No. 4 Imperial Lane

by Jonathan Weisman

  “You have friends in high places,” he said as he ushered husband, wife, and baby into his military-issue office, drab but sun-drenched. “General Costa Gomes offers his regards and has asked us to set you up in an apartment off base.”

  Elizabeth looked quizzically at her husband.

  “That seems entirely unnecessary,” João said, “really.”

  The commander shrugged. “It’s an order.” There was something troubling about his expression, incongruous with the surroundings. His face was clean shaven, his hair fashionably long, not military issue. The crow’s-feet around his eyes and worry lines between his brows were more deeply etched than his age should have wrought. He seemed somehow disloyal.

  “Is that safe,” João asked, “for Elizabeth and the baby?”

  Elizabeth gave the major a concerned look as she rocked back and forth and gently bounced her baby. The commander didn’t give her a glance.

  “My friend, an apartment on the avenida is far safer than here. On base, you are a military target. On the Avenida Cinco, you’re just another Tuga, a settler family with a new Angolan child. I suppose in the largest sense, no one is as safe as we’d like to believe. But there is safety in herds. That’s why the wildebeest run in them.”

  He walked back around his desk and sat heavily in his chair, sighing and reaching for some paperwork.

  “You will be part of the great white herd of Nova Lisboa.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  I had stumbled out of bed to go to the toilet when I ran into Elizabeth staring intently at a pair of dusty bookcases in her upstairs parlor. I stood in the hallway in my boxer shorts, surprised by the sight of her and struggling to cover a useless morning hard-on. The sun was out. It must have been getting late, but there were no windows in my room, tucked against the wall that adjoined the house next door. With Hans in hospital, there wasn’t much reason to wake up.

  “My father absolutely forbade me to sell them.” She said it vaguely, her mind clearly on the furniture.

  “The books?” I asked. I was embarrassed to be standing there in my underwear, my recalcitrant erection mocking my situation, but Elizabeth didn’t so much as give me a glance.

  “The bookcases.”

  They were clearly old, soiled by fingers that rubbed over the intricate brass grilles, which were browned with tarnish. Those grilles would have been startling if polished, even I could tell. The sides had these delicate fronds—leaves, I guess—that no one would bother to carve these days. I had never really noticed the bookcases but had looked at the books quite a lot—rows of uniform, graying sets of Thackeray, Coleridge, Pepys, Samuel Johnson, the kinds of British authors you read about without actually reading. Who the hell was Pepys? I thought to myself as I looked at the spine of the great volumes. They looked ancient. I wouldn’t dare touch them for fear that the pages would crack like dried leaves. To me, the books more than the cases spoke of the ancientness of the Bromwell line. I was more drawn to the Africana in the room: brightly dyed fabrics stretched over cheap wooden frames, a carving of a threatening-looking little man in a loincloth holding knives in each hand, a colorful etched gourd with a long, slender handle I once warned Maggie I’d use on her one night.

  “He was beginning to go round the twist, really. He hadn’t said much when I started selling it all off. Sometimes he’d get angry at the racket the transactions made. But when they came for these bookcases, he came alive. He practically barricaded himself in the library.”

  “They must be worth a lot.”

  “A bloody fortune, I’d imagine. They’re kingwood; sixteenth century, my father insisted. I can’t be sure.” She approached them and reached out to touch the carved edges. “Fronds of ormolu. It’s a bit hard to see them, but a quick once-over and they’d be as good as new. Haversham’s on his way. I’ve promised him something good.”

  We both stared at the bookcases for a while in silence. I was tempted to put an arm over Elizabeth’s shoulder. But I was standing in boxers and a T-shirt, my breath, I feared, stale from a long sleep. I was suddenly aware of my Americanness, uncouth in the eyes of Hans, for sure, unsure of Elizabeth’s opinion of me.

  “Go back to bed, David,” she said, turning to me for the first time. Her face was sad, maternal. “I’ve got a bit of a stomachache. I think I drank a bit much last night.”

