Great House (31 page)

The train pulled into Liverpool close to three in the afternoon. I was watching a flock of geese wing across the iron gray sky and then we plunged into a tunnel and came up under the glass dome of Lime Street station. The address Gottlieb had given me for the Fiskes was in Anfield. I'd planned to walk past the house before finding a bed-and-breakfast nearby to spend the night, then to call the following morning. But making my way down the platform I felt a heavy ache in my legs, as if I had arrived from London on foot rather than sat idle for two and a half hours on the train. I stopped to switch my bag to the other shoulder, and without looking up I sensed the gray sky pressing down on the glass roof from above, and when the letters on the flip board above the platform began to whir and click, times and destinations disintegrating, leaving us, the newly arrived, in limbo, a sickening wave of claustrophobia came over me and I had to struggle to resist the urge to walk straight to the ticket office and purchase a ticket for the next train back to London. The letters began to clatter again, and for a moment I was seized by the thought that the whirring letters were spelling the names of people. Though what people, I couldn't say. I must have stood for some time, because a man from the railway company wearing a gold-buttoned uniform approached to ask me if I was all right. There are times when the kindness of strangers only makes matters worse because one realizes how badly one is in need of kindness and that the only source is a stranger. But I managed to resist self-pity, thanking him and continuing on my way, heartened by my luck at not being forced to wear a hat like his, a perky box with a shiny visor that would make the daily battle for self-dignity before the mirror immeasurably more difficult. My
satisfaction only lasted as far as the information desk, though, where I joined the line of travelers trying the patience of the girl who looked as if she had closed her eyes in one place and opened them to find herself there, in that little circular booth, dispensing information about Liverpool she never knew she had.

It was almost dark by the time I arrived at the hotel. The walls of the tiny, overheated foyer were papered with a flowery design, bunches of silk flowers were set out on the small tables clustered at the back, and hanging on the wall, though it was still some weeks before Christmas, was a large plastic wreath, the whole thing giving one the feeling of having stepped into a museum dedicated to the memory of long-extinct floral life. A wave of the claustrophobia I'd felt at the station came back to me, and when the receptionist asked me to fill out a registration form I was tempted to make something up, as if going under a false name and occupation might bring the relief of another, untapped dimension. My room looked out on a brick wall, and it, too, continued and elaborated the floral theme, so that for the first minutes during which I stood in the doorway, I did not believe that it would be possible for me to stay there. If it weren't for the heavy ache in my legs and my feet that felt like a pair of anvils, I almost certainly would have turned around and left; it was only exhaustion that made me enter and collapse on the chair with its dense print of exuberant roses, though for more than an hour I was unable to close the door behind me for fear of being shut in alone with so much choked, artificial life. As the walls seemed to lean in toward me, I couldn't help but ask myself, not in so many words, but in the fragmentary shorthand of thoughts one thinks alone to oneself, What right do I have to turn over a stone she wished to leave unturned? It was then that the sense rose up in me like bile, a sense I tried but failed to keep down, that what I was really doing was trying to expose her guilt. To expose it against her wishes, in order to punish her. For what, you might ask, punish the poor woman for what? And the answer that comes to me, which is only part of the answer, is that I wished to punish her for her
intolerable stoicism, which made it impossible for me to ever be truly needed by her in the most profound ways a person can need another, a need that often goes by the name of love. Of course she needed me—to keep order, to remember the shopping, to pay the bills, to keep her company, to give her pleasure, and, in the end, to bathe, and wipe, and dress her, to bring her to the hospital, and finally to bury her. But that she needed it to be
me
who performed these duties and not some other man, equally in love with her, equally at the ready, was never entirely clear to me. I suppose it could be said that I never demanded she make the case for her love, but then I never really felt I had the right. Or maybe I feared that, honest as she was, unable to tolerate the smallest insincerity, she would fail to make the case, that she would stutter and grow silent, and then what choice would I have but to get up and leave forever, or continue with things as they had always been, only now with the full knowledge that I was simply one example where there could have been many? It isn't that I thought she loved me less than she might have loved another man (though there were times I feared as much). No, what I'm speaking of now, or trying to speak of, is something else, the sense that her self-sufficiency—the proof she carried within her that she could withstand unthinkable tragedy on her own, that in fact the extreme solitude she had constructed around herself, reducing herself, folding in on herself, turning a silent scream into the weight of private work, was precisely what enabled her to withstand it—made it impossible for her to ever need me as I needed her. No matter how bleak or tragic her stories were, their effort, their creation, could only ever be a form of hope, a denial of death or a howl of life in the face of it. And I had no place in that. Whether I existed downstairs or not, she would continue to do what she had always done alone at her desk, and it was that work that allowed her to survive, not my care or company. All our lives I'd insisted that it was she who was dependent on me. She who needed to be protected, who was delicate and required constant care. But in truth it was I who needed to feel needed.

