In the Walled City

by Stewart O'Nan

  “Mr. Lawson,” she said, “Mr. Lawson.” She touched his shoulder. “Mr. Lawson!”

  “My boy,” he said, gazing up at the high blue sky, empty now, “my boy, my boy, my boy …”

  When she realized he was not going to stop, Mrs. May helped him to his feet and led him away to the clubhouse, both hands around his arm, steadying his elbow like a dutiful child.

  In the Walled City

  Coming down into Logan over the harbor islands, Grey imagined Rachel and the children waiting for him at the gate, and not, like the dots crawling over Fort Warren below, blissfully isolate, far asea on Nantucket. Other years Grey might have wished he were there, lost in mysteries on the porch, or alone in Boston, free to research and write. This year he’d had no choice in the matter. Rachel had not asked if he could come, and for his part, he had jumped at the university’s travel grant.

  Ah, but Madaket, the dunes at sunset. They had sailed there, drunk too much, left the windows open. The shudder of the gear lowering kept Grey from his vision. The city shimmered off starboard in August haze, the sea ended suddenly in runway, and with a cushioned jolt Grey’s summer in Dijon was over.

  A bell rang and everybody jammed into the aisle for their overhead luggage. The cool jet above him stopped. He waited for the others to jostle out and stampede down to the baggage carousels, waited for his three old matching brown bags, waited in the hot exhaust for the shuttle to the T stop to wait for the train that would take him, haltingly, underground to Government Center to wait for a C to Brookline. On this succession of platforms Grey did his best not to think, but stood with his bags massed at his feet, catching up on the stations’ advertising, graffiti, and resident homeless. He was home, which should have pleased him, yet he felt himself fending off the beginnings of an empty anger, and as he tacked homeward his resentment took in the whole city. He had money for a cab and several times considered it, but on the C, aboveground again on the long, glinting flat of Beacon Street, a few stops short of his own, Grey was rewarded with the vision of a boy —eighteen at most —with white-blonde hair in a muscle shirt cut to show his midriff. Such offhand beauty stirred him, and for an instant the rattling, drab brownstones seemed to brighten, the sidewalk crowd to pick up a step, the sun to mellow.

  Rachel and the children would not be home for a good week. He might call Mason. They hadn’t talked since June —transatlantic, crackly —and Grey thought, not altogether honestly, that Mason might have forgiven him where Rachel could not, when it was Mason he had betrayed, Mason sweating out the summer in his rat hole of a studio over Davis Square while he and Rachel fled separately. Mason might have taken up with Rob, his Jamaican friend, again. It was all sordid, regrettable, and by his stop Grey had resolved to become again the husband and father his own father (God bless him, keep him) had failed to be. When it was, of course, too late.

  He stepped down and the heat closed over him. It was not quite two. The time difference made his own neighborhood seem both comforting and strange, fake, as if the real Grey would show up in a few hours. Mock-Tudors and big stucco blocks perched back from the street, windows black, blank. Everyone was down on the Cape. A few station wagons baked in driveways, a lawn lay browning. Farther on, the crazy mail-lady in her pith helmet muttered over her pushcart. He would have to get the mail turned on, deal with Rachel’s bills. God knew what was waiting for him at school. He and Mason no longer wrote: it had been a stray note Rachel found that started everything.

  “Who is Mason?” she had asked that evening on the patio.

  “Student,” Grey said.

  “Male.”

  “Grad.”

  She put her drink down and plucked a scrap of legal paper from her pocket. “He says he misses your hands. What could that possibly mean?”

  He could not come up with a quick, convincing answer because he could see his thumbs on Mason’s waist, between them the downy small of Mason’s back.

  “I was helping him,” Grey said.

  “Were you?” Rachel said hopefully, then when he hesitated answered, “Tell me, why do I bother asking?” She had dropped the scrap of paper in his lap and taken her drink inside.

