Among the Dead

by Michael Tolkin

  It was too late to call Mary Sifka now. She was home, and he only called her at the office, where no one would suspect them. She would hear the news of the crash, probably not pay it any special attention, until she heard the destination and matched it with the time he had left. And even then, would she immediately think of him? She hadn’t known his airline or flight number, but she could have called the office to find out if he had been on that plane, and the office would have told her yes. So she would think he was dead. A lot of people would think he was dead. Unless she called after he had talked to Lowell.

  ‘Lowell,’ asked Frank.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Did you tell the office that I missed the plane?’

  ‘Not yet. It’s too late now.’

  ‘So they must think I’m dead.’

  ‘I’ll call tomorrow.’

  Or not even something so defined as abuse, only a dulled tantrum for the sufferings of childhood injustices, smaller pieces of birthday cake, someone else’s better bicycle. Or he didn’t tell Mary his deepest troubles out of respect for Anna, that there was a limit to his infidelity. He thought that if Anna slept with someone else, she would not set up a boundary that would allow her the sin of adultery and then the sin of pride, for keeping her heart a little bit faithful. He thought Anna, if she had ever fucked someone else, would have given her lover everything, would have forgotten her husband.

  Dockery apologized. ‘Whatever I said, however I said it, if it made you feel bad, I’m sorry.’ He said this in a tone that declared he would not back down from them again. If Lowell pressed Dockery again, he would say what he wanted to say, and there was much to say to a man who took advantage of his brother’s anguish and found a way to bully people who were just doing a job that could only be difficult.

  ‘OK,’ said Lowell, not meaning to tell Dockery the event would be forever buried but to tell him that as long as Dockery was direct with Lowell, and did not embellish with his own foul thoughts what his job demanded he say, there would be no more little storms of rage. So there was a truce between them.

  ‘What’s next?’ asked Frank. He was tired of Lowell’s condescension. He wanted to take charge.

  ‘Well, you’re welcome to stay here at the hotel for as long as you need. There’s a few psychologists here, and we’d like you to talk to one of them. They’re experts at grief counselling. They do a real good job. Very compassionate people. Or if you’d prefer, a clergyman or rabbi is available, too.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Well, it’s too dark in San Diego to really see what’s on the ground. They have lights up, but the area of devastation is pretty big. Three blocks were pretty well taken out. Right now they’ve got the National Guard out to keep the looters away, and the sightseers. In the morning they’ll go in and start cleaning it all up. I have to warn you, a lot of people think that in a crash, the bodies just disintegrate, but they don’t. In all likelihood, every body will be accounted for.’

  ‘I thought there were fires,’ said Frank. He was surprised with himself; he was leading Dockery into an area of gruesome detail, ashes, pieces of charred bone.

  ‘Well, the fires don’t concentrate their heat in any one spot for a long enough time. What I’m trying to say is, even after a fire, there’s a body. Those bodies will have to be identified. We do our best using dental charts and fingerprints, when we can get them, but sometimes we have to rely on visual identification. There’s no other way. We’ve also found that photographs don’t work, people get more upset sometimes looking at pictures of a body than at the body itself.’

  ‘I can do it,’ said Lowell. ‘Anyway, I live in San Diego.’ As though proximity made the gruesome job easier? Of would it be harder to look at his sister-in-law’s body if he had to drive a long way to see it?

  ‘They’ll probably return the bodies to Los Angeles. That’s the practice, going back to the point of origin.’

  ‘Whatever,’ said Lowell.

  ‘I’m sorry to have to speak about these things so directly, but I figure you don’t want me to pull the punches, and frankly, I appreciate that. A lot of people, and this isn’t to say that they’re not entitled to their feelings, but a lot of people in this room don’t want you to say what has to be said. They want you to almost say it, they want you to give them a taste of what you really mean, and then they want you to back down and apologize for going even that far. But I say, if it happened a certain way, you’re obliged to say that’s the way it happened.’ Frank saw Dockery win respect from Lowell for this, for separating Frank and Lowell from the others. And was this something he did with everyone, take them all into his confidence, show them all how much he trusted them?

