Sinister Shorts

by Perri O'shaughnessy

  During his college years, they spoke once a week. She confined herself to the kind of anecdotes he tolerated best, short, funny ones. He didn't share much. He had homework, a test. A pile of books to read. “Which ones?” she might ask, and he would answer vaguely, “Oh, some philosophy. Some physics.” Something she could not sink her teeth into. “I saw a movie,” he might offer, and she would jump. “Which one?”

  “I forget. A shoot-'em-up. Great special effects.”

  The years passed. Then, one weekend, busy with picking weeds and selecting ripe strawberries for dinner from her garden, she forgot to call him. Sunday slipped by. On Monday, she didn't know where he would be. So went the rest of the week. The following Sunday, she fully intended to call at the usual time, but Mrs. Peters from next door came by asking for advice on killing gophers in her yard. Happy for the company, she offered a piece of poppy seed cake. She kicked herself later, as Mrs. Peters ate two pieces, all the while implying that her own efforts to control the gophers had in fact caused an infestation in Mrs. Peters's yard. She felt too upset to call her son that day, too upset to make small talk.

  The following Sunday, as she whiled away the afternoon with the papers, he called. “Mom, where have you been?”

  “Right here.”

  “I've been so worried! I almost called the police yesterday!”

  She had forgotten to call him for a couple of weeks. How surprising! Still, it was probably a good thing. Time was passing. He needed to get along without her. By habit, she reached for the picture of him leaning on his car, but it was gone from its usual spot. She must have stowed it during the dusting on Tuesday. Rummaging in a desk drawer, she found it.

  “I haven't gone anywhere,” she said. “I'm still sitting in my blue chair and talking to you.”

  “The blue chair,” he said. “You've had that forever. That's where I found you… remember that time I ran away?” he asked.

  “Of course I do.” But how funny that he did, and funnier still that he would mention it. He had been so little then, still able to stand under her outstretched arm.

  “I was really scared.”

  “This was a small town. I knew you'd be okay.”

  “Why didn't you try to find me, Mom?”

  “But I did. I searched for hours.”

  “Then you gave up.”

  “I waited for you at home. I hoped you'd find your way back. And you did, didn't you?”

  As time went by, and the phone calls grew ever more erratic, she lost interest in gardening. She would force herself outside, but the leaves became dry and brittle before her eyes, the landscape drained of its usual colors. She called old friends, but found herself wanting to hang up almost immediately. Their conversation, friendly enough, proved as insubstantial as the local ocean fogs. There was no intrinsic value in these relationships, she realized, letting them lag. She quit reading the news, stopped watching her evening shows. Life reduced itself to an egg in the morning, cleanup, sandwich, cleanup, and long periods when she stared out the window, mentally vacant.

  Then one night, she took out some pills and set them on her bed stand. She poured herself a glass of water, opened the bottle, and hesitated.

  She would wait for one more phone call, then end it.

  Strangely, the sight of the pills on her bureau gave her strength. Over the next few days, she conversed cheerfully with neighbors, and, full of purpose for a change, tidied her papers and her life. Her home looked almost happy.

  On her birthday, an intolerably smoggy day a month after he graduated from college, he called.

  “Happy birthday!”

  She couldn't speak for a minute. Sitting down on the bed, she fingered the pills. Her last day. He would be sad, but he would rough it, as she had. These blows that knocked you down only bruised and battered. They did not stop you cold. You went on. He was so young still.

  She roused herself. She knew what she should say, but they didn't have that kind of a relationship. Maybe, she decided, as he told her about what he was up to, she would leave him a letter. She could write at her leisure, explain things somehow.

  He talked, and she found herself nervous, the warm ocean wave of his voice on the other end, usually so important, receding on a tide. She found his meaning hard to extract, although she tried, shifting her attention from the pills, from the window and the clearing of the sky outside, white clouds consuming the yellow haze, back to him.

