All the Dead Yale Men

by Craig Nova

  “Habit,” I said.

  “It will come,” he said. “Yes, my friend, it will come.”

  [ CHAPTER FIVE ]

  THE BURGER KING at Harvard Square doesn’t seem to be the place to try to come to terms with memory, desire, and amazement, but then where is a good place for that?

  So, I considered my grandmother’s notebooks and what I had read years ago in the attic of her house. A sign of how much I missed my father was that I was almost attached to if not affectionate for his goofy spy routine and the fact that he was cheating me, but, with that guano still on my hands, and the risk of desire so obvious in Cal’s fall, spread-eagle, from the bridge, I thought of the first detail of my grandmother’s own longing. It was the desire of another age and of another sensibility in the buzzing of timers for the hamburgers and the appearance of junkies who came in to drool at the tables.

  I read this in my grandmother’s notebooks when I was trying to discover the details of my father’s financial arrangements. Of course, it would have taken a court order for me to get the terms of the trust. That is one of the laws of families, at least those who deal with each other before going to court. But families have far larger secrets than the financial, the scale of these hidden items so enormous as to leave me with nothing but the mystery of being human.

  The notebook said:

  Chip, of course, almost destroyed us all when he took off with a young woman I had hired to copy these books, to get them ready, I thought, to show to a publisher, at least the sections about animals. She came into the house with her perfect carriage, her gray eyes, her smoldering quality that would have scared anyone with half a brain or anyone who knew just how powerful such a quality is. It has started wars. Destroyed empires. It is a flaw, it seems, in the godhead, in what makes things continue, since the attraction is so strong that it will strike anything that dares get in the way. A trial of gods and men was needed to atone for the crimes of the house of Atreus. Well, I don’t want to overstate the case, but it is a miracle no one was killed when Chip, already engaged, ran off with a young woman in a way that had the air of erotic disaster so strong that most people recoil in horror, not from the obvious attraction, but from their own inability to entertain such a feeling. Or to act on it. This inability made them feel reduced, just human, rather than those fleeting moments of being in love when one feels like half a god.

  Of course, Pop negotiated, but fell in love with Jean Cooper too, although I think she let him have it in a way that suits an old fool. Chip was properly chastised. He married as he should, although to show the power we are speaking of, the farm was burned to the ground and had to be rebuilt.

  Still, during the time when Chip was with Jean Cooper, he knew I was sympathetic, and I was, but not for any reason that Chip could have guessed. As his mother, I was concerned for him, didn’t want him hurt, especially after those years I had spent worrying when he had been in a camp in Poland and Germany for prisoners of war. No. I surely didn’t want to lose him to that erotic haze, and the trouble it can cause, violence and death. And, as I said, we came close. About as close as you can come.

  But there was this other matter of my own, too, that had taken place some years before and which made me empathetic, as though Chip and I were charged elements, atomic particles that vibrated at the same frequency. In those days, women were quiet about the things that happened to them, or that they did, at least if they were American.

  Pop and I had an apartment on Park Avenue, with, since Pop loved South America so much, a genuine Argentinian garden, with a false skylight. And, of course, we had the land on the Delaware River. Pop was a customs lawyer and spent a lot of time in Buenos Ares, Rio, Santiago, Lima, and other places. When he traveled, in those days mostly by ship and train, I preferred to live at the farm where I could wait to see a hawk, a deer, a bear, a snake, a grouse, and to write something about them, if only to understand what was happening to me, to my husband, and to my boys. This, of course, was before the war, but not much, when the boys were at Saint Paul’s School.

  When Pop had arranged to represent a meat-packing company in Argentina, a furrier in Patagonia, a mine in Bolivia, and was going to see them one after another, that is, he would be gone for some time, we started the barn I had planned for the lambs I wanted to keep. This was one of the buildings to burn when Chip began to flirt with those old attractions, more than just sex or love, but that passion that mostly just scares people.

  I should have known that a woman in her late thirties was flirting with danger, as definite as a tiger in the jungle. And the man had no sense, no sense at all. He thought that he could just sleep with me, just like that.

  When I read this in the notebook, the dust settled around me in the attic, each small bit like a moment, a sparkling instant of time long gone. Then my grandmother breaks away for a moment from this man, whoever he was, and speculated about pain. She described emotional pain as though it was a creature, too, like her grouse, deer, and brook trout. Is pain a living creature, a thing that has evolved, too, and learned precisely how much it can exist before the host decides it is time to bring both of them, host and parasite, to an end?

  The notebook continued:

  I plan, of course, to burn this before I die. And I hope that I have the time to do so, since I imagine, given my history, that mine will be a slow, continually approaching death, like a snake, a constrictor taking his time over its prey, but then I think sometimes I should burn it right now, so that no one will discover my sad secrets, which, I guess, should simply disappear . . .

  When I was young, I was not beautiful, but when I was in my thirties, something happened: not beauty, but a kind of glow, something like that air that Jean Cooper carried with her: not only attractive but dangerous. How could I deny it when all my life I had looked away from mirrors and now found that something had snuck into the frame while I had been looking away? This thing, this presence, was the tug of life, the scent of it, the allure of a new perfume, unlike any other in the world, that hung about me, for a short time, I thought, like a cloud of desire.

