by Walter Blum
“MG. Max Goldman?” His eyes widened. “You went to work for your father-in-law?”
“That was part of the deal.”
“Why, why?” Genero shook his head. “How could you do such a thing? For God’s sake, man, forgiveness may be all well and good, but there are times when it can be carried too far.”
“There was nothing to forgive,” Adam said.
“How can you say that?”
“Max did what he had to do. We all do in the end.”
A wave of passengers came pouring out of the next elevator—secretaries, business executives, men and women with furrowed brows and briefcases fat with after-hours work. Adam seemed unaware of the confusion. Genero could tell from the way his jaw twitched under one ear, pulling the beard tight, the way his eye wandered, picking a spot in the middle distance to focus on, that for Adam the universe they inhabited now had been replaced by another. And then just as suddenly, he was back. They stood side by side in the rear of the elevator as it dueled with gravity.
The office they were destined for was located on the twenty-first floor. They walked through the company reception area, which was already deserted. Once inside his own office, Adam sat down behind the desk and reached inside a drawer for a glass and the promised bottle of whiskey. Strange, Genero thought—and yet typical. The first thing a man acquires when he reaches executive status is a bar, but there was none here, so even bottles of expensive whiskey had to be kept in a desk drawer.
Genero watched as Adam unscrewed the bottle top and poured a thimble full of brown liquid into a glass. His eye was now caught by the computer. “Going somewhere?” he asked.
“I like to have it with me, just in case,” Adam explained.
Genero had already discerned the reason for the laptop computer on Adam’s desk. Could it be that Adam might have had another motive for luring him out on a ferry ride across the Bay, something beyond the memories and stories, the revival of ancient pain with which they had spent the better part of an afternoon? Was it possible he’d been set up? He didn’t like the sensation, but experience taught him that some people take a long tour around the barn to reach a place they’ve already determined they want to go.
“So that’s it,” he said irritably.
“What?”
“You’re going back.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Don’t be angry with me.”
“I’m not angry,” Genero exclaimed. “I just don’t understand. Why are you doing this? What do you hope to accomplish? They’re all gone, you told me so yourself. You gave up on the detective; you stopped searching for clues that don’t exist. And now this.”
“I have to go back.”
“Oh hell, Adam. What are you trying to do? Thirty-five years—my God, the place has probably changed beyond recognition.”
“I have to go back.”
“Well, you shouldn’t have waited thirty-five years. It’s too long a time. I can understand if you’d decided to make the trip back twenty-five years ago, that might have made some sense, but the Canelius you’re looking for isn’t there any more.”
“I know.”
“This is foolishness, Adam.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“Isn’t there any way I can persuade you to change your mind?”
“No, it’s too late,” Adam said. “I already have a ticket on the ten o’clock flight tomorrow morning.”
Picking up the phone, he punched in a number and waited. Apparently there was no answer, for after a while he set the receiver back on its cradle. He looked at Genero with patient eyes, and his voice was almost inaudible. It was as though, in a garden filled with red and white roses, one stood out because it was blue. A soft wind blew in from the west, ruffling the flowers and bringing with it the coolness of great depths and the smell of the sea. Genero understood that when a mind is made up, not much can be done to change it.
But he had to try once more to discourage his friend. “Adam, the past’s the past. All you’re going to do is bring grief down on your head.”
“You’re right.”
“And still you’re determined to go through with it?”
“I’m sorry,” Adam said, rubbing his wrist, a reminder of what should have been a more innocent time. “It’s not smart, it makes no sense, and it’ll probably make me miserable, but I have to try.”
27
Once again he was airborne, heading east and then south and then backwards in time. But that too was an illusion.
The plane, descending through a membrane of clouds, looked down on a town that seemed to have evolved out of adolescence into middle age without a pause. Everything sprawled. Fields that once were home to tobacco by the acre had disappeared. Housing developments stood in their places. Streets in the new sections were laid out in fashionable curves and loops. Boulevards stretched like spokes on a wheel to the horizon, almost as far as the foothills that were barely discernible under the gray, looming, rain-heavy clouds.
Canelius was now a city in the style of Dallas and Los Angeles, although nowhere near as big. At its nub was a bundle of high-rise buildings, some of steel and glass built in the last ten years, but the outskirts were what defined it. There were shopping centers now far more copious than Southgate, recognizable by their shape and rectangularity; schools and gas stations and firehouses and, as they approached a landing, an eruption of swimming pools that would have been a genuine rarity forty years ago. The airport had grown as well. It could now accommodate twin-engine commercial planes as well as the usual assortment of private craft tied down on the edges of the field.
“Not what it used to be, I gather,” said Genero, peering from his window seat as the ground came up to meet them.
“All new,” Adam said.
It was Genero’s idea that he join Adam on the trip. Fortunately, there were seats still left on the plane. It didn’t sit too well with Adam; there was no reason, he thought, why anyone would want to join him for what should have been a solo journey, but Genero was adamant. His presence was required; a patient needed his expertise. He was not about to let him go into surgery without someone there as a guide.
