Search Party (14 page)

For years, Sofya worked on his appeal. When the appeal failed, she attended his parole hearings as they came and went. Finally in prison he was one of those chosen to take part in one of the dog-training programs being introduced in the correctional system. When he was at last paroled, not as a result of Sofya's efforts but for distinguishing himself in the program, with her help he got into the state university where she had gone to teach Russian after Lindenbaum's death.

By this time she had retired from teaching. Though she was a celebrity in the world of poets, it was less as a poet than as a significant donor to the university that she was one of those invited to say a few words at his graduation. She was old, though not as old as she looked, being one of those who put up no resistance to age. She had to be helped to the lectern. Her hawk's face had softened into swags; her black eyes were quite gone, submerged in their lids. Before she was handed her sheaf of flowers and escorted back to her chair, she rambled on for some time about the work of her late husband, the critic Lindenbaum. Few attending the graduation of this giant university had ever heard of the famous poet Sofya, let alone of the critic Lindenbaum.

“We must wait and see,” she said. She paused with a knobbed hand on her neck. When the audience did not break into applause, she sought to bring her speech to a close. “One of those who will graduate today is someone . . .” Here she paused again to fumble for the water they had poured for her. She turned around to glare at the speakers seated behind her, but no help came. “He is someone my dear husband and I knew in his youth.”

There was no one to say that was not so. No one to say she was confused: no one else in the hall had any idea what or who she had been talking about from the beginning, or who he might be, a heavyset middle-aged man of mixed race walking up to receive his diploma, the oldest of the graduates.

He was heading for the stairs at the end of the stage where she was seated when she rose to her feet and tottered after him with
her sprung hands dropping from the wrist. He turned, bent, and took her in his arms. This the audience applauded at length. Some even stood up. The robed speakers nearest to the two clapped loudest, as at some tender fact known to them. They didn't know this graduate any more than Sofya did, or than he knew her, or than anyone in the world had known her, except her readers and Lindenbaum.

Guatemala

H
IS
son's girlfriend stuck one leg out of the car and followed it with an aluminum crutch. She sank the crutch into the sandy earth and took hold hand over hand as if she meant to vault on it, but she only hoisted herself and then lay back to reach a second crutch in the back seat. This was rapid, practiced.

She sat unwrapping a striped candy. “Get me the canvas one, honey. Here, you take that stuff.”

Then she stood up. The legs were short for the body, and sprung backward, in a dizzying inverse of a knee. His son was hanging a bulging canvas sack from the hand-piece of the crutch, which was like a stick shift, black rubber grooved for fingers.

Well. This was Lupe, of whom Robert had been told and not told.

His son's mild face, flushed and broken out, had a broad smile. “My father,” he said humbly to the girl. “Dad, this is Guadalupe! Lupe! Lupe McCann!”

Robert stepped forward with his hand out, saying to himself, Don't offer to help. “Hello, Loopy.”

“Lu-
peh
, Dad!”

The girl got the candy between her side teeth and smiled a little gust of peppermint. One cheek was printed where she had been sleeping on it, and her bushy black hair stood straight up on that side. Below the tangles the face was pretty in a puppet way,
with round eyes in matted eyelashes like bits of hairbrush. She propped herself and gripped Robert's hand so hard his thumb-joint popped. She sat down a second time and handed up two spiral notebooks with which he found himself pointing the way to the porch steps, as if she might not see them.

Halfway up the steps she stopped. “Wait! My machine!” Quickly Robert made way for the thought of a device, some pump or tank she must require.

“Got it.” Billy was behind her lugging a box and a duffel bag, Robert's huge yellowed army duffel that the boys had each taken to camp long ago, ten years apart.

“Oh! Look!” Lupe was turning around and around on the hooked rug like a skier doing a swivel. Out the window lay the inky waters of the Strait of Georgia, with a white ferry passing in the distance and seagulls wheeling. “Oh, this I like! A real island, a real cabin! I'm so glad—I thought it might be one of those villas.” So she knew there was Ann's money.

“Little lady,” Billy said out of the side of his mouth, “I said cabin and I meant cabin.” That was new, any sort of comeback from Billy. But was he Billy any more? Maybe by now, after six years in graduate school, he was Bill, or Will—though at twenty-eight he still bore the marks of junior high: nodding cowlick and fists in pockets. “What's with the others?”

“They missed the Nanaimo ferry last night and I guess they missed the one you folks took this morning. Sit down, sit down, coffee's on.”

“My brother is never on time,” Billy told Lupe. “He's the spoiled one.”

Was there any truth to that? Robert could not have said. Of the past he had only a vague sense, once in a while, of a half-built house where a man on a ladder was hammering, and the man, though stronger and thinner than he was now, was himself, yet a sort of idiot, deaf and blind to all but a very few things. Down a hallway of doors standing open, in this vision, were a half-grown, silent boy and a smaller one who could not stand to be left alone. That was Billy, the toddler. No one else. Inexcusably, no mother. With no warning, no preparation of any kind, their mother had
removed herself into death. A story so old Robert never went beyond the beginning.

“I see the bathroom,” Lupe said, as if they were playing a game. “Under the ladder!”

“Oh, yeah, here . . .” Billy unzipped the duffel and rummaged. He handed her a flowered bag.

Well, the loft was out, for their room. How could she climb? Alan and Martine would have to sleep up there.

