The Facades: A Novel (7 page)

T
HE THIRTEENTH HOLE AT
S
HERWOOD
F
OREST
C
OUNTRY
Club, par four, opens to a lovely downhill view of the old Trude Fairgrounds. Men in sweater vests pause there, putters in
hand, to consider the urban ruin they’ve left behind. The metallic struts of the grand arcades stand like dinosaur ribs over
pools of shattered glass. Nearby, the unburied bucket seats of the half-submerged Ferris wheel turn in the wind. A huge marble
arch serves as a gateway between two empty fields. These fairgrounds hosted the 1898 Quite Grand Exhibition of Manufactured
Wonders and Medical Curiosities, the event that still must be considered the turning point for our city. The story of the
fair forms a long set piece in the course Trude: Its Brief Glory, Tragic Fall, and Long Decline, required for all-sixth-graders
in the Trude public school system. My own sixth-grade teacher was a thin woman called Miss Herring whose dark clothes accentuated
her nearly chalk-white pallor. Her glasses, sadly out of fashion now, were an enormous face-sized contraption of thick glass
and plastic: it was hard to believe that they
enhanced her vision. Miss Herring described Mayor Trudenhauser’s publicity campaign and the long preparations of the fair
builders. She told us moving stories of clockmakers and artisans who had brought their life’s work to the arcades for display.
The great arch was erected, the fountain that would gush water in all the colors of the rainbow, the set of commissioned sculptures
depicting the Ages of Man. Two hotels were built for the fair and hopefully christened the President and the Ambassador. Macrocephalic
babies and two-headed frogs arrived from obscure corners of the Midwest and were later immortalized as grainy murk in Miss
Herring’s slideshow. She showed us marvels: corn cob churches and enormous pigs. We sat glued to our chairs as she took a
brief detour into meteorology, clapping two chalkboard erasers together to evoke the collision of fronts that week in 1898.
The yellow dust settled on the studious heads in the front row. Miss Herring’s two day account of the fair, lasting as long
as the fair itself did, was a tour de force. She glossed the mechanical failure of the streetcar system. She recounted the
collapse of the arcades, pummeled by hail and tornadic winds, then concluded her presentation with washed-out film of the
devastated fairgrounds, which had been recorded on an obsolete Edison cinematograph. As the film surveyed the broken glass
and scattered violin pieces, Miss Herring led us in a recitation of Lermann’s “Ode to Trude”:

The cross-eyed boy who sat to my left either had not memorized, or could not utter, these terrifying and oblique verses. Miss
Herring pulled him aside and dismissed the rest of us. We applauded her wildly, and she responded with a single, modest bow,
her left hand still clutched on the delinquent’s shoulder. Feeling much older than our twelve years, we filed out of the sixth-grade
classroom and into the falling leaves.

C
ADDYING FOR
B
OGGS
at the country club was one of my more humbling duties. It was a duty I performed on foot, because Boggs was a purist who
thought golf was exercise. This ethos was perhaps best appreciated in the abstract, not with Boggs’s clubs on one shoulder
and J. B. Aabner’s clubs on the other. The three of us passed from the thirteenth hole to the fourteenth tee. The wrecked
arcades were no more than a pleasant shimmer in the distance. The trunk of the Great Arch was a dark blur. Trailing slightly
behind, with the two sets of clubs clanking in stereo, I noted the contrast between the two aging legal playboys. Aabner,
wearing a loose Hawaiian shirt and sagging elastic-waisted khakis, looked swollen from decades of sensual indulgence, like
a debauched aristocrat in an Edwardian woodcut. The meaty back of his neck cooked in the late September sun. Boggs, on the
other hand, looked spry and elegant in his golf duds. His tailored tweed pants fit perfectly. He wore a thin buttercup-yellow
vest over a light blue silk shirt. I’d often wondered what it felt like to wear Boggs’s clothes, the warp and weft of such
fine fabrics against the skin.

He rested his hand on Aabner’s back, unfazed by the rivulet of sweat that had formed along Aabner’s spine, staining the palm
tree on his shirt.

