by Tom Drury
“What are you doing?”
“Taking sun,” said Mr. Freel. He pointed at the crown of a tree beside the house. “Do you see that? It is going to come down.”
Evelyn Hanover lived in a tall apartment building for retired people in Damascus. The doorman called ahead and sent Paul to the top floor.
The old lady led him into her apartment. Paintings of many sizes hung on the walls: ocean pictures, desert pictures, foggy abstract pictures. A bank of windows looked down on the hills and settlements of Damascus.
“I remember you,” said Evelyn. “You read from the Song of Solomon at my son’s wedding.”
“‘How beautiful are thy feet,’” said Paul.
She turned to the windows. “This is the best view in the county. I consider myself lucky to have lived in beautiful places all my life. I grew up in Philadelphia, and then we moved to Taormina and then Banff. It was in Banff that I met Gilbert. After I saw him ski, I told my father I would have him for my own. My father’s name was Loomis.”
“I always wondered where that came from.”
“When my parents gave parties, we children would sit in our bedrooms reciting Keats. ‘God of the golden bow, / And of the golden lyre, / And of the golden hair, / And of the golden fire —’ I remember the chandelier in Taormina, with griffins and angels facing each other across the lights. But of all the views I ever had, none could top Banff.”
They left the windows and sat down. “There was a teacher named Linda Tallis,” said Paul. “She was a neighbor of yours who lost her job and drowned.”
“It happened so long ago.”
“You would remember.”
“And what if I don’t want to? And what business is it of yours?”
“I moved into their house,” said Paul. “I found a statue, I found a scrapbook, I found a hat.”
“And I’m glad you found a hat, Mr. Nash,” said Evelyn Hanover. “I’m so glad that you found a hat for your head.”
“You would remember if you had someone fired.”
Her eyes contracted and glittered. “You concern yourself with unfairness,” she said. “I can tell that you do. What if I told you of a man who left his wife and invaded the home of another family with the intention to disrupt and deceive and take that which he had no business even wanting.”
“There was a teacher —”
“Let me finish. To the point where two little children would sit where you are sitting and ask, ‘When is she coming home? When is my mother coming home?’ What would you say about a man like that?”
“Just on the face of it?”
“How else?”
“I don’t accept the premise. But I know what you want to hear. That he is ‘without scruples.’ Something like that. That he is ‘not good.’”
“And the evidence would bear you out.”
“Maybe the evidence would.”
“Loom doesn’t pay attention,” said Evelyn. “But I pay a great deal of attention. My eyes are as keen as the day I was born. Why, look what I found on the ground today.”
From a small table she took a woven grass pouch, cupping it gently in both hands. Dried grass ends trembled in the air. “This was once the nest of a Baltimore oriole. It must have blown down over the winter. I found it with my eyes.”
She set the nest back on the table. “As for Linda Tallis, the school board giveth and the school board taketh away. Gilbert and I were not privileged to be on the school board. Did we know people who were? I’m sure that we must have. Mostly, I believe they talked about furnaces.”
“It was not your concern.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” said Evelyn. “No one wants to see a young woman die. I didn’t. And Gilbert really didn’t. He went up in the cupola and stayed there. For days at a time he kept the door locked, doing what, I could not tell you. Then one night — this would have been after the funeral — Roman Tallis came over to say that from his place he could see a fire burning at the top of our house. So Roman and I hurried upstairs and began pounding on the attic door. Fortunately Roman was wearing his tool belt, and he took a pair of pliers and removed the hinge pins in an instant. Roman Tallis was like that. Just when you thought he was useless, he would do something clever.”
“Was the house on fire?”
“Not really,” said Evelyn. “But it soon would have been. There were flames and soot and smoke everywhere. It turned out that Gil had carried the barbecue grill up there and built a fire. So I blasted away with a fire extinguisher, although it occurred to me later I might have just closed the lid of the grill. But it was too late. And I asked Gilbert why he had done this, and he said that he loved her. And I said I understood that, but burning the house I did not understand. Then Roman took a glove from his tool belt and dropped it at Gilbert’s feet. It was a work glove with a flared cuff and looked just like a gauntlet from olden times.”
Someone knocked on the door. Mrs. Hanover’s physical therapist had arrived. “Don’t mind me,” he said. “My name is Roland. Go ahead with your talking.”
The therapist stood by Evelyn’s chair raising and lowering her arms, one at a time. “Once I was sick and Evie called me at home. She says, ‘Roland, I need my routine.’”
“Mr. Nash has been asking after a Linda Tallis,” said Evelyn.
The therapist shook his head. “Never heard of her.”
“Well, you wouldn’t have.”
“And the glove . . . ,” said Paul.
“Roman wanted a duel,” said Evelyn. “And he got one.”
“Sounds interesting, though.” said the therapist. He smiled as her shoulder made a small cracking sound. “Easy, old bones.”
The Lager Festival had come around again, and neither the Coltsfoot Motel nor the Pail Hotel had vacancies. Carrie and Lonnie Wheeler let Paul pitch a tent in their back yard next to the swimming pool. Scratch the cat walked around the cedar railing at the top of the round pool as Lonnie, Carrie, and Paul sorted ropes and stakes.
