FIFTEEN

Dean Langley walks into the apartment in New York. Mrs. Miller’s ancient chauffeur whispers to him in the hall. He points him toward Laura’s bedroom. Then he puts a recording of the final act of La Traviata on the phonograph. The music swells through the apartment. He sits in an antique chair just outside the bed chamber, watching.

The door opens onto an opera set, and there is the lovely courtesan sprawled across an enormous four-postered bed. She is lit from above, stage left, bathed in a sunset glow that flows magically through the bed’s silken canopy. The red velvet curtains are closed behind her. Her robe is trimmed in white fur, open at her throat; her arm trails toward the carpet. As her lover approaches, she raises her head, and her hennaed hair floods over her shoulders. Her lips open in a happy gasp.

Dean kneels beside the bed, his shadow bending on the floor behind him. The darkness billows in the corners of the room, giving off a low hum.

I leave my chair. Casting no shadow myself, I stand in the doorway, my white hair falling over my forehead. I light the stub of a cigar and whistle an old cowboy song:

Eyes like the setting stars, cheeks like a rose

Laura, she’s a pretty girl, God almighty knows

The smoke from my cigar drifts across the room, blending with the lady’s perfume. I know from the way Dean twitches his nose that he smells the smoke. I grin.

What are they whispering to each other? Are they recalling their afternoons in Westchester County in the 1920’s and ’30s and ’40s, and their ’50s rides in the belly of the new white-finned whale as I drove them to Connecticut?

I used to stop in the park behind the station where his “late trains” arrived. Kids rode by on their bicycles and gaped at the car. In the back seat, she lay her plump hand on his arm as she listened to him. His silver hair was combed back from his forehead. He talked about his slowing tennis game, about the reorganization of the church vestry. She chatted about her nieces and the problems of settling her husband’s estate. The lovers pressed their cheeks together. He patted the back of her hand as he got out.

I whistle through my teeth.

He is holding her hand now, sitting beside her on the bed. Her fingers cannot twine delicately around his; her knuckles are swollen with arthritis. His own hand is bony and liver-spotted; it takes its warmth from hers. He gazes down at her, lines appearing in his cheeks. Her jowls sag when she smiles.

As she tries to push closer to him, her robe falls open, and a soft pink globe flops beside her on the sheet. He cups it from beneath, the palm of his hand remembering when it was firm and round and thrust high into the air as she arched her back beneath him.

She is too weak to cover herself. Her eyes close with embarrassment. Leaning over, he touches his lips to her breast. Then with perfect politeness he tucks it back into her robe.

I stand over him now, my fatherly hand, even bonier than his, resting on his shoulder. He shudders. My necktie, stained with boarding house gravy, dangles from my collar. He grabs it, yanks it hard, but he cannot choke me. Then he just hangs on for dear life, pulling me down.

She gives us a girlish smile and gazes up at us. The orchestra swells, con molte passione. We are one man now, sitting on the side of her bed and swinging our heels, telling salesman stories to bring a smile to her lonely small-town face.

Blow some of that smoke my way, she says, I love the smell of a man’s cigar … and I do, making her laugh. She sits up, holding the sheet to her chest, letting it fall open along her white thigh.

Something to remember me by, she says, and reaches under the bedclothes. The sheet whispers as her hand burrows between her legs. The orchestra’s conga drums do a merengue flourish.

Here! Suddenly she lifts her hand in the air, opening her fingers wide in the glare of the spotlight.

Something flutters down through the perfumed air. I dive for it in the folds of her robe. It tickles the palm of my hand as it escapes. The laughter of its butterfly wings brushes my ear. I turn and see a tiny ghost of a shadow flit out of the red light to be absorbed in the darkness.

Now I lift my head slowly, and hear her last breath … sandpaper scraping slowly to the end of a long silk ribbon.

I rest my hand along her cheek. Her eyelashes flutter but her lids are too weak to rise. Leaning close to her, I cry

Oh, Laura, Laura.…

The living room was dark, the house silent. I saw the moon slip into view outside the window, its glow turning the top of the piano silver. My brother rolled over on the couch, his arm draped over his eyes as he began to snore. I walked around the rooms downstairs, periodically checking my watch. My father must have taken an hour and a half to reach New York; he could be there now. Or he could be heading back by this time. I had no idea why I was waiting for him.