  I nodded, not knowing whether it was OK to say, “Yeah, Elizabeth, I think you drink a bit much every night.” Instead, I asked, “Sorry, can I use the loo first?”

  “After you, kind sir.”

  I slunk off to the bathroom and back into my room.

  With all those letters clattering around my brain, one on a shredded aerogram was pressing down on me in particular. It had come from my mother.

  Dearest David,

  We haven’t heard from you in a long, long time. I hope you are well. Please write. We miss you. I know your father and I haven’t always been there for you—since Rebecca’s passing. We’ve never really talked about it, and I’m sorry for that, really. I don’t have to tell you your parents did not take your sister’s death well. Some day, I pray, you will have children of your own, and you will better understand the anguish we have suffered—we continue to suffer. But that is not why I’m writing, dear. I’m not making excuses.

  In your absence, I’ve had a lot of time to think about you and your teenage years. I realize now I hardly noticed you turning into a man. Those years are all a blur. I can barely recall a thing. We didn’t give you a bar mitzvah. We didn’t give one to your brother either. Rebecca was still too raw, but still, I’m sorry for that. I have this memory of driving to Providence to drop your brother off at college. Somehow we met you there, but I don’t remember why you weren’t in the car with us. We didn’t take you to college at all. You flew off on your own.

  I can’t complain that you are off on your own now. We gave you little choice in the matter. I want you to know I see all this now. I didn’t see it then, but I have wanted to understand why you didn’t come back after your year abroad. I blame myself.

  David, we are learning to see our sons, I swear. Last week, your father and I cleared out Rebecca’s bedroom. We’re turning it into a guestroom. It was hard. We did it together. I cried, but then in the morning, I looked at the empty walls and the stripped bed, I opened the dresser drawers to see them bare, and moved the garbage bags full of her clothes to the curb for Goodwill. I felt better and thought of you. It’s spring now. You have to start thinking of your future, and I hope that your future is here, not there. My heart is thawing. There is room for you now, and I want you to know I love you and am waiting for you.

  Please come home soon.

  All my love and kisses,

  Mom

  I had been in Washington when my parents took my brother to Brown his freshman year of college. Noah was a skinny kid then, with gray eyes and light brown hair that seemed to come from some other gene pool. I joked about the mailman, something he didn’t find amusing in the slightest. He had a way of making his presence known to my absent parents. He was smart, polite, a striver in the ways parents liked. I had my own mild ambitions, but they were a little off key. I had started an Atlanta chapter of the Children’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, a ridiculous little venture that mostly resulted in well-meaning parents scolding me in Piedmont Park for asking their gullible children to sign petitions they could not possibly understand. A group of us had converged on the nation’s capital to deliver those petitions. I was sixteen. I took a Greyhound with a friend, met a few young senators and congressmen, fell in love with another sixteen-year-old activist named Kirsten, then boarded another bus for Providence. My father had given me the money for bus fare and food. With the arrival of my mother’s letter, I realized they didn’t even remember giving me permission or sending me off.

  My propensity for falling in love—or at least infatuation—came from my mother, Ruth. At barely five feet, she was an overly sensitive woman, buffeted by the world’s storms
and carried along on its currents. She married my father when she was nineteen and at Barnard. My ability to navigate those currents on my own came from my sister. I have this vivid memory of her. I had been reading comics, when I decided to become the Hulk. I took great big oil crayons and colored myself green, covering as much of my body as I could till the greasy utensils broke into bits too small even for my little fingers. My brother laughed and laughed and I loved his laughter. My mother was off at work (she was a social worker with a master’s in sociology by then). My father was at the hospital—a cardiologist.

  I ran into my sister’s room, squealing with joy. Rebecca looked at me with pursed disappointment.

  “David, Dad is going to kill you.”

  “No one can kill me. I’m the Hulk.”

  “You’re an idiot. You touch one thing and you’re dead.”