“Got a little of the old habeas corpus last night,” Aabner said.

“That right?” Boggs replied. He’d lately grown weary of Aabner’s Latinate kissing and telling. Sometimes, when Aabner called
the office to narrate a recent conquest, Boggs would actually inspect a client’s file to divert himself. I also had difficulty
enduring Aabner’s boasts. I couldn’t help imagining myself splayed on Aabner’s desk, under Aabner, accordion files and memo
pads cutting into my ass—as I bore the weight of Aabner.

“Took me about six months to persuade her,” Aabner said, “but damn, let me tell you …”

“I can imagine it well,” Boggs said. “The longer you have to wait, the better.” Boggs winked at me as he reached over my right
shoulder for his driver. The graze of his hand felt like a caress, sending a slight shiver down my spine.

“Heh heh,” Aabner chuckled dutifully. He took a nervous glance at me. Aabner had added the second
a
to his name in 1986, after the firm of Abner, Abner, and Boggs dissolved. The rechristening had vaulted Aabner above his
father in the Trude yellow pages, but after Boggs invested in the cable TV ads, the ordering became, as these fellows would
say, moot.

Boggs was still smiling at me, polishing his driver with a rag. His charcoal hair fanned in the breeze.

“Well,” Aabner continued, “at least he carries your clubs. And it must keep Sheila happy, you having a male secretary and
all.”

Boggs scoffed and took a couple practice swings. He failed gracefully at golf. Boggs was having an especially erratic day
at the tee, so I wasn’t surprised when his drive veered far right of the fairway, landing in a narrow swathe of trees, the
paltry remnants of Sherwood’s “forest.”

Boggs turned to me and shrugged. We strolled down the hill in companionable silence, leaving Aabner and his clubs behind.
Eventually we found an entrance to the stand of trees. Boggs stepped gingerly to avoid soiling his polished brown golf shoes.
Once inside, we were shielded from the golf course by leafy boughs and shrubbery.

He smiled wryly. “Here we are, Norberg, in a bower.”

“I wouldn’t call it a bower,” I said.

“Is that so? What would you call it?”

I leaned his clubs against a tree and began poking through the undergrowth. “A wood, I suppose. A small wood.”

“Here we are, alone together in the small wood,” said Boggs.

I glanced at my employer, who stood smiling impassively under a weathered elm. Had he wooed my predecessors with such clumsy
and unctuous endearments? The ancient love notes, many of them signed by “Willie,” kept turning up in the corners of my desk
and amid the files. They were addressed to Bridget, Jessica, Naomi, Annabelle, in the same looping cursive. My hire was meant
to inaugurate a new marital and clerical regime.

I was determined to find his ball, suddenly. I sidestepped logs, pawed through fallen leaves. I beat back branches with his
nine iron. Boggs, bemused, lingered on the edge of the wood,
watching me work. What else was new. His ball was bright green, with
BOGGS
embossed on it in black. It was on the other side
of a fallen birch, the bark fanning from the trunk like the pages of a waterlogged book. Behind the fallen birch was a small
clearing, an inner enclosure. I stepped over the tree and reached for the ball, then recoiled when I saw a brown hand near
it.

“Sir,” I called, “we have a problem.”

The man lay supine on a small circle of grass, marked by streaks of Sherwoodian light that slipped through the pines and birches.
He wore a filthy blazer with holes in the elbows, a blue work shirt, and baggy pants with paint and turf stains. He was still
breathing. Chunks of food were lodged in his long graying beard. He reminded me, oddly, of the man in my mother’s story, the
vagrant who had allegedly barged in off the street and disrupted my baptism. The impact of the ball had left a small cluster
of red circles along his right temple, along with the reverse imprint of Boggs’s name just above his eyebrow. I’d argued against
getting the golf balls personalized, not that anyone remembered that now. The imprint would be enough to get this fellow a
hefty settlement, assuming he could find his way to an attorney in time.

Boggs took a while to reach us. Stepping into the inner sanctum, he harassed a little tear in his tweed pants. “Oh my,” he
said, looking down at the man he’d felled.

