45
THIS, THEN, is a portrait of Richard’s grief.
Grief is the American flag, folded in tricorner pattern and stowed in a Plexiglas case, an oft-overlooked relic that sat on the corner of a desk cluttered with newspapers, magazine clippings, small electronic devices and their associated chargers. Grief is the oil stains on the heavily ribbed grosgrain of military medals, fingered as talismans by the surviving members of a dead man’s family.
You never wanted grief to be like this, dull and ordinary, delivered to your front door like the Washington Post.
Grief, too, meant these strangers in his living room.
Grief is the phrase that he’d overheard the woman use to describe him: only known living relative.
Richard did not know what to call the people from the airline, the ones who came to tell him that his sister was dead. And what the hell was a cop doing there, standing in the kitchen, drinking his juice and talking on his telephone? He couldn’t even remember who poured the juice. Richard walked straight past him and out onto the balcony; he’d seen in that woman the flash of recognition that usually meant the person knew, but could not place, his face.
They know me from television. Richard did not know when the habit of narrating his own life had begun; now this omnipresent voice spoke to him like a stage whisper, stating the obvious whenever the obvious thing appeared at the core of his unconscious mind. How did people on television grieve? They didn’t. They kept it together until they could retreat. He’d seen the clip of Cronkite telling the world about Jack Kennedy, taking off his glasses: From Dallas, Texas, the flash, apparently official, President Kennedy died at one o’clock p.m. Central Standard Time, two o’clock Eastern Standard Time, some thirty-eight minutes ago.
And today that internal voice had been particularly insistent. The walk home from the television studio had been riddled with reminders of his past. The voice had said, You are now walking on Thirteenth Street Northwest. The place where Richard first saw a prostitute; he was eleven years old, and the street then was nothing but liquor stores and Doc Johnson novelty shops with their twenty-five-cent peep shows. On this street, an ancient janitor in military greens had offered to give him twenty dollars for his Fruit of the Loom underwear, and Richard asked for twenty-five, because to a kid of that vintage, twenty-five dollars was a nearly incalculable sum, a lottery’s worth of mischief and pinball and junk food. He stepped into the restroom of a liquor store that wasn’t even there anymore. He remembered the man’s callused hand palming him the bills, his breath medicinal and sharp as he said, “You are an excellent businessman. A tough negotiator.”
He didn’t tell his mother until years later. And even once he’d admitted it, in the manner of her generation, she simply denied it. “I don’t remember you saying that at all,” she’d say back to Richard as she put together a cheese tray or refilled a wineglass. “I would remember that,” she insisted, but never once looked him in the face. “If a thing like that had actually happened.”
He told his sister that very afternoon. Mary Beth’s reaction: she marched him by the wrist to the police station, found the desk sergeant, and told him the whole story, never once letting go of Richard’s wrist and making him feel very much the little boy. The sergeant smelled of juniper and sweat and came around from behind his desk to appraise Mary Beth, a predatory look, the look older men give to teenaged girls that says, My, how you’ve grown. Richard slipped from his sister’s grasp, bolted out the double doors and into the cleared lot across the street. Mary Beth found him sitting on a short stack of cinder blocks at the edge of the construction zone; he had crossed his arms over his chest and rocked gently back and forth as if he could not be consoled, and now he recognized that as the very moment his internal voice began to speak, the message ex cathedra of Catholic guilt and fear: he’d be punished for losing his underwear, he’d have to give back the money; he worried most that he’d have to tell this story to his father, whose intolerable dinner-table soliloquies were about the decay of modern society and the predators who roamed the modern city.
Now, at a distance of some thirty years, Richard could identify the janitor who asked for his underwear as nothing but an old drunk with an Eastern European accent so thick and comical, Richard had not even understood his request until the visual clue of a twenty-dollar bill was there to help him decode the entire sentence. What the voice said to him as he prayed for consolation on that pile of cinder blocks was the same message he kept hearing now, on his balcony, his hands tight on the steel safety railing as his knuckles whitened with the fierceness of his grip: You will always remember this. His face gathered its musculature into a mask that spoke as well, saying, Here is a stricken man, his body a conversation unto itself. This is a moment you will always remember.
