Requiem, Mass.

by John Dufresne

  “What else?”

  “Red hair.”

  Dead Reckoning

  THREE YEARS LATER, Stevie left Dad, but not us, immediately after she’d learned that he had left her. She threw him out, actually. I was sixteen, and we were safe. Dad, as you may have suspected, did indeed have yet another family out West, and Stevie found that out the day the newer woman called our home in a panic. Their baby, meaning Rainy’s and her baby, was critically ill and in the ICU at a Boise hospital. Stevie said, How old is this baby? She’s two? She sent me down to the Cat Dragged Inn to fetch Dad.

  When Dad left that night—I drove him to the airport for his Requiem-to-New York-to-Denver-to-Boise flight—Stevie told him not to bother coming back. He said, We’ll talk this over when I get home. No, we won’t, she said. He told me the baby’s name was Nevada and what she had was meningitis. I said, How can you do this, Dad? Not now, he said. I said I hoped the baby was okay. I dropped him at the terminal. He hopped out, leaned in the door, and said, I’ll call you with the news. I doubt it, I said.

  Stevie had the locks changed. She stuffed all of Dad’s personal belongings into the truck. Audrey and Drake helped her. He had less than you might expect. Dad didn’t bother trying to get back into Stevie’s good graces. He rented a studio apartment at the Elmwood Arms so we could visit when he was in town, which he seldom was. He had this little kitchenette, two-burner stove, single sink, an under-the-counter fridge, a TV, a Castro convertible, and a Formica table with two chrome chairs. Baby Nevada survived her crisis.

  DAD, DRAKE, and I had come back to his apartment from our Boys’ Night Out. We’d gone candlepin bowling at Colonial Lanes and then over to Coney Island for hot dogs and chocolate milks. Drake fell asleep on the pull-out. I sat at the table while Dad washed his work clothes with Woolite in the sink. His apartment key was attached to a length of black and green gimp, braided in a reverse knot stitch. And that got me remembering the gimp lady, who was this college girl who’d come to Lake Park about once a week in summers (or maybe it was just one summer) and do crafts projects with gimp and key rings and scraps of leather. Irene, I think. Or Eileen. She wore red plaid shorts and a white sleeveless blouse, had black hair, blue eyes, and the whitest teeth. Gimp trumped swings and bocce as far as I was concerned. I thought, Finally after six years of school I’m learning something useful.

  One day I made a small, thin, heart-shaped coin purse for Mom, sewn together with red gimp. She loved it. She told me she’d keep an emergency dime in it so that if she was ever lost or in trouble, she could make a phone call. What she actually kept in the purse was a double-edged Gillette Blue Blade. One morning I saw the purse on the bathroom counter, and after admiring the handiwork, I decided that I needed a dime for a Creamsicle or something, and I poked my finger in the purse. I bled until I thought I’d faint. Audrey heard me howl, turned white when she saw me bleeding into the sink, and ran to get Violet.

  Dad soaked the clothes in the rinse water. I asked him how he met his newish girlfriend Heidi. He told me they met at a church service at a Transport for Christ mobile chapel at a truck stop in Laramie. When I reminded him that he didn’t go to church, that he was not even remotely tolerant of religious zealots, he said that after you’ve survived a jackknife on I-70 in a white-out blizzard, you haul your blessed ass to the nearest church, and you get on your knees and thank the good Lord for saving your life. I said, It sounds like he was trying to kill you. And there was Heidi, he said, her head bowed in prayer. When she looked up, and our eyes met, well, that was that. Some years later I’d learn from Heidi that they had actually met at a casino in Jackpot, Nevada, where she worked as a blackjack dealer.

  I said, “So you see this woman, and she’s cute, and you forget about your girlfriend, your wife, whoever, your kids; it’s all out the window.”

  He said, “A lot of guys, they’ll have affairs. Slam, bam, thank you, ma’am. Love-’em-and-leave-’em types. You’re tempted, you know. You’re on the road, you’re lonely, and so on. Don’t roll your eyes—you’ll be there. Well, I was not made that way. When I love a woman, I need to take care of her.”

  His wallet was on the table. I asked him if I could look through the pictures. He squeezed the excess water from his shirt and pants. He said, Knock yourself out. He draped the clothes over the clotheshorse by the radiator. There was a seventh-grade photo of me, my blond hair looking dark like it did every year. How could Carlton Laporte Studios be so consistently wrong, and who were they paying off to get the school contract? There was a second-grade photo of Audrey with her eyes deliberately crossed. I said, “You ought to update these, Dad.” Drake as a toddler, Little Nevada on her mom’s lap.

