John squinted his eyes; his eyelids fluttered rapidly. He was screening me out but he said, stubbornly, his hands still on his head, “I’m not stupid.”
“I know it,” I said, ashamed of myself. “I’m sorry.” We walked to the parking garage and I drove down to Brunning’s Drugstore.
7.
The next day John and I drove back to the farm. It was a beautiful summer day and we spent it near the pond in the dappled shade of a willow tree. I sat on a wooden “Adirondack” chair trying to read—I had come to the last few pages of my mother’s journal.
In cut-off jeans, John lay on a beach towel and sunbathed while he listened to the local radio station—“Rock Bonanza” was the name of their afternoon DJ program. He had taken his medication and had gotten up in the morning feeling, acting, and talking better. He was quiet, but the rigidity had gone. I was the rigid one. I had gotten up in the morning with a stiff neck, a headache, and a pain between my shoulder blades, but as the day went on and John seemed more and more himself I felt the tensions ease. My headache disappeared and I told myself, See? You can handle this!
Slowly, the afternoon waned, the sky turned a luminous gold, and the house “members” came chugging up the dirt road in their various conveyances, which all (except Skip’s) had as many dents, wounds, and eccentricities as the owners themselves. Here came Shauna in her fat-fendered 1956 Chevrolet, a car which had lost all of its chrome trim strips but still good-naturedly ambled along over ruts and branches and rocks. The Tart with the Heart Shauna called her.
And then May and Wayne appeared in their gallumphing wagon—its springs were shot, at every dip in the road it seemed about to break in half. Sal arrived in his truck, an old Welch Farms milk delivery van he’d converted into a traveling smithy. He’d gone back to being a farrier full time now that more horse farms had moved into the area. Weekends, he got dressed up in his Western clothes, his ten-gallon hat, his vest, his chaps, his custom-made boots, and went out showing a local farmer’s Appaloosa at Western events. He was good at barrel racing—he said it was just like riding a motorcycle only more so.
Alice and Leonard came up the dirt road in the orange Volkswagen. Watching the car you felt as if it were a toy on a string gently pulled along by a giant’s hand. Lately, Leonard and Alice had seemed to be getting along okay, but today his expression was set and Alice, who had turned to say something, I couldn’t catch what, had on her face the same angry frown. She was crosser than ever, her baby due toward the end of August. She said that she slept sitting up, with two pillows under her back. Lying down she couldn’t breathe and if she tried to sleep on her side, she would wake up in the most awful panic, as if she were suffocating. I didn’t like Alice, but indeed I felt sorry for her and wondered how she could be so calm about her future and the future of her child. Perhaps she would give the baby up for adoption. I felt a sort of sneaking admiration for her—I couldn’t imagine being in her situation.
I thought how that was one of the great things about living at the Ridge—that no matter what, you didn’t feel alone. In the year I’d lived there, I felt we’d become more than friends, we really had melded into a sort of family. And hadn’t that been the intention? In a peculiar way, I felt that I cared about all of them, even Alice. Their persons, their lives, their quirks and jokes and even their hurts and bad habits had become important to me.
“Hey, John,” I said, “do you want to go in now?”
“In a little while. Should I be helping somebody with something? Like dinner?”
“Oh no, you’re a guest.”
“I wish I weren’t.”
“Weren’t what?”
“A guest. I wish I lived here, all the time.”
“But what would you do here?”
“I don’t know. Anything. Any kind of work. Chop wood, garden, cook. Liz?” He rolled over and sat up. “Where am I going to live?” Where his hands gripped his knees I could see the whiteness of his knuckles. “I can’t live with Mom,” he said.
“No,” I said.
“She tries, it’s just that she treats me like a kid.”
“You have to learn to take the medicine. If you took it regularly …”
“You always say that. Why do you always say that? You’re making my whole life into one thing—illness! Medicine! Don’t you get it? I’m twenty-four, not eighty-four. I want to have a job and a place to live. I want to have a car and a girlfriend, like other people.”
