All the Dead Yale Men

by Craig Nova

  These extra books, the ones I had found under the lining of the trunk, had been tied with what I supposed to be French ribbons, pink, or maybe a just now faded red, and I tied the diaries shut with this ribbon, although my bows were not as neat and precise as I wanted, and so I did it again, as though by making it perfect, like something on a gown made in Paris, I could communicate with my grandmother.

  Then the trunk lid closed like a bear trap. Bang. The dust rose in a cloud again.

  The boxes, the trunks, the old lamps with shades that were covered with dust, so as to have the color of some old, intimate stain, the broken-down rockers and children’s toys, all washed up here as though time was a force like the wind or tides or something that liked to push things around. Then the stairs creaked under my feet, and outside, on the front porch, the moonlight was brighter now. And then I went along the pond, where a fish stirred at an insect, or along the road to the stone house, where I stopped with only my breathing for company.

  It was getting light, and the road had only a grayish luminescence in the dawn, but as I came to the stone house road and turned down it, that dark shape appeared as though it had been waiting.

  The bear stood sideways, against the hillside. Its head seemed as heavy as a bowling ball, or, at least he seemed to have trouble holding it up, since as he stood there, against the gray stone that emerged from the hillside, like the remains of something that was no longer useful, he kept lifting his head, as though it took effort. Dark fur against the hillside. The living evidence of how things that seemed so right could so easily go wrong.

  We faced one another. His eyes were that same oil-colored hue, although even more opaque, or something darker than dark, a color that not only had no light but actually absorbed it, that vacuumed it up from the landscape in which we both stood.

  The bear swayed from side to side, or at least its head moved back and forth. It was otherwise silent, although its claws made a scraping sound as it came uphill, toward me, as though it had been a guardian all along of those diaries and was now called upon to protect them as he had always wanted. Or perhaps under the circumstances, with the light changing, I thought such a thing. The bear stood on two feet and clawed at the air. Then it stepped toward me so that I could smell that rotten salmon odor, or something like a skunk smell that has almost worn off, and I stepped closer and said, “Get out of my way.”

  The bear swayed from side to side. Yes, it seemed to say, we will settle this later.

  It turned and walked into the brush, its blackness dissolving into the blackness of the undergrowth, which, for a moment, made everything look not like brush but a mass of bears, but then I shook my head and went down that road toward the house. The books were under my arm, and I seemed like an old schoolboy who was late for an exam.

  The light was on. Pia sat with her hair in a mass at the table in the stone house, a cup of coffee in front of her. Robert sat in a pair of sweatpants and a fleece jacket that had a North Face logo. He held his coffee cup in both hands, but even through the window they were obviously shaking. Pia spoke and put her head down. At the window, where I stood like some phantom, their voices vibrated in the glass of the window, where I put the tips of my fingers. Could I make sense from just the touch? As though by a variety of Braille?

  She was proud, I suppose, or more like me than I had given her credit for. She had made a decision to get rid of the child. She was going to stick to it, and even though she loved Robert, she had made a decision, although it was desperate and in an odd way made her close to Jerry. It was almost as though Jerry’s cry, his almost religious plea, the garbling of God’s grandeur lingered there in the room.

  She stared at Robert, and for a moment I thought she was going to give him the précis of the scientific reports she had so causally reeled off for me.

  She bit her lip.

  He stiffened, sat right up.

  “All right,” he said. “What are we going to do?”

  She put a hand into the mass of her hair.

  I tried to answer, as I reached for the window, that question my grandmother had asked, or implied. Just who the hell was I and did I know any more about this, who I was, by standing at the chasm that was deeper than I had ever imagined, and I thought, yes, yes, I know. I’m not so different from her.

  She hadn’t burned those books because the truths in them had come at a cost so high as to leave her lonelier than ever, but yet she couldn’t destroy what she knew to be true. She’d just have to hide it. And after all, I had spent a life hiding certain truths, like how I felt about things, only to have them blow up in my face. I didn’t keep notebooks about animals. I read Tacitus and Xenophon. What was so different? Not much.

  The sky was the gray of a woman’s stockings, and the air had something else, too, like a faint scent of powder. The trees appeared as always at this hour, not ominous so much as though they had been witness to a nightly secret. The stone house emerged from the shadow.

  Robert stood in the living room, his bag open, the methodical way he went about packing it not precise so much as just playing for more time. Pia sat at the table, head on her arms, crying now with long, slow heaves, as though she was so exhausted that this was all she could do, that even this took almost all the effort she could muster.

  My shoes were filled with swamp water, and for a moment I wondered if I had been bitten and not noticed it. What would the first signs be? A puncture wound that wouldn’t stop bleeding? I came up to the door, my feet making a squish, squish just as I imagine my father’s had when he walked to the Wursthaus for a drink after flipping his car into the river. The stink of the swamp mixed with the sweat on my shirt, and a trickle of blood, as though this wouldn’t be complete without that, ran along the side of my face and into the sweat and dampness of my shirt.

  I pushed the door open.

  “My god,” said Pia.

  “Here,” I said. I pushed the notebooks across the table.

  “Robert’s leaving,” said Pia.

