“Gandhi drank his urine, considered it beneficial to health,” countered Jonathan, wishing immediately he hadn’t said anything at all from the moment he sat down.
“By-products give death, and how old was Gandhi when he died?”
“Old.”
“He was seventy-nine when he died you call that old?”
“I should live so long.”
“Wasn’t Gandhi murdered, Mr. Berkeley?”
“That’s right, by a fanatic Hindu,” Jonathan agreed with Dill.
“You people weren’t even born what do you know. Gandhi died of recycling the highly corrosive urea produced in his kidneys and micturated from his body for one reason only, because it is waste, and no longer wanted by the system. Should have ingested olive-green seaweed, from the Sargasso, inhibits cretinism and myxedema. Paella,” he repeated quietly, then, raising his voice: “Alma? Bring me my milk, please.” And then he had a good laugh, to himself.
Having a pretty good time with us, Jonathan thought, abashed at how easily still he was drawn in by his father, drawn in by the false sense of having outgrown him, in some way, and half the time drawn in only to be set up for some laughter. Alma might have been wrong, he seemed awfully capable. Owen was quiet again.
Alma came into the dining room, “You want to eat your paella first.”
“You don’t listen to me—” turning to Dill, who focused on the tufts of black and gray hairs that grew out of Berkeley’s ears. “Neither one of them listens to me, they never did.”
“Of course we listen,” and she sat down next to him, pulled the napkin out of its ring, snapped it and placed it in his lap.
Jonathan watched her; she had assumed the mother’s role—the catering, the baby talking. She handed him a soup spoon and nodded at the bowl. Tentatively, he brought a small shrimp up to his lips, which were curled in disgust.
“You’re acting like a child,” she said.
The soup spoon clattered in his dish, and brothy rice carried a shrimp over the lip onto the tablecloth. “Burnt my, goddamn this stew.” Hands shaking, he pushed his chair away from the table and with some effort rose to his slippered feet to shamble out of the room.
Dill smiled, a misplaced attempt at conspiratorial mirth, but Jonathan’s face was wrapped in anger, and Alma caught the look and interpreted it for what it was: a display of just that anger he had grown up under, a bleakness she could compare to any of the disused, wrath-embedded rooms in the house they had explored together as children, warned by their mother to be quiet, and to stay as far away as imagination could take them from the suite of rooms on the second floor where their father worked. Worked, Jonathan said to himself, and felt as if he too might begin to rock with laughter. Fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, damned if it isn’t the most tedious war of them all.
Jonathan showered, put on fresh clothes, and went downstairs and out into the morning.
The fields were still blanketed in dew and a fine steam sat over the river below. An ultramarine line ran along the western horizon but the brown sky so quickly bled to the pale green spread across it now he had barely perceived its transformation. As he walked down through the grass, long and each spear of it wet, toward the field, he could see the moon huge before him, hanging low and dissolving. It looked like a cement medallion, pocked and genial. Then it was gone. The morning star had already burned out into the blue. His babouches were waterlogged with the dew that had collected on them and when he came back up to the house and walked into the kitchen he slid them off and carried them dangling by two fingers of one hand.
“Good morning.” He tossed the slippers on the stone floor by the door and sat down at the old refectory table and Alma brought him a cup and saucer, the same china they had grown up with, Blue Willow stamped on the reverse. The bone china painted with its familiar cubist pattern of lotus tree, bodhis crossing a bridge over a brook, quirky vessels sailing in the sky littered with cherry blossoms, the central palace, the woman in kimono on the bamboo porch of the pagoda, and the indecipherable geometric shapes, like op art, that ran around the edges of the plate. He knew the pattern without studying it—less recognizable in an immediate way was the hand that laid it on the table. Jonathan smelled his coffee, the scent of the kitchen itself.
“So—”
“So,” she agreed, “I feel like for some reason I ought to apologize for his behavior last night but I know, of course, that, well obviously it isn’t my fault.”
“Alma,” Jonathan frowned.
“I mean, I know it’s not. It’s just I hoped we’d have a good talk, everybody would get along, it’s not very often we’re together anymore, all of us, but on the other hand John you could have been a little more tolerant.”
“I didn’t come all this way, look I don’t want to talk about it, what I want to know is are you going to tell me about what’s going on here, why the telegram.”
