Bereavements

by Richard Lortz

  The snow had stopped as suddenly as it had begun, leaving a good half-inch.

  Martin returned, determined to find his Brooks Brothers Gift Certificate. All that was needed to put the two halves together was a little scotch tape, and if the paper was wet he would dry it.

  He found it all right, with no trouble at all, but finding it, also found Bruno who was standing across the street, as motionless as one of the street lamps.

  Curious, guilty, just a little ashamed, Martin approached the little boy—man—creature—whatever it was, saying quite gently and friendly enough: “So . . ! You got thrown out, too.”

  There was no reply, only something polished and slender, and blue and white, drawn from an inner pocket. It opened into the unmistakable gleam of a straight-edge razor.

  Martin had strong slender legs, well-muscled, hard from dancing, and he had, in highschool, won prizes for running, yet he was no match for the gnarled little man whose feet were heeled with the wings of absolute desire.

  This way, that; stumbling, falling, flying the length of a block, then over a fence, hoping, praying to lose his pursuer in Washington Square. He’d passed a car coming toward him and yelled wildly, waving frantic hands at the driver who, this being New York at two in the morning, wouldn’t stop.

  Bruno caught him just before he reached the arch fronting Fifth Avenue where Martin’s foot hit a patch of snow-covered ice, sending him flat on his back and spinning.

  A revolution and a half—and then his throat was cut with a single, deep, swift stroke by the frenzied homunculus squatting on his chest.

  Beginning to drift, drift gently, nerves calmed, anxiety lessened, sweet sleep a promise away, Mrs. Evans rested her dizzied head against a pink pillow. Her eyes had already adjusted themselves to her occasional double-imaged vision: two lamps, two bureaus, two mirrors where only one of each should be. If Angel were here, she’d have twins; four grubby hands, two greedy mouths stuffing themselves full and bursting as if he—they—couldn’t get Cook’s marvels in fast enough.

  The divine woman had baked him a gingerbread boy for Christmas, marvelously decorated with multi-flavored icings of all different colors, and had it under tissue and wax paper to keep it fresh in a lovely ribboned box so big and flat it looked as if it might contain a pizza.

  Is that what he’d think he was getting? A pizza for Christmas. And she laughed a drugged laugh, happy that this dreadful day had ended. Another minute of it and she would have been as mad as that terrifying little boy groveling at her feet. What in heaven’s name had he been quoting?—as if his mind had gone centuries back in time—“Thou deemst thyself miserable; alas! . . .”

  She had wept, never so heartsick and terrified in her life—not since Jamie’s death—to see Dori drag the kicking, shouting little being down the hall, using all his strength, indeed in danger of losing the battle, for despite his diminutive size and twisted body, Bruno had proven fantastically strong, once righting himself on his two spindley legs and throwing the entire man—Dori’s 190 pounds and six-feet-two-high through the air and hard against a wall.

  But finally it was managed. More by cunning than by strength, Bruno was dragged, pushed, thrown, literally kicked out the door where she caught a last glimpse of him rolling and tumbling down the snowy steps.

  “Shall I call the police?” Dori asked, breathing hard, the door slammed and locked.

  She shook her head, weeping. “No. Just. . . watch for a while. Make sure he isn’t hurt. Make sure he goes away.”

  Later, deeper into her drugged heaven, or nightmare, she heard the dwarf’s soft, sad voice, whispering this time: “I should have thought that the day when a woman could reject such a love, the mountains would dissolve . . . and fall into the sea.”

  The words were repeated, and again, as if his beautiful, dreadful mouth were pressed to her ear.

  The mountains would dissolve . . . and fall into the sea . . .

  Now the sound of a police siren; the undulant shriek of it pulled her back into a moment’s reality.

  How close! So loud! The car apparently passing directly in front of the house, speeding toward Washington Square.

  Because the night and the early morning hours had proven such an emotional strain and she didn’t doze off until almost dawn, Mrs. Evans woke about noon.

  She was hungry and finished all her breakfast, down to the last few crumbs of cinnamon toast which she picked up with a tongue-moistened finger.

