Sonny
On a spring morning, so fragrant and perfect that winter, ferociously present only a few days ago, seems a stark impossibility, Bernhard Weissman is laid to rest. Gathered for the graveside service is a small party, no more than thirty or thirty-five persons, on the rows of folding chairs placed over the soft lawn. Mr Weissman had no siblings or cousins, none that survived, and he has outlasted his contemporaries. He was like Ishmael. But the people whom Sonny knows Seth and Sarah want are here. Lucy has flown in from Seattle; Hobie from DC. Lucy and Sarah both stayed at the old man's house last night, preparing for the visitation, the shiva, which will take place there after the ceremony. Seth was with them past midnight, cleaning, pushing around the furniture, looking through his father's papers, remembering if not reminiscing. This morning, so that the three of them had a final, private moment at the funeral parlor, Sonny took over, stopping at Mr Weissman's to plug in the coffee urns and receive delivery of some trays. Then she raced through traffic to the service, only to find it had commenced seconds before, without her.
The casket, a plain pine box with a Jewish star – 'the economy model,' Seth called it, sure this much would meet his father's eternal approval – stands on a steel contraption over the bleak opening in the earth. On either side, the grass has been peeled back and the mounded soil heaped over the small granite stone that carries Dena Weissman's name. A few clods have tumbled down and touch the shoes of the front-row mourners, Seth and Hobie sitting stiffly, Sarah weeping with her mother's narrow arm about her. From the distance, Lucy appears as Seth has described her, still very much the figure of a girl, small and slender in a black sheath and flat shoes. Her tiny, freckled face, observed at various angles, is chafed at the nose and puffy with tears.
Officiating at the graveside ceremony is Rabbi Herschel Yenker of Temple Beth Shalom, who Seth says presided at his barmitzvah. Seth portrayed him as a cranky, fulsome character, but Sonny finds the rabbi's round tones and eyes-clenched transport in prayer to be somewhat soothing. Eulogies are offered by Seth and Hobie. Each talk is heartrending, forthrightly emotional and honest to the core. Neither man pretends the old man was sweet or kindly. He was fierce, brilliant, immeasurably and inarticulately anguished by the evil he had survived and the incomprehensible conspiracy of forces which had allowed that to occur. More clearly than ever, some sense of the way torment has traveled between generations invades Sonny, and throughout the eulogies, she, like a number of those present, finds herself in tears. She thinks alternately of her mother, and also of Seth, a good person, she feels, truly a good man, yet, for all his privileges and success, tortured at moments. As the ceremony ends, he makes his way to her, palpably uncomfortable in his dress-up clothes – his blue suit and his white shirt, his tie a bit too narrow for current fashion. The new beard he's grown, which adds an element of conviction to his appearance, has filled in everywhere now but the hollows of his cheeks. He holds Sonny at length.
'What I'm trying to figure out,' he whispers, 'is if I'm free now, or damned forever.' Some of both, that's what she knows, but he'll find out on his own. He moves off then to the funeral-home limo that will take Sarah and Lucy and him to his parents'. At the curb, Lucy, still weeping fiercely, is hugging Hobie's parents, whom she's known forever. Seth takes his wife's elbow to help her into the car.
Sonny has yet to speak a word to Lucy and isn't looking forward to it either. No matter how sage or life-rumpled they pretend to be, it will be awkward. She doesn't know exactly what Seth has said to his wife about their relationship. 'Seeing each other,' probably, that wonderfully vague nineties locution. Of course, she doesn't know precisely what she'd say herself. Often, at the smallest moments, Sonny feels as if Seth and she sprang from the same soil. The twenty-five years – an entire adult life in which they did not really exist to one another – occasionally seem to have inexplicably steered both of them into the same estuaries of habit. They each subscribe to The Nation and Scientific American, both crave strawberry frozen yogurt and pad thai. Often some forgotten fashion or event of the bygone decades comes up – the Chrysler bailout, pet rocks, Wilbur Mills, quarry tile on kitchen floors – and they will respond with identical remarks. 'Exactly,' they are always saying to each other.
Yet overall, there's a distance to travel. 'Guarded' is the word she'd use in assessing the present temper of their relationship, certainly on her side. She's heard that about the second time around. Either you make the same mistakes all over again or at every moment labor not to repeat them. Last month, Seth did a column on two tightrope walkers. They made it sound like Zen: You keep your eyes forward. You believe the rope will be where you place your foot. That's their life together at the moment. Counting the trial, Seth has remained in Kindle County for more than sixteen weeks, but his father's condition, which seesawed dramatically for four months, has allowed both of them to avoid any clear declarations. He sleeps at Sonny's usually, and made a point of being there last night, but his clothing's at the Gresham, where he goes each day to write his column. The paper pays for the room anyway, he says. Yet she suspects he'd move in lock, stock, and barrel if she suggested it, which she won't until she's really sure he'd stay, and that she wants him to.
Shining black, the mortuary's stretch Cadillac lumbers off, trailing exhaust. Sonny's heels stick in the soft lawn as she makes her way to the minivan, alone. Outside the old man's house, at the top of the concrete stoop, Sonny finds a pitcher and bowl placed on an old-fashioned TV table with foldaway aluminum legs. 'To wash away the soil of the graveyard,' Stew Dubinsky explains, as he comes wheezing up the stairs. His belly, the size of a large globe, parts both his suit jacket and his overcoat.
Inside, taking her wrap to Seth's old bedroom, Sonny spies Sarah. She's in her grandfather's study, where old Mr Weissman privately surveyed his account statements and brokerage confirmations, locking the door, even when he was alone. Sonny, who has not had a moment with Sarah yet today, enters. Turning from her grandfather's desk, Sarah throws her arms wide to Sonny, her face again a mask of grief. She is a terrific girl, possessed of all the gifts, sincere, sober, if sometimes frenetic with her many commitments, everything from varsity volleyball to teaching English to Russian immigrants. Often, when she has shown up at Sonny's on Saturdays after visiting her grandfather, she confesses she hasn't slept. In private, Sonny wonders if Sarah somehow feels obliged to accomplish everything two children might.
On the desk, where Sarah was occupied, a toy of some kind stands, not fully constructed. A castle?
'It's a three-dimensional puzzle.' Sarah displays the box cover. 'We worked on it last night. My folks and I? Whenever we're together the Weissmans do puzzles,' Sarah offers with a somewhat helpless smile. 'Isaac was awesome.' She turns and fits a piece into a jigsawed opening along the parapet. The image of the three of them – Lucy, Sarah, Seth – working here at the roiltop comes to Sonny clearly. The metal desk lamp, with its old-fashioned beetle-shell head and flexible coiled arm, was burning. They seldom spoke. But each of them knew what they were doing and did not care – they needed the union, the memory, the way Isaac lives when they are together. Sarah offers a handful of the foam-plastic puzzle pieces to Sonny, but she has a strong reaction. She could no more touch them than the dead boy's bones.
In the kitchen now, Lucy has taken charge, giving directions to Seth and Hobie and Dubinsky, who've all removed their jackets, rolled their sleeves. She addresses Seth as 'Michael,' a habit born in their paranoid, terrified dodger days in the early 1970s, when Seth's freedom depended on making no slips. Seth married with that name; Sarah's birth certificate still reads 'Sarah Frain.' The practice seems a little precious now, a boast about the excitement of the past, and yet Sonny has heard herself occasionally calling Seth 'baby.' What's in a name? That old question. She will have to be sure to call him Seth today.
Sonny asks for an assignment, and Lucy, busy at the sink, says it's all done. She turns only as an afterthought and, when she sees it's Sonny, cries out, 'Oh!' and instantly rises to her toes to embrace her, tugging at Sonny's neck and saying how wonderful she looks. Lucy smells of various herbal scents and feels much stronger than Sonny imagined, given either her size or Sonny's memories of her as a girl.
The house fills. Several neighbors filter in, a few elderly friends of Seth's mom. Lucy's brothers and their families arrive. Sarah's boyfriend has led a group up from their residential house at Easton. Alert young people, they stand about together, the girls noticeably better dressed than the boys, all somewhat at a loss for the proper gestures. Sonny spends time with Hobie's parents. They are spectacular – warm and funny, wise with age, one of those perfect couples everyone dreams of being a part of. Now well into their seventies, they are each overweight and arthritic, but still sharp. They tease one another constantly. Then Solomon Auguro and Marta Stern, who have both taken to Seth, come in, and Sonny passes time with them. Across the room, Sonny catches sight of Jackson Aires. What's he doing here? She never gets the chance to ask, because the publisher of the Tribune, Mas Fortunato, arrives, joining Dubinsky and a group of his executives, who've been here for a while. They've been courting Seth for weeks, hoping he'll make the Tribune his home paper, now that his contract in Seattle with the Post-Intelligencer is about to expire. In the last two weeks, Seth has had interminable phone conversations with his lawyer in Seattle, Mike Moritz, every night.
Across the living room, Sarah, who's been summoned to receive Fortunato's condolences, casts Sonny a desperate look and Sonny begins searching around the house for Seth. Through the dining room's bay window, she finally spots him, touring the perimeter of the small back yard with Lucy on his arm. Seth and his wife arrive at the far corner where his father's narrow barnwood shed stands. From somewhere, Seth produces a key and for a moment the two slip inside. In the fissures between the planks, Sonny can detect motion, like figures glimpsed through the trees. She has the wildest association. Long ago, one Sunday afternoon in California, when they'd gone apricot picking, Seth wanted to screw in the woods. From the grove a hundred yards away Hobie, stoned as always, singing 'Sunny Afternoon' at top volume along with a phonograph booming from a window, suddenly spotted them, naked as creation. He cried out, 'Nymph! Satyr!' Grabbing her clothes off the twigs and leaves, she ran away, shamed and angry. She wonders if it would work to cry out the same thing now. Instead, when Seth emerges from the shed, he's wearing a plastic watering can on his head and Lucy's laughing. For her amusement, Seth tries it on again with the spout over the other ear. He has almost none of that frivolity with Sonny. It's there all the time with Nikki, but she wouldn't have even known he could share it with a grown-up, let alone another woman.
'How you doin?' She marks the voice behind her as welcome before she turns. It's Hobie.
'I've had better moments. We all have.' His tie is dragged down and he looks even bigger without his jacket, the white shirt stretched across his upper body reminiscent of the skin over a large drum. She can smell his cologne, the same scent that traveled with him when he came to the sidebar during the trial. 'Are we on speaking terms?'
'Hell, yeah. I'm off duty. You do your job, I do mine, that's how I look at it.'
'Me too.'
'Mind,' he says, in the same intonation she heard half an hour ago from his father, 'I didn't say I don't care. I do. Or that I agree. I don't.'
'I heard what you said. I can pick on you, too, you know. I had my reasons and I'm not apologizing.' Sonny has spent little time reflecting on the trial. The principal sensation in memory is one of grateful escape. Nile Eddgar by now is one of the thousands of younger people who pass before her, headed for moral oblivion. There is no figuring, anyway, what really happened. Everybody was lying. She knows that much. Once that starts, you can never tell. For her, the trial is one more conquered portion of the past. In some ways, she feels it was only a prelude to other things: to something firmer in herself, to this time with Seth, and also, of course, to the cautionary tale he finally related to her so abjectly about the crazy events of twenty-five years ago – the 'kidnapping,' Cleveland's death, Michael Frain's disappearance. He says he's tried at times to write it all down for Sarah, as if that might abate his anger at himself and Eddgar, both of which somehow remain alive to him, despite the years.
