The Laments (5 page)

“It’s the clothing,” countered Howard.

“If I didn’t know better, I’d say he was adopted,” said Rose.

“Mother, what an awful thing to say!”

“Darling,” replied Rose, “if everybody said
nice
things all the time, truth would be in frightfully short supply. Now, about this name, Will. I much prefer Harold. . . .”

“His name is settled, Mother,” said Julia.

“I see.” Rose sniffed.

As for Dr. Underberg, he would carry the secret of the boy’s parentage to his grave, which, unfortunately, he attained only a month later, when he was on holiday.

His wispy halo of hair was no shelter from the sun, so Dr. Underberg wore a kaffiyeh as he ambled along the steep dunes of Port Jeremiah. As sixteen-year-old Tom Price tore across the sand on his Triumph 3TZ, his face broke into a grin at the chance to scare the hell out of an Arab. He raced the motorcycle up a dune, but misjudged the drop on the other side and barely kept his balance when he landed. Then he noticed the kaffiyeh flapping in ribbons around his front wheel. A small, ruddy man lay in the tracks of the cycle, thirty feet back.

After throwing up the three bottles of beer that had launched him on this folly, the boy staggered over to the body. “Are you hurt?” he asked.

“I’m perfectly fine,” came the reply, though Underberg made no effort to right himself.

“I’d better get a doctor,” said the boy, preparing to climb back on his bike.

“I
am
a doctor!” came the reply.

The boy, stricken to learn that his victim was white
and
a member of the medical establishment, realized that something terrible had happened, and that he was responsible.

“Would you mind straightening out my legs? I believe they’re twisted.”

“Your legs are fine,” said the boy.

“Fine? Are you insane?” came the muffled reply.

But Dr. Underberg must have recognized in the boy’s tone the truth; for at the same moment, the boy gained the sobriety to realize that the doctor’s back must have been broken.

“Oh God,” he cried. “I’ll go back to town and get an ambulance!”

“Nonsense, pick me up!”

The youth hesitated, but the doctor was insistent, so he reached under the man’s shoulders and knees and lifted him as tenderly as he’d always imagined he would carry his first love. Tears rolled down the boy’s cheeks.

“I’m so, so sorry, sir,” moaned the boy.

“Stop that immediately!” snapped the doctor. “This is no time to cry! Now, I wish to see the sunset!”

Following the doctor’s instructions, young Tom carried Underberg’s limp body over another dune on the peninsula until a molten sun became visible over the Indian Ocean. Digging a mound of sand around the doctor, the boy scrambled to position him for the best view of the horizon, moving his legs and anchoring them in the sand as if he were a manikin.

“What should I do now?” asked the boy.

“Be quiet and enjoy the sunset!” snapped the doctor. Then he addressed the Almighty: “And since it’s my last, it had better be a
bloody good on
e
!”

The sunset was as rare as it was glorious: a mackerel sky of coral-pink wedges, their tips edged in brilliant amber, advanced across the heavens, followed by a proscenium arch of purple and indigo flourishes, with golden beams soaring into the firmament like a ladder of angels. As Dr. Underberg uttered groans of satisfaction between his last urgent breaths, he was interrupted by the sound of weeping.

“I’m sorry,” the boy sobbed. “I’m so sorry, sir.”

For a brief moment, the doctor quite forgot his own crisis. He realized that this piteous young creature would spend the rest of his life saddled with the burden of his death. It didn’t seem fair. So he asked the boy his name, and the boy replied.

“Well, don’t worry, Tom,” said Underberg firmly. “A doctor knows that accidents happen. And a sunset like this inspires one to forgive. . . .”

“Forgive?” echoed the boy.

“Forgive and forget,” sighed the doctor as his eyes closed.

SINCE DR. UNDERBERG
had been an orphan, there was no family to hold a memorial service; that duty was left to the hospital director, who appealed to Nurse Pritchard for details on the deceased.

“Details?” replied the matron.

“His habits, his eccentricities, a funny story, perhaps?”

“He was the finest doctor I have ever known, sir.” Nurse Pritchard frowned. “And I don’t see how ‘funny stories’ would be appropriate at a funeral!”

