by Craig Nova
“How was Rome?” I said.
She swung her hair and took a sip of wine.
“All I can say,” she said, “is that it’s wonderful to be home.”
“Yes,” I said.
“And you had some time with Pia, too,” she said. “How are things?”
“Fine,” I said.
“Good,” she said. “Let’s make all this last. Let’s not have anything go wrong.”
“I’ve got something to talk to you about,” I said.
“Can it wait a little?” she said. “This is so nice.”
The domestic has such a tug, such a gravity of the ordinary and warm. After dinner, Alexandra came into my study and curled up on the sofa, her legs under a fleece blanket she got from a sporting goods store, and I sat at my desk, reading through the paperwork for an indictment: it’s all in the details, in precision, in not making a mistake, although as I sat there, in the midst of what seemed to be just that, I tried to let the warmth of the room, the gentle shifting of Alexandra under her blanket, the tick of the book she was reading as she turned from one page to the next reassure me, and for a moment it did. I could almost convince myself that it was all right.
Then I told her everything.
She looked down.
“I’m not a lawyer,” she said. “Why don’t you call your father? God knows he’s been in enough trouble.”
I dialed my father’s number and told him that Alexandra was home, that everything seemed fine, but there was a legal matter, nothing important, or at least I didn’t think it was, but maybe I could come by the next day, in the afternoon, and we could talk it over. I didn’t think I was in trouble, but maybe we could talk things over.
“Well, sure, Frank,” said my father. “My Latin American students are going to be here for a piñata party. We’re going to have some fun. They don’t think I can hit that thing, but you know what, Frank, here’s the trick: you listen for the wheels of the pulley that control the piñata. Wait for it to come down. Then, wham! It rains candy. So, yeah, come by tomorrow.”
[ CHAPTER SEVENTEEN ]
ON THE DAY before my father’s funeral, which we were going to have at the farm, I drove the ashes from Concord in that red gift bag. Of course, because I didn’t get to ask for my father’s help didn’t mean I had stopped wanting it. If he had been able to handle Poland and the Germans in the snow, he’d have been able to help. And so I was left with that constant desire to reach across the gulf between the living and the dead, that invisible wall that keeps getting closer.
The ashes gave off that stink of a half-smoked cigar, and the box vibrated from the engine. The light came in the window and made the slick paper of the bag glow, as though it was water with the sun on it. The ashes sat on the seat, in that bright party bag, and I had the sensation of my father straining, as though he was just on the other side of that darkness that confronts us all. And that goddamn bag: it made me think of the store where these things were for sale, as though these cheerful, foil receptacles were there for an endless number of boxes of ashes. The bags lined up, an almost infinite number, like a vision of children in the dark before life, that is, in the gloom of time before they are born.
In the car, I reached over and touched the box, which was a kind of primitive moment all by itself, that is, the son reaching out for the spirit of the father. I touched the box and asked for forgiveness. What, after all, can a father give to a son more than that?
The bag had the aspect of a Buddha, an object that suggests knowledge if you are just smart enough, just keen enough to understand, and so I kept looking for the right question, the right method of asking, of imploring, from one generation to another.
At least we’d bury my father, or what was left of him, near that piece of land along the Delaware.
The director of the Girls Club still wasn’t as cordial as she could be, not after we didn’t kill that bear that was getting into the garbage. But that’s a fact of death. Yeah, she could be pissed about the bear still running around, and yeah, she could be pissed at my father (and me, although I don’t know if she knew I had been along), and yeah, she could wish she had never agreed to any entanglements, like letting us store things in the farmhouse with the white siding, black shutters, and with the trout ponds in front, but when a son asks if he can use the house where his father grew up for a few hours before they bury the father, she couldn’t say anything. And, I guess, in the background this was part of the negotiation for me killing the bear.
That wild green and shiny foliage lined the road I took up from the Delaware with the box on the seat next to me. Then the car ticked as it sat in front of the porch. The new hydraulic pump worked just fine. The lawn chairs that my grandmother and grandfather had used were still on the porch, although peeling now, a little rundown, but my grandfather had sat there with his mint juleps, his mind filled with schemes of one kind or another, and which I listened to when I was eight and nine and ten years old. He never mentioned any problems he may have had when he was young, or younger, and away in South America while his wife was alone.
Charlotte was a woman in her eighties now, so heavy she had to throw her weight from side to side when she walked, but she had worked for my grandfather and my father, too, her age showing when she came out to the front porch in her green cardigan sweater, her hair in a white bun, her skin like a shrunken mushroom. Her husband was dead and gone, and yet Charlotte still seemed to carry his presence with her, as though he had been reduced to a scent. I had the feeling that if she had to, she could open a beer bottle with her teeth.
She came out of the house and took my hand.
“I’m sorry for crying like this, Frank,” she said. “It’s just for everything. That goddamned Girls Club. Your grandfather and mother, your father. That bastard time.”