She glances back to be certain Hobie has been subdued, then tells him how touched she was by his eulogy. His large shoulders move.
‘I talk,' he says.
'It was more than talk.'
'I suppose. You know, I always figure if my momma was just your average black Baptist lady, I'd a been a preacher, maybe better off than I am with law. Being Catholic, however, I found clerical life lacked a certain fundamental appeal.' He clears his throat and they laugh together. Sonny has no religion. It was another of Zora's subjects. 'The great swindle,' she called it. 'Human beings on bended knee before pieces of wood. Using their last potato to hold the candles, even as they starved.' The Inquisition, the Crusades, war upon war. More evil, Zora maintained, had been done in the name of religion than any other force in human history. But today, in that gathering at the cemetery, standing, sitting, listening as many chanted with the rabbi in that ancient tongue, a language which to Sonny has always sounded like the voice of mystery itself, she had some sense of the majesty of spirit which the ritual is meant to inspire. Not that she could ever yield to it. In her own terms, she can think only of woodland moments, mountain views. But she would like to leave this door open for Nikki. Until the old man's death threw things into commotion, Sonny had been talking with Sarah about holding a seder at Sonny's house this week. She wanted Nikki to be exposed to a religious ceremony of some kind, and Passover, the festival of liberation, is the sole Jewish observance Seth seems to enjoy.
Meanwhile, Hobie emits a ruminative sound. He's finally caught sight of what attracted her outside. 'So what do you think, Hobie?'
'I don't think he stands much chance in the Easter Parade.'
'And what about me?' she asks with sudden daring, 'what kind of chance do I stand?' She's a bit shocked by herself, not by the pained tone, which is genuine, but because she knows there's an element of folly. Seth would ask exactly the same question about her: What chance do I have? Then, too, this could be taken as prying. Seth and Hobie are on the phone every week or so, having those weird guy-talks, half an hour on basketball, and then out of the blue, almost as if they hope neither notices, the most heartfelt intimacies. But Hobie turns from the window, looking as puzzled as she is. Large and solemn, he places one hand on her shoulder.
'Only thing I know,' he says, 'is there ain't a tougher guess in life than love.' Seth
'Eddgar's got brass clackers, but I don't see even him pulling this off.' Coming down the hall, Seth recognizes Dubinsky's penetrating nasal tone. 'Turn a fucking street gang into a political organization?' Stew asks. "That shit went out with Hobsbawm.' Seth has just spent a minute with Sarah in his father's study. She was suffering intensely, revisiting all the losses of the recent years. His daughter is learning the hard lessons of a giving nature, that great passion means great pain. Entering the light and noise of the gathering, Seth is amazed to see that Stew's addressing Jackson Aires.
'My condolences, my condolences,' says Jackson and falls forward for Seth's hand, it didn't even strike me Bernhard was your father. You see how doggone funny these things are?' It turns out Hobie's father had introduced Aires and Mr Weissman long ago. Jackson received investment advice from Bernhard for decades and speaks warmly of him, which, Seth supposes, means Jackson made money. The last time Aires and Seth met, they were in their own professional modes, during Nile's trial. Introducing himself as Michael Frain, Seth had proposed an interview with Hardcore. Aires had stared with unapologetic hostility and walked away. i told you I remembered you,' Seth says. 'You lived on the other side of U. Park.'
‘I lived on the black folks' side,' Aires replies, a piece of revisionism that neither of them fully believes. In the 1950s, the Negro professionals in U. Park simply thought they'd finally crossed the river to the real America.' You were always in Gurney' s kitchen. That's what I remember. I remember you fine.' Limber in spite of his age, Aires, with his snowball pomp, draws back, the better to eye Seth and to reflect on whether he's gained any advantage with this display of potent memory. He wears his burgundy sport coat, shiny at the shoulders, and an old paisley tie. 'See, what got me confused's the name, you know. You weren't Michael Frain when I knew you. Can't have been too happy to be your daddy's son. Not if you lived your life with someone else's name. Guess you just got sick and tired of bein Jewish, huh?'
Startled, Seth actually laughs out loud. In all these years, no one has ever suggested that motive before. He is tempted, in his present melancholy, to surrender to a mood of self-accusation, but he finally screws up his face to disagree. Aires goes on, though, certain he's right.
'I've known a couple Jewish fellas over the years who done that. One bird I went to law school with – what was this rascal's name? Abel Epstein. He became Archibald van Epps. Can you imagine? Envied him, too, I must say. Now and then. Don't you look at me like that. Hell yes, I'd change my name and be done with it. You damn right, I would, I'm not afraid to say it. Only thing is, black man can't do it. You see? Whether I call myself Tyrone or Malcolm X or Steppin Fetchit, still some white fella gonna see me comin three blocks away, half of them afraid I'm what I am and the other half afraid I'm one of them hoodlums I represent. Ain't gonna change for centuries. Centuries.' There really is no arguing with him, Seth knows. Jackson's been thinking about this one subject, race, his entire life.
It's Dubinsky who rescues Seth. Always on the beat, Stew wants to talk about the trial, hoping to catch Aires in an unguarded moment. It wouldn't occur to Stew this is out of place. Ordinary lives, even in their tragic instants, are second-tier events to him, inherently less worthy than the news.
'It doesn't make sense politically,' he tells Aires, returning to their quarrel about Eddgar. 'Is the Governor gonna release Kan-el from the pokey one morning and meet him for breakfast the next? It's not possible. It never was.'
'Can't say about that. You see. All you journal-ists' – Jackson gives the word a derisive turn – 'you – all are just professional Monday-morning quarterbacks.' In his humorless, confrontational mode, Jackson rises to the balls of his feet, looming over Dubinsky. With its abrupt and unsatisfactory ending, the trial remains the subject of gossip. Everyone has theories – about where Nile went and whether he is alive or dead and who might have killed him, about Eddgar's role in the crime and his future in politics. One piece – Dubinsky's, Seth thinks – said Eddgar would not run again. Oddly, however, what Seth hears about the case, he overhears almost as background noise, much like this conversation he's happened upon. No one speaks to him directly. Sonny, Hobie, Dubinsky – they all have secrets, ruminations they won't disclose. On his own, he has occasional fantasies of encountering Eddgar on the streets of DuSable. Perhaps they'll stare each other down, or Seth will resort to violence, or they'll have a terse but complete exchange in which they finally finish their business after all these years. He thinks less elaborately about Nile, but wonders often if he's safe.
'So you think Eddgar was on the level?' Dubinsky asks. 'See, to me, this whole case, something's wrong. My editor's like, "Give it a rest," but you know, there's just that basic Kindle County aroma here.'
Dubinsky, Seth thinks. He lays down the best dish in this burg. You read it, you think, Holy smokes, maybe it really is like that. But it isn't. Seth would love to live in Stew Dubinsky's world, believing all evil is the result of bad old men hatching plans in back rooms and corner taverns. It would be wonderful if people were actually that powerful, if chaos was not the predominant force in the universe. But Seth's learned otherwise. You stop on a street corner and thirty seconds later the little boy beside you is dead. Listening to Stew now, Jackson Aires chortles in audible disbelief.
'No?' asks Stew. 'So then, how was it?' He takes a step closer. But Jackson has played dice on too many corners; he's been hustled by better than Dubinsky. He simply shakes his head.
‘I tell you how it was. Same as it always is. My client's in the penitentiary servin twenty years for murder and the white fella's runnin round loose. That's how it is.' Jackson again briefly flexes upward to his toes and then, to dispel any doubt about the injustice of all this, adds, 'If that boy wudn't guilty, you gonna have to tell me why he run.'
With that, Jackson breaks off and Seth goes too. He briefly joins Sonny with her friends, Solomon and Marta. Marta is enormous with child and radiant about it. Even in the spring, the heat of a crowded room is too much for her. When she embraces Seth her cheek is damp. Seth receives their condolences, then moves around the living room thanking others. Dick Burr, one of the honchos from the Tribune, is here, a decent guy, out to woo Seth, but earnest in his consolations. Burr says Dubinsky gave him copies of their eulogies, which they're going to have typeset for Seth at the paper. Together, Burr and his assistant, Fortune Reil, have been speaking with Lucy's older brothers, Douglas – known as Deek – a banker, and Gifford, a manager of pension funds. Both live in Greenwood County and are members of an endangered life-form – the high-born WASP. Seth is enormously fond of each. They have shown unflagging loyalty and good humor through the years, in the face of Seth's columns about their lime-green slacks, their boats and exclusive clubs, and their slavish, sensual attraction to alcohol, which each man experiences as the 'open sesame' to the universe of emotion.
As Hobie's parents make ready to depart, Seth crosses the room to embrace them again, then stands outside on the stoop seeing them off. Afterwards, he faces his father's small brick house alone. What a strange business this is, he thinks, inheritance, owning the walls you once wanted to escape. He looks through the poor glass of the storm door to the tiny entry. The dim, fusty halls, which his father, in his penny-pinching foolishness, did not repaint in forty years, have now acquired a museum quality, as if some special meaning arises from the simple fact they were preserved.
He comes down the stairs, feeling a sudden urge to make a proprietary survey. Daffodils are sprouting in the weedy bed on the south side, next to the tiny cellar windows, which in childhood reminded him of his own mouth, with its gapped teeth. It is that magic time in the Middle West. In the distance, the trees are stark and bare, but up close one sees the branches heavy with sensuous buds. A day or two of warmth and the green explosion will occur, the air will be sweet with chlorophyll.
Across the small back yard, he spies Lucy. Her straight skirt has been hiked fetchingly to allow her to take a seat on the worn steps of the grey wooden porch behind the house. Her eyes are closed and her face raised adoringly to the sky. She looks like a young girl waiting to be kissed.
'A Seattlite struck dumb by the sight of sun,' Seth remarks.
Waking to him, she smiles wordlessly and lifts her far hand to reveal a cigarette. After Isaac, she lapsed, secretly. He didn't suspect until she started wheezing after their evening runs. Embarrassed to be caught now, she crushes the butt carefully under heel and, as Lucy would, folds it into her palm for later disposal. Seth takes the step below her. They marvel momentarily about the day, the promise of blue skies. i never said how wonderful your talk was, Seth. Your eulogy.'
'Yeah.' Words. The fundamental medium of human exchange. They're great. And then what? ‘I worried about Sarah. I was afraid she'd think I was profaning the sacred.'
'Sarah understands.'
'As much as I do.'
'Are you really all right with her plans?' Lucy asks. ‘I wouldn't be shocked if she stays with this.' Last night, Sarah, who has talked of grad school, even the rabbinate, told them that she and her boyfriend, Phil, have enrolled in an Americorps program to train teachers for inner-city schools. They expect to stay here or somewhere else in the Middle West.
'Great by me. I'm proud of her. That she's that kind of person. I never expected her to become a columnist.'
'You seemed to like the idea of her as a professor.'
'I've always loved intellectuals. They seem so distant and admirable to me.' He thinks fleetingly of Sonny twenty-five years ago, his thrall with all that philosophy he couldn't really comprehend.
'Your father was a professor,' Lucy says.
