A Doubter's Almanac (55 page)

“I don’t know. I’m not sure it’s sad. Romance isn’t everyone’s expectation. It could mean any number of things.”

“What could? That he never loved your mother?” I heard her set the phone down on the counter. It was five o’clock: almost dinnertime. When she picked it up again, she said, “He must have been afraid she’d never love
him
.”

In the background, I heard the metronome click on and Niels begin a scale on the piano.

“He’s been talking,” I said. “He’s told me things that I doubt he’s ever told anyone.”

“What kinds of things?”

“You wouldn’t want to hear. Old flames he’s gone to bed with. Ones he’s been in love with. Plenty of it I didn’t want to hear myself.”

“Is he drinking?”

“Of course he’s drinking.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s doing things to his brain now.”

The blender whirred. When it stopped, she said, “Well, then maybe you don’t have to believe everything. Maybe you shouldn’t be taking everything to heart. Just listen for a while. That’s why you’re there. You don’t have to decide whether any of it’s true.”

The blender whirred again. Then came the sound of a spoon banging a bowl. The
tk-tk-tk
of the stove burners.

“It
is
, Aud.”

“What is?”

“What he’s saying. I can tell—it’s all true.”

Brompton’s Mixture

E
ITHER
D
AD DIDN’T
know or he hadn’t remembered: Earl Biettermann had been in an accident. Cle unfolded a ramp for him at the door, and as soon as she was done, she asked Dad to show her the lake. While the two of them walked down to the water, Earl pushed himself into the house. He wheeled through the rooms, lifting curtains, jerking window knobs, bumping irately through the narrow doorways. At the bottom of the stairway, he leaned forward and peered up toward the second floor.

On the shore, Dad and Cle stood looking out at the cove. She made an elegant figure—loose-sleeved sweater, leather handbag, pale flats. An Upper East Side matron weekending in the Hamptons. Behind her, Dad leaned against a tree, pointing out the view.

“I don’t want to be here,” Earl said, moving past me. He stopped before the bookshelves. “In case you didn’t know.”

“I’m sorry you have to be, then.”

“It’s a bad idea. I’m not a man for bad ideas.” He edged himself along the flimsy wall, the rubber wheels squeaking. “It’s why I’m good at what I do.” When he arrived at the window, he shook his head. “Look at them. They’re fools.”

“That very well might be true.”

“Your father’s always been a fool around her. And she can be a worse one around
him
.”

Across the clearing, Dad was gesturing at something in the woods. The land must have seemed awfully shabby to her—pitiful, even—but she stood beside him and seemed to admire it. She nodded as he spoke, one heel crossed behind the other. Biettermann jiggled the brake on his chair. “I need to get to the hotel,” he said. He moved before the wall mirror, but he wasn’t looking at his own figure. I could see exactly where his gaze was pointed.

Even with the accident he was still a handsome man. Steep chin, bladed nose—the skin so deeply tanned that in the light off the lake it looked bronzed. It was a face I’d seen a thousand times on Wall Street—the cavalry lieutenant drawn from noble line—but the features were disturbed by the eyes. They looked unreal.

He glanced up. “I can’t stand pity.”

“I don’t pity you.”

“I get around fine. I get plenty done.” He jiggled the handrails. “It’s a misplaced emotion. Animals don’t pity, they just get what they can.” He felt around in his pocket. “Mind if I smoke?”

“You’d be about the first to ask.”

He smiled for a moment. “I’m not asking. I’m just wondering if it bothers you.”

As soon as he pulled out the cigarette case, I knew what it was: the same thick piece of silver he’d shown to my mother and father after Hans Borland’s funeral, thirty years before. He’d probably been showing it ever since. He set it on the handrail, and on the front plate I recognized the row of screaming figures.

Earl was watching me. “Argentium silver,” he said, tilting it to the light. “From the Ponte Vecchio. Cost about as much as my car.” He flicked it open. “Italians might be even better thieves than the Americans.”

When he held it up, I saw the coiling snakes and the terrified, screaming mouths of the damned. The cigarettes inside looked like pieces of art, too, custom rolled with a red thread dividing each.

