An Unfinished Season

by Ward Just

I made the drink and followed her into the living room. Of course the Cinzano was on the drinks tray but when I moved to prepare her what she wanted, Consuela waved her hand. Never mind, she said. I don’t care what I drink.

  She lay back on the sofa, holding the drink with both hands on her stomach, staring into the middle distance, her lips moving soundlessly. It seemed to me then that Jack Brule’s ghost was in the room with us. When I saw a drink untouched on the cocktail table I was certain of it. The apartment was silent and I wondered where the aunts had gone.

  I said, Is Aurora all right?

  Yes, she said. Aurora’s fine. She’ll be here shortly.

  I’ve been worried—

  She’s dressing, Consuela said.

  What a terrible shock, I said.

  Yes, she said. Yes, it was. Consuela took a small sip from her drink and closed her eyes, grimacing as if the act of swallowing were painful.

  I said, You were a long time with the men from the city.

  Who? she said. Oh, them. Yes, they stayed quite a while.

  Connie, I said. Can you tell me what happened?

  She moved her head from side to side, her eyes still closed. She said, What did Aurora tell you?

  Nothing, I said. I described the cab ride from the Art Institute, when she had been in shock, unable to say anything beyond the fact that her father was dead.

  Jack shot himself, Consuela said. This morning. Two-twenty A.M., to be precise, in our bathroom.

  I could not believe what I had heard. I turned away from her voice.

  The noise, she said. The noise was terrible. I thought someone had thrown a bomb, yet I knew at once that it wasn’t a bomb, that it was Jack and that he had shot himself not ten feet from our bed, the door closed, the tap water running. I knew all this because I was wide awake.

  She took a long swallow of her drink, her eyes still closed.

  The police came. They stayed for hours, it seemed to me. When they went away, they took Jack with them in an ambulance. There were three police cars and the ambulance, lights in the street. They were kind but they had questions and we had to answer the questions, about the ownership of the gun and the circumstances. The night’s circumstances and Jack’s state of mind. Who I was and what I was doing in the house. I had to give them my passport.

  She took another swallow of her drink.

  God, I loved him. We have been together more than one year.

  She began to cry, choking, a kind of wail. I sat beside her on the couch and took her hand, stiff and cold as ice. Her fingers were curved like talons. She remained like that a moment, her face damp, her hands frigid. Then she leaned back with a long sigh.

  Stay quiet, I said. You don’t have to say anything more.

  We had quarreled, she said. Gone to the theater and then to dinner, and at dinner we quarreled, something we did not do often but when we did, we kept at it until one of us declared victory and the other defeat. We quarreled in the cab home and quarreled when we got home and kept quarreling in the bedroom, and when we were exhausted the matter still wasn’t settled. We didn’t want to settle it. We wanted a quarrel that we could look back on later and remember as the worst quarrel we had ever had, a quarrel for the ages, neither of us giving one inch.

  A quarrel of principle, she said.

  Aurora heard us. Aurora liked it when we quarreled—

  Connie, I said.

  —and so I am certain she heard every word.

  Fix me another drink, Wils. A big one.

  I took her glass and refilled it from the bottle on the sideboard.

  Thank you, Wils.

  Connie? Would you like to rest awhile?

  That’s what she liked doing, listening at keyholes. Listening to her father and me quarrel, make love, make dinner, read aloud to each other—we did that, you know, in the evenings. So we had an audience. I think Jack knew it, too, knew Aurora was there and didn’t care. Life in all its complexity overheard by a child with a vivid imagination. Consuela paused then, her eyes refocusing. She said, That which is overheard is never understood completely. She tapped a simple rhythm on the edge of her glass with her crimson fingernail. Around us the house was silent, and if I had not known better I would have said it was empty altogether except for us two in the living room.

  But this quarrel was different, Consuela said. Jack was different. I suppose you’d say that we hit every note on the scale.

  It was private, Wils. Private between Jack and me.