The rental car stood waiting for them outside the airport, a sleek blue Toyota. They drove from the airport on a new six-lane road that might have been faster were it not for heavy traffic and too many stoplights. Downtown was more crowded now. Boutiques and fast-food franchises had sprung up. There were flowered planters on the light poles, and bus shelters replaced the hard wooden benches on Main Street. Adam preferred the old benches.
“Thirty-five years can make quite a difference,” Genero said.
“It’s all new,” Adam said again, wonderingly.
By the time they found a parking space at the hotel, the skies had opened up. Genero unfurled an umbrella and they made a dash through the rain, arriving at the familiar glass doors to the accompaniment of a loud clap of thunder, water dripping on the parquet floor. To Adam’s surprise, the doors hadn’t changed in all these years. Through here, on that night, had come a man and a woman who, as he watched them from the car across the street, signed the register at the front desk and then moved on to the elevator, his arm around her waist, her hand brushing lightly against his buttocks. It was her gesture that most disturbed him, the familiarity of it, strolling through a countryside they had no doubt explored many times before.
In the face of the weather, and the lateness of the hour, he persuaded Genero to settle for dinner in the hotel. The Palm Room was exactly as he remembered it, the tables still properly covered in white cloth with a single pink rose in a vase. They were handed menus by a maitre d’ in a gray suit. Dinner music hummed in the background, the sort with lots of strings he might have played on WCAN when the night was particularly romantic. Across the way a middle-aged black couple, waiting for their entrees, sipped champagne from fluted glasses. So much had changed.
They set off the next morning after a quick breakfast. Clou
ds were already piling up in the western sky. The air, which had seemed so clear and uncomplicated from the hotel room, once more hung heavy with moisture and portent. Genero decided that Adam would be navigator, and he climbed behind the wheel.
“Where to?” he asked as they pulled out of the hotel garage.
“The station,” Adam ordered.
It seemed simple enough, but the once familiar route was now almost unrecognizable. Fortunately, they managed to find their way by following street names. A host of tract homes covered the hill that was once little more than scrub brush and stunted pines, and as they climbed the curving road, Adam thought how incongruous the little station would appear, its seedy, cinder-block walls and coat of bilious green paint intruding on the pervasive suburban monotony.
Only one more turn remained. Adam hoped that, if nothing else, someone had had the sense and perhaps the money to replace WCAN’s scruffy old transmitter with a tower worthy of its name. And perhaps a new coat of paint. The road ended in a cul-de-sac, and as they entered it, a brown wooden sign came into view. The sign hadn’t been there before, and as Adam stared past it, past the houses that now flanked the road, staring straight ahead at the building that now occupied most of the site, his mouth fell open and for a moment he couldn’t speak.
It was as if the world he once knew had swallowed itself. Nothing remained of what he remembered, not even a snip of tail protruding from the monster’s mouth. The transmitter was gone. The Bell Tower was gone. The station in all its hideous green glory was gone, and in its place rose a building and a spire and a cross that explained the significance of the sign they had just passed, the one beside the road reading “First Congregational Church.”
“This is it?” Genero asked.
“This is where it used to be.” Adam’s voice caught in his throat.
“A church?”
They got out of the car, and Adam stood looking up at the building in front of him. By all rights, he should be fighting back the tears, and yet all he could feel was a kind of sad emptiness. It’s one thing when people die, or move away and can’t be found—after all, even those you love don’t live forever. But when they yank the past out of the ground, when they bulldoze your memories, when they spit on the spot where all the beautiful things happened and stop the music forever before it can reach the ozone, when they turn the voices to dust, when they make a mockery of passion and sweetness and order and sympathy—that wasn’t fair.
“Well, I guess Mrs. Warren would have been pleased,” he murmured.
“I beg your pardon?”
“A church,” Adam said, and climbed back into the car. “Mrs. Warren would have said the preachers were right. They stayed and we left. I guess there’s a kind of justice in that.”
***
They went back down the hill, Adam driving now, fighting to get a grip on his emotions as he clutched the wheel. It was like being pursued by ghosts, voices and faces from the past that filled the air, beating soundlessly on the windows, scratching at the door locks in a vain effort to get in. For a while, too, he even had the odd sensation that they were being followed. He could see it in his rear-view mirror a gray Pontiac Trans-Am that lingered a discreet distance back, keeping them in sight, vanishing from time to time and then, just as suddenly, materializing. The car had no markings, so it couldn’t be the police, and no one from San Francisco knew they were here.
So who the hell was keeping track of him?
No, it had to be imagination. If there were ghosts out there, they were no longer interested in him. He tried to think of all the people he’d once known in Canelius. He remembered hearing about Larry and Julie, married now with two children, by this time probably grown. Wally had gone to work for a large advertising firm, moved to New York and made a small fortune selling TV time. More power to the Wally’s of this world, he thought. Sam O’Neill retired to Florida, married off his daughters and spent his golden years playing golf and coaching little league baseball teams. His wife Amy had had breast cancer, but overcame it with surgery and radiation treatments.