“Good Lord, woman, all I’m asking for are a few anecdotes, lovable flaws!” cried the director.

“He had no flaws to speak of,” replied the loyal Mrs. Pritchard. “He often spoke to God,” she added, neglecting to mention that it was usually a torrent of abuse.

“Ah.” The director smiled, pleased at obtaining something he could work with.

Those present at the memorial service would hear Samuel Underberg described as a pious man “whose faith runneth over.” This remark should have been enough to provoke Dr. Underberg’s spirit to haunt the hospital corridors with peals of laughter, but apparently the man was at peace.

Nurse Pritchard harbored only one persistent regret, which concerned the manner in which the doctor had administered the adoption of the Lament baby, and the record of the child’s true identity.

The Importance of Valves

It has been said that a child in his first six months is a blob, a helpless creature, capable of only rudimentary wails for food, affection, or a clean bottom. This was not the case with Will Lament.

Julia had no doubt that this child somehow
knew
he had lost his first parents, and was determined not to lose the second pair. He greeted her and Howard every morning with a cock’s crow of approval, clutched them with a fierce grip all day, and surrendered himself to sleep only with pathetic cries that broke her heart. Howard took a less sentimental view.

“Why can’t he just be happy, like the other one?”

The expression that answered this question was of such deep sadness that Howard would never dare compare the babies again.

“He just wants to be with us,” she replied finally.

“Why won’t he let us bloody sleep?”

“He misses us in the dark.”

It was as if the child were nourished not by milk but by his par-ents’ presence. The baby loved nothing more than to sleep with them; and any attempt to separate him from this arrangement was met with howls.

Woe to the babysitter who came between this child and his parents. Screams lasting two hours were common; the urchin would expend his lungs to the utmost before collapsing in a fit of despairing hiccups.

“This baby will not be
sat
!” declared one elderly babysitter, who admitted to switching off her hearing aid to survive the aria of woe before Julia and Howard returned.

The boy would greet his parents with sobs of gratitude and relief. He forgave them instantly, his bloated, tearstained face emitting coos and sighs, as if nothing had happened. It seemed to Julia that Will was invested not just in their presence but in their union. His tiny arms would reach for both of them, clutching her dress and Howard’s belt loop to pull them together, three for one. At the first note of parental disharmony, a word of sarcasm between them, the child would wail. And when relatives with harsh voices arrived uninvited, smelling of Borkum Riff or lavender toilet water, the baby became doubly fitful, conveniently offering an excuse to cut the visit short.

Though Howard came to appreciate his son’s intense devotion as much as Julia did, the baby’s presence in the middle of their bed was, in Howard’s opinion, a crisis. He was damned if the child was ever going to be in the same room when they made love.

“We’ll tiptoe to the couch,” said Julia, flanking the baby with pillows to simulate parental bodies as they slipped away, only to be interrupted by an outburst of infant hiccups minutes later.

By the end of Will’s first year, when he was up and standing, and quite capable of making his way into the living room in the middle of the night, Howard and Julia decided it was time to find a bigger house.

It would be the first reason they moved—not that Ludlow wasn’t a fine town, but Howard wanted to travel to new territories. He wanted the thrill of starting afresh, he wanted to live up to the Lament tradition, and, most of all, he believed that satisfaction lay on the road ahead. This conviction would become the true test of his wife’s loyalty and his son’s devotion.

HOWARD WAS AN ENGINEER
, a specialist in the conveyance of liquids through valves of every shape and size.

“It’s not like being a spy or an actor, but it can be just as exciting,” he would explain at parties.

Exciting, if you happen to be fascinated by the way a quantity of anything passes through passages that diminish or expand in size, riveting, if you love stopcocks and ball valves. Mesmerizing, if, as Howard did, you spent your childhood racing out in a rainstorm to catch the water running down the side of the road, blocking it with dams, rerouting it, speeding and slowing its flow with rocks and pebbles, and sending out an armada of leaves to brave its treacherous rapids and falls. He spent more time in his bathtub than either of his older sisters, and typically emerged, prunelike, clutching an odd assortment of homemade waterwheels and rubber tubes. As a teenager, he decorated his room with pictures of deltas and alluvial fans.

