Waking the Dead

by Scott Spencer

  She was silent for a while. We were driving under magnolia trees with dead blossoms high up in their gnarled boughs. Sky battleship gray. “I’m unforgiving,” she said.

  “Not if you can say it,” I said, though I didn’t quite believe it. I had a gnawing sense of her as a fanatic.

  “That’s sweet of you,” she said, smiling, accepting it. “I frighten myself. As lives go, mine hasn’t been bad, not so bad. But I seem so much angrier than other people.”

  “You’re angrier than I am,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “I don’t have time for anger,” I said, drawing myself up, brushing something imaginary off my trousers.

  “You must be very busy,” she said.

  “No. I just want what I want, and anger won’t help me get it.”

  “Then you should want something else,” she said. She gave me her purse and I opened it to find her a cigarette. There was a tube of lipstick, a Zippo lighter, about ten bucks’ worth of change and crumpled-up dollar bills, a napkin from Pat O’Brien’s, with the inane invitation to “Have Fun!” printed in green. Her Camels were in a red leather case, one of those touristy things embossed with the words New York City. I opened it up, lit her cigarette, passed it to her. As I replaced the pack, I noticed, snaked on the bottom of her purse, lying in a brown moss of dirt and loose tobacco, a string of rosary beads.

  We pulled into the circular driveway to her grandfather’s house, one of those delusions-of-grandeur jobs, as if the house were the abode of minor royalty. “All this graciousness,” Sarah said, and I couldn’t have agreed more—though I realized our shared aversion to that sort of bourgeois fanciness was really very different in origin. I felt privilege as a foot on the back of my neck and Sarah thought of it as a garish shoe she’d been expected to wear, one that fit her badly and offended her tastes. The twice-a-month gardener was there, cutting back the hedges, feeding the dogwoods. Mrs. McAndrews was out with him, passing the time. When we got out of the car, she waved to us. “Your granddaddy’s inside watching his TVs,” she called out.

  “Thank you,” Sarah called back. “Poor woman’s so desperate for company,” she said to me, in a private voice. “Granddaddy treats her like shit. He treats all the nurses like that. His money gives him that right.”

  We let ourselves in and walked into the den where he kept the large console TV. It was on terrifically loud and there was something in that sound that struck me as ominous, or perhaps there was a scent in the air. We walked in. He was sitting in his camel wing chair, dressed in a baggy white sweater and blue trousers. His back was to us and he didn’t turn when we entered. The portable TV was in his lap, blasting away. A celebrity game show was on. Someone was in an isolation booth, trying to guess what his wife had just said.

  At first, we thought he’d merely fallen asleep. But his face was too slack, his chest too still. His fingers on the little TV had already stiffened.

  “Oh no,” Sarah said, in a defenseless voice. Haphazardly, incompetently, she looked for his pulse. I put my arm around her and tried to turn her around, lead her away. I knew he was gone. There was no reason to let her put herself through it. He’d died in his chair and it was a lucky death.

  “I’ll call Mrs. McAndrews,” I said.

  “No, no, please.” She stood there looking at her grandfather and then, almost shyly, she reached out and touched the side of his bloodless face. She made the sign of the cross and knelt next to his chair. She turned off one TV and I turned off the other; the room jolted into a deep, sad silence. She folded her hands, closed her eyes, and rested her forehead on the arm of the chair.

  “Oh, dear Jesus,” she said, sobbing. “Please take his soul.”

