Koko (63 page)

“Of course you can tell me to get out, and if you do I’ll go,” Pat said. “I have only
the most general idea of what this is all about, Michael. I like both of you. Judy
asked me to come here, and so I did.”

Michael had spent the night on the couch in his little office downstairs, Pat in the
guestroom; when Judy had told him that she would never be able to forgive him for
the way he had treated her—a statement she appeared to believe—Michael had moved out
to the George Washington, which had a few rooms it let out to boyfriends and grandparents.
The following night he had gone
to Conor’s. Now he spent hours each day talking to Max Atlas, his lawyer, who had
visible difficulty keeping himself from showing that he thought his client had lost
his mind. Max Atlas never smiled anyhow, his big fleshy face naturally expressed gloom
and doubt, but during the hours Michael spent with him his dewlaps sagged and even
his ears seemed to droop. It was not Michael’s marital difficulties that depressed
him, but that a client of his should voluntarily leave a business just before it began
to mint money.

“She came to the job one day,” Conor was saying. “In a Blazer. The Blazer was beautiful,
man. I saw her get out, and she looked good. The woman looked real good, let’s face
it. In spite of the fact you could see that she was down on account of her old man
being put away. Ben Roehm hauls me out from where I’m working and says, ‘Well, Conor,
I guess you ought to meet my niece Ellen.’ Right away I think I don’t have a chance
with this woman. But it turns out that her father was a carpenter, her grandfather
was a capenter, Ben Roehm is her uncle, and even her husband, who was bughouse ever
since he came back from the war, was a sort of a half-assed carpenter. Guess what
she likes?”

“I think I got it,” Michael said.

“No—guess what she likes to do?”

“The same things you do,” Poole said.

An expression of blissful amazement spread across Conor’s face. “She likes sitting
around the apartment and talking. She likes coming in here to the bar and having a
drink. We have great times. She claims she gets a big kick out of me. She wants to
have a little house up in Vermont. She wants to have a man to hang out with. She wants
kids. That asshole wouldn’t let her have kids, which was really okay seeing what a
rat in the grass he turned out to be. I’d like to have kids, Mikey, I really would.
You get tired of living by yourself.”

“How many times have you gone out with Ellen?”

“Fourteen and a half times. Once we just had time for a couple of beers before her
parents took her out. They’re concerned about her.” He revolved his beer glass on
the bar. “Ellen gets a little money from Ben Roehm, but she’s about as strapped as
I am.”

“I ought to get out of your way,” Poole said. “You don’t want me sleeping in your
place, Conor. You should have told me when I called you. I can go somewhere else.”

“No, her mother’s down with something, and Ellen’s taking
care of her. So we wouldn’t be together anyhow, for a couple days. And besides, I
wanted to tell you about her.” Conor looked away for a moment. “But I was wondering
when you were planning to make that trip to Milwaukee. Her mother is getting up and
around a little more these days.”

“I could do it the day after tomorrow,” Poole said, laughing. “I have to go to another
funeral. That patient of mine I told you about.”

“Mikey, would you mind if I, if I, you know …”

“Of course not.”

“You’ll like her,” Conor said, and slid off the stool to go to the pay phones.

Ten minutes later he returned with a big grin on his face. “She’ll be here in fifteen
minutes.” He kept on grinning. “It’s a funny thing. I feel like I’m joining up with
the world again—like I was floating around in space, and I finally came back to earth.
It took a long time, man.”

“Yes,” Poole said.

“That whole time we were on that trip, when I look back, it was like I wasn’t really
there.
Everything was like swimming underwater with your eyes open. It was like I was in
a dream and nothing was real. I was a human blur. And now I’m not anymore.”

Conor gulped down his beer and set the glass on the bar. “Did I say that right?”

“I’m like Ellen,” Poole said. “I like listening to you talk.”

