Man Walks Into a Room (28 page)

Pip’s mother, her days spent in a room with the blinds half-drawn, smoking cigarettes and drinking diet sodas, longing for so many lost things, among them that six-year-old girl, christened Patricia, who so brilliantly entered the world of cocktail glasses under the hearty name of Pip. Ray was right: the misery of others was only an abstraction. And because it is impossible to contemplate, to actually
feel
the suffering of another without reference to one’s own, Samson was naturally moved to think of Anna, and then, finally, his own mother. He knew
almost nothing of the last twenty years of her life. He could not bear the thought of her having lived out her days alone, perhaps having drawn her own blinds and sat staring into space. Whoever the son was that observed his mother slowly enter middle age; who grew up, left for college, and called her regularly; who moved away and returned from time to time to visit, to register with compassion the small humiliations of old age; who received the phone call that she was ill and flew out to sit by her side and watch as the cancer quickly advanced; whoever it was that saw his mother out of the world and buried her was now as unreachable as she.

And what is a life, Samson wondered now, without a witness?

He felt an overwhelming desire to be close to his mother. He wondered where she was buried. How could he not know where his own mother lay six feet under? She’d never moved from the house he’d grown up in; that much Samson had gathered from Anna. Presumably he’d buried her in a cemetery nearby. How difficult could it be to find her? Were there not records of these things, the grassy plots sons stake out to bury the women who brought them tooth and nail into the world? He would find her grave and when he found it, flesh of her flesh, he would fall to his knees and grieve for her. He would lie down and close his eyes, and pressing his body to the ground, he would bear last witness.

The bus route terminated in a parking lot near the beach. Gulls perched on rusted metal posts, heavyset and unflappable. Samson nudged Pip awake. Her head rolled back and she opened her eyes. He felt the restless fervor of a man who’d been locked up for years, whose recurrent fantasy had been nothing more than an unobstructed view. He wanted to grab Pip and haul her over his head, to jog her down to the ocean and plunge them both under in a briny baptism. Instead he reached out and unceremoniously brushed the hair out of her eyes, tucking it behind one ear. Pip narrowed her eyes but didn’t protest.

Outside in the parking lot, they stood blinking in the light, inhaling the coastal, arboreal smell of California, the bracing Pacific where
soon Pip would be washed clean of everything but the love of God. From then on she would be called Patricia. The past would live under a different name.

There was someone waiting for her, a woman with graying pigtails sent by the Chapel. She stood waving in front of a van whose bumper sticker said
I Brake for Miracles.
As a parting gift Pip handed him the Bible, folding down the pages about Samson. The camera was still around his neck, and he took it off and hung it around hers. She smiled and he smiled back, and for a few moments they searched each other’s face with the awkward shyness of people suddenly reminded of how little they know one another. Part of him didn’t want to let her go, wanted to accompany her, to watch over her sleep and protect her from harm as he had failed to do for Anna. He wanted to take her small-boned body in his arms and carry her safely into a new life.

But he didn’t, and finally Pip shrugged and walked to the van. The woman embraced her as if they were old friends. Pip endured the hug, then threw her backpack into the car and climbed in after it. As they pulled away she turned and waved through the window, and Samson lifted his hand in a salute.

THERE WAS A THING
he liked to do that comforted him when he was a child. Lying in his bed, he would imagine what other people were doing at the same instant. He would allow his mind to drift out the window and down the street, floating above the trees and rooftops as his great-uncle Max had once floated, in his youth, above the Italian city. He would pause outside the upstairs window of the house next door where Mr. Shreiner practiced his golf swing bathed in the blue glow of the television. He would continue down the street, past the Sargents, whose oldest son, Chuck, came home from college one winter under mysterious circumstances. Mrs. Sargent told people he was writing a play, and Samson would look into Chuck’s bedroom to see him in his mother’s bathrobe, hunched over a typewriter, his hair freakishly unkempt. Samson would drift through yards that emitted an odor of rotting sweetness. He would linger in front of Jollie Lambird’s
house, watching as she slept. In his silent sentry Samson would float over the trim lawns and still swimming pools, through the faint blue night of suburbia. He’d sail over the humped foothills with their mossy oaks. His mother would be out on a date, and he would find her wearing her red dress and the black pumps that pinched her toes, laughing like a gypsy with her head thrown back, leaning into the man she was dancing with. Who the man was hardly mattered, a suitor stepped into the spotlight of his mother’s attention before receding into obscurity, someone she might have met at a rally, a divorced dentist, a moony artist. His mother never appeared to be deeply affected by the comings or goings of these admirers. Sometimes it seemed to Samson—and maybe also to the men on whom she leaned as she limped up the driveway in her pumps at the end of the night—that she was only biding her time.

This bird’s-eye view comforted him, the assurance that beyond the walls of his bedroom the night was also breathing, Mr. Shreiner winding up his nine-iron, his mother dreamily spinning across a floor, taken not so much with her dance partner or the band or the pattern of other whirling bodies, but with her own loveliness. He would continue on, pulled by a gentle, watchful gravity, tumbling above mountains and plains, across the patterned country. He would pass over countless lives like the spinning dial of a radio tuning toward the lone signal of one voice.

