The Testing of Luther Albright

by MacKenzie Bezos

  “I wanted to improve one last thing in my report before I hand it in,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  His paper was due the next day, and although in the last two weeks I had counted half-a-dozen times when he might have done so easily, he had not repeated his question about a time when my father had scared me.

  “The section about how he died. I only know a little about it, and it seems like I should sort of describe it.”

  “It was an aneurysm.”

  “Right.” He took another sip. “But did he, um, fall down somewhere? I mean, was he at work, or at home?”

  “He died in bed.”

  “So Grandma found him in the morning?”

  He had taken to calling them Grandma and Grandpa. When he first began this project, he had referred to them as my mother and father. “Your mom; your dad.” Both things made me sad.

  “I’m not sure when she found him actually. I was at college. I flew home when she called me.”

  “Oh.”

  I had been in Pasadena two years and home to visit only twice, both times at Christmas. Although in some ways, the husk-light relations with strangers in a sunny place had been exactly the opiate I had intended, I have never quite forgiven myself for this.

  His bottle dripped condensation on the editorial, and he wiped it, but the newsprint had already absorbed it, and a dark welt rose over the type. He set his bottle on the spot. “That must have been sad,” he said. “I mean, was it? Going home for that?”

  “Yes,” I said. It was obvious to me that he wanted me to elaborate, but these were not things I wanted him to picture, and I was anxious in a grim way to rush the conversation—to learn why he’d really come.

  He took a sip and glanced at my bottle, which sat unopened next to the telephone. Finally, he said, “Can I ask you a question?”

  My pulse quickened. “Of course. You can ask me anything.”

  He held up the newspaper. “Do you ever feel like writing a rebuttal?”

  “No.”

  “How come?”

  “Because the allegations are stupid.”

  “You could tell people that.”

  “It would be defensive. It would give them more credit than they deserve.”

  “It might make you feel better.”

  “But that’s the point, Elliot. That is exactly the point. I don’t feel bad. I don’t feel bad in any way.”

  Condensation dripped from his root beer to his pant leg. A stridency had entered my tone that undermined my argument. I felt the need to diffuse this, and also to regain my footing for the assault to come, but I had trouble thinking of anything to say. Before I could even try, he said, “I better get going.”

  “All right,” I said, surprised. I had expected tougher.

  He said, “I’ll just head to the library.”

  “Okay.”

  “Unless you have time to look at something,” he said, laying a hand on his backpack. “I mean, I brought something I thought you’d like to see.”

  At this my pulse raced. I felt a hunted conviction, a certainty that he was finally drawing his sword. Wild guesses flashed through my mind—nude pictures, drug paraphernalia, his report on my father—but I cut my thoughts short. I did not want to pause long enough to allow him to complete his move.

  “Oh, Elliot,” I said. “I really wish I could, but today I can’t.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “I have a meeting.”

  He put both hands up, and he blushed more deeply than I’d ever seen. “No big deal,” he said.

  I felt the rise of a new kind of panic. Curiosity made me brave. I said, “Maybe another time…”

  He shrugged.

  I said, “You could bring back whatever it was you wanted to show me.”

  He was still blushing.

  I said, “What is it anyway?”

  “Just a book.”

  “A book?”

  “Yeah.” He could not make himself look at me.

  “What book?” I said.

  He unzipped his backpack then and drew out a book with a torn dust jacket and a faded bar code from the public library. He held it still in his lap for a few seconds, considering, and then flipped it over shyly to let me see the cover: an old photo of two men in gym shorts and 1950s crew cuts standing face-to-face behind the protection of upraised gloves. I read the title: The Sportsman’s Guide to Boxing.

  “Oh, Elliot,” I said.

  “I thought maybe it was like the one you checked out in high school before that fight.”

  “It is,” I said.

  He made a show of studying the cover.

  I said, “It might even be the same one.”

  He slid it on my desk next to my unopened root beer.

  I said, “Maybe we can look at it together later.”

  “Sure,” he said, not unkindly. He zipped up his backpack. “Or you can look at it without me,” he said.

  It’s interesting how strong a role timing plays in history. So near to his leave-taking was the next knock on my door that I was certain he had returned. But when I called out to come in, Belsky appeared, one hand holding a bologna and lettuce sandwich and his tie tucked ridiculously into his shirt pocket. Mustard crusted one corner of his mouth.

  “Oops. Got lost on the way to the ice machine.”

  I forced a smile.

  He held up a manila folder. “I’m here to take your fingerprints.”

  I waited.

  “We’re going to have to incarcerate you for the drowning deaths of a thousand citizens.”

  “What can I do for you?” I said.

  “I’m here for those extra pictures of North Fork.”

  “I filed everything I had.”

  “There’s one I’ve seen in your office though.” He glanced around. “A framed one, I think.”

  He had difficulty describing it, as if he had not paid very much attention during his visits to my office—as if he did not even remember that I myself was in the photograph. As he stumbled about, referring to one of the right abutment, or the left one maybe, or of the whole canyon, yes the whole canyon, I remained silent. When he sputtered out, I told him I was afraid he’d have to be more specific.

