by Peter Straub
“Do you know who was in your seat on yesterday’s flight?”
He shook his head.
“That actor who was in Family Ties.”
“Michael J. Fox?”
“No, the one who played his father.” She looked away for a second. “He must be really old by now. He still looks pretty good, though.”
Tim raised the first cookie to his mouth. Its wonderful fragrance seemed to move directly into the center of his head, making him ravenous. What was the name of that actor, anyhow? Michael somebody: he’d had a nice quality, like Alan Alda without the smarm. The cryptic phrase stenciled on a Spring Street curb came back to him. lost boy lost girl.
How on earth, he wondered, had Nancy died?
2
The obituary notice in that morning’s Ledger told him nothing but Nancy’s age, family details, and funeral information. There was no photograph. For Nancy’s sake, Tim felt grateful. He had known his sister-in-law at least well enough to feel sure that she would have hated having the only photograph of her to appear in the city newspaper run after her death. Tim looked again at the obituary’s few column inches and realized that it had been published four days after Nancy’s death. Wasn’t that later than usual? Perhaps not. And it contained nothing about the cause of death but the words “without warning.” Without warning Nancy Kalendar Underhill, wife to Philip, mother to Mark, a resident of 3324 North Superior Street in Millhaven’s Sherman Park district, had been taken from her devoted family and loving friends. Without warning had she laid down her spatula and mixing bowl, stripped off her comely apron, straightened her arms by her sides, and zoomed away from the surface of the earth at a nice, sharp forty-five-degree angle.
Tim experienced a peculiar tumult in the region of his heart. Yes, that was exactly what Nancy had done. The shock of the recognition made him go to the edge of the bed and sit down, fast. Of her own volition had Nancy shot rocketlike off the planet. Philip’s wife and Mark’s mother had killed herself. Now Tim understood how he could have failed to grasp the situation from the beginning. Philip’s voice, Philip’s words had thwarted him. The voice sounded tamped down, flattened out to stifle any emotion that might shine through: Philip with someone standing on his throat. That had been Philip, standing on his own throat. Philip would be happiest if Tim were never to learn that Nancy had not died in her sleep. He would feel that the knowledge meant a personal loss, that some degree of power had been transferred into his brother’s hands. The tight, stepped-on voice therefore had divulged as little information as possible. I thought you should know that Nancy unexpectedly passed away yesterday afternoon. It happened very suddenly, and I guess you could say I’m in shock. In shock. Probably will be for a while, huh? You don’t have to tell me right away, but let me know if you want to come here for the viewing on Friday and the funeral and all that on Saturday afternoon.
Philip might as well have been speaking to an answering machine.
I don’t suppose you’ll want to stay here, will you? When did you ever want to stay here?
Tim’s heart trembled at the thought of what Mark must be going through.
He found that he was holding his hands clamped down over the top of his head, as if to keep this new information from bouncing around the hotel room, spattering blood as it went. Feeling like Philip, he lowered his hands and for a moment concentrated on his breathing. What could he say to his brother?
With this question came a great, dirty tide of misery and despair, at its center a piercing bolt of pain for Nancy Underhill, for how she must have felt in the weeks and days before. That was monstrous, obscene. Tim made up his mind on the spot: he would not leave Millhaven without knowing why Nancy had killed herself. It was as though she herself had given him the charge.
From Timothy Underhill’s journal, 12 June 2003
I’m checked into the Pforzheimer, and just to make sure I realize that I am once again back in my hometown, Millhaven voices are rolling through my head. My nephew Mark’s sweet e-mail voice; Philip’s dour rumble. Even Pop’s smoky rasp. In the midst of all these voices, why not listen to Nancy’s, too?