“I won’t be in your way long,” said Paul.
“Now where you going?” said Lonnie.
“Go, go, go,” said Carrie.
“Rush, rush, rush.”
“He said we should go, did you know that?” Carrie said. “To New Orleans or California.”
“For what? This is the life.”
“I’m taking my car into the shop tomorrow,” said Paul. “They’re going to tune it up and get it in road shape.”
“Forget that beater,” said Carrie. “Get a new car. The bank has very attractive rates.”
“That’s a good idea,” said Paul.
“I would lease,” said Lonnie.
“They want you to lease so bad it must not be in your favor,” said Carrie.
They raised the tent and went over to a dealership on the south side of Ashland. A saleswoman with red bangs and transparent lipstick showed him a dark green sedan with a moonroof and six speakers.
“I’ll take it.”
“Decisive,” said Carrie.
“He wants to lease,” said Lonnie.
“Leasing is no mystery,” said the saleswoman. “The up-front cost is about a thousand dollars. Anybody who tells you otherwise is giving you a line of bull. And a lot of places will. You better believe it. We used to here, but we don’t anymore. What’s the use? Now, is anyone hungry? We have ramen noodles in the rec room.”
“We already ate,” said Paul.
The saleswoman got out a calculator and punched in numbers with the eraser of a pencil. “The monthly charge is four hundred and ninety-nine dollars.”
“I only want to pay four hundred and fifty,” said Paul. He just said this to say it. What he paid made no difference.
“O.K.”
The dealership took the Fury in lieu of the up-
front charges. The saleswoman came out with a razor blade and scraped off the anti-handgun decal.
Paul parked the new car by the tent, and he, Lonnie, and Carrie sat in the deep seats listening to “Gypsy Woman” turned loud on the six speakers.
“There’s bass in that song I never even knew about,” said Lonnie.
Then he and Carrie went in to bed, and Paul unrolled a sleeping bag in the tent. It was a canvas umbrella tent that smelled of old grass clippings. He left the flap open for the cool night air to drift in. Scratch stood in the opening for a while but would not enter. Paul took the last of Robin Redding’s Percodans and stretched out in the sleeping bag.
The tent reminded him of a camping trip his scout troop had gone on in a state forest in Massachusetts. The knot instructor had been reprimanded for hitting students with rope ends, and all of the scouts had been required to spend one night in the wilderness armed with nothing but a compass and a cigarette lighter. Paul had hiked beyond the forest boundaries and into someone’s garage, where he found a refrigerator stocked with orange juice, vodka, and plastic cups. He drank a couple of screwdrivers and fell asleep on newspapers in the garage. Waking cold in the early morning, he put on a military-surplus coat and found a ring of keys in the pocket. One of the keys fit a Ford LTD in the garage, and around dawn he eased the car out of the garage and down the driveway. He was fifteen years old and had driven his parents’ car three times. He cruised an empty highway and got on the Massachusetts Turnpike by mistake.
It was peaceful on the highway, with sparse headlights drifting along the road through the early light. When he came to a tollbooth, all he had in his pockets was the compass he had been given for his survival experience. Two state troopers took him to a café, where they all had scones and coffee on the house before returning to the scout camp. Paul and his parents went up to juvenile court in Worcester, where the judge told him never to try that again, and Paul said he wouldn’t. In the car on the way home from court, his mother had cried and said that Aaron would not have wanted to live to see such shame on the family.
“Sure he would,” said Paul.
His father twisted around in the driver’s seat and swatted at Paul with his right hand. “I’m going to hit you when we get home.”
Paul’s father forgot to hit him when they got home, and the only thing that happened as a result of Paul’s brush with car thievery was that Uncle Bernard took him on a tour of the Massachusetts state prison in Walpole.
Coincidentally, just as Paul was remembering all these things, Uncle Bernard appeared in the open flap of the tent. Paul shone a flashlight on his beret and coarsely lined face.
“What are you doing here?”
“Listen. Bobby Record’s people are looking for you.”
“What time is it?”
“Just after midnight.”
“How did you find me?”
“Made some calls.”
“I had a painting delivered to Carlo.”
“Carlo’s dead. It was in all the papers. You have to disappear. An FBI guy clued me in. They’ve got an informant.”
“Who?”
“Is this your car out here?”
Paul yawned. “I just got it tonight.”
“Nice.”
“Who’s the informant?”
“How should I know? You have to scram.”
“It’s Ivan, isn’t it?” Paul turned off the flashlight. “I’ll bet anything it’s Ivan Montgomery. But I don’t feel like scramming. I’m already turned in for the night. Go away. Let me be.”
“I promised your mother I’d find you.”
“Go away.”
“Supposedly, you have until the twenty-eighth.”
“When is that?”
“In three days. They’re all out on the Vineyard, and they’re going to scatter Carlo’s ashes on Sunday.”
“Poor Carlo.”
“But I wouldn’t trust that. Leave now.”
“I’m sleepy.”
“Then I’ll pull you out of there.”
