Almost Everything Very Fast (23 page)

Clemens gestured toward the living room: “If you don’t mind my asking: what do you call what he has?”

Albert answered the way he always answered this sort of question: “Fred is simply Fred.”

“Has he always been like this?”

“Yes,” said Albert, annoyed, “yes,” and, setting his cup down, splashed some tea on the table.

“It was only a question,” mumbled Clemens.

Klondi suggested stepping out for a smoke, and Albert, who’d been longing for a cigarette, declined, while Violet, the nonsmoker, eagerly accompanied her.

Clemens slipped both hands around his teacup. “Please don’t imagine I haven’t noticed how completely stressed out you all are. Are you related to him?”

“He’s my father.” Even in his irritation Albert registered how uncommonly easily the words passed through his lips.

“I’m sorry,” said Clemens.

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why are you sorry? Why does everyone always say that?”

Clemens leaned back, holding the teacup defensively in front of his chest. “Because it certainly can’t be easy.”

“And why should anyone be sorry about that? It isn’t your fault, right? You have nothing to do with it, you have no sense of what it’s like—easy or hard or whatever. You don’t have the faintest idea.”

Albert was thinking—and not for the first time—that people said that they were sorry only because they were glad. They were expressing how goddamn happy they were not to be dealing with the same shit. People like Clemens, who lived all alone in their awful terraced houses and wanted only to fit in, to dress their little girls in pink and their little boys in sky-blue, and sort screws on the weekends in their very own garages, just like everybody else; Clemens, all of them, were so goddamn glad that they’d finally found someone whose life was even shittier than their own, and that’s what they were celebrating with their stupid
I’m sorrie
s.

“My father’s sick, too,” said Clemens. “Parkinson’s.”

Albert shut his eyes and let his head droop. “Now you must really think I’m an idiot.”

Clemens set his cup down and turned it slightly counterclockwise. “Right. But I understand. Someone you love is dying.”

And with that Clemens left the kitchen. There was something shockingly clear in his bluntness. Because Fred was dying, Albert was feeling bad. It was as simple as that.

It wasn’t long before Violet came back in.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” he replied.

“Everything okay?”

Albert nodded, and, feeling tears in his eyes, looked quickly into his teacup. “Yes.”

A soft hand touched his neck, and Albert slowly turned to her. They hugged. Albert held her tight, he’d never held anyone so tight before, and he couldn’t remember the last time something had felt so good, and he wept and made noises he couldn’t recognize, they were flowing out of him, frightening him, and he held Violet even tighter.

In the twilight even the Beetle’s solar yellow was merely bright gray. Fred sat huddled in the backseat, wrapped up in wool blankets that Clemens had given them, his head propped on Klondi’s shoulder, while she hummed him a lullaby. Violet stood by the open driver’s-side door, looking over the top of the car as Albert gave Clemens a good-bye handshake. “Thanks for everything.”

“Take good care of him.”

Albert cast around for a decently worded valediction, but couldn’t come up with anything better than “Sure.”

Clemens pointed to Fred. “Your mother must be proud of the way you look after him.”

Again Albert rummaged his head for a suitable answer—and again had to settle for “Sure.” From the corner of his eye he saw Violet signaling him to break it off: snipping her middle and index fingers like a pair of scissors.

After a few more insubstantial good-byes, Clemens went back into the house, and Albert slipped into the passenger seat.

“Kids,” said Klondi, “we need to decide where we’re going.”

Albert ran both hands across his face. “Maybe we ought to turn around.”

“No!” shouted Fred. “No, we have to go to the church!”

Albert turned to him. “You aren’t doing so good. And I don’t want anything to happen because we pressed on.”

Fred gave a booming laugh, as if someone were tickling him. “But a church is a totally great place to go dead!”

Violet looked sidewise at Albert, as if to say, “When he’s right, he’s right.”

Klondi nodded.

Albert laid a hand on Fred’s shoulder. “All right: on to Helena.”

The less-than-attractive smile (asymmetrical teeth) with which Alfonsa greeted Albert corresponded almost exactly to the sort she’d marshaled for him whenever he returned to the convent after one of his escape attempts: a combination of the motherly and the know-it-all. Without uttering a word, she was saying, “Lovely to see you!” as well as “I knew you’d come back.”

Albert disliked it when he felt that someone, especially the nun, was predicting his actions. And Alfonsa had a particular talent for doing just that. He stood at the entrance to her room. The space between the crown of his head and the top of the doorframe seemed vast.

“I’m here,” he said.

“I can see that,” said Alfonsa. She rose from her writing desk, came over to him, and patted his upper arms with both hands, as if measuring just how wide he was.

Her smile contracted to an equivocal smirk. “You smoke?”

“Occasionally.”

“Often, it smells like. Not very healthy, they say.”

“No kidding.” Albert tried to imitate her smirk.

“We’ve missed you terribly, smart aleck.”

Albert couldn’t help himself: though it sounded like irony, it didn’t come across that way at all.

Alfonsa nodded toward the chessboard. “How about a game?” Even in the floor lamp’s meager light, he could tell that she’d polished the checkers she still made him use.

“That isn’t why I’m here.”

“You’re here because of your mother.” No question, and nevertheless her words affected Albert. He reached for the makeup compact in his pocket, but didn’t find it. He’d left it behind in the car. Alfonsa bent over the laptop on her desk, and cued up Frank Sinatra with the mouse. Albert knew what was coming next. In a dreamy sort of tone, she’d say, sighing:
What a stunner of a voice.

Alfonsa settled herself on one of the wooden stools: “What a stunner of a voice.”

Fly me to the moon

Let me play among the stars

Albert didn’t stir from his place by the door. “Really, I don’t want to play right now.”

