by Peter Straub
He tilted his head back, and the covering slipped to his shoulders. A grimace spread his features across his face. He looked as if he had been stabbed in the side. In the same terrible whisper, he asked, “How long ago? Who did it?”
“Alan, wouldn’t you like to come out from under that table?”
He gave me another look of concentrated rage. I knelt down. The buzzing of the flies suddenly seemed very loud.
“Tell me how my daughter was murdered.”
“About a week ago, a maid found her stabbed and beaten in a room at the St. Alwyn Hotel.”
Alan let out a terrible groan.
“Nobody knows who did that to her. April was taken to Shady Mount, where she remained in a coma until this Wednesday. She began to show signs of improvement. On Thursday morning, someone came into her room and killed her.”
“She never came out of the coma?”
“No.”
He opened his Minotaur eyes again. “Has anyone been arrested?”
“There was a false confession. Come out from under the table, Alan.”
Tears glittered in the white scurf on his cheeks. Fiercely, he shook his head. “Did John think I was too feeble to hear the truth? Well, I’m not too damn feeble right now, sonny.”
“I can see that,” I said. “Why are you sitting under the kitchen table, Alan?”
“I got confused. I got a little lost.” He glared at me again. “John was supposed to come over. I was finally going to get the truth out of that damned son-in-law of mine.” He shook his head, and I got the Minotaur eyes again. “So where is he?”
Even in this terrible condition, Alan Brookner had a powerful dignity I had only glimpsed earlier. His grief had momentarily shocked him out of his dementia. I felt achingly sorry for the old man.
“Two detectives showed up when we were about to leave. They asked John to come down to the station for questioning,” I said.
“They didn’t arrest him.”
“No.”
He pulled the cloth up around his shoulders again and held it tight at his neck with one hand. It looked like a tablecloth. I moved a little closer. My eyes stung as if I had squirted soap into them.
“I knew she was dead.” He slumped down into himself, and for a moment had the ancient monkey look I had seen on my first visit. He started shaking his head.
I thought he was about to disappear back into his tablecloth. “Would you like to come out from under the table, Alan?”
“Would you like to stop patronizing me?” His eyes burned out at me, but they were no longer the Minotaur’s eyes. “Okay. Yes. I want to come out from under the table.” He scooted forward and caught his feet in the fabric. Struggling to free his hands, he tightened the section of cloth across his chest. Panic flared in his eyes.
I moved nearer and reached beneath the table. Brookner battled the cloth. “Damn business,” he said. “Thought I’d be safe—got scared.”
I found an edge of material and yanked at it. Brookner shifted a shoulder, and his right arm flopped out of the cloth. He was holding his revolver. “Got it now,” he said. “You bet. Piece of cake.” He wriggled his other shoulder out of confinement, and the cloth drooped to his waist. I took the gun away from him and put it on the table. He and I both pulled the length of fabric away from his legs, and Alan got one knee under him, then the other, and crawled forward until he was out from under the table. The tablecloth came with him. Finally, he accepted my hand and levered himself up on one knee until he could get one foot, covered with a powder-blue tube sock, beneath him. Then I pulled him upright, and he got his other foot, in a black tube sock, on the cloth. “There we go,” he said. “Right as rain.” He tottered forward and let me take his elbow. We shuffled across the kitchen toward a chair. “Old joints stiffened up,” he said. He began gingerly extending his arms and gently raising his legs. Glittering tears still hung in his whiskers.
“I’ll take care of that mess on the floor,” I said.
“Do what you like.” The wave of pain and rage came from him once more. “Is there a funeral? There damn well better be, because I’m going to it.” His face stiffened with anger and the desire to suppress his tears. The Minotaur eyes flared again. “Come on, tell me.”
“There’s a funeral tomorrow. One o’clock at Trott Brothers. She’ll be cremated.”
