by Walter Blum
The Paradise Lounge was that prehistoric fly preserved in amber Adam had been looking for, time frozen, every detail unaltered. The ancient leather upholstery, the Formica bar top even dirtier now with its accumulation of grime, the booths along the side and back walls—he could picture himself with Simon as he leaned forward with that strange, pasty face of his, the eyes boring into him, talking about money and being a good person.
“I’m being given a test,” Simon had said.
What kind of a test? He never did explain.
A pretty young woman with brown hair cut extremely short came over from the bar and took their orders—coffee for Adam, beer for Genero. While they waited, Adam excused himself and went into the men’s room. In his mind had been fixed a vision of peeling green walls, of mildewed floors, a single light bulb hanging overhead and an ugly smell. But the smell was gone. The men’s room had been modernized. The light was fluorescent now, and there was even a hot-air blower where once the paper towel dispenser had hung.
There was no hint that Simon Denning had ever been here.
His name brought only a blank stare from the bartender. The young woman grinned and apologized, although it was hardly her fault that the past remained invisible to all but those who had gone through it.
She did manage to dig up a fat, pot-bellied man from the kitchen who filled them in on what had happened to WCAN. After Ted Sauer bought the station, it had changed hands and formats several times. Then, a housing developer purchased the hilltop property for an attractive sum. Both building and antenna were torn down and the station moved to its present storefront location in Southgate, which had blossomed like some huge marine creature to cover acres and acres more land in burgeoning Canelius.
“You oughta see it,” the pot-bellied man said, puffing a king-sized menthol cigarette that reminded Adam of the tower that, on some evenings, seemed to float skyward on a blanket of smoke. “Biggest in the county. That shopping center is awesome.”
“We’ll see it,” Adam said softly, but Genero sensed a lack of conviction in his voice.
When they left the Paradise Lounge, Adam asked Genero to continue with the driving duties. There was a tired, distracted look on Adam’s face, a grimness that hadn’t been there before. The Canelius they were riding through wasn’t the Canelius that had gotten wedged in Adam’s memory. There was nothing here that could possibly restore the world of thirty-five years ago to the way it had been. It was just a matter of time before they had to turn the car around and head back to the airport.
“I’m sorry it has to end like this,” Genero said.
Adam shook his head. “It’s all right.” He leaned back against the leather upholstery. “I’m glad we had a look at the station, and I’m glad we stopped in at the Paradise Lounge. I don’t think we wasted our time, but I still think it’s out there.”
“What is?”
“The answer,” Adam said.
“You don’t even know what answer you’re looking for.”
“I’ll know when it gets here.”
They set course for the airport. Their bags were packed and sitting in the trunk, and it was just a matter of catching the next plane to Atlanta, which would connect with the last flight of the day to San Francisco. They were almost within sight of the terminal when Adam stretched out his hand and brought him to a stop.
“What?” Genero said, puzzled.
“One more place.”
“We’ll miss our plane,” he objected.
“I’m sorry, Frank. I can’t go home yet, not until I see it for myself. Please indulge me.”
With a sigh, Genero turned the car around. The clouds seemed to be piling up into a tower of gray and white as they headed south.
28
It came into view slowly, a swatch of green space after a long, gradual curve in the road. The pines and oaks pulled back gently, as though bowing their heads in deference to the sanctity of the site. A tall wooden archway, painted green to blend with the scenery, bore the words “Mt. Nebo Memorial Park.” They drove up a short lane that ended at a stone wall and a parking area large enough for a dozen cars. From there, visitors needed to proceed on foot through a spiked iron gate and up a path. The gate stood half open, and Adam noticed with a start that the gray Pontiac Trans-Am, the same one that had been following them for most of the day, was parked at one end.
Thunder was rumbling in the distance as Adam got out of the car. A sullen breeze played about his head. To the east, you could hear the faint roar of a jetliner taking off from the airport where he and Genero had landed, twenty-four hours earlier, their day spent rolling around in the past. Adam felt tired and depressed.
“Would you mind staying with the car?” he asked Genero.
“You’re sure you don’t want—”
“I’d like to go in by myself.”
He pushed aside the gate and stepped into the cemetery. The section he wanted was in the southwest corner, sheltered by a tall, thick-trunked oak tree whose branches and leaves, at this time in the afternoon, covered the area in shade. He walked slowly up the path, reluctant to look and yet afraid not to. Last time there were two gravestones side-by-side, one for Susan Goldman Bernstein, the other for her mother Rachel. Now there were three, Max’s stone completing the ensemble. The family had insisted on simple, unadorned slabs—no statues or fancy monuments—each inscribed with a date of birth and death and a Star of David.
Along with the standard inscription, Adam noticed the words “We miss you” carved in solemn letters on Goldman’s stone, and on Susan’s grave marker the words, “I miss you.”
Such a small difference, but how significant.
