by Peter Straub
Alan faced the mirror. “Signs of improvement,” he said. He scrubbed the electric razor over his face. “Passable. Very passable. Though I could use a haircut.” He found a comb on the marble stand and tugged it through the fluffy white cloud on his head. The cloud parted on the left side and fell in neat loose waves to the collar of his shirt. He nodded at himself and turned around for my inspection. “Well?”
He looked like a mixture of Herbert von Karajan and Leonard Bernstein. “You’ll do,” I said.
He nodded. “Necktie.”
We marched back into the bedroom. Alan wrenched open the closet door and inspected his ties. “Would this make me look like a chauffeur?” He pulled out a black silk tie and held it up for inspection.
I shook my head.
Alan turned up his collar, wrapped the tie around his neck, and knotted it as easily as he had tied his shoes. Then he buttoned his collar and pushed the knot into place. He took the suit jacket from its hanger and held it out. “Sometimes I have trouble with sleeves,” he said.
I held up the jacket, and he slid his arms into the sleeves. I settled the jacket on his shoulders.
“There.” He brushed some white fluff from his trousers. “Did you call the florist?”
I nodded. “Why did you want two wreaths?”
“You’ll see.” From a bedside table he picked up a bunch of keys, a comb, and a fat black fountain pen and distributed these objects into various pockets. “Do you suppose I’d be able to walk around outside without getting lost?”
“I’m sure of it.”
“Maybe I’ll experiment after John turns up. He’s basically a good fellow, you know. If I’d got stuck at Arkham the way he did, I’d be unhappy, too.”
“You were at Arkham your whole life,” I said.
“But I wasn’t stuck.” I followed him out of the bedroom. “John got to be known as my man—we collaborated on a few papers, but he never really did anything on his own. Good teacher, but I’m not sure Arkham will keep him on after I go. Don’t mention this to him, by the way. I’ve been trying to figure out a way to bring up the subject without alarming him.”
We started down the stairs. Halfway down, he turned around to stare up at me. “I’m going to be all right for my daughter’s funeral. I’m going to be all present and accounted for.” He reached up and tapped my breastbone. “I know something about you.”
I nearly flinched.
“Something happened to you when I was telling you about my grandmother. You thought of something—you saw something. It didn’t surprise you that I saw my grandmother because”—here he began tapping his forefinger against my chest—“because—you—have—seen—someone—too.”
He nodded at me and moved back down a step. “I never thought there was any point in missing things. You know what I used to tell my students? I used to say there is another world, and it’s this world.”
We went downstairs and waited for John, who failed to appear. Eventually, I persuaded Alan to salt away the money on the kitchen table in various pockets of his suit. I left him sitting in his living room, went back to the kitchen, and put the revolver in my pocket. Then I left the house.
Back at Ely Place, I put the revolver on the coffee table and then went upstairs to my manuscript. John had left a Post-It note in the kitchen saying that he had been too tired to go to Alan’s house and had gone straight to bed. Everything was okay, he said.
PART
SIX
RALPH AND
MARJORIE RANSOM
1
JUST AFTER ONE O’CLOCK, I parked John’s Pontiac in front of the Georgian house on Victoria Terrace. A man on a lawn mower the size of a tractor was expertly swinging his machine around the oak trees on the side of the house. A teenage boy walked a trimmer down the edge of the driveway. Tall black bags stood on the shorn lawn like stooks. John was shaking his head, frowning into the sunlight and literally champing his jaws.
“It’ll go faster if you get him,” he said. “I’ll stay here with my parents.”
Ralph and Marjorie Ransom began firing objections from the backseat. In their manner was the taut, automatic politeness present since John and I had met them at the airport that morning.
John had driven to the airport, but after we had collected his parents, tanned and clad in matching black-and-silver running suits, he asked if I would mind driving back. His father had protested. John ought to drive, it was his car, wasn’t it?
—I’d like Tim to do it, Dad, John said.