The fierce grimace flattened his features across his face again. He hid his face behind his knotted hands and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and wept noisily. His shirt was gray with dust and black around the rim of the collar. A sour, unwashed smell came up from him, barely distinguishable in the reek of feces.
He finally stopped crying and wiped his nose on his sleeve. “I knew it,” he said, looking up at me. The lids of his eyes were pink and inflamed.
“Yes.”
“That’s why I wound up here.” He wiped most of the tears out of his silken white whiskers. A shadow of pain and confusion nearly as terrible as his grief passed over his face.
“April was going to take me—there was this place—” The sudden anger melted into grief again, and his upper body shook with the effort of trying to look ferocious while he wanted to cry.
“She was going to take you somewhere?”
He waved his big hands in the air, dismissing the whole topic.
“What’s the reason for this?” I indicated the buzzing mound on the towels.
“Improvised head. The one down here got blocked up or something, damn thing’s useless, and I can’t always get upstairs. So I laid down a bunch of towels.”
“Do you have a shovel somewhere around the place?”
“Garage, I guess,” he said.
I found a flat-bottomed coal shovel in a corner of a garage tucked away under the oak trees. On the concrete slab lay a collection of old stains surrounded by an ancient lawnmower, a long-tined leaf rake, a couple of broken lamps, and a pile of cardboard boxes. Framed pictures leaned back to front against the far wall. I bent down for the shovel. A long stripe of fluid still fresh enough to shine lay on top of the old stains. I touched it with a forefinger: slick, not quite dry. I sniffed my finger and smelled what might have been brake fluid.
When I came back into the kitchen, Alan was leaning against the wall, holding a black garbage bag. He straightened up and brandished the bag. “I know this looks bad, but the toilet wouldn’t work.”
“I’ll take a look at it after we get this mess out of the house.”
He held the bag open, and I began to shovel. Then I tied up the bag and put it inside another bag before dropping it into the garbage can. While I mopped the floor, Alan told me twice, in exactly the same words, that he had awakened one morning during his freshman year at Harvard to discover that his roommate had died in the next bed. No more than a five-second pause separated the two accounts.
“Interesting story,” I said, afraid that he was going to tell me the whole thing a third time.
“Have you ever seen death close up?”
“Yes,” I said.
“How’d you come to do that?”
“My first job in Vietnam was graves registration. We had to check dead soldiers for ID.”
“And what was the effect of that on you?”
“It’s hard to describe,” I said.
“John, now,” Alan said. “Didn’t something strange happen to him over there?”
“All I really know is that he was trapped underground with a lot of corpses. The army reported him killed in action.”
“What did that do to him?”
I mopped the last bit of the floor, poured the dirty water into the sink, filled it with hot soapy water, and began washing the dishes. “When I saw him afterward, the last time I saw him in Vietnam, he said these things to me: Everything on earth is made of fire, and the name of that fire is Time. As long as you know you are standing in the fire, everything is permitted. A seed of death is at the center of every moment.”
“Not bad,” Alan said.
&nbs
p; I put the last dish into the rack. “Let’s see if I can fix your toilet.”
I opened doors until I found a plunger in the broom closet.
In a lucid moment, Alan had blotted up the overspill from the toilet and done his best to clean the floor. Crushed paper towels filled the wastebasket. I stuck the plunger into the water and pumped. A wad of pulp that had once been typing paper bubbled out of the pipe. I trapped the paper in the plunger and decanted it in the wastebasket. “Just keep this thing in here, Alan, and remember to use it if the same thing happens.”
“Okay, okay.” He brightened up a little. “Hey, I made a batch of Bloody Marys. How about we have some?”
“One,” I said. “For you, not me.”
Back in the kitchen, Alan took a big pitcher out of the refrigerator. He got some into a glass without spilling. Then he collapsed into a chair and drank, holding the glass with both hands. “Will you bring me to the funeral?”
“Of course.”
“I have trouble getting around outside,” Alan said, glowering at me. He meant that he never left the house.
“What happens to you?”
