The Death of All Things Seen

by Michael Collins

  Norman nodded. ‘Right.’ He let it play out in a way that gratified Joanne’s view on life and politics. So much of life was compromise and biting your tongue. He said, by way of further advancing her optimism, ‘I think you can divide the political parties along a diverging line of ascendancy. Either you come from somewhere or nowhere. Republicans don’t come with a history or backstory in the way Democrats do.’

  Joanne turned. She was the typical community college student, willing to sit through night class, having come from not one, but two, jobs. No doubt Peter Coffey had taken his chances with a series of self-improvers like her.

  Norman prattled on. ‘Think about it, FDR and his fight with polio, or Carter, a peanut farmer from the Deep South. What was it Carter said in that Playboy interview? “I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times.” He’s probably the only man who ever had to pretend to have had impure thoughts. And Clinton, brought up by his grandmother. Everybody knew what the White House meant to him. It was part of his humanity. There are stories of him campaigning, shaking a thousand hands, and afterward eating a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken with those unwashed hands. That’s democracy.’

  Joanne added, ‘Peter says Clinton passed more laws against the poor than Republicans.’

  Norman marveled at the sense of how a mind could be so formed by the guiding opinion of another, by even someone as unfaithful as Peter Coffey. Peter, the phantom limb felt long after its amputation. It was something worth understanding, how someone’s influence could outlast their departure.

  Norman added, ‘Peter’s right. Politics is all about perception. Clinton’s infidelity made him vulnerable in a Faustian way. All through the impeachment hearings, he cut legislative deals to survive. The great problem for Obama, there’s no dirt on him. You need an essential flaw. It constitutes how compromise and change happens.’

  Joanne looked off toward the lake. Peter Coffey jumped in her heart. Norman was aware he had been too cavalier in referencing Peter. He had crossed an invisible border, exposing the tolerable life they were sharing in the shadow of lost loves, so it was suddenly obvious they were doing their very best to be civil and cordial, and it wasn’t quite enough.

  Joanne recovered a bit. ‘You forgot Kennedy in your grand theory.’

  Norman rallied, anything to get them through the day.

  ‘Yes, Kennedy had money, but, with him, idealism trumped money. You throw Jackie and Marilyn into the mix and you get the sort of president most any man would want to be. Money is the preoccupation of the Republicans. You have to grow up with money to respect it, to invest it, to make it work in a way that those who don’t grow up with it will never fully comprehend.’

  Joanne conceded, ‘I think you’re right.’ She said it on an up note, like the awkwardness had passed. She looked in the rear-view mirror at Grace. ‘Your father, he knows a lot about politics. He’s very, very smart. You should listen to him.’

  As she spoke, she put her hand on Norman’s thigh and said quietly, ‘I’m planning on paying you back every red cent you put on my card. I don’t welch on my debts.’

  *

  They were all suddenly tired. It had been an eventful day, and yet they had survived, or negotiated the day as best they could. They were out here at last.

  Norman mentally ran through a list of positives. He was trying very hard to be optimistic.

  In the ensuing quiet, Norman’s phone buzzed. The realtor had postponed their meeting until 4 p.m.

  Norman stared at the text. His inclination was to turn back. There was little point in seeing the house. He might have suggested it, but he knew Joanne had other ideas about the house. He said nothing. Instead, he checked his email in the quiet stalemate.

  Amidst the spam, he came upon an email with a .ca suffix. The name Feldman caught his eye. He read the email quietly.

  He looked up. Joanne was preoccupied with the radio and searching for a station.

  She eventually looked across at him. ‘Anything wrong?’

  Norman cradled the phone in his lap. ‘No, it’s all good.’

  Joanne was again distracted. She used the tone she used when explaining things to Grace. ‘This is where people live if they don’t live in the city.’

  Norman smiled and added compliantly, ‘Like your dollhouse, Grace, and Mr and Mrs Crumby. Everybody has a bedroom and a bathroom of their own.’