And what would happen to his nephew now? Gabriel. Named after the messenger of the Lord, he’d joked after the child had emerged in full-throated howl. That was the message. And this, then, was Richard’s vision: Gabriel running in a backyard as wide as a meadow. The afternoon unbearably bright, the sky yellowed like an overexposed snapshot from thirty years past, and the boy wearing a T-shirt in candy-cane awning stripes, utilitarian green shorts, a functional garment whose pockets could be counted on to be filled with penny candies, odd-lot pieces of Legos, chewing gum, even a goldfish in a plastic sandwich bag. Richard imagines the boy running and ticks off the distinguishing characteristics of the landscape: a toolshed, a short course of feed corn growing in five-by-five rows, a barn that he’d once watched burn as a teenager. He knows this is not literal, this is Gabriel running through time, and to Richard, grief is not the dour monochromatics of a winter’s day but vivid and bright and rendered in primary colors.
He tried to force his mind to focus on his sister. Yet the city intruded, the street four stories beneath him percolating with the sounds of a holiday evening: shouts and car horns, but also the low and dull moans of idling traffic and the trumpeting of cars and buses accelerating away from a too-long signal light and the conversations of lovers and groups of friends headed to the restaurants that dotted his neighborhood. Everything about the place felt like a diluted imitation of more famous and progressive neighborhoods in larger cities. The weather had turned, and the breeze carried a cutting chill, a reminder that said January. At the Hilton Towers, a few hundred feet to his right, the window lights glowed with the dim refraction of televisions, the curtains closed and permitting just the hint of escaping light. Death arrived with duty. He understood this instinctively and could think of only the one duty that would be required of him: the boy.
The first weekend of his life as a divorced man, four and a half years before, he’d stood on this same balcony with Mary Beth; he supposed that had been her last visit to Washington. They’d had a few drinks and pretended as if divorce weren’t the end of their known worlds. It was Independence Day, and Richard’s place provided a great view of the fireworks, the sky filled with concussive shocks, colored phosphor raining down in patterns that looked like stars.
His father had been a sentimental man and liked to preach a bit on the holiday. He talked about parades and memorial services, about how his own father used to make him cut the grass around the base of the stone monument to the soldiers of his hometown who had died in the First World War. Somewhere in that anecdote, Richard knew, was an explanation of why his father always teared up at the sound of the “Star-Spangled Banner,” even when he was watching the Redskins and having a few pops with the boys from the office.
Richard knew he wasn’t remembering a specific holiday but an amalgam of many: Lew inviting the neighbors over for hamburgers, homemade with his two secret ingredients of Worcestershire sauce and powdered onion-soup mix; Lew behind the grill, dousing the fatty flare-ups with a stray ounce of beer. On the Fourth, Lew smoked a cigar, a gift from his boss, the congressman, claiming to his son that the cigar smoke chased away the mosquitoes. At dusk, as the fireworks exploded over the National Mall, Lew and Richar
d and some other kids from the neighborhood wandered out onto D Street, in the shadow of the Capitol, and lit off firecrackers and bottle rockets, Lew igniting the stubborn fuses with the burning cherry of his stogie. Richard knew that most of what his father had been teaching him was how to be a man, and those were lessons he could pass on, the difference between a Windsor knot and a four-in-hand, shaving first with the grain and then against it, all of Lew’s little rituals that to this day Richard unconsciously followed. Lew allowed Richard to hold the cigar and light a bottle rocket, and hold the cigar and pantomime taking a puff, and Richard fetched cans of beer out of the basement refrigerator, the one with the wonky-sounding compressor, and Richard pocketed the pull tabs because his mother had asked him to keep count, a request he hadn’t understood until years later.
