Another Dead Republican

by Mark Zubro

  I could hope.

  The fourth box in had insurance information.

  I sat in Edgar’s chair and began to read through the stacks of dense prose. A whole lot of them were from businesses who offered accidental death life insurance policies. You paid a minimal fee and got a payout if you died in an accident. Did murder qualify as an accident? I clicked onto the Internet and Googled double indemnity. The site I read claimed that such policies did pay out in the case of murder or accident, as long as the murder was not done by someone who benefited from the policy. Edgar had five of these. Veronica was the beneficiary.

  I used manila file folders I’d found in the top right-hand desk drawer. With a fine point marker, I labeled one insurance and stuck those forms inside. I began another for investment companies, a third for bank accounts.

  Five minutes later Scott said, “Why are there voter registration rolls in here for Harrison County?”

  “Huh?”

  He flipped through a stack of print outs that might have come from a laser jet printer in the early nineties. “These cover from nineteen forty-four to nineteen ninety-two.” He glanced into the box and took out the next stack of papers. They were about as thick as a ream and a half of paper. He flipped through the first few and the last few. He said, “These go from ninety-two to this year.”

  “Strange.”

  “No stranger than hunting lodge brochures.”

  Forty-five minutes in, I found the tax forms from five years before. It was a start in organizing the income folders, making it far easier. Any company they had income from would have sent a form of some kind, normally a 1099. If he was making money from businesses that didn’t send tax forms, I think he and now Veronica at least peripherally, were in trouble. Taxes were due late next week. My guess was Veronica would need to find Edgar’s accountant or hire one of her own.

  NINE

  Wednesday 8:44 A.M.

  I’d just placed the first investment form into the tax folder when the door to the den burst open. Edgar’s father, Charles Dudley Grum, marched into the room.

  “Where’s Veronica?” he demanded. His voice was nearly a shout.

  I said, “She’s telling the children their father is dead.”

  He added a snarl to the loudness of his voice. “What’s taking so long?”

  There was a timetable for announcing the death of a parent to children? How cruel? How absurd?

  I didn’t really want to deal with this guy right now. Then I reminded myself, for it seemed like the thousandth time already, that he’d just lost a son, and he deserved a lot of slack.

  At their wedding, Edgar was drunk from before the ceremony began. He swayed at the altar. I remember glancing at the family across the church aisle. The gargantuan Mrs. Grum slopped over the edge of the pew across from my mother. My sister’s moments-from-officially being mother-in-law’s gargantuan face radiated hate. Not disapproval, hate.

  When I met him, I thought Edgar was a fool. When I saw him at the wedding, I thought he was a drunken fool. My sister loved him. Who was I to tell her he was a disaster? And she wouldn’t have listened. She was in love.

  During the entire reception, her mother-in-law sat in a corner and barely seemed to alter an ounce of her posture. The dog didn’t move much either. Didn’t the poor thing ever have to relieve itself? The alternative was too odious to consider. I felt sorry for the poor critter.

  It wasn’t the drunken Edgar or my sister’s hate-filled mother-in-law, I found most offensive at the wedding. It was Charles Dudley Grum, the father-in-law, whom I found most odious.

  At the reception when Scott and I began to dance, one of Edgar’s dad’s minions came over and told us to stop. I knew it was a minion from someone who talked to me later.

  Scott’s dancing is a sight to behold. The man is all grace and athleticism on the baseball field. Put him on a dance floor to any kind of fast music, and he looks like a man in the midst of electro-shock therapy in a video where someone keeps pressing the pause button, kind of spastic jerking on steroids. On the other hand slow dancing with him is a joy. His body swaying, dipping, and dancing next to mine, up against mine, pure bliss. And yes, our doing so at such an event is still a political and moral affront to many. Good.

  We’d even taken dancing lessons at one point. The lessons didn’t do an ounce of good for his dancing to rock and roll.

