Christine buckles her grandson into the front seat of her car. Fifteen minutes later, they walk through the automatic doors of Christ Hospital and find Katherine sitting alone in the waiting room. She wears a blue silk blazer and two silver beaded necklaces. Her lips tremble, as her hands massage her forehead. All she keeps saying is, “it’s so hot,” like she’s been saying it over and over and now that two people are standing in front of her to hear it, she isn’t sure if she is asking or telling it.
THEY WEAR BLACK. They sing in the front row of St. Mary’s, “Amazing Grace” and “Here I Am, Lord,” and they follow a coffin that looks too small to hold a man as big as Trip Holbly. The hot June air scorches the church grass the color of rust.
Trip Holbly doesn’t exist in the house after the funeral. Not the man, anyway. In Joseph’s mind, his father dove into the backyard pool and never climbed out. Katherine doesn’t cry at the cemetery. She keeps counting with her lips, touching thumbs to fingertips. She looks like a woman trying to work out an intractable math problem, as if it will answer what she was doing on that field of stones wearing too many layers in the dead of summer.
JOSEPH HEARS THEM in the kitchen. His grandmother is sipping coffee, while his mother walks around opening the freezer, closing the pantry doors, tapping her nails across the counter, turning the faucet on and off, checking the water pressure with her fingers.
“Trip died of drowning,” his grandmother whispers. “I saw the death certificate. I spoke with the doctors. It’s not the same thing.”
“He died of his heart,” Katherine whispers back angrily.
“What difference does it make? He’s not a blood relative. He’s not a Guiteau, he was a Holbly, so it isn’t the same.” She takes an anxious sip of coffee and struggles as the wheels of her chair keep rolling her away from the table.
“How old was dad when he died?” Katherine asks, not expecting an answer but to prove a point.
“Don’t bring your father into this mess,” Christine replies gravely. “That was too long ago. What you need to do right now is grieve. Real grief, not this twisted mumbo-jumbo logic variety. Have you gone out to the cemetery? Have you taken his son out there? Who’s going to pull the weeds if you don’t?”
“I don’t give a damn who’s going to pull weeds,” Katherine snaps. “Why is everyone in this family so concerned with weeds? And don’t you dare lecture me about history.”
“Please, honey, you must stop obsessing like this. There’s no one to blame. Not you. Not your own family. Trip drowned, he’s gone.”
“Thirty-four, mother. That’s how old Trip was. Just like Dad. Like Grandpa. On and on.”
“He drowned.” Joseph’s grandmother bangs her coffee cup on the table and starts crying. They don’t talk for several minutes, and Katherine finally runs upstairs, beating down the hallway and slamming her study door. Joseph hides in the dark foyer closet, like he does every day for hours that summer. In some way he believes that if he hides there, he might be saved, that the killer won’t find him and will eventually leave them alone.
That summer is also the last of the birds. After Katherine has the pool filled in, Joseph stands in the greenhouse addition with his cheek pressed against the glass. He goes completely still, barely breathing, while birds fly into the windows. He feels the impact of the hit on his face, and watches them drop to the ground, one every hour, like clockwork. Finally, Katherine has thick tweed curtains installed, which cover all of the windows, turning the greenhouse into the darkest room in the house. She tells her son that they can’t open the curtains anymore, that it’s cruel to kill so many defenseless creatures like that just for a view of their own backyard.
At first Joseph thinks that it is her way of controlling death, of keeping more of it from touching them. That isn’t it. It proves to be just the beginning of her descent, the trial run for what is to come. The counting gets worse too. Trip Holbly doesn’t exist in the house after that day in June, but his ghost does. Two years later Katherine legally changes Joseph’s last name to Guiteau. It isn’t a widow’s reprisal to strike the Holbly clan from memory. She’s merely correcting a loophole in history. She’s adding her son to the family count.
