Heft (34 page)

The Harpers go next and then Lindsay and I look at each other, and then we go down to the basement.

I think of a time not that long ago, oh just a couple of months ago, when I would pick Lindsay up from this house and drive her places, when my mother was at home. When she was alive, when she was a wreck but alive. When I had the option of going home to see her. When I didn’t—when I never went home to see her.

Stop, says Lindsay. Stop thinking what you’re thinking.

We lie down so she’s at a right angle to me on the curved sectional couch. Our heads are touching. I kissed her down here.

We’re silent for a while. I wait for Lindsay to talk. She is like this: quiet, quiet, until she builds up the courage to say what it is she has to say.

Are you going to call him? she says, finally.

No, I say.

—Why not?

—I’m going to write to him.

—Why?

It’s what my mother would have done, I say.

I dig in my back pocket for my wallet and take out her goodbye note to me
.
I hand it to Lindsay. It is the most trust I’ve ever put in anyone.

When she is done reading it she hands it back to me without saying anything.

She was a shitty writer, I say, and I laugh. It’s not funny though. I wish I hadn’t said it.

No she wasn’t, says Lindsay, firmly. And Lindsay is the best writer I know.

I take something else out of my wallet next. It’s the piece of paper with the phone number and address of this man Arthur Opp.

I hand this to her next, over my head.

Brooklyn, says Lindsay.

I’m gonna mail it to him, I say.

The whole note? says Lindsay.

The whole note, I say.

You don’t want to keep it? says Lindsay.

No, I say.

In fact I want to get rid of it very badly. As soon as I can. The week after she died, I read it all the time because I missed her. But after a while I got sick of it, sick of regretting, sick of remembering it all. Finding her. Calling the goddamn ambulance. Sitting in the goddamn hospital. I want to drop it in the mailbox and be done with it. It seems easier to me than calling him and explaining the whole situation. It seems right.

•

Lindsay gets up suddenly and walks to the supply closet. She disappears inside it and comes out with an envelope and paper.

Here, she says, handing both to me.

She helps me write the note to go along with it. I make her write the address on the envelope because her handwriting is nicer than mine and I want to make very certain it won’t be lost in the mail. She looks at me when it is time to write the return address and I tell her I guess she should use her own. It’s more likely to find me here now.

I hold the sealed envelope in my hands and look at it. I look at her.

We can mail it now, says Lindsay. If you want.

Very quietly we tiptoe out of the dim house. The only light in the entryway comes from the tree. Outside it is cold and still and I can see every star. Lindsay lets me drive her car, and we both try not to slam the doors. At the Pells Landing Post Office I leave the car running and get out and walk up to the mail slot on the side of the building and drop it in. I close my eyes for a minute. Just a minute.

When I get back in Lindsay has turned on the radio and I smile at her for the first time in what seems like years. And I feel like a kid for the first time in years.

Do you mind if we go someplace? I ask her.

—Where?

—Do you mind?

—No.

So I drive up the Hudson to the beach I know, and there are little lights on the dry-docked boats, and a train whistles by in the distance. This is where I came the night I kissed you, I said. After Margo broke my taillight.

Why did you come here? she asks me.

I wanted to think about you some more, I say.

And I was avoiding my mother, I say, but I laugh, it’s a joke.

We talk for a very long time and I ask her if it gets easier and she says not really, just different, a different duller kind of hurt, the kind that doesn’t surprise you anymore. I ask what her parents were like when it happened and she says they have never been the same. We fought all the time for two years after it happened, she says. But not so much anymore.

After a while I turn the car off so we don’t waste gas and it’s so warm that we fall asleep there, facing the boats and the dark river.

I dream of many things, among them the old man who helped me and my mother get to the World Series, the old man from Pennsylvania who, years ago, paid for our car to be towed. I think of him when I need relief, when I need to feel that the world is not after all very bad. In my dream he is driving in his truck with my mother beside him. They are singing along to the radio. They’re smiling. I am there and not there. I am outside and they are in.

When I wake up I am shivering with cold. I look to my right and Lindsay is crying. She pushes her forehead into my shoulder like a child and says, I miss him. Oh. I miss him.

Dear Arthur Opp,

My name is Kel Keller. But my real name is Arthur Turner Keller. I think you know my mother Charlene Turner Keller. I am sorry to tell you this, but she has died.

I am very sorry to be the one to tell you, in a letter.

Why am I writing to you, you might be wondering. It is because of something she wrote to me actually. I have enclosed her last letter to me. It is important that you have it. You will see why.

I have put my address and my phone number on this envelope. I hope that you will be in touch with me if she was telling the truth. Which I don’t know if she was. She wasn’t well when she died. Or for a lot of her, most of her, life.

Yours truly,

Arthur “Kel” Keller

• • •

I
did not see the letter until a day after it came. Since Charlene
died, & since Yolanda left, I had not been checking my mail as eagerly as I once checked it. It seemed to me that everything that happened this extraordinary autumn was over & done with & I was finished hoping for more. The mailman came every day and pushed the mail through the slot & I let it sit there. If I walked by it I’d pick it up. But since it was always junk, I usually let it lie.

Then on Wednesday I mustered up some effort and scooped up the whole pile & began the nasty process of sorting. When I came across his letter I put everything else down.

The letter was written in three different hands. My address, and the return address, were written on the envelope in very neat proper handwriting. The first page that I pulled out was written in a boy’s messy handwriting. And the second and third pages were written by Charlene. O I’d recognize her handwriting anyplace.

Now. What the letter said I am still repeating in my head. Over & over again like a mantra. I must have read it thirty times in utter astonishment. I wanted to make sure I hadn’t gone mad.

