The Night Listener and Others
Page 21
Four years after we were married, Rachel became pregnant. It was a good time, as our finances were sound. My work was a staple in some of the better Midwestern galleries, and I’d just had my first show in New York. The year before I’d even been mentioned in a feature in Time entitled, “The Neotraditionalists,” although no reproductions of my work were shown. On the phone, my father mentioned having seen the article, and I thought (or hoped) his words held just a hint of pride in me, but perhaps I was wrong.
I had not seen him so excited in years as when we told him of the pregnancy. “So I’m going to have a grandson,” was the phrase he used, and he repeated it at intervals as if he could not believe the reality of it.
The first time he said it, Rachel had gently reminded him, “Dad, it could be a granddaughter, you know.”
He had only laughed and said, with a nod to me, “Not in this family, not if I know this one. It’ll be a boy all right.”
Rachel was a little unnerved by his certainty, and in the car on the way home she slid toward me and placed my right hand on her still flat abdomen where our child lay encased. “Promise me something,” she said.
I smiled and nodded.
“When we have our baby—boy, girl, whatever—promise me that when the time comes to let him or her go, you will.”
I looked at her, a little irritated that she could so easily know the secret that was never a secret. “I know what you mean,” I said. “I know exactly what you mean. I know better than anyone.” I put my hand back on the steering wheel. “I’ll let him go,” I promised. “Whenever he wants to go, I’ll let him and help him and tell him I’m always there if he needs me.”
She was pleased, and soon she fell asleep as we drove west into the red dusk.
The baby arrived exactly on the day appointed by the doctor, and it was, as my father had so definitely predicted, a boy. We named him Edward after my father, and from his reaction you would have thought that it was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for him. He doted on the child, bringing him toys far beyond his age as well as many that he could play with. As the boy grew, he in turn loved his grandfather dearly, and I often found myself just the slightest bit jealous as my son would totter from me to his grandfather, babbling little nonsense songs full of love. It wasn’t that I didn’t have a loving relationship with the boy, because I did. It was simply that “Gampa” was special in a way that was impossible for me to be.
I’ve never been what some people would call a loving person, and Rachel did most of the real parenting in the family. I would read an occasional bedtime story, give horsy rides on my knee, and indulge in dozens of other such father-son activities, but I never really enjoyed it the way Rachel and my father seemed to. I did much of it because it seemed somehow obligatory on my part.
Still, when he died, when Rachel died, I was crushed, totally and finally.
Eddie had just celebrated his second birthday a week before with a small party attended by our friends and their children. My father had been there, of course, with his grandpa’s smile and manners, literally the life of the party, no small feat in a crowd of screaming toddlers and preschoolers. He and I had come together again since my son’s birth, and I would sometimes go with him on weekends to an old cabin he had bought since his deer camp had been eventually dissolved by the various deaths, disinterests, and decrepitude of its members. He would hunt, and I would do sketches for a “Naturalist’s Notebook” series I was planning. Although we were not what one could call open on these occasions, neither were we forced or uncomfortable. It was rather like old times again.
And then came the accident. I’d been reminding myself from time to time to have the right rear tire on the Volvo replaced, as it was getting so thin that the tread was worn smooth in places. It blew as Rachel had nearly finished passing a semi on a four lane. The child’s car seat, the seat belt and the air bags didn’t help at all. The doctor at the scene said they must have been killed instantly. I remember that when I identified the bodies I hoped they had been.
After I took care of the technicalities, I called Rachel’s parents. It was very hard to tell them, and they took it very badly. After I broke the news it was almost impossible to get any sense out of Mrs. Gold, and Mr. Gold was weeping heavily. I told them I would call them back that evening with the details of the funeral, and gratefully hung up.
Then I called my father. His hello sounded tired.
“Dad,” I said. “It’s me.”
“Oh, how are you?”
“Dad, I have bad news. Something terrible’s happened. Rachel and Eddie…there was an accident. In the car.” I paused. The silence at the other end seemed as loud as a dozen Niagaras.
