Erased From Memory

by Diana O'Hehir

  Actually, I do want to talk to you, Egon. Just, not right now.

  He is alarmed. “Murders? Well, not at all. That is, we aren’t sure. For Rita—poor, tragic Rita—-yes, certainly. Shot. That was murder. But for Marcus? There is no sign of murder.”

  I look at him to see if he’s serious and decide that he thinks he is. I mention the ankh.

  “Ah, yes. The ankh. The life force, the symbol. Many of us had them. Carried them, you know? For good luck.”

  I mutter something about its not helping much, which Egon ignores. “And what could be more natural”—he gets almost enthusiastic—“than, at the last minute, when you feel the life force ebbing, all that you love going from you”—he waves a hand to indicate the things he loves dissipating into the atmosphere—“what could be more natural than that you thrust the potent token . . .”

  (Potent token, I think, good, good.)

  “. . . than that you thrust it into yourself.”

  An unpleasant image, don’t carry it further. “So you think he swallowed another ankh, that first time?”

  He looks dumbfounded. No, he didn’t mean that.

  “What did he die of?” I ask, veering the conversation some.

  Egon sounds defensive. “They’re still testing.” The defensiveness makes me decide he hasn’t been told the cause of Marcus’s death and doesn’t want to admit it.

  Of course, maybe they still don’t know. Don’t those forensic studies sometimes take ages?

  “Well,” I suggest, “they said something about low blood pressure.”

  Egon says, “Ah.”

  “And someone has suggested internal bleeding.” Actually the person is Scott, but for some reason I don’t mention that.

  Egon just stares.

  “I mean,” I remind him, “staggering around for a whole day.”

  He fishes for a remark. “Terrible, terrible.”

  We give that some space. “What I really wanted to talk to you about . . .” Egon starts off.

  Yes, I thought you were chasing me around the garden for a reason. And I won’t be deflected just yet. “I’m curious about Mr. Broussard. What was he like?”

  “Oh. Charming.”

  “What did he do for a living?”

  “He was very rich. Very generous. Listed in the Fortune 500. Other places. I think it was . . . banks?” Egon offers this with furrowed brow, as if the subject is a bit vulgar. Mr. Broussard was so rich that one didn’t inquire.

  Now I get to say, Ah. Egon, did you know he was making porn films in your crypt? “Was he here often?”

  “Oh, yes, certainly. Yes, often.” For some reason this question makes Egon uncomfortable.

  “How did you meet him, Egon?”

  “How did I meet him?” I observe that a question, even a repeated one, is a good way of stalling. “Why. A prominent man. Interested in the field. Well.”

  “You were together in Egypt, weren’t you?”

  “In Egypt? Why. Well . . .”

  “In Thebes. In a camp in Thebes.”

  “Ah. That time. Why. Of course.” A concerned crease has developed between Egon’s eyebrows. He fiddles with the doughnut paper.

  “Egon, I’d really like to talk about that spring in Thebes.”

  “Spring in Thebes?” Egon asks, making it sound like the title of a musical comedy. “Oh, my. But, you see, I was there only a few days. Perhaps everyone had a good time. Perhaps you should ask your father.”

  That camp in Thebes is a hot topic. Everyone has to be cajoled, pushed, bribed into discussing it.

  “. . . And it is Dr. Day that I really wanted to talk to you about,” Egon picks up. I’ve waited a minute too long and have lost the initiative. “He is such an admirable scholar.”

  I think, Oh, God, I know what’s coming.

  I want it, what he’s going to say. But on another level, that of keeping my dad from being hurt, I very much don’t want it.

  I wait, thinking at Egon, Come on, get going.

  He’s going to tell me that Edward Day is acting disturbed. Egon has finally caught on—Edward Day is a damaged example of Alzheimer’s. Egon will say, regretfully, that Dr. Day can’t help with the topics the museum is trying to research.

  He will extend his sympathy, but he will say that perhaps my father and I should leave the museum by the end of this week.

  “I was wondering”—Egon opens his little blue eyes very wide—“if we could get Dr. Day to take a more active role in the doings of the Resident Scholars’ Program.” He chews on his doughnut.

