“Yes. He said … let’s see. His exact words were, ‘I let it happen once; I won’t let it happen again.’”
“What was it that happened the first time?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Something Tom said to me in a phone message implied he thought something might have already happened to Nicky; that he might even be dead. Do you have any reason to think that’s true?”
Ellen shook her head slowly, as though it had become weighty with recollection. “Tom was just sort of rambling that day, talking about his brother, and his wife, and how life had gotten so mixed up lately. He was quite despairing, about a lot of things, I think.” Her eyes leaked liquid once again, and she looked skyward. “I hope my father’s right—I hope there is a kingdom up there, a paradise for people like Tom.”
I looked at her. “Do you believe there is?”
She shook her head slowly. “I have a hard time.”
“So did Tom.”
“I know.” Her look was bleak. “He worried about that, too.”
We watched a flock of pigeons make war over a crust of bread. “Everyone keeps telling me Tom would never have committed suicide,” I said finally, “and in the next breath they give me a dozen reasons why he might have done just that.”
Ellen shook her head with sudden vigor. “You have to take it on faith—Tom would never have taken his own life. He would have given it willingly for a thousand causes, but he would never have thrown it away for nothing.”
“Not even to ease the pain you admit he was experiencing?”
She clasped her hands in her lap, tightly, as though the link would make her eloquent. “Tom thrived on pain. No, that’s not it. He didn’t enjoy it, but he needed it. Psychological pain, I’m speaking of. To be torn by conflict, racked with doubt, that was the only way Tom could tell he was functioning at the level he thought he ought to be.”
“I don’t know what that means,” I said with more than a little meanness. “‘I hurt, therefore I am,’ or some such nonsense?”
Ellen closed her eyes. “To know what any of this means—Tom, Nicky, me—I have to tell you what it was like back when we were young.” She opened her eyes and looked at me. “Do you mind a history lesson?”
“History is my business.”
She colored again—her flesh was as variable as a chameleon’s. “It’s not like me to talk about this kind of thing, particularly to a stranger, though since everyone in my life is a stranger, except my parents, I don’t get to …” This time the color was pink. “Anyway, I’d like very much to tell you about Tom. About us.”
She crossed her arms and shifted to a more comfortable position on the bench. “When he was fifteen, Tom Crandall was everything that everyone else aspired to. He got top grades. He played sports. He was a singer, too; he and his friends had this rock band, and when they played for dances, the kids would gather around and cheer and cheer and … well, life was like that for Tom. What other kids dreamed about, Tom experienced routinely. He even played Brick in the senior play. I was Maggie. We were tremendous. The principal was scandalized.” Just now her smile wasn’t Maggie’s at all, but that of an ingenue with a glass menagerie, awaiting a gentleman caller who had already come calling for the last time.
She paused to gather up more memory; when she had, her expression darkened. “The problem was, it came too easily. He did things other people envied, but he didn’t have to work for them—it was more like he was blessed in some way. But Tom was smart, and perceptive, and he saw that because of what he was, some people worshiped him, but other people hated him, and he began to feel guilty about both of those reactions—to feel unworthy of his gifts, even ashamed of them. So he set higher and higher standards for himself, standards that couldn’t be so easily achieved. Because Tom was Tom, they became standards no one could ever achieve.”
“I think I know what you’re talking about,” I said, because it was true: Tom’s personal code was as exalted as any I’d ever seen.
“Tom became obsessed with his shortcomings,” Ellen went on. “They were shortcomings visible only to him, of course; no one else could figure out why he seemed so unhappy. They thought it was contempt, most of them—that Tom was ‘stuck up,’ to use the term of the day—but what no one understood was that Tom’s contempt extended solely to himself.”
“That’s a pretty good prescription for a breakdown, eventually,” I said. And for a suicide, I thought but didn’t say.
Ellen nodded. “The good thing was that Tom kept looking for an answer, but of course any answer that would satisfy him was by definition extreme. He became a vegetarian. He worked nights at a hospital, cleaning up. At one point, he decided to become a monk, so he built a little fort up in the hills and stayed there for three weeks without seeing or speaking to anyone, just to see if he could do it.” She shook her head with wonderment. “When he discovered he could, he didn’t want to be a monk anymore.”
“Sounds like Groucho: ‘I don’t want to join a club that would have me for a member.’”
“That’s it exactly. He could have been a success at anything—doctor, lawyer, business—but that would have been too easy and too … trivial. So he drove an ambulance. And rescued people. And thought about life. And wished he was more than he was.” Her voice broke. “And for some reason loved that woman.”
The reference to Clarissa was as jarring as a curse in the rarefied context in which she’d just been speaking. “Did you ever meet her?” I asked.
Ellen shook her head. “I only know what Tom told me. In the beginning, she was a godsend; in the end, she was trying to destroy him.”
“Literally, do you think?”
Her face hardened into a stubborn mask. “All I know is that Tom is dead. It’s not for me to say whether that’s what she wanted.”
The words were melodramatic and encrusted with bile, and that wasn’t a natural state for Ellen. I decided to move her away from the marriage. “How does your history lesson apply to Tom and his brother?”
