by Craig Nova
[ CHAPTER SIX ]
MY WIFE WAS waiting, of course, and one of the beauties of her knowledge, of her understanding, was that she had a way of discovering things before I had to tell them, and I was pretty sure she already knew about my father and about Cal. Still, the idea of not telling her directly, as I did about most things, was so far from the realm of possibility as to be nonexistent. And yet, who wants to walk into a room and say, “I’ve got some bad news.”
I drove an Audi, which my father had called in his prison camp German, Der Grauer Geist, the Gray Ghost. I drove down Brattle Street, in Cambridge, after Cal had jumped from that bridge, and as I went by those squat, large New England houses, I tried to let their suggestion of time, of the weight of it, of the long-lastingness of it, like a geological formation, make that sense of my father’s paralysis and the lingering slipperiness of Cal’s hand seem more remote or more natural or more ordinary, but instead it worked the other way: the old houses reminded me that this was the only time I was ever going to have.
The house Alexandra and I lived in and where our daughter Pia had grown up and still came to visit when she was home from New Haven was a New England saltbox, in a cul-de-sac not far from that daffodil color of the Longfellow House. Sometimes the color of the Longfellow House looked cheerful, like spring, but at other times like jaundiced eyes. You can guess how it appeared when I passed it and turned into our cul-de-sac. I parked just in front of the window in the study that was at the front of the house.
Alexandra stood just behind the glass of the window. She had blond hair and full lips, her presence edged by light, like a cloud at dawn. She waited, face near the glass, her eyes on the Audi. When we faced a tough time we played a game: she’d guess what had gone wrong, and I’d score it, one to ten. Now her breath made a small balloon on the glass of my study, like the place in a cartoon where someone speaks, and she beckoned with her fingers: come in, she seemed to say. Play the game. That’s how we’ll start.
The car sighed as it cooled, and the power steering pump drained under the hood. Maybe, I thought, with the celon in my hand, with the naked woman who threw thunderbolts and sat on the galaxy’s face, maybe, instead of Cal falling through the strata of misery, as though it was measured in feet, or instead of considering my father’s death, I’d pass the twenty-celon note over and say, in the voice we used for the game, “So, what’s this?”
In the backyard we had beds of snapdragons, delphinium, lupine, and pink astilbe. When they bloomed the flowers screened a small graveyard. Or maybe you could say that half of the backyard is a graveyard. Often I went outside and stood among the fifteen stones that were there, surrounded by a metal fence with spikes on each bar.
The man who had built this house had been buried there, in the 1700s, along with this wife and children. Juduthan and Polly Wainwright. I used to stand there in an attempt to make difficulties less intense. After all, Juduthan and Polly must have stood out here, too, two hundred and fifty years ago, with difficulties of their own. Three children, twelve, nine, and seven, had been buried in a two-week period. Typhus? Cholera? You’d think that it would make the place gloomy, but it was oddly reassuring, at times, to sit there and think with a little luck I’d get through a mess. Or I used to think that. Now the place suggested something else: that I might get ensnared after all.
A wall of books was on one side of my study, Thucydides, Marcus Aurelius, Tacitus, Xenophon, which I read from time to time, and then my desk, which had been my grandfather’s, a rolltop that still had some of his pens and pencils. A sort of lawyerlike odor: ashes and ink. A dark purple rug was on the floor, a sofa, a comfortable leather chair, an impressionist painting, a real one, not by Monet but by a pal who had been in Paris. A small bar in the corner.
And yet, if things worked out the wrong way, I’d lose Alexandra, too. What is like the feeling of lost love? Far worse and more complete, I think, than the itch of a missing limb. And the horror of lost love is that sometimes even the best memories are toxic, or tainted, and so I thought I’d better use a good memory now, as a sort of inoculation. Maybe that was the way to have the strength to grieve for my father and a friend.
On the weekends, before Alexandra and I had a child, we went to a small green house that was on the land that my grandfather had owned, and which was going to be mine, soon. The house was one big room downstairs and two bedrooms upstairs, and it sat in a field surrounded by stone walls on which copperheads sunned themselves. Alexandra put out broken crockery to discourage the snakes.
On those weekends, we arrived at this small house late on a Friday night, a basket filled with a picnic, ratatouille that she bought from a Frenchified delicatessen, french bread, a bottle of white wine in a chiller, pâté, cheese, olives, a pear tart, which we ate and then got into bed. One morning I woke up and found her in the upstairs bedroom of the house, which was white and had gauzy curtains. She stood in front of the window, which was a dormer, and there with the light coming in and marking the highlights of her hair, the pale shortbread of her skin, the luminescence surrounding her like a caress. She said, “Frank, is this what people mean when they are in love and happy? Just this? A moment like this when you are so glad you feel you could disappear, as though by magic?”
I opened the door to our house in Cambridge.
“What’s that on your pants?”
“There was bird shit on the bridge.”
“That’s what it looked like on TV. They followed him all the way down.”
“Even at the end?” I said.
“No,” she said. “They chickened out about that.”
“So they didn’t show the hit?”
“No. Just before the commercial break.”
