The Testing of Luther Albright

by MacKenzie Bezos

  I drifted off, but woke an hour later sharing a pillow with my wife, and somehow her hair against my lips, and the smell of butterscotch from her open mouth filled me with a mixture of sadness and panic that sent my heart racing. I had only felt this feeling a handful of times in my adult life, but long ago I had found a way of dispelling it. Our basement was a space of which I was particularly proud, and part of what made this exercise so helpful was that I had to pass through a room I had made so well. Most basements lack sufficient headroom to allow for the installation of a drop ceiling and a plywood subfloor, but my basement is very deep. I ran all the water supply lines through joists behind the Sheetrock and hid the enormous soil pipe by boxing it in with boards stained and joined to make it appear almost indistinguishable from a wooden ceiling beam. And although most basements are damp and cold, by doing the job myself, I was able to ensure good weatherproofing. In particular, I chose to seal the exterior wall of the foundation rather than the interior one, which is more reliable for two reasons. Hydrostatic pressure, exerting force towards the center of the house as it does, tends to push against the surface of, and therefore tighten, exterior sealers, while pushing against the base of, and therefore loosen, those applied to the interior wall. Maybe even more important, exterior sealants prevent moisture from penetrating even the outer layer of the wall, thus providing several additional inches of security. As a general rule, history has taught us to protect a structure as far from the locus of vulnerability as possible.

  When I got to the bottom of the stairs that night, I stood there, as I often did, and visualized the pipes and wires running behind the pure white walls. When I opened the mechanical closet door, the light came on automatically, and there was just enough room for me to step in on either side of the machines. Mounted on the wall was a hand vacuum. Once a month, I went there to remove dust and dirt from the closet floor. I tightened the pipe fittings and the packing nuts on the centrifugal pump to keep it from losing its prime. I cleaned the air shutter on the hot-water heater to assure the proper supply of air to burner and pilot light. I polished the contacts on the furnace thermostat with fine sandpaper to remove dirt.

  But that night, I did none of these things. It was not what I’d come for. The space behind the furnace was barely wide enough to take my hand, but it was easy to find my way. High in the wall was a hole, four inches by four, that I cut before I installed the furnace. I reached in and pulled out the biscuit tin, and as I removed the lid, the furnace ticked and sighed into motion. Though it was unlikely, I always worried that one of them had found it—run fingers along its checkered grip and drawn wrongheaded conclusions about a life I had kept secret from them. But at the time I didn’t really believe I had a secret life. I thought I was merely protecting them. Guns are dangerous, and moreover, it wasn’t even mine.

  I took it out of the tin, surprised, as I always was, by how heavy it seemed to me. It was a Colt Service Model Ace .22 with a ten-round detachable magazine. One day, I had crept into my parents’ bedroom and copied the serial number into my notebook because I thought knowing its provenance might help me understand my father. It did not, but it did tell me he had probably spent too much, even in 1953. Production on the model had stopped after the war, and the scarcity was just beginning to inflate the price of them. I might have sold it easily years ago, just to rid myself of the worry that Elliot might find it and come to some harm. But by throwing all of the bullets away, I was able to convince myself it was safe enough to keep it. Although the warmest emotion I harbor for my father is pity, the truth is, this was one thing of his I really wanted to own. Superstitious as it was, for me, over the years, his pistol had become a sort of talisman. At those few times in my life when, lying in bed next to my sleeping wife, I had felt the beginnings of genuine fear or sadness building inside me, I had gone down to the basement and removed the gun from the hole. There in the dark, I held it in two hands with my back against the furnace room door, and at the precise moment when my breathing slowed and my pulse became itself again, I put the pistol back where it belonged, unloaded and hidden in my basement wall. In this way the gun was a reminder. It was a reminder of how deeply I differed from the kind of man who would burden his family with knowledge of his petty needs and sorrows.

