Darling? (29 page)

“To kill yourself,” Emerson said, returning. “It’s not in my lexicon.” To give away the gun, in the belief his son wanted to die? No. He went home to Noreen—the paramedics had given her a shot so she could sleep, while downstairs the neighbors pulled up the blood-soaked rug and steamed off the wallpaper. Warren had left no note.

“It seems like his wedding,” Drew said. Last spring they’d been here for Tim’s wedding, and his wife, Fiona, had aimed her bouquet straight at Beth: they’d wanted her with them—she could keep Warren afloat. Though some old dragon had said, “Her? Marry Martha Rookery’s crazy son? I think she has more sense than that.” And looked straight at Cecile as if to drive it home to her, just how senseless a marriage could be.

Which had been right, Cecile thought—her marriage was clearly a mistake. She’d come to Spinnaker, found this man sitting at the head of the table, and thought, “Why shouldn’t
I
have a father like this?” It was hardly unusual—twenty-year-old women are out shopping for fathers this way all the time. His face was sharp, his eyes narrow as if scanning the horizon, relentlessly searching. So, he was like her; they were kin. He’d been reading
Doctor Faustus,
had scowled when Warren asked if she liked science fiction. The vehemence frightened and seduced her: she wanted philosophy thrust into her, and hard—in this way she would prevail over him, draw him away from this table, into her bed. Now here she was, married, alone. Drew loved her, but what did that matter? He was more austere every day, intent on his work, on proving out his life’s ambition, so that distractions enraged him, and fatherhood would, he was sure, be his death.

And it would be her fault, it already was. She was all earthly appetites, the things he’d intended to renounce made real. Every time he put his hand out, she yanked him further away from his ideals. She tugged at her hem, which was far too short: she had good legs, she was praying some man would follow them up to her heart and save her.

A sturdy blond woman—one of the neighbors who’d gone over to help with the cleaning—planted herself in front of Martha as soon as she hung up, saying in a careful teacher’s voice: “Now, there’s always a time when the spirit hovers, before it’s really gone.” She closed her eyes and swayed, transformed from pedant to mystic. “He’s over us now, he can hear us,
now is the time
to speak to him and be heard.” Drew looked up at her with something between incredulity and revulsion, but Polchikov was listening, and Martha’s gaze snapped around, betrayed her: she was waiting for Warren—she knew he wouldn’t leave her without a word this way.

“It was a family decision,” Tim said. “It seemed to make sense. He hates the hospital, he said he couldn’t bear it—I mean this guy Schiffenhaus never knew Warren—he met him once and he wanted to lock him up.…”

“It was school, I think, that weighed on him,” Cecile said, meaning:
It’s not your fault.
As she blamed them absolutely she had to say this again and again. After all they’d loved him, meant no harm. Drew who hated driving, took him up to the hospital, talking all the time about how shameful it was to need professional assistance with life, while Cecile reasoned she’d be tampering in their relationship if she interrupted. Emerson left the gun in plain sight because he couldn’t bear to acknowledge the risk. Martha let Warren decide whether to go to the hospital: he was a grown man; she was a civil libertarian …

Cecile might have walked home with him that first night, years ago, might have taken him to herself, instead of taking Drew, the best he had for a father, away. After all, they were the same generation, they had a whole world in common—a world she’d turned up her nose at when she married Drew. At the birthday dinner she’d told herself she’d call Warren and invite him for the walk she owed him—even try to act the father in Drew’s stead. But what with the history of walks in that family it was bound to be taken wrong, or this was how she’d put it to herself, deciding to keep away.

Drew was going through the canvases, stacked against the wall. “I had no idea,” he said, looking closely at one with veils of scarlet and chartreuse cascading over each other like layers of a waterfall. “If I’d known he was so talented, I’d have been able to talk to him.”

“You might have looked, if you wanted to know,” she said, too quietly, she hoped, to be heard.

“Where will we have the funeral, where can we fit them all?” Martha was asking.

