Mount Terminus: A Novel

by Grand, David

  But as I watched you grow older and more self-aware, said the elder Rosenbloom, the more I was reminded of the loneliness I knew as a child, and the more I recalled the longing I felt to be rejoined with your mother and her sister, the need I felt to be reconnected to the only true family I had ever known. And the more I was reminded of the routines in which I had cycled through alone for such a long period of time, the more insurmountable the regret I felt for having concealed from you that you had a brother, the more I regretted and reproached myself for having abandoned Simon to my blackmailer. I no longer could pretend I had done something noble by sacrificing my child for your mother’s welfare. I could no longer ignore the truth. Without a struggle, without voicing any opposition, I’d deposited an innocent child, my own flesh and blood, into the hands of an unscrupulous thug whose only motive for wanting the boy was to harm me, and your mother, for the roles we played in Leah’s death. I could no longer ignore the fact that I owed Simon more than I could possibly provide him. There was no material recompense adequate enough. And so, in the end, I agreed to provide him, not Freed, the land and the water rights to bring the two of you together and help him realize his dreams.

  Which are what? asked Bloom.

  Pictures, said Jacob. He makes pictures. And down there, he will be able to do as he pleases. With you. If that’s what you wish.

  But why sacrifice the lake?

  Because he has plans for it. But, more important, because he knows what it means to me.

  * * *

  When the elder Rosenbloom had finished his confession, he fell quiet for a long while, presumably waiting for Bloom’s response. Bloom could see in his father’s face that he needed him to express some assurance that he’d one day find it within himself to accept the complicated history of their family and forgive him. But, as Jacob rightly anticipated when imagining this moment all these years, Bloom found himself caught in a schism taking shape in his mind. On the one hand, he was filled with compassion and pity for his father. He had seen in what ways the great abyss at the core of his story had taken its toll on him. For this reason Bloom was compelled to find words to comfort him. But he couldn’t. What, after all, did one say to the figure of such a tragedy? How did one console a Hamlet or a Lear or an Othello? Even if he could find the right words, he wondered if he’d share them. He couldn’t help but ask himself if the preservation of his memories, of the way Bloom perceived him and his mother, was reason enough to conceal from him the fact that Simon existed, that Bloom wasn’t alone in the world. Certainly he would have been capable of forgiving his mother’s frailties, of comprehending the circumstances surrounding the choice his father was forced to make. But now he couldn’t help but think selfishly, of what had been lost to him in the passage of time. For the entirety of his life, he had a brother, and knew nothing of him, not even his name. And when he reflected on this, Bloom wasn’t convinced there was a sensible explanation sufficient to provide this episode a heartening conclusion. He had never before felt distrustful of his father. He had never before thought it was possible he would give him cause to feel this way. But he had. He had deceived him. Intentionally designed an illusion in which he had been dwelling for the entirety of his life.

  There were a great number of thoughts and emotions Bloom wanted to express, none of which squared with the relationship he had had with Jacob. No words he possessed could properly articulate his disappointment, his confusion, his anger. All he could think to do, therefore, was contain his true sentiments and say what he would have said on some other occasion preceding this one, one with which he was more familiar. In a controlled manner, with as much hope in his voice as he could summon, Bloom said, We’ll find our way past this.

  Will we? said Jacob circumspectly.

  Yes, said Bloom. We will. I’m certain of it.

  Unable to say anything more than this, Bloom backed away from his father. At the door, he turned and climbed the stairs to his bedroom, inside which he stared out the window into the night sky and in it he saw the nightmare of miniatures his mother had painted for his father’s devices, his mother running from Leah’s shadow, on her knees before her, begging for forgiveness, and he recalled more clearly the emptiness in her eyes when he was a young child. He could see now, they were the eyes of a woman whose heart had been irreparably harmed, whose spirit had been crushed by her own hand. So devastated, he thought, not even the abiding love of a child, Bloom’s love, could repair it.

  * * *

  For almost a year, the top of Mount Terminus filled with industry. In Simon’s absence, concrete poured into foundations, lumber arrived by the cartload, plumbers and electricians, carpenters and masons overtook the camps, and while they remained in residence, geometric skeletons cast higher and longer shadows onto the mountain. Technicians erected poles along the edge of the road and connected them with high-tension wire spun out from man-sized spools. After some time, the glow of electrified light illuminated the night sky a bright hue of orange, so that from Bloom’s bedroom window it appeared as if the sun were always about to rise over the ridge.