“I lived here forty years, and all of a sudden I can’t remember where anything is.” He glared at me again and took another big slug of his drink. “Last time I went outside, I actually got lost. Couldn’t even remember why I went out in the first place. When I looked around, I couldn’t even figure out where I lived.” His face clouded over with anger and self-doubt. “Couldn’t find my house. I walked around for hours. Finally my head cleared or something, and I realized I was just on the wrong side of the street.” He picked up the glass with trembling hands and set it back down on the table. “Hear things, too. People creeping around outside.”
I remembered what I had seen in the garage. “Does anyone ever use your garage? Do you let somebody park there?”
“I’ve heard ’em sneaking around. They think they can fool me, but I know they’re out there.”
“When did you hear them?”
“That’s not a question I can answer.” This time he managed to get the glass to his mouth. “But if it happens again, I’m gonna get my gun and blow ’em full of holes.” He took two big gulps, banged the glass down on the table, and licked his lips. “Ta-ra-ra-boom-dee-ay,” he said. “All the whores are in luck today.” A wet sound that was supposed to be a laugh came out of his mouth. He scrabbled a hand over the lower part of his face and uttered soft hiccuping wails. This injury to his dignity outraged him, and his crying turned into long shuddering choked-back sobs.
I stood up and put my arms around him. He fought me for a second, then sagged against me and cried evenly and steadily. When he wound down, both of us were wet.
“Alan, I’m not insulting you if I say that you need a little help.”
“I do need a little help,” he said.
“Let’s get you washed up. And we have to get you a cleaning woman. And I don’t think you ought to keep all your money on the kitchen table like that.”
He sat up straight and looked at me as sternly as he could.
“We’ll figure out a place you’ll be able to remember,” I said.
We moved toward the stairs. Alan obediently led me to his bathroom and sat on the toilet to pull off his socks and sweatpants while I ran a bath.
After he had succeeded in undoing his last shirt button, he tried to pull the shirt over his head, like a five-year-old. He got snared inside the shirt, and I pulled it over his head and yanked the sleeves off backward.
Brookner stood up. His arms and legs were stringy, and the silvery web of hair clinging to his body concentrated into a tangled mat around his dangling penis. He stepped unself-consciously over the rim of the tub and lowered himself into the water. “Feels good.” He sank into the tub and rested his head against the porcelain.
He began lathering himself. A cloud of soap turned the water opaque. He fixed me with his eyes again. “Isn’t there some wonderful private detective, something like that, right here in town? Man who solves cases right in his own house?”
I said there was.
“I have a lot of money salted away. Let’s hire him.”
“John and I talked to him yesterday.”
“Good.” He lowered his head under the surface of the water and came up dripping and drying his eyes. “Shampoo.” I found the bottle and passed it to him. He began lathering his head. “Do you believe in absolute good and evil?”
“No,” I said.
“Me neither. Know what I believe in? Seeing and not seeing. Understanding and ignorance. Imagination and absence of imagination.” The cap of shampoo looked like a bulging wig. “There. I’ve just compressed at least sixty years of reflection. Did it make any sense?”
I said it did.
“Guess again. There’s a lot more to it.”
Even in his ruined state, Alan Brookner was like Eliza Morgan, a person who could remind you of the magnificence of the human race. He dunked his head under the water and came up sputtering. “Need five seconds of shower.” He leaned forward to open the drain. “Let me get myself up.” He levered himself upright, pulled the shower curtain across the tub, and turned on the water. After testing the temperature, he diverted the water to the shower and gasped when it exploded down on him. After a few seconds, he turned it off and yanked the shower curtain open. He was pink and white and steaming. “Towel.” He pointed at the rack. “I have a plan.”
“So do I,” I said, handing him the towel.
“You go first.”
“You said you have some money?”
He nodded.
“In a checking account?”
“Some of it.”
