Requiem, Mass.

by John Dufresne

  “Not cool.”

  She lifted her legs, and the swing uncoiled, spinning her like mad. She stood, tried to walk, lost her balance, and fell. “I love being dizzy, don’t you?”

  She told me that the kids at the orphanage were not really orphans except for this very tall boy named Ryan O’Brian or Brian O’Ryan, she wasn’t sure, who said he was going to join the Army as soon as he could. Mostly the parents were all poor and couldn’t afford to feed the kids. Or they were in jail. Billy Maloney’s dad shot a bank teller during a robbery in Fall River. Audrey told me that mostly the kids all did what they were told to do and then whined or pouted about it afterward. They were starting to grate on her nerves.

  I asked her if the nuns had said anything about her boots. She told me she’d worked that out. Then she said she wanted to visit Mom in the hospital.

  I said, “They won’t let us in.”

  When I went to see Audrey on Saturday morning—I was going to surprise her with a trip to the movies, 2001: A Space Odyssey—a nun with her sleeves rolled up, wearing rubber gloves and an apron over her habit, holding a damp rag in one hand and a can of Bab-o in the other, told me that Audrey was with her brother. I thanked her, said, no, I was her cousin Carmine from Lowell.

  “You look familiar,” she said.

  “I’ve got one of those faces, Sister.”

  I expected to find Audrey at home under her bed or in her closet reading. She had been home—her hat was on the kitchen table—but she was gone, and so was Deluxe. The Morrisseys hadn’t seen her. I walked to the field, to the schoolyard, to Iandoli’s, to Charlie’s, back to the orphanage. I went home and stared out the window. I walked to the church. Audrey hadn’t taken the stroller for Deluxe. I thought about calling the cops, but I knew that could only end badly. Where would she have gone? There were no Sandilands, after all.

  It turned out she had been riding the bus for hours. She had Deluxe in her schoolbag, and as long as she stroked his head, he was content and quiet. I saw her get off the bus in front of Charlie’s, and I ran downstairs, told her I was worried sick. She told me not to get all up in her face like that. “Take a pill, Johnny Boy.” Violet made us lunch. Audrey said she used her bus tickets to get around. She said she was trying to find the hospital to visit Mom.

  I told her she could get in big trouble like that, wandering around the city by herself, could get kidnapped or something. She told me that some old guy in a blue parka and brown leather gloves followed her off the bus, up Front Street, into Wool-worth’s, and out the back to Exchange Street. She lost him in W.T. Grant’s.

  BLACKIE TOOK us to the sixth-floor solarium at Four Crowned Martyrs and told us to sit and wait. Twenty minutes later he wheeled Mom in and parked her beside us. Her face was bruised blue and contused. Her bottom lip was split in the middle and swollen. She had a Band-Aid over her nose. Mom looked at Audrey and me and said, “Haven’t you tortured me enough?”

  I said, “Hi, Mom.”

  Blackie said, “It’s Johnny, Frances. In the flesh.”

  Audrey said, “I learned a new song, Mom.”

  Mom leaned toward me, pointed to Blackie with her chin, and said, “I’m supposed to listen to your minion, am I?” She took a pack of Pall Malls out of her robe pocket.

  Audrey stood, very formally, clasped her hands at her waist, and cleared her throat. Mom lit a cigarette, waved the match in the air, and dropped it to the floor. Audrey sang “Moon River” until Mom asked her to please, please, just stop it, please!

  I said, “There are no substitutes, Mom. You’ve watched too many science-fiction movies.”

  “I have, have I?”

  Audrey slumped on the couch beside Blackie. He put his arm around her shoulder.

  I said, “You’re Frances; she’s Audrey. I’m your son. I’m Johnny.”

  “Well, of course you think you’re Johnny. That’s how you’ve been—what do they call it?—programmed. You can’t help it. Your ignorance is your strength.”

  “So you think I’m lying?”

  “You’re not listening. You would have to have a will in order to lie. You’re a machine, bub. No heart, no soul.”

  “So where are we from, and who sent us?”

  “She’s the liar,” Audrey said. “She just doesn’t want us anymore.”