Lew let Richard sit on the edge of a redwood picnic table on the brick patio that took up most of their postage-stamp-size backyard, and all of Capitol Hill rang with fireworks, and maybe, Richard knew now, gunshots. Lew asked him to hand over the pull tabs, and Richard asked, How did you know about that? and Lew laughed and said, I have been married to your mother for a very long time. He talked to his only son about the responsibilities of drinking beer and told him it was something he needed to learn, the ability to drink most of the day and not lose his composure, and to the nine-year-old Richard MacMurray, composure meant a clean shirt and a freshly shaven face and his father, almost always immaculate and smelling of beer and Aqua Velva.
Richard could not tell his sister these memories, because she would want to know what her place in them was, and the truth was that she had so little place there; she had been a spectral presence, a dervish that hustled in and out each summer and around the holidays, and before that she’d been the moody girl in the bedroom next door to his who yelled at her parents and ridiculed her little brother’s clothes, or hair, or teeth. The truth: the most distinct of Richard’s memories of his sister centered around tragedies—packing up Lew’s personal effects at his office and arguing over which child was going to get the flag that had been draped over Lew’s casket.
It felt like he had lived on this balcony for years. What he remembered most of that last visit of his sister’s was the party upstairs, a world he had never been invited into; he’d spent his reckless twenties pretending to be first responsible and later married, and he had abdicated any interest in the more surface recreations of his friends: weekends at the beach and softball and drinking games and charity bar crawls. His neighbors upstairs samba’ed and cha-cha-cha’d and generally had themselves well lubricated by sundown, and the girl who lived in apartment 43 was there too, and she’d leaned out over the fire escape and shouted down, inviting Richard and Mary Beth upstairs, and his sister was halfway up the escape ladder before Richard could tell her that he did not want to go.
He was a stranger at the party and sulked and didn’t really talk to anyone. Mary Beth brought women back to the sofa to meet him and kept repeating, “You gotta get back on that horse,” as she gave the briefest of introductions: “This is Lori, she works on the Hill.” He’d forgotten that his sister was, at her core, as much a Washingtonian as he was, inherited her brusque manner from the same father. He dreaded these kinds of party conversations; he kept up with the Redskins not out of a true love of football but because it felt like the only neutral thing anyone in the city was prepared to discuss. Half the women he met were interested in networking, not dating, and the ones that announced their interest in dating carried their insecurities with them like some sort of ritual scarifications, as if they had realized just that morning how most of their friends were now doting suburban parents. He was in his forties and had never learned how to talk to a woman without introducing that famous Beltway question, “Who do you work for?” as if it were still the era of the Roman Empire and you were defined by who owned the product of your work.
At the end of the party, Richard had nothing but heartburn and a pocket full of business cards of women he never intended to call. His sister was staying at a friend’s house in Silver Spring and had to leave in time to catch the last Red Line train. When she left, she embraced him, her head against his chest. He’d been taller than Mary Beth since he was twelve but never realized just how much; as he rested his chin on the top of her head, he could see the emergent gray hairs at the roots of her part. That couldn’t have been the last time he’d touched her, but he could conjure no other memory, no other likely time they had hugged or even kissed each other on the cheek.
He conflated memories of his sister too. His sister as a teenager, slathering her arms with suntan lotion, his sister at their childhood home, with her shelf full of facial cleansers and herbal shampoos. He could not remember what she smelled like or if she wore perfume or even what she had been wearing that July. Had that really been the last time they’d seen each other? You should be talking to one of my officers now.
He felt the cold, abrupt and shocking; he had been standing on his balcony for who knows how long, and three strangers stood whispering in his living room, the specifics of what they were saying lost in the drone of the television—Continuous live coverage of the crash of Panorama Airlines Flight 503—telling him again and again that his sister was dead. His sister.
