The Death of All Things Seen (27 page)

He knew a dark secret was being revealed, one long suspected. It was still a great shock, even across the span of years, this disconnectedness to a half-brother, a relationship that could never be repaired, and yet the letter from Helen Price had arrived in the immediacy of a need, his own illness, in how this might actually work out.

He felt a shame in having conceived the idea. His kidneys were failing. He had been poisoned as Ursula had been poisoned. How best might it be explained? Did he dare ask for a kidney?

He was thinking, how Frank Grey Eyes might have asked. Perhaps in the apparent poetry of some grander, cosmic story, referencing a shared life source of a great headwater, the attendant tributaries of two life streams run to remote and distant regions, two waters diverged in the babble of different journeys, then rejoined in the brackish estuary of a great watershed, some opening to the sea, where all was one again.

This was how Frank Grey Eyes might have put it, but much better in his grand and overarching theory of everything. It was hard to speak with the conviction of Frank Grey Eyes, because that was Frank Grey Eyes’ undoubted gift and truth.

It sounded wrong appropriating what was not his understanding of life, when he didn’t believe in everything Frank Grey Eyes believed in.

Nate checked the public records of births and deaths. It was all there on the Internet, the year and the date of Norman’s birth. Perhaps Norman already knew this secret, but Nate doubted it. This was Helen Price asserting her hold over the Feldmans.

It was how he saw it, a cold indictment passed down. It was cruel, sending him these reels. She was asserting her influence in death. It suggested the sort of woman she was, or had been, calculating, reaching out in death to stab at him.

Nate looked up. His head was not clear. He needed to voice what he was thinking. He made his appeal. ‘You see, Ursula, what this woman has done to my mind?’ He was standing in the half-light, the curtains drawn in advance of viewing the tapes. ‘This is the trap she set for me.’

*

The tapes had all been recorded at the office. The ones he was interested in were taken post Norman’s birth, in a lapse of almost two months when Helen Price was not there to run the camera. It was easy establishing how Helen had filed the tapes.

The reel rolled in static-filled black and white in contrast to what was, back then, a glorious day of brilliant light and cut shadows. His father stepped into and out of frame, a series of out-takes that had never been edited. They had simply been recorded, labeled and stored.

There was no narrative, no purpose and, eerily, no sound. The tapes simply existed, a contrail of memory, evidence that survived the act itself, eclipsing time, this the sort of evidentiary material St Peter might be charged with reviewing in the great assessment of a life, in advancing one’s destiny toward Heaven or Hell.

*

There was the single sequence at a certain date. Nate fed the reel in a blurred advance and arrived at a scene. Helen Price’s gloved hand adjusted the lens. She emerged, walking away from the camera, this woman, now dead, the spread of her hips betraying what had happened and so recently. Nate held his breath. He cared little about Helen Price. She was there in the historical record. To get to his father, he had to go through her.

Her hair was combed in a wave off her forehead. She was drawn, her eyes sunken, suggesting a period of convalescence, her lips a shade not identifiable in black and white, and yet he observed the exercising control she maintained, an influence and presence that would not be dismissed. It was communed in the quiver of her hold in the crook of his father’s arm, this the first time Helen Price had appeared alongside his father, his father suffering through it, and left holding the baby. There were sayings that literal.

They both looked stunned. It was recorded without sound. It went on longer than it should. His father’s lips began moving. He spoke out of the corner of his mouth. He was saying something. It added a solemnity and underlying mystery to have his father speak and not hear it.

He remembered far back with Ursula, how she had quieted him on their first night after the act was done. She had wanted to hear his heart and not his opinions. Words meant so little and he had quietly caved to a love that would sustain them. It was the opposite in this instance, the silence so sharp in the insistence of an underlying rage barely contained.

In releasing the child, there was opportunity for some show of affection. His father was a head taller, his lips near the crown of Helen Price’s head. He did not kiss her, when, at one point, there had been an act and an intimacy that begat a child, and Nate felt a deepening sense of her pain, for the betrayal of what had happened.