  I said, “So you think you’re important enough for some superior race…”

  “Did I ever say anything about a superior race?”

  “…to worry about?”

  “Gave yourself away there, my friend.” She smiled.

  “What threat would you pose to them or to the government or to whoever you think is doing this?”

  “I know things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?” She laughed and the laugh became a coughing fit.

  “You’re killing yourself with the smokes, Frances,” Blackie said.

  “I’ll give you credit,” she told me. “You’ve learned how to seem.”

  WHAT AUDREY had said about Mom’s not wanting us seemed improbable, but I did need to consider the possibility. But I figured if Mom really didn’t want to be with us, she could have packed her suitcase and left. That’s a lot easier than all this pretense and hysteria. She could have dumped us both at the orphanage, for that matter. She could have had the Welfare people warehouse us in some squalid foster-care facility. She was telling imposters to leave her alone, not telling us. At least that’s what I preferred to believe.

  I walked Audrey to St. Anne’s. When we got to the gate, she stopped and kissed my cheek, thanked me, and said so long.

  “I’ll walk you to the door.”

  “I’ll be fine. Really.”

  I opened the gate and we walked up the path to the steps. Audrey thanked me again, shook my hand.

  “I’ll wait till you get inside.”

  I opened the door. She peeked inside, looked left and right, and took off running down the hallway, her boots clomping on the hardwood floor. She waved without turning back. “Adios, Johnny Boy!” She cracked me up.

  I called Mom while Blackie was downstairs taking a shower. She said she was so happy to hear from me and told me about the recent visit from the aliens, the clones, the robots, whatever they were. Said she was disappointed in Blackie’s falling for their ruse. “When I get out of here, we’ll go to Whalom Park.”

  “It’s December.”

  “We’ll go sledding on Asylum Hill.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “This little guy just doesn’t want to be born.”

  “You’re not pregnant.”

  “Why else would I be here?”

  “You had a breakdown.”

  “Jeez. They’ve got me on so many meds I can’t think straight.”

  “You’ll get better.”

  “Have I been under a lot of stress lately?”

  “I think you get confused when you see things, Mom. Maybe you should close your eyes when you’re home. Wear an eye mask.” I was happy to be talking to the old, confused, but not delusional Frances again. I felt sad that she had to try so hard to find herself when all I had to do was wake up, and there I was. “Can’t wait till you get home and we’re one big family again.”

  “Don’t let’s get carried away.”

  “It’ll be like it was.”

  “‘Like it was’ made it like it is.” She hung up on me, and that was the last time I spoke with her for several months. The doctors decided that Mom would be better off, that she would recover more readily and more fully, by not seeing us or seeing Dad. And by the time we spoke again, I had another mother.

  Your Beamish Boy

  IT OCCURS TO me now that my real struggle was not in the past, but is with the past. I mean the effort now to have then make sense. Of course, there’s nothing I can do to change what has happened, and, in truth, I wouldn’t change a moment of it; otherwise, I wouldn’t be parked here at the desk, your beamish boy, doing what I’m so busily and contentedly (
for the moment anyway) doing. Writing. I’d be somewhere else, doing something else. Or I’d be dead. I subscribe, as you can see, to a chaos theory of time, in spooky action at a chronological distance, you could say. I believe that had I not flapped my wings in alarm and fluttered away from a budding romance with Chrissy Nolan—even now I get a chill at the sound of the name—when I was seventeen, I’d be tending bar in Spooner, Wisconsin, or some place like it, wondering if I’d have to bail one of the kids out of jail again this weekend and if the Ski-Doo would start up and how long could I sit here in the dark alone, drinking shots of Canadian Mist after closing.

  There are so many things best left unremembered. I won’t even get into l’affaire Nolan except to say that four years later Chrissy sicced her overbearing and woeful husband on me by telling him that she and I had been having a fling for quite some time and that the baby wasn’t his. So Mr. Farley James called me up and told me he’d be over to my house in fifteen minutes with a gun. I told him if I didn’t come out to start the shooting without me. I stayed in the house—and away from the windows—until he stopped his screaming and went away.

