The Truth About Death

by Robert Hellenga

  MEG: “I see you’ve got the house up for sale.”

  RUDY: “Oh, that.”

  Molly got up to let the dogs in. Rudy suddenly realized that she’d quit smoking.

  MEG: “Molly and I’ve been talking; we think it’s a great idea. This place is too big for you. You must rattle around here all by yourself. You’d be better off in an apartment or one of those retirement condos. Dan and I heard talk about one on the radio on the way down—Fairview Estates, something like that. You’d have everything you need right there. A pool, a sauna. You’d have your own kitchen if you want to cook, but there’s a dining room too. The best of both worlds.”

  RUDY: A pool? A sauna? What do I need with a pool and a sauna? “What about Margot?”

  MOLLY: “She’s twenty-nine years old; it’s about time she got a place of her own. You’re too protective. She’s got to get out in the world.”

  RUDY: “Where do you think she is? She sure as hell isn’t upstairs in her room. And what about Heathcliff and Saskia?”

  MOLLY: “They’re getting old, Papa. How much longer do you think they’ve got?”

  RUDY: “Well, I dunno. They don’t look so old to me.”

  MEG: “We could take them, Pop. We’ve got plenty of room now. We were thinking of getting a dog anyway. It would be good for the kids.”

  MOLLY: “This neighborhood’s going to hell, Papa; I can tell just by looking down the street. It’s going to go down, down, down. These old houses used to be trendy, but now they’re a drug on the market. Sell now while you’ve got the chance. Give me three months. I’ll have my license. I’ll take care of everything for you, the listing, showing, financing, closing, the works.”

  RUDY: “You going to have a license to practice in Illinois?”

  MOLLY: “I’m planning to take the test for Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, New York, and California. But listen to this. I’ve already got a listing figured out. It’s right here in my purse.”

  She fiddled with her purse and pulled out piece of paper, which she handed to Rudy:

  Victorian fantasy. Shingle-style. 5 BRs. Study. 2 bath. Parquet floors. Baccarat crystal chandelier. Leaded glass. Butler’s pantry. Beautiful millwork. 2 fplcs. Mod. kitchen, Lndry rm. Full bsmt. Excellent condition. Lower 80’s.

  “How does that sound? Not bad, eh? You’ll get eighty thousand for this place; I promise you.”

  Rudy didn’t know what to say. He was dumbfounded. “You might as well get on the phone and call the undertaker right now,” he said. “Tell him to bring the hearse around to the back door. Or call the knacker, for cryin’ out loud. I’ve lived in this house for over thirty years. You don’t think I’m going to pack up and move out just like that, do you? After thirty years? Your mother and I paid seven thousand dollars for this house. Why, you couldn’t build a house like this today for a quarter of a million dollars.”

  “Papa, that’s not what we meant and you know it.” Meg unfastened her hair, tipped her head back, and shook her head. “What we meant is that we want you to do whatever you want to do, and that if you want to sell the house, it’s okay with us. You don’t have to worry about us. We’ll go along with anything. You’re the one who put it up for sale without saying anything to anybody.”

  The sign. The sign’d been a bad idea from the beginning.

  “Suit yourself,” Molly said, “if that’s what you really want to do.”

  Rudy had to laugh. He didn’t know how to tell them how much he loved them, and how much it meant to him to have them come home at Christmas, but he thought they knew anyway.

  About an hour later the phone rang. He was sitting at the kitchen table filling stockings and he grabbed it on the first ring. There was a click and the phone went dead, and Rudy froze. The phone always clicked like that and then went dead on overseas calls. And then it would ring again in a little over a minute and the overseas operator would be on the line. It was a special kind of click; he always recognized it. He knew that the click was the same for good news as it was for bad news, but he associated it with bad news, because it had always been bad news.