This is Lucy, always on the nerve. How did he ever miss that? How? He stands to continue his inspection of the back yard. He offers Lucy his arm and she takes it, accompanying Seth as he ambles. This is always there: they like each other so much. Even as their life together has seemed in the last two years unfathomable, impossible, she remains the nicest human being he knows.
In her mothering years, he lived in undying amazement of Lucy. She looked at every paper, bored in until she'd heard every question the teacher asked at school. She knew by heart what was on the lunch menu, the name of every friend and whether she or he was a good influence, even if the kid had never set foot inside their home. She'd memorized every trumpet note or ballet turn. She hit the laundry room at 6 a.m., because she knew what clothes they'd want to wear, right down to the undies. Her children's lives were so thoroughly understood, digested, imagined, so thoroughly her own, that other women often seemed to freeze over in shame.
But all of that allowed Lucy to avoid wondering about herself. Coming here, seeing Sonny up there on the bench, so positive about what's right, sure about the fate of others, he realized again that was one of the things he wanted, someone whose desires were less frightening to her than they are to Lucy, who is always somewhat oppressed by her need to please, and even past the age of forty can look primitively pained by the question What do you want? Isaac's death somehow fit in with that and drove him often to the point of rage. Didn't she know there was no accepting this, that it was not part of some universal harmonic? It made him crazy, crazy because he was not enough, not big enough, positive enough, to give her what she required. He has often predicted to himself, in solitary moments when he thinks he's given up, that Lucy's next husband will be an oracle of some kind – a clergyman, a visionary. It was no accident she started out hooked up with the likes of Hobie.
'Are you holding up?' he asks her, as they turn the outer boundary of the small yard. An old hedge here is gnarled at its joints with an arthritic thickness that brings to mind his father at the end.
'I guess. I still find death amazing, don't you? It seems so contrary to all of my assumptions.'
He smiles toughly. For him, it's always present now. You build a foothold in the world in the first half of life, and then watch it slip away. But he didn't mean to exchange philosophies. He was daring to ask about her life at present. Shortly after he left, Lucy took up with a twenty-six-year-old, the associate director of the soup kitchen. But that fizzled. People – other women, especially – were unbearably cruel. One neighbor asked Lucy if she was going to give Moe a graduation party when he finished school. She's lonely now, Sarah says. To that observation Seth made no reply, even though he'll always feel the impulse to tell Sarah everything will be all right. He really didn't want his kids growing up in one of those screwed-up American fin de siecle families, where Dad's married to his former secretary, a great gal for a transsexual, and Mom is taking dope and sleeping with the bishop on the sly, and Brother gets off handling snakes and robbing convenience stores, and everybody joins hands at Thanksgiving and says, 'Thank God we have our family.' He wanted his daughter and his son to know there was a true center, that some things are enduring, and healing. And then Isaac died.
As they walk, as Seth thinks about these things, his mind turns to the piece he'll write tomorrow. His work is always with him, a part of him forever lodged in that mainframe in Seattle where the man known in 167 daily papers as Michael Frain seems to exist. That Michael, in Seth's mind's eye, has a somewhat distinct physical appearance, shorter than Seth, fuller in body, perpetually young, with a wry, unflappable expression, probably the physical self he idealized when he was, say, a freshman in high school and still thought anything was possible for him.
The column he'll take up tomorrow is one of half a dozen he dredged from his months visiting his father in hospitals and rehab facilities. It's about marriage. The piece concerns a lean bald-headed man from Kewahnee who donated a kidney to his wife. Seth didn't know that was possible. He thought it was like bone-marrow transplants, where you faced problems unless you were bora with a twin. This man, an engineer at Dunning, a defense outfit, is not particularly articulate, not the kind of fellow who can say much about motives. But this couple now lies together in the same room in Sinai-Cedars Hospital, getting different IVS drugs and the same painkillers, with matching fourteen-inch incisions on their left sides. It seems like an act from mythology, reaching inside yourself, an organ from him now an organ in her, an echo of Adam's aboriginal rib.
The magic of what Seth does is the interviews, asking people to account for things like that. He can be 1,500 miles away, no more than a voice on the phone, someone whom they know at best by reputation, and usually not at all, merely somebody trying to let his soul crawl down the saying ‘I want to know you, would like to tell your story,' and folks, in their hunger to be understood, will tell him almost anything. In his hospital bed, his hand bruised by the I Vs, this man took a sip of water first. 'Well,' he told Seth, in that slow Midwestern drawl, 'well, it didn't really occur to me there was anything else I'd like to do.' The line was a killer. Lucy and he once had that kind of autonomic commitment, and would still do anything for one another, he thinks, whether out of habit, or gratitude or admiration. But listening to that man he was suddenly unsure that what's growing up between Sonny and him will flower that fully. There's been peace, humor, sensitivity -and amazing sensuality. But he doubts Sonny, in the face of sacrifice, could ever really convince him there's nothing else she'd like to do.
At Seth's feet lies the little corner of the lawn his mother ripped away a generation ago to form a vegetable garden. She tilled this fifteen square feet of soil relentlessly and made it yield remarkable things: leaf lettuce first, then tomatoes, peas, pole beans. A huge zucchini somehow sprang up in the adjoining privet and was mistaken by the entire family, when they spotted it, for a raccoon. He can recall his father, terrified, edging up like a fencer with a rake extended. Seth remembers many Sundays out here, hoeing, weeding, being the man his mother needed, doing her gentle bidding while he tried to keep up with the Trappers game on his transistor. Lucy has wonderful vegetable gardens and he's always adored her for them.
His mother's gardening equipment was housed in the narrow barnwood shed his father positioned in the rear corner of this lot. Bernhard feared thieves, of course. A heavy rusted padlock hangs there. Seth would love to look inside. What has my father left me? he thinks again. He heaves on the old wooden door, then recalls the key, still hidden under the same piece of loose walk. The interior is dark, smelling of rotted wood, of rancid fertilizers and loam. The old tools lie in disarray, the metal parts rough with rust. The spiders have choked each other in bleak, silky competition.
'Jeez-o Pete,' he says suddenly, 'what a horrible day this is.' Behind the open door, safe from the wind and prying eyes, actually alone with Lucy for the first instant in months, he wordlessly accepts her comfort. Here she is in the crook of his arm, this woman, this tiny female person whom he was with longer than he lived without her. Here she is. Sonny
'You aren't leaving? I hoped we'd get a chance to talk,' Lucy says as Sonny, carrying her purse, approaches the front door. It's a few minutes past 4:30 and most of the afternoon visitors have departed. Attempting to sound casual, Sonny explains she has to pick up Nikki from day care, a few minutes away, and expects to return with her. Unmentioned is the fact that Seth performs this task many afternoons now.
'I'd love to get away for a second,' says Lucy. 'How about I come along?' As Lucy rushes off for her coat, Sonny indulges in an instant of stark assessment. Lucy is one of those women born in the right age. In the era of Botticelli and Rubens her looks would have been disregarded. Yet at the end of the twentieth century her slender waifishness is right. She has intense black eyes, a tangle of dark hair, a narrow, fragile face. Her size and apparent vulnerability always made Sonny feel like half a cow, even a quarter of a century ago, and watching her slip around the house, she's been unable to contain her amazement that any woman after two children can actually have a waist that small. Seth's side-of-the-mouth descriptions of Lucy have tended to portray her youthfulness as a failing, a sign of continuing childishness, but avoided mentioning that she's retained a lot of sensual pizzazz. Dating a twenty-six-year-old no longer seems pathological. Lucy's one of those women whom men – on the sidewalk, across a revolving door – still turn to watch in that idiot way, as if there's actually some hope you might commit a carnal act right here on the street. Is Sonny envious? Only slightly. There are other aspects of youth – bending from the waist without back pain, or the ability to remember seven-digit-number strings -she'd rather recover.
In the car, heading off, Lucy chatters. People remain so fundamentally themselves, so recognizable. Seth insists Lucy is brilliant, but hamstrung by self-doubt, something Sonny can hear in the urgent way she gushes about the fact that Sonny is a judge. How exciting! How difficult! Support and flattery, the rhetoric of women of our age, Sonny thinks, but she knows Lucy is sincere. She answers that her job is far less lofty than it sounds.
'But it's important in the lives of other people,' Lucy answers. 'And you did that. As a woman. I know what that means, how hard that was. When Michael told me you were a judge, I actually felt proud. Does that sound ridiculous? But I'm very proud of all of you, the women I knew who did all these things that their grandmothers or even their moms couldn't even dare to consider. When we started college, if you think about it, we were so vague. So many women were. I was. We didn't have any sense of what we could do. And what you did, you, all our women friends, they did for themselves. Together, I mean, hand in hand. I don't think Sarah can really understand the imagination that required.'
The reaching trees rush by in reflection on the windshield. Sonny tips her head.
‘I can't take credit,' she says. 'My mother gave me that.'
'Really?'
'It was very unusual for the time, but a wonderful gift. I owe her so much for that.' 'You are great,' Zora whispered. 'You are a treasure of the world.' Day in, day out, the message was repeated, with a passion that left no doubt it was true. At instants, that unrestrained praise of her abilities seemed more a burden than a benediction, but in the end, Sonny thinks, it's a lot to have, to reach back to.
They park at Drees, a small brick building, retooled three or four times for various municipal uses. Rush hour, sometimes madness on University Avenue, is light today and they are early. At Sonny's suggestion they walk down the block to a gourmet coffee shop, the Seattle franchise which has America mainlining caffeine. A native, Lucy knows all the code words. 'Grande, macchiato, double shot.' They sit on brushed-steel stools across a granite table. Shoppers, mostly female, pass on the street. A woman with a baguette from the French bakery across the way turns in the midst of conversation and nearly knocks Lucy from her seat. There is a brief scene, much laughter, and a flurry of apologies. When they are alone once more, Lucy hunches over her coffee cup and lets her tongue slide forth kittenishly to lick the foam.
'So, is it love?' she asks. Sonny, who had not contemplated such directness, feels her chest rock when she attempts to draw a breath.
‘I know Seth's in love with my daughter. I'm not as sure about me.'
'Oh, I think he's always been hung up on you. What's the term? With the torch? As a child it made me think of the Statue of Liberty. But it means love is never finished. Don't you think that's right? I think love is never finished.'
Sonny sees how this will be, one of those oblique, neurotic dialogues, saying one thing and, in some lost recess, meaning something else. If love does not quit, where does that leave Lucy and Seth? Registering Sonny's discontent Lucy apologizes. She didn't mean to pry, she says.
'It's hardly prying,' Sonny says. 'It's natural. You wonder about Seth and me, I wonder about you and Seth.'
In response, Lucy stirs her coffee, her eyes nowhere in the room. 'Life is messy,' she says suddenly. 'Isn't it? People have these messy little corners that you can't get to with one another.' Is it Seth and her she means? Or is she talking about the fact that even decades ago Sonny and she were not especially close?
‘I don't need explanations,' Sonny finally says, then, after an instant's reflection, murmurs Isaac's name. Lucy cannot contain a small, tense reflex.
'Naturally,' Lucy says. ‘I mean, that's the biggest piece of it. Isaac. Michael won't give it up. Resolve. Let go. God, I don't know the word. But he won't. The sadness won't leave him. And I empathize, I think I'm a sympathetic person -'
'Of course you are,' offers Sonny, realizing it's foolish to reassure someone she hasn't seen for twenty-five years, but still certain she's right.