My first reaction—I am weak—was to take the blessing that had been bestowed upon me & swallow it greedily & never look back.

To tell him:
Yes, yes, it is possible you are my son, you, Arthur, were named for me, & therefore you are my son, my very admirable son, fully formed, absolutely perfect, my son. My long-lost son. Arthur.

But I couldn’t do it. It wouldn’t have been right to deceive him. It would have haunted me forever & ever. I would have taken it into the afterlife with me. I would not have rested easy in my grave.

I walked into my bedroom & got out Charlene’s letters & leafed through them to find my favorite one of all. It is my one love letter. It was sent in the midst of our courtship. In it she said many things (O I could name them all) but the one that is most important to me now is something she said that I found peculiar then.

She said that in her wildest dreams we would be married & I would be the father of her child. At the time I took it as something hypothetical, but I wonder now if she already knew. If she was pregnant when she wrote to me. If she stopped seeing me because she was pregnant by somebody else.
You would make a very good father I am sure
, she wrote to me then.
You’re smart and you respect people
.

We were never intimate. Occasionally we held hands. Occasionally she took my arm. Occasionally. Nothing more. The closest to Charlene I ever felt was the very first time we met outside of school—the one time I helped her with her coat. If I could have helped her with her coat for hours, for the rest of her life, I would have.

I sat on the bed and read her old letter over and over again. & then I read the new one I held in my hands. For one whole day I pondered what to do.

Finally I allowed myself to call Yolanda, though I had promised myself I never would, not until she called me first. It was important & I had no adviser. Fortunately for me she answered.

“Invite him to your dinner party,” she said, after I told her my strange tale.

& I felt somehow that this was a very good idea. & I felt that now Yolanda would come too.

My task then was to write back to the boy.

I am deeply sorry to hear about your mother’s death. I knew her when she was about twenty years old. We had a special sort of friendship, but I regret to tell you that, although you do have a father—everyone does—he is not I. I wish with all of my heart that I could tell you differently. I hope this doesn’t bring you any sort of despair. Fathers aren’t all they are cracked up to be. For example I know who my father is, but I also know he isn’t a very good one, and I probably would have been better off without him. All my life I have heard it said that you can’t choose your family, and all my life I have lamented this fact as true & unfair. But I think it is possible to look at things differently: I believe we can choose to surround ourselves with a circle of people we love and admire & they can become our adopted family. For example I had an adopted sister for many years. Her name was Marty. & I seem to have found a daughter to adopt along the way as well, & her name is Yolanda, & I hope you will meet her someday.

And then I invited him to my dinner party, & told him about all the letters I’d had from his mother over the years, & that maybe I could tell him about his mother when she was young, & I encouraged him to bring whomever he pleased.

I opened my front door & put it in my mailbox and I tipped the happy little red flag up.

At last I walked to the shelf & took his picture off it & studied him closely. I stood there, very still, until my knees hurt. Suddenly I thought I saw in him a certain resemblance to my father, when he was young. Something about his eyes & ears. His stern worried expression. O yes, I thought, he could look like my father.

I imagined, one day, telling the boy the story of our name. My mother used to tell me it was a name for kings. When I was growing up this embarrassed me because I thought of myself as very far from kingly. But looking at his picture—Arthur, who was named for me—I reconsidered. Maybe all along it suited me, if only so it could be given to him.

• • •

L
ast night, a thought occurred to me that I had never had
before, and the thought was of Arthur Opp’s letters to my mother. All of the letters he sent to our house. At times they were separated by weeks or months, but they always came, and my mother always brightened and smiled and took them into her bedroom to read. He was a sort of magic in her life, and in a way he was magic for me too—the mysterious Arthur Opp, who in my childish dreams was a rich benefactor who would one day appear and marry her.

I was sure she had saved his letters. I was sitting at dinner with the Harpers when I realized this and I nearly jumped up from my chair and then I sat back down again.

Everything OK, Kel? said Mr. Harper, and I said yes it was, but I had forgotten about something.

You need to go someplace? said Mr. Harper.

Yes, I said, hoping he would not ask for an explanation, and sure enough he did not, and so for the first time I felt like a man instead of a boy.

This time it wasn’t so bad going into my house. Mr. Harper’s sister the real estate agent has gotten some people to make it look nicer to get it ready to sell, and the electricity is back on. When I flicked the lights on inside the front door they went on merrily and the furniture was all neat with nothing on it.

I did have to take some deep breaths before going into her room, but her bed had different sheets on it and it was made up nicely, and so it was better. For a moment I was worried that maybe they had thrown things out, the real estate people, but I yanked open some of the drawers in her desk and all of the documents in there still seemed to be in place.

I had already searched through her desk once so I knew Arthur Opp’s letters wouldn’t be in there. I went to her bedside table instead and opened the one little drawer in it, and there they were, right away, no trouble at all to find.

All the letters were flattened and unfolded in a stack. Next to them was a stack of envelopes. She had thrown nothing away. Gingerly I took out the letters. They were on paper monogrammed with
A.C.O.
at the top. It looked classy. They went in order from latest to earliest. It was a heavy pile of paper, thick as a book. The top one was dated September 12th of this year, and I did not want to read it right away. I tried to think about what was happening September 12th but I couldn’t recall.

So instead I read the oldest one, from December 20, 1992.

Dear Charlene,
it began.
Thank you very kindly for your thoughtful note.

I only let myself read that one. I sat there for quite a while. Then I tucked all of them under my arm, and walked down the stairs, and into the living room, and into the kitchen, and out of the door, turning every light off as I went.

When I got back to the Harpers’ it was late and the little girls were asleep. Lindsay’s parents were someplace else in the house and I could hear their quiet voices going back and forth in a murmur. Lindsay was waiting up for me.