It was all there in the little newsletters Brian Hathaway had put out for a while. They would arrive every year around Easter, a one-page typed sheet bubbling with chatter. Adam would read them, tie them up with a rubber band and toss them in a shoe box where they nestled with newspaper ads for Evening Shadows and the FCC Third-Class radio engineer’s license that made him a “combo man.”
“Do you miss it?” Genero asked.
“No,” Adam admitted.
“So if you had to do it over again…”
“I’d probably do everything the same way.”
He led Genero on a quick tour of the city that had once been his home. They went by the B&B Cafe, still in its old location and still attracting crowds at lunchtime. They passed Johnson’s Drug Store, where so much of such importance happened on a sunny morning. He could still see her in that brown plaid skirt and the flowered yellow blouse, her hair done up in a pony tail, those lovely tresses the color of cafe au lait, bound in back the way Sandra Dee did in the movies.
Johnson’s, renamed Delany’s, was having a going-out-of-business sale. The small jewelry store next door had vanished and was replaced by a pizza place. Only Goldman Brothers was prospering. It had since moved across the street and occupied an entire city block.
It occurred to him that they might make a stop at the public library, and another at the Canelius Post-Ledger, but what was the point? After all these years, it hardly seemed likely new revelations would surface. Grohmeyer had already dug up a pile of microfilm and old newspapers dating back to that time. The file, which he had read and reread, was almost more than he could bear, and it told him nothing he needed to know.
At Mrs. Warren’s house on the outskirts of town, they paused only long enough to read the name on the mailbox. “I’m surprised they haven’t torn it down, like everything else,” Adam said.
He had Genero drive again, this time down Fairhaven Street; they parked across the way and he spent more than ten minutes studying the big two-story white clapboard house where he and Susan had lived. At least the present owners left it pretty much the way it had been. The verandah, the elegant old-South style pillars, the large brass knocker and the large oak on the front lawn were untouched. Only the vines had been cut down, and in deference to the sensibilities of the time, the small ceramic statue of a black jockey with a ring in his hand was replaced by a small flowering apple tree.
They stopped to break bread at the Fairmount Country Club, which was now open to the public for lunch. Adam fully expected the dining room to bring back a flood of disturbing memories, but it was not like that at all. The room was just a room. The past no longer lived here; only a faint sensation of deja vu remained. Oddly enough, it was an image of Max that flashed through his mind, his face as clear in memory as though it were yesterday—the thin, inquisitive nose, the pencil moustache and eyes forever darting from side to side, the blue suit and stiff white collar, the voice with its inflections redolent of New York.
They walked slowly back to the car. Genero continued to claim the role of captain of the ship, and once out of the country club they headed south along the county road. About a mile or so, farther, Adam ordered Genero to stop. Once more he got out of the car. The threat of rain had momentarily dissipated, bright sunshine poured over the oaks and scrub pines. The dividing line on the blacktop shimmered. He walked up the road a few yards and stood staring at the horizon, so enveloped in thought that it came as a shock when Genero stepped up behind and laid a hand on his shoulder.
“This is where it happened?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t seem that sure.”
“It’s hard to tell. They’ve widened the road and the trees look different. I thought I would know the spot right away when I saw it, but now it’s…” His voice trailed off.
“Adam, what is it you’re looking for?”
“The day before yesterday.”
“You won’t find it.”
“Maybe not. But I have to look.”
A faint humming could be heard in the distance and, little by little, there appeared, heading north, a dirty blue Chevy pickup loaded with some sort of unidentifiable yellow farm equipment. Proceeding at a stately pace, the truck gave off a complementary clanking sound from under the hood, followed by a toot of the horn, a sort of casual salutation as the driver passed them. In days gone by, when the countryside was dotted with tobacco and the sprawl of suburbia was only vaguely hinted at, roads crawled with trucks like this. Adam watched as the truck waddled duck-like toward the horizon, topped the rise, dipped and slid over the edge.
“I miss Max,” he murmured, half aloud.
Genero looked at him in surprise. “After what he did to you?”
“Max only did what he thought he had to,” Adam said, and they walked slowly back to the car.
“He lied to you,” Genero pointed out.
“Of course he did. They both did,” Adam said, sliding into the passenger seat. “But they couldn’t help themselves. If I’d had any sense, I would have kept my mouth shut. But I didn’t know. Nothing is worse than thinking you’re smart when you’re not. What I didn’t discover until later is that love is a series of lies—small but essential lies—and if we destroy the lies in search of the truth, we lose the essence of love itself.”
“I refuse to believe that.”
“Of course, that’s understandable. In your eyes, it’s the truth that sets you free. Am I right?”
Genero nodded.
“You wouldn’t have enjoyed the Bell Tower.”
“Probably not.”
It was getting late, and there was still another place to visit. Adam had Genero hurry, which only made things more difficult because the place was not easy to find. Buildings had grown up on all sides; a large Super Save supermarket sat catty-corner at the intersection, a feed store occupied most of the block and parking space was at a premium. And yet, the moment they stepped through the door, it was as though one world disappeared and another took its place.
