“I don’t understand,” Nicola said.
“It’s some kind of sick joke,” James said as he reached for the card.
Irma shook her head. “No, it’s not a joke. It’s a very clever ruse on your dad’s part to make me feel better. “
And she went on to tell Nicola and James about the daily visits from Phil Defantion, mentioning the mystical briefcase, the secluded sessions in Boz’s den, the fact that Phil had spent his entire life travelling distant countries so he must have built up quite a database of contacts . . . people who, as a favor to Phil—and for such a good reason—would probably not be averse to sending a pre-written card across from their home city to Irma here in the US.
After studying for a while, Irma said, “I’ll bet this is the way it works.
“Phil organizes the card from Venice, gets it across here and brings it around for your dad to write. Then Phil takes it away and sends it back to Venice and that same person then sticks a stamp on it and pops it into a box.”
“But the timing is so perfect,” Nicola said.
“Well, maybe Phil held onto the card until –” She paused and shrugged. “Then he sends the card and tells whoever that it’s fine to send it right back.”
“‘I’ll write again soon’? What’s that mean?”
“Exactly what it says, I guess, James,” Irma said.
“You mean . . . you mean there’ll be other cards?”
Irma smiled at Nicola and nodded. “I guess so. I don’t know just how many but . . . they were in there a long time every time Phil came around. And Phil came around pretty much every day until your dad got too weak.”
James watched his mother turn back to the card and read it again. “How do you feel about it, Mom?”
“I think it’s pretty weird,” said Nicola, and she gave a little shudder. “It’s like dad speaking from beyond the grave.”
“That’s exactly what it is,” ventured Irma, “but it certainly doesn’t bother me. After all, that’s what a Will is, isn’t it? The deceased speaking to his loved ones from beyond the grave . . . with all the statements and clauses in that Will written when the deceased was still alive. This is really no different than that and, of course, it’s a delightful idea.”
“Still pretty weird if you ask me,” Nicola concluded.
But Irma was smiling. “I think it’s sweet. And I think I’m ready for a cup of coffee.” She went into the TV room and placed the card on top of the television, standing it up against a bowl containing nuts and dates.
“Pride of place, huh?” James said.
Irma nodded without taking her eyes from the card. “Pride of place.”
* * *
When Phil Defantino called around James answered the door.
“Hey, James,” he said, nodding awkwardly. It had started to snow outside—just a fine powder now but everyone knew that as soon as it warmed up a degree or so they’d get it knee deep—and Phil was wearing a peaked cap like hunters wore, complete with earmuffs, a thick scarf and mitten that made him look like he was hiding freak hands of enormous size. He was a shopping mall dummy on which some over-zealous window-dresser had decided to drop every piece of winter clothing in the store, and James had to smile. Phil frowned at the smile and then said, “I thought I’d call around to see how your mom’s doing.”
“Oh, she’s fine. Thanks to that –”
“Hello, Phil,” Irma said. She moved quickly along the hallway and reached around her son to pull Phil into the house.
“I was just going to say to Mr. Defant –”
“Hey, James . . . it’s Phil. You’re not a kid any more.”
James laughed. “Okay, yeah, Phil.” He turned to Irma. “I was just going to say how well –”
Irma flashed a wide eyed stare at him and gave a single slight shake of her head. “Why don’t you go make us some coffee, honey?” Then, to Phil, “You going stay for a few minutes, yes?”
Phil nodded enthusiastically and started to pull clothing off, depositing it in a heap on the floor just inside the door.
