A Shadow on the Sun

by Francis Cottam

  ‘Here’s to anaesthetic,’ Bill said. He raised his glass. On the TV screen the new president was smiling and saying something to Johnson. In his silk muffler and his overcoat, Johnson looked sedate, Bill thought. Like a rattlesnake.

  ‘Where’s the patrician guy gone?’ Bill said out loud. ‘Where’s the poet?’ Had Robert Frost fallen off the podium? Had that bastard Johnson pushed him? Pretty obvious a Texan rancher and a poet were going to amount to trouble. Maybe Washington had finally adopted the Cold War realpolitik practised on the Russian Politburo and when people were no longer needed they were just erased from the picture and the history rewritten as if they had never been there. Shame, he thought, he had really liked that poem. But Robert Frost had never existed and so nobody could ever have written it, now. Had Pound existed? Course he had. Hemingway had introduced Bill to him once in Rimini. Hemingway, who had only existed because he had made himself up.

  Bill was drunk. It was an auspicious moment in his country’s history and he was very drunk, celebrating it. Light in chinks and motes made dust sparkle like blind movie projections all around the den where he hadn’t drawn the curtains well enough to block it out. He filled his empty glass again. The new president had just said something possibly palindromic about what your country should do for you and you for your country. Beside the television, the bureau in which he kept the remnants of his life blurred and rippled in Bill’s tearful vision.

  What have I become?

  ‘Here’s to the maudlin nostalgia,’ Bill said. He raised his glass. Here’s to the man I can no longer remember ever having been. He drained his glass and threw it at the wall. The bottle, empty now, followed. Through the tinted glass and concrete of his domestic shrine to modernism, these small explosions failed to carry any noise. On the television set, the camera was panning across the seated guests, cold and shining with privilege in their coats and their hats. Julia was among them. He didn’t see her there.

  Bill was weeping. He curled up on his big leather sofa like a child and hid his head under a cushion and cried. Make the bogeyman go away, Daddy. Make the bogeyman go away. But the bogeyman would not go away. His daddy had died long ago. And he was the bogeyman.

  There was nothing different from usual about the remorseful hangover that followed for Bill except for the finding and the reading of the note. And the finding and the reading of the note eventually changed everything. But he only realized that much later, in retrospect, like everyone always does.

  Natasha had hidden the note in the coat pocket of his most sober suit. It was his mea culpa suit, the suit he always wore hungover, so he supposed there was an element of calculation to the choice of hiding place. A further element of calculation that was, beyond its being written and left for him there. She’d had to enter his bedroom and open his closet to place the note.

  ‘You’re in pretty deep, girl,’ he said to himself, making his hangover breakfast of dry toast and a pot of coffee. ‘The evidence is stacked high,’ he said, resolving as he sipped his coffee that he would have to curtail this new habit of talking to himself. If he didn’t, men in white coats would come before long to curtail it on his behalf.

  The note comprised four sheets of plain paper crammed into an envelope too small for what it contained. Maybe she had written more than she had originally planned. The young tended to be opinionated. And Natasha had never been short of something to say. He took the sheets out and unfolded and counted them and put the note beside the rack of dry toast on his breakfast table. But he didn’t read them. Seeing his god-daughter’s handwriting was a poignant enough reminder of just how tender he felt in his sorry, self-pitying state, without enduring yet what it was she had to say to him.

  He had no intention of going into his office. Despite the hangover, he had not intended to wear the suit today. He had emptied the pockets of all his suits because today was the day the woman who did his laundry came in and gathered them up and took them away to be dry-cleaned for him. Bill was far from being a frugal man. He had the divorce settlement to prove it. He did not empty the pockets of his suit coats looking for bills and cheques un-cashed and change. He did it looking for phone numbers and written notes and cards and matchbooks, the odd, indiscreet clues and scraps of confidential business dealings. He was very private on behalf of other people. He thought the phrase ‘harmless gossip’ probably an oxymoron. He vastly preferred harmful gossip, given any kind of conversational choice. But his clients paid him very well not to have themselves become its subject. The more deserving they were of this dubious Hollywood accolade, the better it was they paid.

