House of Windows

by John Langan

  I was surprised at how nervous I was making that call. My hands shook so much that I had to punch the number in four times. I wasn't sure what Ted would have told his best friend, but it wouldn't have been too flattering. According to Gene, it wasn't; although he refused to say anything more than that Ted had been very, very angry with me. "Almost as angry as he was at his old man," he said. None of which—fortunately—made any difference to Gene. He appreciated me wanting to find out about Ted. We talked for a good couple of hours, about Ted, what he'd been like, some of the crazy pranks he'd pulled, how he and Gene had become friends. Gene didn't want to talk about Afghanistan very much. Their unit had gone in ahead of the main invasion force to, as he put it, "set up the party." "Mazar-i-Sharif, Kabul, Kandahar, Tora Bora: you name it, we were there first," he said. "We did what we did and I'm proud of it, but I'm happy I'm home and I'm sorry T.D. isn't." That's what they called him: T.D.

  It took a lot of convincing, but I did get Gene to tell me about Ted's final patrol. "You don't want to hear about that," he kept saying; to which I kept answering, "Yes, I do." They had been out in Kabul, sent out to investigate rumors of Taliban holdouts. The air was abuzz with all kinds of crazy stories, but Bin Laden and Mullah Omar and more of the Taliban than should have been were still running around, so the Army took whatever information came their way seriously. It was late at night, the moon full and shining brightly. Their patrol had taken them to what all previous reports had indicated was a quiet neighborhood. Ahead, the street they were on opened into a square fed by a dozen other streets and alleys. After a quick inspection, they decided it looked safe and moved forward. When they were a little more than halfway across, they heard a loud wailing. Instantly, their guns were up and pointing at its source, an old man who came running out of one of the alleys, waving his hands. Ted swore and advanced to meet him.

  That was when the ambush happened. Gene said he heard a whoosh, then the rocket-propelled grenade hit the spot where Ted and the old man were standing. "That was it for T.D.," Gene said. "The old guy, too. If it helps any, it was over before he knew it." The rest of the men spent the next fifteen minutes in a furious firefight with their attackers before killing them. "All of them?" I asked him.

  "Yes, ma'am," he said.

  "Good," I said, and meant it. The things you never think you'd say.

  The first Roger and I learned of Ted's death came via a call from Joanne. For a change, I was the one out teaching—I had a pair of back-to-back sections of Intro to Lit at Penrose—and Roger was home. He didn't tell me about it for a full twenty-four hours. I knew he was acting differently. He was quiet, always the sign that something was wrong. I asked him if he was feeling okay. Fine, he said, fine. I didn't press him; everyone has times they feel like being quiet, right? Anyway, I had papers to grade.

  At dinner the following night—we were having Chinese—I was eating cold sesame noodles. I glanced over at Roger—who if anything had been more silent today—and saw tears streaming down his face. He wasn't making any noise, just sitting there eating his chicken with snow peas while his eyes overflowed. I thought he must have been crying for some time, because there were a pair of dark patches on his shirt—he was wearing a denim shirt I'd bought him. I reached across the table and put my hand on his shoulder. He continued eating and crying. I said, "Roger, honey: What is it?"

  "Ted," he said. In the sound of that one syllable, I knew; I heard Ted's death. I said, "Oh. Oh, Roger."

  "Joanne called to tell me," he went on. "She said he was on patrol and they were attacked. That's all she knows. That's all anyone is saying right now."

  "Honey," I said, "I'm so, so sorry."

  "That's the end," Roger said, beginning to sob. "That's the end of my little boy."

  It was the end of Roger, too. Not right away, but if I want to point to the moment when he set out down the road to his own end, that would be it. Although maybe not completely. I can't discount the effect returning to Belvedere House had on him.

  He arrived at that decision by himself. If we had discussed it, I would have told him that I was fine with leaving the apartment—it was too small, and shrinking every day—but for God's sake, let's find somewhere new. I don't know if it would have helped us to have packed our bags and gone someplace completely different—another state. I'm sure Roger could have gotten a position at a place like BC or UConn no problem. A move like that might've caused its own problems—but whatever those might've been, they couldn't have been any worse than what we found waiting for us in the corridors of that house.

  Roger was all right—well, he was functional for a couple of days. Shock. I was in shock, too, but it was a completely different kind of shock. What I was experiencing was what you go through when someone famous and distant dies. It was like the afternoon Kurt Cobain killed himself. I couldn't wrap my mind around it. Here was this guy whose music had meant so much to me—who seemed like he'd written the soundtrack to my life, you know? And he put a shotgun to his head. It's a loss, no doubt about it, but what you lose is what you've made of this person you've never met. From the way things had been left between Roger and Ted, you might have expected Roger to feel sad, upset, but not overwhelmingly so. He at least appeared to have distanced himself from Ted considerably. That was an act. Whatever the bad stuff between them, there was all this good history to balance it. Even after that last, awful confrontation, I'd walk into his office at school and catch him looking away from the picture of Ted in his baseball uniform he hadn't gotten around to taking down from his bookcase. Who knows? Roger could have been brooding over what a lousy son Ted was. The point is, he hadn't succeeded in severing himself from his son as completely as he wanted to think. It gave me hope that maybe he and Ted would be reconciled, eventually. It also meant that there was a lot more sentiment than anyone suspected waiting to rise up and carry Roger away.

