The Patricide of George Benjamin Hill

by James Charlesworth

  It was a once in a lifetime idea (he knew it immediately, as soon as it had begun to form in his brain), one he’d tried to explain to his boys in the car on their way back from the stadium, only to find them uninterested—GB already talking of his baseball dreams, asking his father for a uniform that he could wear at all times—had tried to explain it to Mary throughout the remainder of the weekend while they sat together at the pool, the annoying sound of the Wiffle ball bat and the ball occasionally drifting up to the deck, bouncing around, floating in the pool, his younger son getting in the water with his shoes on, which drove Georgie nuts. He’d tried to explain it to them and found that he couldn’t, that this life could already not hold him. That an upper-class home on a hillside was far too mundane. That contentment could never be found in this immaculate yard with a former Miss California and two bright, healthy boys.

  THEY WALKED ALL THE WAY out to the trestle bridge—a mile one way—and then turned and headed back, two brothers shielded from the world by the high brown flanks of the ravine and the chain-link fence that stood atop the ridge at the rear of the mall on San Manuel Avenue, each of them old enough, in his own way, to understand what this day meant. The president had been shot! “Do you think it hit him in the head?” Jamie asked. “Do you think his brains splattered all over the place?”

  But GB would not answer. He could feel the heaviness in the air, could hear the cries coming from the open windows in the backside of the long row of houses above the fence that separated the ravine from the backyards, could sense a building anger in the world and in the clouds that curled across the normally sun-bleached hills. Jamie looked up at his older brother, trying to gauge him for a reaction, trying to copy the calm and steady expression that Jamie admired but could never emulate. Too impulsive was he, too quick to seize on whatever thought came into his mind. On the bus, he’d laughed at some of the antics of the kids in the rows of seats ahead of them, only to have GB give him a look and then train his serious face forward, as he did now, late in the afternoon, as they returned to their house to find a kitchen light on, their father’s car—it was a BMW now—parked out front, the engine still clicking as it settled, their parents’ voices already beginning to rise as the boys crouched at the window and listened with their little faces peering in from just above the window sill.

  Their mother was in a rage like they’d never seen before. She’d spent all day watching the footage from the tragedy in Dallas, thinking this is what television had brought them. She’d watched this take place and had felt the emptiness of her life filling up the room in which she sat, on the couch she’d never found comfortable in the house that was drafty in the winter and stuffy in the late summer when the Santa Anas came across the valley, long days waiting at home for the two boys she barely felt were hers and the husband she hadn’t loved in years, had never loved perhaps, had simply ended up with because he was the most convenient option to settle upon when she’d needed the reassurance a husband would bring. He’d never been faithful to her; she knew this. He’d stopped loving her the instant she’d bore him a child, the instant she’d struggled to lose the weight. She’d stopped eating—one last effort to salvage the marriage, though she had no idea, even at the time, why she was doing it—yet still he was always boarding some plane, flying off to some unknown city where there were restaurants to open and hands to shake and, she knew, young women to meet.

  Where else could all the money be going? Where else could he be spending all his time? He was never home. Even when he was in California, he was always claiming some important meeting to attend, was always darting off and not returning for days, looking as if he didn’t know her, spending only an obligatory afternoon or evening with the children before going to bed, sleeping eleven hours and back to the airport. But his lies were lazy. He’d tell her he’d be back in a week and return in two days with a vague smile, Mary relieved in spite of herself—for what would she tell the neighbors if he ever just left? He’d sit on the couch and put his feet up on the coffee table, would linger like that for a moment, maintaining the pose until he thought she was back in the kitchen. And then she’d watch him—watch his reflection, in fact, in the open French door that separated the kitchen from the foyer—as he swung his feet back to the carpet, leaned forward with chin on fists in an expression of indecision, of instability, angled strangely in the warped glass, his features drawn out like an image in a knife blade.