“I don’t know, exactly that is; I’m not sure what—”
“When I got in to the station, Dill said something funny, said he was sorry about Owen, what did that mean?”
“He shouldn’t have said, I mean maybe you misunderstood.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“I’m not sure. He’s going in and out more, I guess you could see … but it’s less that than, well, there are all these telephone calls, different voices, the mortgage on the house—”
“What mortgage?”
“He’s taken out some mortgage on the house if what I understand is right, a second mortgage third mortgage, the whole property, there seem to be these bank managers calling, some loan officer, always angry.”
“Calling about what?”
“I don’t know what they want, people coming around peeking into the windows, and some consultant shows up the week before last at Dill’s in New York with insurance papers, saying he was looking for me, next of kin.”
“Did you sign anything?”
“No, there hasn’t been any paper presented to me to sign, I’m just saying this has all been like spirits, and it feels like somebody’s trying to upset, I don’t know, a balance somewhere, but—”
“He is in trouble, you know.”
“What?”
“Owen. He’s in trouble—inside. There’s something wrong with him.”
“You always say that, I think he’s been pretty good recently.”
“Alma, listen. Why did you ask me to come? Anyway, I agree, he seems good to me, call it good, but look, how long has this business of people peeking in windows been going on?”
“About a month ago I think it started.”
“You know what it probably means?”
“What.”
“Nothing. Some pervert. Some joke.”
She shrugged.
Jonathan looked into his sister’s eyes. They were the same as his own: blue, and sprinkled with flecks of black and gold. As he began to talk she found she wasn’t listening to him. She worried that the night before he’d excused himself and retired early because he was angry at her for asking him to come. She’d gone to bed despondent, dozed off after midnight, and dreamed fitfully (room of biped antelopes, suits, gowns, cocktails cocked before them in hoofed hands—cut to a warehouse bazaar where a vicious cavalry was intent upon breaking down huge aluminum doors—how was she supposed to interpret that?) and got up to smoke a cigarette by herself. The bedroom overwarm. She smoked sitting in a chair by the open window looking out at the graphite lawn as Dill breathed noisily, asleep under the sheets. She remembered thinking, Jonathan’s not going to be able to fix this. “I thought Jonathan? I thought what would you like to do today, do we have to go into all this on the first morning because I thought first we ought to go visit ma before anything else, I’ll take you why don’t we go ourselves this morning, can’t we do that?”
Jonathan watched her. She had the same sweatshirt on as she had worn the evening before. Her breasts were defined at the flourishes of the white calligraphy. Very Berkeley breasts,
full and plump, ready to nourish. She felt she was more unstable than she really was, he thought. She needed his approval but it was not for this he felt a strong sensation of affection come over him. Not a bullshitter; maternal, and of good heart.
Fifteen minutes, he figured. If his father were true to his old habits he wouldn’t be out of bed until ten-thirty, two hours hence. Alma would come looking for him, within ten or fifteen minutes, so he had to work quickly. This might be his only opportunity.
But the bolt was frozen in place. It resisted with such steadfastness he was afraid he would end up breaking the key in the lock. Deferential to the racket Jonathan made by cranking the handle, a mouse—albino, whose pink eyes fathomed the rubble labyrinth of its circuitous residence—scurried away to the wall. He jiggled the key in the lock again but it would not be coerced. There was another door, he remembered, through which he could get into the offices—the place where Owen had worked, hidden from the world, passed his days, often nights, where his research, everything that defined him, had gone forward.
He went down the hall and found another door that led through a corbeled passage to the top of a back staircase. Up several steps, across a short landing, down several steps and he reached a door painted pink. It was unlocked. He went in.
The sewing room was cramped. It had served in the past as a dressing room, or a sitting room, ancillary to the capacious master bedroom which Owen had converted in the 1950s into his laboratory/study. The door—also pink—by which the two rooms were connected was locked, but Jonathan managed without trouble to open it with the thin steel of a table knife, brought up from the kitchen, wedging down to meet the lock at the angle that compelled it to give way. The door closed with a click behind and he was immersed in steam-thick light sieved through damask heavy as hide. He slid the knife into his back pocket.
“My god,” he said.
