The Bell Tower

by Walter Blum

  “They never made it,” he recalled.

  Adam frowned. Despite the roar of the wind and the screaming of the gulls, he seemed to have heard what was being said. “Who didn’t?”

  “The men who were imprisoned in that place, the convicts who tried to escape, they never made it to freedom. There they were, only a mile away with liberty and the world staring them in the face, and they couldn’t make it. I think that must be the worst torture a man can be asked to endure. It’s hard to believe Americans could ever have been that cruel.”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Are you saying that I’m a prisoner, too?” Adam said.

  “Well, everyone is, I guess,” Genero said. “We all live in cells of one sort or another, although I’m not sure what you’re in for.”

  “That’s what we’re here for,” Adam said.

  The ferry pulled into the Tiburon dock behind Guayma’s Restaurant, disgorging onto the sun-drenched shore the throng of tourists with cameras around their necks and Bermuda shorts revealing their goose-pimpled knees. Adam and Genero, the latter wearing a wool cardigan in deference to the unreasonable weather, made their way to Sam’s. They were given a table beside the rail, looking out over the Bay with Angel Island in the foreground, the Golden Gate Bridge just visible beyond the freeway and San Francisco, far off, shimmering like a dream.

  To Genero, born and raised in the great, dry, ocean-less heartland, it always seemed something of a miracle. Behind the bridge, fog boiled up, waiting for its cue from the invisible doorman whose job it was to decide at what hour, and under what circumstances, the massive white guest would be allowed in. Battalions of sailboats flitted across the Bay, giving way only to a ponderous tanker whose size dictated the order of obedience. In the distance, the spired city shimmered in the early afternoon sunshine. It seemed to be standing on an island, since all around could be seen nothing but water.

  The illusion merited awe. Genero stared at it until the waiter showed up to take their drink orders. A martini extra dry for him, a club soda for Adam.

  “Beautiful spot,” he observed.

  “Peaceful,” Adam said. “All that water—the fog and the bridge—takes your mind off other things.”

  “You come here often?”

  “Not in many years.”

  “Then why today?”

  “Because I need to tell you some things about myself, and this seemed like the most private place available.”

  The tanker gave a loud, grumpy toot and its signature echoed across the Bay. Adam rearranged the silverware on the table, placing the fork on the left where it belonged. The waiter brought their drinks and hung around to take their lunch orders. After a long study of the menu, Genero settled on a Crab Louis. Adam ordered the club sandwich. There was a long pause while the two men took another look at their drinks, the waiter having mistakenly switched them. They made a small ceremony of exchanging glasses, which lightened the atmosphere just a bit.

  Genero focused on the man sitting opposite him. In all the years they’d known each other, it was never clear how you went about approaching such a person. You got the impression that there were layers hiding the inner self from the outside world, and it could take forever simply to peel it back. There was an odd opaque quality about him. No matter how well you knew him, no matter how close your relationship, you always sensed another Adam sitting in the corner, away from the party, trying to avoid having to introduce himself.

  Genero looked around, scanning the terrace for familiar faces, which he could not find. “All right,” he said. “I don’t think our privacy is likely to be disturbed at any time this afternoon. And I doubt if anyone has this table bugged, so you say what you want.”

  “As soon as our food gets here…”

  “No, you’ve stretched this out long enough,” Genero interrupted. “I’m entitled to an explanation. It’s time you told me why I had to be ferried out to Tiburon, and set down in a chair under the midday sun, where I’m liable to incur a dreadful sunburn, simply so you could have a pleasant little chat.”

  “It’s more than just a chat.”

  “Of course. What else?”

  “It’s about the past,” Adam said.

  “The past, my dear Adam, is always the key—and sometimes the obstacle—to whatever’s lurking out there on the horizon of our lives.”

  “I don’t like the ominous sound of that.”

  “It wasn’t meant to sound ominous,” Genero said. “I just thought that if you wanted my advice—”

  “No,” Adam said. “It’s too late for advice. The best I can hope for is that you’ll listen to my story, maybe nod your head a couple of times and tell me you understand. But to do that we have to go back into the past.”

  “Where to?”

  “Canelius.”

  Genero’s brow wrinkled majestically. “Hmm. Sounds like some place in the isles of Greece.”

  “Actually, it’s a small town down South where I worked as a radio announcer when I was in my twenties.”

  “You worked at a radio station?” Genero’s surprise was unmistakable.

  “It wasn’t anything that impressive. Five thousand watts, and you swept out the station when you finished your shift. It’s a part of my life I should have forgotten by now. It’s something I should have purged from my system long ago, but I can’t seem to do that.”

  “Maybe we can do it together.”

  “I was hoping you’d say that.”

  “All right, what happened in Canelius?”

  “It’s where I fell in love for the first time,” Adam said, stirring his drink absent-mindedly with a stick.

  “First love,” Genero mused. “Ah, yes! The most beautiful and the most inexplicable sort of love there is. What was her name?”

  “Susan.”

  “How old?”

  “She would have been twenty-one that October.”

