The Link (8 page)

Waiting.

September 20. Robert parks beside a mortuary and starts for the front door. As he does, a cab pulls up to the curb and his brother JOHN, 44, gets out. Robert moves to greet him and they shake hands.

“Hello, Bobby,” John says. He accepts his brother’s hug perfunctorily.

“I thought you couldn’t make it,” Robert says.

“I worked it out,” John replies.

“You should have phoned me, I’d have picked you up,” says Robert.

John gestures vaguely; no matter. He’s been drinking on the flight from San Francisco. “So who’s paying for this?” he asks as they start up the mortuary walk.

“I’ll take care of it,” Robert tells him.

“We’ll split it,” says John. “I don’t suppose Ruth offered to help.”

“Didn’t ask her,” Robert says.

“She wouldn’t have anyway,” John responds. He winces. “God, this isn’t open casket, is it?”

They go inside. RUTH ALLRIGHT is already there. The only other person present is Konrad. “Super turnout,” mutters John. “All his friends.” Robert pats him on the back.

They sit beside Ruth, Robert closest to her; he kisses her offered cheek. She is the oldest of the three, 46, a heavy-set woman. Whatever genes in the Allright family gave Robert and John their good looks (John’s less in evidence now due to years of drinking) Ruth did not partake of them.

She smiles a thin, obligatory smile at Robert. “This could have been in my church, you know,” she says.

“For
Dad?”
says Robert, smiling faintly.

Ruth and John exchange cool smiles. “John,” she says.

He nods. “How ya doin’, Ruth?”

“I’m fine,” she says.

When she speaks about their father “moving on”, he turns away from her. “We know he has survived,” she says.

“You know it, Ruth,” John mutters.

She shakes her head with a forgiving smile, then looks at the closed casket. “Why is everyone so frightened at the sight of a mere shell?” she says.

“Oh, Christ,” says John gloweringly.

Robert winces slightly as he re-lives attendance at an uncle’s funeral when he was four, his aunt preparing to lift him so he could kiss his uncle goodbye, his reaction of dread, his mother preventing it, her arm around his shoulders to protect him. We do not see her face.

The service begins, typically dreary.

At its conclusion, they move outside where Robert introduces them to Konrad. John breaks into the conversation to say he has to fly back to San Francisco; will Robert drive him to the airport?

“You can’t stay a few days?” Robert asks.

John shakes his head. “Can you take me? I can get a cab.”

Robert looks at Ruth. “I’ll call you later,” he says.

“She hasn’t changed a damn bit, has she?” John says as they drive off.

Robert sighs. “She’s what she is, John,” he replies. “Why sweat it?”

“She hated his guts, you know that.”

Robert shrugs. “It’s in the past. Let it go.”

John makes a bitter scoffing sound. “
One Man’s Family
,” he says mockingly. “Ruth. Mom. Aunt Grace. Aunt Myra. Crazy Uncle Jack. Flakes all of them.”

“They believe what they believe, John. So did Mom.”

“And do you?”

“You know I don’t,” Robert says firmly.

Trying to make conversation, he makes the mistake of telling John about their father’s dying request. “Care to take it on yourself?” he asks.

“You mean you
lied
to the old man?” John asks sardonically.

Robert’s smile is sad. “What would you have done? Let him die without that?”

“He didn’t ask me to do it,” John says.

Robert glances at him, hearing the hurt beneath the anger. “He would have if you’d been here instead of me,” he says.

“The hell he would have,” John replies. “The old bastard.”

At the airport, John asks him if he wants to join him for a few drinks, he has forty minutes before his flight.

“I can’t,” says Robert. “I’ve got to get home.”

“Right,” says John. He opens the car door and gets out. “If you ever get to the coast—” he says. He raises his hand in a casual departing gesture. “See you, Bobby,” he says and shuts the door.

“Oh, Christ, I should have gone with him,” Robert mutters to himself as he drives away from the terminal curb.

Arriving home, he greets and takes care of Bart, then phones his sister. Sorry we didn’t get a chance to talk, he tells her. She invites him to her house for Sunday dinner. His up-cast glance of mock anguish indicates his reaction. “Sure, I’d like that,” he says pleasantly.

He and Bart take a walk in the woods, Robert still talking to himself. “Well, what should I have done, said no, forget it, die without a hope?”

He curses aloud, startling the Lab. “I’m sorry, pal,” he says, stopping to pet the dog’s head. “How you doing?”

He wakes up late that night to hear a heavy, wheezing breath nearby. Disoriented, his sub-conscious still gripped by the funeral, he visualizes his father standing in the darkness by the bed, breathing laboredly, looking down at him in accusation.

