Lucky Leonardo

by Jonathan D. Canter

  Hal knew nothing except that the minivan came home out of gas and looked like it had survived a war, and as usual Joan wasn’t talking, but if his years as a lawyer had taught him anything it was to keep the door closed unless they showed a search warrant. “Sure, send it,” he said, and waited for the next question.

  Harvey also kept his door closed. “I was watching TV and not paying attention to the girl, whoever she was,” he maintained, while the Harriford nurse probed his explanation like she was looking for head lice. And the big boy with zits couldn’t remember if the girl had brown or yellow hair, but thought he had seen her around before, like in the cafeteria or something. And it wasn’t as if Joan punched a time clock on her exit through the shrubbery. So the investigation into who pulled the alarm stalled, and, not without irony, the only discipline taken was against the group of students who passed Leonardo on the path between the gym and the Main House, who continued covertly into the woods beyond the sound of the alarm, and didn’t know about the emergency roll call.

  ———

  Leonardo earned his hospital discharge papers at the end of the week, when his medicines were working without noticeable incompatibility and the bells hadn’t rung for twenty-four hours. He was pale and frail, and moved in baby steps like an old man. The doctors prescribed rest and tranquillity.

  His sister Gayle, driving the minivan—the sight of which gave Leonardo a brief flashback ding-a-ling—picked him up at the hospital and dropped him off at his house where they were greeted by Helen and Mary Ellen.

  “Who are they?” Gayle asked.

  “I don’t know exactly,” Leonardo answered, while the girls hugged him and fussed over him, and showed off the groceries, alcohol and new hairdos they had charged on his credit card.

  “Where’s Chrissie?” Gayle asked. “And your car? And what are you doing about Harvey?”

  “Gayle,” Leonardo told his big sister with his best energy and insight, “I don’t have answers. I want to get into bed.”

  ———

  Helen and Mary Ellen worked well together as a rehab team. They shared the TV remote, and the cooking responsibilities. They sponge-bathed Leonardo in tandem. They took turns screening his calls and reading his mail. They shopped together, and drank together, and liked the same radio stations. Over time Mary Ellen came to trust Helen’s grasp on reality.

  “What would you do with them,” Leonardo asked Dr. Z in an aside before the Sunday morning meeting of Leonardo’s advisor group, which Helen had organized, “if you were me?”

  “I wouldn’t kick them out,” Dr. Z said. “There’s no substitute for people who love you.”

  “What if they’re your ex-stalkers?”

  “I’d try to make it work.”

  “I’m living in a halfway house.”

  “It counts as a life, Leonardo. Or at least a temporary life. What else do you have going?”

  Dr. Z and Leonardo sat down at the kitchen table next to Abigail Stern, Helen and Mary Ellen. Gayle was supposed to be invited but she complained so much about dirty dishes and sloppy housekeeping when she dropped Leonardo off from the hospital that Helen decided Gayle was part of the problem and deleted her from the list. Chrissie was invited, at Leonardo’s insistence, but couldn’t make it due to prior commitments. She sent her love, and said she would be back soon. Abigail brought donuts. Helen made the coffee, and primped her new hair.

  “First, what should we do about Harvey?” Helen asked.

  “I’m afraid it would be nasty litigation,” Abigail answered. “Leonardo’s whole psychological picture would be fair game. They’ll make him look like a basket case. I doubt we could convince the judge he’s an improvement over Barbara.”

  “I’m not convinced,” Dr. Z chimed in, “that he’s strong enough to take care of the boy. I think he has his hands full with himself.”

  “Would Harvey get my room?” Mary Ellen asked.

  “Fine,” Leonardo said, “I’ll back off on Harvey. For now.”

  “Next on the agenda is cash flow,” said Helen. “We’re running up bills.”

  “I’ve spoken to my friend whose family owns a funeral business,” Dr. Z said.

  “That’s not responsive,” Leonardo said. “I want my patients back.”

  “Sorry,” Helen said. “We’ve taken a vote. It’s unanimous not counting you. Negative on the shrinking.”

