The Last Refuge sahm-1

by Chris Knopf

  “I think it’s a good idea to do this. There’s no harm in it, unless it bothers you, and that’s your privilege. The court’s already given me what I need to handle things, but she’s your aunt.”

  He looked at the letter I’d written out while I was talking.

  “Says I want an autopsy.”

  “Just sign it, Jimmy. I’ll take care of everything. I’ll let you know when the funeral is.”

  His signature was a graceful Palmer-method script. Wrote like he dug holes. Only quieter.

  “And if you want, you can say it’s okay for me to act as administrator of her estate.” I handed him another piece of paper. “You don’t have to agree. You can get your own lawyer. I’m just sayin’ I got the time and I’m willing to do it. I just need your address and telephone number. You get whatever she’s got, unless some other family pops out of the blue.”

  He read the letter I’d written up. Then shrugged and signed it.

  “Money’s okay. I don’t want any of her shit. Too fucking depressing.”

  “Except maybe the house. It’s worth a lot of money,” I said.

  He snorted into the paper towel.

  “She don’t own that house.”

  It was my turn to look like a dope.

  “She don’t own that house, Einstein,” he said, somewhat buoyed by my confusion. “She just gets to stay there. Till she dies. Now everything gets passed back to some other fucker.”

  “What other fucker?”

  “She never said much about it. I only know about it ‘cause she didn’t want me gettin’ ideas about her stupid house.”

  A black mass of clouds was clumping up over the rangy oak trees. The breeze was working itself into a northwesterly wind. There was something mildly electric about the air—warning of an incoming storm. The concrete guys had stopped working to look up at the sky. Maddox looked wearily over at his unfinished trench.

  “Fucking piece of goddam piece of shit weather.”

  TWO

  THERE WERE THOUSANDS of bars in Greater New York City that looked exactly like this one. It’d been there since before World War II. All the woodwork was simulated mahogany stained a deep, Victorian brown. It ran like wainscoting three-quarters of the way up the wall. Above that the plaster was painted pale green and decorated with framed, faded covers of magazines that had ceased circulation about the time MacArthur returned to the Philippines. The carpet was probably red at some point, but had turned a brown dinge. So had the vinyl stool cushions. Around the bar itself the floorboards had worn down to the grain. The footrail was solid brass, shiny on the top. At the corners of the bar were racks of hard candy and Tums. Bottles lined a back wall that was mostly mirror, decorated with false muntins.

  It was a few doors down from the entrance to the stairs that led two flights up to my father’s Bronx pied à terre. One of our family myths was that my sister and I had spent our early years in that apartment, but I never remembered it that way. We’d visit, occasionally, and sit on the scratchy living-room sofa and watch TV while my mother cleaned the bathroom and put my father’s clothes back in the drawers and closets. The place smelled like grease, gasoline and oil, because that’s what my father and all his clothes smelled like.

  He wasn’t a drinker in the traditional sense. But he preferred sitting in that bar to sitting alone in the apartment. He’d nurse a shot and a beer for hours, alone at a small round table along the wall, discouraging anyone who might want to engage him in conversation. Not that he had to try that hard. Some people have that unapproachable aura about them. Like me. People get close, then veer away, bouncing off the invisible shield.

  Thirty years ago I went there to talk to the bartender. I had my gym bag with a change of clothes at my feet. I was also nursing a beer, partly for financial reasons. I was living on a starvation budget, all my money going toward night school. The bartender was about my father’s age. He’d inherited the place from his uncles. The standard bartender look was fat and grizzly gray, but this guy was slender and handsome, with a squared-off jaw and black crew cut. A Navy man, with an anchor on his forearm and a portrait of a destroyer above the cash register. He spoke out of the side of his mouth, and rarely put a T at the start of a word when a D would work better, so you knew he belonged in the Bronx.