Nancy’s voice was soft, tennis-ball fuzzy. She once asked me, How do you write a book, anyhow? Heart in mouth, I said. She gave me a lovely laugh, her eyes half-closed. Nancy handled customer complaints for the Millhaven Gas Company. Philip, the vice principal of John Quincy Adams Junior High and High School (“Quincy”), wanted her to quit. He thought that having people yell at his wife all day was beneath him, though when you came down to it, the nuts and bolts of his job weren’t all that different. That Nancy could be funny about her job annoyed Philip. If she was going to insist on going to that office every day, at least she could have the decency to show its cost; that was Philip’s point of view. All day long, these ignorant black dumbbells are calling her “motherfucker,” Philip had once stage-whispered to him. Tell me you could take that every day.
Philip, she had said, they’re not ignorant, they’re not dumb, and they’re certainly not all black. They’re just afraid they’ll freeze to death if they lose their gas. We work out a little deal, that’s all.
Do white people ever get that deal? Philip wanted to know.
That gas company job must have been difficult more often than not, but she kept showing up. At night, she cooked for Philip and Mark. Obviously, she did all the housework. A woman with two jobs then, and I bet she seldom complained. To a girl from Pigtown, Philip had seemed a good enough catch. A budding educator, he already wore a jacket and tie every day. Probably, Philip had opened up to her back then, probably showed her a little flash, a little soul, enough to convince her it would still be there in the years to come. Think of the long marriage afterward, think of how she endured the person he became. I remember the light in her eye as she hurried down the hall toward me, a glow I could see right through the screen door. A great capacity for feeling, then, starved, unused, except for her son.
I want to know why you killed yourself.
A fatal disease? Philip would have told me. A love affair gone wrong? Nancy was not so romantic, not so foolish. Some overwhelming shame? If not shame, then a deep guilt? Guilt for what? For something undone, some action unperformed—that felt like Nancy’s brand of guilt.
Brave, steadfast, resigned, disappointed, true of heart, Nancy was all of these things. Poisoned by an old guilt—when she could have intervened, when she was needed, she stepped back, and the disaster happened. What else? Somewhere, I think, there’s a lot of fear, a big old fear. She feared the cause of her guilt: she feared what had made her needed. Some person, some man, loomed back there in Nancy’s life. He was terrifying.
This is where we locate Nancy’s story: I can feel it stir.
I’m reminded of what sometimes happened to me in Bangkok during the late seventies—I sensed death, actual Death, capering behind me on the crowded street, sending before him as his sign or sigil a naked Vietnamese girl running through the Patpong circus, a girl showing her bloody palms to the world.
It’s so tempting to give Nancy a history similar to mine. A grim creature peering in from just offstage; and with her we have someone she failed to rescue from the hideous Death-figure. . . . For me, the naked Vietnamese girl represented a kind of salvation, the reawakening of my imagination; for her, it was only dread.
I’m not sure what I think about this. It feels right, but looked at objectively it seems too much a by-product of my own story. Not to mention my imagination.
Nancy’s story—I wonder if I’ll ever really get inside it, ever really see the beast that perched on her shoulder. But this is a start, maybe.
From this window on the fourth floor of the Pforzheimer’s original building, Tim Underhill and Michael Poole once had looked down on wintry Jefferson Street as an infuriated motorist with a snowed-in car whipped his tire iron against the side of a bus moving slowly toward Cathedral Square. At the time, what they were looking at seemed like pure Millhaven.
The sparse traffic on
Jefferson Street swam through the hot, languid air. Directly below, a Pforzheimer valet in a short-sleeved brown uniform lounged against a parking meter. Across the street, a hunched old man in a seersucker suit, a bow tie, and a straw hat, the image of prosperous old-school midwestern propriety, picked his way down the red stone steps of the Millhaven Athletic Club. Some retired judge or doctor going home after a bowl of tomato soup and a turkey club. At his back, the weathered red brick facade of the athletic club was sturdy, peaceful, traditional; although less sturdy, the old man looked much the same. Tim watched him ease himself off the last step and down onto the sidewalk. He wondered where the doctor had parked his car. All the spaces in front of the club were empty.
Working his elbows as if in a hurry, the old party in the jaunty hat and the spiffy bow tie proceeded directly across the sidewalk. He glanced quickly from side to side, then hitched up his shoulders and stepped down into Jefferson Street. To Tim, he no longer looked so peaceful. For an old guy who had just finished lunch, he was moving with an awkward, herky-jerky haste.
