All the Dead Yale Men (22 page)

“I've got something to talk to you about,” I said.

“Can it wait a little?” she said. “This is so nice.”

The domestic has such a tug, such a gravity of the ordinary and warm. After dinner, Alexandra came into my study and curled up on the sofa, her legs under a fleece blanket she got from a sporting goods store, and I sat at my desk, reading through the paperwork for an indictment: it's all in the details, in precision, in not making a mistake, although as I sat there, in the midst of what seemed to be just that, I tried to let the warmth of the room, the gentle shifting of Alexandra under her blanket, the tick of the book she was reading as she turned from one page to the next reassure me, and for a moment it did. I could almost convince myself that it was all right.

Then I told her everything.

She looked down.

“I'm not a lawyer,” she said. “Why don't you call your father? God knows he's been in enough trouble.”

I dialed my father's number and told him that Alexandra was home, that everything seemed fine, but there was a legal matter, nothing important, or at least I didn't think it was, but maybe I could come by the next day, in the afternoon, and we could talk it over. I didn't think I was in trouble, but maybe we could talk things over.

“Well, sure, Frank,” said my father. “My Latin American students are going to be here for a piñata party. We're going to have some fun. They don't think I can hit that thing, but you know what, Frank, here's the trick: you listen for the wheels of the pulley that control the piñata. Wait for it to come down. Then, wham! It rains candy. So, yeah, come by tomorrow.”

ON THE DAY
before my father's funeral, which we were going to have at the farm, I drove the ashes from Concord in that red gift bag. Of course, because I didn't get to ask for my father's help didn't mean I had stopped wanting it. If he had been able to handle Poland and the Germans in the snow, he'd have been able to help. And so I was left with that constant desire to reach across the gulf between the living and the dead, that invisible wall that keeps getting closer.

The ashes gave off that stink of a half-smoked cigar, and the box vibrated from the engine. The light came in the window and made the slick paper of the bag glow, as though it was water with the sun on it. The ashes sat on the seat, in that bright party bag, and I had the sensation of my father straining, as though he was just on the other side of that darkness that confronts us all. And that goddamn bag: it made me think of the store
where these things were for sale, as though these cheerful, foil receptacles were there for an endless number of boxes of ashes. The bags lined up, an almost infinite number, like a vision of children in the dark before life, that is, in the gloom of time before they are born.

In the car, I reached over and touched the box, which was a kind of primitive moment all by itself, that is, the son reaching out for the spirit of the father. I touched the box and asked for forgiveness. What, after all, can a father give to a son more than that?

The bag had the aspect of a Buddha, an object that suggests knowledge if you are just smart enough, just keen enough to understand, and so I kept looking for the right question, the right method of asking, of imploring, from one generation to another.

At least we'd bury my father, or what was left of him, near that piece of land along the Delaware.

The director of the Girls Club still wasn't as cordial as she could be, not after we didn't kill that bear that was getting into the garbage. But that's a fact of death. Yeah, she could be pissed about the bear still running around, and yeah, she could be pissed at my father (and me, although I don't know if she knew I had been along), and yeah, she could wish she had never agreed to any entanglements, like letting us store things in the farmhouse with the white siding, black shutters, and with the trout ponds in front, but when a son asks if he can use the house where his father grew up for a few hours before they bury the father, she couldn't say anything. And, I guess, in the background this was part of the negotiation for me killing the bear.

That wild green and shiny foliage lined the road I took up from the Delaware with the box on the seat next to me. Then the car ticked as it sat in front of the porch. The new hydraulic
pump worked just fine. The lawn chairs that my grandmother and grandfather had used were still on the porch, although peeling now, a little rundown, but my grandfather had sat there with his mint juleps, his mind filled with schemes of one kind or another, and which I listened to when I was eight and nine and ten years old. He never mentioned any problems he may have had when he was young, or younger, and away in South America while his wife was alone.

Charlotte was a woman in her eighties now, so heavy she had to throw her weight from side to side when she walked, but she had worked for my grandfather and my father, too, her age showing when she came out to the front porch in her green cardigan sweater, her hair in a white bun, her skin like a shrunken mushroom. Her husband was dead and gone, and yet Charlotte still seemed to carry his presence with her, as though he had been reduced to a scent. I had the feeling that if she had to, she could open a beer bottle with her teeth.

She came out of the house and took my hand.

“I'm sorry for crying like this, Frank,” she said. “It's just for everything. That goddamned Girls Club. Your grandfather and mother, your father. That bastard time.”

She took a damp handkerchief out of her pocket and blew her nose.

“It's a hard job, Frank, to bury a father. It's the last thing they ask you to do. There aren't any harder. Have you cried yet, Frank?”

“Not yet,” I said.

She stood next to me and put her head against me, just the slight pressure making me feel a little better, as though this touch was something I could depend on. “Don't you see, Frank, why you have to be so considerate and loving with your kids? You're going to ask them to bury you. That's a hard job for them and so
you've got to show them how much you love them, or anyone who would do that for you.”

She took her handkerchief from her pocket and twisted it, as though she could force some final element, like saying good-bye, into a more comforting shape, but it only made her seem useless, and so she put it back her in her pocket and said, “Well, come in.”

The living room was clean, and yet it still had the air of a camp, and maybe this was because the furniture was mismatched, worn out by years of squirming Girls Club members who were so excited to be away from the cities of New Jersey that they couldn't sit still. Charlotte went over the small loaves of bread, the chicken salad she had made, the smoked sausage she had gotten in Port Jervis. She said she was going to roast a turkey and a ham, and that she'd have a tub of potato salad with parsley. White wine and beer. A few bottles of liquor.