“This is nothing,” Polchikov reassured her. “My father, everyone loved him—he wasn’t just…” He caught himself, but the message was clear enough. To lose a father is the worst thing—you discover in an instant that there’s no ground beneath you, never was. To lose a crazy son … The drop of scorn in his voice woke Cecile up, she despised him for a moment. Here he was, this little man with a beret over his bald spot, coming here in the guise of sympathy when all he wanted was comfort. But Martha looked at him more kindly than ever—guessing, probably, that she’d soon be in his position, knocking on strange doors and offering sweets in hope of finding someone whose grief could match her own.

Cecile had wolfed down a tart on the sly—she was famished, greedy for food and love and beauty—everyone else seemed to have better management of self. In fact the rest of the tarts were untouched, and she wondered if she dared have another. The younger people, Tim and Fiona and some of Warren’s friends who’d just gotten in from New York, were hugging each other, laughing and crying, talking with an earnest intensity she never felt anymore, while Polchikov held out the terrible crystal of his life for Martha’s contemplation and Drew quizzed the pedant-mystic who had helped clean the room.

“He didn’t suffer,” she said, taking his hand in both of hers. “He just set his spirit free.”

Drew gave her a look of boiling contempt. “What did his body look like, after he set his spirit free?” he asked.

Her gaze dropped. “Well, if you’re just
curious
—”

“Call it that,” he said, chin jutting, challenging her. He was always determined to batter through to some hard truth, until he seemed like a man hammering at a peach to get the stone. Cecile felt her eyes closing and caught herself just as she fell asleep, and Martha touched Drew’s arm:

“Take her home, sweetie, look how tired she is. Tim’s here, and Fiona … Which reminds me, when are
you
two going to have a baby?” She looked happy all of a sudden, flashing a conspiratorial glance at Cecile—they were women together; they overruled, enlivened the men. Drew looked cornered, likely to strike, but she paid no attention. Circumstance had given her license to say what she pleased.

“You’d be a wonderful father,” she said. “The boys got so much from you—they
did,
Drew. And we
need
children in this family …
especially
now.”

This family? Had Drew, leaving his position as Martha’s lover, taken on the role of her son—since there was a vacancy at the moment?

“She’s
not
going to be my baby’s grandmother,” Cecile told him as soon as they were back outside.

“It’s too early to leave,” he said.

“It’s two
A.M
.!” Snow blanketed the narrow street so the town looked as it must have a hundred years ago: proud and lonely, face to the sea. Down by the dark church a gray figure stopped still under a streetlight, waiting for a skunk to nose across the road.

“Which is when things really happen,” Drew said, pointing up to Martha’s window, where the candleflame belled in a brandy glass, and three figures swayed in an embrace.

“Drew, it’s a wake, not a party,” she said. “And Martha is not your mother. Tim is your stepson, not your friend. They need a father, those kids,” she said, remembering suddenly not to use the plural, “… not a drinking companion.” In fact, she needed a father herself—or two, really, one for herself and one for her child.

“I could strangle you,” he said, between his teeth—and she thought how, years ago, seeing her slip her dress off over her head, he’d said “… like vellum,” with awe. Smooth and white, ready to have a history scrawled over—she had loved to see herself that way—an erotic angel who could magically erase decades of a man’s life and earn herself a soft bed thereby. With this image she, who had wanted the most tender and encompassing love, had distracted herself, as he bent her over the back of the sofa, to have her—the first time—from behind.

“Another death, then, for you,” she said now, in the hard voice of the woman she’d become. To think, she was asking him to father another child.

*   *   *

The day of the funeral. The gathering afterward would be at Drew and Cecile’s, Martha’s place being too small and Emerson’s too macabre. In the mirror Cecile saw her black dress was all wrong—even in the shop she’d known she’d have nowhere to wear it, but seeing herself in the mirror had imagined herself happy with a man who loved her, so couldn’t resist buying it. She tied a dull scarf at the neck, listening to Tim, who was dressing in the next room with Warren’s friends, as they chided each other over their clothing—who had the proper stuff for a funeral at this age?

“Yeah, Eli,” Tim said. “When was the last time you put on a matched pair of socks anyway?”

“Your wedding, bub,” Eli replied. Cecile had danced with him there—his shirt had come untucked, his tie askew, his hair sprang comically off his head, and he’d clutched at her waist, holding on for dear life. “You dance divinely!” she’d said, and he spun her out and they crashed back together and bumped their heads, laughed, tried again. Then, of course, she’d had to sit back down with the grownups, who were still talking about Vietnam.