“He’s only unconscious,” I said.

“Why don’t you search him, Norberg.”

I rifled through the man’s coat pockets as he began to stir and groan, uncovering receipts for very small sums, wadded tissue,
cough drop wrappers, a wrinkled letter written in Spanish, gum foil, and lint. Further investigations of the blazer uncovered
(to my amazement) several completed crossword puzzles from the
Trumpet
. These crosswords, concocted by a reclusive puzzle genius fond of misdirection and self-quotation, were notorious for their
difficulty and always stymied me. Yet the stranger had penned in a half-dozen of them, hardly striking a word.

“What about his pants?” Boggs asked from the edge of the wood, scanning the fairway for approaching golfers. He was ready
to run at a moment’s notice.

I turned the man over, reached into his frayed pants pockets, and found an expired library card with his name.

“Hey,” I said, “I’ve read this guy’s confession.”

Boggs was nonplussed. I grabbed Jimenez and shook him hard by the lapels. Something tore. The detectives’ exegesis had not
impressed me that much, but still, it was cathartic to have a possible villain in my arms. “You hear me?” I said, slapping
him in the face. “That’s right, I’ve read your confession.”

“Where am I?” Jimenez asked, opening his green eyes.

“Where is Molly?”

“I’m sorry, sir.” Jimenez’s beard bristled. “Do I know you?”

“You might know my wife,” I said. “M-O-L-L-Y. Do those letters mean anything to you? Don’t fuck with me now—I know how much
you like
word games
.”

He paused, cogitating, and rubbed his wound. “Good God,” he said, “you’re that poor man who lost his wife.”

The perfect English this Jimenez spoke was a far cry from the colorful malapropisms of the confession, I realized.

“You must believe me,” he continued. “I was not the author of that confession. All I know about your wife is that her recording
of
Fidelio
is exquisite.”

I softened. “If you didn’t write it, who did?”

“The confession was the joint brainchild of McCready and his assistant, I’m afraid.” Jimenez spoke staring straight up into
the trees. His sentences were like the sunbeams that filtered through the interior—straight, long, luminous. “Your wife’s
celebrity has made this case a priority, and they’ve resorted to some dubious methods. McCready fancies himself to be a writer
now, you know, and enjoys ‘doing voices.’ From the holding cell I could hear him reading passages to the Oracle, ‘I wanted
to cry like the females on this program’ and so on. They were laughing hysterically. The code was the Oracle’s idea.”

In the distance, Boggs was impatiently hacking papery bark off a birch tree with his five iron.

“The Oracle forced me to sign the ‘confession,’ then released me, knowing he could never get a conviction. I am simply a public
library patron who has nowhere to go since the crisis. I wander from place to place, thinking of the things I never had a
chance to borrow. I am sorry about your wife. Furthermore, I am sorry for my involvement in that cruel joke.”

“You okay?” I asked. “You need some ice or anything?”

“No, thank you,” he said. “I am going to rest a while here, and then find someplace more secluded.”

I left Jimenez in the bower with my number, which I’d scribbled on the back of Boggs’s business card. On my way out I collected
my employer’s ball.

“Well done, Norberg,” Boggs whispered in my ear, then cried “Here it is!” for the benefit of the distant Aabner who lounged,
sunburned, on the green.

He didn’t even take a penalty.

I
T WAS IN
O
CTOBER
, I
BELIEVE, THAT
I
FOUND MY SON
kneeling.

The house had settled into a disorderly decline, opening itself to molds and dusts that Molly had turned away. My weekly vacuuming
sessions were nostalgic more than anything, a nod to tradition. There were still places I couldn’t go, corners I left untended.
With our clunky antique vacuum in tow I went downstairs, trying to make enough noise to warn Kyle of my approach. The basement
was dimly lit and smelled of vanilla candles and patchouli incense. The scents of his nightly vigil could have covered the
smell of pot, but they seemed more theatrical than pragmatic, an attempt to enshroud his activities with a solemn, ritualistic
air.

