The Rail (3 page)

“You're hers now,” he said. “You're hers and William Beauchamp's. You're not mine any more.”

Jimmy Penn threw the biggest tantrum he'd ever thrown or ever would when his father wouldn't let him back in the house with him. Jimmy was left to scream and kick the kitchen door from outside until, a few minutes later, James returned with a handful of the minie balls.

“Here,” he said. “Take these back and play with them. It's just for a little while, Jimmy. I promise.” Even then, an old servant had to help James Penn get him in the car and back to his grandfather O'Neil's house.

It wasn't a little while, either. One day, when Jimmy, who was now Neil Beauchamp, was six, his stepfather threw the minie balls away, tossed them down one of the old abandoned mineshafts in the woods behind the store, and told Neil he was too old to be playing with toys. Neil was much older before he broke himself of the habit of going back into the woods behind Penn's Castle and spying on the human transactions at the house where he once was adored.

“Neil?”

He's aware that Blanchard has been talking to him.

She has a look on her face as if she's about to cry. “You seem so far away.”

“No,” he says. “I'm right here.”

“I was just saying that Millie and Wat wanted to come by and see you tonight, if that's OK. I told them to come about eight.”

It isn't all right, but Neil doesn't feel like arguing, is out of the habit of resisting plans and orders, has gotten used to going with the flow. He shrugs his shoulders.

“You've lost some more weight,” she says. “It looks good on you.” She gets up quickly, and Neil supposes he should follow her into the kitchen, where she's taken their three empty glasses. But he doesn't.

David, who has sunk so low in his chair that the top of his head does not clear its back any longer, looks over at his father.

“Is she OK?”

Neil Beauchamp shakes his head, says nothing.

“This is amazing,” David says, looking up as if he's just now discovered the incongruity of Penn's Castle. “I remembered it as being big, but I never really went near it until today.”

The Penns had moved to Richmond by the time David was born. The castle was abandoned, half-obscured by young pines and hollies and thorns, surrounded by a barbed-wire fence and vandalized within an inch of its life before he ever visited the town or saw the house.

“She just moved back here last year,” Neil tells his son. “She's still got some work to do.”

“You can say that again,” they hear Blanchard call from the kitchen, and Neil remembers how the old place was always supposed to have “zones,” as the Penns called them, where you could hear a person a room away, whispering.

“It's getting there, though,” she says, coming back in with two bourbon-and-waters and a Coke balanced on the tray. “It'll soon be as good as it ever was. Wait and see. We're going to be so happy here.”

David looks at his father. Neil shakes his head so slightly that it escapes Blanchard's eye. He sees that the drink she brought in for herself is half-gone already. While he's trying to find a polite way to tell his benefactor that she's had enough to drink, she gets up and walks quickly to the back of the room, where glass doors face out into the U-shaped rear of the house, two long wings flanking what seems to be, as the outdoor light comes on, a garden.

“Cully!” she calls. “You come here, Cully! Time for supper.” She whistles and slaps her knee, looking worriedly into the dark.

“What kind of dog do you have?” David asks her, as Neil looks away.

“Cully's a beagle,” she says, not looking back at them. “He's a mess, too. One of those high-strung 13-inch ones. Sometimes I have to call him for half an hour before he'll come to me. Cully! You get in here right now!”

Neil rises, unsteady despite being the only one in the room who's sober. He walks over to the door and takes Blanchard's hand, pulls her gently back into the room and closes the door.

“Let me take care of Cully,” he tells her. “I'll fetch him after a while.”

Blanchard listens, bites her lip for a moment and then nods.

“Well,” she says when she gets back by the fireplace, picking up another piece of split oak and throwing it into the flames, “I suppose you all are starved.”

She leads them into the dining room, toward a table for perhaps 14, its burled elm legs nicked where they stick out from under the tablecloth. Neil and David help her, carving the beef roast and setting the table.

“Do you want me to go see about the dog?” David whispers while Blanchard worries over peas and beans and checks the bread.

His father looks at him and shakes his head.

THREE

Neil and Blanchard are out of practice at making dinner conversation; David is tired from the long drive and welcomes the silence. The dead hush, broken by nothing more jangling than fork against china or the mantel clock's quarter-hour chimes, is so deep that he feels he might fall into it and wake up sometime tomorrow.

He misses Carly, whom he has already called, and the girls, and he suspects he would soon grow to miss the din of the television, the CD player, the always-ringing telephone, the competing, escalating needs of a six-year-old and four-year-old. Tonight, though, he is glad for the quiet.

David glances over at his father, who looks neither right nor left, certainly not up, as he devours everything in front of him, as neatly and efficiently as a military-school cadet. If someone had told him, three months ago, that he would be escorting Neil Beauchamp back to the free world, that he would care enough to do such a thing, he would not have believed it.

He is not a forgiving person by nature. He has, he supposes, inherited his mother's sense that right should be rewarded and, implicitly, that wrong should be punished, and furthermore that failure and all it begets fall within the spacious boundaries of wrong.

When David was young, it was his father, the great Virginia Rail, whom he always felt he was letting down. The fly balls he missed, the all-star teams he didn't make, the athletic determination he didn't exhibit, all of these disappointed his father, David knew. Looking back, though (and the last 10 weeks have given him more time than he ever wanted for reflecting), he is willing to believe that Neil Beauchamp got over his disappointment soon enough, that he always (if sadly) accepted the fact that his only son was not going to be a great baseball player.

Neil would treat him roughly, yelling at him on occasion, hurting his feelings on a regular basis. But Neil Beauchamp's great crime, David believes now, was neglect. He would forget birthdays and anniversaries, fail to show up for father-son banquets and school spelling bees, flatly refuse to do overnighters with the Boy Scouts.

