You will not remember me. My name is Daniel Abend.
That was a name he hadn’t asked for. And yet it had found him, grabbed at him, as though it were his own name cried out in a crowd so that reflexively he had turned and said, “Here I am.” Finding no one, he had said, “Who is speaking? Where are you?”
* * *
—
Two phrases made the precious refrain of his first months with Bethany.
There you are.
Here you are.
Years before, waking together in her single bed in the law school dormitory, he would say, “There you are,” and she would say, “Here you are.” Back then, to be able to say that to one’s beloved seemed everything one could want.
The past, he had concluded, had been nothing but run-up. Wasn’t this how providence worked, how the obscure intelligence of surprise and accident gave the past its unchangeable shape? He could not have invented or imagined this Bethany, the line of her long wrists, her sharp rib cage, or how when studying she secured her hair in a bun by impaling it with a pencil, but they had met, and she had chosen him. “You’re my guy,” she had said, her manner affectionately matter-of-fact, but for Spurlock something had been decided. Here he was, and there she was, and so it was settled, the agreement for which their separate pasts had been the long negotiation.
“Today we come together…,” her father had said, lifting his glass at their wedding, “to celebrate Bethany’s choice of a good man.” It was as though the matter had been decided elsewhere. If Bethany had made the choice of a good man, and he was that man, then he must be good. His job was to assent.
And assent he had, but that assent felt different now: less the work of providence than of human provision against loneliness. Each passing year paused for a briefer interval, like Diogenes with his lantern looking for one good man, squinting at him, then turning away. “Here you are,” he would still say to Bethany when she returned from work, and “There you are” was still her reply, though the “there” sounded more and more like somewhere far away.
* * *
—
He stared up into the darkness of the church and felt his thoughts turn to Jessica Burke’s mother, a boiled-looking woman slumped in the front pew on the day of the funeral. He remembered how she remained seated when the congregation rose in song or knelt to pray. She had once been, he was told, a parishioner, a member of the altar guild, a decorator of the church at Christmas and Easter, but he had not known her, and after her daughter’s funeral, she had never returned.
Should he try to find her now to tell her her daughter had been murdered? Or so he thought. Or so someone named Daniel Abend had maintained. Such an announcement would be a cruelty. No doubt, but still, was he not obliged to say something, if not to her, then to the authorities?
This quandary was what they meant, he thought, when they spoke of “the seal of the confessional.” It was not like a seal on an envelope or a diplomatic pouch, or a lozenge of wax pressed at the base of a document, but something more like the seal he mentioned whenever he performed the baptismal rite. After dousing the infant, he would make the sign of the cross on its forehead with a fragrant oil, then proclaim the child to be “sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever.” Spurlock had always understood that seal to be the mark of God’s unshakable love, the love that called each soul into being, but now he felt the weight of it on his own forehead as though it were a brand or scar proclaiming his guilt, his complicity in every sin for which he had presumed to offer absolution. For the first time, he felt a flicker of kinship with members of the old unreformed priesthood, charged to bear bodily in persona Christi the sins of the penitent, to carry them from the confessional to the altar, where the priest in turn would be forgiven.
Informing Jessica Burke’s mother would not remove the grip of sin, would only drag someone else into its embrace. No, Nelson, he thought, this knowledge is for you alone, an excruciation entrusted to you only, for keeps.
Spurlock understood then that it was the solitude that was unbearable, the solitude of his sleeplessness amid the sleepers, as though he had been sentenced to stand lookout forever, scanning the horizon, squinting into the darkness for…what? What was it? How would he recognize it when it appeared? Who was to say he would not wait forever? The prospect seemed to him as certain as it was unbearable, as opaque and unrevealing as the dark above him in the church. But even as the weight of this solitude threatened to crush him, he realized that what he waited for he had already encountered, and it was not a what but a who: a person, a face, her face, Clementine Abend’s. That level brow, the flat-bright nickel gray of her eye, he could see them now as though she had never left, as though she had not fled at the sound of her name when he had said, “Yes, Clementine Abend, all I would need is your address….”
THIRTEEN
As for the question of how Clementine has lived since her departure, I have said nothing of my daughter’s money, the money she took to calling her “abundant riches.”
“Hardly riches,” I would say to her.
“Dan is jealous,” she would say in reply. But I was not jealous; in fact, half of the money had been mine, my portion of my own father’s legacy.
When my father died, three years after I returned from France with Clementine, I inherited half his estate, the other half to be held in a trust for Clementine’s “education and upbringing.” Any moneys remaining in the corpus would be disbursed to Clementine upon her twenty-fifth birthday. A smaller portion, however, was to be maintained in a separate account and released to Clementine when she turned eighteen, on the stipulation that it be used for “a grand voyage” the summer after her graduation from high school. I do not doubt that this private gift expressed principally my father’s love for his only granddaughter, his “French Fry,” his “Tiny,” but I am certain also that it expressed his frustration with what he called my “womanish dithering” over Clementine’s safety and health. “If you’re not careful, French Fry,” he would say to her when she was in grade school, “your pop will seal you up in a bell jar, just so you don’t skin your knee.”
