by Dick Cluster
Meredith finished rinsing, then turned to face him as she twisted the water out of her hair. Her skin was flushed from the hot bath, and her nipples were redder still. Alex felt thankfulness and desire, felt that a year was surely not too long, that two or even three years were not going to make him blasé about her after all. “We could have a tub big enough for both of us,” he said. “Instead of the piano and pool table, maybe.” He started to undress so that he could find room for the two of them even in this one. He suspected, though, that this had been a wrong thing to say. He didn’t know yet that nothing would have been right.
“Don’t leap to conclusions,” she said. He was surprised at the sadness in her voice. He stood, unsure, more of a stork than ever, with one leg raised halfway out of his jeans.
“About us, you mean?”
“No, I don’t mean about us. Earlier this evening you leaped to the conclusion that Suzanne was dead. Or you let Trevisone point you there.” Meredith reached toward a towel hanging on the wall. Alex handed it to her and watched her wrap herself away. He put his foot back through the leg of his pants and back onto the floor. “Take another look at your newspaper,” Meredith said, sharp now, not vulnerable or sad. “The one you left in the wastebin over there.”
Alex looked at the wastebasket, white plastic, just now sweating bubbles of condensed steam. Now her accent annoyed him. The way she said nyewspaper instead of noospaper, the way she said “bin” instead of “basket”— he felt there was something unconsciously superior about it. He saw the morning paper, the one he’d studied while waiting for his doctor’s appointment, folded to one of the news pages and resting on top of the trash. Wet streaks darkened the newsprint like tracks, like stains. He understood that Meredith had been reading this page while she soaked in the tub, solving some puzzle that had so far eluded him.
“You found something I missed?”
“Not missed. I found something that didn’t mean anything then but will now. That skier in New Hampshire who was hit while crossing the road. The driver of the vehicle was Lowell Johnston, twenty-five. Suzanne was telling Maria the truth, though she really meant more like ‘somebody killed,’ transitive verb, than ‘somebody died,’ intransitive. Scat Johnston can’t have been staying at Natalie’s on Saturday night and have run down a skier in New Hampshire at the same time. Natalie has got us both lying to Trevisone, and in the meantime she’s been lying to us, too.”
Alex picked up the paper and read the short item over again. Then he turned to the obituary page and located the death notice. So. “Caroline Davis, 19, died suddenly” was an automobile fatality. And tomorrow’s list would include “Lowell Johnston, 25, died suddenly,” and he had been stabbed. The steamy room felt like a greenhouse— warm but too close, hard to breathe, full simultaneously of life and rot. Alex wanted to be out in the open, to be doing instead of talking. He did not want to see Suzanne Lutrello’s name added to the list.
“So what do you think?” he asked Meredith. “Maybe you ought to get dressed and we ought to go right over and confront her with this.”
“Not me,” Meredith said. “I am getting dressed, and drying my hair and then going home, where I’ve got my own work to do. I have nineteen other students in that class. Of course I’m available if Suzanne herself asks for my help again. But otherwise neither she nor her personal life is my job.” She wrapped her head in a second towel, brown, and rubbed vigorously at her hair. When she looked out, her face was framed by the towel as by a hood. The pose gave her a wise-woman, sorceress sort of look. “In my own way,” she added, “I do understand why you think it is yours.”
5. TWILIGHT AND DEW
Every other Tuesday morning Alex walked Maria to the school bus stop. Tuesday was her swing day, the day she moved back to the home of whichever parent hadn’t had her the weekend before. Laura would pick her up at the end of school today. Maria was not very communicative on Tuesday mornings, as a rule. Noisy, yes. Communicative, no.
Over breakfast, today, she chattered about the police station as Alex toasted her frozen chicken nuggets and sealed them in a thermos container that would leave them lukewarm at lunchtime. Still good enough, apparently, that one chicken nugget could bring half a bag of potato chips in return. “It was different,” she said, with a dark fist propped under her soft chin, “than when we got taken there in second grade. That time it was like getting taken to a play.”
“A play?” Alex asked. “You mean like a police play, mystery play?”