  It was upon the advice of the television that she’d done what she’d done next. She’d hired a private detective. Too much television, too much Hollywood had led her to conceive the idea with embarrassment and then embrace it. She’d hired a man whose name she’d found in a half-inch ad in the classified section of the Times, had paid him an outrageous sum of money to tell her what her husband was doing on those long trips away from home. The phone had rung only six weeks ago. The raspy voice of a stranger telling her she’d better come into his office. What he had to show her—he didn’t want to do it over the phone.

  That had been six weeks ago—the day that the truth about her husband’s other life had come crashing in through the windows. She’d had no idea what to do, and so she’d taken comfort in the presence of her one true friend. The man with the kind eyes whose face looked out on her almost nightly from the television set. The man whose words and smile she’d come to think of as being intended just for her, the sort of man with whom she’d been meant to end up, a Miss America for a president of the United States. Instead of lashing out in response to her new knowledge, she’d basked in it, had used it as an excuse to descend completely into her imagined life—had embraced entirely the fantasy that she was Mrs. President John F. Kennedy, had spent not an instant of the previous six weeks in the house in California but rather in the White House, imagining conversations not only with him but with everyone else she might run into, imagined herself in robe and slippers, gracing the carpeted corridors of the executive mansion, whose interior she’d fancied as a medieval castle updated for modern times, had pictured herself eating dinner with him, discussing the day’s events during the warm afternoons while her sons were at school—she’d been thrilled when it had started up again in the fall, thankful for the hours of privacy it afforded her. In those long hours with just herself and the voice of the president in her ear, she’d dreamed all sorts of dramas, had planned vacations with him, had met his family and spent weekends in the sand. Alone on her couch, she’d created a world so real that on the day it collapsed—on the day she, riding along in the cavalcade with him, the top down on a Texas afternoon, had heard gunshots in the sky and felt the blood on her face—she’d found herself so fully alone that she’d been frozen in place, had lay motionless on the couch until she heard the noise at the front door and knew it was him, heard him step into the room and stand behind her, looking at the television, taking in the scene.

  “Mary—” he said, but that was all he got out before she rose up.

  “I know,” she said. “I know all about where you go when you leave me.”

  He stood looking down at her, a man just turned thirty-two, refined by success and confident in his evasions. He gave her a look meant to display confusion, meant to convince without words that he had no idea what she was talking about.

  “I know about them. There’s nothing you can say. There’s no explanation you could possibly give me—”

  He turned on a lamp. She snapped it off. He came over to the television and she blocked his way, wouldn’t allow him to turn off the never-ending coverage that was taking place on all the channels.

  “Tell me!” she said. “Tell me about them! Tell me their names!”

  He’d turned from her, had gone out to the kitchen and picked up the telephone. She followed him, her eyes red with awful circles beneath them, lips chapped, hair astray. She watched him flipping through the phone book. “This isn’t natural, Mary. You’ve had this problem for years. I’ve watched it take control of your life. It’s time we got you some help.�
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  “Help?” she said, and felt her hand on the drawer, felt it tighten around the handle of the knife, held it hidden next to her hip and then raced across the kitchen toward him, watched his eyes widen as he saw the knife being revealed, lifted into the air for an over handed swipe, saw him raise the phone book just in time to receive the blow, the knife they’d bought for five dollars after watching it cut through aluminum and then an apple carving through the yellow pages and skidding across the floor when he shoved her away, knocking her against the cabinet so she was woozy for just a second, still seeing him through the haze of her hate, the shredded phone book, the knife toward which she crawled across the floor and picked up.

  He turned as if to flee, and that was when it occurred to her that it wasn’t worth it—that it could not change her life for the better, wouldn’t bring back Jack, would send her off to prison with no television and no recompense for the tragedy that had taken place.

  She stood up straight, watched him fall over a dining room chair as he scrambled to escape, saw him turn fully while she raised the carving knife and—thinking of the imagined life that now lay on a gurney in Dallas—brought it powerfully across her throat. And it was in that very moment, her head turning to the side to receive the blade, that she saw two wide-eyed boys looking in at her over the dining room window sill.