  “Come on, Albright. You’ve had it on your wall for six years.”

  “I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”

  “It’s probably in that box right there.”

  “You must be mistaken.”

  At this point, my telephone rang. Belsky held up a finger, as if to stop me from answering, and it was specifically this that made me take the call. The voice was immediately familiar, although this time she took a more respectful approach. “Mr. Albright, it’s Sylvia de Silva. From the Bee.”

  I have thought many times about how things might have turned out differently had the circumstances preceding that moment been altered in any way. Had I remained in my prior office and the picture still been hanging; had Belsky come by without that sandwich that somehow highlighted all I disliked about him; even had I not requested that he close the door behind him. That might have been enough. I would have paused long enough to rise and close it myself. Instead, when it clicked in its frame and I saw his body pass down the hall, I uncovered the mouthpiece on the receiver. “I’m not the spokesperson for the agency. I said so before.”

  “I know,” she said. “I’ve already called Leonard Berkman, and I can leave you alone, I just, you know, things have changed a little. I thought you might have something to say.”

  As she said this, her voice grew fainter, as if she had drawn her face away from the receiver to look through some papers or take a sip from a cup. I learned later that she had been writing for the Sacramento Bee for many years at this point. She had probably become so accustomed to asking such questions and receiving refusals to comment like my last one that she had placed this call to me with no more agitation than she did a call to verify the spelling of a name. I pictured Elliot searching the shelves of t
he public library for something that could touch me. I pictured Belsky getting out of the elevator on the fourteenth floor, within earshot of his phone. It was late afternoon, and the aluminum louvers on my blinds were warm to the touch when I parted them. Below me on the highway, traffic was clotting near the J Street exit. A yellow dog lay in the far left lane, and the cars slowed and swerved to avoid it.

  I said: “The dam is sound.”

  She coughed and drew the mouthpiece closer to her face. “Then why is it being investigated?”

  “Slow year for Safety of Dams.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “The rest of us are busy. Applying for funding. They don’t want to get cut.”

  I heard a page turn. “Ooh,” she said quietly, as if to herself. Then: “What else?”

  “I think that’s enough.”

  “Wait, wait. What do you think about the remediation proposal?”

  “I think we can all agree that it’s a big waste of taxpayer dollars to reengineer a dam constructed on the same principles the Romans used to build structures that have been standing for almost two millennia,” I said. I felt a dryness in my throat. I hung up the phone.

  I stood then and took a pair of scissors to the box leaning against my window. The truth is I had opened it and retaped it several times since I had moved there two weeks ago: twice on Monday mornings when I puzzled over what made Elliot spend so much of the weekend at Belsky’s; but more often in response to a feeling I cannot describe except to say it passed over me like the sudden silence in a hotel room when the stranger next door turns off his TV. Such things can take my breath away. They bring with them such quick sorrow.

  Withdrawing the photo from its box had a different effect on me every time. The details of the photo itself, of course, were always the same: the crest of the high right abutment wall. Cap; gravel; sky. My own clear pleasure. Usually this last made me grateful, but today more than anything it was a kind of taunt. My hair was windblown, and I was wearing that expression of unguarded delight unique to men whose sons have not yet begun to doubt them.

  WHEN ELLIOT WAS TWO YEARS OLD, I LINED THE BASEMENT WITH shelves. I built them from red oak, and sometimes Liz brought him down to play with a small box of tools at the foot of the stairs. It slowed me down. I would ready myself to sand a shelf and notice him hammering at the hand rail four steps from the bottom, his little heel overhanging the riser. I would set the board against the wall and cross the room to show him the pin on the hinge to the mechanical closet door; it needed banging. Then just when I had set myself up again for sanding, I would notice a can of varnish with a loose lid and stop to move it out of his reach. Work took three times as long and was fraught with an awareness of his mortality that made my stomach light. But his presence was a sort of food to me. Every ten minutes I redirected his heart-swelling focus to new tasks whose importance I inflated just to see the seriousness that came over his face. He cut his eyes to my hands and changed his grip on the tools to match mine. He accented my work with reasons to encircle his small torso with my fingers and move him bodily—that tiny rib cage and protuberant belly; his smell of soap and crushed apples; the soft hairs on the back of his neck. That is what I remember: those sudden swells of physical restlessness that parental love fills one with—maybe if I tickle him, or toss him in the air, or take his head in my hands, or press him close to my heart…

  The shelves took three months to build, and when I was done he watched me line them with banker’s boxes and hang a pen holder on the wall. Already, he had drawn pictures—a circle; a series of lines; the tiny hatch marks that were letters to him at that age—and this is where I planned to keep them. Over the years, other things went into the boxes too: photographs, awards, class projects, pieces of family history—and when I got home from work the day I spoke to Sylvia de Silva, I went downstairs to find one.