I didn’t know what to say so I stood up and dusted my hands on my shorts. “Let’s go up, okay?”
“I see these guys I went to school with—these dumb guys. Larry Finnegan! They’re wearing suits and driving nice cars. I don’t have anything! I don’t even have a place to stay.”
“And if we don’t go up you won’t have dinner.” He looked at me and shrugged, and then a few feet up the path I felt a pebble hit me on the shoulder. I turned around but it was all right, he was all right.
“Sorry,” he said, and then pointed up at the sky. “Maybe it just fell off the moon.”
They were all in the parlor, talking and joking. As John and I came through the door, a pause ensued, as if a clock had stopped, and then the talk started again. No one acknowledged us. John went upstairs to take a shower, and I went into the kitchen. It was Leonard’s night to cook. He was looking pleased with himself, humming something deep and tuneless as he shaped hamburger meat into ovals.
“What are we having?”
“Something exotic. Persian, actually.”
“Holy cow?” I asked.
“No, that’s India,” he said. “Will you make the salad?”
“Certainly,” I said. I started chopping things at the butcher block, while he worked at the other side of the sink. He looked so large and deft and safe that I wanted him to put his arms around me. He held up his hands—they were coated with bits of ground meat and meat fat. “Jack the Ripper,” he said, “having just demolished another Lady of the Night, goes home to Buckingham Palace. For, in fact …”
“… he is the Prince of Wales,” I said.
“You read that book, too?”
“No, I read the review.”
“Ahha,” he said. He ran the water and squirted green detergent on his fingers. “How did it go yesterday?” he asked.
“Fine,” I said glibly. “We got the medicine. John’s taking it.”
“Great!” He held out a colander. “Look here, the first tomatoes. Good-looking aren’t they? They’re Early Girl. No slug holes.”
Wayne come to the doorway and leaned against the door-jamb with his hands in his pockets. “That’s more than we can say about you, my friend … How are you, Liz?” he added. “Everything go okay yesterday?”
“Fine,” I said, a little too loudly, smiling too hard.
“Liz,” May said, coming up behind Wayne, putting her arms around him and setting her chin on his shoulder, “you look kind of beat. Are you okay?”
“Look everybody,” I said, “I’m fine, really I am. Has anyone seen Skip? Does anyone know when he’s coming home?”
“Ten,” Alice called from the living room. There was a silence. Alice was sitting in a corner of the wicker sofa with her feet tucked up and her large stomach suspended forward. She was doing a crossword puzzle from a magazine and was using her stomach as a writing shelf. She wet the point of her pencil, wrote, frowned, looked up. “What?” she said. “He told me ten at breakfast this morning.”
“So he won’t be here for the meeting,” Shauna said stoically. “Liz,” she said, “we’re having a meeting after supper tonight.” She was sitting in the wicker rocker with her shoes off, reading a mystery novel.
“What about?” I said.
“Housekeeping, mostly,” Shauna said. “Also, some stuff that came up yesterday. About the Knackers.”
“Oh,” I said. I felt relieved. John came through the door in clean clothes with his damp hair neatly parted. He smiled shyly at everyone, but again I felt the atmosphere in th
e room change. There was another moment of silence as if the surge of current that connected the group had been abruptly cut off.
John said, “If it’s all right, I’ll go listen to the radio in the other room.”
“Sure,” I said, and then called after him, “Close the door.”
Wayne said, casually, “He seems pretty good.”
“Yeah,” I said, and sat down. “What was it that happened at the Knackers? Did everything burn?”
“No,” May said, “only the small barn burned to the ground.”
“We’ll tell you after dinner,” Shauna said, turning a page of her book. She had on her glasses with the lime-green frames. “It’s not exactly great dinner-talk.”
I said, “Were a lot of animals killed?”
“No,” Shauna said, but she said it so flatly that I knew there was more to the story than that.
They didn’t spare me. They went over the housekeeping budget and then got right to the point. Wayne asked me in his kindly, most paternal psychiatrist’s tone “what my plans were.”
