All the Dead Yale Men

by Craig Nova

  “Yes, yes,” I said. “Sometimes.”

  She turned to Pia.

  “You know what I mean, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” said Pia. “I do.”

  “The only one with any sense in this group,” said Mary. “You do your job. Let other people do theirs.”

  They got into the van and slammed the door, and then it took off, that wailing louder than ever, at least when it turned around, but then it receded, the sound having an odd throb.

  “What do they call that?” I asked Pia.

  “The sound?” she said. “The Doppler effect.”

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s what it is.”

  She nodded. Sure. She remembered. It was like those moments when she explained Fermat’s theorem: it happened as fast as a memory triggered by the scent of honeysuckle or an orchid, but then the sound and scent of the river came back.

  Jerry said the seizures came first as a blue light, as though it was the exhaust of a flying saucer. Or sometimes he said it was like a storm, one of those cells out of which the tendrils of a tornado come, rich with the shape and color of the tentacle of an octopus. It came down and touched the earth, at once black and contradictory, like smoke and the ink of a squid. Sometimes it was like an eclipse, when the moon covers the sun, but the shadow was as violet as a gentian.

  He didn’t really stutter, although some words gave him trouble, and while he had a disability check and while my grandfather had left him a little money, I still sent him a check every two months. Well, not a check. A stack of twenties held together with a rubber band. When we were together, we played a game, and he said “One,” and I said “Two,” and then he said “Three,” and we went on that way until we got to nineteen, since he couldn’t quite understand how it went from the teens to the twenties, then thirties, then hundreds. Still, he liked geometry, and he glowed when I showed him a proof.

  Pia and I washed our faces in the river.

  “Dad,” she said. “You understand, don’t you?”

  “What?”

  “I will never, ever have children. Period,” she said.

  “Wait,” I said. “They’ve got all kinds of genetic tests . . . ”

  “Don’t,” said Pia. “Don’t give me any lawyer bullshit. Or any bullshit. For once, I want you to listen to me. Can you do that for once?”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” I said.

  “Just listen. Don’t ask questions. You heard me,” she said.

  “But . . . ”

  She was standing on the bank, a little above me, and so we stood nose to nose. Her eyes were the same gray color as mine, maybe a little bluer, although that could have just been anger.

  We turned away from each other and got into the car, and drove to the hospital in Port Jervis. Jerry was fine. Then we drove home, back to Cambridge, and we didn’t say a word until we pulled into the driveway.

  “Have you heard what I said?” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. “The end of the line.”

  “Good.” She swallowed and closed her eyes. “Is there any other way? Is that what you want? Seizures? Incapacity? Madness?”

  [ CHAPTER ELEVEN ]

  IT WASN’T THE best of times or the worst of times, but some other combination altogether. Or maybe it is better to say that it was the best of times, but fate, or darkness, or that substance Thucydides tried to define, if only by events, was waiting to do its worst. The first detail of it had to do with a dinner Alexandra made five months before my father died.

  Alexandra put pasta on the table, linguine with a white puttanesca sauce, some tomatoes with fresh mozzarella and basil, a white wine, Orvieto Classico Superiore. Then she sat down and smiled. Well, I thought, at least she is making an effort. She put the pasta onto a plate and handed it to me, and in that moment we both held that white plate, when we both tugged it at the same time, I felt some firm, definite pull. I have lived with my wife for twenty-five years, and I know that pull, that insistence, which is so perfectly mixed with hesitation.

  Alexandra taught film production at Boston University, and for a long time she had wanted to make a documentary film about Marinetti, an Italian Futurist who, to my mind anyway, was simply bonkers: he and his followers, at the early part of the last century, embraced the worst aspect of the modern age with a sort delusional pleasure. For instance, they thought that the sound of a machine gun as it mowed down soldiers was a kind of music, or the music of the age. The new symphony. My wife was as amazed by this as I was, and for a long time she had tried to interest people, like WGBH, in funding the project. I had even written proposals with her.