  It was a little late. Green smears had followed me up from the basement, lurking on walls, banisters, doorknobs, and doorjambs. Rebecca stripped me bare and scrubbed. She scrubbed silently and intently until not a trace of green was left. Then she retraced my steps back to the basement, scrubbing away the evidence. When she finished, she looked at me, sighed, and went back to her book.

  I pulled myself awake an hour later amid the clatter of furniture moving. I caught only the back of one of Haversham’s men walking awkwardly down the stairs. I checked the parlor. The bookcases were still there. The Empire-era end tables were gone, though, along with the jade chinoiserie lamps that had rested on them, with their depressing yellowed-silk shades.

  I felt wonderfully rested by the time Hans was discharged from the hospital. It had been only five days, but those were days filled with sloth. There hadn’t been much they could do beyond some IV drips and infusions of A-positive to flush the blood and restore iron levels. I visited him each day of his stay. Elizabeth made the trek once. He mainly slept. Cristina had dropped by as he was nearing his discharge, to see if she could interest him in a Belgian truffle she had picked up in The Lanes. I told her that perhaps she could dress a little more conservatively, and she managed a pair of jeans and a cropped cotton sweater nicely.

  “I do like that you notice what I wear, David,” she told me. “So many men couldn’t care less. Maybe we could go shopping sometime.”

  The thought thrilled me, but I felt a twinge of sadness. She was so delicate, so lovely, and so far from possible.

  “Anytime, Cristina,” I sighed. “Just say the word.”

  It was not that Cristina and I had no relationship. By this time, I considered her a friend. I wanted more, but I would not dare to seek it. I had worked up the courage to ask her if she needed any help with her studies, intent on making good on my promise to Hans.

  “Why David, do you fancy me that much?” she had said with a slight, suspicious smile.

  My cheeks burned, but I held my ground. “No, Cristina, it’s not like that. Really, I want to be of some help. With Hans away, I might as well work for my eighteen quid a week.”

  She regarded me quizzically. We were where we always were when we spoke, in the kitchen, and she offered a test. “Alright, David, where should we go?” she asked suspiciously.

  I shrugged. I understood the test. If I suggested my room or hers, her suspicions would be confirmed.

  “How ’bout the upstairs parlor? Your mother made some extra room with Haversham’s last visit. There are still a few lamps up there.”

  “Alright then,” she responded with a smile.

  After that first study session, Cristina and I began spending quite a bit of time together. High-stakes testing wasn’t part of my educational experience. I didn’t appreciate the pressure of A levels—she was taking three: History, English Literature, and Biology. But I knew history, even British history, I had a passing knowledge of literature, and I was eager to help.

  “Do you really have the royal line of succession memorized?” she had asked during one of my first tutorials.

  “From Ethelred the Unready to Elizabeth the Second,” I bragged.

  “Alright then, who was before Elizabeth?”

  “You mean Bloody Mary?”

  “No, the current Elizabeth, you sod.”

  “George the Sixth, the one with the stammer, assumed the throne after Edward the Eighth abdicated to be with one of ours, Mrs. Simpson.”

  “Very good, David.”

  She let her hand fall gently on mine, then pulled it away—but slowly—when my searching eyes met hers.

  As it turned out, Cristina could be serious when she wanted to be, and as the first generation of Bromwells to attend state school, she had much to prove—if only to herself. Her grandparents were dead. Her Eton-educated uncle had no pull to hoist her back to the class that was for so long the domain of the clan. Her mother, who hadn’t gone to school as a child at all, was impressed with her daughter’s mere willingness to get up every morning and leave the house. That act alone, the discipline of normalcy, made Cristina the rock of the Bromwell household. If her mother was in a particularly lazy or bad mood, or nearly comatose after a solo bender, it was Cristina that made sure her education stayed on track—a before-dawn wake-up, bus fare into town, assignments organized and done. And with my opening offer, I became increasingly roped in as part of Cristina’s act. I still found her enticing, even over early English history. A sly smile and a twinkling eye through her dark, dark locks, and I’d do anything—even long quiz sessions on Labour politics between the wars. But that desire, I figured, was my problem, not hers. I would not burden her with my longing.

