The Paper Dragon (14 page)

"Nothing," he said, and smiled. "Good night, Sally. I'll call you soon."

"Good night, Jonah," she said, and went into the apartment.

He went down the steps rapidly, keeping his left hand off the banister because the wrist was throbbing and each time he tried to flex his fingers a sharp pain shot up the length of his arm, damn stupid little man. It was bitter cold in the street outside; he feared they would have sleet or hail rather than snow — nor gloom of night can stay these couriers from the swift completion, would they tear down the post office now that they had demolished Penn Station? There was nothing permanent in this city, it was a city determined to obliterate its past. If there is one thing all Americans share in common, he thought, it's this lack of an historical sense, a tendency to want to change the recent past as well as the nation's ancient heritage. Oh certainly, destroy the jail where they kept the accused in the Salem witchcraft trials, cover the shame of hysteria, but Penn Station? That noble structure razed to the ground to make way for a sports arena? Heinous crime, I sound like my father, he thought.

He walked quickly to the car, his ears tingling, and then fumbled with the key in the lock, it's foolish to lock a convertible, he thought, they only slit the canvas top. He closed the door behind him rapidly, started the car, and then sat in silence for several moments while the engine warmed and the heater began to operate. He took a pair of fur-lined gloves from his coat pocket, put them on, pulled the tails of his coat out from under him, twisted himself into a comfortable position, turned on the radio, and then eased the car away from the curb. There was an order to everything he did, he was certain he performed the same operations in sequence each time he entered his automobile. He was equally certain that his father, Zachary Willow, drove in an identical manner, and that his grandfather and
his
father before him had undoubtedly performed similarly in a horse and buggy on the cobbled streets of Danvers, Massachusetts. He had gone back there once to trace the heritage, a tribute to Zachary, who insisted that a man should know his roots, though Jonah had been born in Stamford, Connecticut, and could not have been less interested in a pilgrimage to the home of his forebears. But he had found there in the library records the history of a family, the cursive script difficult to read, embellished with curlicues and substituting
f
's for
s
's, words capitalized for no apparent reason, the ink brown and fading on yellowed brittle pages — Benjamin Willow married to Margaret, and before him Nathan married to Elizabeth Anne, and somewhere back in the almost illegible record, a Jonah Willow, apprentice seaman on a whaling ship out of New Bedford. He had made the drive back along the turnpike, the road markers showing peaked Pilgrim hats and witches on broomsticks, possessed if not with a sense of self, then at least with a better understanding of his father.

Zachary Willow was a lawyer, and his father and grandfather had been lawyers before him. There was in him a sense of order that was firmly rooted in a judicial system evolved from the English, and based in part on the Roman Corpus Juris Civilis, derived in turn from such early systems as the Code of Hammurabi and the Laws of Manu. In the law, there was stability and certainty, precedent and continuity. Zachary ran his Stamford house as though it were a courtroom, meting out justice to Jonah and his brother Lucas as though they were prisoners before the bar, firmly imbuing in them the knowledge that there was right and there was wrong and there was nothing in between. The law, to Zachary Willow, was inflexible and clearly defined: it described social behavior as surely as the Bible prescribed moral behavior. The law was the law, and you did not fiddle around with it, and you did not try for fancy interpretations because it had not been designed for that. It was simply and indestructibly created by men, to instruct them in, and to enforce for them, the rules of civilized behavior. "Where law ends there tyranny begins," read one of the inscriptions chiseled in marble on the Criminal Courts Building, and Zachary Willow might have chiseled it there himself.

That the behavior in the old Stamford house was sometimes less than civilized could not be blamed on Zachary. His eldest son, Lucas, must have been a trial to him from the very beginning, although Jonah only became aware of the conflict much later, when his brother entered high school and began playing football. Until that time, frightened of his father and simultaneously respecting him, almost venerating him, Jonah did not once suspect that his brother's opinion of the old man could be any different than his own. Surely there was serenity in the Shippan house, its green shutters facing Long Island Sound, the lawn sloping down to a seawall from which you could see sailing ships and pleasure boats, a view that never tired Jonah; there was, perhaps, still a trace of the original Jonah Willow in him, the man who'd sailed for whale out of New Bedford. "Call me Ishmael," he had once dreamily said to his brother while they sat side by side on white wooden lawn chairs on the green grass sloping to the Sound, and watched a double-masted sailboat cleaving the water. Lucas had replied, "Call
me
Shlemiel," but this, of course, was after he had joined the football team and was playing offensive back and feeling his oats. "I like physical contact," Lucas always said, "I like knocking guys around."