  I didn’t know how to go about asking him what I wanted to know, so we’d been talking about the Yankees and the economy. He had a nephew my age who was going to Penn State. For some unaccountable reason I told him I was out of school and working as a carpenter. Maybe I thought going to night school at MIT would put him off. I don’t know. I was young.

  When the conversation drifted into crime on the streets I had an opening. I looked around, appraisingly.

  “This place seems pretty quiet. You must keep it that way, huh?”

  “Yeah, I get it done. Don’t like any funny stuff.”

  “Wasn’t there something in here, though, a big fight or something? That’s what I heard, is all.”

  He was wiping off the bar at the time, which gave him an easy way to move away from me. I sat there with my beer, acting disinterested, until he drifted back into earshot.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’m just being nosy.”

  “Sure. It’s nuthin’. Dis guy got his ass beat to shit. Tha’s all there is. You ready?” he asked, pointing to the empty glass.

  “Sure.” My heart thrilled at the expense.

  I tried again.

  “D’you know him?” I asked.

  “The guy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah. He come in here all the time. Ornery bastard. But never gave me no trouble.”

  “A regular.”

  “Yeah, I guess so. I never knew his name. Mechanic. Always come in cleaned up, but you can tell by the index finger here, see? Mechanics can never get this part along the side completely clean. From holdin’ wrenches. Gets in the cracks. You can scrub the shit out of it with Boraxo, but when you’re workin’ every day, the grease just gets in there.”

  “So I guess you didn’t see anything.”

  He straightened his back and looked at me, still holding his hand so he could show me how to identify car mechanics.

  “No. I didn’t see anything. Nobody saw nuthin’. What’s with this? You know him?”

  “No. No, I’m just curious.”

  “Well, enough about all that, okay?” he said, and moved on down the bar, adjusting mixers, dropping dirty glasses into the washer, putting fresh fruit slices in the bin.

  I was too young to know where to go from there. So I let it drop and spent the next hour looking into the mouth of the beer glass. I didn’t know how to think anymore. I couldn’t make myself leave, but I wanted to leap off the stool and run the whole way back to Boston. I wanted to find Abby and drag her out of her class and take off all her clothes and lie in bed with her. I wanted to slink back to my dad’s old apartment and curl up on the sofa with the TV on. I wanted and I didn’t.

  The runaway contrapositions must have found their way into my right hand, because when I put the glass up to my lips it shook so hard the beer splattered down the front of my shirt.

  “Hey, you okay?”

  “Yeah, sorry. Tired is all.”

  He tossed me his soggy bar rag.

  “Here.”

  I thought I’d leave quietly after that. He was down at the other end of the bar working the tap. I put down twice as much money as I needed to, waved to him and got off the stool. When I reached down to pick up my bag, he called to me.

  “Hey, kid.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You live around here?”

  “No. Just seein’ a buddy.”

  I held up the bag as proof. He nodded the way people do when they’re unconvinced.

  “Hey, don’t push it. You don’t want to know.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay.”

  I started to leave.

  “Kid.”

  “Yeah.”

  “There�
��s nuthin’ nobody can do.”

  “I know that.”

  He topped off the glass and set it up in front of a scraggly old woman who probably wasn’t all that old. I started to go again and he called me back again.

  “Kid. Com’ere.”

  I walked back and he met me at the end of the bar where it curved into the wall. He leaned over the bartop and lowered his voice, exaggerating his side-of-the-mouth style of speaking.

  “It’s not like it sounds. Don’t listen to what people tell you. It’s always different, what’s really going on. You just don’t know that yet. Only now you do. So get the fuck outta here.”

  The bright daylight outside the bar made me squint. My eyes adjusted by the time I reached the subway back to Grand Central. As I sat on the platform with my gym bag on my lap, a vast emptiness filled my mind. Knowing by not knowing. My first lesson in the Tao of murdered fathers.

  The Senior Center was in a building located behind a Catholic church founded by Polish potato farmers. The roof was Spanish tile. The windows were very tall double-hungs open at the top for ventilation. There were a few shiny old cars in the parking lot and white-haired people going in and out the door. The mood was reflective. It was almost lunchtime.

