Waking the Dead

by Scott Spencer

  Skipper shrugged.

  “How about Medicare? Does your mother get that?”

  “All right, all right,” said Skipper, throwing up his hands as if I’d been haranguing him for hours. “It’s Christmas.”

  “That’s right, it is,” I said, and I felt suddenly something going slightly out of control in me; that heat within me that had always seemed like the burn of appetite now seemed something stranger, less controllable. I had a vision of Sarah with her feet up on the radiator, wearing only brown socks and underwear, smoking a cigarette and watching the snow fall past our window.

  “Quite a boy, Eddie,” Skipper was saying. “If I let him talk to me any more he’ll turn me into a Democrat or something.”

  “Worse things could happen, Skipper,” my father said.

  “Listen to him,” Skipper said to me, jabbing his big thumb in my father’s direction. “Don’t he know in Skipper’s you get meat and potatoes, and not white wine and brie?”

  “That was pretty good, Fielding,” Dad said, as soon as Skipper was out of sight. “You talked right to him. You didn’t talk over his head but you didn’t just go along, either.”

  “It’s not like I convinced him of anything.”

  Dad looked at me strangely, as if he expected me to do something from which he would need to restrain me. “You look kind of tired,” he said, prompting me.

  “I just dropped it, you know,” I said.

  “What’d you drop, kid?”

  “I could have spent the rest of my life trying to find out what happened to Sarah, why it happened, who did it, who let it happen. But I let it pass. It seemed like a lost cause.”

  “It was a lost cause. You don’t go down with the ship. And why would you want to? You have things to do.” He took my wrist and spoke to me through clenched teeth. “And the chance to do them.”

  Skipper appeared with a large white plate that held little circles of salami, chunks of cheese skewered by green-tasseled toothpicks, crackers crowned with little kremlins of processed cheese. The plate was covered by a tight skin of Saran Wrap and a red bow had been taped to the top of it.

  “Here you go, Eddie. Hors d’oeuvres for eight.”

  “Looks nice, Skipper. It gets me off the hook. I told my wife I’d help with the dinner.”

  “My sister’s got a Polack pal who made the sausage. Let me know how you like it, OK?” He handed the plate over to my father and then wiped his hands on his shirt, giving his belly a humorous grab and shake. “You like spicy sausage?” he said, looking at me.

  “I didn’t move to Chicago for nothing, good buddy,” I said.

  Skipper laughed and I could feel my father’s pride beating within his own chest like a swan flapping on a lake, rising, rising, yet not quite taking off. I was, he felt, acting like my Old Self.

  Holding the tray of cold cuts before him, my dad walked back up the hill and I followed him, the wind at our backs. I heard the high-pitched whine of tires spinning in ice but when I looked around, I could see no cars with drivers inside them, no tailpipes pluming exhaust. The steam from my father’s nostrils flowed behind him, waving like a ghostly scarf over his shoulder. Some unknown sensation went through me, like a marble rolling down a flight of stairs. I had a premonition that somewhere—perhaps back in Chicago, at Juliet’s, or at my office, or perhaps right up the street at my parents’—the phone was ringing and it was for me. I could practically hear the phone ringing. I stopped and leaned against a red Impala, trying to catch my breath, find my rhythm. I felt a degrading sort of squeezing pain in the center of my chest—degrading because, even riding the turbulence of anxiety, I knew full well that I wasn’t having a heart attack.

  “What’s wrong?” Dad said, turning around and seeing me propped against the car.

  Just resting, I said, though as I noticed he was continuing to look at me and now was coming to my side, I realized no words had come out.

  Dad laid the tray of cold cuts on the Impala’s icy hood. The plate of meats and cheeses began to slip toward the street and he had to pounce on it with his thick gloved hands. Holding it steady now with one hand, he reached out toward me.

  “What’s going on here?” he said, his voice swinging like an acrobat between the rings of love and impatience.

  “I don’t know,” I said, in a whisper that sounded a thousand times more desperate than what I’d intended.