  I stare. Yes, he is serious. He radiates sincerity. Egon, you take my breath away. Furthermore, I don’t understand. You’ve got to be faking; I can’t imagine why. “Active role? What kind of active role?”

  He brings his nervous horse-face, wiggling nose and all, close in to mine. “We’re going to do a newsletter. Perhaps an article?”

  I don’t answer this, being struck dumb by the idea. Write an article? Some days my dad can’t write at all, and has to deliver anything he wants to put down on paper in wobbly block letters. Other days he can sign his name beautifully, in ornate Victorian script. But to translate some idea in his head into sentences on paper?

  “I would be proud to work with him on it,” Egon suggests. “I could interview him. Something about the earlier days of Egyptology?”

  After a minute’s silence he adds, “There may be wonderful matters he knows that will get lost. Reminiscences. Views of people. Little facts. All those fascinating details that are so helpful, so important, but that we don’t . . . well, that nobody is sure of. Anymore.”

  His voice dies down. He looks reflective, as if he’s listening to what he’s just said.

  “After all, your father knows circumstances that . . .” He pauses, clears the throat. He has started on a sentence he doesn’t quite like. “He knows things other people don’t know. Egyptology things.”

  Okay, Egon, I think, I don’t understand this and it makes me itchy, but sure, you can interview my dad. He’ll love the attention. You think he knows something important? Something connected with the tangle we’re in right now? Maybe. I’ve not had any luck questioning him.

  The Memoirs of Edward Day, edited by Egon Rothskellar. I access that ridiculous image for a few seconds.

  But if my dad is going to hang around here for a while longer, I want the place to be safer. Egon can look doubtful all he wants, but I know there have been murders. Not just one murder, two. Plus a lot of little thefts. And a sheriff who doesn’t know his ass from a posthole. “Egon, I think you should hire a detective.”

  “What?” He sounds absolutely flabbergasted.

  I detail my points. Murder. Theft. Chaos. Inadequate law enforcement.

  Egon is disbelieving. “Inadequate? Oh, my, oh, no. We have a new sheriff. A fine man. This sheriff is a gentleman.”

  “No, he’s not.”

  “Much different from the previous one. Sheriff Munro is interested in Egyptology.”

  No, he’s not. And he’s also not interested in solving the crime under his jurisdiction. “He seems completely inadequate to me,” I say. I start listing for-instances. Egon blinks and says, “Oh. No,” a lot.

  A few more minutes reveal that we are stalemated. Egon is happy with Sheriff Munro. He will not hire a detective.

  We stand staring at each other, and Egon changes the subject. “I truly look forward to working with your father.”

  I do not understand anything at all. There must be something in it for you, Egon, maintaining my damaged father on your elegant premises. But I don’t have a clue what that is.

  And meanwhile your museum is not safe.

  I think of approaching Cherie to do some pro bono detection. She would be okay at it, but having Cherie around all the time? Oh, my God.

  The only available detective is me.

  “Right,” I tell Egon. “I guess my father would enjoy helping the Institute.”

  Chapter 13

  “Hello,”
Rob says at the other end of my cell phone. “I mean, well. Hi.”

  I wait, long enough that it gets embarrassing. Obviously this is a conversation that he thinks will give him trouble. “Hi, Rob.”

  “I got, I mean, I made this appointment. Well. I’m going to San Francisco to see Rita’s boyfriend. And I thought maybe you’d come, too.”

  I manage to keep some of the complete startlement out of my voice. “Rita? Boyfriend?”

  “Yes. Well, you know, I treated her.”

  No, I didn’t know. I keep learning new things. It makes my head hurt.

  “She came into the trauma clinic. I was on duty.” Rob’s field is tropical medicine, but Rita, in spite of her years in Egypt, didn’t have a tropical disease but a worldwide one: depression. And from somewhere she got the common sense to go to the clinic with it.

  So Rob was the one who got her back on track.

  “She listed this guy as her next of kin,” he says after a minute. “She and I got to be friends, sort of.”

  And here I was, thinking maybe it was Cherie who had helped Rita back to sanity.

