Yes, Mrs. Sisal is pretty drunk.
“I’m okay.”
“Not enough dutiful daughters around here. You are a model. An absolute paragon. The morning stars will warble about you. Is that your own hair or a wig?”
I stare.
She analyzes, head on one side. “You’re young enough,” she decides. “Probably you just get up in the A.M. and shake it around, and all day your hair looks like that. Well . . . don’t believe anything Patrick tells you. Not a damn thing.
“And listen.” She wobbles against her doorjamb. “You and I have got to talk.” She raises a finger at me. “Because I know what you’ve been up to.
“No, no,” drunk as she is, I guess she can read my expression, “it’s all right. Somebody needs to poke and pry around here.
“But you and I should talk. I have something to tell you. Something important. Things aren’t always what they seem. Come see me tomorrow, you hear?
“And have a nice, nice day.
“It is important,” she adds, and she exits abruptly back behind her half-open door, which, instead of a bas-relief of seabirds like the doctor’s, has an elegant stained-glass panel.
Chapter 19
Rob comes by that night.
I discover that I am expecting a visit from Rob, that I’ve mentally set aside eleven P.M. as Rob Time. I wait for him on the settee down the hall from my dad’s door. He’s gone to sleep, but I’m keeping guard from here. I’m reading Alice Munro, which is okay for right now because she’s simple and straightforward and a marvelous writer and slightly depressing. I’m about to finish that great story where the woman leaves the kids to run off with the summer-theater director, and she tells us near the end that the children didn’t forget and didn’t forgive, and finally she lets slip at the very end that the romance didn’t last anyhow. It was several romances ago by this time.
“So what’s up?” Rob asks.
I tell him that I want to wait here outside my dad’s door. Just because I feel uneasy. So he kisses me and sits down on the couch and takes Alice Munro out of my lap. “Anything new?” he asks and I tell him about Dr. Kittredge’s buy-out story and then about Mrs. Sisal’s drunk act. I put in plenty of local color about Sisal and how unstable she was leaning against her doorjamb, about how, if I were feeling well enough to think some things were funny, that would be one of the funny ones. But I don’t tell him that I also was drunk, and Kittredge, too, was drunk along with me. I’m interested in myself for not saying this.
Robbie says he wouldn’t trust Kittredge and he wouldn’t trust Sisal, so where does that leave anybody?
“Sure he’s in my hospital, but I still don’t trust him,” Rob augments. “He projects phony.”
Rob and I usually agree about people. It’s on how to live our lives that we don’t reach accord.
“Listen,” he leans forward, looks at his knees, picks at something on his blue jeans, “you know, Carla . . . this isn’t your problem, it’s my problem entirely. I hate to dump on you, but . . . well, I’m feeling bad about Arlette.”
I exercise self-control. I don’t say, “Thanks a bundle.”
“I mean,” Robbie says, “there’s a kind of understanding between me and Arlie.”
Now I do say something. “Oh, shit.” And, “You’re right, it’s your problem.” And then, “Okay, verbalize, say more, how do you feel?”
Rob shrugs. “I dunno. I mean, like, you’re my oldest friend.”
I say, “Sure.” I settle back on the base of my spine.
I must have been expecting this statement for a while without knowing it, because now I only need to spend a few minutes of being surprised and jealous before I’m able to get mad and talk pretty fast. “Listen, everything on earth has happened to me this year: my father’s crazy and my aunt got murdered and I’m stuck in this weird place and I don’t have any money. You having a girlfriend is nothing, just a blip on the screen—everybody has a girlfriend, give me a break. I had a philandering boyfriend . . .” I’m about to go on with a who also about the Habitat guy, and then don’t.
Robbie says, “Yep.”
I think back over the list I just gave him. “You didn’t need to dump on me.”
“Yeah, I did. ’Cause otherwise it’s cheating.”
I think, cheating? If he’s worried about cheating on Arlette, how does talking to me help?
I guess he means it would be cheating on me not to remind me of Arlette. Noble-minded, a Robbie gesture. Revoltingly so. Really wrong and almost right. It helps to get mad at him; it’s good for my soul, cleans out the sludge. “Let me give you a Boy Scout badge,” I say. “Our new decoration, the nobleness merit badge; you do seven noble deeds . . .”