It was one of his earliest memories, listening to his father speak. Samson had been convinced that he would have been able to recognize his father’s voice if he ever heard it again. Once, toward the end of a Little League game, lunging for a ball in the outfield, he was sure he’d heard his father shout his name. The ball landed with a soft thud into his mitt and, heart pounding, he turned triumphantly, holding it in the air. He scanned the bleachers, squinting through the almost submarine light. But there was no sign of anyone who resembled the man in the photographs. He walked back toward the bases still searching the crowd, the ball in his mitt. After the game Samson waited, watching the thinning crowd until the last cars pulled away. When everyone had gone he walked up to the plate and took a few practice swings. He
heard the proud crack of the bat meeting the ball and—as the imaginary ball vanished into the inky air above the ballpark—an ecstatic cheer led by his father, whose voice rose buoyantly above the rest.
Atta boy, Sammy. Atta boy!
He made a victory round of the bases and touched home plate. Then he kept running through the empty parking lot and down the street. Later at night, after he’d made his local tour above the rooftops, he fell asleep traveling on toward that voice.

Now he was on his way back, reversing through space. He watched the ocean slip in and out of view from the taxi window. The driver had a sour look on his face and was hunched over the wheel. He had deep-set eyes and wore a sweatshirt with the hood pulled up.

Samson had found his great-uncle Max listed in the address book in his bag. Discovering what blows the passage of time had delivered him seemed a wrenching prospect. But aside from Anna, Max was the only person Samson could think of who would know where his mother was buried. He was living, if he was still alive, at a place called Fairview Homes on Monte Rosa Avenue in Menlo Park, and for a hundred and fifty dollars paid in advance, the taxi driver had agreed to take Samson there. He’d handed over the money and the driver had greedily wet his fingertips and counted it out. Then they’d set off, the driver keeping one hand on the radio as he drove, scrupulously adjusting the volume every few seconds. He played the dial as if it were an instrument, a counterpoint to the gas pedal he jerkily pumped. He chortled whenever there was a song he especially liked. Samson wondered whether it had been a good idea to sit up front. He wondered if the man’s bludgeoning instruments were in the trunk. He considered taking Pip’s Bible out and making a show of reading it.
Come unto me, all ye that labor,
he’d tremulously announce, and if the driver seemed receptive Samson would tell him that he was a pilgrim who had given up all his earthly possessions. In a voice as inspired as the preacher’s Pip had heard over the radio, he’d explain how he had given up the woman he’d loved, and not only her but all his memories of her too. He would tell the driver how he’d surrendered his past for a plot of emptiness.

Feeling emboldened, chastened by his own sanctity, Samson took
the Bible out and arranged it on his lap. The driver bore down on the road and took no notice, manning the wheel and pumping the gas pedal with disturbing rapture. Samson removed the slides from the other pocket one by one, lining them up on the cover of Pip’s Bible. Either the man didn’t notice or he didn’t care. He twisted the radio up to full pitch. Probably he wouldn’t give a hoot if Samson fished a severed finger out of his pocket and laid it down on the dash.

He would tell the driver, should he happen to ask, that he was a pilgrim. He would say that he was on his way home, having been gone for years. This would capture the man’s sympathies and he would lower the volume and lean in to hear each word as Samson told him the story of his travails, all ending now as he sped him homeward to his mother. The driver’s eyes would fill with tears and he would speak of the importance of his task. To ensure safe passage, Samson would tweak the truth a bit and say that his mother was dying and not already dead.

When they got off the highway at Menlo Park they couldn’t find Monte Rosa Avenue. They stopped for directions but got even more lost. The driver’s face darkened and he hunched farther over the wheel. He drove like a man possessed, making jerky turns whenever the urge struck him. Samson ignored him. He was consumed by the uncanny spectacle of streets he remembered from his childhood. That they still existed and that he remembered them was exoneration: proof that his memory had served him right. They drove down quiet streets lined with stucco houses. The late-afternoon light fell like dust on the leaves. Samson stuck his head out of the window and felt the warm air. A vertiginous feeling came over him.

Within a few minutes they miraculously found themselves on Monte Rosa Avenue. The nursing home was marked with a discreet sign in gilded script that said
Fairview Homes,
plural despite the singular brick structure perched on a hill set back from the road. The man didn’t bother to turn up the drive, just dumped Samson at the curb and reached over to pull the door shut.

“Hey!” Samson flashed his wallet in the window. “How much for you to wait?”

The driver paused, licking his lips. “It would cost you.”

“But how much?”

“Depends what we’re talking about.”

“Half an hour. An hour tops. Definitely not longer than an hour.”

The man fiddled with the radio.

“How much would that be?” Samson repeated.

“A hundred.”

“Fifty.”

The man snorted and jacked up the volume. Samson leaned in and lowered it.

“Seventy-five,” he said, and before the driver could answer he turned and jogged up the hill. Behind him there was a blast of music, a signal that a deal had been struck.

SOMETIMES THERE
IS an image that outlasts all the others, though one never knows what it will be. He would have been no more than six or seven, standing in the door of Uncle Max’s study. A smell of pipe smoke, the light shuttered, falling in slats. The adults were out on the patio; he could hear the occasional glissando of laughter and the clink of cutlery on the plates. The sound of the afternoon passing slowly, according to a design beyond his grasp.