Telling Time

by Austin Wright

  I didn’t want this thought. I wanted to think it a squabble. Brothers have squabbles. But desecration grew like fungus. Like rot, like a smell, a whiff of ruination. I was smelling it when the guests left and we got ready for our last supper together.

  There’s a difference between sadness, which I felt all day, and a bad mood. Sadness is good, but a bad mood kills. I forced myself to be cheerful, which I don’t usually have to do.

  This Larry appeared at supper. Though he had cleaned himself up, he had a bruise on his cheek and a black eye swollen like a pig’s snout. No one talked about it, which wasn’t natural. I brought it up, but all I got was the polite equivalent of Shut up Grandma, none of your business. None of my business the family splitting apart like atomic energy, and my private thought dangerously close to Go to hell, all of you.

  I got through by thinking this is the last time we’ll be together, dwelling on the present joy and underlying sadness. Wholesome feelings. After supper I took Dr. Balsam to the ferry while David, who admires Carl, took the old people to the airport. When I got back Philip and Company were in your study again. They’ve been doing that all week. Your papers. I allowed it, thinking I was obliged to, having no say in the matter.

  But the word desecration is like a bat, it flew around and attached itself to things. When I heard my grown children in your study shuffling papers along with the particular squeak your file drawer makes, it attached to them. Desecration, the beginning of a new era more chaotic than the last.

  I took a look. It was lax of me not to have challenged them before. I went to the study door and saw the four of them (William included) with your file drawers open and your papers all over the place. Belatedly, days late, I was shocked. They looked guilty like rabbits in the rabbit act. Which proves desecration was the right word.

  Theft. Burglary. What are you doing? I said. Going through Thomas’s papers, they said. I knew that. Why? I said.

  They stammered around. Do you have permission? I said.

  Father asked me to, Philip said.

  You don’t have my permission, I said.

  Philip said you asked him on your deathbed to go through and weed them out. Weed out what? Whatever might hurt somebody’s reputation, he said. They thought they had a right to go through your papers looking for scandal. What an appalling idea. And to do this even on our last family night when we could have been all together in the living room.

  I thought of the personal things that must be in your papers, the secrets of students and colleagues not to speak of you and me and I couldn’t believe you would knowingly turn your children loose on them. They even brought William into it, whose very connection to the family is shortly to be severed. If you really did make such a request, you were not in your right mind, deathbed or no.

  I told them that. I was firm. You can’t go through those papers without my permission, I said, and you don’t have my permission. I had no intention of giving it.

  Philip mumbled that you wanted to save me the agony and shock (something like that), but I said if you meant that, you would have talked it over with me. It was deathbed panic for you, a last reflex of unfinished business.

  They asked what I would do with the papers and I said send them to the library. I’ll make sure there’s nothing inappropriate and I’ll send them. They fussed about the burden on me. Nonsense. The activity will be good for me. Only I can understand these papers. Only I know the names mentioned, the circumstances, the significance of things.

  With plenty of time to find scandals if there are any I wondered what their raids had already found. Truth is, they wouldn’t know a scandal if they saw one. Forget it, I told them. Thank you and forget it. Don’t bother to put them back, I’ll do it. It will be the first occupation of my new solitude.

  Did I fail you in failing to catch them at the start? It’s your fault, but I hope they haven’t found anything to embarrass you. If they had they would have told everybody so I guess they haven’t. But how much junk have you left rotting in your files for me? You who would never throw anything away. Maybe I should burn everything.

  In the end it won’t matter. Their merciless eyes will strip our bones like the sun, but until then, I’ll hold my parasol high. They looked chagrined. I’m glad I stopped them. But I feel rotten with the nastiness of a new age and for the first time not sure I want to survive.

  WILLIAM KEY: Narrative

  Funny how they looked when she stopped them. She came into the room like a seismic wave, guilty guilty children, what are you doing?

  We slunk away, the belief we were doing good corrected in a moment to shame. Instead of protecting good people we were scandal mongering. Scrabbling for shocks.

  We talked about it in low voices on the sunporch, out of Lucy’s hearing. Philip, Patty, Henry and I.

  So much for that, Henry said.

  I’m ashamed, Patty said.

  What’s there to be ashamed of?

  We were hunting for gossip.

  I wasn’t.

  We got carried away, I said.

  He didn’t ask any of you, Philip said. He only asked me.

  I’m glad she stopped us, Patty said. It was getting creepy.

  What?

  It made me realize how dead he is.

  If Lucy reads those papers, Henry said, she’ll read the suicide note.

  She’ll read the Wyoming story, Philip said. She’ll read about their courtship.

  It won’t hurt her. You can’t change the past.

  Sure you can, I said.

  Nobody’s changing the past, Henry said.

  Yes we are, I said. We’re trying to control the past.

  Trying to control someone’s perception of the past, Henry said.

  Same thing, I said.

  She’ll read his most shameful secrets, Philip said.

  What shameful secrets? I didn’t see any shameful secrets.