“What’s a bell jar, Grumpus?”
“Why, a jar for capturing tiny belles like you!”
That was how he spoke, the charmer, the great litigator, his eyes lit with guile, like a great cat’s, even in the frailty of his last decline. His allure had always seemed to me to conceal a violence, but with Clementine, a joy clouded those eyes and welled in their corners whenever she had made him laugh, tears he would smear away with his fingertips, pushing his eyeglasses up on his forehead, saying, “Ah, Tiny, you kill me.”
In short, I was to have no say in the matter. The money was Clementine’s, all of it, to spend on her grand voyage overseas. “As for which seas, Tiny,” my father had written in a letter appended to his will, “that will be up to you. Whether you go to Goa and grow conjoined dreadlocks with a Danish hippie, or hoist a prayer flag on Mount Everest with my name on it, or stopper the headwaters of the Zambezi with your boot heel, I shall be happy. Be nice to your pop, because he’ll be lonely when you go. Try to remember that his brittle and high-strung nature is not his fault but mine and his mother’s. So watch out! You probably inherited it too. A brittle lot, we Abends, so be easy on yourself, and remember your old Grumpus, who loved his granddaughter very much when he was aboveground, and loves her even more now that he’s retired to Dirt City. Extinct though he is, he misses his Tiny like mad.”
By the time Clementine reached primary school, my practice had flourished and provided more than enough money to support what was, by Manhattan standards, a modest life. We hardly left the city, and because I detested the idea of leaving her with a sitter, we ate our meals at home. The trust for her education covered tuition for the Lycée. As my salary was sufficient for all our other expenses, I decided, in lieu of taking out a life insurance policy, to transfer th
e money I had inherited from my father to Clementine, adding it to the larger of the two sums left for her, the one designated for her education. Substantial to start with, that fund became sufficient to fund several educations undertaken simultaneously. This plenty, however, I never discussed with her. It was only the smaller sum, the travel money, that Clementine called her “riches.”
As trustee I received all statements and audits, affording me each quarter the pleasure of watching the corpus grow. This quarterly reassurance filled me with a satisfaction familiar from Clementine’s earlier childhood, when she finally took to her bottle and began to fatten, zooming in a matter of weeks from the thirtieth to the eightieth percentile of the weight charts. What gratified most of all, Father, was that the money was not mine. I believed there was no life to strive for beyond the life we had, our little enclosure, for as long as it should last.
The death of Jessica Burke had punctured my complacency, but the letters left it in tatters. During her treatment, I had listened to Jessica Burke as though to a scout, a forward observer transmitting reports from a future that Clementine herself would one day occupy. Jessica wasn’t all that much older than Clementine, after all. I fancied that Jessica Burke’s interior world must in some way resemble Clementine’s, even though Clementine hardly ever reported on her inner world, buffeted now by the forecast storms of adolescence. But then Jessica was dead, and instead of reports from a young woman’s future, I received the letters from my correspondent.
Perhaps I attempted to comfort myself with the hope that such evil luck—having brushed past me to claim the life of my patient—wouldn’t circle back for us. Hadn’t the odds of misfortune narrowed? And yet, even the most remote and abstract impossibilities had now fleshed themselves with ominous substance. Disaster was something that had happened, to someone I knew, someone who had spent hours with me, who had told me more of her cares and aspirations than Clementine ever had, who had stared with me for hours at the same patch of office wall, where a shape of light shifted without motion as the minutes passed.
The letters had never mentioned Clementine. They had made no concrete threat. And yet, a conviction, both visceral and moral, overtook me. The letters had been addressed to me, to the postal box rented in my name, but I was certain they pointed toward Clementine, keeping her in crosshairs.
As soon as Clementine learned of the bequest for the “grand voyage,” she declared she would go to France. It was unfair, unfair that we had never gone to Europe ourselves, that we never went anywhere, that my vacations never seemed to line up with hers, that all of her friends had already been to Paris, or Brussels, or Geneva “tons of times.” And France was where she had been born!
I had informed Clementine of the bequest when she turned sixteen, having delayed the moment as long as I felt I could. Just as my refusals to take her abroad began to seem not merely resolute but perverse, this little heap of money rose on her horizon. For her it meant the promise that she would finally be able to make her trip to France, while for me it meant that she would not make it, at least not yet. There was still time. There was time for her to change her mind, for her to hand herself over to a new enthusiasm, a hobby, a sport, a crush. Why (I said to myself), practically anything might distract her from her younger intentions. Buddhism could. A passion for Indonesian shadow puppetry. The plight of sea turtles. Some boy, wounded and aloof. For the first time in my life I found myself wishing that the storms of adolescence would blow her off course.
The two years passed, however, and her intent held. Then the photograph of Jessica Burke in the bath arrived, and my sense of reprieve splintered in a needle-squall of dread. From that moment, my only preoccupation was how to prevent her from going. No doubt, I declared my motives responsible and loving. Was it not my fatherly obligation to protect her, not just from what could befall her, but from what she could learn? And so I chose blindness, willing myself to ignore what any psychoanalyst knows: that such righteousness is always proof of delusion.