And now? Was there any point to this exercise? Had he come three thousand miles to end up looking at a grave? He stood listening to the breeze, waiting for the voices that used to come to him at times like this, but there was nothing. Only silence. It was as though someone had walked into a room where a radio was playing and turned it off, as though the dial that once brought him a thousand sounds from every corner of the universe had suddenly disappeared.
Only the silence registered, the emptiness.
He stared at the stone and wondered. What would she look like today if they’d grown old together, their faces lined, their cadence slowed, their voices thinned by the emery wheel of time? Would there be children filling the house? Would her hair have gone gray, as his did, or would she have colored it to keep up the illusion of youth?
The odd thing was that he could only see her face in snatches. Most of the time what came to him was an outline, a transparent shape that faded in and out of reality, blending with the trunk of the big oak tree. But he heard her voice clear as a bell. It was the way she spoke that fascinated him then, and still did, with almost no Southern accent, which made her stand out from the other girls. It was a soft voice, low and throaty; a voice that hummed, never harsh, never strident. Now and then you could hear the accent emerging like a woodchuck from its tunnel. It would glance around at the world in wonderment, very shyly, and then vanish to where it had come from.
Why did it have to be that way? Why could it only come to him in small bits, the nights of ecstasy, of glorious intimacy, the mornings filled with birdsongs and the warm smell of eggs frying on the stove. But the dark times, they were different. These he remembered in detail, the weary sadness that followed her miscarriage, the feeling of cold despair once it was clear she wasn’t going to become a mother. He knew now why she had grieved so terribly over the loss. Bad enough that she had lost the child, but this was the second one to be taken from her. She was mourning for two, for the first as much as the second. In her mind, it must have seemed that fate had inscribed her to be childless forever in the book of life.
He glanced back at Max Goldman’s headstone. What a waste. To give his daughter to a man she didn’t love, for the sake of a reputation and because of secrets that were never in danger of being told. What a useless exercise. And yet, some good had come out of it. Hadn�
��t he gotten a year of happiness from Max Goldman’s deception, a year he could live with until he himself was lowered into the ground? Of course, it would never have happened without the envelope and the key. He never deserved her, not for one moment. If he seemed desirable in her eyes, it was only because of what the genie had bestowed one dark and fitful night.
He remembered that night as clearly as if it were yesterday. He was driving home from the station on a particularly dark and faceless street. Canelius had buttoned itself up, showing its angry, cruel side. He remembered pulling over to the curb and sitting, hunched up behind the wheel, staring at the unseeing houses with their drawn window shades and carefully bolted doors. He remembered trying to shake his fist at them in anger, but he couldn’t shake it because his arm throbbed where it had been broken. He sat and stared and swore an oath.
The words still echoed over the years. He remembered shouting in his head, with the arrogance only youth can muster, that he was tired of being forever on the outside, that he needed to be let in. He demanded to be let in, they had no right to keep him from being a part of that secret world. Why it should be so important he never asked himself, but something in that dark, silent place was listening and nodding its invisible head and in that instant a bargain was struck, a deal made, a promissory note handed over with the words: “Payment in Kind.”
He thought he knew what that meant at the time. Now he wasn’t so sure. After all, he hardly knew the man. They hadn’t exactly shared a social life, or gone out for dinner—their schedules would have made that impossible. Scarcely more than a handful of words had passed between them, so what did he expect? Having made a contribution of five dollars, he had in return received a key to a door that could exist anywhere in the world, with no clue to what was behind it, or where it could be found.
And that was it. No transaction, no agreement, not even the verbal kind. You can’t take a key to the bank and expect to receive cash in return, unless of course the key opens a safe deposit box. But keys that open boxes in banks are long and thin, they have a distinctive shape—and damn it, this might not even have been Simon Denning he’d talked to, how could he be sure? The man who sat across from him in the booth at the Paradise Lounge, his back to the door, could very well have been a stranger who just looked like Simon, who had taken on the guise of that big bluff man with the voice like a bass drum, that half-jolly, half imperious jokester who had disappeared into the morning mist and turned up in the smoke of a back-street bar, commuted and transformed.
Why? Was he wasting his time trying to make sense of what had happened? If Simon really wanted to do him a favor, couldn’t he have brought along the one person who meant more to him than anything else in the world?
But that might have been part of the joke. If Simon had run off with a batch of Nat “King” Cole records in his suitcase, he wasn’t likely to come back and play Good Samaritan with someone he hardly knew. The real Simon Denning, assuming this one was an impostor, would probably have put hundreds of miles between himself and Canelius. He had been tricked into spending half an hour in a sleazy bar with a morbid comedian who liked to talk nonsense and whose principal objective, if he had any at all, was the extraction of money for his next drink.
And still, he wasn’t sure.
Someone had laid a small sprig of marigolds at the foot of her stone. The blossoms looked fresh, their petals eager for the approaching rain. He wondered who could have made such a tribute, possibly a relative, an old friend who cared. Was Gwen still in Canelius? There had been so many in those days; now he couldn’t think of anyone who was left. Everything was in the past.
