by Peter Gadol
Gabriel was having some kind of bad family day. Carlo and Robbie traded glances: What to say to make him feel better?
“Mr. Stein,” Gabriel said. “I’ve noticed that you wear a wedding ring, but I thought Carlo told me you weren’t married.”
“Gabriel,” Robbie said.
“Let the lad speak, for pete’s sake,” Henry said. “You’re perceptive. The ring is especially strange given that Carlo’s mother and I were no longer together when she died twenty-four years ago. We never divorced but we were headed that way when she fell ill.”
“I see,” Gabriel said, his voice small.
“But I hadn’t gotten used to the idea that we were not going to be together, which was largely due to my—what?—my excesses, and so I hadn’t yet removed my wedding band.”
Henry turned the ring once around his finger.
Carlo slumped back in his chair. He pictured his mother sitting at the kitchen table, her unfiltered cigarette unattended in an ashtray, the broken spine of the Italian text she was translating, a blank pad in front of her—his mother staring out the window at the airshaft, at a fluttering pigeon, at nothing.
“First of all, she was beautiful,” Henry said. “A curtain of dark hair like Carlo’s, which one would find her invariably sweeping back with her hand—like so—one side then the other, combing all that hair behind her ears, which was futile because it would only cascade back across her brow. Then she was astonishingly quick—what a mind. She was working as a translator when I met her. She could read Carlo in a way I never could. I’m sorry, son, but it’s true.”
Carlo managed a wan grin. For twenty-four years, his grief came and went, came and went according to a tide with no almanac. What kind of friendship would he have had with his mother, if she had lived? Close, his mother as his diurnal confidant—but of course, it was impossible to know. What if his mother discovered the truth about her son, that he was a betrayer and a secret-keeper like his father—would she still love Carlo then? If she knew how Carlo had behaved the night Tom died—she’d disapprove, wouldn’t she? Her disappointment would be crushing.
“She was a saint. Santa Giulietta, I called her,” Henry said, again twisting the gold band on his left hand. “I enjoy thinking about her, it calms me. Yet I broke her heart. I regret that profoundly and hope that she forgave me.”
Carlo knew he could say that of course his mother did, but he chose to remain silent. The house became still, very still.
Gabriel turned toward the old man. “Do you believe in ghosts?” he asked.
“Ghosts?” Henry Stein asked back.
“Gabriel has seen a ghost of his late dog wandering around,” Carlo said.
“I’m just asking,” Gabriel said.
“I can’t say I do,” Henry said, but then he changed his mind: “Or maybe yes. Maybe I believe people have a way of hanging around after they’re dead.”
Gabriel chuckled.
“What?” Henry asked. “Oh dear. Poor word choice, eh?”
“So you wear your wedding ring so Mom can see it,” Carlo said.
“I wouldn’t go that far,” his father said.
“That’s interesting,” Robbie said.
“Oh, very interesting,” Carlo said.
Robbie was glaring at him, signaling him to be nicer, but Robbie didn’t get it, never got it, and so Carlo glared back. Then he noticed that Gabriel was watching him, watching the two men closely. And Gabriel became fidgety, tapping his thumbs against his placemat.
“I suppose then I don’t believe in ghosts like you mean ghosts,” Henry said to the boy, “but I believe in haunting.”
“There’s a difference?” Gabriel asked.
Carlo’s father stroked a patch of gray scruff. Everyone was looking at him, waiting for him to be wise.
“Do you mean something within as opposed to something observed?” Robbie asked, he tried to help.
Still the old man didn’t speak.
“It’s okay, Dad,” Carlo said, gentler now.
“No,” his father said, addled it seemed, “no.”
“Anyway,” Gabriel said.
“A haunting presence. Very solid, very troubling …”
Again the table waited for the old man to elaborate, but he merely sighed and raised his wine glass to his lips with a quaking hand.
“I don’t know what I think,” he said. “I have absolutely no idea what I think. Ghosts. Oh, why the hell not? Why not?”