Jonah's mother was a slender woman with a flawless English complexion and magnificent brown eyes. Her family had come to Massachusetts in 1734, from a town in Wales — she always pronounced it quickly and melodically for him, slurring her
l
's and
m
's, but he could never pronounce it himself and had only seen it written out once. Watching her as she stepped surely and lightly over the sparkling grass to the seawall, he often visualized her ancestors walking in just such a manner, the hands delicately clasped, the head expectantly tilted as though listening for a hidden sound, before the splendid ruins of a castle overlooking the valley. She was softspoken and spoke rarely, but her silence could fall upon a room like a thunderclap in recrimination never voiced against one or another of his father's stern pronouncements. Her smile was sometimes like a knife; he had often "seen his father's bluster grow larger and therefore less meaningful as he rushed suicidally against that naked blade of a smile, her brown eyes solemn and unamused above it. His mother was not an affectionate woman, or at least not a demonstrative one. He could only remember her truly embracing him once, holding him close to her breast and frantically stroking his face, and that was the time Lucas pushed him off the seawall and he cut his hand on a sharp rock.

There was never any doubt that Jonah would one day become a lawyer like his father, nor ever any doubt that he would eventually marry Christine Dunseath. Looking back, he supposed now that the divorce was also inevitable. But he never had an inkling of
that
until it was fully upon him, and he certainly didn't anticipate it when he was courting her as a boy or when they were newly married and trying to make their way in New York. His courtship (the word was his father's and not his) was a natural development encouraged by proximity; the Dunseath family lived next door to them on Shippan Point. Albert Dunseath was Stamford's water commissioner, a ruddy-faced man with a hearty laugh, sparse blond hair covering his tanned pate, combed sideways to disguise the encroaching baldness. His wife was a dark-haired beauty from whom, fortunately, Christie had inherited her looks. She was an avid horsewoman, and was always stamping in and out of her house in jodhpurs and riding boots, flicking a riding crop against her legs, Lady Fitz-Ashton returning from an outing on the moors, Some tea, Lady Fitz? She scared hell out of Jonah with her imperious air and her startling beauty, the black hair cut in severe bangs across her forehead, the proud nose and generous mouth, blue eyes flashing, the riding crop flicking against her thigh, terrifying. Christie was hardly less terrifying as a child, a hellcat who gave Lucas a bloody nose once when he tried to take off her pants behind the tool shed near the big dying maple. Lucas was eleven at the time, and Jonah was ten, and Christie was perhaps eight, yes just eight. Lucas had got her pants halfway down over her knees when she suddenly decided she didn't like the game they were playing. She twisted away from him, her small white bottom flashing in the dappled shade, and hit him with her bunched fist. Jonah was terrified that she would tell her mother what had happened and cause her to descend upon their household like the mounted fury she most certainly was. But Christie was as frightened as he, and never said a word about it. She studiously avoided Lucas from that day on, though, and maintained a cool and barely polite attitude toward him to the end.

Jonah began seriously dating her when they were still in high school — boat rides up the Connecticut River, and long drives to New Haven where they went to see out-of-town tryouts of incoming Broadway plays, and into New York to see the stage shows at Radio City and the Roxy, or the big-name bands at the Paramount and Strand. He once waited in line with her for three hours outside the Paramount on a freezing day in February, to see Frank Sinatra, whom he hated the moment Christie began shrieking; he thought she would faint dead away right there in the balcony, many of the girls actually did. Or just being together, walking home together from school on a bright spring day, or sitting on the lawn at night, fingers barely touching, a farewell kiss behind the shed where Lucas had tried to take off her pants, the sight of her as she walked between the forsythia bushes that separated the two properties a curious walk, so unlike her mother's almost as though she were gliding, a model's walk, with pelvis thrust forward and head erect.