  “This is good,” I said, with the pasta on a fork.

  “Yes,” she said. “Isn’t it?”

  “I wonder if you have heard anything about the funding for the Marinetti?”

  “I can’t fool you,” she said. “How do you do that? How do you know I’ve heard something?”

  “The way you cook,” I said. “So?”

  “Well,” she said. “It’s not the funding. But close. I’ve been invited to teach a course at the University of Rome. American film of the twentieth century. Frankly, I’ll have to go quickly, since someone else backed out on them for the spring. I’ll have to be there next week.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “It won’t be that long,” she said. “I’ll be back before summer. By late spring. I know it might be tough for you, after losing the Citron case. Pia will be at school. I skedaddle to Rome . . . ”

  I went on eating, and as I rolled the shiny linguine on my fork, I thought of Via del Corso, the monument to Marcus Aurelius where I always went to eat a gelato. Well, I thought, well. Maybe she will have a good time.

  “OK,” I said. “That’s great. Have you told Pia?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Pia’s all for it. And you’re really glad, aren’t you?”

  “Sure, you’ll be able to look into Marinetti. There must be an archive or something at the University of Rome.”

  “Yes,” she said. She rolled some pasta on her fork and put it in her mouth. “That’s right. There is an archive.”

  “And Pia comes home for weekends,” I said. “How bad can it be?”

  The wine tasted of those Italian hillsides and that constantly changing light.

  “Do you think a time comes when your kids decide to finish you off?” I said.

  “We’re not Eskimos,” said Alexandra.

  “Don’t be too sure,” I said.

  “It’s possible,” she said.

  “Maybe it’s like Newton’s laws of motion. Big objects attract small ones. Here, if I’m a little shaky, it attracts events that have just been waiting for it. Like if I’m vulnerable, then the natural thing is for Pia to push back. Maybe she’s not even aware of it. Maybe it’s easier to face up to a father’s death if you diminish him first. Or just defeat him in some way. You don’t even know you’re doing it. That’s how natural it is.”

  “Frank,” she said. “I’d relax if I were you. Stop thinking for a while.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s got to be right. Too much thinking around here.”

  A week later I stood in our bedroom, where she packed her new Tumi bag with sheer underwear, dark and red, with small ribbons, matching brassieres, and other items, clinging black dresses, which she folded neatly, as though these things were part of a promise. She was in her forties, but more attractive than she had ever been. I helped her close the bag. And in the morning, she said, “I know you have to be at work. I’ll take a cab.”

  In the kitchen the coffee in my cup got cold as silence flowed into the house like fog. If I had been more alert, the silence should have tipped me off, but I saw it as just the lack of sound, not the announcement of the beginning of trouble, which for me always has an almost ceremonial peacefulness, that is, it seems like peacefulness but is something else altogether.

  I went to work and tried to use those old tricks, desperately employed to be indifferent or at least num
b to the lingering effects of the Citron case, those bodies found in trunks, in the cold and dusty parking lots at Logan, in Dumpsters, trash cans, storm drains, storage rentals, old refrigerators in junkyards, or just left out there on the sidewalk for people to step over. My hands started shaking. That should have been a sign, but, of course, I believed that everything was going to be fine. So, you’re a little shaky. So what? You’ve made your mistakes, paid for them, with interest, hard interest at that. You are growing wise before you grow old. The rest is pure gravy, right? Why be worried about Mackinnon’s First Law of Emotional Gravity? That wounds attract trouble?

  Aurlon Miller, a.k.a. the Wizard, and Pia came for a visit in the middle of January. A winter so odd and warm they hardly had to wear coats. I sat in my office with its view of the drive. A gun case stood at the end of the bookshelves with my editions of Marcus Aurelius (and a bust, too), Livy (The War with Hannibal), Xenophon (the Anabasis), Herodotus, the complete works of Tacitus, and the rest. The guns that had come down to me from my grandfather and the ones given to me by my father were stored there, an L.C. Smith field-grade twenty gauge, a Holland and Holland twelve gauge (which had turned from a field piece to a collector’s item), and that Mannlicher, 6.5 mm with open sights. In the kitchen, I dug around in the refrigerator. Would the Wizard like Roquefort cheese? A pear tart? Salmon on cream cheese with capers? I pushed the bags of plastic one way and then another, like a miser uncertain about the count of his gold.