The conversation continued—tennis may have been discussed again, music, the boy’s preference in music—but Carlo didn’t participate. He was shocked. He’d never seen his father hesitate to render his verdict on any subject. After the boy left, Robbie cleared the table and Carlo made a fire. His father slipped off his shoes and with some difficulty hoisted one foot, then the other up on the coffee table. The old man was old. He’d been left out of sorts.
“That boy,” he said when the two men returned to the couch. He tapped his sleeve with his finger. He said, “I don’t understand who would allow a child to burn a tattoo on the inside of his forearm, to brand anything there.”
He’d had his own mark removed from his arm, leaving a scar in the shape of a caterpillar.
“It’s obscene,” he said. “Does anyone not know what it conjures? Does it not matter to anyone anymore? Shouldn’t there be some kind of moratorium on tattoos on the inside of anyone’s forearms for at least a hundred years? Please. Tell me. Am I all alone in thinking this? Obscene.”
• • •
THE NEXT MORNING when Carlo stepped out to get the paper, he saw something hanging from a low branch of the pepper tree, but he did not understand at first what he was looking at. There was a white nylon rope and then what appeared to be a tattered flannel shirt hanging from the rope, the blue-and-green fabric damp with dew. When he did understand, Carlo beckoned Robbie out to the stoop. His father came out, as well.
It was Henry who said, “It’s an effigy.”
“It is?” Robbie asked. “An effigy of whom?”
“Who do you think?” Carlo snapped.
The shirt was limp like a flag without wind, and not packed with anything to give it body. There was nothing corporeal about it whatsoever, and no person obviously mocked.
“Wait. How is it an effigy?” Robbie asked.
“Dad, it’s cold. Maybe you should go inside,” Carlo said.
“Savage,” his father responded, shaking his head.
“I don’t see it,” Robbie said. “It’s a shirt. On a rope. It’s weird, but …”
Carlo rubbed his eyes. “How can you not see it?” he asked, exasperated.
His father intervened. “Because of that business. You know, Robert. With your acquaintance.”
Robbie walked across the wet lawn in bare feet to the tree and pulled at the shirt and rope. In three tugs, the knot gave and the whole thing fell to the ground. Robbie picked it up. The shirt had been fitted over what appeared to be a partly deflated tetherball, the kind one found in a schoolyard.
“Savage,” Henry said again, and the old man was pale. He didn’t like this at all, not one bit.
“It’s not helpful to exaggerate, Dad. Go have your coffee.”
“So you’re saying this is Tom,” Robbie said. He lifted the rope in the air, drawing up the shirted ball. “A headless, legless Tom?”
“I’m not saying it’s Tom exactly,” Carlo said. “But it’s a hanged man. Because people hang themselves at our house, and someone thinks that’s funny.”
“This sort of thing,” his father said but didn’t add more.
“If that’s true, it would be really cruel,” Robbie said, “really low.”
“Low, I agree,” Carlo said, and he took the shirt and tethered ball from Robbie and chucked it into one of the still-tagged trash bins.
Robbie stood on the front path, hands on his hips, scowling.
“We can talk about it later,” Carlo said to him. “Dad?”
“It’s so unnecessary,
” his father said. “The thought, the creativity, if you want to call it that, the expression. So wasted on absolutely nothing.”
“Come on, Dad,” Carlo said, passing his father on the way in the house. “You have your plane.”
Robbie went in, as well, but the old man remained on the stoop a moment longer, gazing at the pepper tree as if he saw something else hanging from its limbs.
• • •
CARLO HAD DRIVEN HIS FATHER most of the way to the airport before his father spoke: “It’s these idle children with too much time on their hands,” he said. “No place in this world.”
Carlo gripped the top of the steering wheel with both hands.
“Last spring,” he said, “I was driving back from a dinner party. I was alone because Robbie was home sick. Two guys rushed my car at a stoplight.”
His father shifted in the passenger seat. Carlo told him most of the rest, although not about meeting Tom at the police station, none of that or what followed.