I think I laughed. “Plans?” I said. I looked around the table. Across from me and one down sat Shauna with her unblinking passivity, which wasn’t, of course, only passivity; and Wayne, who was sitting directly across from me, Wayne with his wide-lipped smile in his pink, eternally sunburned face, and his little gold-rimmed glasses, and the benign, practiced way he had of listening to you, nodding very slightly; May with her kindness, her husky voice, her “concerned” look, which was partially natural and partially cultivated, for she felt it important to be “involved” and “concerned.” And Sal, who was sitting at my left, and who sighed and shifted in his chair, and tapped his feet under the table.
Leonard sat slumped at my right. Sitting next to me, he seemed so much shorter because his legs were long, and his head was sunk between his shoulder blades. He wouldn’t look up, only doodled G clefs and grace notes all over the masthead of The New York Times, and then (moving down the page) drew horns and a goatee on a Kissinger photograph.
Sitting there, looking around at these faces I had come to know so well, I felt a resigned nostalgia, as if I’d already set off on a long and dangerous journey, and would never see any of them again.
And what about Leonard? I must have been dreaming, that strange, bright, gritty, hot June day when the wind blew and the traffic roared and we had walked together in the city. I had seen him at once as I came through the hospital door, sitting sprawled on a bench in the park. I had walked south and then west around Stuyvesant Square, and then turned north, hoping he would see me. When I turned to walk down Sixteenth Street, I felt him running behind me; I swear I felt the reverberations of his pounding footsteps in the slabs of glinting sidewalk under my feet, and when I stopped at the next corner, confused and prim, and he came around in front of me and laughed—his face, his open, exposed, joyous face—like a blind person living in darkness I wanted to put my fingers upon it—his face was full of light.
But I didn’t, I didn’t let on. I kept my own face very still. I was frightened. The trucks and cabs and vans barreled past, a white florist’s van swerved around us and I didn’t say a word, because I was frightened.
Now I thought, Well. That’s that. I wouldn’t see Leonard again.
Leonard or any of them.
“But what are your plans?” Wayne persisted quietly.
I had come to like Wayne. He was well-intentioned. He wanted to do good in the world, he sincerely wanted to help people. Perhaps someday he would be a good psychiatrist. But he simply didn’t understand. He didn’t understand, the way most people don’t understand, what it’s like, living with someone like John. How you can’t have any plans. You don’t have a future. You don’t have a life.
“We mean about John,” Shauna said, in her flat voice.
“It’s not possible to have plans about John,” I said.
“Let’s put it this way,” Shauna said bluntly. “Were you planning to stay on here?”
I stared at her. She had on one of her diaphanous Indian dresses. It was a creamy beige, with drawstrings at the neck, the waist, and the wrists. “You mean tonight?” I asked.
“No, not tonight, of course you’ll stay tonight,” Shauna said. “We wondered if you’d made plans for after that. Will you stay in the house your mother left you?”
I said, “I don’t know.”
“But you’ve got to make some plans,” Wayne said. Next to me Sal hiccoughed, looked up, said, “Excuse me,” looked down again. His beard lay on his chest and his chin was sunk into the curls. He hands were rather fat and he had a gold ring, a pinkie ring, on his right hand. I had never noticed it before. Of course I couldn’t stay here with John. I saw that. I’d simply thought of coming back, seeing Skip, our room. Perhaps I had hoped—that they would let us stay. That John would take his medicine and be all right and that we could stay.
I licked my lips. I said, “You see, I don’t know what to do.” My voice cracked. Next to me, I heard a creak or a groan and I looked around. Leonard had sunk his head into his hands and his hands looked so peculiar, the shape I mean, his long angular fingers digging into his hair. I looked across the table at Wayne. There was a pottery bowl in the middle of the table piled with peaches and Wayne’s pink face seemed to be resting on top of the fruit. “I don’t know what to do, because if I sell my mother’s house John has nowhere to stay, and if I don’t sell it, there’s not enough money for John to live. At this point he really couldn’t live alone.”
“Aw hell, Liz,” Sal said. “We wish you could stay here.”
