Fletch put his finger on the envelope. “This appears to be from my father. You’ve always given me this stupid line, ‘Your father died in childbirth.’ Never anything more, no matter how I’ve asked. I’ve always let you have the literary conceit of this stupid line. But the humor of it has worn as thin as my skin at the moment.”
“You’re curious?”
Fletch took a deep breath. “Mildly.”
“What I’m saying, sonny, is that I see your possibly hearing from your father causes you to do exactly as he would have done.”
“What’s that?”
“Leave your bride alone on your wedding day.”
“Did he do that to you?”
“He spent the entire wedding reception at the other end of the hangar removing, repairing and replacing the engine in the airplane we were about to use for our honeymoon.”
“You were married in an airplane hangar?”
“By now you know how wind and rain on a bluff exposed to the sea can drown out the sweetest words a woman should ever hear. Consider how much of the wedding ceremony is heard in an airport aluminum hangar, with thirty seconds between scheduled takeoffs and landings.”
Fletch smiled. “Are you sure you were married?”
“Are you sure you were married?”
“He wanted to be sure of the engine before he took his bride up in the plane.”
“That was my kind thought, too, back when I expected to understand because I loved.”
“What do you think now?”
“I think he was avoiding the reception, the congratulations, the handshakes, the slaps on the back, the jokes, and the reasonable questions obliging him to speak of our future with responsibility.” Her eyes narrowed. “What are you doing?”
“My editor, Frank Jaffe, says I may have a talent for investigative reporting.”
“This is your wedding day.”
Fletch shrugged. “I’ve spent most of it working.”
“Why is it considered the height of masculinity for a man to avoid the biggest emotional moments of his life by burying his head, and his body, in work?”
“Trickcyclists say a man’s urge to work is as great as his sexual urge.”
She smiled. “I haven’t heard that slang for the mental health brigade in decades.”
“I read that lately.”
“Wouldn’t you say work can also be man’s way of avoiding emotional responsibility?”
“Okay. Super. You should know. But you’re not going to evade my question now.”
Josephine Fletcher colored. She said, “Your ‘mild curiosity,’ the mystery about your father, is not worth your taking two minutes from your wedding day.”
Fletch shivered. “I don’t know that for a fact.”
“Get into the shower,” his mother said. “Barbara won’t want you sneezing all over her during your honeymoon. This traveler’s court, or whatever it is, must have a washer-dryer for those Americans who choose to live all their lives entirely behind windshields. There are towels in the bathroom.”
When he handed his clothes to her through the bathroom door, she said, “You know, I’m ‘mildly curious,’ too. Would you show me what you think you got from your father?”
Wrapped in a towel he crossed the room to the envelope. “Some tickets to Nairobi, Kenya, and some cash and a letter.”
“Yes,” she said. “If he’s alive, he probably would be in Africa. I’ve thought that. May I see the letter?”
Between index finger and thumb, Fletch pulled the drenched, blued piece of paper out of the envelope and handed it to her.
Josie held it in two hands. As she looked at the washed-out, blank page, her face crinkled. “Oh, Irwin. Don’t you see? There’s nothing there.”
“Ironic, and rather sad, that you are spending your wedding day with your mother.”
Josie had ordered lunch for them from Room Service. They sat at odd angles obliged by the smallness of the motel room at the round table, taking the toothpicks out of their club sandwiches. Wind slashed rain against the window. “I say, more in worry than in bitterness, See what your father has wrought! First time you ever hear from him and you respond with behavior unnatural but typical of him.”
“That much I’ve heard.”
When Fletch bit into his sandwich a dollop of mayonnaise landed on the towel below his waist.
“Can’t you at least telephone Barbara?”
“Not sure where she is.”
“You just told me you’re an investigative reporter. Surely you could find her.”
“I’ve told Alston, my best man, to tell her I’d meet her at the airport.”
“What does that mean?” Josie’s bite of her sandwich was so small, mayonnaise had no chance to escape her.
“I want to do some thinking.”
Her eyes widened. “You’re not honestly thinking of going to Nairobi?”
He shrugged. “When will we ever get another chance?”
“Oh, Irwin! This man ignores you all your life; we presume him dead; and suddenly he snaps his fingers and you cancel your honeymoon and fly halfway around the world to meet him?”
“It could be a honeymoon. Barbara might like it.”
Fletch remembered. Growing up, he had not been exactly the center of Josie Fletcher’s universe either. There were her detective novels, always. He called them her defective novels. Because none had sold particularly well, there had had to be a lot of them. Other people made jokes about his mother’s books. She had not written many novels, people said, she had written one novel many times. People joked that her publisher kept her writing one novel until she got it right. True, her producing murder and mayhem for quiet libraries throughout the land had kept them reasonably sheltered and reasonably fed. For that he was grateful to her.
