Night of Fire and Snow

by Alfred Coppel

  “You mean he never came back? He never tried?”

  “He tried all right. In spite of the fact that that afternoon must have shown him just how much of a religious fanatic Essie had become, he tried, Allie. But it was no good.” He paused again, because it was difficult for him to go on with it. But Alaine wanted to know. She really wanted to know. “You see,” he said, “Mother died that night, and after that who could tell Essie she was wrong?”

  Allie waited. In the kitchenette, the refrigerator whirred softly, prosaically. He said, “And there were circumstances—the way Mother died must have done something terrible to Essie. Unabsolved. In mortal sin. Damned forever. Essie began her novitiate almost immediately after that. As far as I know she never saw Anson again either.”

  He gave a short, hard laugh. “You remember I once said something about having tested the power of prayer. I did that night, Allie. Dear Christ, but I did. I prayed. I hoped for a miracle, a Demonstration, anything. I’d have prayed to the devil if I’d known how. But nothing helped. She was dead.”

  “Mike,” Allie said gently. “I don’t see—”

  “Oh, that. You mean did my mother die of a broken heart or something like that? Nothing so romantic, Allie. No, we had our

  Christmas. She handed out the packages. I remember that she looked very pale and very beautiful—she was still a handsome woman even then. I had a book from Essie. Van Loon’s The Story of Mankind, I think it was. Odd how you can recall these little details. Raoul’s present was a portable typewriter. Mother handed out all the gifts and then she did a strange thing. This medallion I wear. It’s a Catholic thing—made in Italy, I think. Seventeenth century some time. It’s not valuable, and since neither Maria nor I were Catholics, it had no particular significance except as a keepsake. Well, she took it from around her neck and put it around mine. Essie started to cry and Concha took her out of the room. I told you, didn’t I, that my mother and I were not really as close as we might have been. I see now that she had only so much love to give, and it all went to Raoul. But just then, for a few moments there, we were mother and son and I didn’t care a bit that we were losing Raoul.” He drew a deep breath and looked up at the ceiling. It was growing lighter. Down in the little patio a bird chirped tentatively in the early morning quiet. “Then,” he said, “she went upstairs to the bathroom and drank a bottle of Lysol.”

  He heard Alaine draw a sharp breath. He went on. “We heard her scream. The pain must have been horrible. She died that way, in convulsions on the bathroom floor. She was dead before the doctor came.”

  Alaine whispered something, but he didn’t hear what it was. He was driven and consumed by the effort of telling her this

  “It was dark. It could have been an accident. Raoul always said it was. And for a while I actually managed to believe it. I had to. But it wasn’t an accident. How could it possibly have been?”

  He saw that Alaine was crying softly, but he could feel nothing but a growing emptiness in his chest.

  “It’s nothing to cry about, really. It happened a long time ago. And somehow, a woman like my mother would almost cherish a violent death. I could never imagine her slipping away in her sleep, an old woman. No, bad as it was, it was the sort of thing I expected, deep inside.”

  He lay quietly beside her waiting for the tide of release that should come now. It did not come. Instead, the old terror lurked just below the surface of his mind, mocking him. This should have been a moment of genuine intimacy. He had never before told anyone about the night Maria died. And yet, he felt unsatisfied.

  He drew Alaine closer to him, filled with a weary compassion for her. I love her, he told himself. He repeated it to himself. I love her. The void remained.

  If we have a child, he thought, if we marry and have a child it will be better. Thinking that, he fell asleep.

  SEVEN

  Wheels turning within wheels, Miguel thought, staring down at the finger-stained manuscript. What was the mechanism of escape? For Maria, a bottle of Lysol. For Essie, the nunnery. For Anson, Spain and death on the barricades.

  And Nora? Well, perhaps Nora’s answer was a single-minded love for one man out of many.

  He made a grimace of distaste and slipped the script back into the brief case, looking around him.

  The tourists were awake and stirring, craning their necks for a view of the New England coast, low and green in the flat rays of the morning sun.

  A woman in the forward part of the airliner’s cabin laughed and the faintly shrill note made him think of Becky. Dulled with fatigue as he was, he could almost imagine that it was Becky.