  AS I SAID, LIZ’S SCHEDULE NOW AT THE CRISIS CENTER INCLUDED forty hours a week. They’d lost another volunteer, she’d said, and she felt bad for her coordinator, as well as for the callers. When she said this, she looked at me squarely. Our marriage had given me no opportunity to learn what she might look like were she to lie to me. I’d seen her do so once to someone else, a store clerk just after we were married. She had purchased a pair of shorts with LOVE embroidered across the backside, and the zipper broke the next day when she stooped to pick up a flat of strawberry plants at the nursery. When she tried to return them, he said he could only accept the return of unworn merchandise, and without blinking she said it had broken when she tried them on for her husband. In the parking lot, she filled the space in which we might have talked about it with a rant about a mother she’d seen yanking her son’s arm in the aisles, and although I knew why she had lied, in fact, respected her motives, it was several hours before the smoothness with which she had done so lost its hold on my imagination.

  The Crisis Center was in downtown Sacramento, and on my way to two separate appointments, I might have stopped by to say hello. On the first of these, I left home early and parked so that I’d have to pass its door. I looked for her car, and when I didn’t see it, I began to circle the block to find it, but as I passed by a children’s shoe store and saw a woman inside kneeling on the floor to squeeze the sides of her son’s sneakers, I was overcome by such deep shame I turned in place and hurried on to my meeting. A week later when an interview again took me to her part of town during her shift, I left home with the plan of dropping in with barbecue, and when I reached the door it was not guilt this time but sadness that stopped me. This was my wife. I ate my sandwich alone in César Chávez Park and set hers on a bench beside me before leaving, opening the flaps of waxed paper wide for the birds.

  In the end, I learned her secret not through spying, but instead by accident. An early proposal for a very expensive and unnecessary modification to my dam had been voted down, but in the newspaper days later there was an anonymous editorial that suggested this was a mistake we would all live or die to regret. The letter was crazy, and mentioned apocalypse, but one or two lines made it clear that this person had at least some knowledge of structural engineering, and although I’ve come to feel certain the author was a stranger to me, at the time I couldn’t help but wonder if it had been written by Belsky.

  It might be a measure of how much things had changed that when I read it at breakfast that morning I didn’t snap the paper with exaggerated flourish and read the crazy diatribe aloud. Instead, I felt a little flare of panic, not that the editorial would influence their opinion about my work in any way, but at the thought that this kind of humor and casual talk on topics related to my career were somehow now beyond us. I turned to the front of the section to monopolize it throughout the meal.

  When we finished breakfast, I set it on top of the others. I didn’t really care if they read it, just if they read it with me around. But in the next days, I found myself preoccupied with curiosity about whether Liz too had seen it and felt at a loss about how to handle the joking it warranted. The question took on an importance in my mind that I can scarcely explain except to say that it’s been my experience that generalized anxiety feeds best on smaller objects.

  I don’t know what made me think I might be able to tell, looking at the discarded newspaper, whether she had read it. The garage was cold, and my breath hovered in white puffs and disappeared as I leaned over the plastic bin. I felt a bolt of irritation when I lifted the lid. We’d had chicken the night before, and the carcass sat loosely wrapped in a piece of newspaper, covered in its own jelly. Liz always emptied the garbage neatly. Even a single item, su
ch as a ham bone, was wrapped in plastic and tied off before deposit into the can because ever since her first pregnancy she’d had a sensitive nose. It hadn’t even been his job to empty the garbage last night—it had been an act of unsolicited courtesy on his part—but still I felt annoyed, picturing his untied sneaker tapping the gas pedal, two fingers resting on the wheel as he drifted into the left lane.

  I set the carcass aside and began drawing out white plastic bags, neatly fastened by Liz with yellow plastic cable ties. The newspapers slid between them, and it had been cold enough the night before that the chicken smell was not rotten but fresh. It made my stomach growl, and my irritation flared again. Tuesday Sports. Monday Front Page. Tuesday Business. Saturday Home. Some had been discarded inside out after reading, and this made it more difficult to find what I was looking for. Bright, slippery coupons for car washes, hair color, honey-baked ham. It had been in the Friday Metro section, I thought. But before I found it, something else caught my eye. Liz’s red ink on a page of Classifieds.