The air was oppressive. He threw back the heavy curtains: the light spilled through in harsh blocks. It seemed as if it had not penetrated into the room for years. The chair, arms threadbare, cushion a shabby concavity, seemed pathetic, bared to the world. An army blanket, of a nondescript color, an artifact of its owner’s tour in the service, lay crumpled beside it. Jonathan thought, This is outrageous, it’s … but his frustration burgeoning, unfurling itself, did not overtake his attentions which were summarily wrested from the sense of his father here, alone in his laboratory, sitting up stiff as a mannequin, breathless and bloodless, to the clutter that lay before him, a proud mess shining in silken webs of silver. Strewn about the room, besides the books and papers covered in Owen Berkeley’s notes (hypotheses, equations, autobiographical outpourings), was laboratory equipment. He walked over to his father’s desk—or desks, rather, as he had taken two tables, each with all of its leaves added so they were extended to full length, and arranged at one end of the room perpendicularly, one abutting a wall and stacked to the ceiling with bookcases. Their shoddiness notwithstanding, he could see at a glance that the collocation of books, offprints and monographs that stood in these crates was as highly systematic as ever. The other table extended out into the room and faced the windows. Stacked on it was a year’s worth of mail.
Jonathan began to sort through the pile. Catalogues from Carolina Biological Supply, form letters from the copyrights office in Washington, magazines, a partially completed 1040 tax form, bank statements, missives from three real estate firms expressing continued interest in “handling” Berkeley house should the property become available, a birthday card from Alma. Piles of more paper, parcels on the carpet in vast uncertain stacks, books caterpillaring along the wainscot and heaped on top of them more books.
It looked as if there would be too much to go through. The trick with the knife, jimmying open the door from the sewing room, was a remnant from childhood, something he’d once figured out (and never told anyone about), which remained simple as swimming; but to find his father’s address book in this litter would take luck.
Awkwardly he shuffled through the stack that spilled from a wire basket on the library table at his immediate left. There was every possibility the booklet would not have Madeleine’s name listed in it anyway. The light in the room seemed to harden as he narrowed his eyes to the words, names, numbers, codes, colorful stamps, dust jackets, a wild mélange of scrawlings from a woman in Liechtenstein, named Lüchinger. Written in a broken English it read:
In response to the your Query I have One Hundred and Seventeen years old and it is my Diet to eat plain Tripe and Wasser and to kept my Body Pure on the Seventh Day of God’s Week. If you please make out your Money pay to me in DM Cash this shall appreciated be. PS: Gewürztraminer is also benefit Health.
Jonathan put the letter back into its envelope, and opened another:
Aunt Tillie here and my second cussin by my ma’s line her name of Mildred who is elder yet, & also Mildred she got a freind on the Bingo team down at Elks Clb. has a quaintans down there at the nursing Home who’s got her a brother fought in the Little Big Horn and all he ever ett afore they got him in there in that there nursing Home was black beans & shredded cow beef. Mind, strict beef of a cow body, no beef of lamb, pig, bull or any other beast of four foots. Cow, & mind you, shredded. This manner is which the natural health giving Erbs and Spices may enter the Blood flow. In respect & Advance appreciation for your bursement in respect of these advisements.
There was this:
Collard green, the fresh raw milk of a chevron, no flesh of the animal, amaranth grain, kale, limabean, much buttermilk, no egg nor any Rocky Mountain oyster, considerable root of the cattail or if that not available to the sickly body considerable sweet spuds. My personal age 114, verifiable with authorities of the State of West Virginia.
He put these back on the stack, looking quickly at the documents on top of piles which rose out of other wire baskets, but all he could find were more letters, postmarked from around the world, each of a similar nature. The correspondence was massive, but it looked as if few of the letters had been answered, and indeed Jonathan came across a box beside the table on the floor which was filled with letters complaining that Mr. Berkeley had not lived up to his part of the agreement.
Prominent at the center of the green blotting pad which seemed to be the central writing area was a long letter which began with the words “Dear Berkeley, your letter to hand” (which seemed a rather stilted old phrase given that it was very obviously written in a child’s script). A number of words in the letter had been circled in red ink, and transferred in Owen Berkeley’s hand onto a separate sheet of paper attached to the letter by a pin.
The words were:
Chocolate,
bowl of saltwater,
crow,
worm,
birds,
fish,
game,
bananas,
lotus,
turtle,
horse,
ice.
Another recipe for immortality.
