All the Dead Yale Men (12 page)

The women in black testified, too. They knew what was going on in the neighborhood, and they sat in the witness chair, right on the edge, all of them, one after another, only taking up about as much room as the width of a two-by-four. They had all made their peace with the fact that they no longer were opposed to Sally and to anything that she had done, no matter what her shaving had been, and were now infuriated. They wore their black skirts and blouses, their wrinkled faces and black eyes furious as they pointed at Citron and said, “Him, him!” and with their clawed hands and arthritic fingers they mourned all outrages of history, starting in ancient Greece, where their antecedents had worn black and had intrigued and mourned and
disapproved from the Peloponnesian War onward. They hissed. They glared. They accused.

The only physical evidence we had was the underwear, and Pullagia argued that it had been in Sally's trash, that the blood on it came from her period, and that it was outside, on the hard earth, because after Blackie had been killed other neighborhood dogs had come into the yard and had gotten into the garbage cans. It was obvious, or so I said, that this blood came from the night that Citron had killed her. He stared straight ahead, although once he looked at me and made a gesture, slow and languid and with every conceivable aspect of malice, his fingers flicked from under his chin in my direction.

He was convicted.

“Well, that's great, Frank,” said my father. “But do you think that's going to hold up?”

And, for a while, everything calmed down.

I went back to my usual work. Pride surely does go before a fall, as everyone with an ounce of sense knows. Pullagia was better than I thought, or at least a lot faster than I had anticipated. In the fall after the trial, Carol Perkins handed me a copy of the
Boston Herald
which said “Citron Modèle appeal wins, prosecutor's prejudicial remarks sets beauty operator free.” Citron was released, and when I talked about retrying the case, Carol rolled her eyes and other members of the staff and even the mayor called to tell me to realize I had made a mistake.

Sally's house had a new tenant, a man who drove a dump truck for the city. The place appeared the same, though, the cheap shingles on the roof glittering in the fall sunlight, a blush of green in the hard-packed yard, the old women revolving around the street as though looking for the next error that would
cause trouble if you just waited long enough.

I sat in my car, a pint of scotch in my hand, which shook a little as I had one drink and then another, and finally, when the bottle was half-empty, I pushed the button of the tape recorder and the cab driver cleared his throat.

PIA
,
MY DAUGHTER
,
was in her last year at Yale, but she didn't have much course work and was doing a thesis titled “Law and the Protection of the Mentally Disadvantaged.” She came home for weekends in her yellow VW, music loud, probably smoking a joint. She had gotten the highest score possible on the law boards, had perfect grades, and had applied to law school in Cambridge. We were waiting to hear about her acceptance.

Pia's hair is dark, almost black, which sets off her skin, a pale white that is so luminescent as to suggest the moon, or talc powder. Her eyes are blue, although one has a small section of brown, a quarter of one iris. An example, she said, of heterochromia.

Everything about her was large, not in the sense of size but something else, as though every conceivable gift had come down through the ages to her. She was an athlete, and when she was
home from school, we went out on the Charles River, each of us in a single. She rowed beautifully, as though it wasn't a boat but a violin. I had taught her, and she had taken to it in the same way she had to everything else, with a variety of soothing exuberance as though her excitement was something that she passed over to me: it was a thrill to be there, in that water like something out of a painting by Monet, all little chips of light, tinted with green from the grass along the bank. She had perfect catches, the blades cutting into the water like it was a solid, like butter. When she was fourteen and fifteen, we rowed together, but by the time she was seventeen I had trouble keeping up and soon she blew right by me, her hair bright in the sun, her breathing hardly noticeable, her long legs pushing against the stretchers.

She resisted the overly civilizing effect of the boarding school we sent her to, and it left her with a variety of grace. Her vitality had its own imperative, its own dignity, which no amount of crypto snobbery could injure. She enjoyed, for instance, the summer she worked at a drive-in restaurant outside of Cambridge, next to a low-income project. The men who lived in the project worked in the last factories around Boston, on the waterfront and as plumbers. Her frankness with them when they came to the drive-in, her smile, her genuine interest, beguiled them, and soon they were on her side, wishing her the best. In those days before she went away to college we'd argue or discuss those things she was curious about and which she understood better than I did.