  I stood up straight and set them on the hood of my car, but immediately I knew that this was her secret. What struck me first was the variety of the things she had circled: Assistant Bookkeeper, Clothing Sales, Librarian, Pet Sales, Prep Cook, Teaching Assistant, Tutor. Some of them had check marks next to phone numbers—the job as a prep cook at a restaurant near the capitol; the clothing sales position and a teaching assistant’s job at a preschool in Carmichael. What was disturbing about it was not that she had looked for a job, but that she had kept it to herself—whether because the distance between us made it difficult to explain, or because she thought her motives for doing so might hurt me.

  I separated the sheet from its section and folded it small. My drive had weakened somewhat, but I continued searching until I found the editorial. The section had been folded open to this page, and there was a small dribble of tea alongside it that told me that indeed she had read it. I tore it free of the paper and folded this too, as small as the want ads, and returned the garbage to its can. Then I headed back to the house.

  Bad moments that year were plentiful, and so it might seem fruitless to try to select front-runners from among them, but coming as it did at the end of a line of so many, and bearing the weight of all their discouragement, I think it is possible that the most dispiriting of all was opening my front door just then and smelling sewer gas. It was not really a comfort to me that neither of them was home, and I will be honest and say it took a great deal of self-control just then not to open the windows by shattering them. But of course I didn’t. I moved through the house sliding them open in casings I’d sanded with three grades of paper. Then I took a ball of twine from the kitchen drawer and lowered one end down the powder room drain. When it came up dry, I let the faucet run a few seconds to fill it and stepped outside.

  Even through three years of selfish testing, my father had maintained his house in Trenton with uncommon pride and obsessive care, but in the frozen spring of my junior year he began its destruction with something small. He let the faucet leak. At first, I thought he didn’t notice, and I was afraid of shaming him by pointing it out. Maybe my mother was also. We ate our meals listening to it dripping in the background until there was a second sign. He let a pinpoint of rust in the tub basin spread like a sore in the enamel. A lightbulb burned out and stayed burned out. Once, my mother tried to change it, but when my father saw her, he said, “I’ll do that, Lucille. I’ve been busy, but I’m not incompetent.” Our house grew darker. The Austrian clock wound down. Keeping time, too, was my father’s job, and my mother did not even attempt to do it for him. Finally, when his service van broke down that summer, he did not repair it. He began idling around the house.

  It’s hard now to explain exactly why I didn’t move to fix anything myself, except that as he began to betray us, my mother’s model of love was all I had. The more oppressive our passivity grew, the more I longed simply to leave, and this is probably why I chose a college so far away. It was the anticipation of this escape that allowed me finally to feel critical of her. I remember one night she and I were in the kitchen, examining two different jars she held up to a candle. She was making soup, and the aspirin and the bouillon tablets she bought came in similar bottles. She was trying to read them in a room full of burned-out bulbs neither of us could bring ourselves to replace. It had been four years since he had begun doing drastic things to provoke her, staying out late night after night and buying a gun and making up lovers, and now there was this.

  “Why don’t you ever get angry?” I said.

  She kept looking at the jars, but she stopped turning them in the light. Maybe it was surprise at the first verbal acknowledgment between us that there was anything wrong with him. Or maybe it was just the first time it had occurred to her that she might get angry. After a few seconds, she turned to me. “Some people need to see your love more than you need to see theirs.”

  Although at the time I would never have admitted this, even to myself, it was a relief to leave her. I stayed away as much as I could, with the excuses of money for travel and commitment to my studies, until I relied so thoroughly on my detachment for happiness that even a phone call from her felt like an invasion. By the time she called me in May of my sophomore year, the feeling of guilt and sorrow her voice stirred in me was familiar.

