by James, Terry
“I always asked the new parents to send me a picture once they got settled,” she was saying. “I liked to see my babies with their new families. Not all of them did. Out of sight, out of mind.”
She looked up. “What did you say his name was again?”
“William Morris,” I said. “The father’s name was Walter Morris. He was a writer. He wrote under the name of Baxter Conway.”
“Baxter Conway?” she said with a startled look. “Not the detective writer?”
“Yes.”
“Well why didn’t you say so in the first place? Of course I remember him. He came to see me, God, years ago. He gave me one of his books.” She turned towards the bookshelf and nudged up her glasses. “Signed it and everything.”
Then she gave me a strange expression, a mix of dawning awareness and sorrow.
“Oh dear,” she said.
“What?”
“He was looking for his son.”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m afraid he never found him.”
“What do you mean he never found him?” she said. “I’m sure he did. He came here twice. We found the picture and the name and everything. Then he came back again, about a year later, to thank me. He told me he had found him. That’s when he gave me his book. I wouldn’t forget a thing like that. He was the nicest man. Who told you he never found him? The mother?”
“Yes.”
“So you’re working for her?”
“Not exactly,” I said. “I’ve been retained by the lawyer handling the estate. The mother isn’t interested in meeting the child. She doesn’t wish to have any contact.”
She frowned in thought.
“Do you remember the name they gave the baby?” I asked. “The adoptive parents?”
“Little Willie,” she sighed, ignoring my question. “My heart went out to him. He was a tiny baby, so precious. How any mother could have given him up I will never understand. I had him, oh, about a month, I think. I cried when they left with him. I remember them well enough. Youngish couple, in their early thirties. She was real good-looking and knew it. An affected air about her. I don’t recall much about the father. He didn’t say much. They looked great on paper, but I had my concerns. It wasn’t my decision. It was up to the agency. In those days it was much easier to adopt. If you were married, white, and had a job you pretty much had your pick.”
“Do you remember the name they gave him?” I asked again.
“Hold your horses.”
She turned to a page in the album.
“There they are. Oh, there’s little Willie. Wasn’t he gorgeous? Let’s see here. These damn plastic things are so stiff. I can’t get my fingers under them anymore. Can you pull it up? … Now. What’s it say here? … To Ruth. Something for all the something for little … Can you read that? It looks like Robby to me. There’s their names. Can you read it? Mr. King? Are you all right? Mr. King? …”
30
I HAVE NO recollection of the drive to Merino. That I drove is indisputable. They were my hands on the steering wheel. My knuckles were the same color as the cloud in the distance. The car was stopped at the curb, the engine off. Everything was still.
It took a while for my fingers to straighten after I pried them from the wheel. I got out. The sound of the car door shutting behind me seemed to lengthen as I walked across the yard, as if it were something caught on me, unraveling as I went.
At the sound of my entrance she turned startled from the television and, seeing it was me, smiled. The smile lasted about a second, then vanished altogether. Daisy, jerked to her feet by the whiff of my emotion, bared her teeth and unleashed on me for all she was worth. I walked straight past them both, into the kitchen and over to the cupboard where she kept her liquor. I grabbed the nearest bottle and a glass. My hands were too shaky to pour. I drank directly from the bottle and watched her come.
With every passive-aggressive step she took, a fresh wave of hatred swelled in my guts. Daisy was in the doorway, barking herself hoarse. The TV was blaring ecstatic inanities. I gripped the bottle by the neck and poured fire down my throat and watched her come.
“Daisy!” she shouted. The dog turned, startled, was quiet for a few seconds, then turned back to me, growling defiantly.
The muumuu was greenish blue today, a bruise of nearly the same color in full bloom on her left shin. She stopped in the doorway and eyed me apprehensively.
“What’s going on?”
I gave her a cold glare, then said, spitefully: “William Morris.”
Her eyebrows rose, dipped, settled in an uneasy furrow. Her pupils dilated. Her body seemed to shrink under my gaze.