'But it's me, too. He was my child, too. I can't live with this silent accusation that I've forgotten Isaac and he hasn't, that he suffers and I don't. I can't bear that.' She has started crying now. The liner goes at once, and settles on her cheek, a trail of greying sludge. Lucy stares at the traces on the paper napkin grabbed from the stainless dispenser and shakes her head. Why did she bother with makeup? she asks. She's been crying and redoing it all day.
Having touched this great pain so quickly leaves Sonny uneasy. It's like digging in a garden and inadvertently exposing the root of a plant, a white, awkward thing never meant for light. As she watches Lucy regather herself, the day presses in on her amid the hubbub of the store. The place is filling. Women and men, on the way home, with time to grant themselves a few minutes of relief, queue before the bright chrome-and-brass fittings at the counter. A few little ones grind against their mothers' thighs. The steam machines whir, spilling out sensational aromas, while the young clerks bustle about, enjoying the frenzy and performance of the rush hour. For a moment, it seems to Sonny that she can recover some recollected kinship to every person in this store: young and unknown to herself; at loose ends with spare moments; mom with babe in arms. She surmounted all that. Why can she see the arc backward so clearly, but nothing ahead?
'I mean, Isaac's not our whole thing,' Lucy says. 'We're like any other married couple. We've done some bad stuff to each other over the years.'
'I was married,' Sonny says.
'Right,' says Lucy, and smiles quickly, tentatively, not certain it's polite to agree. 'But for Michael, for me – you know, the issue is how much disappointment you can embrace before you say, "I have to start again." I mean,' Lucy says, 'it turns out there are some things you can't say. In a marriage? You can mess up a relationship in a sentence. You don't know it for sure until ten years later. But that's how it turns out.' Lucy, whose dark eyes are flighty, seldom loitering, now land directly on Sonny. 'He's never told you, has he?'
Trying to find the thread, Sonny does not answer. Lucy leans on the tiny hand she has brought to her forehead, the nails short but carefully trimmed in red.
'God, I need a cigarette,' she declares. Lucy takes her paper cup and moves to a table in the corner. She has lit up, wreathed in smoke, by the time Sonny arrives. And her mother died of emphysema. Sonny recalls Seth's stories of this woman, with a ruined face like Lillian Hellman's, smoking behind the oxygen mask, and her family screaming, begging her to consider the fire hazard, if nothing else.
'This, you know, period, whatever you call it,' Lucy says, 'this is like our second Big Crisis. We had a first Big Crisis. About ten years ago. Did you know that?'
'A little,' Sonny says.
'Michael's mother was dying. And he was having a hard time with that. Alzheimer's. They just disappear right in front of you, it eats the soul before the body. And he was becoming very successful at the same time. And he was having a hard time with that, too, you know, people were different with him now that he wasn't just some weird guy ventilating a lot of crazed private thoughts. It was like the commercials that were on then about "Everybody listens"? That was his life all of a sudden. The room would go silent. Everybody listened. And so he was pretty nuts with all of it, and he started sleeping with some girl around the paper. He was traveling with her and telling me nothing was going on. His assistant. But you could just about see sparks when they even said hello. And men never will get it, will they, that women know! And I put up with stuff, that's one of my problems, I always take way too much – but this? Finally, after a party, I threw a fit. I realized I was entitled. I was so hurt, savagely hurt. And he was kind of a skunk about it. He said all of the usual incredibly dumb things, but the one that got me was "You don't understand, this doesn't mean anything," and I said, "No, I do understand, and don't say it doesn't mean anything," and, I don't know, I just said, I said, "For Godsake, I was still sleeping with Hobie a year after we were married." So I'd said it.' She waits an instant, considering only the ember at the end of her cigarette.
'Even when that was going on,' Lucy says, ‘I didn't understand much of it, but I told myself, "If you do this, this is for yourself and only yourself and he can never know." And he hadn't. They were two completely different spheres, like sleeping and waking, or stoned and straight, it seemed completely implausible they could even touch. But they did. They had.
'I mean, the whole thing was like ancient history. It had been over years and years before, Hobie and I had both seen it was crazy and absurd. And one of the problems – I mean, now I was a mom, we had a home; we had, you know, our customs, our things, furniture and breakfast cereal, and honestly, one huge problem was I couldn't even understand it anymore myself. I looked back and it seemed like being with the Moonies. I mean, ho w can I even explain what I used to think when I was twenty-one? We forget what we used to be like, what everything was like. It seems like there weren't the same categories, you know? I mean, everything wasn't in this sort of place. Who understands what an adult commitment is when you're twenty-one? I thought I could sleep with Hobie and be Michael's wife. It sort of made sense, and then eventually it didn't. I mean, that's life, that's reality, I can't apologize for that.
'And you know, the shrinks, the counselors, they pointed out the right stuff, about how complicated it is between Michael and Hobie anyway, and why did Michael – Seth – why did he want to hook up with Hobie's girlfriend in the first place, and we all played a part. But it was still a major mess. Not that he ever wagged a finger, because he's done more than his share of shitty things and he knows it. But he couldn't even talk to Hobie for a couple of years. And I mean Hobie prostrated himself, he absolutely begged forgiveness, which I frankly didn't even think Hobie would know how to do. And you know, I forgave Michael and Michael forgave us. He's a forgiving person. Except for his father. I'd had trouble getting pregnant again, secondary infertility, and we did in vitro and we had Isaac. And we went on. But there's that term "sadder but wiser"? That's a terrible phrase, don't you think? When you really hear the words? And he was sadder but wiser after that. And our marriage was sadder but wiser. And with Isaac suddenly, maybe it was too sad and too wise. And what's the way out, you know? Is there one?'
Lucy, boiling in shame, closes her eyes and crushes out her cigarette. The store is emptying out. As the customers pass through the doorway, a touch of cooler air, swifter movement, the simpler smells of sundown and spring cross the cafe. Through her bleared eyes, Lucy dares to look again at Sonny. She says, 'So now you know.' Seth
The day, like some lingering sweet lament, lolls toward a close. Seth and Nikki sit on the grey stairs of the back porch, facing the failing stockade fence his father years ago erected along the property line of the tiny city lot. The birds twitter urgently, and a block or two away a power mower thrums, as some citizen tries to liberate the weekend with an hour's labor after work, rushing through the first cutting of the year. In magnificent hue, the sky loses light about them. Lucy and Sonny have gone together to pick up takeout for dinner. Inside, Sarah, who just led a minyan in reciting the mourners' prayer, is whiling with the last of her friends. Nikki watched in awe as Sarah chanted and now has asked Seth to hold a conversation in a foreign language, albeit one of her own invention. They have gone on quacking and gargling at each other for some time.
'You know what I was saying?' the little girl asks. She is in jeans and a pilled turtleneck adorned with corny, small flowers and two smears of fingerpaint. ‘I was saying, "Yes, I want to go on a horse ride." '
'Oh, I misunderstood. I thought you were saying, "Thank you, Seth, for hanging out with me, you're such a swell fella." I could swear that was what you meant.'
'No-o-o!' she exclaims and in mock-reproof squeezes his cheeks, stopping to comb her fingers through his new beard, which all three of them – Seth, Sonny, and Nikki – privately refer to as 'Nikki's Whiskers.' Her laughter rollicks momentarily, then her dark eyes grow serious again, reverting to what was on her mind. 'Why was she talking Spanish, anyway?'
'Spanish? Who?'
Nikki waves a tiny hand desperately toward the living room. She cannot recall Sarah's name or otherwise describe her. He has told her a thousand times Sarah is his daughter, but Nikki seems to find it impossible that a daughter is not someone her age.
'You mean when Sarah was praying?' he asks. 'That was Hebrew. Span-ish,’ he mocks and grabs Nikki about the waist momentarily, jostling her in delight. She throws herself deep into his arms, and the compact feel of the little girl, with her mysteriously sweet aroma and innocent seductiveness, enters the core of him. Isaac was such a handful, so haunted and inconsolable, that Seth had half-forgotten the spectacular buoyant pleasures normally part of this age. Around Nikki he has often been called back with a throb to those times, when he was in his late twenties and Sarah was little. She'd been a surprise in every aspect, her conception first, and then, upon arrival, the way her needs dominated Lucy and him. Every meal, for instance, was a task. She was allergic to milk products and, worse, for years would only take her food disguised in baked beans. Each day was a thicket, planning for her, working, scheduling. Lucy was trying to finish college. He had been hired at a daily in Pawtucket, and one day one of his columns was picked up by a real syndicate, fifty papers, which kept asking for more. He'd write. Research. Do interviews. He'd keep endless notes on different ideas and work on them with no particular consistency, free-form, a renegade enemy of order in his writerly role. But with all the pulling and heaving, at home, in the office, he found suddenly there was no activity in the course of the day which did not feel imbued with deep purpose – Lucy, Sarah, what he wrote. And where it all was going, who knew, who knew, but he was laboring toward something, if only perhaps the creation of the self he was, after long wondering, seemingly meant to discover all along. Good years, he thinks now. Good times.
In this mood, he clings to Nikki. Her long dark hair, pigtailed today, spins around as he lolls her back and forth. He is always self-conscious about handling her. Welcome to our era. But a six-year-old needs to be hugged. When his children were little, he enjoyed nothing more than lying down with them for a nap, clinging to their small hands, losing track in sleep of where exactly their bodies and his began and ended. He finally lets her go so he can explain what Sarah was doing.
'Sometimes people feel that they have to try to talk to God. That's praying. And Sarah was praying about her grandfather. Remember that real, real old man? I showed you his picture? I used to go visit him? We're remembering him.'
'Did he get dead?' Seth knows Sonny has gone over this at length, but no doubt they'll be repeating it for days.
'He was more than ninety. He was almost ninety years older than you.' He was the century, this benighted, amazing century, Seth thinks. He has not cried yet, but he's been on the verge once or twice, and with this new thought, he stifles a sob. It would upset Nikki. If she was his kid, it would be all right if he upset her. He would just cry. He'd be willing to say this is life, too. No truckling before the altar of tiny vulnerabilities. But she's not his.
'Is he in the ground already?'
He tells her what he can. That it's all right, the way it's supposed to be. Yet that is no comfort. Lurking here, Seth suspects, is the fact that neither Sonny nor he has ever told Nikki that Seth had a little boy, not much older than Nikki is now, who passed. Even if Nikki were only a third as bright as she is, only partially possessed of that remarkable insinuating intelligence in which she is forever assessing the adult world, she would sense, would know. Who after all does she think this person is to whom Sarah and he are always referring? If things go on, he thinks, they will have to deal with this forthrightly. He will not do what was done to him, create a home poisoned by a secret terror, never to be mentioned.
'So that's what Sarah was doing. She was praying. And when Jewish people pray, they talk in Hebrew. See? Sarah and I are Jewish people, so she talked in Hebrew.'
'Am I a Jewish people?'
He ponders this. Her grandfather, Jack Klonsky, according to family legend, was Jewish. Among the Reform that might be sufficient.
‘I don't think so, Nikki. Your mom isn't. Usually, people are what their moms are. Or their dads. And Charlie and your mom don't really like to go to church. Some people don't like to pray. I'm not crazy about it, to be honest.'