  “Come on,” said my father, “come home, come home.” He touched me with a tenderness that was just barely self-conscious. He was handling me, trying to do what was best, but through the calculation shone a true devotion, as bright as a flame behind a curtain. I looked down at his hand on my arm and then covered it with my own.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m just… I don’t know. I’m in terror.”

  He nodded, as if he knew exactly what I meant. And perhaps he did. He was still holding on to the tray of hors d’oeuvres with his left hand and now it was starting to slide again and he inched closer to the car, reestablishing his grip.

  “Can I just say something right now and then I promise I’m never going to say it again?” I said.

  “Come on,” he said, “you don’t have to ask a thing like that.”

  I took a deep breath. I could feel my nerves settling down, assuming their old, practiced shape, like a room that’s been exploded and then comes back together, without a doily or a fork out of place. I had to speak quickly, because soon I’d be too thoroughly my familiar self to say it. “I want to be good,” I said. I took a deep breath and tried to think of what I’d meant to say and then I realized I’d just said it. My father was looking at me with some confusion in his sharp brown eyes; he didn’t know what h was supposed to respond to.

  “You are good,” he said. “Maybe too good.”

  I smiled. “I don’t know what I am.”

  “There’s a lot of guesswork in life,” my father said. The corners of his mouth lifted in an economical smile. “It’s a scary business. Just being alive.”

  I felt as if he had assumed the weight I’d been carrying—not forever, but just for an instant. He’d given me a moment without it, a moment to feel the outlines of my self without that pressure on it. I stepped toward him and put my arms around him, burying my face into his coat collar. He smelled of coffee and Aqua Velva. His arm went around me like a brace on my back. Our feet were shuffling, trying to keep their balance on the icy incline and as the embrace continued and we breathed together, my father finally took his hand off the tray of hors d’oeuvres and as luck would have it, the bottom had quick-frozen to the hood.

  WHEN WE GOT back to the house, Danny’s car was parked next to mine, bumper flush. This year he was driving a dark brown Jaguar, which, I noticed, he had dented severely on the driver’s door. Danny liked to own extravagant things and he liked to wreck them. He had the anarchic relationship to possessions of those rock stars a decade ago who liked to check into dainty old hotel suites and peel the paper from the walls, flush the sherry glasses down the toilet. Danny had a moth-to-flame relationship with privilege and elegance, but it was a unique species of moth—one that tries to extinguish the flame that lured it. Danny always lived in apartments that were at least twice what he could afford and when he left them they looked like Beirut. He bought himself a ten-thousand-dollar cherry wood dining table and ate pizza off it without a plate. He wore custom-made silk suits and slept in them. He wanted to behave, I supposed, as if the finest money could buy was merely his birthright, that after eons of dozing in the lap of luxury, he was bored. He’d always been like that.

  As a teenager, he spent fifteen bucks on a silk tie—an incredible sum, then; it seemed like a thousand dollars—and then used it as a sweatband while he played basketball in a vest-pocket park near Grand Army Plaza.

  He had brought Caroline and her boys with him from the city and when Dad and I came into the living room, they were all gathered around the fireplace, where Danny was igniting the newspaper he’d twisted under the gr
ate. Caroline and Rudy and Malik were on the sofa and Mom was just coming in from the kitchen, holding a tray of glasses.

  “Fielding!” Caroline said, the first to see me come in. She sounded overly surprised, as if someone had neglected to tell her I’d be here. She sprang from the sofa and came toward me, hugging me close before I could get out of my overcoat. I could feel the cold from my body rushing into her.

  “Caroline,” I said, feeling her hair against my cheek. “You feel all bones.”

  “Take the hint,” she said, smiling, grabbing the flesh beneath my chin.

  “Here’s my lawyer,” said Danny, rising. The hearth behind him was thick with smoke and then suddenly an orange lick of flame showed in the crook of his arm as he stood there, grinning, with his hands on his hips. “My mole in D.C.”

  Mother put the tray of glasses down on a side table and brought her folded hands up to her breast. Her eyes seemed dazzled, almost stricken by happiness. It was the first time we’d all been in the same room in a year.