Like a hideous dream-chariot, a long black car of antique design came rushing up the middle of Jefferson Street, heading straight toward the old man. Tim froze at his window; the retired doctor had more presence of mind. After a moment’s hesitation, he back-pedaled toward the curb, keeping an eye on the car racing toward him. The car corrected for his change of position. “Get out of there, old man!” Tim said aloud, still unable to believe that he was watching an attempted murder. “Go! Move!”
As the black car swung left toward the curb, the old man vaulted across three feet of roadway, came down on his toes, and started to run. The Pforzheimer’s parking valet had disappeared. The black car slithered forward and sideways with the speed of a mongoose charging a cobra, and a straw hat sailed into the air. “No!” Underhill shouted, and rapped his forehead against the cool window. A seersucker shoulder and a white-haired head slid out of sight beneath the car.
Tim’s breath misted the window.
Inexorably, the car ground over the roadbed. After a horrifically long second or two, it picked up speed and rolled toward Grand Avenue. The old man lay still on the concrete, his long legs drawn up and one arm outstretched. Tim tried unsuccessfully to catch the car’s license number.
Hadn’t anyone else seen the murder? Tim spun toward the telephone in his room, then moved back to check the scene again. Now the street was filled with people. Two men in loose-fitting jackets, one a dusty red, the other navy blue, stood by the driver’s side of the car. The man in the navy blouson wore a long-billed black cap that covered half his face. Another man and a young woman had run up to the old man in the seersucker suit, and as Tim watched, they held out their hands, and the victim, not dead, not even injured, pulled himself upright. A young woman wearing a headset trotted through the little crowd with the straw hat in her hand. A man in a fedora and a pin-striped suit got out of the car, pointed back down the street, and nodded at something said by the man in the long-billed cap. He, too, wore a headset.
Tim pushed up the window and leaned out. The man in the seersucker suit, no longer quite so old, settled the boater back on his head and laughed at something said by the young woman. Most of the people on the street had begun to retreat to their positions. The black car was backing down Jefferson Street, where a bare-chested man in shorts rode sidesaddle beside an enormous camera set on miniature railroad tracks.
A visiting film company had transformed Jefferson Street into a movie set.
Tim watched the actor in the seersucker suit trot up the red stone steps of the Millhaven Athletic Club and duck into the doorway to await the next take. Once again, the street looked empty. In a couple of minutes the old man would reappear on the red steps, the long car would begin rolling, the man and the car would come into conjunction, and what looked like murder would again take place; this would happen over and over again until the light changed.
Tim closed the window and went to the telephone beside his journal on the busy writing table. When the desk clerk answered, he asked what was going on outside. “I mean, is it a movie or a television episode?”
“A movie. Big-budget job. The director’s somebody like Scorsese or Coppola, someone like that. The crew will be outside there another two days, and then they’ll be shooting at a location down in the warehouse district.”
Tim remembered the warehouse district, a few blocks south of Grand, from when it still had warehouses and nobody called it anything at all. He also remembered a time when desk clerks at the Pforzheimer would mean something entirely different when they used the word “shooting.” “Ah,” he said. “Gas lamps and cobblestones. What is it, a Golden Days of the Mafia story?”
“Gangsters and tommy guns,” said the clerk. “Whenever they want to set a movie in old-time Chicago, they come to Millhaven.”
Tim moved back to the window. Here came the actor in his retired doctor getup, jerking his shoulders and elbows as he hitched himself off the curb; here was that impression of haste. Now the black dream-mobile, which had running boards and a spare-tire well on the trunk, gathered speed as it cruised southward on Jefferson Street, which would not be Jefferson now but a street in Chicago, South Dearborn or South Clark. The actor froze, glided backward, broad-jumped forward; the car twitched like a living thing, and the straw boater sailed off. The actor disappeared beneath the antique car. This time, Tim was able to see the second camera dollying in, accompanied by the man in the long-billed black cap. This, too, had happened the first time, but Tim had seen none of it.
