20

by John Edgar Wideman

  But now as he strained to hear Nan's laughter once again, as he pleaded for her presence in the room, the Detective felt that jealousy leave him. Now, for the first time, he sensed fully what Nan had given Sadie that day a week before her death; understood the importance of having someone beside you in time as well as in space—no emptiness to touch you; everywhere, in every direction, every dimension, past and future too, a familiar loving face, part of yourself, to greet you. Now at the edge himself, near the end himself, he could no longer rue any happiness for anyone, any escape from loneliness, and certainly not for Sadie, the one he cared about most, the one he cared about even now, as if she were still alive, a form stirring in his mind, begging for comfort. Too late. He couldn't help her now; nor she, him.

  The Detective suddenly remembered the letters. The pure thought, unsuppressed; the clarified image projected before him: the white, feminine-fancy stationery, the rubber band, two lines of Sadie's script. And he waited—for the racing heart, for his body, his thoughts to leap out of rhythm, for the uncontrolled anger and jealousy, the paralyzing fear. But they never came, in their place a sadness so profound, so all-consuming, that he was past crying; and in his mind's eye, he saw Mrs. Klein again, her passive grief as they had sat alone in her living room, but this time she was his mirror, the image of his lonely survival The letters, their physical existence, their presence in the desk drawer beside him; the letters, his soul's metronome, his every dream's question, the one sure key to his unsolved case. The letters. Now that he could remain calm in the face of them, now that he could consider them without his body erupting, they seemed to fill him up with the simple fact of their existence, seemed the very word and substance of the sadness he felt, and an accusation in themselves.

  Before, and until now, that accusation had always been directed at Sadie, a flush of incredulous anger at her potential betrayal. But now that he could consider the letters more passively, analyzing them the way a detective should, he went one step further, searched for the cause of the cause, and began to shift the blame onto himself. The Detective had failed his wife, failed to make her happy—as with Nan in the hospital, when in need, Sadie had turned to someone else. The Detective couldn't bear that; even now he wondered if he could bear the realization that she had been forced to go outside of him for comfort, that he hadn't been enough. And helpless, he saw her once again lying on her death bed: Sadie, his Sadie, her flesh stripped and eroded by a pain so insistent that it couldn't be dismissed—no false hopes, no lasting relief—the finality of its meaning undeniable. And he wondered about the other, earlier pains, the ones he might have eased, the aches and hurts hidden behind her silent, uncomplaining face, her plea-less pride. Too late now. He had failed to soothe those more subtle pains when it had been possible; he hadn't even been aware of their existence, hiding them from himself. If only he had known, if only he had forced himself to see, if only he had been aware when he could have made a difference…if only he could comfort her now, to make her happy now would bring him peace.

  He couldn't bear it; even now the Detective couldn't bear the thought of her in pain: Sadie on her death bed; Sadie's emaciated face; Sadie's eyes, frightened, searching his for peace. But there was no comfort for an agony so real, so unhypothetical—only an end. He couldn't help her, not now, not then; able only to watch, a dumb witness to the death of his happiness. It was painless in the end, the doctor had told him; it was painless in the end, the doctor had tried to console. Painless for whom, the Detective had wanted to scream as he watched Sally sob in her husband's arms, Nan clinging to her coat. I died, I died then, too, he had told himself time and time again; but he knew now that it wasn't true. You die alone.

  The Detective heard the phone ringing in the hallway. He opened his eyes, startled by its sound, an alarm retrieving him to another world, the present tense, the here and now. The call was for him, he suddenly knew with clairvoyant surety, Charlie Wriggins or the Chief; either way an inquiry into the case, pressure to decide whose side he would take. If you must, if you must know, Mrs. Klein had told him, come back. But would she really tell him? First degree or second degree; murder, suicide, or accidental death, they weren't the language of her version of the truth, but it was the only language that Charlie Wriggins and the Chief—that the law—could accept. The law, he had served it all his life; could he turn his back on it now by ignoring a solution? could he betray his allegiance to the lifelong cause, to his own self-image? The Detective wondered if the old ideas mattered to him anymore. People, though, he knew, did matter; loyalty to a man meant more than allegiance to an idea, and he felt bound to the Chief. To ignore the possibility of an answer was to betray the Chief—not literally, not legally perhaps, but in fact; there was no escaping that. Just as there was no escaping the bond he felt to Mrs. Klein, the marriage of their common grief, his desire, his need to comfort and protect.

