by Ward Just
She did not say anything for a very long time and then I heard, That’s nice, dear. Her voice was full of sleep and she didn’t believe a word.
Good night, then, she said.
With my great gift of narrative, I began in the middle of the day and went back to the end of last month and stayed there awhile, my father’s expression growing more puzzled with each halting sentence, describing Jack Brule and the Lincoln Park apartment. Finally I simply began when I walked into the newspaper office to receive my last assignment from Ozias Tilleman. I replayed the conversation with Henry Laschbrook and the long walk to the Art Institute, Aurora not at her class. I asked my father if he had ever visited the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist rooms at the Art Institute, the barmaid, the postman, the clown, and the others, but I didn’t wait for an answer. I was so eager to get on to Edward Hopper and the woman in the motel bedroom, the telephone just outside the frame, the door prepared for a single knock. Wonderful rooms, I said. You should go if you haven’t.
I have been, my father said.
You can go again.
It’s the greatest art museum in America, I went on. Chicago’s crown jewel.
Then I was outside on the steps, watching Aurora stumble from the cab and put her arms around the lion’s plinth. We were in the cab heading for Lincoln Park, the cab driver a perfect prick, Aurora unable to finish a sentence. And then I was alone in a room full of people, making certain the ice bucket was full and the bar stocked, meeting Aunt This and Aunt That and a few of the others, Jack’s patients, medical colleagues, friends of the family. The names flew by. People were in shock and many of the women were weeping openly, while others behaved as if this were a normal Friday afternoon in Chicago. I ducked out for a minute alone in Jack’s consulting room and saw the skull once again. Aurora was somewhere else in the apartment, talking to the men from the coroner’s office. Or that was who they said they were; actually it was Henry Laschbrook and Ed Hoskins from the newspaper. The ruse was often used by Henry to gather the news.
They’re bastards, newspaper people.
Buzzards, Dad. They have no respect for anything.
I paused there, uncertain what came next. I was lost inside this story, a blind man blundering into a familiar room, bearings lost. I believed I should explain about Consuela, so I asked my father if he had ever heard of Famagusta. No, he had not. Wasn’t it in Paraguay? No, I said, not Paraguay. Famagusta was a port city on the island of Cyprus, eastern Mediterranean. Cyprus was an island well known in antiquity. Aphrodite rose from the sea at Paphos. Consuela was from Cyprus; or that was one of the places she was from, the others being Greece and Hungary. Consuela was writing a memoir of her summers in Famagusta, where she lived in a house by the sea. I paused again, trying to get the events straight in my mind. Also, I said, she was Jack Brule’s mistress. She lived in the apartment. They shared a bedroom. Jack was divorced from Aurora’s mother. The mother lived in Michigan with her new husband and their child. Aurora was not at all close to her mother. The divorce was bitter and she took her father’s part. She chose him over her mother. They knew a judge who fixed the custody agreement.
Consuela’s very nice, I said.
The first time I met her, I liked her right away.
She’s very attractive, a nonconformist.
I never met anyone like her.
My father nodded at that, offering a sympathetic smile.
Can you imagine, Famagusta?
My father excused himself and went to the kitchen. I heard ice clink in his glass. When he came back, he had a fresh drink and settled himself as before in his usual chair.
Jack Brule committed suicide, I said, after a terrible argument with Consuela. I never learned what it was about. But the argument was bad enough so that Aurora woke up and heard some of it. I don’t know how much. They were arguing in their bedroom. Jack went into the bathroom and shot himself. That’s it. He left a note but I have no idea what was in it. After everyone had cleared out of the apartment, Aurora and Consuela had a battle. Aurora wanted to throw her out of the house but she wouldn’t move. Consuela was destroyed by what had happened. She lay on the couch with her eyes closed while Aurora went at her. It was awful to watch. Awful to listen to. I tried to intervene but that did no good. Aurora turned against me, and then Consuela roused herself and spoke to Aurora and they seemed to make it up. And in the blink of an eye I was on the outside of things. There was nothing I could say and I had no idea what to do. When I approached Aurora, she turned her back. It was between the two of them. And they seemed united against me, the outsider, the boy from out of town. They were a family after all and I was a new arrival. My grief could not equal theirs.
