“What kind of problems?”
“He was in the machinery business, and they weren’t selling any machines. It’s a low-volume, high-end business—if you sell one or two a year, you’re fine, but if you don’t . . .”
One of the uniformed policemen was sitting in another spindly chair, writing down what I said on a small yellow pad. The third policeman wasn’t there; he must have stayed in the kitchen.
“And there were some product liability suits,” I said. “Some people had gotten hurt, using the machines. They didn’t use them right, they were careless and they got hurt. Or maybe they weren’t hurt—maybe they were faking. You know how people get when they want to do a lawsuit.”
“Uh-huh,” said the detective. His tone was neutral, but it made me scrutinize my own words; I was telling him what my father had told me, but now it sounded defensive, rationalizing.
“Anyhow,” I said. “My father kept having to go to court and testify, and I think it was very upsetting to him. I think he took it personally.”
“Right,” he said. “Your mother told us the same thing. How was the marriage?”
I folded my hands together and looked past him, at Ted’s big black piano topped with silver-framed photographs.
“Fine,” I said.
“They didn’t fight or anything?”
“Nope.” In the corner of my eye I saw the other policeman silently making notes.
“Never?”
“Well, sometimes,” I said. “But it was always—like she would say, ‘I’ll clean up the kitchen,’ and he’d say, ‘But you made dinner, let me clean up the kitchen.’ And she’d say, ‘But you’ve been working all day, you’re tired, let me do it.’” This particular fight was dredged up from my childhood; it had happened probably twenty years ago, but the policeman didn’t have to know that. I looked at him and smiled: See how benign?
He didn’t smile back at me. I took a breath and said quickly, “But there’s something else, something my mother doesn’t know. There was a loan, a big one, not for the machinery business but for this other company he was starting, with three other guys. They took out this big bank loan and they’d been making the payments, but then they missed a couple of payments. It wasn’t their fault—the bank didn’t bill them for a couple of months so they stopped paying, but they would have paid if they’d realized—” I stopped myself; both policemen were looking at me curiously, with that same solemn pity I thought I’d seen when I was telling them about the product liability suits. I clasped my hands together more tightly. “Anyway,” I said, “a few weeks ago the bank called the loan.”
It was as though we’d all let out our breaths, invisibly, silently. A collective sigh was in the room. Oh, dear, it whispered, and at the same time, Thank God. Now we can say: We know why he did it.
“And how big was this loan?”
“I don’t know. He wouldn’t tell me. But I know it was big. And I know he didn’t tell my mother.”
I sat and the uniformed policeman wrote. How gentle these policemen were; they probably had families. They would go home tonight and someone would ask, How was your day?
“Should I tell my mother now, do you think, or would it be too much for her?” I asked.
“That’s up to you,” the detective said. “When was the last time you talked to your father?”
“Two days ago. Wednesday night.”
“What did you talk about?”
I looked away from him, over his shoulder, blindly. For the first time that day, I felt as though I might cry. But it occurred to me as an idea, rather than a sensation—huh, I might be about to cry—and the instant it surfaced, it was gone.
(I had been talking to my mother, and then, on impulse, I’d asked to speak to him. He was hurt, sometimes, I knew from my mother, when my sister or I called and didn’t ask for him; but guilt hadn’t been driving me that night: I had suddenly wanted—needed, it now seemed to me—to talk to him.)
“Not much,” I said. “I was planning to grow some roses this summer, so I was asking him for advice.”
“He sounded normal?”
“Oh, if anything, he sounded better than usual. Sometimes we’d have these long conversations but he didn’t talk—whenever I asked him a question he’d turn it around so we were talking about me instead of him. But Wednesday I asked him how he was, which usually he wouldn’t really answer—he’d say, ‘Okay—how are you?’ But this time he said, ‘Lousy,’ but he said it in this kind of, I don’t know, cheerful, funny kind of way. I asked him what he meant, and he said, ‘Oh, I spilled Mom’s coffee all over myself going up the stairs this morning, and the day was just downhill from there.’” I smiled at the detective: You see how elegant, the way he just laughed at all these disasters? And I felt the smile dissolving, falling off my face.
“That’s all? He spilled the coffee?”
“Well, but there was more than that. The business stuff.” I frowned. Literal, this fellow, isn’t he? The thought came to me in my father’s voice, the faintly English-accented one he used for irony and puns; for an instant it was as though my father and I were sharing a joke.
“But nothing specific? What else did you talk about?”
“Oh. My son. We talked about him for a while, and my father said he thought my husband and I were doing a wonderful job with him . . .” I looked at the piano again. That was the good-bye, I thought.
The policemen were getting up. The quiet one had shut his pad. I said, “Is he—I mean, have you finished up at the house?”
“No, not yet. It shouldn’t be much longer. We’ll let you know.”
“And do you know of any—is there some kind of cleaning service we could get in there tonight? And I want that chair out of the house before my mother goes back.”
The detective said, “We can remove the chair, but I don’t think you’ll need a cleaning service.” He cleared his throat. “It’s really not that bad.”