  THE AMBULANCE ARRIVED IN TIME to save her. She’d done severe damage to her larynx, had nearly severed her jugular vein. It was so serious that they’d thought there was no way she could survive; yet she’d disappeared in the ambulance and he’d received a phone call just hours later saying it looked like she would live. To which he responded: “Where do you recommend we send her?”

  He hadn’t ridden in the ambulance with her, had told the men who’d arrived at the scene that he couldn’t bear to, that she’d done it in front of her own children, that it wasn’t enough for her to destroy her own life, she’d needed to destroy theirs as well. From the medical team, there’d been sympathy. But also a look passing over their faces that said they didn’t want to get mixed up in this: a mother attempting suicide in her own kitchen, two boys too stunned to cry being comforted by a father already telling them they’d get through this, they’d find a way, he already had a plan, already knew where they could go, where they’d never have to live in tension and fear again, where they could find out what a true family was like. That night, he took them out for burgers, sat them down in the uncomfortable dining room of one of the restaurants he’d helped open—the idea, he’d told them once, was to get people in and out as quickly as possible; when maximum turnover was your goal, comfort was not a priority—and while they picked at their food, still sniveling, eyes watery, he explained to them that he was taking them somewhere they could all start over. He knew a place where they could come to live with him and a very special lady who would treat them like her own, where they could have two little siblings—twin siblings, a boy and a girl only three years old. Out toward the foothills at the edge of the city, where they could begin to decide what their next step might be, decide as a family—all six of them. They’d be able to see their mother, of course—“Of course!” he answered his younger son’s concerned look, his hamburger half eaten in its paper wrapper. She’d be nearby in a place where she could be taken care of, where they could visit any time. Though not too often, he hoped, for he was convinced this was something they needed to move on from. “Your mother needs time and space to work things out,” he told his boys at the table in the restaurant only blocks from the hospital. “She’ll always be your mother,” he reassured them, cleaning up the wrappers, stuffing them in the bag and carrying it all over to the garbage. “But this place I’m taking you tonight,” he said on their way out to the car, which he started up and directed along the streets of San Berdoo, “this is going to be your new home.”

  And for six years, it was. For six years, we spent a temporary existence in the house where he brought us together that night of the first attempt on his life, the low-roofed bungalow on a quarter acre of pavement off Wildwood he’d rented in secret for his second family while the failure of his first became complete. For six years, while his first wife languished alone in the desert to the east, we his children lived huddled up amidst a desolate grid of city streets, between a halfhearted dog park and a dozen acres of excavation perpetually on its way to becoming another shopping mall, blinds pulled to keep out the light or the spying world, a narrow hallway of shag carpeting and peeling wallpaper and strangers we learned to call family, awkward gatherings at the dining room table—a scarred leave-behind from previous tenants—with all eyes downcast but his. The breadwinner, the provider, the patriarch, privileging us with the stories of his next big idea sprouted illogically from the remnants of the previous. I’m telling you, kids. This time next year, we’ll be on our way. Alaska. Just the sound of it a terror in the ears of four California kids, a word whispered reverently and with disbelief and implicit danger throughout those six years—years he spent largely on the road. Long stints away for weeks and months at a time, making preparations, plotting career moves, telling us abridged tales of an oil field discovered on something called the North Slope and then charging off in pursuit, returning late on a Friday night or early on a Saturday afternoon, coming through the front door of that somber house in a suit to find us gathered on the living room floor, cross-legged in pajamas and huddled around a pointless board game called Life—and pausing, surprised, as if he’d forgotten we existed. Or maybe we simply aged too fast in those rapid-moving days, the twins walking and talking, rolling dice and making a ruckus, the boys’ voices changing, bodies taking on that hungry look of adolescence and beyond, the first inkling of a life racing off without him, years accumulating too swiftly to keep up.

