“Yes,” I say. I take a sip of my tea. “They were great friends.”
“He had a big heart. He was a man who could forgive.”
This, I think, sounds like what I’m here for. “I’m sure there was give-and-take.”
She looks at me, seeming awakened. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“You know, Willie does something for Neill, Neill does something for Willie. It’s the way of friendships.”
“This was not the way of friendships,” she says. She looks at her tea, the glass sliding in her slack grip. She arrests its fall with her other hand. “I just pray Willie is not burning in hell.”
“God is a loving god.” Maybe? What do I know?
“What is it you wanted to know about my son?” she asks. “You mentioned some forms on the phone?”
I did—it was my alibi—but I don’t have any forms. I open my bag and remove a stray questionnaire, some personality profile Livorno has sent with me.
“You look just like Dr. Bassett about to write me a prescription. You’re not a doctor, too, are you, Neill?”
“No, ma’am. I’m a scientist.”
“Isn’t that wonderful?” She looks into the distance, seemingly at a mounted deer head that stares eternally surprised into the room. “Willie and your father were the best of friends.”
“He was like my uncle.”
She returns her iced-over gaze to me. “Just like an uncle.”
“I loved to go for rides with him. On real estate deals.”
“In one of his awful sports cars, I’m sure.”
“Yes, ma’am—the Corvettes.”
“And he was probably wearing a hankie around his neck and stank of perfume.”
“And his corset—he was wearing his corset.”
“Willie never wore any corset.”
“Whatever it’s called—girdle.”
“He wore no corset and he wore no girdle. People said terrible things about him, said he was light in the loafers. Sometimes I think that explains the way he was with the women. So many women. If they had just left him alone. And where is he now? Is he in hell? Do you think he’s in hell?”
“No,” I say. But I don’t think anyone is in hell. That is, anyone who’s dead.
“But he is. He has to be. That’s what the Bible says, in Paul’s letter to Timothy, but in Corinthians, too, and in the Commandments. Did you see the Commandments as you came in?”
“I did, yes.”
“Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife. Number Ten. It can’t get much clearer than that. Can it, Neill?”
“I don’t know,” I say. I’m not surprised Willie coveted many a neighbor’s wife, but is she saying he coveted my mother?
“You remind me of him. Of course.” She sniffs, touches her hair. “You’ll like this story. When Willie was a boy he got kicked by our jackass, Herbert Hoover. It’s a wonder he didn’t get killed, but he was standing just the right distance away, so he only got a shove into the fence. Oh, he came limping into the house, tears in his eyes. ‘Momma,’ he said, ‘that’s the last time I trust a Republican.’ Isn’t that funny? Everybody was a Democrat back then. He had two bruises on his chest from old Herbert’s shoes. Like two big closed eyes.” She leans forward, takes on a rough voice. “‘Momma, that’s the last time I trust a Republican.’ You can’t say he didn’t have spirit.” She frowns. “And that’s what got him into trouble. The people around here . . .” She doesn’t finish the thought. She waves her hand into the distance, as if brushing these people off an imaginary table.
“This is going to be strange question, Mrs. Beerbaum,” I say. “But do you remember anything—an event, an argument—from 1976, related to my father and Willie’s friendship? That was the year I was born.”
She leans back in her chair. “He wants me to take a blood test,” she says, quietly alarmed. It seems to be a thought that’s broken free from her mind.
“Who?” I ask, though she must mean me.
She drinks her tea. She looks as startled as the stuffed deer. For the first time she seems aware that she might be confused.
“Anything you could tell me about that year,” I say. “It could be big. It could be small.”
“It belongs to him anyway.” She argues quietly to herself. “Am I doing wrong to keep it?”
“I’ll give it back,” I say. “You can trust me.”
Her eyes regain their focus. “Trust you to do what?”
“Return whatever it is you’d like to show me.”
She backs her scooter up, drives over to the front window. “Why don’t you go say hello to Willie?” I approach her, can smell the grass and heat from her clothes. Over her shoulder I see the top of the strange mound I noticed on the way in. It’s a cemetery. “I’ll get down my records from 1972.”
“Seventy-six.”
“Seventy-six. Now go say hello.”
“I’m happy to wait on you,” I say, but she watches me in silence until I step out the front door. Nothing to do but obey, I guess. I pass the Ten Commandments and walk through the yard, crossing the long lines of cut grass. The cemetery is ringed by a wrought iron fence. Inside are a dozen tombstones. I put my hand on the latch, but I don’t need to go in. I can see all the graves from here, festooned with plastic flowers, the marble polished to a high-gloss shine. They are all Beerbaums: Belinda, Robert Sr., Robert Jr., James, William, and Catherine—that woman up there, who’s perfectly alive but has her final moving plans drawn up.
“Hi, Willie,” I say. “Where are all your wives?”
