A Private Sorcery (7 page)

A young ponytailed man stops before the singer. He's carrying yellow roses wrapped in white butcher's paper. He hands her one. She makes an ironic little curtsy and sticks the stem through her matted hair. The words are close enough to Spanish that I can catch the gist: a mother lamenting her son's death at war.

Rena orders Chinese food, setting out place mats on your coffee
table. I sit on the couch and she sits on the floor in gray sweatpants, burying her nose in a mug of the steamy soup. She barely touches anything else. Miserably, I eat too much, drugging myself with food. She puts down her mug and stretches her legs out under the coffee table. I cannot think of you. I cannot think of you and think about what to do for you at the same time.

“I just want you to know that I don't expect you to do it, to sign over your house. Morton's right. He could run. He tried to run when the police came.”

“I don't think he would if he knew his mother and I would lose our house.”

The words sound false before they finish on my lips. I feel terribly lonely, as though you have traveled to a place so foreign I can no longer even imagine you in your surrounds. “I can't not do it. I couldn't live with myself if I didn't.”

Rena looks at me curiously and I think, well, she's not a parent, she doesn't know how it is with children, how, when you have children, there are no heroic acts. What's hard are the small things, the things we excuse ourselves for overlooking or turning from. For years, I operated under a haze of guilt: the dozen little betrayals perpetrated toward you and your brother every day. Whereas at first I thought that my attention toward the two of you increased after your mother abdicated out of necessity—a sort of zero-sum game, if she wasn't going to do it, I had to—it was such a relief to have the guilt of small neglects lifted that even had your mother recovered, I could not have returned to tuning you out. Like one of those feedback loops, Darwinian in its effects, the more I put your needs first, the happier and less demanding the two of you became, which then inspired more in kind on my part. I remember once foolishly trying to explain this cycle to your mother, but she was already too far gone, too lost in herself, to be able to think about anything she couldn't touch with her hands. “Leonard,” she said in her high, tight voice, “surely even you can see that I have a headache?”

I look at my watch. It's nearly nine. Time for Klara's tranquilizers.
Now or never. “I guess I better call Klara.”

I start clearing the dishes, but Rena waves a hand. “Go. I'll do it. There's a phone in there.” She points to the room with the futon. I pull the door shut behind me, embarrassed to have her hear the way I talk to your mother.

Susan answers. She gives me the outlines of Klara's arrival. How she was taken in a wheelchair off the plane because she'd told the stewardess she felt dizzy. How the stewardess whispered to Marc that Klara had fallen ill so suddenly; she'd chatted with the person next to her for the entire flight and eaten all of the lunch. “She perked up,” Susan says, “once she got to the house. I set her up on the chaise longue with a glass of lemonade and some pecan sandies. Marc grilled steaks for dinner and miraculously, she said, her appetite returned. She and Marc are sitting on the patio having their coffee.”

Susan doesn't ask about you. With your brother I would assume this to be deliberate, but with Susan it seems possible that it is genuinely oversight, that your mother's arrival, has, in fact, occluded everything else. She brings the portable phone outside and I listen while your mother recounts the heart palpitations she felt during the landing, the near fainting as she tried to get out of the seat. “I sat there thinking, oh, my goodness, what am I going to do, I can't even get off the plane. I was so upset, thinking about Marc standing there waiting, but luckily there was this nice stewardess, a black girl, who helped me. They had to call for a wheelchair, and I felt so badly holding her up like that …”

I study my watch. After five minutes, I say, “Klara.” She halts, my interjection sharper than I'd intended. “I need to talk with you about Saul.” I imagine your mother shutting her eyes, remember reading back when Marc was a baby that shutting the eyes is the earliest of the defense mechanisms. He'd shut his eyes tight, screw up his face and scream.

“Are you listening?”

A long, languorous sigh followed by short, staccato gasps float over the line.

“Rena and I went to see a bail bondsman. The only way we might
get Saul out on bail is by putting up the house as collateral. I've thought about it. There's obviously some risk, but I think we should do it.”