  “No, he isn’t,” I said. “Not just yet.”

  “I think I am,” said Robert.

  “You and I are going outside,” I said. “Pia has some reading to do.”

  I opened the first page of the first book and pushed it across the table, into that golden light.

  “Right here,” I said. My finger trembled and the blood, as I leaned over, dripped onto the table. The paper towels were by the sink, and I used one of them to make a sanguine smear across the table.

  “Come on,” I said to Robert. “We’re going to watch the sun rise.”

  I took a bottle of scotch that I kept for emergencies, and we went outside, through the grass, and sat on a log, a piece of gray deadwood. Like two bums on a park bench. The sky was like a gold coin just stamped in the mint.

  “Jesus,” said Robert. “Is this what marriage is like?”

  I took a long, hot pull of whiskey.

  “As nearly as I can tell,” I said.

  “Well,” he said after the fourth drink. “It takes more balls than you’d think.”

  The chickadees flitted from one branch to another, and a deer browsed along the wood road, flicking its white tail from time to time. The rays of sunlight came through the mist in lines and the scent of the earth was at once damp and mulchy. Eventually, the door of the stone house opened and Pia came out. Robert and I stared straight ahead, and she put her hand on his shoulder and said, “Hey.”

  “You’ve got something to say?” he said.

  “As a matter of fact,” she said. “I do. Are you ready to be a father?”

  He took a drink and turned to me.

  “Life is full of surprises,” I said.

  [ CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR ]

  A MONTH BEFORE the wedding I took down a book from my shelf and read: “He who falls obstinate in his courage, if he has fallen, he fights on his knees. He who relaxes none of his assurance, no matter how great the danger of imminent death; who, giving up his soul, still looks firmly and
scornfully at his enemy—he is beaten not by us, but by fortune; he is killed, not conquered.”

  The threat (or was it a warning?) from Stas was coming. Just a matter of time. I guessed it would be a note to the office, a short one that suggested a district attorney was involved in corruption. The writer of the note wondered, without giving a return address or anything like that, whether the district attorney’s office would be interested in the details. Maybe it would be sent to more than one person, and I would get a copy, too. That, of course, was one way to do it. But then the difficulty is that no matter what you think, you always come across a surprise. Sometimes I sat in my study and felt that slippery grasp of Cal’s hand as the trash blew under the bridge and the gulls hung in the breeze, like fate personified.

  Or maybe I should say that I had two versions of time running in tandem, the wedding, and the other course that started out there with those piles of smashed cars, so much like icons of the age, the stolen parts, and, of course, the man from Russia.

  Pia and Robert set up a website for the wedding with pictures of the farm, of animals that my grandmother had written about, of the farmhouse, of them holding hands, and, of course, it gave directions to the wedding, which would be at the farm. Or what was left of it. I had asked the director of the Girls Club if we could use the farmhouse for the reception (more attempt, on my part, to address ancestors, just like any primitive tribesman), and she had said yes, although something in her voice, a sort of mild threat or reticence or something, gave me a little pause. I knew she was up to something, but what? What did a woman with a crew cut and glasses like Buddy Holly’s want? Money? Well, I guessed we could arrange that. But I didn’t think it was money.

  We interviewed two women who did calligraphy and hired one. She had blond hair that was so pale as to seem almost white, and she wore a blouse that showed an edge of the tattoo of an eagle that was on her back. She arrived in the morning with her small snakeskin case, which held her pens and ink, and she sat at my desk, where she addressed the envelopes for the invitations with a slow, patient writing, the ink, which came from Japan, she said, filling the air with a scent of the ocean and a musky perfume, like the aroma of an unpredictable god. I brought her tea. She drank it with the same beautiful precision.

  “So, are you an etymologist, too?” I said. “Do you know about words?”

  “Try me,” she said.

  She went on writing, the tip of her pen, which probably came from Japan, too, moving across the heavy paper with the same intensity as the emperor writing a haiku.

  “What’s the difference between a threat and a warning?” I said.

  “Hmmmm,” she said. She reached for another envelope. “A warning is someone telling you not to do something. A threat is what happens after you’ve done it. Sort of like crime and punishment.”

  The invitations were printed on paper I picked out myself, cream-colored stock, heavy, so that you felt it was something important when you picked it up. We sent them to more people than we thought would come, but then Alexandra and I gathered up the little envelopes that came in the brass slot of the door in the house in Cambridge, like a slot machine that was paying off after a long, dry spell. We picked up the little envelopes, each one seeming ominous to me, now, since each one didn’t appear so much as just an invitation but a ticket to a spectacle where someone might get killed, or even a wedding where the bride gets left at the door. But, of course, this was just me brooding: trying to see the details that were too opaque, too much of the future to get my hooks into. But isn’t the future the most important part of being alive?

  Alexandra and I sat at the kitchen table with two shoeboxes, both from New Balance, one for regrets and one for acceptances. None in the regrets box. A full house.

  “Jesus,” said Alexandra. “That’s a lot of people.”