  “Cherie should go with you to visit this guy,” I say.

  There’s a minute’s uncomfortable silence. “Cher says you should.

  “She says you’re in the situation. And you’re good with people.”

  Actually I do want to talk to Rita’s boyfriend. I just don’t want to do anything Cherie has told Rob I ought to do.

  “My dad comes, too,” I say, inspired. Daddy will provide a buffer between me and Rob. And he loves to go to San Francisco.

  Rob, too, is relieved. “Oh, hey, great.” He says it with almost too much enthusiasm. Rob and I, buddies since I was six, have reached the point where we need a barrier between us.

  “Going to the city,” my father says. “Oh, I am so pleased. Now, dear, exactly which city is it?”

  Careening up Highway One in Rob’s little car (Rob is a usually careful driver who gets undisciplined when he’s under tension), he and I alternate between being antsy (that’s me) and superficially matey (which is Rob). He says he is concerned about me. How am I, do I feel better, have I been having bad dreams, any flashbacks? And how is Ed . . .

  We are all jammed in the front seat, with my dad between us, straddling the gear shift. He says, “Ed. That is me. I am Ed.”

  I say, “What do you care, Rob? That’s ancient history, right? What’s past is past.”

  Rob is appalled. “Carla, we’re a team. You are important to me.”

  I let that resonate for a few blue California miles. It’s a bright, achingly clear day. I think even Rob in his present mood of euphoria and denial must hear the echoes his words fling out.

  “I am fine,” my dad announces. “Why do people always ask that? It is not very interesting.”

  After a while Rob picks up again. His voice is still cheerful, but a teeny bit forced. “Well, I called this George; Rita listed him on the treatment form as her next of kin. I didn’t even know if he knew.” (He means about Rita’s death.) “But it turned out he did; the sheriff called him. And then we talked . . .” His voice trails off. He’s silent for a half a mile; the Toyota clunks quietly. “Like, he and I talked. People that have lost someone will talk to anybody. It doesn’t matter whether they know them or not.”

  “I am always happy to talk to people,” my father offers. “I have been conversing with the man in the museum. Doing that is relaxing.”

  I ask him what he’s saying to Egon and he acts interested. “Oh, is that his name? Egon? I knew someone else with that name.”

  “Carla,” Rob says, “I hope you’re not distressed about Cherie. You and I are still good friends. We’ll always be good friends.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I agree. “Sure.”

  “I mean, it’s not as if you also haven’t had . . . other friends. There was that Chinese guy. At the Manor.”

  Wayne Lee wasn’t Chinese; he was an American of Chinese ancestry. A handsome sweet stud who worked at the Manor and with whom I had a three-month flirtation. But that’s been over for a while now.

  I think Rob doesn’t know about my Habitat boyfriend. Rob was in his last year of his internship at Davis. Come to think of it, we corresponded steadily during that one. I sent him matey letters about nailing sheetrock and going to neighborhood potlucks.

  I say aloud, “Oh, for God’s sake.”

  “Anyway,” Rob says, “this George sounds like a really nice guy.”

  “Sure.” I’m beginning to get curious. I can ask this man questions; that will take my mind off wanting to strangle Rob. And it will be as if I’m constructing Rita out of some new bits and pieces. She gave me a few; her computer offered some others. Scott did, too. Scraps of the bright materials she liked to wear.

  A quarter mile of knockout California scenery unreels around us, coves and blue water and wind-tossed grasses. After that we hit civilization in the form of square white cardboard houses plastered against the hillsides like an invading robot army.

  “He lives in the center of the Mission,” Rob says. “He works in a bookstore.”

  I grunt. It’s a mistake to try for a clear picture of people before you meet them; I always do that and it never works out. But up ’til now I was getting a George in my head who’s nothing like the boyfriend that works in a bookstore. The imaginary boyfriend was suave and older and quirky—another version of my imaginary Marcus. I’ve been trying to reconstruct him, too, out of bits and scraps.

  We fight our way along the freeway and down into San Francisco, in and out of the narrow streets of the Mission District. Rob is asking my dad concerned questions about his health and his interests, and my father is answering with a lecture on the history of San Francisco, which seems to be conflated with the history of some Near Eastern city. “There is a more indigenous area to the west,” Daddy says. “Tourists have preempted the central neighborhoods.”