“We’re giving them a run, anyway,” I said.

He allowed himself a clipped laugh. Then he snapped the thing shut and slid it back into his pocket. He looked up appraisingly. “You and I did what your old man never could.”

“Which is?”

“Made something of ourselves. He had the same gifts, but he never did anything with them.”

“You call the Fields nothing?”

He looked at me flatly. “Yes, in fact, I do.” Now he backed up to take in the view again, drumming his fingers on the chair. Out on the dock, I could see that Dad was leaning forward now and rubbing his arms. He was getting tired. Biettermann turned away. “
You
provide for your children,” he said.

“And so did my dad. All you and I did was sell out.”

“The only ones who didn’t sell out were the ones who couldn’t.”

“He didn’t
want
to.”

“That, I doubt.” He rolled to the wall and began pulling books from the shelves, glancing disdainfully at their titles. “Everybody wants to.”

“Not him.”

“Well, look at what it got him. Ending his days in a place like this.”

I turned away.

“What?” he said. “Look around. You wouldn’t live here yourself.”

“So what?”

“So,
you’re
the one who said it—he won the Fields.”

“And?”

“And?” he said, rolling closer. “That’s the question, isn’t it? The problem he never solved. And? And—
what
?”

“Everybody has a different answer to that one,” said Dad from the doorway. He was standing at the top of the ramp.

Biettermann spun. “Bullshit,” he said. “I could have told you a long time ago. I saw it all from the beginning.”

“Told us what?” said Cle.

“How it would end.” He pointed at my father. “I could have told you both how it would end up for him.”

Dad stepped into the room. “Then why didn’t you?”

“Why didn’t I?” He perused us with his strange eyes. After a moment, he smiled. “Because I didn’t want to spoil the surprise.”

—

T
HAT EVENING,
C
LE
and Dad stood together again at the waterline. Dad was talking, his hands moving before him in the air. Cle leaned toward him, her heel crossed behind her again, the white knot of her hair unraveling. After dinner, I’d driven Earl back to the hotel, and now in the kitchen I was cleaning the dishes. When I switched on the light, Cle turned and gazed up at the house. After a moment, she waved. I switched it off.

They moved back now along the shore. With a woman on his arm, my father looked ten years younger. No,
twenty
. Even in the moonlight I could see the pleasure he took in it. His elbow high. His shoulders straight. At the porch bench, they sat down; then she pulled a pad from her bag and handed it to him. She leaned back, gazing out at the water. He picked up the pad, opened the cover, and leaned down over it.

When we lived in Tapington, after he’d come back from the hospital, he used to disappear upstairs to his office and lean down over a pad of paper the same way, like a man in prayer. He could stay like that for hours. We used to start dinner without him, the table strangely calm. But we always knew we were waiting for him to break that calm. To break the unbearable hopefulness of that silence. I remember thinking sometimes that he’d gone away somewhere—I remember
wishing
that he had. But whenever he returned, I was also relieved, hearing his heavy step on the stairs.

A few moments later, when he turned on the bench and looked up at Cle, I realized he was drawing her.

—

T
HE NEXT MORNING,
Biettermann said, “I hear the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

“How’s that?”

Behind us, Dad was asleep on the couch. After breakfast, he’d started a story about the history of the land up here—the Indians, the loggers, the gas drillers—but at some point he’d lost the thread. He’d tried again with something about the invention of the logging wheel, then trailed off. Now he was snoring.

“Rumor is, you don’t drive alone,” said Biettermann.

“Where’d you hear something like that?”

“You and I are in the same line of work.”

“I’m fine,” I said.

He looked up at me, appraisingly again. After a time, he said, “Does he ever talk about her?”

“You mean your wife? No, as a matter of fact, I’ve never heard him do that.” I turned to the window. “And if he does, it’s because his mind wanders. He’s not well.”

“Obviously not.” He shook out a cigarette and tapped it on the chair. “But neither am I. That’s life, isn’t it? We make the best of it.” He flicked closed the case. “Smoke?”

“No thanks.” When he snapped the lighter, tilting his chin, I saw what it was about his eyes: the pupils were pinpoints.