  Genero listened quietly as Adam took them back to the beginning; to the first day he had laid eyes on Susan. Adam’s mind seemed to float almost effortlessly into the past. He was astonished how many details of Susan’s appearance he still remembered: the waterfall of golden blonde hair cascading down her back, the yellow and black outfit she had on and the gold star of David that hung around her neck.

  He told what it was like with her in his arms, dancing to the music of the Mellow Tones. He told about the picnics, when they lay on the blanket in the grass and she let him kiss her and spoke words in his ear that no woman had ever said before. He told about the wedding, the noise, the music, the aunts and uncles and cousins and friends from the station, his parents looking pale and worried, Max Goldman glowing as his daughter walked down the aisle, the band that specialized in horas and Benny Goodman.

  He told how lovely it was to be married that way. But the story darkened when he reached the long, depressing stretch that followed her miscarriage, the fights, the making up, the affair with Bernard, the things he learned from Max Goldman about her past and, finally, the terrible night of the Midsummer Ball when all his hopes and dreams met at the side of a tree and perished in a holocaust of fire.

  When it was over, Genero sat in his chair on the terrace looking west at the ocean and south into the past, and tried to make some sense of what he had just heard. For years now he had considered himself Adam’s best friend, yet all this was new to him; it was as though he’d been handed a packet of love letters and, out of a clear blue sky, asked to assess their contents.

  “I never knew you’d been married before,” he said.

  “It’s not something I broadcast from the rooftops,” Adam said.

  “You’ve told your wife about this?”

  “Diane knows most of it. I didn’t go into all the details because I didn’t know how she’d react.”

  “Tell her,” Genero urged. She’s a good woman. She’ll understand.”

  He was convinced of that. Diane was a quietly elegant woman in her mid-fift
ies, dark-haired, slim-waisted, soft brown eyes with a figure that seemed to have clung to the same size in defiance of the years. There was hardly a wrinkle on her cheeks or, where it counted, around the throat. On special occasions, such as the night they attended the opening of the Opera in San Francisco, she wore the diamond earrings Adam had given her on their thirtieth wedding anniversary. And she was good for him. If a man had to remarry, he could ask for a no more appealing wife than Diane.

  They certainly lived well. No complaint there. MG Enterprises proved to be a benevolent employer although Max Goldman was no longer around to enjoy it. Adam sat on the boards of six major corporations. Diane worked for a prestigious real estate firm and belonged to Junior League. They went to concerts, bought season tickets for most of the major shows that came to town, drove twin BMWs—he a sports car, she a sedan. They had been around the world twice, skied in winter, swam in summer. Home was that rambling two-story house in the hillier environs of Hillsborough, custom-built, the mortgage paid up, insurance plentiful. His investments had turned out well—and how could it be otherwise? Had he chosen to retire, there was enough in his portfolio to keep them comfortable for the rest of their lives.

  And the kids had turned out well. They were grown now, of course. David, the brains of the clan, had passed the bar exam in May and signed on with a prestigious law firm in Chicago. Allan was making a career for himself in real estate. There was a married daughter in Washington by the name of Allison, whose husband was high up in the State Department. Genero had pleasant thoughts about all three, but he wondered how they would react if the truth about their old dad were to be suddenly revealed. What would they think if the door opened a crack and they were allowed a quick look beyond?

  And then it struck him there was good reason why Adam would never tell them. “You blame yourself, don’t you?” he said.

  “Yes,” Adam said quietly.

  “But why? It’s not necessary to take on this burden. From what you’ve told me—Adam, I don’t mean to make this any more painful than it is—but the truth is, she was a disturbed young woman. It wouldn’t have worked out. You know that as well as I do.”

  “But it was my fault.”

  “What was?”

  “What happened,” Adam said. “Don’t you see?”

  “No, I’m sorry. I don’t. Are you saying you’re to blame for the way she died?”

  “I pushed her into it.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “But it is. I did exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time. That night at the country club, and afterwards, was as much my doing as hers. There’s an old song Pearl Bailey used to sing called ‘It Takes Two to Tango.’ We were both part of that dance, and I let her get away from me.”

  “You don’t really believe that, do you?”

  “I’ve never stopped believing it,” Adam said.

  “Guilt is a wicked taskmaster. It’ll kill you if you’re not careful.”

  “I can’t help the way I feel.”

  “But you can’t keep torturing yourself over this indefinitely,” Genero protested. “This business will eat you alive. Isn’t there something you can do to get at the truth?”

  “I’ve tried.”

  “What have you done?” Genero asked skeptically.

  “Hired a detective,” Adam said.

  “A detective?”

  “To get at the truth, as you just said. His name is Grohmeyer.”

  Genero thought for a moment and shook his head. “No, never heard of him. But then, detectives are a little out of my line of work. May I ask, what did this detective of yours turn up after all these years?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I thought so. Then why hire him?”

  “I had to try. All I have left is a key and a promissory note, and the only other person who can tell me about that is Simon Denning.”

  “You won’t find him.”