'Jennifer 2 goes to CDC In Nikki's kindergarten class, there are three Jennifers, all of whose last names start with G.
'Right. So she probably likes praying. And Sarah likes it.'
'Well, how do I tell?'
'What?'
'If I like it. Duh,' she adds, with noble six-year-old contempt.
'I'm sure your mom will help you. Maybe you can go with Jennifer 2 sometime. Or, you know, you could go with Sarah. Then you and Charlie and your mom can talk about it. Maybe you'll want to be Catholic like your Aunt Hen, or you could be Jewish like me. Probably you'll decide you want to be like Charlie and your mom. That's what most people do. But whatever it is, you don't have to worry about it now.'
'I do.'
'What?'
'Want to be a Jewish.' She laps her hand over Seth's. And moves a trifle closer on the stair. Sonny
'Well, we're all together again,' says Hobie with an ironic glimmer, as he glances about the old mahogany dining table to Sonny and Nikki, Lucy, Seth and Sarah. The visitors have departed. A few may look in later, but given the spare connections in Mr Weissman's life, the family decided to limit visitation to the afternoon and early evening. Lucy has a late plane to Seattle. On the table, the cartons of Chinese – the food of Jewish anguish, as Seth puts it, one of those jokes of his Sonny will never really get – leave the room savored of foreign spices and fried oil. How can anybody be hungry again? she thinks. The Jews are like the Poles, chewing their way through any meaningful event. But the energy of high emotion and the drain of the crowd this afternoon seem to have had a ravening effect. They eat speedily, on paper plates. Large foaming bottles of soda pop, dimpled from being grasped, stand amid the cartons. Nikki picks at an egg roll, then draws her hands inside her sleeves and tours the table telling everyone a pair of chopsticks are her fingers.
Sonny sits beside Sarah, discussing Sarah's plans for next year. Teaching was Sonny's final career before she lit on the law, and she recounts some of her experiences. Everything was wonderful until she got to the classroom, where she was done in by thirty-eight third-graders, all of whom wore their deprivations as visibly as wounds. She laughs now at the memory of a girl of eight with a variety of behavioral disorders.
'I hated her, and not because she was out of control. But when she got upset she ate Crayolas. Bit them and swallowed. Supplies were always so short, and she ate all the good colors. At the end of the year, the only ones left were black and white.'
Listening, Nikki is momentarily amused by the notion of eating crayons, but she soon turns whiny, pulling on Sonny's sleeve. 'This is boring,' she moans, a lament that has been steadier since she discovered the black-and-white TV in Mr Weissman's study, which her mother will not let her turn on. In the living room, Sonny digs out the markers and books stowed in Nikki's backpack this morning. They read The Pain and the Great One together, then start a book of pencil-point mazes, which Nikki churlishly insists she can do on her own. When Sonny returns to the table, Seth and Lucy are complimenting Sarah's friends – their kindness, their maturity.
'God, don't sound so amazed,' says Sarah. 'We're the same age the four of you were when you started hanging out together.'
There is silence until Seth says, 'Gulp,' to considerable laughter.
'So is this what you guys used to do when you hung out together?' Sarah asks. 'Eat Chinese and tell cool stories?'
'We'd get ripped and listen to your father,' Hobie says.
Listen to what? Sarah wants to know. Lucy explains about Seth's movies, the science-fiction tales he once composed.
'Cool,' she says. 'So why'd you stop making them up, Dad?'
'Who says I stopped? My computer's full of them.'
'I didn't know that,' says Lucy. Her declaration is a substantial relief to Sonny, who had no idea either.
'Whenever I get blocked doing a column, I fiddle with one of them. This is the halcyon era of science fiction. Recombinant engineering? Computer science? There's no end to weird little thoughts.'
'Like what? Come on. Let me hear one.' Sarah reaches across Sonny to drag on her father's hand.
'It's just stupid, private stuff. They're like topical parables or something. I don't know.'
'Go ahead,' says Hobie. 'Let Sarah see how wigged-out you really are. I bet you got some twisted shit on that hard drive. Don't say no, 'cause I know you do. You got some tales about black folks?'
'Naturally. Nobody is spared.'
'Okay.' Hobie throws his broad arms out, then folds them: Do me something. The age-old challenge between them. He gave Seth ten minutes before about the inadequacies of his new beard. Seth requires additional encouragement from both Lucy and Sonny, but at last he scrapes his chair back and spreads his hands. Even Nikki comes to Sonny's lap to listen.
'Soon,' he says, as the stories always started, 'soon, as we know, cloning will be possible. From a single cell – from dandruff or a piece of fingernail – an entire being can be created. When writers speculate on this, they talk about cloning geniuses – a whole league of Michael Jordans or another de Kooning. But I suspect that people will be most interested in cloning themselves. We'll be like paramecia, reproducing ourselves in an endless chain. You'll literally be the parent of yourself. The kid won't have your bad trips and nightmares and squirrelly parents, but otherwise it's you, someone who'll grow up to look exactly like you, who has your same insane predilection for peach ice cream and, regrettably, the same genetic defects.'
'Like baldness?' asks Sarah. Around the table, there is a thunderous laughter. On Sonny's lap, Nikki roars, too, for the sheer joy of participating. Seth levels a finger at Hobie and tells him to take note of what you get when the last tuition bill is paid.
'So what's the rest?' asks Sarah. 'This is cool. I want to hear more.'
'Okay,' Seth answers. 'Well, naturally the next impulse is people want to improve upon themselves through genetic engineering. They don't want their kid to be stuck being them exactly. He'll be like me, but with my grandfather's talent for music, my mother's for math. And on the other hand, aberrant genes can be repaired. No one need have sickle cell or Tay-Sachs. Of course, there is a potential for horrible mischief, people experimenting, or creating geeks or Hitlers from their own DNA. And so all gene choice and repair is conducted under the auspices of a federal agency, the Biomedical Genetic Engineering Administration, which must consider all applications for genetic alterations. And here our story begins.
'It is one of the legacies of slavery that virtually all African-Americans carry some white genes. Not long after BGEA has been opened, word leaks out that an unknown number of black parents have applied to have white children. This causes tremendous agitation around the country. Racist whites don't want blacks 'passing' this way – even though they'll be white in every real sense – while many African-Americans feel these parents are turning their backs on their heritage. Some white leaders, including a few generally regarded as progressive, urge all African-Americans to take this step and thus, in a single generation, to put race behind us as a national issue. They are denounced by most blacks and many whites, a few of whom, in defiance, apply to have black-skinned children. Pressure is brought on Congress to prevent race-crossing. A law is enacted, but the Supreme Court strikes it down, ruling that the Constitution guarantees Americans the right to be whatever color they want. Now the nation is in turmoil. The Biomedical Genetic Engineering Administration is looted and the names of the black parents who have applied is discovered; around the nation four of them are lynched. Facilities doing gene alteration are sabotaged. Civil war erupts, with racist whites fighting beside the Nation of Islam. The cities burn again.' Seth rattles his fingers down like rain. 'Fade scene. So?' he asks. The silence is prolonged.
‘I liked the stories you used to tell a lot better,' Sonny says.
'Uncle Hobie's right,' says Sarah. 'You're twisted.'
'Hey,' says Seth. 'You guys asked for it.'
'It's upsetting, Seth,' says Sonny. 'It's provocative.'
Hobie, who has been fumbling with his beard for some time, says, 'I think it's a righteous story.'
'My pal,' says Seth.
'God,' says Lucy in reply. 'The two of you never understand the way you sound to anybody else. That's a terrible story.' ' Sure it is,' says Hobie. 'But true. Fact is, nobody in this country, black or white, knows how they wanna feel about difference. There plenty of white folks in this country, maybe even most of them these days, tellin themselves they ain't so hung up. You give them one of those nice-type black people they see on TV to move in next door – Clint Huxtable or Whoopi Goldberg or Michael Jordan – somebody, you know, who lives and talks like them, fine by them. Only whoever it is, don't you dare marry my daughter and hand me no darkie grandchild. And we aren't a damn bit better. We-all are proud of being different, we wanna be different, 'cept when white folks say we are. Don't nobody mention the number of black players in the NBA. Cause then we feel it's a curse, as if that difference runs straight from the skin right through the soul. We're all fucked up, all of us, and not gettin any better.'
Lucy looks to Sonny. 'They both believe we're doomed.'
'Not doomed,' says Seth. 'Just in deep, deep trouble.' His wife makes a face and Seth repeats himself: Deep trouble. Still in her black dress, Lucy pulls in obvious agitation at each of the sleeves and leans across the table toward Seth.
‘I won't listen to this. Not tonight. I don't want to hear how bad it is, how hopeless, how urban life is going to be roving bands of murderous hoodlums fighting it out with armed militias, while the rest of us cower from both.'
'Maybe you should drive down to Grace Street, Luce. Or spend time sitting beside Sonny and hear what passes in front of her on the average day.'
Sonny shoots him a severe look and mouths quite clearly, Leave me out.
'It's not just one way, Seth. Why won't you ever see it? Years ago, you committed yourself to making things better. And they are better. We – all of us in this country – we've accomplished an enormous amount. Why doesn't anybody ever say that? Why doesn't anybody give themselves just a minute of joy? You tell me another century when so many people made so many advances against the kinds of tyranny human beings have always imposed on each other.'
She is reaching toward him, imploring, Sonny sees, near tears. This is the heart of what Lucy knows she can offer him. Himself. Who he was and longs for, if he will just re-establish his courage and his faith. It's too private, too unsettling to Sonny to witness this appeal. Nikki has edged over to Seth's knee and, muttering that she'll be right back, Sonny heads into the kitchen, where she withdraws a bottle of spring water from the refrigerator, a chugging Shelvador, forty years old if a day. The whole kitchen is a relic, with white metal cabinets so old the runners have fallen out of the drawers, and a floor of black and white linoleum squares. Sonny finds a glass – they are all, as Seth long claimed, foodstore giveaways – and gulps the water down.
Whoever said we could name our feelings? It's an old riddle, left over from the foregone life of a philosophe at Miller Damon. The way any individual sees the color green can be measured now; a probe to the optic nerve would find the same chemicals annealing in the neurons of almost all of us. But this contorted stirring, the sensation that someone has driven rivets through her heart, the twisting fore and back, is simply what it is, the massive accumulation of a day, a life, and is wholly unique to her. Who has the right to call it by any known word, whether it's iove' or 'regret' or 'pain'?
From the dining room Hobie's voice booms out. He's telling a story about a Fourth of July years ago, when he was still married to his second wife. Seth, a second later, peeks in from the doorway.
'Don't kill me, okay, but I turned on the TV for Nikki. "God, Seth, this is so cool. There's no color." I mean, is this the next wave?'
She returns his smile wanly. Sonny keeps telling him he has to learn to say no to Nikki, to stop acting like a doting aunt. But there's not much point in that discussion right now.
'What's the matter?' He edges in. 'My story get to you?'
‘I suppose. There's a lot to talk about. It's been a hard day for all of us.'