“Let me call a cleaning service. I’ll do some of the initial work so they won’t run away screaming as soon as they step into the house, but you have to get this place cleaned up, Alan.”
“Fine, sure,” he said, winding the towel around himself.
“And if you can afford it, someone ought to come in for a couple of hours a day to cook and take care of things for you.”
“I’ll think about that,” he said. “I want you to go downstairs and call Dahlgren Florist on Berlin Avenue and order two wreaths.” He spelled Dahlgren for me. “I don’t care if they cost a hundred bucks apiece. Have one delivered to Trott Brothers, and the other one here.”
“And I’ll try the cleaning services.”
He tossed the towel toward the rack and walked on stiff legs out of the bathroom, for the moment completely in command of himself. He got into the hall and turned around slowly. I thought he couldn’t remember the way to his own bedroom. “By the way,” he said. “While you’re at it, call a lawn service, too.”
I went downstairs and left messages for the cleaning and lawn services to call me at John’s house and then got another garbage bag and picked up most of the debris on the living room floor. I phoned the florist on Berlin Avenue and placed Alan’s orders for two wreaths, and then called the private duty nursing registry and asked if Eliza Morgan was free to begin work on Monday morning. I dumped the dirty dishes in the kitchen sink, swearing to myself that this was the last time I was going to do Alan Brookner’s housekeeping.
When I went back upstairs, he was sitting on his bed, trying to wrestle his way into a white dress shirt. His hair swirled around his head.
Like a child, he held out his arms, and I straightened the sleeves and pulled the two halves of the front together. I started buttoning it up. “Get the charcoal gray suit out of the closet,” he said.
I got his legs into the trousers and took black silk socks out of a drawer. Alan slammed his feet into a pair of old black wingtips and tied them neatly and quickly, arguing for the endurance of certain kinds of mechanical memory in the otherwise memory-impaired.
“Have you ever seen a ghost? A spirit? Whatever you call it?”
“Well,” I said, and smiled. This is not a subject on which I ever speak.
“When we were small boys, my little brother
and I were raised by my grandparents. They were wonderful people, but my grandmother died in bed when I was ten. On the day of her funeral, the house was full of my grandparents’ friends, and my aunts and uncles had all come—they had to decide what to do with us. I felt absolutely lost. I wandered upstairs. My grandparents’ bedroom door was open, and in the mirror on the back of the door, I could see my grandmother lying in her bed. She was looking at me, and she was smiling.”
“Were you scared?”
“Nope. I knew she was telling me that she still loved me and that I would have a good home. And later, we moved in with an aunt and an uncle. But I never believed in orthodox Christianity after that. I knew there wasn’t any literal heaven or hell. Sometimes, the boundary between the living and the dead is permeable. And that’s how I embarked upon my wonderful career.”
He had reminded me of something Walter Dragonette had said to Paul Fontaine.
“Ever since then, I’ve tried to notice things. To pay attention. So I hate losing my memory. I cannot bear it. And I cherish times like this, when I seem to be pretty much like my old self.”
He looked down at himself: white shirt, trousers, socks, shoes. He grunted and zipped his fly. Then he levered himself up out of the chair. “Have to do something about these whiskers. Come back to the bathroom with me, will you?”
“What are you doing, Alan?” I stood up to follow him.
“Getting ready for my daughter’s funeral.”
“Her funeral isn’t until tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow, as Scarlett said, is another day.” He led me into the bathroom and picked up an electric razor from the top shelf of a marble stand. “Will you do me a favor?”
I laughed out loud. “After all we’ve been through together?”
He switched on the razor and popped up the little sideburn attachment. “Mow down all that stuff under my chin and on my neck. In fact, run the thing over everything that looks too long to be shaved normally, and then I’ll do the rest myself.”
He thrust out his chin, and I scythed away long silver wisps that drifted down like angel hair. Some of them adhered to his shirt and trousers. I made a pass over each cheek, and more silver fluff sparkled away from his face. When I was done, I stepped back.