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Come Sunday

Page 44

by Bradford Morrow


  “Poverino,” he whispered. Poor thing.

  He had forgotten to steal a shovel, but there was no going back. Fingers quaking, he counted how much money he had left. Four hundred twenty dollars. If he could find a store open on Sunday he could buy a shovel and still have enough money left for the flight back home.

  Disoriented, he drove as if velocity might compensate for his lack of direction. Everything was behind him except his atonement and some still unformed conceit that once he made his way through customs at Aeroporto da Vinci he might set out on a course that would lead him back to Nini.

  Nini. The steel trusses whipped by. The sun, he thought. He had come west from east and he knew where he wanted to go was therefore east from here. The fat man and Krieger with all their theories of history and how civilization for better or worse moved always like the sun from east to west. They both had missed that one simple detail—how simple things can seem at ninety-five miles an hour—that detail which surely figured into this catastrophe as well as any (and who should understand this better than an Italian?). Explorers looking for the East Indies sailed straight into what this short span of time would come to conjure as just the opposite, the west, here, this, and in the beneficent and extraordinary spirit of blunder (blunder! was that the word to define the whole experience?), the first tentative, dainty, stealing, killing boys set out, the first who could see their way to making up a total fiction? beginning with using the word Indian to mean a man, a woman, those who they found here in this place now so perverted that the House of Pancakes (what was that?) … how sad, how sorrowful, how tragic a thing it seemed to Lupi, and it was gone as quickly as it had appeared.

  He was no better than the rest, was he. He was worse than most, in fact.

  That’s how it was. The car easily slowed to a stop. There was a young man standing beside a tractor in a lot not far from the road. Lupi ran, tripped, out into the field and asked him which way was east? The farmer pointed back down the road. Lupi thanked him, and returned to the car, whose engine was still running. He put it into gear, turned it around and accelerated quickly in the other direction. Full of confidence he drove half a mile before pulling over to the shoulder of the road once more and swung the car around again. His eyes ran over the dash, and down across a road map. The map was not an illusion but its smear of alternatives was seductive. He saw where he was, or at least where he had passed the night. There was a red-inked circle along the printed river and beside it the words “our house.” No matter how fast he’d been traveling he knew he was still in the vicinity of the red circle and the words—although in fact rather than speeding in the direction of New York, his flight to freedom was headed out toward a different freedom, to be found beyond the Catskills caught by the great sweet curve of the Susquehanna River, strung out like a basket between the towns of Binghamton and Wilkes-Barre. But before he would get there he saw the ragged blue and pink and yellow flags strung along lines across the fenced lot of a drive-in movie which tempted his attention away from the map and when he looked up he was past when he pulled hard at the steering wheel to make the curve that broke into a field where the road narrowed to a tight lane fenced along either shoulder, and as he did tears came fast again in his eyes but he laughed as the wheels of the car still made rubber bites in the road and he could see the partial reflection of his eyes in the mirror and it made him laugh the more as suddenly he felt happy here in this dislocated tangle of garden because he knew that both he and Cristóbal de Olid were going to be fine they were going to be just fine they were going to make it through.

  3.

  THE FACE BRIGHTENED into a smile deficient in no measure of courtesy, even relief, as Krieger had remained mindful of the complicated mess he had manufactured upstairs in the small anteroom with its single bed and the human specimen stretched out cold in it no longer able to provide his client much to work with. The twitch he felt in the muscles at his temples, a tic that showed deeper nervousness than what he wanted to display, he converted as best he could into a wink, both eyes closed for an instant, while he took Owen Berkeley’s outstretched hand into his own and shook it in a suitably clerklike manner, released it, and said, “Of course, for a minute there I started to think, well Corless it’s true you came quite a distance but it’s not like this is the first time you have gone a long way and sometimes things have gone up in smoke, and you’ll go a long way again no doubt and, sometimes things won’t go just the way you thought they might. It’s just the nature of the, the beast, nature of the occupation.”