  Well, Patty said, she married Thomas and she got Thomas. If she didn’t know him after forty-seven years, that’s not our problem.

  There are certain papers that should be destroyed, Philip said.

  I didn’t see anything like that.

  I did, he said.

  Scornfully: What do you want to do, steal them?

  He looked around anxiously. No one seemed to care as he did. I never saw until this visit how much he depends on the past, as if he could not exist without its encouragement.

  Henry is different. For Henry the past is a ball and chain, like the dead hand of Aristotle he keeps talking about. His only hope—but how do I know what his hope might be? Patty would like to kick loose, rebel girl, too bad for me, but it don’t come easy. Can I put the other two into this framework, the ones who have really kicked loose? No problem for them. George doesn’t care. Ann cares, but she’s too busy picking up sticks.

  PHILIP WESTERLY: What to tell the Judge

  Unless he told someone—the unknown Elaine, some deep friend, Lucy herself—what happened that night is known only to me. The knowledge is my property which I may dispose of as I wish.

  It’s a question of remembering him in his role, my good and loving father. Of what they would say if they read it, even the closest, Henry and Patty, Ann, William, Frank, Melanie. Love or not, they’ll criticize him. Their blame will sting me like arrow poison.

  It will be said that he committed a crime. Technically, legally. Morally too. They’ll use the word cowardice to which some will add the word vile. That while he might not have been able to avoid killing the jogger, he failed to help her. That he panicked and scurried around the countryside thinking how to save himself while making hypocritical excuses. That panic or not, ultimately he had time to think and correct his mistake. But never came forward, which undermined his hope of having changed since then. That his attempt to alleviate guilt by writing was belied by concealing what he had written, as if he had not written.

  I’d like to defend him but I’ve lost the ability to judge. A crime that seems big from a distance, uns
peakable, unforgivable, looks different close up with my father’s figure superimposed. It fills the sky and disappears as if it were no crime at all. I ask you to judge it for me, because what I fear most is not the damage his reputation may suffer with others, but the damage the judgments of others will do to his reputation with me. What words like crime and cowardice and rat can do to my love, my grief. That such words will make me doubt my memory. That I missed the truth of the life I lived. That loving my father’s memory will make me a hit and run driver too.

  You must help me imagine it, how it could happen and he still the Thomas we knew. A man who always tried to live by the rules but had no rule for finding himself in a case like this. Because he knew (as we all know) that he was not the kind of person to be involved in a hit and run. Reason enough to drive on except for the integrity that refused to release him without more evidence, leading to the decision to go back and see. When on his first return to the scene he saw only a dog and on his second policemen who waved him by, it’s easy enough to read the rulebook as letting him off. He was not that kind of person. It was only the next day’s papers that suggested indeed he was, he fit exactly the rulebook definition of a hit and run. From that point it’s easy to imagine the struggle, how to reconcile the person he thought he was with an ignorant act in the night. A man of integrity, pride, a president, who might have left behind some overlooked clue that would lead back to him. Looking in the rulebook to see what a university president would do and finding only that a university president would not be in this predicament because he would not have been on that road or if he had, he would have stopped at the accident and taken the consequences—though he could not think of any university president who had ever done such a thing.

  If after long thought he concluded that the rulebook wanted him to give himself up there would now be the question why it took so long for a would-be university president to recognize a moral obligation a child would see in an instant, and is such a man fit to head our university? Perhaps he squared himself with the rulebook by observing that running away had hurt no one, for he couldn’t have helped, even if he didn’t know it at the time. To stop would only have added to the world’s misery, by increasing the misery of Lucy, Elaine, the university community and himself, without alleviating the victim’s, so it was better that he did not stop. You must credit him with suffering, having to bear the secret knowledge (while the rest of his life went on with its innocent ups and downs) that at sixty-two he was a hit-and-run driver and the designation would not go away. You must give him credit for writing it down, to show that he knew the rules, his confession to a future reader policing the past.

  Could it be said, on some other hand, that what he did was rational, logical and intelligent, in which case his hidden confession was an excess of virtue? He hit the stranger by accident while avoiding the dog. When he found the police at the scene, it was logical to go on. There was no need to turn himself in since nothing led to his trail. It would not help the victim or anyone else. Logic said to let the incident die. It was the principle of high politics, justice, and law. Judges passing sentence, politicians waging war. University presidents. Things had priority, things are ranked, things are always ranked. One thing is always more important than something else.

  And perhaps it never happened at all. A literary fiction, an exercise in writing, how Thomas loved a polished narrative. The style, the writing, organization, chronology, suspense. Once proposed, the possibility cannot be dismissed.

  I did not want to take the chance. When Mother came and stopped everything, I saw a crisis. She would read the papers or send them unexamined to the library for anyone to riffle through, indefinitely into the future. I saw my task like Hamlet’s ghost. I could say, Mother, I found something in Father’s papers which nobody should read, but I couldn’t say that.

  Theft (the word) is romantic. Stealth and care. I would lie awake until everybody was in bed. Mother upstairs because of Aunt Edna in the master bedroom, I would sneak by Edna’s door in the middle of the night. Too deaf to hear me.