  One of the envelopes was a little cheaper than the ones I had ordered, more yellow, lighter, and it hadn’t been addressed by the calligrapher, but in the hand of someone who didn’t write English very well. I imagined it on the fiberboard table next to the Mac where those auto parts were displayed. I put the small envelope into my pocket, and when we had done the tally for the day, and Alexandra said it was time to take a bath, I went to the small graveyard in the backyard near Juduthan Wainwright’s stone. The slip of paper inside had been torn from a spiral notebook, and there in Stas’s hand a note said, “Have I got the date for the wedding right? I looked it up on the web. And, like I said, the only threats you have to worry about are the short ones. Maybe I’ll come to see you there. Bring some friends.”

  In the backyard, in that small cemetery, I sat opposite Juduthan’s stone, the scrap of paper in my hand. So, Juduthan, I thought, what would be the worst? Violence at the wedding or the beginning of a scandal a week before it? Which threat was he going to make good on? Both? What do you recommend? Did you ever come clean, no matter what? Then I thought of Pia’s promise that I would regret it if I had lied to her about Aurlon, which lie, of course, would be elevated to a matter of principle that spread, like a poison, through all things between us. When you have acted as though principles are important, and if you have been pleased to see that your child has absorbed this belief, you can bet, as though it were law, that one day you will find yourself asking a child to put a principle, and an important one, aside. At some profound cost.

  In the morning, I dressed for work in a new gray suit, a blue tie, and shined my shoes. Then I drove back to Boston and parked near the Ritz hotel, where I walked up and down the block, by those trees in their small holes in the sidewalk and from which Pauline had taken a stone, dressed in her fishnet stockings and dyed hair and tight-fitting black top, and had stood in front of the jewelry store and thrown the thing, just like a pitcher at Fenway Park.

  I, too, stood in front of the window, where the diamond necklaces were displayed like starlight, and then I went in and stood next to the man in his dark suit as he took out the diamond necklace I had pointed out and put it in a little box, which he wrapped in tissue paper and put in a little bag (something like the one I had used to carry my father’s ashes) and handed it over, even before he had run my credit card through the little slot: it was his way of saying that he could tell that a man like me understood all aspects of love, and there was never a doubt about the payment.

  [ CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE ]

  THE CATERER, BLACK’S as it was known, and Mr. Black, always Mr. Black, showed up at our house in his white van with BLACK’S written on the side in wedding-invitation script, got out of the driver’s seat, his bald head silvery in the last light of the afternoon, his fat fingers touching the hair at the side of his head. Then he directed his assistants, who lugged in some boxes filled with samples. Pia and Robert and Alexandra and I began to taste them. We started with hors d’oeuvres, small triangles of salmon with a caper paste, not bad when you got down to cases, stuffed mushrooms, a little greasy, and puff pastry with some ridiculous hot dogs inside, which I have always detested as a sort of rank attempt to be cute.

  But as I wiped my fingers on a caterer’s napkin, which had the texture of an expensive hotel sheet, and somehow the atmosphere of a sheet, too (as though everything had to do with a subdued eroticism), a shape moved along the sidewalk, on Brattle Street, at the entrance to the drive. A shadow that I knew not so much by the details of what it looked like, but how it moved, which was with a definite menace.

  “So,” said Mr. Black, “the stuffed mushroom recipe has come down in my family for generations. From Budapest. It has paprika, and not the junk you get here. I obtain it from Hungary. I go each spring.”

  “Yes,” said Alexandra with a sort of wall of falseness. “Very good.”

  “Mr. Mackinnon?” he said.

  “The salmon is good, too,” I said.

  “None of that farm-grown stuff,” he said. “Have you ever been salmon fishing?”

  The shape went by the end of the drive, not limping, but with a staccato quality, like the wing of a b
at, and as dark, too, the color of black crepe.

  “Excuse me for a moment,” I said.

  “Oh, no, Frank,” said Alexandra. “You aren’t going to punt to me on this. Don’t even think about it.”

  “I’ll be right back,” I said.

  “You don’t like them?” said Mr. Black. The disbelief ran back, through generations, to Budapest.

  “Lovely. Just a moment.”

  One figure walked on the black stones of Brattle Street. It went about a hundred yards and turned and walked back, haunting in its unpredictability. It was like a stain on the air.

  “I thought I’d pay a courtesy call, Frank,” said Stas. “You know, we were getting to be pretty good friends, but now . . . ” He shrugged. “I don’t know. Don’t you want to be friends, like before? You never had to see the rough side of me. That’s something a friend doesn’t like to show.”

  Stas wore a black jacket and a black shirt and his hair was cut short. He hadn’t shaved, and the sun left his close-cropped hair and beard like the grit of sandpaper.

  He looked into my neighbor’s mailbox. Bills, fliers from Wal-Mart, a hardware store, Stop and Shop, an ice cream store with a coupon for a real gelato, a pitch for some gutters around the roof. The truth was, I needed new gutters.

  Stas waited in the fall heat: it was as though he was thinking it over. Why was I being so difficult? Is there something I had missed? Was I dim? Sort of like a Russian coal miner who thought the safety rules and regulations were going to be observed.

  “You know, Frank,” said Stas. “You need new gutters. Maintenance is everything. You want to make sure you take care of something before it happens. It’s so much easier that way.”