It took her a moment to leave Clarissa behind. “Nicky was the opposite of Tom. It was like they were twins, except Tom had the good qualities and Nicky the bad. Tom didn’t realize how exceptional he was, and Nicky thought he was special but he was really just … crazy. Tom had a hyperactive conscience, and Nicky had no conscience at all. He was mean, if you want to know the truth—always in trouble, always doing something to embarrass you, always being compared unfavorably to Tom.”
“Which made Tom feel even more guilty.”
She nodded. “Nicky started acting stranger and stranger. Looking back, it was because his illness had started to set in, of course, but Tom thought he was responsible, that no one gave Nicky a chance to be himself because Tom had led them to expect too much of him. So he set out to save Nicky from himself.”
“How?”
“Oh, he got coaches to take him back on the team after he’d been kicked off and teachers to let him make up the tests he’d skipped and the principal to overlook his truancy. Things like that. Just before Tom went away, Nicky had gotten so bad that Tom convinced a clinic in Walnut Creek to admit Nicky as a charity patient—I think Tom did chores for the doctor, or something.”
“What happened to Nicky after Tom went to Vietnam?”
“Not long after he got out of the clinic, he got in some trouble and left home.”
“Wasn’t anyone helping him? With medication or psychotherapy or something?”
Ellen nodded. “He was still seeing the doctor at the clinic, but it didn’t seem to do much good. The Crandalls didn’t have much money, so I’m not sure they could afford the proper medication. Anyway, Nicky got worse and worse, and eventually he made a mistake that turned everyone against him, so he left town and began to roam. After he got back from the war, Tom tried to keep tabs on him, but it was impossible.”
“What did Nicky do that turned everyone against him?”
Ellen closed her eyes. “I don’t know, but it
doesn’t matter. It’s ancient history; I don’t even know why I’ve told you all this. Living in the past again, I suppose. I tend to do that.” She looked at her watch. “I’ve got to get back.” She opened her purse. “What do I owe you for my lunch?”
“Don’t be silly.”
“Please. It’s only right.”
“No, it isn’t.”
She looked at me again, this time for so long I became uncomfortable. “You remind me of him,” she said softly. “I suppose that’s why you were his friend.”
I don’t know if she intended the reaction, but I regarded her statement as a trophy.
When I started to get up, she took my hand. “Would you do me a favor, Mr. Tanner?”
“If I can.”
“Would you let me talk to you again some time?”
“Sure. Let me give you my card. You can call me whenever—”
“No,” she interrupted. “This is forward of me, I know, but what I want is for you to take me to dinner some time and let me talk about myself. I just … never get a chance to talk about myself. And I have some things I’d like to say.”
I smiled. “When do you want to do it?”
“Any time.” She wriggled with embarrassment. “I’m at your disposal.”
“How about tonight? Then you won’t have a chance to change your mind.”
She nodded somberly, as if we’d just agreed to post the banns. “Please pick me up at seven. I can’t stay out later than ten, or Father will be upset.”
Sometimes children have to upset their parents, so the parents will learn they’re not children anymore, but I decided it wasn’t the time to mention it.
THIRTEEN
I was still drifting, without a client or a crime to propel me, pursuing little more than a sense that something sinister had happened to Tom Crandall. It occurred to me that maybe I was on the case because the possibility that Tom had taken his own life was too much baggage for me to carry, baggage stuffed with a lot of Tom’s incapacities, but, because I called myself his friend and because friendship surely encompasses the obligation to know when the other is despairing and to try to do something about it, with my own ineptitude as well.
Since Ellen Simmons shared my view, albeit for reasons no more tangible than my own, and since she was a woman out of time—a child in some respects, with the charms and vulnerabilities the word implies—I had agreed to be her dinner companion that evening. Second thoughts were all around me as I watched her walk back toward her office—depositing her lunch bag in the trash along the way, picking up someone else’s litter while she was at it—but I decided I couldn’t disappoint someone whose life was already laden with disappointment.
Traffic in the Bay Area is a nightmare these days, partly from the leavings of the earthquake, partly from the time lag inherent in infrastructure, partly from the torrent of people still moving into the area despite its drawbacks, so it seemed silly to drive back over the bridge to the office only to turn around a few hours later and struggle through the rush-hour sludge on my way back to Danville. When I tried to think of something to do on the east side of the bay other than what I usually did, which was to browse some bookstores or tour the art museums, the best I could come up with was to have another chat with Tom’s mother.
I found a phone booth and called the bank. When I got through to Ellen, she reacted as though she were on the line with Beelzebub—my willful breach of the edict against personal calls hinted that she’d made a date with the devil. Not until I told her what I wanted, and why, and promised never, ever to call her again at work did her words melt to a normal timbre. Or maybe her supervisor had left the room.
Ellen gave me directions to Tom’s family home, and thirty minutes later I was there. The house was much like the one Ellen lived in—a small board-and-batten bungalow, a relic of the valley’s origins—but in contrast to Ellen’s militaristic environment, this one was negligently tended and irregularly maintained. Shades drawn against the afternoon sun, the house slumbered like an old gray cat at the end of a driveway that was marked at the street by a metal mailbox on a chain-link post and a rock that was painted white and emblazoned with the number 23322.
