All the Dead Yale Men (9 page)

“No,” I said. I picked at the green-white guano under my fingernails. “No. I guess not.”

“I guess I better call Ginny. That was Cal's wife's name, right?” said Alexandra. “Make a ham and take it over. Maybe pick up the kids from school.”

“You can tell her not to worry about the money Cal owed me,” I said.

“I'll let you do that,” she said. “And of course if he didn't leave a note, and if she asks why he did it, you can tell her. That's above my pay scale.”

“I'll tell her,” I said.

Alexandra took my hand.

“I know you miss your father,” she said.

Her hand was like warm lotion that penetrated the skin.

“He had to be such a son of a bitch,” I said.

“But that didn't stop you from loving him, did it?” she said.

“No,” I said. “I loved him for the trouble he'd gotten through or the way he did, but I loved him for the way he fucked up, too.”

“Well, he certainly didn't short you on that,” she said.

MY FATHER'S WILL
was in the finished cellar of his house in Cambridge, the room filled with the scent of mold from the condensation on the walls and from the constant leaks, which my father was always slow to repair. Two days after he died I sat at the card table he used, the one with the green top and the gimpy leg, and started looking through what he had left. I always thought he had been lazy or too devil-may-care to call a plumber right away, but the moisture had only made the papers harder to read. The ink on them, the long lines of figures, the notes about which banks he had used and even the canceled checks, were smeared like a woman's mascara after she has been crying.

No surprises in the will. Everything was left to me. Then I went through the rest of the papers, those moldy sheets and file folders my father kept in cardboard file boxes he had bought from Kmart then from Wal-Mart, the decline of the stores perfectly
matching the increasing corruption of his efforts to manage the last of the money that his father had left. And, of course, the records showed what he had taken from my inheritance. It had a certain beauty to it. The most interesting items were in a file marked “Records for Frank. Open after death.” “Death” had been put in quotes. The mold here was greenish and speckled, the ink harder to read. I guess he had left it under a place where the water condensed from an overhead pipe and dripped, one drop at a time, season after season, onto this file in particular. As a good spook, he had let nature take its course. If the papers were hard enough to read, he could appear to have done one thing while actually having done something else. And, of course, right there on top was a copy of the trust deed that I had found, years before, in my grandmother's notebooks.

Still, I had practical matters to face. The body had to be cremated. And so, a week after Cal had jumped off the bridge, I picked up my father's ashes.

This was the first week in June, my father's favorite time of the year. (
In June, Frank
, he used to say,
you have the feeling all is forgiven
.) The funeral was going to be held the next day in the town close to the land my grandfather had owned and which would be mine after probate.

The funeral parlor where I picked up my father's ashes was just beyond a prison on Route 2. The walls of the prison were gray and looked as though time had been made into a hard substance. Rolls of razor wire were at the top, and every fifty yards or so a guard tower protruded from the wall, and in each one a man stood, his face inscrutable from the distance of the road but yet, for me, as I drove to get my father's ashes, the inscrutable guards seemed to be an accusation. I supposed this was part of the feeling of picking up my father's ashes, but it could have been fear, too, of ending up in this place.

The funeral parlor was in Concord, a sad, pretentious town of such gloom as to seem that this atmosphere was the main product of the place. It was on a residential street, although a dry cleaner, a lunch counter, and a fast food outlet were mixed in with the single-story houses. The overall impression of the block was one of being washed out, dimmed somehow, as though the smoke from the crematorium obliterated all the colors on the street. A woman in a housedress pushed a cart from the Stop and Shop down the block, the basket filled with what looked like rags, but which was her dry cleaning.

The records in the cellar told a sort of story, really, although it was in running ink, indecipherable checks, the names of banks I guessed at more than actually knew. They were kept in my father's slanting handwriting, which was usually easy to read. The first pages were a summary of how much had been left, and a copy of the trust agreement, some parts of which were underlined. It had never been much money, although I was curious that while the stock market had increased, the three hundred dollars a month, which I had gotten as an undergraduate, never did. But even after his spy deviousness, when I had gone to see him years before, and maybe in spite of it, I thought that not talking about the cheating was a way, silent to be sure, of saying how much I loved him. As everyone knows, though, love can get tough, and I had saved what I knew until the time when I was in trouble and wanted to get his attention. To get him to take me seriously. And nothing would have done that like showing him how he was cheating. I was left with a particular emptiness, since I realized I had thought of this as a secret weapon, and what did I have now?

The path to the door of Michael and Green, the morticians, was like the path to any suburban house: shrubs of a dusty green, walkway made of brick, white aluminum door with dusty glass.
Inside, before the reception desk, a brown carpet, stained here and there, as though fluid had leaked out of one of the containers for the chemicals they needed. Mr. Green, a man in a tie and a short-sleeved shirt, waited at the counter, his eyes set on mine, his entire air one of reduced humanity. The ashes were in a wooden box, which he had politely put into a foil bag the color of a red piñata and as shiny, too. The oak box was held shut with a little hook. It smelled like an ashtray where my grandfather had been flicking the tip of a cigar, a good one from Cuba rolled by blind men, as he used to say.

“Would you like to take care of the balance now?” said Mr. Green.

“Yes,” I said. “I would.”

Mr. Green's fingers took the check with a respectful pinch, waved it back and forth while the ink dried, and then said, “Hot today, isn't it.”

“A little smoky,” I said.

“We always get that at this time of the year. Prevailing winds. Why we get all kinds of things from the Midwest. Coal dust. You name it.”

“I guess that's right,” I said.

“I'm glad you came to me for this service,” said Mr. Green. “It's so easy to get cheated these days.”

