Bill put the book down. He lowered the telephone receiver back onto its cradle. He walked over to the bureau in his den and took the stopper from a decanter and poured himself two fingers of Scotch. There was music playing in the den. Bill had been listening to the Sinatra album, Come Fly With Me, when he had made the call to Julia. He’d turned the volume down. The music was almost inaudible. Frank would have been scandalized, would have thrown things, stormed out of the place. He smiled and went across to the stereo and turned the record back up again. He still hadn’t touched his drink. He could smell the warm Scotch in its glass. It was familiar, like Frank’s voice, like the evening sunlight slanting through his blinds onto the furniture.
He opened a drawer in the bureau and took out some photographs, snapshots, a cascade of abstract black and white patterns as they fell from the envelope where he had half filed and half hidden them from his own eyes, onto a table top. Then he sat with his drink beside him and started to sort through them, touching each image with gentle fingertips, remembering their golden light and fading foliage and baked earth and ripples dappling and fixed forever in their streams and ponds and on their broad, unceasing rivers and the people he had loved in them. These people, he had loved. Lucy, he thought. Hannah, my darling. He touched their smiling faces with his fingertips and closed his eyes and his heart filled with a fondness he had thought lost to him. And he remembered them.
Sinatra rebuked him, wise-guy optimistic, jaunty from the speakers of his absurdly expensive stereo. Bill was no stranger to self-pity or nostalgia. But when he wallowed, he wallowed in bars, not at his home. Tonight he was supposed to go to see a Joey Bishop routine at some new club off the Boulevard. He wouldn’t go. He thought Bishop a nice enough fellow but his jokes weren’t funny and he had no gift anyway for telling them. But he didn’t plan to sit here, either, getting slowly drunker and more maudlin in front of old photographs growing blurry because he was staring at them through tears. No. He had taken the pictures out because there was one among them, he knew, of Martin Hamer. It was over twenty years old, taken on a hunting trip in the forests on the border with Canada. Taken by a local hunter, it showed them both. Martin, eight years his junior, would have been about twenty-seven.
Bill shared the composite memory everyone shares of people who are gone and like everyone’s, it was made up of the way they moved and sounded and gesticulated and the smell and weight and mood and presence of them. He had not looked at a picture of Martin since discovering his friend was dead. And so doing so, now, made him gasp as he recognized the eyes of Natasha Smollen gazing coolly out of the photograph from under her flaxen hair, cropped here, cut short and severe.
Julia had sworn a vow to a dying man. Natasha had grown up believing herself the consequence of some anonymous rape carried out in a Polish labour camp. Bill wondered would the mother ever keep her promise and tell her daughter the truth. His own conviction was that two people, one of them dead, very much deserved for her to know it. And he felt that Julia very much needed to tell it. Secrets of this enormity were corrosive to the soul. But this secret looked likely to remain a secret, now. Particularly, now.
Bill remembered his drink and picked it up off the table. He raised it, and prismatic light glittered through crystal in the sunshine between the blinds.
‘Go, Coppi,’ he said.
Five
Some of the girls were smoking a reefer at the back of the bus. Even though it was bone cold on the bus and the air frigid, they had a window cracked back there. She could smell the smell, familiar enough, if still illicit. She’d smelled it in boho coffee bars and on the porch outside sorority parties and even once in one of the dorms. One of the boarders at school, Alice Dome, was said to be heavily into the stuff. Alice was a pale, thin girl from Philadelphia who’d had to give up ballet over stage fright and stayed in her room a lot, listening to Rod McKuen. She’d even tried it herself once, but once had been enough for Natasha Smollen. It had made her nauseous and edgily paranoiac. She thought it was probably more common among her mother’s friends than hers. That was pretty ironic, really. Or it would have been, had she grown up in Salt Lake City, or some steel town in Pennsylvania. People her mom knew used it. But they were consenting adults. And they had far too much class and money to smoke the stuff at the back of a freezing bus.
