Summertime

by Elizabeth Rigbey

  I stare at him. ‘The what Trust?’

  ‘Marcello.’ He spells it for me then sits back down and hands me the paper.

  ‘What is it?’ I ask.

  Seymour shrugs. ‘I hoped you’d know. Because I surely don’t.’

  Katherine says: ‘We think it sounds like some kind of charity. Did Eric make many charitable donations?’

  I shake my head. ‘He could be real generous, he liked to help people out, but he didn’t do much organized giving. I mean, not to charities.’

  ‘Didn’t Eric have an accountant?’ asks Katherine.

  ‘Sure, I’ve spoken with him. He knows nothing about the oil well revenues. I’ll ask him about the Marcello Trust, though.’

  ‘Did Eric know anyone called Marcello?’

  ‘I’ll look in his address book. I’ll look all over. Let’s check the phone book right now…’ I pause. I’m thinking.

  ‘Have you heard the name before, Lucy?’ asks Katherine. ‘Is it sounding familiar now?’

  I shrug.

  ‘I think I heard it recently. But everything sounds familiar if you think about it long enough.’

  Seymour shifts the books and newspapers on the table into new piles as he looks for the phone book.

  ‘Recently?’ Katherine is surprised. ‘Not from way back?’

  ‘No, recently…’ I drink the flowery tea. I grope through my memory looking for the name, a first name or a surname, of Marcello.

  In the phone book I find eight Marcellos scattered widely around the Bay Area. ‘I’ll call them, every one of them,’ I say. Katherine and Seymour exchange glances.

  ‘It’s probably all straightforward and you’ll find some obvious explanation which we should have thought of…’ says Katherine and the way her voice rises a little indicates that they have some less obvious explanation to offer.

  ‘Or,’ finishes Seymour carefully, ‘there’s one other possibility.’

  Katherine warns me: ‘You won’t like it, Lucy. But maybe you should discuss it with that detective.’

  I wait. The tea feels hot and the china cup separating it from my hand absurdly fragile, as though I could crush the cup between my fingers and release the scalding liquid.

  Seymour says: ‘Have you thought about blackmail?’

  I remember the boys on their skateboards in Lowis, how enthusiastically they embraced the notion of blackmail.

  ‘Oh c’mon,’ I say briskly. ‘You’ve been watching too many of those TV crime shows.’

  ‘Maybe, maybe,’ admits Seymour, nodding his bald head. ‘But, when the police were here asking us questions we learned something. We learned how little we know Eric. We learned that we know nothing of his distant past, the family he came from, we don’t even know who his other friends were and, of course, we’ve never met your mother. By the time we were through shrugging our shoulders, that gal from the police department must have been asking how Eric and I could really have been such buddies.’

  ‘People can only be blackmailed if they have something terrible to hide,’ I point out.

  ‘Maybe he had,’ says Katherine evenly.

  I remember the white ring around Daddy’s wrist.

  ‘I mean,’ she adds, ‘maybe something happened way back that he was ashamed of.’

  ‘Now,’ says Seymour, the skin across his bullet head tightening as he makes a small grimace of pain. ‘Please don’t get upset or take offence, Lucy. We all did things when we were a lot younger that we wouldn’t be proud to own up to now. It’s precisely your father’s high standards of morality which would make him a good target for blackmailers. If there was anything in his past which he was ashamed of.’

  I say: ‘There wouldn’t be.’ The tea feels cool in my hand now. I drink the flowery smell but taste only the astringency of lemon.

  Katherine sounds anxious: ‘It’s not a nice thought, I know, Lucy, but there’s a remote chance it may explain why someone killed your father.’

  Seymour says: ‘The police need to get to the bottom of this. You should tell them about the Marcello Trust.’

  I reply without looking at them. ‘If Daddy had a secret, I’d keep it. I certainly wouldn’t have the police, or anyone else, investigate it.’

  They exchange dismayed glances and then Katherine takes my hand and squeezes it hard. I look at their kind faces and, for a moment, wish they were my family. A happily married couple with children and grandchildren, interesting lives behind them and a retirement packed with as much volunteer work and travel and friends as they want. This is normal. Not for the first time, I wish that my family could be normal too.