  “Helen,” Leonardo said, “you’re changing. You’re becoming domesticated.”

  “Dr. Lenny,” she answered, “I’m just trying my best to manage this difficult household.”

  “The funeral work will be temporary,” added Dr. Z. “Be happy your former patients are transitioning in fine fashion.”

  “I…,” said Leonardo, trailing off because he lacked more words to defend himself with. He wore a sorrowful face, like a man who has lost a lot, which made Dr. Z beam because he was sure Leonardo’s sorrowful face would sell well in the funeral business.

  And it did. From his very first funeral—a young father dead of brain cancer—Leonardo gave good condolence. He followed the casket down the aisle, shoulders stooped in the face of the mystery of death, sad eyes filling the room with condolence like all the sad-eyed men who ever walked behind a casket from the beginning of time, standing for the community and engulfing the bereaved like the ocean. He was a natural.

  “Thank you for being here,” a mourner might murmur to him on the way out, and he would dolefully nod, his years as a practicing shrink coming in handy, and if it felt like the right thing to do he might add a sad smile, to wash over the mourner like a gentle wave, so as to say, “I’ve seen an infinity of death pass by, my friend. This too will pass.”

  Or he might give a glance to the casket so as to say, “Tomorrow, my friend, that box will be our home as well. Let us rejoice for the air we breathe today.”

  Chapter 45

  Hal got the application package from Harriford, and it spoke to him. “This is for your own good,” he advised his hard-drinking daughter Joan, when the Harriford van came to the house to pick her up and whisk her off, to her utter, dumbstruck surprise. “It will give you a second chance to be a happy girl. Some day you’ll thank me.”

  By that time, Barbara was back from her business trip with her boss, and looking for a home/office to share with him. He gave preliminary approval to the plan, but delayed final approval pending review of the confidential report he had requisitioned from his lawyers regarding the enforceability of his pre-nuptial agreement with, and more generally the economic consequences of obtaining a divorce from, his then-current wife, whom he feared would not be inclined to take prisoners, or disinclined to use weapons of mass destruction, he said. This delay took some bloom off Barbara’s rose.

  In the interim she moved out of Stan’s house and life, and put herself up in a downtown hotel room, and waited, which was not something she was used to doing with her men.

  “I feel like a fucking call girl,” she confided to her mirror one morning when the lawyers’ report still hadn’t materialized and the interim was getting bigger and harder to straddle, prompting her to return to bed and ask her boss for a raise, which seemed to signal the beginning of the end.

  “I’m sorry, honey,” she told Harvey on the phone when he said he’d been as good as she asked him to be, but wanted to come home. “I don’t have a place for you right now. I promise I’ll visit you soon. I love you…”

  ———

  “He’s good for the payments,” Chrissie promised, as they sat around Leonardo’s kitchen table for another Sunday morning meeting in the tradition of the American family, Chrissie, Tom, Leonardo, Helen, and Mary Ellen. This was Chrissie’s and the Corvette’s first time home since she drove off in it to help her mother deal with the Roger LaFlamme situation two months before, on the eve of Leonardo’s breakdown.

  “Mom wanted to come down with
us,” Chrissie said, “but she couldn’t fit into the car.”

  “She’s fat?” Mary Ellen asked.

  “Two seats,” Chrissie answered with a little chill.

  “How’s your mom?” Leonardo asked.

  “Great,” Chrissie answered. “Can you believe she’s dating Roger?”

  “Great. How’s Roger?”

  “He’s great. Mom’s been a good influence on him. He just got promoted to assistant store manager.”

  “Send him my regards.”

  “I thought you didn’t want to meet him.”

  “No, that was…a different time.”

  “You know,” Tom said, “there’s a visible scratch on the rear right…”

  “It’s new…”

  “No, it was there.”

  Leonardo turned to Helen, who nodded her confirmation that it was there. “OK,” said Leonardo, “anything else?” It was unspoken but obvious that they were consummating his separation from Chrissie, and that a deep discount on the Corvette was the price to be paid. In lieu of palimony.