“What?”
“William Morris,” I said again.
Her eyes pivoted to the bottle in my left hand, then back to my face.
“What the hell is going on?” Her voice was starting to crack.
I took another drink and stared at her.
“William Morris.”
Her eyes were darting back and forth now. An innocent bystander might have thought it was confusion.
“Who is William Morris?” she asked, still desperately searching for some way out.
“I am.”
What little color was left in her face evaporated. She gaped at me as if I were deranged.
“I know, Mom, okay.”
That vile word, Mom, suddenly gutted of all meaning, hung in the air between us for a moment then dropped lifeless to the floor.
“What in God’s name are you talking about?” she said. It was astonishing, the conviction in her eyes.
“Ruth Brenner?” I said with as much ridicule as I could freight into my voice. “Does that ring any bells? I’ve just come from her house. She showed me the picture of you and Dad holding me. It was your handwriting on the back of it. Thanks for all the love you gave to little Eddie.”
All she could do was shake her head.
“Mom. Don’t.” There it was again. That horrible word. Straight to the floor like a burst balloon.
“Do I need to spell it out for you?” I said, the anger rising in my voice. “You’re not my mother.”
“You’ve been drinking,” she said sourly.
“Are you really going to stand there and lie to my face?” I said.
“I can’t talk to you when you’re like this.” She turned and retreated to the living room. Daisy followed. I wasn’t far behind.
“Forty years of lies,” I fumed at the back of her head. “You’ve been lying to me for forty years. My whole life has been one big lie.”
She slumped into her chair and reached for her pack of cigarettes. Her hands were so shaky she could hardly get the cigarette out, much less light it. I watched coldly as time and again her thumb missed the button of the lighter and the spark died. At last it caught and she brought the flame to the tip of her cigarette and sucked deeply.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I demanded. I was standing about ten feet away from her, off to the side. She refused to look at me. She was staring at the TV screen as if it were her only salvation.
“You’re out of your mind,” she said.
“Go get my birth certificate.”
“Eddie, for God’s sake. Who told you this asinine story? You’re my son. I lost a quart of blood giving birth to you. That’s the truth, so help me God.”
“Go get the birth certificate,” I repeated. “I want to see it.”
She dropped the cigarette in the ashtray and got up in an indignant huff and set off down the hall. I took another drink. Daisy was cowering in the doorway to the kitchen. I flared my nostrils at her. She flinched and whimpered.
From the TV came sounds of joyous laughter. A man and a woman were sitting silently at opposite ends of a sitcom couch, doing nothing, staring blankly at the camera. Every few seconds a chorus of laughter would blast them, but they continued to sit unperturbed, which seemed to be the source of the hilarity.
My head was starting to spin. I looked around me. Everything in this house
was false and ugly and shallow and brittle and stale. The sight of the debating trophy on the mantle made me want to vomit.
She returned with the birth certificate and shoved it at me on her way back to her chair. I had seen it plenty of times throughout my life. It stated, as it always had, that Edward Patrick King was born to Stella Ann King and Gerald Marcus King at 11:02 a.m. on April 16, 1972 at 5704 Baltimore Drive, weighing six pounds, eight ounces. The line for the attending physician was blank. The story which I had grown up with was that she was having a bath when the contractions came on so suddenly that she knew she would never make it to the hospital in time, so she stayed in the bath, and that’s where I was born, in the very tub that years later I would bathe in myself. My father was on the rig that week. She gave birth to me all alone. I had heard this story so many times that it had acquired the heft and solidity of irrefutable fact. It was so vivid in my mind, me as a fetus sliding out of her into a bathtub full of blood, that it might as well have been a memory of my own.