We all stood for a moment, looking down at the floor.
The detective said, “We asked your mother if there was a woman friend we could call—you know, someone to be with her now. But she seemed to want Mr. Tyson.”
“Uh-huh,” I said.
In the next room, my mother was screaming. “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” I pushed open the door and ran in. “Oh, my God!” my mother cried, holding out one hand to me and pointing with the other at the third policeman, the one who’d stayed in the kitchen. “He was on the woodchipper murder!”
“What’s the woodchipper murder?” I asked.
“It’s the book I’ve been reading. You know how I like those true crime books? I just finished it. The man who killed his wife and then put her body into the woodchipper. It happened just north of here. And I just remembered why his name was familiar—he was the policeman in the book!”
I nodded politely at the policeman, who looked down and shifted his weight from one foot to the other and then back again.
When the police left, I felt tired, or disappointed—I couldn’t tell exactly what the feeling was, the loss of momentum, perhaps. The day had gone along as a procession of things that needed to be done; the prospect of the next task had felt, oddly, like hope. But now the tasks were completed; the anticipated relief had not come. There was no obvious next step.
It was the dinner hour. Ted and Annette were setting the long dining room table with heavy peasanty ceramic dishes, blue-and-white checked place mats, blue linen napkins. My mother was ladling the soup into a big flowered tureen. My husband was mixing a salad.
“What is this, a dinner party?” my sister muttered to me in the little passageway outside the kitchen.
“Ted’s been cooking all day. It’s his way of trying to help,” I said; but my sister’s face was dark and her red eyes glittered.
I went into the dining room and stood by the table.
“That’s where your father spilled the wine on New Year’s Eve,” Ted said softly behind me. I looked down at a dark splotch on the porous
blond wood of the table; I put my hand on the stain.
At dinner my mother and Ted did witty repartee, as though their dialogue were being documented—Look at us, we’re doing witty repartee! My sister’s face was frozen. Annette lit candles, handed dishes, silent and beautifully grave, a Vermeer maidservant. I couldn’t eat, but occasionally I joined in the talk, casting apologetic glances at my sister: I know it’s horrible to talk and laugh, but Mom and Ted are trying so hard, and if this is how they want to play it, then it’s our job to help them out.
We were all still at the table when the phone rang; it was Kurt.
“You’d better talk to him,” I told my mother. “He was upset before. I think he feels shut out.”
“I can’t help how he feels,” my mother said, but she got up and took the phone from Ted and went with it into the kitchen.
The rest of us cleared the table. I put down a stack of plates on the counter and heard my mother say, “No!” a couple of times; then, “Kurt, I don’t think you understand, we don’t have the body, the police have it, I don’t know where it is.” Then, “Kurt, there’s nothing to see, this is not a body you’d want to see . . . Kurt. No. Kurt.” She held the phone away from her. “He wants to drive up here tonight.”
“Tell him no,” I said.
“He hung up,” said my mother.
“Call him back,” I said. “I’ll talk to him.”
“Don’t bother. He won’t come.”
“What if he does?”
My mother shrugged. “He doesn’t know where to find us.”
“Mom,” my sister said. “Let’s at least call him back and tell him where we are.”
“He won’t come,” my mother said again. “He always gets lost. He always says he’s coming—Christmas, Daddy’s birthday—and then he doesn’t show up. If he cares so much, then where was he when Daddy was alive?”
“This is different,” my sister said.
“He’s hysterical,” my mother said.
“It’s his brother,” I said.
“Well, it’s my husband,” she said.
A few minutes later I went upstairs and tried calling Kurt at the theater, but they said he had just gone onstage. I left a message saying that I hoped he’d drive up and see us tomorrow.
But all that night I wondered if he was in his car, driving along dark, frozen, unmarked roads, winding up by blind instinct at my parents’ house, banging at the door.
“So, should we tell her about the loan?” I asked my husband. We were back upstairs, whispering, in Ted’s study.
“I don’t know,” he said. “There’s nothing she can do about it tonight. It might just upset her.”
“It might make her feel better, to know that’s why he did it.”
“We don’t even know how much it is.” He took a deep breath. “We need to call Neil.”
“Maybe we should.”
I stood beside my husband as he made the call. I listened as he told Neil that it wasn’t a heart attack; it was suicide. My husband said, “We know there was a loan that you guys took out to start the door company. We know that the bank had called the loan—is that right? We need to know how much it was.”
I pushed a piece of paper under my husband’s hand, and gave him a pencil from the silver cup on Ted’s desk. I waited for the figure to appear: millions, a number that would throw my mother into debt, that would clang like a giant bell tolling, a number that would explain everything. I watched as my husband wrote down: $220,000.
I said out loud: “His share?”
My husband shook his head and wrote: The whole thing.
I divided in my head by four, for the four partners in the door company. I said, “You mean his share was fifty-five thousand?” I wrapped my arms around myself; I went into the next room, Ted’s bedroom. I sat down on the big bed, which was the only piece of furniture in the room. The walls were lined with built-in drawers and cupboards, one of which gaped open to show a row of hanging shirts, grouped by color. I saw white shirts, blue ones, striped ones, dark plaid flannels. My husband came in. I said, “We could have given him that. We could have taken out a second mortgage and given him a check. He could have taken out a second mortgage. My God. Neil could have covered it, without blinking an eye.”