  “How’s school?” she said.

  “Good. Exams are coming up next week—”

  “I should call back then.”

  “No, no…” Through the wires, I heard the Austrian clock tolling. She was sitting in my father’s chair, I knew. I said, “How are you? How’s your sewing?”

  “I’m making a dress for Aunt Lynn.”

  “Oh?”

  “It’s like the one I made for Jenny.”

  “And Dad?”

  “Not good.”

  I didn’t know what to say to this. Just before I left home two years before, I had seen her break something intentionally. He had passed an entire dinner without speaking a word to either one of us, and afterwards, when she was alone in the kitchen with her back to the hall door, she held a plate at shoulder height over the kitchen sink for a few seconds, her arms outstretched, and just let go. Then she put on a pair of rose-pruning gloves and wrapped the pieces in newspaper and took them to the garbage can at the curb. There was that memory to turn to, but this was the first time I’d ever heard her express her pain with words. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Actually,” she said, and stopped. The clock had finished. There was a click in my mother’s throat. “Actually, he had a heart attack, Luther.”

  “He what?”

  “He’s dead.”

  There was a moment of silence then, during which, to my surprise, I felt the beginning of tears. I covered the mouthpiece on the receiver with my hand until the feeling passed. Then I said, “I’ll be home tomorrow.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  When I arrived, I found the front door unlocked, and a small stalagmite of sodden plaster obstructed the entryway. Rain had leaked through the light fixture, and he had not fixed it. My mother was in the kitchen, making deviled eggs by candlelight. I set my suitcase on the floor and took up a pastry tube full of the cooked yolk to help. She placed pimentos after me. She wanted to know what of my father’s things I wanted to take with me for sentimental reasons, and it’s a clear failure of character that I did not pretend to want anything. I forced her to make suggestions: his watch, his good winter coat, his tools. She asked me several times that first day, and I could only tell her I would think about it, but in my mildew-scented room that night, I could think of nothing he had owned that did not make me angry.

  The following morning, she told me she was going to the grocery store to buy more food for the funeral reception, and four hours later, I found her there in the frozen-food aisle, a glass door propped open by her body, her breath and the steam off her coat clouding the glass. She was holding a frozen spinach soufflé in one hand and her purse in the o
ther. “What about his pocket knife?” she said, and it is a dark secret of mine that what I felt at that moment was a fear mixed not with sympathy but with irritation. How could she mourn him? I led her to the cash register, her wool coat cool from the freezer, and when I took her wallet from her purse, I saw that beneath it lay my father’s gun.

  This, then, was what I asked for. It is a sign that I’d judged the severity of her mental state correctly that she did not even worry over why I wanted it myself. We buried him the next morning, and I stayed two more weeks to move her things to her parents’ house in Princeton, and when I returned to school, I spent a restless night getting out of bed to flip on the fluorescent lights and reposition the pistol. First I hid it under the mattress at the head of my bed, but in that state between half-sleep and dreams when worry is still active but the line between reality and fiction is gone, I imagined the gun misfiring into the base of my skull. It kept me from sleeping. I sat up in bed and rested my hands on my knees. I moved it into my desk drawer. Then I worried about someone finding it there—a fire inspection. Surely it was against university regulations to keep firearms in the dorm rooms. I checked its chamber again for bullets. Finally, I put it in a small square biscuit tin and slipped it in the deep pocket of the winter coat my mother had insisted I take with me. This is where it stayed, untouched in my closet, until that strobe of police lights on my ceiling in Sacramento two years later. Funny; a burglary in the building might have made me want to keep a gun in my apartment, to protect myself, but instead I wanted only to hide it. When I examine the impulse, it seems there were two emotions behind it. One was fear of loss, and the other was shame at the way my attachment to an unloaded pistol marked me as my father’s son.