29

Anna Wick, DeVere’s long-time “right hand and confidante,” as one TV reporter put it, spoke at DeVere’s memorial service, an invitation-only affair at the Palace of Fine Arts. The service resembled a pageant more than a ceremony of mourning, and police video cameras swept the crowd. “Looking for crooks,” said the matron behind me in a stage whisper.

“One thing is clear to all of us today: we will never forget Ty DeVere,” said Anna. Black suited her well, as did an expression of thoughtful sadness. She had evidently taken diction training at an early stage in her career. She had the clear tone of a woman reading poetry on educational radio, or a stewardess accustomed to working first class. “His name will be forever a part of our times. When they think of us, they will not remember our individual names, or our faces. They will remember Ty DeVere.”

At his request, his ashes had been scattered in the Pacific. This was a surprising decision, dictated by DeVere’s attorneys, although it is possible that DeVere had seen this as less a final annihilation than a way of blessing that largest of oceans with his remains.

Dr. Skeat called late one afternoon. “Please don’t visit her again without my permission,” he said.

I prepared myself for bad news. “Is she worse?”

“We adjusted her medication.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“An apology won’t do a whole lot of good,” said Dr. Skeat. “She needs to be protected.”

“But it’s a pretty terrible situation when a woman has to be protected from her sons.”

He agreed that it was. “Apparently you don’t realize the corrosive nature of your family.”

“We’re loving people—”

“Family love isn’t always motivated by wisdom, Mr. Fields. It can be possessive, manipulative, and it can kill people. In your mother’s case, we have a reactive trauma if we so much as mention your father.”

My voice was ragged with feeling. “We love her.”

“We have to be careful. Especially in a family like yours.”

He must have sensed my anger over the phone.

“Please, Mr. Fields. Stay away.”

It wasn’t fair, I thought, hanging up the phone, stepping to the window. But this was a feeble complaint. Since when was the world just? Besides, Dr. Skeat had been chosen by my brother and myself out of a long list of “sensitive professionals.”

I gazed out the window at the street. My family was—I groped for pale, dried-up phrases: honorable, civic-minded. We were decent people.

I could not keep myself from wondering if the occasional figures strolling in the dark, walking a dog, smoking, were decent, innocent people, or individuals sent to watch us, to remind us that they were out there, waiting.

A few days went by, cue cards splashed with bold letters: good news. More money. Commissions, interviews.

Strengthened by Nona, I entered each new day, very much a man who expects to be attacked, taken at any intersection, any restaurant or gallery. I kept myself at ease, inwardly alert. I was anxious. I was happy.

Fern arranged his hours around my schedule. He drove us to the symphony, to my appointments with potential clients, and I was familiar enough with the way of such guardians that I came to enjoy him without giving him much thought, as one enjoys the shade of a landmark elm.

Packard, the contractor, finished the walls, plastered, painted. The house looked now as I had dreamed it would.

Collie arrived each morning to whisk her ostrich-feather duster about the new furniture arrangement, offered the usual assortment of splendid salads for lunch, and yet I could tell that she understood the household to be under some manner of siege. She appeared pleased at the thought, involved in an important ordeal, inspired, perhaps, by my calm.

My career was unfolding. International calls imprinted themselves on my answering machine, and the planning chiefs of what the financial pages called “energy consortiums” and “communications empires” were planning visits to San Francisco. Notice of my career was printed not on the society pages, and not in a paragraph in a review of local art shows, but on the business pages. It was clear to me that not only was success coming my way, it was coming quite literally to my doorstep.

Time magazine flew its chief photographer in for a sitting. Vanity Fair magazine shot me playing frisbee with Nona at the Marina. The events of these days seemed sacred, devoid as they were of any taint of the uncanny. Rick, and his creditors, played no further part in my life for the time being. This was not unusual. It was typical of Rick to spin through my life with a vivid problem and then vanish.

In all ways my life was becoming a chain of ordered, connected events. It is that characteristic of dailiness that makes us enjoy films, stories, even travel. We intuit that the flow of things, the episodic spill of occurrence, is the natural state of our lives. It is only when a death, or something flavored with death, takes place that we awaken.

People accepted DeVere’s death as a suicide. Collie suggested that people at the checkout at Lucky’s felt it was “bad conscience he couldn’t live with because he tried to hurt the Fieldses.” People doubted his death was murder, apparently, but would not have been terribly outraged if I had, in truth, taken DeVere’s life. When an article in the Sunday supplement referred to our family as “the modern day Borgias” it was intended as a compliment.

Fern was tight lipped. When I asked him what was wrong he would say, “Let me take care of it.” He would shake his head, keep driving, keep standing behind me at the art gallery, keep his place at the curb while Nona and I window shopped.

I glanced up from time to time to wonder if the van at the stoplight next to me was really a carpet cleaner’s. But with each lulling hour I was becoming tarnished, sleepy, returning to my faith in life.

I believed, as days followed one another, that the troubled times were behind us.