The Afterlife (6 page)

The marriages, and the families, went on. So many outings, to build up their children’s childhood—beaches, mountains, shopping malls, Disney World. So much shared sunshine. Why, then, did Fred’s scattered memories of Carlyle tend to
be shadowy? One Christmastime in Brookline, Fred, responding to a ruthless battering sound from below, went into his cellar and discovered his brother-in-law, sinisterly half-lit by the fluorescent tubes above the workbench, pounding something glittering gripped in the vise. The other man’s eyes, looking up and squinting with the change of focus, had that watery, warm—was it sheepish?—look they had worn that day of his wedding, as he came up the shady road beneath the hemlocks and birches. “Santa’s workshop,” he explained huskily. He hid with his body what he was doing. He looked demonic, or damned, in the flickering basement light. Fred backed up the stairs, as embarrassed as if he had surprised the other man undressed.

Betsy explained it to him later, in bed. To save money, Carlyle was making some of their Christmas presents this year—silver dollars drilled through and beaten into rings for the boys, and strung into necklaces for the girls. It was the sort of thing he used to do as a boy; he had been creative, artistic. It was sweet, Betsy thought.

To Fred, even this exercise in thrift savored of extravagance—silver dollars! “Are they that hard up?” he asked. “What’s happened to all Carlyle’s money?” He had always resented it that Carlyle had simply
had
money, whereas he had had to make it, a crumb at a time.

Well, according to what Betsy had gathered from Germaine, who out of loyalty of course didn’t like to say much, six children in private schools and colleges aren’t cheap, and the stock market had been off under Nixon, and Carlyle had trouble trimming his expensive tastes—the M.G. convertible, the English suits ordered tailor-made from London even though he rarely wore suits, the beach house in Malibu in addition to their seven-bedroom Mission-style home in Bel Air. The people he dealt with expected him to have these things.

“Who
does
he deal with?” Fred asked.

“
You
know,” Betsy said, in the voice of one who didn’t exactly know, either. “Movie people. He’s involved in a movie now, Germaine did allow, that’s just
sucking
the money out of him. He’s in with this guy, Lanny somebody, who was supposed to make a low-budget blue movie with an adventure theme as well, so it would not just be for the triple-X theatres but could get into the softer-core drive-ins, but who without asking or telling Carlyle went and rented one of those sound stages that cost twenty-five thousand a day or something fantastic for these episodes that don’t exactly tie in yet, since he doesn’t have a real script, it’s all in his head. He even bought an old frame house somewhere and burned it down for one scene. Germaine thinks Carlyle is being taken for a
hor
rible ride but is too proud to say anything. You remember all that buddy-buddy skiing and hunting he used to do?—those people used to take advantage of him, too. He has this old-fashioned sense of honor and can’t defend himself. He gets caught up in a macho sort of thing. Furthermore, he likes being around these movie people, especially the little porno starlets. She wishes
you’d
talk to him.”

“Me? What would I say?” Fred’s stomach pinched, there in the dark. He was still afraid of Carlyle, slightly—those flat-lidded eyes, the way he could throw a ball that made your hands hurt.

“Just open the subject. Let him tell you how it is.”

“The tried-and-true talking cure,” he said bitterly. A decade later, he still missed the woman he had given up—dreamed of her, in amazing, all-but-forgotten detail. He would never love anyone that much again. He had come to see that the heart, like a rubber ball, loses bounce, and eventually goes dead. He did feel a faint pity, smelling his brother-in-law’s pain in the house. There had been a physical
deterioration as well as a financial. Carlyle’s doctor had told him to take afternoon naps, and it seemed he was often upstairs, in a kind of hibernation, from which he would emerge red-eyed, wearing soft moccasins. To his counterculture clothes his health problems had added a macrobiotic diet, and the clothes hung loose on his reduced, big-boned frame.

One day between Christmas and New Year’s, when all the others had gone ice-skating on the Brookline Reservoir, Fred walked into the kitchen, where Carlyle was heating water for a cup of herbal tea, and asked, “How’s it going?”