“No, they sat us down in seats and talked like somebody on a stage.”
“In the lobby?” Alex remembered only a controversy that had raged beforehand, when the school had sent home a notice for parents to sign, consenting to have their children finger-printed. The cops and the teacher had thought it would be fun. Some parents thought it would put their children down in FBI files for life. Alex had doubted this, but as a matter of education he had sided with the “anti” faction nonetheless. He thought the procedure taught children to be too trusting of police. In the end, the solution had been pluralistic: those with signed permission had gotten fingerprinted, and those without it had not. Alex had worried that he’d been a killjoy in Maria’s eyes. If she’d afterward described what else happened in the visit, he apparently hadn’t listened.
“No, in some kind of room where the police had classes.”
“Did they talk about how crime didn’t pay?”
“I don’t know. They talked about strangers and stuff.”
Then Alex remembered. A leaflet of do’s and don’ts with strangers had come home afterward. “So how was it different last night?”
“Realer, even though nothing happened. The guns didn’t look real, but they wore them. The policewoman told jokes she might not only tell to kids. They brought in a woman that was swearing and waving her arms, and Officer Crowley, the policewoman, told me she was drunk. I knew she was drunk, or just really mad. I told the policewoman you helped to solve a murder once. Will you call me if you find out anything more about where Suzanne is?”
Alex packed the thermos container, a brownie, and a few carrots into Maria’s backpack. He thought that Maria seemed to accept the explanation Meredith had given on the ride home last night: that Suzanne was okay but hiding from something; that both her friend Natalie and the police were trying to find out why. He waited for more, but Maria dropped the topic of police and talked about the trip she and Laura and Laura’s husband and baby were taking the next weekend. Alex realized he was going to have to call Laura and explain something about the missing sitter and the police. He could come up with an explanation, but what was the truth? Was Suzanne hiding out, or was it worse?
On the way to the bus, Maria asked Alex whether he would have a new tai chi posture to show her next week. Until they were within sight of her stop, she consented to nestle her gloved hand in his as they walked. They watched their feet, avoiding both the icy patches and the shit left by the local dogs.
“No,” he told her, “I think the next thing I do is repeat some old ones.”
“What’s the use of that?” Maria wanted to know.
“I’m not really sure. Most of the motions seem to get repeated a lot. That’s true in real life, isn’t it? Take chewing. We repeat that a lot, though we do some new things in between.”
“Well,” Maria said, “let me chew on that till I see you again.” She let go of his hand and ran to join the clump of children waiting for the bus.
The only other parent was a Haitian mother, to whom Alex smiled and from whom he got a nod but no smile in return. He spoke no Creole, so as usual he left it at this. If the news from his country had been like the news from hers, Alex didn’t think he would smile either— especially on a cold morning in this icy place.
The bus arrived, nearly on time, and Maria and others piled in. Alex watched her sit down and pull off her hat, which he hoped she would not lose. He waved as the bus drove away. What would she be like, what would her worries be, when she r
eached the age at which Caroline Davis had died? What, in fact, had Caroline Davis’s worries been? Alex chose the second question over the first. He nodded at the Haitian mother again, and as they went their separate ways he practiced walking the way he’d been learning in Terry’s class.
Weight low, back straight, pelvis tucked; let the heel touch first, roll onto the toe, empty the other leg before you step. It was easier on the smooth studio floor. Allow yourself to be right here, right now, he told himself. He tried that, long enough to get home, but then while he warmed up the car he reread yesterday’s obituary notice for the woman, or girl, whom Scat Johnston had run over:
DAVIS — IN JERICHO, NEW HAMPSHIRE, CAROLINE, AT 19 YEARS. BELOVED GRANDDAUGHTER OF ROSEMARIE (STURGEON) DAVIS OF BOSTON. DEAR DAUGHTER OF JAMES AND SYLVIA (MCCANN) DAVIS OF SAN FRANCISCO. CHERISHED SISTER OF FRANKLIN DAVIS OF BILLINGS, MONTANA, AND HELENA (DAVIS) ENGEL OF HONOLULU. A SERVICE IN HONOR OF HER LIFE WILL BE HELD AT THE MEMORIAL CHURCH, HARVARD COLLEGE, ON TUESDAY AT 5:00 P.M. CONTRIBUTIONS IN HER MEMORY MAY BE MADE TO THE INSTITUTE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART.