  It was mixed in with my coursework from a mechanical engineering class because I did not want them to find it. I am not sure why anymore. It was a brown paper accordion file full of mementos of the successes my mother was always celebrating: a one-dollar bill from my father’s first customer; a picture of my father installing a pipe on a Tudor house in Hopewell; the schematic from the plumbing system he designed for a small hotel; the invoice he never sent an elderly woman in Hoboken; a program from the 1949 Plumbing-Heating-Cooling Contractors Convention that listed my father’s speech, “The Mysteries of Drain-Waste-Venting Systems.”

  I put them back in the accordion file. Upstairs, I found the door to the attic closed. I knocked, and instead of calling out, he padded across the room and opened it.

  “I’m sorry for interrupting,” I said.

  He was looking at my hands. “What’s that?”

  “Something I thought might help you with your report.”

  “What is it?”

  “A folder of things my mom kept of my father’s.”

  His report was due tomorrow; the offer, coming now, might reasonably have made him angry, but he looked behind him and opened the door wider. He gestured toward his spare bed—moved up at Liz’s urging for friends he would never bring home—and so that is where I set it. Then he looked through them quietly, one leg bent on the bedspread and the other foot flat on the floor while I stood beside him, too chastened by his private manner at his door to really feel welcome. He turned them over one by one.

  “Where did you find it?”

  “It was downstairs. Mixed in with my college notebooks somehow.”

  He examined the invoice long enough to constitute a question.

  “He did that work for free,” I said. “My mother was proud of him.”

  He looked up at me. His pupils moved around in tiny abrupt increments, just like his mother’s: my mouth; my eyes; my hands. He ran a hand over his dark new hair. “Do you want a chair?”

  “That’s okay.”

  “Or you could sit on the bed, too. There’s room.”

  “I’m all right.”

  “There’s room.”

  “Okay,” I said, and remembered, as I settled there, how soft his old mattress was. It had been a long time, I guess, since he had invited me to sit.

  “What about this?” He held up the dollar bill.

  “From his first solo job,” I said.

  “What was it?”

  “A clogged toilet.”

  “Were you there?”

  “Yes. Sort of. I was in the car outside. My mom wanted us to watch.”

  He pushed at his glasses. He was looking at the photograph from the 1954 science fair my father had not attended. At first glance it looks like a crowd shot, all of the people are so small, but far in the background I am standing in front of my display explaining the workings of my centrifugal pump to a man with black-rimmed glasses. It was an odd thing to store among the work things that had made my mother proud, but as I looked closer, I realized that the hat and coat on the woman in the corner next to my station were my mother’s. My father must have taken the shot.

  Elliot held it up to me.

  “It’s from one of my science fairs,” I said. “That’s me back there.”

  “Who took it?”

  “He did.”

  The fair was in Passaic, a ninety-minute drive in each direction. When my mother and I got home afterwards he had been sitting in his chair next to the Austrian clock. He had a deck of cards laid out that made it appear he had done nothing with his day. There were dishes in the sink from both breakfast and lunch—a half-eaten ham sandwich; a hard-boiled egg—meals he could not possibly have eaten. “Sorry,” he had said, regarding my mother coolly. “I got distracted.”

  Elliot held the photo close to his face, studying it. Although I only saw my mother cry twice in my life, both times it had been from the sort of joy only relief from sorrow can bring, and there was no question in my mind that she had done so when she discovered this picture. When it began to seem Elliot might never stop studying it, I said, “I looked through the boxing book af
ter you left.”

  “Oh yeah?” he said, but he was still holding the picture.

  I said, “It’s got some of my best moves in it.”

  He forced a smile.

  I said, “Maybe I could teach you a few.”

  “Yeah.” He set the picture on top of the file. “Sure.” His stomach growled then, loudly, and he glanced at his watch. I had a sudden image of him arriving home alone, trying the kitchen door before remembering he had to use his key, and I thought about the way he and Liz had stood in the kitchen together last month, discussing his favorite bands. I wondered if he knew her absence was my fault, and because I could not apologize for this without inviting questions about a lot of things, instead I said, “I thought about what you suggested.”

  “About what?”

  “About writing a rebuttal.”

  It was still light out, but he had already changed into his pajamas, the same cotton button-front-and-pants style he had been wearing since he was eight. I don’t know what made him decide to change early some evenings, but it always made me uneasy, sometimes tongue-tied, at once recalling a thousand nights of bath time and stories and making me aware of their passing, his size and his Adam’s apple making a costume of those clothes. He drew his foot from the floor up onto the bed and gripped it, waiting. My ears felt hot.

  I said, “What I meant this afternoon is really true. I mean, I still mean what I said—that I think it would give them more credence than they’re due—but I respect your opinion, and I thought about it more. I think there are a lot of people who don’t know what to think one way or the other—not the reporters or the people who write those editorials, but the people who don’t have an opinion in the first place and then read the paper.”

  I became aware from his gaze that my hands were troubling the elastic band on the accordion file. I laid them on the bedspread. “That reporter called again after you left, and I told her what I thought.”

  “You did?”

  “I gave her a comment.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said I thought the investigations were mostly a way of justifying funding for a part of the Department that didn’t have a lot of work to do.”