Do you suppose that was it?
An unequal weight of grief?
My father sipped his drink and did not reply.
When I tried to mediate between them I stepped over the line and they took offense, Aurora especially. She may have thought I was disloyal, not on her side, opposed to her. I tried to put myself in her skin but could not. Was it my inexperience? But I had no authority to speak in that room. I suppose you could say I was not entitled to speak. What do you think is the more terrible loss for a woman, a lover or a father? I waited for my father to say something but he seemed lost in thought.
Wouldn’t it depend on the individual? I said.
My father raised his eyebrows and said softly, It usually does.
Also, I said, the nature of the death. An unnatural death.
Yes, my father said.
Have you ever known a suicide?
He moved his shoulders doubtfully, neither yes nor no.
I was just wondering, I said.
Tom Felsen’s brother, my father said slowly. Younger brother, two years behind us in high school. He had a rough time of it. Tom’s father was a difficult man, humorless, angry most of the time. He was a farmer who hated farming. Tom’s brother was very quiet, not a popular boy, not good at sports, not good at much of anything. He was bullied at school and bullied at home. Tom did his best to protect him but after Tom graduated the brother was left on his own. His name was Roy, named for his father. Everyone called him Little Roy except for his mother. I think she was bullied, too, by Roy Senior. My father sipped his drink and was silent, his expression formal, as if he were testifying in court. He said, Little Roy hanged himself. In the barn, from a rafter. I was away at Dartmouth. By the time I got the letter from home the funeral was over and done with. The family put out some story about an accident. Everyone knew the truth but no one spoke it. I wrote Tom a letter but never got a reply, and when I saw him at Christmastime he thanked me for my letter but said he didn’t want to talk about his brother. He let me know he was no longer on speaking terms with his father, but they had been on the outs for years so I didn’t think much about it. Tom was on his own by then, a deputy sheriff, making plans. Years later I learned that Little Roy had committed suicide and the cause was still considered a mystery, and not a subject for conversation. Of course he had been bullied. But there had to be something more. Or something else, and I don’t know what that was. I don’t think anyone knows to this day. I suppose only Little Roy knew the whole story.
I think Tom’s been trying to get even ever since, my father said.
Jack Brule was in the war, I said.
Lots of men in the war, my father said.
The Bataan Death March, I said. He spoke to me about it. And I saw some of his photographs, Jack and his comrades in the Philippines. He said what disturbed him most was not the hatred of the Japanese for him but his hatred of them. He couldn’t get over it. The hatred was still there. I think hatred was his constant companion. Hatred was the brother who wouldn’t go away.
A terrible episode, my father said.
Aurora didn’t know anything about it. Her father wouldn’t say. Maybe Consuela knew something. But she never told Aurora.
Shame, probably.
Despair, I said.
At something h
e did or something he didn’t do,my father said, completing his own sentence. I wasn’t in the war. I don’t know how they got on from day to day and the combatants weren’t interested in reliving those days. They still aren’t. It’s nobody’s business but theirs, so they put it away like an old love letter they can’t bear to read but don’t want to destroy, either. I think with suicides there’s also an element of revenge. But I don’t know anything about it, really.
My father paused there, rising, stepping to the terrace doors. He stood, rocking on his heels, then turned to the phonograph, silent these many minutes. He carefully set the needle on the record and turned the volume low, so that when Gershwin’s music began again it was barely audible. He said, There will be some things in your life that you’ll never speak about. Not to your wife and not to your children, not to your closest friend. Not on your deathbed. Most often this will involve an episode that you’ll want to forget, something shameful or dishonorable. Maybe only something cheap, a failure of nerve or a failure to comprehend; a failure of character, in other words. But if you lead any sort of real life, you’ll have the other thing, too. Something magnanimous, a large-hearted act committed when no one was looking and you won’t want to say anything about that, either, because the words will stick in your throat. You’ll know what they are but there’s no reason for anyone else to know. Try to avoid being sloppy about things, Wils. Sometimes I think the only memories worth having are the ones that are private.
