All the Dead Yale Men

by Craig Nova

  When you drive to think things over, just to be behind the wheel of a car, as though having your hands on a machine gives you a grip on some difficulty, you don’t really think of a place you want to go. You just drive. And so I found that the Tobin Bridge was green as it ever had been, sort of pale, like insect killer in a glass jar. The cars went by when I pulled over, next to the spot where Cal had waited in that scum of guano and fast food wrappers, bits of Styrofoam and sticks from ice cream bars, and other items people threw from cars, parking tickets, bills, advertisements. The wind blew, but even so the river still had that stink of diesel and salt air, chemicals and garbage. The two hollows in the guano where we had sat were still there, not yet completely filled in with bird shit and junk. The gulls hung in the air. I got out of the car and stepped closer. The wind carried that harbor aroma and I came closer yet. Down below, where the bridge went above some houses before it crossed the water, the streets were cluttered with debris. Further out the haze seemed to be waiting. The metal of the bridge was cold.

  A cop turned on his red and blue lights and stopped behind my car.

  “What are you doing out here?” he said.

  “Just thinking,” I said.

  “No kidding,” said the cop. “This isn’t the place for thinking. Let’s see some ID.”

  I took out my wallet.

  “Well, Mr. Mackinnon, if I were you, I’d go home. Am I making myself clear?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m going to be late.”

  •••

  In the evening, with the Audi in front of the house (with its new hydraulic pump no longer leaking like my father’s cars), I sat in the golden light of my study. I ran my fingers across the spines of the books. Thucydides, Livy, Xenophon, Herodotus, all said the same thing: nothing, once started, just disappears. Be careful what you start, these books seemed to say, as a chorus, since you never know how it is going to end, and when it does, it’s usually not what you wanted. Xenophon, Thucydides, and the rest liked to show how the machine of history grinds, not only fine, but with perfection, as though some beautiful and frightening thing decides to show itself in the details of malice. And then, if you are alert, one day you find the machine has turned your way.

  [ CHAPTER NINETEEN ]

  FLOWERS ARRIVED ONE afternoon in June at our house in Cambridge, sent to Pia from an address near the law school. Card included.

  “Who’s this Robert person?” said Alexandra.

  She gave me the card. I thumbed the edge and put it back in its green plastic holder.

  “He was with her at the funeral.”

  “Oh,” said Alexandra. “Him.”

  She said this as though it explained everything.

  Pia had rented an apartment in Cambridge, not far from the law school, but she took her time in furnishing it, and sometimes she came home to our house from IKEA or Target, the plastic bags like a hump an ant carries after finding a sugar bowl. Then she’d ask if she could have some towels, some sheets for a double bed she had bought. Sometimes she didn’t come home at all, and Alexandra and I were left with the modern lifeline: her cell phone. I learned to text. So, I sent a note to Pia, my big thumbs hitting the wrong letters on my Droid X. “Flowers for U here. Can U pick up?”

  “Did you ever send me flowers?” Alexandra said.

  “Of course I did,” I said. “Roses, orchids. You don’t remember the orchids? They had the scent of paradise.”

  She took my arm. “Of course I remember. You’ve got to recognize a joke. See, someone says something and you see it isn’t what it really means, but something else. Like a guy walks into a bar . . . ”

  “I get it,” I said.

  “That’s my boy,” said Alexandra.

  The flowers were an array of delphiniums, spiked, blue, haunting, the petals like an illustration of some genetic fact, some structure associated with DNA.

  “So, every day I find a message from that guy in Braintree. Stas?” Alexandra said. “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Well, I’ll stick with you. Thick and thin. Remember? I’m not some frail reed like Ginny.”

  The flowers stopped coming, but this just meant that Robert was sending them to her apartment, which is where she stayed now. Then the call came.

  “Mr. Mackinnon,” said a voice when I answered the phone in my study. “You may not remember me, but we met at your father’s funeral.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Robert. You’re a classmate of Pia’s.”

  “I wanted to say how sorry I am about your father,” said Robert. “I didn’t really get a chance to say that at the time.”

  “Well, I appreciate that,” I said. The rows of books, Herodotus and the rest, seemed like a chorus now: a polite young man, they seemed to say. What the hell does he want?

  “Can I take you out to lunch?” said Robert. “I want to discuss something.”

  So, a couple days later, the oak chair squeaked in front of the rolltop desk with the green blotter that still had inky hieroglyphics from signatures and notes my grandfather had blotted there. An atmosphere flowed from the old joints and polished wood of the desk, part of it the stink of the ashes of cigars that had been rubbed into the wood, although nevertheless perfectly mixed with furniture polish: the scent of genteel mischief. But it had a lower depth, a monstrous substance like a demon that wants to escape that dark, stinky, bone-filled lair, where all the death and disaster are hidden. I faced this presence when I had to see things as they really were. Or when my solitude was complete. What were the details of the deal I was going to work out with this Robert? Just what did he want? Had Stas gotten to him? The books on the shelf looked down on me with a certain harsh reminder of just how wrong things could go.