She wore a blue gown to his high school prom, she had taken to wearing her hair like her mother's by then, sharp bangs across the forehead, blue eyes twinkling beneath them in secret amusement (secret
contempt
, he later came to realize), the pale blue of the gown emphasizing her eyes and clinging to her childish body. She was almost seventeen, but her figure seemed to resist all womanly transformation. Narrow-hipped and small-breasted, slender and slouched, she achieved a look that only years later woud become fashionably chic. Her face was undeniably beautiful, though, her eyes sometimes flashed at older men who stopped dead in their tracks and then quickly surveyed the slender body and shook their heads in wonder, dazed by their obvious mistake. When he danced with her, he could feel every inch of her body pressed against him, the small budding breasts that would never really develop into an abundant bosom, the protruding bones of her hips, the mound of her pubis, the curve of her back where his hand rested, his fingers sometimes spread to touch the tight firm buttocks, he had seen her almost naked once, white and dappled with maple-shadow as she twisted away from his brother's hands, the blue eyes angry and not at all amused that day.

He asked her to marry him on that graduation night, resplendent in his white dinner jacket, holding her cool and slender in his arms. The senior class had rented the country club and hired the best young band in the area, a fourteen-piece orchestra with monogramed stands and identical blue jackets, white shirts, blue bow ties. The trumpet section rose to take their chorus of "Summertime," straight mutes protruding from the golden glowing bells of their horns, ceiling lights glistening with blues and reds and greens that shimmered in brass-bound reflection, he danced with Christine Dunseath and asked her to be his wife. He was eighteen years old, and a languid June breeze blew in fresh over the dew-misted golf course and through the open French doors of the ballroom. She nodded when he asked her, and he said, "You will?" in surprise, and when she answered, "Of course," he whispered a kiss into her hair.

He had thought at the time, being eighteen, the United States involved in another great war for democracy, that he would naturally be called into the Army, that he would naturally serve his country, become a hero perhaps, though not a dead one. When he registered for the draft, however, he was afraid he might be rejected because of his eyesight, and even debated memorizing an eyechart before going down for his physical. But he decided against it, sweated through the examination instead, and immediately afterwards asked the doctor how he had done. The doctor told him his eyes were okay as far as the Army was concerned, proving once again the old military adage about healthy seeing-eye dogs. The military, however, did not yet possess either an adage or a deterrent for poison gas seeping into a man's system through a hole in his eardrum. Jonah was surprised to discover that he possessed just such a punctured eardrum and that the Army did not want him, better luck next war, Mac. Poison gas at the time was the ultimate weapon, the dread weapon each nation hoped would never be used again. In later years, Jonah would come to appreciate the irony of having been rejected because of the fear of poison gas, only to have the war finally decided by the use of a weapon a million times more heinous. He would also come to appreciate (and this only very much later) the supreme irony of fighting wars under the guise of preventing them, and would come to the conclusion (never admitted to a soul) that all men,
including
Americans, were warlike and that the invention and use of "The Bomb" was restraining them from doing what they really loved doing most: killing each other. ("I like physical contact," Lucas had said, "I like knocking guys around.") Lucas himself had enlisted in the Marine Corps when he was just eighteen, against Zachary's wishes, but what could the old man do? He was a hero, his captain later wrote, who managed to kill sixteen Japanese soldiers before being killed himself by a mortar explosion. "I am sending you a small carton of his effects, please know that we respected your son highly and share your loss deeply," kind captain sitting out there in the Pacific with jungle rot on his balls and dead youngsters on his hands. The small carton of effects included the maroon-and-white letter Lucas had received in high school for being the team's star halfback, a hero even then. Jonah's keenest memories of his brother would always be of those crisp October days, the sky above the high school field, the handoff to Lucas and the plunge, God, how he could run! Even at Yale years later, even as a law student there (his father and grandfather had of course studied law at Yale) he would experience a strange, odd sensation whenever the team came out onto the field, a shudder would run up his spine, and he would once again see Lucas charging into the opposing line, would remember once when Lucas got up and limped away from a pile-on and then waved to Jonah where he was sitting in the stands, his grin cracking white and sharp across his mud-stained face. 
I like physical contact, I like knocking guys around
. He had knocked around sixteen of them before they'd brought him down, you do not get up and wipe mud from your jersey after a mortar explosion, you do not smile into the stands at your kid brother.