Life Between Wars

by Robert Patton

  The Winstons were constantly asking him to come visit them. The associations such a visit might bring to mind intimidated Brendan. But getting stir-crazy at home, he eventually agreed to go with Lois one Saturday when she was cleaning there. He kept to the main house, avoiding the solarium and certainly the backyard. Outside, he held his eyes low lest they reflexively flick to the widow’s walk and, as if from seeing an eclipse or an atom bomb, be blinded ever after.

  He’d come hoping for news of Araby. They’d whisked her away to Manhattan two days after the shooting and he hadn’t had a word from her since. The Winston place was all about death to him. But in its evocation of good times with her, it likewise was all about life.

  The plan, carefully orchestrated by Lois and Mrs. Winston, was to keep the boy’s visit brief, uneventful, light. Oddly, the shooting last September had shocked and dizzied Mrs. Winston much more than it had her husband; he seemed rather sharper and spryer for the excitement. And in her muddlement Mrs. Winston’s hostess persona had come to dominate. Brendan’s fall off her roof, Jerome’s violent death in her backyard — these things reflected poorly on her hospitality, an impression she aimed to rectify. At lunch she strove to keep conversation to the harmless present. Her panic when a lull set in was dispelled by Brendan’s questions about Araby. But Araby too was a grim reminder, so Lois, who’d been asked to join them at the meal for precisely this reason, smoothly shifted the subject to Brendan’s doings at school and at home. Matthew’s name came up — and the fact that he owned the house Brendan and Lois lived in, and the fact that he was an artist.

  “An artist!” Mr. Winston exclaimed as he took another tongue sandwich off the serving tray. “I’ve been needing one of those.”

  “You have?” said his wife.

  “To paint my arborvitae tree!”

  Mrs. Winston met Brendan’s gaze abjectly. “Oh, dear.”

  These days the old man was dressing neatly, nodding off less, keeping current with newspapers and cable television; he’d become crazy for home shopping, buying jewelry and exercise equipment in vast quantity, a fiscal nuisance had his wife not given him a dummy credit card to play with. By and large, however, he seemed almost normal. Yet his bizarre interest in arborvitae phenomena evidently had been revived by Brendan’s visit today. “My tree saved this boy’s life. He landed on it, see? It broke his fall, and I want the damn thing commemorated.”

  Lois corrected him, “I thought Bren hit the solarium first.”

  “Oh, dear,” Mrs. Winston repeated, her careful plan crumbling.

  Brendan’s pulse raced. He didn’t remember falling. There was Johnwayne with a pistol, then there was Lois’s face in the hospital. But his body remembered, for it began to quake and perspire at this turn of subject. His face throbbed where the stitches had been. For a moment he forgot how to breathe.

  “Okay,” Mr. Winston allowed. “He hit the solarium, then bounced into my shrubbery.”

  Brendan slid back his chair and left the dining room through the swinging door leading to the kitchen. The cook Mrs. Locke jumped at the sight of him. The two gaped at each other. He remembered her from his visits here last September. Other links dawned on him. The woman was Johnwayne’s mother. Johnwayne’s brother had killed Jerome. The woman’s son therefore, her other son, had murdered Brendan’s dad.

  Mrs. Locke backed away as if from a mugger. “They told me not to see you.”

  Lois burst into the kitchen. “Bren, we’re sorry.”

  “I wanna talk to her.”

  “Brendan, come on.”

  “Just us.” He saw Mrs. Locke fearfully wince. Lois backed out through the swinging door.

  “Young man,” Mrs. Locke began, “you can’t know my shame — ”

  “Where’s Johnwayne?”

  “Safely put away, I promise you. I signed the papers without hesitation.”

  “He’s in prison?”

  Her hands twitched on her apron. “Basically.” Johnwayne had been remanded to a secure institution for extended observation to determine what further danger he posed. “We can all sleep better now. It scares me even today to think he wanted to kill you and that girl. He still won’t admit it, the doctors tell me. He says the gun was a gift. For her.”

  “I heard it wasn’t loaded,” Brendan said.

  “Yes. No,” she said, confused. “And that has hurt poor Del’s, my older son’s . . . ” She made herself finish. “His chances.”

  “Is he back as a cop? I haven’t seen him around.”