  Ever since the night Jacob had recounted the circumstances that led him to abandon Simon, Jacob, perhaps out of respect for Bloom’s need to absorb what he had learned, perhaps because he sensed in what way Bloom’s estimation of him had been lowered, perhaps so as not to burden his son any further, removed himself to seclusion and returned to his routines. He returned to his gardens, where, to dull the noise of the construction, he stuffed tufts of cotton into his ears, and when he could no longer stand even the muted drumbeat of labor echoing from the plateau, he locked himself away for the remainder of the day in the gallery, where, as a form of penance, Bloom speculated, he stared into his mother’s Woodhaven landscapes to recall his wife gazing vacantly at the countryside without seeing its beauty or feeling the possibility of its sanctuary, seeing, rather, visions of her sister. In the gallery, the elder Rosebloom drank. From Manuel Salazar’s chamber Bloom watched him drink until he could drink no more, and as the construction beat on, as its noise continued to disturb his father’s communion with the two women he’d loved since before he could remember being alive, as the sounds of the pneumatic drills bored deeper into his interior, he visited the gallery earlier and earlier, oftentimes falling unconscious well before the sun dipped below the horizon.

  Bloom witnessed his father surrender. In the furrows of his brow, in the gauntness of his cheeks, in the dark depressions under his eyes. He could clearly see drain from the elder Rosenbloom’s body what remained of its vitality. It was as if the telling of his story had released him from his obligation to his son. It was the withholding of this information, it occurred to Bloom, that motivated Jacob to keep on living, and now that it had been released, the largest artery of his spirit had been depleted, the reason for his being, exhausted, and to watch him fade, without a glimmer of resistance, unsettled Bloom. He didn’t know what to do. He had grown accustomed to the oblivion in which his father had dwelled for so long, an oblivion that now seemed to him mild compared with this one. He couldn’t fathom the rate of such an unnatural decline. In less than six months, his father appeared to have aged ten years. His life no longer nurtured the gardens in which he dwelled; rather, it leeched into them, drained into the soil holding firm the roots of the hedgerows. He grew so feeble, Bloom was afraid to leave him alone at night. He feared he would set himself on fire with his pipe’s burning cherry of tobacco, that he would, perhaps, take a drunken tumble down the stairs, or worse, stumble upon the courage to exact his own destruction.

  When the elder Rosenbloom entered the gallery in the late afternoons, the younger Rosenbloom climbed to the heights of Salazar’s chamber, where, sitting across from Cyclops and before the dim reflection of the projection table, he kept a watchful eye. He watched and labored on the illustrations of Death, Forlorn, hoping he could prove his devotion through the dedication of his work, his exacting lines. He thought, surely this would show him he was still loved and ne
eded by Bloom, that his presence continued to fortify him. Perhaps then he would return to him, if not in full measure, as some small fraction of a man. And so the younger Rosenbloom worked through the nights with Salazar’s journal by his side, learning from his hand how to draw strong, flowing lines and embed detail into his compositions in such a way his father would feel as awestruck as Bloom felt the first time he set his eyes upon Salazar’s pages.

  During the day, he now refused to leave his father’s side. He took Roya by the hand and led her to the gardens, where amid the hammering of the construction, he sat with her in case he could no longer fight his fatigue. And it was here, when Bloom’s face had begun to resemble what it would look like when he became a man, Roya reached out and pressed into his hand a note that read, in her childlike script, I will watch over him. She then reached out and took the younger Rosenbloom by the neck and placed his head on her thighs, at which point she opened a second note and placed it in front of his eyes. It read: Now sleep. Roya’s palm pressed itself against Bloom’s ear, and the world grew silent, and Bloom slept. And every day afterward he slept with his nose buried in the pungent scent of Roya’s lap.