“They were killed, Dad. Both of them. They’re dead.”
The silence kept rushing into my ears for I don’t know how long, seconds or minutes, finally broken by a low moaning, followed by a series of wrenching sobs that sounded as though a giant fist was spasmodically squeezing my father’s chest. Then there was a soft click.
“Dad?” I said. “Dad, are you still there?”
He was not. He had hung up. I dialed his number again, but there was no answer. I must have let it ring thirty times before I finally gave up.
That evening I made arrangements at the funeral home, and the next morning I drove the hundred and sixty miles to my father’s house. It was locked, showing no signs of life, and his car wasn’t in the garage. I asked a neighbor if he knew where my father was. He said he didn’t, but the car had been gone when he awoke at seven.
I drove home, hoping he would call me. My house felt like a mausoleum, emptied of my wife and son’s bodies and spirits, but filled with their things, the shells that marked their one-time existence in this house, the toys, clothes, the small stool my father had made for the baby’s first Christmas, now nothing but artifacts, like flint tools found in a cave, reminders of the extinct beings who once used them.
With thoughts like these I quickly recognized and accepted the finality of their deaths. I had no illusions that it was all a monstrous mix-up out of a TV sitcom, that they would walk in the door smiling the next minute.
Rachel had made me promise, and the time had come, not only to let him go, but to let her go as well.
The funeral was held two days later. The Golds came out from Ohio, but my father didn’t attend, nor had he tried to call me at all. I had dialed his home frequently, but there was no answer, not even from his answering machine, which he must have turned off. I’d even called his shop, but they hadn’t seen him for three days, and had started putting the absence on his vacation time. The Golds, distraught as they were, had the good taste not to ask where he was. They and I talked little before, during, or after the service, and I’ve not been contacted by them since.
I drove again to my father’s home the following weekend after receiving no answer to my repeated phone calls. I had called his shop on Friday, and they told me he had called and apologized for not coming to work, but that there had been a death in the family, and he would be in on Monday.
I arrived at his house early Saturday afternoon. The car was in the garage, and when I looked in through the dusty windows I saw a tricycle beside the car. It took a few seconds, but I recognized it as the one I’d had when I was a little boy. Then I saw the other things, the big metal dump trucks, the tin shovel and pail with starfish painted all over it, the wooden pull-toy of the mother duck and three ducklings that must have been in my father’s attic for decades, at least a dozen toys lying there in the car’s shadow.
I walked up to the house and knocked. There was no answer. I looked around the large yard and saw a red and yellow inflatable wading pool filled with cold clear water, a plastic duck bobbing gently in the light breeze, and a fat green garden hose stretching like some jolly cartoon snake from the pool to the outside faucet. A toddler’s chair swing was swaying back and forth from its ropes in the maple tree, as though occupied by an unseen rider. I looked away and knocked again.
Finally I went to my car, got some paper and a pen, and wrote my father a note saying that I wanted to see him and talk to him, that it was very important, and please to call me, or, if he didn’t want to talk, to write. I also wrote down my phone number and address, thinking that in his state of mind he might have misplaced or forgotten them. As I stuck the note in the crack between door and jamb, I thought I noticed a slat of the venetian blind in one of the windows move, but when I looked it was down, parallel with the others. The whole house seemed to be watching me as I got into my car and drove away.
The letter from my father came the following Wednesday. It read:
Dear Sir,
I am writing this letter to you at the address you left, hoping that you will stop bothering me with your phone calls and your visits. I don’t know what you want but I don’t want to talk to you. You signed your letter to me “Your son.” This is very cruel as my son and his wife were killed in a car accident just a short time ago. I don’t know why you are bothering me this way and I hope you will stop before I have to call the police to make you stop. I am a very busy man with my job, and please do not try to reach me there, along with my raising my grandson Robert since his mother and father died. I hope you will respect my privacy and my recent loss and will not bother me anymore.