I said, You can’t mean that.
But I do, he said.
Can you tell me, I began.
No, I cannot, my father said, smiling one of his thin smiles. I tried to see behind it. Something to do with his business, I thought, the strike or its aftermath; or his life with my mother, some indiscretion, or more than indiscretion, betrayal or an act of dishonesty. He was looking at me evenly and I was listening hard but I knew I had all I was going to get. At that moment my father was impenetrable. He was fifty years old and as I looked at him, his heavy shoulders and head, his wrestler’s build, I knew I would make a different sort of life for myself. Mine would be a twentieth-century life, the modern world, where spillage was inevitable, even necessary. Some disorder was welcome, was it not—and then I remembered Jack Brule.
My father smiled suddenly and said, in conscious parody of his gruff voice, Be a god damned adult, Wils. Then he turned and limped back to his chair, easing himself onto the cushion.
You win, I said.
Winning doesn’t come into it, he said.
Your way, I went on, sounds lonely.
Can be, he admitted. He extracted his Havana from its silver tube and rolled it between his thumb and forefinger, testing density. But he did not light it. He said, Butch Greenslat had an interest in suicide. He’d had a client or two over the years, took that way out. We often talked about it over a drink at the end of the day. Butch had a philosophical turn of mind, when he wasn’t chasing women or putting the fix in at the Hall. He had a theory that suicide, like any affair of pride, required equilibrium, the perfect harmony of emotion and will. A kind of sublime handshake was how Butch put it. Think of a musician at the height of his powers, the pure note of a horn, the note held to the limits of breath. My father hesitated, listening to Benny Goodman play the opening notes of Rhapsody in Blue.
I listened to Goodman’s run, the notes rising and dispersing, ending in silence.
You can’t arrest it any more than you can arrest a puff of smoke, my father said. Its course is inevitable unless something interferes with the equilibrium, changing the field of force, and in Jack Brule’s case, nothing did.
That would be Butch’s explanation, I think.
I hope you can make it up with your girl, my father added.
I shook my head. I think she’s dispersed, like your black smoke.
She’ll be having a bad time of it, he said.
I think so, I said.
It’ll work out, my father said.
For me or for her? I asked.
For her, he said.
I hope so, I said with a confidence I did not feel. I think, with Aurora, it’s an affair of pride.
I’m very sure it’s more than pride, my mother said from the doorway. I had no idea how long she had been standing there in the shadows listening to my father and me. Her face was set in a frown, her arms crossed, her manner distant. I’m sure she only needs to find her own way. Only, my mother repeated with a cold smile. Not that she’ll have much help.
You didn’t used to listen at keyholes, my father said.
Come to bed, Teddy, my mother said. You, too, Wils.
In a minute, my father said.
It’s late, she said.
We haven’t finished, my father said.
It’s never finished, my mother said as she turned her back and walked out of the room.