  I’m afraid I committed one of the great sins at that moment of attempted minion intervention. I was neither afraid, intimidated, or much interested, that was normal. No, the great sin was that I laughed at the minion attempting to remove us from the dance floor.

  We didn’t stop dancing. If guests were offended, they did not rush out of the reception screeching in horror. In fact, they all seemed to live through it. So the minion stuff was odd, but not the oddest.

  That came at the height of the dinner, prime rib and lobster. Charles Dudley Grum got up to make a toast to his son. He was at least as drunk as the younger man, if not drunker. Picture an enraged bull swaying like a cobra, eyes pink, nose red.

  Prior to this my sister kept telling me that her future father-in-law was a charmer. Up to then I’d missed that part of his personality. What happened next did not add the notion that he was charming to my list of things I thought about him. Perhaps all who knew him and his family were charmed by their reported wealth and reputed influence in local politics. At the reception, I didn’t note anything that resembled charm in anyone in Edgar’s family.

  Charles Dudley Grum was at the podium in the middle of the head table. He held a randomly screeching microphone and lurched back and forth worse than a drunk trying to walk down the aisle of a moving train.

  Well, I wasn’t married to him.

  It’s what he said that I found most awful, weird, offensive. He talked about my sister as, “the little woman who could now keep house the way a woman should,” and, “the new addition to a family that knew how to keep traditional values sacred,” and “that she’d married into a family that knew how to pray and keep things holy.”

  You think I’m making this up? It got worse.

  He talked about what a fine man Edgar was despite his wayward youth. Then he began listing all the wayward youth things his kid had done. Beginning with a disgusting toilet training incident, moving on to drunken teenage puking, then with him, daddy Charles Dudley, being called to settle run-ins with school authorities and with the law.

  Weird, odd, obnoxious was bad enough, but the eternal recitation was boring beyond belief. My parents and the rest of my family sitting at our table had frozen smiles plastered on their faces. The entire rest of the audience, except Scott next to me, were laughing and cheering and carrying on as if Charles Dudley Grum was announcing the last triumph of the idiot right.

  Except, of course, Mrs. Grum, whose stony expression altered barely a whit. At the best of times her face looked as if someone had recently shoved a baseball bat up her butt, thick end first. At that moment her expression looked like maybe the bat had been replaced by a smallish cucumber. I remember wondering if this slight change meant that she was amused, possibly even having a good time? I’d hate to think she was as astonished and disapproving as I was. I’d hate to think I shared any of the same emotions as she. Such thoughts might introduce the notion that she was human. At any rate, she didn’t try to interrupt or stop her husband.

  Edgar, instead of being embarrassed or angry, began cheering his dad on at the end of each incident. As in, “Yeah, dad,” or “You tell ‘em dad.”

  My main thought at the time was that at least I wasn’t marrying him.

  After they were married, Veronica and her husband moved near his family in Wisconsin. At the time, he had a job in a law office there as a clerk.

  Edgar, in my sister’s version, had tried breaking with the family. He’d quit the clerk job, become a financial planner, and been laid off by that company. His family had upbraided him for being in trade, for losing a job, for not being as successful a
s the rest of them.

  The unofficial version I’d gotten at their wedding from a drunken cousin. She’d told me that even the family couldn’t put up with his incompetence, or at least they stopped putting up with his incompetence when he started costing them money. Nothing criminal, she insisted at the time, just rampant stupidity.

  Most recently, he’d signed on to work temporarily in the county repub office and the anti-recall campaign.

  Scott and I never went to my sister’s for the holidays.

  In fact, other than a few lunches, I rarely saw her although we talked on the phone frequently. We’d been close. She’d rant about her in-laws, but she loved her husband. There wasn’t much to be done, and there wasn’t much I could suggest. Nor was I being asked for suggestions.

  Shutting up is an underrated virtue.

  TEN

  Wednesday 8:47 A.M.

  Charles Dudley Grum planted himself in the middle of the room.