There are towns and cities in the southern states of this great nation, she thought, where possession of dope is a felony crime punishable by public execution.
He was back there with them now, Professor O’Brien, his nose in the air and his head in Ulysses. Probably it wasn’t Ulysses at all. He always appeared to read the same book on trips, claiming it to be the only novel ever written worthy of his enlightened attention. But Natasha had sneaked a peak and though the dust jacket was suitably dog-eared and ragged, the pages were pristine. Probably a pulp western by Louis L’Amour. Or something featuring a hard-boiled private dick. Was there such a thing as a soft-boiled private dick? Or maybe he was reading wham-bam sex stories. There are towns and cities in the southern states of this august republic, she thought, where pornographic books are a prize beyond all measure. And she smiled to herself, because that was probably true. But Prof O’Brien wasn’t reading smut. He was the Celtic cowboy, heading into town for a shot of red eye and a shoot-out. It was Louis L’Amour and not James Joyce at all the old fraud was reading. It was a wasted opportunity. With what he was unknowingly inhaling back there, Ulysses would probably have made a lot more sense. More sense, that was, than Natasha ever thought it normally did.
She had reading of her own. She had a net book-bag full of Kerouac and Ferlinghetti and Camus to muse over. But she was too excited to read. She was travelling to Europe for the first time and was so thrilled about it that she couldn’t even think about mundane requirements like eating or sleeping or the reading of books. It was December and bitterly cold and she was aboard a bus churning and wheezing over snowy roads on the way to New York Harbour and a boat to France. From there they would take the train to Austria. She was going to the Alps on a school ski trip. She would have preferred something cultural, like Paris or London or Rome. But her mother had made the perfectly valid point that she was only seventeen. She might have no patience. She had plenty of future. Paris and Rome were places best seen in May or September, not December. Besides, she was a good skier and there was likely to be plenty of snow. You can see Innsbruck if you want culture, her mother had said, and a look had passed over her mother’s face that she did not recognize. They have a crystal museum at Innsbruck, she said, and she shivered and goose bumps rose on the flesh of her arms, perhaps, Natasha thought, at the memory of snow.
Natasha almost hadn’t made the trip. Her mother hadn’t wanted her to come. There was often conflict between them, and fines and confiscations were her mother’s favoured methods of imposing discipline. Natasha had been rude on the telephone to someone calling from Hyannis Port. More accurately, she had been rude back. The aides were endlessly civil when they called. They understood her mother had a career. They understood that she couldn’t always be pacing the carpet, waiting for the call, as some of them were paid to be. Natasha sometimes fielded her mother’s calls. Ted Sorensen nicknamed her Bush Baby. She didn’t know where the endearment came from. But even when she could hear how hard pressed he was in the tone of his voice, Sorensen was kind and courtly. Kennedy himself was kind of old fashioned, on the two occasions she had spoken to him on the telephone. He called her ’Tasha, which he must have overheard her mother do. He was apparently unaware of just how intimate the contraction was, because he was so polite and formal and, though it sounded crazy to say it, almost shy. Jack’s brother Bobby, though, was a complete jerk on the phone.
‘Julia?’
‘No.’
‘She there?’
‘Yes.’
‘Get her.’
Or:
‘Julia?’
‘No.’
‘She there?’
‘No.’
‘Shit.’
Usually he hung up then. Sometimes he demanded numbers at which her mother could be contacted. You would have thought he was the one running for office by the urgency and temper of him. He always sounded in an absolutely foul mood.
She’d seen him at Hyannis Port, usually at the heart of a huddle of cronies, their ties and tight shirt collars incongruous on bleached decks and against the picturesque sand and boat-sails backdrop of the village. He was good-looking and boyish in repose, but you never caught the man without a frown creasing his features. Unless he was with his older brother. He seemed to relax around Jack. Jack could make him laugh out loud with a joke you could never hear, no matter how close or still you were. He had that knack, that gift of witty confidentiality his younger brother so woefully lacked.
