The Blizzard Party

by Jack Livings

  By all means, don’t spare my feelings, my father said.

  Whatever transgression you’ve locked up within yourself, it’s turned you into a creeping bug of a man. What if I could help you shake it loose? Give it a shove and see what happens to it in the light of day?

  You’re a charmer, Albert. But what if there’s no mystery? Maybe there’s nothing more than good old child abuse at the root of my problems.

  No, Albert said in a tone without menace. No, it’s not that. You’re suffering for your own actions. You’ve done something terrible.

  My father did not answer him.

  Have you ever considered what it would be like to speak that shameful secret aloud to another person?

  I don’t need the sales pitch, my father said. What is it you want me to do?

  I’d prefer that this be an equitable arrangement.

  I’ll consider your offer. But tell me what you want me to do for you.

  I’d like you to administer a test. Once a week.

  To chart the progression of the disease, my father said.

  Correct.

  Your daughters can’t do it?

  I don’t want my family involved. They’d either be feeding me the answers or weeping uncontrollably. They wouldn’t be able to help themselves. I need an impartial judge. And, frankly, you don’t seem like you have any trouble keeping things to yourself. Your—whatever you call them. Phobias. Neuroses. They’re all the evidence I need. In return, as payment, I’d like to suggest that as my memory fails, I might serve as your confessor. At a time of your choosing, you can speak your secrets to me, in whatever detail you like. And you’ll be assured that I’ll have forgotten them by the time you’ve gotten home.

  It’s a novel idea, my father said.

  I’m told it’s liberating, relieving oneself of the burden, Erwin.

  You’re selling me the cure?

  I haven’t spent my life in courtrooms without learning a thing or two about a man’s conscience.

  No one’s ever accused me of having one of those, my father said. Why don’t you have a neurologist administer the test?

  A neurologist would want clinical justification, and they’d just put me in front of some standardized test, anyway. More importantly, a neurologist would inform my family, and that can’t be allowed.

  And why don’t you just write up a multiple-choice test and grade it yourself?

  You don’t think that’s my preference?

  So?

  Have you listened to anything I’ve said? When the mind starts to go—when it’s hurtling downhill faster than I can run—I won’t be able to keep the schedule. I won’t remember to stay within the time limits. I don’t trust that I’ll even remember to do it in the first place. I need an interrogator.

  I see, said my father.

  I am your way out, Albert said. I will be the bottomless hole you can pitch your transgressions into. You can confess the sin without confessing the sin.

  Why don’t I just go down to the coma ward and tell a vegetable? my father said.

  You know that won’t work, Albert said. You need a living, breathing, conscious human being to react. You need the reaction. If I am horrified, if I am shocked by the depths of your depravity, then you’ll know you’ve told the truth. You’ll have dug right down to the root.

  I’d rather you just give me a six-pack and thank me for my time.

  That’s an option. But out of balance.

  Because you need commitment that goes beyond my desire to do a good deed.

  Yes.

  And once you’ve reached a state of incapacitation and I tell you all my little secrets, then what?

  Not complete incapacitation. Incipient incapacitation. When I reach the cusp of forgetting my grandson’s death and my role in it, that’s where we end.

  And then what? my father said.

  Then your work will be done. The weekly tests will end.

  For Christ’s sake, Albert. And then what?

  Then I’ll shuffle off this mortal coil. Clear enough? You’ll be legally protected, if that’s what you’re worried about. If I behave in an unusual manner after the evaluation period ends, you’ll have nothing to concern yourself about. You’ll have done nothing more than proctor a test.

  Oh, for Christ’s sake, Albert. You can’t be serious.

  Albert shrugged. Arguably, it’s the only sane decision available to me. And you have the stomach for this sort of thing. I know that much, he said.

  My father looked back at him.