  DAD SHOWED up out of the blue one afternoon a week before Christmas and took Audrey out of St. Anne’s. I didn’t know what was up, and Dad wasn’t talking. I didn’t ask, maybe because I didn’t want to know. I thought, I’ll just relax like this is just another day in our lives. Dad called Dr. Reininger. I eavesdropped from the living room. Mostly he said, “Uh-huh, uh-huh.” Then he called the hospital, and I heard him say, “Not until when?” We ordered a large mushroom and pepperoni from Pizza ©. Audrey scraped off the mushrooms and gave them to Deluxe, who licked the sauce and ate the bits of cheese. School’s good, we said. That’s good, he said. Veronica? She’s good, I said. Good. Yeah, it sure is cold, I said. Freezing, Audrey said. Your mother’s going to be fine, he said. Got a little something they call Cotard something or other. She just needs some rest. Good as new, I said. Fit as a fiddle, he said. Audrey said, What’s going on?

  Dad said, “I want you kids to get packed. We’re going on a Christmas vacation.”

  I said, “Where to?”

  Audrey said, “We can’t leave Mom.” She cried.

  “Mom’s not up to it, sweetheart,” Dad said. “But she wants us to enjoy the holidays. Trust me.”

  “We’ll send her a card,” I said.

  Audrey said, “Will we have a tree?”

  “Of course,” Dad said.

  “And presents?”

  “Wouldn’t be Christmas without presents.”

  Audrey bent down and told Deluxe we were all going on vacation. Dad said Deluxe’d be better off with Caeli. Audrey looked at me, her little chin trembling. I told Dad I didn’t think Deluxe’s coming was up for debate.

  We packed our suitcases and the litter box up in the bunk of the cab. Plenty of room for the three of us to nap or lounge back there. The sun was just coming up. Violet ran out from the house with a cooler full of sandwiches. Dad hammered the tires, hopped in, blasted the air horn, and we were off, bobtailing it to points unknown to us. By evening we were pulling into a truck stop as bright as any city there in the mountains of Virginia.

  Dad parked the rig beside a mobile chapel at the edge of the parking lot. He said the walk would do us good. Audrey said, Carry me. Dad bent over and Audrey leaped on for a piggyback ride. The chapel was a semi trailer resting on its support legs with a door in its sidewall above the auxiliary tank and a flight of fold-out stairs to the asphalt. JAMMERS FOR JESUS was painted on the side. A small sign by the door read, CHAPLAIN BUCK ALEXANDER, AVAILABLE 24/7/365. We could hear tinny organ music from inside like it was being played on an eight-track machine. We headed for the restaurant that Dad called the Chew and Spew. It was like a carnival in there, noisy, flashy, garish. Lots of shouting and laughing and smoke. We sat in a booth. We were the only kids in there, and the only women were the waitresses. Audrey ordered a bologna burger and a Coke float. Dad got the Montreal smoked meat sandwich, and I got a grilled cheese. A guy in a cowboy hat at the booth across the aisle was telling his buddy how he blew his turbo and figured to spend the night here, so he was fixing to find himself a lot lizard to kill the time. Audrey kept trying to get Dad to tell us where we were going. Disneyland? she said. The Emerald City? Dad said he’d never tell. She said that wasn’t fair. But he did say we’d get there by tomorrow night. Our plan was to fill the tank, drive to a motel about an hour down the road, get some rest, let Deluxe stretch his legs and do his business, wake up early, and drive.

  A clean-shaven guy with enormous earlobes, wearing bib overalls and a white dress shirt buttoned at the neck, stopped at our booth and smiled. The cuffs of his shirt stopped above his wrists. He had a Bible in his left hand. He held his right hand above his head, looked at Dad, and said, “Brother, can I ask you, do you have any kind of spiritual belief?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal lord and savior?”

  “I’m trying to sit here with my family and enjoy my smoked meat.”

  “Do you believe there’s a heaven and a hell?”

  “I’m asking you nicely to leave us alone.”

  Audrey slid her float to the edge of the table.

  The man who might be Chaplain Buck Alexander said, “Let us bow our heads and pray.”