  In response to his demand for a time frame for breaking horrific news to children, Scott said, “I’m sure she’s doing the best she can.”

  Edgar’s father glared from one to the other of us, finally fixed his eyes on me.

  He said, “What are you doing?”

  I looked up from the tax planner document I’d been about to inspect.

  I was not about to justify myself to him. Nor, simply because he asked a question, was I obligated to answer it. Instead, I asked, “How are you and the rest of the family doing?” Scott tossed the coupon booklet he had in his hand into the trash and came around the desk and stood next to me.

  Mr. Grum said, “You have no right to be going through those things.”

  I said, “Is there anything I can do to help you right now?”

  He said, “You will leave this. Go. You will not interfere in this family.”

  Before he walked in, he couldn’t have known what we were doing. We hadn’t started sorting until after Barry Grum’s earlier visit. I wondered why he’d come in here in the first place. I didn’t have a lot of patience with these people in normal times. Usually, by this point I’d have told him off. I kept my voice calm.

  I said, “I will leave what go, precisely?”

  He waved a hand at all the boxes and papers. “I will tell Veronica that you don’t wish to do this, that you will put all these papers back, and that you don’t wish to be bothered.”

  Very quietly, I said, “You don’t speak for me.”

  He stamped around the room bumping into a few of the larger animals. He slammed his fists down on the desk. He shoved fistfuls of paraphernalia and papers from the desk onto the floor. Throughout, he bellowed and screamed at full volume various versions of, “Get out. Go away.”

  There was way more emotion being exhibited here than was called for by the simple truth I’d stated.

  I stood up. The man was out of control. Did he need a sedative, a mountain of them? Did he take blood pressure pills? He looked like he needed a whole bottle’s worth. He looked a heartbeat or two short of a stroke. I was more worried about him collapsing than I was about making points about how absurd he was, or demanding to know who he thought he was that he could command me at will.

  He grabbed a stack of papers that were on the top of the heap in the box Scott had been going through. The top ones were hunting lodge brochures. He leaned across the desk, waved them in my face, and finished his rant with, “Nothing. You have nothing to do or say. You will do what I say.” He planted his fists on top of the desk. His chest heaved as he gasped for breath.

  I’d dealt with far too many idiot administrators in my time to put up with this. I took a breath to begin an angry response. I didn’t get the first syllable out. Scott put his hand on my arm and said, “Maybe you should sit down, Mr. Grum. Can I get you something to drink? A glass of water? Should I call a doctor? Or call 9-1-1? You don’t look well.”

  Scott’s deep, calm, thrumming voice brought me to my senses. This was no time for me to be out of control. Charles Dudley Grum might not need me, but Veronica did.

  Scott’s voice had no such soothing effect on our attacker. Thrusting his hips against the desk, he bent toward us, his clenched fists mushed onto the top of the desk, concentrated on his breathing. Scott and I stood silently. Finally, Mr. Grum had enough breath to say, “You can get out and not bother this family anymore. Do as I say!”

  In deference to his presumed emotional distress over his son, I replied in my softest voice, “You have no power over me.”

  “What I say goes in this family, in this county.”

  I said, “I’m sorry. I don’t know what we’re talking about. Is there something I can do to help you at this terrible moment?”

  Again, he turned very purple. He sputtered. Again, he began to pace and shout. “How dare you? You’re not in charge here. I’ve done exactly what this family needs. I know exactly what this family needs. I’ve made all the decisions. I will make all the decisions.”

  “What decision are we talking about?” I asked. “Your son is dead. I’m sorry for your loss.”

  The inkling of horror crept into the back of my mind. Had he made the decision to murder his son? Too ghastly, too inhuman; then again, he was a Republican. I so very much didn’t want it to be true that the Grums somehow could be involved in the death of their own son. It was just such an awful thing to contemplate.

  Mr. Grum tried to launch his vast bulk around the desk. He sprawled on top of it for a few moments. All of the rest of the papers and junk on top of the desk went flying. Some of the ceramic souvenirs broke into bits on the rug. It took him a few moments to control his rage and get himself righted on his feet.