He was kneeling by the bed in his boxer shorts. A glossy page was open on the wrinkled mass of the comforter. Kyle was murmuring
something and moving his hands.

“Whoa, sorry, son,” I said, abandoning the vacuum and beating a quick retreat to the neutral territory of the kitchen.
Halfway up the stairs I was already regretting my reaction. That “whoa” had been especially unfortunate. I could have done
the adult thing and gone back downstairs to explain things right then, but I couldn’t quite find the words. I stayed upstairs
and after midnight I pulled out
Indecent Reference
from its stashing place under the sofa.

The next evening, after the hot dogs and chips were cleared away, I prepared the living room for a mellow but significant
father-to-son conversation. The living room couch, where Molly had stretched her full length against the cushions, sipping
wine, was one of the haunted heirlooms we skirted past. Her reading lamp was a complex, many-bulbed affair, an electrified
bouquet, and I spent a lot of time twisting its metallic stems into a non-interrogatory arrangement. I tucked my shirt into
my cords. Knocked on the door to the basement, as I should have the night before, and called for Kyle. He took the stairs
in three giant strides and crossed the living room, flopping on Molly’s couch. The leather huffed and squeaked beneath him.

I took a seat on the weathered armchair reluctantly. The twisted lamp burned between us.

“So what is it, Dad?”

Kyle sprawled back on the couch, his left foot dangling off it and grazing the area rug. The stiffness of the old armchair
forced me to adopt a prim, upright posture.

“I wanted to apologize for last night,” I said.

“For what?” Kyle asked.

I had worked out a short speech during the work day, even drawing on Boggs’s mastery of all things carnal. (Not that he’d
been much help: he had never spoken to his daughters about sex,
he claimed, adding that their grasp of the subject was “intuitive.”) Generously, I took all the blame for the awkward encounter
the night before, vowing to better respect his privacy in the future. I told him that he had found a healthy outlet for his
desires, that there was no need to conceal these activities from me. Being the elder male, I understood perfectly well how
one’s thoughts, when not otherwise occupied, tended to default to images of naked women in sexual positions, and that his
activity of the night before might be considered a beneficial part of a full, satisfying existence in which one was a respectful
friend to women. I had further thoughts on the subject but I could no longer ignore Kyle’s recoiling. Far from being put at
ease by my permissiveness, he had contracted to a tight ball at the end of the couch, knees wrapped in his arms. His cheeks
reddened as he studied the ceiling. It was an inverted topography of textured drywall, rough as his face. I had often imagined
myself walking weightlessly through the craters and gulfs of that upside-down landscape. My monologue had developed its own
momentum, weirdly stronger now that I realized its effect on Kyle, and I kept talking until he interrupted.

“Dad, please,” he said at last. “I wasn’t doing that.”

“But I saw—”

“That wasn’t what you saw.” He clutched his forehead, exasperated. “I wasn’t doing it. But I know all about it from my sex
ed class, so you’re covered.”

“It’s okay, it’s natural.”

“It’s lust.” He implored the ceiling. “It’s lust, Dad.”

“I should have knocked,” I said, retreating. “I was just trying to clean.”

“
Dad
,” Kyle said, leaning into the blinding light of Molly’s
lamp. “That was your illustrated bible I was looking at. I was
praying
.”

T
HE GRAY VAN
first trespassed onto the property just as I’d settled into my chair with the Sunday paper. It wobbled into the cul-de-sac
slowly and uncertainly, and I took it at first for the vehicle of a confused plumber or electrician who would soon realize
the mistake and retreat. But the van pushed forward into our uphill driveway and idled there for a few moments before sounding
its horn twice. It was windowless on the sides and offered only dim glimpses of its driver and passenger: a man with a puffy
beard and hair tucked into a chauffeur’s plaid cap, and the thin, coifed blonde beside him. Obfuscated by the windshield,
they looked like peripheral figures in a fresco. The van looked like a kidnapper van, it occurs to me now, though I didn’t
see it that way at the time, because the words
FIRST CHURCH OF THE DIVINE PURPOSE
were painted in bright yellow along its side. Apart from the bright yellow cross and the name of the church painted over
the rear sliding door, there was nothing to distinguish the F.C.O.D.P. van from those traditionally deployed by so-called
pedophiles, captors of helpless kids, who relied on windowless vans to shield their quarry from parental view.