  While Dockery was talking, one of the men cruising the tables came to his side and put a hand on his shoulder. Dockery introduced him. ‘Mr Gale, I’d like you to meet Dale Beltran. Dale is one of our grief counsellors. If you don’t mind, I think it would be good to talk to him.’

  ‘Frank Gale,’ said Frank. ‘And this is my brother, Lowell.’

  ‘Dale Beltran,’ he said.

  ‘Are you a psychologist?’ asked Lowell.

  ‘Yes,’ said Beltran. Frank hated the way he looked. His hair was too long for his curls, and the effect of suspended youth with his soft face and body bothered Frank terribly. Why am I threatened by this guy? Frank asked himself, but he had no answer. ‘Do you mind if I chat a bit?’

  ‘It’d be a good idea,’ said Dockery.

  ‘Sure,’ said Frank.

  Beltran sat down. ‘How do you feel?’ he asked.

  ‘Not great.’

  ‘Like you can’t believe it’s really happened.’

  ‘I believe it.’

  ‘Intellectually, yes, but emotionally?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Well, Mr Gale ...’ He paused, and Frank knew why; he wanted Frank’s permission to use his first name.

  ‘Frank.’

  ‘Frank. There are a few stages of grief, and I wanted to share them with you, to help you get through them, so you won’t feel so alone. The first is denial, which is what you’re going through now. And with that, you’ll feel alone. That’s the isolation stage. Then comes anger. And that’s a hard one. After that, well, you’ll feel pretty low. The experts like to call that the depression phase; I’d prefer to call it the period of sadness. And then, finally, after the storm, you’ll make peace with it. And that’s acceptance.’

  ‘And then what?’ asked Frank.

  ‘Hope.’

  ‘That’s the one that seems so far away,’ said Ed Dockery. ‘And that’s the one we have to live for.’

  ‘Good luck,’ said Dale Beltran. ‘I’ll talk to you again.’ He left them with a round of handshakes and then walked away and introduced himself to the copper-haired woman.

  Frank was tired. It was only eight-thirty, but he felt as fired and alive as he had the night he worked in the recording studio until five in the morning, all those hours working on one song. The singer wasn’t sure if the song was best done slowly or quickly, and what kind of beat he needed. Frank began by suggesting variations that were too different, which confused everyone and wasted their time as they tried to please him, since he was paying them, since he was their boss. There were four musicians in the studio, the singer, a guitarist, a drummer, and a pianist with a keyboard connected to a computer. The pianist was a friend of the singer, and he was used to playing with stars. He was there as a favour. Frank had at first resented the deference paid to him, but around one in the morning, after they had started at seven, he realized that yielding to the pianist would be the first creative thing he had done in the control booth. He would let the artists create, and if the song came out well, Frank would get the credit. He felt, with that decision, a glimmer of what it might mean to be a professional, and with that, this node of understanding, this seepage from the great occult mysteries that only the boldest seekers could penetrate, he saw, clearly, the possibility that he could leave the r
ecord stores, leave his brother. What were the lessons of the great mysteries, really, but instruction on how to live? The pianist inspired the singer, and Frank found it easy to find the right levels for the balance of tone among the instruments and voices.

  That morning he knew the sensual weariness of exhausting himself at work that was play. If they failed at creating a song that would live for ever, at least they knew what it meant to give all of their effort together in the service of something like beauty. And of course they would fail, the song was awful, but it didn’t matter. They were trying to find in something bad, this stupid song, the bit of divinity that hides in all things.

  Frank thought about the pianist’s confidence. Failure was never part of the pianist’s view of things. He knew his worth. He had depended on certain processes, he had faith in practice leading to perfection. He was an adept and his musicianship was just the manifestation of the progress of his soul. And my failure? thought Frank. Was I aware of failure because it lay before me, so obviously, because I was not a musician? Everything about the pianist’s maddening hostile sweetness proclaimed his membership in an elite to which Frank had only a ten-hour pass.

