The Twenty-Year Death

by Ariel S. Winter

  “Probably not,” I said, trying to remember what he meant, ‘work with me.’ And it hit me that we had been writing together that night, a play. Me, writing.

  “Well even if we don’t work more together, it’s been a real honor.” He met my eyes and his were just beaming, and it really made me feel like the rottenest person that ever lived, him looking at me like I was sacred, and me knowing that I was a philandering alcoholic hack screenwriter killer.

  “Yeah, it’s been an honor for me too,” I said, and took another drink so I didn’t have to decide what expression to give to my mouth.

  He swallowed, looked for a place to put his glass down, and settled on the floor beside his foot. “I shouldn’t even say anything,” he said, “but even if we’re not going to work together, I brought along something I worked up...if you don’t mind, it’d mean a lot to me if you looked at it.”

  I didn’t want to look at it. I was too tired. But there was something in his fawning that made me feel like somebody again. And with just that glimmer of self-worth, I started to think, I wasn’t bad. I’d just ended up in a compromising situation. And not for any gain. That was the thing. It had been self-defense. This kid would believe that. He knew I was a good guy. So I leaned forward, and held my hand out for whatever it was he’d written, and said, “Sure, why not?”

  His face lit up, and he pulled out his pad from his inner coat pocket, the same pad from the bar. He started to flip through it. “It’s just an idea for a scene I think would come at the end of Act I.” He handed it over, and at first I just stared at the script unseeing. “It hit me what you were saying about the Furies being mortal. And I thought if one of them killed the other, you see, if one Fury killed another Fury, that would be like a sister killing a sister, and then that’s exactly one of the things the Furies punished people for, killing a family member, you know, in the old myths.” My face must have changed colors, because he stopped and said, “Mr. Rosenkrantz, are you all right? I’m sorry if, well I knew I shouldn’t say anything about the play. My mom would kill me if she knew I was here acting like this with you having just lost your son.”

  I shook my head and held out a hand when it looked like he might try to get up. “It’s fine, it’s all right. I want to read it, I do,” and to prove I did, I started reading. I could feel him watching me and then looking away and watching me again, but I furrowed my brow and focused on what he’d written. And it was pretty good. It was really good, actually, and I felt some of the excitement I had felt with him in the bar the other day. I finished my drink and balanced the glass on the arm of my chair, and flipped through to the end of the scene. It was only four handwritten pages, but it was really good. “I like it,” I said, handing the pad back to him.

  His eye opened wide. “You do? I mean, you really do?”

  “Yeah, it’s a great idea. It’s a great way to end the first act.”

  His smile was open and giddy.

  “I’d cut that crying and laughing part at the end there.”

  He knit his brow and stuck out his lower lip in seriousness, nodding. “Sure, I could see that.”

  “A small action carries a lot of weight on a live stage. And you have this murder. That’s going to be big enough. You just let the other two sisters stare at the body in shock. They lead the audience, you see. Everyone’s in shock. Because you are in shock when it happens. You’re looking down and thinking, this couldn’t be, it doesn’t—it just couldn’t. You’re in shock, you see.” I realized what I was saying, and I got up to fix another drink.

  “I see what you’re saying,” he said, writing something down. “Yeah, that’s better than the murdering sister breaking down, if she just looks at her sister’s body, and then the third one looks at her accusingly, their eyes meet, and the murderer runs off the stage, lights out.” He was writing the whole while he was talking.

  I drank half my drink on my way back to my seat. “And then when the innocent sister seeks vengeance on the murdering sister, then she’s only left the choice to do the same thing, to kill her sister, and then she’s no better off than the other one. Because really, we’re all guilty in the end, right? It’s not just one person who’s guilty, but everyone, because they let it happen, they made it too.”

  He wasn’t quite following me there, and I wasn’t even following myself, I wasn’t making any sense. “I like it,” he said. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “Here give me that,” I said, reaching for the pad in order to hide my own confusion. He handed it back to me. “And a pen.” He handed me that too. I looked at what he’d just written, and I started to jot some dialogue down. It just came to me:

  “Don’t you accuse me. How dare you accuse me. She would have killed me if she’d had the chance.” “Do you think self-defense is an excuse? How many times have we ended a life even when self-defense has been invoked?” “I’ll never let you get to me. I’ll get to you first.” “And that’ll be self-defense too?” “It will.” “Well you have to get to me first.”

  It felt good, the dialogue flowing like that. And you read it now, and I know what you’re thinking, that I was trying to make excuses for myself. Only I didn’t see that at the time. At the time it was just a play I was writing. And the important thing was that I was writing. And not the nonsense I’d written in the hotel the other day, but actual dialogue that fit into a play. Montgomery would take care of patching it all together, like the script doctors that come in and touch up a screenplay after you’re finished with it.

  I looked up for a moment, and saw that Montgomery was watching me with fierce intensity. It made me self-conscious, and I lost the flow of what I was writing. I handed back the pad and mixed myself another drink. He looked at what I had written and then immediately started writing something else down. I watched him work and it was exciting to see his enthusiasm and self-confidence. I wondered what had happened to my own self-confidence. If only I had a young man like that with me, I’d be unstoppable again.