Sincerely,
Edward Harris
My grandson Robert, he had written. Robert is my name.
I think that, at last, my father has the son he always wanted.
Jeaves and the Deteriorating Relations
Try as I might, I couldn’t see how things could’ve gotten much worse. I, that is to say Bernard Worster, was in as great a pickle as I’ve ever been in in my life, and my man, Jeaves, who usually bails me out of such dashed tricky predicaments, was on one of his brief (for him) and frustrating (for me) holidays, blistering himself on some sunny seaside, while I sat perplexed, dismayed, and otherwise flummoxed to the nth degree.
I mean to say, there I was, firmly ensconced in Binkley Court, the charmingly situated country house of my Aunt Delia and Uncle Tim Traven, at what should have been the most pleasant time of the year, mid-August, of which the Bard of Avon had once penned, if memory serves, “Da-dum-dee-dum as a something in mid-August.” Yet the Worster brain was as muddy as a muddy stream, pardon the simile. It seemed that everything had gone helterskelter at once.
In short, I found myself once more accidentally engaged to both Marjorie Bucket and Hortense Crayne, and in so doing had simultaneously aroused the ire of these two beazles’ former Romeos, Gustie Fink-Tottle and Rodney Spade, both of whom wanted nothing less than to blacken the Worster eye-sockets, break the Worster spine in four or five places, and probably a great deal more; I knew of a dreadful plot by two other blackguards, a husband-wife team, to steal Uncle Tim’s precious and highly coveted antique cow-creamer, but could not expose the plot lest the miscreants reveal to my Aunt Delia a minor incident on Boat Night in which I, egged on by my fellow Sluggards, had been arrested for knocking off a policeman’s helmet with a lump of horse dung, and Aunt Delia was already peeved at me for doing nothing to prevent the upcoming purloinage of her prize cook, Monsieur André, by Bungo Liddell, by whom he had been formerly employed.
I confess that, in Jeaves’s absence, and without his all-knowing and guiding hand, I could see no other course but to confront my various fiancées, rivals, mugs, and relatives face to face, decapitate them one at a time, and place all their heads in that idyllic and peaceful lake on the west lawn, the one with the little island on it.
But I find that I’m getting ahead of myself, as Jeaves has often informed me, so I suppose it best to slow down and let time run backwards in its something-or-other flight and fill you in on how poor Bernie Worster, viz. moi, came to this sorry state.
I suppose it all began the morning Jeaves made that little slip with the new razor while shaving the Worster phiz. Not that I blamed him at all, mind you. We were both in a rush, Jeaves to go on his holiday, and myself to bung down to Binkley Court and enjoy a fortnight or so of sponging off the old aunt and uncle and sopping up André’s delicious viands until my stomach was of the approximate circumference of an official medicine ball.
“New razor, Jeaves?” I sharply observed.
“Indeed, sir. I hope it meets with your liking,” he said as he stropped it back and forth in an almost hypnotic motion. Funny how the simplest act becomes one of those proverbial things of beauty and joy forever in Jeaves’s graceful hands. He looked like that Michelangelo chap must have when finishing up daubing the beard of the almighty on that ceiling in Italy.
“Why the change, if you don’t mind my curiosity?” I queried.
“The previous razor, sir, was getting a bit nicked in spots. I thought it best to take the liberty of retiring it before its flaws evinced themselves by producing a minor scratch. The resultant sticking plaster would most certainly spoil the line of your collar, and the color would clash with your hat.”
“Right ho, Jeaves,” said I, turning my attention to the morning newspaper, the front of which was cluttered with stories of whatever war we were currently fighting. I flipped several pages back and perused the results of the previous day’s cricket matches, while Jeaves dolloped warm shaving cream onto the Worster cheeks, jaw, and throat.
When he raised the new razor into view, I was struck by both the sheen of the steel and the attractiveness of the handle. “By Jove, Jeaves, that’s a peach of a grip—what’s it made of ?”