  “Let’s not and say we did,” Audrey said.

  The man said, “Brother, if you fell over and died right now, right here, if your face hit the Formica, I mean, if your heart stopped beating, where would you go?”

  “Heaven,” Dad said.

  “But would God let you in?”

  Dad put his sandwich down and said, “All right, that’s enough, now. If you—”

  “If what you believe is not true, would you want to know?”

  Audrey said, “Oops,” and poured her float down the gentleman’s pants legs.

  DAD GOT pulled over for speeding on Highway 11 outside of Cleveland, Tennessee. Audrey and Deluxe were conked out in the sleeper cab. I was studying the road atlas, trying to determine from our previous course and from our present direction where the hell we were headed, constructing what I would now call a fourteen-hour cone of probability that stretched from Biloxi to almost the Texas border to Shreveport. I would have a better idea when I saw what highway we took out of Birmingham if, in fact, we were going to Birmingham. The truck continued to idle, so I could hear Dad and the cop outside, but not what they were saying. Their voices both sounded calm as pudding. Dad hopped back up into his seat and wished the trooper a merry Christmas. The trooper tipped his Stetson and said, “You be good, now, Mr. Donais. Safe home.” Dad ground the gears into first, put on his blinker, and eased out onto the highway. He said, “I need to paint a biblical verse up there on the cab. They like that down here. ‘Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.’ Something like that.”

  “Where’s the ticket?”

  “We settled out of court.”

  “What did he call you?”

  “Donais, as in Raymond Donais. My alias, my nom de guerre. Got to spread those moving violations around somehow.”

  Dad told me to reach under my seat and take out the attaché case. I did. It was scuffed brown leather with a sticker of Yellowstone National Park on the top. The clasps were rusted, and one side of the handle had been repaired with twine. He told me the combination and told me to open it. A bottle of aspirin, an Argosy magazine, and a little black address directory. He told me how to release the false bottom. In the secret compartment I found a dozen sets of fake identifications, a couple even had photos of Dad.

  “You’re breaking the law.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Do you ever forget who you are?”

  “I get to live a dozen lives.”

  “When do you get to be my father?”

  “Don’t be melodramatic. I’m always your father.”

  “Or you’re always pretending to be.”

 
“I can tell the difference between who I am and who I made up. Ray Donais, he’s from Newark, New Jersey. Rusty Driggs is from Round Rock, Texas, and he talks like this here—” Dad was hardly moving his lips when he spoke. “And he wears this big old rodeo belt buckle.”

  “And Roscoe what’s-his-face?”

  “He’s me, too.”

  Now, having written that unmasking scene, and in the interest of full disclosure (and because I might be grilled about this someday on Larry King Live), I have a confession to make. My father and I never had that dramatically convenient conversation. All of Dad’s revelations leaked out over the following few days, but what would have been the point of dragging it out over multiple scenes? My way you get the accumulated facts, the streamlined truth. I’m sorry if you’re offended, but sometimes a writer needs to bend the truth to fit a more efficient and attractive shape. And sometimes the writer finds that he has to flat-out make things up because that’s the way he wants or believes his life to have been. So he changes the truth to change the facts because he’s trying to make sense of his life, and the life he knows he lived is not always the life his fallible memory recalls. Let me give you a case in point.

  Last night Annick and I went to eat with Ricky and Nikki Vladimir at their house in Coconut Grove. Built in 1915. Dade County pine, coral fireplace. Gorgeous. They’re married and are both writers. Ricky also had a long career in public relations and knows all the celebrities you’ve ever heard of. Spot stayed out on the patio with Pumpkin the aging wiener dog and tried to get her to play take-away or pounce. The Vladimirs’ stories led from something like JFK to Ike to Richard Nixon to David Frost to Diahann Carroll. Diahann, it turns out, lived in Ricky and Nikki’s apartment building in Manhattan with her little daughter. She was trying to make it in show biz in those days. One afternoon she asked Ricky for his advice. Should she give up show biz and become a hairdresser? Under no circumstances, Ricky told her, and we were thinking, What might not have been!