Catherine Taylor Beauchamp filled the spaces, and it seems now to David that she did it willingly. She was, everyone agreed, a trouper. David seldom wanted for a parent when one was required, but there were many events where Kate was the only mother in a room full of fathers.

She would defend Neil in his absence, and everyone in Chagrin Falls understood that the Virginia Rail sometimes had things to do that mere mortals were spared. Should someone make a remark that could be interpreted as pejorative concerning the Rail (as David himself has come, over the years, to refer to his father, with no hint of reverence), Kate would respond with a smile that reminded more than one errant suburbanite of a large predator, and then make the speaker understand certain things that should have been understood already. (“Well, you know, Neil had to be at that Cystic Fibrosis fund-raiser last night in Akron, and he's got to fly to Chicago tomorrow to pick up some kind of award or other, I can't remember what just now. He's a little tired.” And the nearly visible subtext: “And who, exactly, are you, Mr. Nobody, to be making cracks about the inestimable and much-in-demand Virginia Rail?”)

Later, though, age and arthritic knees started catching up with Neil Beauchamp. David was in his teens, and suddenly his mother was uttering the same kind of asides that would have brought down her wrath on some hapless outsider two years before. And David was as uncomfortable in this role of reluctant confidant as he'd ever been in the previous one—the kid who would never be the man the Virginia Rail was.

After David left for college, he came home as seldom as he could.

It had been Kate Beauchamp's wish that her son, after it was determined that he would never wear a major-league uniform, would go to law school and make use of the fine intellect he'd been granted in lieu of speed and reflexes. And when David let himself fall by the wayside in the competition as an undergraduate at Columbus, when he “drifted,” as Kate described it, into journalism and newspapering, “getting by” with barely passing grades and spending too much of his time working for the campus paper, a certain chill let him know that he, too, had fallen short.

He still sees his mother twice a year, once with Carly and the girls, once without. It is clear to him that, at some deep-seated level, he has slipped from the pedestal, has committed the crime of non-brilliance.

At least, he's always told himself, his mother was there. When, after the glory days, Neil would be the manager of some minor-league no-hoper (which inevitably did worse with the Virginia Rail than it had the year before without him) or the third-base coach at Texas or Seattle, Kate was there, through his high school and college years, hectoring him at close range or long-distance, always there.

What, he wonders to himself in his 38th year, is worse: to be neglected or to be disappointing? He has been sure, for most of his adult life, that he would rather be disappointing. Lately, though, things have been happening.

He knew about the consultants, of course. They were, according to his friends back in the newsroom in Cleveland, crawling all over the place “like cockroaches,” trying to justify the million dollars the company was paying them for a year's fine-tooth combing to find out how the paper might turn its 20 percent yearly profit into 25 percent.

“How hard is that?” asked a woman who had been a city-hall reporter since David was in high school. “You fire people and get your news off the wires. Screw quality; no profit center there. But you've got to have somebody to tell you to do it, so it isn't your fault. Pontius Pilate would have used consultants. ‘I'm sorry, Mr. Christ. It isn't our idea, but we paid these consultants a lot of money, and they said we could maximize profits if we nailed your ass to this cross.'”

As the Washington correspondent, David felt blissfully above all that. He commiserated with his colleagues when he was back in town, and by phone and e-mail at his office in D.C. But he'd never even seen any of the consultants. When they announced the first round of layoffs and buyouts, which were referred to first as downsizing and then rightsizing and finally as career growth opportunities, he went to a tearful party for two friends who were among those cut.

Even when the assistant managing editor started mentioning the “next round” being a little closer to home, David never worried that much. He'd been with the paper 10 years and had won several state awards, had even been nominated for a couple of Pulitzers. Granted, he'd not won anything in the last three years, maybe was in a little bit of a rut, but he'd stand on his record, as he told Carly, who took it all more seriously than he did.

When he was called back to Cleveland in September, he told his wife not to worry, but even he was worried by this point. The first wave had cut almost 10 percent of staff, and now they wanted more.

The meeting was held in the human resources office. The sign was newer than the ones on the other doors in what the newsroom referred to as the beancounter wing. The department's old name, Personnel, had been considered too cold and unfeeling.

The director of human resources was a man two years younger than David. His name was Tad Winkler, and he was as universally despised as anyone in the entire company. He never smiled, but he never frowned. He wore neutral-colored suits (no one had ever seen him in anything except a suit) and small, brown-framed glasses. He was of average height, average build, as mild as a lamb. His job was, it seemed to David, to do whatever needed doing that no one else was willing to do.

“Winkler,” someone had said at the going-away party following the first round of cuts, “was born in the wrong place, at the wrong time. I'm thinking Germany, nineteen-thirty-nine. He's great at following orders.”

By the time the meeting was over, David was no longer an employee of the newspaper. He would be given six months' severance, the director told him. David kept thinking that at any moment, the assistant managing editor, or the managing editor himself, would come bursting in and tell Tad Winkler there was no way he was going to be allowed to fire David Beauchamp, who had done such a wonderful job for so many years. Soon, though, he came to understand that he was alone, and he was screwed.

He'd always thought, when he allowed himself the dark fantasy of being in this position, that he'd spring across the desk and throttle the living shit out of the godless humanoid on the other side, something he and old cronies would laugh about 20 years later in some bar in some other city. When it was over, though, he realized, when he shut the door quietly behind him, that he had issued only a minor complaint, so seamless was the process, so devoid of any criticism of anything David might have done or not done. (“The consultants say, David, that we've reached a point where this paper can no longer afford to have a Washington bureau, for now, although certainly that could change. We know we need a Washington correspondent, but they are adamant, and the corporate people agree. We are working on the most generous packages we can offer, especially for valued employees such as yourself. You will be well-provided for.”)