All the Dead Yale Men

by Craig Nova

  “It’s hot,” I said.

  “You’re telling me,” she said.

  “Come back in the shade,” I said.

  “What’s this house here?” she said. She pointed to the hoods and plywood.

  “It’s a long story,” I said.

  “It’s so green back here,” she said. “Can you count the different shades? Look, there’s one, and two. There are five shades, one on another, like pieces of cloth . . . ”

  The air by the stream was cooler, and maybe it was just the movement of water that made it seem cooler, although the touch of her fingers against mine seemed hotter than ever, and my palms were moist, too. She put her lips against my neck and ear and whispered, “It’s good to see you, Frank. Although it breaks my heart.” She closed her eyes and swallowed. “What times we had.”

  The water rushed in that constant way: as though nothing could stop it. A perfect reminder of how once something got started, like those moments when Pauline sat on top of me and laughed, the tightening of her grip like love itself, it doesn’t stop, at least not in memory; it lingers and grows, it seeps into who and what you are and never leaves you alone. And this, with the accusation of failure, and not knowing what to do or when doing the right thing comes at such a price, or a price so ridiculous, left me dizzy with the possibilities for trouble.

  “And what do you think, when you think of me?” she said.

  I splashed a little cool water on my face, and Pauline looked at me as though I was trying to hide the fact that I was crying.

  “The impossibility of it,” I said. “You realize it at a certain point, and that’s it.”

  She looked down at her feet. Then she stepped out of her shoes and into the stream and said, “Oh, Frank. That feels good. You can’t imagine.”

  Then she stepped out of the water, her calves slick with the wetness, her eyes on mine.

  The two stones by the side of the stream were like small stools and we sat on them, although here the heat of them was exactly the opposite of those stones in that small graveyard in my backyard, and so we sat, her fingers on my knees, as the water flowed from one pool to another, a drop of about five feet, and from there another five feet: a sort of cascade of silver, tinted green, and a number of shades of green. We stared across the water: it was as though the heat made the time that had passed palpable, that we were sitting in the passage of it, that it pressed against us, made us feel it, the rank shove of it.

  “I’ve made mistakes,” I said.

  “Well, who hasn’t?” she said. “Although you sure fucked up the Citron case. I followed that in the papers. Boy, what a mess.”

  She leaned her head against my shoulder so that I came back into her scent, her light touch, and then she stretched her legs into the water, where it washed over them, like the surf when it slides back into the ocean.

  “But I fucked up, too,” she said. “Bitterness is a mistake. It’s sort of like being greedy, like being a miser.”

  She stepped into the stream and got her dress wet to cool off, and the material clung to her youthful figure. She said, “Don’t I still look nice?”

  “Yes,” I said. “You are beautiful.”

  Then she moved against me again, put her hands on the back of my neck, kissed my cheeks and turned, back into the heat, into that swaying mirage, those silver pools in the road along the Delaware. Her figure seemed not to disappear into it so much as to sink, to get deeper into that lake of mercury, swaying, leaving a trail of fragrance, and, of course, defiance, too. The river flowed, the rocks looking like the prows of ships, and overhead the hawks flew, looking to see if something was stupid enough to show itself in the heat.

  Just as she approached the swaying curtain, that hot air, I said, or called out, “Pauline! Pauline!”

  She turned to me with the undulant, silvery wall behind her.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  She nodded and then disappeared into the heat.

  I went uphill, through the woods, the spruce and pine, to get dressed.

  [ CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE ]

  THE BRIDESMAIDS WENT out in a cloud of perfume and cosmetics. I dressed in that cloud, my shoes shined, my striped pants pressed, my shirt with the tab collar at my neck with a reassuring crispness. Pia primped in the bedroom. It was just us now, since I was going to drive her to the chapel, where my father’s funeral had been, and then walk her up the aisle.

  As I made a white cream of soap with my brush and worked it into my beard (gray here and there, more salt than pepper), I went through the wedding guests who had been arriving over the last twenty-four hours. Robert’s parents showed up in sedate, precise clothes and kept in the shadows, aside from a shaky moment at the rehearsal dinner, and then Robert’s friends from school in California, all of them distinguished by a certain gait, a sort of bobbing walk, and even the ones who didn’t have sun-bleached hair seemed to have it anyway through a process of attitude that was so profound as to leave me a little intimidated. And then, of course, Pia’s friends, some of whom I had known from the time they rode bikes together in Cambridge, with training wheels, and whom I had taken along when Pia wanted to go for pizza or a hamburger, these women and a couple of men all grown up now, and when I recognized them, in their adult incarnation, I still felt them with us as we had gone to a hamburger stand, their arms out the window to feel the wind. And then a man who had built boats at the Cambridge boat club, dignified, upright, polite, and precise with his Australian accent, and who had nodded to me when he had arrived. I had the feeling that he was looking around at the stands of ash on the land, as though he wouldn’t mind having one of the trees to use in his boats. My friends from work, even Jimmy Blaine, who had betrayed Cal and had come out to the Tobin Bridge to show sympathy to the man he had exposed and put in the position where the only solution was a Dutch job. I had learned, the hard way, that in an office like the one I worked in, you had to go along to get along, even when it meant inviting people like this, careerists and schemers, to a wedding.

