London Calling (4 page)

I pointed out, “Aunt Elizabeth said he remained mentally sharp until the end.”

“Martin Mehan? No way. He wasn’t even mentally sharp in the beginning. He didn’t have much to lose. He was clueless at forty, and he was clueless at eighty.”

“Then how did he become this famous guy who knew the Kennedys and all?”

“He got assigned to work for Ambassador Kennedy. Pure luck, I guess. How bright could he have been? He didn’t even know his wife was an alcoholic.”

“An alcoholic? Did she drink that much?”

“She drank every day. You’d have never known it, though. She’d handle herself at family gatherings, except when she’d start to tell that crazy angel story.”

I answered knowingly. “About the nine First Fridays.”

“Yeah. That’s the one. Old Martin would cut her off as soon as he could.” Dad took an openmouthed swig from the bottle. He exhaled loudly, then said, “But he got just as crazy at the end—hearing voices, talking out loud to people who weren’t there.”

This was all news to me. I asked, “How do you know about these things?”

“Your mother,” he answered, as if that was obvious. “She used to tell me all about him, back when we first got together. She was trying to get away from all of this . . . family history stuff.”

Dad looked at the wall of portraits, and his lip curled up in anger. “This wonderful family line would be over now if it wasn’t for me—your mother and me, obviously. That’s what it’s all about to them. The family line.” He turned away from the wall, pulled out his wallet, and showed me an old photo. It was of a young man in a uniform. “Well, guess what? I’ve got a family line, too.”

I stared hard at the photo. “Grandfather Conway?”

“Right.”

“What kind of uniform is that?”

“United States Marine Corps.”

“I’ve never seen that photo before.”

“I’m not surprised. It’s not hanging on the wall at home, is it?”

Dad seemed to get increasingly embittered after that. He soon stopped talking, but he kept drinking. By eleven o’clock, he had passed out and was snoring loudly. I thought about talking a nap, too, but I was afraid of having another real-place dream, another encounter with a clueless eighty-year-old man armed with a silver letter opener.

At four-thirty, we all drove in Aunt Elizabeth’s Maxima to the funeral home. When I got inside, I walked right up to Nana’s open casket, knelt down, and prayed. I had done the exact same thing at my grandfather’s wake four years before, but this time I felt a physical presence around me. This time I felt that Nana was not lying in the casket; she was hovering around me somehow, in the ether. It was a thrilling feeling, and not at all frightening.

I remember a strong smell of flowers, and a steady stream of elderly people walking past us and shaking hands. We stood in a row to greet them: Aunt Elizabeth, Mom, Dad, Margaret, and me. However, and this bothered me, the people who supposedly came to honor Nana’s death weren’t even talking about her. They were talking about Grandfather Mehan—how important he was to the church, and to the country, and so on. They actually said stuff like “There’s a great woman behind every great man, and she was it.”

I kept nodding, shaking hands, and saying thank you for two hours, until the elderly people all started to look alike. Then, near the end, one woman entered who looked different. She was tall and muscular, with rosy brown skin. She was dressed in a work uniform—white pants and a maroon top with the words “Home HealthCare” stitched over the pocket. She came through our line, like everybody else. Then she walked over near the wall, took out a set of rosary beads, and started to pray silently.

When the line finally died out, I approached the woman and stood in front of her until she looked up. Then I grimaced apologetically. “Excuse me. Did you take care of my grandmother?”

The woman smiled a dazzling white smile. She answered “Yes, sir” in an accent I had never heard before. “You must be Jimmy. Your grandmother talked about you all the time.”

I recoiled slowly. “Me? No. I’m Martin.”

“Yes. I am sorry about your grandmother. She was a real nice lady.”

“But you just called me Jimmy.”

“Yes, she called you Jimmy.”

“She did?”

“I thought so. Maybe not. Maybe I have it wrong.”

I leaned closer. “But if she wasn’t talking about me all the time, who was she talking about?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“I’m her only grandson.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Was there a boy around named Jimmy? A boy in the neighborhood? Or in church?”

The woman started to get flustered. She looked around until she spotted Aunt Elizabeth a safe distance away. “Miss Elizabeth said she must be talking to her grandson. So I thought that was you, and I thought that your name was Jimmy. That is all. I am sorry.”