  The bags weighed on him. Ah, but Mrs. Abplanalp’s garden was prospering, brilliant in the sun. It ran around the iron rail of their porch, a dizzy burst of color. Ralph, his youngest, had tended it one summer while the Abpianalps had their month at Bar Harbor, lugging Rachel’s sloshing watering can across the lawn at dusk, and the thought of such painstaking devotion so miraculously rewarded buoyed Grey. He himself was watching a house —if it had once been his own —and perhaps if he tended it diligently he would be welcomed again. The last few weeks of spring semester he had slept on the couch in his office. They had been through it before, in the past had fought to unsatisfying draws whose terms acknowledged his desire and her distaste. Back then, Rachel would eventually relent. So far this time, she’d shown no sign. Her idea was that they should part amicably. The children were old enough, though there was no need for them to know why. He had not thought her so harsh, so impractical. They still had a joint account. He would pay the bills, happy to take care of them. Fine, she’d said, just don’t expect anything from me.

  The house hadn’t burned down. Rachel had probably gotten Sigi Hansen next door to water the plants. It looked like one of the twins had cut the grass. Grey had to put his bags down on the porch to find his keys, and kneeling on the patterned tiles he had hosed down summer evenings for twenty years, wondered where he would go.

  The air was musty, the blinds drawn against the sun. He locked the door behind him and went to the fridge, hoping for something cold, but found only some cans of papaya nectar Melanie had recently discovered. He got the scotch out of the pantry and poured himself some over an ice cube, then sat on the couch in the curtained living room and drank, from time to time closing his eyes.

  When he had stopped moving, he went back into the kitchen and called the house at Madaket.

  “Grey’s,” Melanie answered. She sounded funny, squeaky.

  “Melanie?”

  “No. Mr. Grey?”

  “Who is this?”

  “Lisa.” She would be Ralph’s or Mark’s latest from school; he could not see a face.

  “Lisa, is Mrs. Grey around?”

  “Everyone’s at the beach. I’ve got a cold.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Do you have a message?”

  “Yes,” Grey said, “please tell everyone I arrived safely.”

  “Should I have Mrs. Grey call you?”

  “If she wants to,” he said. “It’s nothing urgent.”

  He had to go through the pictures he’d taken in Beaune, put some notes together before the semester started. He had work enough.

  He took the plants out of the sink and put them back where they belonged. He called the post office; they said he’d have to come down and sign for their mail. He ate some peanut butter on crackers, drank some more scotch, and found the keys to the squareback. It was Rachel’s originally; Mark had driven it hard in high school. It was good for around town, or in winter. A dayglo rubber wolfman swung from the mirror. No one would recognize him, and this pleased Grey. He fashioned a costume of old tennis shorts and a paint-spotted Izod shirt, in the squareback found a dated pair of Mark’s shades.

  The post office gave him a shopping bag full, most of it junk. At school he snuck up on the mail room, taking a back staircase. The door connecting it with the graduate office was open for circulation. Inside he could see Peggy at her word processor, and while he was tempted to say hello, he kept to the wall of mailboxes. His was crammed, a few envelopes accordioned. Clutching the mess to his chest, he scanned the hallway, then darted across, and quickstepped down the stairs.

  Back home, he dumped the pile on the couch and pawed through it, sipping. Nothing from Mason, but a photocopied note said in the anonymous, heartfelt language of departmental missives that Rolandsen had died in Cologne. It gave no explanation, onl
y the when and where of the memorial service. The date was the day after tomorrow.

  Grey slumped back into the couch and bit a cracker in half. Rollie, Jesus. He had known the younger man, if he had not been his friend. Politics were involved, the raw obstacles of position and reputation, and horrified, Grey found himself thinking that if things fell the way they should, he would move up and take the empty Marsden chair.

  But how young Rolandsen was, late forties, only beginning to be recognized for his early book on the troubadours, when he was far beyond that. He’d been working up a book on the Klafeld heretics; he was in Cologne to go over the original manuscripts. Probably a heart attack the way he ate. Peggy hadn’t thought the two close enough to call him in Beaune. And the sick thought came to Grey that while he was flying back coach, nibbling dry corned-beef sandwiches, Rolandsen was below with the cold baggage.