  “You take a philosophical approach to life,” Berkeley retorted. He had not shaved, and as he spoke the light from the window sparkled in the silver grinds collected in his hollow cheek. The morning suit he wore, complete with its waistcoat and gold chain that fell in a catenary arc from watch fob to the pocket opposite, weighted with a boar’s tooth and an Irish gold coin, had a sheen like ice so many times had it been worn; the edge of the collar and piping along the buttonholes showed almost through to the pale buckram lining underneath. Nevertheless, elegance pervaded, or rather, an old-worldliness.

  “Yes well, but I thought, this Berkeley he seems different than some of the others, flattery aside—was thinking of some speech or other of Patrick Henry, you know well of course you must know even better than I do, but this speech?”

  “Yes …”

  “Of Henry’s? I think it was before the Virginia Convention where he said and I quote, If we wish to be free, if we mean to preserve inviolate those inestimable privileges for which we have been so long contending—and I think here you and I know whereof we speak, don’t we—if we mean not basely to abandon the noble struggle in which we’ve been so long engaged and which we’ve pledged ourselves never to abandon until the glorious object of our contest shall be obtained—we must fight!”

  “That may well be the case, Dr. Corless,” he breathed.

  Despite himself, Krieger was impressed by what he viewed as absolute insolence in the nod that Berkeley made, a deep and tardy nod designed for some different era, a time whose history had no obligation to embrace the quark or the curvature mathematically deducible in the soul of a straight line. “I’ve been challenged by both your children here to take advantage of your absence and their what …? What can I call it? their superior abilities to understand the nature of your needs, the needs that is of your important work here and I must say, well, fight is the word.”

  Owen Berkeley turned to his daughter but before he could say anything she rose out of her chair and announced she was going back to New York: “I give up. I don’t care what you, like what’s going on here. I just don’t care. I’ve done everything I can do.”

  “You’ll do no such thing,” her father shouted after her, but she had already left the kitchen.

  For such a heavy door the sound of its slam was sharp.

  Krieger’s eyes shot over to Berkeley senior to see that he did not recover his composure, because he never lost it.

  “Jonathan,” the man said, evenly, bored even, “go talk to your sister.”

  “You’re the one who needs to be talked to. For openers you might be interested to know that this man’s name is not Corless—”

  Ignoring him, Owen poured the fresh thick milk from a canister into the top pan of a double boiler, produced a match from his vest pocket and struck it on the wall. He lit the gas burner of the stove.

  “I believe it’s important that I know what’s going on here, I’ve had dealings with this man in the past, maybe you’ll remember, and I think I’m better equipped to judge the value of whatever it is he’s trying to sell you than you are,” continued Jonathan. “I also happen to know what lengths you seem to be willing to go to, to get the money together for this insanity, and since this is my house, too, I think I ought to have some say.”

  “Your house,” were Berkeley’s words.

  Krieger stood politely back into the room, having sensed the expediency an almost Edwardian deference might have under the
circumstances. It was so plainly rhetorical a gesture that Jonathan recognized it for the value it had; “Goddamn it,” he said.

  “Pardon me, Corless,” Berkeley muttered and left as the great oak door pitched into its frame with a slow quiet dignity, meaning to Krieger that all was well, a matter of moments just to be tended with patience, almost with love, so that this little journey—like all the others—would bear its fruits. And as he waited for Jonathan to speak, he thought, What dire and unexpected slapstick, as he began then to detach himself from the proceedings. The hiccup of a laugh stuck in his throat. It felt anguished, this air stuck in the contraction of flesh, but it was best left in his body, and at the same moment he pulled his face into the purest blank stare. It worked and he was grateful when Jonathan followed his father out of the room without having done more than mutely clench his fist and raise his middle finger out of it, holding it up so close to Krieger’s face he was sure he could feel the warmth of the skin radiate there at his forehead. He had not flinched, would not flinch, and the gesture had received only that blank look for all its incipient violence and passion before the door was pressed shut, this time with a crack which reverberated through the china in the cabinet, and Krieger was left alone.