  Spread out on the table before him were six large gray wool hunting socks with red tops and six piles of additional stuff: oranges, apples, dried apricots and raisins (wrapped in Saran wrap), chocolate kisses in foil, salted peanuts, ballpoint pens, mechanical pencils, little bars of scented soap for the girls, penknives for Dan and Tejinder—He could keep it in his turban!—crayons and protractors for Daniel and Philip. He’d always filled stockings, and he didn’t see any point in stopping now. He opened one of the penknives and tested the blade; he started to clean his fingernails. His pulse was speeding up, and he was experiencing a choking sensation. He was afraid that if anything was wrong he’d start to cry and wouldn’t be able to talk. He’d have to get a hold of himself. The house was strangely silent except for the occasional clink of a metal dog collar and a strange pounding that might have been his heart. It was strong enough to rattle the copper saucepans that dangled from a rack over the table.

  It was Margot, all right. At first he didn’t pay any attention to what she was saying. He was listening for something else, like a mechanic listening to an engine idling.

  “Is it really you, Papa? I had trouble getting through. Say something.”

  “How are you?”

  “Oh, Papa, I’m so happy. I’m in love, really in love. Head over heels. Can you hear me all right? I don’t want to say it too loud.”

  “Where are you?”

  “At the post office.”

  “In the middle of the night?”

  “It’s nine in the morning here. Why? What time is it there?”

  “It’s two o’clock in the morning.”

  “Oh, Papa, I thought it would be afternoon. Is it Christmas yet?”

  “It’s still Christmas Eve. I’m filling the stockings. I gave yours to Molly’s boyfriend. His name’s Tejinder and he’s from Punjab. He’s a Sikh and he wears a turban.”

  When he knew she was all right he was tempted to scold her: Why didn’t you write? Why didn’t you call? Why didn’t you come home? You promised … But he was too overwhelmed, too happy.

  “Well,” he said. “That’s wonderful. Who’s the lucky guy?”

  “He’s an Italian.”

  “Married?”

  “No, Papa. Well, yes, but he’s getting a divorce. He’s from the Abruzzi. He’s the head restorer for the whole region of Tuscany. He’s working on the frescoes in the Pandolfini Chapel in the Badia Fiorentina. You remember the Badia? The monastery where they had the foosball game in the cloister? It’s still there.”

  The foosball game he remembered, after all these years. But that was all.

  “It doesn’t matter. And the Simone Martini Annunciation. I sent you a postcard of it. Didn’t you get it?”

  “I got it; it’s up on the refrigerator.”

  He tried to picture her in the post office. He couldn’t remember anything about Florence—he and Helen had gone there to bring Margot back home after her nervous breakdown, and then he’d gone again when Helen was having that affair—but he imagined Margot in a red phone booth, with her friend—her lover—standing outside, waiting, impatient, eager.

  “What are your plans? I mean, are you coming home, or what?”

  “We’re going to the Abruzzi sometime in January to see Sandro’s parents, and then to Rome.”

  “Have you written to your boss at the Newberry? He called here the other day. To tell you the truth, I don’t think you’ve got a job anymore.”

  But she didn’t hear him, and he didn’t repeat himself. It might just be possible, he thought to himself. A mature man with a good job, a responsible position. But married?

  Rudy suddenly realized what the pounding was that was shaking the saucepans. It was the bed upstairs in Molly’s room. The Indian was humping his daughter. They were shaking the whole house with their lust. It gave him a hard-on, just the cruel fact of it. It made him ache for his wif
e.

  “I didn’t know you could get a divorce in Italy,” he said.

  “It’s an annulment; it’s the same thing. You’ll see. Don’t worry, Papa. I’m all right. I’m fine. I’m not cracking up again. I’ll write to you, Papa. I really will. I have to go now.”

  “Take care of yourself.”

  “You take care of yourself too, Papa. I love you. Tell everyone I love them.”

  That was all she said. But it was enough.

  Rudy finished filling the stockings and carried them into the living room, where he spread them out on the coffee table in front of the fireplace. He moved the TV into a dark corner in the dining room, ate the cookies the boys had left for Santa, and wrote an answer to the note they’d left:

  Thanks for the milk and cookies. Be good.