She took a damp handkerchief out of her pocket and blew her nose.
“It’s a hard job, Frank, to bury a father. It’s the last thing they ask you to do. There aren’t any harder. Have you cried yet, Frank?”
“Not yet,” I said.
She stood next to me and put her head against me, just the slight pressure making me feel a little better, as though this touch was something I could depend on. “Don’t you see, Frank, why you have to be so considerate and loving with your kids? You’re going to ask them to bury you. That’s a hard job for them and so you’ve got to show them how much you love them, or anyone who would do that for you.”
She took her handkerchief from her pocket and twisted it, as though she could force some final element, like saying good-bye, into a more comforting shape, but it only made her seem useless, and so she put it back her in her pocket and said, “Well, come in.”
The living room was clean, and yet it still had the air of a camp, and maybe this was because the furniture was mismatched, worn out by years of squirming Girls Club members who were so excited to be away from the cities of New Jersey that they couldn’t sit still. Charlotte went over the small loaves of bread, the chicken salad she had made, the smoked sausage she had gotten in Port Jervis. She said she was going to roast a turkey and a ham, and that she’d have a tub of potato salad with parsley. White wine and beer. A few bottles of liquor.
“It’s a mixture of the comfortable and the cheap. But I got one really good bottle of scotch, just to keep them guessing. Just the way you, father would have liked it. He loved to keep them guessing. Was he the sharpest man we have ever met?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“I’ve got brand name Kleenex here and there,” said Charlotte. “Extra wastebaskets. Here’s the bill for what I spent,” she said.
The twenties and fifties in my wallet were wrinkled and old, and I counted them out, giving her two hundred dollars, which she tucked into the pocket of her dress.
“Well, god bless your father,” she said. Then she shrugged. “We’ll be ready for the people after the church. I’ll clean up after. God bless his miserable heart.”
The party bag, with its r
ed sheen, made a little rustle as I went through the woods and around the swamp that was between here and the stone house where my father had held his hunts and which had been built for his dead brother. Somehow I didn’t think I could leave it in the car, and yet bringing the box out here seemed to be the height of folly, of sentiment, and yet I went through the mountain laurel, the low brush, and came out on the stone house road.
I sat in front of the stone house and some turkeys made their way through the field above it, their burnished feathers in the mist of the late afternoon. The stone house had walls of cobbles up to shoulder height and then the roof went up from them. I sat on a stump in front of it, the bag on the ground at my feet, both of us alone.
•••
Alexandra already had a room in the motel in Sparrow Bush, a town about ten miles away. And when she traveled to places like this, she brought snacks: good blue cheese, sardines and crackers, olives, cold chicken in a hamper, a bottle of white wine, napkins, all of which she had in the room. It was the culinary version of the difference between us, a way of being devoted to details that showed how much she loved me or how much she loved our daughter. The details that made for comfort.
“Is Charlotte going to help?” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “All set.”
She got into bed with her book, just like home.
I brought the bag with the ashes in it and put it on the cheap dresser and then got up and put it in the closet, but as I sat there, Alexandra got up, took them out of the closet, and put them on the dresser. She glanced over at me and I glanced back, and that was another of those moments that held us together.
“Here,” said Alexandra.
She passed a bottle of single malt scotch from her bag over to me, and then she put down, next to the box, two small glasses from the motel bathroom.
“I only need one,” I said.
“Pour one for him,” she said and got back into bed with her book.
I poured scotch into the other glass and shoved it at the box. The odd thing is, he seemed to appreciate it.
On that early June morning, one my father would have loved, the trees so green as to tint the air, I left the bag in the car when I got to the chapel with the white siding, the green shutters, the brass fixtures on the door, the pitched roof covered with slate tiles, and, of course, the building sat in the middle of a churchyard where the stones stood up like a model of a town. The river, with its rills and bone-white boulders, deep pools and long rifles, was a hundred yards away. The chapel had pews on three sides, small ones with a little door in the rail that went in front of them, and then in the middle ten rows of benches were arranged in front of the altar. I had had help with this, in that Charlotte had hired a friend to order the flowers here, and they were on the altar and here and there in front of the pews, nice white ones, carnations with ferns, and some lilies, too, although my father had always hated lilies.
I stood by the front door to greet the mourners. Alexandra did too, her expression one of gratitude for people attending mixed with her natural dignity, her dress a dark blue, her blond hair showing like some vision from the painting of a chapel in Italy where the angels hover overhead. She even handled Ginny for me, Cal’s wife, who came in with an air of sexual uneasiness, as though she was reminded by funerals of why her husband jumped off the bridge.
Billy Meerschaum, the Cambridge cop, came in, dressed in a suit that he wore for weddings and funerals, the thing smelling a little of the mothballs that he packed it in between these events. He took my hand and gave it a squeeze, and then looked around the chapel, giving it the once-over to see where drugs might be hidden. Then he waddled up the aisle and sat in the front, his eyes on the altar, straight up, dignified and alert.