  “He has applied. The investigation concluded it was a totally understandable accident. But Chief Rickert just won’t believe your, your — ”

  “My dad.”

  “ — your dad, he won’t believe your dad meant to use that gun on Marcus.”

  “On Johnwayne.”

  “Yes,” grudgingly. “And it’s Rickert’s vote that counts, as far as Del’s reinstatement goes.”

  “He always had a soft spot for my old man.”

  Mrs. Locke composed herself, perceiving a glimmer here. Her defective child she could write off; she’d do anything to save Del. Carefully she asked, “Do you think the chief is right?”

  Brendan hesitated. Before he quit drinking, Jerome had been quick to erupt in violence — Brendan recalled this too well. During the Vietnam war, according to Willoughby, Jerome had been a precise and prudent trooper in the cause. No monster, no killer. A man to admire. Brendan had his own memories of his dad, loving but not smitten, fond but not foolish; and he had these shiny new legends from Willoughby. “You’re asking would my father have shot Johnwayne if he’d had the chance, after seeing me all bloody like that?”

  She nodded, knowing she was requesting a son’s betrayal. “It would show Chief Rickert that Delbert had proper cause to believe that your father, your dad, was dangerous.”

  Brendan breathed in, breathed out. His head hurt trying to remember it right, trying to recall Jerome as he’d truly been. It was easier when people just told him. At length Brendan said, “My dad was an exceptional person, you can ask anyone,” growing angry now, angry at something, “and now he’s just dead in the ground.”

  Mrs. Locke looked scared. “I’m so sorry — ”

  Brendan didn’t let up. “Johnwayne was okay. Probably the gun was a present for Araby. Maybe you signed papers on the wrong man. Del should be put away, not Johnwayne. Your Del oughta fucking die!”

  “Brendan!”

  Lois and Mrs. Winston, listening at the door, rushed between them. Mr. Winston stood in the background as erect and dapper as a circus ringmaster. “This is fine,” he said as Brendan shoved past him back into the dining room, “this is healthy.” The old man turned to Mrs. Locke and was moved to see tears on her face. Discreetly he leaned to her ear as if passing a tip on a horse race. “Take heart,” he said, his smile boyish and winning. “I did.”

  Thirty-Two

  Reinstatement to the police force was only the second most important thing to Del. He was more anxious to get his brother released from the mental hospital, and to that end was gathering affidavits affirming Johnwayne’s gentle nature from locals who knew him. With these on file to support his decision, Johnwayne’s psychologist would recommend that the boy be allowed to return home. Home was Del’s new apartment above a video store near the Catholic church. His mother was still at her house across town. He’d moved out for the reason most people do, because he felt dead in his childhood home.

  Chief Rickert’s resistance to Del’s return to the force remained steadfast. Del understood that Rickert had been fond of Jerome, treating him as a ne’er-do-well son. Understanding didn’t ease Del’s resentment, however. Reinstatement had come to represent his last bit of reprieve for killing Jerome. As long as the chief withheld redemption, Del withheld it too, going to bed full of doubt each night and waking with it each morning, like a child hungry with no ho
pe of food, hollow dread in the pit of his stomach.

  While collecting affidavits on Johnwayne’s behalf, Del thought of a way to remedy his own difficulties as well — he’d enlist the aid of Jerome’s brother. Del recalled the odd rapport between Robby and Johnwayne, when Robby had been in lockup awaiting arraignment. He hoped Robby, whether out of fondness for Johnwayne or out of his born-again spirituality, might leap at the chance to get seriously Christian and forgive one’s brother’s killer. Sure it was calculating, but that was Del these days: He was nobody’s dupe any more.

  Robby had vacated his and Lois’s apartment. Back working as a fisherman and part-time roofer, he spun dreams of marital reconciliation constantly through his days. Lois still asked him to dinner now and then. He lived for the invitation, bringing fruit or pie and doing dishes afterward as good husbands do; later he’d fret over each word and nuance between them and invariably decide he’d blown it. Her smallest kindness fueled hope, so back he’d be the next day, dreaming of indestructible love. He put those dreams to music.