“Son,” his father said. “You told me it was an accident.”
They had entered the airport and were working their way around the horseshoe of terminals. Carlo signaled and maneuvered toward the curb.
“When I made it home later, Robbie was already asleep,” he said, “and the next morning I didn’t tell him. I never told you, I never told him.”
His father bit his lower lip.
“You’ve been through an awful lot lately,” he said, “haven’t you?”
Carlo put the car in park.
“I don’t know. Maybe,” he said.
“Maybe? I should say so,” his father said.
His furrowed brow was easy to read: Why was his son giving him this news right as they were about to part company? In doing so, Carlo was being unkind. He got out of the car and grabbed his father’s bag from the backseat along with his hat and helped the old man out of the passenger’s side, waiting while his father smoothed back his hair with his palm and threw his overcoat over his arm and took the bag, the hat.
Father and son stood there a moment. A plane lifted off. Henry gripped Carlo’s arm. It was clear he didn’t want to leave him, not like this.
“Dad, your flight,” Carlo said.
His father kissed him on each cheek and a second time on the left before moving toward the automatic doors and heading off, turning once to wave. Carlo leaned against the car.
When they were alone in the kitchen that night, Tom had said, “And yet you believe all there is is the ground beneath your feet. Nothing more than that? That’s it?”
Maybe their house was cursed, maybe Gabriel was on the right track. Ghosts of beloved dogs, of sad young men rambled around Silver Lake. Tom as a ghost strewing trash; phantom Tom hacking the plum trees; Tom the poltergeist taunting them with a minimalist effigy. Tom was behind the pranks, insisting in some spectral way that finally he be understood for who he was, in trouble, lonesome: unseen.
If only he could subscribe to something alongside hard science, Carlo thought, a complementary unempirical system that made working sense of the proofless: Against what was known, faith in the balance. To find a place for skepticism or doubt or cosmic ambivalence was a yearning as fast-spun, unexpected, and perplexing as any Carlo had suffered that autumn, and for one brief moment, the mere prospect of belief and, perhaps more significantly, the prospect of commune with others holding belief, left him light.
“Sir,” an airport police officer on a motorcycle said. “You can’t park here. You’ll need to move your car, sir.”
A plane descended toward the airport, lumbering, hesitant, as if it had hoped to remain airborne longer and landing were a defeat.
• • •
HE DID NOT HEAD STRAIGHT HOME because he did not believe in ghosts or restless spirits. He believed in real people, unknown but real, their malevolence real. Even though he hadn’t been back since May, he found the place near the airport easily enough, the acre of a parking lot, the store itself as unremarkable as any in the city except that there was an armed guard posted out front who opened and closed the door for each customer.
Carlo made his way through the racks of rifles and hunting gear and approached the counter, itself a vitrine of handguns. All the pistols on glass shelves looked like reptilian specimens in a natural history museum: even inert and lifeless, a snake looked capable of harm.
All these months, he’d kept the claim check in his wallet. He slid it across the counter. He wasn’t sure what the procedure would be, if another clearance would be required. Maybe the weapon had been resold.
A sales clerk looked at the claim check and pointed at the date. His eyebrows bounced up and down twice, as if to say, Oh my, oh my. Or. Why now, why now? He indicated he would be back in a moment, and then, as if he thought Carlo might disappear again for another six months, the clerk added, “This shouldn’t take long.”
And it didn’t take long before he returned with what could have been a shoe box. Although there weren’t shoes in the box, but rather, fitted into a foam bed, a fat, square, silver L of metal, pug-nosed, unfed, brutish: a gun.
5
AFTER CARLO AND HIS FATHER left for the airport, Robbie was dumping coffee grounds down the trash disposal when he became stuck on a thought, or less a thought than a question: If challenged by the same tragedy in their home as the two men had been this autumn, and if then subjected to the same sequence of unsettling vandalism, wouldn’t most couples, in seeing each other through the ordeal, be brought closer together? The morning Robbie found Tom, Detective Michaels had suggested as much would happen, but that had not been the case. And now this sketchy effigy hanging from the pepper tree—Robbie did not want to talk about it later. He had no desire ever to talk about it with Carlo.
