by Jack Livings
Sadistisch, sadistisch, she’d said. The infantry destroys. It’s those who come after, bearing accordion folders and documents, the shaved, pressed, and dressed, who conquer. Berlin, was it? Or Nuremberg? Why was he revisiting these things? What sadist was behind all this? Oh for god’s sake, don’t pretend it’s a punishment. What difference did it make who he thought about—he was nothing but an animal prowling old hunting grounds. No harm in it. They were pictures, not people. And then one day, in the doorway: Erica, as soft around the edges as a blurry photo, yet real, flesh and blood, a beating heart and a compassionate soul. God, how embarrassing, looking at her was like being caught peeping through a hole in the changing room wall, yet he kept catching himself doing just that. A little burst of shock and he’d turn his head, imagining himself to be disgusted. If nothing else, he had his iron will. Once that was gone, he was finished. He’d restrained his hands if not his eyes, and kept his comments to himself, and after she’d been with him a few weeks, the afternoon waters calmed. Sometimes he allowed her to sit in the room with him and read. She absorbed his loneliness, shuffling quietly through her copy of the Post, occasionally murmuring in dismay at a bus plunger or a smash-and-grab with casualties, and she made him feel that there was some life yet in the world. All those afternoons before her, his mind had gone to what was available in the archives, but now those memories had been sent back on their wheeled carts. He’d almost become fond of her.
More than fond. I know that he dreamt of being summoned to her room, where she would pull away the sheet and slide down the pillows, her parted fingers reaching for him in supplication, speechlessly beseeching as only someone unhitched from shame could, her body a pool of water for his thirst, her breasts, her belly, the dark saddle between her pliéd legs a feast, her thighs as thick as tree trunks, and she would be murmuring his name, begging for him.
The other memory, the one he meant to tend so carefully, was untethered and would arrive on its own schedule, flagellate him, evaporate, then reconstitute, a time-lapse shot of a cloud on an endless loop. The blue sky, the pool, the body. It came and went like the weather, and because when the memory was gone it left no trace, every time it reappeared it was a fresh pot of scalding water. This was the horror that he did not want to outlive.
When was it that he began to regard his inner life as nothing more than a slightly mysterious facet of his physical being? Love was an ache in the center of his mass. Lust, a hard-on. Sadness was a dragging, salty ache at the back of the throat, an emptiness like hunger. When emotions acted in a disorderly fashion, he put them in a headlock and choked them until they submitted to his will. He shoved them into the sunlight when he felt blue, whipped them when his courage failed, strangled his unmentionable desires, and applied exacting reason in those rare instances when he couldn’t force the stubborn beast to correct its course. When confronted with an undeniable truth about himself, a jag in his otherwise linear existence, he reflected the inquisitorial beam back onto his family, his colleagues, whoever happened to be available to lash to the pyre and torch in sacrifice to the gods of self-ignorance. Feelings! Gibberish language, a translation of a translation of a translation, distractions no sane person needed to spend more than the bare minimum of time wrestling into submission. Feelings were a tactic women invoked when they didn’t get what they wanted.
So inexperienced in matters of his own heart, he’d barely managed to develop a rudimentary language for the sorrow that came after the boy’s death, but then when Sydney died he had to create yet another lexicon of grief, and that was beyond even the great mind of Albert Caldwell.
* * *
Someone was slamming cabinet doors in the kitchen. Albert listened, looked around, and waited for his brain to make sense of it. Fil was at his desk, one hand full of unopened mail, the other flipping through the checkbook ledger—platter-sized, three checks per page, green pleather with an embossed gold border.
She’d gotten through to Erica on the phone, but the girl would say nothing more than she no longer needed the work, about as naturally as a hostage reading off a cue card.
Stop bothering my things, Filomena, Albert said. Come back over here.
Daddy, last time. What did you do to Erica?
Albert leveled his eyes on her. I don’t remember.
I’ll get to the bottom of it, she said. Honestly, Daddy. Look, I’ve told you not to worry about writing checks.
What are you talking about? Albert said.
Daddy, I pay all the bills. Erica leaves them here for me. She held up the rubber-banded stack of envelopes.
Of course you do. What are telling me not to write checks for? I know full well you’ve robbed me of every adult responsibility.
Just stop writing checks. I’m leaving you a note here that says, No Checks, okay? And where in the world are you getting these numbers? Two forty-nine to D’Agostino’s?
Delivery charge, he shot back.
Daddy, Erica shops with you. You two go to the store on Tuesday and Friday.
I’m fully aware of that, he said. He looked around for Tracy, hoping for confirmation that her sister was behaving unreasonably, but apparently Tracy was the one banging around in the kitchen.
Fil carried over the ledger and laid it in his lap.
What, Filomena, what? he said. I thought I wasn’t to write any more checks. Get this off me.
Daddy, look here. If you want to get away with it, you’ll need to stop documenting your crimes so carefully. These receipts. This one, and this one. You’re too meticulous for your own good.
There it was, handwriting that exactly matched his own. A jolt, as if he’d touched a live wire. He flipped through the stubs.