  Frank’s attitude, his bearing, the way his private turmoil registered its battles in his sullen expression, the way he made small talk when he knew better and should have kept his mouth shut, would never improve. He would never, even with the death of his family, be anyone other than who he already was. If there had ever been the chance to break free of himself, to rename himself and become a new person, the time for that was ten years past. The whole point of the pianist’s life, Frank knew, was to live correctly so that he would never make the kind of false step with his life that would, if seen in another form, mean death, like the false step on a mountain. To see his life as an allegory. The real mountain is a test for the metaphysical mountain. The pianist took his life seriously, thought Frank, and was appreciated by other serious people. I am not serious, thought Frank. I am a dabbler. The whole point was to be conscious of his actions, so that he could die in peace, without despair. The pianist would never regret a marriage.

  Frank started to cry. He was crying also for his daughter, but until he remembered that long night in the recording studio, sitting behind the console, in a comfortable chair, reading the dials and fiddlings with knobs, like an airplane pilot! – like the airplane pilot who had died with Anna and Madeleine – he had been far from tears. He knew no one would fault him for his misery so long as he didn’t tell them that he cried now because he would never produce a record, never write a song that the world would sing, that he would always and only be a salesman. He brought a hand up to cover his eyes, and before he closed them he could see that the people in the room were watching him, just as he had watched the other mourners in the room whose sadness had already erupted.

  Lowell massaged his shoulders, and Dockery patted him, awkwardly, yes, but also, Frank thought, for a little luck. Now Dockery could anticipate courage in a bad situation. He would always know that he could touch someone who had been electrified by (tragedy?) this force, this angel of death in whose wake everyone close was given a measure of charisma. At last, thought Frank, I am fascinating.

  4

  Amtrak

  ‘When the baby was born,’ said Frank, not looking at his brother, looking at the freeway, and the big Jewish cemetery against the hill that faced to the west and a little south, ‘everything felt different. I drove through the city, and everything felt charged up. The colours were alive everywhere, the city looked beautiful.’

  ‘This city can never look beautiful,’ said Lowell.

  ‘But it can, it did that day. I don’t think I’ve stopped seeing the beauty in Los Angeles since the day the baby was born.’

  Sepulveda Boulevard went under the freeway, and Frank followed the line of the bluff to the ocean. Bluffs, ravines, canyons, hills, gullies, mesas, rivers. The planet on which the city has been imposed. Why did it matter to him at all?

  When the brothers moved out of the house and went to college, their parents sold the large house in Bel Air in which they had grown up and bought a condominium on Wilshire Boulevard, looking out over a neighbourhood of small apartments in Westwood. The house had been expensive when they bought it, in 1960, for $500,000 and when they sold it, in 1982, they made $8 million. For a million and a half dollars they bought half of the twenty-third floor, nine rooms, three baths, everything new.

  It was an apartment in which Frank never felt comfortable. Frank missed the big house, the suite he shared with his brother, their bedrooms, a large playroom, their bathroom, down a hall where their parents almost never came. What did he really miss? The pool, the guest-house, the garden which they pretended was a jungle. The old house looked like a small hotel, in the style of a mission. When his parents took the apartment, it was as though ... yes, he knew what he resented about the new place, that by leaving the elaborate setting of the house, they had brought themselves closer to the light, and in the apartment they could easily be examined, and appraised, and finding them wanting, as he did, he found himself wanting; in seeing his parents diminished in their new setting, he was forced to see just what it was that he came from. In the house there was something, if not baronial about his father or aristocratic about his mother, something serious about both of them, something admirable. His family, in that great house, and within the circuitry of all the relatives, all the other Gales and Abarbanels and Siegels, was held to be the most important. When they lived in the large house, his father was head of the family. When they moved, he lost his crown. Everyone could see him for what he was, and whatever that thing was, and it was a quality of character that even now Frank could not name, he had lost his place. And Frank knew that this was something his father knew, that his house, this large, gracious, quiet, dark, noble, old, sober, rich, well-built, heavy-walled stone-and-wood house, was his great achievement, and selling it, he had given away everyone’s dream, everyone in the family touched the house and felt the house as part of their blood, as part of their lives, as a centre, even though the Gales had owned it for barely one generation. The sale of the house was a betrayal of the clan. They owned no other house so grand. In the ten years since his parents moved, when the family gathered for holidays, once a year when everyone came in from Toledo, Minneapolis and New York, they came to Wilshire Boulevard, and there was nothing about this apartment that could buttress the lie of the family’s superiority, that could make of the family something better than a family, a clan, even a tribe. Even the jealous cousins, who resented the Gales, felt lucky to be at the table in a mansion.

