Lying with the Dead

by Michael Mewshaw

  “Can I have another Coke?” Maury asks.

  “Sure.” Quinn waves to the waitress. “What are you looking at?” he says to Maury, who’s squinting through the bus windshield.

  “The seat where I rode and the rack where I kept my bag.”

  With Maury preoccupied, Quinn and I are free to trade glances. I’m afraid he’ll roll his eyes and crack a joke. It’s not like I’ve never made fun of Maury myself and laughed at Quinn’s fooling around. But tonight we have serious things to talk about. “We need to discuss assisted living,” I say.

  Maury lowers the bus from his eye. “What’s that?”

  “It’s where Mom’ll have care around the clock,” I say. “She’ll have her own room and three nutritious meals a day.”

  “Sounds like Patuxent,” Maury says.

  Somebody chuckles, and I’m prepared to be annoyed at Quinn. But the laughter’s from Lawrence, who’s brought Maury’s second Coke. “Am I interrupting family business?”

  “Not at all.” Quinn clambers to his feet and shakes Lawrence’s hand. Maury keeps his hands on his lap.

  Lawrence kisses my cheek. “Hi, hon. Scoot over and let me have that chair.”

  Quinn and Lawrence are right away on a first-name basis, and Maury … Maury is on his own basis. He gazes out the window where white streaks fall like chalk marks on a blackboard. The sleet has changed to snow.

  “It’s not supposed to accumulate,” Lawrence promises us.

  “I wish it would,” Quinn says. “I haven’t seen a heavy snowfall since I moved to London.”

  “I love snow,” Maury says.

  That’s all I need. A blizzard to maroon us in this restaurant. It shouldn’t matter that Lawrence isn’t as tall and handsome as my brothers. But I wish he hadn’t worn a Banlon sweater and Sansabelt slacks that make him appear paunchier than he is. Lawrence has a basically good body and is healthy from playing thirty-six holes every weekend. While he doesn’t have Maury’s shoulders or Quinn’s cheekbones, he’s going a distinguished gray at the temples. If only he wasn’t so eager to please and didn’t have an aggravating habit of talking like a political candidate.

  “Am I happy to meet you for the first time under these circumstances?” he asks Quinn, and promptly answers his own question. “Of course not! Would I rather your mother was hale and hearty and we could meet in London? That goes without saying! Do I hope that day comes soon? You bet! But am I glad we got this chance to talk? Obviously I am. I like your mother. She’s a pistol.”

  “Yeah,” Quinn agrees. “Loaded with live ammunition.”

  Just when I fear Lawrence will behave like a dork all night, Quinn acts like an idiot himself. The waitress takes our order, and he asks about each item on the menu, “Is it fresh?”

  “Sir, all our fish is fresh. We buy it off boats from the bay.”

  “Are you telling me these Alaskan king crab claws come from the Chesapeake?”

  “No, they’re flown in from Seattle. But they’re real fresh.”

  “You mean frozen.”

  “Yeah, frozen fresh.”

  “Frozen is the opposite of fresh.”

  “No, spoiled is the opposite of fresh.”

  “Is anything here fresh and unfrozen?”

  “I’ll ask in the kitchen.”

  She goes off, and Quinn says, “Do you suppose the poor girl spent her childhood eating lead paint off a windowsill?”

  “In winter it’s tough to find unfrozen fish,” Lawrence says. “During the off-season these waterfront restaurants have to think outside the box.”

  Maury jerks his head around. “Outside what box?”

  “Just, you know, normal business practices.”

  “Aren’t boxes normal?”

  “Sure they are,” Lawrence says. “That’s a nice bus you have.”

  I give his thigh a gentle squeeze. I love my brothers, but not like I do this kind man.

  After a second bottle of wine, Quinn loses the last traces of standoffishness and starts talking nonstop. He doesn’t ask anything of Lawrence and me except that we listen. Though to my mind this one-way traffic’s not much of a conversation, it amuses Lawrence, who’s exposed to Quinn’s high-voltage energy for the first time.

  He describes a Neil Simon revival he did last summer in London with an American actress famous for a TV sitcom. It worried her when several minor royals visited backstage after the show. She whispered to Quinn that she didn’t know how to act.

