‘It’s too soon to know,’ said Bettina. ‘And it’s dark now, so the crews can’t search for clues.’
‘They have voice-recorders on these planes, don’t they? And wasn’t the plane in contact with the ground? What were the pilot’s last words?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Somebody does.’
‘Sir, I’m here to help the survivors, I’m not here as a spokesperson for the airline.’
‘You can help the survivors by telling them what the airline knows. Otherwise, the lawsuits are going to be even bigger.’
‘Mr Gale, I can promise you the airline is doing everything in its power to help the survivors.’
‘You’re a fucking corporate whore, you’re a fucking corporate liar,’ said Lowell. Lowell was used to making those who worked for him unhappy, but Bettina Welch worked for something else, not a man but a company with thousands of people on the payroll. Bettina Welch was not frightened of Lowell.
‘Lowell,’ said Frank, ‘don’t.’ Meaning: don’t be your usual posturing, difficult self. Meaning: you have put this woman in an impossible position, she can’t tell you what you want to know, you have to speak to someone higher up. Meaning: apologize for your language.
Frank had no real power; he was everyone’s buddy. When he was angry, when he yelled, there was a gracelessness to his rage, his energy was not contained, and he threw his arms into the air, awkwardly, and lost whatever little presence he had.
‘Frank, she’s not on your side, she’s working for the airline. You can’t trust her.’
‘I understand how you feel, Mr Gale.’ Bettina Welch was in harmony with the gods of public relations now, and she read her line perfectly. The way she said 1, weighted with a penny, just enough to register her own ego but not so much as to compete with the corporation. And then understand how, a small break in the first word dropping as she spoke it, to say, I can’t possibly feel all of your grief, of course, but I know that your grief is making you not responsible for your actions, and so I cannot take your actions personally, and so I cannot take your promised threats seriously, because no one cares to listen to a lunatic, which is how I am treating you now, and which is how you will see yourself when you think about the awful things you said to me. And then after understand how, she said you feel, telling Lowell that the crash was not a matter for metal, flame, and flesh, but opinions.
‘No, you don’t understand how I feel,’ he said, but he sounded nasal; the anger had drifted out of his belly into his head.
‘Mr Gale, both of us are under a lot of stress right now, and I have to talk to some other families. If you want, we have psychological counsellors, and as I said, we also have religious counsellors here in the ballroom. Would you like to speak to one of them?’
‘Forget it,’ said Lowell, backing away from the fight as though he hadn’t lost it. ‘I guess I am getting a little out of control here.’
‘Let’s sit down,’ said Frank. Frank took Lowell by the arm and led him to a television set.
‘I feel terrible,’ said Frank.
‘I know.’
‘I hope they didn’t suffer too much,’ said Frank.
‘Well, if the plane blew up in the air, if there’s any consolation, they probably passed out.’
‘If they weren’t killed immediately,’ said Frank.
‘It’s probably a good idea to let yourself have all these feelings right now. Whatever images come to mind, I want you to talk about them with me.’
‘I wish I didn’t feel so numb.’
‘Would you mind if I had a drink?’ asked Lowell.
‘Are you giving up the lawsuit?’ asked Frank. He meant this to be taken lightly, and his brother smiled.
‘What the hell,’ said Lowell, but Frank didn’t know what he meant by this. Was he throwing the lawsuit away, or was he just taking a vacation from his anger, in which case, was he also taking a vacation from his grief?
‘Go ahead,’ said Frank. ‘Get me one.’
‘What do you want?’ Lowell looked relieved that Frank was joining him. Frank began to make a silent vow not to get drunk, but checked himself. He would try to have only one drink, without making any sacred promises. He asked for a beer, then changed his mind and said he wanted a scotch.
‘You’re sure?’ said Lowell.
‘No, give me a beer.’ He was worried about the headache he might get from scotch, since he hadn’t tasted any in months.
When Lowell went to the bar, Frank regretted asking for beer; beer was not a drink for comfort but celebration. Nothing here had been achieved except an accidental massacre. And what of the beer he drank in the airport bar, before the news broke? He had been celebrating two things, his thirst and the inevitable fight he would have with his wife, now that she had read the letter.