CHAPTER THIRTY - NINE
DEL DANCED LIKE she was drenched in gasoline and fire licked her knees. Her bare feet kept time, dirty heels crashing backward on the hardwood, and her hips dissolved that metronome in fast swaying. She lifted her arms over her head, hands winging like giant hunting hawks, and then dropped her hands on her face, black hair covering her eyes and nose.
If she can move, there is hope. If her blood beats, there is hope. If her tongue can form a word, there is hope.
Del danced alone for the length of two ’70s rock albums, the turntable cranked to its highest volume. She never looked over at William on the couch, never asked him to join her, lost in her own drunken orbit of where the music took her as she sipped from a bottle of scotch. Nor was her dancing for William’s benefit; she was dancing in spite of him—or, better yet, to spite him. The message: This is my home, you aren’t welcome here. This is my noise, my private rite, and you’re not invited. The only thing you can help yourself to is the front door.
She lit a cigarette and consulted her wristwatch. It was almost midnight, and Joseph wasn’t home. He had left her alone at first, she thought, because she needed distance. But every hour tonight increased the feeling that maybe he had just left her, running off to his own secrets that he never let her in on. And here she was, trapped with this stranger whom she never liked, while clear across the island Raj kept his own vigil that no longer involved her. How alone she felt tonight in the solitary confinement of the living room, how many years she had thrashed only to end up here with her own arms wrapped around her. She had tried calling Joseph but his phone went to voicemail. She had wanted desperately to call Raj but feared the stalemate of silence on the end. What could she say to him if he answered? Drunkenly, she spoke the word in her native tongue: oikía, home. She could say whatever she wanted in Greek but no one would understand her.
The apartment was lava hot with the windows only cracked open an inch, and the air thick with her smoke. She was purposelessly hotboxing William, filling the room with her sweat and cigarettes until there was no oxygen left without her angry taint mixed in it. She jacked her body straight like a switchblade trying to find the pulse of the music but stopped as she caught her reflection in the lit glass of the window. Her hair hung in a tangle down her back. Her skin was phosphorescent but darkened with muddy clumps of eyeliner over swollen eye sockets. Dancing to the most contagious form of American culture, she looked like a foreigner marooned in a nightclub far from home.
The song ended and Del collected her breath with a hand against the wall, the bright lights of the room throwing her shadow across the ceiling. There was a jumpiness in her eyes and a sag to the lips that made her look lost, and sorrow burst forward like a crowd spilling out of an arena when a concert ends, running and screaming with pandemonium, unbeatable sorrow flowing from her eyes and mouth as she tugged on a silver necklace to pull it from the sweat of her neck. She lifted the needle from the record.
“I loved that album,” she said.
CAB LIGHTS FLOATED down Broadway. She felt as if an invisible protective seal had fallen off of her, and, as she finally managed to wave down a cab, she realized that the invisible seal had been her youth.
It hit her like a piano falling from one of the penthouses laced in white Christmas lights, the sound of the keys and wood crashing onto the concrete, a boom louder than it could ever play when pieced together. The only action that filled her life was that of waiting—waiting for a green card, waiting for December, waiting through the last days of her job to see her into a future that held no other career. Waiting around like an old woman to make sense of what her life had become. Youth can handle its failures; it can wake from its botched love experiments wound-licked by its own survival mechanism—that there would be something e
lse around the next corner. The survival mechanism of those who have lost youth: laziness, habit, the fear of falling down.
The cab sailed by club entrances lit red like ovens, dungeons of love with young women cooked in the haze of the doorways. Above them, apartment lights glowed, and bedroom televisions flashed unending blues and pinks. The whole city was pulsing with electricity. It had been all of this light that had first attracted her to New York, had brought all of the fresh arrivals beating around the same shine. But what happened when her eyes finally adjusted to the light? In the reflection of her living room window she saw a lonely married woman in a tiny apartment too tired to remember what she was waiting for. The alcohol was pushing thoughts through her head fast and jumbled, and the most reckless seemed the most illuminating. Madi would have told her that she was just feeling sorry for herself. But Madi wasn’t around to tell her anything anymore. What was the survival mechanism to guard against selfpity? She rolled down the cab window and lifted her head out into the cool wind of Twenty-Third Street.