  “I noticed that at the first rehearsal,” Quinn says. “But she meant she didn’t know how to act around royals. I said, ‘Just do what I do.’ So when Princess Beatrice swanks in, I kiss her hand and damned if Miss Airhead doesn’t do the same. Lays a big wet smacker on the girl’s knuckles.”

  I’ve never heard this one before and chuckle. But then he recycles an old tale about being a pallbearer at Dad’s mother’s funeral. On the trip from the undertaker’s parlor, he lost track of the other cars and drove to the nearest Catholic church. Sure enough a requiem mass was in progress, but Quinn didn’t realize until it was too late that he had crashed the wrong funeral.

  Lawrence lets out a belly laugh, and Maury glances up from his plate, his cheeks crammed with food like a chipmunk’s. This makes me laugh. Quinn probably assumes it’s for his story.

  I find myself musing how much he’s like Bill Clinton. Quinn’s leaner, harder-looking, and doesn’t have the ex-president’s thatch of white hair. But both of them have this charisma, as everybody calls it, that’s combined with a little-boy vulnerability. You never forget—they never let you forget—that the smartest kid in the class hailed from a hard luck family. Dead father. Messed-up mother. Black sheep brother. Now, successful as they are, they don’t hide their broken parts, and they make sure every woman knows they’re needy.

  “You’re a funny guy,” Lawrence tells him. “You could be a stand-up comic. How’d you wind up in acting?”

  Simple as flipping a switch, Lawrence taps into one of my brother’s favorite anecdotes. At the university, the drama department held an annual speech contest. When Quinn won first prize as a freshman, they invited him to audition for a play. Naturally, he landed the lead role.

  “That’s something out of Hollywood legend, “Lawrence says. “Like discovering Lana Turner in a drugstore. What was your speech?”

  “I advocated the abolition of professional boxing,” Quinn says. “The irony is, I loved boxing. Mom and I used to watch the Friday Night Fights. But instinctively I knew my audience—a bunch of bleeding heart professors and lily-livered students. So I described how seeing the Emile Griffith–Benny Paret match convinced me the sport should be banned. I led off with a couple of zinging lines.” He falls into a stagey voice. “‘In my living room last night I witnessed a murder. It was the most sick-making spectacle I have ever seen.’”

  Alarmed, I sneak a look at Maury. But mention of murder doesn’t appear to have registered.

  “Hey, hold on a sec,” Lawrence breaks in. “You couldn’t have watched the Griffith-Paret fight. That was before you were born.”

  Suddenly, as so often in my life, I feel like I’m the one on the spot. Embarrassed for Quinn, furious at Lawrence for bringing this up, I hunch my shoulders and wait for a blow to fall. But I shouldn’t have worried. Quinn handles it like a minor speed bump.

  “I never claimed I saw it live,” he says. “Mom and I watched it on one of those Fights of the Century shows. Believe me, it was just as gruesome to see Griffith punch Paret to death on tape.”

  “Did they catch him?” Maury asks. “Did he get life?”

  But the waitress brings the bill and his question gets lost in the good-natured debate over who’ll pay. Quinn, as I’d have predicted, wins and swears to Lawrence that he’ll let him pick up the tab when we have dinner in London.

  As we leave the restaurant, Maury’s at my side, and I forget for an instant and give him a hug. He shivers, like a horse shuddering off flies. To cover my mistake, I say, “We need t
o buy you a warmer coat.”

  The falling snow doesn’t stick to the parking lot, but it glitters in everybody’s hair, like confetti at a party. Maury’s delighted by this, but then remembers he left his bus in the restaurant and rushes back to fetch it.

  “What’s he need it for?” Lawrence asks.

  “The return trip west,” Quinn says, and is rewarded with the last laugh of the night.

  Feeling the wine, I almost warn him what Mom’s about to tell him tomorrow. But I catch myself. For all I know he won’t be upset; he might be happy to learn he’s only half-related to us.

  Quinn climbs into his rented Chrysler and heads off to the Hilton. The three of us bundle into Lawrence’s Volvo. I’m tired, and my leg aches. I don’t mention this to Lawrence for fear he’ll advise me again to get tested for post-polio syndrome. If I have it, I don’t want to know—not unless they discover a cure.