“I can't bear it,” your mother says. There's sobbing and then a banging sound, the phone, it seems, dropped to the ground.

“What did you say to her?” Marc asks. “Hold on.” I hear Marc yelling, “Susan, come here,” and then Susan's voice rising over your mother's cacophony: “Mother, Mother, calm down. Now, you have to stay calm.” The line goes static and then clear again, and I surmise that Marc has walked back into the house.

I tell him Charlie Green's proposal.

“Look,” Marc says, “if the judge set the bail without a noncash alternative, that means she thinks there's a good chance he'll skip town. She has no other motivation for keeping him in jail. Take your lead from her. You don't want to lose the house.”

“Saul wouldn't do that.”

“Don't be a fool. He's a drug addict. It looks like he was an accomplice in an armed robbery. He'll probably lose his medical license. You think he's worrying about your house?”

I want to chastise your brother for calling me a fool, but I force myself to stay focused. “I've made up my mind. I'm going to do it. But I can't go forward without your mother's agreement.”

“Well, I can't advise Mom to do that. I have to advise her against it.” We continue a few minutes longer under the guise of furious politeness. I tell Marc I'll call tomorrow, first thing, to talk with your mother.

Rena helps me unfold the futon in your study. She brings me sheets and towels and a pair of your pajamas. Your pajamas are too small. I lie on the futon in my underwear still fuming at your brother, imagining calling him back to say,
I don't give a goddamn what you think about this, I expect you to do as I say
.

I pull the shade up and stare out the window at the postage stamp garden. A trash can lid bangs. A cat darts toward the easement between the buildings. It occurs to me that maybe I've inadvertently set you up by sending your mother to Atlanta, where she can be pulled into Marc's sphere of influence. I meditate on that word,
inadvertently
, and how the
notion of the unconscious wipes out its meaning. Your mother's not going to do it. And even if she were, your brother would do anything in his power to prevent it.

A
T EIGHT, A LOCKSMITH
arrives to drill a hole in the metal door and install a new cylinder. It's Ruth who has insisted this must be done, Maggie who has arranged for the man to come.

Your mother calls while the locksmith is still at work. Her tone is firm but friendly. What a businesswoman she could have been had her feelings about her father not felled her so early on. A Leona Helmsley in a sharp red suit.

She sighs. “I didn't sleep a wink, up all night thinking about this.” For once, I believe her. “We cannot risk our house, where would we live, and besides that would be unfair to Marc since the house is our largest asset and will someday be half his. But I'll put up my jewelry. The pearls, the diamond earrings, the pieces I inherited from my mother. And there's our silverware, too.”

She's a card player. She knows these items all together aren't worth fifty grand. At Wellesley, there'd been a set of them who played poker with some dissolute Harvard boys. The loser supplied the next game's bottle of bourbon. After we moved to New Jersey, she'd given it up because in our neighborhood men and women didn't play together. The women played bridge in a way that lacked cunning. They drank coffee and ate pineapple upside-down cake.

I don't have the heart to dig at her. The locksmith is sweeping up. I follow Rena into the kitchen while she makes a pot of tea and cuts up fruit. I tell her your mother's proposal. She responds with a series of quick, sharp chops.

We reach Green late morning. First Rena, then I, try to get him to accept what we can come up with, but we both know that we're just going through the motions: he's not going to change his initial offer and we cannot meet it. At noon, Rena calls Morton to tell him we've reached
an impasse with Green. I listen on the extension.

“Sorry,” Morton says. “But it was a long shot. Look, he's lucky these are federal charges. As I told you before, the MCC is a hell of a lot better than Rikers.”

“Is there anyone else?”

“If Green won't do it, no one will.”

Morton pauses to allow Rena a decent amount of time to take this in.

“I just came from seeing Saul.”

“How is he?”

“He's struggling with the detox. Sometimes it's just as well for them to have something else to think about.”

“Can we visit him?”