“Ivory, sir.”
“What are those little bits—symbols of some sort?”
“Those delicate carving are, I believe, of grape leaves and a flower that I believe to be lilies.”
“Quite spiffy indeed. Where’d you come across such a superb instrument of the barber’s art?”
Jeaves began to tickle my whiskers with the blade as he filled me in on the item’s hist. “I procured it from the modest estate, sir, of a cousin who departed England for the United States some years ago.”
“Estate? Does that dire word suggest that your cousin no longer dwells in the land of the living?” I closed my eyes to revel in the sensation of the razor against my rosy cheeks. It glided along so smoothly in Jeaves’s capable mitts that I was scarcely aware my face was being denuded of bristles.
“I’m afraid that’s the case, sir,” said Jeaves, his always sober voice sounding even more melancholy than usual. “A small tragedy befell not only my cousin, but his wife and children as well.”
“Proceed, Jeaves. My curiosity tingles with expectation. Details, if you please, full steam ahead.”
“It was one of those small tragedies, sir, that writers of popular fiction will no doubt one day elaborate upon and totally obfuscate.”
“Ah, you mean the way that writer chappie takes my memoirs and changes them around a bit, rebusing up our names and dropping in all those gags and such?”
“Precisely, sir.”
“Well, can’t complain as long as my share of the royalties keep trickling in.
Pray continue, Jeaves, with this cousin yarn.”
“There is actually little of import to relate, sir. My cousin was in service at a resort hotel in the American state of Colorado.”
“Ah, in Hollywood?”
“That would be in California, sir. This particular Colorado hotel shut down for the winter due to snow, and my cousin and his family, who were overseeing the hotel that winter, were frozen to death when the furnace failed.”
“Brrr.” I shivered in sympathy. “Not a very pleasant way to depart our veil of tears, eh?”
“I wouldn’t know, sir, but I have heard that freezing to death is not unpleasant, rather like going to sleep.”
“Says
who?” quoth I. “Anyone ever come back to swear to that?”
“You have me at a disadvantage, sir. I know of no such eyewitness account.”
“So you got a razor out of the whole brouhaha, eh?”
“Along with a few other items, sir.” Jeaves went on with the tale and the shave, which had proceeded to scraping the neck with smooth upstrokes. It felt like a feather, or at least like a feather would if it were sharp steel. “The razor had been passed down to him by another family member who had gotten it from the estate of the original owner, a barber by the name of Todd. It was, from all reports, his prized possession, and has held up admirably over the ensuing years, as I trust you’ll agree, sir.”
“You betcher, Jeaves, just like grease across a pig’s…ow! “
The completion of my deft simile had been interrupted by a sudden stinging at my neck. It wasn’t so much the usual razor nick as it was an intense searing, as though a dozen wasps with cigar lighters had decided to play a match of Burning-Bernie’s-Wattles.
Jeaves withdrew the offending instrument immediately, and gave a gasp, perhaps the first time I’d ever heard him make any sort of sound signifying dismayed surprise, except for when I’d grown that long-vanished moustache. “Great heavens, sir,” he said, setting down the razor and picking up a towel to press against my aggrieved neck. “I’m terribly sorry.” Indeed he must have been, for italics were alien to Jeaves.
“Tut tut,” said I, my gallantry returning as the pain ebbed, which it did surprisingly quickly. “No harm done, just a scrape.” I slowly removed the towel, expecting a jet of fuchsia to come spurting out upon the trailing arbutus of the wallpaper, so painful had the initial sensation been. But instead there was only a tiny, nearly invisible mark, with just a droplet of the Worster bloodline in evidence.
Jeaves, oozing apologies, bandaged me up with all the skills of Florence Nightingale, and then cleaned and dried the razor, folded it into its handle, and put it atop my dresser. “I trust, sir,” he said, “that you were planning to take your safety razor to Binkley Court?”