by Dennis Must
These covered the table and spilled over onto those still sitting, in a virtual trance, witnessing our efforts to revive Whadizit?.
When his body appeared normal again, I stepped away from the table. The scene had been depleted of any comic cast.
I waited in earnest for my partner’s next move.
Slowly, he began to stir one leg, then an arm; he lifted his head and glanced around. Shortly he evinced a crabbed smile and sat up.
“I tried so hard to love God,” he uttered.
As if he were testifying for each of us.
Whadizit? climbed down off the groaning table.
He beckoned me closer and whispered in my ear. I resisted, as if offended by what he said. But he insisted.
I stepped away from him and began to look directly at each of the residents. Instinctively, each looked to the ceiling or to the floor, except the “painting.”
“He wonders if each of us is carrying about the corpse of God within him,” I said.
“Who would be the first to utter it?” Whadzit? challenged.
Their faces mirrored the blank expressions of Father Rostislav’s wooden torsos.
He removed the conical pate that he’d carefully fabricated, slid his hood back on, and replaced the taxidermied white rabbit. Brother Alexander summarily abandoned the dining room. Moments later, each of us filed out to the clatter of dishes being cleared and hushed conversation in the kitchen.
FRIDAY AFTER-DINNER VIGNETTES CANCELLED.
The notice was posted the following morning in the dining room.
House overseers called us in and admonished us for a “blasphemy beyond reproach,” was how they phrased it. When asked what our defense was, Brother Alexander said there was no malicious intent on our part, but when the residents began to become so animated and robustly alive in a manner he had never witnessed . . . “well, I just lost it.”
“Lost what?”
“Asking the question that must never be uttered.”
“And having done that?” they persisted.
“I feel as if I’ve crawled out of a grave.”
The overseers looked at each other, nonplussed, speechless. Brother Alexander stood. “I’m sorry,” he said, and together we left the room. Neither of us spoke to each other for several days. It was evident that we had caused considerable torment in the interior lives of the remaining residents. To a person, each appeared to have visibly compounded the guilt already encumbering them. At meals they chose to close ranks, forcing Alex and me to eat at one end of the table by ourselves.
We were pariahs.
Yet the effect of that Friday night’s performance on me was also one of modest liberation. I hadn’t dared to address the unutterable that my friend had. But it was as if he rose out of my manuscript and did what I could never have done in an environment like ours. True I had harbored such thoughts . . . but Brother Alexander spoke them.
And everyone except he and I figuratively gasped.
Upon returning to my room that evening of the performance, I felt closer to him than I ever had. And as I lay in bed, pondering what we had done, it felt as if he were alongside me, laughing at the delinquent liberties we had taken . . . like two siblings.
At some point that night, I was awakened by his signal on the door. When I opened it, he stood before me in street clothes, the white taxidermied rabbit dangling from his right hand, the choir cowl from his left.
“Can I come in?”
Years earlier, I’d heard that very same question.
“Get dressed, Ethan.”
“But it’s the middle of the night.”
“I know.”
“Where are we going?”
“Home.”
I began laughing . . . then he joined in.
“Except there isn’t any,” I countered.
“I know.”
“So?”
“Someone there will recognize us.”
I began to get dressed.
“Like who you once were, Ethan. Not who we are here.” He reached into my closet, tossing out my street clothes like his. “We have to leave before the others rise.”
Once we were outside and began walking toward the town, he looked back and stopped.
“They meant well,” he said.
Then, with a wide grin, he turned to me. “What took you so long, brother?”
PART TWO
He looked surprised, discomfited, to see us sitting there.
We were seated at the very same picnic table where he’d given me the box of Westley’s writings. Having implied the meeting would be between him and me, I was visibly anxious as to what might occur. Would the true nature of Brother Alexander and my relationship be unveiled when he appeared?
Was Westley the impostor I feared he might be?
The two eyed each other intently.
But momentarily, Papa relaxed and sat down across from us, studying my face for a while before uttering:
“Your mother would have given her life for this moment, Ethan.”
He clasped my hands. “You found him. You brought Westley home.” Visibly moved, he turned to Brother Alexander.