Lowell came back with the beer in a glass in one hand and a scotch in the other. Lowell gave him the beer, and he took a sip. It was all wrong, the way he had expected it to taste; it was like having a beer in the morning when he didn’t want a drink at all. Even the pleasant kick of the alcohol annoyed him, an inspiration to relax that made him hate himself, but he finished the glass.
‘That guy over there, at the bar’ – Lowell pointed to a man in a T-shirt and running shorts – ‘his next-door neighbour lost her parents on the flight. She was screaming when he heard her, she was on the phone, and he drove her down here.’
‘Her parents,’ said Frank, dumbly.
‘He heard someone say that it was a bomb on the plane.’
‘Terrorists?’
‘Not necessarily. Maybe someone who worked for the airline.’
‘Does it really make any difference?’ Frank snapped. It was the beer; he was feeling gloomy when he should have been miserable, and the gloom led him to sulk.
‘Why are we here?’ asked Lowell. Meaning: we are sitting in this awful hotel conference room like students detained by the vice-principal who caught them running in the halls. We don’t have to be here. And more: we are better than these others in the room, we have more money. Even more: we can get better lawyers, lawyers as good as the airline will hire.
‘Where would we go?’
‘Home.’
‘I don’t want to go home. I don’t want to see the house.’ He thought this was sloppy of him, cowardly not to face his daughter’s dolls, books, blocks, and his wife’s French shoes, her make-up, their bed.
Ed Dockery was crossing the room, and Frank knew he was going to have to talk some more about what couldn’t be changed. Frank Gale was Ed Dockery’s assignment. There were other men in the room, with the same sober respect, who moved among a few tables, sitting for ten or so minutes, talking, making notes on legal pads, and Frank guessed that each had been assigned to only a few families, not to spread the airline’s attention so thinly that in the inevitable lawsuits the surviving relatives could add corporate indifference to the list of complaints. ‘We lost our family, but as if that weren’t enough, the airline couldn’t find the time to talk to us for three hours, because they only had two people in charge.’ Like not enough waitresses in a crowded coffee shop.
Dockery introduced himself to Lowell. Of course Bettina Welch had warned him that Lowell was difficult.
‘I’m his brother,’ said Lowell.
‘There’s been a new development here, and we wanted you to know before it goes on the ten o’clock news.’
Frank’s heart began to pound, unreasonably he thought, as if he were guilty, and about to be caught for the thing he had done. Or was it just the fear that he would learn something dreadful, and the foundations of his control would erode in the space of a few seconds, however long it took to hear Dockery’s revelation?
‘What happened?’ said Lowell. It was a challenge to Dockery: he should stop playing the part of the saddened messenger; he should tell the story and not act as if there was anything eternal in Lowell’s disdain for him.
‘We think that the plane went down because one of our e
mployees, I should say one of our former employees, sneaked a gun on to the plane and killed the pilot.’
He told this story quickly, and directly.
‘Thank you,’ said Lowell.
‘For what?’ asked Dockery.
‘For telling us the truth.’
Frank wanted to say, Yes, that was kind of you. Something between the two men went unspoken; it had to do with integrity, and Frank didn’t understand it. Instead he asked, ‘Why?’ although he didn’t really care. So they died for nothing. If a Palestinian had blown the plane out of the sky, Frank could always warm himself on the fires of history, he could tell the world that his life had been touched by the terrible events of this awful century, that he was now a part of history. Their deaths, however tragic, would have been given some meaning. He would have had an enemy too, a movement, an ideology. He saw himself, letting the fantasy roll ahead to its conclusion, as someone who could even RELUCTANTLY ACCEPT a role as the public spokesman for the victims of terrorism, as the great champion of innocence. Of the innocent victim. But a FORMER EMPLOYEE? Where was the glamour in the fatal radiation from the decaying misery of a DISGRUNTLED EMPLOYEE? Was there anything to gain from the death of his wife and his daughter if a nutcase had killed them? What if their murderer had been released from a mental hospital, or had been denied entry to one because the state had no money to take care of him? All the boring editorials! How they would add the name of the nutcase to the list of the victims of his unhealed rage! Surely he was as much a victim, blah blah blah. And until we solve the problems of the blah blah blah ... And all the predictable anger at the government, at the social workers who will defend themselves for not having seen the danger lurking in this unhappy man! I will be forgotten in all of this, thought Frank. I will be abandoned. Emptiness surrounded him.
