by John Enright
“I’d say the fact that he called both of us to be here would indicate we’re both in her will. I don’t know of any other illegitimate half siblings. Do you?”
“I didn’t even know that I had one.” Dominick did know where his mother’s liquor cabinet was, in the passageway to the dining room, but it was locked. He went back to the kitchen and got a knife to spring the lock. There was Chivas Regal. He brought it back to the kitchen.
Amanda, who had followed him, brought back a fifth of Maker’s Mark. “My dad drank bourbon,” she said.
“Mine drank Scotch,” Dominick said.
Chapter 2
“No, he was gone this morning when I got up. I mean his stuff is still here, but he was gone. Weird dude. And it is freezing here because the furnace isn’t working or something.” Amanda was sitting at the kitchen table, talking on her cell phone. She was dressed in a flannel nightgown, jeans, boots, and sheepskin jacket. She was drinking instant coffee—all that she could find—into which she had splashed some Maker’s Mark to try and make it palatable. The bottle was still on the table, along with the bottle of Scotch and two glasses. Last night’s dirty dishes were still in the sink.
There was a screened-in sun porch off the dining room, and Amanda took her mug of coffee out there, still listening on the phone to Morgan. She lit up a Pall Mall, then laughed, then coughed. “No, no. He doesn’t look anything like me. He’s big and vaguely British. You know, reserved like, doesn’t talk much.”
Talking on the phone, she had only one hand free for smoking and drinking. She had to find a place to put down her cigarette to take a swig of coffee. There was a pot with a dead fern in it. She laid it there. She laughed again. “No, I’ll take that back. I don’t think he is gay, just a loner.” She took a sip from her mug and listened some more. “Don’t count on it.” There was the sound of a car pulling up in the gravel driveway. “Listen, Morgan, do what you want about that, get a second bid then. I gotta go. He’s back. My best to the rest. Call you later.”
Amanda looked down at what she was wearing—her crappy old nightgown. Well, there was no taking it off now as she had nothing else on up top. She stubbed her cigarette out in the dry dirt of the fern pot then dumped what was left in her coffee cup onto it because it was still smoking. She heard Dominick’s car door slam and then him coming in the front door. It was strange being around men again. You never knew what they might be thinking.
Back in the kitchen Dominick was laying out pastries on a plate—two large croissants, a sticky bun, and two of what looked to be blueberry muffins. From another white paper sack he took out two large Styrofoam cups of Starbuck’s coffee, then shook a small avalanche of various sugar, sweetener, and creamer packets onto the table. “I didn’t know how you took yours,” he said, not looking at her. “I can’t drink instant.” As he sat down he pushed one of the cups of coffee toward her. “French roast, nothing fancy.”
Dominick was dressed in a dark-blue windbreaker, which he had unzipped. Beneath it was a lighter-blue sweatshirt. He had obviously showered and shaved before going out—he had nicked the side of his chin shaving, and his short-trimmed, thinning black hair was still damp against his skull. Amanda stood for a minute and studied him. She thought he looked older than she, even though he was her junior. He had a large head and large hands, but then he was a large man, well over two hundred pounds she would guess. But he wasn’t at all clumsy. He moved with that slow grace big men sometimes have. No rings, no watch, no jewelry. He looked up at her, his eyes inviting her to join him. His eyes were an unremarkable blue, neither friendly nor hostile. She got herself a plate and joined him.
Amanda never referred to herself as Amanda, but she did often privately think of herself in the third person and narrated her life from a place slightly above and behind her actual self. When she did so she invariably thought of herself as younger—sometime in that golden period of twenty to forty when she had never had to worry about how she looked. She pulled her jacket closed to hide her nightgown as she sat down, thinking: She sits down across from the stranger, who is large—not like a bear, but more like a manatee. She picks up the sticky bun and puts it on her plate. He takes a paper napkin out of a paper sack and hands it to her without looking at her. “Thanks,” she says, and he grunts in return. He is eating a croissant, picking it apart with large tapered fingers as if it were a French fortune cookie. He drinks his coffee black. She imagines him a foreigner who doesn’t speak English. She is not attracted to him.