  Locke-Ober is at once oddly European and keenly Bostonian, all white linen and silver utensils for serving, large egg-shaped covers the size of an ostrich’s body, all reflecting the light in the place and the painting on the wall, nude, antiquated, and oddly sultry as though there are some constants in the universe. Surely, sultriness is one of them. But even so, as I went along that hard sidewalk in front of the place (concrete always seems hard at the moment of decision or action) I was alert to mischief. Or, at least, uncertainty, which in many ways is the same thing.

  Maybe my hands were shaking a little, between my own worries and the possibilities, made up from nothing, of what I would say to Robert, that is, if he knew anything he shouldn’t. I came up the street to the glass doors, the polished brass, the reflection in the windows that revealed me in that moment I usually avoided: my hair was turning gray, and some new lines showed in my forehead and around my nose. My expression was troubled. I looked ripe to be sold a graveyard plot. Nothing fancy. Just the basics. And at the door, in the reflection of the glass, Cal’s figure showed, arms out, tie fluttering over his shoulders, legs bent back, the ground approaching, as all good schoolboys knew, at thirty-two feet per second per second: the last, critical fact. Schoolboy knowledge that comes back to haunt.

  I had reserved a table in the café downstairs, and I sat with my face to the door, the bar on my right, the silver trays and covers looking almost medical in their sheen. I sat there in my suit made in New York, in my best shirts from Fifth Avenue (four-hundred-thread-per-inch cotton), in my most soothing silk blue tie, and to kill time (an ominous way to put to it) I added up my life, one side and then the other, pro and con, and as I did this, never coming up with the same answer, I brooded more about Stanislav with each run through the past. At least I came to this: I didn’t think my grandfather or father (putting aside the war and just considering his fuck-ups here) had been in quite the same deep shit as I was.

  Robert wore the same suit as mine, same tie, although his shoes had a better shine. I stood up. We faced each other.

  “Well, it’s great we could get together,” I said.

  Robert’s shirt was the same as mine, too.

  “Yes,” he said.

  He
was already sweating.

  Maurice, the waiter in his apron and his white shirt, arrived, his head gleaming in the light, his dentures as white as piano keys, his paunch seeming to advertise the wiener schnitzel, the panfried potatoes. He brought us both a drink, single malt, my favorite, and said, “Well, have you got any money in the market? It’s taking a dive today.”

  “Too bad,” I said.

  “They’re going to be jumping out the windows if this keeps up,” said Maurice. “Any place high up. Bridges. You know.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  Maurice had a waddle, and it showed mostly when he walked away.

  “Well,” I said to Robert. “It’s nice to be able to talk.”

  “Yes, sure,” I said.

  “Is this really convenient for you?” said Robert.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “You seem a little worried,” said Robert.

  “Nothing out of the usual. You know.”

  His expression was so familiar I thought I was having déjà vu until I realized it was the same as Tim Marshall’s. Of course, I saw this as a sign that more caution was in order. Robert didn’t believe me either.

  “Of course,” said Robert. “I understand.”

  “Do you?” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “But I don’t want to intrude.”

  “Well, what do you want?” I said.

  “I want to talk to you about Pia.”

  “It’s best to do that alone, that is, just the two of us,” I said. “You can’t really do that with Alexandra and Pia around. You know the joke about the minister in New England who took up the collection and found three pennies in the offering plate? He looked over the congregation and said, ‘I see we have a visitor from Scotland with us today.’ And a man stood up at the back and with a thick accent from northern Scotland said, ‘Yes, there are three of us here.’”

  Robert sipped his drink. He looked me in the eyes.

  “My family is from Scotland. Campbells,” he said.

  “Me, too,” I said. “Sinclairs.”

  “Maybe we should have worn kilts,” he said.

  “Hunting or dress?” I said.

  “Hunting,” he said. “Do you have a dirk? You know all the clans were horse thieves and murderers, at least in the nineteenth century.”

  “I’d heard rumors about that,” I said.

  “Not rumors,” he said. “Bloodthirsty thieves. They were as bad as the tribes of Afghanistan.”

  I wonder if this had occurred to my father when he was a spook who had encouraged the Taliban against the Soviets. Maybe that’s why he felt so comfortable with treachery.

  “Well, I don’t really put much stock in genealogy . . . ,” I said.

  “Me, neither,” said Robert.

  Robert sat so still I thought he was posing for one of those Civil War photographs. His eyes were on mine, and as he tried to see beyond them, into me, I realized what was happening. I’ll be damned.

  “I want to marry Pia,” he said.

  “I can see why,” I said. “But just between the two of us, I think you should talk to her about this.”

  “I have,” said Robert.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Yes,” said Robert. “She says that she doesn’t want to get married, ever. It is not me. It is not ambition. It is not any kind of political thing. She just said she can’t.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “So, I wonder if you have any influence with her?” said Robert.

  “Me?” I said. “Pia and I have just been through the worst fight of our lives. I don’t think I’m the one to ask.”

  The crinkles around his eyes had a slight sense of the tragic.

  “I’ve come to be honest,” he said. “To offer what I have.”