  That was how I thought of the change in Roger, that his grief over Ted's death was carrying him away from me. It was as if we were standing on an ice flow that was gradually breaking up; every day, he receded a little bit farther. He cried a lot at first—we both did. I'd never seen a man cry that hard or that much. He couldn't sleep. We sat up most of the night channel surfing; or Roger went out for these long walks that kept him away till dawn. I waited for him, trying not to be as anxious as I was, wishing I'd insisted on going along. I couldn't figure out where he was walking.

  Now, I'm sure his destination must have been Belvedere House, the place where he and Ted had been happiest together. I can picture him standing there on the edge of the lawn, dressed in the gray sweatshirt and –pants that were his nighttime attire whether he slept in them or not. He's panting. His eyes are wide. He's remembering tossing the ball back and forth with Ted so vividly he can see them in front of him, the ball a white blur in the air. And there's the spot where he'd found Ted writhing on the ground, his arm broken after he fell off the roof. And there's the tree that still bears the black mark from where the teenage Ted, drunk on wine coolers, smacked into it with Joanne's Mercedes. Roger stares at the house's stone walls as if he could look through them to the interior he knew, to the kitchen doorway where he marked Ted's height, or the banister Ted delighted in sliding down, no matter how many times Joanne yelled at him for doing so, or Ted's room—rooms, really, because once he'd turned twelve, he convinced his parents to let him move to the third floor. Now Roger's climbing the narrow stairs that connect the second to the third floor. Now he's standing at the threshold of Ted's room, glancing at the posters of Yankees players in action that crowd the walls, at the Oxford Dickens Roger gifted him neatly arranged on the desk, at the bed unmade from when Ted last slept in it. Now he's crossing to the bed and lowering himself onto it. His nose wrinkles at the sharp bite of the Old Spice Ted has taken to wearing in imitation of one of his favorite players, beneath which are the softer odors of Ivory soap and Ted's skin. He rests there, outside and inside the house, calm if not happy, until a car passes by, startling him back into
himself and his grief.

  He would return an hour before dawn, full of words. I'd be staring out the kitchen window, wondering where he'd gone, and the lights in the yard would click on, announcing his return. Or I'd be asleep at the kitchen table, and the squeal of the front door opening would wake me. Roger would half-stumble to the couch, his face bright with sweat, his chest heaving. His heart attack was fresh enough in my mind for me to remember the way he'd let his head fall against the headrest as I sped down 299. His sneakers, the bottoms of his sweatpants, would be soaked with dew. I'd bring him a glass of water, insist he wrap a towel around his shoulders against a chill. He would sink into the couch, pressing the glass to his forehead, and say, "I haven't told you about my father, have I?"

  I would shake my head. Except for some basics—a father, mother, younger brother and sister, all of them plagued by disease and disaster—I didn't know anything about his family. He never spoke of them. By the time I had met him, so much of Roger's life had already happened that his family had seemed distant, of little consequence.

  Roger would drain the water and pass me the empty glass with a "Thank you." Before I had the chance to return the glass to the kitchen, he would start talking. "My father was an alcoholic. Where and when I grew up, that term did not have much currency. A man who enjoyed his bottle too much was either a drunk if it took over his life and caused him to make a fool of himself in public, or none of your damned business if the worst you noticed was that his cheeks were a little redder than they should be, or that his breath was a tad fierce. Father was one of the none-of-your-damned-business alcoholics, a designation that was not hurt by the fact that he also owned the town's undersized Sears and half-a-dozen houses. Oh yes, my dear, I knew money before I met Joanne. Father liked his bottle, but it never interfered with his business responsibilities, so it was his concern. That he would beat my brother, sister, and me when he was in his cups was nobody's concern but ours.

  "You knew, when he was drunk, that someone was going to feel his fist before too long. In that way, he was almost comfortingly predictable. His drinking, which had remained at a more-or-less constant rate throughout the long work day—he started before seven and returned home for dinner at six—would take a sharp jump while we ate, two or three more glasses of Jack Daniel's by the time Mother was passing around the dessert plate. Something would happen—once, I fumbled his dessert onto the floor; another time, my brother, Rick, scraped his chair on the floor; still another, my sister, Elizabeth, laughed too hard and sprayed the milk she had been drinking across the table. If the offending party was close enough, Father's hand would lash out and catch us where he could, the jaw, the cheek, the ear. He did not believe in pulling his punches. If we were sitting too far away, he would push himself back from the table—and we knew, the second we heard his chair stutter across the floor, we knew what was on the way. He would rise, and God help you if you snickered at the way he needed to grab hold of the table to keep himself from pitching over. Even before he was on his feet, he was talking. 'Boy,' he would say, or, 'Girl,' 'what in the name of the Almighty Lord God, the good and most merciful Jehovah, have you done?'

