All Those Vanished Engines (15 page)

Marty, my brother-in-law, had played a Brahms intermezzo. And Richard Wilbur had read some verse. “I'm surprised you didn't say anything yourself,” Constance said, her lips compressed.

Though the room was full, I could hear everything she and Roseheim were saying, every word, though usually I have difficulties in crowds. “I felt I could be more useful in an editorial capacity,” I said. “Besides, the family was well-represented.”

“I was telling him about the catalog of cats,” said Constance. “Did you know about that in advance?”

“No. Elly is hard to rehearse. I don't think she knew what she was going to say. But I saw the other stuff.”

“Actually, I found that even more impressive,” Shawn said. “What your older sister said about the drowning. I was trying to reconcile that with my memories of your mother—you know, in department meetings. She seemed so diffident and respectful, which was ridiculous. We'd known about a certain type of heroism all along—you know, from her books. But I'd never pictured her as an action hero. It was like a missing piece in the puzzle.”

I closed my eyes momentarily. “Not drowned,” I said. “Everyone survived. That was the point.”

The story went like this: Around the time Elly was first diagnosed, when I was seven or eight, we spent part of the summer on Block Island off the Rhode Island coast. We were staying with the Engels, whom my parents had known since college—their children were our ages. We lit a fire on the beach at the north point of the island near the lighthouse, and the kids went swimming. But a riptide pulled Stephanie Engel and my older sister out to sea, maybe half a mile, as we watched. Then Monroe Engel and Brenda jumped in, but Monroe was soon in trouble, because he wasn't a strong swimmer. It was just getting dark.

I was on the shore. What I remember was a pair of newlyweds, who were sitting in the sand nearby. “I can't believe I am witnessing a tragedy,” said the man. “These children will be orphaned before our eyes.”

Perhaps he also was an English professor or a writer. “But why aren't you doing anything?” asked the woman. She stripped to her bra and panties—this was the part I found most interesting—and jumped in. Soon she also was in trouble. Elly was crying, and I sat beside her in the sand. Already I knew I couldn't comfort her directly. I didn't even know why she was so upset. I could only guess it wasn't quite what you'd expect.

This was the part of it my older sister told at the funeral:

… We were really far out when the riptide seemed to turn and suddenly I could swim again. I started to swim for shore. Halfway back, there was Mom, swimming to get us. She saw me and she kept on swimming. I don't think she questioned for a moment what she should do. I was swimming and Stephanie was not. So she went on, found her and held her up for the next hour, and told her stories while the fog came in, the Coast Guard was called and boats were found …

“It was very literary,” Rosenheim said now. “Everything your family does is very literary. It's as if someone is writing a script. She was talking about this random person, but of course really she was talking about your autistic sister. That's the girl who was always drowning during your whole childhood. The rest of you, it was sink or swim. Your mother didn't even break her stroke.”

I decided at that moment to dislike Shawn Rosenheim, and decided also I would pay him back for what he had just said. Maybe I would pay him back three times, three separate ways. Maybe I, like my autistic sister, could refuse to be consoled.

“There was an old guy,” I said. “He was the hero, not my mother. He was surf-casting near the point. The people on the shore were calling out, and the boat thought they were waving them off the rocks. So they started to pull offshore, and this guy realized that was going to be a problem. So he went in as well, but instead of trying to save the others, he took the current and let it carry him straight out to the boat. He brought them in, where they picked up everybody. My sister was the only one who managed to swim in by herself.”

“I think it's possible to hit a seam in a riptide,” Constance said.

She spoke like someone who understood about boats, and swimming also. She spoke like someone who knew everything. “Did you see Jack Shoots at the service?” I asked. “He was there. Did you know him?”

She gave me a look that told me not to be stupid. “He looked old.”

I also had found him diminished, gray, and small. This was months before I'd first met Traci or seen her synopsis, and I hadn't thought about him in a long time. Even so, I didn't have much interest in him at that moment—a successful lawyer, married, two children. I had read my mother's poem on the occasion of his daughter's birth (“the skull, its perfect eggshell full, hazed, haloed with the usual hair”). In my memory he was a different kind of person, and perhaps in Constance's also. “I like that,” said Shawn Rosenheim. “I like people whose names are complete sentences. I once had a student named Chace Lyons.”

