by Ward, Robert
“Was there a girlfriend?”
“Probably. My father had a certain weakness for younger women. But there was no stolen funds. He didn’t need to steal.”
“What happened to him?”
“He went to jail for three years. When he came out, he wasn’t the same.”
“You mean jail broke his spirit?”
“No,” Jeremy said. “That was the curious thing. In a sense jail gave him his spirit. He had a religious conversion. All the old life of wealth and power now seemed utterly meaningless to him. Empty. He said that all that mattered in the end was ‘seeing through the screen.’ You should have heard him, Tommy. It was like he was possessed when he said it. ‘You’ve got to see through the screen. That’s all that matters, son. Don’t let them tell you any different.’ Then he would laugh; it was like the laughter of some holy man. Of course, our friends and the good old family shrink thought he had gone round the twist, and maybe it was true, but if it was, it was a kind of divine madness.”
“Seeing through the screen?” I said. The phrase sent electricity through me. It seemed to somehow be the very embodiment of Jeremy’s mercurial personality. “Did he ever explain that to you?”
“Not in so many words,” Jeremy said. “But he was absolutely intent on it. He became obsessed with charity work, visited terminal patients in hospital wards. He grew a long dirty beard, and he let his fingernails grow until they curled at the ends. To others he seemed quite mad, but for the first time, he began to pay attention to me. He would smile at me, say that I was his little miracle. I remember him looking down on me as I lay half asleep in the hammock out in the yard and he said, ‘All along I’ve thought that whatever was miraculous was out there, but it’s not so. It’s right here. We have to make people know that, son.’ “
“How did that make you feel?” I said, fascinated.
“Pleased, but embarrassed, I guess,” he said. “I know now that Father was having a kind of vision. Either that or a complete breakdown, but at the time I was only twelve and I remember how weird it was when he had to come speak to the headmaster at Gilman about my unruly behavior.”
“Where was your mother during all this?”
“On her way out. Mother couldn’t bear the social disgrace, which was odd, because she wasn’t from our rarified little social set. No, she was a dancer on Broadway when they met in a absurd little play called Jelly Bellies. Father always had many women; before the jail term they would call him at all hours here, and Mother would cry and go off into that room.”
Here he stopped and pointed to a small library to my right. The books were still sitting in the shelves, but they were covered with a fine, golden dust.
“She would sit in there and read thrillers. Father always hated that. He was a bit like you, my boy, always big on moral and spiritual uplift. He wanted her to read the Bible, the Upanishads, and she would scream, ‘You liar, you hypocrite, you talk religion but you’re screwing every woman at the club.’ “
“But it wasn’t true.”
Raines smiled sadly and sat down heavily in a rattan chair.
“No, not anymore. I mean I don’t know for sure, but I think that after he had his breakthrough he wasn’t any longer interested in the flesh. In that way we’re very much alike.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “You’re a real saint. What were you doing in your room with Sister Lulu?”
“Spiritual instruction,” Raines said, smiling. “Oh, we had sex a few times, because she wanted me to, but I was trying to find out about her experiences in the nunnery. You see, I thought if I talked to someone who had had a religious conversion, someone who understood miracles, I might be able to … well, it didn’t work out that way. Lulu was more interested in the simpler delights, and of course, she’ll be better off for it in the end. No doubt.”
There was such sadness in his voice, such loss, and I felt that cold night, as we talked in that abandoned old house, that I was at last beginning to peer into the complex heart beneath his whirling, scheming mind.
“Mother smoked Luckies,” he said then. “She wore Chinese robes made of raw silk. She was exquisite looking. God, when they were young and walked into the Chesapeake Restaurant, no one could eat. I mean people simply stopped and stared, and I would be walking in front of them and I would think we were royalty, we were magic. But in reality it was their youth and their love that gave them the magic. In the end …”
He stopped, and for a second I thought he might break down, but he only smiled at me wanly and walked toward the front door.