  Worse, there was a secret kept from the rest of the family, that Leon Gale’s only great investment had been the big house, that he was not the brilliant developer his family believed him to be. He worked alone, without partners, building apartment houses, and he bought land for too much money, and sold finished buildings for too little, and he took bank loans at high rates, and spent too much money on construction. His workers stole tools and lumber. When he built small office buildings, he chose bad tenants, who went out of business. They would owe him money, they would leave their offices or their store fronts filthy, and he would have to wait in line with other creditors when they filed for bankruptcy. He was a man of mild temper, and to the family this confirmed, before he sold the house, their sense of him as someone satisfied, rich and wise, a man outside the battles of life. With the sale of the house what had looked like calm was now just meek, and without the big dining room and the ballroom and the long swimming pool he was not the king in exile; he was a small man. His cousins, the men and women who had known him from childhood, would tease him in ways the brothers had never seen. They brought lesser wines to dinner, smaller bouquets of flowers. The cousins of his father’s generation wouldn’t even bother asking for permission to smoke. They guessed, correctly, that Leon’s profits from his house went to pay off his debts. He still had a million dollars in the bank, but his income was no greater tha
n any of theirs. He had been humiliated.

  Lowell once told Frank that their father’s problem was that he expected things to turn out well, that he went through life as though something would rescue him in the end. Lowell’s contempt for their father was greater than Frank’s, and Frank knew that this contempt extended to Frank for still thinking so highly of their father. Lowell once told Frank that when he needed to make a difficult decision, he would think about their father, and then do what he wouldn’t do.

  ‘That’s not fair to him,’ Frank had said.

  ‘Fine. I’ll do what you want to do.’

  There was no contest. Both of them knew that Frank would let Lowell make the hardest decisions, because, after all, Frank was his father’s son.

  But was Lowell like their mother?

  Frank’s mother met them at the elevator. She was crying, and when she hugged Frank, Lowell patted her shoulder. Frank was not as good a son to her as Lowell. He didn’t think that she loved Lowell more, but Lowell was easier. Had Lowell discovered earlier than Frank that their father was a hollow man, and with their mother’s coaching did he beat the disappointment and keep the clarity? Lowell understood something in their mother that Frank resisted, Lowell had compassion for her, and pity. For too long Frank saw his mother as an embarrassment to his father. For a time he hated his father for marrying such a weak woman. There had been a moment at his wedding when he hated himself for marrying Anna, when he knew that he was marrying her for bad reasons, and then hated his mother for loving Anna, and then hated his father for loving his mother, for loving a woman who did not have the courage to tell her son that he was making a bad choice, that if he wanted to be brave, to be the hero of his own life, to succeed beyond Lowell, he would have to be alone, longer, and without the warmth and kindness of a woman, without someone to soften the blows of the world, so that he would be forced to fight back, to be stronger than the blows. He wanted his mother to tell him that he didn’t need a woman. He wanted his mother to tell him that he didn’t need the kind of woman his father had needed, to tell him that he didn’t have to be like his father, all talk. Frank thought his mother had said these things to Lowell, so Lowell was free not to marry, free to start a business and make it succeed, and make himself rich. Or had Lowell known this without their mother’s help? Now he was without a woman. Would his mother expect greater success from him? Would she expect him to give up the business and go back into a recording studio, without the excuse that he had to be home to be a good husband and father? What would she hope for him now that he was finally free of the woman he had wanted her not to love?