  “She’s your half-sister.”

  “Does she point at my picture and say, Who’s that, Daddy?”

  “She calls me Papa.”

  Dad heated a cube of salt pork in a skillet. He took a jar of horseradish and a plate of cold string beans from the fridge and set them on the table. I said I’d pass. “You want a beer?” he said. “You’re old enough for a beer.”

  “How old am I?”

  “Old enough.”

  “I told Stevie we’d be home.”

  He slid the salt pork off the skillet and onto a paper plate. He sat and spread the horseradish on the meat. He licked the knife.

  “When I married your mother, I figured, you know, that was it. One wife, two kids, maybe three, a steady job, a union pension, an apartment and then a bungalow, maybe a summer camp on Cool Sandy Beach. Die in my sleep, fat and happy.”

  I realized I hated the way he ate, never really closing his mouth, chewing far too much, way too vigorously, running his tongue over his gums, sucking at his teeth, the clicking jaw, the audible swallow. Every mouthful of food was like a skirmish. What else I didn’t like was how he inspected his handkerchief after he blew his nose. In fact, I had a list of irritations—the way he’d drink milk right from the carton, wash his hair with a damp face cloth, smell his shirts before he put them on.

  I heard a key snick in the front door lock. Dad looked up, the fork an inch from his mouth. Mom walked in. She said, “I didn’t expect to find you here, Johnny.”

  I looked at Dad. “She has a key?”

  She said, “Sometimes I need to get away from Mr. Brown.”

  “She’s still my wife. What’s mine is hers. The least I can do. Like I said, I don’t abandon people.”

  Mom said, “I could use a martini, Rainy.”

  SO DAD and Heidi live in Idaho these days, and if Dad has another family, I don’t know about it. The two of them spend a good deal of their time on the road. Dad still drives, and Heidi’s his able copilot. They could retire, of course, but they’re having the time of their lives, trucking around the country with their GPS and their forty-channel CB radio, and Heidi’s twenty-thousand-song iPod. (“And every one of them songs is country, hon.”) Heidi cooks on a hot plate in the cab. They’ve got a doghouse sleeper, but prefer motels. They’ve got a Web page where they post Today’s Photo (Heidi by a sign advertising “THE THING ONLY 135 MILES!); Thoughts (“I don’t live to drive, I drive to live”); Jokes (Q: What’s the difference between a Jehovah’s Witness and a Peterbilt? A: You can close the door on a Jehovah’s Witness). And there’s a map where you can follow their route and progress. This morning they left Taos for Santa Fe. According to Heidi’s Journal they spent last night at the Sagebrush Inn, ate chile rellenos at the Adobe Bar, and stayed up past their bedtime dancing the two-step in the cantina.

  Nevada, the half-sister I’ve never met or spoken to, lives in a small coastal town in Alaska. Dad says she’s a reader like me, cut from the same cloth, two peas in a pod; the two of us would get along like gangbusters. Heidi also has two sons from an earlier boyfriend. The older son, Curt, is a banjo maker in Arkansas. He has a gray beard to his waist and looks about a hundred, but he’s in his late fifties. Morris is a sportsman, a hunting and fishing guide with his own outdoors show on a cable network. I saw him on
the show one time standing in a wheat field in an orange vest and cap, rifle sloped on his shoulder, whispering to his dog. Suddenly a bouquet of pheasants rose and scattered not ten yards ahead of him. I changed the channel.

  FOR A couple of years now my dreams have presented themselves on many nights as a computer file. Documents and SettingsHP_AdministratorMy DocumentsMy FilesDreams. I open the menu, click on New if I’m feeling adventurous, or click on the title of a recurring dream, and download. I get full-screen, DVD-quality visuals and stereo sound. I can link to other dreams, freeze the image, jump ahead, replay, mute the sound, zoom in or out, enhance the color, save with changes. I’m sure I’m not the only person this happens to. Of course, my dreams are a Windows application, so they’re prone to gotchas and crashes. Annick says my dreams at night would be more user-friendly and reliable if I switched to a Mac during the day, but she’s talking to a guy who typed his first novel on an Atari without a hard drive and would still be using it if they had not stopped making the parts. Thirty-six single-sided disks.

