Fallen Idols (12 page)

“Why not?’

“ ‘Cause I won't be here.”

Clancy felt like he'd been keelhauled. “Where will you be?”

“Seattle. I'm flying up to meet with some people from the University of Washington. They have a project they want to involve me in. We won't be here.”

“We?” Clancy asked, dumbly.

“Did I say
we?
Figure of speech. Sometimes … your mother…” Walt left whatever else he was going to say unsaid.

Clancy knew what his father had been unable to articulate. That Jocelyn was no longer alive was at times, for all of them, still unfathomable.

“Damn,” Walt exclaimed. He sounded genuinely unhappy about the circumstances. “Why didn't you call me earlier, if you knew you were coming out to the coast? I could have changed the meeting. It's too late to do that now, people are flying in from all over the country.”

Sonofabitch!
Clancy thought. “I'll bag tomorrow's stuff,” he told Walt. “It's not that big a deal, I've gotten what I needed out of this. I can be in L.A. by noon.”

“Noon,” Walt parroted.

“It's what, two hours from here to there? I'll rent a car, drive up, we can hang out until you have to leave. I'll change my ticket so I fly home out of the Los Angeles airport instead of the one down here.”

“Well…” Another pause. “The thing is, I won't be here then.”

“But you said …”

“I'm leaving tomorrow. My plane's at seven in the morning.”

Clancy, sitting on his bed in his hotel room, sagged. He felt like kicking himself. “I should have let you know earlier, dad. That I was coming out here. Jesus, I feel like an ass.”

“Don't be ridiculous. You didn't know.”

Screw it. He was only two hours away. “I'll come up now.”

“What do you mean?”

“I'll drive up now. They have a Hertz counter here at the hotel. I can jump in a car and be there by”—he looked at the clock on the nightstand—”ten-thirty.”

“No, that wouldn't work,” Walt answered with alacrity. “I've got this dinner meeting I'm going to now, I'm already late, I don't know how long it's going to go, then I have to pack when I come home and get a few hours of sleep, because I've got to be up at four to catch that seven o'clock plane. It won't work, son. I'm sorry.”

Clancy could hear the avoidance in his father's voice. “Dad. We have to see you. All of us do.” He was begging. He didn't care. “This is unhealthy, the way it's been.”

“I know, Clancy. It's been way too long. I'm going to change things.”

“When?”

“Soon. Very soon. I promise.”

Clancy had blown it. He had to salvage something. “Let's make a plan. Now.”

“E-mail me, we'll set it up. I've got to run. Give my love to everyone.”

The phone went dead in Clancy's hand. He resisted the temptation to hurl the receiver against the wall.

“He's screwing us over again.”

“You don't know that for sure.”

“C'mon, Clancy, this is how it's been all year long,” Tom complained. “There's always some excuse.”

After his father hung up on him, Clancy had called his brothers. It was late—they lived two time zones ahead of the West Coast, but they would want to know how he'd botched meeting up with their father.

Will had been out; Clancy left a message on his service. Will was often out, until all hours of the night. He was a young colt. He liked the ladies, and they liked him. He had been semiseriously involved with a woman for a year while in college, but it didn't stick. He wasn't ready to settle down yet. Basically, Will liked everybody—it came with being the youngest, he'd learned from the cradle how to make friends.

Will had received his MBA at the University of Minnesota the year before last and was making serious money working in the bond department at Merrill Lynch in Minneapolis, a way station to the home office in New York, where he'd be transferred in a couple of years if he kept on doing as well as he was now. Clancy had no doubt that his younger brother would make it. He was good with money. Once Clancy got his head above water and had some disposable income, he'd give it to Will to invest for him.

Tom, unlike his social-animal kid brother, was at home, in Ann Arbor. Clancy could picture him, sitting in his small apartment near the University of Michigan campus, watching a game on television, a beer in his hand and a scowl on his face. Tom was the most volatile of the brothers, the quickest to anger. Although he didn't like to hear it, particularly from his family, he was also considered the brightest. They were all smart—they came from smart stock—but Tom was a true brain.

