The Violet Hour: A Novel (9 page)

“Damn it!” Howard muttered. The desperate pigeon opened its mouth wider, emitting a throaty, ghoulish grunt. Cringing, he turned and swatted at it again, whacking his head on a rafter. The bird’s wings made an even more ferocious ruckus than before and all of a sudden he felt himself losing his balance. With ringing ears, Howard pitched forward, saw luscious green grass below, and felt his head, shoulders, and chest pass over the edge of the frame. His stomach vanished and he closed his eyes, releasing himself to the inevitability of the fall.
How unlucky,
he thought, as he tumbled freely through space.
If I’d been just an inch farther back.

The ground hit him with a snap, and a light warmth spread loosely through his body.
Not so bad,
he thought,
could have been worse
. He had flipped over somehow, and was now looking up backward at the sky. He could see that the old pigeon had indeed made it to his roof, though it was redder now and more elongated than it had been. The sound of pianos and strings filled his head, swelling like a wave about to break upon the rocks. The bird’s head swiveled, seemed to explode, and Howard closed his eyes again.
Damn bird
he shouted over the music.
Goddamn, good-for-nothing bird.

W
HEN
E
UNICE SAW
her husband stretched like a vine on the ground, she did not immediately think he was dead. His head was tilted back, as though he were watching the clouds roll by, and his legs and arms lay comfortably enough that she thought he may have fallen asleep mid-gaze. Howard had always been industrious, but Eunice liked to entertain the fantasy of a lazy husband. It seemed to justify her own vigorous work ethic, and it gave her a natural object of blame when
events didn’t turn out the way she expected. She took a mischievous pleasure in catching him asleep, and Howard, for his part, obliged her fun. “Damn it, woman!” he’d say, sitting up in his recliner. “Can’t a man get any rest in his old age?”

She’d heard a commotion in the yard a few moments before, while she was rummaging in the pantry for her cake stand. These days, in their neighborhood, there was rarely any cause for alarm. But Eunice still liked to double-check.

“Wake up,” she shouted as she approached his motionless body. “Wake up, you lazy old man. We’ve got company, remember?”

A pigeon flew down from behind her, coming to rest by her husband’s leg.

“Shoo!” she cried, flapping her hands. “Damn bird!” The pigeon cocked its head, ruffled its wing, then took off as ordered for the trees.

It was only at this moment that she realized something was wrong. She took a few additional steps, more tentatively now, until her toes nearly brushed his head. Peering down, she saw that his eyes were closed, but that his neck was somewhat oddly bent, and a trickle of red was forming at the corner of his mouth.

“Howard?” she asked, more softly than she usually spoke, nudging his shoulder with her toe. “Howard, you’re all right. Get up.” She looked at the sauna frame and saw his hammer hooked on a beam, a box of nails nearby.

“Mom?” Cassandra’s voice came from somewhere above. Eunice looked up to see her daughter’s concerned face in a second-floor window. Her bedroom—no, no, the bathroom—three windows over from the left.

“Everything all right?”

“Well,” Eunice replied, reaching her verdict. “Dad’s dead.” Her voice came out curt on the first word, but was audibly shaking by the last.

“I’ll be right down.” Cassandra took a towel from the rack as she left, thinking it might somehow help.

At the bottom of the stairs, she met Mary, Howie, Estella, and Max, each carrying a plastic shopping bag full of food. Estella was wearing a childish candy necklace, and was in the process of biting off a bright pink piece. They had, by chance, just walked in the door.

“It’s Grandpa,” Cassandra shouted, relieved to have people to tell.

They spilled into the yard en masse. Eunice was sitting on the ground by Howard’s head, her hands gripping each other in her lap. Her shoulders shook like leaves on a branch. She was laughing.

Elizabeth appeared at the back door, her hair matted, nearly breathless. “What’s going on?” she asked before running out to join her mother. “What happened?” But then she saw her grandfather lying on the ground, his skin unmarked, and understood. Had she been smarter, had she foreseen, she might have been there when he fell. She took another step forward and crouched down by his body. She touched his sleeve. All around him, like a soft crust, the grass was green.

Tears streamed down Eunice’s face and she continued to laugh in vindication and disbelief. “I
told
him he was going to fall and break his neck!” she managed, nearly choking on the words. “I told him. And look what happened. He
did
.”