On the infamous occasion of the rudeness, Natasha had been tired and pretty grumpy on her own account. She struggled maintaining her maths grade. She wasn’t bad at maths, but everything was relative. She didn’t enjoy calculus or algebra. She didn’t respond to their cold abstraction. When she looked at an equation, she didn’t see elegance, she saw hard labour. Everything else came more easily to her, nothing else so unrewardingly. The fact that it was a Friday probably exacerbated her existing misery. But she wanted to get her maths assignment out of the way to have the weekend free. So she had struggled that evening over sines and co-sines, her feet already feeling the sway of fresh powder under her skis, her lungs filling with the unfamiliar air of an alpine adventure. It was October. Semester-end and Europe were only weeks away.
It was about eleven-fifteen when her mother arrived home from one of her dates. She walked into their sitting room putting her car keys into her clutch bag. She was dressed in a belted, calf-length skirt tailored to her slim hips. She wore it with a white shirt with a single string of black pearls at the open throat. Her skirt was a deep red and her jacket, slung across her shoulders, was a pale grey. She looked chic and beautiful and unhappy. Natasha could tell she was unhappy by the set of her mouth under her lipstick. There were blue shadows on the pale skin under her eyes.
Natasha felt sorry for her mother at times like this. She thought forty-three a tragic age for a woman to be dating. She was in before midnight, so the date had been unsuccessful.
‘You should be in bed, darling.’
She only ever called Natasha that when she was in one of her remote, withdrawn moods, preoccupied and uninvolved. And ’Tasha hated it.
‘Calculus,’ she said. She yawned. ‘I’m going to make some hot chocolate to take to bed. Would you like some?’
Her mother breathed out through her mouth and shook her head and started up the stairs. The telephone began to ring, then. But her mother didn’t respond.
‘Hello?’
‘She there?’
Natasha looked up at the empty staircase. She could hear her mother moving around her bedroom, taking things off. Could hear a tap running and then water splashing.
‘She’s not available.’
There was a pause. ‘What?’
‘I don’t want to disturb her.’
‘Let me get this right. She is there?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then get her. Now.’
‘You really need a lesson in manners, mister,’ Natasha said. And so she gave it to him. She hung up.
But of course, he had rung back. And her mother had come down in her dressing gown with her hair wet around her shoulders and had taken the call. And when she finished the call, after forty minutes for Natasha of purgatory under the covers in her room with the light switched off, her mother came in and sat on the edge of her bed.
‘I don’t need to tell you never to pull a stunt like that again.’
‘No.’
‘You’re not a little girl. And I don’t need to tell you what’s at stake here.’
She meant Jack Kennedy’s election. Natasha thought it was already in the bag. Not even the boorish antics of his brother could sabotage that.
Her mother was quiet. ‘I’m not going to pay for the trip to Europe, Natasha. I need to do something to discourage this spoiled behaviour.’
Natasha sat up in bed. She didn’t deserve this. ‘I’ll ask my godfather to lend me the money. I’ll go down and phone him and ask him right now.’
‘Fine,’ Julia said. She stood, wearily. ‘Phone him. But it’s after midnight, now. And he’ll be far too drunk to speak to you.’
The phone was a very busy instrument in the Smollen household that evening. And though her uncle Bill might have been too drunk to speak, he was capable of listening.
Bill slalomed over in his dust-caked Jeep. He was wearing a pair of combat fatigues and sneakers and a white singlet and a frown. The muscles bulged with red-neck belligerence in his upper arms and massive chest and neck. Natasha hadn’t realized just how big he was. He looked a little like Clark Kent in the telephone booth in mid transition. In their living room, in this outfit, he was that big. Except that his hair was not blue, the way Clark Kent’s was in the comic books. And he was staggeringly drunk. He waved his arms around to no effect except perhaps maintaining balance. Natasha hugged her uncle Bill. He had come. That was the important thing. The important thing was that he had come.