From here the log house looks like a gas station trying to hawk local crafts. All those careful reproductions, all that timber. If she’s lucky she’ll go the way her son did—in tongues of flame.
I walk back up the hill and ring the bell. I knock a few times, then try the door, which is now locked.
“Mrs. Beerbaum,” I call out. “Mrs. Beerbaum.”
“He told me to mind my own business.” Her voice is like a snake hissing in my ear. She’s sitting by the open window, invisible behind the screen. “I told him it was my business to keep him out of hell. He said he’d never met a woman like your mother. He wasn’t going to let nobody influence his behavior. And then you came along. His spitting image. I don’t know how Dr. Bassett stood it. He just acted like nothing had happened. Buddy-buddy. There was evil in that friendship.”
• • •
IN THE LUMINA, I feel sick, as if I’ve unexpectedly lost a fight, my old opponent having darted in some fatal blow. She’s clearly not in possession of all her faculties. But—I bend the mirror to take a look at myself. I have to say, it’s a face of uncertain provenance.
I start the car. I know already that I can survive it. That’s the sorrow of it all. That whatever comes I’ll survive it. I mean, even if the worst were to be true, would it really be the worst?
And it would explain a lot. Willie’s inexplicable fondness of me. My dark coloring. The timing of the suicide. Neill Sr. raised me, waited until the shame was out of the house, and then he killed himself. But if he really suspected that there’d been an affair, wouldn’t he have done something, killed Willie? Or something less dramatic—cut him off? Why remain best friends? Maybe he wasn’t sure. Or he was sure, but scared. He would have had to give everything up.
Still, maybe my mother had an affair—it was the seventies. But another man’s child? Of course, they were staunch Catholics. Every child was a gift. My father had his out, though—adultery annuls the marriage. But there would have been the embarrassment. The shame. To disown me would be to admit what happened, and that would have been truly unbearable. He was scrupulous—God, he was scrupulous. But I can imagine the thought that people were whispering, a worm burrowing through his soul. His lifel
ong dream of respect, of being a pillar of the community, undercut at the sound of his own name. Neill.
• • •
BACK AT THE HOUSE, my mother asks me how my day was. I didn’t tell her I was visiting Mrs. Beerbaum.
“Strange,” I say. I don’t know if she’s done this deliberately, but my mother looks old. Her hair is tied back in a knot, her hands are wrinkled, callused, slightly bent, cradling three tomatoes she’s just picked. There’s dirt under her fingernails. She’s going to toast some sandwiches for us. Bread, tomatoes, Monterey Jack. She’s shy about this simple meal and somehow she also seems very young. Very young and very old—that is, defenseless.
“Mom,” I say. “Would you mind if I asked you a question?”
“Of course. Just smell this tomato.”
It smells like the sun. Like dirt and sweetness and life. “Nice,” I say.
“It does get lonely here. I guess I’ve been lonely since I visited you last.”
“What about the bridge ladies?”
“They have their own lives.”
“Lonely because of Dad?”
She smiles at me. I know it pleases her to hear me call him Dad.
“I woke up last week mad as hell over something at the clinic, some crook trying to take advantage of his good nature, and I thought, ‘Libby, that happened thirty years ago.’ It felt like it was yesterday.”
“I saw Willie’s mother today,” I say.
Libby reaches for the faucet, turns on the water, wiping the tomatoes carefully with her thumbs. She twists the stems free and sets them on the cutting board, dripping and bright. She brings the cutting board over to the middle counter so that she faces me.
“You understand she has fairly serious dementia.” She opens the drawer and pulls out a blackened knife with the tip broken off.
“Mom, I’m on the side of life and living life and I don’t make judgments. I know life is complicated. Affairs of the heart are complicated.”
She positions the knife on the tomato, ready to halve it, to render Nature’s hard-won bounty into sandwiches. She looks up at me and then past me. She has a faraway expression, as if hearing the distant hoofbeats of the barbarian horde.
“Life is complicated?” she says.
“What I’m getting at,” I say.
“I suppose she told you that Willie was your father.” She puts down the knife and goes to the sink. She wipes her face with a dishtowel. “She wouldn’t be alone in that opinion, you know.”
“It doesn’t change your life with Dad at all.”
“Of course not,” she says bitterly. “Life is complicated.”
“I always loved Willie. He loved me. It makes sense.”
“My God. My God. Are you happy to think Willie is your father?”
“Dad is my father. My raising father.”
“Your raising father.” She’s trembling, scaring me. She grasps her hands, pulling on her swollen knuckles, as if she’s her own only friend.
“That’s what really counts.”
“I guess you think this is why your father committed suicide.”
“Not in a direct way,” I say.
“Oh, I think it would be direct. If your wife had an affair with a man in a corset. A man who was essentially a clown.”
“He was charming.”