She bit her lip and looked down, as though to say, You don’t have to describe that part. That shape and a sound like a watermelon dropped from the fifth floor.
“What good would it do for me to cry anyway?” I said. “So, I sit here and blubber? Great.”
She just nodded. What can you do? Patience.
A pair of sweats I wore in the evenings were on the sofa, and I stripped off the shit-stained pants, put on the sweats and a clean shirt she had left out, too, then took the dirty things and put them in a hamper for the dry cleaning that was at the back of the kitchen.
We had a drink and sat side by side. The warmth rose between us, just from the touch of one thigh against another, and it seemed to me that this was just as good as words, or maybe even better: warmth, touch, understanding.
Guano was still under my nails, and in the bathroom downstairs, I used the lavender-scented soap, but it didn’t work. The stink lingered like some bad memory. My fingers had little green-white new moons at the tip.
“We need some Lava soap,” I said.
We let the warmth build between us.
“Cal and I had some good times together,” I said. “We were going to change the world.”
“That’s the best kind of friend,” she said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “They get disappointed.”
“So,” she said. This was the opening for the game. That’s the way we were going to handle this. “He did it because of money?”
“One,” I said. “That’s a one. The bottom.”
“He was cross-dressing and got caught,” she said.
“One,” I said. “Not even close.”
“His wife was sleeping with someone else,” she said.
“Warmer. Say three.”
“Ah, so it’s the wife.”
“Sort of,” I said. “Or, at least, that’s where it began. He wanted her to do something with him. She didn’t want to. He was watching a clip at the office . . . ”
“A clip of what?” she said.
“What he wanted the wife to do . . . ,” I said.
“Her name is Ginny, right? Pretty uptight if you ask me,” she said. “But what did he want?”
I whispered in her ear.
“Uh-oh,” she said.
“Well, the thing is, he was watching the clip, you know, a woman doing what he wanted, and Blaine came in and saw it, too.”
“Oh, Jesus,” she said. “He went to see Martha Bingham. I’d bet anything. Why . . . ”
“Cal asked him not to,” I said.
“Well, sure,” said Alexandra. “That probably made it better for Blaine. Don’t you think?”
“That’s a nine,” I said. “Then Lady Martha, on the advice of the publicity director, to stay ahead of the wave, called the Globe. Next thing you know I was sitting with my best friend in pigeon shit. Then he slipped through my fingers.” I swallowed. Almost. At least I had that first ache, down there beneath the larynx. But it didn’t come to anything.
I gave her the index card with the drawing of the naked woman on it.
“What do you think this is?”
“This?” she said. “Why you poor mutt. This is a twenty-celon note. The Raver gives them out when he quotes Marcus Aurelius.”
“That’s ten,” I said.
I closed my eyes. Cal turned in the air, the birds around him, the scent of the harbor and those layers of smoke.
“But listen,” she said. “We don’t have to worry about you doing anything like that, do we? I mean for the trouble you’re in. For our troubles?”
“It’s nice that you think of them as our troubles,” I said.
“Well, let me tell you,” she said. “Those people are going to have to deal with me, too. If they try anything.”
“They’ll try,” I said.
“That’s what I’m afraid of. Maybe I’ll buy a gun.”
“We’ve got a case, right over there,” I said. In the corner of the room sat a small closet of Mannlichers and L.C. Smith shotguns, firearms I had inherited from my father and grandfather.
“I meant a handgun,” she said.
“Well, my father’s .45, his service sidearm, is going to be ours soon.”
“That’s more what I had in mind,” she said.
Beyond the kitchen window the first spikes of snapdragons and delphinium grew, no flowers yet, just the green promise, like enormous asparagus.
“What are we going to do?” she said.
“I was going to talk to my father for advice,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “That was your father’s greatest charm. Trouble.”
“So, we’ll just have to see how it works out.”
“And how bad could that be? For you? For us?” she said.
“I wish I knew,” I said.
She thumbed the edge of the celon.
“I’m sorry about Cal,” she said.
“You know what the cops call it?” I said. “A Dutch job. Doing the Dutch. Or they call it a kervork. There’s all kinds of kervorks. Water. Air. Parking.”
“Parking?”
“When you start the engine of the car and close the garage door. That’s a parking kervork.”
“So for Cal it was just a dumb scandal,” she said.
“Scandals aren’t dumb anymore,” I said. “Indiscretions aren’t dumb. Sex is dangerous.”
“Sure,” she said. “But it isn’t sex where you’re concerned. At least I don’t think so. You haven’t withheld anything like that, have you?”
“No,” I said.
“But, Frank, you’re not going to go out on a bridge or something.”
“No,” I said. I picked at the green-white guano under my fingernails. “No. I guess not.”
“I guess I better call Ginny. That was Cal’s wife’s name, right?” said Alexandra. “Make a ham and take it over. Maybe pick up the kids from school.”
“You can tell her not to worry about the money Cal owed me,” I said.
“I’ll let you do that,” she said. “And of course if he didn’t leave a note, and if she asks why he did it, you can tell her. That’s above my pay scale.”
“I’ll tell her,” I said.
Alexandra took my hand.
“I know you miss your father,” she said.
Her hand was like warm lotion that penetrated the skin.
