The Throat (31 page)

"Maybe you should hire that
nurse, Eliza Morgan, to spend at least the daytime with him."

"You don't think my
father-in-law seemed capable of caring for himself? I wonder what might
have given you that impression." John dropped more ice crescents into
his glass and poured in another three inches of icy vodka. "Anyhow,
here's the sandwich stuff. Dig in."

I began piling roast beef
and swiss cheese on bread. "Have you thought about how you'll tell him
the truth about April?"

"The truth about April?" He
set down his glass and almost smiled at me. "No. I have not thought
about that yet. Come to think of it, I'll have to tell a lot of people
about what happened." His eyes narrowed, and he drank again. "Or maybe
I won't. They'll read all about it in the paper." Ransom set his glass
back on the counter and rather absentmindedly began making a sandwich,
laying a slice of roast beef on a piece of bread, then adding two
slices of salami and a slice of ham. He peeled a strip from a slice of
cheese and shoved it into his mouth. He stuck a spoon into the crock of
mustard and stirred it aimlessly.

I put lettuce and mayonnaise
on my own sandwich and watched him stir the mustard.

"What about funeral
arrangements, a service, things like that?"

"Oh, yes," he said. "The
hospital set up an undertaker."

"Do you own gravesites,
anything like that?"

"Who thinks about stuff like
that, when your wife is thirty-rive?" He drank again. "I guess I'll
have her cremated. That's probably what she would have wanted."

"Would you like me to stay
on here a few more days? I wouldn't mind, if you wouldn't feel that I
was intruding or becoming a burden."

"Please do. I'm going to
need someone to talk to. All this hasn't really hit me yet."

"I'd be glad to," I said.
For a little while I watched him push the spoon around inside the
grainy mustard. Finally he lifted it out and splatted mustard on his
strange sandwich. He closed it up with a piece of bread.

"Was there any truth in what
you told her father about her company's merger with the other brokerage
house?" I asked him. "It sounded so specific."

"Made-up stories ought to be
specific." He picked the sandwich up and looked at it as if someone
else had handed it to him.

"You made it all up?" It
occurred to me that he must have invented the story shortly after April
had been taken to the hospital.

"Well, I think something
was, as they say, in the wind. Something was wafted here and there and
everywhere, like dandelion seeds." He put his sandwich down on the
plate and lifted his glass and drank. "You know the worst thing about
people who do what April did, people in that kind of work? I don't mean
April, of course, because she wasn't like that, but the rest of them?
They were all absolutely full of hot air. They gab in their morning
meetings, then they gab on the phone, then they gab to the
institutional customers during lunch, then they gab some more on the
phone—that's it, that's the job. It's all
talking.
They love
rumors
,
God, do they love rumors. And the second-worst thing about these people
is that they all believe every word every one of them says! So unless
you are absolutely up-to-the-minute on all of this stupid, worthless
gossip and innuendo they trade back and forth all day long, unless you
already know what everybody is whispering into those telephones they're
on day and night, you're out, boy, you are about to get flushed. People
say that academics are unworldly, you know, people, especially these
bullshit artists who do the kind of thing April did, they scorn us
because we're not supposed to be in the real world? Well, at least we
have real
subjects
, there's
some intellectual and ethical content to
our lives, it isn't just this big gassy bubble of spreading half-truths
and peddling rumors and making money."

He was breathing hard, and
his face was a high, mottled pink. He drained the rest of his drink and
immediately made another. I knew about Cristal. In just under ten
minutes, John had disposed of about fifteen dollars worth of vodka.

"So Barnett and Company
wasn't really going to open a San Francisco office?"

"Actually, I have no real
idea."

I had another thought. "Did
she want to keep this house because it was so near her father's place?"

"That was one reason." John
leaned on the counter and lowered his head. He looked as if he wanted
to lie down on the counter. "Also, April didn't want to be stuck out in
Riverwood with dodos like Dick Mueller and half the other guys in her
office. She wanted to be closer to art galleries, restaurants, the, I
don't know, the cultural life. You can see that, all you have to do is
look at our house. We weren't like those dopes in her office."

