by Dennis Must
It won’t feel ice-blue.
CHAPTER TWO
ORIGINS
Carrying the box of stories back to my apartment, I sat down before it that late afternoon, debating if I should begin reading, for I had become obsessed with taking my life like a doomed lover awakened to his fate. Tomorrow wouldn’t arrive for me. I’d made peace with that. Yet here before me lay the putative “history” of a brother I’d not known existed. And as dusk turned to darkness that Sunday evening, a faint illumination—similar to that in the bridge’s green jelly jars—escaped the box of stories’ skewed lid. It was death summoning me in reverse.
Perhaps Westley understood something about staying alive that had failed me. At some point after midnight, I opened the box, and as I read, Monday came and went. Upon completing a story, I’d sit for an extended period, reflecting on it.
On Tuesday, after falling into a deep sleep, I awakened to the arrival of Westley’s “Going Dark” manuscript in the mail. Relying on it as a template, since it struck me as his looking-back endeavor, I specifically sought out those early pieces it referenced. It felt as if I were reconstructing him, title by title, in an effort to will him alive.
“The Waffen-SS officers appeared on the screen, twenty feet taller than Papa, in jodhpurs, gleaming boots, and officers’ caps with black patent leather bills and silver skull emblems on their crowns. Several wore gold-rimmed glasses. Headlights from their ebony motor cars reflected off the spectacles’ lenses, shooting sparks of phosphorescence across the screen. At that very moment, the real me and the celluloid me coalesced.”
YOU LIKE SARDINES? (excerpt)
I returned home from school one fall day and found a note on the kitchen table.
Westley, the note said, ask him what ’Til Death Do Us Part means. Once I get settled somewhere I’ll call you. And take good care of your brother. Love, Mom.
You’re me now, she seemed to be saying. You and he work it out.
When Father came home that evening, I handed him the note, and it was the first time I saw him lose heart.
“What are we going to do?” I said.
“I don’t damn well know.”
“Who’s going to cook and look after Jeremiah?” I asked.
“Me and you, I guess.”
“Who’s going to wash our clothes?”
“Same,” he said.
“Is she ever gonna come back?”
He shrugged, sat down at the kitchen table, lit a cigarette, and stared out the kitchen door over the backyard. It was muddy out there and bleak. The house felt cold and dark. After a while he said, “Whaddya want to eat?”
“I don’t know. How ’bout you?”
“You like sardines?”
“Fish?” I said.
“Little ones in mustard. They make good sandwiches.”
“I ain’t ever tried them,” I said.
“Well, let’s pretend you and me just went fishing and we pulled these out of Pymatuning Lake. And you can make the Kool-Aid.”
So I pulled out a loaf of Wonder Bread and he slathered one piece of bread with yellow stadium mustard and opened the tin of sardines. Laid four headless ones out on mustard bread, then covered them over with a clean white slice. And he cut them in two with a butter knife. Oil and mustard began to bleed through the white bread and out onto the gray speckled Formica. I poured large glasses of cherry Kool-Aid, and we sat across from each other, eating quietly. Kind of like friends. And he smoked. Jeremiah took a peanut butter and jelly outside.
We did this for five nights straight. It was on a Monday that Mother left us. Friday night, he didn’t go out. Read the Hebron Chronicle in the living room after dinner, then went to bed early. On Saturday after work, he came home and said maybe we should change our menu.
I agreed. Though I had grown to like the sardines, especially when, on the third night, he cut up some onions on them.
“Well,” I said, “what can we eat now?”
“Eggs,” he said. “Saturday night is a good egg supper night. Go down to the corner and buy a dozen. And get another loaf of bread. We got plenty of margarine she left us, and buy some more Kool-Aid. Any color you want.”
When I returned home with the groceries, Father had made up the table real nice. He had dressed it with Mother’s hand-embroidered tablecloth, the one she used for Sunday meals. He even had napkins under the silverware and placed a knife inside the spoon on the right side and a fork on the left-hand side of his, Jeremiah’s, and my plates like Mother always did.