Behind him a wall of cages came alive. The mice in them began to stir. Several started running with such speed inside their basket treadmills that Jonathan was certain the sound could be heard all over the house. He tried to shush them, but his movements only made them more excited. One of them depressed a small plunger that was fixed at the base of its cage, and this set off a crisp, faint beep. Immediately some of its fellow inmates enacted the same procedure. Jonathan did his best to ignore them, and continued looking frantically. The phrase give it up and get out of here had visited an instant before the book, tucked inside its unbending leather covers, emerged and was in his hands.
Under M, nothing; nothing under W for Work. He turned to the beginning of the alphabet. None of the names was recognizable. Aaron, Abouassi, Almeda, Anderson, Ayer read like alphabet soup in a melting pot; at the end of the Bs and seemingly out of place was “Daughter” and a number.
The clicking sound the telephone made each time its wheel revolved back to its original position seemed deafeningly loud. H
e wondered, would he be able to recognize Maddie’s voice after all these years, if she answered? or would Henry answer? Instead, it was a recording and its deliberate message, a woman stating she was not willing to come to the telephone but that a name and number accompanied by a substantial reason for her to return the call might or might not, as circumstances dictated, prompt a response. The tip of Jonathan’s tongue slid up over his piltrum, then wetted his lips. There was the smell of antiseptic in the room he noticed in the instant he recradled the handset; that, and the odor of decay—some hapless mouse decomposing in a vent no doubt, or a squirrel that had wintered in the attic and had got itself trapped up there, just the kind that can gnaw through the electrical wiring and set a house on fire.
It was the stack of odd-shaped letters, written in childish script, in pencil, on sheets of thin salmon butcher paper, and with envelopes whose Honduran stamps were familiar—presidential profile, Caesarian and torpid, engraved on their faces—that caught his eye as he reached across the desk to replace the booklet. The letter on top—they were stacked with comparative care, and there seemed to be four of them—was disarming in that its tone, its language, and its import were completely out of character with what age the writer surely must have been, if the handwriting were to be trusted as a measure of such matters. As Jonathan read, feeling both angry and silly at the same time, a host of problems began to formulate themselves before him, and that grown-up inner world, that sanctum which the offices had always been since he was a child, suddenly began to open up. Phrases like “and if in the course of your custodianship It happens to pass away or in any manner be disabled or in any way injured, it is understood that the full responsibility for such accident shall fully be borne by you, the custodian”—“so many examples of breakthroughs both in the applied sciences and even the arts that have taken place not in industrial think-tank scenarios or, god forbid, in the groves of academe, that one begins to wonder is there any other possible way in which to proceed: that is, just to think of all the credit Edison gets, while Nikola Tesla, who is still considered a madman, a freak, something suitable to a carnival sideshow, we acknowledge, men such as you and I, to be the real pioneer behind electricity, radio, radar, the electron microscope, vertical take-off aircraft, TV, solar energy, etcetera etcetera—and what did his neighbors at the foot of Fifth Avenue, just above Washington Square, what did they think when his windows exploded blue flashes, exciting the laughter of delight from friends such as Mark Twain, echoing across the dry summer cobblestones and down into the park, as he tested a cordless, phosphor-coated bulb, or blew two million volts of electrical ganglia around himself for no other reason than to demonstrate his own genius? what did they think? they thought well how in the hell can we deport him to Yugoslavia whence he came with a few pennies and some horrid verse?—this, and I tell you as a comrade and in sympathy with what anguish your reclusivity must sometimes breed, is your lot, or might be, also, and this is why we feel your project worthwhile, and are willing to throw ourselves behind it to the degree we have and do”—“so happens that in our research and utterly by chance we discover that the place we have chosen safest and most comfortable for It and the diplomatic escort who will accompany happens to be the residence of a relative of yours who we assume will be ready to assist in directing the final leg of the long journey, and whereas, per our earlier communication, all responsibility once It has reached American soil is transferred to you for the period of inspection and, it can be assumed without overbearing assuredness & certainly without any hint of pressure, custodianship, we assume this decision will meet with your approval and intend to proceed immediately with our arrangements”—phrases like these were Gothic to the point of hilarity. The offices were wrenched open, indeed; it was as if it were a physical thing, as if it could be heard.
Come Sunday Page 32