by Peter Straub
We were moving down a hallway lined with framed diplomas and awards and certificates. Among the awards were a few family photographs, and I saw a younger, robust Alan Brookner with his tweedy arm around a beaming blond girl only a few inches shorter than himself. They looked like they owned the world—confidence surrounded them like a shield.
Brookner went past the photograph without looking at it, as he must have done a dozen times every day. His smell was much more intense in the hallway. White fur like packed spiderwebs covered his bony shoulders. “Get a good woman and pray she’ll outlive you. That’s the ticket.”
He thrust his way through another door and pulled me into a cluttered junk pile of a kitchen before the door swung shut. The smell of rotting food helped mask Brookner’s stench. The door swung back by itself and struck John Ransom, who said, “Damn!”
“You ever think about damnation, John? Fascinating concept, full of ambiguity. In heaven we lose our characters in the perpetual glorification of God, but in hell we continue to be ourselves. What’s more, we think we deserve damnation, and Christianity tells us our first ancestors cursed us with it, Augustine said that even Nature was damned, and—” He dropped my arm and spun around. “Now where the hell is that bottle? Those bottles, I should say.”
Empty Dewar’s bottles stood against the splashboard of the sink counter, and a paper bag full of empty bottles stood beside the back door. Pizza delivery boxes lay strewn over the counters and tipped into the sink, where familiar brown insects roamed over and through them, scuttling across the crusty plates and upended glasses.
“Ask and ye shall receive,” Brookner said, fetching an unopened bottle of Scotch from a case beneath the sink. He slammed it down on the counter, and the roaches in the sink slipped inside the nearest pizza boxes. He broke the seal and twisted the cap off. “Glasses up there,” he said to me, nodding at a cupboard near my head.
I opened the cupboard. Five highball glasses stood widely scattered on a shelf that could have held thirty. I brought down three and set them in front of Brookner. He looked a little like a disreputable Indian holy man.
“Oh well, today I could use a drink,” Ransom said. “Let’s have one, and then we’ll get you taken care of.”
“Tell me where April is.” Brookner gripped the bottle and glared at him out of his monkey face.
“April is out of town,” John said.
“Investment poo-bahs don’t go dillydallying when their customers need them. Is she at home? Is she sick?”
“She’s in San Francisco,” John said. He reached and took the bottle from his father-in-law the way a cop would take a handgun from a confused teenager.
“And what in Tophet is my daughter doing in San Francisco?”
Ransom poured half an inch of whiskey into a glass and gave it to the old man. “Barnett is going to merge with another investment house, and there’s been talk about April getting a promotion and running a separate office out there.”
“What’s the other investment house?” Brookner drank all of the whiskey in two gulps. He held out his glass without looking at it. Liquid shone on his jutting lower lip.
“Bear, Stearns,” John said. He poured a good slug of whiskey into his own glass and slowly took a mouthful.
“She won’t go. My daughter won’t leave me.” He was still holding out his glass, and John poured another inch of whiskey into it. “We were—we were supposed to go somewhere together.” He gestured at me with the bottle.
I shook my head.
“Go on, he wants one too, can’t you see?”
Ransom twisted sideways, poured whiskey into the third glass, and handed it to me.
“Here’s looking at you, kid,” Brookner said, and raised his glass to his mouth. He drank half of his whiskey and checked to see if I was still interested in having a good time.
I raised my glass and swallowed a tiny bit of the Scotch. It tasted hot, like something living. I moved away from the old man and set my glass on a long pine table. Then I noticed what else was on the table. “Ta-ra-ra-boom-dee-ay,” Brookner boomed out in his disconcertingly healthy voice. “All the whores are in luck today.” He sucked at his drink.
Next to my glass was a revolver and stack of twenty-dollar bills that must have added up to at least four or five hundred dollars. Beside that was a stack of tens, just as high. A taller pile of fives stood beside that, and about a hundred singles lay in a heap like a pile of leaves at the end of the table. I made some sort of noise, and the old man turned around and saw what I was looking at.