The birth certificate looked authentic. That’s because it was. It was an amended copy. They swap out the mother’s and father’s names, post-date it to the date of the adoption, and replace the name of the hospital with the home address. It’s common practice with closed adoptions, a way of erasing all traces of the birth parents to protect the child. Perfectly legal. In my case no attending physician was named because for this “birth” there wasn’t one, only a woman named Ruth Brenner. I was three weeks old when Gerald and Stella King adopted William Morris and changed his name to Edward King. The original birth certificate was in a filing cabinet at the Office of Vital Records.
I set the bottle on the TV and shredded up the birth certificate and tossed it to the floor.
“Eddie!” she shrieked.
It was her turn to go on the offensive.
“You ungrateful sonofabitch. You haven’t done a damn thing for me since I moved up here. I don’t know how many Christmases and birthdays and Mother’s Days I’ve spent alone. Not even a call. What have I ever done to you? I was always there for you. When your father was off chasing every skirt in town, blowing all our money on drugs and guitars, I was there. Fifteen years of slaving away in that office so you could have a better life. Saving every penny so you could go to college. And you throw all your talent away on dead-end jobs and booze and whores. Who was the one who bailed you out every time you lost a job? Oh, then you come crying to me, begging for a loan, which you never pay back. You’re just like your father. A no good, selfish bastard. Sometimes I wish I wasn’t, but I’m your mother, goddamnit, and nothing is going to change that. Birth certificates don’t mean shit.”
She reached for her puffer and shot a defiant blast into her mouth. On the TV a bald man sitting in an armchair was laughing to himself. I stepped in front of the console, pulled my revolver from my shoulder holster and fired a round directly into the screen. A soft implosion followed hard upon the ear-splitting blast. An arc of pink electricity flared out from the sudden hole, through which a finger of black smoke lazily curled. For a moment the man in the armchair seemed to hover in the air before my eyes, like a genie from a bottle. Then he vanished. Mom screamed. A few panicked scrapes of toenail on linoleum were all that could be heard of Daisy.
It wasn’t until the trailing whine of the concussion began to fade that I realized that the maniacal laughter I was still hearing wasn’t coming from the TV. By then I was already out the door.
31
IT WAS AFTER eight o’clock when I reached the outskirts of San Calisto. The streetlights were just coming on, an unearthly tangerine glow, the gases not yet excited to the jaundiced yellow that would hang over the little seaside town until daybreak.
How I had managed to stay on the road was a mystery to me. For four solid hours I had seen nothing but images of Imogen before my eyes. Sometimes dressed, sometimes naked, sometimes filling my glass of wine. Each image an icepick through my heart. Around and around the thing I went, trying to find some way out. Mom was lying. I was certain of that. But she had sown enough doubt with her vehement denials to allow a tenacious little seed of hope to take root in me. Maybe there was something I was overlooking, some obvious explanation. Maybe there was a mistake on the birth certificate. Maybe Mom had had an affair with Walter Morris. I imagined every possible bypass. But they all led me back to Imogen.
I stopped at the first filling station and asked the cashier if he knew where Appian Way was. He didn’t. I drove around until I found the Domino’s. The kid coming out with the pizzas gave me good directions. I followed them, heading south onto the main drag (auto parts stores, fast food restaurants, scuba gear rentals.) Past the A&W I took a right on Oxbow Street and drove six quiet blocks to Appian Way, then half a block to the Seabreeze Apartments.
The sign, in vintage cursive, was bolted to the stucco of the unit facing the street. I pulled to the curb and got out and made my way between the buildings to the walkway skirting the courtyard. No hint of a breeze, from the sea or elsewhere, was stirring tonight. A bone-jarring racket echoing from the walls of the surrounding units was soon revealed to be two kids scraping empty soda cans against the poolside pavement. The hedges concealing them were in bad need of a trim.
His apartment, according to my address book, was 12B. If he still lived here. The B’s were on the second floor of the building to my left. I took the staircase up and made my way to the opposite end accompanied by the vacuous vibrations of primetime television, the clinking of silverware against plates, the brisk clip of Spanish.
