Chapter thirty-nine

I was unwell all summer. My arm got infected and I needed another operation. I had to lie around a lot, in the hospital first, and then at home. It gave me a lot of time to read. I read the news. I read about Nathan Jersey.

He got to see the games that year. The Reds went nowhere, but he got to see the games. It was a close call for him there, but once the story hit the papers, the governor had to act. The execution was stopped with about five hours to spare. After that the headlines started. It was a quiet news season otherwise, that summer, and Jersey’s case had become a minor cause célèbre. The papers had a good time with the old murder angle, and the story of how the victims’ children had come home to see justice done. It made me sad to see Yardley’s big story torn to pieces by the competing vultures. But Yardley was dead. Jersey was alive. And for Jersey, all in all, it worked out well. The law-and-order types stood against him for a while. He had killed a guard, after all, they said. But in the end no one could really hold that line. Jersey was paroled. He wound up in one of those halfway houses for the retarded. I saw a picture of the place in the paper. It looked okay.

So that kept my interest while the arm healed, and then there were the Mets and Charlie Rose. And, of course, Susannah.

She had to take six weeks of summer courses to get her degree, but she came down to visit every weekend. We studied together. I studied her eyes and the places on her neck that her hair covered and all the rest of her, and she studied me. We made love a lot in the dead heat of the summer days. Then, slippery with sweat, we lay tangled together and talked the fading weekend evenings into dawn, into the cooler hours when we could make love again.

At first we talked about what we had come to refer to as It: our story, the story of the scarred man. Suddenly I found I had a mindful of memories that had not been there before. As if the old neglected closet door had opened, and all the junk that had been stuffed inside it had come tumbling out. I wanted to share it with her, that junk. I wanted to show her every piece of it: the broken toys, and the pictures in the shattered frame, and the boxes that held old smells in them, and the ones that somehow held old voices. I wanted to tell her about my mother in the kitchen in the afternoon when the light hit the ringlet of hair that curled under her ear. I wanted to tell her about the smell of my father’s pipe on the porch in autumn. I wanted to tell her about the strangers who raised me and how they were cruel and sometimes kind.

Susannah listened. The way she listened made me love her, want her; even the fact that she listened. I talked so much that summer that sometimes even I couldn’t listen to it anymore. Then, finally, I’d shut up, and she would talk, and she would tell me about her dreams. She would tell me about her childhood—not the Connecticut woodland idyll, although that was also part of it, but about the fear—the gnawing anxiety that had been with her, in one shape or another, her whole life long. She had tried to tell me about it—a little—that first time we walked together through the woods of her childhood. She had told me about the invisible bogeyman who followed her, so she thought, down the forest paths, who hid from her behind trees and rocks, who waited for her while she lay in bed at night. She had been trying to tell me that she was afraid. That deep in the wordless interior of her mind, she had always been afraid.

I hadn’t wanted to hear it then. I had believed—I had wanted to believe—that she had a mind like crystal, untouched by fear. That she had never even. had a nightmare.

But she had. She’d had plenty of them. Even as a little girl she’d had them. The perfect little rich girl McGill had raised was tormented by them constantly. And though the dreams faded by breakfast time each morning, they became a part of her after a while, they were her little secret, they were the thing about the perfect little rich girl that no one knew.

And now they were gone.

“I almost miss them,” she told me one night. “I feel empty inside where the dread used to be.”

All that summer I could actually see the fear fading, packing up its home behind her eyes and moving on. Something new moved in after a while. I don’t know what to call it, but it seemed to me to finish her up, to make her complete somehow. I hadn’t missed it before it appeared, this new; thing, but now that it was there, in her eyes, in her smile, I was glad to see it. It made me crazy with love for her.

Anyway, by October I was back at my job. McGill had almost finished the drug book and was planning another one on murder for hire. I hesitated for a while before agreeing to work on it. There were still things between me and him that were not settled.

One night we went out to Truffles together to talk. We drank. We talked. We pointed cigarettes at each other’s chests. We screamed.

“Moral cowardice,” I shouted.

“Fuck you,” he yelled.

“You knew.”

“You’re seven years old, what the fuck do you know about moral cowardice?”

“I know plenty,” I said, draining my scotch.

“You know diddly shit,” he said, draining his scotch.

We ordered two more scotches.

“You wanted to keep her all sweet and sheltered,” I said.

“So did you, my young friend.”

“You couldn’t face the truth.”

“Neither could you. So what? Life’s tough.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Moral cowardice. Jesus! If you weren’t an invalid, I’d ask you to step outside.”

“If you weren’t an old man, I’d go.”

We drank some more. He sang a medley of Johnny Mercer hits under his breath. I rested my head on the table.

“And another thing,” I said.

“What? I can’t hear you like that. Pick your head up.”

I raised my head. “Another thing … I wanna know about Laura.”

McGill straightened a little. His gnarled fingers tightened on his glass. “Well,” he said softly, “it’s like this, North: go fuck yourself.”

“Did she ever—”

“And the horse you rode in on.”

“Did she ever tell you about Harris?”

“Oh hell.” He hunkered over his drink. “Hell, no.” He laughed. “Only that he was ‘not so nice.’”

I laughed. He looked at me. I stopped laughing. “Why’d she come to Hickman?” I asked.

“Born there.”

“What?”

“Sure, she lived there till she was, like, three or something, then her father got a job down south.”

“So she probably told Marks that—Harris—whoever the hell he was—you know—probably told him about it when they talked back in Louisiana. That’s how he knew where to find her.”

“Swell. You’re a genius.”

“Or maybe he just remembered the name and came there and was surprised to hear about her when the lynching thing happened.”

“Swell. You’re a genius.”

“Or maybe …”

“Swell, already. You’re a fucking genius.”

“I mean, it’s almost like he had to screw it up,” I said. “He was home free and he couldn’t stop … being who he was. She was his excuse. And after that, he had Jersey to tease along. He must’ve loved that, being his lawyer. He couldn’t stop himself.”

“Yeah, well, it’s like that,” said McGill, staring deep into his scotch. “Your self, I mean. It’s like that.” He shook his head once and looked up at me. “What the hell, Michael. Stick around, willya? Stick around and work on the book. Christ, you won’t have to put up with me much. The research alone is sure to get you killed.”

He swayed in his seat. He laughed. So did I.

“Oh, all right,” I said. “If it’ll get me killed.”

It was just as well. His daughter had graduated from college now and was all but living with me at St. Mark’s Place. She got a job at a school in Brooklyn for retarded kids. We began looking for a place of our own. All in all, there wasn’t much point maintaining hostilities with the old guy. I had to see him on holidays anyway. It was already getting to be time for Thanksgiving. And then, of course, after that game Christmas.

Christmas came. Charlie and Angela were there at the house in Trent. Susannah and me and McGill were there, and Kate and Kelly. All of us who were there at the beginning were there again. We didn’t say anything about it. We were just there. That was enough.

Some things, of course, were different this year. This year the snow fell lightly: just a pretty patina on the trees and the grass, and big whirling flakes swallowed in the black water of the river. And this year we did not tell ghost stories at night. This year, we did not believe in ghosts.

But we had the tree again, and the great meal, and the presents and the nog and the mistletoe and the sleigh ride and the music. And we knew how to keep Christmas well, if anyone alive possessed the knowledge, and we resolved to live in the Past, the Present, and the Future, and let nothing us dismay.

May that be truly said of us, and all of us.

And, as Charlie Rose observed: Doo-wow.