“My bank,” he said. “Worked it out myself. So I can pay the delivery boys. This way they can’t cheat ya, get it? Make change lickety-split. The gun there is my security system. I grab it and watch them count it out.”
“Delivery boys?” John asked.
“From the pizza place, the one with the radio vans. And the liquor store. Generally I asks ’em if they’d like a little blast. Mostly they just take the money and run.”
“I bet they do,” John said.
“Uh-oh, my stomach feels bad.” The old man palped his stringy belly with his right hand. “All of a sudden.” He groaned.
“Get upstairs,” John said. “You don’t want to have an accident in here. I’ll come with you. You’re going to have a shower.”
“I already had—”
“Then you’ll have another one.” Ransom turned him around and pushed him through the swinging door.
Brookner bellowed about his stomach as they went up a second staircase at the back of the house. The loud voice went from room to room. I poured whiskey over the roaches, and they scampered back into the pizza boxes. When I got tired of watching them, I sat down next to the piles of money and waited. After a little while, I began stacking the pizza boxes and flattening them out so that I could squeeze them into the garbage can. Then I squirted soap over the heap of dishes in the sink and turned on the hot water.
15
ABOUT FORTY MINUTES LATER Ransom came back into the kitchen and stopped short when he saw what I was doing. His wide, pale face clouded over, but after a moment of hesitation, he pulled a white dish towel from a drawer and began wiping dishes. “Thanks, Tim,” he said. “The place was a mess, wasn’t it? What did you do with all the stuff that was lying around?”
“I found a couple of garbage bags,” I said. “There weren’t all that many dishes, so I decided to take care of them while you hosed the old man down. Did he get sick?”
“He just complained a lot. I pushed him into the shower and made sure he used soap. He goes into these funny states, he doesn’t remember how to do the simplest things. Other times, like when he was down here, he seems almost in control—not really rational, of course, but kind of on top of things.”
I wondered what the other times were like if I had seen Alan Brookner when he was on top of things.
We finished washing and drying the dishes.
“Where is he now?”
“Back in bed. As soon as he was dry, he passed out. Which is exactly what I want to do. Would you mind us getting out of here?”
I pulled the plug in the sink and wiped my hands on the wet towel. “Did you ever figure out what that trip was that he kept talking about?”
He opened the kitchen door and fiddled with the knob so that the door would lock behind us when he closed it. “Trip? April used to take him to the zoo, the museum, places like that. Alan isn’t really up for any excursion, as you probably noticed.”
“And this was one of his good days?”
We went outside by the kitchen door and walked around the side of the house. The overgrown grass baked in the sunlight. One of the big oak trees had been split by lightning, and an entire side had turned black and leafless. Everything, house, lawn, and trees, needed care.
“Well, everything he said was coherent, as far as I remember. He would have been better if he hadn’t been drinking for a couple of days.”
We came out of the tall grass onto the sidewalk and began
walking back to Ely Place. Prickly little brown balls clung to my trousers like Velcro. I pulled fresh moist air into my lungs.
“He’s supposed to teach next year?”
“He made it through last year with only a couple of funny episodes.”
I asked how old he was.
“Seventy-six.”
“Why hasn’t he retired?”
John laughed—an unhappy bark. “He’s Alan Brookner. He can stay on as long as he wants. But if he goes, the whole department goes with him.”
“Why is that?”
“I’m the rest of the department.”
“Are you looking for a new job?”
“Anything could happen. Alan might snap out of it.”
We walked along in silence for a time.
“I suppose I ought to get him a new cleaning woman,” he said finally.
“I think you ought to start checking out nursing homes,” I told him.
“On my salary?”
“Doesn’t he have money of his own?”
“Oh yes,” he said. “I suppose there’s some of that.”
16
WHEN WE GOT BACK to his house, Ransom asked me if I wanted something from the kitchen.
We went through a dining room dominated by a baronial table and into a modern kitchen with a refrigerator the size of a double bed and deep counters lined with two food processors, a pasta machine, a blender, and a bread maker. Ransom opened a cabinet and brought down two glasses from a crowded shelf. He shoved them one after the other into the ice-making contraption on the front of the refrigerator and filled them with silvery crescents of ice. “Some kind of water? Soft drink?”