He says, “Hey, cut the crap.”
Suddenly I’m yelling, “Crap? What’s crap about it?” I realize that we’re in the hall of the Manor and will probably wake up half the aged populace. I take a breath. Then I begin a three-minute low-voiced squawk about how pious he is and back in my life now after almost three years and acting as if he has voting privileges, “Look at how you try to order me around, ideas for my future. Yes, I do think you’re bossy, and yes, poor Arlette, I do agree. You and I should totally stop seeing each other. Right away. Now. This minute. Good-bye. I’ll go one way, and you go the other.” I’m half-standing, prepared to dive for my room and leave him sitting here.
He reaches out and grabs my wrist. I don’t much want to sit back down, but I do.
“Listen, Carl . . . Oh, God, I guess I was pious. Sweetheart, let’s give it time.” After a while he adds, “It’s been a godawful week, just let it be. I know, everything’s awful. I’m sorry.”
I wait to stop ventilating. “I meant it.”
“Yeah, I know.”
We’re both breathing hard, and suddenly we just drop the subject.
The window’s open; outside it’s a nice night, not much wind, smell of salt and kelp.
“So, okay,” I tell him, “you’re my oldest friend.”
And somehow for the next ten minutes we get into a big discussion, trying to remember when was the first time we saw each other. A long time back. “You were about six,” Rob says, “sitting on the steps going up to your porch, and you had some kind of a book open on your knees. You were drawing in it. Not that I really paid attention. You were just this little kid.”
That’s not the way I remember it. What I remember is Rob out in front of Susie’s practicing his yo-yo and my dad coming over to watch, with me right beside him. After a minute Daddy asked to try it out; in about four minutes he got pretty good.
“Check on him? I’ve been here. Except for a few minutes, bathroom and stuff.” But meanwhile I’m up and halfway down the hall toward the door, thinking, well, estupida, your father’s a target, what’s the matter with you, and Rob likes to be directive, good quality, so let him.
When I look back he’s following, his wide flushed face screwed up into what I guess is a worried frown.
It takes me a minute to discover that my father isn’t in his bed. The bed, nestled in the alcove, is a bit scrambled, covers disarranged, but there’s no old gentleman there. I dally in the entryway making amorphous questioning noises; Rob, from behind me, turns on the light.
The room isn’t particularly messy, but it looks, with the tumbled bedclothes and a displaced chair, as if someone has left it suddenly.
The bathroom door is open, and he’s not in there.
Rob is the one who finally notices. He points to the space under the window seat. This little cavern probably once had a cupboard door, but that door has been removed, leaving the molding that would fit around it and a space inside suitable for storing things like bedding.
Right now it contains a hunched-up figure, a round shape unidentifiable except for one sleeve of a tweed jacket, one pants leg, also of tweed, and the back of a head.
My father is curled up in there like a fetus, his head against his knees. His feet are side by side with their backs to us; o
ne of his nice brown leather shoes has come untied, the lace dangles across the cupboard threshold.
Rob and I dash and kneel close. He’s breathing raggedly. I say, “Father, we’re here.” Rob says, “Hey, Ed. Hey, buddy.” I say, “Darling, it’s okay,” and Rob says, “Come on out and let me look at you.” And so on and so forth.
At first there’s no answer. Finally we get some twitching and a slight shoulder-muscle movement from inside the tweed jacket.
Rob says, “Attaboy,” and “Come on,” and “Let’s get out of here, shall we?”
Nothing more happens.
Rob mouths, “Catatonic,” at me, and I agree, “Shock.”
I murmur into the cupboard, “Daddy, did something scare you?”
Rob tells me, “Traumatic shock—they come out of that.”
“Who’s ‘they’? This is my father.”
Rob says, “It’s short-lived, usually.”
I say, “Oh God, how dumb I was.” I’ve started crying. The tears are mostly frustration and anger, all aimed by Carla at Carla. I’m thinking, I knew I had to get him out of this place. I was being stubborn, I wanted to disagree with Rob. It’s my fault this happened, I’m to blame.