He glanced up at the sky. The clouds were darkening, growing heavier, but the breeze had died, which meant it would be a while before rain arrived. The voices were fading now. If nothing else, he had managed to turn down the volume in the monster radio that seemed to play, interminably, in his head. Straightening himself, he turned away from the gravestones and started to leave. It was then that he became aware of the tall, heavy-set black man coming toward him from the next burial plot.
He was a good-looking man in his mid-thirties, dressed in a conservative brown suit and a black tie. An expensive gold watch encircled his wrist, and he wore black loafers polished to a high shine. There were stress lines, though, down the side of his face, even a touch of gray in his short, curly hair. A small black moustache, a wart to one side of his oddly narrow nose and deep brown eyes partially hidden by fashionable aviator-style glasses completed the picture.
They stood side by side, not speaking for a while, the black man looking down at Susan’s grave with his hands crossed in front of him. At one point he took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped it across his mouth. Finally, he looked up and turned toward Adam.
“She was a beautiful woman, I’m told,” he said.
His voice was soft and cultivated, with just a touch of Southern grace. Adam wondered what could have attracted a man of his age here, since he was obviously too young to have known personally the woman who slept beneath this soil. In fact, after all these years, it surprised him that anyone would be interested in a story so old, so rooted in the past as to be almost part of a legend.
All he knew with any certainty was that the man standing beside him was the one who had parked his gray Pontiac Trans-Am out in the parking lot.
“You’ve been following me, haven’t you?”
The man nodded.
“Why?”
The man introduced himself. “My name’s Neil Hammond,” he said. “I’m with the county district attorney’s office.”
“You’re not—?” Adam started to ask.
The man smiled. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s not official business. I’ve been waiting to speak to you.”
Adam could not resist a stare. “You could have done that any time.”
“I was hoping to get you alone,” Hammond said. “And this is an appropriate spot for it.”
A gust of wind suddenly sprang up, gathering a swatch of dead leaves and swirling them around his feet. Strange, Adam thought, because winter with its mists and glooms, its leaves that shriveled and turned dark and dropped to earth forming a carpet of brown, was a long throw away. Had the seasons been inverted? A pigeon settled down beside a nearby gravestone, pecking placidly for seeds and hidden spoils. A roar in the distance to the east reminded him that their stay in the castle of the past would soon be over.
“We know each other?”
“In a way.”
The breeze died. Off in the distance, Adam caught sight of a small family making its way toward another gravesite. He could make out an adult, two children and a squat figure that could be a grandmother. He wondered if they’d come to pay homage, as he had, and if so who was their loved one buried beneath this solemn ground.
He glanced back at Susan’s grave, and his eye was attracted to the sprig of marigolds at the foot of the stone. “Well, I like your taste in flowers,” he said. “You put them there?”
“Yes.”
“How often do you come?”
Hammond shrugged. “Once a month, more or less, sometimes twice. I try to make time whenever I can.”
Off in the distance, the family group at the other gravesite was beginning to disband. The two children, their hands gripped tightly by a man in a dark leather jacket, stirred for the first time as though released from a malignant spell. Together, they moved down the knoll, unaware that the grandmother had remained behind, bowed before the grave, perhaps for a few more moments of contemplation. It was left to the mother to go back and gently ease her away from her post.
The truth came to him without any touch of surprise, as though it had been waiting there all the time.
“You’re her son, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he took in the silent tableau on the knoll. He didn’t want to stare, but it was hard not to see himself in the scene. He wondered if he too had been left behind. All the
se years, chasing rainbows, climbing towers that did not exist, surely there must have been someone to come back and fetch him, someone to take his arm and say, “All right, old man. Time to give up this foolishness, once and for all.”
He took a deep breath. “I should have known.”
“There was no way you could have.”
“It’s what she told Max.”
“That’s what she wanted him to believe, but at the last minute she couldn’t go through with it.”
“She lied.”
“In those days, it was the only thing she could do.”
The lie was to her father, who then relayed it, compounded it, turned falsehood into truth, and so it had been perpetuated down the years. Now as he stood staring at the gravestone, hearing for the first time a part of her life that he had never known, he knew it was something he’d never been meant to know.
“How did it happen?” he asked.
Hammond told his story quietly, without any of the flourish one would expect from a trial lawyer. He had never known Susan, his real mother, of course. That would have been impossible. After the baby was born, he said, she ended up giving him to a black couple who were living in Paris at the time. The couple were people she had known from Canelius, and young Neil was raised along with two children of their own. They saw to it that he had an education—a good education—and when he was old enough, they told him who his real mother was.
“I was pretty angry at first.”
“I’m not surprised,” Adam said.
“But gradually I came to understand,” Hammond said. “That was the way it had to be.”
“But it didn’t have to be that way.”
“You don’t live around here, do you?”
“No, of course not.” Hammond’s expression said that, because he was an outsider, someone who had only dropped in for a fleeting moment, he would never understand. And he was right. Adam realized that he was probing waters beyond his comprehension. “And your father?”