  And then I found myself wishing again that Montgomery had been my son. I would have been a different person with a boy like that looking up to me like I was king of the world. With a son like that you could really make something of yourself. You just about had to with a son like that, because he had you so great that you’d bend over backwards to prove he was right. But Joe had said that he thought the world of me as a kid, and what did I do? I made him think I was worse than I was and it seemed like I had proven him right in the end too.

  But that didn’t matter. What mattered was that I was up and awake and my mind was sharp.

  He started talking. I offered him a drink, and he waved it off, and went on about another plot point in the play, and then we really were working again, just like the night in the bar. Everything else fell away. All of my guilt, my anxiety, my self-loathing, those things evaporated in the creative flow of hashing out murder and drama on the stage. It was so much easier on paper than in—But I couldn’t think like that.

  I kept drinking and finished the bottle. Montgomery nursed the first drink I had given him, learning from his mistake the last time. He took the role of secretary so I didn’t have to worry about my handwriting. We hashed out most of the second act in what must have been something like four hours. I’m not sure how long it was. It wasn’t dark yet outside, but it was getting there, that late evening summer twilight.

  Montgomery filled up his pad at some point, but he had another one. He’d really come prepared; he was that eager and hopeful. To him, I really was somebody, even if everyone else in the literary establishment had forgotten me, and my call girl girlfriend didn’t want to see me, and I owed money all over, and the police were probably going to arrest me any day. No, for him, I was a big-time writer. And we had that perfect give-and-take you need to get something good. I could feel it was good as it was happening. And maybe, I’m not ashamed to say it, maybe I began to believe it too. The Furies by Shem Rosenkrantz and Taylor Montgomery! The new smash hit! Yeah, we wrote. />
  And I didn’t once think of Joe or anybody else.

  16.

  That was Tuesday, and the funeral was set for Thursday. Montgomery and I wrote all that Wednesday with only two notable interruptions that I guess I should mention. The first was a letter from Vee telling me to meet her at the hotel’s luncheonette first thing Friday morning. She didn’t know when she could get away so I was to just go and wait. Then we could figure out what we were going to do, and get the hell out of Calvert.

  The second was two phone calls back to back, so if you count that as two things, then I’d have to say three things happened that Wednesday. The first phone call really threw me for a loop. Connie announced that someone was on the line for me, and I ran upstairs to take it in my room, expecting that it was Vee and I would need some privacy. But when I picked up, a familiar man’s voice came through the line, “Shem Rosenkrantz, I can hardly believe it’s you.”

  I sat heavily on the bed. “Hub.” Hub Gilplaine was a nightclub owner and pornographer in S.A. who I used to pen smut books for. We’d been friends, but I soured that the second I asked to borrow money. How had he found me?

  “Shem, how long have we known each other?”

  “A lot of years,” I said.

  “A lot of years. So you know what I hate more than anything, don’t you?”

  “For someone to waste your time.”

  “For someone to waste my time. That’s right. So how come I find out that you’ve skipped town and I’ve got to waste precious hours getting you tracked down?”

  “Hub, I haven’t skipped town. Quinn died, and then Joe—”

  “How come?” He’d raised his voice. Then I knew it was personal. He never raised his voice.

  I was silent.

  “Huh?” He waited for me to answer. “How long have we been friends? You’re afraid to call me?”

  “I’m coming into some money—”

  “Money! Money...”

  I could hear him shaking his head through the wire. So he was going to take this offended compatriot act through to the very end.

  “Shem, I had to put your name out in a lot of places to track you down, and we’ve already established that my time is too valuable for that. When somebody offered to buy up your debt, I didn’t say no. You and I are square as far as money goes. It’s not my problem anymore. I’ve washed my hands of it.”

  “But, you don’t understand, I’m coming into a lot of money. That’s why I’m here.”

  “Then you’ll have no trouble paying your new creditors off.”

  I had no answer for that.

  “That’s all I wanted you to know,” he said, “that you have someone else to pay back now, Shem. Someone less patient than I’ve been.”

  “Hub...”

  “I’m sorry, Shem, I gave you all the time I could.”

  “Sure. Yeah.” But he’d hung up.

  I put the receiver down and just sat there, unable to get up. All of the energy that Montgomery had brought out in me in the previous thirty-six hours was gone, just pulled right out of me and across the country. Who was I kidding writing a play? I couldn’t get away from my life. In America, you got one chance, and if you hit it big then you hit it big, but if you fell, there was no climbing back up. You might as well just die or go off somewhere where you weren’t in the way. Yeah, I might have come into a lot of money, but I owed a lot of money too. And now some gangster had bought up my debt... Who knew how much he’d expect from me? There was no pretending. I was on my way out, not up.

  But thoughts like that were doing me no good. I picked up the phone again, and got the Enoch White clinic on the line. I asked for Clotilde, and the nurse on the other end got icy and told me to hold on, and then the phone delivered me a voice that was as relieving as the last voice had been frightening.

  “Shem, you haven’t called.”