  Bill maintained an office, because it was good business practice to do so and also because it gained him tax relief. It occupied a suite in a smart building designed by a fashionable architect and it enjoyed the requisite panoramic view. A decorator had filled it with onyx and hide and chrome and good post-impressionist prints in understated frames made from pale, lacquered wood. Staff these days comprised only a bilingual secretary Bill had employed almost entirely for her looks. He paid her a salary and a clothing allowance. She favoured cashmere sweaters to enhance her creamy complexion and to combat the effect of the fierce office air conditioning the building always ran. But the fact was, Bill did not need to go to work. Business came in anyway. His area of legal expertise was damage control. Hollywood was full of damaged people seemingly intent on damaging themselves further. Not even the divorce settlement paid to his expensive second wife had dented what he accrued from shrewd investments made years ago and the fat retainers the studios still paid for him to keep their talent breathing, walking unaided and out of the newspapers. Frank could turn the whole town against him tomorrow and he would still never need worry about money again in his life. But Frank wouldn’t do that, Bill didn’t think. In feuds, as in all things, Frank enjoyed a measure of exclusivity.

  Bill considered the lie he’d told Julia one he could forgive himself. He’d done some exhaustive checking on his own account and paid a talented police lieutenant working out of Santa Monica to do some more. Scoping, lanolin secretion and wearing Old Spice were not a lot to go on. But this was someone adept at covering his tracks. Bill went through every case file to see if there was someone (apart from Frank and Frank’s stuck-up, English party guest) he could have offended. Meanwhile, the LAPD lieutenant concentrated on gun clubs and reported gun crime involving a rifle. The cop was scrupulous and smart, but he came up with nothing. After three weeks of independent checking they met for a beer at a tavern on the outskirts of Santa Monica and compared notes. And their conclusion was the same. The guy had been some random nut.

  ‘You couldn’t even call him a perp,’ the cop pointed out to Bill. ‘He may have spooked you and your god-daughter, but he didn’t commit any crime.’

  Bill handed the lieutenant a thousand dollars in cash and thanked him.

  ‘If I think of anything else.’

  ‘Sure. Thanks.’

  They shook hands.

  Driving home, Bill knew that the money hadn’t exactly bought peace of mind. But he was as satisfied with the explanation as he could have been.

  After his coffee and his dry toast, Bill showered lengthily and then brushed his teeth until his gums bled and dressed in blue jeans and boat shoes and a polo shirt. Dressing, he appraised himself in the mirror. He was taut and tanned, the big muscles of his upper arms and chest smooth and hard, very little sagging skin to betray his years or advertise his persistent fondness for the bottle. For years now he had traded on the genes he’d been so blessed with. Probably his liver wasn’t in great shape. But the whites of his eyes were surprisingly white still and he had a healthy enough pallor, even today. He stood every chance of achieving his three-score-years-and-ten. Unless the phantom scoper got him, that was. If he cleaned up some of his personal habits, the decade Biblical prophecy owed him might not even be that much of a chore to live through. He took some pieces of ripe fruit from a bowl and put them in a paper sack and put on his wristwatch. It wa
s eleven o’clock on a tautologically perfect Californian morning. He had showered and dressed to the sound of a rip-roaring Count Basie soundtrack, pondering on the contents of his god-daughter’s note. He would drive the Jeep to a deli he liked near Newport Beach and drink more coffee and read what it had to say. Then he would drive to a boxing gym he went to sometimes in Anaheim.

  There were two ways, to Bill’s mind, you could deal with a hangover. You could tiptoe apologetically around it. Or you could confront the thing head-on and beat the crap out of it. Though he despised the bombastic side of his nature, Bill invariably favoured the latter approach. He would eat the fruit in the paper sack after his coffee and the note and go to the gym in Anaheim and skip rope and work the heavy bag for six or seven rounds. Then he’d wrap himself in a clean sweatsuit and pedal the stationary bike for an hour.