He rejects the vision, turns on the lamp and sees that it is Bart again. He sits on the floor and holds the dog’s head on his lap.

“What’s the matter, Bartie?” he asks. He strokes the dog’s neck and shoulders. “We’d better take you to Amelia.”

He is trying to work the next afternoon when the telephone rings.

It is a lawyer named Williker calling to tell him that he is his father’s heir. What about my brother and sister? Robert asks. Nothing, says the lawyer.

“Forget it then,” Robert says, suddenly resentful. “Give it to some charity, I don’t want it.”

Shutting down his processor after the call, he drives to Amelia’s office where he learns that Bart has cancer.

The news is jolting to him, his reaction even stronger than it might be normally; a reaction we will understand later.

“Dear God,” he says, faintly. “Is he in pain?”

“Hard to tell,” Amelia says.

He groans. He seems so happy most of the time, he tells her. I’m sure he is, she replies; he’s with you and he loves you.

“I love him too,” Robert says. He hesitates. “You don’t think… I should—” He cannot get the words out.

That’s up to you, she says. She can give him pills to ease the pain right now. He doesn’t have to make his mind up right away. Why not wait a while?

Robert drives Bart home, the dog’s head on his lap.

We see a quick, almost subliminal shot of some woman saying, “Cancer.”

The random vision confuses and disturbs him.

He drives to his father’s apartment building, taking Bart along; it is a day or so later. Norman Konrad has told him that he’s “closing down” the apartment and, if Robert wants any of his father’s belongings, now is the time to come and get them.

An evocative scene as Robert is admitted into the apartment by Norman and looks around, recalling various moments from his life and what his father looked like.

We see photographs of the Allright family on the wall. One shows Robert, three, beside his brother and sister. Another shows him standing beside his mother. We also see a full-face photograph of Robert’s mother; she was very beautiful.

It is the face we saw on Palladino’s body in Robert’s vision.

While he is in the apartment, he tells Norman that he’s turned down his father’s “legacy”—money to continue the Arizona dig, nothing if he does not continue it, the money going, instead, to the Archeology Department of Columbia University.

Does Norman have any idea what his father was working on? Not that anything he hears will convince him to drop everything he’s doing and head for Arizona with a pick and shovel. (Don’t blame you, Norman says.) But he would like to know.

“Not much I can tell you,” Norman answers. “Your father was a tight-lipped man. Some secret project. As best I could gather, it had to do with human advent in that area further back in time than any accredited archeologist (including himself) would care to accept.

“He said something about a link,” says Norman. He smiles. “I don’t believe he meant the missing link however; he was too sensible for that.”

Robert stares at him. “That’s it?” he says. After all the urging and mysterioso, it is a distinct let-down to him. Back-dating human existence in Arizona is hardly his idea of something to do.

“And why should you?” Norman agrees.

“Maybe you’d care to try it,” Robert says. “I’m sure I could get the money for you if—”

He breaks off as Norman raises his right hand in a traffic cop gesture to stop. “Not me,” says Norman. “I’m too old for that sort of thing—and really not interested.”

The entire time Robert is in the apartment, we keep CUTTING to the crystal on the desk. Robert passes it half a dozen times, ignoring it.

Only when he is about to leave, does he pick it up, apparently on a spontaneous impulse, and drop it into his jacket pocket.

He drives through Manhattan, talking to himself.

Why did his father make such a big deal of Arizona? It sounds completely boring to him. Probing for ancient skulls in the desert? “Forget it,” he mutters. He wishes that his father had offered it to John. After all, John was the one who went on digs with him when he was a boy. John was—probably still is—the one who has a feeling for their father; respect—admiration. No matter what he says. Really, it was thoughtless, even cruel of their father not to ask John.

Waiting for a traffic jam to break, he reaches into his pocket for his bio-feedback control, frowns. “Did I forget it?” he mutters.

He finds, instead, the crystal, holds it up and gazes at it.

Sunlight refracts across his face, the seven colors of the spectrum playing on his cheeks. He grunts, staring at the crystal. He starts as the driver behind him honks impatiently for him to move on. He blinks and shakes his head like a man awakening. Then, driving off, he drops the crystal back into his pocket. “Wake up, Allright,” he tells himself.

He turns on his cassette player and listens to Mahler as he turns right toward the east side highway.

CLOSE UP on the sign outside a church called THE TEMPLE OF ETERNAL SPIRIT.
Sunday Healing and Devotional: 11:00 a.m.; Wed. Eve. Services: 7:30 p.m.; Message Meetings: Twice a month as announced: 6:30 p.m.; Open Séance: 1st Friday every month: 7:30 p.m.; Pastor: Rev. Ruth E. Allright
.