  Odd the way the usual quick hang up did not happen. He talked about the smell of the ocean breezes and the din of the weed cutters in early summer. She couldn't help noticing how remarkably like his father he sounded, picking up on the sensory details of life as though entirely untouched by them. The similarity unsettled her, reminding her of another leaving a long time ago. This was different, she told herself, because his reaction would be different. Hardy, she hoped. He was an independent soul, she felt, although she was guessing.

  She listened now without listening for content. She pressed her ear to the receiver, eager for something besides words. She listened for rhythm, for a thrumming, for a bigger meaning. It took a minute for her to realize what she wanted. She was asking a lot of this final conversation, wasn't she? She urgently wanted to make final contact with his heart.

  What she heard instead was a young man's awkward voice, her distracted chat, and punctuating silences between them. But that was who they were, she thought, realizing she didn't have to hear its beat through the phone, or even in the words he said. His heart continued to beat inside her, alongside her own, out of sync.

  She knew she must sound funny, but she couldn't help it, as things large and painful moved inside her own heart.

  She swung her attention back to the conversation. She had expected to say good-bye by now, but then questions began, like, what was the weather like there today, and how big were her beefsteak tomatoes this year?

  She wouldn't tell him she hadn't planted any. “Oh, not as big as last year's. But when did you start to worry about my garden?”

  She could hear the silence ballooning, as it so often did, full of all the things they would never say to each other.

  Then, he exhaled. “I've met someone.”

  “Someone?” she asked stupidly.

  “A girl named Tammy.”

  A gusher of something, her blood pumping perhaps, made her suddenly dizzy. “Hang on,” she said, then took a sip of water and four deep breaths. “Honey,” she said, “what does that have to do with my garden?”

  He wanted to tell Tammy about her tomatoes, he said, because she complained that all they could get were ones that tasted like cardboard.

  He had a girlfriend.

  How long was her hair? What kind of clothes did she wear? Was she tall? Thin? Pretty? Freckled? Plump? Sweet-natured or cross? Smart? Foolish? Fun? Serious?

  A student? Older than him? Younger? An only child?

  Sterile?

  Sick?

  Big-bosomed?

  But he would hate her questions, and so she didn't ask them. “I've got to go,” he said, as he always did when he had had enough.

  “Okay, dear,” she said, as she always did, careful to keep the leap of frustration she felt at this abrupt pronouncement out of her voice. This time something new crept upon her-fear. She stopped all such feelings and thought about her last words to him. Nothing came to mind. She couldn't show what she felt without scaring him, too. “Have a good evening.”

  “Oh, that's weird.” He laughed slightly. “I almost forgot to say why I called! We're flying out for her dad's birthday next weekend. Would you come?”

  “Her folks live out here?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where?”

  “Real close to you, actually.”

  Surprising herself even more, she said immediately, “Of course I will.”

  “I'll pick you up.”

  “Okay, honey.” She waited for his good-bye, picking up his picture to look at, hoping she would not cry.

&n
bsp; He hovered on the phone. She could hear him breathing. “Honey, are you still there?”

  “Yeah.”

  He breathed in and out, and she followed the rhythm like a jumpy little tune. Why didn't he hang up?

  “It's a double celebration. Mom, we're getting engaged.”

  “Oh, honey!”

  “Marriage next June, if that works out.”

  “That's wonderful news.”

  “And she wants to settle near her parents. We'll be able to visit more often than I have lately.”

  “That would be really nice, dear.” A vague picture arose and sharpened in her mind, of roses, of arbors, sunshine, smiling people, a happy event in her very own beautiful, flower-soaked yard. “How did you meet? At school?”

  “No, she worked in a copy place at night putting herself through college. I was always in there in the middle of the night.”

  “Who spoke first?”

  “You obviously don't know her or you wouldn't bother to ask.”

  She heard a tinkle of laughter in the background. So Tammy was there, listening. “What's she like?”

  “Oh, she's a riot. Has a story about everything. Kind of like you, Mom, although she talks more. Much, much more.”

  He yelped and dropped the phone. “Oops,” he said, “sorry.”

  “Will she be with you when you come?”