Josie Fletcher lived in a world in which fictional characters had reality and real people were forgotten, blinked at, treated vaguely. The characters in her novels seldom had breakfast, lunch, and dinner all in the same day, never had cuts on their elbows, black eyes, broken fingers, itchy pubic hairs, or teachers deeply mistaken in their student’s mathematical potential. They never went shopping to replace trousers that had risen up the shank of the leg or split in the back when the wearer stooped for a drink from the school water bubbler.
Independence was not something for which Fletch had ever had to strive. There had been moments when he had deeply resented it.
Yet here he was, on his wedding day, in a moldy motel room, having a sandwich with his mother, listening to her surprise at his expressing “mild curiosity” regarding his father. She had never, never told him about their marriage.
In fact, he was curious about both of them. Always had been.
“Why haven’t you?” he asked.
“Why haven’t I what?”
“Ever told me about my father, your marriage?”
“Fear and fairness.”
“Fear?”
“Your masculinity, too, my son, is something I’ve never been able to come to grips with. Don’t think a mother doesn’t know. You’ve been ripping your jeans on garden fences since you were nine years old.”
In front of his mother, Fletch blushed. “Men aren’t born virgins, you know.”
“You weren’t, at any rate.”
“A man has nothing to give up but his energy.” Fletch laughed.
“Oh, God.”
“I can’t help it if I’m energetic.”
“Is that what you call it?”
“May I have some of your french fries?”
“Of course. Do keep up your energy.”
“I had pizza about three this morning. Supper or breakfast. I don’t know which.”
“Despite all my last chapters, not all mysteries have solutions. How does a mother explain to a son that she doesn’t understand a husband, a father? That she was in a marital situation she doesn’t understand?”
“By beginning with Chapter One?”
“And there’s the
element of fairness. I could have spewed forth what I thought about your father, my confusion, my hurt, my puzzlement, the mystery, but he wasn’t around, you see, to defend himself, to give you his side of whatever story. I loved him, you see.”
“You could have told me he left you, not that he died, for Christ’s sake.”
“I never knew that, you see.” Her face turned whiter. “You show up today with, frankly, a blank piece of paper …”
Fletch watched his mother try to gather together in one hand another quarter of her three-decker sandwich.
“You know that we had to have your father declared assumed dead, after seven years. Otherwise, I couldn’t have married Charles.”
“I remember him.”
“He wasn’t with us long, was he? Or Thad.”
“You’ve kept the name Fletcher.”
“Well, I had published books under that name, you see, and it was your name. And Charles, and Thad, and … weren’t your father.” She wiped under her eyes with her paper napkin. “It was the impossibleness of your father that I loved. If that blank piece of paper you showed me means anything, if he did go somewhere, I would have loved to have gone with him.”
“But you say you didn’t understand him.”
“Oh, who the hell understands anybody? Damn fools keep asking me why I write mystery stories. Maybe because there’s a big mystery in my life I’ve never been able to solve. So, neurotically, I keep setting up simulated mysteries and arriving at simulated solutions. Frustrated practicing.”
“Writers have an uncontrollable compulsion to control compulsion,” Fletch said. “I read that somewhere, too. Remembered it, in my effort to understand you.”
“Lots of luck,” she said.
“Chapter One.” Fletch snuck a look at her wrist watch, “I’m trying to make a decision here. Am I flying to Denver, Colorado, or Nairobi, Kenya?”
“I don’t know what to tell you.”
“Chapter One,” he repeated.
“Chapter One,” she said. “High School. Montana. I was the pretty little thing. Cheerleader. Honor student.”
“I’ve read this book,” Fletch said. “Several times. And he was the big man on campus, president of the class, captain of the football team.”
“Far from it. He was way out.”
“Sorry. Wrong novel.”
“Way out, skidding his overpowered motorcycle around his parents’ dirt-poor ranch. Bright enough. He once wrote this paper for English class, this long, somber, brilliant analysis of a Shakespearean sonnet. The teacher gave him an A-plus-plus, and complimented Walter in class. Walter roared with laughter. He told everybody he had written the ‘Shakespearean’ sonnet himself and then analyzed it. Nearly destroyed the teacher.”
“Ah,” said Fletch. “So it was Daddy who wrote Shakespeare.”
“When they expelled him for that—”
“They expelled him for that?”
“Suspended him. At the time, the object of education was obedience, not intellectual freedom. Has anything changed? Anyway, Walter took an airplane without permission from a neighboring ranch—”
“He could fly a plane in high school?”
“No one knew he could. First he buzzed the high school a few times, while it was in session. Then he bombed it. With a volume called The Collected Plays of Shakespeare. Made a perfect hit, too. Smashed the skylight over the stairwell. The book and all this glass came crashing down three floors.”
“And you’ve never wanted to tell me about this man?”
“Wild. You mentioned football. One Saturday at a home game, suddenly he appeared on the field, standing up in the saddle of his motorcycle. He caught a pass, sat down, roared down the field and through the goalposts, ball cradled under one arm.”
“Did he ever spend any time in jail?”