  Bill co-owned the gym in Anaheim with a trainer-promoter convinced they’d one day discover a world boxing champion in the murky pugilistic talent pool of East LA. This trainer knew his fighters and the two men got on well as business partners. But he had confessed himself mystified by Bill’s insistence on the introduction to the gym of a stationary bike. It was true that you didn’t really see stationary bikes around fighters. This one sat behind the hanging bags and the speedballs and the rack of hand-weights. It was poised like some curious boxing non-sequitur, bolted to the concrete floor between the steam room and the practice ring. Frequently goaded about it, Bill would never discuss the inspiration that had led to his buying and installing his controversial piece of gym hardware. This was because the inspiration was Julia Smollen. Bill was pretty confident that Julia had never laced on a pair of gloves in her life. But he had studied her limbs and what they were attached to often enough to appreciate that cycling must be awfully good for the body.

  Bill sat at a pavement table outside the deli in Newport Beach and thought about age and its corollary: decline. The interesting thing about decline was that as the years passed and you grew older, you didn’t grow any less indignant about it. You just possessed less mental energy and so the indignation you felt at your decline dissipated more swiftly. The same was true of failure. With age, you felt just as bad about failure. It just didn’t hurt for the same length of time as once it would have because an aging mind wouldn’t let it. It was like with an athlete. The first thing that went was the focus. The focus went even before the reflexes started to slow. Concentration was the first casualty of advancing years. Maybe it was nature’s blessing. As you grew older and the calendar insisted your failure grew more acute, age prevented you from dwelling on the fact. He sat there, a big, disgruntled man in jeans and a polo shirt and watched traffic. Who was he kidding? As you got older, failure just felt worse and worse and worse. Because age extinguished hope. He took the note from his jeans pocket and unfolded the pages on the table top. Be thankful for small mercies, Billy Boy. At least he didn’t need eye glasses to read what ’Tasha had written. He could bench press more than he weighed. When he threw a hook, with either hand, the heavy-bag still shuddered under the meat of his fist. He wasn’t having to get up twenty times every night to coax pee from an empty bladder. His memory might be wilfully selective, but it still functioned when required. Small mercies, my elderly, crotchety friend. Small mercies.

  Dear Bill,

  I hope you watched out for us on the television. I plan to wear my black coat and to look as elegant and mysterious as possible. If you did see me you are welcome to review my performance. I picked up some tips on elegance and mystery on my recent trip to Europe and think the key to achieving these attributes is to be emotionally detached from whatever is going on around you.

  Of course, it is very easy to be emotionally detached about snow flurries and conifers, sipping Glühwein and watching an essentially alien world through a café window in a pretty Austrian town. It is quite another when you are seated at the presidential inauguration next to your mom, thrilling with pride in what she has accomplished and how poised and beautiful she is. It is her moment and I am prouder of her than I can say. Did you see her, Bill, on the television?

  Anyway, the real purpose of this note is not to wallow in the Smollen family’s Brief Moment of Reflected Glory. The real purpose is quite serious and concerns you. The thing is, Bill, I know you will be reading this with a hangover. And believe me, the temptation is to be jocular and rerun one of the old jokes. You know: there are states in the southern part of this august republic in which the sale of vodka is a crime against God, punishable by lethal injection. Furthermore, southern California is renouncing state rights and ceding full judicial authority to Georgia.

  Hallelujah for the Confederacy.

  Is that a sea-breeze in your hand, Suh?

  You know. That kind of thing.

  Except that it isn’t really all that funny. And if you don’t do something about it, it really will become a death sentence.

  You have always taken your job with me very seriously, Bill. You and Mom have always joked around about you being responsible for my ‘spiritual welfare’, but I know in my heart that you’ve always treated it with absolute seriousness. You have been as generous and kind and loving as any father I could have wished for. And when I’ve needed you to be, you’ve been wise.

  But now it’s my turn to talk about your spiritual welfare.