  He found himself wondering why Luis, who could surely have had his pick of a great many women, had married Becky Coulter. Perhaps it had been simply because Becky had moved in close to the family. Propinquity could easily account for it in that case.

  Miguel’s thoughts about his brother had run the gamut over the years. He had thought him at various times a distant god, a near-friend, a betrayer, a pitiable man. When Miguel thought of him now, he was saddened to think that they had never been able to exploit the bond between them. Basically, they were alike, but the twelve years’ difference in their ages raised a barrier. In the moments when they could have sustained one another, the really critical moments, communication had ceased. And in the end, Miguel had done his best to destroy the memory of that brotherhood that never quite was.

  At least, Miguel thought thankfully, Luis never knew.

  It was, oddly enough, Tom and Tom’s troubles that made a beginning. Miguel remembered that day in May 1940, midway through his freshman year at Stanford, when Tom called. Not from Los Angeles, where he was supposed to be boning for midterms at USC, but from the Palo Alto station.

  It was one of those pleasantly bright spring days on the Peninsula, with the sky washed by a light evening rain and the air clear and cool with just a hint of the season in it.

  From the window of the room Miguel shared with Julian Trowbridge on the third floor of Encina Hall, the foothills of the Coast Range looked green and fresh in the morning sun.

  Julie was tending his aquarium of tropical fish and complaining about the pickled salamanders that kept turning up among the shoals of mollenisias and rashora trilineata he favored. Life at Encina could be trying for a person of Julian’s temperament.

  “I’d like to catch the guy who thinks this is so funny,” Julie said, staring moodily at the murky tank. He was a tall Nebraskan with red hair that stood up like a frightened brush on his knobby head. His eyes were pale blue, and since moving into Encina with the rest of the frosh, they had held a hunted look. Julian was the sort of person who brought forth the best efforts of the practical jokers, and there was no shortage of jokers in the class of 1943.

  Julian had been the first freshman waterbagged, the first to get caught painting the Big C in Berkeley red—a fact that accounted for his frightwig haircut and the bits of blue and yellow paint that still clung to his scalp, the first to have his bed pushed down the stairwell. The list was endless. There were people born to be abused and Julian Trowbridge belonged to this unhappy clan.

  Miguel put his feet up on the battered desk and closed the copy of Buell’s Governments in Europe he had been reading. He stretched his toes in the scuffed brown-and-white buck saddle shoes and yawned. He lit a cigarette and tossed the pack to Julie, and said, “How much can a dead salamander eat?”

  “Very funny.” Julian, standing in his striped pajama bottoms, which were too short, his bony feet bare and his even bonier chest exposed, looked like an angry heron.

  “The world is blowing apart in our faces and everybody behaves like this was the sixth grade or something,” he said. “Salamanders, for heaven’s sake. You’d expect more maturity from a group of college men.”

  Maturity, Miguel thought. Maturity, crap. That was all Raoul talked about these days. If Miguel wanted to go down to Del Monte with the rest of the gang for spring vacation, Raoul gave it the big thumbs down. Childish t
o want to run in a herd. Not mature. And when he asked permission to sign up for the CPT program, it was playing aviator. There had even been a hellish uproar because he had insisted on living at Encina instead of at home.

  He thought of Raoul saying, “Ridiculous. Absolutely out of the question.”

  And Becky, of course, meek and mild little Becky trying to act like God-knew-what, being the peacemaker.

  “Your father’s not well, Mike. Why do you want to upset him with something like this?”

  “Because for once, God damn it, just once, I’d like to be treated like something besides a stupid kid. What’s so wrong with wanting to spend my freshman year in the goddam dorm with the rest of my class?”

  “Do I treat you like a kid, Mike?”

  “Becky, for chrissake talk to him.”

  “Mike, don’t swear so much. I will.”

  And in the end, he had moved into Encina, but not before Raoul had made such a terrible scandal about it that Miguel hated to drive the seven miles to Los Altos to see him for fear it would all begin again. Of course, he had to do it and he did, but each visit was more unpleasant than the last with Raoul asking him acidly if he had gotten the silly kid stuff out of his system and was ready to come back and live at home where he belonged with his family.

