I decided that I couldn’t stay here in Djuna Cobbetts’s room any longer. I wanted to do something, anything. It hardly mattered whether I would walk up the hill and confront the light in the tree, confront Berg, bring matters toward some manner of denouement, or else backtrack along Coecles Inlet toward the causeways on foot, leaving the bike behind, and just get out of Berg’s life like he asked me to. Up here, hiding as I’d always done in high places, aeries, looking out onto the world like a raptor but without so much as the most menial set of claws with which to address it and bring it under my control, I had no chance of bringing our scattered lives back into some kind of alignment. I felt like a child. I felt like screaming.
Of course I didn’t retreat along the lapping inlet toward that miserable, airless hotel room on the other side of the island. Retreat just didn’t seem an option. My life, such as it happened to be, was here. What I knew about the world, such as it happened to have come to me, had come from here, too. So I climbed, like a possessed woman out of a late-night movie, say, a zombie, someone beyond the thaumaturgical good old pale of death that you sometimes see long about two in the morning on the box, someone who can no longer be hurt because she’s been hurt so much that there is no more hurting her that will register, and the direction I was headed was up toward my home. My lost older brother was there. Someone I had loved as a brother and in my imagination, as a child, as a lover was there in spirit. My father, whether he chose it or not, and my mother as well, idem whether she liked it or not, were there. And it was where I was going to go.
The light was down out of the tree by the time I got to the row of arborvitae, and it was almost past me by the time I knew what hit me. Whoever knocked me over had runpast me, past Djuna Cobbetts’s house, and, I supposed, made his escape along the scree and vegetation that lined the water edge. The figure had emerged from behind the corner of the house, where the cherry tree stood, so suddenly, and bore down upon me with such frightening speed, that I had no chance of seeing him in the dark.
“Grace?” said Berg.
He helped me up, and took the sheet of paper that was there on the ground beside me. My head throbbed, not of a megrim pain, but from having been hit—grazed, really—by the escaping figure. Berg put his arm around me, and we went inside. He was as unsteady on his feet as I was on mine, and I could smell the vodka on his breath and clothes.
Of all the unexpected events of the evening, what was typed on the sheet of paper was most unexpected of all. It was the same white paper, the same typeface, and was unsigned, just like that note I had received before. Berg read it first, and his face was drained of color when he finished and handed it to me. “If you want to avoid a certain party’s reporting all the activities of that division of Geiger known as the Gulf Stream Trust, and its illegitimate bastard offspring known to the Revenue Service people as the Almanac branch, and if you want to avoid a certain party’s putting into the hands of Mr. Charles Brush, who, like the rest of you, will not survive said disclosures, a complete and accurate cataloguing of all ‘creative’ activities that have been financed through the unfortunate lending services that you his son and daughter have undertaken to facilitate, payment of five hundred thousand dollars …” and the note went on to describe details of how the money was to be dropped off in front of a car rental desk at La Guardia Airport—it was just frigging ludicrous!
Berg was yelling something about how all this was my fault, that the only person who could have known about everything was Cutts, and that if I’d shown a little restraint …
Incredulous at what I was hearing, I said, “You knowthat’s all a bunch—look, Berg, what does this mean here about ‘his son and daughter,’ I mean listen, what the hell have you been doing?”
“That’s wrong, that business, I don’t know what they’re talking about. I don’t remember—”
“You what? You don’t remember what? You used my name in some of this stuff, didn’t you?”
“I don’t know.”
“What kind of junk have you got me involved in?”
“It doesn’t even matter. What matters is what are we going to do?”
“We? Leave me out of it.”
“Hey, Grace. It’s too late. I told you to stay out of it, didn’t I? I told you to leave me alone. I told you it wasn’t any of your business. Well, you didn’t listen to me. You’re in it, too, now. I think what we have to do is pay him. He goes through with this and everything falls to pieces.”
“Not everything, not me. I haven’t done anything.”
“We don’t know who this is doing this, but as I said it seems to me that Cutts is the only person I can think of—”
“Cutts would never do this. That wasn’t him just then.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t know for sure, but I’m saying Cutts, this just isn’t something he would do, that’s all.”
Berg paused, and said, the paper quaking in his hand, with as studied a calm as he was able to summon, “Do you have any idea how Faw would react if he knew about you and Cutts?”
“I’m not six years old, Burke. There are limits, all right, there are limits to how much I’m going to be able to care what he or you or anybody else thinks. Whatever right he might have to make a negative judgment of me has got to be offset by what he’s doing himself out there, with this church thing, and all the rest. I don’t pretend to understand business, and I think he’s wise enough not to pretend to understand my personal life. For openers, he’d realize what Cutts and I did is none of his business, so to speak.”
“And what about Bea? What about your friend Bea? How would she feel if she knew?”
“Pretty cowardly thought.”
Berg folded the paper, put it in his pocket, and in a quieter voice said, “What about me and Faw?”
“You actually want to pay this person, is that what I’m hearing here? Have you lost your mind?”