Wouldn’t it be a relief if a tornado moved through Manhattan and wiped all of the garbage away? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if a tidal wave cleaned all of the windows and watered the trees? Wouldn’t it be magical if fire melted every skyscraper into pure molten liquid and eradicated all of the documentation on who was an immigrant and who was not, and they could all start over, in the scraps of what had been? It was a sick perversion of youth to romanticize destruction, but it was also perverse to wake up every morning and be repaid in such little happiness. She thought she could hear the city’s message in the air curving around her ears: I made you no promises. If you can’t stand it, leave.
Why was she so insistent on staying here anyway? Greece had been windblown lavender, the soft pebble beaches that cooled the palms of her feet, not new, very un-new, but un-terrible and sweet with uncomplicated currents. She could have lived all through Europe without having to sacrifice a single night’s sleep worrying about a green card. And that was the brutal revelation, wasn’t it? Maybe she had made a mistake to marry Joseph. She had loved him but not enough; they had known each other but not entirely. She had married him for the green card—that was drunken honesty in a cab ride late at night. She would have married Dash and she would have married Raj. It had been her own survival mechanisms that had led her down to City Hall two months ago with Joseph. But now survival was no longer on her mind.
The cab rolled over potholes, and Del noticed the condemned two-story buildings anchored on the West Side Highway, once home to strip clubs and adult-video emporiums that had long been raided and shuttered, their paper proclamations of HOT, NUDE, CHEAP still peeling from putrefied walls.
She paid the fare and climbed out the backseat, hurrying toward the bell. As long as she still can move, there is hope. As long as she still can speak, there is hope. She pressed the buzzer for his apartment.
“Hello?” the familiar voice boomed in the near-empty street. Streetlights flooded down on the green dumpster where two rats ran under its rusted wheels.
“Raj, it’s me. Can I come up?”
She didn’t know if she should expect him to open the door. She wasn’t even sure what she would do if the door opened. But when it did, she almost cried.
CHAPTER FORTY
THE CHILDREN WHO grow up in Cincinnati in the ’80s learn about the world on the evening news. They sit night by night at dinner tables watching the Iran-Contra hearings and Reagan’s assassination attempt and the epidemic of AIDS escalate from a disease that plagues viceless coastal cities to hospitals and dental offices in their own backyards. They learn such hardhitting facts about their world mostly from one leading news anchorman. He sits at a news desk as a sincere arbiter of international affairs and closes his commentaries with a comforting message, one, it could be said, appropriated from a children’s storybook: “Take care of yourself, and each other.” Children love him, and they see the world.
In 1991 this man takes a second job in television, hosting a daytime talk show in Chicago. No child accustomed to this venerated man beaming into their kitchens each night feels particularly reassured watching him heckle incest victims, interview closet plushophiles, or encourage punches in a nail fight between transsexual prostitutes. What is the truth and where did it go? The stories bleed together, two outposts of televised reality losing their sovereign glue. From 1991 to 1993, this leading anchorman reads the Channel 5 news and hosts The Jerry Springer Show on the same network.
Every fact depends on its source. If the source is corrupt, the fact should be disregarded. What we know depends on the veracity of who is telling it. Such obvious logic blurs in the prism of Cincinnati.
WHEN JOSEPH LOOKS back, all he sees are conspiracies. Not just with his mother—that’s too easy—but a bigger, more devious variety that collects over the sprinkler-clicking lawns of his upper-middle-trying-to-beupper-upper neighborhood. Those Midwestern mothers and fathers hide facts every morning under the shirts they button and the skin-toned stockings they roll to their waists. They want their children to believe, no matter which reality Jerry Springer is spinning on the television set, that Ohio is locked-in, state-padded, farmland-pillowed, and as long as they keep office hours they can keep living in their two-story Tudors with the Sunday football games shouting over snacks fresh from airtight bags and the days can go on forever, they can, like this, on and on, magically, forever. Every wealthy neighborhood is a confluence of dreams, as bright and intangible as the dew that collects on the grass each morning. And it is a hopeful promise for those who could afford to keep it.