  7

  THINGS WERE MOVING quickly, though with no particular direction; time was rapid but shallow, like a dying pulse. I was out of my office at the County Court Building. I was invited by the Illinois Democratic Party to a meeting in which I would be named the candidate for Carmichael’s seat, but the meeting was called off at the last minute because Kinosis’s nephew got into a six-car collision around Carbondale and after that the governor and the Mrs. were off for their winter holiday. There’s nothing quite so irritating as overconfidence in others, especially when you yourself are anything but confident. I played squash with a lawyer named Ed Pinto and he hit me on the side of the face with his racquet. The white of my eye turned into tomato soup for a day but then went back to normal, though I still had a queer feeling in my head, as if someone had dropped a freezing little fork in the middle of my brain and left it there. Juliet and I had a decent couple of days and then it was time for me to go to New York to have Christmas with my family. Juliet had left it open whether or not she’d be coming with me, but she settled it by falling into foul spirits and I think I was doing my part to seal the deal, too, because I have no idea what we fought about—though I was in it as much as she was.

  All we really needed from each other was a decent good-bye, and we were used to saying good-bye so it ought to have been easy. Yet she felt heavy, almost comatose, in my arms as I brought her close to me for a parting kiss and her lips were cool, hard, and I don’t know that mine were any more appealing.

  “I’ll call you tonight,” I said.

  “You’ll probably forget,” she said.

  “Of course I won’t.”

  “It’s OK. It doesn’t really matter.”

  “Then why’d you say it?”

  “It’s just that you always do when you go to New York. Forget.”

  “I’m sorry about the other night, Juliet.”

  “I know you are. You can stop apologizing now. I mean I really wish you would. There’s too much to do. Let’s just go on to other things.”

  “To the business at hand?”

  “OK.”

  I pulled her to me again for another try and this time, as she did her best to return my embrace, I realized how empty and sad my gesture was. My suitcase was packed, shut, and standing at the door next to my stack of Christmas presents. There was the sound of a car’s horn honking below. Isaac had insisted on taking me to the airport. It was Christmas morning, before eight o’clock.

  Juliet watched from the window as I walked to Isaac’s car. I looked back at her; framed by the beige curtains, the glare from the snowbound street obscuring half her face, she waved slowly—or seemed to—and I waved back. Isaac stayed at the wheel of his Continental, dressed in his herringbone overcoat, his Russian hat. He’d be asking no questions about why Juliet wasn’t taking me to the airport or coming along for the ride. That would be indiscreet. Isaac was not interested in the necessarily untidy private lives of others.

  I got into his car. It smelled of pipe tobacco and that after-shave lotion he got mail order from a little Bulgarian chemist’s shop on Portobello Road.

  “Juliet says hello,” I said as we pulled onto the street.

  “She’s well?” he asked casually, in a tone that didn’t invite an answer.

  “Fine,” I said softly. I watched the apartment houses go by and tried to think of all those souls inside as my constituents. I wanted them to live better and to be better; I wanted them to need me as I needed them. Yet they slept now, with their presents beneath the trees, and if they knew my name at all they probably assumed I was just another jackal running with the pack, another set of sticky fingers in the public pocket, another overgrown jock with a gung ho heart.

  “We’ll be seeing Juliet later this afternoon,” Isaac said. He turned in his seat to see if a car was behind him before making a left turn. He didn’t trust mirrors.

  “Keep an eye on her, will you?” I asked. “She holds so much in.” “Her father was exactly like that, Fielding. And it always worked itself out.” He accelerated and we were on the Outer Drive, following the shoreline of the gray, chunky lake.

  “I suppose you’re looking forward to seeing your family in New York,” Isaac said wistfully. I don’t think Isaac very fully understood why I needed my old family,
now that I had him and Adele. He saw them as dicey characters. My sister had married a black man and what little Isaac knew of Danny made him jittery head to toe. He must have seen them as bad influences and seen my continuing attachment to them as a danger—as if they represented an unruly sort of life into which I might suddenly revert and fall.

  “It’ll be good to see them. I just wish there was more time.” “Yes,” he said. “But there isn’t. You realize that, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “The election will be January 22. It’s around the corner.”