  So be it.

  Chrissie was great, but obviously not part of the solution. He wished her the best even with a slippery slug like Tom, and even with his car. Helen cried all night long in anticipation of losing the car, but was mostly dry-eyed and reconciled by the time it drove up. “We’ll always have Paris,” she said to no one in particular as the late winter sun climbed through the bare branches of the apple tree in the backyard, and she made the coffee.

  Chrissie sat close to Tom, and kept her distance from the others, like a college student returned to the family farm who holds her nose and can’t believe this was ever her. Like what is Mary Ellen? Like how old is that old man? She and Helen eyed each other warily from across the table. Neither seemed interested in getting too conversational.

  “I like your hair,” Chrissie said with respect to Helen’s stylish new do.

  “Nice boots,” Helen said in turn.

  Mary Ellen stared at Chrissie like she’d never seen a pretty girl before.

  Chrissie was definitely pretty, Leonardo saw for himself not for the first time but in all likelihood the last, with her girlish body in jeans and boots and a powder blue jersey. “I won’t get this lucky again,” he thought, and felt old, and for a moment regretted what he could have done but didn’t do, or didn’t do enough of and couldn’t do any more. The loss of a loved one, he felt.

  She gave him a “Lenny, are you OK?” when she arrived, which he took to mean, “I hear you’ve had tough times, Lenny, and you certainly look like shit. Thank God I’m out of here.”

  Leonardo and Helen teared-up for their respective reasons as Tom and Chrissie disappeared over the horizon in, and with title to, the Corvette. In an effort to cheer her up, and maybe get her out of the house, Leonardo asked Helen if she’d be interested in trying her hand at funeral work, and was pleased when she did and found it satisfying, stimulating a spot inside of her she hadn’t touched while stirring the lattes. She called it performance art, on her resumes and in her letters home. She even looked for opportunities downstairs in the preparation rooms, which were beyond Leonardo’s range.

  “No dead body experiences for me,” he advised. “I’m only in it for the spiritual part.”

  In general, he was recuperating.

  ———

  On Harvey’s birthday, a few days later, ex-Barbara called Leonardo out of the clear blue sky. “I heard you’ve had it rough,” she said.

  “I’m doing better,” he answered. “How about yourself? Still with the tuba player?”

  “No, no, he’s ancient history. Right now I’m alone, a single woman struggling to make her way in the city. God help me, but I don’t even have a job.”

  “What happened?”

  “My boss was a shit.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I’m suing him for everything he’s worth.”

  “Oh.”

  “Sexual harassment. Breach of contract. Defamation. You name it. I like the litigation.”

  “Oh.”

  “But Lenny, my point is why don’t you give Harvey a call. He misses you.”

  Chapter 46

  Good-bye Marge Blitz.

  On a dark and drizzly Sunday morning at the end of April—two weeks after Barbara called Leonardo, and Leonardo called Harvey and had a good chat, and said, “I love you” to his son, and made some plans for the future—when all the flowering plants in the greater Boston area were on the brink of blooming but needed a sip of sunshine to get themselves off, and all the people were grousing about the Red Sox, Marge Blitz drove from breakfast cocktails at Janet Casey’s waterfront condo to the cemetery where Brockleman was buried. She remembered his plot location from Kurt’s video, and walked her way to it along the cemetery’s twisting path, past mourners at a burial in progress and scattered graveside visitors, looking as wild-eyed and irreconciled as any of them.

  She carried flowers as a subterfuge. Her intent was to verify that the soil above Brockleman was firm and unbroken. Kurt had refused this assignment, prompting her to smack him across the face with her fist, and, when he fell in a heap, to kick him with her sharp-pointed shoes.

  “I knew she was gone,” Janet said afterward, “but I didn’t know how far or where to…”

  “You didn’t call the police?”

  “To say what? That there was a crazy woman driving around someplace in eastern Massachusetts?”