“I treasured your stories, son, but they were no substitute for your longed-for presence. Before your mother passed on, she asked for forgiveness for having alienated you. When she lost you, she also lost Ethan . . . and because of that, departed in a troubled state.”
He parsed his words as if by uttering them he was resurrecting their wounded presence. I was struck by how my own self-absorption had denied each of us what I had in fact been seeking. I also knew that any hope of reconciliation between us was fated.
Yet his departure would not mirror hers.
“That Sunday I sat across from you, Ethan, on this very spot, encouraging you to find Westley and seek his return, yet deep inside I worried it would all end badly. That you would carry out your dark attraction to the bridge.
“Except here you both are, and no longer strangers.”
I wanted to speak but sensed in the tenor of his words, how he paced them, that they were chosen carefully so as to not reveal what they were disguising.
It was in that moment that a buried fragment of the stories surfaced in my consciousness:
When he pulled me out of the swells in his seersucker suit and stocking feet, he promised me I wouldn’t die. And when he laid me on the sand and pumped my bony chest, urging I give the green water back to the Great Lake, he cried, “You won’t die. I swear in God’s name. Everything’s gonna be OK. Now pass it up, boy. Spit it all back up.”
After the panic subsided and I’d begun taking deeper, more peaceful breaths—looking back at the high waves, they almost laughing, Next time, kid. You were nearly ours—I turned to my father and saw that he, too, had begun to assume a come-unto-me smile, the very reason I’d entered the water unafraid. Two-tone shoes kicked off several feet away, jacket and trousers clinging to him like wet newsprint, his belt buckle glinting the morning sun—I wondered where he’d come from, for I’d gone to the shore alone that morning.
With a pleasant rain imbuing the sand with a muddy brown and the lake’s waves breaking louder, to grow fully awake, I’d decided to walk into the surf when its grainy floor suddenly collapsed and an undertow pulled me out toward the horizon.
Nobody was around. I screamed back to our cottage, the one that sat at the edge of the precipitous drop-off.
Where had my father been?
And why was he dressed so handsomely for the occasion?
Years later, when I became a man, I recalled that incident and confessed it had caused me to bond to him like a child to a mother. With me in his arms, he’d climbed seventy-two wooden steps up the eroded shore to our rented cottage.
“Miraculously you appeared out of nowhere, Dad, in your blue seersucker suit, your hair slicked back, and that iris tie with a splinter of yolk tearing down its front—Christ, I thought you were the cat’s ass.”
“I was, boy, until you interfere
d.” His dismay masked a pale grin.
“Interfered?”
“On your way to the stony deep.”
“What did I disrupt?”
“Somebody one lane over from ours, waiting in her doorway.”
“Another woman?”
“The yard outside our cottage where we played badminton . . . remember how it eroded over the winter and spring each year, and we knew one summer we’d return to the lake and even the rental cottage would be gone?” He rubbed his eyes.
Once the azure of a calm Lake Erie, his irises were now occluded like pearl seeping across blue marble.
“Who was she, Dad?”
“I don’t recall,” he muttered.
I’m not sure what precipitated my recollection of this excerpt. Perhaps it was the manner in which he looked at me as if willing me to recall a crucial moment between us. Maybe the trigger was his inferring the bridge lights. Or my attraction to water. Or his deeper understanding that fathers exist to save their sons. For he had that day. I was going to die, but for some strange reason following that incident, I felt a kind of invulnerability.
That he, in a seersucker suit and iris tie with a yolk of yellow running down its center, would remove his spectator shoes and save me. From women, the deep, or myself.
But now he no longer sought clandestine rendezvous. He was an old man. The gentler sex only visited his dreams . . . and even then their lights, their odors, their laughter had dimmed . . . and he’d awaken to savor what he’d once tasted, sung to, held onto for yet one more turn down the hollows of this wondrous arcade.
Would he have known Brother Stanislaus? I wondered.
This moment of recognition between us lingered while Brother Alex looked on. Perhaps each understood what was transpiring more than I did. Yet the memory was mine and mine alone. Even if Westley had penned it.
This was Papa’s good-bye.
As if he was saying to me, My watch is over.