He was also the least focused. His stated ambition was lo solve a key mystery of the universe, earning him worldwide acclaim and the Nobel Prize, but he wasn't anywhere near doing that, because he was still in school. He had been dicking around on his Ph.D. dissertation on mathematics for three years now, and he wasn't close to completing it. Sometimes he despaired that he ever would; that after years of being a perennial graduate student the university would weary of his dallying, he'd be kicked out of his program, and would have to get a humdrum job in the real world. He envied his brothers, both of whom had found their vocations and gone for them with purpose.

Like Will, Tom wasn't involved with anyone, either, but for a different reason: he was too demanding. He expected perfection, and was disappointed when whatever particular woman he'd gone for turned out to be mortal, with flaws. His mother had been the model he'd held other women up to, and none had ever approached that standard. His social life, consequently, was considerably more limited than his brothers’. One of the reasons he was taking their father's alienation from them the most personally.

“It's pretty damned coincidental that on the very day you want to go see dad, he has to go out of town,” Tom said. “That he's in such a hurry he has to leave as soon as he gets off the phone with you.”

“I guess,” Clancy admitted. He knew that what Tom was saying was true; he'd been trying to suppress that same feeling, to give their father the benefit of the doubt. But there was doubt.

“He probably isn't going anywhere. He flat-out doesn't want to see any of us. It's freaky. It's like he had a personality transplant after mom died.”

Clancy felt a heaviness in his soul—this was a lot of weight to carry, for all of them. “He did say he wished he'd come out to the gravesite with us for the commemoration, and that he wanted to get together soon.”

“When pigs fly,” Tom snorted.

“I'm going to take him at his word, one more time,” Clancy said. He didn't want to defend his father this goaround; he was as put off by Walt's erratic behavior as Tom was. But squabbling about it among themselves wasn't the answer. That just got all of them even more upset.

“Well,” Tom said grudgingly, “you gave it a shot.”

“I should have called him earlier.”

“Or gone up there and sabotaged him. That's what I would've done.”

“And driven him away even more? No thanks. Sooner or later, he has to become involved with us again,” Clancy argued. “He can't stay apart from his family for the rest of his life.”

“I sure hope you're right,” his brother said gloomily. “But the way he's been acting, it feels like that's exactly what he wants to do.”

Callie was more sympathetic about Clancy's striking out than his brother had been. “He isn't ready to come back to the fold yet. When he is, he'll let us know. Don't beat yourself up over this,” she counseled her husband gently. Whatever's making him act this way will change. It's going to take time. You can't force time, Clancy. You work with injured athletes, you know that.”

“But it's so damned frustrating.”

“Leave it alone.”

“Since I have no choice, I have to. I wanted to see him, Callie,” Clancy lamented. “I need to know that he's okay. He's never lived alone, he never had to deal with the day-to-day, routine stuff. Grocery shopping, laundry, bills. Mom always handled all that for him. He could be living like a bag lady, for all we know,” he said, forcing a laugh.

“I sincerely doubt that,” she replied. “Your dad can take care of himself. He's a capable man. Give him credit.”

“I guess.” Clancy didn't sound convinced. “He always had mom at his side. Being on his own is foreign to his nature. He could never stand a void.”

“He'll be fine,” she said again. Clancy's fretting was becoming exasperating. “You're the one I'm worried about. Let's not talk about this anymore now, okay? It's making you get agitated. I'll pick you up at the airport the day after tomorrow, we'll go home and talk about it. Without stress.”

“Yeah, that'll be good. Incidentally, I'm flying home out of L.A. instead of San Diego.”

There was a brief pause. “Why are you going to be in Los Angeles?” she asked.

“One of the guys I met here at the conference has a clinic in L.A. that's similar to mine but with newer equipment, stuff I haven't seen yet. I'm going up there with him to check it out. I'm out here already, so why not?”

“If you want to,” she said, sounding dubious. “This has nothing to do with Walt, does it?”

“How could it?” he answered quickly. “He won't be there.”

“Okay, then,” she said. “I miss you, honey. I want you home.”

“I miss you, too.”