  At one point, I think it was in the cab though it might have been later, Jack said I was not a suitable woman. He didn’t like my manners, the way I talked, my character. He said I was Balkanized and he hated me for it. “A Balkanized personality” was the phrase he used. But he didn’t mean it. I’m sure he didn’t, it wasn’t like him. I had said the same things to him, not in this quarrel but in another quarrel, and we agreed to forget it. I apologized right away and wrote him a note later. I was so ashamed. But he never apologized. So it’s still there between us and it will always be between us, something unresolved.

  You don’t think he meant it, do you? One of those terrible statements that come out in the heat of a quarrel that’s the truth. Straight from the heart.

  Of course not, I said.

  I don’t either.

  He wasn’t himself, I’m sure.

  No, she said.

  People say things, I said.

  Yes, they do.

  Say whatever comes into their heads—

  I wonder how often they say things and then shoot themselves.

  Connie, I said.

  Not often, I’ll bet.

  Somewhere in the apartment I heard a telephone, one ring and another, but whoever it was rang off after nine rings. I remembered the interminable sound of the telephone that night at dinner with my parents, the signal for the brick through the window. I stared at my drink and tried not to think of the nature of the quarrel and Jack Brule later in the bathroom.

  And Aurora heard all of it, every word, Consuela said. I’m sure she enjoyed it. Otherwise, why listen? Why make the effort? So there were actually three of us in the quarrel, Jack, me, and Aurora, though only Jack and I had speaking parts. Aurora was the walk-on in the corner. We’d quarreled before, as I told you. But this was different. Jack was different, playing for keeps in a way he never had before. And he made no effort to apologize. Consuela looked at me, her eyes pleading, her hands beginning to tremble.

  Why did he do it? she asked.

  Not because of a quarrel, I said.

  I want to believe that, she said.

  Believe it, I said.

  But I can’t, quite, she said, her voice breaking. I want to but I can’t.

  You must not—

  Blame myself? No, I won’t blame myself. And I won’t blame Jack, either. I’ll pretend we’re both blameless. Isn’t that the best way? she said in a tone of voice that discouraged any answer from me.

  I knew nothing of suicide, except that no family wanted to admit to one. I could not imagine the despair that would cause someone to take his own life, even a terrible illness or a prisoner under torture; and then I thought probably that was what it was with any suicide, a way to stop the torture. So you hanged yourself in your cell or swallowed the bottle of pills or put a gun to your head, knowing that each day would be worse than the last and the only release would be death. I supposed that once you were tortured you stayed tortured. There was no end to the memory of it. Yet it was hard for me to understand how a memory could stay fresh year after year; surely it would fade and the wind become wolves and the wolves become wind and in time the event would become an illusion, a kind of fable. Surely a simple quarrel would not be enough for a man to end his life. I leaned close to Consuela and told her my guess about Jack Brule at Bataan but she did not respond. I don’t know if she was listening or, if she was listening, she understood. She seemed to diminish as I looked at her, sinking into the cushions of the sofa, her drink cold in her hands.

&
nbsp; She said, Thank you, Wils.

  Do you want to tell me about the quarrel?

  No, I don’t. You can ask Aurora. Aurora can give you chapter and verse. No doubt she will anyway.

  I won’t ask Aurora, I said.

  She’ll tell you, Consuela said.

  I’ll close my ears, I said.

  No, you won’t. No one ever does.

  The afternoon light was beginning to fail. Far away on the Outer Drive I heard the rush-hour traffic, all those cars bound for the North Shore and the last weekend in August. I remembered that there was a dance tonight, an end-of-summer black-tie affair at one of the Lake Forest country clubs. Aurora and I had declined, planning instead—and now I couldn’t remember what it was we had planned. My scheme to spend a night together in Quarterday had fallen apart. The ten days flew by and my parents were suddenly home from Havana. I had hardly seen them since their return, though I had noticed an unusual cigarette box in the den. I took that as a sign that things had returned to normal. I looked at my watch. Six o’clock.

  There’ll be an inquest, Consuela said from the couch. That’s what the people from the city were here about. The coroner’s office.

  The coroner’s office? I heard myself say.