With great difficulty I managed to drag myself down to the hotel bar for a gin and tonic to calm myself. The only other drinkers were two old women, sisters, I think, perhaps even twins, perilously frail, their hands deformed around their glasses. Ten minutes after I'd arrived, one got up, departing so slowly she might have been performing a pantomime, leaving the other alone, until at last the second one vacated her spot just as slowly, like some demented version of the Von Trapps exiting to the tune of “So Long, Farewell,” and as she passed me she swiveled her head and gave me a terrifying grin. I smiled back, the importance of manners, my mother always said, is inversely related to how inclined one is to use them, or, in other words, sometimes politeness is all that stands between oneself and madness.

When I returned to Room 29 an hour later the air itself seemed to have taken on a sickening floral odor. I dug out the number Gottlieb had given me from my bag. I dialed and a woman answered. May I speak to Mrs. Elsie Fiske? I asked. Speaking. Really? I almost said, because no small part of me still held out for the possibility that Gottlieb's detective work would lead to a dead end, and that I would return home to London, to my garden and books and the grudging company of the tomcat, having tried and failed to find Lotte's child. Hello? she said. I'm sorry, I said, this is bound to be awkward. I don't mean to throw you off guard, but I was hoping to discuss with you a rather personal matter. Who is this? My name is Arthur Bender. My wife—this really is very awkward, forgive me, I assure you I don't wish to make you uncomfortable in any way, but some time ago my wife died and I learned that she had a child I never knew about. A boy she gave up for adoption in June 1948. There was a heavy silence on the other end of the line. I cleared my throat. Her name was Lotte Berg—I began to say, but she cut in. What is it you want, exactly, Mr. Bender? I don't know what possessed me to speak so frankly, perhaps something in the tone of her voice, the clarity or intelligence I thought I heard in it, but what I said was, If I were to answer that
question honestly, Mrs. Fiske, I might have you on the phone all night. To be as straightforward as possible, I've come to Liverpool and I wondered if it would not be too much of an imposition to ask to meet you, and perhaps, if you come to think it would be all right, to meet your son. There was another pause, a pause that seemed to go on a long time as the vegetation unfurled and advanced along the walls. He's dead, she said simply. He's been dead twenty-seven years.

The night was long. The heat in the room was unbearable, and from time to time I would get up to open the window, only to remember that it was sealed shut. I threw all of the covers onto the floor and lay spread-eagle on the mattress, inhaling the heat rising off the radiator, a heat that infected my dreams like a tropical fever. They were dreams beyond language, grotesque images of raw, wet, bloated flesh strung up in black nets, and white bags that secreted a slow colorless drip echoing off the floor, images from the nightmares of my childhood at last come back to me, even more horrifying now than they were then since I grasped, in that semi-hallucinatory state, that they could only belong to my death. We have to draw some distinctions, I repeated over and over in my head, or not I but a disembodied voice that I took to be my own. But there was one dream that stood apart from that monstrous parade, a simple dream of Lotte on a beach, drawing long lines with her bony toe in the sand while I watched, lying back on my elbows in the body of a much younger man which I sensed, like a nimbus at the edge of that bright day, didn't belong to me. When I woke, the blow of her absence made me gag. I stood gulping from the bathroom tap, and when I tried to urinate there was only a drip and a burning sensation, as if I were trying to pass sand, and suddenly, out of nowhere, the way news of oneself so often arrives, it dawned on me what a ridiculous thing it was to have dedicated one's life to being a scholar of the so-called Romantic poets. I proceeded to flush the toilet. I took a shower, dressed, and checked out of the hotel. When the receptionist asked if everything had been to my satisfaction I smiled and said that it had been.

