Bomber's Law

by George V. Higgins

  “Now, give the old biddies credit here, that setup would’ve handled the whole thing very well. Tory and I could’ve stayed right where we were in Canton, paying Virginia’s half of the mortgage, if she died before it was paid off, out of her Megabucks checks. And Lucy could’ve stayed put too—her Megabucks money would’ve covered her half the rent easy and still left her more’n enough to live on. Then, when she kicked the bucket, Tory would’ve inherited the whole house of horrors, and we immediately would’ve turned right around and sold the goddamned thing for whatever the market would’ve brought.

  “But, with Lucy dying first, and leavin’ her Megabucks checks to some niece or other down of hers down in ragin’ Cajun country, well, that made it an entirely different bag of cats that we had on our hands. Virginia had enough to pay the whole mortgage and cover all of her other expenses, but it was going to be a real tight squeeze. What she actually had, income from all sources, would’ve been just barely enough to do both, if you really stretched it. And that was the real problem that we all had to face: the stretching. She just didn’t have any slack at all. One heavy, unexpected expense, like a new roof, or one more small but steady, regular expense, some new prescription’d keep her breathing but that’d cost as much to refill every month as the payment on your first car did; some other article she simply had to have: either one’d do it, just sink the whole thing. The minute she needed anything more’n a cleaning lady dropping by three, four hours a week—because this’s still a great big house we’re talking about here, keep in mind, even though there’s only one person living in it; even though some rooms’re vacant, closed off in order to save heat, that doesn’t mean they still don’t have to be opened up and dusted every now and then—that’d be her camel’s-backstraw. She’d be in over her head.

  “She was trapped, and because she was, so were we. If she paid the whole mortgage, she’d need help with her overhead. If she covered all her medicines, her normal incidentals, plus the food, and the car, the insurance; the phone, heat and water, lights and so forth, well, then, she’d need help with the mortgage. Which we’d be in no position to give her. Not with the kids’ tuition bills, and not on top of what it was costing us to live in the house in Canton. We just couldn’t do it, even with both Tory and me working—and we’re not living in any kind of luxury that I’m talking about here either. There was just no way that we’d ever be able to swing it. It just wasn’t going to be possible.

  “Well, what all of us were really hoping, of course, that none of us of course’d even so much as hint at, especially Virginia herself—was that when it happened to her, well, it would just happen, like a bolt out of the blue, and then it’d be over with. But of course that didn’t turn out to be what happened.”

  “I wonder if it ever does,” Dell’Appa had said.

  “Of course not,” Dennison had said. “Or at least, not often enough so anyone’d be anything more’n a fool if he relied on it happening that way. If it did there wouldn’t be any such thing as a motor-vehicle fatality, let alone forty-five or fifty thousand people getting killed that way every year. Everyone’d always wear their seatbelt. Nobody’d ever get himself reeling-shitfaced and then get behind the wheel. When your wife was out in the old family car, just coming up on a crosswalk, the brakes wouldn’t all of a sudden let go on her. And there wouldn’t be a school bus stopped there at that very moment, letting all the little kiddies out to run into the street, right in front of her. Everybody’s timing would be perfect, every time. If there were two ways that a given thing could happen, one that’d be disastrous and the other a fine beach day, we’d all have lovely golden tans. Melanoma’d be unknown. Disasters wouldn’t happen. Casualty-insurance guys’d starve, and there’d be no more venture capital to put up more office buildings than anyone’ll ever use.

  “In Virginia’s case,” he had said, “what she was praying for was a nice, neat, thunderclap of doom, but when her number was starting to come up, her choice turned out to be out of stock and on back-order. What she got instead was a gradual, almost imperceptible, deterioration. Just a normal slowing-down that none of us probably even would’ve noticed if we hadn’t all been braced for it, on the lookout like hawks to see if it would happen. And maybe that’s got something to do with it too. You think? If there was the slightest chance, an outside chance, a longshot, that a bad thing might not happen, in any case like this, the fact that everyone still knows it might and can’t get it out of their head, that that maybe brings it on?”

