All the Dead Yale Men (37 page)

The stone house had a particular silence that came from the stone walls, which not only kept the sound out, but seemed to have distilled time, as though it was embedded in the centuries or millions of years it took to make the rock in these walls. We sat in that almost infinite silence, aware, at least for a moment, how our love for each other was strong and up against that hard infinity. Then I kissed Pia good night, took a drink upstairs, and got into bed. For a while, in the dark, Alexandra spoke to Pia in the downstairs bedroom, which came through the floor of the loft where it was as a buzz and stop, a buzz and stop, the advice of a mother to a daughter on the eve of a wedding, the hum, the
vibration of it seeming to come not just through a wooden floor (which came from the white pine on this land) but through time as well. I tried to calculate this, back to the land between the Tigris and Euphrates, to Egypt, and just as I could see the muddy, broad Nile and the reeds at the side, which was a sign I was about to fall asleep, Alexandra pulled back the sheets and slid in next to me, sighed, took my hand, and said, “Well, what about that asshole Russian? The one who was threatening you?”

In the morning the bridesmaids came in the door with their dresses, hair driers, combs, cases of makeup, bottles of perfume, new stockings for the ceremony. Then they went to work, taking showers, shaving legs and underarms, working on Pia's hair, powdering themselves, using safety pins in more ways than I could count, and as they wiggled into their pantyhose, their clothes, they used the mirror in the kitchen where I tried to shave and then gave it up. They looked over my shoulder and said, “Sorry, Mr. Mackinnon. Tight squeeze.”

My suit hung by the door, like a scarecrow at Buckingham Palace. Tie, shoes, vest, jacket.

“You know, Frank,” Alexandra said. “This isn't a place for a man. At least right now.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “I think I better take a walk.”

So, outside, beyond that cloud of perfume and lemon soap, shampoo and powder, cosmetics and delicate clothes, I turned downhill on the wood road that leads to the stream. There, next to one pool that poured a silver spout into the next, I went downhill toward the Delaware. Surely, this was a good time to stand next to a river and be there as the power of it, the liquid force, the delicate meniscus of the surface tension all floated by as though it always had been there and always would be. A poor man's mysticism, I guess, but none the less necessary for all that.

At the bottom of the stream the land opened up, or flattened out, and here the heat was more silver and more shimmering than in the woods. Well, it was the marriage not the wedding, I guessed, and maybe a little heat was a good thing, if only to remind Pia and Robert that nothing worked precisely the way you wanted it to.

Still, the heat flowed along the river in layers, each packed against another, some layers hotter than others, but the entire mass of hot air moved above the Delaware's serpentine path.

At the mouth of Trout Cabin, just opposite the Delaware, I splashed a little water onto my face. Jerry's house, that collection of the leavings of car wrecks, fires, construction debris, hubcaps, with a high-tech solar collector on top, was just behind me, a shrine to the dead.

The river was on the other side of the road, a silver like mercury, something or someone moved with the same swaying motion of the heat. And as I stood and walked closer, as I came down to the road and put a hand over the glare, the shape there resolved itself into a woman, still attractive after all these years, ten years younger than me, still perfectly correct in that heat and the motion of the glare. Pauline wore a thin dress and high-heeled shoes. She came across the heat of the blacktop and said, “Frank, there you are. I've been looking all over.”

The swaying of the heat from the pavement matched the swaying of her thin, almost transparent dress. The ten years she was younger than me were critical ones: she emerged from the hot, moist shimmer and took my hands, both of them, and looked into my eyes and then she embraced me. She wore nothing but that thin dress, and in the heat there was the press of the mons, the soft crush of a breast, the hard touch of a nipple, the aroma of perfume and sweat that rose from her neck, the scent of her
hair, the tug of her arms on my shoulders, the light, tender, even loving touch of her fingers on my neck.

“It's hot,” I said.

“You're telling me,” she said.

“Come back in the shade,” I said.

“What's this house here?” she said. She pointed to the hoods and plywood.

“It's a long story,” I said.

“It's so green back here,” she said. “Can you count the different shades? Look, there's one, and two. There are five shades, one on another, like pieces of cloth . . . ”

The air by the stream was cooler, and maybe it was just the movement of water that made it seem cooler, although the touch of her fingers against mine seemed hotter than ever, and my palms were moist, too. She put her lips against my neck and ear and whispered, “It's good to see you, Frank. Although it breaks my heart.” She closed her eyes and swallowed. “What times we had.”

The water rushed in that constant way: as though nothing could stop it. A perfect reminder of how once something got started, like those moments when Pauline sat on top of me and laughed, the tightening of her grip like love itself, it doesn't stop, at least not in memory; it lingers and grows, it seeps into who and what you are and never leaves you alone. And this, with the accusation of failure, and not knowing what to do or when doing the right thing comes at such a price, or a price so ridiculous, left me dizzy with the possibilities for trouble.

“And what do you think, when you think of me?” she said.

I splashed a little cool water on my face, and Pauline looked at me as though I was trying to hide the fact that I was crying.

“The impossibility of it,” I said. “You realize it at a certain point, and that's it.”

She looked down at her feet. Then she stepped out of her shoes and into the stream and said, “Oh, Frank. That feels good. You can't imagine.”

Then she stepped out of the water, her calves slick with the wetness, her eyes on mine.

The two stones by the side of the stream were like small stools and we sat on them, although here the heat of them was exactly the opposite of those stones in that small graveyard in my backyard, and so we sat, her fingers on my knees, as the water flowed from one pool to another, a drop of about five feet, and from there another five feet: a sort of cascade of silver, tinted green, and a number of shades of green. We stared across the water: it was as though the heat made the time that had passed palpable, that we were sitting in the passage of it, that it pressed against us, made us feel it, the rank shove of it.