“We like them scrambled,” he said. I thought that was OK, and he began breaking the eggs into a black iron skillet, two at a time, until he had the whole dozen bubbling almost to its rim. He poured in a lot of pepper and salt. And asked me to hand him the ketchup.
“What’s that for?” I asked.
“Hell,” he answered. “We put it on ’em after; why can’t we do it while they’re cookin’? Gives ’em color too,” he boasted.
That’s when Jeremiah noticed he was wearing Mother’s apron. And when the eggs were ready, he proudly spooned them onto our plates as if he’d done something real special. He held it out for me as I took a forkful, seeing if they were done to perfection. But the toast had begun to burn, and he dropped the plate of eggs before me and rushed over to the toaster.
Soon we were sitting across from each other again, and it was real pleasant, eating eggs with red veins in them. Then we doused them with even more ketchup and watched the margarine melt into the toast. We drank grape Kool-Aid and were real quiet and enjoying our meal . . . when halfway through, he looked up and said:
“You heard from your mother, Westley?”
I said I hadn’t.
“Oh,” he said.
Jeremiah had cried the first couple nights. “You seen her, Pap?” he asked.
Father didn’t raise his head, but shook it. The moths were beating against our screen door. I told him I’d wash the dishes that night and clean up the kitchen. He seemed appreciative and went in and read the paper. We retired early. And that’s the way it went for nearly three months. Sardine sandwiches through the week. Eggs and toast on Saturday evening. Sunday evenings he took Jeremiah and me to Coney Island Lunch, where we each had buttermilk and two chili dogs with everything on, and then went to a movie at the old Paramount Theater. There was always a double feature there, and since it was wartime, most of the movies were about Nazis.
I was glad I was seeing those flicks with him and not Mother. He was our father, and I wasn’t afraid the Nazis were going to come and take him away—whereas they might’ve stabbed Mother with her scissors.
Father came home from work promptly each night, and there were never any mysterious phone calls from women. It was almost as if we were camping out. I’d watched and helped Mother launder clothes, so Mondays became wash days. I hung them in the cellar on clotheslines: his and our shorts, socks, handkerchiefs, bedclothes. He took his white shirts to the Chinaman. On Tuesday evenings I’d iron what I’d washed the day before. (Jeremiah hung around the schoolhouse or played in our neighbors’ yards until dark.) Sunday morning—none of us went to church—we shared dusting and vacuuming the house.
“Just in case she ever comes back,” he said. “Neither of us can be ashamed.”
“There was this character in my head who owned a basso profundo voice—it could have been Josef Mueller—lecturing me how utterly stupid life was and insisting that to save me hurt and heartache I must ‘leap off a trestle bridge,’ of which there were several in our town.”
RUN HOME, JIMMY MUELLER (novel excerpt)
We were studying Macbeth in English class when a voice, appearing out of nowhere, asked: James, why don’t you commit suicide on your way home from school tonight?
Elton Briggs, the teacher, wondered what I thought was so funny. I apologized. “Nothing the rest of the class would understand.” But the internal dialogue didn’t cease. In fact, this new and strange visitor appeared to have entered my head to pepper me
with questions until I conceded I hadn’t one satisfactory response to its gloating query: Why shouldn’t you kill yourself?
The Washington Street Bridge. After school. It’s the ideal place from which to leap. Or are you afraid, James? What do you have to live for? Name five reasons that hold you back. One by one I’ll refute them all—fucker.
I now walked two people to school and back each day.
Waiting. Waiting. Are you up for the night? The voice never slept. If I was in the company of others, it’d step into the background but adamantly reassert itself the first lull in our conversation. Athletics the same. If I was out in right field shagging balls, This is no fun, it’d sigh, and you know it. You’re only pretending it’s fun to keep me at bay. It’s empty bravado, James. Pretend all you want. Laugh and bullshit with your empty friends. Ratchet up the noise. Nothing will work, I assure you. I have all the time in the world—prick.
