Go outside, I told myself. Go out into the garden, where you can think.
I wanted to clip the privet bush, trowel the earth around the tulip bulbs, where any day now they would be erupting.
I hurried into my back garden. There was the lawn, the greenhouse, and the side buildings where, I knew, I could find everything from a chainsaw to a bicycle. I stopped.
Surely I was mistaken. This couldn’t be happening.
The gingko tree was full-leafed. The leaves were tiny, still the greenery of early spring. But the tree was back again, as it had been years before.
13
The television stations played the tape of Peterson’s suicide again and again.
At first the news readers warned viewers against “the shocking footage due up next.” But after awhile they just played it, in slow motion. Someone on Pier 39 had a T-shirt printed up, the channel 7 logo splattered with gray and ruby. The shirts sold.
An editorial in the Chronicle decried “Golden Gate Design Prize Manipulation.” DeVere appeared on the same television show that had seen Peterson’s death. The backdrop was new, a more sunny shade of beige. The chairs were new, too. DeVere denied any “collusion to keep the well-known Stratton Fields from getting what he deserves.”
The moderator, the amiable man, did not look changed at all from his up-close experience with death. “So you deny any involvement in trying to persuade the jury that Stratton Fields should not get the award?”
“I don’t decide who gets the prize.”
“Who does?”
DeVere gave his smile. “The jury.”
“But it’s well understood that you are the one who knows who should, and will, win.”
DeVere did not bother to respond.
The host gave a smile of his own. “We’ll have to wait and see?”
It was a contest of smiles, teeth, manly good looks. DeVere was winning.
The announcement of the award was moved up. There was no point, evidently, in making all of us wait a matter of weeks. DeVere was working quickly. There were hurried preparations. Calendar entries were scratched out, and plans were rearranged all over Northern California. No one wanted to miss the ceremony.
And no one complained about the short notice of the arrangements. After all, DeVere always got what he wanted.
Nona and I sat together in the pew at Grace Cathedral. DeVere sat nearby, and Fern was somewhere behind all of us, watching, and, I somehow knew, praying.
I was dazzled with that deep sense of dislocation an effective memorial service gives. Something grievous has happened, but the service offers hope, even promise, as though what has happened was an injury that can be healed. It is almost persuasive, the candles, the flowers, the prayers.
On this day, however, I found myself unable to concentrate on the prayers, which I had always found a source of sacred majesty, however unclear I felt about my own faith. My mind slid away from them, the words abstract and without flavor.
I kept repeating to myself the granite advice: Don’t think.
Don’t think about the suicides. Don’t think about the prize.
I had nothing to do with either death. There was no reason to be uneasy.
We descended together, tugging on our raincoats, a few photographers flashing pictures in the drizzle. Nona was at my side, and she always gets the attention of a photographer or two by her looks, her carriage, the way her eye takes them in with amusement. You can hear them asking afterward, “Who was that lady with Stratton?”
Fern was there, too, behind his aviator glasses, tiny drops lashing the lenses, escorting us to the curb. The man had sat in on a presidential Commission on Violence in the Home, thanks to my father’s influence. But something had always eluded Fern. He should have been a police chief, but now he was eying a crowd of tans and white teeth.
I was glad Fern was there, in the way I might be comforted by the presence of a familiar oak. DeVere and I stood close, protected by the crowd. Despite the drizzle, and the blossom of several umbrellas, no one was in a hurry to leave. With Blake’s death an era had ended, a San Francisco name was gone, and few of the people there would ever be in the presence of so many actors and producers again. Besides, there was a crowd across the street, and the park was filled with a multicolored wash of onlookers. We were a subcontinent of famous faces surrounded by the more democratic sea.
DeVere looked outward, at the crowd of citizens beyond the haze of drizzle. “Look at them all,” he said. “Like flies.”
He stood beside me as though we were easy companions, and I could not blame him for thinking myself like him in some ways. In the face of an anonymous crowd, the two of us had something in common.
“The medical report is in. They leaked it to me,” said DeVere. “Suicide. The same as Peterson. You’ve done something very smart,” he added. “I’m going to figure out what it was.”
Suddenly the crowd was a group of people who could eavesdrop, and I waited until the lion’s pride of famous entertainers had moved away just a bit, leaving only Nona and Fern close enough to overhear.
DeVere sighed. “Sometimes I get sick of all of this,” said DeVere. “All these people, all these faces.”
He turned to me, as though sharing a secret. “Most of these people are lucky they can swallow their own spit. People are so stupid.”
There was a sadness in his voice, though. There was something about DeVere’s posture, the way he turned away into the rain, helped along by his own security people, that made me see him as a source of trouble. But as something else, too. He was a human being, and he had just attended a memorial service. Perhaps, in his own way, he was grieving.
The hospital cafeteria had that agreeable, fake feeling of so many institutional places. There was plenty of artificial, unnourishing light.
“He calls you the Man Who Makes Horses,” said Nona. “The way he says it makes it sound like your formal name. A ritual name. More serious than your legal name.”