"Sounds like she would have
enjoyed San Francisco," I said.

"We'll never know, will we?"
He gave me a gloomy look and bit into his sandwich. He looked down at
it as he chewed, and his forehead wrinkled. He swallowed. "What the
hell is in this thing, anyhow?" He ate a little bit more. "Anyhow, she
would never have left Alan, you're right." He took another bite. After
he swallowed, he tilted his plate over the garbage can and slid most of
the sandwich into it. "I'm going to take this drink and go up to bed.
That's about all I can face right now." He took another long swallow
and topped up his glass. "Look, Tim, please do stay here for a little
while. You'd be helping me."

"Good," I said. "There is
something I'd sort of like to look into, if I could stay around a
couple of days."

"What, some kind of
research?"

"Something like that," I
said.

He tried to smile. "God, I'm
really shot. Maybe you could call Dick Mueller? He'd still be in the
office, unless he's out at lunch somewhere. I hate to ask you to do
this, but the people who knew April ought to be told what happened
before they read it in the papers."

"What about the other man
who called? The one who didn't know whether to call you John or Mr.
Ransom?"

"Byron? Forget it. He can
hear it on the news."

He twirled his free hand in
a good-bye and wavered out of the kitchen. I listened to him thudding
up the stairs. His bedroom door opened and closed. When I had finished
eating, I put my plate into the dishwasher and stowed all the lunch
things back in the refrigerator.

In the quiet house, I could
hear the cooled air hissing out of the vents. Now that I had agreed to
keep John Ransom company, I was not at all certain about what I wanted
to do in Millhaven. I went into the living room and sat down on the
couch.

For the moment I had
absolutely nothing to do. I looked at my watch and saw with more than
surprise, almost with disbelief, that since I had staggered off the
airplane and found an unrecognizable John Ransom waiting for me at the
gate, exactly twenty-four hours had passed.

A trio of reporters from the
Ledger
arrived about three in
the afternoon. I told them that John was
sleeping, identified myself as a family friend, and was told in return
that they'd be happy to wait until John woke up. An hour later, the
doorbell rang again when a Chicago deputation appeared. We had more or
less the same exchange. At five, the doorbell rang once again while I
was talking on the telephone in the entry. Gripping colorful bags of
fried grease, notebooks, pens, and cassette recorders, the same five
people stood on and around the steps. I refused to wake John up and
eventually had to shake the telephone I was holding in the face of the
most obstinate reporter, Geoffrey Bough of the
Ledger
. "Well, can you
help us out?" he asked.

Despite his name, which
suggests a bulky middle-aged frame, a tweed jacket, and a tattersall
vest, this Bough was a skinny person in his twenties with sagging jeans
and a wrinkled chambray shirt. Forlorn black hair drooped over his
thick eyeglasses as he looked down to switch on his tape recorder.
"Could you give us any information about how Mr. Ransom is reacting to
the news of his wife's death? Does he have any knowledge of how
Dragonette first met his wife?" I shut the door in his face and went
back to Dick Mueller, April Ransom's co-worker at Barnett and Company,
who said, "My God, what was that?" He spoke with an almost comically
perfect Millhaven accent.

"Reporters."

"They already know that, ah,
that, ah, that…"

"They know," I said. "And
it's not going to take them long to find out that you were Dragonette's
broker, so you'd better start preparing."

"Preparing?"

"Well, they're going to be
very interested in you."

"
Interested
in me?"

"They'll want to talk to
everybody who ever had anything to do with Dragonette." Mueller
groaned. "So you might want to figure out ways to keep them out of your
office, and you might not want to enter or leave by the front door for
a week or so."

"Yeah, okay, thanks," he
said. He hesitated. "You say you're an old friend of John's?"

I repeated information I had
given him before Geoffrey Bough and the others had interrupted us.
Through the narrow windows on either side of the front door I saw
another car pull . up and double-park in front of the house. Two men,
one carrying a cassette recorder and the other a camera, slouched out
and began walking toward the door, grinning at Bough and his two
colleagues.

