Nona closed her door, locked it, and then kissed me. She slipped off her shoes, sitting behind her desk, skimming a brace of pink memos to one side. She kept my hand in hers, not wanting to let me go. She looked into my eyes, though, and her smile faded.
Her hand squeezed mine. “What is it?”
“Nothing you should worry about. You have enough on your mind.”
“Are we being a little coy today, Strater?”
She rarely used her office, on the ground floor of the medical center, and yet it bore marks of her character. There was a yellow sheet marked THINGS TO DO on the wall, but it was blank. Nona could always remember what she had to do, and get it done.
“I saw my mother this morning,” I said.
She gazed down at my hand, and then back up into my eyes. “How is she?”
I told her about my mother’s condition, and she listened with an air of compassion. When I had concluded my brief description of the visit she did not say anything for awhile.
Perhaps I seemed to be waiting for a prognosis, because she added, “Maybe there will never be a return, Strater. Maybe she will always be as she is now.”
“You want to prepare me for disappointment,” I said.
Nona’s face was rarely sad. She was too lively, too direct. But there was a touch of melancholy as she said, “There is so much that we can’t change.”
There was feeling in my voice as I said, “And the children here. Stuart, for example.”
She didn’t answer.
“They don’t have much hope either, right?”
“I think we have to have hope. As human beings—we have to have faith to keep on living. But there is such a thing as a false hope.”
She meant: Stuart did not have long to live.
She seemed to read my thoughts. “They don’t even know what’s wrong with Stuart.”
“Whatever it is, he’s dying,” I said, my voice husky.
“I help them in my way. There’s only so much I can do. Stuart was found in a dumpster as a newborn, abandoned. He’s lived with a string of foster families.”
“I used to believe the world was going to get better and better. We’d abolish things like sick children.”
Nona gave me a wide-eyed, knowing look and said, “You’ve been through something recently, Strater.”
I slipped easily into mock-cheerful denial. “Like what?”
“You’ve changed.”
I tried to laugh. “I’m in love.”
She smiled in response to that, but then she added, “You are keeping a secret. Don’t try to deny it.”
I had always intended to tell her. But I was not prepared to begin the story now.
She continued, “Are you in trouble, Stratton?”
The formal form of my first name made me look away. I could not lie to Nona, but what sort of truth could I tell her?
“Do you need my help?” she asked.
“Soon,” I said. “I will be able to tell you everything. But not now.”
A long silence. She whispered, making a joke of it to protect her feelings, “I know what it is—another woman.”
“I believe,” I began, “that there are Powers in the world that can pluck us as we might pluck an apple.” Having started, I wondered at my choice of words, at how I could possibly make her believe what I myself could barely accept.
“Do you mean,” she asked, “supernatural powers?”
“Not exactly,” I said.
She slipped behind me, and her fingers found the places in my neck and in my skull where the tension seemed to reside. “You had better tell me now. Whatever is bothering you, I want to know now. I won’t wait.”
Her fingers were wise. Calm pooled inside me. It had been a long time since I had felt anything like this.
But I couldn’t tell her. I had to keep my secret.
I stood and strode to the bulletin board, feeling caged in this office. Her eyes were aglow with the question: What is it?
And then I realized that Nona was the only person I knew, and perhaps would ever know, with whom I could share such a tale. I took a long breath. “It might not be safe to be with me right now.”
She waited.
My voice caught. “I’m a dangerous man.”
“I’m not that interested in playing it safe. I see children die.”
It was a decision as deep as the moment in which a person picks up a weapon to defend his life, or decides to leap from a burning building.
Telling her, letting the events slip through my fingers like a line, I did not begin to imagine what impression the story would make on her.
It took a long time. I told her all over again of Blake’s suicide, of DeVere’s apparent suicide. With a trembling voice, I told her of my father.
“You’ve been through all of that,” she said at last, “and didn’t think to tell me even a hint of it?”
There was no glib response to that. “Do you believe any of it?”
“What you say disturbs me, Stratton.”
“What do you think?” I added, with a rasp in my voice, “Give me your diagnosis, Dr. Lyle.”
“I believe that something wants your soul.”
“Something real?”
“Does it matter?”
“You know it does.”
She watched me, actually saw me, the way few people look at another human being. “It’s real for you, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know.” I let the admission, the confession of ignorance, linger in the room.
“I think you want me to tell you that it’s all impossible.”
“If that’s what you think, please do.”
“I don’t think there are such places as Heaven and Hell, Strater. I don’t believe in things like that.”
“Psychosis.”
She was thoughtful as she rose from her desk and plucked a thumbtack from its place on the bulletin board.
“That’s the word you’re trying to avoid using, isn’t it?” I said, pain in my voice.
“I don’t know what to think,” she said. “But we might have to consider the possibility.”
“You’re being too nice about this,” I said, with a flash of impatience. “Go ahead and say it—I’m ready to move into the hospital with my mother.”