At about three o’clock, I lay down on the bed in Miss Gilly’s old room. Then, minutes later, it seemed, I was aware of a machine pulsing noisily nearby, its vibrations filling the air around me. I sat up on the bed. The room smelled of exhaust fumes. The engine sound was coming from the garage.

Opening the screen door from the corridor, I nearly walked into the grill of the Dodge, parked with its nose flush against the door frame. One of its headlights was broken. The car was empty. I heard a noise from outside and walked into the damp gray air. A tall figure slipped out the side door of the toolshed.

“Dad?” I called out.

He stopped for a moment, facing me, and I could see that he still had on his sports jacket and tie. The tie hung sideways at his open shirt collar. He was holding an axe over his shoulder like a rifle.

He strode across the lawn. Mist rose off the grass further down the hill. He seemed to be heading into it when he stopped beside the terrace, glaring at the big maple before him as if it had just moved to block his way. His arm rose; the axe head swished through the air and thunked into the tree.

The terrace door opened. Robert stepped out. My father strode on. I ran after him, slowing as Robert came onto the terrace.

“What’s he doing?” Robert called.

“I don’t know. He just got home.”

“I heard the car.” Robert peered down the lawn. My father moved in a lurching zig-zag pattern toward a group of birch trees. Another chunk! sound. Then silence. Then a barrage of chops from closer by, behind the big pine tree.

My mother’s window opened. “Dean!” she called out. Then she saw us below her. “He’s trying to cut down the pine!” she shouted.

“Don’t lean so far out!” Robert called.

“I’m coming downstairs—” Her head retreated inside.

Robert and I ran across the grass toward the sound of chopping. I saw some long feathery branches sway. One fell, and in the space it left, I saw my father’s face, a streak of hair falling over his eyes.

“Over here!” I called to Robert.

Then my father was gone again. We lost him in the mist. The hills across the valley were outlined in a wavy line like a child’s drawing on glowing gray paper. The dog barked from behind the toolshed. Then we heard the whack of the axe from the front yard and ran toward it. My father was flailing away at the oak by the flagstone walk.

My mother stood on the doorstep beneath the carriage lamp. “Can’t you stop him?” she called to us, hugging her bathrobe against her throat.

Now my father started on the forsythia bush beside the driveway. Branches flew as the axe head swished back and forth. I’d never seen his face so clenched, his eyes so wildly unfocused. He lurched behind the bush. When Robert and I began to follow, he came out on the other side.

He was heading for my mother. I heard him breathing hard. My mother walked out to meet him, her bathrobe flapping around her ankles.

She stopped in front of him. “Please, Dean—no!”

He kept moving toward her, his axe dragging beside him.

“I’m sorry—I’m very sorry about Laura,” she said, her voice quavery. “But you don’t want to destroy everything, do you?”

Robert came around the forsythia bush behind my father. I cut sideways, gauging the distance between my parents, ready to run between them. My father lurched forward, his breath rasping in his throat, the axe rising in his hand.

My mother took a step backward. “Dean!—” she shouted.

He stopped several yards from her. His head hung down. Robert was a running blur behind him. The axe lowered. My father let it slip from his hand an instant before Robert dove into the middle of his back.

The two of them stumbled to the ground together, Robert’s arms locked around my father’s waist. My father’s eyes were wide open when he hit the grass. I ran to him and fell onto his legs, holding him down.

He didn’t stir. I sat up. Robert rolled away from him. Lying on his stomach, my father looked as if he’d fallen from a great height and hit the ground with a terrible thud.

My mother sank to one knee. “Dean?”

Struggling to my feet, I heard him groan. His arm moved. Robert sat up and saw it, too—my father was crawling across the grass on his hands and knees toward my mother. He raised himself up, then dropped again, his face in her lap. Her hand rested on his head. His shoulders rose and fell. He was sobbing.

I picked up the axe, my fingers trembling so hard I nearly dropped it. Robert and I took it to the toolshed. Then we went into the kitchen to put on some water for coffee.

In a while, my parents came in through the front door. We watched them pass in the hall. My father’s flannel trousers were torn at the knee, pale flesh showing through. My mother, her nightgown trailing beneath the damp hem of her bathrobe, guided him by the arm. Low voices came from my father’s room.

“Did you think he was going to hit her with the axe?” I asked Robert.

He stared at the glass dome bubbling on the coffee percolator. “There’s times you have to make your move and think afterwards.”

“He’d dropped the axe before you tackled him.”