  The lobby had a reception desk like a hospital or a nursing home. A woman who was probably in her nineties was at the helm. Her hair was polar white and her weathered skin the color of fresh dough. Her wet blue eyes had seen it all, but not much of it had stuck.

  “Yes?” Her head bobbed when she talked.

  “Just looking around.”

  “Oh, you’re too young,” she said.

  “Thank you. I’m looking for a friend.”

  “Lots of friends here,” she said in the unanswerable way some old people have.

  “It’s a specific friend. Paul Hodges. Mind if I go in and see if he’s here?”

  She waved her hand at the air and looked down, then abruptly looked back up again as if her head was being operated by remote control.

  “Oh, I don’t know anybody’s names. Go on in there and see if he’s here.”

  I had a thought and tried it out on her.

  “Do you have a list of people who normally come in here?”

  She looked at me and moved her mouth around, chewing on the idea.

  “I don’t know.”

  I got the feeling she didn’t know how to think about the question.

  “Do people have to sign up to come here, or do they just come in when they feel like it?”

  “Oh, whenever. I don’t think there’s a list,” she looked around the empty desk area in front of her, searching for explanations. “Do you think we should?”

  “No, I’m just wondering who comes here. Just curious.”

  She tried to understand me, but the necessary circuitry had been disconnected. She looked upset.

  “I’m sorry to bother you. I’m just curious. This looks like a nice place.”

  She lit up, relieved to be back on familiar ground.

  “Oh yes, it’s very nice. Would you like lunch? Here’s our activity schedule for October.” She dug a slim blue pamphlet out of a drawer. She slapped it down on the countertop and patted it like the head of a grandchild.

  “Lots to do. Lots to do.”

  I folded it once and stuck it in my back pocket.

  “Thanks.”

  She nodded and looked back down at her desktop full of nothing. I went inside. It was a big open room with circular tables set up around the periphery. Women who looked as old as the people at the tables were moving around with trays of food. I spotted Hodges at a table by himself with a steaming plate of hot turkey sandwich. His back was to the wall and his eyes fixed on his meal.

  “You’re right. It looks good.”

  He frowned.

  “They won’t serve you. You gotta have a Senior Card.”

  “That’s okay, Mr. Hodges. Already ate.”

  I sat down a few seats away. His frown got a little deeper.

  “Go ahead,” I said to him, “eat.”

  “I’m going to. This is my lunch.”

  “Go ahead.”

  He did, reluctantly. Old manners die hard. At the surrounding tables elderly people lingered over their coffee or tea and were joined by people who looked to be volunteers. I felt like an interloper in an entirely alien place. Tolerated, but not really welcome.

  Hodges got me a cup of coffee to go with his. I told him I’d found Jimmy Maddox. He seemed a little interested. Then we talked about fishing for a while before I asked him if anyone in the room had hung out with Regina Broadhurst. He squinted his big frog eyes and looked around the room, but shook his head.

  “Not that I can remember.”

  A big woman, late forties, with a huge head of jetblack beauty parlor hair and a blunt hatchet of a nose, strode toward us. She wore some sort of undefinable casual clothes and a red knit sweater that clung to her body like chain mail. Behind her plastic-rimmed glasses her eyes were sharp and on the move. She looked like an overfed predatory bird.

  “Hello.”

  Her hand thrust forward to shake mine. It reminded me of a karate chop.

  “Hello,” I said back, taking her hand.

  “I’m Barbara Filmore. The executive director.”

  “She runs the place,” said Hodges, helping me out.

  “Sam Acquillo. I’m with him.” I nodded toward Hodges. She kept her eyes on me.

  “I understand you were trying to get a list of our clients,” she said, neither as a question nor a statement. By then I’d forgotten that I had.

  “No ma’am, not exactly. Just trying to look up a few old friends.”