I watched the scene as if it was just one more atrocity from the paper I was reading, unfolding far outside of my control.
I listened to the front door open and close and watched Kyle descend the front stairs, walk down the drive, and climb through
the sliding door, which opened automatically. He had combed his hair, wore a pressed blue shirt I didn’t recognize, and held
my father’s illustrated bible under his arm. That bible had
loomed untouched on the high bookshelves of my childhood. I had never seen the threat in it, never found the conviction to
donate it or throw it out. The opening and closing of the van door garbled the church’s name, as if it had been translated
into a foreign language of which I did not speak a word. It was only when the van was pulling away that I began to grasp the
significance of what had happened. I was possessed by the strong feeling that at the very moment I most needed to intervene,
I had done nothing. The gray van circled the cul-de-sac and made its puttering progress down the block, leaving a flourish
of exhaust. Some minutes later, forcing myself upright, I went to the kitchen for a refill and found my son’s simple note:
went to church
.

A
FTER THE VAN
’
S
growl receded, I returned to the paper hoping to find something to distract myself. Despite drinking half a carafe of coffee
and smoking three cigarettes, though, I couldn’t absorb more than a line or two of a story before irritably flipping the page.
I remembered that Molly had wanted me to get my eyes checked. Unless I held it very close to my face, the type was indistinct
to me. True, the
Trumpet
was infamously stingy with column space and ink. It was an inferior product for an inferior city, and as much as we complained,
we secretly knew we deserved it. What’s more, the
Trumpet
usually landed in the yard mangled, damp, or both, thanks to the bad throws of the third-rate paperboy. That Sunday the paper
was badly damaged, A-1 through A-23 forming a waterlogged pastry of print. So I turned to the Leisure section. After its initial
run on the front pages, Molly’s case had been demoted to this home of speculation and gossip. It was tucked deep within the
paper and its
irrelevance had kept it dry. It was here in Leisure’s journalistic backwaters that Martin Breeze was printed, his opinions
as ephemeral as the scrawl a fishing line left in water. Breeze had made his living nibbling at my wife’s talent. Since her
disappearance I had deliberately avoided his column, The Opera Scene. But as it was Sunday morning and I was not a churchgoer,
and the rest of the paper was wet, I found my eye drifting back to Breeze.

His column was devoted to the Lyric Opera’s new production of
Carmen
, which had premiered the previous Friday. The title role was, of course, supposed to be sung by my wife, who had already
performed the part three times in extended and successful runs. In her absence, the role of Carmen fell to Ariel Perloff,
who’d spent the last four years in Molly’s long shadow as her understudy. Her image, sheathed in suggestive red roses, appeared
everywhere now: on billboards, on the sides of buses, on fliers that fluttered past blighted buildings to land at my feet.
Martin Breeze’s column left no doubt where his sympathies lay—it was a ruthless performance even for him.

NEW
CARMEN
A DISASTER

Much has already been written about the long-awaited debut of Ariel Perloff in the Lyric Opera’s production of
Carmen
. Languishing (justifiably) since 2005 as the understudy of much-loved mezzo Molly Norberg, who disappeared earlier this year,
she finally had a chance to silence doubts and prove herself in the Opera House’s spotlight Friday. However, her effort to
sing perhaps the most coveted role in the mezzo repertoire was simply a disaster. Perloff’s many problems began halfway into
the first act. Her rendition of the Habanera was the most banal I’ve ever heard—wooden, often audibly flat, and worst of all,
lacking even the slightest charm. It beggars belief that such a be-loved role would be entrusted to this novice. Some may
even suspect that Ms. Perloff did not so much earn this role as inherit it as the only daughter of iron-ore baron Paul Perloff
and his new wife, Isabelle, the opera’s powerful trustees. I don’t advise going to this
Carmen
, this gawky insult to the future of opera in Trude. Despite the efforts of the director and supporting cast, this new Perloff
production brings to mind the famous self-deprecation of Georges Bizet: “The people want their trash, now they have it.”

