Scott Lasser

by The Year That Follows (v5)

  Maclean has a story of how one of their salesmen took out a NatWest portfolio manager, who got so drunk that the salesman, a rugby player, carried the manager into his flat, where the salesman couldn’t help but notice all the furniture had been removed save one ratty old chair, on which was a note from the manager’s wife, explaining why she’d left with the kids. “Infidelity, alcohol, absence,” says Maclean. “The trifecta.” The salesman left the manager passed out in the chair but took his keys, in order to return the next morning to help him shave, shower, and get to work. The salesman told Maclean, “The firm spent over two hundred quid on the bugger. The least he could do was go to work and sling a few bonds around.”

  “He’ll go far,” Kyle says, meaning the salesman.

  “If his liver holds out,” Maclean answers.

  “Anything happening?”

  “Naw. Nervous but quiet. Stocks trade like shit, you ask me.”

  Such, Kyle thinks, is the nature of stocks. They make you nervous. Even two years ago, when they were rocketing upward during the five best years for stocks in the history of the universe, there’d been a feeling of unease. At least, Kyle had felt it. Companies that didn’t make money were naming professional football stadiums. Ah, he thinks, the madness of crowds. These nervous times suit him better. Never a rah-rah guy, Kyle dislikes rah-rah markets. He was always a better range trader than a momentum guy, making money in small bits, winning slowly, over the long haul.

  Kyle feels Caputo before he hears him ask, “You ready?” It’s easy to feel Caputo, all that nervous energy and hyperalertness, a squirrel always looking for the hawk.

  “It’s not even eight-thirty,” Kyle says.

  “Let’s walk outside; it’s a beautiful day.”

  An interesting comment from Caputo. It’s possible to reach the Trade Center without going out, but Kyle hates the rabbit-warren passages and tunnels. He and Caputo walk out to Vesey, cross the West Side Highway, then climb the steps that lead to the courtyard. There’s something different about Caputo here, with the sun shining on his black curls, the light on his face. Kyle realizes he’s worked with Caputo for four years and has never seen him in natural daylight.

  “What do you think of these buildings?” Kyle asks.

  “Big.”

  “Fucking ugly, you ask me.”

  Caputo stops, looks up. “Just buildings,” he says. “Rentable space.”

  This, Kyle thinks, might be an admirable quality, the ability only to think about money. It’s why Kyle has brought Caputo along, to drill down to the money. They are meeting McHugh and his boss, who have an electronic trading platform. Caputo’s idea is that the firm should get it for free in exchange for moving bonds through it, ignoring that the business plan for the product must have included a charge for the service. “Let ’em charge the other guys,” Caputo said in the strategy meeting. Kyle couldn’t argue. Besides, these Web guys seemed to like giving things away.

  Kyle wishes his job had more meaning for him, but at this point it’s only money, which he remembers liking more when he had less of it. There must be something he could do that would feel important. Of course, nothing would pay more, and if capitalism puts such a high price on what he does, he must be missing its import. He and Caputo switch elevators and he thinks of Siobhan. Maybe after breakfast he’ll go back with McHugh and visit her floor, maybe ask her to dinner. At the very least he’ll get a look at her. He always liked doing that.

  Right here they should be passing her floor. There’s a slight shimmy in the elevator, or maybe he’s feeling his life shift. He knows he shouldn’t wait any longer; he should make his move now. He could form a business with his sister. Cat was once a star student, a tall, beautiful, popular girl. Kyle remembers how he quietly looked up to her and envied her success. He’d like to do that again. Reconnect with his own flesh and blood. And go see about Siobhan and that little boy.

  In the end, he knows this: Cat is the one person he trusts.

  It’s very quiet in the elevator, just a slight sway and whirr as they rise, and Kyle can feel Caputo, who abhors quiet as nature abhors a vacuum, pushing against the silence. “Hey,” Caputo finally says. “What time you got?”

  Kyle looks at his watch, a Piaget, impossibly thin, like so many expensive things. “A quarter to,” he says. “Plenty of time.”