“I’m sure a judge would allow me to adopt the name. I like the way it sounds. Stratton-Who-Makes-Horses.”
The Medical Center food was good. The lasagna Nona favored was made with fresh mushrooms, and what tasted like fresh rosemary. And I had that peculiar, wonderful feeling of experiencing moderate sexual arousal in a public place.
Nona seemed aware of this, meeting my eyes, giving me a knowing smile. “The children will be glad to see you,” she said. “They always ask when you are going to come see them again.”
Nona gossiped about the other people carrying trays to distant corners of the room, and I was warmed inside by how happy she seemed to have me with her.
Then, her voice dropped and she said, “I’m glad you’re not too upset about Blake.” She touched my hand, turned it over, and ran her finger along my lifeline.
“I’m all right.” I found myself wanting to sound like Fern, laconic and sure of myself. I closed my hand around her finger, and kept it there for a moment.
She smiled. She understood. She added, “And maybe you think you can woo me by acting tough. Men are supposed to be that way.”
I answered her smile. “Not in my family. My father would recite The Tempest, tears on his cheeks.”
“He was an actor?”
Our words were calm, but behind each syllable there was a current of understanding: We knew each other, and we wanted each other. “He was everything. My father had old money. Old railroad money, and before that old shipping money, and before that old tobacco and iron-smelting money. I imagine them financing cannons and Yankee clippers. The Fieldses invested, and their dollars flowered, for generations.” I spoke with a certain irony. “I was expected to do something aristocratic with my life.”
“Children like you. That’s important.”
“Because children are a good judge of character?”
She laughed. “Children can be deceived. Just like us. But sometimes they can tell something about a person. I’ve always felt that to be loved by children is
a very valuable sort of trust, and an honor.”
“I like it when you look into my eyes.” This was, it struck me, an unusually frank and even romantic confession for a hospital lunchroom. But having said as much, I added, “Although I wonder, sometimes, what you see there.”
She opened my hand. I had never realized what a sensitive instrument fingers could be, or how erogenous the human palm actually was. She gazed at me with such warmth—and such gentle amusement—that I nearly blushed. “I see a man who should have more faith in himself.”
We made the rounds, visiting her patients. We stayed close to each other, mutually enlivened by the touch and feel of our bodies.
They were all children that medicine had decreed incurable. She counseled them, listened to their dreams. She reassured them, but more than anything she understood them, and gave them a sense of companionship. She did it because, no matter what she might say, she loved the children more than anything in the world.
Before they had wanted me to draw pictures. Now everyone wanted a puppet, “like Stuart’s.”
Some of the rooms were like the private rooms of a home for the very old, for human beings aged beyond the expectations of nature. But in the bed, beneath the Porky Pig poster, there would be a child, withered as though with a century’s hardship, meager head on a huge white pillow.
Stuart had the nearly bald head of a radiation victim. He had, Nona had told me, a disease very much like leukemia but hard to classify, a flaw in his bone marrow, a critical disease of the blood. He had been enduring for months, and at times seemed to be recovering and then on other days was faded to a figure that was almost translucent. His smile was corroded, his lips broken. He held out his hand for one of my better efforts of the day, a horse made out of cotton bond.
“Why is that you like horses so much?” I asked him, helping him fit the steed over his fingers.
He spoke, and I couldn’t quite make out his words.
“Because they’re so strong,” said Nona, realizing that I had not understood Stuart.
“Lions are strong, too,” I said, really just making conversation to keep the sympathy in me from making it impossible to say anything at all. “And so are bulls.” But then I saw the look in Stuart’s eye. “But I can’t think of any animal that is stronger and faster than a horse.”
His cheek wrinkled with a smile.
Later, over coffee, I leaned forward and asked, “Stuart has time left, don’t you think?”
She stirred her coffee, looked up, and then looked down at the plastic stirring stick.
“I mean—a few months,” I said. “Maybe even a little longer.”
“Some very strange things can happen. What they call miracles,” she said. “You never know.”
“Children have all kinds of reserves of energy.”
“Of course they do,” she said.
That night, once again, I gazed upward into the dark, unable to sleep. I didn’t want the prize. I did not want anything but Nona, and she was gone by then, in Seattle to do a radio show and tour the university there.
Innocent.
I was innocent, and that’s all there was to say or think. How could I have had anything at all to do with the death of two people, miles from me. Two people I liked.
There was no question about it in my mind.
14
GQ had once listed me as one of the “Ten Men Who Look Best in a Tux.” It was not the sort of honor I sought. It was my opinion that Tutankhamen’s mummy would look pretty good in a tuxedo.
Even when the audience that filled Davies Hall was hushed there was that wash of sounds that makes the presence of a thousand people known. But then, as the envelope turned in the fingers of the master of ceremonies, and the thick, soft paper began to tear, the audience took in its breath.
The auditorium was silent. It was that quiet I love, tension about to be broken. The spotlight reflected hard off the microphone clipped to the master of ceremonies’ black lapel. The envelope tore, and the off-white card was half lifted from its paper housing, and then caught. The envelope fought back somehow, clinging to the card within it, one corner snagging, as though the name of the recipient shrank from human touch.