  Curious Rose had sat there watching her, a most peculiar, open-eyed expression on her face, the Daily News folded on her lap. Something was afoot.

  But Mrs. Evans was content to wait, like a patient chess player for her opponent’s move.

  The move didn’t come. So finally, warmed and content from her breakfast, she playfully goaded the girl to speak.

  “Rose-dear-Rose. I see you have news of importance, bad news, though I cannot imagine what. It is written all over your face and into your manner as plainly as colored chalk on a blackboard. It seems you cannot wait to spoil my Christmas Eve.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am.”

  “You are not sorry. For some reason I have never been able to understand, servants, if you’ll forgive the anachronism, are always the first and happiest to bear bad tidings to their employers.”

  But her levity was short-lived as Rose read her the brief, apparently press-time item about Martin, under the title “Washington Square Murder” appearing boxed on page two of the newspaper.

  “The body of a man identified as Martin Dzierlatka of 122 Grove Street, Manhattan, was found, his throat cut, in Washington Square Park early this morning.

  “Police say the victim, described as white with dark hair, 32 years of age, was discovered shortly after three a.m. near the arch at the Fifth Avenue entrance to the area.

  “The man, about six-feet-one and weighing 170 pounds was dressed in a dark grey flannel suit and tan cashmere overcoat. A hat was found some distance away. He also wore a St. Christopher medal and a gold ring on his left hand. His wallet contained ID, credit cards and fifty dollars in cash as well as a torn but probably usable $500 men’s store gift certificate. Because of these items, robbery was ruled out as a motive for the killing.

  “Police said the neck wound was so deep that the head was almost severed from the body.

  “The victim was found by a resident of the neighborhood who was walking his dog.”

  Mrs. Evans was sure Martin had her name, address and telephone number scribbled somewhere—in an address book, perhaps. And he did have a roommate who might know of her. Even so, she would be only one name among many, perhaps hundreds, since the lives of people in the theater were always weighted with friends, contacts, the slightest of countless acquaintances who might one day prove useful.

  So it did seem possible that the police wouldn’t question her, seeking information. If they did, she’d pretend ignorance, or remember only vaguely that she had, yes, been introduced to the young man socially, and then ran into him once or twice in a restaurant. That would do. Nevertheless, she felt compelled to warn the servants, telling them, if a detective turned up, what to say—which was nothing.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t want to help. But there was no way she could. Martin’s shocking, sickening, heart-breaking death was incomprehensible: a freak accident, a coincidence of time, place and one of the city’s raving psychotics (she never once thought of Bruno) madly roaming the streets.

  What was the point of risking all the unpleasant publicity a revelation of her friendship with Martin would involve?

  None. None at all. No, she would try to put it entirely out of her head.

  Besides, it was Christmas Eve and she wanted all her time to belong to Angel.

  Seated beside her, directly behind four precise nuns, Angel, scrubbed shiny-nosed and sufficiently well-dressed for the occasion, proved true to Mrs. Evans prediction. Consistent with the first immutable law concerning small boys and midnight mass, he twice fell asleep, his h
ead heavy against her shoulder.

  A little later on, during the interminable and (God must have agreed) tedious goings-on at the altar, his behavior—as sure as gravity, as certain as the pull of the moon on the sea—expressed the second immutable law: that is—that any male child under eighteen, regardless of race, if given a coin to hold for the collection, will, at some crucial point in the mass, drop it.

  Angel not only proved the rule but was a classic example. The Ben Franklin half-dollar which Mrs. Evans had Rose polish to its brightest and which he insisted on keeping, not safely in a pocket, but constantly either looked-at or squeezed in a sweaty palm, clattered loudly to the floor the moment the sunburst of the Monstrance—in dead, breathless silence—was raised above the bowed heads of the adoring congregation.

  When they returned from mass, famished for the small feast that awaited them, and Angel’s first look at the snowdrift of presents under the tree Rose and Cook and Dori had dressed, an event of the most singular nature occurred, an astonishing, momentary optical illusion.