“He had to be such a son of a bitch,” I said.
“But that didn’t stop you from loving him, did it?” she said.
“No,” I said. “I loved him for the trouble he’d gotten through or the way he did, but I loved him for the way he fucked up, too.”
“Well, he certainly didn’t short you on that,” she said.
[ CHAPTER SEVEN ]
MY FATHER’S WILL was in the finished cellar of his house in Cambridge, the room filled with the scent of mold from the condensation on the walls and from the constant leaks, which my father was always slow to repair. Two days after he died I sat at the card table he used, the one with the green top and the gimpy leg, and started looking through what he had left. I always thought he had been lazy or too devil-may-care to call a plumber right away, but the moisture had only made the papers harder to read. The ink on them, the long lines of figures, the notes about which banks he had used and even the canceled checks, were smeared like a woman’s mascara after she has been crying.
No surprises in the will. Everything was left to me. Then I went through the rest of the papers, those moldy sheets and file folders my father kept in cardboard file boxes he had bought from Kmart then from Wal-Mart, the decline of the stores perfectly matching the increasing corruption of his efforts to manage the last of the money that his father had left. And, of course, the records showed what he had taken from my inheritance. It had a certain beauty to it. The most interesting items were in a file marked “Records for Frank. Open after death.” “Death” had been put in quotes. The mold here was greenish and speckled, the ink harder to read. I guess he had left it under a place where the water condensed from an overhead pipe and dripped, one drop at a time, season after season, onto this file in particular. As a good spook, he had let nature take its course. If the papers were hard enough to read, he could appear to have done one thing while actually having done something else. And, of course, right there on top was a copy of the trust deed that I had found, years before, in my grandmother’s notebooks.
Still, I had practical matters to face. The body had to be cremated. And so, a week after Cal had jumped off the bridge, I picked up my father’s ashes.
This was the first week in June, my father’s favorite time of the year. (In June, Frank, he used to say, you have the feeling all is forgiven.) The funeral was going to be held the next day in the town close to the land my grandfather had owned and which would be mine after probate.
The funeral parlor where I picked up my father’s ashes was just beyond a prison on Route 2. The walls of the prison were gray and looked as though time had been made into a hard substance. Rolls of razor wire were at the top, and every fifty yards or so a guard tower protruded from the wall, and in each one a man stood, his face inscrutable from the distance of the road but yet, for me, as I drove to get my father’s ashes, the inscrutable guards seemed to be an accusation. I supposed this was part of the feeling of picking up my father’s ashes, but it could have been fear, too, of ending up in this place.
The funeral parlor was in Concord, a sad, pretentious town of such gloom as to seem that this atmosphere was the main product of the place. It was on a residential street, although a dry cleaner, a lunch counter, and a fast food outlet were mixed in with the single-story houses. The overall impression of the block was one of being washed out, dimmed somehow, as though the smoke from the crematorium obliterated all the colors on the street. A woman in a housedress pushed a cart from the Stop and Shop down the block, the basket filled with what looked like rags, but which was her dry cleaning.
The records in the cellar told a sort of story, really, although it was in running ink, indecipherable checks, the names of banks I guessed at more than actually knew. They were kept in my father’s slanting handwriting, which was usually easy to read. The first pages were a summary of how much had been left, and a copy of the trust agreement, some parts of which were underli
ned. It had never been much money, although I was curious that while the stock market had increased, the three hundred dollars a month, which I had gotten as an undergraduate, never did. But even after his spy deviousness, when I had gone to see him years before, and maybe in spite of it, I thought that not talking about the cheating was a way, silent to be sure, of saying how much I loved him. As everyone knows, though, love can get tough, and I had saved what I knew until the time when I was in trouble and wanted to get his attention. To get him to take me seriously. And nothing would have done that like showing him how he was cheating. I was left with a particular emptiness, since I realized I had thought of this as a secret weapon, and what did I have now?
The path to the door of Michael and Green, the morticians, was like the path to any suburban house: shrubs of a dusty green, walkway made of brick, white aluminum door with dusty glass. Inside, before the reception desk, a brown carpet, stained here and there, as though fluid had leaked out of one of the containers for the chemicals they needed. Mr. Green, a man in a tie and a short-sleeved shirt, waited at the counter, his eyes set on mine, his entire air one of reduced humanity. The ashes were in a wooden box, which he had politely put into a foil bag the color of a red piñata and as shiny, too. The oak box was held shut with a little hook. It smelled like an ashtray where my grandfather had been flicking the tip of a cigar, a good one from Cuba rolled by blind men, as he used to say.
“Would you like to take care of the balance now?” said Mr. Green.
“Yes,” I said. “I would.”
Mr. Green’s fingers took the check with a respectful pinch, waved it back and forth while the ink dried, and then said, “Hot today, isn’t it.”
“A little smoky,” I said.
“We always get that at this time of the year. Prevailing winds. Why we get all kinds of things from the Midwest. Coal dust. You name it.”
“I guess that’s right,” I said.
“I’m glad you came to me for this service,” said Mr. Green. “It’s so easy to get cheated these days.”
“Well, yes. It’s seems very reasonable.”