  Presentation, he reminded himself, presentation, presentation, and when he poured another cup of coffee he concentrated on the play of the steam, its fickle wiry tendrils, as a meditation. He seated himself at one end of the table. The coffee had a dismal thinness to it. He crossed his legs, uncrossed them, tapped his fingertips to replicate the sound of cantering hooves of a horse.

  Gloomily he looked around the room. The calendar with its great empty squares for each day and the photographic scene of a comfortable and quaint town, New Hampshire or Vermont, under the winter’s first dusting of snow, its white clapboard church and steeple reaching into the parrish-blue sky of morning. The utensils. The potholders, one shaped like a lamb. The reproduction of Renoir’s Le Bal à Bougival. The drooping shelves weighted with their cookbooks—Betty Crocker’s Picture Cookbook, revised and enlarged, the High Maples Farm book of recipes, The United States Regional Cookbook by Ruth Berolzheimer—on the spine of the dust jacket, the cock, the beehive, the bull, the idealized face of the Spanish girl with a red flower in her hair, the fagot of wheat, and the sober Midwestern girl above with her bonnet, brown eyes, and cherry-round lips. (They were arguing in the next room. The voices came through the wall. Somewhere in their exchange of tones Krieger descried the music of his own adolescence, although Krieger thought of himself as a man without a childhood and far removed from the possibility of such words as those he now could hear.) He got up and pulled down the Berolzheimer.

  He opened it at random. Zoete Broodjes, he read. Sweet rolls. Dutch. Zoete Broodjes for company. 1 pint milk. 5 tablespoons shortening. 4 tablespoons sugar. 1 teaspoon salt. 1 cake yeast. 6 cups sifted flour. Melted butter. 1 cup brown sugar. Directions. Scald milk.

  “I apologize,” Berkeley said when he returned.

  Krieger snapped the cookbook shut, ran his fingers over the faces of women depicted on the cover.

  “Would it be better, Dr. Berkeley, if I came back another day?”

  “Absolutely not, Corless. I appreciate your patience,” and he picked a head of garlic from the strand that hung by a cord from a cabinet and began to separate and peel cloves on the counter as he went on. “You have children, Corless?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “You’re a wiser man than most.”

  “Seems like a heretical statement for a gerontologist.”

  “It does?”

  “Of course.”

  “Maybe on the surface.”

  “Well look, no children no subjects for your study, the point goes moot, doesn’t it?”

  “No children, no longevity, no death, no gerontology, but if I were more interested in the personal aspects of the research I suppose I’d have managed by now to get myself into an academic setting, or some kind of lab in an applied-sciences division of a corporation, pharmaceuticals or whatnot. But I’ve never been able to abide committee decisions. The minor disagreement with my children just now, it’s a perfect example. The process intrigues me more than the product, the pill, the poultice. You see?”

  Berkeley had placed a handful of pungent aromatic cloves of garlic into a mortar and began crushing them under the porcelain pestle’s head.

  “But nevertheless, take my advice, whatever it is you might want with children, do it with other people’s children, otherwise I think you’ll discover they’re a joyless enterprise, an illogical and wasteful, dreary piece of work. You raise them, try to create the semblance of a home around the idea—a borrowed idea, by the way, a received tenet, not something you could know a priori—and what happens inevitably is that they turn on you. You’re either swept under the rug, or mollycoddled, blamed for a whole host of problems you never created. You become an instrument for their own mercenary tendencies.”

  “I’ll bear it in mind for the future.”

  “Do,” and Berkeley mixed the garlic juice with warm water and drank it. “Would you like something?” He held the empty glass up toward Krieger.

  “No, I have my coffee.”

  “Alkaloid caffeine, behaves like theobromine, overstimulates the vascular system, nervous system, a rotten fuel. Balzac died of it.”

  “Well, we all have got to die of something.”

  “We seem to, but coffee’s suicidal, you have a moral—almost—responsibility, liability not to consume it.”