14
THE DAY WAS overcast when I left Quarterday but brightened when I reached the city. I had trouble finding the Lutheran church, a few streets west of Lincoln Park, stuck between low-slung apartment buildings in a residential neighborhood. The church was constructed of red brick, and if it weren’t for the steeple and the clerestory windows you could mistake it for a school or a warehouse. I was a few minutes late and most of the mourners were already inside. The hearse and three black Cadillacs were waiting at the curb but the chauffeurs were across the street fanning themselves with their billed hats; the day was warm. A few older men were finishing cigarettes on the church steps. I recognized them from the parties earlier in the summer, only now they were in business suits, looking impatient at eleven o’clock in the morning. They were staring at their shoes and shaking their heads when I passed by. I heard one of them say, Jesus, what must Jack have been thinking to do such a thing, and one of the others replying that he didn’t know but it certainly wasn’t anything good, but Jack was always a queer duck, even for a head doctor. I nodded and they nodded back, trying and failing to place me as they flipped their cigarettes on the gritty patch of lawn and consulted their wristwatches once again. Inside, I recognized the doctors who had been arguing about German tattoos, and a few of the women who had been in the apartment on Friday. All the women wore white gloves and hats. I looked for Marlon Brando but he was not in sight. I did identify what looked like Adlai Stevenson’s bald head but I could not be sure, the church was ill lit and crowded. Charlie Smithers and his wife were seated near the front, son Al wedged uncomfortably between them. I was surprised to see only a few friends of Aurora’s, Dana and Antoinette and one other girl whose name I could not recall, sitting together in the middle of the church. I wondered what had happened to her schoolmates and the boys she had dated over the years, but perhaps she had discouraged them from coming; and then Oscar Palshaw wálked by. Probably Aurora wanted only to get the service over with, do what was necessary without the chore of greeting friends and listening to their so-sorrys and what-can-I-dos, everyone nervous and on the edge of tears. I had tried to call Aurora half a dozen times but the phone was busy; twice it went unanswered, even when I let it ring a minute or more, imagining Aurora sitting alone in her room and listening to the monotonous interruption, unwilling or unable to move. I had no idea what had become of Consuela. I had written a note also but had heard nothing in reply. Now I noticed the aunts in the front pew, facing the closed casket and its spray of white roses. Aunt That’s son Oliver was next to her and on the other side a pretty girl in a wide-brimmed hat, and I knew without asking that she was the cheerleader, Aurora’s Texas cousin. The older man on her right was as weather-beaten as a fence rail but turned out in banker’s gray for the occasion, and two rows behind them, inconspicuous in the shadows of the far end, was a grieving woman with her head on the heavy arm of her blank-faced husband, surely Aurora’s mother and the piano-playing stepfather, the Elliotts. He was staring intently at the casket, covered by an American flag. On the flag was a decoration, no doubt the dead man’s Silver Star, and I wondered if he would approve of such a dramatic
memento—and then I remembered Aurora and me discussing when the future began, with graduation or a job or marriage or children and never imagining that it would begin with a funeral. The church was appointed in a plain style. Behind the casket was a lectern where the minister would stand and beyond that risers for the choir, except the risers were empty. The light inside was wan and seemed to evaporate as I looked at it, drawn upward to the vault of the nave. A somber attendant in a black suit handed me a program as I slipped into an empty pew at the rear of the chamber and bent my head to say a brief prayer, wishing Jack Brule Godspeed and some measure of grace and consolation for his daughter and for Consuela. Whatever ill will I had toward the dead man was gone, and it was not my place to judge. The program proposed a hymn, a reading from Scripture, another hymn, another reading, remarks by the Reverend William Chasewell, and a final hymn. We all sat uneasily in the half-light listening to the organist play scales. Under the music was a hushed sibilant rustle, people whispering mouth to ear. The woman in front of me remarked to her neighbor that she had refused her daughter permission to attend the funeral, too depressing for a young girl, not at all appropriate given the unwholesome circumstances. She’ll discover that side of things soon enough. Poor Aurora. I closed my eyes and thought about affairs of pride and the marriage of emotion and will; and you would have to add imagination to reach the perfect equilibrium when, I supposed, anything was possible. Perhaps when they said emotion, they meant imagination. This plain church discouraged the