  “Like one of those self-fulfilling prophecies there?” Dell’Appa had said.

  “Yeah,” Dennison had said. “Maybe everybody’s force field or something like that, maybe the worry waves just go out and cause sympathetic anxiety-vibrations, tremors, that kind of thing, in the cosmic milk, so you get whitecaps kicking up in the cereal bowl, washing your karmic Wheaties all over the sports section and the funnies while you’re trying to read them.”

  “I don’t think so,” Dell’Appa had said. “If that could happen, then counting on something to happen the way it really should, under normal circumstances, the way you wanted it to—say, that Larry Bird’s back really hadn’t gotten so bad that he really was gonna have to quit the Celtics while he was still pretty young—then more things’d happen that way. The amount of hoping for the good result’d always reach critical mass ’way ahead of the anxiety and dread that the bad one might be already underway, and anyone who bothered to look around’d see a lot less grief.”

  “I suppose,” Dennison had said. “Anyway, there was this one Sunday we drove down there—one of Tory’s favorite woodland sprites was opening his first shop of his very own, down in Somerset, throwing what actually turned out to be a very elegant, summer-Sunday champagne brunch—big tent with flowers on it in the yard out back, lobster salad, chicken salad, leg of lamb, roast beef, local trio playing show-tunes—all of which we would’ve missed except that in addition to needing to stay on good terms with people like David, in her line of work, she also really does think a lot of him, so she thought we ought to go. And then after that we drove over to see Virginia.

  “I can ‘see it now,’ ” Dennison had said, deepening his voice. “My father used to watch that show, Edward R. Murrow, when I was a kid. ‘See It Now.’ Sunday nights at first, and then later on they moved it, some night during the week. Murrow cured him, cured my father, of smoking. For a while. Murrow got lung cancer, and he was the one that always had a butt in his face? Well, as long as he was all right, and you could see him every week if you didn’t think he was, then all the scare-talk about smoking had to be just a bunch of bull. But then, when the word got out, he was dying of it? My father said: ‘That does it,’ and he quit. And it was hell. He was in Hell himself and he always was real generous so he took us all along, everyone who lived with him and everyone he worked with. And then Murrow died anyway, which was just the kind of thing my father’d been hoping for, any kind of thing that’d give him an excuse to quit his quitting, and he said: ‘Well, fuck it, then,’ and started up again.”

  “That what killed him?” Dell’Appa had said.

  “Sure,” Dennison had said. “Along with all the other things, I mean, that a person gets going wrong with him when he gets to be ninety-one. He lived for over thirty years after Murrow died, and when he finally did get into the speed checkout line, well, I think he died of basically the same thing that Tory’s mother died of. Only in his case I think there was a greater amount of sheer wilfulness in it. During the last year or two of his life he spent a fair amount of time complaining that the only friends he had left who weren’t dead were getting silly. But since he really only had one left, Peaches Cassidy, what that actually meant was that when he forgot to call Peaches over in Norwood to remind him they were driving out the next day to the alleys on Route Nine in Framingham, to watch Don Gillis tape the ‘Candlepin Bowling’ shows—two or three, back to back, that the two of them’d watch again on TV when their Saturdays came up; they never missed t
hat show—Peaches’d get nervous. He’d start to think Dad was losing his marbles, call him up and ask him: ‘You still doin’ all right, Jake? Not gettin’ simple on me, I hope.’

  “But then Peaches had the heart attack that killed him, and about two weeks after that, Dad had one of his own. Course I think a sprained ankle would’ve done it. If his heart hadn’t attacked him, he would’ve found something else to die of. He’d just reached the point where he’d lost interest in the whole thing. It was time for him to go. People know that, feel it or something, recognize it right off, too, what the signal means. And it’s like they just sort of excuse themselves, get up from the chair in a room where something’s still going on, isn’t over yet, and just leave. Answering a summons that only they could hear. If you didn’t happen to be paying attention, you wouldn’t even notice they’d gone until you got up yourself, and since most of the world isn’t paying attention when most people vacate their places, hardly anyone usually notices. And not many of those who do notice remember for very long afterwards.