What would I have done, just then, standing there in the house where we grew up together, if I had known what I was to know about a month later? I wonder whether I would still have turned my back on Berg and walked out into the night field, returned to the hotel, settled my bill after waking up the poor innkeeper, and driven back to New York. Would I still have made the decision to leave him to his own devices and accept whatever consequences my refusal to capitulate to his maudlin requests might bring?
I don’t know. I’d love to think I would have had the clarity of mind to make an even response. There are reasons for me to believe I might have managed, in the face of Berg’s desperate duplicity, to maintain some dignity; to have found a middle path whereby I wouldn’t become his friend, but nevertheless wouldn’t turn into his enemy, either. Even now, I surprise myself. Even now I look at what a shambles things had become, and I have to pinch myself to see whether I am awake to all the nuances of what Berg has accomplished, not only practically and legally, but emotionally. If I saw Berg how would I react now? Maybe I overestimate my ability to remain loyal in the face of cowardice and rejection and betrayal. I look back over these pages, and I believe that everything I have been able to puzzle together about us, this family, is truthful, and fair. It seems, in its perverse way, logical that Berg would have felt his resorting to a bit of cinematic flimflammery was the best way to drag himself up out of the depths of his disaster. What a dramatic piece of work to type up a note thatoffered to blackmail us—himself included, indeed himself above all—and lure me into believing that someone else was involved. He was never going to be able to finish his Almanac, so why not turn his own life into some kind of teeming farce, using me as the straight man and audience as well.
I have to face the fact that it is possible any equanimity I have had in light of all this would have self-destructed. Had I known that night that Berg realized he was in trouble and knew that there was no way out of it but to draw me into helping him at my own expense I can say, I think I can say with honesty, I might have tried to kill him. It’s not like I’m not a p
assionate woman. It’s not like I learned nothing about men and their sometimes nakedly vile responses to the realities of defeat from reading Shahrazad and Can Xue, or watching those shows on the box. In Arabia, back in time, when a king could get it into his skull that the only way to trust a woman as a wife was to make love to her and then slit her throat at dawn so that she would never be unfaithful to him, in Arabia it would have been nothing for me to have taken a dagger and concealed it in my robes and stabbed this sad specimen in the neck and left him for some vultures to devour. In Can Xue, he’d have been transformed into a blind black fly left to make its way flying about in a room of spinning spiders.
Things are never so bad as they seem to be in the night. It is a platitude, that, but platitudes have their value, like mulch. Because as bad as things are—sometimes they are even worse than they appear to be at first—resolutions grow like weeds the next morning. It is inevitable.
When it became clear, a week later, that his sister was not going to participate in his game of threats, Berg confessed his authorship of the typewritten notes. He even told herthat he was sorry, that he was cornered, trapped, and that she simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“Real genius,” was her comeback, but he was far too involved, by then, in piecing together his relationship with Analise to be offended by such sarcasm; Grace had a right to be angry, after all, and while he knew he couldn’t suddenly grow wings, he sensed that if he left her alone, didn’t try so hard to act as nemesis or as pal, things might work themselves out over time. Analise was his concern, now. She had developed a sense of guilt, as Berg might have expected after that day when she with the rest of the crew had blown him off. During the weeks that followed their peculiar sojourn on Shelter, she offered to help him get the film finished, but only per Meade’s firm instructions, in the city, in the controlled environment of a loft studio, with the standard sets—a bed, a backdrop—and with the understanding that a perfectionist director is worse than a lamp without a bulb, and of course Berg knew better than to turn the offer down. He did allow himself the pleasure of telling Analise what a treacherous harpy she’d shown herself to be, leaving him out there on the island the way she did, but she countered with a statement that ran something like, Given she had decided not to leave him stranded—and she certainly could have, damn it all, in light of what a prima-donna he had shown himself to be—there was nothing more to say about the matter; and he knew when to say when.
They were back on the film within a week of Berg’s encounter with Grace. As the production wore on he found that the original intensity of keeping things honed in tight to their truths, truths as he had always thought he’d seen them, waned. He cared less and less about holding the film up to the concept of being some kind of portrait of the Brush family. Analise and Meade, in their own persistent ways, became cowriters on the film. It changed. It varied, and varied drastically, from his painstaking script.
It didn’t take long to finish. Analise had put a new title on the thing, and her colleague made no protest. There was a moment, as they were editing the film, when Berg determined that it might even be the better part of valor to destroy that script. Analise was convinced that what they had ended up with promised to make them some serious money. “Cannes you can forget,”she told Berg, her arm around his shoulder in a small private viewing theater that a friend of Meade’s had in the basement of his house out in the grasslands of New Jersey—on a beautiful horse farm there—“but I think that you can expect to get your investment back into the account, and then some.”
Berg supposed he was grateful at least for that. But he still wondered what the film would have looked like had he been able to see it through, himself. It occurred to him that the only way for him to find out would be to start from the beginning, maybe rework the script, maybe even rewrite it from top to bottom, and then take his time ferreting out the right producer, all the right colleagues for the project.
They should be just malleable enough, he thought, to go along with his wilder propositions and just strong enough to be able to help him pull off, with discrimination and common sense, his film version of what he knew as the milieu in which he’d lived his life.