This city was his childhood, and how much of it he’d spent heeled at her side. She’d taken him to the Smithsonian to see Charles Lindbergh’s airplane and John Glenn’s space capsule and bought him a bootleg FBI T-shirt from a Korean street vendor whose cart was a cornucopia of pizza by the slice, soft pretzels with huge, glistening crystals of white salt, and ice-cold seven-ounce bottles of Coca-Cola. Together they’d waited in line to see the touring treasures of the Egyptian king and sat in the House gallery on the day that the Judiciary Committee voted to impeach Nixon and then ate lunch in the cafeteria of the Rayburn Building with their father, who took Richard back into the committee room and let him sit in Chairman Rodino’s big leather seat and even take a crack or two with the chairman’s weighty gavel.
Later that same afternoon, his sister took him to the top of the Washington Monument, and Richard asked her if the first president was buried on the grounds; Mary Beth laughed and asked why, in the patient manner of a mother, and Richard said, “Because it looks like a tombstone.” And the view from the monument’s small windows was not much different than the one from his balcony.
His building was situated at the crest of two intersecting hills. To his right stood the hotel where President Reagan waved to the lone gunman. Though the clouds had thickened into what forecasters called a low ceiling, visibility was still good enough that Richard could see all the way south to the new tower at National Airport, which rose like a parapet. His eyes roamed across the cityscape, all its polished granite and etched concrete, the monument built of marble blocks carried on the backs of Union Army carts, and that was when it struck him: there were monuments to dead cops, and a black granite tombstone hundreds of yards long inscribed with the names of the dead from America’s most foolish war; there were plaques to honor the dead army nurses from the two world wars, and in the suburbs there were eighty-three stars blasted with a pneumatic hammer into a marble wall at Langley, two and a quarter inches tall to represent the life of an intelligence operative lost in the line of duty, a cenotaph so inconsequential that the sculptor who chiseled the recesses into stone never even knew the names of the dead.
There was life, a future, but not here. His nephew was the only necessity now. Dallas, that modern cartoon; how could a boy live there? Gabriel needed space and sunlight and the soft undulations of a half-acre lawn. He needed a dog. A room with a desk for his homework, and a captain’s bed with secret compartments and comic books. None of that was here, not in this dour apartment and not in this disappointing city. There were cities of angels and cities of light, windy cities, and cities of night, cities that never slept, cities of magnificent intentions, cities of big shoulders and kisses and promises, cities of balconies, and brotherly love, but it was this
city that had been poisoned for him; what the young Richard MacMurray had once seen among the marble and granite landmarks of his hometown was a living history, where now every notable building of this city he had once loved with all his heart was nothing but a monument to the fallen dead.
46
LEMKO NEEDED to develop his own theory about grief, about how and why people reacted the way that they did. He had been well trained in the aphorisms of the legal profession. You never asked a question unless you were absolutely sure of the answer, and he was sure that guilt and anger and self-recriminations came quickly. He wanted the contact—say, the husband, contact number two—to offer him coffee, tell him stories of how he had met his dead wife, and flip through the photos from last summer’s trip to the Greek Isles. Death, however, was proving to have a variable effect.
The contingency plan limited the visit of an Adam and Eve Team to thirty minutes per stop, but he secretly wished he could stay longer, until the contact disassembled himself into a hysteric, convulsive mass. Just once he wanted to see flagellations and mortifications of the flesh, to see the tangible presence of grief right there in the room.
Contact number three, MacMurray, Richard L., had offered him orange juice and cashews, and Lemko at the very least could understand why. Probably raised Catholic, wakes of Irish whiskey, brisket sandwiches, and pitchers of beer at some dingy bar where the bartender wore black slacks and a white shirt and kept a shotgun or a Louisville Slugger or both in the beer cooler. If Nessen hadn’t been there, MacMurray probably would have offered him a shot and a beer; he looked like the shot-and-a-beer type, Lemko thought, because Lemko himself looked like the shot-and-a-beer type. Shot-and-a-beer guys wanted action. They didn’t want paperwork and explanations and promises.
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