Suddenly he seemed very drunk. The bar had emptied out as we were talking. I turned back to the lady. “I find that so hard to believe,” I said.

“Did you talk to him?”

“Yes, but he was very weepy, very sad. Then Elly interrupted. She wanted to discuss a house portrait he had commissioned.”

Constance smiled. “He wasn't sad when I talked to him. He said something very strange. He took me by the elbow and asked about a line from Hamlet, where he's yelling at his mother, and he says something like ‘for at your age, the heyday in the blood is tame.'”

I stared at her perfect, ageless face. “I would have thought that was pretty straightforward.”

“Me, too. He asked me whether this was a reference to menopause or some seventeenth-century belief that older women couldn't experience orgasm. Then he said your mother could have cleared this up at once if she were still alive.”

I stared at her. “That's disgusting.”

“Well, it turns out he's a disgusting little man. He told me how a justice of the Supreme Court had married his daughter. I mean, officiated at the wedding.”

The vampires were all gone. Shawn Rosenheim leaned back in his chair, the crown of his head against the wall. His eyes were closed. Then he collapsed forward onto the tabletop. “It's okay,” Constance said. “I drugged his beer. Either that or we were boring him. Let's get out of here.”

Once outside, she was like a teenager. We held hands, and I kissed her against a wall, only a little before she pulled away. “Let's go back to Mass MoCA. Let's see if we can sneak in. We can make out in the boiler house.”

Of course none of this was really happening, or at least not much of it. “I've got another idea,” I said. “Why don't we go back to my mother's house?”

That's what we did: we climbed up the back staircase. “Oh,” said Constance, “this is just like her office in Stetson Hall. It's like a museum. I remember that little statuette of Milton. And your sister's painting of Rudyard Kipling's house in Brattleboro.”

She made a circuit of the room, peering at little objects in the dark. Everything she did was more an act of homage than I might have wished. “Clara Park's office—how kinky,” she giggled. “Do you think it's haunted?”

“No,” I said.

“I hope it is. I feel like I can finally pay her back.”

“Keep that thought,” I said.

We embraced, and then after a little while I fell asleep on the narrow bed. Past midnight, when I woke up, she was already gone. I heard a noise in the hallway. “No,” I murmured, but after half an hour of listening to my mother's footsteps up and down the corridor—after her first stroke, she'd dragged her left leg a little bit—I got up to investigate. I didn't have to get dressed, because I'd fallen asleep in my clothes. I walked between the bookcases, and when I got to the front of the house, I looked down over the banister where my mother had fallen. A tiny blue carpet now covered the discoloration in the wood. My father had bought it in a woman's cooperative in Istanbul.

I didn't have to worry about making any noise, because my father would have taken out his hearing aids, and my sister would have put in her earplugs. Nothing could have disturbed them, not even the sudden crash down below, where Magnus, my mother's calico cat, had leapt up onto her little desk opposite the front door and knocked something over. There was always a night-light burning down there.

When I got back to my bed, I lay on my back, rubbing my face and eyes until Nicola called. “I'm trying to explain to Abigail how ridiculous your family is,” she said. “I'm trying to explain to her about the serial killer your father wanted to move in with you when you were kids. But she doesn't believe it.”

That's not why my family was ridiculous, I thought. But I played along. “He wasn't exactly a serial killer,” I said. “He only strangled his wives. Besides, he was down on his luck after he got out of the hospital.”

“You mean out of jail.”

“No, the first time he was found not guilty by reason of insanity. It was only after the second time that he went to jail.”

I paused for a moment, then soldiered on. “He was a very plausible fellow, very distinguished-looking, a gifted singer and musician. Everyone thought it was a singular phenomenon. My father testified for him at his first trial, because he'd been his roommate at Harvard and at prep school before that. His best friend, really.”