  In late winter he began playing guitar in Penscot bars. At first he played mostly to locals; tourists added to his audience as spring came. He was out on bail awaiting trial for manslaughter. He mentioned this in his stage patter in a fatalistic, not entirely crass way that set strong moods for the blues and gospel standards he sang, and for his own compositions as well. It hardly looked like Robby up there, fingerpicking a Gibson sunburst in his engineer’s cap and denim shirt, his long hair pale in the blue stagelight and his arms thin as a junky’s, though he was clean of any intoxicants save religious faith, and even this he’d moderated to a basic maintenance program. In a sense he’d become married to the part of himself that had killed a person. The first blush of fever and thrill was gone. It was something he lived with now.

  Del came in during Robby’s last set at The Cave one weekday night. Many patrons there had been Jerome’s buddies and knew exactly who Del was; they regarded him with disdain. Del took a table near the stage. He thought of ordering whiskey to fit in with the crowd, but that would have been the old skittish Del. He ordered what he wanted.

  When Robby’s last song was over, he went straight to Del’s table, summoning the waitress. “One more for my brother here.” Del bridled at the expression, at first. He realized that Robby was too dimwitted to provoke him with sarcasm, and that he meant brother as in brotherhood — of people, that is, who share some like experience. “Whatcha drinkin’?” Robby asked.

  “Diet Pepsi.”

  “I’ll have the same,” Robby said to the waitress. When it arrived, he tipped his glass to Del. “How ’bout it? Raise any dead lately?”

  Del too tipped his glass. “Not yet.”

  Thirty-Three

  Lois had no personal experience of major illness, though TV, with its PBS documentaries and disease-of-the-week melodramas, had familiarized her with cancer’s technical aspects more than she knew. When Matthew finally divulged his condition to her, she understood that “inoperable” was bad but not necessarily a death sentence.

  “Radiation has shrunk my tumor somewhat,” Matthew said. “That’s what I do on the mainland, when I go. Get zapped.”

  “I figured it was lovers’ getaways. With him.”

  “With Willoughby?” Matthew smiled. “Don’t tell him you thought that, he’ll have a fit.”

  “It’s your business.” She shrugged, gladder than she let on that Willoughby wasn’t, well, like Matthew. “So you dying, or what?”

  “I’m living,” he said.

  Brendan’s recovery had been Lois’s single exhaustive concern; news of Matthew’s illness restored her equilibrium as heavy luggage in each hand makes for an easier trip than in one. After that, she found herself grouping them together, Brendan, Robby, Matthew, and Matthew’s pal Willoughby, as orphans under her care. That was the change Jerome’s death had wrought in her. She wanted anchors now — a purpose, a home — to keep her from the chasm his death had opened; a traumatized boy and three pathetic grown men would serve. Of them all, she took the broadest view of what their lives had become. She saw their image in Penscot itself, sheltered and assailed by the surrounding sea. The island was moving, ocean currents eroding away its eastern bluffs while accreting sand at its opposite shore. The island was moving, though you couldn’t feel it. Lois felt it now.

  Evenings she presided over dinner, Brendan at the table’s far end, Matthew, Robby, and Willoughby between, she was filled with a sense of obligations met. It helped her sleep at night. What kept her awake were memories of her life at the time of Jerome’s death. That life now seemed brainless but for its industry, its hustle; it seemed empty despite a worldly cynicism that had colored all her dreams contentedly gray. What most chagrined her in retrospect was her proud claim in the face of any critique that she was a survivor, for it seemed a dubious priority now.

  From an early age Lois had sought lusterless circumstances within which she might shine unopposed. Marrying Robby, settling on Penscot, had shrunk her horizons willfully. Her present selflessness was no less expedient, a patch job meant to last until her guilt pangs passed. She still felt guilty for seducing that child Ollie Newberry; though you couldn’t call it evil exactly, in hindsight it looked pretty seamy, a childish prank that by the coincidence of a bullet fired two miles away, seemed, today, an integral factor in that bullet’s consequence. She was haunted by the way she’d envied the growing affection between Jerome and Anna, wished a wish that had come grotesquely true in Jerome’s death and Anna’s breakdown, her sister flipping out and fleeing to a convent as if in some medieval soap opera.

