All the Dead Yale Men (8 page)

I read this fifteen years ago; the page of the last book turned with a little sound, like a creak in an old house. “Life is ninety-nine percent anxiety and one percent fear. The trick is to know which is which.”

The diary ended. Just like that. The last entry had to do with a case of pears that were overripe and had to be returned. Pears.

The end paper at the front of the book had a small number “1” in my grandmother's dark, furious penmanship. If she had a 1, then she had to have a 2 or a 3 or 4. Isn't that the way it works? Were there more?

The trunk had piles of other books filled with plates of animals, of Audubon's drawings, of lovely drawings of moths and butterflies, and in particular a drawing of a moth that, when resting, had wings that were brown, but when they were spread for flight, triangles of pink that had been folded into the closed wing suddenly appeared: a pink like hope, like a raspberry, like a ribbon on lingerie.

So, there was more, but what? My grandmother had left the light, but not the darkness, and it is the darkness that teaches hard lessons. The bloom enthralls. The frost informs.

Still, I had the paperwork, and this is what I was going to use with my father on that day of the high-speed chase. I guess I had waited so long because if I had this, then I had information about my father's desperate affair, and, where decency was concerned, letting him know that I was aware of this secret was not worth three hundred a month. After all, I loved him.

But then my troubles began, and I was desperate enough to bring up the past, the toxic periods in his own life to get help with mine.

MY WIFE WAS
waiting, of course, and one of the beauties of her knowledge, of her understanding, was that she had a way of discovering things before I had to tell them, and I was pretty sure she already knew about my father and about Cal. Still, the idea of not telling her directly, as I did about most things, was so far from the realm of possibility as to be nonexistent. And yet, who wants to walk into a room and say, “I've got some bad news.”

I drove an Audi, which my father had called in his prison camp German, Der Grauer Geist, the Gray Ghost. I drove down Brattle Street, in Cambridge, after Cal had jumped from that bridge, and as I went by those squat, large New England houses, I tried to let their suggestion of time, of the weight of it, of the long-lastingness of it, like a geological formation, make that sense of my father's paralysis and the lingering slipperiness of
Cal's hand seem more remote or more natural or more ordinary, but instead it worked the other way: the old houses reminded me that this was the only time I was ever going to have.

The house Alexandra and I lived in and where our daughter Pia had grown up and still came to visit when she was home from New Haven was a New England saltbox, in a cul-de-sac not far from that daffodil color of the Longfellow House. Sometimes the color of the Longfellow House looked cheerful, like spring, but at other times like jaundiced eyes. You can guess how it appeared when I passed it and turned into our cul-de-sac. I parked just in front of the window in the study that was at the front of the house.

Alexandra stood just behind the glass of the window. She had blond hair and full lips, her presence edged by light, like a cloud at dawn. She waited, face near the glass, her eyes on the Audi. When we faced a tough time we played a game: she'd guess what had gone wrong, and I'd score it, one to ten. Now her breath made a small balloon on the glass of my study, like the place in a cartoon where someone speaks, and she beckoned with her fingers: come in, she seemed to say. Play the game. That's how we'll start.

The car sighed as it cooled, and the power steering pump drained under the hood. Maybe, I thought, with the celon in my hand, with the naked woman who threw thunderbolts and sat on the galaxy's face, maybe, instead of Cal falling through the strata of misery, as though it was measured in feet, or instead of considering my father's death, I'd pass the twenty-celon note over and say, in the voice we used for the game, “So, what's this?”

In the backyard we had beds of snapdragons, delphinium, lupine, and pink astilbe. When they bloomed the flowers screened a small graveyard. Or maybe you could say that half of the backyard is a graveyard. Often I went outside and stood
among the fifteen stones that were there, surrounded by a metal fence with spikes on each bar.

The man who had built this house had been buried there, in the 1700s, along with this wife and children. Juduthan and Polly Wainwright. I used to stand there in an attempt to make difficulties less intense. After all, Juduthan and Polly must have stood out here, too, two hundred and fifty years ago, with difficulties of their own. Three children, twelve, nine, and seven, had been buried in a two-week period. Typhus? Cholera? You'd think that it would make the place gloomy, but it was oddly reassuring, at times, to sit there and think with a little luck I'd get through a mess. Or I used to think that. Now the place suggested something else: that I might get ensnared after all.

A wall of books was on one side of my study, Thucydides, Marcus Aurelius, Tacitus, Xenophon, which I read from time to time, and then my desk, which had been my grandfather's, a rolltop that still had some of his pens and pencils. A sort of lawyerlike odor: ashes and ink. A dark purple rug was on the floor, a sofa, a comfortable leather chair, an impressionist painting, a real one, not by Monet but by a pal who had been in Paris. A small bar in the corner.

And yet, if things worked out the wrong way, I'd lose Alexandra, too. What is like the feeling of lost love? Far worse and more complete, I think, than the itch of a missing limb. And the horror of lost love is that sometimes even the best memories are toxic, or tainted, and so I thought I'd better use a good memory now, as a sort of inoculation. Maybe that was the way to have the strength to grieve for my father and a friend.

On the weekends, before Alexandra and I had a child, we went to a small green house that was on the land that my grandfather had owned, and which was going to be mine, soon. The house was one big room downstairs and two bedrooms upstairs,
and it sat in a field surrounded by stone walls on which copperheads sunned themselves. Alexandra put out broken crockery to discourage the snakes.