  In an ideal world I’d have you and Mom grow old together. To accommodate Mom’s more ethnic domestic urges you would need to share the occasional period of dark brooding and from time to time there’d be mandatory plate throwing. But you are skilled at conciliation and agile enough to dodge and, on the whole, I believe you would be fantastically happy together.

  Sadly, we don’t live in an ideal world (a fact likely to remain unchanged even under the full presidential force of JFK rhetoric). We have to work with what we’ve got. And I honesty think that your world would be much more to your own liking if you were more often sober experiencing it.

  You use booze the way a dope addict uses morphine, Bill. If things are that painful, shouldn’t you be trying to change them rather than trying just to deaden the pain?

  Please forgive me for speaking so out of turn. But if you can’t turn on your family …

  And I only write these things because I love you and I believe them to be true.

  I’ll end on a piece of news to try and distract you from being mad or disappointed at me for what I’ve said in this letter up to now.

  I’m going to join the Peace Corps.

  There’s nothing political in this decision. And there’s certainly nothing elegant or mysterious about the Peace Corps. I just feel I’ve had a very fortunate life and want to do something for those born into circumstances less blessed. God knows, there are enough of them in the world. Having emerged (relatively) unscathed from my revolutionary phase, it’s going to be the Peace Corps and then med school. All I have to do now is break the news to Mom.

  Wish me luck!

  Take care, Bill. And please think about what I’ve said.

  Love always,

  Natasha

  PS The Glühwein, for reasons too obvious to mention, must remain our secret.

  PPS One obvious reason is that Mom and I do need at least some unbroken crockery at home.

  Bill took off his sunglasses and rubbed sweat from his eyes in the bright reflection of sunlight from the white deli tablecloth. He folded the note into four and put it back into his jeans pocket. ‘I didn’t know you threw plates, Julia,’ he said out loud. ‘The Peace Corps,’ he said. ‘Jesus.’ He shook his head and looked down at the cradle of his linked, empty hands. ‘Go, Coppi.’

  Natasha had inherited her father’s handwriting and on the drive to Anaheim and the gym in the jeep, Bill thought about her father and, in particular, the last occasion on which he had ever seen his friend. It could have been the handwriting that reminded him, but he thought it was more likely that phrase she had used, ‘an essentially alien world’, in describing her endearing bid at teenaged ex
istentialism in the café in the snow in Austria. That had been how it was for Bill when he attended Lillian Hamer’s funeral. He walked straight into an alien world, one that announced itself everywhere in hateful iconography and a subdued atmosphere of ever-prevalent foreboding.

  Martin Hamer had never been a Nazi. He had watched as a boy as a pair of carpet-bagging Americans came to enforce the vindictive peace that followed the Great War. They inventoried his father’s possessions and then parcelled off his land as reparation. It was the Hamer family’s misfortune to own an estate on the border with France. They would pay the heavy price agreed at Versailles by Wilson and Clemenceau and charged those who had lost the war by its winners. Martin found his fathe’s body next to his shotgun the morning after the Americans had proffered their bill and departed. Fighting Germany’s war had worn his father out. But it was the peace exacted by her defeat that had killed him. When Martin went back there years later, at Lillian’s insistence—‘to try to lay the ghost’—an open-cast mine scarred the land he would have inherited, exhausted now, worn out and derelict.

  No ghost was laid. But Martin Hamer made himself a promise. And his own military career was his chosen way of keeping it.

  No Nazi, then. No anti-Semite or believer in Aryan destiny or euthanasia or eugenics or any of the other grotesqueries of the creed. But without men like Hamer to fight their wars, how far would the true believers of the blood banner and the bier keller putsch have got? How far would men like Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler have got, marching with a rifle at the head of a column through the steppes of Russia or patrolling the Atlantic, captaining a U-boat crew?

  In 1937, no one outside Hitler’s ghastly inner circle could have predicted the way that Germany would prosecute its war. But it was obvious that war was coming and when wars were declared, it was soldiers who fought them. It was soldiers and airmen such as those Germany had sent to Spain to aid Franco in a callous rehearsal the previous year.