There was no car or other evidence of habitation in sight. Heavy and still, the air seemed undisturbed by living things, human or otherwise; even the trees in the surrounding orchard seemed somnolent. I remembered reading that the original walnut grafts—English onto black—are failing for some reason, probably for the reasons the rest of us are failing.
When I knocked at the door, a dog started barking; a moment later a second took up the song. For several minutes the canine chorus was all that greeted me. I looked and listened for signs of life other than four-footed, knocked on the door half a dozen times, wondered what I was doing there in the first place. As if to confirm the illicit nature of my presence, a siren sounded in the distance, adding its voice to the weird chorale, making it a comic opera. The siren got nearer; the dogs barked louder; I was the first to yield.
Halfway back to my car I heard a door scrape open at my back and the porch boards screech at each slow step taken by the person who had ventured onto it. I turned around. Mrs. Crandall, burly in her slip and slippers, was watching me with thick belligerence. The mongrel at her side duplicated her attitude exactly.
Although it was better than midafternoon, I’d clearly awakened her. She seemed dazed, befuddled, and more than a little frightened, as evidenced by the cast-iron skillet that dangled from the hand that wasn’t dragging a thin white strap back onto her shoulder. I made as abject an apology as I could come up with and took two steps toward the porch. The dog growled; Mrs. Crandall brandished cookware.
“I told you the last time, I don’t want you coming around here,” she blurted in a fuzzy rasp.
The combination of grief and slumber seemed to have addled her senses. “I’ve never been here before, Mrs. Crandall. The only time we met was yesterday at Tom’s funeral. After the service, near the grave.”
She frowned. “Tom?”
“He was a friend of mine, remember? At the cemetery, we talked about the old days, before Tom went to Vietnam. And about his friend Ellen Simmons.”
The siren had become loud enough to make us wait for it to whiz past on the highway that was twenty yards behind me on the far side of the lifeless orchard. “You’re not here about Nicky?” Mrs. Crandall asked when the screech had diminished enough for her to prevail above it. “You’re not one of the ones that was here before?”
I shook my head, wondering at the history that had led her to lie to me about her other son when I’d inquired of him previously. “I would like to talk some about Nicky, Mrs. Crandall, but I’m interested in the person who was here before. What was his name?”
“He didn’t say.”
“What did he want?”
“To take Nicky off. In one of those.” She looked in the direction of the fading siren.
“He came in a police car?”
She shook her head. “An ambulance. A white one with red letters.”
I tried to decipher what was going on and finally came up with an answer. “I think the ambulance you’re thinking of was the one Tom used in his work, Mrs. Crandall. His partner brought it to the funeral yesterday, when he came to pay his respects. It must have been someone else who came about Nicky.”
She shook her head. “He told me Dr. Marlin sent him.”
“Who’s Dr. Marlin?”
“Nicky’s doctor. Back when he first went crazy.”
“The one at the clinic in Walnut Creek?”
She shook her head. “Not anymore; he moved away.”
“Why would Nicky need an ambulance, Mrs. Crandall?”
“He didn’t need it; it needed him.”
“Why?”
“To give him his medicine.”
“When was this?”
After a long pause, she slumped and shook her head. “Time’s been lost to me for a while.” She looked up. “I thought it w
as night; I thought it was time for bed. I must have pulled the shades too soon.” As though it had become a stone, she bowed her head until her chin rested on her chest. “It’s a fearsome thing to be confused about day and night.” To register his sympathy, the dog muttered a woeful moan.
I resumed my advance on the porch. “I’m confused about a lot of things myself.”
Mrs. Crandall regarded me with dispassion. “You’re young. You’ve got time to straighten yourself out. I’m too old to change a thing about me or the world, either one.”
“No one’s that old,” I said, then wondered if I believed it. “I had lunch today with a friend of yours,” I went on as affably as I could manage given the look in the mongrel’s eye.
“Who?”
“Ellen Simmons.”
Her eyes widened, and her grip on the skillet loosened. “Tom’s Ellen?”
I nodded. “I met her at the bank where she works, and we had a picnic by the lake.”
She considered my story, compared it with her estimate of reality, then nodded. “Ellen has an important job.”
I envisioned the stark and servile basement where Ellen Simmons paged through her pile of checks. “Yes, she does.”
“Ellen always loved Tom. Even after he married that woman.”
I nodded. “I think you’re right.”
“I don’t know what will happen to her now that he’s gone.”
“Maybe something good.”
The answer caused her to blink and, surprisingly, to join forces with me. “God knows Ellen deserves a blessing. We’ve seen too much grief, the both of us.”
I nodded again and let silence edge my attitude toward tenderness. “I don’t want to bother you much longer, Mrs. Crandall,” I went on when it looked like her pool of pity had drained a bit. “I was just wondering if you’d heard from Nicky lately.”
My question seemed to surprise her, not because she didn’t know the answer but because I didn’t. “Nicky never comes out here anymore. Everyone knows that.” The declaration was orotund with truth.
“Does he call?”
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