  “To get back to what we were saying,” as Krieger placed the saucer on top of the cup, “it wasn’t that I minded your son’s—what’s his name again? Jonathan? yes well Jonathan, not that I minded his concern, just a touch combative is all, might have learned something if he’d asked a question or two, could have used the opportunity to orient himself about his father’s discipline, but of course I wouldn’t know, don’t mean to sound presumptuous …”

  “Presumptuous? No, you’ve been patient—I apologize for not wanting to proceed with matters last night but as you know you did go over my head, coming straight here, I thought we’d agreed to, well, no matter—”

  “I’m sorry about that.”

  Krieger glanced at his watch; these preliminary formalities were taking too much time.

  “In any case, the three of you slept well?”

  “We did.”

  “Fine, well, I believe we have some business to conduct.”

  The milk had come to a soft boil; the kitchen was warm with a yeasty steam. Berkeley poured it through a sieve of cheesecloth into a bowl and brought it to the table. Fingers disquieted by his apprehension lifted the bowl uneasily to his lips and then set it down beside the thick manila envelope. He began to untie the string that was wound in a figure-eight under the two circular tabs. Krieger watched the fingers and saw how they tapered to the fine yellow nails that showed in their length many weeks’ growth. “What’s your real name, Corless?” he said, flatly.

  Krieger hesitated, improvised, “Ingram.”

  “Ingram.”

  “Yes. Ingram, I think it means angel-raven, the first element deriving from Ingil, the second from French or German, Ramn.”

  “That’s pretty good, Corless.”

  “Thank you. By the way, before we discuss the project, etcetera, I’ve brought you a present.” Krieger lifted the small rectangular wooden box off the floor beside his chair and handed it across the table.

  It was the kaleidoscope. With imperturbable skepticism, or so it was played out, his face drawn down into a docile enough frown, Berkeley removed it from the bed of dried leaves which had served as padding for the journey (and he noted how the leaves’ strong scent lent the object some sense of antiquity, veritability—this Corless had seen to everything). He held it up to the light and turned the barrel. “Very lovely.”

  “I told you, didn’t I?”

  “Well.” Berkeley put it back into its box. “That is to say the i
mages are quite pretty, but it has as much value as a three-dollar bill if you still claim it was made, what, several hundred years ago.”

  His words went unheard. Lupi should have been down by now. Precious minutes were twisting past, each full of increasing contortion. The profound sense, here under the hollow ticking of the wall clock, that something had gone awry began to trouble his nerves. The silence startled him. Krieger looked up and said, “Whatever you say.”

  “I’ve done a bit of reading about the area you say It comes from, and I have to admit it is distinctly, well, plausible that this Spaniard through Mayan techniques which none of us in our pragmatic blindness would so much as bother to investigate might have discovered some combination of methods to prolong his life, well, if not as long as you claim, at least—who knows, and if the village is pristine … well …”

  “Pristine?”

  “Uninfiltrated by moderns.”

  “I assure you.”

  “Well it was pristine that is, was before, but we can’t lose sight of the possible benefits that can be derived.”

  Krieger stood up. He heard voices, the voices of men, deep voices echoing from some large room nearby in the house.

  “May I have a look through the photographs of the village?”

  “What?”

  “The photographs?”

  He did not answer; his head was erect, chin pushed out forward. He noticed the unlatched window that gave out onto a fallow garden and mist of gray woods beyond. The voices were very formal in their address.

  “I’ll just have a look at the photographs and then we can go up and have a few words with … the photographs, yes here …”

  Krieger casually took several steps in the direction of the window. “Fine,” he said, forehead wrinkled.

  “But these aren’t Spanish-looking faces particularly, tell me, which of these in this group here … or …”

  Berkeley glanced up just in time to see Krieger’s hand abandon the crackling white paint of the sill, a mere jot of salmon—his hand—shredded into the pinch of chill wind that blew in by the open square and caused the pile of photographs to flutter beside the ring of milk.

 

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