Then, in today’s paper, he found Scat’s as expected. There was only the notice, however; apparently the family had been able to keep the murder out of the news, at least for a day.
JOHNSTON — OF CAMBRIDGE AND JERICHO, NEW HAMPSHIRE, SUDDENLY, LOWELL TOWNSEND. DEAR SON OF GRAHAM AND BARBARA (PEPPERELL) JOHNSTON OF CAMBRIDGE. BROTHER OF GARDNER JOHNSTON OF NAHANT AND MRS. ELLEN SIMMONS OF PARIS, FRANCE. A FUNERAL SERVICE WILL BE HELD THURSDAY AT 2:00 P.M. IN THE GOODE-KEATING FUNERAL HOME, BELMONT, TO BE FOLLOWED BY INTERMENT IN THE MT. AUBURN CEMETERY. PLEASE OMIT FLOWERS. EXPRESSIONS OF SYMPATHY MAY BE MADE IN HIS MEMORY TO THE GREATER BOSTON UNITED WAY.
Belmont and Mount Auburn, Alex thought. That fit. He wondered where Caroline Davis would be interred. San Francisco, he supposed. But he remembered that, aside from the old one in the Mission Dolores, graveyards were not permitted within the municipal boundary. Where then? Daly City? He let the car keep warming while he went inside to pack a change of clothes. He drove to his shop, where the first customer brought him a Saab that needed a valve job. He pulled the cylinder head, covered it with a plastic garbage bag, and lugged it out to his own car.
Later he pulled the rear hubs of a Triumph and covered and carried them out as well. At two-thirty he was ready, showered, and dressed in a pair of new gray walking shoes, creased brown wool-blend slacks, and a blue oxford shirt. He dropped the parts of Saab and Triumph at the machine shop he patronized, to get the valves and disks ground. By five past three he was parking in a “Harvard University STICKERS ONLY” lot; he told Divine Providence that he was going to church and would appreciate not being towed. His sport jacket across his arm, he sprinted along a neatly plowed asphalt path that led through an ivied brick arch and past nineteenth-century red brick dorms. He turned left in front of an older building, built to last out of large, hand-quarried stones. He ran past two Japanese visitors posing for VCR pictures under the statue of John Harvard. Did they know the man cast in bronze, on his granite pedestal, had merely been a minor Colonial preacher who happened to bequeath a fledgling seminary some books?
The church came into view around the corner— a newer building, a low, sprawling mix of brick and wood whose lines looked almost suburban. The architecture spoke more of secular, ecumenical Protestantism than the training of the stern Puritan theocracy. Its broad steps had been shoveled clean of snow. These were the same steps from which, in the warm days of June, passports to wealth and power were annually issued. In the church vestibule, Alex shed his winter coat and caught his breath while tying a solid, square-cut tie. Then he slipped into the sport jacket and studied the traces of automobile grime on his hands.
It wasn’t as if Alex Glauberman never crossed the physical barriers that separated his part of the city from the university. He ventured occasionally into the college lecture halls, sometimes for a movie, sometimes for a speech. The social barriers were porous, too, in their way; the woman in his life before Meredith had been a medical technician, but the one before her had been a graduate student here. He’d never had a reason to step into the church, however, and he couldn’t help feeling that this was a place where they might look at your hands to make sure they were clean and your blood— he remembered Natalie’s comment— was blue.
For Alex this feeling was heightened because, though he did not practice the religion he’d been only lackadaisically taught, still he felt there was something tainted about setting foot inside such an unequivocally goyische place. This made him all the more conscious of a particular fact: Lowell Townsend Johnston of the Brattle Street Johnstons had committed vehicular homicide against someone whose grandmother would and could call a memorial service here in the Harvard College church. It seemed that the dead and the agent of death were required to come from the appropriate circle. Alex rubbed his hands unconsciously and took a seat in the rearmost pew.