  Generally, you hear that boys aren’t a gentle species, Albert said. Girls are more perceptive, even when they’re small. You know this. Your daughter’s a sharp one. But my grandson didn’t fit the mold. He was small—even for a little boy, he was small. And he was gentle. I don’t know that he would have been able to make his way in the world. You worry about children when they show no inclination toward cruelty, don’t you? You think, How will they survive? We had little talks, he and I, about dolphins and starfish. His very existence was steeped in innocence. For me to do less than attend to his memory in this way … I might as well piss on his grave.

  Albert said, At the very end, after he became an innocent, my father went through one final transformation. He became an animal. Raving, calling out to phantoms, throwing punches at anyone who came near him, and two seconds later wailing like a lost lamb, holding his arms out, begging for us to embrace him. Save me, he’d cry. Save me! Then, just before he died, he became peaceful. The demons vacated his sorry corpus and left behind nothing but an empty sack.

  I understood, eventually, that all along he had been concealing wild terrors of the mind. Some kind of waking nightmare, fighting to understand what before him was real. It was night; he slept; he woke; it was night again. Or was it? Surely divisions between day and night dissolved. His existence made as much sense as in a dream. He had no past and no future. There was a dinner roll on the plate, and then there was not. Had he eaten it? His wife was by his side, and then she was not. Where was his wife? Who was she, for that matter? His own being was mutable, a pappus pushed this way and that by the breeze, rising and falling, a being of immaterial lightness, an observer without sentience. I know what the end holds, Albert said. Oh yes.

  * * *

  Until the very end, Albert worked to maintain his ability to slip in and out of that day in Florida, and he experienced his memory of it with unusual lucidity. He heard the water that ran up over the coping in sloshing jolts and hit the concrete with a chirping sizzle. He smelled the billowing chlorine and the concrete. The wind that day was onshore, holding back the gnats, but the horseflies had come in powerful numbers and there were a couple of their finely figured bodies floating near the skimmer port. Tad, Tracy’s husband, was in the water. Through the glass he had seen the distended shape refracted on the surface and shot through the sliding door. His drink, iced tea, was on the counter where he had left it. That was his way, controlled, steady even in the nexus of a storm. He had been a football player at North Carolina, a massive man, the embodiment of everything John was not and so desperately wished to be. Useless miracle, Tad had trained as a paramedic in the off-season.

  Tad’s mass had set the water rolling over the coping, where it was in rhythmic recoil by the time Albert, with the rest of the family, emerged, the concrete dark, the humid sear of hot chlorine everywhere. Tad had the boy clutched to his chest and he was plowing through the water toward the steps. He emerged from the pool, the water shredding in white channels around his legs. Tad could tell by the way the boy’s weight dragged through the water there was nothing to be done. That knowledge didn’t slow him because it was not a conscious thought—it was something he knew as he knew his own body’s balance point, and he was not aware that he was struggling against his own animal understanding as he laid the boy down on the concrete and put his mouth on the boy’s mouth, pinched the boy’s nose with pressure enough to close the nostrils, but gently because, again, without conscious thought,
Tad meant not to cause the little boy any pain.

  Albert had cultivated the ability to become Tad. That is, he could imagine himself in Tad’s body, his lips on the boy’s, the fear and anguish in his massive chest. He could inhabit in the same way, as in a dream, Tracy, Sydney, John, Fil, her husband, Skinner, their daughter, Beatrice. He could inhabit the boy’s mother. The boy. The boy, mesmerized by the strange skin of the water, the winking reflection of the sun. A horsefly riding the surface, and his frustration at not being able to reach the insect as it flicked its wings, his arm stretching, knees on rough concrete, the enclosure of the water as he tipped in and sank. The weird, not-unbeautiful moment of descent. Then the larynx snapping shut, the heart still beating normally, the brain, unperturbed, dawdling for a few more seconds. Then panic, a child’s panic, which is not fear of death but fear of separation from his mother, and he cries Mama, the water flooding into the esophagus, forcing the larynx into spasm, the trachea sealing off, oxygen level dwindling, the painful astringency of inhaling chlorinated water, the larynx pulling down yet more water, great gulps of water, the little hands seeking purchase, grasping at the cool liquid, thrashing, finding nothing to hold on to but water until it is over, his life is over. The boy hangs there, suspended above the bottom of the pool, and no one sees him. His blond hair spreads in a corona around his head. The surface of the water is smooth. The spirit leaves the body, and the body becomes a place as serene as deep space, and as cold and airless, a place of acute absence.