The woman backed away slowly, but I followed. “So, did she talk to this Jimmy boy a lot? Did she talk to him like he was
really
there? Or was it more . . . delirious-like?”

The woman turned and walked toward the door. “I am not supposed to talk about my clients, sir. I am sorry. Miss Elizabeth would not like that.”

When we reached the doorway, I dared to put a hand on her muscular arm. “Please, ma’am. I just want to know what my nana was doing at the end of her life. It’s just private information between you and me. It’s for nobody else. Certainly not for my aunt Elizabeth.”

The woman smiled kindly, but she continued on her way. I walked behind her, out onto the street and through a clump of smokers. When we were past them, she finally stopped and replied, “It was only near the end, sir. The last week of her life. That’s when she started talking to Jimmy. It was like he was
really
there. Not like delirium. She never did nothing like that before. Goodbye, now.”

I stopped still and watched her as she walked away.

I remained out on that sidewalk for a long time afterward, puzzling over the woman’s words. I stared down the dark, unfamiliar street as if looking for a sign. I listened to the noises of the city. And I breathed in the cigarette smell, like the smoke from a distant fire.

THE PHILCO 20 DELUXE

After the funeral, I returned to Princeton Junction and to my life as a basement dweller. For about two months, I emerged only to trudge to the Acme and back and to attend Sunday-morning mass. I insisted that we go to the Resurrection parish church in Princeton instead of to the All Souls Chapel. I was afraid of running into Hank Lowery again.

I continued to sleep a lot, too. I kept expecting my grandfather to appear in another dream, especially right after we got back from Brookline, but he didn’t. Still, I remained fearful of him, and of Lowery, and of the dark.

That’s where the Philco 20 Deluxe came in. I carried my dad’s old TV into the storage area and covered it with a white sheet. I put the Philco on the nightstand in its place. From that night on, I used the radio’s round amber dial, glowing as dull and hazy as an ancient moon, as a nightlight. And I used its tuner, set between stations, to fill the creepy silence in the basement with the soft rush of static.

It was after I started sleeping with the radio on that I had the weirdest real-place dream of all. I had fallen asleep at nine p.m. to the radio’s scratchy whisperings. Sometime around three a.m., though, I woke up. I was lying in bed, looking at the dial, and I heard a voice. I concentrated harder to hear inside the static, thinking that I had picked up a stray channel. Then I noticed a smell. The smell from my grandfather’s study. The musty smell of the past.

Suddenly I became aware of another person in the room. I sat upright, totally alert, straining to see in the dark. That’s when it happened. A boy—small, thin, dressed in mud-brown clothes—leaned out from behind the radio and whispered, “Johnny, will you help me?”

I remember thinking,
He’s got an English accent. A thick one. So I’m definitely dreaming.

“It’s me. It’s Jimmy.”

The name certainly didn’t surprise me. I answered him confidently. “Okay, so you’re Jimmy.”

“Your gran, did she tell you about me? Did she ask you to help me?”

“Gran? My grandmother?”

“Yeah, that’s her.”

“She, uh—maybe she did. She did talk about a Jimmy.”

“There you go. That’s me, then.”

“How did you talk to my grandmother?”

He looked over toward the Philco. “Through the radio. I talked to your grandfather, too.”

“My grandfather? Martin Mehan?”

“Yeah. That’s him. He wouldn’t help, though.”

“When? When did you talk to him?”

In response, the boy turned his face away, slowly. When he answered, he sounded perplexed. “I don’t know.”

“Because my grandfather is dead. He has been for four years.”

“Yeah? Well, when I talked to him, he was alive.”

“My grandmother is dead, too.”

He got very still. Then he whispered, “When?”

“Two months ago.”

He nodded rapidly. Then he spoke with more confidence. “Right. Okay. That’s why I’m here, then. She told me to talk to you.”

“To me? Why?”

“She said you would help.”

I thought of Nana’s distant voice on the phone. “So . . . my grandmother said that I would help you?”

“Yeah.” He held up one finger, like he had remembered something. “Yeah. She told me to tell you that your real name isn’t Martin at all. It’s John. She said I should say that so you’d know she sent me. It’s like a letter of introduction.”

“Okay. Okay.” I leaned toward him to try to get a better look. “That’s who I am. But who are you?”

“I told you already. I’m Jimmy.”