“I would say so, if that’s what I thought. Your father taught you to be noble and generous. Mine taught me to be honest.”
“If it’s not psychosis, then I’m in even worse trouble.”
She lifted an eyebrow.
“Because that means that what has happened to me is actual. Real.”
She gave the tack a toss, and it nestled in the wrinkle of her palm. She seemed to be weighing it.
“Besides,” I continued, “a man who dares riptides as a form of recreation can hardly be called normal.”
“I never said you were ‘normal,’ Strater. Every potential hero has to be a little bit in love with death. Only a little—but it makes the big risks possible.”
“I never quite saw myself as heroic.”
“I always saw you that way.” She replaced the tack, down by the frame of the bulletin board, and pushed it in carefully.
“But you see why it might be dangerous to be around me. I don’t know what I’m going to see next. Besides, DeVere’s people will be after me. You might not even be safe in your apartment. I’ll ask Fern to arrange some security for you.”
“You rely on me, don’t you, Strater? As a source of common sense. You think that I’m going to be able to answer your questions. You almost hope I have some sort of medication that will put these images to sleep.”
I answered truthfully. “I wouldn’t mind.”
For the first time that afternoon, and perhaps for the first time since I had known her, she seemed defeated by something. Listening to me had spent something in her, and I sensed that I was about to discover something about Nona I had never known before.
“My father was a physician,” she said. “Not one of these doctors wh
o spend their afternoons playing tennis with their investment counselors. One of the real kind, the kind with a black bag and a practice of people who can’t pay their bills. He had a general practice in Oakland, years before it was stylish to want to save the inner cities, and then after it was no longer stylish.”
She gave me a glance, and I told her with my eyes: Please go on. She rarely spoke of her family.
“He died of overwork. That’s hardly a medical description. But on a death certificate there is a step-by-step breakdown. There is the primary cause, and the secondary cause, and the contributing cause to that. A cerebral hemorrhage killed him, and that’s all that they bothered typing in. But they could have accurately given fatigue, and the weight of too many sick people, as the contributing causes.
“He died when I was in college. It broke my mother’s spirit. It forced her back into her past. In a way, she reacted like your mother, only much less violently. She moved back into her old neighborhood, and lived quietly and peacefully in a world of soap operas and bridge games where she was born and raised, in Minneapolis. I think seeing me reminded her of what she couldn’t bear to remember. My father was that special. When she died it was as though she made up her mind not to breathe anymore.
“I would be proud to accomplish one-third of the good he was able to work in his lifetime. And one thing he bequeathed to me, one precept, that I swear to live out each day: Be true. Be honest. Don’t lie, especially not to yourself. If you don’t know, admit it. Be ignorant and brave.”
I had never heard her describe her parents in quite this way. There had been, naturally, the occasional anecdote. I had thought that I was getting to know Nona. But now I saw that she was a person I was only beginning to know, and that I could spend years with her, as in a new, unfamiliar country, and still find her amazing.
“I never mentioned why I decided to study psychiatry,” she said. Without waiting for me to respond, she continued, “I had problems of my own. They are all far behind me, thank God. I got the help of someone very capable.”
“I think your father would be proud of you,” I said.
My words touched her. She ran her hand through my hair. She kissed me, her lips the flavor of cinnamon, sunlight. Then she kept her hand there, on my head, as though in an effort to bless me, to give me peace. “Something is after you, Stratton. After your soul. I don’t know what it is. But I’m going to fight with you against it.”
“It might be a mistake.”
“Whatever it is, Stratton—it makes me afraid. And it has convinced me: I’m moving in with you. Today.”
29
Anna Wick, DeVere’s long-time “right hand and confidante,” as one TV reporter put it, spoke at DeVere’s memorial service, an invitation-only affair at the Palace of Fine Arts. The service resembled a pageant more than a ceremony of mourning, and police video cameras swept the crowd. “Looking for crooks,” said the matron behind me in a stage whisper.
“One thing is clear to all of us today: we will never forget Ty DeVere,” said Anna. Black suited her well, as did an expression of thoughtful sadness. She had evidently taken diction training at an early stage in her career. She had the clear tone of a woman reading poetry on educational radio, or a stewardess accustomed to working first class. “His name will be forever a part of our times. When they think of us, they will not remember our individual names, or our faces. They will remember Ty DeVere.”
At his request, his ashes had been scattered in the Pacific. This was a surprising decision, dictated by DeVere’s attorneys, although it is possible that DeVere had seen this as less a final annihilation than a way of blessing that largest of oceans with his remains.
Dr. Skeat called late one afternoon. “Please don’t visit her again without my permission,” he said.
I prepared myself for bad news. “Is she worse?”
“We adjusted her medication.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“An apology won’t do a whole lot of good,” said Dr. Skeat. “She needs to be protected.”
“But it’s a pretty terrible situation when a woman has to be protected from her sons.”
He agreed that it was. “Apparently you don’t realize the corrosive nature of your family.”
