Acceptable Losses (23 page)

Love, Sheila

Slowly he put the note down, the elation he had felt all that afternoon drained away, replaced by a sense of guilt. While he had been spending money like a drunken Texas oil prospector whose gusher had just come in, Sheila had needed him and he had not been there. He did not like the old lady and she certainly had never liked him, but he didn’t want her to die. He didn’t want anyone to die. Or anyone, Sheila especially, to be confronted with death this week.

He went into the living room, turned on the light. He saw that the answering machine had been unplugged, remembered that he had decided to disconnect it himself as soon as he got home. Telepathy. He sat down heavily and stared at the telephone. He dared it to ring. It did not ring.

He reached over and picked up the telephone, dialed the operator, got Information in Vermont to give him the number of the Holiday Inn in Burlington. It was the wrong name for a hotel in which you were staying waiting to find out whether your mother was going to live or die. In other days Americans had been more apt in naming places—Tombstone, Arizona; Death Valley; Laughing Water. The language, like so much else, was declining.

Sheila sounded calm when she came to the phone. She had already been to the hospital, she said, and had just come back to the hotel to check in and have a bite to eat. Her mother’s condition was stable. “Whatever that means,” Sheila said. “Her left side is paralyzed and she can’t talk and I don’t know if she recognized me or not. You wouldn’t think vegetarians would have strokes.” She laughed harshly. “Eating all that grass for nothing.”

“Sheila, darling,” Damon said, “are you sure you don’t want me to come up there?”

“Absolutely sure,” Sheila said firmly. “Have you called Oliver yet?”

“No. I just got into the apartment.”

“Will you call him?”

“Yes.”

“You won’t stay alone in the apartment tonight?”

“No. I promise.”

“Roger …” She hesitated.

“What is it?”

“I had lunch with Oliver today …” She let the words trail off as though she wasn’t quite sure how to continue.

“Yes?” Damon could tell that whatever else they had spoken about over lunch, she and Oliver had discussed him.

“He happened to see your notebook, Roger,” Sheila said. “You left it open on your desk.”

“So?” He couldn’t be angry. He and Oliver went casually back and forth to each other’s desks all the time.

“It was open and he saw the beginning of your two lists—personal enemies and professional enemies. He could only make out one name. Machendorf. I can guess why you started that list, but …”

“I’ll explain when I see you, dearest,” Damon said gently.

“What I want to tell you, what I must tell you, is that Oliver and I started a possible list of our own. I hate to do this over the phone, but who knows, one day later may be too late …”

“I think I covered the ground pretty completely,” Damon said, sorry he hadn’t hung up earlier. “I don’t think either you or Oliver could …”

“Did you think of Gian-Luca?” Sheila asked, interrupting him. “His mother’s up here and I asked about him. He’s dropped out of sight. For all anybody knows, he’s dead. But all the same …”

“I’ll be on the lookout for Gian-Luca if he ever shows up,” Damon said, wanting to end the conversation.

“One more,” Sheila said, persisting. “Oliver told me about that Mr. Gillespie, who went crazy …”

“He hasn’t been back since,” Roger said impatiently. “Actually, I have the feeling that nobody, not anybody that you and Oliver thought of or anybody I dragged up is of any importance. Maybe nobody is of any importance, or it’s somebody out of the blue, somebody who’s …” He stumbled a little. “Well, it’s hard to put into words—somebody who’s unknown, a random evil spirit and we may find out tomorrow or we may never find out. Darling,” he said, “you have enough to worry about. Forget about this for the time being. Please.”

“All right,” she said. “Just promise me once more that you won’t stay alone tonight.”

“Promise. One more thing …”

“What’s that?” Sheila sounded fearful, as though the one more thing would turn out to be another blow.

“I love you,” Damon said.

“Oh, Roger,” Sheila said brokenly, “I’ve sworn not to cry. Good night, my darling. Take care.”