  The Detective heard his daughter's footsteps in the hall and then (he imagined them in his mind just before they occurred) three sharp knocks on his study door. He closed his eyes when, after a pause, the door swung open.

  “Dad,” he heard Sally call softly.

  He didn't move; he breathed through his nose; his belly rose and fell slowly as he sensed her drawing closer.

  “Dad,” she said softly, “it's for you.”

  The Detective sat motionless, time suspended, body suspended; he didn't need to open his eyes to see his daughter now. They were so close, so interdependent, that he knew her face better than he knew his own: the pinched concern, the constant conflict between fear and caring; always the struggle to do the right thing, features flexed in perpetual moral crisis. She was at that age when one thought one ran the world, when one assumed responsibility for it, a middle-aged martyrdom. It seemed so silly, so sad to him now, the Sea Gull Sallys striving to save us all, and for an instant he thought he might sit up and tell her: “Leave it alone, Sally; it will happen on its own.” But time suspended, body suspended, he didn't move; knew at last that he wouldn't, couldn't tell her. That was what old age was for—you had to feel it in your bones before you could believe that it was true.

  The room seemed so calm, his body so painless and peaceful, that the Detective felt as if he could wait there forever with his breath held. Only the fire was impatient, busily consuming itself, a hushed but relentless rustling beside him. He knew that his daughter still hovered above him, indecisive and concerned, and he knew too, in another feat of detection, that she would call out to him one more time—out of guilt for having hung up earlier in the afternoon, out of concern for his, her father's feelings; because she cared about him, because despite her worrying and her need to maintain control, she would do what she thought would make him happy as best she could. And when she did that, when she leaned closer and once again called softly just above the steady pant of the fire, “Dad,” he wanted to reach up and hug her for her effort. She tried so hard, her struggling ascent out of the pith of her own failures into kindness was so desperately human that he was moved to recognize it, to let her know that he knew. But by the time he could arouse his inert body—raise his head and open his eyes—the study door was closing, her back disappearing behind it.

  Too late, again too late to give comfort to his family. The Detective straightened up in his chair and conversed with his body, the language of old age, the paradox of suffering; reminding him that he was, at the same time, both alive and dying; arousing a fear that he would die before Sally would return again, before he could show her how much she mattered to him—a curse-prayer-promise tossed out into the night begging his survival for just that much longer. There seemed no end to this business of living, only to life itself; always a few more facts needed to settle the issue, solve the case. Death seemed to lack resolution; he put it off with these pleas for reprieve because he had too many things to do, a lifetime of loose ends to tie up. At the end, one should be able to gather all of the accomplices in one's life into a single room as at the climax of a murd
er mystery story, and there resolve one's relationships with them; explain every false lead and missed connection, reveal the alibis and extenuating circumstances; and then, after assigning guilt, bestow and receive forgiveness in an ordered, happy finale. If only he could see Sally just one more time before he died, one more chance to explain his feelings; if only he could have seen his father one more time, held his hand as he was dying; and Sadie, above all Sadie, if only she had told him, if only she had understood…. My gift, the Detective thought, was detection, a miraculous gift that appeared as if from nowhere, that wasn't even mine except to cherish and protect, that will leave me like a soul when I die, that seems to have deserted me already, the vessel empty, a prelude to the end. Detection was my gift and I wasn't very good at anything else; but I tried, Sadie, I did try, he wanted to tell her. I hope you knew, I hope you felt it somewhere behind the silence I so rarely broke through—how much you mattered, how much I would have sacrificed for you if I had only known how. To ease your suffering, to quiet your pain, I would have absorbed it all myself. I hope you knew, I hope you know that I'd accept, that I'd embrace even this awful loneliness if it brought you peace.