Fermat's theorem, for instance. She said, “Because there are an infinite number of equations, and an infinite number of possible values for x, y, and z, the proof has to prove that no solutions exist within this infinity of infinities.” She said this and smiled at me. It was her smile that really made her deadly: a full, large mouth that turned up at the corners when she smiled. It was like
turning up the thermostat on a cold morning. “Don't you see, Dad? It's pretty obvious why German mathematical academics spent so much time on this when you get down to cases . . . ”

We had gone every now and then, on a weekend when she was in school, to that piece of land my father owned on the Delaware River, or the five hundred acres that were left after he had sold the thousand acres to the Girls Club.

On a trip there a year or so ago, ten months before my father died (the clock was already ticking), Pia and I had our one really bitter argument. As bitter as the taste of ashes in the spring after they had been left in a fireplace all winter. We did our best to pretend that it had never taken place, but it fits here, too, and I guess was part of her license to behave the way she did.

This fight had been coming for a long time, and, in fact, it had been building with the same, perfect cadence that drove her from being a girl to a young woman. This, of course, meant that she slowly stopped considering the prospect of having children as an abstract and distant if not impossible circumstance to one that was as real as a stone. We argued about what she called the Mackinnon stain. Mixed in with this bitter fight was the fact that she was the end of the line. I would die. That left just her. If she didn't have children, that was the end of all of us, the living and the dead. No future. Nothing but entropy. And she wondered at my fury.

We went the usual way, out through Hartford and then on 84 to the Delaware Valley, which you could see from above Port Jervis and which had, on this trip, a blue mist that hung in the ridges. We were going to stay in that stone house that my father still owned and hated, and which I liked to go to, if only to have a little time alone with Pia so we could talk and hike, and go down into the stream on the land, Trout Cabin, where we used to see the copperheads coiling on the rocks.

On the place where Trout Cabin ran into the Delaware, it flowed through a piece of flat land, a couple of acres that my grandfather and grandmother had, as nearly as I could tell, given to my cousin. Or someone my grandmother and father had told me was a cousin, a poor one, I guess, whom they had taken in and raised. About fifteen years younger than my father. This, I guess, is one of those places where secrets live. Or where I should have been aware enough to know that a secret was here, but why should I have doubted my grandparents?

Here, on that flat land, my cousin had built a place from hoods of cars that he got from a junkyard, pieces of plywood he had picked up after dark at construction sites along the river, and some corrugated roofing material you see in Mexican border towns. He had a Coleman stove he cooked on, although he had power, too, and a laptop computer that he used to watch the Nature Channel and clips of alligators and snakes, zebras and sharks. One time, he made me watch a lion eat a zebra in large, shredded chunks.

On the afternoon of that bitter fight, we stopped at my cousin's house. The place was empty, although the door was unlocked. At one side he had a pile of sardine cans, which he was saving, I guess, to make a new roof. He existed mostly on sardines. The pile of them looked like an enormous mound of fish scales.

“Guess he's not here,” said Pia.

“Wait,” I said.

Upstream, in the Delaware, something came through the water that went around the rocks where big fish waited. Still, that creature emerged from the glare, which finally lifted like the sides of a circus tent. That is if the tent was made of foil. Jerry emerged from it, and we came down to the river to meet him. He stood in about a foot of water, in a patched pair of waders, but he wasn't fishing. Just looking around. Maybe he had set an eel trap.

Jerry's shirt was sun-bleached, a blue that was the color of a piece of glass from a milk of magnesium bottle that has washed up on the beach, and it perfectly matched his eyes. His hair was straight, and even though he was balding, he left it long. Still, he smiled with a sincerity that was as intense as the stars.