“Maybe that’s what he was afraid of, that Neil would have to cover it,” my husband said. His face was white. “Maybe he was ashamed at having gotten Neil into the deal.”
“I thought when we knew how much the loan was, we’d understand,” I said. “All day I’ve been thinking that was the reason.”
“Maybe it was,” my husband said again.
I stood up. “Fifty-five thousand? That doesn’t explain anything.” I began to walk around the room; I slammed the cupboard door shut. “That is not a reason.”
“Sssh.” My husband came toward me with his arms out. I ducked away from him.
He said, “Should we tell your mother?”
I shrugged. “Sure.”
“There’s something else,” he said. “Something the police told me. There was a note. Well, not a note exactly.”
“What do you mean?”
“Something on the desk. An envelope. He’d written your mother’s name on it.”
“What was in it?”
“I’m not clear exactly. Financial information. A list of bank accounts. Should I tell your mother?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I went over to the window, saw my own reflection, turned away. Behind us, in the study, the phone was ringing. “I want this day to be over,” I said. “I want things to stop happening.”
“I know,” my husband said. Then: “So, should we tell her?”
I said, “Well, now she’ll know what she has and where it is.”
My husband moved to leave the room. I said, “Wait,” and I stood for a moment on Ted’s threadbare Persian carpet, trying to purge myself of meanness before I went downstairs.
My sister and Ted were trying to talk my mother out of going home for the night.
“What are you making such a big deal for?” my mother was saying. “I don’t have any problem going back there.”
“Sleep here tonight,” Ted said.
My sister looked at me.
“Go home tomorrow,” I said. “Not tonight.”
“I’ll stay here with you,” my sister said.
“We can’t go back there anyway,” I said. “The police are there.”
“They’ve finished,” said my mother. “They just called, to tell us they’re leaving.”
“Okay,” I said slowly. And I felt another, final, surge of organizational energy. I looked at my husband. “You go over there and pack a bag for my mother. Get a nightgown and her toothbrush and—and, Mom, you tell him what you need.”
“I’ll go with you,” Ted said.
“Oh, that’s all right,” said my husband.
“No, let him go with you,” I said. “Mom, give Ted a list.” I pulled my husband into the back hall and whispered to him, “Make sure the chair is out of there. The police told me they would get rid of it, but make sure they did. And take some paper towels and some, I don’t know, Windex or Fantastik or something. All right?”
“All right,” he said, and I could see that he knew what I meant, but I didn’t want to take any chances.
“Get rid of all the blood,” I said. “I mean it. Check the baseboards, the stairs. They probably took him out in one of those bags, but check anyway.”
“I will,” he said.
Annette had finished in the kitchen and gone to bed. I sat with my mother and sister by the dying fire waiting for my husband and Ted to come back.
“He always took such good care of me,” my mother said sleepily. “Even today. Did you hear about the list he left?”
“How do you know about that?”
“The police told me,” my mother said. “Do you think he sat there this morning, making the list?”
We didn’t answer her.
“No,” she s
aid, “this morning he acted in the moment. He must have made that list some time ago, and this morning he just put it into an envelope for me and left it on the desk.” She looked at me. “Are you planning to stay here tonight?”
“Of course,” I said.
“It’s just that I don’t think Ted has enough beds. Annette’s in the guest room, and there’s the other little guest room down here, for me.” She looked at my sister. “And you can sleep on the couch.”
“Oh,” I said. The thought of going back to my parents’ house frightened me. I did not want to be there, sleepless, where my father had slept the night before; I did not want to be there tomorrow morning, watching the clock creep around to the last minute of his life. Yet I also knew that if I went there I would be as close to him as it was still possible to be.
“And you must want to see the baby,” my mother went on. “You could drive there tonight and still be back here in time for breakfast.”
“Drive where?” I asked.
“To Katherine and Neil’s, of course,” my mother said.
She was right. I could get in the car and drive to my husband’s parents’ house, an hour away; they would take care of me. I could be someplace safe for a few hours and then come back to all this, because I had that child fifty miles away: a perfectly honorable excuse, a flight from responsibility disguised as maternal duty.
There was a noise at the front door, and I got up and went out to intercept my husband and Ted in the hall.
“Was the chair gone?” I asked.
“It was out on the front porch,” my husband said.
“That’s what they call taking it away?”
“We’re going back first thing in the morning, with the Jeep,” Ted told me. “I’ll get rid of it.”
“Before my mother sees it,” I said.
“Of course,” said Ted. He was holding my mother’s overnight bag.
I took it from him and opened it up. Inside there was a pale green nylon nightgown, something I had never seen my mother wearing. I took it out and unfolded it; it was narrow and silky, nearly transparent. I looked at my husband. “Where did you find this?”
The Suicide Index Page 3