On those weekends, we arrived at this small house late on a Friday night, a basket filled with a picnic, ratatouille that she bought from a Frenchified delicatessen, french bread, a bottle of white wine in a chiller, pâté, cheese, olives, a pear tart, which we ate and then got into bed. One morning I woke up and found her in the upstairs bedroom of the house, which was white and had gauzy curtains. She stood in front of the window, which was a dormer, and there with the light coming in and marking the highlights of her hair, the pale shortbread of her skin, the luminescence surrounding her like a caress. She said, “Frank, is this what people mean when they are in love and happy? Just this? A moment like this when you are so glad you feel you could disappear, as though by magic?”

I opened the door to our house in Cambridge.

“What's that on your pants?”

“There was bird shit on the bridge.”

“That's what it looked like on TV. They followed him all the way down.”

“Even at the end?” I said.

“No,” she said. “They chickened out about that.”

“So they didn't show the hit?”

“No. Just before the commercial break.”

She bit her lip and looked down, as though to say,
You don't have to describe that part
. That shape and a sound like a watermelon dropped from the fifth floor.

“What good would it do for me to cry anyway?” I said. “So, I sit here and blubber? Great.”

She just nodded. What can you do? Patience.

A pair of sweats I wore in the evenings were on the sofa, and I stripped off the shit-stained pants, put on the sweats and a clean shirt she had left out, too, then took the dirty things and put them in a hamper for the dry cleaning that was at the back of the kitchen.

We had a drink and sat side by side. The warmth rose between us, just from the touch of one thigh against another, and it seemed to me that this was just as good as words, or maybe even better: warmth, touch, understanding.

Guano was still under my nails, and in the bathroom downstairs, I used the lavender-scented soap, but it didn't work. The stink lingered like some bad memory. My fingers had little green-white new moons at the tip.

“We need some Lava soap,” I said.

We let the warmth build between us.

“Cal and I had some good times together,” I said. “We were going to change the world.”

“That's the best kind of friend,” she said.

“I don't know,” I said. “They get disappointed.”

“So,” she said. This was the opening for the game. That's the way we were going to handle this. “He did it because of money?”

“One,” I said. “That's a one. The bottom.”

“He was cross-dressing and got caught,” she said.

“One,” I said. “Not even close.”

“His wife was sleeping with someone else,” she said.

“Warmer. Say three.”

“Ah, so it's the wife.”

“Sort of,” I said. “Or, at least, that's where it began. He wanted her to do something with him. She didn't want to. He was watching a clip at the office . . . ”

“A clip of what?” she said.

“What he wanted the wife to do . . . ,” I said.

“Her name is Ginny, right? Pretty uptight if you ask me,” she said. “But what did he want?”

I whispered in her ear.

“Uh-oh,” she said.

“Well, the thing is, he was watching the clip, you know, a woman doing what he wanted, and Blaine came in and saw it, too.”

“Oh, Jesus,” she said. “He went to see Martha Bingham. I'd bet anything. Why . . . ”

“Cal asked him not to,” I said.

“Well, sure,” said Alexandra. “That probably made it better for Blaine. Don't you think?”

“That's a nine,” I said. “Then Lady Martha, on the advice of the publicity director, to stay ahead of the wave, called the
Globe
. Next thing you know I was sitting with my best friend in pigeon shit. Then he slipped through my fingers.” I swallowed. Almost. At least I had that first ache, down there beneath the larynx. But it didn't come to anything.

I gave her the index card with the drawing of the naked woman on it.

“What do you think this is?”

“This?” she said. “Why you poor mutt. This is a twenty-celon note. The Raver gives them out when he quotes Marcus Aurelius.”

“That's ten,” I said.

I closed my eyes. Cal turned in the air, the birds around him, the scent of the harbor and those layers of smoke.

“But listen,” she said. “We don't have to worry about you doing anything like that, do we? I mean for the trouble you're in. For our troubles?”

“It's nice that you think of them as our troubles,” I said.

“Well, let me tell you,” she said. “Those people are going to have to deal with me, too. If they try anything.”

“They'll try,” I said.

“That's what I'm afraid of. Maybe I'll buy a gun.”

“We've got a case, right over there,” I said. In the corner of the room sat a small closet of Mannlichers and L.C. Smith shotguns, firearms I had inherited from my father and grandfather.

“I meant a handgun,” she said.

“Well, my father's .45, his service sidearm, is going to be ours soon.”

“That's more what I had in mind,” she said.

Beyond the kitchen window the first spikes of snapdragons and delphinium grew, no flowers yet, just the green promise, like enormous asparagus.

“What are we going to do?” she said.

“I was going to talk to my father for advice,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “That was your father's greatest charm. Trouble.”

“So, we'll just have to see how it works out.”

“And how bad could that be? For you? For us?” she said.

“I wish I knew,” I said.

She thumbed the edge of the celon.

“I'm sorry about Cal,” she said.

“You know what the cops call it?” I said. “A Dutch job. Doing the Dutch. Or they call it a kervork. There's all kinds of kervorks. Water. Air. Parking.”

“Parking?”

“When you start the engine of the car and close the garage door. That's a parking kervork.”

“So for Cal it was just a dumb scandal,” she said.

“Scandals aren't dumb anymore,” I said. “Indiscretions aren't dumb. Sex is dangerous.”

“Sure,” she said. “But it isn't sex where you're concerned. At least I don't think so. You haven't withheld anything like that, have you?”

“No,” I said.

“But, Frank, you're not going to go out on a bridge or something.”