  “Yes. And, Mom. I tried to resist, but she begged me. And I gave in. I told her all about you.”

  “You have?”

  “She knows all your secrets.”

  “Really.”

  He laughed. “I'm sure there are a few left you can tell her yourself, if you can get a word in edgewise. You two are gonna get along like a house afire, Mom. That, I promise you.”

  He kept her on the phone for a very long time. She heard love in his voice, and hope. Listening to the emotional outpouring, her heart pumped faster. Her eyes welled up. They made plans for his visit, then she said good-bye and hung up.

  Sun came through the window, spilling butter on the bed, warming the skin of her arm. Outside, blue skies, puff clouds, all kinds of prettiness.

  Plans to make.

  She needed to make the place beautiful with her flowers. It wasn't too late to put in some azaleas for a fall bloom. She stuck the pills into her bedside drawer. Dusting his picture with a dishrag, she gave it a kiss and put it back on the desk.

  She remembered the day the photograph had been taken, how eager he had been to change the oil on his first car, how she had begged him to read the instructions in the manual first, how he had gone ahead and got more of it on himself than into the pan. How hard she had laughed.

  When they came, she would show the picture to Tammy. And then, Tammy would ask about her son's interesting expression. She would tell her all about it.

  And then, Tammy would talk.

  His Master's Hand

  I am a cultured man. I am a lonely man. I am a nefarious man. My liver is healthy, and I expect to live well into my eighties.

  I have my pleasures, and I enjoy my work.

  Have you heard of Peter the Gravedigger? No, you have not and you never will because if the authorities ever realized I existed, they would staple my face onto every post office wall.

  My profession is a solitary one. Oh, I am not the first. There are a few rudimentary practitioners in the Valley of the Kings, where there is a long history of my line of work. And of course, there is the woman. She is not in my league yet. I am the specialist, a professional with the highest standards. My work demands a strong back and a scientist's curiosity, and… but let me give you an example.

  In the summer of the year 200-, I needed funds. My bank account at the time would appear large to you, but my interests are expensive. A generous contributor to several charities and a certain political party, in that pivotal election year I had outdone myself in more ways than one. Christie's chose that moment to announce a forthcoming auction of an incredible treasure-the manuscript of Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground, written entirely in the Master's hand, which I had coveted since reading a copy as a boy, sitting beside a fresh grave while my father dumped dirt into a neat pile beside me.

  In that chilly Upstate New York village of my origin, I began my odyssey through life, my small steps accompanied by the sound of a shovel, a man grunting, moist soil, and the gaping holes that receive life's detritus. My father, whose broken English inspired such derision from the locals, taught me after school in our shack on the edge of town about Tolstoy, Stendhal, about that European culture which America has so hastily forgotten… and about Dostoyevsky.

  The Master's story, the spewed-out vitriolic phrases, laying bare the hypocrisies of the Establishment in his day, had turned my staid world upside down. And now his ms. was available to the highest bidder. To me!

  Gates might acquire his Leonardo for $30 million, Spielberg could keep his Holocaust memorabilia… for me, the supreme collectible has always been the paper upon which was penned the immortal ruminations of the nineteenth-century Russian novelists, Chekhov, Tolstoy, and… the most tortured of them all, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky.

  I had to have it. I contacted my New York agent for more details and found out the manuscript's probable cost. One lucrative job plus my current liquid holdings would suffice.

  After driving to the library of the large university in my city one humid Sunday, I immersed myself in the academic journals. What I needed to find were the latest historical academic brouhahas. The Egyptian controversies I skipped; a one-man operation is unsuitable for an Egyptian project.

  The University of Missouri Journal of American History mentioned a dispute over John Wilkes Booth's body. Certain academic factions alleged that Booth was not buried in his grave, but instead had fled to the Wild West after being-oh, please!-unjustly accused of the assassination of Lincoln. It had possibilities. Speaking of Lincoln, the old controversy as to whether he suffered from Marfan syndrome had heated up again. Then I waded through the usual Napoleona. Cause of the stout little general's death has never been indubitably established-a trip to the Isle of Elba might be pleasant.