  Of course, Pia and I had an unspoken language, and the item we never mentioned was that nothing is more dangerous than the wrong man. Nothing. I wasn’t uninformed about this, either, since I saw the police logs, and the investigation reports (the 34-1-A forms) that were filled out for rape, assault, robbery, murder, murder with mayhem, with mutilation, and for various scams that were still being used, such as the Murphy.

  The odd, lint-colored light of a New England winter flowed in from the window. I had pushed the plastic bags around in the icebox, my head stuck in there like a bear in a trash can. So, Aurlon and Pia came in, with a whiff of smoke and cold air, while I discarded the salmon, the cheese, the capers, and the rest. Booze, I thought. That’s best.

  Pia sat on the leather sofa and Aurlon stood at my desk, where he looked down at a manila file that I had left closed, but which was now open. With the tip of one finger and his thumb, as though he didn’t want to leave any fingerprints, he turned the pages of a case I was trying to make a decision about. I had left The Pearl Fishers playing on the gray, matte-colored electronic equipment I had installed, and Aurlon sang along, not missing a word as he turned a page in the file. This was a summary of a murder indictment: a woman had killed her child and tried to put it, one piece at a time, down the garbage disposal. Her attorney, a public defender, wanted to cop a plea.

  I stood in the doorway.

  Aurlon was almost six feet tall, slender, as though he had been built to wiggle into small spaces, and his gray eyes and dirty blond hair were oddly familiar. Kurt Cobain? Was that who he looked like? His face was oddly handsome, his acne scars making his complexion rough, his entire aspect at once vulnerable and yet tough. He looked as if he had been in jail, not a penitentiary, just a jail. His hair smelled of Pia’s shampoo, and he looked as though he had taken a shower and then put on his dirty clothes. Gray shirt with a sort of cape over it.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  With one long finger he flicked the file shut.

  “Hi, Dad, this is Aurlon Miller.”

  “Just Miller is OK,” he said. “Some people call me the Wizard. You know, just for fun.”

  “Don’t look at my papers again,” I said. “Is that clear?”

  “Oh,” he said. “I didn’t understand all that legal stuff anyway.”

  “Miller knows a lot of opera,” said Pia. She had that look, too. Don’t, she seemed to say. Just be nice, OK?

  “You got a lot of nice things,” Miller said. “Very cool sound.”

  “I’m glad you like it,” I said.

  He turned an ear to a speaker. “Great sound. Really great sound.”

  The second act, the most beautiful duet, came on. We listened, although Miller kept his eyes on me to see just what effect beauty had. Was that a weapon?

  “I see you’ve got a chess set. You want to play?”

  He spoke like a three-card monte man who stood behind a card table at Harvard Square and fleeced the suckers who came in from the suburbs. And, of course, a three-card monte man is what he was. He had a tensile, cobra-like intensity, a toughness that while seeming to be a stance, might have been more than that.

  He took two pawns, one black, one white, and put them in his hands behind his back.

  “Pick,” he said.

  I got the white. He smiled.

  “Good,” he said. “I guess we’ll see what you know. I guess it’s possible to make a living playing chess, but most chess players are so broke it’s hardly worth it.”

  What would we play for, he seemed to be thinking, after he had let me win a couple of games and then suggested that we make it a little more interesting. How about twenty bucks? How about what was in the gun case? That twenty gauge? The computer? Is that the way it would work? He considered each object in the room, his eyes sweeping along the books (already thinking, or so it seemed, how much he could get for the books at the used bookstore up the block), the desk, the pen there, the paintings on the walls, and then, with a barely perceptible but still acidic smile, he glanced at Pia.