Clancy hadn't been serious when he had told Callie he was worried his father could be living like a bum; that was nonsense, and they both knew it. But voicing the possibility of deterioration, out loud, had made real the true concern they had about Walt—that he wasn't in control of his life. Not his outward life; Clancy knew his father wouldn't fall apart physically, he had too much vanity about how he looked. But it was obvious to all of them that Walt's emotional life, the life of his mind and heart, was increasingly becoming a cause for alarm. A passionate professor doesn't quit his prized, lifelong post without fighting back, and a loving father doesn't turn away from his children unless there are deeply felt issues left unresolved. Losing the one absolute in your life, as had happened to him with Jocelyn's sudden and violent death, could have thrown everything out of whack for Walt, who was a colossus, not only in the world, but more important, in his own mind. A man who couldn't be bothered with life's petty aggravations, who pretty much didn't even know they existed because of how his wife had sheltered him from them, could be thrown for a loop when he unavoidably had to confront them, now that he was alone.

Clancy couldn't literally be with his father now, since Walt was conveniently not going to be in L.A. (a spur-of-the-moment invention, Clancy thought, but motive was irrelevant; Walt wasn't going to be there), but at least he could see the physical circumstances of his father's current situation. That would be better than nothing. He was only a hundred miles away. Besides being concerned, he was curious. They had lived in the same house in Madison since Clancy was six years old. It had been the family's shelter from the storms of life, a big, rambling place, full of happy memories. Walt had often vowed, hail-jokingly, that they'd never get him out of there until he was dead.

Now, instead, his mother was dead and a large part of his father, Clancy knew, was with her. So the house had to go. Clancy could understand that. It was better not to live among those memories if the person you had created them with wasn't there to share them.

What would this new house be like, Clancy thought? Similar to the old one, or a deliberate departure?

It would be dumb not to take advantage of the proximity to find out.

Changing his schedule cost Clancy an additional seventy-five dollars. He paid with his mileage-plus Visa card and put the Dodge Neon Hertz rental car on the same card. At least he'd get some frequent-flyer miles out of the transaction. The counter attendant gave him directions to Walt's address in Los Angeles.

He checked out of the hotel at nine-thirty in the morning; there was no reason to rush. He'd arrive at his father's new house around noon, satisfy his curiosity, be at the L.A. airport in plenty of time for his evening flight home. Throwing his duffel onto the backseat of the little rental car, he hit the road.

The journey to Los Angeles was uneventful and boring. The I-5 took him up into Orange County, where it melded into the I-405. An ugly drive. Mile after mile of billboards, chain hotels, high-rise office buildings, each one a weak carbon copy of the other, their unifying feature being floor-to-ceiling windows tinted dark against the sun, dozens of floors of them. Anonymous, benignly foreboding. As he entered Los Angeles County he passed by massive oil refineries that were lit up even in the brightness of day, their natural gas waste fires flickering against the cataract sky.

Following the instructions on his map, he got off the freeway at Sunset Boulevard and drove east for a brief spell, then took a right on Beverly Glen, heading south. To his left, a short distance away, he could see the redbrick towers of the UCLA campus.

He reached Walt's street. It was brisk inside the car from the air-conditioning, but he felt clammy. Nerves. His dad wouldn't be home, but he was jittery anyway. He was intruding into a situation he had been firmly requested (ordered, to be precise) to keep his ass out of.

He'd take a quick look around. If there weren't any nosy neighbors lurking about he'd try to get a glimpse inside through a window. As he got closer, checking the house numbers against the address on the slip of paper in his hand, a slow burn started inside his gut, a reaction to his angst about intruding.

Screw this defensive-attitude feeling, he thought. There was no reason for him to be guilty about what he was doing. Walt was his father. He had every right to be here. He had to know that his father was okay.

Three quarters of the way down the block he saw his father's new house. It was one-story, Southwestern-style. Classic-looking, like pictures Clancy had seen of movie stars’ homes: whitewashed walls, turquoise wood window frames, Mexican tile roof. It was set back about twenty yards from the street, fronted by a well-manicured lawn. A large fig tree threw shade onto part of the lawn and house. The yard was bordered with tastefully arranged desert succulents, small cactus, and iceplant. On the left, a driveway led from the street to a detached garage behind the house. The garage door was closed. The wooden blinds on the house windows facing the street were three-quarters drawn.