The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter (70 page)

“Yes. You're the brother of the deceased?”

Randall catches his breath. Everything in the room disappears, some other dimension.

“Hello?”

His voice quiet: “Yes.”

“I didn't know him. We just bought this place six months ago.” The man clears his throat often and sniffs occasionally, as if suffering from allergies. “When we bought it, no one told us the previous tenant had died. The super, right?”

“Yes.”

“Yeah, we were told the super died. Just nobody told us before we moved in we were living in the super's quarters. 4F, right?”

“Yes.”

“Sorry to tell ya. You didn't know your brother passed on, huh.”

Randall feels something wet in his palm. Blood. He realizes he is still holding the pen he was using to write the check, and has stabbed himself. He stares at the thick red feeling no pain, a stream slowly rolling down his wrist, his arm.

“I'm sorry. Condolences,” in a tone that also sounds like “Goodbye.” Randall speaks quickly.

“You don't? You don't know where his family moved to?”

“No, I think there was a little lag time between when. You know. And the time we moved in.”

Monique waits in the kitchen, dinner ready but not served, her arms crossed.

She's furious to find out Randall would make such a decision, to offer his bone marrow, without consulting her. She says she would leave him if he ever did such a crazy thing, but thank God that won't happen because B.J. is long gone. She is instantly remorseful of her outburst, and the one-sided argument is over. They are silent in bed that night until she says, “He'da never done it for you.”

“You don't know that.”

“He was ready to let you sleep in the street when you come visit him in New York. His own brother. He wanted nothin to do with ya, so what's that tell you bout if the tables was turned.”

“You don't know that,” and Randall wipes his cheek, rolling over to face the wall.

A week later Monique sees the letter first, the same one he had written to his sister-in-law, now stamped RETURN TO SENDER, ADDRESS UNKNOWN. She leaves it for Randall and he finds it and they never discuss it.

She spends Saturday morning at the mall and when she comes home she stops, staring at the framed pictures on the wall and on the mantel above the faux fireplace. Something has been altered. All the photographs are of her numerous relatives with the exception of the one taken on the occasion of Randall's sister's nuptials: Benja in her gown smiling with Aaron, her groom and soon-to-be batterer. To the left is their mother, a bittersweet smile which Monique had always attributed to her sadness that her husband was missing this, Randall's father snatched away from them so tragically only two years before. To the couple's right is tall B.J. at twenty, and next to him Randall, a diminutive fifteen. And now she discovers what is out of kilter. This family gallery, this parade of happy white folks, and now stuck in the lower-right corner of Benja's wedding, as if she were part of the family, is a school photo of a small brown child. Monique sighs. The resemblance is uncanny, the girl unmistakably B.J.'s. And when she peers closer, she is startled to note a touch of Randy in his first cousin.

 

10

In the summer of 1980, Randall and Monique received the news that their son Randy had expired in a crash during a routine air force training exercise. Randall, who had vigilantly prayed the country would stay at peace, was astonished and bewildered to envision his son's death in a practice drill, though in his frenetic mourning-engendered research he was to discover that fully 1,556 active soldiers had lost their lives by “accident” in 1980 alone (and an additional 174 by homicide and 231 “Self Inflicted”) while precisely zero had died by “Hostile Action.” The grieving father bitterly demanded of the heavens what he had ever done to deserve a life of nothing but misery, but as he quickly realized the answer was too painfully obvious, he rephrased the question so as to insert Monique's name in the subject line. At any rate, he didn't believe it was fair for the sins of the father to be visited upon the son. (In a bizarre coincidence the Taggert boy, also rehabilitated from illegal substances, had gone the rich-boy route of college—his family relieved that he now partook of nothing but booze—only to be found dead that fall after a dorm keg party: alcohol poisoning.)

The months following Randy's death saw Monique's paralyzing grief give way to a new horror: Randall's bereavement over the loss of his son had blossomed into a renewed search for his brother—an energetic awareness that, unlike the conclusiveness of Randy's charred remains, he had never gotten concrete confirmation on the issue of B.J.'s demise. On his two monthly Saturdays off he would drive to Austin and spend hours in the new central library, the
New York Times
microfiche, checking every day since his brother's alleged passing for his name—not just the obituaries but, optimistically, the front page, local page, sports, arts, as if his brother may have committed some act of heroism or depravity so remarkable as to have made the Gotham press. In addition he would approach anyone at work, stranger or not, if he heard they were going to New York and ask if they wouldn't mind stopping by 247 West 53rd Street to inquire if anyone there might know anything about Benjamin Evans. (Monique never found out about the private investigators he'd phoned, the one avenue Randall quickly discovered was universes out of his financial reach.)