Phil and Irma sat in the TV room for almost an hour, drinking coffee and eating cookies and generally just shooting the breeze. Phil checked to see if Irma was okay and made sure that she didn’t need any money or anything, and Irma said she was fine on both counts, with Irma telling him that one of his magical lost billfolds was not required. She had forgotten all about the postcard and she saw Phil notice it there on the television but he didn’t say anything so she didn’t say anything either. When the snow started to fall heavily outside the window, Phil decided it was time for him to hit the homeward trail. He gave Irma a kiss on the cheek and a big bear hug—God, how she missed her man’s strong arms around her!—and then, once more suitably attired, he ventured out into the elements. Irma watched him trudging along the path to his 4x4, watched the lights come on as Phil got in, and then watched the car move off. She waved energetically at the little toot on Phil’s horn and closed the door. When she turned around, James was leaning against the stair-banister watching her.
“Why didn’t you want me to say anything? About the card, I mean.”
“Wasn’t anything to do with him.”
Irma walked past James heading for the kitchen.
“Wasn’t anything to do with Phil? Didn’t you tell us that –”
“James,” Irma snapped, spinning around at the kitchen door. “However or whyever this thing happened and no matter whose help was used, that card is to me from my husband. My dead husband. Writing to me from one of the most wonderful cities on Earth.” She shrugged and her stern expression mellowed. “Sure, I could maybe track down the whys and wherefores of it—talk to Phil, ask him to come clean and so on—and where would that leave me? What benefit would I gain from that?”
James could feel the color draining back out of his cheeks.
“You think of religion, right? All those folks traipsing to chapels and churches, synagogues and mosques . . . and all of them doing it, week in and week out, on the back of a fairy story? Oh, it’s a pretty widely held and widely believed fairy story but it’s still a fairy story. There’s no proof. It’s like the old saying goes: if you had proof then you wouldn’t need faith. And right now, when I thought my life was pretty well over, I get a postcard from the one person in this planet that means more to me than anything else in the world . . . a postcard from Venice, for crissakes—excuse my French—and yes, sure, there’s a part of me, maybe just a tiny itsy-bitsy part, that thinks well, maybe he is in Venice! And maybe I will get to go there with him one of these days. And until that happens, he’s just going to stay in touch with me, writing little messages to me. It doesn’t hurt, does it? To believe that, I mean? But you want me to seek out the proof that he just sat in his den day after day, concocting silly meaningless little notes using his travel books so’s he could send me postcards from exotic locations for me to read while his body—the body I loved and cherished more than anything else, and that I miss so very very much—just decayed to mulch in the –” Irma slid down the wall sobbing.
James went across to her and crouched down beside her, his own tears rolling down his face. “Oh, mom . . . I’m so sorry. So very very sorr –”
Irma patted his arm and rubbed her eyes with her sleeve. “No, you haven’t done anything, honey. It’s me should be sorry.”
“No, you –”
“Shh. Let me finish. You just wanted me to rationalize everything so’s I wouldn’t fool myself . . . so’s I would face the fact that your dad is dead and gone and I’m alone now. You didn’t want me to allow myself to become dependent on . . . on a fantasy. Is that about right?”
James nodded. “That’s about right, yes.”
“Well, honey, let me reassure you that I’m absolutely fine. I do know the score. Maybe your dad and me . . . maybe we’ll meet up again”—Irma waved her hand and shrugged, eyebrows raised as though challenging her son to disagree with her—“someplace else . . . be it Heaven or wherever.
And then again,” she said with a shrug of resignation, “maybe we won’t. But the possibility—no, the faith that I have—that I will see him again is all that’s going to keep me going. And that postcard and maybe others just like it, is a part of that faith.
“Even though, deep down, I know—and I do know—that your dad wrote those cards when he was still alive, there’s just this wonderful what if? element about it . . . like when you see a squirrel gathering nuts and you imagine it going home to a tree-hole where its partner is cooking dinner for it, or on Hallowe’en when you look out of the window and you wonder whether, just maybe, the ghouls and the ghosts are gathering down at the Cemetery gates just waiting for some shmuck to wander by . . . or Christmas Eve, looking out of that same window into the snow and trying real hard, no matter how old you’ve become, to hear sleigh bells.