Fil went back to the desk, opening and shutting drawers until she found what she was after. Good god, Daddy. Here, look. One drawer was packed solid with signed, uncashed checks. You really went on a tear this week, didn’t you? Fil said.
Not so long ago he was still trying to mail them, but recently he’d taken to stashing them all over the desk, a disheartening adjustment, Fil realized, because it meant that the task of writing the check, addressing the envelope, sealing it, locating a stamp, and posting the letter had become too much for him.
She dropped the stack of checks onto the ledger in his lap. Albert glanced down at them, casually, as though assessing a bowl of peanuts put out by a bartender. Fil waited. He picked them up. There were about thirty, all bearing his signature. He hummed to himself as he went through them.
Even confronted with written proof, he could not bring himself to believe that it was his memory that had failed to retain the image of his pen scraping across the check’s pale green surface. Surely it hadn’t been he who had written all these. No, quite impossible. There’d be an imagistic flicker, a tickle somewhere in his brain. Surely it wasn’t he who’d written the checks. It had been someone else.
This is outrageous, he said. It’s the girl. She’s been forging my signature.
Daddy, said Fil, her fingertip tapping at the ink, you wrote these checks. It’s your handwriting. It doesn’t matter that you’ve forgotten. Just acknowledge that you did it.
I’m not a child, Filomena.
Who said you were a child?
You’re treating me like a naughty boy.
No one’s treating you like a naughty boy. You’re just making mistakes, do you get that? You’re making mistakes and that’s fine, but would you just admit it?
I’ll do no such thing. This is a kangaroo court! Let’s drag the girl before judge and jury and we’ll see what she has to say for herself.
It was then that Albert’s eye fell on a check he’d written for $10,000, made out to Erica Spindrake, a check she’d refused to take even though she’d agreed, in principle, to allow him to buy her out. He’d discovered during one of her monologues that her father had taken ill and for that very reason she was working as Albert’s caretaker instead of attending classes at CUNY, and he offered on the spot to rectify the situation in
exchange for her prompt resignation. He did not know what to make of the check now in his hand, but he could imagine, and when Fil turned away he hastily stuffed it down the side of his seat cushion.
Fil was threatening to take the ledgers with her if he couldn’t stop himself from writing checks. Well, he said, if he wasn’t even aware of the existence of the impostor who was writing the checks, presumably while he was asleep, then how the hell was he supposed to stop it?
Albert couldn’t have recalled that this had first happened over a year earlier, or that this scene played out every week or so since, Tracy and her wet black eyes watching from her seat across the room. To Albert it was a fresh inquisition every time, and to Fil, ever more depressing. Her frustration had given way long ago to sorrow. She played frustration now, a dutiful daughter creating reality for her father. It was all a stage show and they were a ragged troupe hashing out the same old lines, entering and exiting, a spiritless production of a dusty old American tragedy. Yet Fil dreaded the day she’d search the desk and find empty drawers, a cheerful old man smiling wanly at her from across the room.
What Albert also failed to recall was that Erica, nowhere close to the dim bulb everyone took her for, had the previous Friday walked with him to the Chemical branch on 82nd Street and stood by as he’d withdrawn $10,000 in cash. She had packed and left that afternoon, only too happy to turn half of it over to her father (her whole take, for all the elder Spindrake knew), whose illness’s primary symptom was a tendency to place bets on perennial losers at Aqueduct. With the other half wrapped in butcher paper and stashed in the back of her closet, she began plotting her own escape.
We’re getting someone new, Daddy, Tracy said. I’m phoning an agency as soon as this storm’s blown through. We’re going to get someone who can put up with you. Understand?
Fine, fine.
As girls they had stood on tiptoe, one on either side of him, and he’d bent down for their kisses. Now Tracy knelt at his left, Fil at his right, and they crossed their arms over his chest and pressed their lips to his cheeks.
My girls, he said, folding his hands over their forearms.
As they rose, Albert did an unexpected thing. He caught them both by the wrists and looked into their faces, his great mottled head swiveling back and forth, and then he pulled them both down and embraced them.
They thought at first he was hallucinating, and they weren’t all wrong. He’d heard a sound, something from far away, and he was holding them close the way he’d have held them as children, to keep them quiet, to silence the room, so he could identify the source. But he couldn’t put his finger on it. He thumped them on their backs and released them.
If the trains are running, we’ll be back tomorrow, Daddy, Fil said. Otherwise, we’ll see you the day after.
Not if you’re lucky, he said, his standard sign-off, plunging his girls into an ice bath before sending them out into the cruel world.
Bye, Daddy, Tracy said, kissing his cheek one more time for good measure. The floorboards in the hallway creaked as they made their way out, and the heavy maple door swept closed with a hermetic swoosh, the locks ticked, silence descended.
In the hall outside, Tracy said, I’m telling Manny not to let him out even if the building is on fire.
Hope you have some cash, Fil said.
One of us should stay with him tonight.
Are you nuts? Fil said.
Probably.