  “I know. But how can I lose? There’ll be no one opposing me.” “There’s a great deal more to do than winning,” Isaac said. “After the election, you’ve got to hit the ground running.” We drove in silence for a few moments. A wave of terrifying, senseless hope was going through me. I had just had a vision of seeing Sarah at the airport. I wanted to close my eyes and follow that thought, to worry that inflamed nerve of longing, but I didn’t dare. Yet even as I tried to let it pass, it left its traces on me, like a fog can leave shreds of itself in the tops of bare trees.

  “So you’ll be at your parents’ for the Christmas festivities,” Isaac said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I haven’t even seen their new house. Did I tell you? They moved outside the city.”

  “Ah,” said Isaac with a smile. “The great working-class heroes have opted for life in the suburbs.”

  “You’ve got it all wrong,” I said. “The suburbs are for the working class. The city is too fancy for normal people and it’s even spilling over into Brooklyn. My parents’ apartment went co-op three years ago and they either had to buy it or get out. Talk about changing neighborhoods. To them, it was a tragedy. So they sold their apartment to a Wall Street couple and took the money they made on the deal and bought a house out of town.”

  “Very enterprising,” Isaac said. “Has it changed them?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, they’ve always been on one side of the bargain. Now capitalism’s working in their favor. I was only wondering.”

  “A way of life ended for them, Isaac. Don’t you understand? It was like the weight of all the new people with their new money opened up a hole and everything my parents once knew sunk into that hole and now’s gone forever.”

  “Well, they made the most of it,” said Isaac. “That’s the important thing. Surviving.”

  When we got to the airport, Isaac glanced at me from the corners of his eyes and said, “There’s something I wanted to bring up with you.”

  “Good,” I said.

  “Good?”

  “Well, it explains why you’re going to all this trouble. I could have just as easily taken a taxi.”

  “It’s no trouble, Fielding. I’m an early riser.” He was as aware as I was of my tactics and he knew I had, for a moment, deflected him. He moistened his lips and started in again. “I’m a little worried about your family.”

  “Granted,” I said.

  “I’m only talking about possible repercussions on our campaign.”

  “What am I supposed to do, Isaac? Get another family?”

  “It’s just something to be aware of, that’s all.You have a sister with an unconventional marriage and a brother—well, you know, a brother with all the earmarks of a dangerous style of life.”

  “I think of them as assets,” I said. We were falling into pattern with the other cars arriving at the airport.

  “Yes. Well, this isn’t about how you think of them.”

  “They humanize me, Isaac.”

  “I think you’re quite human enough.” He glanced at me to see if I was smiling.

  “I don’t,” I said, and I wasn’t smiling. “Anyhow, if the president can survive a beer-swilling brother who makes private arms deals with Libya, then I think I can survive Danny and Caroline.”

  “And Sarah Williams, as well,” added Isaac. “We have to expect that to come up one of these days.”

  “Yes,” I said. “One of these days.”

  We drove to the American Airlines terminal. Traffic was thick and rude—even on Christmas, I thought inanely, as if the mere birth of Christ could make people stop leaning on their hooters. Isaac was nervously clearing his throat, as if sentiment was congealing at the back of it. It was hot in the Lincoln but he kept his lamb’s wool cap on and his white hair was damp with perspiration.

  “I don’t even know how to thank you, Isaac,” I said.

  “There’s nothing to thank me for.”

  “Right. And Pinocchio owed nothing to Geppetto.”

  “Folklore,” said Isaac with a shrug. He turned toward me and with a stiff, clumsy lurch of emotion, he put his arms around me and pressed the side of his face against me. “God bless you, Fielding. I know you’re going to do well. Just remember:The barbarians are all around us.” He put his hand in his coat and pulled out an envelope. “Will you take this? Adele asked me to give it to you.”

  I looked at the pale green envelope. My initials were written on it.The snow rattled against the windshield like a beaded curtain.There was a solid ring of taxis and buses and cars around the airport. Skycaps were pushing luggage around in their pipe-metal carts, cutting unstable tracks in the wet snow. There were at least a hundred travelers and any one of them could have been Sarah—Sarah in a fur coat, Sarah in disguise, Sarah transmuted by time. I promised myself not to look in anyone’s face. I was in the grip of a long and powerful hallucination; I would hide from it.