  2002

  I

  I’m dead, Sam thinks. Simple as that.

  For months they’d been warned of kamikaze attacks and, initially, nothing happened. Then one day he ran down from the bridge, heard the batteries open fire and the whine of an approaching plane. He saw it, recognized the charcoal silhouette against the milky sky. A Zero. It came in low, its wings toggling through the antiaircraft blasts till it veered and disappeared behind the starboard railing.

  He wakes and looks about, at the bare walls of his bedroom, then grabs a fistful of sheet and takes a moment to get his bearings. A dream. The dream. The same damn dream these fifty-seven years, the memory burned so deep that most nights his mind can’t avoid it. Always he wakes terrified, but comforted, too. There’s the terror, but it’s the same terror.

  Sam sits up, playing out the history, a memory now, a waking dream and just as real. He came to on a hospital ship. He learned that the Japanese pilot missed his destroyer but crashed into the sea close enough to shake the ship like a bath toy. Twelve men went overboard; five were rescued. Sam stayed on deck, but cracked two vertebrae. For eleven weeks he lay paralyzed. I’m dead, he thought again. Back home, in a VA hospital in Detroit, the doctors fused the two vertebrae together, and most of the rest. Six days after the operation, he regained feeling. In that moment, when he realized that the world would come back to him, he felt dizzy, weightless, not a person at all. Life now seemed a surprise, an unopened gift. Soon he could walk, but with limitations; his back was rigid as a two-by-four, his neck so stiff that he could only look straight ahead. For this the navy would send him a small monthly disability check. How odd, Sam thought. One moment you’re dead, the next you have income for life.

  He will see the rabbi in two hours, so he shaves, a two-part process, first with the cream and blade, then, once his face has had a chance to dry, with the electric razor, which makes that odd hum when it finds a patch of whiskers he missed with the blade. He’s seen old men who shave themselves badly, leaving sloppy patches of gray stubble, signs of incompetence or—even worse—apathy. It’s the little things that matter now, the small acts of defiance that bring dignity in the face of all the deterioration. He has decided that if there’s any meaning to life, it’s to be found in the daily struggles.

  Two squirrels are bickering outside his window, making a racket that could be mistaken for birds. Daily struggles. They know it, too.

  He dresses in a dark suit, funereal as fits the occasion, and slips his dog tags into his pants pocket. He likes the feeling of them there, like loose change; if he ever drops over dead, they’ll know exactly who he is.

  His son soon will have been dead for one year, and Sam wants to recognize this, as per the Jewish tradition. He has no others. That Kyle has been taken from him, that he simply disappeared—this is something that no father should endure. He understands now the look his own father gave him when Sam shipped off to war, and also why he looked away when Sam came back, paralyzed, weighing 126 pounds. The suffering of a child is horrible; of one’s own it is unthinkable. And so Sam has turned to his faith, though he doubts he has ever truly believed, even when he lay in that hospital bed and didn’t know if he would move again, or again almost fifty years later when they cut his chest open. Faith has always eluded him. The rituals of faith, though, may still prove useful.

  He drives to the temple, navigating his Lincoln down the bright streets, at one point catching a glimpse of the denim-colored Pacific. Midweek there are but a few cars in the temple’s lot, just the old sedans and econo-boxes of those who work in religion—at least the Jewish religion. Inside, the air is still, the lighting dim. There
are pictures on the wall of an old temple in Brooklyn, displaced here to California, like the Dodgers. Down the hall he sees light and heads for it.

  The rabbi is a tall man with coarse black hair, thick dark eyebrows, glasses to match. Gauss. “Like the mathematician,” Sam said on the phone, to which the rabbi replied, “Exactly.” Sam took it as a good sign. The real Gauss was perhaps the most brilliant man of his time, maybe of all time, and Sam respects anyone who has heard his name, unusual now in this era of good-looks idolatry and the worship of anyone who can shout into a microphone and call it music. Sam sits before Rabbi Gauss’s heavy wooden desk, looking at his bookshelves and photos. He is struck with the same thought he had the last time he met a rabbi: how is it that such a learned man can have faith? It’s a mystery to Sam, and yet here he is.

