Relic of Time (22 page)

He wore a seersucker suit and sailed his straw hat at the stand in the corner when he entered the room. He missed. He left the hat on the floor. He had the smile of a man who had just made a hole in one.

“A sense of the Congress resolution, Paul. I tacked it onto a bill that went through like shit through a goose.”

It was the sense of Congress that Paul Pulaski was a hero. A wounded hero. Gunther smiled with triumphant slyness. The sense of Congress, hidden away where no one knew they were voting for it? That summed up what a screwed-up mess this was—skirmishes all over the place, oddballs shooting at other oddballs—no wonder the administration could consider the matter little more than an annoying distraction. But by God, the border was being protected.

“I want you to come to Washington. I want you to talk to the press. I want you to hit the circuit and explain things to your fellow Americans.”

“No.”

Gunther took this as the humility of a wounded hero. Paul had read
Sons of the Fathers
, about the Iwo Jima flag raisers who had been put on the circuit to sell war bonds and had lost their bearings in the process.

“You owe it to the country, Paul.”

“The country doesn't seem to feel in our debt.”

“There you're wrong. You are a certified hero, by act of Congress.”

He let Gunther talk. He got rid of him only by saying that he would think of it. No reason to go on about what he thought of the crazy idea.

Neal Admirari's agent hadn't thought much of the idea but when several publishers expressed interest, Hacker got to work, playing one publisher off against the other. Neal did a one-pager, Hacker circulated it in an auction, and Mastadon Press came in with the winning bid. Lulu had been dubious about the idea of writing a book about the immigration wars that would emerge from the story of Lloyd Kaiser, but the contract softened her skepticism.

“Want to be coauthor?”

“Just because you stole the idea you'd given me?”

“You want it back?”

“I'm no Indian giver.”

They were in the place in Connecticut when Hacker phoned with the good news.

“I told them six months at the outside, Neal,” Hacker said. “This is hot, but it could cool.”

Neal accepted the deadline. He knew all about deadlines. Besides, he might end up with nothing more than the hefty advance. Hot projects do cool. He left Lulu at the summer place and flew off to Indianapolis to talk with Judith, Lloyd Kaiser's daughter.

Judith Lynch lived with her family in Fishers, a little town just north of Indianapolis, a commuter town. The house she lived in was a slight variation on all the others in the development, aluminum siding that rippled beneath Neal's fingers as he stood at the door after pushing the bell. He could see the swing set in the backyard, and there was a trike and wagon in the driveway, which was why he had parked the rental at the curb. The door opened and a woman looked at him through the mesh of the screen door.

“Neal Admirari. I phoned.”

“But I said I didn't want to see you.”

“An understandable reaction. Something like this is hard to explain on the phone.”

She had all but hung up on him when he called from Connecticut. She wanted her father to rest in peace. The screen door burst open and two kids emerged. Neal held the door while they exited and then went inside.

“I smell coffee.”

She made a face and then suddenly she smiled. “My, you're persistent.”

“With an idea like this it would be a mortal sin not to be persistent.” He had seen the Madonna on a table and the sprig of palm behind one of the framed pictures. “Was that your parish church I passed?”

It was like the secret handclasp. Judith and her family were obviously good Catholics. That was the hook on which Neal hung the version of his project he outlined for Judith in the kitchen, at the table, sipping coffee.

“Tell me about your father.”

She brought albums to the table and turned the pages slowly, a sad smile on her face.

“That your mother?”

“She preceded Father in death.”

It sounded like a line from the obituary. Maybe it was.

“When was that?”

She thought. “Six years ago.”

“And your dad never married again?”

“No!”

Neal was thinking of the woman Lloyd had apparently met at the Whitehall just before heading for Mexico City. Given Judith's reaction, he wasn't going to bring that up. Eventually they got around to her father's funeral. Judith put the visiting book from the mortuary on the table. She also had a list of those who had made memorial donations. He sat back when he saw Catherine Dolan's name on the list. He tapped it with his finger. Judith was smiling.

“Now that's a story,” she said.

“How so?”

“We talked on the phone afterward.”

This woman had been a childhood friend of her father's. They had started to correspond and then they agreed to meet in Chicago.

“She came to the funeral! Isn't that something?”

“It certainly is.”

“The stories she told me of how they had talked and talked about when they were kids. She was devastated by what had happened to Daddy in Mexico City.”

Neal was memorizing the address that Catherine had added to her name on the list.

“Think if they hadn't gotten together. That was what bothered Catherine, I think. How easily they might never have had the chance to talk about when they were kids.”

Neal just shook his head at the mystery of life.

“I can't let you have these albums,” Judith said.

“Of course not. Do you have negatives of some of these pictures of him?”

“There are videos of the funeral.”

“I would like to see those.”

She lowered the blinds in the living room and hooked the video up to the television set. Neal watched as one watches other people's home videos.

“That's her,” Judith cried. “That's Catherine.”

“Beautiful woman.”

“Isn't she?”