  They stepped from the car, and after Dori had driven off to garage it, and they turned to go into the house, they saw that someone had covered the snow-and-ice-cleared stairs with a red carpet.

  In the split-second of her surprise, Mrs. Evans had time to speculate concerning which of the servants was responsible. Dori? Cook? Rose? Perhaps all three, thinking, as a joke, to make her welcome back from midnight mass and to the festive house a “royal” one.

  But it was not a rug at all.

  It was Bruno, of course, who, lying in the deepest shadow under the door, had, more than an hour ago, after watching Angel get into the car with Mrs. Evans, slashed his wrists: two, three, four times each, the criss-cross of wounds erupting, flooding his life down the steps to create, adorn, spread out for the feet of his beloved, the bright, red carpet of his blood.

  Book VI

  TWO FANTASTIC deaths: one a murder, the other a suicide, both so brutal, senseless, bloody and violent, that for hours, sitting numb, motionless at the desk in her bedroom, Mrs. Evans couldn’t, wouldn’t admit the reality of either.

  The Christmas Eve she’d planned, the time in the country where, a day late and despite everything she finally did manage to go and take Angel with her, became a true “mare” of night to which she was hopelessly fettered, the monster rearing and plunging through moors of her mind so desolate, they seemed eerie, empty landscapes of the moon.

  Martin dead, acquired a meaning and a worth he hadn’t possessed in life, and she was anguished, ashamed to have thought the young man trivial, to have used him the way she had, to have been careless, even contemptuous of a friendship that, if partly bought, had only been superficially so.

  I have admired you always. 1 have adored you in a sense . . .

  That much had been genuine, together with all it implied.

  And had money bought the abundance of his grace, his charm, his passion to please her? His sexual ardor, as unwelcome and refused as it was? All were lovely, generous flowers offered in arms too full.

  She had been despicable, disdaining every one, even betraying and disowning him in fact as well as in mind as he lay dead in the snow, his beautiful throat grinning with the hideous mouth cut into it by a maniac.

  Maniac! It was she who had killed him, pulling him closer, pushing him away, then close again, then away, taunting him in her subtlest manner, bruising his pride, his manhood . . . finally sending him off with a goodbye icier than the snow that had swirled between them, hiding him—and it was to be forever— from view.

  And sweet, dear, unbearable Bruno, with his horrid, broken branch of a body, stunted wing, gorgeous face, manly cologne, and fake muscles on boney flesh! What of him?

  It was impossible not to smile—even through tears and the hurt of sobs convulsing her body when she recalled the dwarf’s absurd, impossible passion, the monstrous histrionics of his fantastic: “Alas! Thou knowest not what misery is! It is to love a woman—to love with all the energies of your soul. . .”

  What difference did it make that she hadn’t slashed his wrists herself? She had killed him just the same. Pathetic little boy, coming into the world with a burden so vast it was impossible to carry. Next to his suffering, Christ with his cross was bathetic. No wonder, though born to it, she wasn’t a Christian. The pain of Jesus, the much-publicized agony on the cross—what was it compared to what Bruno had suffered all his life?

  And what of her own, her very own Jamie?—more than three weeks in his dying, the pain so inexplicable, nowhere and everywhere simultaneously, that his muffled brave cries in that flower-choked room were simply not to be endured.

  If she had had a choice, how happy, happy she would have been to see him crucified. Yes! Hang him on nails for an easy three hours!

  That being impossible, she desired to pick up a pillow and quickly smother him to death—and should have.

  Instead, she stuffed handfuls of money into the pockets of slyeyed nurses and orderlies to sneak in extra syringes of morphine, yes, and street-bought pellets of LSD.

  She’d had to buy everything all her life, why should things be different now? Dreams and lies were for sale, too . . . a few hours of peace purchased; sweat dried on the anguished brow, the white knuckled hands that clung through their leather handcuffs to the iron bars of the bed, loosening their frightful, constantly-kneeding grip.

  In the end, like Bruno with his incredible “Alas!” she had dissembled belief, groveling on her knees, crying “Mercy! Mercy!” to Whomever or Whatever might exist that was said to traffic in such things.