Now, he said, his lips moist, his hair slick with sweat and his own personal oil, “Well, hell, hell, hell, hell . . . ”

“Hello,” I said.

“No. No. Don't say that. I can say it. Don't do that. Don't. I hate it.”

I swallowed.

“I'm sorry,” I said.

“Just let me be . . . ,” said Jerry. He swallowed. “Cousin Frank. How are you?”

“Hi, Jerry, how are you?” I said.

“Well, you know me. I'll fight till the last dog dies,” he said. “And look who you've got with you. Why it's Pia. My favorite cousin. How the hell are you, Pia?”

“I'm fine,” she said.

“Well, you know what, that's fucking-A great.”

“You better fucking believe it,” said Pia.

“Come on,” said Jerry. “Let's do our drill.”

“Some other time,” said Pia.

“No, no, no,” said Jerry. “It's how we say hello. Like some handshake at Yale. Look into my eye.”

Pia stood opposite him, nose to nose.

“You see it?” he said. “You see the brown part in my eye? Like a quarter of a pie? Just like yours.”

“Yes,” said Pia.

“We're like two peas in a pod,” said Jerry.

Cars went by on the highway with that ripping sound, like something that arrived not by speed but violence.

“I see you're still driving that Audi,” said Jerry to me. “Der Grauer Geist, your dad calls it.”

“Yes,” I said.

“You want to hear the other German I know?” he said. “
Schießen Sie sie in der Rückseite des Ansatzes
. Your dad taught it to me when we used to drink together.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“It means ‘Shoot them in the back of the neck,'” said Jerry.

Jerry's skin was red from the suntan dope that he cooked in the back of the shack made from those hoods of cars and with that solar panel to watch the nature movies on his computer, which, I think, he bought from a man in Matamoras, just across the river, who had passed through here a couple of years ago, one jump ahead of the police.

“Yeah. That's one thing your father told me . . . He had some other things to say about Russians. You want to hear them?”

“I think I've heard his war stories,” I said.

It was a misty afternoon, but not the kind that leads to a thunderstorm. Just that silver water in the river because of the mist.

“Looks like we're going to get a storm,” said Jerry. “See?”

“See what?” I said.

“Sort of purple over there,” he said. “Like we're going to get lightning.”

Pia stood there, light in light.

“What's the storm look like?” she said.

“Can't you see it?” said Jerry. “Getting darker, like smoke, like some chemical is burning . . . the color of an iris. Or something that grows at night.”

He bit his lip and looked around as though he was in the midst of vertigo, or that the entire landscape had begun to swirl around like water going down the drain.

“Everything is turning purple. Blue . . . ,” he said.

Jerry blinked at the distance: the sky was clear, blue, as clean as a baby from the bath.

“Building a little,” he said. “Funny. Can't you see it?”

“Yes,” said Pia.

“Frank,” said Jerry. “You remember what you read to me?”

“I remember,” I said.

“God's grandeur flashes out, like a dapp-dapp-dappled dawn dawn—drawn . . . ”

“Falcon,” said Pia. “Falcon.”

She stepped forward and behind him.

Jerry's eyes rolled back in his head and he went stiff. He seemed to resist it, like a deer just hit by a car, but it was just too big. The tremors already swept his arms and legs. He fell backwards, an ironing board slapping the water. His head went under and his feet kicked, but even so, in bubbles and in sheer volume, he clearly said, “ah, ah, ah, ah.” Dawn drawn, I thought, dawn drawn . . . The bubbles of his voice rose and burst, the surface of them smeared with a rainbow. It appeared that we had an enormous fish and that it thrashed as it tried to get away. I reached down and Pia did, too, our fingers touching under Jerry's back, and as we pulled him up, Jerry's convulsions quickened. Like an increasing earthquake: if we had been in a house all the dishes and glasses would be rattling. Although in the rattling, I felt the ebb and flow, the waves of them, each one becoming stronger than the next, as though that half-hidden malice in the landscape had rolled down to the river and into this man.