“Some. He was so handsome, so …” Josie shrugged. “… energetic, everyone should have loved him. Everyone hated him. Everything he did jeered at everything we held sacred. He jeered at the school by fooling the teacher with his Shakespearean sonnet. He jeered at football by saying, If the object is to get the football down the field, through the goalposts, use a motorcycle. He’d show up at school dances drunk, and dance energetically, satirically, I now realize. Everybody else would go home.”
“Dance with you?”
“To my embarrassment, yes.”
“What was a nice girl like you doing with a rogue like him?”
“Maybe I had a little understanding of him. At least between someone very feminine and someone very masculine, if not much ability to understand, there is a very strong chemistry? Electricity?”
“Sex?”
“He wasn’t an outlaw. As soon as everybody in the town thought he was, and the real baddies began to talk as if he were one of their own, Walter dressed in as close an approximation of a suit and tie as he and his family possessed, and went down to the local baddy hangout, a really horrible roadhouse about eight miles out of town, and started a riot I expect they’re still talking about. He jeered at everybody.”
“How old was he then?”
“Would you believe fifteen?”
“How could you not tell me about him?”
“Energetic,” his mother said. “Bright, handsome, and energetic. Saw things his own way, and never asked for agreement. I mean, it’s not everybody who is expelled from school and the local roadhouse. I thought him simply marvelous.”
“Is that why you’ve never sought agreement from me?”
Josie looked at her son from under lowered lids. “Anyway, we were married literally over my father’s dead body. I’ve told you your grandfather died of a heart attack during my senior year of high school.”
“Yes. Must put that fact in my medical folder, if I live long enough.”
“Walter had a flying job. Flying ranchers around, mining executives, emergency medical equipment, out-of-state crop-dusting, in season. Sometimes, frankly, I wasn’t absolutely sure where he was. Weather’s always a problem in a job like that.” Josie poured coffee for them both. “I got pregnant immediately. I thought that was the right thing to do, that was the way life was, that we both wanted it. It never occurred to me you were supposed to think about such things. We were buying a house trailer. I thought we were perfectly happy.”
“What do you guess he thought?”
Josie sighed. “Everyone was telling this boy, Walter, that he was married and about to be a father and ought to give up flying and riding motorcycles. That he ought to give up being Walter. At the time, I thought such talk was natural, too. I’ve wondered since how he heard it.”
“Come on, get to the good part: me.”
“You were born ten days ahead of expectations. Walter had promised he would be with me when you were born. In fact, he was across the state. My mother telephoned him the good news. He said he would take off and fly home right away. There being a major storm in his path, he was advised against flying. He took off. He never arrived.”
“He crashed?”
“Seven years later we were able to assume him dead. After the snows melted in the spring, a search was made for his plane. It was never found.”
“He died in childbirth.”
“An enigmatic statement, for which I apologize. I always thought it rather graceful. What I mean by it is, What was in his mind when he climbed into that airplane, when he took off, while he flew alone across the state of Montana in the dark, presumptively to his wife and son, me and you? Do you understand? What was in his mind at that point has always been more important to me, in a way, than whether he lived or died.”
“Maybe I understand. A little.”
“Who was Walter? Who is he?”
“I need my clothes.”
Josie looked at him as if awaking suddenly. “Where are you going?”
“I don’t know.”
“When will you know?”
Fletch said, “It’s a long drive to the airport.”
“May I kiss the bri
de, too?”
Fletch decided where he wanted to go only as he walked down the airport corridor with the muddy envelope under his arm and saw Barbara and Alston waiting outside the gate.
“Where have you been?” Barbara asked.
“Where did you go?” Fletch asked.
“Where did you go?”
“I didn’t know where you went.”
Alston rolled up his eyes.
“Have Cindy and her friend gone?” Fletch asked.
Barbara said, “They’ve gone.”
“Where’s our luggage?” Fletch asked.
Barbara said, “It’s gone.”
“I checked it in this morning,” Alston said. “So you wouldn’t have to be bothered with it at this point.”
“It’s gone?”
“It’s gone.”
“We need to get it back.”
“Oh, no,” Alston said. “It’s gone.”
“The plane’s about to go,” Barbara said.
“It hasn’t gone,” Fletch said.
Alston looked at his watch.
“We’re not going?” Barbara asked.
“We’re going.” Fletch said to Alston, “You didn’t tell her?”
“I’m not going to.”
“We’re not going to Colorado.”
“Our luggage is,” Barbara said.
“Must get it back,” Fletch said.
Alston hit his forehead with the palm of his hand. “Skis.”
“Come on,” Fletch said. “Let’s go.”
They were rushing up the corridor.
“We’re not going?” Barbara asked.
“I’ve got the tickets,” Alston said. “Turn them in. I’ve got the baggage tickets. Get the luggage.”
Barbara said, “We’re not going.”
“We are going,” said Fletch. “Alston, we need to get the luggage to British Air at the International Terminal.”
“The plane’s changed?” Barbara asked.
“We’re changing planes.”
“For Colorado?”
“London.”
“London, Colorado?”
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