Reading the damning words, I remembered Molly’s impression of the young girl straining for a high note. Ariel had gotten on
my wife’s nerves, to say the least. She followed Molly from room to room in the Opera House and studied her every move. “Imagine
being stalked by a twenty-two-year-old version of yourself, who is just as clueless and annoying as you were,” Molly said
once. I laughed to remember this statement but the laughter hurt my lungs. Breeze’s evisceration had been enjoyable but the
enjoyment didn’t last, and I now felt more tired than anything. I returned to the bedroom to nap away the afternoon, but just
as I was nodding off, the phone rang. Back in the old days, the calls had almost always been for Molly, and I’d let them go.
But now I could never tell what news a call might bring.

“Sven Norberg?” asked a faintly accented voice on the other end.

I coughed in reply.

“This is Eduardo Jimenez.” The caller seemed to be outside
and using a bad public connection. “From the golf course,” he said.

“Hello. How’s your head?”

“The ringing has stopped. I sincerely apologize for disturbing you at home, by the way. I hope you weren’t busy?”

“Me?” I looked around for an open pack of cigarettes and found one. “Where are you right now?” I asked.

“Um,” Jimenez said, “I am not entirely sure. Either Sherwood Forest or New Arcadia, close to … the border? There is a large
unmarked building behind me. The lot is full. People are emerging with laden shopping carts.” There were sounds of freight
trucks and approaching sirens. “Coupon day,” Jimenez intoned solemnly. “In any case, I wanted to thank you for the consideration
you showed me the other day, on the golf course.”

“Happy to,” I said. “I’m sorry that Boggs didn’t apologize. He has a very limited sense of his own wrongdoing.”

Jimenez spoke again but his words were swallowed by another belligerent voice. It was something about his avidity for crossword
puzzles and how everything he read, at times, resembled an encrypted block that needed to be decoded. “So did you see it?”
he asked.

“What now?”

“The acrostic in Martin Breeze’s column?”

“The
acrostic
? Martin Breeze? Are you sure?”

Jimenez wasn’t listening. I heard him trying to placate the foe who now seemed to be rattling or shaking something metallic.
In a matter of seconds the phone cut off. I waited for a few minutes to see if he would call back, then figured Jimenez was
out of quarters. Or maybe the pay phone had stopped functioning. The dead booths dotted the corners in Trude like empty
confessionals. I went and found the paper where I’d left it, in a disheveled heap at the foot of my chair. I reopened the
Leisure section to Breeze’s column, which was directly across from the Sunday crossword, a time-consuming behemoth that must
have taken Jimenez all morning. I reread Martin Breeze’s column several times, first looking for a code similar to the one
McCready and the Oracle had “discovered” in Jimenez’s so-called confession. I then realized that I had overlooked a much more
obvious acrostic:

NEW
CARMEN
A DISASTER

Much has already been written about the long-awaited debut of Ariel Perloff in the Lyric Opera’s production of
Carmen
. Languishing (justifiably) since 2005 as the understudy of much-loved mezzo Molly Norberg, who disappeared earlier this year,
she finally had a chance to silence doubts and prove herself in the Opera House’s spotlight Friday. However, her effort to
sing perhaps the most coveted role in the mezzo repertoire was simply a disaster. Perloff’s many problems began halfway into
the first act. Her rendition of the Habanera was the most banal I’ve ever heard—wooden, often audibly flat, and worst of all,
lacking even the slightest charm. It beggars belief that such a be-loved role would be entrusted to this novice. Some may
even suspect that Ms. Perloff did not so much earn this role as inherit it as the only daughter of iron-ore baron Paul Perloff
and his new wife, Isabelle, the opera’s powerful trustees. I don’t advise going to this
Carmen
, this gawky insult to the future of opera in Trude. Despite the efforts of the director and supporting cast, this new Perloff
production brings to mind the famous self-deprecation of Georges Bizet’s: “The people want their trash, now they have it.”