Rob says, “Hey, Carla,” trying to make it sound comforting.
From inside the cupboard a voice emerges. It’s cracked and rusty-sounding, but recognizable, “Carla? Did somebody say ‘Carla’? You know, I had a daughter named Carla.”
“I’m here.” I put my hand in the cupboard with him and pat his knee.
It takes a while, but finally he turns enough to peer out. He says, “Oh, of course,” in a very ordinary voice. And in a minute he’s scrambling on his hands and knees over the closet sill and onto the rug.
He doesn’t look too bad. His hair is messed up, and he blinks at the light. He’s clutching a piece of paper that has gotten folded and spindled into a baton.
We descend on him with soothing useless chirps. Rob says, “Come on now,” and I say, “Now, now, just sit here.” Rob says at me, “Drugs, maybe.” I say, “He hid. Not drugs.”
My father gets positioned onto a chair. He is still holding his rolled-up scroll of paper. He seems insecure about sitting on the chair; he plants his feet flat and his back straight and angles his baton upright. He looks like one of the little Egyptian guardian tomb-figures, a shabti.
“Father, did something happen?”
“I got an e-mail.” He gestures with the rolled-up paper baton. He seems to want to hand it to me and to not want to. Finally, he extends it.
Straightened out, the baton becomes a big piece of paper, clearly labeled, “e-mail,” in red computer-printing. With a message, all in caps:
THIS OLD AND USELESS KING WOULD NOT HELP THE JUDGES AND HAS BEEN CONDEMNED TO THE FARTHEST PUNISHMENT IN LONELINESS AND DARKNESS, WHERE THE KA IS CONDEMNED TO DRINK FILTH AND EAT FECES.
I suppress an impulse to crunch the paper up and throw it away. To rip it into little bits. To tell my father it doesn’t matter. “Where did you get this, Daddy?”
“They usually just drop them through the transom.”
Rob and I exchange looks. My father’s apartment doesn’t have a transom. I don’t think any of the quarters at the Manor do.
“And then they come and get it.” Daddy looks at me and apparently decides he hasn’t answered our question. “She brought it. The lady with the scissors.”
I stare at him, completely stopped. I always thought the lady with the scissors was Mona.
“With the moon and stars.”
Mona again. I mouth at Rob, “Tell you later.” I’m still holding the e-mail. “This is evil.”
It’s evil, and it has truly upset Edward Day. I have to acknowledge the authenticity, the Egyptian-ness. All that stuff about wandering in darkness, drinking filth. Straight out of The Book of the Dead. Some parts may even be quotes. Guaranteed to abrade my poor Dad in the vulnerable parts of his psyche.
But in The Book of the Dead we have straightforward ways of dealing with evil.
“I’m going to destroy this now, Father. You watch, and I will completely destroy it.”
I set the paper afire by holding it against the element of the little electric kitchen stove. Rob supplies a saucer to catch the ashes, and together Rob and I, with my father witnessing, flush the ashes down the toilet.
“There now,” I say. I even add the childhood formula, “All, all gone.”
Daddy seems better after this exorcising ceremony. He talks about how upset he was. “I didn’t like that. It bothered me. That was a bad paper. I’m glad you came.”
Rob and I give him tea and put him back to bed. And he seems happy when I say I’ll spend the night here on his window seat. “Yes, wonderful, dear. Truly thoughtful. I would appreciate it.”
He still claims it was the moon-and-stars lady who brought his e-mail. “Oh, yes indeed. In a cape like yours, you know.
“They want my token. But they can’t have that, not the token, I’ve hidden it. Hidden where no one can find it.
“I think it possible that’s why they cursed me.”
I decide he’s right. Yes, that’s why they cursed him.
“It wasn’t Mona. But Kittredge wrote the curse.”
It takes a lot of yellow notepad and ballpoint pen to explain why I think this, after which Rob nods, yes.
“Lock the doors. Lock the windows,” he scribbles.
I try to picture Dr. Kittredge disguised as Mona. And fail.
“But why Mona?” Rob writes.