  The Detective suddenly remembered Mrs. Klein, felt again the shaking of her shoulders beneath his hand, heard again the palm-stifled sounds of her crying. And he was reminded of the endless and multiform suffering of all the men and women in his life, pain's many faces: his daughter sobbing in a hospital waiting room, Sadie's searching eyes, the Chief's perplexed exhaustion. Even Dexter's rigid mask couldn't hide from him now the shared anxiety in them all, the quiet, constant fear best expressed by Sally's need to intervene, her lack of faith: life dies when you close your eyes—better not blink! He would have reduced them all if he could have, compressed them into the quaking form of Mrs. Klein; and there he would have reached out and touched them, a benediction for the tired and frightened; there he would have told them, all the suffering survivors: “It's all right.”

  But could he say that to himself? Where was the source of peace in the world for an old man past his time? Could one offer comfort, forgiveness to oneself? There were moments when he had sensed a peace in Mrs. Klein, moments when he had believed she was tapping its secret source, moments when, as she had probed him, he had felt her to be his teacher and guide, possessor of a strange wisdom he had only begun to understand. She seemed then to beckon to him, to bring him closer. But in the end, she had only been human; in the end she had cried like everyone else, lonely like everyone else, just another of pain's many faces, although her suffering and isolation had seemed more perfectly complete, more fully understood—but was that because they were self-induced? I'll tell you, she had promised him at the day's end, two survivors grieving in the dark. Come back and I'll let you know. Would she, though?

  The Detective felt buoyant, expanding suddenly with that old sensation of dispossession, of time suspension, that instinctual belief preceding the infallible solution—his gift returning. But now, for the first time in his life, the gift frightened him; seemed now to have been infected by his philosophizing, by the uncertainty of those strange thoughts which had afflicted the last years of his life, bringing him not an answer unquestionable, not a solution, but another question in itself. And that question wasn't, would she tell him, but rather, could she? Did even Mrs. Klein know for sure? Would her answer, if she provided one, be anything more than a pro forma gesture to satisfy the law? Would it be anything more than an act of friendship, a reciprocal kindness to the Detective, giving him only what he wanted, what he felt he had to know, rather than the truth? And could he now, after his day alone with her, after those moments at the promontory point, could he himself accept any of the definite answers? Was there ever, the Detective suddenly thought, terrified by the thought, was there ever a solution? Not to satisfy the law, but for him, for her, for any man or woman? Was there ever an etiology, a chain of facts to be relied upon? Could one ever close one's eyes while at the brink, on the edge, and still be sure? I'll tell you, she had said. If you must know, if you must…

  The Detective rose, felt himself rise, above his chair, above his pain and exhaustion, the accrued erosion of a hard day, a hard life; and carried by his concentration, only the case to be solved on his mind, he walked past the fire to the desk beside him. Bending, one hand propped against the writing top for balance, he opened a drawer and removed a pack of letters, raising them then before his eyes.

  A pause then, a lingering sensation—tantalizing, frightening—of proximity in time and space to a conclusion, a crisis. Now unavoidably fate's accomplice, he feared his freedom, the weight of the impending decision, forced complicity in life—he alone to decide. The Detective's mind reeled for a moment, spinning memories of Sadie, a multitude of images from the days of their lives, all the framed scenes, the stored immortalities, the secured niches where she still lived in his mind, and all illuminated it seemed at the same time, an explosion of her being inside him. Sadie as his fiancée, Sadie as his wife, Sadie as a mother, breastfeeding their child, Sadie a thousand different times, tagged by a thousand different titles, and appearing so rapidly that they began to blur in his mind, becoming not one picture, not many pictures, but beyond them all, until he could no longer see her face or hear her voice, but just accept and believe in her life.