  All Lois’s fault, that’s how it felt — illogically, but real enough to give her nightmares, nightmares she tried to head off by sifting her more distant past for seeds of virtue she’d long denied or downplayed in the interest of hanging tough. Not given to prayer, disinclined to get stoned or laid, she had to fashion a new peace of mind bit by bit. It was something she did with her eyes shut and her hands clamped tight between her knees, alone, awake, every night.

  Maybe it was inevitable that she and Willoughby began to resonate sympathetically. The pressure of contrition each labored under was released, like steam, in ironic mutterings, confessions really, of dismay at the stunted lives they were leading. Before ever speaking directly, Lois and Willoughby shared secrets of attitude. They’d distrusted and disliked each other when coincidence first cast them as players in the same drama. But dismissal gave way to edgy parity. When Willoughby had first moved into Matthew’s spare room above her flat, she received him with obsequiousness just skirting sarcasm; or she went the other way, acting bossy and put-upon so he’d know he was unwelcome. He in turn parried with sticky gentility. Before long they came to enjoy it. So stuck were they in feeling sorry, it was fun now and then to tease and flirt. Roused from a sleepwalk by desires they’d supposedly sworn off, they looked forward to meeting at evening. The fixed receptor of one another’s dry manner became something familiar to count on.

  By appearances Willoughby was unattached and Lois happily separated. Neither knew of the other’s constraints; each considered themselves the naughty one for positing communion. They were vain that way: Neither believed anyone was their match in the devilish things that crossed their minds. And since each was a person who expected to tell right from wrong only afterward, as a consequence of poor choices, they told themselves that any eventual consummation would, at worst, offer some hard-won wisdom. Regret surely walks with revelation — Lois and Willoughby pursued it as some pursue happiness. Their cautious, mutual circling was a regression to careless ways. And had he noticed it happening, it would have confirmed to Matthew his deepest-held dictum — that people never change — though in this case it wouldn’t have pleased him, not at all, to be again proved right.

  Thirty-Four

  Matthew had first come to know Eve Cochran — Jerome’s second wife, Brendan’s mother — wh
en she lived in his downstairs apartment during Jerome’s tour of duty in Vietnam. Eve had borne her husband’s absence with fierce grace, trusting in God and country while bombarding Washington politicians with scalding, pleading letters to end the war. Matthew’s mother recently had passed away, creating an absence in his heart that Eve, big-hipped, embracing, earthy, had occupied in a perfect fit.

  When Jerome wrote to tell Eve, the curt tone of his letter hardly sounding like him, that he was volunteering to extend his combat tour six months. Eve had wept in Matthew’s arms on his living room sofa. Subsequently Matthew had funded Eve’s trip to Honolulu, where she joined Jerome for a brief leave resulting in Brendan’s conception — so he wasn’t totally out of line in regarding the boy as his son. The presumption posed a dilemma when Jerome came home in 1973. Though Matthew was closer to Eve than was Jerome at that time, he didn’t intrude on their conjugal, parental reunion. To the young family he became a doting, beneficent, eccentric uncle, a role that eventually conditioned into habit his present personality — hard to take on a daily basis but worth indulging, keeping around, for its periodic embodiment of great decency.

  After Eve’s death, Matthew had resolved to be Brendan’s vigilant guardian. It turned out Jerome needed him more. The depths the man sank to, the destruction grinningly wreaked on himself and others, implied depths of emotion Matthew hadn’t thought thugs could feel. He found himself wanting to master Jerome’s wild heart and to cultivate it — he developed a big crush, in other words, which to live with required major sublimation. Not a longing glance nor one untoward touch did Matthew ever let slip. Brainy overtures of poetic friendship were this seducer’s wine and music. The nearest he came to consummation was when he ventured “deep” to describe his feelings to Jerome and didn’t get his ass kicked.

  Jerome had a fair hunch about Matthew’s sexual tilt. Wary at first, in time he thought it very cool that he could hang with Matthew intellectualwise despite Matthew’s being both queer and smart. It was okay too if the fag friendship estranged Jerome from his drinking buddies; those guys were bums anyhow. Jerome’s elitism was his bashful secret. Matthew’s was defiant, the last recourse of a nobody artist. It fulfilled the men in complementary ways to pull off such an unlikely union. And Jerome had plenty of women to sleep with whenever, while Matthew settled for selfless virtue to keep him warm at night.