  When I get up, saying that I’m going home to call all the Marcellos in the phone book, they first try to dissuade me and finally Seymour offers to help.

  ‘Sit down, eat something for heaven’s sake, and I’ll take turns with you,’ he says.

  Katherine watches us curiously as we make the calls. All the Marcellos who answer say they know nothing about a trust in their name and have never heard of Eric Schaffer. One is suspicious, then angry, and finally threatens to call the police.

  ‘So,’ asks Seymour, ‘now what are you going to do about this?’

  ‘Later I’ll call all the Marcellos who were out. Tomorrow I’ll search the den, ask the bank, phone the accountant. I have to sort this out, Seymour.’

  Katherine has been watching us in silence. Now she asks: ‘Lucy, have you seen Scott since you’ve been back?’

  ‘Oh yes. We’re still friends.’

  Seymour says: ‘I sure like Scott. And Eric was very close to him. He needed a lot of support after you left.’

  ‘Scott always needed a lot of support,’ I point out. ‘One reason I went was that I couldn’t give him that support when Stevie died.’

  Katherine says: ‘Losing a child is the worst thing that can happen to you. Not many marriages can take that kind of strain.’

  ‘Having a child put enough strain on our marriage.’

  They protest. ‘You were besotted with Stevie! Both of you. And so proud.’

  ‘I loved him more than I’ve ever loved anyone, ever. But that doesn’t mean I was a good mother.’

  When I leave Seymour and Katherine’s I drive to the cemetery where Stevie is buried. I am surprised by the human traffic here at the end of the day. People with flowers, small groups, women walking alone, an elderly couple hand in hand.

  As I approach Stevie’s grave, I see a figure standing motionless in the dusky light.

  ‘Scott?’

  He swings round. When he sees me his face lightens.

  ‘Luce!’

  ‘I meant to come with you but we just didn’t get around to arranging it so…’

  ‘I thought the flowers we left on Saturday must be looking pretty dry by now,’ he says. ‘I just stopped by to tidy up a bit.’

  ‘How often do you come?’

  ‘Once a week, sometimes more.’

  We stand before the grave in silence and I look around. Most of the small headstones in the children’s cemetery are carved joylessly with nursery images. A teddy bear, a puppy, the man in the moon. It is like a playground which the children have vacated. There is no shade. In summer the sun will bake Stevie’s small rectangle of earth, in winter the rain will fall on it. I see that he is unprotected in death as he was in life.

  Scott has been waiting for me to comment. Now he prompts me. ‘Luce? Do you like it?’

  Stevie’s little headstone is without the starkness of the newer graves. It reveals only his name and dates.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I’m glad you kept it simple and didn’t put a teddy bear on it.’

  I stare at the grave. I know Scott wants me to cry. I try to cry. I am unmoved. This unyielding monument to Stevie’s existence has nothing to do with the kicking, squirming baby which I remember.

  Scott says: ‘Are you starting to get over Stevie? I am. It’s not that I forget him or it doesn’t hurt any more but for a long time the grief was sort of physical, li
ke something heavy on my back, and that’s all lifted now.’

  I squeeze his arm.

  ‘I’m not sure if I’ve laughed since Stevie died.’

  ‘You mean, since he was born.’

  I turn to look at him and he squares his shoulders defensively.

  ‘It’s a stage in the grieving process, Lucy. The stage when you become completely honest about the decedent. I’ve reached it. I admit that I loved him a lot but I didn’t enjoy Stevie. Not at all. Right from the beginning it was a shock for both of us. Nothing prepared either of us for the sacrifices and the losses of having a child. That’s when I lost you. When he was born.’

  When I’m driving home I admit to myself that Stevie’s six months was six months of madness. Nothing happened when it was supposed to, nothing got done unless I was far away from him in my office. I forgot things. I lost things. I shrunk the laundry. I burnt the toast. I arrived late. I arrived on the wrong day. And all the time Stevie voiced his objections. I rocked him and it made no difference. I shouted and it made no difference. I sang to him and it made no difference. Eventually I’d stand there while he just filled me up with his noise as though I was an empty beaker. And after he died, I slept for twenty-four hours.