  A thought occurred to the Detective then, appearing in its entirety as if by magic. Perhaps he had read it somewhere or overheard it in conversation, but having lost the mental tenacity to force the connections, he couldn't recall its source, only the thought itself: “Identity is more than just content.” He would leave it to the Sallys, to the new generation of detectives, to chart the etiologies, to trace it back to its origins; he was through with that now. Instead, he held onto the thought, to the feeling it described, to Sadie's presence, so real to him now that he believed her by his side: the reprieve granted at last, a little more life; one last chance to show her that she mattered, to break through the silence, to ease her pain and earn his own peace by it; one last chance to prove that he loved her. His choice now. His freedom to decide.

  The Detective stands, has stood, is always standing, a man in a moment, a man in his study, a study middle class in all respects, Victorian Yankee. Its leather easy chair, oxblood red; the slotted cupboard of its roll-top desk; its bookshelves, inset, their contents arranged by subject; its Tiffany reading lamp illuminating the hung emblems of success, Latin-graved plaques and framed newspaper print—all evoke the bourgeois faith in order, in justice: that wild hope-belief in the eventual redress of effort with reward. A flagstone hearth and carved wooden mantel, memento-adorned with a Sherlock Holmes hat and luridly gleaming, fake gold statuettes, frame the fireplace, whose controlled destruction, a slow explosion of heat and light, hypnotizes this old man, this detective. Gravity-bent, he stands there, an arm outstretched, a pack of letters balanced on his palm. Flames, searing yellow against the black-charred brick, leap chaotically beneath his hand.

  Fact: he is alone.

  A man in a moment, a man in a crisis, the Detective peers into, peers from, the blurred and darkened corners of his life—for sense, for shape, for the sure means to decide, the sure lines. But there is no frame to the frame when you're in it; there is no meaning without movement and no movement without dying. Everything grows tentative, vaporous, murky, his life undefined, its borders stretching beyond the limits of his eyes, his mind. For him, no safe enclosure; just empty space, black infinity, the unknown to hold him.

  The Detective stands, has stood, is always standing, a man in this moment, a man at a fire, the letters balanced on his palm, he alone to decide—to forgive, forget? to let the question die? Living, relived, Mrs. Klein waits, hoping as she waits. Living, relived, Sadie waits, hoping as she waits, the unseen silent presence by his side. Helplessly, passively, with his hand on her chest, the murderess, the unfaithful wife, await the declaration, guilt or redemption, while outside the study a girl is heard laughing, and time suspended, is always hear
d laughing above the coarse, rasping voice of the fire.

  But does it happen—now or ever? objectively or in a manner of speaking? Can it really come to this: destruction of the evidence? Can it really be a case of “no corpse, no crime”? No, ignorance fails him; now and forever he knows that it fails him, forgetfulness too hypothetical to be born. Forgiveness is not to forget what he can never forget, but is instead to live the question, to suffer and survive it, to know always that he will never know and to accept that. Forgiveness is to sacrifice the old self-image, to deny his gift of detection, is to leave, now and forever, the case unsolved…because he loved her. Because he loves her.

  The Detective stands, has stood, is always standing. Always a hand on his chest; always poised at the fulcrum, on the cutting edge of paradox where opposites meet: judged and judging, alive and dying in the same moment—suffering. And waiting, always waiting for the miracle, for a reprieve he must believe in from a sentence he must take on faith alone as well. Always a man with the unknown before him; always alone at the end. But in spite of that, it happens; now and forever, he makes it happen; the sufferer, the survivor, he alone decides—becomes fate's accomplice, an accessory to the crime. He leans; he steps; he moves yet closer, daring even to close his eyes. And love spills from his palm, an old man's affirmation, into the purging flames, the purifying ocean, from one moment to the next, from one frame to another, the miracle: life.

  1982

  THIEF

  Robley Wilson

  He is waiting at the airline ticket counter when he first notices the young woman. She has glossy black hair pulled tightly into a knot at the back of her head—the man imagines it loosed and cascading to the small of her back—and carries over the shoulder of her leather coat a heavy black purse. She wears black boots of soft leather. He struggles to see her face—she is ahead of him in line—but it is not until she has bought her ticket and turns to walk away that he realizes her beauty, which is pale and dark-eyed and full-mouthed, and which quickens his heartbeat. She seems aware that he is staring at her and lowers her gaze abruptly.