‘We don’t know why, not yet,’ said Dockery.
‘Did you know him?’ asked Lowell. Of course it was a man.
‘Just to say hello.’
‘What did he do?’ asked Frank. ‘What was his job?’
‘He was in the freight office.’
‘Why was he fired?’ asked Lowell. Frank was glad his brother was asking all the obvious questions. He didn’t want to seem too curious – what would they think if they saw how this interesting development submerged his grief? Lowell could ask any questions, because Lowell had charm; he could make a person happy to answer a rude question. People liked to talk to him. And these questions weren’t rude, they were just obvious. Anyone would want to know. Frank thought he should have been able to ask them. I have a RIGHT TO KNOW! Now he wanted another drink.
Dockery was uncomfortable with the question. ‘All of this was very recent.’
‘Why did he take down the plane?’ asked Lowell. Implied in the way he stressed the word ‘plane’ was the thought that something was out of scale, that the man’s murderous anger and need for revenge, if justified, should have satisfied itself with the death of whomever he was angry at. Because it was routine news for people to get fired and go back to their offices and kill the person who fired them. There was no revelation in that kind of news. But a whole plane? And a neighbourhood?
‘Now look, I’m not supposed to be telling you this,’ said Dockery, and Frank thought that were the situation reversed, were he the one whose brother had suffered the loss, the airline executive would not confide in him, if Lowell was overcome by his sorrow and couldn’t talk for himself. The man who fired him was on the plane. And he had seven children.’ Three feathers on a delicate scale tipped the weight on the word ‘he’ and then again on ‘seven’. Is this, Frank wondered, a dig at me, a way of diminishing by comparison my grief for my one child, Dockery’s retaliation for Lowell’s tirade at Bettina Welch?
Lowell felt the same way but wouldn’t keep it to himself. ‘That’s a little tasteless, isn’t it, Ed?’ He said the name as though only dumb people were called Ed, as though a man with the dignity of a full name, Edward, would be higher up in the company, wouldn’t have to take the public’s abuse. They teased him as a child. Mr Ed! Frank loved his brother for defending him like this, but he also heard the insinuated diminishment of his own loss, and had not reacted so quickly.
Dockery said, I don’t know what you mean.’
‘I think you do,’ said Lowell.
‘Lowell,’ said Frank. ‘Forget about it.’
‘You know what he’s saying,’ said Lowell.
‘What am I saying?’ asked Dockery.
‘The way you said that the man had seven children. You were telling Frank that the death of his wife and daughter was smaller.’
‘If I said anything that could cause you to feel like that’s what I said, then let me apologize now. I had no intention of saying anything like that,’ said Dockery. He was lying, anyone could see that.
Frank put a hand on Lowell’s arm. ‘Forget about it.’
‘You have to understand how it sounded to me,’ said Lowell. ‘It didn’t sound right.’
Dockery said nothing. It was an odd ploy, this unassailable quiet; now the executive was the centre of their attention, he was the issue, his feelings and not the plane crash, and what could be done about something about which nothing could be done; the plane could not be pulled from the sky before the crash, but maybe he had meant it as it sounded; in his frustration with Lowell he tried to say the worst thing that was on his mind.
Frank thought about the man on the plane who died leaving seven children. Was his wife in the room? He looked for a table with a woman who looked like she might have had a large brood, but he couldn’t tell. And he imagined that there were small children, so he looked for a woman in her late thirties, but there was no reason that a supervisor couldn’t have been with the airline for a full career, and have seven grown children, with maybe one still in college. So he could be looking for a grandmother. Anna had wanted more than one child, but he had resisted. She wanted three. She wanted a son, a big boy who would bring all of his big friends over to the house after school, to stand in front of the refrigerator and drink milk from the jug. Well, not the jug any more, although that was what she called it. The bottle. The container.