At this point his mother had stepped in perkily to say that John was tired, he wanted to talk, and wasn’t it nice that his friend from New York was willing to drive? His mother was short and hourglass-shaped, big in the bust and hips, and her sunglasses hid the top half of her face. Her silver hair exactly matched her husband’s.
—John should drive, that’s all, said his father. Trimmer than I had expected, Ralph Ransom looked like a retired naval officer deeply involved with golf. His white handsome smile went well with his tan.—Where I come from, a guy drives his own car. Hell, we’ll be able to talk just fine, get in there and be our pilot.
John frowned and handed me the keys.—I’m not really supposed to drive for a while. They suspended my license. He looked at me in a way that combined anger and apology.
Ralph stared at his son.—Suspended, huh? What happened?
—Does it matter? asked Marjorie. Let’s get in the car.
—Drinking and driving?
—I went through a kind of a bad period, yeah, John said. It’s okay, really. I can walk everywhere I have to go. By the time it gets cold, I’ll have my license back.
—Lucky you didn’t kill someone, his father said, and his mother said Ralph!
In the morning, John and I had moved my things up to his office, so that his parents could have the guest room. John armored himself in a nice-looking double-breasted gray suit, I pulled out of my hanging bag a black Yohji Yamamoto suit I had bought once in a daring mood, found a gray silk shirt I hadn’t remembered packing, and we were both ready to pick up his parents at the airport.
We had taken the Ransoms’ bags up to the guest room and left them alone to change. I followed John back down to the kitchen, where he set out the sandwich things again.—Well, I said, now I know why you walk everywhere.
—Twice this spring, I flunked the breathalyzer. It’s bullshit, but I have to put up with it. Like a lot of things. You know?
He seemed frazzled, worn so thin his underlying rage burned out at me through his eyes. He realized that I could see it and stuffed it back down inside himself like a burning coal. When his parents came down, they picked at the sandwich fillings and talked about the weather.
In Tucson, the temperature was 110. But it was dry heat. And you had air conditioning wherever you went. Golfing—just get on the course around eight in the morning. John, tell you the truth, you’re getting way too heavy, ought to buy a good set of clubs and get out there on the golf course.
—I’ll think about it, John said. But you never know. A tub of lard like me, get him out on the golf course in hundred-degree weather, he’s liable to drop dead of a coronary right on the spot.
—Hold on, hold on, I didn’t mean—
—John, you know your father was only—
—I’m sorry, I’ve been on—
All three Ransoms stopped talking as abruptly as they had begun. Marjorie turned toward the kitchen windows. Ralph gave me a pained, mystified look and opened the freezer section of the refrigerator. He pulled out a pink, unlabeled bottle and showed it to his son.
John glanced at the bottle.—Hyacinth vodka. Smuggled in from the Black Sea.
His father took a glass from a cupboard and poured out about an inch of the pink vodka. He sipped, nodded, and drank the rest.
—Three hundred bucks a bottle, John said.
Ralph Ransom capped the bottle and slid it back into place in the freezer.—Yeah. Well. What time does the train leave?
—It’s leaving, John said, and began walking out of the kitchen. His parents looked at each other and then followed him through the living room.
John checked the street through the slender window.
—They’re baa-ack.
His parents followed him outside, and Geoffrey Bough, Isobel Archer, and their cameramen darted in on both sides. Marjorie uttered a high-pitched squeal. Ralph put his arm around his wife and moved her toward the car. He slid into the backseat beside her.
John tossed me the car keys. I gunned the engine and sped away.
Ralph asked where they had come from, and John said, They never leave. They bang on the door and toss garbage on the lawn.
—You’re under a lot of pressure. Ralph leaned forward to pat his son’s shoulder.
John stiffened but did not speak. His father patted him again. In the rearview mirror, I saw Geoffrey Bough’s dissolute-looking blue vehicle and Isobel’s gaudy van swinging out into the street behind us.