  —Santa

  He filled the humidifier, turned down the thermostat, let the dogs out to go the bathroom, turned off the tape deck, which had been left on, let the dogs back in, put the garbage container up on the kitchen table so the dogs wouldn’t empty it, got a hammer out of his toolbox, pulled on his jacket, and went outside to take down the For Sale sign.

  He still had a hard-on, a great lump of sensation swelling against his trousers. He’d almost forgotten how good it felt, and even though he didn’t know what he could do about it, he was grateful. It was good to be alive. He felt like a young man, young and strong, the way he’d felt when he and Helen had moved into the house, which looked just the same now as it had then. They’d kept the red trim. Chinese red. He thought of the first Christmas they’d spent in this house, after his father’s death; of Mr. Hamilton, the previous owner, whose paving-brick business had fallen into the hands of the receivers, and who had driven off to California with his whole family in a broken-down Pierce Arrow; of the French dollhouse that the Hamiltons had left in the attic; of the steamer trunks; and of the letter that Hamilton had sent him about a year later, telling him about the house, how Harald Kreutzberg, the famous German dancer, had been entertained there and Cornelia Otis Skinner and Matthew Arnold and Aleka Rostislav, who was Princess Galitzine and whose husband’s mother was the older sister of the last Czar, and many other famous people. He kept the letter in the safe-deposit box at the bank.

  The sign had worked its way loose—he hadn’t hammered the nails all the way in when he put it up—and he could have pulled it off with his hands. He didn’t need the hammer. But instead of pulling it off, he walked down the driveway to the street to pick up the empty garbage cans that had been sitting there for two days and to have a look.

  It was windy and the snow blew upward in spiraling flurries; the ornamental streetlights glowed like beacons marking a broad channel. Most of the big old houses on the street had long ago been broken up into five or six apartments—sometimes even more. Most of the owners didn’t live there anymore, and the lawns didn’t get cut as often as they should have, and the houses got painted every ten or twelve years instead of every six or seven. Helen used to say that when she looked down the street at night through the leaded glass of the mullioned windows in the master bedroom at the front of the house, she could imagine—if she squinted a little—that she was living in a suburb of Paris—Saint-Germain or Saint-Denis. To Rudy, who’d lived in Chicago longer than he’d ever lived anywhere else, it just looked like home.

  The living room window, which was curved, was divided into three panels, like a triptych. The window was filled with little white lights that were doubled by the beveled edges of the glass; in the large center panel stood the Christmas tree, full of light and promise. The light under the porte cochere was on too and the For Sale sign was clearly visible from the street. Rudy loved this house. “Come on in this old house,” he used to sing to Helen. “Nobody here but me.” But now it was time to move on, time to let go. He didn’t know how he knew this, but he knew it. He knew it as surely as migratory birds know when it’s time to leave everything behind them and head out who knows where, and no one has ever figured out how they find their way, but they do. It was as if he were sprouting wings, big golden wings, like those on the angel on Margot’s postcard, wings that would carry him out of the past and into the future, wherever he needed to go.

  THE SECOND COMING

  Rudy let the dogs in, filled their water dish, and spread out the mail on the kitchen table. There was nothing from his daughter Margot, who was in Italy, but there was a letter from the University of Chicago, where Helen had gone back to school, asking for money, which he tossed in the garbage—Helen had been dead for almost ten years—and there was a large formidable envelope bearing a stern warning:

  This Cash Winner Notification may not be delivered by anyone except U.S. Government employees.

  A partial list of sweepstakes winners was enclosed. Rudy could see his own name displayed through a little window, but he tossed the envelope, unopened, into the garbage with the letter from the University of Chicago. There was also a trial issue of a senior citizens’ magazine called the Golden Age Digest, and finally, there was a letter from his nephew in East Africa.

  He set the letter aside and glanced through the Golden Age Digest to see what his age-mates were doing. They were mostly playing golf. Happy foursomes in fruity two-toned shoes with fringe on the tongues, like the hair that hangs down over a sheepdog’s face, waved from pea green links. The men wore cardigans and blue or white Oxford shirts; the women wore bright-colored skirts and pale blouses with wide collars. The same folks were buying condominiums with little work islands in the kitchens, which were tiled for easy maintenance. The idea was that old age wasn’t just a downhill slide but the culmination of life, the peak.