  Anyway, one of my recent dreams is Reunion. It’s just below ReqMem on the menu, and in it the lot of us are back in the old O’Connell Street backyard for a gathering and cookout. Red and Miss Teaspoon are there even though they’re dead (ALS/peritonitis). Red’s sitting by Violet in her wheelchair. He’s sipping a ’Gansett and stroking her hair. Miss Teaspoon is quiet, and she’s shimmering, and sometimes she vanishes for a few moments. Annick is there in the role of Stevie, watching over everyone, making sure they have enough to eat and drink. Blackie’s filming it all with his old camera. There are seventeen nuns in matching floral print housedresses and pale white hose sitting on bleachers where the shed used to be. They’re all eating cake and humming Gregorian chants. “That’s going to make a nice soundtrack,” Blackie says. Nunzie’s there with Caeli. Another Nunzie is across the yard with his wife, who is veiled in black lace. The Sandilands made it. The Captain and Ivy wear matching blue yacht-club blazers, white duck pants, and admirals’ hats. Ivy says, “You remember the twins, don’t you, Johnny?” Will and Grace have flown in from North Dakota to see me. Some nights they’re Regis and Kelly and they’ve driven up from Greenwich.

  Mom’s wrestling with her new boyfriend on the grass. Dad’s truck is idling out front on O’Connell Street, and he has a map unfolded on his lap, but he and Heidi seem to be enjoying the party. Heidi’s boys are scarfing down the hot dogs like they’re in training to go up against Takeru Kobayashi in a competitive eating competition. Deluxe is sprawled on a branch of the birch we buried him under. He died the way that Dad wanted to. Veronica tells me she married a man who owns a flow-control valve company in Birmingham and she plays golf four days a week at the country club, and I don’t tell her how disappointed I am in her orthodoxy, and Annick reads my thoughts and tells me I have no right to be so arrogant.

  Alice is not invited, but some nights she shows up anyway, looking beautiful and twenty-nine. I feel the pressure to keep everyone entertained. Some nights there’s a pétanque match. Dad introduces me to Nevada. We shake with one hand and embrace with the other. She’s brought me a salmon. “Copper River,” she says. It turns out that she reads mysteries, thrillers, suspense and crime, whodunits, cozies. Our conversations go something like this.

  “You like Grisham?”

  “Haven’t read him.”

  “King?”

  “Haven’t read him.”

  “You’d like him. Clancy?”

  “Nope.”

  “Kuntz?”

  “Nope.”

  “Mosley?”

  “Nope.”

  “You’ve read Crichton.”

  “I haven’t.”

  “Sue Grafton.”

  “Nuh-uh.”

  “Who do you read?”

  “William Trevor.”

  “Who?”

  Every time I see Garnet she’s across the yard from me. I wave, but she doesn’t look up. I wade through the waves of guests, and when I arrive at where she was, she isn’t. I want to tell her how I’ve written about her, how she is not forgotten. I want to say how sorry I am. I want to thank her for all she did. And then she’s standing beside me, squinting at the house. I tell her about the dedication in the memoir. She tells me it means nothing to her. She’s beyond meaning. She’s dead. Meaning doesn’t cross that barrier.

  We’re all, we suddenly realize, waiting for Audrey to arrive. We wonder what she’ll look like, what she’ll have to say for herself. We wonder what’s keeping her. Caeli checks her watch. Someone says he saw Audrey earlier at Speedy’s waving goodbye. People have run out of things to say. The nuns have stopped humming. They’re licking frosting from their fingers. At this point scenes from the dream begin to repeat themselves. Dad rubs the scar on his leg again. Curt braids his beard. Folks begin to drift away. The sun is going down. There’s a chill in the air. The ashes in the Weber are cold. Spot’s under the bleachers with a birdhouse in his mouth. Once again, the party has been ruined by great expectations. I decide that I don’t like the dream anymore, and I wake myself up.