After months of reasoning and pleading, Monique was through. She demanded a separation of sorts, banishing him to the basement since two apartments were not in their budget. Because she didn't want to cross paths in the kitchen but also didn't like cooking for one, the arrangement was that she would have her own dinner at six and leave his plate on the table for him to have promptly at seven. When he emerged the kitchen would invariably be spotless, the cookware washed and Monique nowhere to be found, though he could usually hear the television faintly from their bedroom upstairs. Work mornings she would already be in the backseat of the car when he was ready to depart and, like a cabbie and passenger, he would drive his wife and himself to work, not a syllable passing between them. At first all this was obviously awkward, but as the months dragged on to a year, then two, they settled into a strange meditative comfort in their isolation. Occasionally they might briefly catch each other's eye at the factory, but an unknowing observer would peg them strangers.

Somewhere in the silence Randall had discovered word-find puzzles. He stands holding the lightbulbs he'd just picked up (Monique had left a note telling him they were needed) and staring at the Walmart magazine rack. He sees he has already gone through all the issues up to the present, May 1983, so on the drive home he decides to stop by that new little periodical place. He'd not been there before but, as it's a specialty shop, he imagines there may be more to choose from.

The store is quiet, and Randall appears to be the only person in it other than the bearded heavyset man perusing an
Esquire
behind the counter, but the space is a maze of tall shelves so it's possible there may be another customer hidden somewhere. As he walks through the aisles searching for
PUZZLES AND GAMES
he passes
FITNESS, GUNS AND SPORT, CELEBRITY
and after turning a corner:
LITERARY JOURNALS
. Some impulse from his long past, of lustfully devouring books and having a report card to show for it, draws him here.
The Antioch Review
,
Granta
,
The Paris Review
. He's never heard of any of them. On the cover of one of the journals under the subtitle
FICTION BY
he skims several names, and his perusing freezes at “April May June Evans.”

April Evans may be a common name, but when he ate dinner at their table in New York didn't she say she was a writer? And some joke about her whole name, that it
was
three months? Randall opens to the table of contents. The story is called “The Purple Room.”

Paulina, who is black and deaf, exits a New York subway train and finds herself lost. She hands a note asking for directions to a very tall gentle-looking white man, Orville. He hesitates, then signs back, thus blowing his cover as another deaf person. Paulina is delighted, as she had known somewhere in her heart there was a reason that, of all the people in the station, she had singled out
this
particular man for help. Later she invites him to a party but instead they spend hours at a diner, and that burnt burger and greasy fries will remain the best meal she has ever eaten in her life. She finds out that night that he has never been physically intimate with another person, and she deduces, and is later proven more correct than she even imagines, that he is a terribly lonely man. No family, no friends. She has had several lovers in her life, all black. She's from the Deep South (as is he) and had never before had any interest in being with a white man—yet from the moment she'd met
this
white man . . .

Their days and nights are blissful, and yet there are times when she glimpses him, when he's at his bedroom desk alone and doesn't realize she's awake, or even when he's sleeping, and a terrible affliction crosses his face. Some torment from his past he cannot escape.

They are recently married and Paulina very pregnant when Orville comes home with news: Surprise! His long-lost brother has shown up.

“You buyin?”

The man from behind the counter.

“You been here half an hour, you can't jus—” Randall, sitting on the floor cross-legged, looks up and the man trips back. “Oh! Sorry, you okay? You need somethin?” Randall is confused, then realizes what he is feeling must be registering on his face. He looks down at the journal, turning to the front cover. $5.50. He pulls out his billfold, hands the cashier a ten.

“I can get the change on the way out.” His voice is quiet.

“Yes sir.” The man nods and walks away.

Something in Orville's wild eyes as he tells his wife that his brother is about to walk through the door, coupled with Orville's silence on the matter of his family, frightens Paulina. And yet her heart pounds with a certain eagerness: her first in-law! A window to Orville's past! And at dinner Edmund is courteous, even warm. Soon afterward Paulina retires for the evening, leaving the brothers to themselves. She lies awake a while, something bothering her, haunting her, despite Edmund's cordiality, perhaps
because of
Edmund's cordiality, which doesn't seem to correlate with Orville's secrecy. Then she's in a room surrounded by monsters, men in men's clothes with grotesque faces. At one point in the dream she recognizes the gait and gestures of one of the monsters as those of Edmund's, and she's afraid, but the dream doesn't truly kick in to a nightmare until she is suddenly aware that Orville is among the monsters, his presence is palpable, and she's not distressed that he's a monster per se
but rather that she can't discern
which
monster, she doesn't know who he is, going from one beast to the other in a panic, trying to pull off their masks except they aren't masks so they won't come off.

The next morning Paulina sits up in bed reading a magazine. He stumbles in, having pulled an all-nighter with his brother, seeming to be sleepwalking, and he tells her he would like to nap just five minutes, that Edmund had stepped out a moment, and Orville places his hand on Paulina's stomach and is about to ask a question about the baby, his hand signing the question, but before he can complete his thought he has conked out.