  I wonder if you would mind going with me, Consuela said. With Aurora and me, to the coroner’s office. I’d rather not go alone. Would you mind awfully?

  Of course not, I said. Tell me about the men from the coroner’s office.

  They were agreeable men, she said. Their questions were upsetting but they had to ask them. They apologized for asking but they had their instructions, the law was clear, given the circumstances. Jack’s death was “wrongful,” they said. It was only a formality anyway.

  I know some of the people at the coroner’s office, I said, trying to keep my voice under control. Was one of them a little taller than I am, gray hat, wing-tipped shoes?

  Why, yes, she said.

  Was his name Laschbrook?

  I didn’t get their names, she said. Is something wrong?

  I don’t know, I said. Let me make a call.

  I stepped into the corridor, located the phone, and dialed the newspaper. When Henry Laschbrook came on the line I asked him what he was doing at Dr. Jason Brule’s apartment, and when he replied curtly, My job, I said I was a friend of the family and would do everything in my power to see that he was fired. I knew the publisher. I would talk to Ozias Tilleman. I said the coroner’s office would hear about his impersonation, a violation of the law. He would be prosecuted. Blacklisted from the newspaper business. I talked at him for five minutes, growing angrier by the minute and knowing at the same time that nothing whatever would happen to Henry. That was not the way Chicago worked. Lapse of judgment would be the explanation, competitive pressures leading to unseemly zeal and, by the way, were there inaccuracies in the reporting? When I finished, he said, Sorry, boyo, the piece is in the early edition of the newspaper. You’ll find it on the newsstand. So fuck off.

  I hung up the phone but I did not move. Aurora and Consuela were about to become news, their pictures and a picture of Jack Brule, “prominent society psychiatrist,” a description of the apartment and of the death, the caliber of the handgun, the nature of the wound, who found the body and the probable cause, inevitably “despondency” following an argument with—“his mistress”? “a female friend”? I hoped to God the headline did not read LOVE NEST SUICIDE, but I knew as I mouthed the words that that was exactly how it would read. For the late edition they would have the doctor’s war record and comments from his professional colleagues, if they could get the doctors to speak for the record. The story would run for two, perhaps three days, starting on page one and progressively receding inside the paper; and then it would disappear, leaving only the echoes that would follow Consuela and Aurora whenever they made news, including their own obituaries. I wondered how much Aurora and Consuela had told them, and how vivid they had been. Henry Laschbrook would have played them beautifully, radiating compassion, wanting only to understand the circumstances, inquiring only because the law obliged him to do so, in order that his report be as complete and factual as possible. All of it in confidence, of course.

  I returned to the living room, now in near darkness. I switched on the lamps and turned to face Consuela.

  I said, They weren’t from the coroner’s office. They were newspapermen.

  Consuela stirred, her eyelids fluttering. She looked at her fingernails and said, I don’t understand.

  They were newspaper reporters, not from the coroner’s office. That was a lie. They lied to you.

  They lied?

  Yes, for their story. It’s one of the tricks they have. Usually they lie over the telephone but this time they decided it was better face to face. That way, they could describe the apartment. The bedroom. Where Jack died.

  They asked to see the bedroom and I showed it to them.

  It’s not your fault, Connie. You couldn’t have known.

  Will they print what we told them?

  Yes, they will.

  Can you fix it?

  No, I can’t.

  I thought anything could be fixed in Chicago. What do they > call it? Pulling a string. When you pulled a string, things could be made to go away.

  Most anything, I said. But not this. It’s already in the paper.

  In the paper? They seemed so nice.

  Yes, I said. They have a way about them.

  Consuela took a sip of her drink, made a face, and put it down. She said, I don’t want to think about it. I have so much to think about and I don’t want to think about this.

  It’s only a newspaper, I said hopefully.

  Jack hated them, she said. Buzzards, he called them. Scavengers.

  I feel awful about it, I said.

  I had no idea, she said. They sounded so—official.

