“Here I am paying alimony meant for Donald Trump,” Herbert said, “and I’ve had less than thirty clients all week. Look at this.” He produced a napkin from off the bar and a pen from his shirt pocket. “It’s all a female code, alimony is, a secret language.” On the napkin before him he drew large letters, A L I M O N Y. “Now watch,” he said. Between the L and the I he inserted another large L and then an H. He wrote an S between the I and the M, and then an E between the N and the Y. He handed the finished product to Frederick. ALL HIS MONEY. “See what I mean?” he asked. “I’m telling you, it’s a secret language all their own.” Frederick scrunched the napkin into a tight ball. Herbert would soon be convinced that he was being followed by Elvis. Or that Atlantis was somewhere in Casco Bay.
“Can I get you another drink?” the geisha asked Frederick. “Anything at all?” She was leaning on her elbows, hands under her chin. Frederick considered the invitation. Perhaps he could express himself to this stranger. She was probably the closest he would ever get to Japan. And after all, geishas were expected to be knowledgeable about the elegance of the past as well as hip to present gossip. It was part of their job to entertain men in public restaurants. Frederick decided to chance it.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Hannah,” she told him.
“Hannah,” Frederick said, “when my sister was born, I was told that my mother was going to the hospital to have her tonsils out. I was five years old before I realized that Polly was a permanent part of my family.”
“Ah, come on, Freddy,” said Herbert. “Is this necessary?” Frederick held up a hand to silence him. He would start at the very beginning, with those adolescent angers, and work his way up to Dr. Philip Stone’s cold indifference. To his mother’s sleepy impassivity.
“When I was seven my father raped me,” Hannah said. “See this?” She produced a thin arm from out of the loose sleeve of her gown. Round scars, like small craters, formed a latticework running along the ulna. “Cigarette burns.”
Frederick felt very foolish now for his revelation about Polly’s birth. He didn’t have a single scar to bring forth, except the one he’d received when he cut his foot on that soda pop bottle at Willard’s Pond, on a Boy Scout outing. Or the one from the mumblety-peg incident, when Richard Hamel had tossed a jackknife on Frederick’s hand during a particularly vicious championship game. And Richard Hamel had cheated as well, insisting that the knife was not leaning too close to the earth on fives, and he had won. Up until the day they graduated from high school and went their separate ways, Frederick had hated Richard Hamel. He looked at Hannah. Could he share his jackknife scar with her? Could he explain how it hurts to lose a childhood championship game by defraud? He decided against it. She had probably swallowed jackknives in her day. She would open her mouth and say, “See this?” And he would lean forward in order to look down her throat, where he would see scars on her larynx, her pharynx, her palate. My God, but she had been raped by her father at the age of seven!
“Or you could hire Larry Wells,” Herbert now said. “He’d be like Jaws II. Only partially effective but not so costly.”
Frederick’s felt his eyes watering. He wanted to unburden himself of the albatross, to tell his sad story to these two wedding guests. Like the albatross, he had thought himself able to stay aloft in windy weather for a long, long time. But he had been plucked out of the matrimonial skies by his wife and, again like the bird, was now living on squid, better known as tofu. He was attracted to ships’ garbage, namely the China Boat regulars. He wanted to remind his brother how loud coffin lids could slam shut, and how their father’s had closed with a rude thunk, the final insult, as he and Herbert stood by. Polly had not been there. She was busy with her own dying. Their mother had remained at home, sound asleep. But he found he couldn’t talk about the family Stone, not even with a cold wind lashing about that opened fissure. He decided he would talk about other families. He would tell Hannah how the Brady Bunch was all grown up. And that Dale Evans was eighty years old now. It was true that even his false notion of family was crumbling. Even Robert Young, the dad that all of Frederick’s generation had pined for on Father Knows Best, had attempted suicide with a rubber hose, in his garage, drunk. All the things you thought you could depend on, all the familiar landmarks, were disappearing. The Union Gap were probably all grandfathers by now.
“Wouldn’t it be great if Mayberry was a place you could go to?” Frederick asked. He heard the break in his voice and knew that his composure was abandoning him. But he no longer cared. “You could go and sit on the front porch with Andy and Barney and Floyd. And Aunt Bea would bring you a bowl of homemade peach ice cream. And Opie would be having some major math problem at school that you could help solve.” It would be great. It would be heroic even, because Andy wouldn’t let fathers rape their little daughters. None of the tiny Mayberrians would have a single cigarette burn. And Helen Crump would tell Opie the truth about a potential baby sister. Frederick wanted to tell Hannah how his own father had never touched him, and that there had been pain in that, too. He wanted to explain how he had never come to know the meaning of family. Instead, he had watched from a distance, at Christmastime in department stores, from a corner table in some restaurant, at movie theaters, city parks. He had always been fascinated with how a real family seemed to work, like some great pinwheel, the children colorful vanes revolving happily around the parental stick. Now, at forty-four, he wanted a pinwheel of his own. But with Chandra gone, with Polly and Dr. Stone dead, his chances were made of smoke. No wonder men like Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty seek out, in their fifties, girls so young that a dozen children lie unborn inside them. “I just wish we could all live in Mayberry.”