  “I think she’s the one to listen to that,” I said.

  He shrugged.

  “I think I need some help,” he said.

  “We all do,” I said, before I could stop.

  Maurice appeared in his apron, with that head shiny as a bowling ball, his hands behind his back. He never wrote anything down and just nodded when we asked for the wiener schnitzel, the panfried potatoes, creamed spinach, a salad, and a little apple strudel for dessert.

  “Why do you want to marry her?” I said.

  “That’s pretty obvious,” he said.

  “How do you know you love her?” I said.

  “I feel sick when I leave her. When I’m not with her. Cold and sorry.”

  We sat in silence, looking into each other’s eyes.

  “So, what’s the difficulty?” he said.

  “You’ll have to ask her,” I said.

  “She avoids it,” he said.

  The shape of his fingers, the texture of his hair, his eyes (and just what intelligence did they suggest?), the way he moved, his posture, all those qualities that, if you are smart enough, showed something critical about a man.

  “I think we should talk honestly,” he said.

  The word “honestly” emerged just at that moment when everyone in the room was quiet, and it hung there like an unexpected expression, not “fuck” or “cunt,” but something unusual at Locke Ober’s. The other men in the room glanced at Robert with a wary concern. Honesty was not a Bostonian virtue.

  “I want to tell you something.”

  Maurice brought our lunch. A faint sound of the plate hitting that tablecloth. Then, sensing that we were at some critical juncture, Maurice vanished.

  “I went to Stanford on a track scholarship,” said Robert. “I will probably do well at law school. What I have is prospects, not money. That is what I have.”

  “Of course,” I said, although I wondered, with that sense of turning into my grandfather, what the hell does that mean?

  “I understand that you read Tacitus, Xenophon, both the Latin authors and the Greek.”

  “In translation,” I said.

  “That’s what Pia told me,” he said. “Have you read The Agricola? It’s one of my favorites.”

  “Tacitus?” I said.

  “Yes,” Robert. “A panegyric, or maybe a funeral oration for his father-in-law.”

  “Yes,” I said. And, of course, there it was: no one lives forever, and here was a young man who understood that, and who was offering his concern for me, too.

  “So, what’s wrong? Why won’t Pia even talk about it?”

  “I think you better ask her,” I said.

  We ate our lunch in silence, then the apple strudel. I paid the check and we went outside, into the small side street and then up to the commons, where the trees had come into leaf and where the street had a sheen, like a green light on a woman’s skin.

  “So,” said Robert. “You haven’t answered me. About Pia. I think you know.”

  Then we went into the street, where the capitol glowed in the afternoon light like a bauble of gold in Paradise Lost, and as we came up to the corner, a garbage truck pulled in front of Robert.

  Robert stood straight, in the same way, I imagine, as his ancestors had done when marching with swords and bagpipes in Scotland. Just a straightening of the shoulders, the eyes a darker blue, like that tint in the sky when something odd is about to happen. And, if the garbage man had had any sense, he would have stopped the truck, gotten out, and apologized. Robert’s posture should have shown what the garbage man was facing. Instead, when Robert stood that way in the crosswalk, the garbage man spit into the street.

  Robert said, “Watch where you’re going.”

  “What the fuck did you say?”

  “Watch your language,” said Robert. He stiffened more and squared his shoulders. In the park, on the other side of the street, boys on skateboards went downhill but watched the truck. A mugger who waited on a bench glanced away from a limping old woman and turned toward the man who stood in the street with such square shoulders, right next to the garbage truck.

  “My fucking language?” said the garbage man. “Listen here, you dumb shit. Why don’t you
go fuck yourself?”

  He spit into the street again, but this time on Robert’s shoe.

  “Mr. Mackinnon,” said Robert.

  “Call me Frank,” I said.

  “Are you sure you aren’t having trouble?”

  “No,” I said. “Nothing special.”

  He nodded. And then, as though showing me how things could be handled, he said, “Did we hear this truck driver clearly? Did he say what I think he did?”

  “Yes,” I said, although my voice had a defiant sadness, which I remembered as being like the one my father had used when we faced that lonely bear and he had passed over that rifle: here, get ready for trouble, it seemed to say.

  “Let me show you something,” said Robert.

  “What the hell are you two jackasses jawing about?” said the garbage man.

  “Listen, you asshole . . . ,” said Robert.

  “What did you say?” said the garbage man.

  Robert put his face up to the garbage man’s.

  “Fuck you,” said the garbage man.

  Robert turned back to me.

  “Listen to the man,” said Robert. “Why, it takes your breath away.”

  Robert opened the door of the garbage truck, and as the man inside lunged out, Robert put his elbow, with a sharp, perfectly practiced movement, into the man’s stomach, right there under the rib cage. Even from a distance and over the sound of the traffic, the cabs going by with the drivers leaning on their horns and with the kids in the park on their skateboards, the air came out of the man’s body like someone stepping on billows. Robert reached across the seat and the wheel, took the keys from the ignition, then stepped down, still holding them, and in the momentary silence of the stopped engine, he walked about five yards away to a U.S. mailbox.