It was a relief to talk to Nicola, though not in the conventional way. Often she wasn't aware of the games I played with her. In this one, I would try to reproduce for her the words and inflections that my father might have used with my mother long ago. I liked being a source of entertainment, to be laughed at rather than with, especially if people didn't quite understand what I was doing. “My mother said no,” I said. “She was … protective of us.”

“Hunh. She probably didn't want to do up a new room.”

“You're too hard on her,” I mumbled. “Is Abigail there?”

“These are just stories I get from you. I never met the lady.” Then she paused. “She came to help with Adrian.”

I lay in the dark on the twin bed, remembering my father as if he had already died. Once when I was eight, after Uncle Dick was out of jail, my father had taken me down to the Eastern Shore of Maryland to see him where he was living in a fishing shack next to the water, a single room on stilts, heated with a woodstove. He was there with a much older man, and I was curious about the whole arrangement, mostly because I'd never met a murderer before and didn't know what I was supposed to say. My father, who was big on etiquette, told me it would be impolite to mention anything at all about the actual crime. As I compromise, I proposed asking Uncle Dick whether he had enjoyed being in prison, but my father said that was a terrible idea. “Indiscreet,” he said.

Here's what I remember about the fishing shack: to the right of the cast-iron stove stood a wicker basket for scrap wood, in this case a pile of broken, splintered bowling pins.

“His name was Dick Holden,” I said. “Even at Cedar Junction he was still writing theatrical productions for the inmates. Musical comedies about prison life. Then they let him out again, and he resolved our dilemma by drinking himself to death.”

“Obliging.”

“My father thought so.” I was enjoying this, for reasons I might have found difficult to explain. “Is Adrian asleep now?” I asked. And then in a little while: “Did I ever tell you about Jack Shoots?”

Later, after she'd hung up, I lay on my back and remembered the stupid stories my father had told me when I was a kid: How his table manners had been so impressive, the city of New York had erected a glass case in Sheridan Square for him to take his meals, and all the schoolchildren would spend their lunch money to come down on the subway and watch him eat. How his father had once taken him to the bean mines of Boston (now closed down), and for one awful moment he had gotten to see, skewered by the lantern light, one of the raw galleries of uncut bean. How the farmers in Connecticut had eaten poison ivy sandwiches on the first day of spring.

I got up and went over to the file cabinet. I had my mother's pencil flashlight, which I held in my mouth so I could use both hands. I squatted down and pulled out the second-to-last drawer. Earlier in the day, leafing through my mother's poems, I had seen it there: a manila folder labeled “Jack.”

In it were his letters over a period of twenty years. Here is a sample. Left-handed, he had terrible penmanship:

July 1, Madrid

Dearest Clara,

I hope it's okay for me to call you that. I'm here in the Escorial taking a break from being a tourist. Prado this morning. It's very hot. I keep going over in my mind the last time I saw you, when you gave me a hug and a kiss in your downstairs hallway under that wall of books. How was I supposed to interpret that? I mean, am I crazy to think about the things I think about? I go over these scenes over and over, replaying them in my mind. Even here I think about it, in a different language. It's very hot in the hotel and hard for me to sleep. I keep on thinking of the things I could have done or said, is that crazy?…

Here's her reply, dated two weeks later:

Dear Jack,

I'm sending this to the address you left for me. I hope it finds you. I'm so pleased you are liking Spain. What I found astonishing in the Escorial is the amount of work involved in it. I read a book once that described the sheer volume of Philip II's correspondence, something like two million documents with his signature, and another two million marked with his initials in the margin, which he had obviously studied. Here he was, the most powerful man in Europe, slaving away over his desk like a clerk in a Dickens novel. I picture him in a black cap with an ink-spot on his chin. Terrible eyesight, I suppose. As for the Prado, what I remember most is that little gallery right at the top of the stairs in the east wing, with some little Flemish landscapes. Usually the big pieces—
The Garden of Earthly Delights,
for example—leave me a little cold. I feel I'm not really looking at them, except through veils of memory or preconception.…