It was at this moment I sensed I was taking on water, that my lungs were filling with the grief of his departure. And inside me, I witnessed myself calling out to him, as if he were up on the hillside looking down on me. Except I saw him begin to fade. The seersucker suit began to turn primrose like the abundant yarrow at the cliff’s edge, his face became obscured by a wispy cloud, and his black hair metamorphosed into a raven that echoed back to me.
And once again I looked across to him . . . My watch is over, son. God willing, we’ll meet up again. But then he flashed his ingratiating smile.
Except more than likely not.
The Dodgems died yesterday.
The denouement, however imperfect it might be, had now taken place.
Papa caught my look of panic as to what was actually transpiring. He eyed me as if to acknowledge its truth but to keep it between ourselves.
“You are grown men now. Early on—and to hell with the park onlookers—we would have celebrated by removing our clothes and jumped into icy Big Run, swimming out to where the Lightning Roller Coaster dipped heart-shudderingly close to its deepest part before climbing again. The yellow-and-red cars are no longer operating, but we would have circled the floor manically waiting for the first opportunity to crash headlong into each other . . . laughing in a manner I’ve forgotten how.”
I caught Brother Alexander staring up the hill where as a boy I’d run soon as I wolfed down the picnic lunch to the park’s midway and its rides. Was he recalling his summer afternoons there?
“What are you remembering?” I asked.
“The lemon meringue pie.” He laughed.
Yes, I thought, my manuscript.
“I’d like to take you back to our old house, boys . . . but it’s empty now. The neighbors have either died or moved away. It began to take too much out of me to keep up. One day, I packed a suitcase and locked the doors behind me.”
At that, he placed a key ring on the park table.
I was uncertain as to his intentions.
“It’s yours,” he said. “You and Westley can fix it up over time. Reclaim your old rooms. I kind of let it go. But with a couple weeks of labor, it will feel and look just as it did when you were growing up there.”
I looked over to Brother Alexander.
“Where are you living now?” he asked.
“A tidy little room in town. Closer to a few old friends who are still around and not far to walk from where I get my papers each morning and stop in at the tavern to shoot the breeze and enjoy my morning wake-up.”
At that, he stood up . . . as did we. Hesitant at first, he came over to our side of the table, embracing me.
“Ethan, your not succumbing to the jelly jars enabled me to hang around . . . for which I’m grateful. I couldn’t have survived knowing that you went off into the so-called Big Run without me in pursuit.”
As for Brother Alexander, Father grasped his hands, though he stood a bit formally across from him: “May you find peace here. Your brother needs you. What other reason is there to live? Thank you for bringing him home.”
When he was almost out of sight, I cried out:
“Please stop by, Papa!”
“Oh, I will,” he muttered.
“At the first sign of summer, we’ll challenge you to a race here in Big Run!” Brother Alexander chorused.
Papa turned, and I could detect in the distance a wry grin. It was as if he was deciding how to respond.
“I may have already gone in without your knowing it,” he replied. “Always wanted to know what’s beyond the Lightning’s dip where we always turned back.”
ENDNOTES
1.Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1946).
2.Edmund White, Genet: A Biography (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2010).
3.Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky (London: John Lehmann, Ltd., 1949).
4.Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1963).
5.“Brother, we must die.”
6.Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain (Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1948).
7.Merton, Seven Storey Mountain.
8.Thomas Merton, Entering the Silence: Becoming a Monk & Writer (HarperSanFrancisco, 1996).
9.Merton, Entering the Silence.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Dennis Must is the author of two novels: The World’s Smallest Bible (Red Hen Press, March 2014) and Hush Now, Don’t Explain (Coffeetown Press, October 2014); plus three short story collections: Going Dark (Coffeetown Press, 2016), Oh, Don’t Ask Why (Red Hen Press, 2007), and Banjo Grease (Creative Arts Book Company, 2000). He won the 2014 Dactyl Foundation Literary Fiction Award for Hush Now, Don’t Explain, and The World’s Smallest Bible was a 2014 USA Best Book Award Finalist in the Literary Fiction category. His plays have been produced Off-Off-Broadway and he has been published in numerous anthologies and literary journals. He resides with his wife in Salem, Massachusetts.