“Look out,” Herbert said to Hannah. “You’re witnessing the nervous breakdown of the television generation.”
But Frederick was listening to another voice than Herbert’s, one warm and assuring. A Robert Young kind of voice, before the rubber hose, before the bottle of booze that bleak night out in the exhaust-filled garage. Time is more puzzling than space, Mr. Bator said softly, because it seems to flow or pass or else men seem to advance through it. But the passage or advance seems to be unintelligible.
“Time,” Frederick said. And that’s when he knew what he had to do. He knew that some scars don’t show up as small round craters. That sometimes a game of mumblety-peg was all sharp, glassy edges. He would take charge of time and not let it pass unintelligibly. He would advance through time like some kind of titan soldier. He would grab Cronus by those hoary, hairy balls. He stood up from his bar stool and looked at Herbert, who seemed ready to flee.
“Whatever it is, the answer is no,” said Herbert. He loosened his latest Impressionist tie, one on which Toulouse-Lautrec dancers kicked up narrow, red legs.
“Big brother, I’ve got a date with destiny,” Frederick said. “And destiny currently resides at 257 Bobbin Road.”
• • •
It was almost ten p.m. when they pulled up to the curb, just down the street from the yellow house, and sat there idling in Herbert’s big Chrysler.
“Shut the engine off,” Frederick said. Herbert sighed to make his point that he would rather not be there, but Frederick ignored this. Instead, he surveyed the house, the narrow lawn, the sloping veranda that jutted out from the upper windows. The red maple was full and leafy. The same lamppost threw out its yellow beacon. A soft rain had begun to fall in thin threads, but Frederick refused to let Herbert use the wipers.
“That will only attract attention,” he said. “Why would wipers be going on a parked car?”
“Why would two grown men be sitting in a parked car?” Herbert asked.
“And who recently wanted two grown men to be sitting in a parked car with two young cosmetologists?”
Frederick patted about his feet for the paraphernalia he had picked up at the house after they’d left the bar. A pape
r bag rustled dramatically. He pulled out a woolen ski mask and fitted it over this head. Herbert watched as he adjusted the eye holes, the nose hole, and then inspected himself in the mirror. It would be hot as hell, but he’d be anonymous.
“How do I look?” he asked.
“Like Spider-Man,” Herbert said, “who also has an identity problem. I never should have driven you here. I’m what they call a codependent.”
“You had no choice,” Frederick said. He was pulling on Chandra’s gardening gloves, lavender cotton things with round yellow flowers. “You’re being swept along by destiny.”
“I’m being swept along by an idiot,” Herbert said. “It’s apparent to even the mailman that this woman wants nothing more to do with you. So why can’t you hire a good lawyer and give the hell up? Do you know what your trouble is, Freddy? You’re as contrary as all the Stones before you. You’re Uncle William all over again. Remember the story about him?” Frederick did remember. Uncle William had been taken prisoner during World War II. Three days later, the Japanese gave him back.
“I never believed that story,” Frederick said. “Now keep your eyes on the street.”
He didn’t want to think of Stone men before him, failures in so many ways, failures except where cheekbones were concerned. He was in charge now for the first time in a long time. Maybe it was his lunch with Doris Bowen next to the millpond that had done it. Ponds, like happy hour at the China Boat, were teeming with life. Maybe it was everything Yeats didn’t say about those damned shuddering loins, that torn wall—or was it broken?—that poor fragile neck in that impervious beak. Maybe it was Doris’s own white breasts. He would mount the goddamn roof on Bobbin Road! He had been through a rainbow of lunatics the past month. He had lived through Reginald’s brown Conestoga, Joyce’s green hair, Lillian’s vermilion lips, Valerie’s maroon tights, Herbert’s orange cigarette tips, Budgie’s blue tail, Teddy’s milky condoms, Geraldo’s pink ass. He had survived the black silhouettes of his neighbors, those complacent beetles, their entire lives locked like shells about them. Yet he knew what his real motivation was, what had given him courage on that night. It was the knowledge of having seen her wheat-colored hair lace itself with gray, her red protest skirt fade into a soft rose. He had even watched the tissue that lines her eyelids and runs out over the balls of those beautiful eyes—Mr. Bator would know it as the conjunctiva—he had seen it turn yellow as an autumn vine. He had studied this Impressionist woman, her pats and dots and short strokes of pure emotion, with the tender and discerning eye of an art critic. For twenty-three years, since he first met her in August 1969, he had concerned himself with one single magnificent canvas. He had invested time with her, dammit, and it had not been time spent unintelligibly.