  True to her nature, Mrs. Evans almost fainted at the sight of Bruno dead on the stairs. But her loss of consciousness wasn’t total: little more than a staggered, reeling seizure of the bewildered Angel, who had no idea what was happening, together with a strange, prolonged, deep, airy cry—more flute than human voice.

  Intuitive Rose had already opened the door and was prodding the tiny puzzling corpse with a toe before screaming, not understanding the red of the steps which she thought painted by a mischievious child, one of the numerous underground graffiti artists of the day.

  Below, she saw Mrs. Evans in Angel’s arms, all three for moments transfixed until Dori stopped the car and came back.

  It was impossible to walk up the steps: the blood was either still wet or half frozen, so Dori opened the iron gate and helped Mrs. Evans into the house through the service entrance.

  The police were soon there and countless questions asked and answered truthfully, if just a few with understandable circumspection, and because the tiny dead boy on the doorstep had no relatives—at least any that could be found—he was destined to disappear into the city morgue for a few days where an autopsy was obligatory. After that . . .

  Perhaps she’d be back from the country in time, if she could bear to face a funeral. If not (and she wasn’t) she left a large sum of money with Cook and Rose who were to make sure that Bruno had not only a decent burial but an expensive one.

  Later . . . later . . . (she thought vaguely) she would purchase a tombstone: something simple and suitable. And in her dazed, shocked grief, she smiled a little, wondering if any tombstone, even the smallest she could buy, wouldn’t be much taller than the Little Crocodile himself.

  There was another tree in the Long Island house, a nine-foot giant just as you entered—there!—in the great round hall, centered between the twin, mirror-image staircases that rose majestically to the high second floor on either side.

  Angel guessed that this one had been dressed with “ten trillion” of the tiniest lights he had ever seen, each a pinpoint of a distant star. But unlike the city tree “in town” (as Mrs. Evans called New York) with its multicolored ornaments and waterfall of tinsel, this one was covered with small, patiently home-made angels—all of puff-ball cotton, cut-out gold paper and twisted furry pipe-stem cleaners, “in honor,” Mrs. Evans smiled, half-sadly, again wearing her diaphanous mourning, “of the one real angel I know.
”

  There had been so many presents in New York: clothes and books, games and toys, that Angel hardly expected anything more. But here under the tree he found a pair of boy-size skiis and a bright yellow sled with Snow Flyer painted on it in curled fancy script, and under that, his name, his name printed: Angel Rivera.

  He turned from the tree, the skiis, the sled, his face alive with pleasure, but Mrs. Evans wasn’t there. When she came in, hours later, and with Dori and Delia standing idly by, watching, she knelt, smiling.

  “Come here, Angel,” pulling him gently to her, palms cupping elbows, eyes searching his so strangely, he felt a moment’s stinged panic, quite as if it was his father who called him.

  “Enjoy them.” The sled, the skiis, of course. Then: “You feel warm,” the back of her fingers touching his temple; “don’t tell me you’re getting a fever? Darling, not again! You musn’t be sick for the holidays.”

  Her lips touched his cheek; then she moved her head under his so that they brushed his mouth, too.

  And there it was again—the perfume or cologne she put on to make her smell nice, only to Angel it hadn’t the niceness of flowers. It was much sweeter than that, with an acrid echo, a faraway sting of acid that hurt the nerves inside his head, making him slightly dizzy and for the moment blurring his vision.

  Now her hand moved to steady his chin which was beginning to jerk.

  “Do you forgive me?”—almost a whisper, though her eyes rose for a quick look at the servants standing by, as if to see if they’d heard, though it didn’t matter in the least if they had.

  Forgive her for what? He didn’t put the puzzling question into words, but it was so stark on his face he didn’t have to.

  “For . . . everything;” lowering her head, then raising it tearfully. “For all. . . this embarrassing opulence”—with a weary gesture about. “How dreadful . . . how truly awful. But I did tell you that Mr. Harrison-Smith was a theatrical man.”