  Marge reached Brockleman’s grave, and kneeled down to study the grass and feel for heat and tremors, reminiscent of Selma in Kurt’s graveside video plus ninety pounds. Brockleman’s ghost had been visiting Marge with increasing frequency, first in dreams, but then as she lay awake without sleep, and following her as she paced through her rooms, as she ran outside to escape, as she drove through the night.

  It was a vicious cycle of visitations, because the more he visited the more she drank and the less she slept and the more vivid and insinuating he became. He pushed her to extreme resorts: she thought or wished or had seen on late-night television that proof of a quiet grave disrupts the ghost, makes him feel locked out from his home, uprooted, in exile, and, from her lips to Brockleman’s ghost’s ears, possibly suicidal.

  “Aha,” said Marge, as she moved her hands over the smooth, undisturbed grass atop Brockleman’s remains.

  Selma herself maintained ties. She re-visited the site a few times over the winter, to apologize to Brockleman for her weakness and duplicity and cry herself back into disarray. She was there regularly now that the weather was improving, and was making friends with some of the other graveside regulars. They would visit their person’s plot, say what they had to say, scream if they had to scream, then head in a convoy to Dunkin’ Donuts for coffee. If only the stones could talk. Or give love in return. Or forgive.

  When Selma arrived that morning she recognized Marge walking ahead of her along the path. “Yes,” Selma said as she recalled how Marge had induced her to bear false witness. “Yes,” Selma said as she recalled how Marge had greased the skids of the track going directly to hell, and welcomed her aboard. “Yes,” Selma said as the opportunity to thank Marge in person presented itself.

  Selma followed Marge to the grave, stealthy like a predatory cat, and when Marge bent to the ground to feel for ruptures, Selma burst upon her from behind. “You perverse bitch,” Selma screamed. “Get away from that grave…”

  Marge never looked back to see who or what might be there, because she knew. She upped and ran straight down the hill with her heart pounding and her eyes popping as though chased by a battalion of bats. She guzzled her gin as she ignited her engine and screeched across the cemetery’s dirt parking lot. She fishtailed onto the road and pushed pedal to metal on the straight-away, about a coffin length ahead of Brockleman’s angry ghost, by her estimation.

  The faster she d
rove, the closer he felt. She was drinking and screaming and swatting him away from her hair, and swerving all over the road. She speed-dialed Kurt, and got his tape. “Kurt,” she recorded for posterity at ninety miles an hour, “I’m being chased by Brockleman’s ghost. I think I can out-maneuver him…” Followed by the sound of a total crack-up as she went off-road and into a bridge abutment, like a bird who didn’t see the picture window. Apparently the mother turtle didn’t want anything to do with her.

  Kurt made funeral arrangements from his hospital bed. “The good news,” he said to his friends who came by to express sympathy, “is that Attorney Brockleman’s ghost won’t have to keep chasing her, and can finally get some rest.”

  “Unless,” said one of his friends, “Marge’s ghost attacks Attorney Brockleman’s ghost…”

  “Oooh,” said Kurt, with a little shiver, at this vision of eternity.

  Chapter 47

  Two soggy mornings after Marge intersected with the bridge abutment, the parties and lawyers of Binh et al. v. DeltaTek et al. showed up en masse to Martin Drunkmiller’s harbor-view conference room for their previously scheduled mediation session, as directed by the Superior Court judge who said he was damn tired of being sucked into their weekly pissing contests, or words to that effect.

  There was Drunkmiller, with his round-faced lieutenant, Remington, and their clients Susan H. and Eugene Binh, with Eugene drooling through the wires which held together his jaw, but otherwise motionless in his wheelchair. A sight to see, as was intended by Drunkmiller. “Be the vegetable,” he directed Eugene in rehearsal.

  Drunkmiller’s script also called for Susan H. to look like Eugene’s hurt and loving wife, cruelly denied her conjugal entitlements, but she blew her cover in the first scene, during coffee and Danish, when she pushed and pushed on his wheelchair but couldn’t make it go because the brake was on, which she didn’t know anything about since she had never touched the chair before.

  “Your chair must be broken, sweetheart,” she said with a very tight jaw herself.