“In the end, father wanted to start a church,” Jeremy said. “He wanted to go into the wilderness, out in West Virginia, and he actually got some right-wing lunatics to put up the money.”
“Do you think he was mad? I mean, why would he?”
“Well, there’s a line in one of Ginsberg’s poems,” Jeremy said.” ‘America, you hurt me into wanting to be a saint.’ Maybe that was it. Or maybe it’s in our blood, Tom. Wildness, great designs. Father told us we were descendants of the kings. In the end, all such things are always mysteries, aren’t they? In any case, Father had his followers, even then. Of course, Mother didn’t think so. He would say, ‘There are people who count on me, Louise,’ and she would say, ‘Yes, if you count all the sex-starved bitches.’ But he would never get angry, just look at her as though she had clubbed him, and I would stand there and think, if I don’t move, if I don’t move a muscle, it will all go away and be like it was.”
“Like Billy McConnell?” I said.
“You’re becoming far too smart,” Jeremy said.
“Did he really move to the woods?” I said.
“No,” Jeremy said. “The day before he was to go, he had a vision of lightning and rain, and he became convinced that he had to take his boat out on the Chesapeake and sail to Mayo down on the Eastern Shore. There he would meet someone who would show him how to finally ‘see through the screen.’ He left, and we never saw him again. The boat ran aground somewhere down near Betterton, but there was no trace of Father. Mother left after that. She went back to New York for a while with some vague plan about making a stage comeback, but, of course, she was too old. She died three years later from pills. They found her in her room at the Gramercy Hotel curled up with her Erle Stanley Gardners and thirty-five Seconals.”
He turned and looked at me with such pain and longing in his face that I could not help myself. I put my arms around him and hugged him tightly.
“Jesus God,” I said.
He said nothing, but we stayed that way for a while, and then he gently pushed me away.
“There’s one family we can still save,” he said. “Come with me.”
I followed him out the door and I got a terrifying feeling. Yet it wasn’t from the fact that we had to drag Johnny’s cold body across the dark earth to the flowing Severn River behind his parents’ home. And it wasn’t really because Rudy would be coming around to find out what happened to his associate. No, rather it was that I had come this far—killed a man—and only now did I begin to understand Jeremy and my own heart. Yes, now I saw clearly that I had hoped in my own naive, romantic way that Jeremy Raines was somehow a man born without a history, a man who had whole cloth invented himself. Oh, it was clear to me now, as we dragged that dead bully Martello toward the old shell beach, that in my own folly I needed to believe in Raines as a man who had defied all history, who was a product of nothing, who was pure legend, like Daniel Boone and Ben Franklin. I had, of course, from time to time, wondered who he really was but not very often and not very deeply. Maybe I didn’t really want to know, for I suppose somewhere in my own crossed heart, I knew that his history would be tragic, as sad or sadder than my own. Now, even as I shuddered from the night wind and the fear in my stomach, I saw that Dr. Spaulding had been right, that all was truly irony, for this man, this hero I had created, who I had believed owed no man, was as tied to his own history, society, and family as all the rest of us. Indeed, he seemed to
me now more a product of his bizarre family than I was of my own. Yes, Jeremy Raines was the creation of that classic American whipsaw—money and religion—and it made sense to me at last why the King of Cards had to create a desperate business that was in reality a church, a church with himself installed as pastor, keeper of the flock and the flame, the bright flame lit all those years ago by his own mad father.
And it also occurred to me then that I had been wrong to not want to know about his past, for knowing didn’t lessen him in my eyes. No, he was picking right up from his father’s work, which was the work of the true America, Wall Street, Madison Avenue, the High Flying Eagle on the Legendary American Greenback. In his own mad way, Jeremy was taking it all to some new place, where the dollar bill and the longing heart would be forever united. There would be no difference between them. He had even said it to me, “There’s time for poetry and time for money,” and I knew that in Raines’s mind, they would be the same time and they would bind us where love, blood, and kin had failed.