“The whole thing about the very idea of the cards and that he even thought of doing it and that Phil got so involved—God only knows how much effort he had to put into this . . . and maybe is still putting into it—well, how could anyone want not to believe? It comes right down to this: my man is dead and I have to go on without him. I can make that portion of my time on Earth very hard or I can make it just hard—it could never be easy. The postcard helped, God forgive me that I needed such help but I guess I did. And I still do. And if I speak with Phil about it then I break the spell. So all those people he’s had lined up and all those visits to the house when your dad was so sick . . . all of that would have been in vain.”
The sudden sound of water draining from the bath upstairs broke the silence and Irma smiled, running a hand through her gray hair and sweeping it back from her forehead.
“You’re right, Mom,” James said, and he threw his arms around her once again. Breathing in the smell of her—her soap or perfume or whatever it was—suddenly made him realize that he wouldn’t be smelling his father’s unique smell ever again. “I miss him too,” he whispered into his mother’s ear.
“I know, honey,” she said. And then because such a revelation and the enormity of its implications needed to be acknowledged more than once, “I know.”
They made a pact that night, Irma and James and Nicola, to keep the postcard—they hardly dared speak of it in plural, not yet at least—a secret amongst themselves. They had a small celebration to mark their decision, a late-night feast of port and cheese and crackers, raising their glasses to the continued success of Boz Mendholsson’s travels and adventures. When James went to stand outside in the wind and snow for a cigarette, he looked at the surrounding houses and listened to the snow-muted sounds of the neighborhood and the sussurant hum of the traffic on the Interstate, and he steeled himself to face a world that was now minus one of the half-dozen people who mattered most to him. It was easier than he had imagined.
* * *
The second card—the one from Paris—arrived the following week, wedged between a credit card statement and a letter from Suzanne, Irma’s eldest sister. The statement and the letter were ignored until much later in the day, but the other item was devoured voraciously by Irma right there on the doorstep, the wind blowing her hair around her face. Casual passers-by who knew of Irma’s loss may have been surprised and possibly even dismayed by the huge grin on her face. “And au revoir to you too, honey,” Irma whispered when she reached the end.
From then on, the cards arrived with dependable regularity—always one per week and very often two. It seemed that Boz was on a whirlwind tour of the entire world, jetting across continents and time-zones with casual disregard for jet lag or budgetary constraints. Berlin, Amsterdam, Vienna, Austin, Rekjavik, Milan, Rome . . . and every card cross-referenced and referring to ones that came before it. It was a veritable where’s where of cities, countries and cultures, each card bringing her up to date on how Boz was and providing snapshots of local cuisine and landmarks, the smells, sights and sounds or the world delivered every few days into the Mendholssons’ mailbox.
James and Nicola fell into a routine of telephoning Irma purely to get the lowdown on their dad’s latest adventures, and whenever they visited the house they relished holding the postcards and reading them for themselves, marveling still, way down inside of them, at the ingenuity and sheer meticulous dedication being employed in this scam of scams. But as the days and weeks rolled into months and seasons, that attitude was eroded and, even in spite of themselves, the cards became the reality of their situation . . . their father off on a prolonged world trip with a brief communication coming from every stop along the way.
By the time Irma flipped the calendar over into 1987, Boz had sent her 71 cards. The one she received on January 7th was from Moscow—or St. Petersburg, as Boz informed her in his note—where he had spent New Year’s Eve celebrating in Red Square. In a nice touch at the end he said it was a good thing he didn’t feel the cold because it was 10 degrees below.
Irma kept the cards in a special rosewood box by the side of her bed, the cards all filed in date order. There had been a couple of screw-ups in the summer when cards arrived in the wrong order but now she had marked each one with a number and there was a complementary sheet with all the numbers and the dates the cards arrived. At night, before she went to sleep, Irma would sit in bed, with the wind whistling around the streets of Forest Plains, picturing Boz in all these exotic locations. He hit his one-hundredth card in late June—the card even emblazoned with a hand-drawn rosette in red ink proclaiming Boz’s literary century.