  “You look fantastic,” I said to Caroline. It was only the truth.There was color in her long narrow face and her hair had been pinned up in a complex, fancy braid, with sprigs of baby’s breath stuck jauntily in the sides, half fetching, half satiric. She wore a necklace of what seemed to me, in my ignorance of such things, diamonds, and a delicate red and peach sweater. Caroline had virtually no money, but always managed to look striking and fashionable. She claimed it was a talent she’d picked up while living in Paris. “A Parisian girl working in a factory looks better dressed than an American doctor’s wife,” she’d once said and since then had pursued a kind of ragtag elegance as if it were an art form.

  “God, look at those velvet pants,” I said, stepping back, feeling a wave of tension, almost a desire to run outside and breathe alone for a moment. “Fantastic.”

  “Danny’s,” she said. “I starve myself to stay his size.”

  “Hey, hey, what have we here?” I said, walking toward the sofa where Caroline’s boys, Rudy and Malik, sat. Rudy had his father’s dark blackness as well as his large, injured eyes. Malik looked more like a Pierce: tall, not entirely well put together, with curly brown hair and an overbite. They were each looking toward the fireplace, presumably fascinated by the fire, thought it was obvious they were only hoping to appear absorbed, out of shyness. I put my hands on each of their heads and felt a twinge of love; they were my only genetic legacy in the next generation.

  “Hi, Uncle Fielding,” said Rudy, turning around and looking up at me. He was wearing a light blue summery suit and a clip-on bow tie. Malik was dressed more for the season, forsaking formality for function in brown corduroy pants and a pullover with reindeer.

  “It’s great seeing you guys,” I said. I wanted to kiss them but I was afraid they were too old for that now.

  “Congratulations, Uncle Fielding,” said Malik. He had his father’s phlegmy voice.

  “Thanks, pal. How’s your daddy these days?”We all felt possessive of Rudy and Malik. But I didn’t like to pretend they were wholly ours. Eric McDonald was their father, and the other half of their life.

  “He’s fine,” said Rudy. He seemed happy I’d brought it up. I walked around and sat between them on the sofa, with my arm around each. “He said to say hi to you,” Rudy was saying.

  “He’s quite a guy,” I said. I was glad my back was to Caroline for that one. She was subject to fits of anguish over Eric, as uncontrollable as a malarial fever. The rest of us had never expected the marriage to take. Too much warfare, from the very beginning. They’d met during Caroline’s European travels and even her letters home throbbed with the subtext of their discord. “I tossed Eric’s alto sax out of our hotel window yesterday evening. It looked so pretty when it landed in the snow, a little golden curlicue far below in the Tivoli Gardens.” Yet Caroline stuck with him, sketchbook in hand, as he and his quartet made their northern European tour, and by the time they hit Paris and the chestnut trees were in bloom, Caroline wrote home on a postcard showing the Eiffel Tower in a sunset. “The reason this card is so corny is I’m pregnant.” She came home, finally, when Rudy was two years old and five months after that came Malik and a year after that she and Eric split up for good.

  “Look at you,” said Danny, fixing me with both his pointers. He was wearing a loose-fitting charcoal jacket; he’d pushed up the sleeves and the pink shirt beneath it. The hair on his arms was wiry, golden; his tendons thick and close to the skin. “You’ve really done it. Congressman Pierce. Really adds class to the family.”

  “We always had class, Danny,” Dad said. He’d just come in with Skipper’s tray and placed it on a side table. “And the best kind of class.”

  “Yeah,” said Danny. “Working class.”

  “You always wanted more than we could give you,” Dad said. “But when I was coming up, being a first-rate printer was nothing to turn your nose up at.”

  “We didn’t turn our noses up at it,” Danny said. “You turned our noses up for us.” He was smiling, but it seemed a pretense at good humor. There was a sharp, boyish urgency in his voice, a vein beating hotly along his temple.

  “OK, you two. It’s getting on my nerves already,” said Mother. With a shrug, she turned to me and said, “They’ve been fighting all year.”

  “What about?” I asked. “Noses?”

  “That’s truer than you think,” said Danny to me, with one of those weird, Las Vegas-y bang-bang gotcha gestures.