  On the drive Lawrence is subdued as he digests, along with the dinner and wine, the fact that in addition to the world’s most difficult mother I have two wildly mismatched brothers. Or is he wistful that with Maury in town we won’t be spending the night together? He treats me with extra tenderness as he walks me to the door of the townhouse and says, “This is like kissing good night outside the Tri Delt house.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that. But a kiss is a kiss.”

  He extends a hand to Maury, catches himself, and digs into his pocket for the car keys. “Sweet dreams, you two.”

  Alone with Maury, thrown back on ourselves like when we were kids, I’m in danger of plunging feet first into one of my pity parties. On nights like this as a little girl I used to sneak out of bed after everybody was asleep and fix a batch of Jell-O. I didn’t like Jell-O myself. But the rest of the family did, and I made it as a surprise for them in the morning.

  Doing for others in a Christlike spirit—that was what the nuns urged on us. But even back then I realized I was guilty of a martyr complex and believed that I deserved whatever disappointment I brought on myself. I feel different now. I deserve Lawrence and his love. I deserve a life of my own, just like Maury deserves forgiveness for murder and Quinn deserves understanding for his aloofness. But in the end, whether or not we get what we think we have coming, we need to wake up in the morning, brush our teeth, and buckle down to work.

  Maury’s in the spare room, rocking and moaning. I trust he’s in bed, not spread-eagle on the floor. I tap on the door, and the noise dies. “I laid out towels for you in the bathroom,” I tell him. “The blue ones.”

  After a long pause he says, “Okay.”

  “If you wake up before me, there’s milk in the fridge and instant coffee and cereal in the cupboard.”

  Another pause. “Okay.”

  I don’t linger. I know he’s eager to get back to rocking and moaning.

  I could call Lawrence. Some of our best, most intimate talks have been by telephone. But it’s late, and he has been on his feet all day playing Doctor Drill and Fill. So to hear a cheerful human voice I dial the weather and listen to a recorded announcement. “Intermittent snow. No accumulation. Cold.”

  Quinn

  Unsteady on my pins, I stroll from the lobby to the bar at the Hilton. Neither spot looks inviting. The public areas of the hotel are penitentially bright and deserted except for sleepy employees. At eleven o’clock on a Saturday night, regardless of the weather, people in London roister through the streets, just getting started. Here in Maryland they’re ready to call it a day.

  With nothing better to do, I retreat to my room. The wine-induced euphoria that helped get me through dinner en famille has diminished to a dull throb behind my eyes. I open the minibar and collect a few Chivas Regal miniatures. Headache or not, I splash Scotch into a toothbrush glass and top it off with club soda.

  Although a maid has turned down the bed, the curtains remain open on the room’s only window. Maybe the hotel management is proud of the view—a baleful stretch of interstate. Snowflakes spool yellow gauze around streetlights that look as lethal as surgical instruments. Thirty-six hours after my homecoming, and already I feel a yoke settling on my shoulders, the familiar weight of childhood. Back then I had no choice of roles. There was just the part I was fated to play. Now I want to believe I’m free to choose my character; I can even change my lines.

  I shut the drapes. It’s not that easy to drop the curtain on tonight. I feel awful about Candy, so fragile and eager to please. What she asks is simple—a late shot, a last shot, at happiness. How can I begrudge her and Lawrence that? Why couldn’t I get out of my own way and grant them what they need? Pay attention and listen—that’s all they expected.

  Instead, I talked a blue streak, I talked bollocks. Here I am hoping to play Greek tragedy, yet when I hit my mark, I act like a sad tramp trapped in theater of the absurd. Uncertain whether the stage directions call for laughter or tears, I shamble around like a baggy-pants vaudevillian. To Lawrence and Candy I must have sounded as bad as a moron hogging the mike at a comedy club on amateur night. If for some reason I felt compelled to talk about my fuckup at the funeral, I might at least have been honest. It hurt. It wasn’t funny.

  Before her death I had crossed paths with my paternal grandmother a grand total of two times. What I recalled of her was a hornet’s nest of black hair restrained by barrettes. So my first shock at her wake was to see a wizened white-tressed woman in the casket.