“I've made mistakes,” I said.

“Well, who hasn't?” she said. “Although you sure fucked up the Citron case. I followed that in the papers. Boy, what a mess.”

She leaned her head against my shoulder so that I came back into her scent, her light touch, and then she stretched her legs into the water, where it washed over them, like the surf when it slides back into the ocean.

“But I fucked up, too,” she said. “Bitterness is a mistake. It's sort of like being greedy, like being a miser.”

She stepped into the stream and got her dress wet to cool off, and the material clung to her youthful figure. She said, “Don't I still look nice?”

“Yes,” I said. “You are beautiful.”

Then she moved against me again, put her hands on the back of my neck, kissed my cheeks and turned, back into the heat, into that swaying mirage, those silver pools in the road along the Delaware. Her figure seemed not to disappear into it so much as
to sink, to get deeper into that lake of mercury, swaying, leaving a trail of fragrance, and, of course, defiance, too. The river flowed, the rocks looking like the prows of ships, and overhead the hawks flew, looking to see if something was stupid enough to show itself in the heat.

Just as she approached the swaying curtain, that hot air, I said, or called out, “Pauline! Pauline!”

She turned to me with the undulant, silvery wall behind her.

“Thanks,” I said.

She nodded and then disappeared into the heat.

I went uphill, through the woods, the spruce and pine, to get dressed.

THE BRIDESMAIDS WENT
out in a cloud of perfume and cosmetics. I dressed in that cloud, my shoes shined, my striped pants pressed, my shirt with the tab collar at my neck with a reassuring crispness. Pia primped in the bedroom. It was just us now, since I was going to drive her to the chapel, where my father's funeral had been, and then walk her up the aisle.

As I made a white cream of soap with my brush and worked it into my beard (gray here and there, more salt than pepper), I went through the wedding guests who had been arriving over the last twenty-four hours. Robert's parents showed up in sedate, precise clothes and kept in the shadows, aside from a shaky moment at the rehearsal dinner, and then Robert's friends from school in California, all of them distinguished by a certain gait, a sort of bobbing walk, and even the ones who didn't have sun-bleached hair seemed to have it anyway through a process of attitude that
was so profound as to leave me a little intimidated. And then, of course, Pia's friends, some of whom I had known from the time they rode bikes together in Cambridge, with training wheels, and whom I had taken along when Pia wanted to go for pizza or a hamburger, these women and a couple of men all grown up now, and when I recognized them, in their adult incarnation, I still felt them with us as we had gone to a hamburger stand, their arms out the window to feel the wind. And then a man who had built boats at the Cambridge boat club, dignified, upright, polite, and precise with his Australian accent, and who had nodded to me when he had arrived. I had the feeling that he was looking around at the stands of ash on the land, as though he wouldn't mind having one of the trees to use in his boats. My friends from work, even Jimmy Blaine, who had betrayed Cal and had come out to the Tobin Bridge to show sympathy to the man he had exposed and put in the position where the only solution was a Dutch job. I had learned, the hard way, that in an office like the one I worked in, you had to go along to get along, even when it meant inviting people like this, careerists and schemers, to a wedding.

Tim Marshall arrived, as upright and harsh as ever. Marshall had with him two men I had seen from time to time, detectives who had worked in Boston for so long they seemed to carry a perfume of the city with them, not quite the air of corruption as the atmosphere of fighting against it or living in it, like a shark in the ocean. They were in their late thirties, had short hair, and one, who worked undercover, had a gold ring in his ear, although his hands, or his right hand, was disfigured from having been broken in an arrest long ago. The two detectives, dressed in dark clothes, were carrying guns, or so it seemed by the cut of their jackets, and one had a lump around his right ankle, which was probably another holster. Tim once told me that he didn't feel
dressed without a pistol. Along with them the local constable arrived, his jacket bright green, and he stood with a certain pride of association when he had been introduced to Tim and the two men from Boston.

Of course, Alexandra's friends from her job, from school, from the neighborhood all arrived, too, all in dresses that were silk or at least slinky, and they formed a posse of grown-up, elegant women, who drifted along as a competition with the bridesmaids, who surely had youth and beauty but at least here they had to face elegance and womanliness, perfectly realized. Jerry was there, too, and while I hadn't seen him in the church yet, he had been up at the farm, pointing out to the guests who were killing time a deer that had died in the woods and how the vultures were circling like black flags. He wore a jacket, moth-eaten and with patched elbows, that had belonged to my grandfather and which Jerry must have stored in a Styrofoam chest filled with mothballs: you could smell it a hundred yards away. Then, finally, I had invited Charlotte, and the few people who had worked for my father and some even my grandfather, but they were old now and must have come up to the church with a walker.

I dried my face, put on my shirt, tied my tie. And now, after that cloud of feminine power had gone out the door, and Pia and I were there alone, the essence of what the place had been reasserted itself for a moment: rough and manlike, a place where men had come to hunt deer and drink and play cards, which I had been part of but which was now gone for good. The men who had been here with my father and grandfather were mostly dead and gone, and all that was left was that lingering, odd, lonely atmosphere of a place where something had come to an end.

“You look beautiful,” I said.

“Do you think so?” she said.

“Just lovely,” I said. “I'm proud to be with you.”

“Oh,” she said, “you say that to all the brides. I just hope this goes smoothly.”

“Me, too,” I said.

She looked at her watch.

“How long does it take to get there?” she said.

“Five minutes,” I said. “We pull up in front of the chapel. I come around and open the door for you. You take my arm. We walk in.”