The Douglas Kennedy Collection #2

by Douglas Kennedy

  So, around a week before I made the decision to head home (“home”—it was the first time I had used that word in years), I sent an email to my old contact, Margaret Noonan, at the Harvard Placement Office—explaining that, due to a “personal tragedy,” I had left the academic world for the last while, but was now thinking how much I missed standing up in front of a class and talking about literature. And I was just wondering if she might know of any teaching job that had opened up for the fall.

  A day later I had a reply—and one which began with Noonan saying she had, of course, learned about my “personal tragedy” and could only express her “immense regret” at my “terrible loss,” but was pleased to hear that I was ready to “reenter the world.”

  Reenter the world? Perhaps—but with everything changed. Changed utterly.

  She also said my luck was with me. Did I know Colby College in Maine? A top-twenty liberal-arts college, lovely rural location, smart students. A two-year post had just opened up there, a faculty member having just been offered a big job at Cornell. And though I’d be in competition with around eight other candidates, she was pretty certain they would like my credentials. Was I interested? I emailed back, saying yes indeed. Five days later I was told I had a job interview in a week’s time.

  So I threw away my fixed-date ticket back to Calgary and bought a one-way fare to Boston. I closed up my apartment and said goodbye to Johann. We had one valedictory night together in bed. In the morning, as he left, he simply said: “I enjoyed our time together.” Then he kissed me on the head and was gone. En route to the airport my taxi was diverted around the Brandenburg Gate and I passed the Holocaust Memorial for one last time. Today—after days of early spring sleet—the sun had cracked the gloomy dome of the Berlin sky. It was actually balmy. So balmy that a trio of adolescents had decided to use three of the Memorial’s slabs as makeshift sun beds. I wasn’t offended by this. Rather I found it strangely affirming. What I see as a metaphor for all the granitic grief in the world you see as a tanning opportunity. Life—even at its most excruciating—is never more than a few steps away from all its inherent absurdity.

  Later that day, as the plane dipped and began its approach to Boston, I felt nothing but dread, wondering how, if, I could handle being there. I rented a car at the airport and drove straight up to Waterville, Maine. The college had arranged a hotel for the night. The chairman of the department—a young live wire named Tad Morrow—took me out to dinner. He’d liked my book. He liked my credentials. He liked the fact that I could talk a good game about recent novels and movies, and had even tried being a librarian for a while. And I actually found him good news—very convincing about the college’s attributes and the pleasures of living in Maine, while also explaining that, up here, you were cut off from big-league academia.

  “I can live with that,” I told him—and the next day, despite fighting jet lag, I nailed the interview. So much so that, when I returned to Boston that night and checked into a hotel called the Onyx near North Station, there was a message awaiting me from Margaret Noonan. I had been the last candidate to be interviewed and I actually had the job, starting this September.

  “The chairman did indicate that the post could go tenure track, especially if you publish another book in the meantime. I have here in my notes that you were, at one time, working on a biography of Sinclair Lewis. Might you think about going back to it?”

  “I might.”

  So there it was: a job offer, a motivation to return to that world.

  I was still flagging from the flight—but the management of the hotel had put a complimentary bottle of wine in my room, and I celebrated with a few glasses of Australian red. Then, around midnight, too wired to go to sleep, I called a number I had so wanted to call for so many months, but just couldn’t.

  I could hear Christy’s sharp intake of breath as I said hello.

  “Oh, my God,” she said. “Where are you? How are you?”

  “That’s a rather long story,” I said. “But the short answer is: I’m in Boston and I’m . . . OK, I guess.”

  “I’ve only tried to make contact with you around six hundred times . . .”

  “I know, I know. And I hope you know why that was impossible for me.”

  “I did know about Montana and your flight north to Calgary. Half a dozen times I was ready to jump into my car, drive over, and arrive unannounced . . . but Barry always advised me against it.”

  “Who’s Barry?”

  “Barry Edwards is a town planner here in Eugene. In fact, he is the town planner for Eugene, Oregon. And he also happens to have been my husband for the past six months.”

  “Now that’s news.”

  “Yes, it certainly came as a surprise to me as well.”

  “Happy?”

  She laughed.

  “Like you I don’t do happy. But . . . well, it’s actually not bad. And I’ve got some other news as well—and I’d rather tell you straight out than later. I’m pregnant.”

  “That’s . . . wonderful,” I said. “When are you due?”

  “In sixteen weeks. And I find it difficult telling you all this.”

  “But you just did. And I’m glad you did now, rather than when I come out to see you.”

  “Now that’s news. Do you have an ETA?”

  “That depends on your schedule.”

  “My schedule remains what it was. I teach on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I lock myself away from three to six all other days to try to inch my craft forward a bit—my usual prolific output of a poem every ten months, if I’m lucky. But . . . you . . . I need to know more about you.”

  “I’ll tell all on Friday. I’m going to Calgary in two days to close down my life there. I’m pretty sure I can fly on to Portland.”

  “What brings you back to Boston?”

  “You’ll get the whole spiel on Friday.”

  “You’re not planning to see Theo while you’re around Cambridge?”