  For just a moment, before heading down the hallway to where his second wife waits—where she always waits, or so it seems—he pauses as if prepared to speak, as if ready to address the four of us looking up at him from the carpeting that screams late sixties. Instead, another chance passes awkwardly; another scene concludes prematurely. Shuffling down the hallway with his briefcase and barely a smile, long arms swinging: the breadwinner, the provider, the patriarch. Too preoccupied or busy to begin the labors that might start to lift that silence, too ill-equipped or scared to confront what might return to haunt him when this little brood of his grows old enough to look back on these years as something other than what he has trained us to see.

  Monday

  GB HILL FELT LIKE A ghost.

  Four in the morning in the pouring rain on the New Jersey Turnpike and the old ballplayer was driving with the top down, dressed in a pinstriped Yankees uniform and shouting along with the radio to the classic Gloria Gaynor hit, “I Will Survive.”

  He was giving it everything he had, really belting out the words though he didn’t know half of them and it wasn’t making him feel any better, a shining dampness having collected upon his face though the pulled-down brim of his ball cap had mostly kept the rain off that part of him.

  He was drunk, had been sipping Comfort and Coke for some twelve hundred miles through the plastic lid of a convenience store coffee cup situated at his crotch, steering with his knees when necessary to mix up stiff refills from containers concealed beneath the seats of this antique ’73 Stingray that had long been his most prized possession. Now it was his roofless home, his worldly accumulations reduced to a knapsack and a baseball bat bag in the trunk and an eleven-year-old chocolate lab scrunched down on the passenger side floorboards trying to stay dry, looking up at him like a picture hung not quite straight as his tone-deaf chanting rose over the storm and the engine and the stereo: I will survive … I will survive! Words even he didn’t believe.

  For what seemed weeks they’d been shackled to these interstates, pursuing white numerals on blue and red shields at speeds upwards of eighty, tracking with a tattered road atlas their progress along the mostly monotonous landscapes of the I-95 corridor. It had been unfathomabl
e at first, impossible to imagine when they’d set out from Miami just eighteen hours ago that this pondered-over and then impromptu departure perpetrated in the calm of a Sunday morning could lead them so far in so short a period of time, that this tar-patched path of asphalt strung out lazily along the suburban tracts of Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach could deliver them in a seamless push across seven state lines and countless states of mind.

  The plan, if it could be dignified as such, had called for him to leave Friday morning, to reach his destination by Saturday afternoon, to accomplish what he meant to accomplish and be on the road west by Sunday. And yet anything resembling intelligent design had long since disintegrated, the decisiveness born of desperation with which he’d achieved a sort of escape velocity those first hours having degraded by degrees throughout the late morning, a hazy pall settling gradually over the cloying glaze of four hundred miles of Florida coastline. It was not just the alcohol. There had been other things, images speckled across his eyelids every time he blinked, things he’d seen that Sunday morning in a cold sterile capsule of white walls and stainless steel that he could now not unsee, confused intentions that had blazed white hot at his departure only to burn themselves out, little more than smoking embers by the time he’d made the Georgia border just past two, mixed up another drink and comforted himself with the manufactured reassurance that the worst of it was over, that it would now officially be easier to keep going than it would be to turn back.

  Four decades had done a not uncommon thing to the ten-year-old boy who’d once cracked Wiffle balls over his backyard fence and called himself the next Roger Maris. A lifetime of nonachievement had taken his once animal-lean frame and turned it flabby, the face once striking and heart-shaped like his mother’s gone amorphous and livid with middle age. In February, he’d turned fifty, had honored the occasion behind a single-storied row of numbered doorways, a budget motel in Hialeah across whose shadowy lot—beneath a faded signboard promising free HBO and Cinemax—he had smuggled the dog with a series of well-practiced movements, had placed the key and watched the door slide open to reveal the disappointment beyond.