He looks behind him, then crosses the kitchen and takes her in his arms. He asks if she's okay. She does not answer, but falls against him. Beside them, the window, opened for the cross-draft when the house was crowded, remains unclosed in spite of the growing nighttime chill. The wind kicks up, transmitting the sound of a cat a few houses down, squalling in some act of overheated masculinity. The air, the sound, Seth's presence, raises within her the first faint throb of sexual need. Amid all the uncertainty between them, their lovemaking has been a spectacular success. She has had these periods before with a couple of other men – Charlie was one – and when you're into it, sex, having great sex, it seems to be the center of the world. All other connections grow slightly more remote. In the last hour of the day, when Nikki is in bed, Sonny turns to him, as formerly she turned to herself. He brings her a glass of wine. They drink. They make love. Sometimes it goes on. He roams. He approaches from behind. The side. He leaves. He caresses her ankles, knees, the vulva, then mounts her again reeking with her strong female scent. It feels always, as the minutes pass, as if they are going deeper and deeper into one another. The twined fingertips. The pleasure points. The outbreak of exulting sound. As if they were twins, separate selves swimming toward the retained memory of how they issued from the same core. The flooding recollection of this now is moving, disturbing. She will hate herself if she comes to tears.
'How are you doing?' she asks.
Confused, he says. Numb.
'I nearly wrote you a letter last night.'
'Did you? Was it a love letter?' He rears back with that puckish smile. Always the jokes, the hapless defenses.
'It was condolences, Seth.'
'Oh.'
'And I tore it up because I didn't know exactly what to say.' 'I'm not sure I would, either.'
'No, I mean about us. I didn't know what to say about us. I didn't know what right or role I'd have comforting you tomorrow or the day after.'
'Oh.' He lets her go. 'Is that what we have to talk about?' His innocence is such a complete show she has to stifle an urge to pinch him. His eyes, in fact, are watery with fear.
'This may be the wrong time.'
He looks back to the dining room. Hobie is talking about fireworks, imitating his wife, Khaleeda, as she begged him not to set them off around the girls. His mimicry, always perfect, has Lucy and Sarah in the heat of laughter.
'Go on,' Seth says. 'It's working on you. Let's hear it.'
'Well, Seth. I already said it. What are you doing? Say, tomorrow. Are you staying? Going?'
'Tomorrow? Look, you know I've been promising Moritz for two weeks I'll come out to Seattle so I can meet with the people at the PI face to face. I said I'd leave as soon as the funeral is over. You know that. And it's Passover anyway. Sarah wants to have it with Lucy now. She asked if we could all be together. So I'll probably fly out tomorrow.'
'And then? How long will you be there?'
His mouth parts vaguely. He slumps a bit, backed up against the old black counter on which the linoleum's secured by steel borders.
'I'm entitled to ask, Seth, aren't I?'
'Of course,' he says, but averts himself somewhat. 'Look, I have to get down to it. I know we're there. Only, I want to be sure you realize it's not only me. Do you know that?'
In the four years since Charlie fell out of the picture, she never seemed to recall his most fundamental complaints, that she was cold at the core, elusive. At his angriest, he wrote a poem: Humans have four-chambered hearts, You keep three for yourself. She was crushed by those lines and happily forgot them until Seth cautiously began to hint at the same thing.
'I know that,' she says.
'Because,' he says, 'there's a way we've never gone one step beyond where we were last December – when you were calling this a childhood romance? There's a level where you don't believe me. Or won't take me seriously.'
‘I take you seriously, Seth. But I'm afraid.'
'Of?'
‘I don't know. It's hard to say.'
He runs down a list of possibilities and she says no each time. She's not afraid of being hurt. Or being abandoned again. Or the mess of another breakup.
'So?' he asks.
She has her arms about herself in the cool air. The kitchen light is bright.
'Seth, I don't know. I hear Hobie call you "Proust" sometimes and I guess – I quiver. It scares me. That you remember every detail about your friends from college. That you're still hung up on what Loyell Eddgar did to you twenty-five years ago, as if it happened yesterday. Because I can't help thinking that's the same reason you're here with me, trying to pick up where we left off.'
'And the reason is? I'm not following.'
‘I think what I'm afraid of is that beneath it all, Seth, you've been trying to figure out one thing, which is, basically, how you might have been happier. If you'd stayed with me, if you'd faced down Eddgar, would your life have turned out differently? Would you be more complete? Would it have turned out, if you'd been tougher or luckier, something – Would it have turned out he didn't have to die, Seth?'
She stops for a second, to see if she's gone too far. Across the kitchen his eyes are flat, his jaw turns a bit. But he seems to be taking it.
'That's why it scares me,' she says. 'Because in the end, Seth, sooner or later, you're going to get a grip, you're going to see what everybody has to see. You're going to say,' ‘I can't disrespect the life I've lived. I can't pretend I don't have these connections. I could have had a different life, but I didn't." I think you're thinking those things right now.'
'Look,' he says, but says no more for quite some time. In his white shirt, he too has crossed his arms in the chill. 'This is really complicated. Maybe we should save this. Why don't you take Nikki home? And then I'll swing by whenever we're done here.' His approach seals off the window, so she unexpectedly catches a swirling breath of the warm air still hovering in the house, which carries the stimulating current of his presence. He wants to sleep with her, she realizes. When all this anguish is expressed, when they have pulverized themselves with this raw cavalcade of doubt and high emotion, that ardor will fuse itself in motion, contact, pleasure, and connection, so that something will be left. When he goes in the morning, there will be a wake of tenderness as well as pain, something to return to. 'We'll talk, okay?'
'We have to.'
In the dining room, Hobie's voice booms out: 'I light the first sparklin devil and it spins around shootin sparks and whatnot, and all the sudden, the sucker rolls right under my car, my brand-new Mercedes 560 SEL, and I swear to God, swear, the whole fucking car, man, goes like kaboom – there's a flash of light, you'd have thought God, man, was behind the wheel.' Lucy's and Sarah's laughter, the identical high-pitched squeal from mother and daughter, peals from the dining room. Hobie's wheezing too hard to continue.
'Funny story,' Sonny says.
'Hysterical,' says Seth. 'Funnier if it was true.'
She looks at him soberly, briefly reflecting on the depths between the two men. Neither of them, Seth nor she, seems disposed to move.
'Look,' he says again, ‘I don't want to fight about whether you're right or wrong. Because in some ways you are, I'm sure you are. And I have to think about that a lot. But there's also a self-fulfilling element to what you're saying. You're using what you think you see in me as an excuse to avoid dealing with yourself. It's fair to worry about whether my commitment's transitory. I dig it. But I'm not sure I'm getting even that much. Really, Sonny.
Listen to you. All this worry about what Seth's gonna do. But not once have you actually asked me to come back here next week, or made me any promises about how it'll be if I do. I've spent months trying to find the magic word that'll let you feel secure enough to come across. I've made a hell of an effort here. You've had all of me. Do you really think you can say the same thing?'
'Seth, I'm who I am. You know that. I'm not going to write you love letters.'
'And I accept that. However reluctantly. I know that. But I'm entitled to more. It's just that simple. Right now, if I call you up from Seattle, if I say, "I'm staying here" or "I'm not coming back," I'm afraid I know just how you'll feel.'
'God, Seth, how would you want me to feel?'
'What would I want? I'd want you to feel devastated. I'd want you to feel torn away from something vital.' From the dining room there's the sound of movement, chairs creaking. They're clearing the cartons, their voices are coming this way. She waits in the full force of Seth's gaze, his light eyes intent between those funny, frail brows. She feels somewhat overpowered because of what she's invited. She will have to bear the invasion of that vast terrain where Zora's daughter, the determinedly normal child of an unconventional and impulsive woman, has dwelled in shuttered privacy throughout her life, in dread of being known not merely to others but to herself. 'And what I'm most afraid of, Sonny, is that secretly, in a large part of yourself, you'll be happiest to avoid all of this and to be left alone.' He points to her from the doorway. 'I'm afraid you'll be relieved,' he says. Seth
Mrs Beuttler, Seth's father's secretary for the last twenty years, a dry woman who held a distant and somewhat charitable view of Mr Weissman, returns after dinner so that her husband, Ike, can pay his respects. A few neighbors also appear. For the most part, they are older folks who coexisted with his father in the perfunctory amity of a familiar wave and remark about the brute nature of recent ice storms or the insanity of the country's creation of no-parking zones in the middle of the block. A younger couple, the Cotilles from two houses down, arrive, and the missus, a well-intended straitlaced blonde, insists that Bernhard was the sweetest old thing.
By nine o'clock, the ceremonial aspect of mourning is over. Sonny has gone to put Nikki to sleep. Hobie loads as many of the folding chairs borrowed from the Turtles as fit into his parents' car and drives down the street to pass the remainder of the night with Gurney and Loretto. Lucy and Sarah and Seth undo the work of the night before, push the elderly divan back into the center of the living room, dry and stack the dishes, study odd objects that are suddenly outlined with the striking clarity death provides. In the living room, beneath the glass of a corner table, his mother laid out a mosaic of photographs over the years, single instants in the march through time, the early Kodachromes bleeding green into the other hues. Seth is the principal subject: gleeful, at the beach, with sailor cap and shovel; a solemn cowpoke at his seventh birthday party, incapable of much levity, because the guns and chaps he received were in line with his father's wants, second-rate, plastic, possessing none of the substance leather and metal would have lent Seth's fantasies. The years go forward: here he is in mortarboard at Easton. Then Lucy begins appearing. Sarah in infancy frolics in a tub. Lucy, Seth, Lucy, Sarah, age seven, and both his parents, all outfitted with walking sticks and rucksacks, stare at the camera in the Olympic rain forest. There are also a couple of snaps of Isaac which his father added, maintaining Dena's shrine: the infant swaddled and then, Seth's lost boy, at three in his He-Man outfit.
The plan is for Sarah to drop Lucy at Kindle International on the way down 843 to Easton. At the curbside, beneath the weird purplish tones and penumbral shadows which the mercury vapor lights cast through the bare trees, Seth heaves her small case into the back of Sarah's Saturn. Leaving, Lucy allows herself a full embrace. She rises to her toes and throws her slender, solid arms around him. Squeezing her small form to him, she quickly kisses his lips, then her cheek appears beside his and in the smallest voice possible, with their daughter some unaccountable distance from them in the dark, Lucy whispers, as he has known for hours she would, 'Come home.' She breaks from him before he can answer. The pale side of her palm, lifted to the window, catches some of the light as the car zips into the dark.
He stands at the curbside watching this departure, locks the door to his father's house, and loads the last of the folding chairs borrowed from Hobie's parents into the Camry. At the Turtles' bungalow, a close replica of his father's, Hobie's mom, Loretta, fumbles through the many bolts, then throws her arms open and comforts Seth in her familiar abundance for what seems the tenth time today. 'Oh, how you doin now, baby?' she asks. Waddling with the folding chairs, he clatters down the stairs to the basement, where Hobie has established himself for the night.
