Let Me Be Frank With You (10 page)

“That doesn't sound good,” I said. Though it didn't sound like anything white people on every block in Haddam didn't have a patent on. We're always environed by ourselves.

“Well,” Ms. Pines said. “Ellis and I didn't know how bad it had become. We were quite happy children. Ellis didn't prosper in school, but had a lovely singing voice, which made our mother dote on him. I did
very
well in school, which pleased my
father
. In that way it wasn't so unusual for any American family.”

“I was thinking that,” I said. “Sounds like a story in
The New Yorker
.”

Ms. Pines looked at me with incomprehension. I was suddenly one of the in-limbo underachievers in Wall Township, who'd just made an inappropriate joke about the Compromise of 1850 and needed to be ignored.

“I'm not sure you need to hear this, Mr. Bascombe,” Ms. Pines said. “I don't require to tell it. I'm happy just to leave. You've been more than kind. It's not a happy story.”

“You're alive to tell it,” I said. “You survived. Whatever doesn't kill us makes us stronger, right?” I don't, of course, believe this. Most things that don't kill us right off, kill us later.

“I've wanted to believe that,” Ms. Pines said. “It's the history teacher's bedrock. The preparation for bad times.”

History's just somebody else's
War and Peace
, is what I thought. Though there was no reason to argue it. I smiled at her encouragingly.

Diaphanous mist rose off the scabby snow outside the
window, making my yard look derelict and un-pretty. The house gave a creaking noise of age and settlement. A spear of pure, rarefied mid-December sunlight illuminated a square on the hickory trunk in the neighbors' yard across the bamboo fence behind the potting shed the hurricane had damaged—the D'Urbervilles, a joint-practice lawyer couple. It could've been April, with balmy summer in pursuit, instead of the achy, cold days of January approaching. The inspector crows had disappeared.

Ms. Pines sniffed out toward the yard. “Well,” she said crisply. “I'll make it brief.” (Why did I say I wanted to hear it? Had I
meant
that? Had I even said it? Something was making me suffer second thoughts—the hopeful ray of sunlight, a signal to leave well enough alone.) “My mother, you understand, was
very
unhappy,” Ms. Pines said, “in this very house, where we're sitting. Our father drove out to Bell Laboratories each day. He was working on important projects and being appreciated and admired. But then he was coming home and feeling alienated. Why, we'll never know. But at some point in the fall of 1969, our mother inaugurated a relationship of a common kind with the choral music teacher at Haddam High, who'd been providing Ellis private voice instruction.” Ms. Pines cleared her throat, as if something had made her shudder. “Ellis and I knew nothing about the relationship. Not a clue. But after Thanksgiving, my father and mother
began to argue. And we heard things that let us know some of the coarser details. Which were very upsetting.”

“Yep,” I said. Still . . . nothing new under
these
stars.

“Then shortly after, my father moved down into the basement and out of their room upstairs.” Ms. Pines paused and turned her gaze around toward the hallway and the basement door. “He went right down those steps—he was a large, well-built man.” With her un-injured arm she gestured toward there, as if she could see her father clumping his way down. (I, of course, pictured Paul Robeson.) “He'd converted the basement into his workshop. He brought his instruments and testing gauges and computer prototypes. He'd turned it into a private laboratory. I think he hoped to invent something he could patent, and become wealthy. My brother and I were often brought down for demonstrations. He was a very clever man.”

I realized for the first time this was how and when the basement came to be “finished”—a secondary value-consideration for resale; and also a bit of choice suburban archaeology, plus a good story for an as-told-to project—like the Underground Railroad stopping in your house.

“He'd put a cot down there,” Ms. Pines said, “where he'd occasionally take naps. So, when he moved there, following Thanksgiving, it wasn't all that unusual. He was still in the house—though we ate with our mother and he, I think, ate
his meals in town at a restaurant, and left in the mornings while my brother and I were getting up. School was out for Christmas by then. Things had become very strained.”

“This feels like it's heading for a climax,” I said, almost, but not quite, eagerly. It wasn't going to be a barrel o' laughs climax, I guessed. Ms. Pines had said so already.