“We’re loving people—”
“Family love isn’t always motivated by wisdom, Mr. Fields. It can be possessive, manipulative, and it can kill people. In your mother’s case, we have a reactive trauma if we so much as mention your father.”
My voice was ragged with feeling. “We love her.”
“We have to be careful. Especially in a family like yours.”
He must have sensed my anger over the phone.
“Please, Mr. Fields. Stay away.”
It wasn’t fair, I thought, hanging up the phone, stepping to the window. But this was a feeble complaint. Since when was the world just? Besides, Dr. Skeat had been chosen by my brother and myself out of a long list of “sensitive professionals.”
I gazed out the window at the street. My family was—I groped for pale, dried-up phrases: honorable, civic-minded. We were decent people.
I could not keep myself from wondering if the occasional figures strolling in the dark, walking a dog, smoking, were decent, innocent people, or individuals sent to watch us, to remind us that they were out there, waiting.
A few days went by, cue cards splashed with bold letters: good news. More money. Commissions, interviews.
Strengthened by Nona, I entered each new day, very much a man who expects to be attacked, taken at any intersection, any restaurant or gallery. I kept myself at ease, inwardly alert. I was anxious. I was happy.
Fern arranged his hours around my schedule. He drove us to the symphony, to my appointments with potential clients, and I was familiar enough with the way of such guardians that I came to enjoy him without giving him much thought, as one enjoys the shade of a landmark elm.
Packard, the contractor, finished the walls, plastered, painted. The house looked now as I had dreamed it would.
Collie arrived each morning to whisk her ostrich-feather duster about the new furniture arrangement, offered the usual assortment of splendid salads for lunch, and yet I could tell that she understood the household to be under some manner of siege. She appeared pleased at the thought, involved in an important ordeal, inspired, perhaps, by my calm.
My career was unfolding. International calls imprinted themselves on my answering machine, and the planning chiefs of what the financial pages called “energy consortiums” and “communications empires” were planning visits to San Francisco. Notice of my career was printed not on the society pages, and not in a paragraph in a review of local art shows, but on the business pages. It was clear to me that not only was success coming my way, it was coming quite literally to my doorstep.
Time magazine flew its chief photographer in for a sitting. Vanity Fair magazine shot me playing frisbee with Nona at the Marina. The events of these days seemed sacred, devoid as they were of any taint of the uncanny. Rick, and his creditors, played no further part in my life for the time being. This was not unusual. It was typical of Rick to spin through my life with a vivid problem and then vanish.
In all ways my life was becoming a chain of ordered, connected events. It is that characteristic of dailiness that makes us enjoy films, stories, even travel. We intuit that the flow of things, the episodic spill of occurrence, is the natural state of our lives. It is only when a death, or something flavored with death, takes place that we awaken.
People accepted DeVere’s death as a suicide. Collie suggested that people at the checkout at Lucky’s felt it was “bad conscience he couldn’t live with because he tried to hurt the Fieldses.” People doubted his death was murder, apparently, but would not have been terribly outraged if I had, in truth, taken DeVere’s life. When an article in the Sunday supplement referred to our family as “the modern day Borgias” it was intended as a compliment.
Fern was tight lipped. When I asked
him what was wrong he would say, “Let me take care of it.” He would shake his head, keep driving, keep standing behind me at the art gallery, keep his place at the curb while Nona and I window shopped.
I glanced up from time to time to wonder if the van at the stoplight next to me was really a carpet cleaner’s. But with each lulling hour I was becoming tarnished, sleepy, returning to my faith in life.
I believed, as days followed one another, that the troubled times were behind us.
30
One evening Nona and I were dining in Christophe’s, off Geary, enjoying the post-posttheater quiet. We enjoyed brook trout, Montrachet, and candlelight in a corner of the restaurant the maître d’ always managed to have reserved for me.
It was that time of night that is actually very early morning, a time so far removed from business and appointment books that one can actually believe that no further harm will ever take place in the world.
Nona’s dark hair was more radiant than ever, the deep, hidden burgundy hue of her brunette catching the candlelight. She was peaceful, in a way that was distinctively her own. She was sure of herself, and of her life.
Landscaping was a matter of illusion, I was saying. “If you want a blue garden to look blue, it should be twenty percent yellow,” I said. “If you want your garden to look old, plant poplars. No tree grows faster in Northern California.”
I had managed to spend an hour or two that afternoon beginning to restore my hothouse. I had been busy composting, opening new bags of potting soil, writing orders for new plants.
“It’s all magic, then,” said Nona.
“It’s a matter of glamour. In the sense of ‘artifice.’ The flower has to attract the bee. The blossom is a natural form of cosmetic. A botanical fashion statement.”
Coffee arrived. We chatted about recent staffing changes at the Medical Center, the progress of a local theater, my own good prospects for a contract with a Japanese financial firm, and then she reached out her hand, and closed it over mine, a gesture that I recognized.
She had something important to say. I encouraged her with a look, but she was oddly reluctant to continue.
The Horses of the Night Page 16