  Miguel wondered how on earth he was ever going to broach the subject of a fraternity to him. The SAEs and the DUs were both making a few moves in his direction—illegal, because rushing hadn’t started yet, but all the more flattering because of that. God, Raoul would throw a fit.

  Miguel thought moodily of the RCAF. He had thought about it a great deal lately. The French and English were sitting safely in the Maginot Line, but the fall of Norway had shaken things up a bit. The Canadians were accepting Americans now. It might be a way out.

  Julian began to dress for his eleven o’clock class. Miguel had the morning free and he was wondering what to do with himself. Perhaps he would drive out to Lagunita and study. There was a quiet spot at the northern end of the lagoon where no one was likely to bother you.

  He heard someone down the hall yell his name. “Rinehart, tele-phone!”

  He got to his feet and started out of the room. Julian, who was examining a hole in the heel of his socks, looked up. “Say, Mike. You going out tonight?”

  Miguel shook his head. “I’ve got a Western Civ midterm next week. I think I’ll hit the books.”

  “Well, can I borrow your Brooks jacket?”

  Julian, dressed in Miguel’s clothes, looked even more like a bird than he did in pajama bottoms. He was not, and never would be, the proper picture of a Stanford Rough. He wasn’t put together right.

  “The last time you wore it, you puked all over the sleeve,” Miguel said coldly.

  “It was drinking those awful Pink Lady things Marjorie likes. I’ll be careful this time.”

  “Okay,” Miguel said. “I’ve got a phone call, Julie.”

  “Why don’t you come along? Marge’s roomie is free and she likes you.”

  “Can’t tonight.”

  Julian shrugged. “Let me know if you change your mind. We ought to get together more, Mike. Out of school, I mean. We’re roommates, after all.”

  Miguel nodded absently and walked out into the hall. As he passed the stairwell he heard someone on the top floor yell, “Bombs awaaaaay!” And a waterbag plummeted down to explode with a great splash in the cavernous depths below. An agonized voice yelled back, “You son of a bitch!” Miguel thought dryly: Ah, maturity.

  He picked up the dangling phone receiver and held it to his ear, half expecting to hear Becky’s voice asking him why he hadn’t come home last Saturday.

  Instead, he heard Tom Eubanks say, “Spicko, you old greasy bastard!”

  “Tom. For chrissake. Where in hell are you?”

  “At the SP station in Paly. Come on down and pick me up.”

  “What goes on? Don’t they have midterms at that football mill of yours?”

  “Uncle Tom couldn’t be bothered right now.”

  “Are you drunk?”

  “I wish I were,” Tom said.

  There was a middling long silence on the phone. Miguel could hear the sound of a train bell and the long sighing hiss of airbrakes.

  “Are you in trouble, Tom?”

  “It’s a long story.” Tom’s voice had lost its imitation gaiety.

  “I’ll be there in ten minutes.” A thought struck Miguel. “You haven’t rolled out of school, you muscle-bound ape?”

  “No. It isn’t that. The term papers you sent were fine.”

  “I’ll be right there. Sit tight.”

  “Hurry it up, Spicko. Your old Uncle Tom is lonesome.”

  “Wait out in front,” Miguel said.

  Back in his room he changed into a sweater and a clean pair of bedfords. Julie was holding a yellow-and-black regimental tie against the navy-blue Brooks jacket. “Can I borrow this, too, Mike?”

  “That’s my Roslyn tie, for chrissake,” Miguel said.

  “I don’t mind, Mike boy.”

  “God damn it, Julie—”

  “Mike, you really swear an awful lot,” Julian said, frowning. “You should watch your language.”

  Miguel said impatiently, “All right, wear the tie. You can use my gray flannels, too, if you need them.”

  “They’re too short for me, but thanks just the same.”

  “I’ll have them lengthened. Remind me,” Miguel said and slammed the door behind him.

  He drove down Palm Drive at fifty, watching the rear view mirror for the campus patrolman. He was worried about Tom. If it wasn’t school, it must be some girl. “Son of a bitch,” he said aloud. “God damn son of a bitch.” And if Becky and Julian didn’t like his language, they could jam it.