A long walk in the hours after dawn, of which I remember little. Only that I arrived at the house before nine, though Elsie Fiske had asked me for ten. All my life I have arrived early only to find myself standing self-consciously on a corner, outside a door, in an empty room, but the closer I get to death the earlier I arrive, the longer I am content to wait, perhaps to give myself the false sensation that there is too much time rather than not enough. It was a two-story terraced house, indistinguishable from the others on the road apart from the number next to its front door—the same dull lace curtains, the same iron rail. It was drizzling, and I walked up and down the opposite side of the street to stay warm. Something about the sight of the lace curtains filled me with a sickening guilt. The boy was dead, the story I'd asked Mrs. Fiske to tell would end badly. All those years Lotte had kept from me the story of her child. However he had haunted her, he had not been allowed to intrude on our lives. On our happiness, I should say, since that was always ours. Like a strongman under an enormous weight, she'd borne her silence alone. It was a work of art, her silence. And now I was going to destroy it.

At ten o'clock sharp I rang the bell. The dead take their secrets with them, or so they say. But it isn't really true, is it? The secrets of the dead have a viral quality, and find a way to keep themselves alive in another host. No, I was guilty of nothing more than advancing the inevitable.

I thought I saw the curtains move but it was some time before anyone came to the door. At last I heard footsteps and the lock turned. The woman who stood there had very long gray hair, hair that must have gone all the way down her back when it was loose, but which she had plaited and coiled on top of her head in the style of one who had just stepped off a stage where she'd been performing Chekhov. She had a very erect carriage and little gray eyes.

She showed me into the living room. Right away, I knew that her husband had died and that she lived alone there. Perhaps a person who lives on his own has a special sense for the shades, tones, and
peculiar echoes of that life. She gestured to the tasseled sofa decorated with an abundance of crocheted pillows, all of which, as far as I could tell, pictured various species of dogs and cats. I took a seat among them; one or two slipped onto my lap and nestled there. I proceeded to stroke a little black stuffed dog on the head. On the table, Mrs. Fiske had laid out a pot of tea and a plate of digestives, though for a long time she didn't move to pour it, and by the time she did the tea was too strong. I don't remember how we began to talk. I only remember that I made the acquaintance of that stuffed little dog, a spaniel of some kind, and then Mrs. Fiske and I were deep into conversation, a conversation that both of us had been waiting a long time to have, though neither had known it. There was very little (or so it seemed, sitting in that room that I soon realized was filled with canine and feline likenesses of every kind, not just the pillows but the figurines that crowded the shelves and the paintings on the wall) that we couldn't say to each other, even if we did not choose to say it all, and yet it wasn't intimacy that existed between us, certainly not warmth, but something more desperate. At no time did we ever address each other as anything but Mr. Bender and Mrs. Fiske.

We spoke of husbands and wives, of the death of her husband eleven years earlier, who had gone by a heart attack while singing “You'll Never Walk Alone” in the football stadium, of the hats and scarves and shoes of the dead that keep turning up, diminishing powers of concentration, letters returned in the mail, of train travel, of standing over graves, of all the ways that life can be squeezed out of the human body, at least I have the impression now that we spoke of these things though I admit it is possible we spoke of the difficulty of growing lavender in a wet climate, and that those other things were only the subtext, so clearly understood between Mrs. Fiske and me. But I don't think so, I don't think we discussed lavender or gardens at all. The bitter tea grew cold, despite the tea cozy. A few strands of Mrs. Fiske's gray hair came loose from arrangements made earlier.