  For Albert, it was a sharper punishment to plunge into the memory chest of the grieving mother, to sit in the discord of her inner sanctum, to hear nothing but the accumulated voices of the world’s every farewell echoing off the walls. At battlefronts, on train platforms, beneath hotel awnings, in airports, at prison gates, at hospital beds, across courtrooms, at gravesides. They resonated endlessly in languages known and unknown, Xhosa mixing with Giligudi, an Irish fisherman’s watery cry as he is pulled to the bottom of the North Atlantic, the Chinese miner’s to his family, scribbled on a cigarette package after the cave-in, the slave’s grievous, unspoken farewell to her children at the auction block. And not all tragedies. In balance and provocation, the tossed-off seeya as a roommate leaves for class, a see-you-in-a-minute run to the corner for cigarettes and milk, the paratrooper’s truncated Geroniii— as he hurtles away from the jumpmaster.

  They mock her, Albert thinks, these farewells, all of them. It’s torture. There’s a keening beneath the collective din, and that’s her voice. She, after all, could not say farewell, because the boy never left. He was right there, wasn’t he, right beside her chair, arranging his stuffed animals in a row, speaking through them the concerns of his day. But no, he was not there. She’d failed to watch over her own son. Until the day of her own death she will call out that animal wail. Awake, asleep, she will never be without the sense that she’s left it undone, that the most essential part of herself is lost, drifting, stranded on an ice floe carried out to sea on the tide. A cliché? They exist to make horrors like this comprehensible.

  Bronwyn was a good girl, trustworthy, and lost in the way of all Californians who abandoned that coast’s optimism for the great soldiering-on of the granite-willed East. She and John had gotten married in July 1968. She had a broad, substantial face that Albert liked. He approved of her shapely body, sharp mind, the unadorned beauty that wasn’t exactly innocence, but related. He saw what attracted John—the same thing that had attracted him to Sydney. Neither of them put up with any bullshit, and he could see that Bron kept John in check. He was erratic, an easy mark for provocateurs, a peculiar and dangerous characteristic for a New Yorker to possess. When introduced to Bron, Albert had recognized the iron will immediately. They carry it in their shoulders, women like that. There was a drunkard father back in California, or a dead mother, a brood left to fend for itself, something along those lines, and Bron would have been their protector. As it turned out, neither death nor drink had shaped the girl—it was the other thing, success, a father who had worked hard, provided for his family, prospered, and a mother who commanded equal respect, and exuded a sunniness that seemed to endlessly billow up from within her. Albert was as stupidly misled about his daughter-in-law as he was about his own son. It was a father-in-law’s hopeless enchantment with the girl who he feels is at least in part his own, part daughter, part lover, and who, in turn, should adore him back.

  Her family was physically imposing. That was what you noticed first. When Albert and Sydney had taken the Breckenridges up on their offer to spend Christmas at their home on the Russian River, Albert felt as though he’d walked into a hallucination. The house, built from the ground up by Bron’s father and her brothers, was scaled to their maple-sized frames. The kitchen counter hit Albert high on the rib cage; Sydney, attempting to safely deliver a plate into the depths of the industrial-sized porcelain sink, had to stand on her tiptoes. The stairs were something from an acid trip, and although the furniture had been purchased in the world of standard sizes, the beds, four-posters built from wood cut on the property, each post a tree itself, bark intact, required visiting mortals to use step stools. Getting down in the dark for a midnight piss was a dangling, toe-waggling descent over the cliff’s edge. The bed was itself easily large enough to host a family of five. The damn robes were on hooks six and a half feet off the bathroom floor, and when he put one on it covered him like an evening gown.