  “Virginia was different,” Dennison had said. “She wasn’t as old as Dad was, of course, but she grew up in a generation where women who were strictly wives and mothers really didn’t make a lot of friends, of their own. Not after they were married. After that the female friends they had, except for the women who lived next-door to them, were the women who were married to the men who were friends with their husbands. The next-door women never liked their husbands, and the husbands always knew this, sensed it, so they of course didn’t like the next-door women.

  “But, see, they couldn’t very well just come right out and say it. That that was the real reason why they never wanted to have anything socially to do with Joe and Isabel, like take in a movie, maybe, or just go out for a pizza or something for a change some night, instead of just staying home all the time and cooking dinner every night all the time, the same old thing, old thing, old thing, always the same old thing. They couldn’t say it because their wife was absolutely right when she said it seemed as though they always got along all right with Joe, swapping tools and stuff back and forth with him on the weekends, and when it was only a matter of sitting down over a couple beers after they finished waxing the car or cutting the grass on Saturdays, they seemed to like each other well enough.

  “Because they knew if they did that, did come right out and say it, that the reason that they didn’t want to go out with Joe and Isabel was because Isabel didn’t like them and they knew it, they always knew it, knew it the first day they met the broad, and they didn’t like her either, their wife would feel like she had to defend Isabel, or whatever the woman-next-door’s name happened to be, and the only way she’d be able to think of to do that most likely would be to attack her own husband.

  “She might even actually come right out and say that there were lots of times, as a matter of fact, when she’d thought to herself that if Isabel didn’t like their husband—which Isabel’d never come right out and actually said, mind you, but if she had’ve done that—well, she had plenty of good reasons not to like him. Always being so rude to her and acting like she didn’t even exist, they couldn’t even see her when she saw them in the yard in the morning and said hello to them or something. Which would promptly make him just as mad as she already was, so that he would say something like: ‘Yeah, in that goddamned yellow house-dress that she wears all the time, and that blasted kerchief she’s always got on there, tied around her head. She ever take that damned thing off and wash it? I don’t care if she is your friend. I can’t stand that woman.’ And then the two of them would have a good fight, when all she’d been trying to do was get out of the house and the kitchen for one night and talk to somebody besides him for a change, and he was just so selfish that he never understood that she needed to get out after spending all day in the house. The upshot of which would be that neither one of them would get laid at all that night, and most likely not for the next week or so, either, until finally one of them got so horny that the fight was over with because it had to be or else no one was ever going to get laid again. Well, fuck that. Which no one of course said aloud then, but they muttered it deep in their hearts, boys, they said it deep in their hearts.

  “So what the husbands did was find a different reason to explain why they didn’t like the next-door women. And the one that they generally came up with was that the women next door were stupid. As in fact they quite frequently were, and their wife would have spotted this already by herself, so she would have a pretty hard time defending Isabel, and would therefore maybe not even try. She would not be happy, but she wouldn’t be all pissed off, either, with a big hair across her ass that’d be there until the snow flew and the Christmas lights went up, and at least there would still be at least a possibility—maybe not too good a one but still a possibility—that when a man came home from work he might get laid that night.

  “So once the sun went down or when the weekends came, these women who were wives and mothers never socialized with the next-door women who were doing the same thing. They were just daytime friends, and those’re not the kind you keep.