Something intrusive and inexplicably sinister when his brother slowly pushes their bedroom door wide, and proceeds to have a private chat with Paulina. Edmund has a confession to make.

Randall claps the journal closed, trying to steady his breathing. The pages are now damaged, sweat and tears, so he feels it's only right he has made the purchase. He slowly opens it again.

Edmund tells Paulina that when he was in high school he got into a fight with another boy over a girl. The girl finally chose the rival, and although Orville warned his younger brother to let it go, Edmund could not. He hunted down his enemy and stabbed him to death. Reform school till twenty-one.

A cry escapes Randall. He holds the periodical tight against his chest, eyes closed. He's certain everything he has read up until now has been fact, and he whispers to his sister-in-law his relief for this single departure from the truth: “Thank you.”

The dog days of summer had descended upon them when Paulina accompanied Orville to the clinic. She had told him, It's nothing, It's nothing, her hands still inadvertently speaking the words over and over even after he had been taken in for examination and she was sitting in the waiting room. She looked around at the others. Many of them would receive bad news, and she selfishly prayed to be among the few winners in this game. She was returning from the bathroom when she saw the doctor standing there, staring at her. His face. He turned, expecting her to follow, but her legs were frozen, her body stuck. She had not yet heard anything devastating, she would stay here fastened to this moment, in this moment safe.

Sitting with Orville in the ambulance transporting him to the hospital, her hands were aflutter. That Dr. Alvarez has said the patient survival rate had improved in recent years, that Orville had been otherwise healthy, didn't smoke, rarely drank. Orville nodded without responding. When the nurses asked Paulina to step outside the room as he underwent a procedure, he asked her to go home, to open his lower desk drawer and find the superintendent's contract he had signed and to bring Felix, her old lawyer friend from Gallaudet, to see him. As the two men discussed his pension, how it would go to her, and Orville was being advised on the drafting of his will, she was burning with fury. She would
not
jump to the worst-case scenario. They only needed to find a donor.

The problem was family would make the best match, not to mention would be most likely to volunteer, and his parents and sister were all dead. And his brother. When they had exhausted every possibility for a bone marrow donor Orville still refused her pleas to contact Edmund. In desperation she finally stooped very low, suggesting that his feud with his brother had taken precedence over his love for his daughter, that in clinging stubbornly to the grievances of his past he was apparently more than willing to allow his daughter to grow up fatherless.

Even after all the moments she had ascertained that unnamed misery in Orville's eyes, she had never seen anything like the anguish she had provoked now, and it broke something inside her. And at that moment Jade came running in, followed by Paulina's babysitter friend Nina who stepped out to leave the family alone. If Paulina could never bring herself to believe Orville would leave her, then she certainly couldn't suggest such a thing to their child, but Jade's father had become weaker with each visit, the tubes in his arms, coming out of his nose, and suddenly the five-year-old seemed to understand everything. She burst into tears, holding her mother, her back to her father. And then he asked her what shade of purple she would like her room to be. This was a subject that had been dropped since his illness had consumed the family, and the child turned to him, showing new interest. She asked him what purple he liked. And he told her a story that he had never before shared with Paulina, of being a youth in Alabama, and his jealousy when his only brother had suddenly found a new friend and, Orville had felt, abandoned him. There were days when Orville would go alone to a field of heal-alls. The violet wildflowers could grow two feet high and he would sit, only his head above them, and he would be calmed, finally fully comprehending the plant's namesake.

The babysitter came for Jade. When they were alone Orville gazed at his wife, a tenderness in his eyes. She was certain he was reconsidering contacting his brother. But then he fell asleep. She vowed to ask him again as soon as he woke, but in his slumber he acquired an infection which put him into septic shock, and he was rushed to intensive care.

So without his permission she wrote to his brother. For the rest of her days she would have to live knowing her last desperate words to her husband had been so deeply hurtful, and that with her next deed, in going directly against his expressed refusal regarding Edmund, she had betrayed him. She never heard back. They had not been in touch since Edmund's visit, and for all she knew he may have moved and never received her request.

In intensive care Paulina put her unconscious husband's hand into hers and her fingers spoke to him. Jade asked for a haircut. We argued, and she won. Actually it looks quite cute. She said she can't wait for Daddy to see. Oh when you come home you'll be surprised. We have completely rearranged the living room furniture! Then Jade decided she wanted to hide plastic Easter eggs—in August! She hid the whole dozen but there was one I couldn't find, and she couldn't remember where she hid it. We turned the apartment upside down and finally I told her it was alright, but she began to bawl. And bawl, and bawl, and bawl, I could not get her to stop.