  They were a hardy, sporting family whose quail and venison graced the dinner table and whose basement had been strung with bulbs of elk sausage. Hemingway had been a guest at the cabin, as they called the five-bedroom fortress, and the thirty-aught-six he had shipped to Roland in gratitude hung over the mantel. A wooden plaque identified its provenance: Papa.

  And they were, it turned out, supremely Christian. Theirs was an unfamiliar practice to Albert, his own exposure having run to the darker end of the spectrum, and he dismissed their rosy outlook as unserious, a child’s version of the faith, and their admiration for John’s accomplishments, their genuine wonder not just at the amplitude but at the timbre of his instrument, as the Breckenridges referred to it, was an extension of that unserious worldview in which things were good or bad, beautiful or ugly, and complaisance masked an unchecked and vicious insistence on the rightness of their attitudes.

  He and Sydney had spent three nights there before returning to San Francisco where Albert had client meetings. Mornings on the hunt; afternoons engaged in outdoor sportsmanship; and every night after dinner, Bron’s mother had insisted on a song. John, Albert noticed, displayed none of the formality or reticence with his in-laws that defined communication with his own parents, and he would rise with a broad grin and walk to the hearth of the fireplace as though it had been constructed for the express purpose of his performance. Such was parenthood; you instilled the ideals that caused them to reject you. So be it.

  The last night Albert glimpsed the true source of his son’s pride, however. Instead of watching his son sing, Albert watched his daughter-in-law listen. She was enraptured, red-cheeked, face upturned to John as he lilted through a lied, her fingers clasped in her lap as though attempting to form a cage over the orgasm no doubt building in her wet little snatch. So that’s it, Albert thought, and he reclined in the enormous leather chair and folded his hands over his belly, satisfied at his discovery, a tidy explanation of his son’s good humor, his voice just another trick for getting laid. Of course the ruddy-faced Breckenridges couldn’t see the truth, living as they did in the benevolent glow of their happy Jesus and his tum-tumming Negro band. Just remember it’s the same Christ who smiles down on my son’s bare ass while he pounds away at your little girl, Albert thought.

  * * *

  That day in Florida, it had fallen to Albert to phone Roland and Gerta Breckenridge. In the even, gray-flannel tones he’d have used with a client, he explained to the silent line that the little boy had fallen into the swimming pool that afternoon, efforts had been made to revive him, b
ut he had been pronounced dead at the hospital. Roland had asked to speak to his daughter but Albert had said she’d been sedated and wasn’t able to come to the phone. Roland asked to speak with John. Albert called his son over. John took the phone and walked with it through the nearest open door, which happened to lead to the bathroom. He’d yanked the cord in behind him and closed the door. Caldwell did not hear the light switch. His son remained in the bathroom for half an hour, and when he emerged said only that the Breckenridges would arrive the next day.

  Together the two families flew with their terrible cargo to New York. They buried the boy. Roland and Gerta took their daughter back to California. She returned to New York only to appear at the divorce proceedings.

  Sydney was dead within a year, like something from Shakespeare, killed by grief. Her heart broke: an arrhythmia. A failed surgery and she was gone. Gone before that, though.

  And in the end, an unnatural state of existence, an inversion of the order of all things, the earth in orbit around the moon, rivers flying into the sky, hoary old Albert Caldwell living on, Sydney and the little boy cold in their graves.

  For all their days together, Sydney had been his shepherd, unflappable, coaxing out conversation with her good humor, but after the boy’s death, even she had been silenced. Tracy and Fil had retreated to what comforts they could find in their own families, John to his catastrophe. Albert’s dinners with Sydney were concertos of silverware on porcelain, resonant mastication. He had already formulated the idea that the boy’s death was his fault, but it was Sydney’s silence that convinced him he was right.

  Sydney’s airless place was not unlike Bronwyn’s, the stones packed tight around her chest. The frantic gasping for shallow breaths. The wild, hair-tearing agony of white pain that, like a nuclear flash, blotted out everything else with its light. Albert wondered what it was about these women that their collapse had to be complete, a total shattering of their psyches?