He decided to change what he was wearing and put on a pair of jeans he hadn’t worn in a while, more frayed than what he usually went around in, a tighter fit in the seat. He undid an extra button of his shirt. When he headed out, Robbie noticed the shallow craters of mud where the lost plum trees once stood. It wasn’t until that moment that he realized Carlo had apparently given up on the saplings.
Jay giggled when he answered his door because he and Robbie were dressed alike, their torn jeans, their faded black shirts. He offered to switch into something else, and Robbie said he hardly cared if they looked like twins, which they didn’t, and never could, he pointed out, not with their age difference. Then Jay said something along the lines of, Oh please, you look like you’re turning thirty, not forty.
Their afternoon together was loosely structured around Jay’s quest for a new belt buckle, thus drawing Robbie in and out of stores (and not only clothing stores) he wasn’t sure he’d ever set foot in on Vermont, on Hollywood, down Sunset a-ways. Instead of the elusive belt buckle, Jay bought inexpensive opera CDs and a set of pastel pencils. He bought two used cowboy shirts, while Robbie purchased none, although he did try on several, and when he did, Jay slipped through the curtain into the changing booth with him to assess the fit. They became familiar, easily physical, or Jay did; he had a way of tapping Robbie’s arm, shoulder, or back as if to italicize a comment or add an exclamation point. They made a date to hang out again after the weekend.
That night at the house, the two men read, one in the main room, the other in the bedroom. When Robbie came to bed, Carlo let his open book fall against his chest.
“I’m sorry if I was angry this morning,” he said.
Robbie nodded. “It was strange, I admit. Hard to read. But it will stop.”
“You think?”
Again Robbie nodded.
Then Carlo was staring out the window, not looking Robbie in the eye when he asked, “Do the police know you’ve got Tom’s address book?”
Robbie burned with blush. He said, “No,” and he explained how he’d found the address book in the couch. So Carlo had noticed it on the dresser after all, and yet all this time had gone by and he’d said nothing. That fact aroused a different kind of burning, one deep be
neath Robbie’s sternum.
“You wanted something of Tom’s, a keepsake?” Carlo asked.
That sounded good, so once more Robbie nodded.
“Or were you hoping to discover . something?” Carlo asked.
Robbie surprised himself with his frankness: “That, too,” he said.
“I see. And what did you hope to learn?”
Carlo seemed extra-nervous, extra-tense, like he was wearing a stiff, cringing, papier mâché mask of his face over his true easy-grinning face.
“What have you discovered?” he asked, impatient.
Once upon a time, Robbie wanted to talk to Carlo about Tom, but now Tom was a place Robbie had journeyed to on his own, and he found he didn’t want to relay his adventures in Tomland, what he saw there, what he carried away from that trip. Tom belonged to him alone, not the two of them together.
“I can’t say I discovered anything,” he said, and his voice sounded thin, he knew.
“Do you feel, then, that you’re over Tom?” Carlo asked.
Over Tom! As if these past months Robbie had been lovesick, and perhaps it was fair to say he’d suffered an infatuation for a dead man, for an acquaintance whom he never got to know as a true friend, but that seemed so far from the core of what he’d felt. How misunderstood he was in that moment, he thought. How monumentally misunderstood, yet to explain why meant surrendering what he wanted to guard, so he remained cool.
“I suppose,” Robbie said, an easy exit. “Sure.”
Carlo propped up his book but didn’t read it. This was when, unplanned, Robbie asked how Carlo would feel if Robbie extended his break from the office.
“Oh,” Carlo said. “For how long do you think?”
“I’m not sure.”
Carlo didn’t blink. His mouth was open, a thought forming.
Make a demand, Robbie thought. Tell me to come to work. Say to me, Earn your keep. Say, Be my best friend. Say, We don’t talk—talk to me.