Throughout the trial, Hobie was in tenancy here, in the knotty-pined domain which was the kingdom of their youth. Here, at the age of fourteen, Hobie opened what he called his 'office.' They hung Playboy Playmates on the wall, set up his hi-fi, with the tweed speaker covers, and his aquarium with the grow light and the bubbler, which imparted a chill, dank smell to the basement air. With other friends, Seth would take the bus to downtown DuSable, see a movie, run up and down the streets, dodge into alleys in flocks when they saw a cop even a block away, as if they had done anything that merited fleeing. Hobie would seldom come along. He never said why, although Seth knew. There was always somebody who stared, snarled a little, pushed him, wouldn't respond. Once a trip. Just for a moment. But it was enough to keep Hobie at home in U. Park. Here in this basement he was the exalted ruler. Seth can still clearly recollect the cold kiss of the floor, can see without looking the precise pattern in which the variegated asbestos tiles have been cut to fit the hummock of cement at the foot of the central I-beam. He would listen to Hobie go on, an exotic, spectacular young man, with a mind full of thoughts like shooting stars, a personality of unlimited art and promise, before the world brought him to heel.
During the trial, Hobie, a restless sleeper, preferred to bed down here rather than pad through the house all night and wake his parents. He slept on the davenport, with its tartan bolsters, which has been here since their childhood. He would arrive late, n p.m. or even midnight, and Seth often met him for a beer, or, as Hobie preferred, a joint. Hobie never discussed the case. He'd spent his evenings at Nile's apartment, supposedly preparing for the next day of trial, although from idle references it sounded like Hobie passed most of the time on the phone, trying to keep up with the rest of his law practice in DC. Descending now, Seth spies four banker's boxes full of the records of the case – the reports, exhibits – on two pallets near the furnace. They're stored here, rather than DC, in the event of Nile's apprehension, even though Hobie calls the prospect of a retrial remote.
In greeting, Hobie sticks his head out of his paneled enclave and makes a low noise. He has on an old button-down shirt, open over an olive-green ‘I, both garments splattered with bright gobs of acrylics. He is holding a brush. For years, he's painted as a pastime. He is at work on a small canvas set on a large easel, a Pollockesque piece he started during the trial and apparently did not complete. On the same spattered box where smeared tubes of pigment rest, a tiny TV glows. Seth admires the artwork, but Hobie remains dissatisfied.
'Sometimes I think, man, if I'd only started earlier. But you can buy a lot of jive, talkin like that.' He tosses his head sadly and briefly considers the TV.
'Professional wrestling?'
'Greatest Show on Earth.'
'Hobe, they're still using the same script they were when we'd put Buddy Rogers's Figure Four grapevine on each other thirty-five years ago.'
'Eternal as the rock,' answers Hobie. 'This here is opera for the working class. Big-time ballad of good and evil.' He has an open jar of dry-roasted nuts nearby and pops a whole handful in his mouth. In this low-rise room, the acoustical ceiling is close to the spongy mass of his hair. Seth sniffs twice, noticeably, at the basement air, in which the predominating odor of the paint doesn't fully mask other scents.
'Hell yeah, I'm stoned,' says Hobie. 'That a problem?' It is actually. The volume of intoxicants in this man's body still remains stupendous. Hobie takes note of his equivocal look. 'Hey, man,' Hobie says, 'substance abuse has got a bright future – it's a growth industry. People will take chemicals to improve their mood just as long as human unhappiness persists. That's word. May as well face facts. Fuck, we all grew up junkies anyway. You ever watch a kid in front of a TV set?'
'Often, unfortunately.'
'Tell me it don't look like someone tripping.' Seth laughs, but Hobie insists. 'Am I right? I know I am. Sure,' he agrees with himself. 'This here's gonna be the liberty of the twenty-first century,' he says. 'Gotta let folks journey to their inner self, come to grips with the primordial mind, the pre-rational head that exists and is supreme over the world of rationalist signs and symbols. That's where folks reside. And that's the world that's beyond true governance. People gotta realize that. Let freedom ring, baby.'
'Listen to this,' says Seth, laughing at the gusto with which Hobie goes on. He grabs both Hobie's hands. 'Hobie T. Turtle,' he says, 'you are still a trip.'
In answer, Hobie gives a brimming look, wise and regretful, half a life in it. He tips his head a bit.
'I ain't just talkin shit, you know.'
'You never have,' says Seth.
Satisfied by that, Hobie grunts again and turns away. 'So I hope you didn't come round here to ask me somethin dumb, like can a man love two women.' 'Can he?'
'Folks keep tellin me no. I'm paying a piss-pot full of alimony for tryin.' Hobie's adult years have been a mixed bag at best. The law is its own universe and he reigns in every courtroom, but given the wreckage in his personal life, Seth never hears him claim to be a success. Seth loved Hobie's second wife, Khaleeda; she was a follower of W. D. Muhammad, a serious, complex person who, unlike most of Hobie's women, had some sense of the immensity of his spirit. But he philandered his way out of that marriage. It's been hard for him since and will probably remain that way.
'Does it violate a biological law,' Seth asks, 'or is it just psychologically impossible, like grasping your own death?'
'Good, man,' says Hobie, 'good. Let's hear all your crazy shit. That's what you come to do, right? Tell me how tormented you are?'
'I'm too blown out to be tormented. I'll be tormented tomorrow. I wanted to drop off the chairs and thank you for your eulogy. It was great.'
Hobie acknowledges him with another low rumble, a sound of mild pleasure, and dries a brush on the bottom of his shirt. This is hardly a novelty, telling him he made a deep impression in his public portrayal of himself.
'Yeah, I was on today. Think maybe I oughta become Jewish? I's a sorry-ass Catholic, and a worse Muslim. Maybe third time be the charm.' Hobie's fascination with religion remains obscure to Seth. He explained it once in terms borrowed from the Grand Inquisitor. If everything is permitted, he said, then belief is permitted, too. So why not do it, since in existential terms, it requires the same effort? The logic was lost on Seth. But he smiles at the thought of Hobie undergoing another conversion.
'Now that would really get Jackson Aires going,' says Seth. 'Did you hear him ripping on me about my name?'
'Jackson, man, I've heard his shit all my life. Sometimes it's how the impoverished young black man ain't got nothin but his anger and his self to blame for that, since every crime, every stickup and robbery, makes life harder for other black folks. Then next sentence he's gone tell you how the black male's been in deep trouble in America since the first slave on the dock got told to drop his shorts, seein’ as how no white man was gonna set loose a fella with a dong that size. Jackson, man, he's goofy, he's just as confused as everybody else.' Hobie picks up a rag and lifts his chin to remove a dab of green paint that has landed on his beard. 'Don't pay no mind to Jackson. He's gonna rip-all on everyone. He was rippin the living hell out of me during that trial bout how I was treating that sack-of-shit gangbanging client of his, and he knew better than me the fool was up there tellin tales.'
'What kind of tales?' asks Seth quietly.
'Don't start.' Hobie points the paint-smeared rag. 'Now don't you start.' They have never talked about the trial, even after it was over. Hobie shut down every conversation once Seth told Hobie about Sonny and him.
'But it was a lie, right? Through and through? Nile didn't want to do anybody?'
'You were there. You heard the evidence.'
'There was a lot of bullshit in that courtroom, Hobie.'
'Yeah, but you're considering the source.' Hobie's eyes twinkle at the thought of his own devilment.
'The whole thing with the money Nile gave Hardcore? That was all fairy tales.'
'Music to my ears.'
'One day it was dope money. Then it was campaign money.' 'Okay.'
'Well, which was it?'
'Hey.' Hobie briefly turns. 'I'm the question man. Him, Moldo, whatever his name was, the prosecutor, he's the answer person. I'm the this-don't-make-sense guy.'
'But look. Like the bank books? You were going to put in all
Nile's financial stuff to show Nile couldn't have given Core $10,000 of his own, right?' 'Pretty slick, huh?'
'But Nile paid your fee. You told me that. So where'd that money come from?'
Hobie stops now. He looks around for a sheet of newspaper and lays it on a beaten wooden chair, where he takes a seat.
'And here's the real thing,' says Seth. 'Nile told me straight up – he never handed Hardcore any goddamn $10,000. Campaign or no campaign. He said it was a stone lie. Remember? I told you that the day in the jail.' Hobie has watched him, holding his whiskered chin.
'Listen,' he says, 'listen, I'm gonna tell you something. 'He said. The defendant said. Shit. Listen, when I got hired as a PD in DC, 1972? I got into a prelim courtroom right away, cause they wanted brothers moving up fast as possible? And, man, I didn't know what the fuck I was doin. First preliminary I had, I remember, I'm representing a guy named Shorty Rojas. You know, as it is, you get about two minutes in advance to confer with your client and this dude, no fuckin lie, he can't talk. He's some kind of calypso spade, but I couldn't suss out what blood this dude had in him. I mean, he starts in, it's like, What motherfuckin language is this? This idn't street, this idn't island, this ain't Puerto Rico, this is just like fuckin glossolalia or somethin. And the case is a knifing, okay? Shorty, he performed a splenectomy out on the avenue. And thank God, the victim made it, and he's up there on the witness stand, and the prosecutor gets the victim down, "Show the judge just what Shorty done to you." So here's this motherfucker, he's stabbin away with the actual knife, about two inches from the judge's nose, you'd think you're watching Zorro. And Shorty, who I've understood maybe two words he's ever said, pipes up, "That's a lie. All lie. No right. No right."
'And I hear this and I'm like, Holy smokes! Hold on, heart! I got myself an innocent client! I got so fuckin excited. I cross-examined like some ferocious motherfucker. And lost. Naturally. Never win a prelim if the victim says that's the guy. But I'm blue, I'm whale-shit low. So I go over to the jail that night, I walk up on the tiers to see my client. "Hey, man, Shorty, I'm sorry, we'll beat it at trial.'' He starts in again.' 'No right. No right. No right.'' And somehow, I'm walkin away and it dawns on me, he's still shaking one hand at me. And I go back, I say, "You mean, he's lying cause you didn't stab him with the right hand, it was the left?" Seen the fucker smile, you wouldn't believe it. "Left, left, left. No right." So don't tell me that the defendant said it was a lie, all right?'
'Well, what does all that mean?'
'It means what it means.' Hobie stands again to ponder his painting.
'Nile was lying to me? Nile really paid him? What?'
'See, this is why I didn't want you involved. This is why I was telling you, stay away from him. Cause you can't handle this. Man, I knew you, Jack, when you cried cause you found out Mary Martin was flying with strings. And you ain't changed. So leave it be. Scat.'
'Hobie. Something happened there. Someone was murdered. I've known this boy almost his entire life.'
'Look, I ain't gonna tell you what he said to me. I can't. Privilege holds unless he's dead. And he ain't dead.'
'You sure?'
'Pretty sure.' Hobie smacks the canvas with his brush. 'Why, you afraid Eddgar murdered him, too?' 'It's crossed my mind.'
A rankling snuffle shoots from Hobie's nose. 'You the only fucker on Planet Reebok who hates Eddgar worse than I do.' 'Maybe I've got more reason.' 'You know your problem with him?'
'I have a feeling you're about to tell me. Sock it to me, bro.' 'You envy him.' 'Say what!'
'Yep, I think that's what it is. See, man, I hate him for the shit he did. But you hate him for that and what he is now. You look back to all that stuff you were going through twenty-five years ago and you say, "Wow, that was exciting, that's when I was political, idealistic, committed. But I quit that nonsense." And you blame him because you think he's basically the one what forced you to give it up. Yet here he is, that dog, talkin all that shit you'd still love to believe, doin it too, and you find that infuriating.'