“But of course you do.” She pointed to the empty stool across from her. “And afterward, we’ll talk.”

Let me see what spring is like

On a-Jupiter and Mars

Was it just him, or would nobody give him what he wanted? Where was it written that things couldn’t just run smoothly? Sister Alfonsa, for example, could’ve just told him—no drama at all: “This is your mother.” Or at least: “That was your mother.” It wouldn’t even have to be true, just as long as he could believe it.

In other words, hold my hand

Children, thought Albert, not for the first time, should be allowed to choose their parents. Parents were far too careless in producing offspring. What had his own parents, no, what had his mother, been thinking? He would have been spared a good deal. He would have been spared worrying about Fred, whom he’d left back in the Saint Helena infirmary. He would have been spared holding Fred’s pale hand, promising him that he’d be back before Fred “went dead.” He would have been spared the five-minute walk from the infirmary to Alfonsa’s room, which had ballooned to half an hour because on the way he’d paused again and again to ask himself whether he ought to go back and say his good-byes to Fred—which course he finally rejected, preferring the risk of never getting the chance to say good-bye over the prospect of having to do it twice. And he would have been spared—along with all of the irritating, stressful, painful things that had filled the last nineteen years—sitting down across from Alfonsa, now, just after midnight, not even an hour after their arrival at Saint Helena, behind his army of white checkers, and for his first move sending one of his pawns to certain death.

In other words, baby, kiss me

Albert wanted to get this game over with. So he had to lose. A quick win against Alfonsa was a contradiction in terms. But to lose deliberately without her noticing would be almost as hard as bringing her to checkmate. Albert would have to go at it shrewdly. For a while he went on the attack, guns blazing, and so let her take three pawns, a knight, and a bishop. (Alfonsa, teasing, said he was rusty.) Then he regrouped, played cautiously, and even took one of her rooks. (Alfonsa purred a respectful
Hmm
or two.) Secretly, though, he was working to wall in his king, using his own retinue to cut off all escape routes, so that finally the black queen was able to set up the deathblow. (Which Alfonsa punctuated with a satisfied
Ha!
) Albert glanced at the clock. They’d been playing for barely forty minutes.

“Let’s talk,” he said.

Alfonsa took one of the white checkers and looked at it carefully. “Were you actually making an effort?”

“Yes.”

“Rematch?”

Albert just looked at her.

“I understand.”

“I want you to tell me what you know,” he said. “Now.”

Ever since they’d left for Saint Helena, there’d been an unpleasant feeling squatting in Albert’s chest. At first he’d thought it was simply the fear of finding himself stuck in some new impasse. But that hadn’t been it. It was the fear of finding no new impasse at all. Fear of the truth. What do you do with the truth, once you’ve finally found it?

“We have to go to the Zwirglstein,” said Alfonsa.

“Zwirglstein?”

“It’s a mountain. There’s an old-folks home there.”

“And that’s where my mother is?”

“She’ll be there.”

Albert leapt up. “Just tell me her name.”

“I’m not going to do that.”

“Why!”

“It’s complicated.”

“What’s so complicated about a name?”

“You’ll understand when we get there.”

“And if I go there alone?”

“Then you’ll never find her.”

Albert stepped over to the window, stared out at the night. His whole life he’d been waiting, for nineteen years he’d searched and hoped and waited, and Alfonsa, who’d raised him and whom he’d trusted, this woman could have helped him, could’ve put an end to his waiting long ago; she couldn’t just sit there now, refusing to cough up the truth, sit calmly, as if everything were fine, he wasn’t a five-year-old chess student anymore, he had a right to be told his mother’s name, who she was, and why she’d abandoned him.

But when he turned back to Alfonsa to make that clear to her, she was already sitting at her desk, flipping through her papers, and wishing him, without glancing up, a good night.

He left her room without a word, walked quickly down the corridor, away from her, starting to run now, across the yard, toward the chapel, where it was even chillier than outside, and hid himself, the way he used to, in one of the confessionals.

Later, my sister told me that she’d stared at the plumes of smoke and sweated in the heat of the fire that was devouring our house, until somebody covered her eyes and threw her over a shoulder and carried her away.

The next morning she was woken by a gentle voice; she opened her eyes to tell Papa or Mama or me about her nightmare—but the light falling through the window was unusually bright, and the air smelled different, like cow dung, and someone, somebody, passed her a cup of milk. Later a different somebody gave her a violet dress. Yet another somebody ran hot water for her to bathe in, water boiled especially for her. The same somebody who’d given her the violet dress suggested they milk the cows together, bake a cake, play with the cat. But Anni shook her head. The somebody with the gentle voice explained that she couldn’t go back home, that from now on she’d live here, with her new family. But Anni didn’t see any family. There was only a somebody, another somebody, and yet another somebody. She shook her head again and shouted for Julius. Somebody said, “Your brother’s in heaven now.” And then Anni shook her head so long that she got dizzy, and nobody said anything more.

Anni didn’t realize she’d set our house on fire. Her eight-year-old’s mind screened her from the knowledge. It rejected the truth for her own protection, as Anni herself rejected so many things. As the months went by, she practiced shaking her head, training herself, whenever other children called on her to play with them, or at lunch, when somebody suggested eating a little more. Or after her First Communion, when Farmer Egler asked her in a whisper whether she was interested in the closely guarded secret he kept inside his pants. And one day, when she discovered my
I love you
carved into the winding root on Wolf Hill and asked herself who’d written it and when, she shook it as if she never wanted to stop again, left and right and left, with raised chin, staring eyes, and white lips pressed firmly together, locks of hair whipping against her cheeks, wiping the world away.