A gawky young minister and a white-haired woman in a powder-blue suit stood at parallel lecterns. They took turns reading from selected works. Alex studied the woman and did not at first focus on the words. It must be unusual, he thought, to wear that color to a memorial service, even one “in honor of the deceased’s life.” Aside from this choice of dress, her looks reminded him of his landlady’s aunt or cousin Mary, who had served him breakfast yesterday morning after tai chi. Only her looks, however— not the discipline of her voice, the careful crafting of what she said and how she said it. Now Alex realized that the minister and grandmother were reading something— a poem— in which each took a stanza at a time. The minister read with slow emphasis on each word, not a very good way to read, Alex thought, but rather as if the poem were in a foreign language and if he didn’t pronounce the words carefully, the audience might not know the meaning of what were actually very ordinary words:
Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill:
For there the mystical brotherhood
Of sun and moon and hollow and wood
And river and stream work out their will.
The verse described the place where Caroline Davis, whoever she had been, had died. In the White Mountains, where hill was heaped upon hill, when it was blanketed in white snow and she had made the mistake of disdaining to take off her skis when her communion with the snow was interrupted by a road. Now the grandmother, more eloquently, read the stanza that concluded the poem:
And God stands winding His lonely horn,
And time and the world are ever in flight;
And love is less kind than the grey twilight,
And hope is less dear than the dew of the morn.
The kind grey twilight and the dear morning dew. Meredith would be able to identify the poem, but he hadn’t invited Meredith, and if he invited her she probably wouldn’t have come. Alex was ambivalent about this— both glad to be on his own and also a bit confused by her attitude. Tonight they could talk it out, maybe. He didn’t need to worry about it now.
Instead he absorbed the grandmother’s words, loved the words though he couldn’t say quite what they meant, and his heart went out to the woman who read them. He felt she was revealing something about herself, her own old age, and also about what makes people, even much younger people, leave the city to go live where the brotherhood of nonhuman forces work out their will. And this thought took Alex from the north bank of the Charles River to the north bank of the Platte, near Grand Island, Nebraska. There hill was not heaped upon hill, in fact the prairie had barely even begun to roll. But the river flowed shallow and fast, spending the force it had picked up in a thousand streams of the Rockies far out of sight to the west. The thought took him to all the twilights and dewy mornings he’d spent there, during those two years when he’d apprenticed to his trade and paused in his rushing from coast to coast.
At the same time, Alex tried to get the chronology straight. He tried to lay the events in a line like a series of bolts and washers and nuts. If you laid them in line right away, Hans Heidenfelter
of Grand Island Motors had taught him, you could put them back together in the right order; you needed no manual, no puzzling it out, no muss no fuss.
Caroline Davis’s grey twilight had been Saturday, some hours before Suzanne Lutrello had announced to Maria that she had to leave because someone had died. In that twilight, Lowell “Scat” Johnston had run into her. In the dew of the next morn, Alex had tried to locate Suzanne but failed. Then there had been another dusk and another dawn, and Scat Johnston had been cut up in less pastoral surroundings with a knife.
Those were the only facts that Alex knew for sure. He studied the mourners; there were only fifteen, scattered in small groups or single, as if they did not know each other. They ran the gamut of generations. He tried to place them in order, to remember who was with whom. After the literary passages, Rosemarie Davis gave a brief account of her granddaughter’s life, as if she were bringing this disparate crowd up to date. Caroline Davis grew up in San Francisco, she traveled and wrote poems and had her first love affairs and began to figure out who she was. She came east to college, decided that was not who she was, and moved to New Hampshire to wait tables for a while and spend as much time as she could outdoors.
When her grandmother finished, Alex did not join the receiving line but dashed back the way he had come. His car had not been towed, and he got to the machine shop in time to pick up the hubs of the Triumph. The Triumph’s disks were once again smooth and shiny, the way they would have been anyway if the owner had brought the car in for new pads on time. Putting the wheels back together, Alex thought about time and the world being ever in flight. Suzanne Lutrello was in flight. The question was whether all these things fit together or not.