'No,' says Seth. 'I mean, yeah, I see it. And I know I still believe it. I mean, not all of it. I can't. It was a children's crusade and some of it was childish. But I recycle my bottles. I vote for the good guys. But it's the wild hopefulness I really miss. All that time, it didn't seem there was any difference between love and justice. You could have them both, without conflict. We were going to revise life, down to the essence. We were going to abolish unhappiness. It was glorious.'
'Right,' says Hobie. 'We asked the essential questions: How many roads must a man walk down, before you call him a cab?'
'Thank you for your support.'
'Shit,' says Hobie. Momentarily, neither speaks.
'How about just a yes or no on one thing, Hobe? Did Eddgar get Hardcore to off June?'
Hobie's sole response is to draw his mouth down into an irked little pouch.
'Goddamn,' says Seth. 'You just want to be Captain Marvel.'
'Oh, fuck you, motherfucker. All you're doin is lookin after yourself. This is the single thing in this life I am any good at, leastwise that means something to anybody else. And I'll be goddamned if I will treat it with disrespect, just cause you got the blues or some Holy Grail about some boy you looked after when he used to wet his pants. It's in the books, man: I can't tell.'
They are within a few feet of one another in poses that would look combative to an outsider, staring each other down. Seth turns away first, wandering from Hobie's room, and takes a seat on the basement stairs, picking at the metal runner. The cellar is a collection of musty smells. Glancing menacingly over his shoulder, Hobie emerges but stalks off in the opposite direction. In the darkness, beside the glimmering sheet-metal venting of the furnace, Hobie rummages in the banker's boxes where the trial records are stored. Swearing in all the romance languages, he throws the top two aside to reach the herniated carton below. When he returns to Seth, he is holding a sheet of paper.
'Not so fast,' he says, turning the paper to his chest. 'Not so fast.' He sits on the step below Seth, his bulk occupying the entire space of the stairwell. 'Now look, you're such a journalistic hotshot,' Hobie says, 'maybe you can figure this much out. See this prosecutor, what's he called? Moldo?'
'Molto.'
'I got onto him right from the start. You gonna be a PA for life, man, you gotta be an angry fella, you gotta be lookin to see the right people kick the shit out of the wrong people, you gotta get off on that, day in and day out. So I'm hip, and I start runnin some changes on him, and pretty soon he's so sore at me, he ain't even thinkin bout Nile, cause he figures I'm the evilest, most deceptive bastard ever walked into a courtroom. Which is just fine with me. All right?'
'Are you going to say anything plainly?'
'Lookee here,' he says, 'just listen up. Now here I am at the end of this trial, and I pull the rabbit out of the hat. State says my client brought $10,000 to this gangbanger to get him to commit murder, and lo and behold, I go and show Nile give him $10,000 cash okay, but it was from the DFU. You remember that part?'
'Are you looking for applause?'
'You be fresh, I can just go back to paintin’ on my picture.'
'Fine, I apologize. So what's the point?'
'Now, if I know from day one, from before that trial starts, that skunk Hardcore is lying through his gangbanging booty about what that $10,000 is and where it came from – and I do, I surely do know those things for fact – then why wouldn't I go in and say, "Now now, Mr Prosecutor, you done made one hell of a mistake, here's the check, go see the folks at DFU"? Why wouldn't I do that? How does Moldo answer that question?'
'Because you're the evilest, most deceptive bastard that ever walked into a courtroom?'
'Right on. I just get my jollies pullin his chain. That's what he thinks.'
'And what's the truth?'
'You supposed to tell me.'
Seth thinks. 'It's a smoke screen, right? I would say you waited because you didn't want him to have time to look into this. Something about the money was wrong.'
'Doin good, bro. Now I'll tell you the truth, man: There's a lot about that money, a whole lot, that's wrong, and I can't tell you but a little tiny part of it'
'You didn't want Molto to ask Hardcore about it?'
'No. Hardcore, he had to tell the lies he told before. Jackson gave him a script – that whole thing was so Jackson, man – and Core stuck right to it. Wasn't worried about Hardcore. See, what I didn't want Moldo and them to do was go out to that bank and talk to the teller who cashed that check. Cause she might tell them what-all she told me.'
'Which was? Is that privileged too?'
'Not really.'
'So what'd she say?'
'She remembered Nile. She remembered him cause he acted like his usual dumbbell self. She handed him $10,000 in cash – 100 one-hundred-dollar bills, by the way, no fifties or twenties. And he stuck them in an overnight delivery envelope. And she says, "You shouldn't oughta do that, it says right on the form, like, Don't send cash," and he says, "Neh, we've done it before," and 'fore he leaves out, asks her is Fed-Ex around the comer.'
'So he didn't give money to Core? That's the point?' 'No.'
'He did give the money to Hardcore?'
'I'm saying that's not the point.' 'Well, who'd he send the money to?' 'That's the point.'
The paper which Hobie's been holding is a printout from microfiche, white on black and heavy with toner, reflecting the data about a Fed-Ex delivery last July. Nile is listed on one side of the form as the sender. On the other is the destination:
Michael Frane RR 24
Marston, Wisconsin 53715
When Seth looks back, Hobie is studying his reaction abstractly, waiting to see how long it takes to sink in. 'April Fools?' Seth asks. 'This here's no foolin.' 'It's him, right?'
'Be a funny coincidence if it wasn't.'
Seth stares at the paper again. His arms feel weak.
'How long were you going to wait to tell me this?'
'Probably forever. I'm probably doin somethin I shouldn't, as it is. Only you're breakin my heart with that hangdog shit, fuckin Oliver Twist or something, waitin for more. And this is a goddamn secret, Jack. The judge doesn't hear word one about this. I had enough lectures from her about withholding evidence to last a lifetime.' Hobie nods. 'You forgot to ask me when I got that from Fed-Ex.'
'When?'
'Night before Nile run off. One hell of a surprise, too. I'd asked them to dig it up weeks before. I opened the mail. It's like "Ee-yow!" '
'He hadn't told you?'
He shakes his head again, not a reply, but a sign he cannot respond.
'He couldn't have told you,' Seth says. 'You just said you were surprised.'
Hobie merely looks: a great stone face, which in fact it is, a face that would be worthy of some sculptor's efforts. 'What else did I miss?' Seth asks. 'Name of the town familiar?' Marston. 'Is that where June lived?' 'Bingo.'
'He's been living there with her?'
'Not with. Not so far as I can tell. But he'd been in those parts twenty-five years, same as her. Ran a little TV/radio/stereo kind of store since the eighties. Big chains, volume discounts finally put him out of business. Left him with some heavy debts.'
'Is that what the money was for?'
Hobie points. Bingo again.
'Apparently, bankruptcy wasn't an option. Some folks didn't like the notion of a credit check on Michael or anything like that. You know, he'd sort of kept the name, case he ever ran across somebody he used to know, but he changed the spelling so he didn't step on your toes. Remember, you had his social security number. So his must have been a phony. Which meant they didn't want anybody pokin round about his background. That's how I figure it. Seems he's kind of a sensitive guy, anyway, not too good with stress. Had some kind of breakdown years back. He was working around there as a farmhand originally and cut off half of one foot in a threshing machine. That's like 1971.1 think that's when June showed up. June and Nile. Kind of nursed him back to health.'
'Where the hell do you get all of this?' he asks Hobie. 'Not from Nile, right?'
'Nope, else I wouldn't be telling you. No, I spent quite a bit of time on the telephone, starting with lunch the last day of the trial. While you were beatin the streets? I talked to the banker, realtor, chamber of commerce. Everybody liked Michael. Sweet, peaceful fella. Kind of strange. The boy we knew. I guess he stayed pretty close to my client over the years. Kind of like you and my client? Anyway, that's who I was trying to rustle up – my client. I've always figured this is where he bolted. Wanted to warn Michael his cover was blown.' 'That's why he took off?'
'Partly, I'd guess. In part. I'd say, overall – strictly an estimate, not a confidence – Nile wasn't very pleased by the direction of the defense. He was ripshit with me already, by the time I showed him that piece of paper. But I think this here's a secret he'd always sworn to Mom he'd keep. I'm damn sure he didn't want me to go into all of this in court. Which, of course, I'd be obliged to do, if he would have let me. And then again, I think he might have worried I'd let word slip to you.'
'To me? What would I do?'
'Hey, dude, way I remember this one, Michael set you up big-time. Only logical to think you'd want to trash him, if you ever got a bead on where he was.'
'I never held him to blame. You know that. I'd actually like to see him.'
'Proust,' says Hobie.
'Right,' says Seth. His imagination, anchored in the past, already is crawling toward some usable image of Michael. Seth has been to towns like Marston. Several years ago, he did a few columns on a girl up in Podunk, Minnesota, who wanted to play the tuba in the all-boys marching band. He spent a week out there. Everybody has strange hair: girls with dos like woodpecker's combs, guys whose fathers ragged the hippies now with greasy locks dripping to their shoulders. All of them get drunk on Friday nights and tear down the county roads, picking off the rural-delivery post boxes with their bumpers. Their parents, farmers mostly, are utterly confused by the viral spread of urban life. Their kids take drugs and hang out at the malls down on the interstate, wear their seed caps backwards, and call each other 'motherfucker.' What the hell? the adults always seemed to be asking.
And here, where people once thought they were the real America, Michael Frain has remained. Seth envisions him on the main street peering discontentedly into the window of his store. An unlit neon sign, too small for the frontage it decorates, mentions a popular brand, Sony or G. E. Behind it, the shop is gloomily, grimly out of business. Some disused something, two cardboard boxes, and a few stray kinks of wire are piled meaninglessly on a ledge blanketed with acrid dust, which has gathered at places into hairy wisps. The fixtures and display shelves have been removed. The man himself remains angular, still slender, though his gut has taken on some slope. He wears a washed-out plaid shirt, with the tails hanging outside his twill trousers. He looks a bit wasted, gawky, with a knobby weight at the elbows and the knees. He still has some hair, ragged but not quite as wild, not quite as bright of course. And he would take considerable pain in stepping down into the street. To walk, Michael wheels his upper body to the left and stiffy hurls the opposite leg, an elaborate, painful-looking motion which he has thoughtlessly mastered. Down the way, the unpainted clapboard church and corrugated Farm Bureau building stand beside a new brick restaurant, prefab construction from the looks of it, insubstantial as a cereal box. As he moves along, Michael's eyes, still glossy and uncertain, would flash this way and avoid Seth, as they avoid all strangers, with no hint of recognition. That's him. Seth gathers himself around the picture.
'And did you find him?'
'Which one?'
'Either. Nile?'
'Nope. Course not.'
'How about Michael?'
'Nope. That's how come I ended up talking to everybody in town. Man's just gone. Nobody could find him that day. Or since.' 'They're together?'
'Doing their fugitive thing. My guess. Michael's had practice slipping his name, his past. I figure he's showing Nile how.'
In the silence of the basement, the voice of one of the wrestlers, at the same pitch as an engine exhaust, rumbles across the room from the TV. 'I'll crush the Mighty Welder's butt,' he declares to an interviewer.
'And you're not going to tell me the rest. How we get to this point?'
'Can't, man.'
'Who can?' Seth asks. 'Who will?'
Hobie lays his heavy hand on Seth's knee. He smells of paint, his eyes are bleary. He looks at Seth, as they look at each other, with what's been imbued over a lifetime.
'You'll figure,' he says.