  * * *

  On the sixth morning of Yamim Noraim, just as the autumnal winds began to blow, the team of craftsmen put the finishing touches on their work. By the afternoon, when the gales began to howl their fiercest, the last of them departed, leaving behind an arrangement of unremarkable architecture. Out of the materials that had traveled such a great distance to the top of Mount Terminus, they formed a cul de sac at the plateau’s far end. At its center, some form of French chateau with an odd configuration of asymmetrical towers and spires. On either side of this huddled a colorful collection of smaller-scale construction, an incongruent assortment of Samoan huts, Tudor cottages, a Rhine castle, odd little shacks with domes and minarets, all built up with plaster, lath, and paper. Where the long stretch of property abutted the mountainside, they had built two sizable warehouses whose roofs were lined with skylights. Across the road from these structures were a dozen wooden stages with latticed roofs. It all amounted to a small settlement. Seventeen buildings in all. Impressive to the eye only insofar as it was something of a monstrosity, a pastiche conceived in a mind holding little regard for balance or symmetry.

  When the last of the tools had sounded, and the last of the workmen had departed, the elder Rosenbloom left his garden and joined Bloom at the overlook. For the first time since the start of the construction, Jacob looked down onto the land he had provided his estranged son, and upon seeing what had been built, he said with a brave smile, I hope you will try to find your place there. Bloom could see his father’s eyes dampen in this instance, and he thought for a moment he was going to reach out and pull him into his chest the way he did when Bloom was small, but just as a tear had welled with enough volume to fall onto his cheek, his father turned and walked away. He meandered through the avocado grove, brushing his long fingers over a burr forming on the trunk of a male tree whose flowers had wilted, and every few paces thereafter, he bent down under the limbs of a female and lifted from the ground her blackened, withered fruit. And when his thin arms bulged with misshapen avocados, he returned to his garden’s labyrinth, where he would stare into the leafy eyes of his topiary for the last time.

  * * *

  Jacob didn’t return to the house at the wane of day. As he did every year on this sixth day of Yamim Noraim, he collected the trimmings he had cut from his topiary and bundled them in twine; he unearthed the juniper saplings he had planted the year before, gathered his candles and his lanterns, the jug of water and sack of oats, and carried his cargo to the stables. On this third twilight before the Day of Atonement, however, he remained in the gardens after the sun set, and continued to stay there into the night. He refused Meralda’s overtures to come in for the dinner that would fortify him for his fast, and he refused her again later when she begged him to take shelter from the winds. Bloom watched over Jacob from the tower’s pavilion until a dry electrical storm cracked the black glass of the sky. He descended the tower stairs and walked out into the flashing light, to where Jacob knelt at the feet of the sculpted shrub staring out over the promontory. Please, Father, he said, the storm. He took his father by the hand and tugged at the weight of his arm. The elder Rosenbloom wouldn’t lift his head to look at his son, but with his eyes turned away, he rose to his feet and allowed himself to be led away. Bloom sat him down in the drawing room and poured him a drink, which he placed into his father’s hand. He then ran upstairs to the gallery and retrieved his pipe and pouch of tobacco. When he returned to the parlor, he emptied the bowl the way he had observed his father do it so many times before, with three gentle taps to the side of the silver tray. He dipped his fingers into the pouch and pinched enough of the moist leaves to fill the pipe; he struck a match and puffed at the lip—three small kisses—then sucked in his cheeks in the same manner his father did when he breathed the smoke into his body. When the burning smoke hit the back of his throat, he wanted to cough it out, but he suppressed the urge—no more than a hiccup sounded from him—and he blew out a steady stream, did it again, this time allowing the smoke to enter into him without so much as a sniffle.

  This performance of Bloom’s amused his father. With the most melancholy of eyes and the most joyful of smiles, he said, You have been watching me, I see.

  Yes, said Bloom as he placed the pipe into his father’s palm.

  Joseph Rosenbloom, said his father, look at you. You’ve become a man.

  Yes, Father.

  Yes, my dear. Yes, indeed.

  Bloom removed his father’s shoes and tucked a blanket around his legs. A loud clap of thunder rattled the windows, and when it quieted, Bloom knelt beside the elder Rosenbloom and said, Father, I worry about you.

  His father tried to hold Bloom’s gaze, but he couldn’t. He tried to find the courage to say what Bloom needed to hear, but he could only say with his son’s face so near to his, My dear Joseph. My gift from God. And the elder Rosenbloom could say no more.

  Please, said Bloom, don’t leave until morning. If you leave in the morning, I will go with you, as always.