“Well, we'll have to talk about that. Right now, he says he doesn't want any visitors. You don't have too many rights inside, but you can refuse visitors.”

A silence falls and for a split second I think maybe the line has gone dead. I jump in. “It's me, Leonard,” I say. “I'm on the extension. Why is that?”

“He says he feels too awful.”

“Physically or mentally?”

“He didn't say. I'd guess both.”

Rena stays quiet for the rest of the phone call. I talk with Morton about what will happen next. He tells us that they've set the state prosecutor's presentation of the manslaughter case against you before the grand jury for the ninth of March. I count days on my fingers: nineteen. Neither you nor Morton is permitted to attend.

“I'll stop by to see him every day,” Morton says. “Depending on how the evidence shakes out, we'll most likely keep the not-guilty plea, which means we'll then have to prepare for trial.” He sniffs. He's a sniffer, one of those people always fighting some kind of upper respiratory thing. I wonder if like Green he, too, had a broken nose. “Don't worry about this not wanting visitors thing. It'll pass. A lot of them feel that way for the first week or so.”

Rena and I convene in the living room. We go over the conversation. We're not talking about anything, just talking to ward off a tide of emptiness.

At the door, I hug her loosely. There's a little heave in her chest. I tighten my grip and she stays still that second longer that transforms what was ceremonial into something else. Quickly, she straightens and her face rearranges itself.

It takes over an hour to walk to Penn Station, by the end of which I've decided that your wife's eyes were, indeed, damp. The idea that as much of a strain as my presence was for her, she might feel worse once I left, hadn't occurred to me any more than it probably had to her. Standing at a bank of phones, I call her. I reach your machine with your voice, then stumble over sentences about how she should call me if there's anything she needs, even just to talk. I purchase my ticket and board the train.

On the ticket stub, I write a shopping list. Milk, fruit, stamps. I cannot think of anything else to buy. I cannot imagine what I will do once I get back to the house.

Sometime after Newark, I doze off. When I wake, you are in my mind's eye: a crescent moon on a thin mattress on the floor of your cell. Your eyes are open and there are water bugs and I worry that you are cold. That old feeling from when you and Marc were babies and I would spend the nights in and out of my bed going to lift one or the other of you crying from your crib. That anxious sleepy look on your face as you stood clutching the bars. Maybe that's it. The bars. Are you clutching the bars?

I
WRITE YOU EVERY DAY
. Long, struggling letters, some of which I know better than to mail. After a week, I see that they could be titled like country-and-western songs: How Could I Have Failed to See Your Pain, What Have You Done to Yourself, What Have I Done to You, You Must Be Strong: The Travails of Life Are the Iron in the Steel (this one I don't send), I Will Stand by You Through Thick and Thin.

You don't respond. Morton reassures me that you're receiving the letters, that you're doing well with the barbiturate detox and that you've told him to tell me you will write when you feel able. I don't believe you've sent such a message, particularly in the middle of the night when I lie in the dark, my routine now shattered so that like your mother I am up until three and asleep half the morning.

In the middle of your second week in jail, Morton calls to tell me that the grand jury date has been changed to Friday, March 13.

“Great. Friday the thirteenth.”

Morton doesn't respond. As always, I am surprised that other people are not superstitious the way I am, that they don't walk around saying touch wood and reaching down to tap the leg of a chair. Superstition has always struck me as not what it seems, not a belief in magic, but rather a belief that it is beneficial to be on guard. If you worry about even implying something might go well, you're less likely to overlook that your wings are attached with beeswax that will melt in the sun.

I hear Morton swallow. “There's something else. If they return an indictment, which they're going to do ninety-nine percent chance, I'm going to recommend he enter a guilty plea.”

“A guilty plea?”

“Most of them, by this time, are so eager to get out, they'd sell their mother. Saul, though, doesn't have the heart to defend himself. But even if he did, I'd still say it's the way we got to go. These guys have a rocksolid case. It's like telling a terminal cancer patient to plan for a cruise next winter. Don't make any sense.”