Nate stopped the projector at the moment the child was surrendered and they were suddenly out of frame. In their absence, he could see the shrouded relief carving of a giant Egyptian and Indian cradling time aloft out over the city.

It was 4.46 p.m. by the clock, deep afternoon in late April 1963. April 22 to be precise.

Nate checked the historical meteorological records. The mercury read sixty-two degrees at two in the afternoon in what was described as a week of glorious weather, a high pressure front of blue skies. It was a point of no importance, but a fact, nonetheless, that could be accessed on the Internet. The Cubs were playing well out of the winter pen in Arizona, in advance of what would be their first winning season since 1946. Jack Brickhouse was making the calls on WGN.

Nate spent another hour screening reels in the way an ad man might audition actors for a part. His father wore his pants cinched above the hips. He had a figure not dissimilar to Clark Kent, as played by a vintage George Reeves, the original Superman, when vainglory and heroism were not necessarily aligned, the glasses worn such a weak conceit. It was, he understood, less Lois Lane being actually duped, as her wanting to be duped, to permit normalcy to proceed alongside valor as it did, or had, in the lives of so many who had served during the war effort.

Nate fed another spool, unraveling unremitting hours of tedium, his father at his office window, his gaze drawn to the camera like some desultory God.

At some point, a tripod had been purchased. Helen appeared in one sequence, smoking at his father’s desk in the fashion of James Cagney. He thought her so fundamentally ignorant. Her misconception of how men of power acted, when she had evidence to the contrary, when at certain moments, there must have been confidences gained and succor sought, before eventually, and without ceremony – like mild-mannered Clark Kent – his father had taken his leave, not up, up and away, but to his death below.

*

On his laptop, Nate opened a site from the Philippines. You could buy a kidney on the Internet, or begin the brokering. He stared at a line of bantamweight men, all smiling, fathers with their arms raised revealing stitch marks running beneath their ribcages.

They were all healthy success stories, each having willingly agreed to sell their kidney to pull their family out of poverty. They were posed against a non-descript Manila slum of corrugated shacks. Their lives were not changed so much. It was no different when you overdrew on a credit card. Extended credit, or pawning something, was never tied with absolute freedom, or to a definitive change of fortune. It bought the illusion of a certain respite from crushing debt. It let you luxuriate in things you did not need.

Nate’s cell phone beeped, a declarative one-liner email.
In the lobby.

A minute passed, then five, then ten. Nate waited. The reel kept playing.

Theodore Feldman had done Helen Price a great harm. Nate believed it. It had taken a willful act to exert his improvident influence over a woman so fundamentally lost. She had a lazy float to the left eye. It gave her expression a flattening quality. She had never been good looking, and perhaps it was this that had made her susceptible to his father’s advances.

It had taken the two of them in their mutual foibles. Nate would make this conditional assessment, not to relieve his father of a great wrong, but to apportion how it happened, the ease with which Helen Price fell under his father’s influence.

She had represented a reprieve from the war, an endearing faithfulness, distinct from the underhanded affectations of Harper Delacroix, who as an incessant presence had foisted his Southern sensibilities on Shelby Feldman, who, in a desperation in coming north, was never truly comfortable there, no matter what Theodore Feldman or any other Northerner might have offered.

Nate could discharge their relationship as simply as that. He understood better what they never shared, but for a brief flicker in the intensity of the war.

Whatever about his mother, in those rare instances when Helen appeared on the reels, there was a strangeness of her general disposition, a stiffness to her movements. She pulled at her skirt and jacket, all of it managed, but not with any assuredness, so she was forever an amateur negotiating a bit part, a woman caught in some far cast plot she couldn’t finally manage, so her world, what she sought, had disappeared, and had long before she was born.

Nate was turned toward the door, caught in the beam of light. A tape was still playing, his father at his desk, the camera rolling in a stultifying omniscience God must have endured, watching over this man, this hero, determined to persevere as best he might a life, when his best days were behind him.