  Grey tried Mason but the number was no longer in service. Like Rachel, Mason wasn’t good with bills; he’d never had to be. Besides youth’s invulnerable cynicism and hope, Mason had a streak of helplessness or ineptitude that gave Grey fits. He was not good with money or at choosing friends, and when Grey admitted worrying about him, Mason, like a child, would either go quiet or laugh it off. “Can’t we just enjoy ourselves?” he’d say, in essence saying they weren’t going to last (the ashtray cold on his chest, clock in the kitchenette telling him he should get dressed for class), and though Grey knew they could not, some romantic ideal from his youth kept him wishing. How many had he lost, and yet he was always shocked, for weeks a wreck. He clung to his men the same way he clung to Rachel and his family —the lost, sunlit excursions to Crane’s Beach or Lake Winnepesaukee, Rachel asleep on the chaise on the back porch, the waving shadow of the maple picking out bright flecks of skin, lip, lash. His two loves seemed equal —right, somehow fated —though when he was with his family for more than a few days he was certain he was paying for a decision made long ago by someone not himself, and in his lover’s arms saw Melanie dressed for church.

  Grey drove over to Davis Square. Mason’s name was still on the same door of the bashed brass mailbox. Grey rang the buzzer, looking up the stairs at the second floor, the weak, naked bulb, then gave up and stood in the ratty vestibule, feeling old and so heavy he thought he would never make it back to the car. He did not pull out of the space, for a time sat in the heat with his keys in his lap. A car pulled up and honked, hoping Grey would leave. Grey looked in the mirror. The wolfman hung from its chain, turning.

  “Keep your pants on,” Grey said.

  He took the phone off the hook, poured himself a coffee cup of scotch and took it to bed.

  He worked most of the next morning in the dining room, numbering and labeling his pictures. He had spent the last two months in the walled city of Beaune, in the Hôtel-Dieu, a great medieval bastion, photographing Van der Weyden’s Last Judgment. A polyptych of death, damnation, and resurrection, it was often cited as the model for Brueghel’s Triumph of Death. God loomed huge and backlit over a mountain of corpses with crossed arms and closed eyes. Below, sinners tore at themselves, burned broken on wheels, drowned in tides of blood. The Hôtel-Dieu had been a hospital during the plague. The mural covered one monstrous limestone wall of what had been the poor ward. Grey imagined the patients lying helpless under such vivid agonies, face to face with their own ends. The French now ran it as a tourist attraction. They had installed an ingenious, mechanized magnifying glass which inched over the painting’s surface like the pointer on a Ouija board, picking out the bugged eyes and clenched teeth of the damned. When he had arrived in Dijon, Grey had a book on the cautionary in medieval art in mind, but as the summer wore on he found the Last Judgment depressing, obscene, and now he only felt compelled to publish the damn thing to get it out of his system. But he needed something to work on now, some distraction. He fit together the Last Judgment on the dining room table like a rainy day puzzle for the children, the pieces big, colors bright, then paced around it taking notes.

  He and Mason never had mornings. Grey dreamed of him making coffee naked, or surprising him in the shower. He could see if Rachel had been jealous, the way he had been when they were younger and she came back late some afternoons from tennis, beaming, serving up feeble excuses. They were supposed to be over that, she said, tearful, when she meant she was disgusted, that he was a monster. Mason never made him feel that way, it was only when he was alone.

  Over a lunch of tuna fish, he called the department office. It was a heart attack, Peggy confirmed.

  “Want to hear the weird thing?” she said. “He was in the rare book room when it happened. With the book.”

  “With the door locked from the inside, no doubt.”

  “Better,” she said, “he wasn’t the first person who died reading that book.”

  “Don’t joke,” he said.

  “It sucks, doesn’t it?” she said. “Poor Rollie.”

  Like most of his colleagues, Grey did not frequent department functions, and he certainly did not feel like a funeral now. Peggy said she wouldn’t be able to make it, though she gave him no hard excuse. He did not want to say it was inconvenient (it was not) or that he had never actually liked Rolandsen. He said he didn’t know, he doubted it.

  He was not quite drunk when Rachel called —it was hard to judge, not having talked with anyone all evening.

  “The weather’s been wonderful,” she said. “Did you get around to any of the vineyards?”

  “No time,” he said. “The house is fine. I’m fine.”

  “Lisa said.”

  “She’s Mark’s friend.”

  “Good guess. She’s new. Very nice.”