When I reached the door I stopped and stood before it, listening. It was quiet inside. A light was on behind the orange curtain in the window to the right. I looked back the way I had come. Through the gap between the buildings, I could see my car parked out there on the street, comfortingly black and solid. I lifted my hat and ran my fingers through my sweaty hair. The scraping of the cans ceased momentarily, then started up again.
If not exactly my courage, I mustered up something and made myself knock. I waited for half a minute. I couldn’t hear a thing inside. I knocked again, more forcefully, half dreading, half hoping he wasn’t there. It was another ten seconds before he hollered irately from somewhere back in the apartment:
“Who is it?”
“Eddie.”
“Eddie who?”
I turned and looked back at the car. Come, it was saying. There is nothing to be gained.
I turned back to the door. “Eddie King. Your …” I clenched my teeth. “Open the damn door!”
An odd clicking sound accompanied his approach. The door opened a few inches, more than enough to reveal how much deeper he had sunk since I last saw him.
“Are you alone?” he asked, one solitary eye, his right, red-rimmed and lusterless, busy with suspicion. The wiry gray hairs of a beard concealed the lower half of his face.
“Yes.”
He shifted to favor his other eye, trying to see around me.
“Did anyone follow you here?”
“Just let me in.”
He studied me for another few seconds then stepped back and opened the door. I recoiled at the sight of him. He must have lost fifty pounds since I had last seen him. The most disturbing thing was the beard. Having never seen him with more than a shadow of stubble, it was hard to reconcile his familiar eyes and nose and forehead with that wild thicket of gray hair overgrowing his mouth and chin and neck. It was the beard of a castaway, a hermit, a madman. A cartoon beard. So shaggy and unkempt that the symbolism of it (hopeless isolation, social ostracism, mental imbalance) seemed to nullify its actuality as a beard, to nullify, even, the man it was attached to. That was how it struck me, not as something growing out of him, but something latched onto him, a parasitical organism sucking the life out of him.
He was in his maroon terrycloth bathrobe, untied, no undershirt, his saggy paunch hanging slack from his protruding ribs over a pair of navy blue boxers. At one time he had had trouble closing this same robe around his
girth. A sour smell was coming off of him.
It wasn’t until he moved to step back that I saw the prosthetic leg. Where his right leg below the knee should have been was a stainless steel cylinder, its hard plastic mount several shades browner than the skin above. The foot was a revolting little plastic flipper.
He grinned at the look on my face.
“I guess she didn’t tell you about the leg,” he said with that morbid pride of his. He stepped jerkily aside, eager to get the door closed. I stepped in, out of the way, my eyes riveted to the leg. He closed the door and turned and limped back into the apartment. I watched with a mixture of guilt and shame as the plastic foot swung along beside the real one under the drape of his bathrobe.
Like every other place he had lived, this one was crammed to bursting with his junk collection. Nearly every available surface was occupied by some kind of container—yogurt tubs, tin cans, Tupperware storage vessels, shoe boxes, prescription drug bottles, mayonnaise jars. During most of my childhood it had been scrap metal. Long after his acetylene torches had gone cold he had continued collecting every piece of junk that caught his fancy (weathervanes, carburetors, saw blades) believing that one day it would be just the piece he needed to complete a new sculpture. Year after year the piles in the back yard grew bigger, rustier, more contentious. After the divorce he had gotten into computers, long before the common man had any use for them. In those days he lived in a crush of circuit boards, disk drives, power supplies, monitors, scuzzy cards. The word that always came to mind when I thought of that period was “crater,” not only because this was when he started living in his bomb-shelter-like dwellings, but because he was always using that word, as a verb, when his machines failed him: i.e., “The CPU cratered on me.” In truth he was never really interested in doing anything on the computers. He just needed to be surrounded by parts of things, things in a transitive state. Nothing in his domain was ever fully assembled and functioning as it was intended to. All I wanted to do when I visited him on weekends was play computer games, but there was always something wrong with every machine. He finally gave up on computers when their innards became so minute that there was nothing left to disassemble.