And he tried, but couldn’t. He stood in the opening of the tent breathing heavily. “You were always a stupid bastard.”
“Stop the presses.”
“I remember once I took you candlepin bowling. Of course candlepins are tough for even experienced bowlers, but you wanted to get them all down right away.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You stamped your feet and walked off in a huff into someone else’s lane. It was just stupid.”
“How will you go home?”
“Route 2 to 395.”
“You don’t want to drive at night.”
“Sure I do. I like driving at night.”
On the next morning. Paul went to a shop in Ashland that sold guns, canoes, and art supplies, and tried to buy a gun, but there was a waiting period for a computer scan, and God knows what roadblocks that would turn up. Leaving the store, he found Alice Hanover standing on the sidewalk admiring the canoes.
“Where have you been?”
He told her, skipping over Scotland, and, fascinated, she observed the scar. “You just never really know, do you?”
“I know some things,” said Paul. “I came here because of you. And I’ll miss you when I’m gone.”
“Don’t say that. Nothing has really changed. We’ve always been friends, haven’t we? Listen — tonight is Loom’s birthday party. Do you think he’d like a canoe?”
“You have the rowboat.”
“That’s true,” said Alice. “I also have something you would get a kick out of.” They went to a diner by the railroad tracks, where Alice opened her briefcase and took out some papers.
“The mayor’s office gives scholarships every year, and so we get application essays. You want to hear one?”
“Yes.”
“To Whom It May Concern: I want to be a constitutional lawyer and this episode explains why. As is our custom, my boyfriend and I rented a room in the hotel last October to watch the World Series of baseball. We were drinking a substantial amount of cherry sloe gin. Suddenly uniformed police officers broke into the room with no warrant. In the confusion I slipped into the bathroom and began vomiting cherry sloe gin. This was not due to the police presence but because of simply having drunk too much while watching the ballgame. Then a policeman came in to see if I was all right, and he saw that I was not all right, for given the coloring of the cherry sloe gin, he surmised that something was very wrong indeed.”
“I don’t want to hear this.”
“Wait, it gets better. O.K. ‘. . . And the policeman said, “Hey, you’re really sick.” An ambulance was summoned, and soon I was admitted to the hospital for observation. My point concerns the motivation of the police. It seems there had been a robbery in the hotel, and they mistakenly guessed that my boyfriend and I were the culprits. Thus it was that they smashed in our door. It cannot be tolerated in America the so-called Beautiful that the state should override the constitutional rights of the citizenry for the mere possibility of some greater good. Now, I don’t drink much, and that’s the truth. In fact, as I have told my mother many times, were I more of a drinker I might not have reacted so violently to the cherry sloe gin. To sum up, I want to be a lawyer so that I can prevent other people from having their rights trodden upon as were the rights of my boyfriend and me that night when the police broke down the door of the hotel.”
“Give her a scholarship,” said Paul.
“Isn’t that wild? I have another essay here, but I don’t think I’ll read it.”
“I could listen or not listen.”
“It’s not as jazzy as the first one. This other kid goes on and on about an old carpenter named Huck he shingled with on summer vacation,” said Alice. “It turns out the wise and simple laboring man had many l
essons to teach the middle-class youth.”
“This is a shingle,” said Paul.
“But then the young workers locked Huck inside a portable toilet,” said Alice, “and the toilet fell over, and Huck chased everyone with a hammer.”
“Give Huck a scholarship,” said Paul.
He folded the tent, packed the car, and drove out to Loom’s birthday party that night with a European Union pen set wrapped in newsprint. Approaching the house, he heard someone wailing, “I want an equal dose!”
Paul knocked on the door. “Hello? Anybody home?”
Loom appeared in the hallway wearing a red terry-cloth robe with tags hanging from the sleeves. “Chester thinks he didn’t get as much ice cream as Faith.”
“Mama, I want an equal dose,” cried the child from somewhere inside the house. Lame as his complaint might have been, his voice sounded heart-rending in the big and echoing house.
“He’s very sensitive, and we’re all sick of it,” said Loom. He turned. “Chester!” he shouted. “Eat what you have, and you will get more.”
They went into the kitchen. Chester huddled under the table and Faith looked at a book of Robert Capa photographs.
She smiled at Paul. “I got this for Father,” she said.
“Come out, Chester,” said Loom. “Come out before I take you by the ear.” But Chester only repeated his demand for an equal dose.
Alice sent the children upstairs and the adults ate cake and drank Courvoisier and listened to the fighting overhead. Then a painted grate broke out of the ceiling and swung perilously above the table. Loom put down his fork and ran upstairs.
Paul stood to stop the motion of the grate. “I shouldn’t have come,” he said. “This is too weird.”
“It is weird. But Loom doesn’t care.”
Paul took a drink. “But here’s what justifies it in my mind. And I believe this. That I asked you first.”
“Asked me what?”
“To move in,” said Paul. “I asked you to move into the house in Bell Station. Don’t you remember? When we were in college.”
“Oh, Jesus,” said Alice. She leaned back in her chair and laced her fingers behind her head.
“Why do you think that was?” said Paul.