“Anything,” I said.
He swung open the refrigerator, took out a bottle of water with a picture of an iceberg on the label, broke the seal, and filled my glass. He handed me the glass, returned the bottle, and pulled bags of sliced meat and wrapped cheeses and a loaf of bread from the shelves. Mayonnaise, mustard in a stone crock, margarine, a head of romaine lettuce. He lined all of this up on the butcher block counter between us, and then set two plates and knives and forks beside them. Then he closed the refrigerator and opened the freezer door on shelves of frozen cuts of meat, a stack of frozen dinners, a big frozen pizza wedged in like a truck tire, and two shelves filled with bottles of vodka resting on their sides—Absolut Peppar and Citron; Finlandia; Japanese vodka; Polish vodka; Stolichnaya Cristal; pale green vodkas and pale brown vodkas and vodkas with things floating inside the bottles, long strands of grass, cherries, chunks of lemon, grapes. I leaned forward to get a better look.
He yanked out the Cristal, unscrewed the cap, and poured his glass half full. “Really ought to chill the glass,” he mumbled, “but it’s not every day that your wife dies, and then you have to shove a seventy-six-year-old man into the shower and make sure he cleans off the shit smeared all over his legs.” He gulped down vodka and made a face. “I practically had to climb in with him.” Another gulp, another grimace, another gulp. “I did have to dry him off. That white hair all over his body—ugh. Sandpaper.”
“Maybe you should hire that nurse, Eliza Morgan, to spend at least the daytime with him.”
“You don’t think my father-in-law seemed capable of caring for himself? I wonder what might have given you that impression.” John dropped more ice crescents into his glass and poured in another three inches of icy vodka. “Anyhow, here’s the sandwich stuff. Dig in.”
I began piling roast beef and swiss cheese on bread. “Have you thought about how you’ll tell him the truth about April?”
“The truth about April?” He set down his glass and almost smiled at me. “No. I have not thought about that yet. Come to think of it, I’ll have to tell a lot of people about what happened.” His eyes narrowed, and he drank again. “Or maybe I won’t. They’ll read all about it in the paper.” Ransom set his glass back on the counter and rather absentmindedly began making a sandwich, laying a slice of roast beef on a piece of bread, then adding two slices of salami and a slice of ham. He peeled a strip from a slice of cheese and shoved it into his mouth. He stuck a spoon into the crock of mustard and stirred it aimlessly.
I put lettuce and mayonnaise on my own sandwich and watched him stir the mustard.
“What about funeral arrangements, a service, things like that?”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “The hospital set up an undertaker.”
“Do you own gravesites, anything like that?”
“Who thinks about stuff like that, when your wife is thirty-five?” He drank again. “I guess I’ll have her cremated. That’s probably what she would have wanted.”
“Would you like me to stay on here a few more days? I wouldn’t mind, if you wouldn’t feel that I was intruding or becoming a burden.”
“Please do. I’m going to need someone to talk to. All this hasn’t really hit me yet.”
“I’d be glad to,” I said. For a little while I watched him push the spoon around inside the grainy mustard. Finally he lifted it out and splatted mustard on his strange sandwich. He closed it up with a piece of bread.
“Was there any truth in what you told her father about her company’s merger with the other brokerage house?” I asked him. “It sounded so specific.”
“Made-up stories ought to be specific.” He picked the sandwich up and looked at it as if someone else had handed it to him.
“You made it all up?” It occurred to me that he must have invented the story shortly after April had been taken to the hospital.
