside his two boys and Kelly, who chattered on with my dad’s new wife Florence about maternal matters or consumer considerations like the prices of things or how well one product performed compared to its competitors, while Peter and Fran and I talked with my dad about current affairs. We talked of wars and governments and what was coming next, allowing my dad the freedom of dealing in intellectual abstractions and thereby keeping the wolf of his cancer at bay, never allowing this open secret to intrude upon the proceedings of the new family tradition begun ten years ago in that snowbound cabinet at Incline Village…

  I was different by then—addicted and recovered with a new life in Amsterdam until I’d come home again with Fran—and this was the first Christmas I’d spent with my dad
since I couldn’t remember when. I walked to the picture window and looked outside to the east where dusk was falling, watching the drifting snowflakes get fatter and heavier. Then Kelly came up behind me with a drink for me and told me that it was time for toasts, and so I took my seat on the living room sofa between the two Fran’s—my brother on the right, my father on the left—but I wasn’t there in spirit and drifted off into anxiety, wondering about the future and whether my father’s cancer would allow him to be part of it. Florence clinked the mixing spoon against her glass and proposed a toast to something about health and the future and happier days ahead. I looked at my father and saw the yellowness of his skin and its dry chalky texture, saw his head becoming distended and peanut-shaped from doses of chemotherapy he’d been taking that fall, and began getting angry at the charade we were taking part in while keeping the realness of his impending death at bay.

  Then Florence got our attention again—just us boys—and looked us all in the eye, going from one to another of the three of us, and saying just loud enough for we and my dad and us to hear, “You know, boys, your father loves you very, very much.” I looked to my left and watched my dad nod silently in the affirmative and grew angrier still, wondering to myself why he couldn’t say it himself and why he had to have this phony art whore from Arizona speak for him. He was still alive, still spoke presumably, still had feelings too. Why, if he felt this way, couldn’t he enunciate it? I wondered why this was so. I tried to remember the last time I’d ever heard words issue from my father’s mouth that were expressions of feeling, other than ones that dealt with history or politics or philosophy or analysis. For the life of me, I couldn’t remember when that was. A feeling cold, dark, and lonely came over me as I looked about the room and became aware that I was the only one there seeming to experience anything approaching misgiving. The rest of the family was sipping their drinks and conversing about football or engineering or the hostilities between Arabs and Israelis, or the best way to prepare pie crusts or how much my dad’s new Chrysler cost and what kind of options it had and how long it would be before the ordered car would arrive at the dealer’s. The conversations rocketed around me, and the information contained in them didn’t lodge within me but piled up like debris that was outside me while shovelfuls more of it were thrown atop the pile. I thought: ‘He’s dying and we know it, but nobody will say a word about it so we do this instead…’"