  Did I understand? We were going to play for her. This was his horror and his charm: he could take any small action, any small gesture, and fill it with the ominous.

  I opened with a king’s pawn. He answered. Basic setup, move for move. He made a clumsy attempt at a fool’s mate, the moves made with the expression of a douser who is looking for water. What was down there, under the surface?

  I had played a lot of chess when I was an undergraduate. At school a Russian grandmaster put on an exhibition, one of those occasions where the grandmaster (in his French suit and with his Russian girlfriend who looked as though she would turn heads in Moscow) played twenty people at one time: it came down to him and me. Of course I made a mistake, but it was close to the end and the grandmaster had had a good scare, but he was still a gentleman, in the old style, and so he wiped his brow, looked me in the eyes, and said, “You play well.”

  Aurlon and I went at it, and while I tried to avoid trading pieces, just to see how dexterous he was with a lot of possibilities, he traded as often as he could, doing it by the book, taking each small advantage as though it was money in the bank. After all, I thought, why not make a couple of mistakes, just to see if he is up to it? He was. It was five moves to mate, then four, then three, then two.

  “I guess that’s it,” he said.

  “You play very well,” I said in a voice that I tried to make sound precisely like the grandmaster. “Why don’t we try it again?”

  “Sure,” he said. He looked at Pia. “I’ve got a little time.”

  “Let’s make it a little more interesting,” I said.

  “Oh,” he said. “I never play for money. It’s just the beauty of the game.”

  “Why not keep it friendly?” said Pia. “It’s just a game.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “But I’m being nice to your dad.”

  “How much do you have on you?” I said.

  “Fifty bucks,” he said.

  “And how much in your shoe?” I said.

  “How did you know about that?” he said.

  “Lucky guess,” I said.

  So, we sat there for a moment. He looked across the table with those non-colored eyes, his bad skin, his breathing slow and regular. He nodded to himself, and in that moment, like a sudden breeze on water, he had a little doubt. Was he the mark, or was I? He took off his shoe and took out fifty dollars and put it on the side of the table along with the fifty he took out of his pocket. I moved them to the desk. The money from his s
hoe smelled like a gym.

  “Pia’s a nice girl,” said Aurlon. He pushed the hair out of his eyes. Then he looked at me so there would be no misunderstanding. “You know what I mean?”

  “I can take care of myself,” said Pia. “People make that mistake all the time.”

  “Sure,” he said. “I’m sure you can. Let’s play.”

  The house made a slight ticking that you could only hear when the silence was absolute. A dripping in the downstairs bathroom, which I was going to have to get fixed. Every now and then a car went by on Brattle Street with a tearing, ripping sound. Aurlon drew white. King’s pawn opening. If he was any good, I could play for a draw, but then he glanced at Pia, at her legs. She looked away, out the window. Then back at me. Was that where it began, in that little defiance, in that moment when she wanted to show me that she could deal with this and any other trouble that might come her way? Or were we still bitter about the end of the line, and did that contribute to her anger?

  I pinned a bishop, gained a move, set up according to Aron Nimzowitsch, all slashing angles, from each side, still keeping the pin.

  “I’ve never seen that before,” said Aurlon.

  He began to sweat. He bit his nails. He put his nose down to the point where he almost touched a rook. His fingers touched a bishop, tilted it on the base. Then he left it alone. He looked at me and then at the money and then at the things in the room.

  “Well, well,” he said.

  He made his move. Five to mate, then four, then three. He knocked his king over.

  “Maybe we should play for real money. Or something else,” he said. That glance at Pia.

  “Sure,” I said. “Sure. If you want. I’ll give you a chance.”

  We sat in the silence of the house. The dripping faucet. The creak of the old timber. The ripping of tires on the sidewalk. The sound from the house next door, where my neighbor and his mistress met every Saturday afternoon and got into bed.