A little while later Poole too went to the telephone, thinking that it was not so
very different for him. During their time in Singapore and Bangkok, everything had
seemed very sharp and clear—he had been reminded of what it had been like in Vietnam.
But in a short time everything had switched around. Singapore and Bangkok felt like
peacetime, and what was around him now felt like Vietnam. Another version of Elvis
was following them. Like Conor, Poole had not thought that he was asleep and dreaming
when he had walked through the Tiger Balm Gardens and Bugis Street; but maybe his
first moment of real awakening had come on the rickety bridge beside the cardboard
shacks. That was where he had started to give things up.

He dropped in coins and dialed his wife’s number. He expected to hear her message,
but someone lifted the receiver after the first ring.

Silence.

“Hello, who is this?” he asked.

“Who is
this
?” asked a strange female voice.

Then he knew who it was. “Hello, Pat. This is Michael. I’d like to speak to Judy.”

“I’ll do what I can.”

“Please.” Poole waited for long minutes while he watched Conor look at the door whenever
someone walked in. He would have to leave Conor’s apartment and check into a hotel
that night—it was not fair to keep him from his girlfriend.

Pat’s mild voice came back on the line. “She won’t, Michael. I’m sorry. She just won’t
talk to you.”

“Try again. Please.”

“One more try,” she said.

This time Judy came to the telephone almost immediately.

“Don’t you think we ought to get together and talk about things?”

“I’m not under the impression we have anything to talk about,” Judy said.

“We have a lot to talk about. Do you really want the lawyers to take over?”

“Just stay away from here,” Judy said. “I don’t want to see you, I don’t want you
sleeping on the couch, and I don’t want to talk to you now.”

It was all a game—sooner or later Judy would want everything back the way it used
to be. For now she wanted him to suffer. He had kept her from doing something she
had been pretending with all her heart to want to do.

“Have it your way,” he said, but she had already hung up.

Poole wandered back to the bar. Conor took one look at him and said, “Hey man, Ellen
and me can always stay at her place, you know. The only reason we use mine is that
she lives over in Bethel and it’d take me a little longer to get to work, but the
real main reason is that Woyzak’s got all his stuff all over the walls, pictures of
himself in uniform and a bunch of medals all framed, everywhere you look there’s Tom
Woyzak sighting down on you. It gets to you after a while.”

Poole excused himself and went back to the telephone. By now the bar was full of people,
and he could barely hear the mechanical voice instructing him in the use of his credit
card.

A man answered, asked for his name, and said that he would bring Maggie to the telephone.
He sounded very paternal.

In a moment Maggie was on the line. “Well, well, Dr. Poole. How did you know I wanted
to talk to you?”

“I have an idea that might be interesting to you.”

“Sounds interesting already,” she said.

“Has Tim Underhill mentioned our trip to Milwaukee to you?”

He had not.

“It hasn’t been too definite yet. We’re going to look up Victor Spitalny’s parents
and spend a little time seeing if we can pick up some new information on him. He might
have sent a postcard, there might be someone who’s heard something—it’s a long shot,
but it’s worth trying.”

“And?”

“And I thought that maybe you should come along. You might be able to identify Spitalny
from a photograph. And you’re a part of what’s going on. You’re already involved.”

“When will you be going?”

Michael said that he would book tickets that night for Sunday, and that he expected
to be gone only a couple of days.

“We’re opening the restaurant in a week.”

“It might only take a day or two. We might find out that it’s just a cold trail.”

“So why should I come along?”

“I’d like you to,” Michael said.

“Then I will. Call me back with the flight times, and I’ll meet you at the airport.
I’ll give you a check for my ticket.”

Michael hung up smiling.

He turned to face the bar and saw Conor standing face to face with a woman who was
perhaps an inch taller than he. She had long, unruly brown hair and wore a plaid shirt,
a tan sleeveless down jacket, and tight faded jeans. Conor nodded in his direction,
and the woman turned to watch him approach them. She had a high, deeply lined forehead,
firm eyebrows, and a strong intelligent face. She was not at all what Michael had
expected.

“This is the guy I was telling you about,” Conor said. “Dr. Michael Poole, known as
Mike. This is Ellen.”

“Hello, Dr. Poole.” She gripped his hand in hers.