  “The years began to mount up, and the husbands started dropping off, one by one. And therefore so did most of the friendships of their grown-up years. They vanished, poof, into thin air, the same as all the friendships that they’d had when they were girls, and they were friends with other girls who went to school with them. Or when they were young women and they’d worked together with them in the same stores and offices. The ones they shared all those secret giggles about boys with for quite a while, and then with the ones that they knew later: knowing nods and smiles about young men. Not much later they got very jealous of those disloyal ones, though, the little bitches who stabbed their best friend in the back, by getting their engagement ring first, before their best friend did—‘Never speak to her again.’ Back when they were young, before they found their own husbands—those friendships that they’d had back then just disappeared. Like blocks of dry ice melting; not even a dirty little puddle on the floor to remind you they’d been there.

  “It was sort of a paradox, really. You had all these women who’d followed the pattern and’d gotten themselves involved in marriages of almost complete dependency, and then as the dominant partners, the men, died off, there they were, all those women, suddenly expected to be completely independent now. Having no choice except that, really. No choice, no preparation, and after all those years, no protection, either. What they might’ve preferred didn’t matter. Not one soul in the whole spinning world cared.

  “Well, that was what’d happened to Virginia, had been in the process of happening to her long before that lovely June Sunday when Tory and I’d driven down to David’s champagne open-house and then, not close to tight but wined and dined and nicely-mellowed, on over to Westport to Virginia’s. Just a casual ‘right-down-here-in-the-neighborhood-and-thought-we-might-as-well-drop-in’ call, and if that doesn’t teach me never again to make another visit like that to anyone, anywhere, anytime, no matter how long I may live, then I am beyond even a chance of reclamation, let alone hope of measureable improvement. You might just as well lead me out of the barn now down to the back forty, and have the hired man shoot me point-blank in the head. And then fire another one, just to make sure, we really did get it all over with.

  “Virginia was out in the yard,” Dennison had said. “She was really good with flowers, good enough and knew enough so that if she hadn’t put her mind to not becoming one, she could’ve become a really preachy pain in the ass on the subject. Like one of those anally-compulsive men who’s obliged by the rules to retire when he hits a given age even though he doesn’t want to, but being the type he is, he sees it coming and prepares, years ahead—as Brennan doesn’t seem to’ve, at all, and that may be another part of his problem; or: another problem: that he’s suddenly realized he’s still facing flatfoot retirement flatfooted, and there isn’t enough time left to do much about it now. So when they finally give him
the watch and kick him out he knows an indecent amount about golf, or flyfishing; bridge, stamp-collecting—which he’d never call ‘philately’—or some other goddamned thing that then becomes the only thing he does, and all he talks about. A guy in my wing in Vietnam had a father-in-law that he really got along with fine while the two of us were there and the old guy was back here and working every day, but then we both came back and the time went by, and pretty soon, it seemed like, the old man retired. What’d been up ’til then a nice, pleasant, interesting hobby that the two of them’d shared, became the old man’s total occupation, and now here was Billy with his wife, her name’s Rachel, and three teenagers, two of them in college and the third one headed there, his own career to think about and get as far as he could in, before his own time was up, so he’d have a decent pension to look forward to, at least, and his father-in-law wouldn’t leave him alone, would not give him a minute’s peace.

  “Birding,” Dennison had said. “The old boy’d always had a soft spot in his heart for spending a May morning tramping through wet pumpkin-vine underbrush, spying on prothonotary warblers catching errant woodstocks, and that was all right then. But once he was completely on his own, he did it every fucking day, and a good part of most nights. Billy’d be in his office at Three-Em there, out in Minnesota, getting his work done, he was general counsel by then, and the phone’d ring on his desk: It was Ted, and it was important. So he’d interrupt his train of thought, stop what he was doing—because he did like the old man and Rachel’s mother, too, something might’ve happened to her—and pick the phone up to discover that his dear wife’s father’d just added to his Lifelist a least-plum-busted dingbat, very rare ’round Chapel Hill, at least at that time of year. ‘This kind of entertainment,’ Terry told me, ‘well, put it this way: No matter how much you like watching the birdies, or your loving father-in-law, it can get on your nerves very fast.’