  “Like me,” said Hodges.

  “We don’t keep those sorts of records. Are you connected with the state?”

  Only someone from Social Services would call a bunch of old geezers clients.

  “No ma’am. I’m just looking for old friends of my mother. She passed away recently.”

  “I’m sorry.” She didn’t move much, and stood very close to where I was sitting. I got the vague feeling that she’d tackle me if I tried to make a run for it. “Who are you looking for?”

  “Regina Broadhurst and Julia Anselma. Know ’em?”

  Her face was immobile.

  “They’ve passed away as well. Very recently, in fact. I’m sorry to have to tell you. What was your name, again?”

  “Sam. I guess you should expect it. They weren’t kids.”

  “They hadn’t been well.”

  “Really.”

  I slid my chair away from the table. Her head turned to follow me, but the rest of her stayed in place. She took off her glasses and stuck the tip of a temple in her mouth. She slid her weight over to her right leg as if to relax her posture, but I noticed her move even closer to where I was sitting. At that distance I could see she’d had some kind of facelift. They wiped off the character lines around her eyes and pulled back the skin at her throat. It helped explain the hawkish mask.

  “Anybody here know those two? Julia and Regina?”

  “I’ll ask.” She didn’t look like she would. “Is there anything else? We’re about to rearrange the tables for this evening’s activities. We’ll be asking everyone to let our volunteers get to work.”

  “They’re clearin’ us out,” said Hodges, still in a helpful mood.

  Miss Filmore smiled mechanically but didn’t look over at Hodges.

  “Okay, I guess we’ll let you go,” I said, standing up. “Just have a question.”

  She might have arched an eyebrow if she’d had enough skin left around her eyes to do it. Instead she put her glasses back on and cocked her head.

  “Yes?”

  “Do you ever ask family, or anybody, about clients who, you know, pass away?”

  “We don’t like to discuss it. For obvious reasons.”

  “They just don’t show up for bingo one night,” said Hodges.

  “I wouldn’t characterize it that way,” said
Miss Filmore, without looking at Hodges. “We simply feel that dwelling on mortality is not a constructive pursuit for people of maturity. We stress life and looking forward.”

  I looked over at Hodges and he shrugged. Give a man a square meal once in a while and I guess you can stress anything you want. He stood up to leave with me.

  “Why do you ask?” she asked me.

  “It’s a long story.”

  “Certainly.” She said the word the way you’d drop a heavy bag on the floor.

  We moved around her and would have left right then, but she wasn’t quite ready to have us dismissed.

  “You’re welcome to visit anytime you’d like. But please check in with us occasionally. My office is just inside the front entrance.”

  “Certainly.”

  We walked out together, and Miss Filmore escorted us all the way to the front door. She wanted to shake hands again.

  “It’s wonderful to have people show some interest in the elderly,” she said by way of seeing us off. “They have so much to offer, but tend to get lost in the shuffle.”

  “Yeah, so I’ve noticed.”

  Hodges climbed into a rusty Ford Econoline after looking over the Grand Prix. As I drove off, I looked back at the Senior Center and saw Barbara Filmore still standing at the door, a trained professional, alert to threats and poised to seize opportunity.

  Amanda’s car was in my driveway when I got home. I didn’t see it at first because it was raining hard and silver Audis aren’t normally parked in front of my house. She was in the driver’s seat, her head back on the headrest. I thought she might be asleep, but she jumped out of the car when I pulled up and ran behind Eddie and me through the rain and into my kitchen.

  The cottage filled up with the smell of wet dog. Amanda’s hair was all flattened out, which made it more obvious that she had a very pretty face. It was still strained, and there were dark semicircles under her eyes. She clutched her windbreaker close to her throat and shivered. I looked up at her from where I was drying off Eddie with an old beach towel.

  “Sorry. I’ll turn up the heat.”

  “That’s okay.”

  Eddie sniffed at her knees and wagged his tail. She rumpled the top of his head.