Surely one morning I’d awake clear-headed. The voice was preposterous, like one of the crazies who paraded the streets talking angrily to himself.
Why don’t you do it now, James? It’s the perfect day. One watertight reason why you shouldn’t take the challenge, James?
“I enjoy school,” I replied. “I want to drive my own car. The powder blue suit in Levine’s Haberdashery window will look terrific on me at the senior prom. Rudy Roman and I plan to dazzle our friends in gymnastics assembly next month when we mount a hand-to-hand stand from the reclining position.”
The voice replied that not one of these “reasons” was sufficient justification for staying alive. And you know it . . . So I stopped going home in the evening by way of the bridge. I walked a mile out of my way by crossing the Jackson Street viaduct instead. It hung closer to the Neshannock. If I went over the side, perhaps I could swim to shore. But in the morning, so as not to be late for school, I took the Washington Street Bridge. Racing across it at considerable speed, I’d warble a love song at the top of my lungs while the voice droned:
Just a matter of time, James. Just a matter of time.
And Jeremiah hadn’t a clue.
The reference to Jeremiah at first both puzzled and embittered me. Had Mother given birth to yet another child? But, anguished by that possibility, I chose to believe that Westley, being their only child, had simply invented Jeremiah’s existence. I, too, had an imaginary brother who became an integral part of my early years, especially at night as we awaited sleep, transfixed by a passing car’s headlights racing across our walls.
PART TWO
CHAPTER THREE
THE QUEST
It was apparent that Papa knew more about Westley than he was telling me. He’d chosen to let the stories speak for themselves, suggesting that he believed they were more revealing than my brother ever had been when they lived under the same roof.
Apparently we had two paternal uncles: Stephen, a monsignor in the Roman Catholic Church, and Felix, who had spent the bulk of his life in traveling carnivals and circuses, performing a variety of roles, including a Joey, a trapeze artist, and a faux hermaphrodite in the Ten-in-One, or freak show. The brothers reappear in the stories in various guises.
I, however, had grown up believing I had one surrogate relative, “Aunt Ruth,” my mother’s closest friend, and that my grandparents had succumbed prior to my birth.
Westley was manifestly preoccupied with the contrasting careers of our uncles. He depicted our devoutly religious grandmother as attending mass daily to pray for them, whereas our grandfather, who earned his living as an ironworker, erecting trestle bridges over the many streams and rivers that flowed through and around Hebron, preferred the saloon over a kneeling bench. The pair resided in a single-room tenancy on the south side of town alongside the railroad tracks and the tin mill.
Early on in their marriage, our parents had moved to a better neighborhood of Hebron, set on raising a family not haunted by the ill-conceived hopes, poverty, and mayhem that for generations had characterized their kinfolk’s lives. Papa, who had once served as an altar boy during high mass, even joined the new neighborhood’s Protestant church with Mother and for several years taught a men’s Sunday School class prior to abandoning religion altogether.
But sometime around my brother’s tenth year, the scourge of fatalism from which they had tried to escape began to reassert itself.
It’s this and successive years that Westley writes about as if to release himself from their memory.
I continued to spend each day reading, followed by a very unsettled sleep, roiled by much of what I’d learned, especially how utterly superficial my own life had been.
By that, I mean I envied my brother’s passion, his deep hurt, and the conflict he encountered—willing to stay alive and not succumb to our mother’s death wish. Yet by the time I came around, that wish had been heavily veiled, as if it had all been transcribed in anguished passages and then secreted deep inside her heart. I only knew her as God-fearing, consumed by the expectation that I would not fail her as Westley had, and would accept the Man of Sorrows as my savior.
I freely obliged. All of my life’s choices were predicated on that commitment. I never questioned the countless scriptural teachings she shared with me nor what I learned in church, since that would have been heresy. Each night before turning in, I recited the Lord’s Prayer and slept soundly. My future had been spelled out for me, and I rested in inviolable confidence that I’d be justly rewarded in the afterlife.