Her mother had come down. She wore her silk dressing gown and slippers and a sardonic expression and watched his flailing from the sofa. Natasha thought her mother secretly amused. There was something noble, Herculean, about Bill’s struggle to appear sober. It was a performance possessing that tragic dimension of always being predestined to fail. Her mother sat and watched and lit a cigarette and tried not to smile. She was glad Bill was here, Natasha realized. Even in this condition, in these circumstances, she was happy to see him.
Bill extricated himself from Natasha’s embrace. ‘Julia, hon, gotta drink?’
‘You know where it’s kept. But you can’t have anything if you’re planning to drive home.’
‘Tickle a cab,’ Bill said. ‘Cab. Tickle.’
‘In Orange County? At two in the morning? Godparents are supposed to give spiritual guidance,’ she said. ‘It’s not at all the same thing as guidance in spirits.’
Natasha could see that her mom was enjoying herself. Stripped of make up, with her hair splashed darkly over her shoulders, she looked much younger than she had on returning from her date.
Bill fetched himself a beer from the refrigerator and sat nursing it between both hands. He was a lawyer. Tonight, though, his self-appointed function seemed to be to play both judge and jury. He had what he probably thought was a sage and judicious expression on his face. To Natasha, he just looked constipated. He asked her to reiterate what she had told him on the phone. She did so.
‘Julia?’
But her mother refused to testify.
‘Taking the fifth,’ Bill said. ‘A pragmatic choice.’ He pulled a thick roll of bills from a pocket in his fatigues and leant across and put it into Natasha’s lap.
‘Ask me, Bobby Kennedy sounds like an asshole.’
‘Bill!’
‘Sorry, Julia, but he does.’ He winked at Natasha. ‘Enjoy the trip, kiddo.’ And he stood. ‘I may retire to the spare bedroom, if that’s acceptable,’ he said. ‘These judicial proceedings have taken their toll on my stamina.’
Natasha and her mother sat in the room for a while after Bill had left it and the radio comedy of his ablutions had ceased and they heard the bedsprings stop groaning as his dormant weight settled into slumber in the spare room. Natasha shifted the roll of bills off her lap and put it on the table between where mother and daughter sat. It was hundreds, a tight cylinder held by a rubber band.
‘We’ll give it back to him in the morning.’
‘There must be five thousand dollars there.’
Her mother shrugged. ‘I don’t think he would have counted it. I don’t think he ever does. I think five grand is chump change to Bill.’
‘And I’m the chump.’
‘No, ’Tasha. You�
��re not a chump at all.’
‘I’m sorry, Mom.’
‘Come here.’
They sat and held one another and her mother stroked her hair. ‘I’m sorry too. We were both at fault. Of course you are going to Europe.’
‘I worry about Uncle Bill. I love him so much and he’s so unkind to himself.’
‘He’s kind to you, though.’
‘He’d be much better if he took things more seriously.’
Her mother stroked her hair. ‘I think that just the opposite is true,’ she said. ‘But then if we didn’t disagree all the time, you and I, what would we be?’
‘Well, I don’t know the answer to that. What would we be?’
‘Imposters,’ her mother said.
It had been a very late night for Natasha and when she got up the next morning, she could hear Bill and her mother breakfasting already on the balcony. She went down to the kitchen and passed a packed overnight bag at the bottom of the stairs. It meant a flight to Cape Cod. It was what the call had been about. She would take advantage of the situation by making herself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and washing it down with a Coke. This was not a breakfast her mother would have allowed her. But she gambled on having the time alone to prepare and eat it. The key to a contented life with a parent as puritanical as her mother could be was never letting an opportunity slip.
They sounded pretty engrossed in their conversation. They were talking about Kennedy’s campaign for the presidency. Her mother had been with him in West Virginia, which he had not been expected to carry. His wealth was a problem with electors there. His Catholic faith was an even bigger one. Kennedy had been shocked at the deprivation he saw there, her mother said.
‘A man with his background would be shocked by the deprivation at the Paris Ritz,’ Bill said.
She heard her mother laugh. She never heard her mother laugh the way her mother laughed with Bill.
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