  “Jesus Christ, no. I haven’t been in contact since I had an incident with himself and his lover in a diner off Harvard Square.”

  “Yes, I did hear about that . . .”

  “I figured you probably did. The world is sometimes too damn small.”

  “Well, I know for a fact that Theo wants to talk to you.”

  “And how do you know this?”

  “Because he’s called me every couple of months, wondering if I had any further news of your whereabouts. On two occasions he was rather drunk and very teary. Talking about how Adrienne had dropped him, and how not an hour went by when he didn’t think about Emily and you, and how he wished—”

  “I don’t want to hear any more of this.”

  “I don’t blame you. So . . . Friday then. Email me the flight details. I’ll be there.”

  “I’m really pleased with all your news, Christy. All of it.”

  “Who would have thought? Me who always said I’d run a mile from all this.”

  “Life does have this habit of upending all our dogmas.”

  “I am so glad you called.”

  “I’m glad too.”

  Afterward I put my head in my hands. Theo. In all the months since Emily’s death I’d tried to suppress my rage against him. In one session after my botched suicide Dr. Ireland told me that, at some point in the future, I would have to find a way of detaching myself from the hatred I felt for him.

  “I’m not saying you have to forgive him,” she’d told me. “That might be impossible—and if it proves so, there it is. But what you will have to do is stop hating him. Because hate is ultimately toxic to yourself. You can’t win with hate. It goes nowhere, it solves nothing, and, sadly, it can’t turn back time. One of these days—and it might be years from now—you’re going to have to drop it. But that might take a long time.”

  Too damn true—because all I could still feel was contempt and fury.

  I told Mr. Alkan the same thing when I met him the next day. He seemed genuinely pleased to see me—and, in his ow
n quiet, hesitant way, asked me how I was bearing up.

  “Some days are tolerable, some aren’t. The nature of the beast, I guess . . .”

  “Before we get on to other things I must tell you that your . . . ‘ex-partner’ I suppose is the official term for him . . . Mr. Theo Morgan . . . has been in touch with me on a regular basis, attempting to reinitiate contact with you. Naturally I followed your instructions to the word and never contacted you about this. But . . . how can I put this? . . . he fell apart on the phone and seemed disconsolate about his breakup with you and . . . uhm . . .”

  “The death of our child?” I asked.

  “Quite. There are around half a dozen letters from him here for you, sent over the past year or so.”

  “I don’t want to read them.”

  “Then they will remain here until you’re ready . . .”

  “Burn them, throw them out.”

  “Perhaps you will think differently in time.”

  “No, I won’t. It’s exactly how I felt when I asked you to sell the apartment.”

  “Yes, you did ask me to sell the apartment, Ms. Howard—just as you also directed me, quite clearly, to hand over the insurance settlement to a charity for bereaved parents. But apropos the apartment . . . when you signed over power of attorney to me, you simultaneously signed a document giving me free rein over what I could do with your estate. So, I’m afraid, I breached your directive—as your apartment in Somerville is being rented to a very nice visiting professor of French at Tufts. He’s paying two thousand a month—and after tax and running costs, you’ve been netting around twelve hundred a month, all earning interest in an account I set up for you. Not a fortune, but . . .”

  I was going to say something whiny like: “I did tell you to sell the damn thing.” But I knew it would sound . . . well, whiny. Something else struck me: All those months ago, when I was in the darkest wood I could imagine, my need to shed everything was, without question, colored by the fact that I could think of no other solution than to leave the world.

  But now . . . now . . . well, it’s somewhat graceless to admit this, but I was rather glad he had held on to the apartment for me.

  “Thank you for thinking clearly for me when I simply couldn’t.”

  “It’s what I’m paid to do. But yes, I did arrange the entire insurance payment to create a fund in Emily’s name with the Samaritans—”

  I held up my hand.

  “Some other time, OK?” I said.

  “Fine. But there is one other thing that has to be discussed. The cemetery called around two months ago, asking if you were going to commission a headstone for Emily’s grave.”

  I knew this was coming—as I also knew that Mr. Alkan would be sent a “reminder” from the powers that be at this “place of rest” (as they called it in their scuzzy brochures), wondering when I’d fork up the several thousand dollars for the requisite marble slab.

  We’re all selling something in this life . . .

  “Can you give me a pad and pen, please?” I asked.

  He pushed both forward. I picked up the pen and wrote:

  Emily Howard Morgan

  July 24, 2003–January 18, 2007

  Beloved Daughter

  Then I pushed the pad back toward him.

  “Can you take care of this?” I asked.

  “Of course. And if you would like to go out and view the site . . . ?”

  “I just . . . can’t. It’s just too soon.”

  I felt immense guilt about this—the fact that I still couldn’t bring myself to visit my daughter’s grave. But as much as I tried to talk myself out of this decision, a voice inside my head uttered two words: Not yet. There will be a time, somewhere in the future, when, perhaps, I can stand above where she is buried and not fall apart. But that’s not possible right now.

  “No problem,” Alkan said. “I’ll take care of everything.”