  “So, Mr. Miller,” says Rabbi Gauss. “You want to recognize your son’s yahrzeit.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Have you been to our temple before?”

  “No.”

  “How long have you lived in Santa Barbara?”

  “About fifteen years,” Sam says.

  “Have you been to any temple, or, should I say, when was the last time?”

  Sam thinks about this. “Nixon was president.”

  The rabbi, bless him, is amused. “Nixon? So at least thirty years,” he says.

  “My mother died back then, of heart failure. My father, too.” Sam’s eye catches a shaft of light coming in the window, dust dancing in its beam.

  “So now you have lost a son, and you are back.”

  “Guilty as charged, Rabbi. You know, I look at your books and think, I could love Judaism, were it not for the religion. I’ll be honest, I never feel less Jewish than when I’m in a temple. The Hebrew prayers, the responsive reading, even the idea of God. I struggle with it all. My father, who really only spoke Yiddish well, he used to take me to temple on Yom Kippur, when I was a boy, this was in the twenties, and when he’d had enough of the service, we’d go up the street to a coffee shop and have ham and cheese sandwiches. Ham and cheese: he thought this was one of the great things about America.”

  It occurs to Sam that his story might be offensive to a rabbi. This one doesn’t look offended; there’s something to be said for the young. “The point is,” Sam says, “he still went to temple. He found something of value there.”

  “Tell me about your son,” the rabbi says.

  “A fascinating young man. Very smart and, what do they say nowadays, intense. He worked on Wall Street. On the morning of September eleventh he had a meeting in the north tower. He went in and was never heard from again.”

  The rabbi takes off his glasses to rub his eyes, which are surprisingly blue.

  “For a time I hoped against hope. There was no body. I sat no shivah, held no funeral, but after a time I had to face the truth.”

  The rabbi nods, puts his glasses back on.

  “Most of the people who are important to me are dead,” Sam says. “And soon, I will be, too. Till then I want to remember the dead. I wish I’d done it all along; it’s as close as I can get to bringing them back. And I want to bring my daughter out to teach her how to do this. I’ve taught her nothing about death, but her mother is dead, her brother is dead. Soon, her father will be dead, and she will be alone. This may be the one thing left I can teach her that will do her some good.”

  “Your children’s mother?”

  “Dead, in 1975.”

  “She was Jewish?” asks the rabbi.

  “No.”

  “So your children are not really Jewish.”

  “Do they have to be?”

  “Not at all,” says Rabbi Gauss. “But you are. I will make you a deal. I will read your son’s name on the yahrzeit, a son who was not Jewish. You will attend High Holy Day services this year.”

  “To feel less Jewish,” Sam says.

  “Maybe you won’t.”

  “You are a hopeful man, Rabbi.”

  “Of course,” the rabbi says. “It’s my business.”

  Sam drives home beneath the milky sky, happy with the outcome. He needs to call Cat, never an easy thing. If Sam were like everyone else, he’d have a cell phone, but he has resisted this convenience—if it is that. Always to be in contact seems more a curse than a blessing, and besides, the buttons on those phones are small and difficult to operate.

  Every year things get a little more difficult, the indignities a little greater. He is eighty, with a replaced hip, a triple bypass, a system pumped so full of this and that medication that he can’t say anymore what they are all for, knows only that he’s still breathing. Sometimes he wants to stop people on the street and say, “I was a young man once, full of vim and vigor. I won a war, founded a family, made a small and unlikely fortune. I know things.” Of course, they’d think he was crazy.

  Once home, settled into his reading chair—he has discovered large-print books, both a blessing and another indignity—he calls Cat. She answers on the first ring, and this makes him smile, to hear her voice, to picture her, his beautiful daughter.

  “Making any money?” he asks.