  “I got a note at school that said Rollie Rolandsen died a few days ago in Cologne.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t remember him. Was he a friend?”

  “He was about our age.”

  “Single, is that right, a big man?”

  “He was fat. He wasn’t much of a social type. He came to the house maybe twice.”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “We were never friends but he was a good man.”

  “Unlike some in your department.”

  “Yes,” Grey said. “I guess he was more like me, kind of harmless.”

  “How are my plants?” she asked. “We’re thinking of staying another week. Will you be there when we get back?”

  “Am I allowed?”

  “We’ve been through this,” she said, as if exhausted by the question.

  Grey stood at the sink, looking out the window into the dark backyard. “Tell me what you want me to do.”

  “I don’t care,” she said. “Make up your own mind.”

  “I miss you.”

  “We’ll see how the weather holds up.”

  The squareback rattled all the way to Davis Square. He chewed gum and smoked, hoping they would help if the cops stopped him. It was sweltering, and the sidewalks were crowded, the stairs to Mason’s building a gantlet of young West Indian men drinking beer and laughing with what seemed to Grey calculated menace. Rob was not among them, but the first purred words in patois were enough to temper Grey’s hopes.

  He buzzed and waited, buzzed again and was ready to go when a figure appeared at the top of the stairs. The bulb behind the man made it hard to see, but halfway down Grey recognized Mason, looking fit in jeans and a tank top, his feet bare. He’d been out in the sun; his hair held an auburn tint and his arms were dark. He gave Grey a sour smile, opened the door but held on to the frame.

  “I tried to call.”

  “I don’t need a lecture.”

  “If Rob’s here,” Grey offered.

  “No one’s here.” He stood blocking the door. Grey could not help but remember him differently, more boyish, but could find no sign in his face.

  “I don’t know why I came.”

  “I’m sorry,” Mason said, as if he couldn’t help him.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m doin
g fine.”

  “How’s your money?”

  “It’s fine,” Mason said.

  Above, at the top of the stairs, a figure asked, “Everything cool, Mace?”

  “Yeah,” Mason called, then said to Grey, “I’ll see you at school.”

  “Be careful.”

  “I’ll see you,” Mason said.

  The men on the steps roared when Grey came out, their laughter following him down the street.

  He could not look at the Last Judgment, the lost slit like fish. The rain held off until midnight and didn’t cool anything down. Grey sat on the patio, sipping and listening, thinking of the vegetable garden they used to plant, the inflatable pool with the blue bottom the children lounged in, lunch under the maple. That, he thought, was the mystery, how all of that had vanished while the house stayed the same.

  The service was in the morning at a funeral home over in Cambridge. It was humid and overcast, threatening, and Grey made sure he was late. He parked the squareback on a side street off Mass Ave. He had on a linen suit he used to wear Sundays when the children were younger. It was not as light as he remembered. The funeral home was air-conditioned, heavily carpeted, and dark. There were several viewing rooms, and following a standing menu board he mistakenly entered the first one, empty save a casket. He backtracked to the main hall where a man in a beautiful charcoal suit said yes, that was the Rolandsen room.

  “Is the family here?” Grey asked.

  “I do not believe Mr. Rolandsen has any family in the area.” He said it with such composure and —Grey liked to think —compassion, that Grey accepted it as normal, even right. A man his age, unmarried. This time of year the city was empty; it was unfortunate, nothing more.

  The coffin was closed. Grey took a seat halfway back among the padded folding chairs and waited. He was only a few blocks from Davis Square. Mason would just be waking up, ready for a full day in the stacks of the Widener.

  The director walked up the aisle to Grey and said the procession would begin momentarily. If he would bring his car around?

  He followed the hearse, checking in the mirror for latecomers, but none showed. He wished he had air-conditioning. The funeral home supplied the priest and the pallbearers, leaving Grey with nothing to do but stand by the open hole, leafing through the complimentary program. The service went on for pages. The heat and low clouds brought out the smell of turned earth. He expected some friend or lover to rush over the shadowed grass, bearing flowers. He wanted it all to mean something to somebody. A sudden panic welled over him, and he fought it by gazing far over the neat rows of stones.