Because if you stay, you’re going to be presenting arguments to hizzoner in there until three in the morning. And then you’ll get to sit through the rebuttal, which should take you right through to breakfast.
Sounds like a good time to me, Tracy said.
You know he won’t set foot outside the building unless one of us tells him not to, not in weather like this.
I know, Tracy said. I know. What are we going to do about Erica?
What’s there to do? She’s done. Finis, Fil said.
How many times are we going to have to go through this?
Once. We’re getting him a muscle-head. A big dumb idiot. A big dumb idiot who doesn’t speak English.
Tracy nodded.
One of these days he’s just going to disappear, you know. He’ll turn into a nice old man who can’t remember his own name and he’ll do exactly what we tell him to.
I know.
And we can empty his accounts and retire to Bermuda, just as we’ve always planned, Fil said, grasping Tracy’s arm. We’ll finally have those matching minks and—and—and we’ll never think of home and we’ll drink martinis all day and laugh and laugh!
We’ll seduce the pool boys!
Oh yes, yes. One each.
Two each. And when we’re done with them, pffft, Tracy said, drawing a finger across her throat.
And we’ll flee to Monaco!
Poor Daddy, Tracy said. Murderesses for daughters.
You can’t say we don’t come by it honestly, Fil said.
Jesus Christ, Tracy said.
* * *
Alone in the oak-paneled den, among the piles of Barron’s and the Journal, the weekend’s cigar stubs leaning like drunk, fat little men against the ashtray’s marble walls, Albert reached for the Bakelite radio on his reading table, and his fingers tapped against the grille but he did not turn it on. His daughters’ presence was still draining from the room. People left no truly meaningful remnants; a person was either there or she wasn’t, and a photograph or old dresses or drawers full of her stockings and sweaters were only artifacts, triggers for memories, and memories were morbid things, confirmations of loss. He had nothing left but absence. So it was just as well that he go.
Once he became accustomed to the room’s silence, it was as if they’d never been there at all. Outside, the usual symphony of horns and sirens. The roar and scrape of the plow trucks.
Through the French doors he saw the baby grand in the corner of the living room, and from there his eyes drifted back to the sofa across from him, the rumpled basins left by his daughters’ behinds. The Oriental rug, turned up at the corner, and on the coffee table, his own empty scotch glass. A water mark. He supposed the girl would put some mayonnaise on it, but as he filled his lungs with air to bellow her name, he wondered why it mattered.
All the same, he called after her, repeatedly, in a harsh, barking voice. She didn’t answer.
Oh. Yes. The girl is gone.
He went to the sideboard, poured a scotch right up to the rim of the glass, and sat back down. He sat in his chair for another hour, the leather creaking when he shifted his weight, fingering the rivets at the end of each arm, not exactly thinking but allowing thoughts to skip across the surface of consciousness. The girls; vague screwball theories about commodity prices; images from a trip to Ireland he took with Sydney in 1966. His son, who never visited. He winced when he thought about his grandson, and he invited the memory to submerge him. All along, his mind was rummaging around for the plan.
How did it start, again?
Another hour passed. He nodded off, snapped awake, repeated the cycle. More snow slipped by the window. Intonations drifted from the heating grates. The pipes knocked in the wall. Night soil sliding down to the sewer. What causes the vibration of pipes filled with human waste? Something to do with vacuums, air pressure, he couldn’t exactly be sure, but now he had an image, all the waste behind all the walls of his apartment, the dark mass in transit, surrounding him, a prison of excrement. When he’d arrived a scholarship boy at Tolver in 1918, he’d never used an indoor toilet. In those days, one became a man at thirteen. Today one could make a good living playing sports or popular music, one could dress in a T-shirt and tennis shoes, eat at 21 wearing blue jeans. Money had superseded the refinements of the upper class. Did this mean anything to him? No, only an observation. In this era a man’s chief aim was to remain a child.
He sneered and exhaled through his teeth. Wasting time. He hated wasting time. Where was the girl? He consulted the small notebook he kept in his pocke
t. It was Monday. Was it Monday? Yes. His scotch glass was empty. He got up and refilled it.
The girl is gone.
He’d dismissed her, had he? Things would be different for her afterward. His daughters might file suit, but what could they take from her, sheltered as she was by poverty? Would she miss him? Unlikely that she’d ever visit his final resting place, or glance mournfully out at the river. If he failed to complete his task, he’d be institutionalized. He’d never see her again, either way.
The girl is gone. Good. So you’ve taken care of that.
He was trying to puzzle out what hospital to call when Erica appeared, an apparition floating down the hall like a whisper, turning the corner into his study with an imperceptible sigh. Efficient as ever, she moved to clean up the decimated Times scattered on the floor beside his chair.
I’m still reading that, he snapped.
She backed away.
You didn’t use a coaster, she said.
It’s my goddamn table. Put some mayonnaise on it.
Did you have a nice visit?
Yes, he said quickly before scrambling to recall who had visited.
Well, that’s good. Did Fil make you something to eat?
He looked around, in part to gather more information so that he might answer, in part because he meant to show her that he couldn’t see anything she couldn’t, and that the question was stupid.