“Well, I think something was, as they say, in the wind. Something was wafted here and there and everywhere, like dandelion seeds.” He put his sandwich down on the plate and lifted his glass and drank. “You know the worst thing about people who do what April did, people in that kind of work? I don’t mean April, of course, because she wasn’t like that, but the rest of them? They were all absolutely full of hot air. They gab in their morning meetings, then they gab on the phone, then they gab to the institutional customers during lunch, then they gab some more on the phone—that’s it, that’s the job. It’s all talking. They love rumors, God, do they love rumors. And the second-worst thing about these people is that they all believe every word every one of them says! So unless you are absolutely up-to-the-minute on all of this stupid, worthless gossip and innuendo they trade back and forth all day long, unless you already know what everybody is whispering into those telephones they’re on day and night, you’re out, boy, you are about to get flushed. People say that academics are unworldly, you know, people, especially these bullshit artists who do the kind of thing April did, they scorn us because we’re not supposed to be in the real world? Well, at least we have real subjects, there’s some intellectual and ethical content to our lives, it isn’t just this big gassy bubble of spreading half-truths and peddling rumors and making money.”
He was breathing hard, and his face was a high, mottled pink. He drained the rest of his drink and immediately made another. I knew about Cristal. In just under ten minutes, John had disposed of about fifteen dollars worth of vodka.
“So Barnett and Company wasn’t really going to open a San Francisco office?”
“Actually, I have no real idea.”
I had another thought. “Did she want to keep this house because it was so near her father’s place?”
“That was one reason.” John leaned on the counter and lowered his head. He looked as if he wanted to lie down on the counter. “Also, April didn’t want to be stuck out in Riverwood with dodos like Dick Mueller and half the other guys in her office. She wanted to be closer to art galleries, restaurants, the, I don’t know, the cultural life. You can see that, all you have to do is look at our house. We weren’t like those dopes in her office.”
“Sounds like she would have enjoyed San Francisco,” I said.
“We’ll never know, will we?” He gave me a gloomy look and bit into his sandwich. He looked down at it as he chewed, and his forehead wrinkled. He swallowed. “What the h
ell is in this thing, anyhow?” He ate a little bit more. “Anyhow, she would never have left Alan, you’re right.” He took another bite. After he swallowed, he tilted his plate over the garbage can and slid most of the sandwich into it. “I’m going to take this drink and go up to bed. That’s about all I can face right now.” He took another long swallow and topped up his glass. “Look, Tim, please do stay here for a little while. You’d be helping me.”
“Good,” I said. “There is something I’d sort of like to look into, if I could stay around a couple of days.”
“What, some kind of research?”
“Something like that,” I said.
He tried to smile. “God, I’m really shot. Maybe you could call Dick Mueller? He’d still be in the office, unless he’s out at lunch somewhere. I hate to ask you to do this, but the people who knew April ought to be told what happened before they read it in the papers.”
“What about the other man who called? The one who didn’t know whether to call you John or Mr. Ransom?”
“Byron? Forget it. He can hear it on the news.”
He twirled his free hand in a good-bye and wavered out of the kitchen. I listened to him thudding up the stairs. His bedroom door opened and closed. When I had finished eating, I put my plate into the dishwasher and stowed all the lunch things back in the refrigerator.
In the quiet house, I could hear the cooled air hissing out of the vents. Now that I had agreed to keep John Ransom company, I was not at all certain about what I wanted to do in Millhaven. I went into the living room and sat down on the couch.
For the moment I had absolutely nothing to do. I looked at my watch and saw with more than surprise, almost with disbelief, that since I had staggered off the airplane and found an unrecognizable John Ransom waiting for me at the gate, exactly twenty-four hours had passed.
PART
FIVE
ALAN BROOKNER
1
ATRIO OF REPORTERS from the Ledger arrived about three in the afternoon. I told them that John was sleeping, identified myself as a family friend, and was told in return that they’d be happy to wait until John woke up. An hour later, the doorbell rang again when a Chicago deputation appeared. We had more or less the same exchange. At five, the doorbell rang once again while I was talking on the telephone in the entry. Gripping colorful bags of fried grease, notebooks, pens, and cassette recorders, the same five people stood on and around the steps. I refused to wake John up and eventually had to shake the telephone I was holding in the face of the most obstinate reporter, Geoffrey Bough of the Ledger. “Well, can you help us out?” he asked.