Idly, his gaze drifted northward to the trim little park beyond the club’s parking lot. Angled paths intersected at a concrete circle with a wooden bench and a dead fountain. Beech trees cast angular shadows on the grass. An old woman scattered bread crumbs to several families of combative sparrows. At the top of the square, digital bells in the cathedral’s tower tolled three times, sending out a dull clang clang clang that hung like bronze smoke in the bright air. Then an argument between two teenage boys proceeding toward the bottom of the square snagged his attention. The floppiness of their clothing, as alike as the dress of twins clothed by their parents—baggy jeans, oversized short-sleeved T-shirts (pale blue and navy blue) worn over oversized long-sleeved T-shirts (light yellow and dirty white)—heightened the vehemence of their gestures. At the bottom of the square they turned right and began moving toward the Pforzheimer, on the far side of Jefferson.
The taller of the two had cropped dark hair and shoulders so broad his arms seemed to swing at a distance greater than usual from his slim body. He was walking backward and waving his arms. The smaller boy, wider, rounder, and with long, sandy-reddish hair, had the resigned, rubbery face of a comedian, but Tim saw that his instinctive equanimity was strained to the breaking point. He kept slowing the pace, jamming his hands into the deep, low pockets of his capacious jeans, then raising them in a gesture that said, What can I do? Sorry, I can’t help you. Dancing before him, the dark-haired boy seemed to be saying, Man, I need you with me on this. Give me a break! A pair of mimes could not have drawn the poles of their disagreement any more clearly, nor the passion of one and the resistance of the other. The tall boy stopped moving and clutched the sides of his head. Tim knew he was cursing and hoped he was not trying to coax his red-haired friend into some illegality. It did not look like that kind of dispute, exactly. Something crucial was at stake, but probably an advanced form of mischief, not a criminal charge. Come on, we’ll have a blast, it’ll be great versus Give it up, there’s no way I’m doing that, and I don’t think you should do it, either.
Tim thought he heard a wail of frustration and outrage.
The red-haired boy dodged around his gesticulating friend and continued up the sidewalk. The taller boy ran up to him and clouted his shoulder. Looking extraordinarily graceful in his pale blue and light yellow shirts, he shot out an arm and pointed at, or very near to, Tim Underhill’s window. Instinctively, Tim stepped back. Almost immediately, he mov
ed forward again, drawn by an unexpected recognition. The taller of the two boys was strikingly handsome, even beautiful, in a dark-browed, clean-featured manner. A second later, Tim Underhill’s recognition system at last yielded the information that he was looking at his nephew, Mark. By a kind of generational enhancement, features that passed for pleasing but unremarkable in his mother emerged, virtually unchanged, as beautiful in her son. In all likelihood, Mark had no idea of how attractive he was.
The next message that came bubbling into consciousness was that just then Mark could have been speaking of him to his red-haired friend. Philip had probably mentioned that he would be in town for the funeral, and it would be like Philip to throw in a sneering reference to the Pforzheimer. That Mark was probably speaking of him meant that Tim had some role in the dispute between the two boys. What sort of role, he wondered: advice, direction, decision?
Whatever his point had been, Mark—for it really was Mark, Tim saw—had decided to save his powder for another day’s battle. That this was a truce, not surrender, was evident in his loping slouch, the ease of his stride, the wry set of his mouth. The red-haired boy spoke to him, and he shrugged in feigned indifference.
It almost hurt, that Mark should have become so beautiful—the world at large had already begun to conspire against the straightforward destiny that would otherwise have been his. Would you just look at him, down there on the sidewalk? He’s pretending to be too tough to be wounded by his mother’s death.
Both boys stopped moving to watch the man in the seersucker suit and straw hat once again come hitching down the red steps of the MAC. There was always something horrible about catching an actor at work, suddenly becoming aware that he was after all merely playing a role.
From Timothy Underhill’s journal, 20 June 2003