  I’m going to blow the whistle on Laschbrook, I said. Speak to his boss, get him fired if I can ... I imagined the conversation with Ozias Tilleman, a short walk down a dead-end street.

  Consuela offered a thin smile, and for a moment a hint of her old asperity returned. What good will that do now, Wils?

  Just then we heard a commotion at the door, the aunts evidently saying goodbye in whispers. Aurora said something I could not hear and then the door closed and in a moment she was standing in the doorway, dressed, like Consuela, in a black shift, choker pearls at her throat. Unlike Consuela, she looked lovely, her hair damp at the edges, freshly washed and combed. She stood indecisively in the doorway, steadying herself with one hand, her eyes focused on the untouched cocktail glass on the table near the window. I rose slowly and went to her, holding her face in my hands, believing that we were over the worst of it.

  Get out, she said.

  I took a startled step backward but saw at once that she was not talking to me but to Consuela, who seemed to withdraw further into the cushions of the couch.

  Get out now, she said.

  Consuela moved her head languidly back and forth, neither yes nor no but an involuntary movement that signaled deep fatigue.

  I want you out of my house, Aurora said.

  Consuela did not look up or give any sign of having heard. She might have been alone in the room. She looked to be way inside herself, not existing in the present moment but somewhere in the distant past. Aurora’s voice was ugly, a timbre I had never heard. She advanced from the doorway and now stood over Consuela, her fists clenched at her sides. Aurora was breathing deeply, looming over Consuela like a prizefighter at a knockdown.

  Take your things and get out, Aurora said.

  Darling, I said. Wait a minute.

  She said, Stay out of this.

  I won’t, I said.

  You don’t know what it’s about, so stay out of it.

  My heart was with Consuela, defenseless against Aurora’s fury. She still had not spoken, having retreated somewhere into her memory, perhaps the moment she had seen Jack Brule disappear into the bathroom, the
door slammed shut; and a minute later heard the shot that sounded to her like an explosion and in the appalling silence saying, Jack? in a voice not her own, waiting for the reply she knew would not come. How long did she wait before opening the door, or did they open it together, she and Aurora? Aurora was correct, I did not know what it was about, though obviously the mysterious argument figured in it somewhere. But this was the struggle of the strong against the weak, Aurora speaking with the remorseless clamor of the schoolyard bully. Consuela looked to me defeated, unwilling to defend herself or even to speak. Now Aurora was tugging at Consuela’s hand as one would with a stubborn drunk.

  I said, Stop it, Aurora.

  She said, Help me get her out of here.

  I said, We’re all upset.

  Are you going to help me or stand there?

  Leave the poor woman alone.

  Then you get out, too, Aurora said.

  Don’t do this, I said.

  Whose side are you on, Wils? My side or her side? Look at her. She’s disgusting.

  Consuela had sagged back into the cushions. She still had not spoken and I could not swear she even knew where she was. But her abject manner inspired pity in me, and I thought that whatever she had said in the argument with Aurora’s father—or he to her—she did not deserve this treatment. She did not deserve to be called disgusting. Aurora was so young, there was something indecent in her belligerence and contempt. Brutalizing Consuela would not bring Jack Brule back to life. And so I stepped between them, pinning Aurora’s wrists to her sides and moving her away from the couch as I spoke softly in a low, reasonable voice, saying that we had to look to the future. We had to think about tomorrow and the day after. We had to decide about the funeral, where it would be and who would speak, the minister, the pallbearers, the music. I was remembering Squire’s service in Connecticut, my mother and grandmother carefully reviewing the details. I said there were people to be notified and I would do that if she gave me the names and telephone numbers. I thought that by enumerating the mundane details we could allay grief, if only for an hour. We had to be practical. We had to stick together—and before I knew it, the word “teamwork” had tumbled out and I heard my father’s voice merged with my own: no one ever won a strike. But Aurora was not listening. She had gone rigid, glaring over my shoulder at Consuela, who had curled up on the sofa, her eyes closed, her face slack. The glass of scotch had fallen from her hand, leaving a sloppy wet spot on her black dress. Aurora pushed against me but I held fast.