“The way people
danced
then,” Drew was saying. “The sexual frenzy!” Cecile and Warren and Tim had been children, of course, with only the barest understanding. Now Cecile took a pair of Drew’s socks across the hall to Eli and found him bent double as over a wound, with Tim kneeling at his side. They didn’t see her, and she slipped down the stairs as he started to cry in great retching masculine sobs.

Drew grinned, a dizzying anomaly, and went for the liquor cabinet.

“Hair of the dog that bit him,” he said.

“He’s not hung over, he’s crying,” she said. “It’s a funeral. A funeral. Someone has died. Your son.”

“He wasn’t my son,” he said. “They were never mine. It wasn’t like that. You weren’t there.” He looked surprised, as if he’d just remembered. It was true, of course—she’d been home with her own parents, those waifs lost in the phantasmagoria of the seventies. When she saw Drew she’d wanted him just because he
was
solitary, harsh. She’d chosen her husband the way men choose their mountains; now she was tired and cold and the air was too thin to breathe.

“He was someone who needed you,” she said, wondering if she was arguing for Warren or herself, and thinking that now it was Drew who needed her. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s a hard time, that’s all.”

“But you’re right,” he said, stern. “You’re quite right.” And looked straight into her eyes. “I failed him, as I would fail a child of yours.”

Her eyes filled, but where she would cry, Drew seemed to parch, until a fissure split him down the center. Marrying him, she had contracted to do his weeping for him: she might weep all the rest of her years.

On the way to the church he drove slower and slower as if he hoped they would never arrive. She tried to think of summer light on the water, the dusky seaweed gardens and the green shallows paling with the tide. Now the bay looked hard as steel, too bright—the air had that frozen clarity; she could see the morning shadows across the dunes in Wellfleet fifteen miles away. It was high tide, and waves slapped against the seawall, spraying the pallbearers as they carried the coffin in.

“The black hearse, come for Warren,” Drew said with cold dread. Yes, it was real. Cecile set a hand on his arm but he pulled back—Martha would see them. Ten years now and he was still guilty, still protecting them from her. Father a child now, when Martha had lost one of hers? Never—it wouldn’t be fair.

But Martha must have realized this, that was why she’d brought it up last night. She’d been giving them her blessing.

The hearse driver, standing at military ease at the curb, glanced quickly over at Cecile—it was Wizz Mancini, dope dealer and sometime taxidermist whose moonlight job at the funeral home had been the source of some hilarity. He smiled at her with sorrowful tenderness now, not a spark of the usual lechery—in his suit, with his long, thinning hair carefully braided, he seemed entirely dignified and respectful, someone who’d seen enough of death that he could meet it on natural terms.

Inside, Drew stood for a moment with Emerson—they looked alike, weathered to silver like thousand-year-old olive trees.

“Woe betide,” Drew said after a while, and Emerson nodded, and another long silence was broken by Emerson’s asking Drew what he thought about the Serbo-Croatian situation. Cecile’s interest fell away, and when she listened again Drew was describing a story he’d read, about a father and son blown off course during an afternoon sail. “Finally they’re standing on a rock, while the tide rises—he puts the boy up on his shoulders … there’s nothing else he can do.”

Unbearable, to be responsible for another life. They looked off past each other, and Cecile imagined taking them into herself, healing them. The feminine fallacy, that sense that a man might complete himself, cure himself, by sacred immersion in her. Had she learned nothing, seeing that for all her warmth Drew had never thawed? In fact the kindest thing she could do for him might be to spare him from becoming a father.

Warren was dead, they could have their way with him, assigning him this or that role in their stories, each one using him as he or she liked. The church was full, everyone in town had come, humbled, washed through by it all. Last week they’d gone back and forth on their errands, never quite sure whether it was all right to be reading on the sofa when the dust was thick underneath, whether the baby ought to be comforted or left to cry … whether to send Warren to the hospital though he said he’d rather die. Last week their opinions had been quite definite: some acts were despicable, some could be forgiven. Now there was nothing to do but stand here and bear this together—and everything else fell into shadow—they remembered how little they knew. Bill Friedrich, whom Drew had punched in the jaw years ago when he made some crack about Martha, came in and pulled Drew into his arms.