Robert took a deep breath. “I’m glad to know that.”

I sat down at the kitchen table and drank a cup of coffee with him, though I usually had tea for breakfast. “Have you ever seen him cry before?” I asked.

“I didn’t know he even had tear ducts,” Robert said. “I used to think he never secreted any bodily fluids at all.”

I kept shaking my head. I could still feel the sensation of the axe handle in the palm of my hand. It made the cup hard to hold.

After a long time I heard footsteps on the stairs again. Through the kitchen doorway we saw my parents in the hall. My mother had on a skirt and blouse outfit, with pearls. My father was dressed in his business suit, his briefcase in his hand. He opened the closet door, took out a raincoat, then hung it back up again. He must have noticed the sunlight streaming through the living room windows.

“Is he really going to the office?” I whispered to Robert.

“I doubt it—look.”

He was heading toward the front door, not the garage. When I saw my parents again, out the kitchen window, he was no longer carrying his briefcase. They walked slowly up the flagstone walk to the oak tree, where my father touched the gash he had made in its trunk. He seemed to be stroking it. They walked along the driveway toward the forsythia bush. Branches lay strewn on the gravel. My father leaned over and gathered some up. My mother picked up a handful. They lay the branches in a little pile. Then they continued on across the front lawn.

We watched them moving slowly along, several feet apart but side by side. They vanished behind some cedar trees and reappeared in the bright slanting sunlight, their legs moving in unison in a kind of strolling lock-step. Sometimes they leaned in the same direction, as if the ground were slightly tilting beneath their feet. They stopped, and my father stared down the hill like a man gazing out to sea. My mother took his arm.

They seemed to be posed in a photograph. I stood at the window and squinted into the glare, focusing on them as sharply as I could, trying to keep them framed there in the window.

After taking my father back to his room, my mother came down wearing a blue suit jacket over her blouse, and started frying some bacon. She didn’t try very hard to make me go to school. I scrambled some eggs in a bowl and Robert reheated the coffee. We arranged some orange juice, a plate of eggs and bacon on a tray. Robert took it upstairs to my father. My mother and I made up another tray and carried it into the dining room.

In a few minutes, Robert joined us. “Dad’s pretty calm now,” he said.

“Did you get him his bathrobe?” my mother asked. “He’ll need it to sit up in bed. He was very chilled.”

“I got it for him,” Robert said.

“Where’s your leather jacket?” she asked him.

“I’m all right.” He smiled at her.

She glanced at me and, seeing that I had on a sweater, confronted the yellow mound of eggs on her plate. “I don’t know if I can eat this.”

“How are you feeling?” I asked.

She took a sip of coffee. “I ought to be relieved, I suppose. But I’m a little sad, now that Laura’s … gone. We were friends years ago, believe it or not. We used to go shopping at Lord & Taylor.” One corner of her lips rose in a faint smile. Her coffee cup made a fast clicking noise against her saucer; she let go of its handle, silencing it. “When I had you—” She looked at Robert. “Laura came to the hospital with flowers, and an orange teddy bear.”

Robert put down his piece of bacon. “Amazing,” he said. “I remember that bear.”

“It must have been hard for her. She wanted children so badly.” My mother lit a cigarette and sat back. “Her last illness was very painful, evidently.”

“Was he there when she died?” I asked.

“Until she lost consciousness.”

“Aren’t you mad at him?” I squinted at her.

“Yes.” She dropped her eyes. “Yes, I am.…”

“Why are you staying with him?” Robert asked.

She lifted her head slowly. “I’m his wife,” she said.

I remember what a strange day it was—the air clear and bright with sunlight while people tried to sleep or wandered around the house finding things to do. Robert and I went to his room to sort baseball cards. It was a relief to talk about baseball. I needed to tell him how awful it was that the Dodgers were leaving Brooklyn to go to California, a place so far away it might as well be on Mars. The idea that we could never again go to games in Brooklyn had me so choked up that I actually started to cry.

“It’s not fair!” I insisted.

“I know,” Robert said. “They used to tell me about how fair things were supposed to be. At that Country Day School, and prep school. They shouldn’t do that to kids.”

I told Robert about the school in Colorado. He thought it sounded like a good place for me. “It’s not that far from California,” he said.