Actually, it had been a very long time since Amanda had felt attraction for any male. It made life a lot simpler. “When I was a girl, I wanted a pony,” she’d say, “but I got over it. I went through a similar phase with men.” She didn’t necessarily dislike men; she just had little use for them. They were like public servants or somebody else’s pet. In fact, that was how she identified and remembered men—by the animal species they reminded her of. Women had personal names. Men were Badger or Storky or Snakeface. This dude here would henceforward be Nemo whenever she mentioned him to Morgan and the others, Nemo the Manatee.
“Do you have Barnett’s number? We should probably call him and tell him we’re here. Get this over with,” Nemo said, taking a sip of coffee. He still wasn’t looking at her.
Once again Amanda was watching from her observer’s post: She chews her sticky bun, which, like him, she is eating with her fingers. With two different actors sitting there this could be a romantic scene. Even the cold morning sun through the windows is right. Or maybe a Starbuck’s ad—the way the big cups with the prominent logos catch the light. She chews and doesn’t answer, looking at the top of his balding head as he stares into his coffee cup. The rich boy who never had to work a day in his life, who has no home, no wife, no permanent address. She had lied, earlier. When she recognized him it wasn’t by seeing his mother in his eyes. She had recognized him because he so closely resembled his father in the photographs in Marjorie’s room—his size, his smoothness, the look that gave her the feeling that a photograph was as close as you would ever get to him.
“His number’s on my cell phone. I’ll give him a call,” she said.
All the best schools, all the breaks. There was a photo in Marjorie’s room of a young Nemo at his Oxford wedding—slimmer, with a full head of black hair—with a bride who seemed half his size. Marjorie was in that photo too, looking fantastic in a rakish purple hat. You saw her first before you saw the bride and groom. Marjorie had celebrated that divorce a few years later. He is picking apart the other croissant now, the one she thought was hers. Now, why had she assumed that? Because if there are two, you share or at least offer? Why did she assume he knew that rule? Or any of her rules, for that matter? The backs of his hands were hairless like a child’s.
“I don’t know about you, but I would like to get this all settled as quickly as possible,” Nemo said.
Why? So you can disappear again? Amanda felt like asking him, but didn’t. “I can call him now,” she said.
“It’s Saturday,” Nemo said. “He probably won’t be in.”
“Cell phone. We’ll see,” Amanda said, licking her fingers then wiping them on a napkin before getting her phone from her jacket pocket. She got up his number and called. She got his voice mail and left a message.
“I hate those things,” Nemo said.
“What?” Amanda said, looking at her innocent cell phone.
“Answering machines, all electronic voices, machines pretending to be human. Isn’t it interesting that the more people there are in the world—what is it now, seven billion?—the more dehumanized it gets?” Nemo was still staring into his coffee cup. Then he got up—“You’ll excuse me”—and walked out through the swinging door to the hall. She heard the front door close, then his car door, then the sound of his car driving away.
***
There wasn’t much to Fort Ward. It was billed as the best-preserved Civil War era fortification for the defense of the capital across the river, but time had
dissolved its significance. A half dozen painted black field pieces behind a citadel-pointed earthen embankment. It was a park now. Gay couples walked apartment-appropriate dogs. Everything had to be kept on a leash. Fort Ward had never had to face an enemy. Now it looked to be defending itself against the interstate just to the north and the Catholic middle school campus off to the west. Screams from a girls’ soccer game blended with the freeway traffic growl through the spring-bare trees. The most symbolic thing about the place was the way the mouths of all the cannons had been sealed shut with cemented-in cannonballs. Of course that was only to keep them from filling up with trash, like the little bags of poodle shit that the leashed humans carried.