  “I know, baby. I’ve been real tied up out here. Joe died.”

  There was quiet, but not quite silence. She squeaked out, “No,” and I sank again. She was supposed to comfort me, and now I’d have to comfort her.

  “It’s okay, honey, listen...”

  “Shem, where are you?”

  “I’m still in Calvert. The funeral’s tomorrow. Then I’ll come home.”

  “I miss you.” She was crying, but quietly.

  “I miss you too.”

  “I love you.”

  “I love you too. Listen, baby, it’s going to be okay. I’m getting the money now. The whole thing, the estate. I’ll be able to pay Philips. You’ll be set up for a long time.”

  “Oh, Shem, I’m so happy,” but she sounded just the same as she had a second before.

  “It’s all going to be okay now.”

  “But Joe died?”

  “It’s okay, honey.”

  “I miss you.”

  I sighed. This was actually worse than the conversation with Hub. He’d sent some gangster on my trail, but Clotilde...she tore it right out of me, you know? She emasculated me. All the no-good things I’d done to her. I just needed to lie back and go to sleep and never wake up.

  “You’ll pay Director Philips now?” Clotilde said. She’d stopped crying, but her voice still sounded small, like a shy little girl’s.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m so happy, Shem.”

  “Yeah.” It went on like that a little longer, with the I-love-yous and I-miss-yous. I’d planned to tell Director Philips the good news about the money, but I didn’t have it in me anymore, so when I was able to, I let Clotilde hang up. I don’t know how long it took me to get up, but I eventually made it back downstairs to Montgomery, and at first I was morose, but after a drink and a half he was able to pull me back into it, and we wrote until late in the evening, and he stayed and we had dinner with Great Aunt Alice and Connie.

  The next day was the funeral. It was unseasonably cool thanks to the rain of the previous night. We gathered at the same funeral home where Quinn’s service had been held just under two weeks before. Mary and her parents, Great Aunt Alice, and I sat in the first pew, with Connie directly behind us, and Montgomery a row behind her. Palmer Sr. was also there, and some other acquaintances I didn’t recognize, friends of Quinn’s from her life without me. It seemed that Joseph had had almost no friends of his own or maybe they were just all far away, seeing as how he’d always boarded at school. I half expected Vee to show up too, and I couldn’t decide if I was relieved or disappointed when she didn’t. I’d see her the next day at the hotel anyway.

  In front of our pew, there was a waist-high wooden barrier that separated us from the closed casket and the podium from which the minister spoke. He did a hell of a ceremony, quoting the Bible about how the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, to every season, you die in body but live on in spirit, etc., etc. He threw in a bit about Abraham’s test with Isaac on the mountain, and tried to make it that God tested us every day, and some trials were harder than others, but we should always trust in God. I guess he brought that up for my benefit, seeing as I was a father robbed of his only child. It was a nice try, but it only made me sick to my stomach.

  When he’d finished, a man from the funeral home announced the location of the cemetery and informed us that people outside would be handing out maps to anyone who needed them. The pallbearers, just members of the funeral home’s staff, wheeled the casket up the aisle and we all stood to follow it out.

  It was then that I saw Healey and Dobrygowski standing in the back of the room. I had really hoped to not have to see them again, and the sight of them there started me sweating. Fortunately, they filed out ahead of everyone else and were gone from the lobby by the time I reached it. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that they had come because they knew something, that they had wanted me to see them so that I could stew a little, and would be more likely to make a mistake when they actually talked to me.

  I was on edge the entire ride to the cemetery. I didn’t even attempt to talk to Mary or her parents. I told myself that
the cops were just paying their respects, that there was no other reason for them to be at the funeral. Even the police couldn’t be so cold as to arrest a man at his own son’s funeral. They probably had already gone back to work. Surely Joe’s case wasn’t the only case they were working. They felt obligated to make an appearance, but that was all it was, an appearance, and I didn’t have to worry about them anymore.

  I’d just about gotten myself believing it when we pulled into the cemetery through an enormous granite archway, the wings of a black iron gate folded back into the grounds. The narrow road was just large enough for a single vehicle. The driver of the hearse expertly drove through the winding hills until he came to the Hadley plot. The large family marker, engraved with the umbrella that had made their fortune, was visible from the car, as was a four-foot pile of dirt.

  And on the other side of the road, pulled off on the grass, was a black Lincoln with Healey and Dobrygowski standing up against it.

  I got out of the car on the opposite side, and reached back to take Mary’s hand. My reflection in the car’s window—pallid, pinched face, shoulders hunched nervously, rumpled suit—was frightening. I looked like I had a big ‘guilty’ sign around my neck, and my only luck was that it was my son’s funeral, and I hoped the guise of mourning still masked my expression.

  I focused studiously on Mary, and even when Dobrygowski gave me a wry smile and a nod, I acted as though I hadn’t seen him. We walked between the graves, picking our way up an incline towards the Hadley marker. It was shocking to see how many of the gravestones, even in the old part of the cemetery, were marked with the war years, ’43, ’44, ’45. And all of them with birth dates as much as twenty-five years after mine.