How can you blame these deceitful mothers and fathers? Isn’t this precisely what everyone wants? The right to unremitting peace, the assurance that nothing goes bump or blast, that families can be just what they are: families birthing more families on sprinkler-clicking lawns while football games go into overtime over bottomless chip bowls.
The gentle, infectious peace of Cincinnati gives Joseph’s generation a mild headache, like riding too long in the backseat of a car. One look at Joseph’s grade-school class and it’s apparent that these offspring of so much protection and love have little chance as happy inheritors. Petty, mean, ruthless cabals of hostile socialites, sharp-eyed for easy weaknesses, they are mean, vengeful children, and Joseph fits right in. They are Ohioans. Proud, nasty, beautiful Ohioans. Because they don’t have outsiders, they make each other into them.
So, by the local squint, Joseph grows up relatively normal. Except, of course, for his heart.
AFTER SCHOOL, KATHERINE takes him to appointments with area specialists. The doctors draw blood, run him through scanners, x-ray his ribs and lungs, strip him down to his electric-blue underwear and bring in colleagues to stare in awe at his sunken breast bone and pale left nipple. A few expert cardiologists, aroused enough by the Guiteau family history to fly four hours from Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute in Los Angeles, talk to Katherine in pleading whispers, hoping to write treaties and present her son at regional medical conventions. One Xavier University documentarian even asks if she can periodically follow Joseph around with a camera until he turns thirty-four, recording the “paranoia and being choices” of an abbreviated human life span. Katherine dismisses all opportunities for early-death stardom. She wants to keep the paranoia close at hand.
Katherine Guiteau remains a college professor in and out of the classroom. She is an empiricist in the old sense, constructing her lectures on American history the same way that she draws up the death warrant on her own son’s heart: by observation and recorded evidence. Facts do not shift in transport on their way to the vague ether of the theoretical. The eight Guiteau birth and death certificates that she collects tell all she needs to know on genetic predisposition. Eventually when the doctors fail to find any physical aberrations in Joseph’s heart muscle, Katherine stops scheduling appointments. She takes Joseph on as her own assignment.
The greenhouse addition is the first room to be sacrificed of sun. The rest go later,
window by window, year by year. For Katherine, pulling the blinds is a way of killing free time. Darkening the house assumes the same gathering tactic that other families utilize by building a fire or calling their children to dinner. Initially, Katherine doesn’t remove her husband’s artifacts from the house, packing only the most obstinate possessions like his cross-country skis and Holbly Builders job files into the far reaches of the basement. She leaves most of his things where they last fell. His bathroom door is shut in the upstairs hallway, the bulb in the ceiling socket unscrewed, but it still holds his clutter of loose change, nail clippers, and open cans of shaving cream. Trip’s winter coats mix with theirs in the front closet. His shoes line up single file in their shared walk-in off the bedroom, and ties hang according to color from a bar on the other side of the door. Joseph takes his father’s teeth from his medicine cabinet and hides them in a sock at the bottom of his underwear drawer. If Katherine notices, she doesn’t say anything. She continues on, rifling through the mail, pulling out advertisements and election notices addressed to Trip Holbly and collecting them in a brown grocery bag permanently stationed by the front door. Joseph didn’t really know his father. He was too young when Trip died in a swimming pool that had since been filled with concrete and covered with teak lawn chairs that have never once been sat on. Katherine keeps those remnants of her husband around not so much as if he still lived but as if he just left. It is Trip’s death that defines his character. It eats and sleeps in the house right alongside them. Katherine has the widow’s habit of closing her eyes and rotating her wedding ring. She wears it for the remainder of her life.
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