  Joanne enthused. ‘Right... like Mr and Mrs Crumby.’

  Grace didn’t respond.

  Joanne averted her eyes. She knew enough about psychology to know that important milestones had been missed in Grace’s development.

  Norman broached an explanation. They had talked little about anything of substance since the revelations of New Year’s Eve.

  ‘When we first got Grace, I was dead against the imperialism of English. I read that if you spoke just your language, and let a child maintain their language, the two languages could work alongside each other. I felt she deserved to have her heritage intact. But maybe it was a mistake. How much can one person hold on to?’

  With it said, there was a quiet indictment of his life, his past, and Joanne’s, too.

  Joanne was forgiving in her answer. ‘Grace just needs friends, maybe that’s all it will take. I see potential, real potential.’

  In her voice was the charge of a clinical and compassionate concern, the true measure of who she was, stern and loving in the way a child needed direction and the assumed role of a strong parent. It was obvious Joanne loved this child.

  Norman looked out of the window. He turned his phone over in his hand. He was aware his mind was processing Nate Feldman.

  Joanne angled in the impropriety of wanting to see it, asking, ‘What are you hiding?’ so Norman held the phone up as a part of full disclosure.

  He read the message, broaching its greater context.

  Joanne interrupted, ‘Is this Mr Feldman even still alive?’

  Norman advanced the story by degrees. ‘Mr Feldman committed suicide on Black Monday, 1987. He jumped from his office building.’

  In Norman’s voice there was a tone that betrayed a greater intimacy.

  Joanne half-turned with a familiarity that came from simply being in the presence of another’s life and asked, ‘You knew him?’ She was holding the wheel with the determination of a captain steering a ship.

  Norman looked ahead at the advancing street. He said with a tone of quiet remembrance, ‘I used to go to my mother’s office. Mr Feldman did this trick. He’d reach behind my ear and pull out a silver dollar. I was young. I always wanted to know how he did it and my mother used to say he couldn’t tell because that’s what made him the boss. He could make money out of thin air.’

  ‘Your mother liked Mr Feldman, huh?’ Joanne said it as though it was the stuff of ordinary life.

  It meant little to her, a story to pass the time on a drive together.

  Norman felt it in the act of telling it. He offered as a point of continuance, not for Joanne as much as himself, ‘I have a vague memory of my mother telling my father something about Nate.’

  The word Canada formed under his breath. He said, as though it was revelation, which it was, ‘Nate, he was a draft dodger.’

  Joanne didn’t know these people. She was presently distracted. She looked in the rear-view mirror at Grace. There was the ever-present to occupy the totality of one’s existence. ‘You okay, Grace?’

  She turned to Norman with the pressuring sense that perhaps there had been too much talk and not enough attention paid to Grace. She said by way of reconciliation, ‘Grace can get a doll for being so good, right?’

  Norman said, ‘A new doll, why not?’ just as Grace leaned forward and threw up in a spew that hit the back of Joanne’s head.

  8.

  NATE WAS A day early for his appointment at the office of Weatherly, Sutherland, and Saunders, Lawyers. He called in the mid-afternoon from a coffee shop out in Winnetka, politely asking if he could be slotted in at the end of the day
perhaps. He was in town ahead of plan. He could be at the office in less than an hour.

  He was put on hold, then the message came back that he could not be accommodated. Documents needed to be drawn up. Nate heard the receptionist opening and closing a ledger or scheduler. She confirmed his appointment. He thanked her and assured her he would keep to the schedule.

  There was no need to head into the city. He used his phone to search for a hotel in the area and found a Comfort Suites room, breakfast included. An immediate upgrade pop-up appeared as he was registering – a California king sized bed for an extra $9.95, including a spa upgrade for the gym. It was too complicated to decline, or navigate back through the site, so he booked it. Margins were met on $9.95 upgrades. The final price was never what you were quoted.

  *

  The old carriage house was off to the side, not visible from the road, but Nate saw its distinctive rooster weathervane and felt its presence loom over him. He heard the word Duchess in his head.