Catherine Dolan was a tangent, but one Neal found irresistible. Unless the concierge at the Whitehall was given to imaginings, Lloyd and Catherine had done a thing or two besides reminisce about their childhood. A flawed martyr, a penitential visit to Our Lady of Guadalupe after several days in the sack with Catherine? What poignancy that would add to the story. Judith would never forgive him, but it was the bane of his profession to create enemies while insuring the public's right to know. Even so, when he flew off to Minneapolis, he didn't let Lulu know where he was going. Her reaction would be the twin of Judith's.

Before going to the apartment in a building overlooking Lake Calhoun, Neal researched Catherine Dolan on the Inter-net, not expecting anything. That there were entries at all was a surprise, but the number was astounding, thousands upon thousands. When he went to call on Catherine he knew all about her academic career, the patents she held. Lloyd's childhood friend turned out to be a distinguished woman.

There was an elderly woman in the lobby of the building emptying a mailbox. She smiled vaguely at Neal when she opened the door to him.

“Do you know which apartment is Catherine Dolan's?”

This was going to be tricky. He had considered calling her before he came, but he just couldn't come up with a convincing lie, and the true reason for his calling did not sound like an open sesame. Let's talk about your fling at the Whitehall with Lloyd Kaiser. The woman had stepped back but she was still smiling.

“This is her mail. She wants the bills sent to her.”

“Then she's moved?”

“She's away.”

“Well, this is a disappointment. Where do you send her bills?”

The little woman became wary. “Why do you ask?”

Neal gave her an account of his visit to Indianapolis, of Judith's reaction to the appearance of her father's childhood friend at the funeral. He told her he was a writer who was considering a piece on Lloyd.

“He was killed in Mexico City, you know.”

Her mouth opened in surprise. “No.”

Neal nodded. “It's a very romantic story.”

Before he left he had the address to which the little old lady sent Catherine's bills. Napa Valley! Care of Professor Jason Phelps. After he researched Phelps, Neal knew he was going to California.

George called Lowry, asking if it would be all right if he extended his vacation.

“Everything's under control. Relax, get some rest.”

With George, that was like telling a model husband to go beat his wife. The kid was too intense. You can't last at anything if you're too intense. Lowry was getting a little R&R himself, a fifth of midway decent scotch, holed up in George's office lest any of the guests decided to fall off the wagon with him. The one thing Lowry understood about his refound relation with God was that God is mercy. Feeding and shooting the bull with the vacant-eyed drunks and addicts who sat around the common room, avoiding the television screen, just breathing in and breathing out, waiting for the next meal to be dished out to them, Lowry told himself that they were what he looked like to God, if so good. This life was a life of penance to him, and the problem was it was easy. At first he thought it would be a temptation to feel superior to the guests, but that passed quickly. How many of them had a bottle of scotch stashed away and waited for nightfall and a serious session of solitary drinking?

“How many guests do we have?” George asked.

Lowry counted those sitting around. “All I could see from where I stood were three long mountains and a wood. . . .” He murmured the lines to George.

“What's that?”

“Edna St. Vincent Millay.”

“Don't know her.”

“She never answers my letters.”

Careful, careful. He never knew if George suspected that he dropped back into his old habits from time to time, just to remember where he had been. Millay. He had read her life; a real dingbat but an almost perfect poet. Like most people who couldn't stand themselves, she got into political agitation. Dorothy Parker was another. If you can't change yourself, change the world. Lowry knew the feeling. Most of his life had been a long vacation from himself and now, more or less reac-quainted with the person he was and couldn't abide, he needed a little respite. The human race cannot stand very much reality. Sapienza understood that.

The bishop of Santa Ana had a decade on him, more or less, and liked to grumble about the fact that he had to write a letter of resignation when he hit seventy-five.

“When they accept it, I'm going to do what you do.”

Well, maybe he would. The trouble was that Sapienza was a lot like George, a repressed optimist where good works were concerned. Both of them secretly believed that bums would seek a job, drunks dry out, and addicts go cold turkey and . . . And then what? Religion as the opium of nonaddicts? Lowry smiled and brought a match to his pipe. It gurgled like a water pipe. He should clean it out. But it would only get tarred up again. Besides, it tasted better this way.

He had an hour before he had to begin fixing the evening meal. After he put down the phone, he relaxed in George's desk chair. There was a pile of pages beside the typewriter. Lowry picked them up and began to read. He got halfway through a page and returned it to the pile. George was a romantic, no doubt about it.

Later, when he got the stew going, causing a ripple of interest in the common room as its fragrance drifted out there, Lowry almost liked the thought that he was in charge. The truth was that he was happy enough to be George's right arm or whatever, and he never felt that the fate of the house depended on him. Maybe that was what got to George. No, it was the girl, Clare Ibanez. Lowry could have told George that a girl like that would never settle into this kind of work. The trick was not to consider it a life sentence. George had been surprised when Lowry told him he hadn't taken solemn vows to live this life forever and ever. He had a done a lot already and maybe that was all he was meant to do. Lowry remembered that when he was George's age he was all afire for the coming revolution, enlisted for life, and look at him now.