  “Not really,” she says, after a pause. They haven’t spoken for several months. Sam would call more if he didn’t always feel that he was bothering her.

  “Why not?” he asks.

  “I’m not much of a salesman, I think.”

  “Maddening, isn’t it?” he says.

  “What?”

  “The salesmen always make the money. No geniuses, most of them. Goodman was like that. Not an exceptionally bright man, but he had the big house and the fleet of luxury cars and the vacations to Bermuda because he could put his arm around you and get you to buy something. He had that quality. For some reason, you never wanted to let him down.”

  “Where is he now?” Cat asks.

  “Dead.”

  “Well,” Cat says. “There you go.”

  “How’s Connor?” Sam asks.

  “He growing up. But he still draws me pictures to show me how much he loves me.”

  Sam remembers that Cat did the same thing for him. She would leave those pictures on his dresser, where every night he would dump his keys and money clip when he came home from work. He wishes he’d kept those drawings, but he was never good at saving. He decides now to get to the point, and mentions that Kyle’s yahrzeit will soon be here. “I’d like you to come visit,” he says. “I know you don’t want to. I promise, it’s the last thing I will ever ask of you. Please. When someone dies, you’re supposed to mourn for the year that follows, then you light a candle for the dead, say his name at services, and move on.”

  “You want me to come two thousand miles to light a candle and hear Kyle’s name read in a church?” she asks.

  “A temple. In a temple. It’s a Jewish ritual.”

  “Kyle wasn’t Jewish,” Cat says. “Right? Technically?”

  “I’ll handle the technicalities,” Sam says. “Can you bring Connor?”

  “So, coming wasn’t the last thing you were going to ask.”

  “Cat, I’m an old man. Can you bring him?”

  A pause. “Michael is supposed to have Connor that weekend. I’ll have to work it out.”

  “I’ll call that man,” Sam offers. He can’t say the name.

  “You know,” Cat says, “Mom died in September.”

  “She did, at the end of the month.” He remembers that day, how it changed things, how things spinning one way suddenly spun another.

  “Can we do all this for her, too?” Cat asks.

  Oy, Sam thinks, another trip to the Rabbi. “When the time comes,” he says.

  “I’ll think about it,” she allows, which, right now, gives him reason for hope.

  II

  Cat settles into her office, kicks off her pumps, feels the cool of the carpet under her feet. It’s not much of an office, just a cubicle, six-foot high partitions of gray felt, thumbtacked pictures of Connor, also a poster, courtesy of American Dream, Inc., about t
he joys of home ownership, and a photo of Cat and Kyle when they were teenagers, found in Kyle’s drawer. Cat remembers this picture being taken by their mother with the Polaroid she used for her real estate listings. Cat logs on to her Dell, and then the New York Times Web site. She doesn’t read the headlines, doesn’t want to know the news; instead, she clicks on the link to “Portraits of Grief,” the compilation of little one-computer-page obits of those who died on September n. Her brother’s appeared about two months ago—a reporter had called her and done a nice job—but it’s not her brother she’s after. It’s Siobhan.

  Under her keyboard Cat keeps two photos of this woman, taken from Kyle’s drawer, the same drawer that contained the Polaroid. Cat’s idea is that Siobhan might also appear in “Portraits of Grief.” Cat knows almost nothing about her, only her first name, her likeness, that she worked in the towers, and that she might have been—or maybe even is—the mother of Kyle’s child.

  Today there is grief for two maintenance men, an insurance salesman, a dishwasher, a bond trader, and a hair stylist who happened to be visiting her brother, the bond trader (like Kyle, in the wrong place at the wrong time), but no Siobhan.

  Eleven months. For eleven months Cat has been trying to find the boy. Many times she’s wanted to give up, told herself that she doesn’t even know if the child is Kyle’s, that she may be searching for the son of someone else. Still, she can’t stop. Part of it is normal human curiosity, a simple desire to find a lost child, but part of it is personal, her own unfinished business.