  Then came the second shock of encountering relatives who presumed to know me when I didn’t recognize a single one of them. I can only compare the experience to traveling in a foreign country and running into fans who’ve never seen me except on a movie screen, and who’ve never heard my voice except dubbed into the local language. These people don’t know me. At such moments I barely know myself. I’m some ghost they’ve imagined, a shadow they’ve projected.

  Yet the weight of my grandmother’s corpse was real. And there was no denying the meaty presence of the other pallbearers. After we carried the casket to the hearse, the rest of them scattered to rented limos, and I climbed into my car alone. In an hour or two, I kept telling myself, this would be over. These relatives, these strangers, would recede into oblivion. Then one chapter of my life would end and a new one would begin.

  Along with a cast of University of Maryland drama students, I had been selected to travel to Europe and perform plays on American military bases. At the end of the summer, when the others flew back to College Park, my secret plan was to stay in London. Like a Cuban baseball player, I had plotted every detail of my defection. Letting on nothing to Mom or Candy, I had contacted an English agent. Confident of my talent, confident I’d soon be self-supporting, I had no nagging sense that I was leaving anyone or anything of value behind. That was the advantage of not having a father. I was free to reinvent myself, free to be my own father.

  The disadvantages … well, they’re what I edited out of the cartoon narrative I told Candy and Lawrence. I would never admit to them how lonely it felt to slink into that church, hide in a rear pew, and discover that the requiem mass was almost over. Up at the altar, between rows of lighted candles, the casket looked like the one I had carried. But I recognized nobody around me. After the final blessing, I skulked forward to take my place among the pallbearers, and a man grabbed me by the elbow. A gesture of condolence, I thought.

  He squeezed harder and hissed, “What’s your problem, buster?”

  I looked at his face. I looked at the rest of the congregation. Then I turned to the priest. He at least wasn’t angry. But by his baffled expression I knew I had blundered into the wrong funeral.

  “Sorry,” I murmured. “I’ve made a mistake.”

  “Damn straight you have,” said the man who had grabbed my arm. He pushed me up the aisle, past disgruntled onlookers, and out to the church portico. I attempted to explain, but he was in no frame of mind to listen. He’d have welcomed any excuse to throw me down the marble staircase. So I hurried to my car.

  I didn’t speed away though
. I sat there, and as the church emptied, I studied every face, still futilely hoping to spot a familiar one, a forgiving one. Then I slipped back inside, thinking the pastor might know where my grandmother was being buried.

  In the sacristy, he stopped polishing a chalice and seemed prepared to use it as a club. But when I mentioned my grandmother’s name, he remembered her as a parishioner, and said she had moved to a nursing home. Her funeral was scheduled for the chapel there.

  He offered directions, but there was no chance I’d make it on time. As in a nightmare, I was late and I was lost.

  Replenishing my toothbrush glass with Chivas Regal, I let the words “late” and “lost” reverberate and end up thinking about Maury. If I feel like odd man out, how about him? What does he feel? On the surface, he appears to be completely shut down. It’s possible he’s smothered all emotion to protect himself from people and to protect people from him. At dinner, whenever he wasn’t making a weird noise in his throat or staring into the toy bus, he sat there like a statue, a monument to an event that neither he nor anyone else can understand.

  It comes to me how little I know about him or the killing. When, at age ten, I asked Mom about that day, she grabbed me by the hair and slammed my head against a wall. I never asked again.

  It’s always about you, isn’t it? Through a fog of jet lag, wine, and whiskey, I recall the line that girlfriends have often flung in my face. I start off fretting about Maury and wind up fixated on myself. Better to quit maundering and get ready for bed.

  I’m at the sink, wrist deep in warm water when the phone rings. I hope it’s Mal, with word from the BBC. But at this hour, in this place, I figure it has to be Candy. I pick up the bathroom extension, and there’s a British accent. “Quinn Mitchell, please.”

  “Speaking.”

  “You sound sooo American.” It’s Tamzin.

  “That’s what happens to me at home. I become a ventriloquist. Or a ventriloquist’s dummy.”

  “Quite a gift.”