  "He had wanted to be a preacher, you see, that had been his secret, childhood desire, which had been squashed by his father, who told him in no uncertain terms where his future as the only son of the town's richest man lay. Father's business duties kept him too busy to become a deacon, which I assume the church was grateful for, but we were there in the front row every Sunday, and the walk back home was inevitably given over to Father disparaging the day's sermon, and offering his own in its stead. To give the man his due, he knew his Bible. He tended to express that knowledge, however, as a series of questions to whichever one of us he was preparing to unleash his fists on. The fourth commandment—he was obsessed with Honoring Thy Father and Mother. No matter what we did, or he thought we did, it all came back to that commandment. His hands were the instruments of God's justice, you see."

  "What about your mother? What was she doing while he was terrorizing you?"

  "Minding her own business. Clearing the table. Doing the dishes. She and Father had made their peace a long time ago; he did not raise his hand to her. Until we reached the age of seven, we were under her protection, unless we'd committed some particularly egregious trespass, in which case, she was the one who turned us over to Father. Once we had achieved the age of reason, however, we were his. It was bad—it was every bit as bad as you can imagine, and worse, besides." Roger reached up and fingered the bridge of his nose. "Have you ever wondered who did this?"

  What do you do with that? What do you do with hurt that's festered for half a century? For five mornings running, I heard variations on the same tale: the time Father gave Elizabeth a black eye for having given him a Look; the time Rick lost one of his front teeth for an offense Roger still couldn't identify; the time Roger fled out the front door rather than face another beating—in return for which, his father had the town police arrest his son and treat him to a night in jail for his insolence, after which he got the beating. From a vague backdrop, Roger's childhood and adolescence leapt into sharp focus. I don't know if anyone's ever told you anything like this, but when they do, you wind up re-evaluating everything you know about them. Roger would talk until dawn was pouring into the apartment, when he'd finally let me lead him to bed. I would lie beside him, listening for his breathing to change, to deepen, and then I would sleep, too, as best I could.

  After a week off from school, Roger decided to return to his classes. I tried to argue him out of it. Instead of teaching his students Great Expectations, he should be talking to a psychiatrist. "You require the services of a psychoanalyst when you do not understand what is the matter with you," he said. "I understand what is the matter with me. My son is dead and I am grieving for him. What I need is a distraction to occupy me while I do what Freud calls the work of mourning." I didn't pursue the argument, didn't tell him there was more to it than that. He was grieving, yes, but he was guilty, too. The last thing his only son had heard him say was that he was nothing and they were no longer father and son.

  When the reports started to come in—about Roger not being prepared for class, thinking they were reading Bleak House when it was Little Dorrit; or delivering the same lecture for three classes in a row; or not showing up for class because he was in his office trying to pull his thoughts together on a book he'd taught for the last thirty-five years; or standing for long stretches of time in front of his students without saying anything—I wasn't exactly surprised. That's not true. I was surprised at the extent of Roger's collapse. I'd expected him to have some kind of difficulty teaching; there was no way he could be the kind of teacher he usually was. Roger at half-speed was still better than ninety-five percent of the people in that department, and I thought that it would be worth him fumbling around a little bit if it helped him in the long run. A lot of people, when they're having a hard time, they let it all hang out at home, in private, but when they go out in public, to work, they pull themselves together, you know? With Roger it was the opposite. With me, he would rally himself; with his students, he went to pieces.

  While this was happening, we held Ted's memorial service. The service was my idea. Joanne held one in the city, but neither of us wanted to make the trip. You just knew it was going to be a chance for Joanne to grandstand, to present herself as the bereft but dutiful mother, while Roger would be the father who, the last time he'd seen his son, had been fighting with him. No way. Roger was going through enough, already; I had no intention of letting him walk into that. God only knows what they would have thought of me. Joanne didn't press the matter. I'm sure she was more than happy to have the spotlight to herself. Since we hadn't attended her service, we had to have one of our own. I thought it would be therapeutic, help Roger reconnect with Ted. At first, Roger wasn't interested. We had spent a Saturday driving down to the cemetery in Westchester where Ted's ashes had been buried—in Joanne's family plot, of course; Roger
hadn't contested her decision. There was no headstone yet, only a strip of bare earth and a tiny American flag. On the drive, we had stopped at a mall so Roger could run into a sporting goods store. When we found Ted's grave, he removed the baseball he'd bought from his coat pocket and set it at the head of the grave. That was enough for him, Roger said. "It isn't for me," I said, "I need something more formal," which wasn't exactly true. He needed it—and if he did, so did I. We bickered about it for a week, at the end of which Roger gave in. I went to talk to the minister at the Dutch Reformed Church on Founders. I was too preoccupied with what I was going to say to the minister to pay much attention to Belvedere House. Ted's service was scheduled for the following Saturday.