H
oward was dead; people had to be told. The party guests first and foremost. Fortunately, Mary found comfort in the phone. She grieved, not by crying or shouting or needing to be by herself, but by pressing the hard plastic to her ear and telling the story to friends and relatives—some as soon as an hour after he passed. She needed to be straightforward, to convince herself it was real. Her father was dead; he had died; party’s off.

Once she’d gotten through her share of the most urgent calls, she sat down in Howard’s leather office chair, covered her eyes with her hand, and envisioned a map of the United States. In her mind the country was dark, with tiny white lights marking the locations of her aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends: the modern Fabricant universe, fully graphed and illuminated. She’d called each of the brightest lights: New Jersey, St. Paul, Colorado Springs. She’d even called her mother’s sister, Trudie, who lived in a retirement home near Phoenix and who thought that everyone who phoned was her dead daughter, Leigh.

Still, Mary wasn’t satisfied. A large swath of the country remained grimly in the dark; a light was missing out west.

O
N THE
S
UNDAY
that Howard Fabricant died, Abe awoke in San Francisco fog, with a chafing itch in his throat.

He sailed now more than ever, and he looked like a seaman, his cheeks tawny and taut, his hands chapped as old leather gloves. His new boat was shorter, leaner, and lighter than the tarnished one, and under its sails he sought a more physical life. He wore wind-resistant pants and white T-shirts full of holes. He sang chantey songs on the waves and in the shower. When he walked onshore, it was as though he rolled, flowing to the office and ebbing back each day.

His old mentor Sam Upchurch sometimes came out with him, and in recent years, he’d made a few other friends at the yacht club. He’d even found an apprentice: his secretary’s son, a goofy kid who’d somehow developed a thing for boats. He liked Asante because he reminded him of his own youthful fascination. Abe had seen the ocean for the first time on a trip to the Jersey Shore when he was five. He knew the water was dangerous, but he felt compelled to run in anyway. His parents had egged him on from the sand, flinging their hands overhead. They’d been brainy Philadelphians, eccentric; they wanted him to see the world. Later, in the surf, his mother squatted down and pointed at a white triangle perched defiantly on the faraway waves. “Hey, water boy,” she’d said. “Wouldn’t that be a fun thing to do?” He had his mission.

Twice a week now, the teenaged Asante came to sea with Abe, giggling across the deck, tying perfect knots, and trying to predict the changing winds. When the air was calm and they dropped anchor, Asante entertained himself by reading aloud. His favorite books were drippy spiritual fables, books like
Siddhartha
and
The Alchemist,
which he never tired of defending to Abe.

Some years back, sailing had been a useful escape. Offshore, there was no risk of encountering Cassandra or any of her arty friends. But
the sea was also a better way of life. It was indifferent and uncluttered, solitary, which had always suited him. If he’d had anger once, he didn’t now. The ocean had all but washed it away. That, and Proposition 215, which brought cannabis back into his life just as his marriage was drawing to an end. On the water, and under the influence of self-prescribed, hand-rolled grass, he became more aware of himself and the world. He’d thickened with age, expanded, but so had the ocean, both of them growing more powerful as human civilization declined. Eventually, of course, he’d die—he was as guilty as any carbon-emitting life form—but not for many years. For now he still had his strength.

Downstairs in the kitchen, he drank a full glass of water with his pill and brewed his coffee as usual. By nine, the itch in his throat had become a full-blown ache; twenty minutes later came the sneezes. He blew his nose thoroughly, took several puffs of a searing nasal spray, and fled for his regular Sunday sail.

On the water, everything cleared: the fog, his nose, his throat. By the time he returned to the marina, all that remained was a dull, pinprick ache in his cheeks and along the ridge of his brow. He credited the sea air, Asante’s good spirits, and his own resilient cells. Back home, he ate a lean dinner of salmon and greens and, deciding after his eventful morning to forego his usual toke, he poured himself a small but brimming glass of pinot noir. Later, on his deck, he read the latest Philip Roth, and poured himself another. He had just finished a chapter when the phone rang.