“I hope you’ll call me Michael,” he said. “I’ve been hearing about you too, and I’m
glad to meet you.”

“I had to get away for a little while so I could check up on my sweetie,” Ellen said.

“If you guys ever have babies, you’d better ask me to be their doctor,” Poole said,
and for a time they all stood in the noisy bar grinning at each other.

When Michael slid into the last pew at St. Robert’s on the village square the service
had already begun. Two pews near the front had been filled with children who must
have been Stacy’s classmates. All of them looked taller, older, and at once more worldly
and more innocent than she. Stacy’s parents, William and Mary, “like the college,”
they said to those who met them for the first time, sat with a small group of relatives
on the other side of the church. William turned around and gave Michael a grateful
glance as he sat down. Light streamed in through the stained glass windows on both
sides of the church. Michael felt like a ghost—he felt as if bit by bit he were becoming
invisible, sitting in the bright optimistic church as an Episcopalian priest uttered
heartfelt commonplaces about death.

He and the Talbots met at the church door at the end of the service. William Talbot
was a beefy good-hearted man who had made a fortune with various investment banking
firms. “I’m happy you came, Michael.”

“We heard you’re leaving your practice.” There was a question in Mary Talbot’s statement,
and Michael thought he heard a criticism too. In the world of Westerholm, doctors
were not supposed to leave their posts until they retired or dropped dead.

“I’m thinking about it.”

“Are you coming out to Memorial Park?”

Mary Talbot had begun to look oddly worried and doubtful.

“Of course,” Michael said.

There were two cemeteries in Westerholm, located at opposite ends of the town. The
older of the two, Burr Grove, had filled up shortly before World War II, and was a
leafy, hilly, shady place with rows of pitted old eighteenth-century tombstones. Burr
Grove was known locally as “the graveyard.” Memorial Park, a straightforward modern
cemetery, occupied a long level field bordered by woods near the expressway on the
north end of town. It was neat, very well tended, and without charm or character of
any kind. In Memorial Park there were no tilting tombstones, no statuary
of angels or dogs or wailing women with dripping hair, no stone bungalows testifying
to the fortunes of merchant families—only straight rows of small white headstones
and long, level stretches of unbroken ground.

Stacy Talbot’s grave lay at the far end of the occupied section. The mounds of excavated
earth had been covered with strips of imitation grass of an unearthly, chemical green.
The young priest from St. Robert’s stood beneath a canopy and performed with what
looked to Poole like fussy satisfaction in his own elegance. The schoolchildren, presumably
considered too young for an actual burial, were not present. William and Mary Talbot
stood with bowed heads among their relatives and neighbors. Poole knew better than
half of the crowd of neighbors, who appeared more numerous outside in the cemetery
than inside St. Robert’s. They were parents of his patients, some of them his own
neighbors. Poole stood a little distance away from these people. He had really only
been a doctor here: none of these people were his friends. Judy had been too busy
and too anxious to invite people to their house; she had been secretly scornful of
their lives and their ambitions. During the service Poole saw a few of them notice
him—a little outburst of whispers, a few glances and smiles.

Because this was a child’s burial, Poole found himself remembering Robbie’s. He felt
drained by too much recent grief: an era, in many ways the calmest and most productive
of his life, seemed to be sliding into the ground with Stacy Talbot’s coffin. His
heart ached for William and Mary Talbot, who had no other children and whose daughter
had been so bright and brave. For an instant this grief pierced him like an arrow,
and Stacy Talbot’s death was an abyss—a monster had taken her, whittled at her body,
killed her inch by inch. Poole wished he had someone to hold, someone with whom he
could cry, but he stood at the edge of the mourners and cried by himself.

It was over soon, and the people who had known Stacy turned away toward their cars.
William Talbot came up to Michael and put his arms around him and then backed away,
too moved to speak. Mary Talbot put her patrician face beside his and embraced him.
“Oh, I miss her,” Michael said. “Thank you,” Mary Talbot whispered.

Into the darkness
, Poole thought, for the moment forgetting where he had seen or heard the phrase.