  “What is it?” I asked Isaac, holding up the envelope.

  “From Adele,” he said. “Go. Your plane takes off in ten minutes. Go.”

  I clapped my hand on his shoulder and made a determined face at him—lips pursed, eyes wide and steady, head slightly nodding. He smiled back, the light dancing in his eyes.

  “Wonderful career,” I heard him say as I climbed out of the car. A skycap near the American Airlines door looked questioningly at me and I tried to indicate with a shake of the head that I was too hip, too virile, to be helped. I turned to look at Isaac a last time. The snow was sticking to my hair, my eyelashes. The weight of the suitcase was cutting a groove in my hand.

  “I’ll call you,” I said.

  I hurried through the airport, down the carpeted ramp with its metal walls radiating cold and the disinfected odor of the plane at the end of it, and found my seat. The 727 was full. It was Christmas morning and the stewardesses were wearing reindeer pins on their uniforms.

  After takeoff, I opened the envelope and saw to my great surprise that Adele had written me a poem.

  TO A MAN AT THE BEGINNING

  Life is a journey between solitudes.

  We are born in aloneness and we

  Die in aloneness

  We dance on graves

  We are solitary as stones

  The wind through the window extinguishes the

  Last candle

  Sorrow is everywhere

  Betrayal

  A world of death camps and soft fur coats

  Human lampshades and exquisite chocolates

  A bird on the wing and then the sky darkens

  And then there is light

  Darkness and light.

  Darkness again and

  Then there is light, there is light, there is

  Light.

  Adele Green December 24, 1979

  In New York, I rented a Ford and drove from LaGuardia to my parents’ new house in Nyack. They lived on Mayfair Street, a narrow strip of asphalt that pointed straight down at the Hudson River like the barrel of a gun. The river was filled with ice islands, moving slowly like squares in one of those hand-held puzzles. The street was icy and I held onto the steering wheel of my car with both hands, feeling not quite in control.

  My parents’ house was near the bottom of the street. It was made of fieldstone and yellow wood. With the prerogative of homeowners, they’d put a large Styrofoam snowman on their icy front lawn. Dad’s instructions had been to pull into the d
riveway behind their Impala, but the town plow had left a wedge of hard dark snow in front of the driveway, grille high, and I had to park on the street. Carrying the suitcase and shopping bag uphill, I felt a senile shortness of breath. Nerves. I spit and put my left leg in front of my right, pivoting off it like a gondolier. The sky was coming closer, notching down like a canopy upon which plaster is falling.

  I went up the little salt-pocked sidewalk to their house, patted the Styrofoam snowman, looked for their faces in the window. I climbed the three-step porch and rang the doorbell. In a moment, the door opened and they were standing there. I was the socket and they were the plug and now we were together and the lights were on.

  “Merry Christmas, Congressman,” Dad said, and opened the aluminum storm door to me. I trudged in and dropped the suitcase on the bare, highly polished floor and opened my arms to Mom, who was gliding next to me like a boat sidling into the dock. They both looked superb. Somehow younger, more fit than they had a year before. Mom’s hair was cut short, pixyish; her jawline was tight, youthful. She was wearing dark red lipstick and nail polish, a turtleneck sweater and new blue jeans. Dad was in jeans, too, with a blue and green flannel shirt. He’d put on a little weight and it suited him. His hair was bright white and combed back in three gentle waves. His face was pink, healthy, scrupulously shaved.

  “Look at you two,” I said. “You both look fantastic.”

  “What’d you expect?” Dad said, furrowing his John L. Lewis eyebrows and raising his fists. “What else we got to do but make ourselves pretty?” He grabbed my valise, making, I thought, rather a show of it, hoisting it up as if it weighed a pound or two.