They hung back when I pulled up in front of Alan’s. John locked his arms around his chest and worked his jaws as he chewed on his fiery coal.
I got out and left them to it. The man on the tractor-sized lawn mower waved at me, and I waved back. This was the Midwest.
Alan Brookner opened the door and gestured for me to come in. When I closed the door behind me, I heard a vacuum cleaner buzzing and humming on the second floor, another in what sounded like the dining room. “The cleaners are here already?”
“Times are tough,” he said. “How do I look?”
I told him he looked wonderful. The black silk tie was perfectly knotted. His trousers were pressed, and the white shirt looked fresh. I smelled a trace of aftershave.
“I wanted to make sure.” He stepped back and turned around. The back hem of the suit jacket looked a little crumpled, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. He finished turning around and looked at me seriously, even severely. “Okay?”
“You got the jacket on by yourself this time.”
“I never took it off,” he said. “Wasn’t taking any chances.”
I had a vision of him leaning back against a wall with his knees locked. “How did you sleep?”
“Very, very carefully.” Alan tugged at the jacket of his suit, then buttoned it. We left the house.
“Who are the old geezers with John?”
“His parents. Ralph and Marjorie. They just came in from Arizona.”
“Ready when you are, C.B.,” he said. (I did not understand this allusion, if that’s what it was, at the time, and I still don’t.)
John was standing up beside the car, looking at Alan with undisguised astonishment and relief.
“Alan, you look great,” he said.
“I thought I’d make an effort,” Alan said. “Are you going to get in back with your parents, or would you prefer to keep the front seat?”
John looked uneasily back at Geoffrey’s blue disaster and Isobel’s declamatory van and slid in next to his father. Alan and I got in at the same time.
“I want to say how much I appreciate your coming all the way from …” He hesitated and then concluded triumphantly, “Alaska.”
There was a brief silence.
“We’re so sorry about your daughter,” Marjorie said. “We loved her, too, very much.”
“April was lovable,” said Alan.
“It’s a crime, all this business about Walter Dragonette,” Ralph said. “You wonder how such things could go on.”
“You wonder how a person like that can exist,” Marjorie said.
John chewed his lip and hugged his chest and looked back at the reporters, who hung one car behind us all the way downtown to the Trott Brothers’ building.
Marjorie asked, “Will you be back at the college with John next year, or are you thinking about retiring?”
“I’ll be back by popular demand.”
“You don’t have a mandatory retirement age in your business?” This was Ralph.
“In my case, they made an exception.”
“Do yourself a favor,” Ralph said. “Walk out and don’t look back. I retired ten years ago, and I’m having the time of my life.”
“I think I’ve already had that.”
“You have some kind of nest egg, right? I mean, with April and everything.”
“It’s embarrassing.” Alan turned around on his seat. “Did you use April’s services, yourself?”
“I had my own guy.” Ralph paused. “What do you mean, ‘embarrassing’? She was too successful?” He looked at me again in the mirror, trying to work something out. I knew what.
“She was too successful,” Alan said.
“My friend, you wound up with a couple hundred thousand dollars, right? Live right, watch your spending, find some good high-yield bonds, you’re set.”
“Eight hundred,” Alan said.
“Pardon?”
“She started out with a pittance and wound up with eight hundred thousand. It’s embarrassing.”
I checked Ralph in the rearview mirror. His eyes had gone out of focus. I could hear Marjorie breathing in and out.
Finally, Ralph asked, “What are you going to do with it?”
“I think I’ll leave it to the public library.”
I turned the corner into Hillfield Avenue, and the gray Victorian shape of the Trott Brothers’ Funeral Home came into view. Its slate turrets, gothic gingerbread, peaked dormers, and huge front porch made it look like a house from a Charles Addams cartoon.
I pulled up at the foot of the stone steps that led up to the Trott Brothers’ lawn.
“What’s on the agenda here, John?” his father asked.