“Willie Beerbaum was a drunk and a clown.” She nods quickly, brushing the hair from her face. “You want to know about my affair with Willie. It’s understandable. People have wanted to know, for decades. So here’s the full story. There was no affair. Willie came over to our house—Alex was a toddler. When were we supposed to make love? Willie came over, your father was away a lot, and Willie was having a miserable time with Sandra. He came over and we talked. He was my friend. And do you want to hear an amazing thing? Nothing more ever crossed my mind. It wasn’t until Willie had stopped coming by that I heard the gossip, and I was flabbergasted. I was so mad. I thought, I can’t live in this town, I can’t live in this nest of vipers. But I knew your father would never leave. I told him we were going to move to the country, just us. And I would have my garden and my family and that would be all. Just us.”
She touches her face again with the dishtowel. “Is that what you wanted?” she asks.
“But did he—Dad—still suspect it?”
She looks at me, as if every good thing she’s ever thought about me has been horribly, irrevocably refuted.
“I can tell you why your father killed himself, Neill.” She scratches her nose and smiles as she says this, but it’s a smile full of malice.
“I just need to know what happened in 1976. For Dr. Bassett.”
“We’re talking about Dr. Bassett. You don’t want to know the secret?”
Of course I do. Of course I don’t. The secret sounds like something that could snatch the breath from my chest. “Does it have to do with me?” She doesn’t answer. “It’s just one secret?”
She’s taken the knife back up. I have a brief thought that she’s going to stick it in me. “Just one.”
“Don’t tell me.”
“You better consider that decision. This is your chance.”
I see him at the Formica table. The tokens on the table. His silence. He rubs the bridge of his nose as the animal band hacks its way through a song. Those strange looks he gave me. His clinical concern for my phantom pains.
Do you think there’s something wrong with us?
Yes, sir.
“Tell me,” I say.
She slices the first tomato, the knife hitting the board with a controlled tock. “Because he was depressed.”
• • •
THAT EVENING, as I’m sitting on the back porch watching a deer walk warily down to the pond, Libby takes a seat next to me.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“There is a secret,” she says.
“I don’t need to know anything. It’s none of my business.”
“The secret is that I was never happier. When he was angry and jealous, when he mistrusted me—we fought in the bedroom in hushed voices, when Alex was napping. Your father was so upset, and I was never happier. I knew how much he loved me.” She leans back in the old bench, but she’s so light it makes no noise. “In the beginning, I didn’t fight as hard to convince him as I should have.”
We sit in silence. The deer leans down, drinks.
“By the time I did convince him a light had gone out in his eyes.”
“Maybe he was never sure.”
“He was a doctor. You think he couldn’t run a blood test?”
I’m almost amused at the idea. But my amusement feels hollow, distant.
“Then what was it?” I ask.
“It was nothing. It was your father. I could tell you ten reasons, but they’ll never add up. He was depressed, and he was unable to seek help. I wish I had something better.”
“It just puts me back at square one.”
“Except now you know you’re at square one.”
She hands me a large brown envelope—which I hadn’t noticed she was holding. I open the flap and pull out the contents—a short stack of antique yellow legal pads. The journals from 1976.
24
ON THE PLANE HOME, the envelope sits on my lap. I smell the pages, run my thumb along their edges to get a sense of size. Did he write more in a difficult year? Less?
I reach in to remove them, but stop. I’ve done this exact motion—reaching in to remove them, stopping—ten times, maybe twenty. Laham will have to scan them in. These pages aren’t for me; they’re for Dr. Bassett.
frnd1: you have words now, but the suspicions aren’t true
drbas: how do you know? how do i know?
drbas: how can you tell?
frnd1: i can sense it
drbas: how can you sense it?
frnd1: you have to have faith
drbas: i have suspicions
frnd1: you had suspicions in the past. but you were wrong
drbas: in the past we are wrong. in the present we are right
frnd1: something like that
drbas: why would he be there at lunch?
frnd1: they were friends
drbas: a friend is a man who knows when to go home
frnd1: that was all in the past. i brought you the words. now you have to let it go
drbas: let it go?
frnd1: let it go = no longer be concerned with it. overcome your reverse love
drbas: but i need to know the truth
frnd1: you know the truth. besides events from the past are unimportant
drbas: events from the past are unimportant. a man’s hobby is his longevity. children are the future but you are the past
frnd1: i gave you the words. will you come to the contest?
drbas: he was partial towards you, though he didn’t like children. he used to take you on errands, driving in his corvette. do you remember?
frnd1: he introduced me as his associate one time. the poor farmer didn’t know if he was kidding—i was eight years old
drbas: he had good qualities, but he had many bad qualities
frnd1: will you come to the contest?
drbas: a man is only as good as his word
frnd1: is that a yes?
drbas: yes
frnd1: thank you
drbas: you’re welcome
frnd1: now i have some questions for you
drbas: i might answer them and i might not
A Working Theory of Love Page 29