"How is John holding up?"
asked Mueller.

"He had a couple of drinks
and went to bed. He's going to have a lot to do over the next couple of
days, so I think I'll stick around to help him out."

Someone metronomically
pounded his fist against the door four times.

"Is that John?" Mueller
asked. He sounded worried, even alarmed.

"Just a gentleman of the
press."

Mueller gasped, imagining a
gang bawling his name while pounding at the brokerage doors.

"I'll call you in the next
few days."

"When my secretary asks what
you're calling about, tell her it's the bridge project. I'll have to
start screening my calls, and that'll remind me of who you are."

"The bridge project?" More
bawling and banging came through the door.

"I'll explain later."

I hung up, opened the door,
and began yelling. By the time I finished explaining that John was
asleep in bed, my picture had been taken a number of times. I closed
the door without quite slamming it. Through a slit of window I watched
them retreat down to the lawn, munch on their goodies, and light up
cigarettes while they worked out what to do. The photographers took a
few desultory pictures of the house.

A quick check from the
bottom of the stairs disclosed no movement upstairs, so John had
managed either to sleep through the clamor or to ignore it. I picked up
The Nag Hammadi Library,
switched on the television, and sat on the
couch. I turned to "The Treatise on the Resurrection," a letter to a
student named Rheginos, and read only a few words before I realized
that, like most of Millhaven, the local television had capitulated to
Walter Dragonette.

I had been hoping that a
combination of gnostic hugger-mugger and whatever was on the afternoon
talk shows would keep me diverted until John surfaced again, but
instead of Phil Donahue or Oprah Winfrey there appeared on the screen a
news anchorman I remembered from the early sixties. He seemed almost
eerily preserved, with the same combed-back blond hair, the same heavy
brown eyeglasses, and the same stolid presence and accentless voice.
With the air of unswerveable common sense I remembered, he was
repeating, probably for the twentieth or thirtieth time, that regular
programming had been suspended so that the All-Action News Team could
"maintain continuous reportage of this tragic story." Even though I had
seen this man read the evening news for years, I could not remember his
name—Jimbo Somehow or Jumbo Somebody. He adjusted his glasses. The
All-Action News Team would stay with events as they broke in the Walter
Dragonette case until evening programming began at seven, giving us
advice and commentary by experts in the fields of criminology and
psychology, counseling us on how to discuss these events with our
children, and trying in every way to serve a grieving community through
good reportage by caring reporters. On a panel behind his face a mob of
people occupying the middle of North Twentieth Street watched
orange-clad technicians from the Fire Department's Hazardous Materials
Task Force carry weighty drums out of the little white house.

Rheginos's teacher, the
author of "The Treatise on the Resurrection," said "do not think the
resurrection is an illusion. It is the truth! Indeed, it is more
fitting to say that the world is an illusion, rather than the
resurrection."

The news anchor slipped from
view as the screen filled with a live shot of the multitude spilling
across Armory Place. These people were angry. They wanted their
innocence back. Jimbo explained: "Already calls have been heard for the
firing of the chief of police, Arden Vass, the dismissal of Roman
Novotny, the police commissioner, and the fourth ward's aldermen,
Hector Rilk and George Vandenmeter, and the impeachment of the mayor,
Merlin Waterford."

I could read the lettering
on some of the signs punching up and down in rhythm to the crowd's
chants:
WHERE ARE YOU MERLIN?
and
DISMEMBER
HECTOR AND GEORGE
. At the
top of the long flight of marble steps leading to the front of police
headquarters, a gray-haired black man in a dark double-breasted suit
orated into a bullhorn. "… reclaim for ourselves and our children the
safety of these neighborhoods… in the face of official neglect… in the
face of official ignorance…" Seedy ghosts with cassette recorders,
ghosts with dandruff on the shoulders of hideous purple shirts, with
cameras and notebooks, with thick glasses sliding down their noses,
prowled through the crowd.