My father came to dinner dressed in his usual slacks, sports jacket, white shirt and knit tie. Since Robert hadn’t put on a clean shirt, I didn’t either. I hoped my father would ask me to go change. I wanted to tell him I wasn’t the only one around here that needed to do some changing. That was exactly how I was going to put it.

But he didn’t seem to notice what I was wearing. I wondered what he’d have to say to us. As he unfolded his napkin, I waited for an apology, or at least an explanation for his behavior this morning—something to show us that he knew we were onto him.

“Smells like steak,” he said, glancing toward the kitchen.

I looked at Robert. There was nothing to do but unfold our napkins.

My father ate more slowly than usual, and sometimes he stared out the window, his eyebrows looking so bushy and heavy that it must have been difficult for him to see out from beneath them.

I remember him sitting there at the table looking tired, old, but apparently thinking nothing at all. I watch him press his fork into a piece of meat, put it in his mouth … and now, for a split second, comes a shudder in his jaw which tells me that eating anything at this moment is causing him pain and nausea. Then, determinedly, he begins to chew. His jaw moves, his Adam’s apple bulges as he forces the food down his throat.

And in that brief pause I see that this is all a performance, this eating. This is the way the man has gotten through most of his life: grinding his jaws and forcing himself to swallow everything he has worked so hard for, then reaching for more, whether he likes it or not. Now and then he gets to act outside of his role. And very occasionally he gets caught out there. But that’s not significant. The long-haul performance is what counts.

I see, too, that the act is more for him than for anyone else. He believes that he has no choice but to keep it up—look what happened this morning when he suddenly forgot all his training.

I scream at him though my eyes: I know what you’re doing! You’re acting it! You’ve always been doing it!

And he glances back at me in such a way as to slam my look away as if it were an easy backcourt lob. So what? You’ll learn to do the same one day if you’ve got any brains. Meanwhile, eat your life and lump it.

And then his eyes go blank again. He takes a sip from his water glass to force down his grief along with the clotted meat collecting at the back of his throat. What is appalling is that, in a way, I admire his performance. He really does have what it takes to recoup and once again block all the chaos rising within him.

But he’s so terribly lonely. I see him sitting at the table in the flickering glow of the candles, with four more candles blinking in the shiny mirror behind him, and again I see the man in a phone booth beside a roaring highway. He is still in his glass box. The air is thin and stale and hard to breathe in there. He hates living inside it as much as I hate to see him there, shut off from us. But he cannot get out now.

“We should take the car to the garage tomorrow,” my mother said. “For that headlight.”

He looked at her and nodded. “Yes.”

“We’ll take it in early, so you won’t miss your train,” she said.

He nodded again. “This is good, Marian,” he said, pointing at the meat on his plate.

“I’m afraid it got a little overdone.”

“I prefer it well done,” he said. “How’s yours?” He turned to me, then Robert.

We said that ours was fine.

I see the house as a big rickety stage set. I’m more of an observer now than a participant: a change I’m not sure I like. But it’s not as if I have a choice about this any more.

The front wall of the house is cut away to reveal the various rooms, staircases, halls. Spotlights illuminate one room at a time where characters are talking, gesturing, moving about. From off-stage comes the occasional sound of a car starting, or a lawn mower droning. Sometimes there is the slap … slap of a ball landing in baseball mitts. The ball’s shadow arcs across the forest-green set behind the house, then two figures enter the kitchen through a screen door. A piano plays jazz with a hard, rumbling beat; it is cut off in the middle of a bar and the house goes dark again.

Sometimes two second floor rooms are lit at the same time. In one, a man pores over books with photographs of old airplanes in them. He looks up now and then, listening for something.

In the other room, a woman paces, lights cigarettes, sits on a chaise lounge and tries to read. She too stops moving from time to time, and listens.

Across the house, a very dim light comes on to reveal a bearded young man staring out a window. He does not read or smoke or pace. All his movement is in his eyes as he listens.

The light goes on in the attic. A boy sits on his bed and turns the knobs of an old wooden radio, its orange dial aglow. He is very restless, just marking time in this place. Now his hand stops moving. He, too, is listening, waiting.

Am I sitting too high above the set, or is no one speaking out loud? Now I begin to hear murmurs, everyday intonations whose meanings I can fill in: Don’t forget your history book.… We’re invited for cocktails this Friday, have we got anything planned?… Time to feed the dog, you can give it those scraps from last night … Where’s my raincoat?… The meat’s a little too well done, I’m afraid.…

I can see from their facial expressions and gestures that the players are throwing themselves into this production as if their lives depended on it. They seem hopelessly miscast in their roles, and it’s hard to watch them struggling on without a script to work with. But if I leave I might miss something. And I know now that I’d regret that terribly.