  “Who knows what they fight about?” Mother was saying, casting her eyes about and finally settling on Caroline, who nodded sympathetically. Caroline had always had a spooky fondness for Mother, a love so complete and self-effacing that it could only be unrequited. As a child, she followed Mother around the house, studying her, and Mother’s nature had enough steel in it to clang with despair over her daughter’s adoring her so. It seemed like weakness, madness. Mom was repelled by anything easy and it was too easy for her to please Caroline. To make it seem more interesting, she began to interpret Caroline’s unstinting praise, to search out the secret aggression, the snottiness beneath it, and with that breach of faith their relationship turned tragic. Caroline began expressing her love with a kind of daredevil self-hatred. “Love ya, Mommy,” she’d called, slamming out of the house to some adolescent rendezvous. She was part of a crowd of wild girls who went with their boyfriends to a creepy, end-of-the-world-looking place near the Brooklyn Bridge, where in all kinds of weather they swigged Southern Comfort and fucked in the backseats of Buick Skylarks, Plymouth Furys, Chrysler LeBarons. You could see the Watchtower clock from where they parked, looming over the stark girders of the bridge, counting off the seconds we sinners squander in our spiritual morass. I’m remembering now the milky dawn and Caroline sneaking into the house, like a drunk in the Sunday funnies, with her shoes in her hand, and our mom sitting in the yellow chintz chair, a Pall Mall glowing in her hand, a cup of tea gone tepid near her elbow. I heard the screams from my alcove upstairs and came running down in my Fruit of the Looms. “They laugh at you when they’re done with you, you know that, don’t you,” Mom was hissing and Caroline sat on the floor before her, her head down, her arms wrapped around her knees, as if waiting to be beaten.

  Dad was supervising the opening of the presents. He stood at the tree and picked up the gift-wrapped boxes one at a time and called out the name of the recipient. “Caroline, this is for you, from Santa and Danny,” he said, giving the box an avid shake next to his ear. (Danny’s presents as usual put the rest of us to shame—they were invariably expensive and perceptive. Caroline received an antique Cartier watch from him. I got a French leather briefcase with my initials burned in, Mother got an autographed picture of Franklin D. Roosevelt framed with a letter FDR sent to Mayor Walker in 1930, and Father got a huge history of the C.I.O. and a specially made pair of glasses for reading in bed.) The boys made out like bandits, though the gifts seemed to embarrass them as much as please them. I knew their father had them in a Muslim
school uptown and I supposed they were learning things that made these rituals seem rather foolish. Watching Rudy gently peeling the candy-striped paper off the binoculars I’d brought for him and then seeing the tender but withheld smile he gave to me, I had a quick sinking feeling that in a few years I would hardly know this boy at all. Malik, younger, accommodating by nature, seemed closer to us, but when he came to kiss me after opening my present I made the mistake of holding him too closely and with his bony little chest pressed into me I could feel his spirit leaping back like a toreador evading the horns of a bull.

  The presents were open and the living room was a wasteland of torn colored papers. Danny built the fire up to a chimney-charring roar and our father filled his cup with the killer punch Mother had brewed. (I was starting to resent my club soda.) Dad stood in front of the fireplace holding the cup before him. With his large noble head, the rich white hair, his broad shoulders, his ardent eyes, it looked as if he were about to erupt into song. “I want to make the toast,” he said. “The first of many.” The fire danced behind him and suddenly the heat made him turn around. “It’s burning my ass,” he said.

  We all laughed—but especially Caroline. She had always found our parents strictly puritanical and any deviation from that Gothic picture of them she carried in the most injured part of her consciousness made her giddy.

  “And I’m going to make one after that,” our mother said.

  “Everything in its time and place, Mary,” Dad said, with a bow. “To Christmas,” he said, in a boom. “To a season of family happiness … and sharing … and peace.” His voice suddenly stopped, as if blocked by an avalanche of emotion. His face darkened, he looked away. There were luxuries of feeling he would never have allowed himself ten years ago, which now he felt were his entitlement, like a pension. “To a new year coming, the first year of the decade. A year which I hope will bring us together many times in happiness.” He stopped again and took a deep breath, forcing something down in himself.