Dominick had never been here before. He had only recently discovered his interest in old battlefields and abandoned forts. One of the fine things about such places was that he usually had them pretty much to himself. This was true of Fort Ward on a Saturday morning. There was always a silence in these places that was different from other silences, as if even the birds kept their mouths shut out of respect or fear or shame, as if the place had a memory. In 1861, after the disaster of First Manassas, there had been just sketchy emplacements like this one to halt a Confederate drive on Washington. What if the war had started and ended that way, with a first-move checkmate by the rebels?
Dominick had brought his camera, but there really was nothing to photograph. He was grateful for that. The mood he was in, any photos would have come out bad anyway; and the weather had changed, a low front rolling in and blocking the sun. He debated driving out to Manassas, less than an hour away. But what was the point if it was going to rain? He did not want to return to the feminine den of his mother’s house, that occupied territory. Alexandria had been the longest-occupied city in the civil conflict, seized and held by Federal troops from the beginning to the end of the long war, the War of Northern Aggression. By the end of the war, half of the city’s population would be freed black slaves. “Contraband” they had been called, as if giving them a made-up name would somehow disguise that they were just property.
What Dominick liked about the past was that you could move around in it, take your time, linger and ponder, even go back to look at things again with second thoughts. Not like the present, where you were always being hurried along lockstep, caught in some involuntary race to keep apace; or the future, populated with the ghosts of what-might-become. You could live in 1861 as long as you chose to. He wanted a camera that could take pictures of the past, sepia-toned photographs of men in rumpled clothes leading wasted horses through a blasted, treeless landscape. A siren passed on the interstate, whooping like some android Indian. Or was it a digitized rebel yell? The past was also soundless. He couldn’t remember the sound of his mother’s voice. No one ever spoke in his dreams. Only the present came with a soundtrack. He wondered about deaf people’s sense of time without that parameter.
“Hey, you, come down from there. You can’t walk up there.” A black man in some sort of uniform was yelling at him.
Dominick had hiked up to the top of the fortification’s earthen embankment, trying to imagine vanished geography.
“That there, is one hundred and fifty years old. You can’t walk up there.”
“I am descending,” Dominick said, then he snapped a photo of the man. A combatant, he thought. Contrabands had built most of these places. It began to rain, big random drops the color and size of bullets.
***
The rain brought Nemo home. Amanda heard him come in, but she ignored him, stayed in her room. She had taken Marjorie’s room, the master bedroom suite. It had one of those gas fireplaces with imitation logs and a big flat-screen TV. She had lit the fire, and the room was warm; she was watching her afternoon judge shows. After a while there was a knock at her door. She muted the sound and said, “Yes,” but not “come in.”
“Sorry to bother you,” Nemo said from the other side of the door, “but I gather the fuel oil delivery did not happen? I’ll give them another call and say it is an emergency. That will cost extra, but it’s the weekend, and I’m afraid they won’t come until next week otherwise.”
Amanda didn’t feel like telling him it was toasty warm in her room, especially seeing as he was worried about the cost. He could afford it. Hell, they both could afford it now. “Okay,” she said, “and, by the way, Lawyer Barnett stopped by and dropped off some papers. I’ll bring them down later.”
“Some papers?”
“Her will and some other things for us to look at.”
“Oh, that was fast.”
“I fired him,” Amanda said and clicked the sound back on. The plaintiff in the American-flag tie was getting excited, waving papers around. Judge Joe was not pleased. Nemo could wait, she decided, to hear the good news. She needed more time to think and for Morgan to call her back. It was time for contingency planning, positions and fallback positions. Amanda knew her loner brother did not need money. According to Marjorie, his old man had left him pretty well set up for life. He wasn’t avaricious. He had his simple nomadic life and few real expenses. So why had the old lady left half of everything to him? He wasn’t expecting anything from her. Was Marjorie just punishing her? Fair play had never been part of Marjorie’s MO. Fifty-fifty; half and half was something you put in your coffee, not a guiding principle of sharing. Morgan’s guess was that Marjorie was just trying to set up some conflict, stir things up even from the grave. Well, from her urn anyway, wherever that might be. Amanda had forgotten to ask Barnett about that.