  So, I sat upstairs and looked out the window at this man, this McGill, tall, home from the First World War with a limp, in his thirties, too, and when I see him I feel more myself (a sure sign of foolishness).

  And, I thought, what does that have to do with anything, with duty, with obligations, with what one feels at three in the morning when a child won’t sleep and when you are so tired you can’t remember if you are alive or dead? Then you remember the sense of being bigger and wonder at the seduction of it.

  •••

  The dust in the attic was infinitely golden, infinitely fine.

  •••

  Now I have times when I am alone with McGill. I go out to the barn, since sometimes he has trouble measuring and figuring and getting the most out of the lumber Pop has bought. McGill, who has had trouble since the war, was a bargain, and Pop loves a bargain. But McGill needs help. Sometimes he can’t plan on the number of pegs he will need, or how to drive a piece of hardwood through a hole in the post and beam construction. I read, at night, about how barns are built this way. It makes me feel close to him.

  •••

  You must do what’s right, my grandmother wrote to herself, as though she was both the prosecutor and the defendant. And, in fact, I could sense this growing division between her objections and her desires. They made a sort of crackle that could almost be heard in that dusty attic. She told herself to go to the river and to sit by the water: it is eternal, she wrote, it goes on forever, and that is what you must concentrate on. The long term, the forever, since you are flirting with something that is far too intense to last and that, by its nature, the shortness and intensity, can’t be anything but dangerous.

  She knew she was going to have to pick up the pieces when this was over and she was good at that, although this, to be sure, was cold comfort.

  She sat with McGill in the kitchen, her hand on his. And, of course, her feet
were bare on the kitchen floor against that polished pine, yellow as an intimate stain. Upstairs, he sat on the edge of the bed. She said she knew better than this, that her husband was a decent man, and she had tried to learn to write so beautifully, but it had come to nothing. When they were done, when they had touched each other and were sweaty, they took a bath together in her tub with lions’ feet.

  The light came down all buttery when I sat with my grandmother’s diaries, although it seemed to have a different color, still yellow, still weak, and in the sweetness of it I recognized my grandmother’s profound sympathy: she wanted to leave a moment of delight, of love, of romance for her nosey grandchildren. That was why she hadn’t burned this book. If she had burned it, those moments of tingling delight, when pleasure had been like the gold flecks of a sparkler, so surprising and complete as to leave people speechless with dismay. How could such intensity exist for ordinary human beings? It was like being close to a godhead, wasn’t it? If my grandmother had burned this book, the smell of the sweat and wood chips and the bare floor under her feet, the touch of those sheets, the smell of that soap she used to wash him in the enormous tub with lions’ feet all would have disappeared. In particular, my grandmother had made a note of that: the tub had lions’ feet.

  The notebook continued:

  The new world caught us. Or, I should say a new airline, Pan Am, did it. Pop was in South America on business, and while he usually took a ship, he now took a plane home. McGill and I were in bed upstairs, and the dark Buick, driven by Pop’s chauffeur, Wade, a tall man with tea-colored eyes, stopped in front of the house.

  I recorded this, made notes, was precise, since it was a transformation. McGill pulled on his clothes and went out the front door, past Pop and Wade.

  “Wade, put the bags inside the door,” said Pop.

  “Yes, sir,” said Wade. “Mr. Mackinnon, I think I am going to put the car away.”

  Pop and I sat in the kitchen. Light came in the window and lay in squares on the yellow oilcloth on the table. I made tea and poured Pop a cup, the trickle of it into the porcelain at once cheerful and ominous.

  In the yard, McGill cut some short planks to fit those places that hadn’t been filled in the side of the barn. Pop put down his tea and stood, his shadow falling across me like a sheet.

  “McGill,” said Pop from the door. “Come in here.”

  McGill’s boots came up the steps to the kitchen as though he was walking across the top of a hollow log. Then the squeak of the hinges of the door, that sigh and squeak. He stood in front of it, the door left open just a bit, as though that would make it easier to run away. I bowed my head on the other side of the table, not for shame exactly but because I didn’t want to see McGill’s face. Then he sat down.

  “Yes, sir,” said McGill.

  I cringed at that “sir” as though this diminished him, and me, too. As though the “sir” was an indication of how desperate I had become or how silly, or how the two were so perfectly intertwined as to make no sense at all.

  “Don’t call me that,” said Pop. “You know my name. Say it.”

  McGill said, “Mis, Mis, Mister Mackinnon.”

  “Would you like tea?” said Pop. “It’s good, dark tea. We should drink something if we are going to negotiate, to decide things. It is very good tea.”

  “I know what kind of tea you have in this house,” said McGill.

  “Do you?” said Pop.

  Pop poured a cup, his hands absolutely steady, the dark tea coming out of the spout of the pot, which looked like the neck of a bird, like a small goose.