  Tom was standing in front of the station. He was dressed in a suit, which made him look strange and older than he really was. The only luggage he carried with him was a leather toilet kit, the kind draftees carried. For a moment Miguel wondered if Tom had enlisted—to get his year over, the way so many undergraduates were doing. But no, that would be completely out of character for Tom.

  He pulled up with a squeal of tires and opened the door. His car was a Chevrolet convertible, a 1938 model, and he hated it. He had always hated it and though he knew it was unreasonable to feel that way about what was, essentially, a pretty good car, he could not help himself. The car had never been what he wanted, even when it was new.

  Tom jumped in beside him, banging his head on the chrome-plated arm of the convertible top as he did so. “Son of a bitch! These little cars, for chrissake! How I wish you still had the old Lincoln.”

  They drove out of the station grounds across El Camino Real and onto the campus. “Well, give, dammit,” Miguel said.

  Tom looked at his watch. “Hold up, Spicko. You have to buy me some lunch first. I’m hungry and broke.”

  “Okay. We can go up to Rossotti’s for a sandwich and a beer. But talk, Uncle, talk.”

  Tom laid his head back onto the worn leather seat back and closed his eyes.

  Miguel watched him, concerned.

  “Jesus, I’m tired,” Tom said. “You couldn’t sleep a wink on that milk train.”

  It was obvious to Miguel that Tom would talk when he got ready.

  “How long will you be up?” Miguel asked.

  “Couple three days.” Tom looked worried and uncomfortable. “Going to see Ella and Oliver?”

  Tom shook his head.

  “What is all this, Tom?”

  “I’ll tell you. Let me get my breath, that’s all.” He punched Miguel’s arm in a clumsy gesture of affection. “I’m glad to see you, you old bastard. And I want to thank you for those term papers you did for me. They were lifesavers.”

  “I was afraid maybe they wouldn’t pay off. You use different texts down there.”

  “Hell, the profs never look at the papers. And the instructors don’t care.” He grinned uncertainly. “How many papers have you written
for me, anyway, Spicko? Counting Roslyn and all?”

  “Quite a few, I guess,” Miguel said, grinning back.

  They drove past Lagunita and around the golf course to Alpine Road.

  “By God,” Tom said, “this is the way we used to get to jolly old Roslyn, isn’t it?”

  “I remember, Uncle.”

  “What happened to Olinder after the old alma went bust?”

  “He’s working for some publishing house in New York. I hear from him once in a while. Now can we tie this down to what the hell you’re doing up here?”

  “I came up to see you,” Tom said with sudden bleakness. “Trouble.”

  Tom nodded, looking moodily at the car radio. He leaned forward and timed it to KRE. A girl on the radio was singing about “Those cool and lim-pid greeeen eyes—”

  “A girl?”

  “Well, in a way.”

  “God damn,” Miguel said. “I knew it.”

  “It’s not what you think. Nobody’s knocked up.”

  “Then what—”

  “A cold beer will loosen the tongue,” Tom said. “This isn’t easy, you know. In fact it’s just goddam embarrassing.”

  “All right.” Miguel drove in silence past the rundown gate that once had led to Burroughs Hamner’s noble experiment in education, Roslyn School for Boys. “Want to go out tonight?” he asked. “Old Florian is around. And I think there’s a Juke Box Jig at the Fairmont.”

  “Oh, balls, Spick.”

  Miguel was shocked to see that Tom was almost crying. He turned and didn’t take his eyes off the road until they reached Rossotti’s.

  With a bottle of beer and sandwiches under the trees, they settled down to lunch. A cool breeze blew down the narrow valley from the west. The first robins were appearing in the woods and orchards around the foothills. On such a day it was hard to think of the war in Europe and the great debate about neutrality and the futile way the British had tried to defend Norway.

  “What’s the date today, Spick?” Tom asked quietly.

  “The fourth of May. Why?”

  He passed a hand across his eyes. “Christ, I forgot Ella and Ollie’s anniversary. It was day before yesterday.”