And what of the copper-haired woman? She was sitting with a rabbi (skullcap, forty, curly hair, eager and attentive posture), and she was shaking her head from side to side, saying no to him. If her daughter was the salvation of her life, was that equal to losing seven children?
And what of families that had been wiped out, mother, father, son, daughter, daughter? or sisters on their way to visit uncles? Who goes to the funeral of a family killed at the same time? Who arranges the funeral? Who gets the record collections, the books? Someone would say, It’s better in a way that they all died, no one had to suffer the loss of the others, or now they’re all together in heaven. But what if one of them went to hell? Would the others in heaven miss him? And if they did, if they felt the pain of loss, would that be heaven? If he had been on the plane, and had gone to hell for the sin of his adultery, and Anna had not read the letter, and had gone to heaven, and had found out, in heaven, that she was there with Madeleine and not with her husband, because she was saved while he was damned, what would she feel? If she felt a sudden hatred for him, would that slip (if it was a slip) consign her to hell? Would she feel sad? And for how long?
Maybe Dockery’s line really was disgusting. After all, there was a woman with seven children mourning one husband, not one husband mourning the extinction of his family. The woman had seven anchors, at least! – and all I have, thought Frank, is my brother and my parents, and he wanted to say, they will need me, I will have to be their anchor, and I will have to beg for comfort.
Then he thought of Mary Sifka. He had never called her to cry about the things that wounded him, because he felt – what? – that if he told her he was upset about his failed music career, or that he knew that his brother was more capable than he, she might see him in a new light, in his light, and come to share his bad feelings of himself. She someti
mes talked about her childhood and alluded to things she wanted to keep hidden, but when he pressed, she always said she didn’t like to talk about those things. Something bad had happened to her, beatings or worse. He had believed, listening to her when she said anything about her bad childhood, that abuse was the beginning of her intelligence, and having been set apart from her family by its cruelty, she was able to see into the nature of Nature, which was cruel. This had been his theory of Mary Sifka’s special attraction, her bleak youth and the intelligence that had come out of it.
But what if she wasn’t intelligent, the proof of which was her acceptance of Frank? What if she was a lonely woman, dulled by this soul-destroying childhood, whose affair with Frank fitted a pattern set long ago, something she needed to maintain her bad opinion of the world, by breaking the trust her husband gave her? What if she chose Frank not for his sensitivity, his humour, his sincerity? What if she liked him for qualities he despised in himself? In this case, abuse had not yielded to her any special insights; it had made her, not sardonic or cynical, but only distrustful, and what she might have liked in Frank was his lack of power, and his acceptance of the limits of his ambition, that he had made peace with himself. But if she couldn’t see his frustration, then she was lying to herself, or else she saw it but didn’t care, and her adultery with him fitted into the plan of her reprisal against her husband for things she never talked about with Frank. Frank knew almost nothing about her husband.
He thought of his own childhood, and the thing he wanted to name as his own intelligence might not be so grand. He envied Mary Sifka for the clarity of her father’s crimes, since his parents had muddied it all up, never beating, but almost, never raping, but invading in other ways that had left him so confused. Lowell had escaped with a little more confidence, but then, thought Frank, don’t they work together because they both feel too weird for the rest of the world, and doesn’t that strained and peculiar character they both share leave them incapable of feeling right with anyone except each other? In that case, aren’t we really a team? Doesn’t Lowell really need me? Don’t I make a real contribution to the business? If Lowell, to escape the family’s pressures, had launched himself beyond their gravity with his homosexuality, was he too, in his own way, a kind of failure by still having to work with his brother? Frank had never considered this before, that if Lowell were free, he would be free of Frank. Unless Lowell didn’t share Frank’s hatred of his parents, who, after all, had long ago accepted his homosexuality. It was something that they had understood about him, from high school. Unless they accepted his homosexuality as something that was just his NATURE, to protect themselves against the inescapable judgement on their failings as mother and father, if they looked for an interpretation for his nature in psychoanalysis.
Among the Dead Page 8