  Tim Marshall arrived, as upright and harsh as ever. Marshall had with him two men I had seen from time to time, detectives who had worked in Boston for so long they seemed to carry a perfume of the city with them, not quite the air of corruption as the atmosphere of fighting against it or living in it, like a shark in the ocean. They were in their late thirties, had short hair, and one, who worked undercover, had a gold ring in his ear, although his hands, or his right hand, was disfigured from having been broken in an arrest long ago. The two detectives, dressed in dark clothes, were carrying guns, or so it seemed by the cut of their jackets, and one had a lump around his right ankle, which was probably another holster. Tim once told me that he didn’t feel dressed without a pistol. Along with them the local constable arrived, his jacket bright green, and he stood with a certain pride of association when he had been introduced to Tim and the two men from Boston.

  Of course, Alexandra’s friends from her job, from school, from the neighborhood all arrived, too, all in dresses that were silk or at least slinky, and they formed a posse of grown-up, elegant women, who drifted along as a competition with the bridesmaids, who surely had youth and beauty but at least here they had to face elegance and womanliness, perfectly realized. Jerry was there, too, and while I hadn’t seen him in the church yet, he had been up at the farm, pointing out to the guests who were killing time a deer that had died in the woods and how the vultures were circling like black flags. He wore a jacket, moth-eaten and with patched elbows, that had belonged to my grandfather and which Jerry must have stored in a Styrofoam chest filled with mothballs: you could smell it a hundred yards away. Then, finally, I had invited Charlotte, and the few people who had worked for my father and some even my grandfather, but they were old now and must have come up to the church with a walker.

  I dried my face, put on my shirt, tied my tie. And now, after that cloud of feminine power had gone out the door, and Pia and I were there alone, the essence of what the place had been reasser
ted itself for a moment: rough and manlike, a place where men had come to hunt deer and drink and play cards, which I had been part of but which was now gone for good. The men who had been here with my father and grandfather were mostly dead and gone, and all that was left was that lingering, odd, lonely atmosphere of a place where something had come to an end.

  “You look beautiful,” I said.

  “Do you think so?” she said.

  “Just lovely,” I said. “I’m proud to be with you.”

  “Oh,” she said, “you say that to all the brides. I just hope this goes smoothly.”

  “Me, too,” I said.

  She looked at her watch.

  “How long does it take to get there?” she said.

  “Five minutes,” I said. “We pull up in front of the chapel. I come around and open the door for you. You take my arm. We walk in.”

  “I know, I know,” she said. “We’ve got six minutes. Let’s go.”

  The landscape slid by, the pines still green, the sky in the distance a pale blue. Those vultures still turned in the air over the kill in the woods. On the way, I said, “You’re sure about this?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “No second thoughts?” I said.

  “No,” she said.

  The approach to the chapel is along the river, and from a distance it appeared as a white, clean building, a sugar cube on a brown tablecloth, and as we got closer, as it grew in size, as the cars around it appeared as individual objects, not just clutter, she took my hand. Then we pulled up to the church: the white siding, black shutters, the black fence around the churchyard, although in front, where two pillars stood, bouquets of delphinium had been tied with a white ribbon. Pia held her flowers, the ones she was going to carry, in her lap.

  We stopped in front of the door. Three men walked toward us, out of the heat, their shapes momentarily obscured by that shimmering blacktop. I went around and opened the passenger side door, and Pia stepped out, her presence, her dress so white it made an afterimage in the sunlight. Stas, Seymon, and Timofei walked along the cars, their swagger different from the boys from California, as though they meant it not for fun, but another matter all together. The scars on Stas’s face were the color of the fieldstone that was visible in the cliffs along the river, and Seymon and Timofei looked as before, like hired help for the spooks my father had worked with. They were dressed in gray jackets and black shirts, a sort of gangster chic.

  “Psssst,” said Stas. “Frank.”

  “Get away from me,” I said.

  “You keep saying that,” said Stas. “And what good does it get you?”

  “So this is your daughter?” said Timofei.

  “What’s going on?” said Pia.

  “I’ll talk to you,” I said to Stas.

  “Where are you going to talk to us?” said Stas.

  “Right over there,” I said. “There.”

  A large gravestone stood in the middle of the cemetery, the color of it the same as the old scars on Stas’s face. Around it the sanded paths were yellow and clean.

  “Just as soon as this is over,” I said.

  “All right,” said Stas. “We’ve got a date.”

  They walked through the gate of the cemetery, the hinge of it making a long, low moan.

  An usher, one of the grooms from California, opened the door with a bounce and swagger as though he was taking his surfboard down to the beach. The organ began to play and Pia and I stood for a moment in the foyer of the chapel. Then we began, one step at a time, all of the faces turned toward us, including Tim and the two men from Boston and the local constable.

  “That’s them?” said Tim.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Come on,” said Tim to the men from Boston.