  After this meeting I went to an internet café and booked myself on a flight to Portland, Oregon, with a two-day stopover in Calgary. I also wrote an email to Geraldine Woods, thanking her for all her decency and kindness toward me. Though part of me felt badly about not going in to see her and my other colleagues while in town, I also sensed it was better this way. I wanted to travel under the radar—to pay off what few bills I owed, ship my books back south to Maine, redirect my mail, call the Realtor and ask her to terminate my tenancy of the apartment, close down my bank account: all that endgame-in-a-place stuff.

  Upon reaching Calgary at lunchtime the next day all this was achieved in a matter of hours. I even went to Caffè Beano for a valedictory cappuccino—and asked one of the baristas behind the counter if I could borrow the phone to make a local call.

  I dialed the number for the Central Public Library. Just in case Ruth Fowler was answering the switchboard late this afternoon I put on a terrible English accent and asked to be put through to Vernon Byrne. He answered on the third ring, announcing his name in that hesitant, I-really-don’t-do-public-conversations manner of his.

  “Vern, it’s me.”

  A long silence. I broke it.

  “Are you still angry at me?”

  “I was never angry at you,” he said.

  “If I were you, I would have been.”

  “Where are you right now?”

  “Calgary—but please, don’t tell anyone else that.”

  “Your secret is good with me. Anyway, you know I talk to nobody around here.”

  “Any chance of a drink tonight?”

  “I’m hearing András Schiff play Beethoven—and the concert’s long since sold out, otherwise I’d say come along. But I have the day off tomorrow. You free?”

  “I’m free.”

  The next morning he was outside my apartment building at ten. He was, as always, dressed in that brown car coat and flat corduroy cap (which he probably wore to the beach—if, that is, he ever went to the beach). He greeted me with his usual tentative nod of the head.

  “You have to be anywhere today?” he asked as I closed the car door behind me.

  “Actually, no. My books are packed up, my suitcase ready. I’ve got a flight out tomorrow morning at eleven. Other than that . . .”

  “How about a drive?” he asked.

  “Out of town?”

  He caught the worry in my voice.

  “That’s what I was thinking—but not south. We don’t have to head down there.”

  South meant Townsend and the badlands. We don’t have to head down there. Was this Vern’s way of dropping a hint that he was on to me?

  “I was thinking northwest—if that was OK with you?”

  “I think I can do that now.”

  We headed off, CBC Radio 2 (as always) playing on the radio. There was an uncomfortable minute or so when we didn’t seem to be able to say anything to each other.

  Then: “I want to apologize,” I said.

  “For what?”

  “For calling you a drunk.”

  “Why apologize for an observation that is truthful? I’m a drunk.”

  “It was still a lousy thing to say.”

  “It didn’t bother me.”

  “Well, it bothered me.”

  A pause. Then he asked: “Have you been following the news about Ivy MacIntyre?”

  “I gave up on news a few months ago.”

  “Then you missed all the big stuff. Seems that Brenda MacIntyre was having a big fling with Coursen, not knowing that it was he who was holding her daughter. She’s gone into hiding since then, public opinion having completely turned against her.”

  “How’s the girl?”

  “The doctors actually managed to save her foot. Otherwise she’s been sent to some rehabilitation place outside of Toronto where they deal with children who have been through severe trauma. I know all this because every day there’s been something on the case in the Herald and on the news. The press can’t get enough of it.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “There’s no question that
Brenda’s going to be declared an unfit mother and Ivy—when she’s ready—will be found foster parents.”

  “And how did the police and the press deal with the fact that they so demonized George MacIntyre?”

  “A major mea culpa from the RCMP, an editorial in the Herald apologizing for rushing to judgment, and the province has just announced compensation in the form of a two-million-dollar trust for Ivy MacIntyre.”

  “That’s not going to bring her father back,” I said. Once again I saw her lying facedown in the car, telling me how desperate she was to see her daddy.

  “According to the press she still keeps asking to meet the woman who rescued her. And the press keep upping the reward for the person who will come forward and reveal themselves as her savior. So far around fifty different women have said it was them.”

  “Evidently there are a lot of ‘Lone Vigilantes’ out there.”

  “Seems to be,” he said quietly. Then, with his eyes never once deviating from the road up ahead, he added: “But I know it was you.”

  I fought off a half smile. I failed. Vern’s eyes veered over toward me to catch this. The radio played on. And the matter was not raised again.

  We reached that juncture in Calgary geography where the city drops away and the plains reassert dominance of the landscape.

  “Where are we heading exactly?” I asked.

  “You’ll see,” he said.

  For the next ninety minutes, as we drove steadily north, I kept my head lowered and avoided looking out the window—because as we gained altitude the badlands were soon encumbered by the jagged, epic silhouettes of the Rockies. Once or twice I caught their stern grandeur out of a corner of my eye—and I had to turn away. It was still too hard to look at such beauty.

  Vern knew this, so he kept up a reasonably steady stream of chat, asking about my forthcoming return to the college classroom and quizzing me intensely about every good concert I had heard in Berlin.

  “There were no bad concerts,” I said. “Because it’s Berlin.”

  “I’d like to find a way of getting over there.”

  “You should, Vern. Because sitting in the Philharmonie, listening to that orchestra, would make you happy.”