I have an idea, but I don’t try to explain. It’s the sort of ridiculous, fanciful thing that practical Rob doesn’t go in for, but I can imagine that a certain kind of sick person would get a charge from dressing up, pretending to be Mona, dead Mona, Mona gone now for several days, Mona with her neck broken. I can also imagine that maybe Mona, in her original form (nurse, hospital worker) is someone my father thinks has a right to come into his apartment when she scratches on the window.
Because that’s how it must have happened—entry through the window, which is almost floor-to-ceiling height. I’ve bolted that window in two different places now and leaned a chair against it.
Chapter 20
“How are you this morning? Are you better? You slept well, I think? Does that make you feel okay now?”
My father, of course, can’t answer all these intrusive questions. He looks at me confusedly and drops his toothbrush.
Our tête-à-tête is broken up by Mrs. Dexter, who bangs on our door and nails me with an accusation: “What on earth are you doing in your father’s apartment so early in the morning, and in your pajamas, for goodness sake?”
Mrs. Dexter has been consistently cross with me lately. Perhaps it dates from my doing the Heimlich on her after the oyster-glass. Everyone says I saved her life then, and there’s a legend about how the saved person always resents the one who butted in and took over. Something about indebtedness.
I mutter a couple of words about Daddy not feeling well, which she ignores. “I came by to show him my new car.”
My father says, “New car!” and I say the wrong thing, “I didn’t know you could drive.”
Which totally riles Mrs. Dexter, who wants to know why I thought that; did I think she had always been an old lady with a walker? She’s only had the walker for ten years, she grew up on a ranch; how could she not know how to drive?
“I got the walker after I fell off a horse. And then the bastard kicked me.”
My face probably gives me away. I also didn’t imagine Mrs. Dexter on a horse. I didn’t imagine her using the word bastard. But my father, thank God, enters the conversation at this point. He has new-car questions. “I like new cars. What kind of new car?”
The new car is a Lincoln.
Daddy completely approves. He thinks that a Lincoln is the best kind of car. “Didn’t I see you recently? You didn’t tell me you had a Lincoln.”
Mrs. Dexter recomposes herself and smiles at him. She offers him a ride i
n her car. Now. After breakfast. As soon as Carla has gotten herself out of her pajamas.
I’m not the least bit sure about letting Daddy out for an excursion right now, what with e-mails and traumatic withdrawal episodes, but then I look at his face, washed with pleasure and seeming alive again, and listen to him saying, “Does it have leather seats?” and think that an hour’s drive with an old friend would be good recreation. And Mrs. Dexter, although crotchety, is reliable. I don’t question her motives, the way I do Mrs. La Salle’s.
“I’m going to eat breakfast with you,” Mrs. Dexter announces, obviously making a concession. “Go ahead now, Carla, get dressed.”
Over French toast Mrs. Dexter mellows into conversation and talks about the horse who kicked her. “Burly old brute. Just like my uncle, who owned his dam. My uncle lived here, you know.”
“You told me earlier.”
“In this house. He was rich. He lived here, in the Manor.” I look around me, at the high ceilings, chandeliers, redwood walls. “It seems so overwhelming. So institutional.”
“Always did. He was filthy, and he was filthy rich, and he owned the Manor. We were his poor relations. Used to come over here to play. And sometimes ride. It was a role we acted, poor relations. And he did the rich act . . . Pulled out all the stops . . . Lord of the Manor. Edward, are you almost ready?”
“Kicked by a horse,” my father says. “That would be hard on the ka.”
Mrs. Dexter asks, “But did they have horses in ancient Egypt?”
“Of course they did. I would like another piece of French toast.”
I’ve been wanting to congratulate Mrs. Dexter on her purple suit with the fur collar, which looks new, but she glares at me so peremptorily that I decide to stuff it.
“Perhaps.” He seems more interested in the car and its leather upholstery. He climbs in and leans his head back. “I need this drive. I have serious concerns. Things to travel to.”
I start to tell Mrs. Dexter to be careful with him, to watch him, and then don’t say it. I start to caution that he’s been feeling bad lately, and don’t do that, either. “Call me as soon as you get back?”
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