Even Papa, the nonbeliever, looked upon me with a soupçon of pride. I suspected my parents at some ineffable level hoped that they had finally broken from their past. Yes, my brother was “dead,” to their way of thinking, but I had obliged my mother’s deepest longing to atone for all of her and my father’s mortal shortcomings. I was preparing to devote my life ministering to others in His name.
Except I envied Westley’s stories.
What were mine but paeans to the Father of Abraham for sacrificing his only begotten Son God in my behalf, acknowledging I had or would commit an egregious wrong? Why had I penned such anodynes, basking in the compliments of my elders?
But Westley early on knew who he was . . . or perhaps it’s more correct to say he knew what he wasn’t. And each night after reading, his presence virtually hovered above those onionskin manuscript pages.
If only he would utter my name, I believed, then I would have a reason even at this late age to be somebody. To exist. Yes, I was alive to others, but only as an imposter, an actor.
Exactly what Christopher Daugherty had written in “Going Dark.”
There were one hundred and twelve story manuscripts and two unfinished novels under Westley’s pen name in that box. I estimated that just shy of a hundred had been published over a period of fifteen years. And after several days of virtually nonstop reading of the complete oeuvre, I began again, this time taking notes in an effort to provide clues as to his possible whereabouts.
I refused to consider the possibility that he was dead.
In one piece he’d quoted Anaïs Nin: “We write to taste life twice.” Westley, I trusted, wrote also to disgorge it by some fanciful alchemy in an effort to release its grip on him. Yet in story after story the reader quickly observes that the effort is futile, and the familiar narrative reappears again and again in various disguises.
All told, there were a dozen or more stories that comprised the core of his work.
So I sought to explore where I might pick up his trail. I was now guardedly optimistic because his work evidenced an indomitable will to survive. Why else would he have kept turning over the stones of his life? The “Going Dark” tale manifests a protean self, an identity that found no ballast in multiple personas, yet perseveres as if their composite may amount to one.
In an early tale of his, Westley gave me ample reason to set out to find him. I record its initial paragraphs.
MASQUERADING AS A REVOLUTIONARY
(excerpt)
Leonard’s father, brother Felix, and he vowed early on
to get out of town. His mother and sisters had no such ambition. “Perfectly fine for us under the willow tree in our backyard.”
“We want Gotham instead,” the men said.
Mr. Hart never made it. Following a deathbed request, Leonard took the bus to Geneva-on-the-Lake, Ohio, where the family spent one week each summer. He walked to the water’s edge, said a brief prayer, and shook his father free of the black funerary urn.
It was empty.
Mrs. Hart and Leonard’s sisters had salted him under the willow tree.
Even more determined to escape Hebron—”You’ll perish here,” Mr. Hart prophesied—Felix borrowed his father’s sedan one Sunday afternoon. Its carburetor burst into flames on a country road, as did Felix, who trotted across a wheat field, dripping fire. “That’s one way of getting out,” Leonard mused.
They sprinkled young Felix under the willow tree, too.
One summer night before his senior year in high school, Leonard waited until his sisters and mother were sound asleep before waltzing out of the house. His Schwinn bicycle was stationed against the willow tree. Carrying only a change of clothes in a pillow case, he knelt.
“Pap, Felix—I’ll come home for you someday. Keep the faith.” He embraced the tree.
Anguished over his departure, Mrs. Hart traveled to nearby towns on weekends and spoke to merchants in an effort to track down her son. A neighbor, two years after the incident, swore she’d seen him standing on his head atop a golden palomino in a Mills Brothers circus over in Meadville. That same week, another said her daughter had seen him playing drums in a cocktail lounge at Conneaut Lake Park.
Leonard, over time, was spotted singing with Stan Kenton’s band in Cleveland’s Starlight Ballroom; as an extra in From Here to Eternity; on a Pennzoil racing team at the Indianapolis 500. Then, one Christmas Eve, the local butcher told Mrs. Hart her son was a missionary in Havana, Cuba.