  Middle of the night, adventure and heroism for any memoir. Protecting my mother and father. I didn’t want to do it in the middle of the night but that’s the only way I could think of. Meanwhile she went to the bathroom. Because I was thinking of midnight heroism, it took me a moment to realize that if I didn’t take opportunities when they came I would never take opportunities when they came. The others were in the living room and sunporch, a lot of loud talk. I didn’t know how long Mother would be in the bathroom, and I had already used up time thinking about it. Excuse me, I said. I went upstairs for my briefcase. When I came down, Mother was still in the bathroom.

  I went into the study where I had been forbidden, dark since she kicked us out, with papers still on the table and floor. I went to the drawer where I had concealed it from my siblings. I heard the toilet flush and for a moment couldn’t find it. Then I found it, just as she came out. I shoved it into my briefcase and she saw me. She saw plainly, exactly what I was doing.

  Philip, she said.

  It’s all right, I said. I forgot something.

  She couldn’t challenge me because that would deny the trust we take for granted in this family. I let that trust swallow my shame. The danger of a heart attack subsided gradually, not pain, just a tightness, shortness of breath, heavy beats.

  THOMAS WESTERLY: As read by Philip

  Up in his room when it’s bedtime and Beatrice in the bathroom, Philip opens his briefcase to check the stolen manuscript. He flips through the hit-run narrative to make sure it’s complete and discovers he has also grabbed a loose page from a letter. He reads it as best he can through the fires in his brain.

  Tender feelings aren’t the only feelings as you know, as you know Nor are they helped by mean talk and threats yes threats, Threats can blot the light tender feelings need to survive

  It’s not all your fault but on this point you are irrational not saying I don’t love you yes the curve of your the curve of your buttock the unbearable glow the hairy push of your the sweet warm opening to the urgency of my the joy of my illegal cock sliding sliding in into

  As for who seduced whom, don’t try to change the facts. Check your memory, for I wrote it down so please don’t talk betrayal to me

  PHILIP WESTERLY

  Damn it Father you should have burned them yourself.

  How can I destroy my father’s writing?

  To put them in my own files and deliberately forget. The moral equivalent to destroying them.

  Not quite. Eventually I will die. Then David or Charlie or Nancy or Betty, by then grown, will go through them, and I will have passed the problem on to them.

  Maybe when I am older I will know what to do. I will put them in my files to postpone a decision, while I await the growth of wisdom.

  Perhaps I am waiting for Thomas to die. Is he not dead yet? Eventually he’ll be a mere historical figure. Then I can open the book on his weaknesses and put his lapses in perspective.

  Or return it to Lucy. Give it to her outright with an excuse, how I thought it was too sensitive but on second thought etcetera. This would multiply the shock we were trying to save her from. Or slip surreptitiously back into the study and restore it to the file cabinet.

  Destroy the adultery letter anyway. Take it home, burn it, tell no one, not even Beatrice. Never mind curiosity. Who was she? Was she Elaine? Or was she another without even a name to be remembered by?

  There may be other letters I never found. He “wrote it down,” he says, but I didn’t find it.

  Tear out this page? No, wait a day or two.

  PART TEN

  SATURDAY(2)

  LUCY WESTERLY: To Thomas

  We were in the kitchen this morning, putting the dishes away.

  Mother, Henry said. Did you ever hear of Pete Arena?

  Is that a rock star?

  No ma’am. You never met him?

  Should I? I don’t recall the name.

 
Not even from Patty?

  Is he a friend of Patty’s?

  You could say that. Or more.

  Oh my. She didn’t tell me about that. Is it serious?

  Ask her.

  I asked Henry what sort of person Pete Arena was. He said that was an interesting question, involving the meaning of terms. One point of interest, he said, was that Pete Arena had been here all week and sat in the back at your funeral.

  Well for heavens sakes, I said. Why didn’t Patty tell me?

  Ask her, he said. My hands are clean.

  Later I asked Patty. I said, Why didn’t you tell me about Pete Arena?

  She was plainly embarrassed, though she pretended not to be, asking me how I heard about him. When I said Henry told me, she wondered how Henry knew and I mentioned the rumor trail of children. She said, What is the rumor exactly?

  What, exactly? Can a rumor be exact? Two things, I said. He’s close to you (boyfriend or whatever the word is now). And he’s on the Island.

  Is that all?

  Whatever more there is, I’ll have to learn from you, I said.

  She said he was just an ordinary guy, simple, working class. That’s her language. Little education but nice. Sweet. Kind. Religious.

  Good adjectives. She expected me to object, but I fooled her. I scolded her for bringing him to the Island without meeting me. Hospitality, I said. I’m ashamed he had to hide, that you required this of him.

  She said he came against her wish. He came on his own without warning her and that’s why she made him stay out of sight.

  In other words, who has the power, that sort of thing. I said I’d like to meet him before he goes.

  He’s leaving on the ferry, she said.