  CHARLIE BROWN became Charles Brown when he became the administrative director of the city’s methadone clinic. In his new role he became a local countercultural celebrity and hero as a forceful and vociferous advocate of the poor, the homeless, the addicted, and the disenfranchised. He surprised me, I’ll admit. Folks urged him to run for the City Council, but he wanted nothing to do with the “establishment,” as we called it then. He gathered a—devoted would not be too strong a word—a devoted group of acolytes and assistants, who admired his passion, commitment, and eloquence. He shaved his head. He looked more like Elmer Fudd than a Buddhist monk, I thought, but the new fashion aesthetic proved alluring to his followers, one of whom owned a large farm in King Phillipston and donated it to Charles. About a dozen folks, including Mom and The Fox, moved into the commune they called Laing House. Charles ran the place like a hippie boot camp. Mom found herself only one of several “wives.” Power may have gone to Charles’s head. There were rumors of a financial scandal and sexual improprieties. He vanished and turned up nine months later in San Francisco, the guru to one of the Grateful Dead. And from there it was just a small step to artist management, concert promotion, and a mansion in Marin, where, as far as I know, he still lives.

  Mom never wanted for suitors, marginal characters most of them, rode hard and put up wet, but attentive and affectionate enough, so that even before Charles Brown made his splash in Newsweek when his wedding to a flower child in Golden Gate Park was featured in a special issue on the Haight, Mom was living with a soft-spoken fellow named Dennis LaPlante, who had cerebral palsy. Dennis quit his job at H&R Block, and the two of them opened a vintage clothing store in what had been a used book shop downtown. They called the place the Glass of Fashion, but Mom always referred to it as Rags to Bitches. She started to dress like a femme fatale in a forties noir movie. Dressed to kill, Dennis said. She looked radiant and dangerous. I bought all my Rooster ties and Cowichan sweaters at the store. Business was booming, but Dennis was also selling cocaine out of the men’s dressing room, and one day he sold half a gram to an undercover cop (Lenny Cox, Kenny’s brother) and got busted. So Dennis went to jail, and the store closed. Mom told me she was going to visit a friend in Santa Fe, and I never heard from her again, not in person. The occasional postcard, the annual phone conversation. Dad stayed in touch with her. She had no friend in Santa Fe, of course. She waitressed at the Plaza Café for six months and then moved to Tucson and then to Flagstaff. Dad said she was looking for a place where she fit. She worked a season at the El Tovar in the Grand Canyon. She moved to Los Angeles. Dad sent her money for a flight back to Requiem.

  After Audrey enrolled at Requiem State, Stevie and Drake moved back to Louisiana. A couple of years later Stevie married Skeet Dryden, a wealthy gentleman of leisure from a prominent Monroe family. As a young man Skeet had gone off to Yale and then settled in Manhattan. He published a critically accla
imed novel, Bobby Reynolds, In Person, when he was twenty-two. He wrote teleplays for Studio One and Playhouse 90. And then he stopped writing because, he claimed, he had nothing else to say. He knew Truman Capote and Nelle Lee—three Southerners in the big city. After his father died, Skeet moved back to Monroe to care for his mother. He and Nelle are still in touch.

  Stevie could remember the scandal in Monroe that accompanied the publication of Skeet’s novel. Decent citizens were outraged when they read in Time magazine that Skeet was writing about homosexuals and insanity and miscegenation in little “Madison, Louisiana.” The nerve! When the public library refused to purchase the book, it was effectively banned from Monroe, there being no other place to get yourself a book in those days unless you wanted to drive over to Jackson. Fortunately, everyone’s over that now. Skeet’s about as close to a celebrity as you have in Monroe. People find it endearing that he clips grocery coupons and recycles string and tinfoil. He and Stevie take a trip or two every year to Europe or to Latin America. Drake owns a car dealership in Monroe. In his TV commercials he rides onto his car lot on a golden palomino, lassos his sales staff, and makes them promise to sell their new and pre-owned automobiles at the lowest possible prices. He sold me my salsa lunch box. We talk about once a month. Usually about Audrey.

  Remember Keefe Smith? The balding reporter I found in our kitchen the morning after one of Mom’s parties? Ben-Gay on the scalp; black, tasseled loafers, and op-art necktie—that Keefe Smith. Well, these days Mom and Keefe are married or they’re attached, I’m not sure which. They live together and have for ten years, at least. Mom hasn’t spoken to me—not even when spoken to—in a dozen years. She won’t answer the phone or acknowledge birthday or holiday cards. Keefe sends me a note every few months letting me know how Mom’s doing. Good days, bad days. Laughing, crying. Chatty, withdrawn. Docile, belligerent. He sees that she keeps her medical appointments and takes her drugs. He loves her. He keeps the wolves from the door. Mom doesn’t know about Keefe’s correspondence with me, or she would tell him to stop, and he would. She’s angry at and frightened by her past. Keefe doesn’t know why exactly and says he doesn’t need to. He has a hunch.