By the time he reached adulthood, however, Howard had realized that most people didn’t share his fascination, and on more than one occasion he had no sooner explained his profession than the listener walked away. He took to reducing his specialty to one word: valves.

“Valves,” said Mrs. Gill, the dean’s vapid wife, at his graduation from Cape University. “Then you must like to ride bicycles. Aren’t there valves in bicycle tires?”

“Yes, but . . .” said Howard.

“Or do you prefer motorcar tires?” said Mrs. Gill, her mind suddenly taking flight at the potential of the word.

“Actually, I work with—”

“Perhaps the Michelin people could use you; don’t they make tires? And I love their guide. I once spent a
glorious
fortnight eating my way through Brittany!”

Though Howard was a shy man, and chose, in the future, not to discuss his vocation with people who hadn’t a clue, he knew the world was his oyster. Liquids were everywhere, and valves were essential.

Howard met Julia while working for the Ludlow Water Works. He was pursuing his master’s degree and the job was a temporary position, which allowed him, in exchange for doing an efficiency analysis for the township, to conduct research on water conveyance. It was Howard’s dream to design a purification system as magnificent as the Roman aqueducts. A system in which water passed through a complex series of enlarging and diminishing valves using only gravity as a propellant. With a little brilliance and pluck, he would save the millions of gallons of water wasted through evaporation and sloppy mechanical design, and build a system that could irrigate the Sahara!

ON FRIDAY AFTERNOONS
, as the sun set over the Water Works, Howard would perch outside his office and survey the splendid jungle of pipes, priding himself on knowing where every pipe went, and what it did, and one day he’d show that Mrs. Gill that there was much more to Howard Lament than bicycle tires.

“You’re in my way,” said a voice one Friday afternoon.

She was silhouetted against the sun, with a tangle of black hair, paintbrush gritted between her teeth, standing before an easel.

“Oh! Sorry,” he apologized, ducking first, then attempting to step backward to see what she was painting.

“Don’t look,” she said. “I can’t stand being judged when I’m not finished!”

“I wouldn’t judge it.”

“You say that, but you
would
,
” she said, raising one eyebrow sharply. “People are always judging.”

The young woman must have been about his age, or a little younger. Pretty, with shiny cheekbones as round as apples, a smallish freckled nose, and that hair, raven-black, tied back and secured with several paintbrushes, geisha style. She wore slacks and a man’s large blue shirt, smudged with oil paint in various yellows and oranges.

The conversation abated. She was busily wiping away sections of the canvas with a cloth and reapplying a few carefully chosen lines. Howard stood still, fascinated by her yet frozen in place for fear that she’d accuse him of judging her if he advanced, and not wanting to obstruct her view of the Water Works in his retreat.

“Do you paint for a living?” he asked.

She cocked a suspicious glance at him.

“Why? Does it matter whether I’m a professional?”

“I’m curious,” he replied, deciding that she was remarkably pretty.

“I’ve sold five paintings of sunsets,” she said. “I suppose that makes me a professional, or a lucky amateur. Take your pick.”

“Really?” he replied, and was about to ask if she had any more sunsets to sell, not that he could afford them—he was an impoverished graduate student—but it would be a good excuse to see her again.

“I’m sick to death of sunsets,” she continued. “Such a cliché! It’s much harder to make
noon
interesting. Or an overcast day with no sunlight at all! Only the old masters can do that. A sunset is a cheat. That’s why I’m here at the Water Works.”

“Ah,” he said, impressed on the one hand, and wanting to sound as if her last comment were a logical step from the previous one.

He had already decided that he liked this girl. Liked her frank manner, her expressive face, her unruly hair, and her practical use of paintbrushes as a hair ornament. Worried that he might say the wrong thing, he said nothing, and she said nothing, and the painting continued. After a while he liked the fact that he could say nothing without feeling uncomfortable, and that she could say nothing and not look uncomfortable; he was just thinking that this could be a brilliant sort of . . . friendship when she asked the question he dreaded.

“What sort of work do you do?”

“Do you mean where do I work? Or what is my career?”