  It is late when I finally drive across the bridge and back into the city towards my Russian family. The lights, the smells, the city’s constant and purposeful motion, all please me. It is so late that I decide to park right inside the lot and risk antagonism from that unpleasant person and bad neighbour Dimitri Sergeyevich. I have been leaving the car a couple of blocks away in the lot where Mother parked when she brought me, as a child, to visit with Grandma. A man with cross-eyes used to take our money. He exchanged a few routine pleasantries with Mother and this was always the first Russian of the day. I look for him each day but of course both he and the shack he used to sit in have gone now, replaced by a machine.

  I drive slowly between intersections, the window down, remembering how I used to walk these streets holding Mother’s hand, past the Russian stores and restaurants and the Cyrillic billboards. It is good to hide inside these memories. They are a soft, kind place and in them Mother is barely sick at all.

  I held her hand and we walked down these streets and I trusted her. Of course, we never went inside any of the dark doorways or spoke to the groups of men who stood around on street corners speaking Russian. Occasionally a passer-by would say something to Mother but she would not reply.

  ‘Did that man know you?’ I asked once.

  Mother grasped my hand tightly and marched on. ‘No, he’s just impertinent.’

  ‘Did you understand him?’

  ‘Of course I did! Only too well!’

  ‘Then why didn’t you say something back in Russian?’

  ‘Because this isn’t Russia! It’s America! We don’t speak Russian here.’ There was a hysterical edge to her tone which meant it would soon be time to stop asking questions.

  ‘How about the guy in the parking lot?’ I inquired cautiously.

  ‘He is too simple to learn English.’

  ‘How about Grandma?’

  ‘Grandma is too old.’

  It was useless to point out that Aunt Zina and Sasha and all the aunts and cousins spoke Russian with each other all the time and that, although Sasha had been born here and went to an American school, he would never be so completely an American as Jane and I were.

  On our monthly visit to Grandma’s house, I watched Mother as first her language changed and then her mouth changed shape to accommodate the language and then gradually the whole of her face and body pupated into someone young and sweet-tempered. The woman who had married Daddy and named all the rock layers in the geology department cake.

  Grandma would sometimes talk to me using her few words of heavily accented English but mostly she would smile and hold me and stroke me and coo over me as though I was some much admired, small, tame bird. The aunts spoke better English. Katya and Olya, who had been born after the family’s arrival in the USA, could sound almost completely American and their language had all the colloquialisms and inconsistencies that Mother’s correct English lacked. They would break off from their Russian conversation to ask me questions and, almost incessantly, they gave me food. I basked in their love and admiration and home-made candies. As I ate I listened to their lyrical language, not understanding a word but feeling an intimate part of their circle. When I left I felt satiated, perhaps with love, perhaps with candy.

  ‘They’re stifling, I hate it there,’ Jane said. Mother seemed sympathetic to this view and Jane was seldom made to visit Grandma. This was not perceived as a slight: on the contrary, Grandma and the aunts asked constantly about Jane, reminding one another, in broken English for my benefit, of her beauty and cleverness.

  And now, here I am again, not a child but a woman, driving not walking, alone and without Mother, passing the shops and billboards and bars of the Russian quarter again, making my way towards Grandma’s apartment, although Grandma is long dead and Mother is incarcerated at Redbush clinic for her own safety and possibly others’.

  The streets have changed little. Perhaps the shops are brighter, lit by some flickering, far-off reflection of the new Russia, but they are still un-American. There are no groups of men on the corners but when I stop at a light I can hear Russian spoken by a passing couple and the rise and fall of their voices sounds as though they are singing some long, sad song. When I get out of the car the very air of the dark streets, cool after a warm day and a hint of fog thickening the air, seems pregnant with melancholy.

  I know now as I knew then that I am about to enter a place where I am loved, unconditionally and uncritically. I hear my feet on the asphalt. Their stride is even. The night lights, the salty air, they please me and make me feel guilty that I ever could have wanted to trade my own family for Seymour and Katherine.