“Are you in pain?” I asked.

“Lord” was all he said.

—

A
LL THAT MORNING,
while Dad slept, Earl conducted business on the phone from the side room, his voice ringing through the walls. He was working on some kind of private equity deal with a venture capitalist on the West Coast who seemed to be having second thoughts. For hours it ran on, Earl alternately ranting and flattering and cajoling. Hanging up and calling back. Speaking testily with his assistant in New York and obsequiously with the guy on the coast. The chair squeaking against the baseboards and bumping against the desk. Cle had gone into town for something. In the kitchen I turned up the radio.

Near noon, he finally quit. A few minutes later, when he rolled out into the living room, there was a dumbbell on his lap. He deposited it at the center of the rug and said, “But I don’t let it stop me.”

“All right.”

“The pain.” He unfolded a gym towel and spread it on his legs. “I’m sorry if I lost my cool yesterday. You had a problem. You tried to solve it.”

“That’s one way of looking at it.”

“You want my guess?”

“Do I
want
it?”

“Blow.” He tucked the towel around his legs. “Am I right?”

I said nothing.

“Typical.” He pushed his hands into a pair of half gloves. “I mean, typical for a guy like you.” He pinched and pulled the fabric over his palms. “It’s the same old story. I’ve seen it a hundred times. You all make the same mistake.”

He closed his eyes then and sat there, taking himself through a series of breaths that gradually slowed until he was hardly moving. Finally the chair rolled forward. At the center of the rug he scooped up the dumbbell, pressed it over his head, and set it back down. Fifty times he repeated this. Then he rolled backward, pivoted in the chair, and did the same thing again with the other arm. At last he sat still at the center of the room, sweat rolling off his temples.

“The real nature of your desire,” he said. “That’s what you’re missing. It’s the hole that can never be filled.”

He dried his face with the towel. Then he closed his eyes until his breathing calmed, almost to nothing again. When he opened them, he jerked himself forward and repeated the whole routine.

—

T
HAT AFTERNOON, AFTER
I’d driven Earl back to the hotel, a truck appeared in the drive. The back doors swung open, and two men started unloading furniture: a table, a set of chairs, a rug, a sofa. The rug was a Persian and the sofa was dark leather. They brought everything inside, then came in with a box of framed prints—black-and-white daguerreotypes of small-town Main Streets from the last century. Cle followed the men around, directing where everything should go.

As soon as they were done, Dad sat down on the new couch. He’d made no objection to any of it. Out had gone the chipped linoleum table and the ramshackle chairs. The cracked wooden bench beneath the window. When the old, thready couch was tilted through the door, he followed it with his eyes; but he said nothing. As the truck pulled away, Cle unpacked a box of candles in pewter cups and set them along the window ledges.

That night at dinner, she lit them. She’d picked up her husband by then, and he’d taken his place at the far end of the table. He didn’t even seem to notice that anything had changed. His eyes were dull, staring out the window. While Cle served the meal, he turned his chin away and gazed into one of the candles. His lips were pale. My father, at the other end, ate steadily, clinking his fork, talking with the elegant woman beside him. Every now and then, he would turn his attention to Biettermann, but Biettermann didn’t even look back.

With dessert, the conversation between Cle and my father at last quieted. Then came the evening silence. Out the window, the last light of day flared, the shorebirds
cheep-cheep
ing in the scrub.

Dad had eaten most of a steak, a salad, and a plate of pears. Now he leaned back in one of the new chairs, the sun angling up through the windows onto his cheeks. A line of violet flamed the row of prints on the wall. He lifted his head and gazed at them, his eyes lowering then to our faces. On Biettermann’s they rested the longest.

—

T
HE NEXT EVENING,
Cle walked up from the dock to ask if I would mind picking up her husband for dinner. She’d been sitting on the bench with Dad, watching a row of thunderstorms over the far hills, and now she walked back down again and sat beside him.

As I drove toward town to get Earl, charged air rolled through the car. The sky above was clear, but from the west, the thunder was steadily rumbling, like furniture being moved in the distant part of a house. I took the long route, pulling into the Speedway station at the crossroads and taking my time with a cup of coffee.