  Rudy tossed the magazine into the garbage, poured himself a cup of coffee, and then retrieved the sweepstakes envelope. He was, he learned, a “verified sweepstakes winner.” But it wasn’t clear just what he had won. He read through a lot of fine print. There were prizes in his category that ranged from two hundred fifty thousand dollars to one thousand dollars “to many thousands of substantially lesser cash prizes (as stated in the official sweepstakes rules).” He started to toss it again, but then his eye was caught by another stern notice:

  Failure to claim prize will result in loss of your cash award. Company is not responsible for unclaimed cash awards. There is no entry fee or purchase necessary to claim your award.

  But in fact they wanted him to buy some perfume, real perfume, not cologne or toilet water. Perfume that cost two hundred dollars an ounce in fine stores in New York and Paris, but which he could buy for only five dollars an ounce: Chanel No. 5, Opium, Melograno, Joy, Aramis. They came in different-shaped bottles, but it was hard to tell how big they were. Zen was shaped like a bowling ball. Aramis looked like a pint of whiskey. Aramis, Rudy thought. He was one of the three musketeers, wasn’t he?

  You didn’t have to order any perfume to enter the sweepstakes, or claim your prize, but they made it very difficult for you if you didn’t. You had to cut out your computer-printed number from one place and paste it on a three-by-five card, and then you had to cut out other bits of information from other parts of the official form and paste them on different parts of the card. And you had to cut out the “NO” paragraph from the lower left-hand corner of the Grand Prize Claim Document and affix it to the card too. There wasn’t enough room; and if you didn’t have them arranged in a certain way, you would be disqualified. You were also disqualified if you used staples or cellophane tape. In the end Rudy decided to order some perfume: presents for his daughters, Meg and Molly and Margot; and one for Mrs. Johnson, the cleaning lady; one for Mrs. Lake and another for Miss Heckathorne, the secretaries at the Agostino Co. Anyone else? That was six bottles, all different: Joy, Opium, Seduction, Chanel No. 5, Aramis, Diva. He wrote out a check for thirty dollars and then had to tear it up because he hadn’t allowed for postage and handling, another $3.95, per bottle! What the hell!

  Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. A quarter of a million dollars. What would he do? He wasn’t
sure. He closed his eyes, tried to imagine. He could get to the feeling he’d have right after he’d opened the letter telling him he’d won, how he’d hold himself together, not tell anyone but the dogs for a few days, just riding high, till he’d gotten used to the idea. And then he’d tell Gus Agostino: “Gus,” he’d say, “looks like I’m going to be leaving.”

  “Rudy, what’s the matter?” Gus would ask, concealing the extent of his interest behind a cloud of cigar smoke. “Where you going to go?”

  “I was thinking about Florida, Gus, or Southern California, or maybe Texas; get myself a little spread of my own, maybe a hunderd acres, hunderd an’ fifty. Run things my way.”

  “Rudy, that’s great. You won’t forget us, will you?”

  “Of course not, Gus.”

  Why should he forget Gus? Gus had given him a job when he’d needed one.

  When he was a boy he used to have daydreams like this—waking fantasies—about women, about success, about how everyone would be forced to acknowledge how extraordinary he was. But he’d thought that when you got older, when you grew up, you wouldn’t do that anymore. Now here he was, no better than a kid. It wouldn’t have occurred to him in a million years that his dad or his mom might have had thoughts like that. He could see his dad, standing in the door of the empty packing shed, looking out at the empty trees. Three years in a row they lost the entire peach crop during the Depression. What was his dad thinking to himself?

  “Well,” he’d say, “looks like you and me can eat the whole crop again.” And they’d wander up and down the rows, looking, and find maybe three or four peaches. But what had he been thinking, imagining, dreaming?

  And his mom, her hands up to the elbows in soapy water, looking out the kitchen window. What had she been looking at? The pump? The packing shed? Or something beyond? What had been her heart’s desire?