“Jimmy?” I racked my brain to find a sensible question to ask after that, but all I came up with was “So . . . Jimmy, are you really here? In my room? Or am I dreaming?”

“I don’t think it’s either one, Johnny. It’s something else entirely. We’re at a point here, you and me.”

I began to feel very confused, and then very scared, like I was losing control of my body. I couldn’t look at the boy again. I couldn’t talk to him, either. So I spoke aloud, to myself, “I’m going to wake up now.”

And I did. I found myself sitting upright in the exact scene of the dream. But there was no boy standing in the corner.

I stared at his spot for about three minutes. Then I started to tremble, like it was freezing cold. I was so shook-up that I forced myself to get out of bed, turn on the lights, and walk upstairs. I walked all the way to Mom’s bedroom and placed my hand on the doorknob, ready to confess every frightening, crazy detail.

Then I got ahold of myself and stopped. I was too afraid to go back downstairs, so I retreated to the living room. I turned on the TV and muted the sound. I eventually fell asleep there, in the blue flicker of the screen. When the light of daybreak woke me up, I clicked the TV off and hurried back down to the basement.

I sat on my bed and looked at the radio for a long, long time. Then I walked into the computer room and logged on to the Internet. I got into a search engine and typed “Philco 20 Deluxe.”

Over the next few hours, I discovered a whole world of radio repairers and sellers and historians. I found out how to download wiring schemas and how to send for new tubes. I learned that my particular radio was marketed to the wealthiest customers in the 1930s and 1940s. It ranked with other classic Art Deco radios, such as the Atwater Kent 165 and the Zenith tombstone. I learned that the “cathedral” design took its name from the rounded arch of a cathedral. It was meant to discourage people from putting things on top of the radio, which would overheat its tubes and wires.

Aunt Elizabeth had given me the radio in a sturdy cardboard box with a large packing envelope that included the original bill of sale and some other papers. One of the papers was a card from Nana to Grandfather Mehan. It said, in curly blue ink:

The envelope also included a small metal plate with the words
MARTIN MEHAN, U.S. EMBASSY
engraved on it. The plate was supposed to be screwed into the radio, and it had two holes for that purpose. But a quick check revealed that although the nameplate had once been attached, it had been unscrewed, and removed, and never returned.

The back of the radio was completely open, for cooling purposes. It contained metal boxes, glass vacuum tubes, and assorted old wires. It displayed a list of patents owned by the Philadelphia Storage Battery Company (Philco), and information about voltage (115) and wattage (75). The radio had a number written in ink at the top: USE83040. I double-checked the pile of original papers and, sure enough, saw the same number on the receipt from the U.S. Embassy in London, dated August 30, 1940. Below that number was another, shorter one: 291240. This number was written with black ink in another hand, a sloppier one.

*                  *                  *

After my morning nap and a skimpy lunch, I sat down to IM with Pinak and Manetti. We corresponded about once per day, even more often in the days leading up to our meeting at All Souls about the vandalism incident. Pinak, who believed in justice, didn’t think anything bad would happen to us. Manetti, who believed only in Manetti, didn’t seem to care what happened. Personally, I couldn’t see any good coming out of this meeting, for me or for anyone else.

We were usually all online around noon. Sometimes two girls from All Souls checked in, too, through Manetti. Their real names were Penny and Stephanie. Penny was a scholarship kid whose father taught French at All Souls. Stephanie went there the normal way—that is, at great expense to her family.

The best thing about those girls was that they hated Lowery and anyone who would hang around him. I appreciated that more than they could ever know. The subject of Lowery came up often, and they were always happy to trash him with us. Inevitably, that subject came up on the day of our meeting with Father Thomas.

I felt sick at the thought. I didn’t answer. Neither did anybody else, until Penny typed in:

When it was just the two of us, I tried, indirectly, to ask Pinak about my dream.

I signed off and trudged into my room for a nap. But I didn’t lie down. I was afraid to. I was afraid I’d have another encounter with an English boy who claimed to know my dead grandmother. I had a terrible feeling that I had crossed some sort of line, mentally, with that last dream. In every other dream I’d ever had, real-place or not, I quickly realized that it was only a dream. I woke up, snapped out of it, and felt silly for ever believing it was real.

But that didn’t happen with this dream.

Well into the afternoon, I was still wondering if that English boy, that Jimmy, was real.