  “The Irish Potato Famine came in what years?”

  “The Great Famine, David. Only Americans call it the Potato Famine.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. Eighteen forty-five to eighteen fifty-two, death toll about a million.”

  “Cause?”

  “The subdivision of land, overdependence on the Lumper potato, and of course the Corn Laws.”

  Literature was my favorite subject for these sessions, even if history was my strong suit.

  “‘The world is too much with us; late and soon, / Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers,’” I read from a well-worn textbook, its spine long broken.

  “Wordsworth,” Cristina chimed back, “written I think very early nineteenth century, no?”

  “Bingo.”

  “Bingo?” she asked mockingly, her eyes twinkling.

  We were sitting on the floor, backs to the wall of a room in a house steadily emptying of its possessions. Her mother, no doubt, was drinking in the kitchen. Her uncle lay still and silent beneath his wool blankets. And Cristina had again laid her soft, long fingers on my forearm. My heart thudded, so loudly I thought surely she could hear it, as I flipped through pages, trying not to scare her away.

  “Tell me about this one:

  Listen! you hear the grating roar

  Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

  Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

  With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

  The eternal note of sadness in.”

  “I love that poem,” she said quietly, her hand still there, burning my skin, “‘Dover Beach.’ Any schoolgirl who grows up on the South Downs knows it.”

  “What do you hear in that section?” I asked.

  “The sea, of course, you twit. I hear it every night if I listen carefully.

  Ah, love, let us be true

  To one another! for the world, which seems

  To lie before us like a land of dreams,

  So various, so beautiful, so new.”

  I rejoined.

  “Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

  Where ignorant armies clash by night.”

  It was late. I put my hand on hers and squeezed softly. She lifted it and enveloped my hand in both of hers, and I brought the precious package to my lips. Our eyes met. I moved my head toward hers, eyes open, riveted by the soft beauty of her lovely face. Then she smiled and turned he
r head to offer a cheekbone sheathed in perfection. My lips found not what they were looking for but lingered on what they found. She gave one more reassuring clasp, dropped my hand, and stood.

  “Best we get to sleep, love.”

  “Cristina, wait. I…”

  “Our next session, David. Biology. Promise.”

  Then she was gone.

  On Hans’s last morning in hospital, I climbed the two blocks on my own to fetch him. Elizabeth was in typing class.

  “Well, David, my welcome wagon, I trust all is well on the home front,” Hans said, strapped tightly back into his wheelchair, snug in his coyote fur, a greasy brown paper bag in his lap with his toothbrush, comb, and some dirty clothes. It was odd seeing him so expertly put together, none of it my doing. I had come to believe I was the only one who could do it properly.

  “Hans, you’re looking a lot better. I won’t get too carried away, but really, I mean it,” I said. And he did look better. The puffiness in his face, the lolling eyes and drooping lip were gone. He looked attentive. But he was still tired. I wondered if that would ever change.

  “Have you shagged that niece of mine yet?” he asked, in a way that would sound serious to anyone who didn’t know better. I had been circling around to the back of the wheelchair to relieve the orderly. A nurse giggled, not knowing how else to act.

  “Cheeky bastard,” she said to him.

  “No, Hans. On my best behavior, not that it’d matter if I wasn’t,” I muttered, jerking the wheelchair a little roughly and heading toward the large double doors.

  Getting myself and Hans back into a rhythm proved surprisingly difficult. Hans was eating nothing now. Elizabeth made a small plate of food for him at meals, knowing he would take a bite or two of each offering and then turn his head away. I no longer ate the leftovers by his side. With so little food on the plate to begin with, swallowing the few forkfuls after Hans would be too mortifying, even for me. Hans was dispirited. I would put the music on for him, more often than not. With so little nourishment, operating the stereo was too heavy a lift on bad days. He could manage turning the pages of a book, though mainly he just stared at the words. I’d set up his reading desk, strap on the rubber-tipped stick, and prop up a very worn copy of a book called Darkness at Noon by someone named Arthur Koestler.