  The local constable stood up, too, in his green jacket and his wrinkled pants, although he was wearing an obvious holster where he carried, I knew from long association, a .357 magnum. They went by us, as though they were getting off a subway and we were getting on. Then Pia and I slowly worked our way down the aisle, where, at the end, Robert and his best man, the one with the stutter, waited, although they glanced now not only at us, but at Tim and the men from Boston as they went out the door, not slamming it but going fast to that squeaky gate of the cemetery. Stas, Seymon, and Timofei smoked by the large headstone, their eyes now set on Tim and the others. The smoke seemed to drift away over the stones like ghosts.

  The faces in the crowd stayed on us, but every now and then one turned toward the men outside, the two groups getting closer. The organ played. Pia had her arm through mine, but she gave me a tug, a loving, warm pull.

  Outside, Stas, Seymon, and Timofei spoke, and while I couldn’t hear the words, it looked like “Hey, fuck you.” Then Tim spoke and the detectives and the local constable said something, too. Timofei put a hand in the middle of Tim’s chest, and Tim, like an old bartender opening a bottle of beer with a quick snap, put his palm on the back of Timofei’s hand and leaned forward. Timofei’s mouth opened in an O, as though a pain he had only heard about was now here. He stepped back, one hand cradled in another. Tim spoke again, and while I couldn’t hear what he said, the expression suggested, the shape of his lips seemed to say, Am I making myself clear? Timofei nodded, as though he had some things to say, too, that would clarify matters. He reached under his jacket, to the left side, under his armpit. Tim shook his head and spoke, just once, which looked like “No.” Stas said, or his lips seemed to say, “What? What? You’ve got that shithead Aurlon?”

  Then we came up to the altar, and the minister said, “Who gives this woman in matrimony?”

  “Her mother and I do,” I said.

  Alexandra glanced at me and then I sat next to her.

  Outside Timofei still had his hand under his coat, but as he began to bring it out, with something the size of a small brick in it, or just a lump under his jacket, one of those men from Boston, who glanced in our direction first, as though timing his action with the ceremony, made a quick movement, part with his elbow and then part with the palm of heel of hand. Timofei sat down on the clean yellow sand, not far from where my father was buried. The blood appeared between his fingers, the color of it like a Christmas ball, and as shiny, too.

  The congregation strained with the effort not to look, but half-turned to the churchyard for a glance, the faces of these witnesses to the wedding at once solemn and horrified, but intrigued, too, and blinking with surprise, if not something like enjoyment. At least they were that way until Seymon reached under his coat and took out a revolver the color of those tombstones. Then, as though they could make this go away by pretending it wasn’t happening, they turned back to the altar. There, at least, they found something they could depend on.

  “And do you, Robert . . . ?” said the minister. But he glanced, too. Silence seeped into the church with such intensity that even the ordinary human sounds, breathing, shifting, sighing, the bubbling of indigestion, the creak of an old joint stopped, too.

  One of the detectives with short hair and the earring put his hand on Seymon’s wrist, moved to one side, and then, with his back to the congregation, as though breaking someone’s arm could be done in a manner that was at once discreet and polite, brought his weight to bear. The pistol, as blue as fieldstone, dropped onto that sandy path. Seymon looked up and screamed, a harsh, guttural sound, which seemed to come from the steppes, from the Ukraine, or from someplace a long way from here, came into the church.

  The congregation stared straight ahead.

  “Go on,” said Robert to the minister. “Finish. I’ll take care of that later.”

  He stood up a little straighter. Pia held his hand.

  That left Stas. He walked through the blood on the path, not bothering to put his hand under his coat, since he was too smart for that, and while Tim and one of the detectives leaned over the two men on the ground (do you put a handcuff on a man with a broken arm?), Stas came up to the window, directly opposite the altar. His eyes
lingered on Robert, who turned once in his direction.

  Stas’s eyes came to the first row and then to me. Then he put one knuckle on the church window and tapped, once and then harder, his pale face with those scars against the glass, his breath making a cloud, but even so his expression was obvious, not exasperated but more profound than that, as though he had come up out of the ground to get what he had assumed was his only to find he had been cheated. He tapped the window.

  “You,” he said. He tapped the window, pointed at me. “You. You think I’ll forget? Didn’t we understand each other? Didn’t we?”

  •••

  “What did I tell you?” said Robert to the minister. “Are we having trouble understanding each other?”

  Tim Marshall appeared behind Stas. I supposed Stas didn’t even hear him coming. And, of course, like any good half-drunk cop who is ready to retire, he simply made Stas drop straight down, below the window, but we still heard against the side of the church a bone-hard thump-thump, where some part of Stas’s anatomy, a knee, a hip, an elbow, hit the hard white siding twice and then stopped. The silence flowed back into the church. Outside, Timofei kept his hands to his face, as though to hide what had happened, but the blood ran down his fingers and even his forearms, over his jacket, now dripping from his elbows onto the yellow sand.

  “Do you, Robert, take this woman, Pia Mackinnon, to be your lawful wedded wife . . . ”

  Alexandra began to cry. Stas appeared again, like a figure in a jack-in-the-box, standing up now with some help from Tim, although he was wearing some silver cuffs, his shoulders broad, his posture bent forward as he went back to the center of the cemetery.