  It still hurt. He felt it and winced. It was all there again in his heart and head. In wartime, gear and supplies had to be meticulously packed and weighed. This was how his father packed for him, military style, deciding what to take and what to leave behind. They had the lie rehearsed.

  They were going on a fishing trip, wilderness gear packed into the car, canned provisions, oil-slick parka and wading boots, thermal underwear, a Swiss Army knife, flint, and a cache of dry kindling. His father weighed it all in the carriage house on a scale taken from the kitchen.

  In pulling out of the drive, Nate saw his mother in the upper floor window of his old bedroom. A curtain moved. She was then gone from his life.

  They talked among themselves eventually miles out of Chicago. His father drank whiskey from an engraved pocket flask set between his knees. At times the car swerved and had to be corrected. Thankfully, they didn’t run into anyone as they drove along the funneling timberline.

  Business had been going to hell, or so his father had determined, or it was getting so. He saw bad times ahead. There had been mistakes made at all levels of government. It wasn’t even about governments anymore, but multinationals, about prevailing interests that transcended any one border.

  His father cast into a great pool of discontent. He was then anticipating the rise of the Japanese imports. He had a head for understanding the ways of the world, or it was his hatred of the Japs that keyed him in on them specifi-cally. In looking back, it was hard for Nate to decide what was prophetic and what was rage within his father. It was perhaps both.

  Whatever the case, the Vietnam War was a great distraction. His father announced it, banging the dash of the car, the joke of those early Toyota and Honda four-stroke engines – a lawnmower motor in a car – the compacts that nobody in their right mind would think of driving, and didn’t, but then did eventually, in what would be the subtle narrowing of dreams and skyrocketing inflation.

  It was never about Nate. That was one of the fast truths emerging at the time. There would be no succor. His father was lost. It was the Japs, what he had experienced in war.

  His father pulled over and pissed into the desolate landscape against the onset of evening. He wavered and steadied, went round the front of the car, shielding his eyes against the cone of light.

  Getting in, he reached back and touched his hunting rifle with a strange reassurance that it was still there, so it had frightened Nate what might have happened if they were stopped, or what might happen after he was gone across the border.

  The anger was suddenly gone from his father. He was exhausted. He took another drink. They talked again eventually, or his father did. What he described was not the act of desertion, not the act of disgrace, but something far nobler, something connected to the Feldman past.

  They were heading up into Feldman territory connected to a band of heroic Norwegians going generations back. They were, in fact, more Ingebretson than Feldman. His father turned and faced Nate in the compelling sense that this was all true, or it should be believed.

  Nate could do nothing but acquiesce and listen.

  It was a complicated story. The Feldman name had entered the family through a mercurial Norwegian who had given birth to a daughter of immense beauty, but also petulant character, who broke camp eventually and was seduced and bedded by a fur trapper named Feldman, so the mirthless Ingebretson Norwegians, those dumbfounded giants who had come across the Atlantic, had their bloodline infused with a sagacious, nomadic taxidermist from the Urals who knew something about fox fur and ermine and its value to the Imperial Court of czarist Russia. This, according to his father, was how a rarified beauty, a daughter who struck out and found another life, saved the Norwegian side of the family from a great obscurity.

  His father had been brought up outside Saint Cloud, Minnesota. The family name was Engelstad, and he was christened Angar, a name he had always associated with a clod driving oxen, so that when he distinguished himself in school and left Saint Cloud eventually, he took the lifeline of the ancestral, Semitic Feldman name. As for Theodore, he chose the name from a haberdashery storefront sign seen fleetingly through the window of a train on his way down through Saint Paul, believing he might find favor in circles of money in the metropolis of Chicago, Philadelphia or New York. He did. He was such an anomaly with his flaxen hair and great strength, and to be counted a Jew, to have that lineage.