Oh, it was a dark, chancy dream; both poets and businessmen would scream equally loud that such a thing was impossible. To the poets and the thinkers like Dr. S., Jeremy would be one more Babbit, taking the bad road to philistinism, and to the businessmen he would be “unprofessional,” an “amateur.”
But in his heart, Raines thought it could work. Like his father, he had founded a church, but not in West Virginia and not one of renouncement.
It was the High Church of Fast Times, Easy Money, and Friends for Life, and if it was absurd, it was no more so than the very promise of America itself.
You’re quiet,” he said as he lifted Johnny’s arms and walked over the earth backward to the river.
“The son of a bitch is heavy,” I said, telling a white lie, because I was not ready to let him in on my thoughts. I had seen him in some new and radically different light, and I didn’t know what to make of it, how to talk to him, only that now everything between us had forever changed.
I was older now, I thought, as old, and wise as I was ever going to get. He had shown me everything he had and in some new way, we were really partners, each other’s brothers, each other’s fathers, both lost and found here on the dark shores.
And of course I was scared, scared shitless, as we finally threw Johnny’s fat deadweight body down on the brown sand by the dark, flowing Severn.
“Get stones,” he said. “Lots of them. I’ve got an old anchor here, over by the boat house.”
“We ought to get these cards off of him,” I said, “in case he ever comes up.”
“He won’t come up,” Jeremy said.
“Still …”
“All right. Be my guest.”
I reached down to the gangster’s ice-cold skin and found the melted plastic on his bloated bluish cheeks. Words can’t express my horror as I dug into Johnny M.’s cheeks, trying to pull the melted plastic from his face. My stomach lurched, and I gagged. Jeremy reached down and handed me a pair of rusted garden scissors.
“Use these,” he said. “It’ll go quicker.”
“Thanks,” I said, gasping for air.
Then I dug in and really got to work.
It was a good forty minutes before I’d gotten most of the damnable plastic wrapping off of Johnny, and it took us another hour to row out into the brackish waters of the Severn. Finally, there under the brilliant ice blue stars, we threw his body into the drink and Johnny Martello sunk quickly, without a trace.
“Nice, isn’t it?” Jeremy said, lying back on the bow of the old rowboat. “When I was young, Mother and Father and I would spend whole afternoons out here fishing. Mother pretended she hated it, but she didn’t really mind. In those days, it didn’t matter what they were doing as long as they were together. I never saw two people more in love.”
“What went wrong?” I asked, not believing we were having this conversation as Johnny sank to the bottom of the Severn, his toes being bitten by crabs, trout, eels.
“That’s the great mystery,” Jeremy said. “That’s the question without an answer, because it had gone wrong way before Father’s jail troubles. The Raines men have always had too much appetite for life. Maybe insatiability is the worst crime. We burn people out. Hell, we burn ourselves out.”
He laughed a little sadly and took the oars in his hands.
“There’s always a formula for success,” he said quietly, “but there’s never any blueprint for tragedy. Well, what say we head back to terra firma?”
And so we did, headed back to the dark land under the brilliant St. Claire moon, like two college friends out on a nighttime fishing trip.
But as we rowed back into the dock, that illusion was shattered forever. Someone waited for us, a huge, hulking man in a long dark coat.
“Christ,” I whispered, “it’s Mr. A.”
“No,” Jeremy said. “It’s only Farlow, our housekeeper.”
“Do you think he saw us?”
“I don’t know, but it’ll be okay. He’s very loyal.”
We rowed to the dock and tied the boat up as the old man moved over the creaking warped boards toward us. He was tall and stoop shouldered and had a great gray walrus moustache. His eyes were cast downward, which made him look like a huge hound.
“Jeremy,” he said. “It’s you. I almost called the police.”
That sent another chill through me.
“No need for that, Mr. Farlow. Just showing my friend here the delights of the river at night.”
“You could get swept away by the current out there,” Farlow said. “Damned crazy for you to go out there.”
“Now you know I know the river like the back of my hand,” Jeremy said. “Things going well for you, Farlow?”