Frederick made sure the laces on his tennis shoes were tight, and then found the small flashlight in his jacket pocket. Already, he was beginning to sweat extravagantly.
“Honk twice if you see anyone approaching the house,” he told Herbert. “Especially if it’s the police.” Herbert shook his head.
“That’s a fine line of dialogue to pass between an accountant and a veterinarian,” he said. “‘If you see the police, honk twice.’ Are we Canada geese?”
“Honk twice,” Frederick said. “Besides, I’m not an accountant, remember? I’m a top criminal lawyer. Now don’t do anything to attract attention.” He got out and eased the door gently shut. Herbert whirred his window down.
“You get caught, I don’t know you,” he said.
Hunched over, Frederick crept slowly past the lamppost light, toward the maple tree. He had noticed the tree on his first trip past the house on Bobbin Road, its height and thickness. And it had all those limbs for an estranged husband to climb. At first he had disliked that word estrange. But after a bitter month of estrangement, he had changed his mind. It came from the medieval Latin extraneare, to treat like a stranger. It was the best word possible. He hid behind a large clump of something—perhaps he should take up gardening one day—and crouched there for a moment. All seemed quiet in the house. The downstairs was in darkness, but a light beamed from the upstairs window, the one he had studied so diligently during his first visit, the Petrarchan window, Laura’s window. The same maroon car was parked in the driveway, along with a small modern model. He didn’t know cars anymore. Like shrubs, they all looked the same. Cars probably came from Home Depot these days.
As usual, Chandra’s red Toyota was nowhere to be seen. He had no doubt she’d been hiding it in the garage. He felt the coil of rope bounce against his hip. Why he’d brought a rope hooked to his belt loop, he had no idea, except that it seemed reasonable to bring a rope. Keeping as low to the ground as he could, he eased away from the something and scuttled across the lawn to something else. He squatted there behind the shrub, and waited. The triumvirate Bitches of Fate obviously owed him a bone, for they tossed one at him by allowing the rain to stop. He made an impressive dash to the maple. He hadn’t climbed a tree since his boyhood and had no idea if he was still good at it. But wasn’t climbing a tree a bit like riding a bicycle? Or sex? Didn’t it come back instantaneously? Disappearances of neurons in the nervous system make the aging person less agile than the young.
“Fuck off, Mr. Bator,” Frederick whispered. The climb at first was easy enough. A few leaves on the smaller branches slapped against his face. By the time he’d pulled himself up to the fifth large branch his tennis shoes felt like balls of cement on his feet. He would begin a good exercise program, maybe even the next day. When he finally reached the stout limb that grew out over the slanted veranda, he paused to rest. But there was the lighted window. Indeed, there was Yeats’s wall waiting to be broken. Frederick hoped it would be the wall and not his neck. He would wait a moment, let his breathing resume its normal rate, before he attempted the limb. He rested his face against the smooth bark of the tree. The window was curtained, but once he was on the veranda he could peek into that opening he noticed, right where the two panels are supposed to join snugly together but rarely do. He was thankful that Robbie had a distaste for blinds, for there could be no doubt this was where he lived. Unless Chandra had moved on to another man. Who knew what she might do these days?
Frederick studied the layout before him. He knew well that the sloping roof could be treacherous, what with that smattering of light rain that had just fallen. After all, he had spent those college summers in roofing, a job he would never want again. The roof of Robbie’s house was a gable style, with a slope Frederick estimated to be nine in twelve, a steep mother, too steep for do-it-yourself roofers. The roofing was new slate. This must have cost Robbie an arm and a leg and the biceps he loved to flaunt. Slate was definitely expensive and had to be installed by professionals. How could Robbie afford a slate roof? He was a goddamn kid. But slate was a good choice. It lasted almost a lifetime, fifty years, the way some marriages were supposed to last. And it was durable as hell, fireproof, the way some marriages should be. Frederick hoped to God—in whom he didn’t believe—that someone had been careless with the chimney flashings, perhaps allowing them to join instead of overlapping. And he prayed the roofers had forgotten to install a cricket, so that Maine’s snow and spring water would build up behind the chimney and cause a myriad of leaks, preferably over the bedroom.
As he was about to crawl out the limb that would deliver him to the veranda, he heard a buzz from down on the street, an electronic trill that pierced the quiet of Bobbin Road. Herbert’s car phone.
“Hello?” he heard Herbert say. There was a pause and then, “What have I done wrong now?” Frederick held his breath and waited. But Herbert was far from finished. “Don’t get on my ass, Maggie. I pay enough alimony that you can take care of house repairs yourself. Don’t call me again. If you have a problem, get your Jaws to call my Minnow.” His voice resonated from inside the car. Frederick would kill Herbert Stone. He waited through a few seconds of silence. Herbert must have hung up. As Frederi
ck was about to move on, he heard him again.
A Marriage Made at Woodstock Page 14