Damon put the telephone down, closed his eyes, thought of the mean old vegetarian lady who had never liked him lying stricken, at last speechless, in the hospital bed. It wasn’t a lucky month. Troubles arrived in bunches. He remembered the French saying—
jamais deux sans trois.
Well, Sheila and he had had their two. Be prepared for the third. And why only two without three? Why not three without four? Ten without twenty?

He opened his eyes, shook his head to rid it of further dire speculation. He was grateful to Sheila for refusing to let him come to her side, sparing him from the swamp of her family’s grief, the blowsy sister with the dreary husband, the weeping aunt whose son he had thrown down the stairs.

He remembered his own father’s death, just after the war, in the hospital in New Haven. The wasted hand searching for Roger’s, the last bond of family dissolving. Well, if Sheila was on a family visit, he decided, it was a good time for himself to pay a visit, too.

He dialed Oliver Gabrielsen’s number. “God,” Oliver said worriedly, “where the hell have you been?”

“Just around,” Damon said. “I had some errands to run.”

“You know about Sheila’s mother …”

“Yes. I just talked to Sheila. Her mother’s in a stable condition.”

“Do you want to come up here?” Oliver said. “Or do you want me to come down to your place?”

“Neither.”

“Roger,” Oliver said, pleading, “you can’t stay in your place alone tonight.”

“I won’t be staying,” Damon said. “I’m going out of town for a few days.”

“Do you want to tell me where you’re going?”

“No,” Damon said. “Keep the office going. I’ll be in touch.” He hung up. Oliver would have to wait for his blue flannel blazer.

CHAPTER

FIFTEEN

H
E ROSE EARLY THE
next morning and went directly from the motel just outside Ford’s Junction to the cemetery. The cemetery bordered the tracks of the New York, New Haven and Hartford railroad on one side and one of the two main streets on another. It was well-kept but because of its position between commerce and transportation was not an adornment to the town, although its inhabitants had not made any known complaints. Its population had grown considerably since the last time Damon had been there for the funeral of his father.

The Damon family plot had three stones on it, with a place for a fourth, himself. His father had been a thoughtful and family-loving man. Damon stared down at the three graves, that of his mother, his brother Davey and his father, green with the sprouting April grass. Damon had not been at his mother’s funeral because she had died while he was at sea. He had been too young, his parents agreed, to assist at his brother’s funeral.

There were no other Damons in the cemetery because his father had immigrated to Ford’s Junction from Ohio as a young man.

If Damon had been asked why, after all the years since he had last visited the family graves, he had come this morning, he would have been hard put to phrase an answer. He knew it had something to do with the recurrent dreams he had been having lately in which his father figured, and at his age it was more or less natural to have thoughts about death and a last resting place, but his decision to rent a car and drive to Ford’s Junction the night before after the telephone conversation with Sheila had been almost automatic, instinctive. Now that he was there, paying homage to people he had once loved, he felt an easing of tension, a melancholy but not sorrowful sense of peace, which was not disturbed by the clicking of a train going south to New Haven or the sounds of work and conversation from a nearby plot where two men were digging a new grave, the smell of the fresh earth a springlike loamy odor, defying death or at least making death bearable.

Three good people who belonged to him, his father gentle and honorable and hard-working, his mother a staff to lean on at all times, his brother too young to have sinned. Family, family …

Yes, it had been a good idea to drive up from New York to his boyhood home to commune with his only family and to see for himself that their modest tombs had remained proper and fitting receptacles for those irreproachable and beloved souls.

The day after he had heard the Mozart Requiem he had looked up the words of the Mass. His memory was good and his schoolboy Latin served well enough so that he could remember the first section. He said it to himself above the tombstones.

Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis.

Te decet hymnus, Deus, in Sion, et tibi reddetur

Votum in Jerusalem.

Exaudi orationem meam, as te omnis caro veniet.

He skipped the repetition of the first three lines of the Mass and whispered the last two somber resounding phrases—“Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison.”