  Then I found it: a most acrimonious debate. The National Review of Musicology, a new publication of the Juilliard School with a slick cover photo of Mahler in his slippers, smoking a pipe, contained an intriguing series of letters. A Juilliard professor, Anton Sabatich, expert on eighteenth-century opera, was embroiled in a wintry and progressively more impolite exchange with Professor Arnhem of the University of Leyden concerning the cause of Mozart's death.

  Sabatich refused to believe the young genius died of any illness, much less the atypical tuberculosis theory advanced by Professor Arnhem. The American, influenced perhaps too heavily by popular media, opined that Mozart had been slowly poisoned by his rival, Salieri, probably with arsenic. It's well-known that Mozart died penniless and was buried in a pauper's field.

  I faxed Sabatich my standard letter:

  Dear Professor Sabatich:

  Regarding the death of Mozart: I can make you privy to incontrovertible scientific evidence as to the causa mortis.

  Please fax me to arrange a meeting.

  Sincerely,

  Peter C.

  Before lunch I had my reply, a very good sign, and I duly flew to New York City for a consultation. We met in the VIP waiting room at La Guardia. Sabatich was a short, hawk-nosed man glinting with fanaticism behind his spectacles. He never opened the heavy briefcase, presumably full of learned papers, which he held tightly on his lap. I discussed my ways, my means, and my price, ignoring the gaping of his mouth and the paling of his skin. By the time I finished, he had recovered his normal floridity and fallen under the calming influence of his own avarice. He agreed to my terms. He had money or the intensity of his need had overpowered his good sense. Usually, they try to dicker.

  I caught the next available flight to Vienna, checking my long, heavy bag of equipment. In first class, the charming flight attendants kept my glass full of medioc
re champagne and provided me with a blanket when I grew fatigued. I arrived, still weary, in the small hours in the heart of the old city. A taxi took me to the Wienerwald Gasthof, a homey jewel amid the soulless international hotels near the Ring.

  Later that morning, after a hearty Frühstuck of fresh eggs, black bread, and strawberries, I made my way along the cobbled streets, an inconspicuous if unusually broad-shouldered tourist, to St. Marxer Friedhof, where the young composer had been buried without ceremony in a pauper's unmarked grave.

  Of course, it was raining. A funeral party brooded under black umbrellas, issuing low wails. Urns of red plastic flowers and a horseshoe wreath of white and yellow mums had been arranged in the general area of Mozart's final resting place, as though others had tried to pinpoint its location. A smashed can of Heineken beer formed shallow puddles over the spot that I knew, from information gathered years before by my father's father, held the body. A low black fence surrounding an area nearby invoked a grassy yard where the composer's youthful spirit might still wander.

  I remained awhile paying my respects, hat in hand, rain dripping off my nose, eyes busy. A security guard drove by at 10:20 and again at 10:35 and 10:50. Out of such routines are crimes born.

  After a while, the cold having prowled through my skin and taken hold of my bones, unwilling to admit a slight unease, I explored further, walking to the far end of the cemetery at the edge of a misty forest. A pile of loose earth fast turning to mud indicated recent maintenance activity-brush clippings, shreds of winding-sheet. I looked more closely, a fractured humerus and knobs of knuckle-the gardener had been tidying up, all too assiduously. The clippings, dry under a tarp, would make excellent fill, if need be.

  Reductio ad absurdum.

  As I replaced the tarp, I caught movement on the periphery of the forest. Something light in color, a large animal perhaps. A deer? But it was my experience that wild animals will leave if you approach them, which I did, waving my arms a little foolishly, shouting, I admit. A slow withdrawal into the murk of the dark green marked its exit, nothing more. I was loath to follow. The dark of the day and the sucking sponge of the ground below discouraged me. Can you blame me for a moment's unprofessionalism? I am not immune to the emanations of human fragility such a place provokes. I left quickly, leaving the forest to its mystery.