  Next he tried to rush around the desk to attack us.

  We tried the simple expedient of not moving.

  The older man couldn’t get at us by going around to the left because the chairs were in the way. He tried the right, but had to stop because he had trouble fitting his gargantuan self between the desk and the grizzly bear.

  His feet crunched on shards of the broken paraphernalia he’d swept onto the floor. He kicked at several of the larger bits.

  Mr. Grum was breathing too hard. He swayed, shuffled sideways, grasped the desk for support.

  I said, “Do you need us to call 9-1-1?”

  He gulped breaths for several minutes. We waited. His face turned from awful purple to deep red. Then he began screaming again, “You’re just some faggot interloper who we’ve had to tiptoe around for years.”

  I thought of matching him scream for scream. The screamers usually think that once they’re screaming and you’re not, they’ve won.

  He waved a fat finger in my direction. “We aren’t going to put up with you anymore. You’re history.” He swayed, clutched the desk for support. I’m afraid the thought flashed through my head that if he had a heart attack or a stroke, should such a thing eventuate, I would not weep.

  I wondered if Veronica and the kids could hear him, or maybe Mrs. Grum and/or their kids might come rushing from the living room in support.

  In the softest, most measured tones I could summon, I said, “You will, now and forever, treat me and mine with dignity and respect. You do not get to play plantation master with me, now or ever.”

  Scott didn’t interrupt me or try to shush me, and I got no warning touch of his calming hand. As we met this threat, I felt his shoulder press against mine in solidarity. That touch was enough and more than enough to remember at that moment how much I loved him.

  As I stared at Mr. Grum trying to control himself, I wonder what the hell was going on here? Was he some kind of enraged, mad fool? Or a poor, desperately wounded schlub who had lost his son and didn’t know how to deal with the loss except to hit out at anything in his path, a wild animal too blind and grief stricken to deal any other way?

  Mr. Grum continued drawing deep breaths.

  Scott said, “Mr. Grum, we are deeply sorry for your loss. This must be the hardest thing a parent could possibly go through. W
hether we like each other or not, Tom and I are here to help Veronica and your grandchildren and your family through this difficult time. We’ll be happy to do what we can.”

  Mr. Grum responded to this compassion with, “You can help by getting out. Now and forever. Veronica is not our blood. We have a family Trust. We are here to protect our interests. The Trust is very clear on what happens when someone dies.”

  I’m not sure I cared about his family Trust. It didn’t bother me that he didn’t want me involved in his grief and sorrow. That was none of my business. I did know I cared about Veronica and helping her through this. A rampaging bull elephant he might be, but perhaps if he raged at me, Veronica might be spared some grief later. And what was this crap about not being “blood”? Was this son-of-a-bitch planning to leave her destitute? He wouldn’t want his grandkids out on the street, would he? Hard to tell, he was a Republican after all.

  We were interrupted by a tap on the door.

  ELEVEN

  Wednesday 9:03 A.M.

  The door opened. A woman peered into the room. She balanced a briefcase and a cup of coffee in one hand and held the door handle in the other. She said, “I was told Veronica was back here.”

  I said, “She’s still with the children.”

  The woman came into the room. She was in her mid-to-late-thirties, slender, and wore a white shirt and a dark gray pantsuit. She said, “I’m Enid Achtenberg, Veronica’s attorney.”

  Mr. Grum said, “We don’t need any outside attorney. The family has attorneys. You’re not wanted. Get out.”

  “You’re Mr. Grum,” she said.

  “Yes, so what?” His voice was still at bellow level.

  Nobody else from the family had rushed in to see what was going on. Maybe the rest of them were used to bombast beyond all levels of decency, or he was the one in the family who did the bidding and commanding and they didn’t dare interfere. Although, according to Veronica, Edgar’s mother ruled the roost.