Nate closed and opened his eyes, his thoughts landing on the awful circumstance of Walter Price’s suicide. He had given absolutely no thought to the man, to this cuckolded man. What a terrible word! “Cuckold!” that it even existed in a language, that it had a name.

Did Walter Price know it?

*

Another email arrived, a single word,
Here!

It had been a mistake summoning Norman Price. It had troubled Ursula greatly that Nate had come upon the idea of approaching Norman. It was a betrayal to her, extending their natural union in death. She had settled like a bad conscience.

He whispered, ‘Sorry’ into the grey dark.

Nate let out a long breath. In light of what he now knew, the meeting seemed pointlessly hurtful. How could he explain the reels, when he had come upon them so recently, and he had yet to come to terms with something not yet fully understood?

He would not presume to assert any influence as a half-brother, or as a half-not-brother. They were bound, but not in a way that should be pushed upon either of them. There could be nothing gained. He had been rash and too mindful of his own circumstances, when there was Norman Price to consider.

At some point in the future, he would forward the reels to Norman and let him configure his own understanding. It was decided.

He sent a cursory email, abrupt but deferential, ending any chance of their meeting. ‘Regrettably, due to unanticipated circumstances, I am returned to Canada. I beg your forgiveness.’

Of course, Norman Price, if he wanted, could have checked the desk to see if Nate was checked out. In fact, a minute later, the phone in the room rang and rang.

Nate held his breath, waiting for it to stop, its insistence in his head, the shrill ring. Norman Price knew he was there.

A minute passed, then another, and then five minutes.

Nate heard voices and footsteps along the corridor. He sat staring at his father, the tape at the end of the reel, the last tape. He purposely played it last, this the day he died, the quiet meditation of a life coming to an end. It was different from the other reels. The date was written in his handwriting, not Helen Price’s.

His father had set up the tripod. He walked toward the camera and away, sat with a conscious stiffness that his destiny was decided, and had been for a long time. He did not look up or drink in the way he did on other occasions.

He put his signature to a series of letters or statements, the flourish of his hand raised at the end of signing his name. At a certain point, his father simply stood, and, adjusting his tie, he was then out of frame. A sheer curtain billowed a moment later, a ghost passing, his father gone to his death.

The reel went on a good while longer in his absence. Fifteen minutes or so, until it was uncovered, who had jumped, because there was no identifying the body from such a height, a search conducted floor-by-floor, until there was the frightful desperation on Helen Price’s face, her hand raised to her mouth, upon entering the office. She was caught staring at the camera, the absolute horror of it, the wide-eyed stare and her mouth open in an awful bawling that he heard in his head, when there was no recorded sound.

The phone rang again, a shrill ring from another era, the inherent alarm in the sound itself when a phone was never at arm’s length, and it took a breathless rush to reach it. It kept on ringing. Nate had his hands to his ears.

Norman Price had the tenacity to knock on the door. He called Nate’s name, and when he was done knocking, when Nate was sure, when the persistent shadow from under the door was gone, when he heard the elevator door open and close, he unplugged the projector, let the bulb cool.

Standing in the sudden dark, he lifted the projector for its dead weight, to know he still existed, to somehow anchor the present.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

—F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

T
HERE
WAS
ACTIVITY
on the house, as the realtor described it, a tentative cash offer by a family of Mexicans.

The outstanding issue not yet managed was their legal status. The family had been to the house three times already. There was nothing easy in real estate, and it was made more difficult in the tightening of credit. An intermediary, a legal immigrant, might front the offer. It was done within their community. The realtor sounded unsure. She had not worked with this community before.

Under better market conditions, the house might have been a starter home for a young couple, a law grad, accountant, a medical intern, those of upwardly mobile means, starting out, the house close to the commuter train. A house, until recently, meant equity in soaring market values, monopoly money, a recoup against unrealistic student debt and credit cards. Accommodation had been made within the system.