  Adam made a sound that could have been a chuckle, but was more like an eruption of breath. “As a matter of fact, he did turn up someone in New York who—well, we both thought we’d found him, but apparently it was someone else.” He glanced out at the foaming water and the diving birds, stubbornly seeking a free meal.

  “And he’s still looking?”

  Adam sighed. “We agreed that there wasn’t much point in digging in the desert. Mr. Grohmeyer is still on retainer, but I no longer send him out on fishing expeditions.”

  “You’re crazy, you know.”

  “Yes,” Adam agreed.

  “You and a million other people,” Genero said. “We’re a planet of crazies. There’s no other way to explain all the things that we do.”

  The breeze off the Bay had picked up, sauntering across the table where they sat, ruffling its fringes. The breeze, signaling the arrival of the fog, which would be upon them long before the sun went down, was a cold one. Genero reached for the bill. Adam waved him off and paid it himself.

  “Adam…”

  “I hope you’re not disappointed in my little story,” Adam said.

  “Should I be?” Genero said.

  “Most people like a happy ending. I wish I could give you one, but it doesn’t come out like that.”

  They walked down the narrow main street, arriving at the ferry slip just as a line was starting to form. On the ride back to San Francisco, Adam stared at the gulls that hovered over the ferry, adjusting their flight to the speed of the boat.

  “At least they’re free,” he murmured. “You never see a gull worrying about what happened the day before yesterday.”

  “You could free yourself if you wanted to,” Genero suggested.

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “You could if you were a bird.”

  “I suppose so,” Adam said, “but people don’t have that luxury.”

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a peanut, one of several table snacks that had come with their meal, and tossed it overboard. An eager gull left the pack, swooped down and caught the nut in its beak without breaking the trajectory of its flight. “Weddings and funerals,” he murmured. “Those are the milestones we measure our lives by.”

  “You’re still mourning, aren’t you?”

  “Not mourning,” Adam murmured. “Anyone can mourn. It’s the grieving that takes an eternity.”

  Behind them, off to the west just beyond the bridge, the fog massed for an assault that would begin as soon as the sun sank to just the right height above the water, as soon as the wind picked up enough to heave the mist into the Bay.

  Genero marveled at the confluence of natural forces and man-made artifacts, the ferry skimming through the whitecaps, the booming of foghorns that seemed to come from all sides. He realized this might be the last chance he had to ask the question that was most troubling him.

  “Adam,” he said gently. “I don’t mean to keep at this. I know it still hurts, and if you want me to stop, just say the word, but I have to ask.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “After all she did to you, after all the misery and suffering and uncertainty, you took her back, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I had to.”

  “No, that’s not a proper answer. That doesn’t sound like the Adam Bernstein I’ve known all these years. Being the injured party in this, you could have done anything you wanted. You could have ordered her out of the house, or at least seen to it that she consented to be the wife you expected.”

  “No, I couldn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I didn’t deserve her.”

  Genero stared at him. He thought he had a pretty good notion of what Adam was like. Strong, self-reliant, a man with all kinds of things to admire—a graceful manner, an easy sense of humor, a kind of charm that women seemed to find attractive. But was this the man he knew? How much of it was real? What chance was there that any of these wounds, so deeply embedded in time, could be healed? Most people, Genero told himself, mak
e peace with their demons in the end. Adam’s were still waking him up in the middle of the night, leaping about, sitting on his chest and thumping.

  He wanted to help, but there were no drugs in his pharmacopoeia for that kind of pain.

  “You didn’t—?”

  “I didn’t deserve her,” Adam repeated.

  The ferry eased into its San Francisco berth, making dull thudding noises as it bounced against the poles, a sound that reminded Genero of his youth when he had just arrived in San Francisco and ferries were the only way of crossing the Bay. Strange how everything jogged your memory, bringing sounds and pictures into focus when you got to a certain age. Genero fully expected to walk back to Adam’s office building, since he had parked his car in the garage beneath it. Adam was always urging him to get more exercise, although men who are naturally small and heavy-set like Genero rarely turn into svelte, muscled he-men with just an occasional heavy-duty walk. As luck would have it, though, a taxi had just pulled up at the curb to disgorge passengers and Adam insisted that they take it.

  They emerged from the cab in a swirl of late-afternoon traffic.

  “How about coming upstairs for a few minutes,” he said. “I’ve got a bottle of thirty-year-old Scotch one of our clients gave me as a gift, and I’d like you to give it a taste.”

  “I thought you didn’t drink,” Genero said.

  “I don’t, but that’s all the more reason why I need you to give your opinion.”

  Genero knew he couldn’t refuse the invitation. Besides, since his wife died, there was no reason for hurrying home to fix dinner all by himself. Shove a frozen veal Parmesan in the microwave and wait, that was about the size of it.

  They made their way into the building, pressing like spawn-bent salmon against the outgoing tide. Waiting at the bank of elevator doors, Genero found himself studying the building directory, his eye caught by the listing that read, “MG Enterprises, a division of Unicom, Inc.” He knew this was where Adam worked, but it wasn’t until that moment that the significance of the initials hit home. Max Goldman. The name sprang from his lips before he could halt them.