“Yes,” Ms. Pines said. “There
is
a climax.” She raised the orangish fingertips of her un-injured hand up to her shining, rounded cheeks and touched the skin there, as if her presence needed certifying. A gesture of dismay. I could smell the skin softener she used. “What do you hope for, Mr. Bascombe?” Ms. Pines looked directly at me, blinking her dark eyes to invoke seriousness. Things had worked their way around to me. Possibly I was about to be assigned accountability for something.

“Well, I try not to hope for too much,” I said. “It puts pressure on the future at my age. If you know what I mean. Sometimes a hope'll slip in when I'm not paying attention.” I tried a conspiratorial smile. My best. “. . . That I'll die before my wife does, for instance. Or something about my kids. It's pretty indistinct.”

“I hoped that about my husband,” Ms. Pines said. “But then we divorced, and I wasn't always sure. And then he died.”

“I'm divorced,” I agreed. “I know about that.”

“It's not always clear when your heart's broken, is it?”

“It's a lot clearer when it's not.”

Ms. Pines turned and unexpectedly looked both ways around her, as if she'd heard something—her name spoken, someone entering the room behind us. “I've over-worked your hospitality, Mr. Bascombe.” She looked at me fleetingly, then past, out the sliding-door windows at the misty snow. She frowned at nothing I could see. Her body seemed to be about to rise.

“You haven't,” I said. “It's only eleven thirty.” I consulted my watch, though I eerily always know what time it is—as if a clock was ticking inside me, which it may be. “You haven't told me the climax. Unless you don't want me to know.”

“I'm not sure you
should
,” Ms. Pines said, returning her gaze solemnly to rest on me. “It could alienate you from your house.”

“I sold real estate for twenty years,” I said. “Houses aren't that sacred to me. I sold
this
one twice before I bought it myself.” (In arrears from the bank.) “Somebody else'll own it someday and tear it down.” (And build a shitty condo.)

“We seem to need to know everything, don't we?”

“You're the history teacher,” I said. Though
of course
I was violating the belief-tenet on which I've staked much of my life: better
not
to know many things. Full disclosure is the myth of the fretting classes. Those who ignore history are no more likely to repeat it than anyone else but
are
more likely to
feel better about many things. Though, so determined was I to engage in an inter-racial substance-exchange, I clean forgot. It wouldn't have been racist, would it, to let Ms. Pines leave? President Obama would've understood.

“Well. Yes, I certainly am,” Ms. Pines said, composing herself again. “So. Sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas of 1969 . . .” (neuropsychically, a spiritual dead zone, when suicides abound like meteor showers) “. . . something disrupting apparently took place between our parents. I possibly could have found out what. But I was young and simply didn't. My brother and I didn't talk about it. It could have been that our mother told our father she was leaving him and going away with the music teacher. Mr. Senlak. I don't know. It could have been something else. My mother could be very dramatic. She could have said some wounding and irretrievable thing. Matters had gotten bad.”

For the first time since Ms. Pines had been in my house, I could feature the lot of them—all four Pines—breathing in these rooms, climbing the stairs, trading in and out the single humid bathroom, congregating in what was then the “dining room,” talking over school matters, eating PB&J's, all of them satellites of one another in empty space, trying, trying, trying to portray a cohesive, prototype, mixed-race family unit, and not succeeding. It would do any of us good to contemplate the house we live in being peopled by imperfect predecessors. It
would encourage empathy and offer—when there's nothing left to want in life—perspective.

Somehow I knew, though, by the orderly, semireluctant way Ms. Pines was advancing to what she meant to tell, that I wasn't going to like what I was about to hear, but would then have to know forever. My brain right away began sprinting ahead, rehearsing it all to Sally, an agog-shocked look on her face—all before I even knew what it was! I wanted to wind it back to the point, only moments before, at which Ms. Pines looked all around her, as if she'd heard ghostly old Hartwick pounding up the stairs from the basement with bad intentions filling his capacious brain. I could lead her to the front door and down to the snowy street, busted wrist and all; let her go back to where she'd come from—Gulick Road. Lavallette. If in fact she wasn't a
figment
—my personal-private phantasm for wrongs I'd committed, never atoned for, and now had to pay off. Am I the only human who occasionally thinks that he's dreaming? I think it more and more.