Then what everyone seemed to have been listening for, happened. Strange cars rolled up the driveway, two of them. They stopped at the end of the walk. Men in military uniforms got out. Two stayed with the cars, looking around the yard. The other two knocked on the front door.

My mother, who hadn’t seen them, was heading along the hall toward the door when I stopped her. “Military police,” I whispered.

Her face went pale. I pulled her around the bottom of the stairs—I’d caught sight of a figure peering through the window beside the door. It was of opaque faux-antique glass; the man probably hadn’t seen anything but a blur. From the pen behind the toolshed came the frantic barking of the dog. With each bark, my mother flinched.

“I’ll go tell Robert,” I whispered.

“I’ll have to tell your father.”

“What’s he going to do?”

“I don’t know.” She gripped the stair railing. “He’s hardly thought about anything else but this since Robert came home.”

Upstairs, I pushed open the door to Robert’s room. He stood far back from the window, staring down past the curtains at the drive.

I stopped a few feet from him.

“I saw,” he said. Suddenly he turned toward the doorway.

My father stood there, looking exhausted. He lifted his eyes from the floor and stared at Robert.

“Don’t tell the police he’s here!” I blurted. “Don’t do it!”

My father’s mouth opened; I could see that he wanted to speak, but then the doorbell buzzed downstairs. He turned sharply. His shoulders straightened. We heard his footsteps going down the stairs.

“You can get out Dad’s window,” I whispered.

“I know. But I need to hear what he’s going to say.” Robert rested his hand on my shoulder.

“Dean?” That was my mother. From where we stood, we could see her leaning over the railing on the landing outside her room.

My father glanced up at her. Then he opened the front door.

“We’re looking for your son, Mr. Langley.”

“My son Robert?”

“We’re sure he’s in Ridge Haven now. He was seen a week ago.”

“Oh?”

“Do you mind if we come in?” My father cleared his throat. I felt Robert’s hand tighten on my shoulder. Outside the window, another car appeared on the driveway, a blue and white police cruiser.

“What do you want?” my father asked.

“We’d just like to look around, if you don’t mind.”

There was a long pause. I looked at Robert. His eyes narrowed.

We heard my father speak. “As a matter of fact, I do mind.”

“Why is that, sir?”

“You’ll have to excuse me,” my father said. The door clicked shut.

Robert ruffled my hair. Then he rushed out of the room, nearly colliding with my father at the top of the stairs.

“Robert—”

My brother grabbed his arm. They shook hands fast. As Robert darted down the landing, my father reached out for him, his fingers brushing the back of his jacket.

My mother stepped away from the rail, her arms rising. Robert hugged her. I heard a faint cry as she buried her face against his chest. Then he was gone into my father’s room.

I ducked between my parents and got there first. Robert had opened the window onto the garage roof. The dog’s barking was suddenly louder. Robert climbed over the sill. I climbed down, too, and felt his hands steadying my legs as I dropped beside him. We slipped down the roof feet first as if sliding into a base.

He lay on his stomach, his legs dangling over the edge. “Can you hold onto my arm?”

“Yes.” I dug my heels into the roof and grabbed his wrist. He let himself slowly down. His fingers dropped off the edge. I didn’t want to release my grip, but I had to. His wrist slipped out of my hands. He was gone.

I squatted against the slope of the roof. The dog’s barks grew faster and faster. With a crunch of gravel, the police car stopped just around the side of the garage. I saw Robert again: he’d landed in the flower bed and fallen forward onto the grass. He picked himself up.

“I’m okay!” He whispered up at me, grinning. Then he took off across the lawn.

I see him cutting around the terrace and disappearing under the plume-like branches of the pine. Some men stand at the corner of the driveway, looking toward the toolshed and the sound of the dog. But Robert is dashing along the side lawn on his way down the hill.

Flattening myself against the roof, I watch him move behind the cedar trees. There are enough of them left to give him the cover he needs. The men beside the garage don’t see him.

The grass glows in the sunlight; the lawn, open and empty, ripples as a breeze blows some leaves along its surface. Then Robert vaults over the stone wall like someone hopping a freight train, and I am with him, plunging into the woods.