  “Sugar?” said Pop.

  “Yes,” said McGill. “I like sugar.”

  “Do you?” said Pop. “Life is hard without something sweet.”

  “I’ve noticed,” said McGill without the least guile or without any understanding of the meaning of the word “sweet.”

  “One spoon or two?” said Pop.

  “Two.”

  Pop put two neatly measured spoonfuls into McGill’s tea, swirled the dark fluid.

  We sipped the tea. The kitchen was bright. A silver spoon made a slight note against a cup. Overhead the geese honked with that steady, strained, alarmed sound. Pop nodded to himself, up and down, over and over. McGill held his cloth cap in his hand and reached out for the teacup and took a large sip.

  “It’s good sweet tea,” he said.

  “Do you have anything to say?” said Pop.

  McGill bit his lip, and looked down. Then he glanced up at me. The entire room was suspended in some invisible thing, like love or the impulse toward revenge.

  “I have to say I’m sorry,” said McGill. “I meant no harm.”

  “And you?” said Pop me.

  “No,” I said. “I meant no harm.”

  Pop went back to nodding, yes, yes, yes.

  “There are two things we can do,” said Pop.

  Pop closed his eyes. The geese honked.

  “You can go with him,” said Pop to me. “There’s a house vacant in town. You’ll need some money. I’ll give you some to get started. You’ll need furniture, household things. I’ll provide them.”

  “And the other?” I said.

  “He goes someplace else,” said Pop. “I’ll give him something to get started.”

  “You mean money?” said McGill.

  Pop held up a hand, as though directing traffic: stop. Don’t speak.

  “Talk it over with her,” Pop said. “Don’t be stu—” Then he stopped and bit his lip. “I’ll be outside.”

  He stood up and he went out the door.

  McGill and I finished our tea, although we didn’t speak then. Gathering courage or admitting despair.

  “Do you think I could keep you?” he said.

  I shook my head.

  “I could try,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “You could.”

  I cleared the tea things and then McGill sat with his hat in his hands, his face sad, and when Pop came into the kitchen he took one look and then removed his wallet from his pants and took out a hundred dollars and pushed the bills across the table.

  “It’s better this way,” said Pop.

  “For you?” said McGill.

  “For everyone,” said Pop. “To eliminate complications.”

  McGill stood up and opened the door, letting the cool air in, and the smell of dirt and sawdust, and walked straight through the yard and then up the road, on both sides of which there were stone walls that had been built one heavy piece of rock at a time, over a hundred years. He put the money in his hat and put the hat on his head. He didn’t even look back at me.

  “All right,” said Pop. “That’s done. But let us finish.”

  “Finish?” I said. McGill had now vanished. “I thought we were finished.”

  “No,” he said.

  “So,” I said. “We are going to negotiate?”

  “What else is there? God? Church? No. None of that lasts. The law prevails, endures.”

  “So you want a divorce,” I said.

  “No,” he said.

  “What then?” I said.

  “I am not getting younger. It is time to make a will, to set up a trust, to make arrangements for the money. Don’t you see?”

  “Have you forgiven me?” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “But I want to make sure no more mistakes are made after I am gone.”

  •••

  In the attic I looked around the leavings of his time, the leather trunks, the fly rods in cases, the blankets, and chairs, the plaid cushions. All suspended now in the dust stirred up by an intruder, one of the living.

  In a week, Pop had brought the papers, perfectly executed: when he died, my grandmother would have access to the income from the money he had acquired, and on her death the income would go to her sons (or only one, Chip, since his brother never made it back from the war), and then Chip would serve as executor for the next generation, that’s me, and there, in the end of the notebook, was a copy
of the trust. Ink like dried blood. And, of course, the details were there. Right there.

  I read this fifteen years ago; the page of the last book turned with a little sound, like a creak in an old house. “Life is ninety-nine percent anxiety and one percent fear. The trick is to know which is which.”

  The diary ended. Just like that. The last entry had to do with a case of pears that were overripe and had to be returned. Pears.

  The end paper at the front of the book had a small number “1” in my grandmother’s dark, furious penmanship. If she had a 1, then she had to have a 2 or a 3 or 4. Isn’t that the way it works? Were there more?

  The trunk had piles of other books filled with plates of animals, of Audubon’s drawings, of lovely drawings of moths and butterflies, and in particular a drawing of a moth that, when resting, had wings that were brown, but when they were spread for flight, triangles of pink that had been folded into the closed wing suddenly appeared: a pink like hope, like a raspberry, like a ribbon on lingerie.

  So, there was more, but what? My grandmother had left the light, but not the darkness, and it is the darkness that teaches hard lessons. The bloom enthralls. The frost informs.

  Still, I had the paperwork, and this is what I was going to use with my father on that day of the high-speed chase. I guess I had waited so long because if I had this, then I had information about my father’s desperate affair, and, where decency was concerned, letting him know that I was aware of this secret was not worth three hundred a month. After all, I loved him.

  But then my troubles began, and I was desperate enough to bring up the past, the toxic periods in his own life to get help with mine.