I badly wanted to say something; slow the onward march of words; win some time to think. Though all I said was, “I hope he didn't do something terrible.” Hope.
There
, I'd hoped something.

“He wasn't a terrible man, Mr. Bascombe,” Ms. Pines said meditatively. “He was exceptional. I have his coloring. And she was a perfectly good person in her own way, as well.
Not as good or exceptional as he was. As I said, he was like a wonderful idea, but labored under that delusion. So. When life turned un-wonderful, he didn't know what to do. That's my view, anyway.”

“Maybe he didn't tolerate ambiguity well.”

“His life was a losing war against ambiguity. He knew that about himself and hated it. The essence of all history is contingency, isn't it? But it's true of science, too.”

“So did they have a terrible fight and everything got ruined? And it all happened in these rooms?” (In other words the way white suburbanites work things out?)

“No,” Ms. Pines said calmly. “My father killed my mother. And he killed my brother, Ellis. Then he sat down in the living room and waited for me to come home from debate club practice—which we were having through the Christmas holidays. Debating the viability of the UN. He was waiting to kill me, too. But I was late getting home. He must've had time to think about what he'd done and how ghastly it all was. Being in this house with two dead loved ones. He took them down to the basement after they were dead. And either he became impatient or extremely despondent. I'll never know. But at around six he went back down there and shot him
self
.”

“Did you come home and find them?” Hoping not, not, not. I was full of hope now.

“No,” Ms. Pines said. “I would never have survived that.
I would've had to be committed. The neighbor next door heard the two earlier gun reports and almost called the police. But when he heard another report an hour on, he did call them. Someone came to the school for me. I never actually saw any of them. I wasn't permitted to.”

“Who took care of you? How old were you?”

“About to turn seventeen,” Ms. Pines said. “I went to stay with the debate-club sponsor that night. And after that my father's relatives came into the picture—though not for very long. They didn't know me or what to do with me. The school, Haddam High School—the guidance counselors and the principal and two of my teachers—made a special plea on my behalf to be admitted midyear to the Cromwell-Aimes Academy in Maynooth, New Hampshire. A local donor was found. I was made a ward of our debate-club sponsor and lived with her family until I started Barnard. Which saved my life. These are the people I'm staying with. Their children.”

Ms. Pines lowered her soft chin and stared at her lap, where her un-injured hand held her injured one in its grasp. Her green tam held its perch. A thin aroma of Old Rose escaped from somewhere. I heard her breathe, then emit a sorrowing sigh. Her posture was of someone expecting a blow. (Where was I when all this mayhem transpired? Happy on Perry Street in Greenwich Village, as worry-free
as a guppy, high on the town every night, in love-and-lust with a canny, big-boned, skeptical Michigan girl, and trying my hand at the “longer form” for which I had no talent. Living the life of the not-yet-wounded. Though why didn't I finally hear about all this? I was a realtor. Towns keep secrets.)

“Does it seem beneficial to come back now?” I am muted, grief counselor-ish, skipping over twelve consolatory, contradictorily inadequate expressions of what? Empathy more complex than words can muster? Grief more dense than hearts can bear? I've never sought the services of a grief counselor. A dwindling group of us still holds out. Though from Sally I know what the basic mission entails: first—avoidance of the plumb-dumb obvious; second—the utterance of one intelligent statement per five-minute interval; third—simple patience. It's not that difficult to counsel the grieving. I could've said, “Roosevelt was a far better choice than Willkie back in '40.” Which would be as grief neutralizing as “What a friend we have in Jesus,” or “Mercy, I can't tell you how bad I feel about your loss.”

But
was
it actual grief? The spectacle-grim-oddness of the whole bewilderment might require an entirely new emotion—a fresh phylum of feeling, matched by a new species of lingo.