Irma was glad of the warmer weather. The winter—her second as a widow—had been cold and long, and it had taken its toll on her stamina and her constitution. Nicola insisted that she go to see Doctor Fredricks and, though she refused at first, James was quick to remind her of what she would have said to his dad in a similar situation.
Jack Fredricks said that Irma’s blood pressure was up a little but it wasn’t anything to worry about. He gave her some pills and congratulated her on dealing with her loss so magnanimously. “You’re an inspiration to us all,” he told her as he showed her out of the surgery.
“Well,” Irma said, “I’ve had a lot of help.” And then she was on her way.
Phil and Jackie Defantino had stayed in close contact over the twenty months since Boz’s death, and though Phil was often tempted to mention something to Irma about his special project with Boz, he refrained. He had quickly recognized the danger of stealing the magic from what Boz had conceived and so he never said a thing . . . not even a knowing smile. And Irma, in what Phil considered to be remarkable forbearance, never let her own face slip when Phil would ask her how things were.
But when James and Nicola were shown the one-hundredth postcard they saw something that must have been happening for a while but which they had missed. They didn’t say anything as such but James had to ask his mother to clarify some of the message as the words appeared to have been smudged. “Probably dropped in a puddle someplace,” was all Irma could say as she took the card and read aloud the whole message. While she read, James looked across at his sister and saw the same concerns in her eyes as he felt sure were present in his own: Boz’s handwriting was deteriorating.
The following day, James called around to take his mom to the mall but she wasn’t ready. He shouted into the bathroom and asked if it was okay for him to flip through Boz’s postcards. “Go ahead,” Irma shouted over the noise of the shower. “They’re in the box beside my bed.”
Sitting on the bed flicking through the cards, James saw that it was worse than he had first thought. Boz’s penmanship had become uncontrolled, the words slanting into each other and littered with misspellings and grammatical errors, inconsistencies and duplications. He wondered just when, in his father’s illness, these cards had been written.
But, as it was to turn out, James’s concerns were overtaken by events.
* * *
The following Monday, James took the day off from work and drove up to Forest Plains to see Nicola. They met up at the coffee shop on Main Street, the pl
an being to discuss what they were going to do when the cards dried up. It was something they had never really considered, having been swept away on Irma Mendholsson’s floodtide of optimism and wonder. Maybe, for just a while there, they too had signed into the belief that their father truly was enjoying a long vacation, writing home every few days to keep them aware of where he was.
“She’s going to crash,” James said, shaking his head in desperation. “Crash and burn.”
“Oh, I don’t know that –”
“Nick, she has never mentioned the whole thing ever since that first couple of cards came. Not once. And neither have we. She actually believes now that he’s simply out of the country.”
Nicola nodded thoughtfully.
“And when the cards finally stop, it’s all going to come back to her. It’ll be like he’s died all over again.”
“So what’ll we do?”
“I think the time has come to have a long talk with Mom.”
With great reluctance, Nicola agreed.
They realized that something was wrong as soon as they saw the folded-up Sunday newspaper lying on the porch.
“Oh, God, Nick,” James said as he fumbled for his key.
“Stay cool, it might not mean anything,” Nicola said. “Let me try the doorbell.” She reached past her brother and pressed the bell. The distant sound of bing bong from inside the house only seemed to exacerbate their feeling of impending doom.
Inserting the key in the lock, James turned the handle and opened the door. “Mom?”
They both stood on the porch for a couple of seconds, each of them convincing themselves that they simply didn’t want to frighten their mother. But it was more than that. It was something both profound and sublime. So long as they remained outside the house then anything that might have happened in there stayed in the future as a mere possibility. Once they went in and confronted what they now believed to be inevitable, there was no turning back . . . no alternative but to accept.
Mister October Page 14