“We have some time alone with April.” He got out of the car. “After that there’s the public reception, or visitation, or whatever they call it.”
His father struggled along the seat, trying to get to the door. “Hold on, hold on, I can’t hear you.” Marjorie pushed herself sideways after her husband.
Alan Brookner sighed, popped open his door, and quietly got out.
John repeated what he had just said. “Then there’s a service of some kind. When it’s over, we go out to the crematorium.”
“Keeping it simple, hey?” his father asked.
John was already moving toward the steps. “Oh.” He turned around, one foot on the first step. “I should warn you in advance, I guess. The first part is open coffin. The director here seemed to think that was what we should do.”
I heard Alan breathe in sharply.
“I don’t like open coffins,” Ralph said. “What are you supposed to do, go up and talk to the person?”
“I wish I could talk to the person,” Alan said. For a moment he seemed absolutely forlorn. “Some other cultures, of course, take for granted that you can communicate with the dead.”
“Really?” asked Ralph. “Like India, do you mean?”
“Let’s go up.” John began mounting the steps.
“In Indian religions the situation is a little more complicated,” Alan said. He and Ralph went around the front of the car and began going up behind John. Bits of their conversation drifted back.
Marjorie gave me an uneasy glance. I aroused certain misgivings within Marjorie. Maybe it was the ornamental zippers on my Japanese suit. “Here we go,” I said, and held out my elbow.
Marjorie closed a hand like a parrot’s claw on my elbow.
2
JOYCE BROPHY held open the giant front door. She was wearing a dark blue dress that looked like a cocktail party maternity outfit, and her hair had been glued into place. “Gosh, we were wondering what was taking you two so long!” She flashed a weirdly exultant smile and motioned us through the door with little whisk-broom gestures.
John was talking to, or being talked at by, a small, bent-over man in his seventies whose gray face was stamped with deep, exhausted-looking lines and wrinkles. I moved toward Alan.
“No, now, no, mister, you have to meet my father,” Joyce said. “Let’s get the f
ormalities over with before we enter the viewing room, you know, everything in its own time and all that kinda good stuff.”
The stooping man in the loose gray suit grinned at me ferociously and extended his hand. When I took it, he squeezed hard, and I squeezed back. “Yessir,” he said. “Quite a day for us all.”
“Dad,” said Joyce Brophy, “you met Professor Ransom and Professor Brookner, and this is Professor Ransom’s friend, ah—”
“Tim Underhill,” John said.
“Professor Underhill,” Joyce said. “And this here is Mrs. Ransom, Professor Ransom’s mother. My dad, William Trott.”
“Just call me Bill.” The little man extended his already carnivorous smile and grasped Marjorie’s right hand in his left, so that he could squeeze hands with both of us at once. “Thought it was a good obituary, didn’t you? We worked hard on that one, and it was all worth it.”
None of us had seen the morning paper.
“Oh, yes,” Marjorie said.
“Just want to express our sorrow. From this point on the thing is just to relax and enjoy it, and remember, we’re always here to help you.” He let go of our hands.
Marjorie rubbed her palms together.
Just Call Me Bill gave a smile intended to be sympathetic and backed away. “My little girl will be taking you into the Chapel of Rest. We’ll lead your guests in at the time of the memorial service.”
By this time he had moved six paces backward, and on his last word he abruptly turned around and took off with surprising speed down a long dark hallway.
Just Call Me Joyce watched him fondly for a couple of seconds. “He’s gonna turn on the first part of the musical program, that’s your background for your private meditations and that. We got the chairs all set up, and when your guests and all show up, we’d like you to move to the left-hand side of the front row, that’s for immediate family.” She blinked at me. “And close friends.”
She pressed her right hand against the mound of her belly and with her left gestured toward the hallway. John moved beside her, and together they stepped into the hallway. Organ music oozed from distant speakers. Alan drifted into the hallway like a sleepwalker. Ralph stepped in beside him. “So you keep on getting born over and over? What’s the payoff?”