Bereavements (2 page)

In the next moment, the amazing woman was ostensibly in trance, foam-flecked and writhing, while a cord of ectoplasm began to materialize in the air above her. This, like television, had apparently improved with the technology of the age: no longer white, misty, fearfully malformed, but as real as a knot of hanging rope, subtly multicolored, burning with an unmistakable “dayglo” brilliance.

If that wasn’t heartbreak enough, a child’s voice was heard—boy or girl, nevermind—from nowhere and everywhere at once, reverberating faintly, like a popular ballad in an echo chamber, surely a record or tape, even a bored child behind a secret curtain wailing into a pillow or through a mouthful of cotton.

“Mrs. Evans—?”

Dori touched her shoulder, smiling because she always “came to” with an expression of mild surprise, like an 18th Century lady overcome by the “vapors.”

“Are we there?”—
there
being the Christopher Street Post Office where he had been driving her once a week on what mysterious errand he hadn’t yet been told.

Dori was, more than anyone—and Mrs. Evans thought of this now because his eyes were curious, shyly questioning—one of her very few remaining confidants. He’d been in her employ for more than thirty years—long before the death of her second husband. Consequently, to the degree it was “seemly,” he was very much loved, sharing many of her most secret thoughts and feelings—not a practice, sadly, uncommon to rich, lonely widows like herself. After beloved friends die and shallow ones disappear, servants, who are devoted, often become—at least in warm affection and a reciprocity of confessed private feelings—truly intimate friends.

Still, there were a few activities held strictly her own affair, and her weekly visits to the post office was one of them.

Dori noticed, however, that she had a small steel key which she never bothered to conceal, usually taking it from her purse long before she stepped from the car. Afterward—twice now—she’d returned with a few letters in hand, so it was obvious she possessed a personal box to receive mail. But what kind? Dori had no idea, and it was this that generated his curiosity and concern.

Why would a wealthy woman with two home addresses in the East, a third in Florida, together with many secondary ones (those of a battery of lawyers, accountants, brokers, business managers and advisors) need, or want a private mail box besides?

With some slight embarrassment the thought that the letters might be of a sexual nature occurred to Dori. Surely, many post office boxes were rented for exactly that reason. But to attribute such a motive to Mrs. Evans seemed wildly improbable, in conflict with all he knew of her—even more so now after the shocking death of her son, a death that had left her devastated, irreparably broken, it seemed, in spirit and mind.

Dori had known sorrow himself, grieving as all men must when the inevitable, inescapable time for grief is upon them. He had buried his parents four days apart, his father dropping dead at his feet the moment the handful of earth was thrown into the open pit of his mother’s grave.

Some years later, he lost a lovely young wife, suffering on the day and hour of her funeral a seizure so insane, he wrenched the artfully blushing corpse from the coffin, thinking to bring the wretched cold dummy of white satin and subtle stink back to singing life in the total, miraculous crush of his arms—while his two brothers, wild in their frenzy to stop him, sought almost in vain to pry the shapeless broken doll from his grasp.

So then.

Grief he had known.

And his empathy for Mrs. Evans was boundless. As was his care. And his watchfulness.

He had not, at first, expected her to live. He was convinced she would arrange to die as gracefully and theatrically as the way she had chosen to live: breathing death in a fragrance, or mixing it into dark sweet chocolate in a Wedgewood cup.

She had done neither. But it was clear she lived out her daily nightmare like the anonymous alcoholic who saves himself with one word: today. Today
only. Today.

Sexual motivation discarded, Dori was left with a head empty of thought: only that his employer, for her own private reasons, must be corresponding with a person or persons to whom she wanted her Manhattan address as well as the estate on Long Island kept secret.

“Are we there?!” And Mrs. Evans smiled almost brightly, her shadowed eyes playing with his, not above teasing in her familiar way, apparently recovered from the vapors which today were indeed visibly real, the smog outside the car dust-thick and golden in the unusual heat and glare of the late September afternoon.

She found her small key, put a hand on the door, but then sank back, her face swiftly bloodless, the smile she had forced turning fake and thin.

That boy, that boy . . . !
—So like Jamie, his after-image became a teared blindness, a pressure against her chest.

Faded blue, white, watered gold, cinnamon (these had been
his
colors, too): jeans, shirt, a weight of pale sun-streaked hair so heavy and abundant she was forever begging him to have it cut—at least thinned or shaped to sane proportions—and the darkening olive of his skin, flawless and even finer-grained than his beautiful Spanish father’s.

With dismay, helpless censure, secret pleasure—warning him against the dangers of cancer—she’d watched his thin young body tan to an astonishing cocoa after months of surfing. By summer’s end, he appeared as black as a Black! Indeed, against the evening’s darkening sky off the veranda of the Palm Beach house, he became invisible! Or so she joked (to his vain joy) pretending child and heaven had become indistinguishable.

Laughing, blind, she played at reaching for her elusive boy, her lovely gentle boy, through the scented, honey-suckled darkness . . .

Your son is well. And happy.

He sends his love.

Many kisses . . .

It was impossible to move, embarrassing to be able to find only enough strength, desire, will, to lift a shaking, hesitant hand.

“Dori—”

She placed the key in his palm, and after a slight pause murmured faintly: “Box 89.”

There were five letters in all; no, seven: one a postcard, another an eight-by-10 manila envelope marked PHOTO-DO NOT BEND, nevertheless folded exactly in half, obviously to fit into the small post office box. The remaining letters were all roughly the same size. Most were addressed
Occupant,
or simply
Box 89.
Only two had return addresses.

One of these was very thick, containing something of plastic or metal; fingering it carefully, Dori decided it was a tape cassette.

But, of course, the postcard proved the most interesting and rewarding of all—if thoroughly baffling—and, to Dori’s well-developed sense of mystery and intrigue, just the slightest bit hair-raising.

It was addressed, Box 89, plus city and zip, but no return address.

He turned it over and with the greatest surprise read the first two words:
Dear Mother
—with the “Mother” underscored.

Beneath this bizarre salutation, complete with smudged erasures and several words crossed out with such industry and pressure an actual hole had been scrubbed into the paper, Dori’s widening eyes trailed over a wavering pen’s scrawl that only a badly-schooled child or an uneducated adult could have written.

Dear Mother. I seen what you wrot. Im lost. Please fine me. Youre loving son. Angel.

The “loving” had been partially scratched out but was intended with the slightest effort to be easily read. The “son” like the “mother” was heavily underscored. And in parenthesis in the lower left-hand corner was a telephone number.