Tim Marshall, the inspector with the Boston Police Department who had been on the bridge when Cal did a Dutch job, was there too, a little drunk in the morning, which he allowed himself as a good Irishman on his way to a funeral.
Marshall said, “I’m sorry, Mackinnon, for your troubles,” and then he sat down, right next to Meerschaum, the two cops finding each other in the crowd like two members of an Eastern European tribe, Croats or Serbs, who send out a kind of radio signal that can be picked up only by other members of the group.
Jerry came in a blue fishing shirt and his hair slicked down with what looked like a bottle of Stay Comb that must have belonged to my grandfather. He took my hand, let me smell the scent of his hair, blinked, then let the tears run down his face and said, “Schießen Sie sie in der Rückseite des Ansatzes.” No stutter. And, for a moment, I wondered if I taught him German if he could speak that without any trouble. But he sat down, too, his Stay Comb bright as the sheen of a bowling ball.
Pia came in, her eyes set on mine as she said, “Oh, Dad, you know I’m sorry. Please. Let’s spend a little more time together. OK?”
I nodded, not trusting my voice.
“I’d like you to meet Robert McQuire,” she said.
McQuire was tall, with perfect posture, and a nose that was so beaked as to make him look like a bird of prey, a peregrine, I guess, and he had a look in his eyes that suggested a variety of smoldering anger, as though, in advance, you were warned that you better not give him the least cause for trouble. He took my hand.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Robert’s a rower,” said Pia. “A classmate, too.”
“We’ll row together sometime,” I said.
“Anytime,” said Robert.
“You better get ready,” said Pia. “His splits are under 2:00.”
She cried, too, and they went in and sat down, Robert’s tall, blondish head above the others.
So I sat in the cool air of the chapel, scented with flowers and the newly dry-cleaned clothes and perfume worn by some of the women. Out the window, the churchyard had gray stones sticking up like boulders cracked by frost, covered with lichen, and beyond the black metal fence of the churchyard the current in the Delaware showed as a slight braid in the otherwise green and dark water, and above it all the sky was smoky, as it always is at this time in the spring. Bare trees, the sudden frost.
About a hundred people showed up, mostly older than me, men and women of my father’s generation who came to funerals as a sort of endless dress rehearsal for the one they weren’t going to be able to attend, at least not on two feet, and who looked around with a sort of sad accounting to see who, among their friends, had fallen aside. The minister was the chaplain at Yale and he spoke of my father’s service in North Africa, his skill as a hockey player at Yale, his instinct for “fun,” which we all knew was a way of admitting that the man we were saying good-bye to had been a drunk. The minister seemed to be keeping his eyes on the otherworld, as though by doing so, he could avoid having to address the pitfalls of this one.
Men in dark tweeds and women in gray and black dresses sat here and there, the men from the school where my father had taught law and diplomacy, although everyone knew this was a front for his CIA stunts, and the friends and associates from that aspect of my father’s work stood around at the sides of the chapel, not wanting to sit down, I guess, because they had been trained not to get comfortable in any place where there was only one exit. They looked a lot like the professors and academic administrators who had shown up, although the CIA ones appeared more like an academic who had just published a book that had gotten a bad review in a journal that was important for scholarly success. Or maybe it was more intense than that: the men looked like they had been sleeping with a graduate student who was about to spill the beans. A constant worry and a sort of dread.
At the back stood two men whom I thought might have been the next generation of spooks, or maybe the CIA had gone democratic, since these men had obviously not gone to Groton or Saint Paul’s and Yale, but came from somewhere a long ways down the academic and social river. They wore black suits and one of them had a gold earring about the size of a golf ball. They both had bad skin and wore their hair slicked back, and f
rom time to time they turned to stare out the door or out the window at that array of headstones that seemed to be dying, too, absorbed into the earth, eaten by lichen.
Fifty or so people who cry at the same time is not a comforting sound, but perhaps a necessary one. Pia cried harder than all the rest, so much that I thought she would dissolve, that she would just disappear in the silver streaks that came from her eyes, and when she wiped them away, it seemed that she cried for my father, whom she had liked, for me, and for everything else, too, having been seduced by a punk, having made a fool of herself, and out of relief, I guess, that even here she had a chance to start again. Robert looked straight ahead, although when he touched her hand, she seemed to take comfort and to lean against him.
The men with the slicked hair and the bad skin stood at the back, more like morticians than mourners. One reached for a cigarette and the other gave him an elbow in the ribs.
We filed out. The ashes were in the back of the car, and when I picked them up, I was oddly reassured by the weight of the box, as though that, at least, gave me some momentary connection to my father.
The two men in dark suits with the lousy skin stood right behind me, their backs against the black fence with the small points, like spearheads that went around the churchyard. In the distance, around a hole near the back of the place, the mourners gathered in a sort of disorder.
“Hey, Frank,” said the man with the earring.