The master of ceremonies blinked to adjust his contact lenses, perhaps, and with the timing of so many such stagestruck speakers he took one second too long to acknowledge that he knew something the entire assembly did not.
The master of ceremonies was the president of a major corporation, an impeccably attired patron of the arts, and he was a man accustomed to working in private, in the boardroom, in the oak-and-leather box of an office. He enjoyed this attention, and he wanted to keep it, feeling in the beam of the stagelight a power that he, for all his accomplishments, relished.
The emcee spoke, and to me the syllables were for an instant entirely unfamiliar.
Not me, I thought, in a confused attempt to protect myself from disappointment. Surely it’s somebody else.
Nona was squeezing my hand, gripping it hard, with a clench like terror, except that she was smiling, her beauty smiling into my eyes. People were turning to clap their hands at me.
What an incantation a name is, meaningless sounds that are, at the same time, as intimate as a gland, or a first memory. I was dazed. I made myself repeat the syllables he had spoken, to make sure that I had heard correctly.
My name.
Christ, they’ll think I’m milking the applause. More faces were turning to look, still smiling but touched, now, with curiosity. Eyes were on mine.
I pulled myself to my feet, the applause swept me onto the stage. Fortunately the stage had that reassuring artificial look, the look of a place that was hyperreal, lurid and awash with light and at the same time fake. The floorboards gleamed. The podium was far in the distance, a monolith I could never reach.
The audience was comprised of professional designers and architects, and the critics who approved and derided them. Then, naturally, there were the hundreds of people who employed these professionals.
I reached the podium and accepted the award, a simple, purist-pleasing rectangle of engraved paper. I turned, and for a moment it happened.
Peterson would be standing here, I told myself. Blake Howard would be sitting there, at the end of an aisle, his usual sort of seat, smiling toward the stage.
How strange the theater looked from where I stood. I surveyed the blur of faces, and what I saw resolved itself into individual countenances. These were the well-fed, wrinkles surgically erased, hair transplanted, jawlines lifted, women long past childbearing kept eerily teenage-thin.
These were the men and women I knew well, some of them friends since my childhood. Isn’t it wonderful of Stratton to take up architecture, family friends had smiled, but at the same time it had been obvious that they generally thought it just a bit odd that I shouldn’t content myself with horses and a tasteful and slightly dull collection of eighteenth-century oils.
There was DeVere, his eyes hard.
I began to speak, and the years of training, practicing careful diction under the attention of a gifted man who was at once teacher and servant, and the years of watching my parents at ease in public, all stood with me.
I praised Peterson’s work. I offered the solemn memory of the promising architect, and of “San Francisco’s best friend,” Blake Howard. By instinct, I was able to choose exactly the words people wanted to hear. Looking upward, up the slope of the seats, through the haze of faces and the glints off jewels here and there in the audience, I sought Nona’s face, and found it, continuing to offer my thanks, my appreciation to my fellow designers and architects, sustained by the sight of her encouraging smile.
It was then that I saw a new person, a stranger, slip into the room.
She stepped through the doors at the end of the aisle, declined with the easy wave of a hand the assistance of an usher, and slipped into a seat at the end of the very top row. It was a glimpse, only, of a figure with white hair, a latecomer, wearing some
thing moon-bright and resplendent, a gown.
My voice was steady. But as I spoke there were thoughts edging in on me, pressing upon my pleasure. Now, I thought, they’ll start to actually build one of my projects. Now they’ll take me seriously and let my gardens take their place in the real world, and not only in a few out-of-the-way corners. I would get commissions from around the world.
I should have felt joy. I should have felt the bliss of honor. What I felt was anger. They had withheld this sort of public acceptance from me for a long time. Too long. I had redesigned a cardiologist’s mock-Tudor, managing to make the residence into an office building without making it look cheapened. I had doctored a multistory parking complex so that it now looked more like a set of hanging gardens, gracing San Francisco instead of punishing it. But most of my dream gardens, dream landscapes, dream glimpses of what structures could be if we gave ourselves over to trees and ivy, natural wood and native stone, remained in the realm of the unlikely, sets for plays no one would ever produce.
I had designed birdbaths, wading pools. Now, I thought, I can actually accomplish something real, and not be rewarded as a visionary, a man of dreams that are too beautiful to be made concrete. “You think too much,” my brother had once said. “Beauty’s a luxury. All that prettiness is so much perfume—nice, but not worth the earthquake insurance.”
Now all that futility was behind me.
The reception was what the society columnists would call a “sparkling affair.” I shook hands and accepted warm congratulations. It was obvious that Peterson’s lurid death was eagerly put out of mind for the moment, and Blake’s loss was not enough to dim the event. The celebration was all that I could have wished.
Barry Montague, my doctor, clapped me on the back and said that this was the best thing that had happened for a long time. We promised each other again that soon we would play tennis, “like the old days,” said Barry. “Although I think you’ll clobber me.” He patted his stomach. “Too many doughnuts.”
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