“It's a mixture of the comfortable and the cheap. But I got one really good bottle of scotch, just to keep them guessing. Just the way you, father would have liked it. He loved to keep them guessing. Was he the sharpest man we have ever met?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I've got brand name Kleenex here and there,” said Charlotte. “Extra wastebaskets. Here's the bill for what I spent,” she said.

The twenties and fifties in my wallet were wrinkled and old, and I counted them out, giving her two hundred dollars, which she tucked into the pocket of her dress.

“Well, god bless your father,” she said. Then she shrugged. “We'll be ready for the people after the church. I'll clean up after. God bless his miserable heart.”

The party bag, with its red sheen, made a little rustle as I went through the woods and around the swamp that was between here and the stone house where my father had held his
hunts and which had been built for his dead brother. Somehow I didn't think I could leave it in the car, and yet bringing the box out here seemed to be the height of folly, of sentiment, and yet I went through the mountain laurel, the low brush, and came out on the stone house road.

I sat in front of the stone house and some turkeys made their way through the field above it, their burnished feathers in the mist of the late afternoon. The stone house had walls of cobbles up to shoulder height and then the roof went up from them. I sat on a stump in front of it, the bag on the ground at my feet, both of us alone.

•
  
•
  
•

Alexandra already had a room in the motel in Sparrow Bush, a town about ten miles away. And when she traveled to places like this, she brought snacks: good blue cheese, sardines and crackers, olives, cold chicken in a hamper, a bottle of white wine, napkins, all of which she had in the room. It was the culinary version of the difference between us, a way of being devoted to details that showed how much she loved me or how much she loved our daughter. The details that made for comfort.

“Is Charlotte going to help?” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “All set.”

She got into bed with her book, just like home.

I brought the bag with the ashes in it and put it on the cheap dresser and then got up and put it in the closet, but as I sat there, Alexandra got up, took them out of the closet, and put them on the dresser. She glanced over at me and I glanced back, and that was another of those moments that held us together.

“Here,” said Alexandra.

She passed a bottle of single malt scotch from her bag over
to me, and then she put down, next to the box, two small glasses from the motel bathroom.

“I only need one,” I said.

“Pour one for him,” she said and got back into bed with her book.

I poured scotch into the other glass and shoved it at the box. The odd thing is, he seemed to appreciate it.

On that early June morning, one my father would have loved, the trees so green as to tint the air, I left the bag in the car when I got to the chapel with the white siding, the green shutters, the brass fixtures on the door, the pitched roof covered with slate tiles, and, of course, the building sat in the middle of a churchyard where the stones stood up like a model of a town. The river, with its rills and bone-white boulders, deep pools and long rifles, was a hundred yards away. The chapel had pews on three sides, small ones with a little door in the rail that went in front of them, and then in the middle ten rows of benches were arranged in front of the altar. I had had help with this, in that Charlotte had hired a friend to order the flowers here, and they were on the altar and here and there in front of the pews, nice white ones, carnations with ferns, and some lilies, too, although my father had always hated lilies.

I stood by the front door to greet the mourners. Alexandra did too, her expression one of gratitude for people attending mixed with her natural dignity, her dress a dark blue, her blond hair showing like some vision from the painting of a chapel in Italy where the angels hover overhead. She even handled Ginny for me, Cal's wife, who came in with an air of sexual uneasiness, as though she was reminded by funerals of why her husband jumped off the bridge.

Billy Meerschaum, the Cambridge cop, came in, dressed in a suit that he wore for weddings and funerals, the thing smelling a
little of the mothballs that he packed it in between these events. He took my hand and gave it a squeeze, and then looked around the chapel, giving it the once-over to see where drugs might be hidden. Then he waddled up the aisle and sat in the front, his eyes on the altar, straight up, dignified and alert.

Tim Marshall, the inspector with the Boston Police Department who had been on the bridge when Cal did a Dutch job, was there too, a little drunk in the morning, which he allowed himself as a good Irishman on his way to a funeral.

Marshall said, “I'm sorry, Mackinnon, for your troubles,” and then he sat down, right next to Meerschaum, the two cops finding each other in the crowd like two members of an Eastern European tribe, Croats or Serbs, who send out a kind of radio signal that can be picked up only by other members of the group.

Jerry came in a blue fishing shirt and his hair slicked down with what looked like a bottle of Stay Comb that must have belonged to my grandfather. He took my hand, let me smell the scent of his hair, blinked, then let the tears run down his face and said, “
Schießen Sie sie in der Rückseite des Ansatz
es.” No stutter. And, for a moment, I wondered if I taught him German if he could speak that without any trouble. But he sat down, too, his Stay Comb bright as the sheen of a bowling ball.

Pia came in, her eyes set on mine as she said, “Oh, Dad, you know I'm sorry. Please. Let's spend a little more time together. OK?”

I nodded, not trusting my voice.

“I'd like you to meet Robert McQuire,” she said.

McQuire was tall, with perfect posture, and a nose that was so beaked as to make him look like a bird of prey, a peregrine, I guess, and he had a look in his eyes that suggested a variety of smoldering anger, as though, in advance, you were warned that
you better not give him the least cause for trouble. He took my hand.

“I'm sorry,” he said.

“Robert's a rower,” said Pia. “A classmate, too.”