Lupe urinated long and hard while Robert talked over the sound. “Did you get a look at the wall, where the pylon came down? At the far end? I've got Smalley coming with some concrete. Sit down, sit down. I expect you had a wait for the midget, it's been full every day.” Then he felt himself blush—why must he do this, in his sixties?—because of the girl's size. By midget he meant the little car ferry, not much more than a chugging raft, that took you back into the Strait from Vancouver Island, and out to the Gulf Islands. Billy, still wearing the dazed smile, didn't answer but sighed, cradled his mug and looked out at the water with eyes so bright he might have been getting ready to cry.

After a time Lupe came out, made her way to the glider and flopped down on it. It sent up a rusty creaking as she pumped it, poling with the crutches. She didn't stop until Robert brought coffee and then she leaned back, smoothing the faded seahorses with their afterimage of mildew. “Are we in heaven?” She had an odd, jokey voice, a bit . . . hard-boiled. Or maybe just playful. Was that what his wife would have said? He still patted along some dusty shelf for Ann's opinions. “That's a great ladder. I bet you built it.” Of course Billy would have told her that.

“I confess I did. My wife and I.” An off-kilter thing he wouldn't build today. But Ann had sat notching the rails by hand, with a hammer and a chisel.

“Put that over here, would you, Billy honey.” A Mae West sort of voice, with another candy in the cheek. She delved in the canvas bag. “Every minute I'm here I have to sew. We're going straight from here to the wedding.”

Robert said, “Wedding?”

Billy said, “Remember, Dad? We have Maria's wedding on Saturday? Lupe's sister?”

It was too late; now they were assessing his memory.

H
E
would cross his legs, turn a page, scratch the stubble on his neck. Some evenings he made no more noise than a moth in a lampshade.

He had opened up the cabin himself for the first time since his stroke. His sons lent it freely; blankets were hanging spread out to air on the loft railing, and the cake of soap in the shower stall was soap, not a piece of bone as it always had been in summer when they arrived as a family. His rod and reel were messily stowed; on the back porch there was fishy water in the bottom of the bucket that should have been turned over.

Could he keep his balance enough to fish off the rocks.

In the medicine cabinet where he put his pills he found a box of condoms. Wildflowers sat on the counter in a mason jar, holding down a note in a precise hand: “we both thank you alan for a week of sweet serenity.”

His sons had had a phone put in, and both had been calling. How many sea lions had passed? Was the woodstove working? It had always worked. They meant was he counting, was he cooking. What would he be like when they got there.

“I'll show them,” he had told Loretta, his office temp. She had him flexing the affected arm.

“They don't know!” she said. “You
tell
them! You say you're fine!”

When his secretary Rose Fitch retired, personnel had sent a temp, with the promise of a real assistant—they weren't called secretaries anymore—once the job was posted. But after the stroke, Robert had put in for a full-time position for Loretta. Usually the agency sent girls, but Loretta was a woman in her fifties, with pictures of children on her screen saver. They were her foster children, she said proudly. She was divorced, with no children of her own. She had gone in and screamed—of the truth of this Robert soon had no doubt—until the agency let her keep
several of these children with her on past the age of eighteen. They were grown now; the pictures were old.

Loretta came from a temp agency but she brought a folder of references and letters of commendation with her. Soon she had things organized more efficiently in the office than his old secretary Rose had in twenty years. Often he heard her outside his door, getting up to walk to and fro in the high heels she wore despite her weight, as she pored over files she was going to enter into the computer, stopping now and then as if she couldn't believe what she was reading. After a few hours, if he opened his door, she liked to take off her glasses and say, “Whoa, Honey!” The glasses had dug deep marks on either side of her nose. They were reading glasses and after wearing them all day she couldn't see a thing. At the end of her first week at work she took the glasses off, dropped the pearl chain that held them onto her bosom, and whether she could see Robert or not, told him the story of her life.

It was largely the story of the foster children and the courts. Jobs, long-ago marriage barely figured. Loretta spoke of her life with a combination of perplexity and satisfaction that pushed the pink skin of her forehead into thick even ridges like crayons, which in later weeks he would be half-tempted to lean over and press with a finger. He knew not to do that, not to touch an employee, male or female, or let his bad arm graze one, or say anything suggestive. Suggestive of . . . what? Of the body. A subject Robert would not suggest to anyone. He was not like some of the others his age in the firm, bumping into girls at the copiers. He knew what would offend; he kept up.

He was surprised at himself for listening patiently to Loretta while the office doors opened and closed for the day and the elevators rose and sank. Normally he would have made some summarizing remark to cut such a session short. He always put a firm stop to any employee's attempts to bring personal business into the office.

Loretta had arms that could heave the stuck drawer out of the filing cabinet. She had a big head of hair, the blondness of which
varied every month or so from yellow to the color of manila file folders to off-white. He knew she feared she would be done out of the job while he was on leave. Every few days he had been calling in from the cabin to tell her to sit tight. “Call me if anybody even looks sideways at you.”

“I guess I will!”

“I mean your job.”

“And you do like I told you. Don't fool with any
blueprint
. You made a promise. The only thing you do is you squeeze that

little ball.”

“I'm crushing it.”

A
ROUND
the glider, sheets of a dress pattern settled on the floor. Billy was bowing along scooping them up like dropped underthings. Robert drank his coffee with a mild exasperation. Ann had sewed. The filmy hissing paper might once have sent him into that dry, unspecific, widower's craving, itself a memory now.