“Well as can be expected. Nobody’s been here for weeks. Why don’t you come in and have a drink or a cup of warm tea. I could brew it in a jiffy.”
“Can’t. Have work back at the hospital. Hey, if any of the doctors call up for me, I wasn’t here. Playing a little hooky, Far.”
Farlow smiled and put his arm around Jeremy’s shoulder as we walked toward the lopsided shingled house.
“Haven’t your secrets always been good with me, son?” he asked.
“Of course,” Jeremy said.
“When he was young, we played hide and seek out here,” Farlow said, turning to me. “He thought he was a clever boy, but I could always find him.”
“That’s right,” Jeremy said. “That’s right, Far. You were the only one who could.”
“We had us some fine times,” Farlow said. “We had us some high old times.”
“I’ll call you,” Jeremy said. “Next week. Maybe we’ll open the old place up again. Have a crab feast.”
Farlow’s eyes flittered in the moonlight.
“Could we?” he asked, sounding suddenly like a child who has been made a promise he dare not believe in.
“Not only could we,” Jeremy said, squeezing his old arm, “but we shall. Next week. We’ll show that there’s some life left yet in the old place.”
Farlow said nothing then, but his face turned to joy, and he suddenly hugged Jeremy tightly, like a father would a son, and I felt such emotion well up in me that I had to turn my head.
When I looked back, Jeremy was shaking hands with him.
“Good to see you, Jeremy,” Farlow said. “I’ll wash out the crab pots.”
“And don’t forget to make the stewed tomatoes, Farlow,” Jeremy called as we walked away. “Can’t have the feast without your stewed tomatoes.”
“I’ll make them,” Farlow called after him and then he waved, and we left him there alone, standing on the starry, moonlit dock.
As we drove out the dark St. Claire road toward Baltimore, I stared at the great tall oaks, which formed a canopy over the road. While we had been disposing of the body, I had lost myself in speculation, but now the full horror of what we had done came back to me and I felt numbed, shocked, as though my brain had been covered over by layers and layers of the
plastic that had wrapped itself around fat Johnny. I took deep breaths in order to keep the rising panic inside me down, shut my eyes as Jeremy drove too fast down the bumpy, spooky roads, and remembered my youthful fantasies of the Cape. I recalled sitting in the back of my parent’s Studebaker at the age of twelve, thinking that the Cape must be the very essence of the highly advertised Good Life of the Chesapeake Bay, which had been drummed into my head in American history classes all through elementary school. Here came the old Catholic colonists who escaped the persecution of the cruel British High Church. Here on these gentle shores under the shade of broad-branched magnanimous trees, our forefathers ate giant plates of oysters and crabs, which were so plentiful, came from waters so bounteous, that they must have felt they lived in a waking dream, a dream of plenty, a dream that must have been to them like some new Eden. How our forebears must have loved their lives, these rough men with their powdered wigs, bright knee stockings, muskets, horses, and tobacco. And their women. I pictured them all as beauties in bright hoop skirts, long, flowing hair framing their pale white faces, and behind them on the veranda, a veranda very much like Jeremy’s family porch, perhaps there was a lively string band playing some Scotch-Irish aire that rang over the salt marshes and out into the great blue gull-filled Chesapeake Bay. Yes, that was the dream of Olde Maryland, and one I’d entertained from time to time.
If by some miracle I could ever get my hands on just a little money maybe I could have a home down here on Cape St. Clair. I’d even thought, not more than ten days ago, that armed with my new money and my new artistic sensibility that Val and I could settle down near here. At first she would think it square, lame, but the place would win her over in the end, and we would at last have the place that all orphaned children want most of all—a true and loving home.
Now, however, as I drove the dark, leaf-strewn lane with Jeremy Raines, it was as though those delightful fantasies were the absurd, naive speculations of a foolish child. And when I thought again of Dr. Spaulding, I began to laugh bitterly. All his hushed talk, all his academic babble, that was all beyond me now. Yes, whatever sensibility I had, whatever potential, it was now wiped out, smeared over with human blood.