  Jacob smiled at his son and drank down his brandy, and with his sunken eyes, he looked up at Bloom, and Bloom without saying another word stood up, took the tumbler from his father’s hand, and poured him another drink, thinking if he could get him drunk enough, he would fall asleep in his chair and be safe until the storm passed. And then it occurred to him how he might do just this. Don’t move, said Bloom. I have a gift for you. And Bloom ran off again, this time to the library, where he retrieved the magic lantern and the box of slides on which he had been laboring. He unpacked the magic lantern and set it up on the table behind his father’s chair. He then lit the lantern’s lamp and extinguished the lights of the drawing room. You recall, said Bloom, you asked me some time ago to illustrate Death, Forlorn?

  I do, yes.

  I’d like to share it with you now, if I may.

  Please do.

  Bloom opened the wooden box and removed the first slide, that of the couple standing under a wedding chuppah, gazing into each other’s eyes. He slipped it into the slot before the flame and removed the lens cap to reveal his mother and his father.

  Look how beautiful you’ve made us. Jacob turned his face to the light, and there Bloom saw the pride in his eyes. I have never seen such lines, he said. Never. He blinked, and blinked again, then returned his gaze to the image, and on Bloom went through the entire box, and when he was through and had brightened the lights, his father wept openly in front of him for the first time since his mother died.

  * * *

  That night the desert winds mixed with storm clouds from the sea. They gathered over the great basin and pressed their combined forces onto Mount Terminus. Bloom sat beside his father, filled his glass several more times, and together, in silence, they listened to the intemperate mood of the world. A hard driving rain began to lash at the vill
a, and when it did, the lines that had etched themselves onto his father’s brow and around the corners of his eyes appeared to soften, and Bloom was able to see in him an image of the much younger, more vibrant man they had just observed in his slides, an image in which his father’s features were still fine, in which he wore a suit and tie, his hair slicked back, his fingernails buffed, his shoes shined. His father soon dozed off, and when he did, a calm came over Bloom, and in that calm, he felt weary. He dimmed the lights of the parlor to a blue glow and, for the first time in a long time, he retired to his bed, where he counted the passing seconds between the lightning flashes that brightened his room and the thunderclaps that followed them. And as the storm began to subside, he drifted off to sleep.

  * * *

  The sun had long since risen when Bloom was startled awake by an explosion of shattering glass. A paroxysm of wind had blown one of his bedroom windows around the axis of its hinges to crash against the wall. The young man dressed and put on his shoes. He walked over the glimmering shards to discover the latch had snapped. The rain had ceased and the skies had cleared. The fiery desert heat, it appeared, had overpowered the moisture from the sea. Bloom looked out over the courtyard and down the path of paving stones under which their water now flowed, and there he saw an odd sight. He saw their mare attempting to shake off a long rope lassoed to its neck. With the rope dragging under her, the mare galloped up the path and through the pergola and came to a halt at the reflecting pool. She looked up at Bloom and for a long time stared at him with obsidian eyes, then as quickly as she approached, she turned and galloped off in the direction from which she came. When Bloom saw her turn toward the front of the estate, he ran down the landing, calling out to his father. He ran downstairs and into the parlor, where he had left him. Jacob’s blanket had been pushed aside, the tumbler from which he drank, with which Bloom had plied him with drink, the pipe, were just where the young Rosenbloom had left them, but no father. Meralda called out from the kitchen, asking what had happened, but Bloom ignored her and ran out onto the drive and into the maze of the garden, calling out at every turn, Father! and when he reached the plots in the garden where the elder Rosenbloom had appointed his topiary, Bloom discovered, with a deepening sense of dread, that each figure his father had spent perfecting all these years, each and every figure he had communed with in his irreparable state of grief, had been irreparably damaged. Their limbs torn from their torsos. Their torsos torn at the waist. Their heads severed at the neck. When he exited the maze of the first garden, he entered the maze of the second and found the same devastation. Father! he called out. And when he exited this garden, he noticed the mare standing on the promontory. She no longer was trying to shake herself free from her rope. She just stood there, her long neck tipping into the ravine. Bloom approached the mare with some caution, and when he had reached her, he saw the outer edge of the headland had fallen away. He advanced toward the precipice and looked down, and there he saw some twenty yards into the chasm a deposit of mud mixed with brush and rock, and rising up out of this, a shoulder and an outstretched arm, both of which remained perfectly still. As soon as he comprehended what he was looking at and what had happened, Bloom averted his eyes, and when he did, he noticed, standing beside a motorcar at a turn on the road, the three men in dark long coats holding against their chests their bowler hats.