“Well, yes. It's seems very reasonable.”

Mr. Green showed his bad teeth when he smiled. I thought the odor of the place was like that cellar in Cambridge. It was as though my father had been willing to let me see what he had done, sort of, since some of the papers were missing, and then he had waited to give me a glimpse after he was safely out of the way. Even as I flipped the pages, turned over the canceled checks made out to himself on the account that was for me, I knew that he had been struggling to come up with a legally defendable
position that allowed him to do this, to take the money that was mine and still be on the right side of the law. About midway through the green-tinted paper, the running ink, the speckled mold that was so much like the black dust you see on an apple in an abandoned orchard, he had written “Eureka!” I guess he was so happy to have found a legal way to cheat me that he wanted to make a note, or to share it with himself, since the only other person he could share it with was me, and he knew, at least, that I wasn't going to be overjoyed at the discovery.

The box sat on the counter. Mr. Green gave it a little shove.

“That takes care of it,” he said.

“Not quite,” I said. “There's the funeral.”

“Yes,” he said. “There's always that. But it comes to an end, too.”

He held the front door for me and then stepped into the hazy air behind me, a man who was tinted gray. I carried the festive bag. And when I was in the car, stabbing the key into the ignition, he waited, stooped, small and oddly defiant, too, as though he knew a secret that no one else had the guts to face. The cigar stink of the ashes hung in the car.

Perhaps I could put them in the trunk, but that seemed wrong. Somehow, we were going to make this trip together: me at the wheel, my father in the front seat. We used to go for a drive that way when I was first practicing law and then when I was an assistant prosecutor. He always wanted to celebrate at what he called the “farm.”

So, after the “Eureka!” I knew I was getting close. The next page of the ledger also had a note clipped to it, too, and there, along with a moldy Xerox of the original trust, he had come back to the kill. The underlined section of the trust said that the trustee's fiduciary duty was to maintain the monthly stipend. Well, sure, that's right, I thought, but as I turned the pages, as
the papers became more wrinkled where they had been wet, the shape of the strategy emerged. It had a sort of beauty, when you got down to it. He didn't have to produce more than the original monthly stipend, no matter what percentage of the original trust this was. Pop had been specific, I guess, because he didn't want any doubts about the amount, never dreaming that the market could go up two thousand percent.

Well, at least I didn't have to ask him about it, or to sit with him, at that card table, where we looked each other in the eyes and realized that the money was only part of the secrets that were hidden, not only by my grandmother, but him, too—that is his seduction or madness of the erotic over a young woman, years ago. What had been behind that? The years in a prison camp? The moment when he had looked down that hole in the barrel of the guard's pistol in Poland? Had it all snapped right then, in that smoldering, sultry look of a woman who just appeared and seemed, if my grandmother is to be trusted, to exist in a haze that so perfectly engulfed him?

Here, I think, is the time to add another one of those things from the dark. When my mother was dying and when my father sat next to her, she said to him, “Chip. Promise me one thing. You won't chase any cheap blonds, all right?”

Of course, he gave his promise, and within a month after her death that is exactly what he was doing, to the extent of finding one and even marrying her, although she died of cirrhosis within two years. Then my father lived alone. I feared I would end up the same.

I SHOULD SAY
that my own trouble started eighteen months before my father died.

The first part was the Citron Modèle case. My father knew some of the trouble, but only a little on the surface. The trouble was deeper, far deeper than what my father knew.

Citron Modèle wasn't the man's real name, which was Jason Slivotviz. He was about six feet tall in his cowboy boots, and his hair was bleached “rock singer blond,” as he put it. He wore a pair of black jeans, a sheer shirt, and a gold necklace. At least he dressed this way when he worked at the Citron Modèle Beauty and Nail Salon, which was in a failed auto parts store in Braintree. Perms, trims, bikini wax, full sphinx, nails, and piercings. Three chairs, a cabinet for lotions, dyes, conditioners, creams, mousse, and wigs on plastic heads. The place smelled like a cotton candy machine in a hot chemical factory. Discount
prices. Coupons. A little card he'd punch if you were a member of the Citron Modèle Fashion Club. Ten trims or perms gave you a free one. A pile of
In Style
magazines, next to some back issues of
People
mixed in with
Extreme Sports
and
Cosmetic Surgery Monthly
. Citron Modèle was making money, although to get his salon started he had borrowed from some men who weren't regular bankers.

Sometimes Citron wore his hair in a ponytail, held there with a rubber band, so as to look like a sort of hippie transgendered cheerleader.

Citron was falling behind in his loan payments, at least as nearly as we could tell from the books he kept, the numbers and words written in a hand that he must have copied from a nineteenth-century manual of calligraphy for young women. Scrolls and swirls: two cases Condo Conditioner @ $56.95 per case, plus tax. And then an entry that said, “Need new girl for other chair. I skim her fifty percent and the rest is pure profit.”

He put an ad in
Cosmetics Journal
and hired a woman who was in her twenties. She was thin with very pale skin, and she had short blond hair, no tattoos, no identifying marks of any kind (which caused us trouble later). In the salon she called herself Sally Sunshine, but her real name was Martha Franklin. She had grown up in Lodi, New Jersey, where she had been a cheerleader in a secondhand uniform with losing football teams, and yet she had been a good student but without money to go to college. She fled Lodi as soon as she could, on a Peter Pan bus to Boston, where she went to the Braintree School of Cosmetology. A certificate in a frame she bought at Target. During the trial, I went down to Lodi. The main road ran by the wetlands, where ducks floated in the back channels on the reflections of smokestacks from the oil refineries. Giants Stadium sat like a crater made by a meteorite.