expression of either. Submission was recommended. We all sat dumbly listening to the organist practice his scales. The Reverend Chasewell was standing behind the lectern now, a Bible in his hands. He was as tall as Jack Brule but older and seemed to regard his congregation with mild distrust, his eyes narrowed and his mouth a thin suspicious line. He had the superior bearing of a Victorian gentleman. At his perfunctory signal everyone rose and the organ sounded the notes of the first hymn. At a movement behind me in the center aisle, I turned to discover Aurora and Consuela, dressed identically in black, unveiled, advancing a step at a time. They walked side by side, both bent slightly at the waist and moving so slowly they might have been struggling through water. They looked like sisters, only a few years separating them, their heads almost touching, walking in soldierly unison; and then I saw they were holding hands. The congregation, singing, turned to watch them, and time itself stopped in a sudden gulp of held breath. Some of the women turned away in distress, though Olivia Elliott never moved, her eyes resolutely forward. Aurora paused, her hand resting lightly on the pew rail not two feet from where I sat. She was wearing her father’s wristwatch, her left hand made into a fist so that it would not slip off. I smiled at her but she stared straight ahead, pausing as if to gather strength for the march down the center aisle to the casket with its draped flag, white roses either side, the Reverend Chasewell standing motionless, waiting. My hand clasped hers until she looked sharply at me, her eyes alienated and unfocused; and then she smiled crookedly, a look of studied resolve. I am not certain she knew who I was. Her hand was under mine and then it was gone. Aurora and Consuela went on up the aisle, laboring against the current that threatened to overwhelm them. They were holding hands so tightly, wrists touching, that they resembled—not lovers, not sisters, but prisoners shackled by fate and circumstance, the vultures in the trees; and they would not give in. Their heels clicked on the stone floor, a tempo at odds with the hymn but consistent somehow with the frank curiosity on the faces of the congregation. The Reverend Chasewell’s frown was commentary on the disgraceful irregularity, daughter and mistress marching down the center aisle as if they were members of a wedding. Robert Elliott raised his head and gave a cross look, but it went unseen. Aurora and Consuela were unaware, their eyes set on a point in the middle distance. At last they reached the front of the church and took their places beside the aunts, still holding hands. They began to sing. I sang, too, and listened to the Reverend Chasewell read from John, and sang again and listened to the Reverend Chasewell read from Ecclesiastes, and then listened to the Reverend Chasewell read his appalling lesson until I could listen no longer and quietly slipped out of the pew and stepped into the indifferent light of midday Chicago. The hearse and the three black Cadillacs were waiting at the curb, their chauffeurs looking listlessly at me, alone on the porch. Two motorcycle patrolmen, ominous in white helmets and black leather leggings, waited to conduct the cortege to the cemetery. I did not know in which of Chicago’s many graveyards Jack Brule would be interred. I wondered what words, if any, would be etched on his tombstone; and finally I wondered why his remains were not bound for Arlington, where the war dead were. But I thought I knew the answer to that. I stood on the front steps listening to the final hymn, the one about God’s mighty fortress. The congregation was not in good voice and the music was pale. I strained to hear the words but what I heard instead was a kind of groan, voices under the organ, an indistinct murmur. I listened for Aurora’s alto but it was lost somewhere in the interior and I suspected she was not singing but listening, as I was, for one clear note, evidence of the heartbeat beneath the skin. Then the hymn concluded. The patrolmen fired up their engines, the chauffeurs returned to their cars, and Aurora and Consuela were walking down the porch steps, followed by the aunts, the Texas cousin and her father, the Elliotts, and other family members I did not recognize. There was a moment of confusion after Aurora and Consuela disappeared into the lead limousine, the one behind the hearse. Mourners gathered on the church steps watching the departure, the funeral party debating which car to enter as the chauffeurs stood at attention beside open doors. I saw Aurora’s arm fall from her open window, that gesture again. She caressed the skin of the limousine as if it were a cat’s fur, her father’s wristwatch limp around her wrist. At last the cars pulled away from the curb and moved slowly up the street, the hearse so long and black it seemed to go on forever. Aurora’s arm disappeared from the window of the limousine behind it. I walked away among strangers, searching for my car. Nothing in this neighborhood was familiar. The hearse turned the corner and disappeared. I was nineteen years old.