  He earned a scholarship to Cornell, enrolling in ROTC simply because he had no respectable civilian clothes. He wore his uniform exclusively, compensating in the way certain men can turn disadvantage to advantage. He was described in the Yearbook as a student of great patriotism, featured in his uniform, inspiring and deferential, and he came to understand that you could be a fraud, or not a fraud exactly, but that your true self, what you felt and thought, could be so concealed from others, and from yourself, too.

  He had a head for applied mathematics and a penchant for philosophy, and also the steady hand of a carpenter, given the thunderhead Norwegian Engelstad and Ingebretson in him. His height and his looks gave him a physical stature. He was wildly courted and admired. This was an established fact. There was nothing he couldn’t do, because you had to do everything in Saint Cloud, Minnesota, and he had done everything well by necessity.

  A Vanderbilt had her claws into him at Cornell. She didn’t care a whit where he had come from, not then, but he knew it would come against him, and yet, for a time, he described a growing self-awareness, how he could elicit a recklessness in women. They were rough in their lovemaking, and there was always the possibility he would sire a child. There was that much in him, that much explosive charge. This was the frontline of a war that might be won, the war over the heart.

  Nate had heard the story. His mother had verified certain facts during the trials and rows of a contentious marriage, relaying what his father could have had, and what he left behind in the first great act of selfless love in leaving behind his Vanderbilt. There was a lamenting sense that he had passed on true love and was never whole again. So it wasn’t the war entirely that had changed him, but what he left behind, what could never be recovered, and would most surely have ended, if there had been no war, anyway.

  Nate dared not ask about the Vanderbilt. It wasn’t a question of facts and understanding, but a story of perceptions and deepening influences. His father described how he had been influenced by his studies in philosophy and engineering at Cornell, where, notoriously, existential devotees of Sartre and Camus regularly committed suicide at any of a number of bridges along the gorges near campus. He revealed how, during his sophomore year, he used to walk out toward the gorges with his Vanderbilt debutante, both sharing the mutual understanding that suicide was a genuine option in a world without a God, and that, each time neither jumped, they were making an existential choice to go on living and felt the better for consciously making a choice.

  His father held the whiskey between his knees. He drank liberally, looking out into the unfolding landscape. There was
the surging sense of what had passed, the rush of great and undeniable passion, and all of it begun before his father was Nate’s age, the indictment laid out before Nate.

  At times, his father found it hard to contain it all, the car swerving so it had to be corrected and accounted for, but, thankfully, there was nobody going north or south along the funneling timberline. These were stories pulled from his father’s head and his heart, the stream of words, the Feldman nomad and the giant Swedes, or was it the giant Norwegians? Yes, the goddamn Ingebretsons. His father corrected himself, lost in the quiet incantation of how life could be otherwise invented and lived, peopled by great and noble nomads who must surely have existed in how the land was first discovered.

  Nate listened, his father coming round toward an awareness of his own disaffection, tendering the tremulous and humble opinion that, at a certain point in history, just before the Industrial Revolution, when men still lived without the hitch of industry and machines, when distances meant something, a man could find the measure of his strength and temperament in Nature, in lands yet uninhabited.

  He alighted on the story of a great ox of a man, Per Ingebretson, their Norwegian primogenitor, who, of his own volition, neither from religious persecution nor any real ambition, just a wandering sense of wanting to see the greater world, had left home at age sixteen, crossed Iceland and Greenland, before making shore in North America. Per, a towering, uncomplicated figure in the tradition of Paul Bunyan, a man who would find his true calling logging in what would eventually become Minnesota. His passage to America had been secured through a trading company out of Hudson Bay, his first true landfall along a meandering river at a bleak outpost near Pictured Rocks on Lake Superior at a supply shed on the way to nowhere, where he was given the vague mandate to begin work further north and simply keep chopping until someone came and got him. There was enough in a lifetime to keep him busy.

  His father told the story driving into the upper mitt of the Michigan peninsula in a thinning tree line of spruce and pine. How he knew the most intimate details of Per Ingebretson was not up for debate. It was just understood he did.