The other man wore an embroidered green dashiki hanging loose outside dirty old painter pants. His hair had vanished on top, and he had let it grow long at the back; with the long graying wisps straggling at the nape of his neck, he seemed a dazed old woman, fussing at her broth. His bare arms looked white and chilly. Years in California had thinned his blood. Fred said, “If you’d like to borrow a sweater, I have plenty.”

“Actually, I just turned up the thermostat.” Carlyle looked over at him mischievously, knowing that thrifty Fred would resent this, and continued his aggressive tack. “Everything’s going great,” he said. “Life’s all
samsara
, Freddy. The Terwilliger girls may have been stirring you up about this particular film project I have in the works, but, like they say, no sweat. It’s money in the bank. When you bring your gang out this summer, we should have a rough print to show you.”

“That would be nice,” Fred said. To be brotherly, he was wearing the ring Carlyle had given him; its roughly pounded edges scratched his skin, and an inspection of the basement had disclosed that a number of his drill bits, meant for wood and not silver alloy, had been ruinously dulled.

The film, when they saw it that June in L.A., also seemed crudely made. The young flesh, photographed in too hard a
light, in rooms rented by the hour, had a repulsive sheen, a smooth falseness as of tinted and perfumed candles. The adventure parts of the film failed to link up. The burning house was on the screen only a few garish, orange seconds. Fred was struck by the actors’ and actresses’ voices, recorded with a curious flat echo that made him realize how filtered, how trained, the voices in real movies are. Carlyle’s profile had been fascinating in the dark, the screen’s bright moments glittering in the corner of his eye. When the lights came on, his tender-skinned face was flushed. He said sheepishly to his in-laws, “Hope it wasn’t too blue for you.”

“Maybe not blue enough,” Fred allowed himself to say. It was the nearest to a negative word he had ever dared, since that time on the Vineyard when Carlyle had laughed at his pipsqueak indignation.

Now it was his turn to be amused, when, at dinner afterwards, over Hawaiian drinks and Chinese food, while the wives held tensely silent, Carlyle hoped aloud that Fred would consider investing in the film, toward distribution and advertising costs, which were all that was left to get the package off the ground. One more boost and the movie would make everybody a bundle. He could offer eighteen-percent annual interest, just like MasterCard in reverse, or up to a quarter of the net profits, depending on how many hundred thousand Fred could see his way clear to invest. Plus, he promised, he would pay Fred’s principal back right off the top, before he even paid himself. He knew Boston real estate had been going through the roof lately and Fred must be desperate for a little diversification.

Carlyle’s mien, in the shadowy restaurant with its guttering hurricane lamps and pseudo-Polynesian idols, wasn’t easy to read; his strained-sounding voice, almost inaudible, wheezed on doggedly, and a watery fixation glazed over the old glint—
the guilty glance from the bottom of something—that Fred had caught or imagined on the hemlock-shaded road twenty-five years before.

Fred didn’t laugh. He said he would think about it and talk it over with Betsy. Naturally, she had a stake in all his business decisions and was always consulted. In private he asked her, “How important is it to you as a sister, if this would bail Germaine out?”

She said, “It isn’t, and I don’t think it would anyway.”

Fred felt contaminated by the other man’s naked plea, and could hardly wait until he got away, safely back to his own coast. He was too cowardly to turn Carlyle down himself. He left it to the Terwilliger sisters, Betsy to Germaine via long-distance telephone, to pass him the word: No way. Fred Emmet, too, could give a brotherly lesson in limits.

When Carlyle Saughterfield, less than a decade after his failed film had emptied his pockets, died, it was in a movie theatre. The girl next to him—not a date; they had just been introduced—noticed him at one point softly thumping his own chest, and when the lights went up the tall man was slumped as if asleep. Impassive. Wearing a green dashiki, and not much older than his father had been.

Germaine and he, some years before, had gotten divorced, and Fred and Betsy, too, as the Terwilliger sisters continued their lives in parallel. Betsy had never really forgiven him for the insult of that old affair. Germaine, a week after Betsy had phoned Fred with the stunning news, called him herself to invite him to a pagan ceremony, a scattering of Carlyle’s ashes in a tidal creek north of Boston where the dead man used to sail and swim as a boy.