Honor thy father and thy mother, as the Lord God hath commanded thee, that thy days may be prolonged and that it may go well with thee
…

With a feeling of shame that he had left their care to others for so many years, he went out of the cemetery, found a florist’s shop nearby, bought some branches of early-blooming white lilac and went back to the plot and carefully laid the fragrant fragile blossoms against the three stones. Repose, gentle souls, he thought, and intervene for me …

That it may go well with thee
…

Impossible to prevent some form of selfishness to intrude in even the most devout of actions.

With a last look backward, he left the cemetery and slowly drove the rented car through the town.

Steeped now in the past, he resolved to visit the places of his joyous boyhood and youth, an old man feeding the springs of memory, remembering the times when he had been carefree and unwounded to balance, for a day, the blows and erosion of age. He would go to their old house, he decided, where he was born and in which he had lived for eighteen years before he went off to college and which he had never lived in since. He would stroll past the high school he had attended, remember the Latin classes, the verses of “The Ancient Mariner” which the English teacher had read aloud, the prom where he had first danced with a girl, the football field where he had cheered the team on crisp October afternoons … Maybe, he thought, I will look into the telephone directory and see if any of the friends who I had thought would remain comrades for life and had soon forgotten, still remained in the town.

Now for the living, he thought, or the still living. He turned toward the hotel and, postponing breakfast, telephoned the Holiday Inn in Burlington.

Sheila’s voice on the telephone was grave. “She’s still about the same. That’s a good sign, the doctor says. Doctors …” She sighed. “We hang on their words, try to interpret them in the best light possible, put our faith in them. It’s not their fault, but there’s no escaping it. How about you? How are
you
?”

“Fine,” he said.

“Is Oliver with you?”

“No. I drove to Ford’s Junction last night. I’m in the motel there. I thought it might be useful to get out of New York for a couple of days.”

“Ford’s Junction,” she said almost reproachfully. “Don’t you have enough to remember these days without that?”

“I’ve had a most rewarding morning,” he said. “Believe me. It’s turned out to be a very good idea.”

“I hope so.” She sounded doubtful. “Look,” she said, “I can’t stay away from the school for more than a couple of days. Stay where you are or wander around anywhere you please. Just don’t go back to New York until I can get there, too. I’ve been thinking—the Easter holidays start next week and we can go out to Old Lyme and camp out and relax together and not see a soul for ten days or so. We can both use the vacation and if there’s anything drastic with mother, Burlington’s not all that far away. Doesn’t that sound like a good idea to you?”

“Well …” He started to say something about work, but Sheila interrupted him.

“Think about it,” Sheila said. “You don’t have to decide now. Call me tomorrow morning and we’ll talk about it some more. I promised the doctor I’d be at the hospital before ten. Please, please take care of yourself, my darling. And leave your dead in peace.”

First he drove toward the house where he was born and where he had lived until he had gone off to college. As he turned into the familiar street, he slowed down as he passed the old Weinstein house. Like the other houses set behind their neat lawns, all of them clapboard or shingle, it was modest and old-fashioned, with a comfortable front porch and Victorian scrollwork for decoration. But it had special associations for Damon. Manfred Weinstein, who was the same age as himself, had been his closest friend from the age often until they had separated to go to different colleges. Manfred had been one of the best athletes in town, had been the star shortstop for the high school baseball team. He had been chubby and deceptively soft-looking, with tow hair and a snub nose and a pink, childish complexion that even the afternoons in the sun never turned tan. His voice had been deep and incongruously loud for his age and during the games you could hear him over all the noise of the crowd as he encouraged the pitcher. He was a fair enough student, with a taste for reading, mostly Dumas and Jack London, but fanatically devoted to improving himself as a baseball player. Like a good friend, Damon, who was not much of an athlete himself, spent long afternoons hitting grounders to him, which Weinstein gobbled up gracefully until they were the only figures moving on the deserted playground as dusk settled over the town. Among his friends it was confidently predicted that Weinstein would end up in the big leagues. Now Damon realized that he had never seen Weinstein’s name in any newspaper’s box score of a National or American League game and wondered what had gone wrong.