It wasn’t too much to ask. Of himself, or anyone else. So strong were his hopes that it had even dawned on him it might be easier to take the monies that were going to be made off this first film and loop them right back around into the second and surely purer version. Why go through the hassle of having to thread the eyes of needles with unwieldy camels twice, if what he had in mind could succeed?
Yes; if he was right in his meditation on this subject, which now had become so dear to his heart, there would be no need for miracles. He knew that if he could get another shot at it he’d have camels doing back flips through those needle eyes. And let the eyes be burning bright with fire, at that; it might heighten the effect.
Now that I’ve managed to make some notes, looking back as a way of making a map—in the grand Brush tradition of trusting maps—I have found that the flare man has been on my mind, more and more. I don’t know what I will do next, so I wouldn’t have any idea what map to pull out of my father’s map case. But I did think of doing this. I’m going to try to find out if the people who live in that house up in Harlem would mind if I visited my old room. People do that, I think. Come back to the place where they grew up, just to see what it looks like now that they are older, and more experienced, and believe they can see it with mature eyes—see it more clearly than they had when they were young. I’m sure the flare man will have nothing to say to me, now. He’s probably playing his fabulous tricks for the benefit of someone else’s imagination.
Can Xue has been on my mind as well. I’ve even considered going to visit her, as a pilgrim, knowing full well that she would be difficult to find, knowing moreover that she is a woman not so much older than I, who might consider my desire to be in her presence an unnecessary intrusion on her time. She would probably tell me to go and have my own dream, like Old Jiang and his wife had had, like Ru-shu and her old man had. But I would know that there is always the danger of wanting to dream about beautiful, aristocratic cranes, and then finding yourself instead among a tribe of croaking toads, trying to keep up with them as they cross the long expanses of muddy earth they prefer to inhabit. China is so far away, too. Oceans and continents and cultures away. My questions seem so much nearer.
If you can’t trust dreams, you can at least try to trust time. Time and experience have taught me to believe that the osprey nest, that stick-cloud, will be there longer than any Brush will be in the farmhouse within its purview.Having made it through another winter of salty winds and soft snows, the ospreys will return every year, and add a few more sticks and pieces of our clothing and our tools and toys into its weave, just as it has always done in the past. Desmond, in some manner or form, will be there, too, patient as a raptor’s aerie, waiting for me like the mother osprey to come home when the weather has warmed. And I know that I’ll go there sometimes to visit them both, even though the osprey doesn’t scare me as she used to, and though Desmond is too far on the other side of the death-curtain for me to be able to see him or hear him as I could once. But you go, and pay homage when you can. It’s what one does. That saying about how it’s hard to come back to a twice-left house may be true—but it is smart to test those sayings, as you know. They’re like ghosts and can fade away too.
I wonder what will happen with Faw. Berg has told me that he’s got the money back into the Trust (should I bother to believe him or not? the point is moot) and that the branch he had established to use for his own ends has been silently closed. The man from the Council of Churches (point moot) telephoned the other day, and asked me whether I would mind talking with him again. We’re supposed to meet tomorrow. Him I know how to handle, him I know how to lead afield. Even though I have come to believe my original notion, that I could somehow play a part in the survival of our family, was misconceived (now I see it
’s a matter of emotional rather than corporate, or legal, survival, and my own, not others’) I still can buy Faw something he can never find no matter what corner of the earth he plunders. Time. I’m not so blind that I can’t see who they’ve targeted—they; that omnipresent governmental they—as the weakest link in the Brush chain, the bastards. I don’t even care whether they have a thousand principles that clearly state they’re right to be putting together their case against him; if I’m the one who’s supposed to be so lame that I’ll lead them wherever they want to go, then I’llhobble indeed with a hidden smile. Like Berg, Faw may or may not find his redemption. I think he might, because I think he is capable of finding what simple strength it would take to bring about such a thing. He’s a builder, and though held in the thrall of obsessive movement there must be a still center, in his gypsy soul, which will eventually orient him. Meantime, the simplicity and clarity and directness that Erin Brush once showed, when her needs became clear to her, I would hold to myself as a model. Slow learner I am, but at least, I swear, a learner.
I still hope that twists and turns of the past can somehow be straightened out, leaving me free to walk on a different road than the one my feet are used to traveling on. In this way I’m like everyone I’ve ever met. Not that it would matter if I weren’t. Time is a welder; time is a cutter. And time—dream in it as you may of toads or cranes, of church or wealth, of iron or a lover’s flesh—is indulgent, for all its nasty side. It will let you do in it whatever you want. From where I sit it looks as if that could be the most subtle and dangerous gift any of us should ever hope to hold in our hands. Anyway, that’s what I think.
A Biography of Bradford Morrow
Bradford Morrow is the award-winning author of six novels and numerous short stories, essays, poetry collections, and children’s books, as well as the founding editor of the celebrated literary journal Conjunctions. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, the Academy Award inLiterature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Pushcart and O. Henry Prizes, and the PEN/Nora Magid Award, as well as other honors.
The Almanac Branch Page 27