This scattering had been his idea, as was Fred’s being invited.
Germaine said, “He loved you,” which sounded right, since families teach us how love exists in a realm above liking or disliking, coexisting with indifference, rivalry, and even antipathy. What with his health troubles, ominous family history, and nothing much else to do, Carlyle had done a lot of thinking about his own death: from beyond the grave, it appeared, he was trying to arrange one more group photo. The children were adult and dispersed, most on the coasts but one in Chicago and another in New Mexico. A ragged group gathered on an appointed wooden bridge, on a February day so clear it did not feel cold.

Fred dipped his hand into the box of calcium bits that had been Carlyle’s big bones and, imitating the others, carefully dropped them over the rough, green-painted rail. He had imagined that the tide would carry these fragments called ashes toward the sea, but in fact they sank, like chips of shell, tugged but not floated by the pellucid ebbing water. Sinking, doing a slow twirling dance, they caught the light. Two of Fred’s nieces—young women in defiant bloom, with ruddy faces and blond hair and pale eyes flat across the top—beamed at him forgivingly, knowingly. The sunshine seemed a lesson being administered, a universal moral; it glinted off of everyone’s protein strands of hair and wool hats and sweaters and chilly nailed hands and the splintered green boards of the bridge and the clustered, drifting, turning little fragments in the icy sky-blue tide. In this instant of illumination all those old photographs and those old conglomerate times Carlyle had insisted upon were revealed to Fred as priceless—treasure, stored up against the winter that had arrived.

Geoffrey Parrish, approaching sixty, had long enjoyed an uneasy relationship with the stars. In childhood, when we assume the world to have been elaborately arrayed for our own benefit, with a virtual eternity allowed for inspection of its many large and mysterious parts, he had taken the stars, like the clouds overhead, for granted. His mother knew the Big Dipper, and Orion, and on a summer evening might point out, in a voice of unaccountable excitement, Venus—a white shining puncture in the blue that was deepening above the gory sunset. For a moment or two at night, he might become aware, as a skater is suddenly aware of the dark water he skims across, of the speckled heavens, a dust of distant worlds, between the massy silhouettes of the black treetops. But in his back yard, where such revelations would find him, he was generally intent upon catching fireflies or feeling the throb of his breath and heartbeat as he ran, late for his bedtime, toward the tall lit windows of the house.

Wynken, Blynken, and Nod
, illustrated by Vernon Grant, had been one of the big thin books, smelling like the oilcloth on the kitchen table, that his mother would read to him at bedtime, and somehow it seemed to be taking place among the stars:

The image upset him, conveying a seethe of activity that went on without him, all night:

Wynken and Blynken turned out to be his, the listener’s, two little eyes, and Nod his little head. It was a hideous thought, like two eggs and a cabbage bouncing around in this glimmering soup, and in merciful escape from the unthinkable he let himself be lulled by his mother’s enclosing voice as it read aloud, in a grave voice sweetened by the approach of the end:

High school and college brought him word of what the stars really were, how senselessly large and distant and numerous, but such intellectual shocks were cushioned by the distractions of co-education—the female bodies with their supple heft, their powdered and perfumed auras, their fuzzy sweaters and silken blouses, and the glimpses, at the edges, of elastic underwear. Why do girls wear skirts, with their strange nether openness and vulnerability, while boys get to wear trousers? And why do girls like to talk so much, and what do they say to each other all the time? Such questions, and courtship, and marriage, eclipsed the stars, which yet seemed to hang waiting for Geoffrey to get to know them. One summer,
while renting a seaside place with a long deck, he had purchased a pocket guide to the heavens and (with difficulty, for the blazing points strewn across the black dome overhead made a poor match with the little diagrams picked out by dying flashlight) taught himself the summer triangle of bright stars, Deneb and Altair and Vega, and a few prominent constellations—Andromeda’s flying V, and cruciform Cygnus, and boxy little Lyra, and Cepheus, shaped like a house in a child’s drawing.