Morgan called and they went over the details. Morgan had reviewed Virginia’s testate and probate statutes online and figured she could handle the necessary filings, even if she wasn’t a member of the Virginia bar. “It ain’t straightforward, but it’s doable,” Morgan said. “You get to handle him. We want to avoid probate if we can. That would really speed things up.”
If Barnett’s market estimate on the house was right and the balances he had for Marjorie’s various accounts were accurate, the estate would be worth about two million dollars after taxes. Amanda went over to Marjorie’s walk-in closet and looked at her yards of clothes on hangers, sorted by season and colors. Shoes, toes out, lined the floor beneath them. They were all like costumes ready to wear. There was a rack just of furs. Nothing, of course, would fit Amanda, who was twice the size of her petite mother. She would take all this with her, have it packed and shipped. The girls could see what they could use and sell the rest. Amanda figured a million bucks was more than enough to do the trick, but Morgan thought they should go for it all and that the timing was right, if they could strike quickly.
There was a mirror on the back wall of Marjorie’s closet. Amanda saw herself there. Her observer’s voice spoke up: God, she looks terrible. Look at her. She hasn’t showered or washed her hair in days, and maybe she could find something different to wear, that outfit’s getting pretty old.
She accompanied herself to the bathroom and watched herself undress and shower and shampoo. She wasn’t pleased with what she saw: That’s why you never look at yourself in mirrors any more, you bitch. You’re in denial. You are lumpy and pale and lax and unattractive. Put some conditioner in your hair. It didn’t used to take so long for you to dry off, did it? I remember when you had beautiful feet.
An hour or so later she was ready. Her hair was dried and brushed and pulled back with a headband. She was wearing a long denim skirt and her best L. L. Bean shirt with the sleeves rolled up. She had to admit she felt a lot better clean and in fresh clothes. She picked up the file of papers Barnett had left and went out of the room. Seconds later she was back. She had forgotten that the rest of the house was unheated. She put on her down vest and went out again. Then she returned again and found her pack of Pall Malls and lighter in the pocket of her sheepskin jacket. Get it together, Amanda. She went out again, closing the door firmly behind her.
Amanda found Nemo reading in the kitchen, sitting at the table in the chair closest to the open oven. He was wearing a ch
ocolate-brown cardigan and smoking a cigar. Beside him on the table was a saucer serving as an ashtray, the bottle of Scotch, and a short glass. He had a pen in his hand and was underlining a passage in the book. The oven had taken the chill off the room, but it was still not warm. Nemo looked somehow right with the cigar; it completed him.
“Marjorie would never have …” Amanda said, raising her eyebrows at his cigar.
“Allowed this? No, of course not. I was just making myself at home.”
“I thought I’d make some tea.” Amanda put the file of papers on the table, taking the teakettle from the stove to the sink to fill it. “The funny thing is she had no sense of smell. She caught some bug once, down in Cancun, that wiped it out for good.”
“I didn’t know that,” Nemo said, sounding distinctly uninterested.
“I think that’s how she stayed so thin,” Amanda said, turning the burner on under the teakettle. “Nothing tasted good to her after that.”
“Pity,” Nemo said distantly, still underlining.
Amanda sat down at the table. “You really don’t give a shit, do you?”
Nemo gave her a sidelong look. “Not really.” He put his pen in the book as a bookmark and set it aside. He took off his reading glasses. “The mother-son news channel shut down a long time ago. Are those the papers the lawyer brought? What have we got to do?”
Amanda’s observer came into the room: You’re looking good, girl. All scrubbed and clean and fresh, not a gray hair showing on your head. Not that he’s noticed. Men still do notice you, you know. So, what’s with him? Is he as past romance as you are? Maybe it’s one of those things that skips generations. The only thing you have in common with him is a mother whose only career, whose only ever paying job, was romancing.
“There are some documents for us to sign. Are you interested at all in the terms of her will?” she asked.
“Yes, of course.”
Nemo rubbed his eyelids before putting his glasses back on. How natural the cigar looked between those big fingers.