  And every now and then, over my dad’s head, Rob tries to alert me to my sins. The ones against my father. “Carl,” he begins solemnly, “I wonder”—flicking a glance down at the crisp white head between us—“enough attention here? Are you really paying attention? To your dad, in the middle of everything? Do you think . . . ?”

  Rob, what I think is that I will swat you and wreck this car full of people.

  He has parked so close to a crateful of plantains that I have to scramble over the gearshift and out the door on his side. My dad has no trouble doing this. He thinks it’s fun.

  Rob and I, despite Cherie, are practicing for our old favorite script: telling each other what to do. “You have a colossal amount of nerve,” I say to him, scraping my shin on a plywood carton.

  Rob does the loud knocking on the door’s glass panel; I lean against the warm splintery housefront and try to take in street scenes. Assorted interlocked couples pass by; after that there’s one woman in an undershirt and purple skivvies pushing a stroller holding a fluffy white dog, then there’s another woman in T-shirt, sweatshirt, gold lamé shoes, skirt on top of jeans, and playing a recorder as she walks. Typical Mission District scenery. The door crunches open to reveal George Marziano, who is skinny, long-haired, and a little breathless. He wears a blue-stained undershirt with gaping armholes.

  He is so much not what I’ve been picturing as Rita’s boyfriend that I’m struck dumb. I guess Rob is, too. And George takes a minute to get enough wind to greet us. “Well, hi there. Wow.”

  Well, hey, wow.

  He greets my dad with enthusiasm. And Daddy says, “Yes, of course, young man. You’re an old friend; I’d know you anywhere.”

  We follow him up a steep staircase. Early San Francisco builders economized by making staircases too narrow and too abrupt.

  At the top of the stairs George’s apartment is a long hallway with rooms branching off. There are lots of rooms; this was once a spacious house. Someone has painted the front space, which maybe used to be the parlor, black, but George doesn’t take us in there; he leads us into anot
her room with lipstick-pink curtains.

  “Welcome to my humble abode.” I guess he’s trying to be funny.

  We sit on furniture that looks like the stuff Rob and I had in Santa Cruz. Goodwill or left-in-the-street, primarily tapestried, shiny, and gray. Cats have been sharpening their claws on the chair arms; that’s a big feature of this kind of furniture.

  “Well,” we say, and “Hi,” and once again, “Wow.” George gazes at us anxiously. He is hollow-chested, which shows up painfully with the kind of undershirt he’s wearing. He has a long, sincere, worried face and circles under his eyes.

  “I guess it’s hard to believe,” he says.

  Rob and I nod.

  “I mean, when you called. Of course I already knew. Hey, it was really nice of you to do that.”

  Rob nods again. “Glad to.”

  “I mean, Rita was special. Know what I mean?”

  Et cetera. We do this, him emoting and us agreeing, and my dad saying things like, “I think I understand the system behind that sculpture there” (a mobile made out of plastic strips) for about five minutes. I listen and try hard to get a picture of how this weedy little man fit into Rita’s life, but I don’t succeed. George is sweet, tentative, insecure. He’s about thirty-five years old. About five years younger than Rita. Maybe she liked younger men? No soap. Marcus wasn’t younger and neither is Scott. Maybe she liked losers? That certainly doesn’t work, not with those two as evidence. Even this guy, with his ropy chest and anxious eyes, isn’t exactly a loser. He’s just hopeful and sad-looking, and maybe the sadness is for her.

  He says he is writing a novel.

  I revise my analysis. You can’t tell with writers. Rita would have thought writers were in a special category. I can hear her saying something about how if you’re really creative who measures your machos.

  Although that lady really liked macho a lot, I think.

  The novel, George says, is about a wolverine. His eyes get a little life in them. He says, “Hey, great of you to ask.”

  Wolverine. I struggle with this; it’s strange and uncomfortable but it might be interesting. The wolverine is not the central character, exactly, George elucidates, it’s the alter ego for the guy who is the central character.