It was Cassandra’s sister, Mary. She identified herself right away, saving him the embarrassment of pretending as he groped for context. The wine warmed the bridge of his nose and he found himself conked back to where he could almost see her as a teenager, when she wore headbands and sandals so tall she could barely walk. It had been years since he’d spoken to her. He’d almost forgotten she existed.

Her adult voice was businesslike and arid, the voice of a person with allergies. “I just wanted to let you know that our father died this afternoon.” Or a person who’d cried herself dry.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said, reflexively, as though they spoke all the time. “Was he sick?”

“Just fell off a sauna he was building and died, around four o’clock East Coast time. I tried you earlier but you must’ve been out. Anyway, I thought you’d want to know. We’re all a wreck here in Maryland.”

She told him the details in a hurry: an aborted birthday party, a pigeon, a viewing at the house, the date still to be determined. She’d be in touch again when she knew for sure. “Thank you,” he said, not knowing what else to say.

After he hung up, he stood thinking. His own parents had died in a highway crash when he was ten; then his grandmother Helen, who he’d gone to live with in Virginia, had succumbed to a heart attack just before he graduated from medical school. Both times, the losses fell upon him like sun spots, zapping out all other connections. In the end, he could hardly remember the deaths, or the life he’d led before them. All he knew was he’d been changed, emerging a new man both times.

He went into the bathroom. From the medicine cabinet, he retrieved a canning jar he’d bought at an upscale kitchen store downtown. He popped the metal clamp and considered the cannabis inside. Enough for at least two good joints. And to think he’d told himself he’d go without it today. He would write himself a refill in the morning.

Abe rolled a joint, bit down the edge, and took it to the bedroom. Dope-smoking had advanced over the years, but Abe still preferred the mellow, old-fashioned doobie. He didn’t need to be out of his mind. He liked his mind, and he liked the pleasure of rolling his own joints. He sat cross-legged in the middle of the bed and inhaled deeply through his nose. When it became apparent that the room was too quiet, he turned on his clock radio, which brought him a pleasurable and entirely inconsequential argument about the moral character of Barry Bonds.

It occurred to Abe as he smoked and looked at the clock that his sinuses had cleared around the same time that Howard had died.
An eerie, discomfiting coincidence. The thing with the pigeon was another. Just loafing about the scene. Eight years earlier, when Abe had almost drowned, the last thing he’d glimpsed before he’d lost consciousness was a pelican with wings patterned like a stretch of desert viewed from the crest of a hill. He considered the nature of birds: their cloudy eyes and hard beaks, their tragic inattention. Human machines were always in their flightpath, their deaths so often our fault. Of course they’d seek out retribution any way they could.

I
T TOOK SOME TIME
to get Eunice to leave the yard. She remained sitting in the grass by Howard, smoothing his eyebrows and tucking in his ear whiskers, careful not to nudge his angled head. Alvin Dao stood by with a gurney. “The coroner’s coming,” Cassandra told her, but Eunice wouldn’t move until he’d arrived. Even then, her children had to pull her to her feet and walk her inside.

The family spent the evening huddled in the master bedroom, drinking iced tea. Newly widowed, Eunice rested on top of the covers, her short legs stretched out in front of her, her shoulders propped up by mauve ruffled pillows along the wooden headboard.

“I should call the church,” she said. “He hasn’t been in months.”

“We’ll call them in the morning, Mom,” said Howie.

Howie was fifty, with a perennially adolescent appearance. His face was virtually without wrinkles, his chin round and sparsely haired. Though bank tellers and waitresses still spoke to him in condescending tones, Howie’s youthful appearance had actually spurred his greatest success. In five consecutive elections, the people of Bainbridge Island, Washington, where he’d moved in his thirties for the climate and outdoor activities, had made him a city councilman, finding him earnest, sweet, and considerably less phony than his opponents. It amazed Cassandra every November that a voting district so recently acquainted with her brother could understand him so well—perhaps
better than her family ever had. He sat now by his mother’s side, patting her tiny cold wrist.

“Is Alvin all right?” she asked.

“He’s taking care of Dad,” Mary said. “Don’t worry about that now.” Mary was an organizer. Besides making calls and serving as the liaison to Alvin, she’d also organized her children into a row for comfort. Estella, Mary, and Max sat one in back of the other on Eunice’s chaise lounge, hugging like bobsledders.