After she turned eighteen, I declared that I had given the matter much thought, had taken into consideration the score of sixty-seven she’d received on her latest physics exam, the recent eruption of Franco-Arab unrest in Paris and Lyon, her as-yet-imperfect command of colloquial French. There would be time for her to travel after she had graduated from college, or even, should she choose, during a junior year abroad. She would profit more from the experience having deferred it than she would by pouncing on the opportunity just because it was there. Money wasn’t for the gratification of rash schemes. And anyway I had already arranged for her to repeat her internship at my institute, working for Mr. Shettleworth, the librarian and archivist. He would be delighted to have Clementine back. Of course she knew what a favorite of his she was….
This declaration was sufficient to touch off the fuse. The expression I took at first to be merely the shadow of her disappointment revealed itself to be a blotchy hash-up of disgust and fury.
She began almost inaudibly, “It would be sad—no, funny, really—”
“I’m not sure I see anything funny here, Clem,” I said.
“No,” she continued as though I hadn’t spoken, “it would be funny if it wasn’t merely sick.”
“What is sick?”
“Daniel,” she said. She had never in my hearing called me Daniel, only Dan. “Daniel, do your patients know that you are sick? Is there some kind of disclaimer you give them, something they could sign?”
“Clementine—”
“It’s sick—sick but also sad, pitiful really—how you’ve convinced yourself this—this ploy could work. Is it possible? Have you even managed to convince yourself you aren’t lying?”
“Clementine, I will not stand here—”
“I don’t know. Maybe you just missed it. Maybe you were thinking of something else. Maybe you just didn’t notice that your daughter is now an adult—”
“Eighteen may feel to you like—”
“—or that your precious daughter fucks guys? I see, Daniel, do your shrink thing, go ahead, do your silent listening thing, knock yourself out. It’s worked for you so far. Have you convinced yourself in your twisted, shrinkish way that I’m something you get to keep? Jesus, Daniel, you suck all the air out of the room. You suck the air out of my life! I cannot calculate—no, I cannot conceive—how much more viable my life would have been if you had been the one to kill yourself, not Mom!”
“Clementine—” I said, but now she was waving something at me, a sheet of paper, a photocopy, shoving it toward me across the dead space between us. “It’s obscene! But you know that, or you wouldn’t lie about it—wouldn’t have lied about it for years, Daniel, years!”
And so she was gone—cellphone snatched up, keys abandoned, backpack shouldered, the door slammed open, slammed shut—all, it seemed, before the mimeographed sheet of paper she had thrust at me had floated to the floor, the clipping I could never bear to read again, recounting the facts of Miriam’s suicide.
FOURTEEN
She did not return for supper, or later that night, or the next morning. I walked through a pelting rain to the precinct house to report a missing person.
“And how old is this lost daughter?” the officer asked, with all the sympathy she might have shown someone reporting a lost sense of optimism. “Eighteen? So not a minor. You sure she’s missing, not just somewhere else?”
PEÑA, announced the badge on her uniform. Officer Peña cranked a form into her Selectric.
When had I last seen my daughter? Was she with anyone at the time? Was there reason to think she was in danger?
“Mr. Upend?”
“Was there reason—what?”
“Is there reason, Mr. Upend.”
“For what? It’s Abend.”
“Do you, Mr. Upend, have any reason to suspect—”
“Ah…no. I mean, she didn’t come home….”
<
br /> “Yes, I know.”
She yanked the form from the Selectric and pushed it toward me to sign. She assured me I would be called.
When would I be called?
When there was something to call about.
From the police station I went directly to the bank, was referred to the trust department. The trust officer who greeted me I had not met before, but he shook my hand enthusiastically and asked after my daughter. Well, it certainly had been a pleasure, he said, to see Miss Abend yesterday. Gracious, what an exciting trip she had planned! He’d been to Paris once, on his honeymoon—
“Paris,” I said.
Yes, sir. Nothing like it.
“Paris.”
They did grow up, kids, didn’t they?
I managed to say that I’d—uh, as it happened—I’d come to withdraw the funds for her trip.
He peered at me and shifted in his seat. My daughter (he cleared his throat) was the sole beneficiary named in the trust instrument. Having reached her majority…He paused and shifted again. In any event, all principal and accrued interest had been disbursed to her yesterday. She hadn’t mentioned that?
Out on the street I hurried home, breaking into a jog at the intersections to make the light, certain that…certain what? I stopped at the door of the building, immobilized. I was certain of nothing. Itzal came out, his concerned gaze sheltered under his bushy brows. Had Docteur Abend lost his keys? He was well? He was not sick, was he?
“No, no, Itzal, thank you. I am fine. I just realized—”
And la petite Clémentine was well, yes?
“Yes, she’s well. You have not seen her today, have you?”
He pursed his lips. Today? No, not today, he had not.
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