  Aunt Zina has already taken her Pushkin and gone to bed but in the kitchen I find a light on.

  ‘Lucia!’ His leather jacket slung over a chair, smelling strongly of smoke, sweat and liquor, Sasha is raiding the cookie jar. ‘I just got home and thought you must already be asleep. Look, Mama left a meal here for you if you want it.’

  ‘I ate with some friends of Daddy’s.’

  ‘What have you been doing today?’

  I sink down into a chair near him. Suddenly my legs are weak with fatigue.

  ‘A million things. Mostly Daddy’s paperwork.’

  ‘Ah, the good daughter, Analysing figures. Double-checking, cross-referencing. Drawing a neat line at the bottom of her father’s page as she closes accounts and terminates pensions.’

  ‘I also found his headstone.’

  ‘Good gracious, wherever was it?’

  ‘In the yard. It says Remember Death. His pals have similar stones too. They think you live your life differently if you remember that you could die any minute.’

  ‘How many pals?’

  ‘Just three of them.’

  ‘The Remember Death club. I love it. Perhaps your father’s death leaves a vacancy and they will allow me to join.’

  Sasha passes me the cookie jar.

  ‘Why so late? Have you been in a meeting?’ I ask.

  He smiles mysteriously. ‘A most stimulating and fascinating meeting, to which Natasha’s contribution was frankly sensational. Wait here, please.’

  He disappears from the room and returns with whisky and two glasses.

  ‘Oh no, Sash, it’s too late for that and I’m tired.’

  ‘The best talks are tired talks.’ The bottle exclaims a little as he pulls the stopper from it. ‘And is adding columns of figures so very exhausting for a banker?’

  ‘Adding isn’t. Thinking is.’

  He fills one glass with ice and we listen to its protests as he pours whisky over it. Then he pushes the glass towards me and lifts his own.

  ‘A toast to Lucia, a loving sister and beloved cousin.’

  He touches my glass with his and the two em
it a note of religious purity.

  ‘And what have you been thinking about so hard, Lucia?’

  ‘I think I know who killed Daddy.’

  He rubs his hands and sits down across the table from me. I sip the whisky and feel its heat run through my body, even to my toes.

  ‘Have you shared this information with anyone else? That charming detective who was supervising on Monday night, for example?’

  ‘I can’t tell her. I can’t tell anyone.’

  ‘Except for your adoring cousin. How flattering.’

  ‘Sasha, I’ve lied to everyone. The police, Jane, Scott, even you.’

  He raises his eyebrows. ‘Sasha can be relied upon to keep your secrets, Lucia.’

  ‘I’ve told everyone I haven’t been to California for three years. But I have. I was here last weekend. Here in San Francisco.’

  I didn’t enjoy it. I didn’t enjoy any of the weekend. From the moment the plane landed, no, from the moment it took off, I was watchful, anxious, that some relative or old schoolfriend might see me. And Kent was so on edge he didn’t even sit next to me on the flight. Later, he looked my naked body up and down without warmth and with no indication of admiration and then he pulled me on to the bed. He was a talented and insistent lover. Sex with him was single-minded, pursued by both of us with an energy and determination that excluded love and even lust. Afterwards we lay still, our bodies touching without connecting. A deep loneliness fell across me like darkness. I looked at Kent and wondered if he felt it too but I knew that if he did he could only acknowledge its presence by further sexual adventure.

  Whenever the phone rang, he answered it and I leapt up and into the bathroom and turned on the shower because it might have been Mrs Kent calling. Mrs Kent with the blade of a baby swishing and cooing in the background. When the call was over he would switch off the shower and say: ‘You can come out now.’ He wrapped me in one of the big, soft hotel towels and I mistook this manoeuvre for affection. Only now, sitting in Aunt Zina’s apartment with its smells and dust, do I recognize that here I am loved. I am loved by Aunt Zina and Aunt Zoya and Sasha and Jane and Larry and Scott. I am wrapped up in their love like a bug in a curling leaf and I know I never should have chosen to mistake hotel laundry for affection.