“The thing is …” Wayne said.
“No,” Leonard said suddenly in his deep voice. “Let me tell her.” I glanced at him. He sat looking straight out across the table, giving me his profile—his black brows, his jutting nose, his smallish indented chin, and a tiny brown mole I had never noticed before, just below his left earlobe. He turned to face me. His eyes were a light and beautiful gray. “The police were here.” He said it harshly.
“The police?” I asked.
“The state police,” Sal muttered, at my left. “Last night. They came about the fire.”
“You mean the Knackers’ fire?” I asked, turning to Sal.
He didn’t look up. “Right,” he muttered. “Right.”
May said nervously—she sat across the table, next to Wayne—“I know you didn’t hear, Liz. Erroll died in the fire.”
“Erroll died?” I said.
“He was in the barn.” Shauna said.
“Oh,” I said. “Oh I see. Oh my God.” I started to get up.
Sal put his hand on my arm. “Whoa,” he said. “Wait.”
I sat down again. “So they killed him after all. And we couldn’t prevent it?”
“Liz,” Leonard said, “They wanted to talk to your brother.”
“What?” I said. I rubbed my forehead. My headache was coming back. “Who did?”
“The state police,” Leonard said.
“Oh,” I said. I laughed. “There’s been a murder next door and they want to talk to my brother? What about? Sleeping in the park?”
Leonard stared down at the tabletop. “Dan Knacker claims that John and Erroll had a fight. He says John came to their place and beat Erroll up. And then he started the fire.”
“What?” I said. “Who started the fire?”
“John,” Sal said.
“But that’s crazy,” I said. “My brother got beaten up at The Rainbow’s End. He told me so and I believe him. Listen to me, he has a mental illness, he is not dim-witted. He told me that Dan Knacker beat him up outside of The Rainbow’s End.”
There was another silence, but this time it was not a solid and hostile silence, only uneasy, troubled. Somebody coughed, May dipped her head and frowned. Leonard said, “We ought to go down there and talk to the bartender.”
Wayne said, “Let the police do it.”
I said, “If the police do it, nobody will know anything.” I looked around the
table. Some of their faces were changing, like stone masks eroding. Behind her glasses, Shauna blinked. There was a loud banging at the front door. Everyone looked up, no one moved. Finally, Alice, who’d been sitting to the right of Leonard, stood up. It took her a long clumsy moment. She said, “I’ll get it.” In her funny, pregnant, duck’s walk, she waddled through the summer parlor and into the hall and I heard the voices at the door just as in your nightmares you imagine they will sound, harsh and authoritative, and then they came in, clump, clump, clump, following Alice’s slippered shuffle. They filled the room, all boots and belts, holsters, polished buttons, caps with leather visors, booming voices, the two of them. I don’t know why, police of any kind have always inspired terror in me.
We were driven down to the State Police headquarters. They made John sit in the front of the car, between them. They took him into a room for questioning. I sat outside on a bench and waited. After two hours, one of them came out. His name was Officer Pastore. He said that they were going to take John down to Greystone for psychiatric evaluation. I said I wanted to make a statement. I said that on the night of July 5, John had come back to the Ridge around suppertime. Later, he told me he’d been beaten up by Don Knacker. “Have you got that?” I asked Officer Pastore.
“Yeah,” he said. He was perfectly noncommital. I thought to myself, They must train them to look like that.
The same officers drove me back to the Ridge. It was a perfectly silent ride. They let me out at the front door. All the lights in the house were off. It was past midnight.
I walked around the house to the side parking lot. Skip’s car was there. I didn’t go upstairs. I got into my car and backed out of the lot. I drove down the bumpy dirt drive and out on the county road. At first I didn’t think much, I just drove. I drove south, I drove east. I drove back to Comstock, to my mother’s house.
Inside the house I curled upon on my girlhood bed and fell asleep with all my clothes on. I fell asleep at once. I could sleep because John wasn’t in my care. He was somewhere else, somewhere safe, safe in a place of asylum.
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