The Truth About Death (21 page)

“Sleep tight,” I said. “Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”

That night, lying in the bottom bunk of the old cedar bed that matched my old cedar desk, I read for a while—Thucydides’s
History
in Rex Warner’s translation. A book I’d read in my first year at Michigan. But I didn’t get very far. I turned out the light. The silence was unnerving—an occasional car went by on Kruger Road, the lights swishing across the room. The old house creaked, my sister closed and opened the bathroom door. I listened harder, kept listening harder and harder till I could hear Rosella’s voice in my ear:
“Whun ye feel it coomin, luv, tock it oot,”
till I could hear my mother playing
The Harmonious Blacksmith
on the piano downstairs, till I could hear Gracie sobbing at the kitchen table after Pete left her and moved up to Battle Creek, and someone who was not Bob Dylan singing “Corrina, Corrina” on YouTube, and the sharp whistle of the coal mine at the Museum of Science and Industry, and Elena grunting with pleasure as she chomps down the apples that I hand-feed her, and even the
clack-clack-clack
ing of my father’s typewriter in his little office off the front hall, and I knew that I had nothing to lose, that nothing is ever lost.

FOR SALE

In 1996, thanksgiving at the Unterkircher house in Chicago was the same as always—turkey, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, cranberries, apple pie—except that Margot, Rudy’s youngest daughter, was in Florence, Italy, where she’d gone to volunteer her services after the big flood; and Molly, his second daughter, had stayed in Ann Arbor, Michigan (where she was studying to get her real estate license) in order to be with her new boyfriend. Dan, Rudy’s son-in-law, had taken the car down to get gassed up for the trip back to Milwaukee; Meg, the oldest of the three girls, had put the kids down for a nap and was helping Rudy with the dishes. Rudy was washing and she was drying bowls and plastic containers and wooden spoons—all the stuff that didn’t go in the dishwasher—and spreading them out on towels on the kitchen table.

Meg and Dan had bought a house up in Milwaukee, and when she said, “Pop, uh, we’ve, uh, been kind of wondering,” he thought she was going to ask him for some money, which he didn’t have. But she said, “We’ve, uh, kind of
been wondering about having Christmas in Milwaukee this year.”

Rudy rinsed off his hands, dried them on a dish towel, and poured himself another cup of coffee from the pot on the stove. He wasn’t sure who was included in the “we.”

She started to talk a little faster. “Molly would probably be staying in Ann Arbor,” she said; so Rudy knew that the two of them had already talked it over. “She was really working hard,” Meg went on, “and the New York Central schedule was really impossible, and she’d sold her car …” But all Rudy and Margot’d have to do—if Margot got back from Italy—was hop on a train in Union Station and they’d be in Milwaukee in about ninety minutes if they didn’t feel like driving or if the weather was bad.

Rudy’s life—or maybe it was just
life
—had a way of sneaking up on him, catching him by surprise. He’d think a chapter was about to end, and then it would go on and on. Or he’d think he was in the middle of a chapter, and all of a sudden it would end. It wasn’t so bad when you were young, because most of the chapters were ahead of you; but when you were Rudy’s age, sixty-five, there weren’t so many chapters left. You hated to see a good one come to an end, which was what was happening.

“Well,” he said, swirling the coffee around in his cup, “suit yourself, if that’s what you really want.” This was a phrase he’d used a lot when the girls were in their teens. One of them would want to hitchhike out to California with her boyfriend, and he’d say, “Suit yourself, if that’s what you really want.”

And that’s the way they left it, because just as Meg was about to say something that might have settled the matter one way or another, Dan came in the back door, kicking snow off
his boots, saying that the weather looked bad, and they ought to get going before it got really dark.

After they’d gone Rudy sat at the table and started to work seriously on a jug of wine that he’d put away earlier, imagining what Christmas would be like with just him and Margot and the dogs—Heathcliff and Saskia, a German Shepherd and Husky—and by the time he got to the bottom of the jug he’d pretty well convinced himself that he ought to sell the house and go down to Texas and buy an avocado grove. Then they’d appreciate what it meant to come home for Christmas to the place you grew up in.

He went down to the basement and pulled out an old one-by-twelve board that had been lying on the floor behind the furnace ever since he’d taken down the bunk beds in Meg’s old room—the board had been used to keep Meg from falling out of the top bunk—and cut off a two-foot length with his new saw. The saw—a present from the Central Texas Avocado Growers Association—was Japanese and cut on the upward pull rather than on the downward thrust, which confused him a little but didn’t stop him.

He didn’t bother to sand down the edges; he just opened a can of the paint he’d been meaning to use to paint the storm windows and painted

FOR SALE

in big black letters. Underneath
FOR SALE
he painted

by owner

When he was done he brought down an electric fan from the attic and turned it on and pointed it at the sign to make the
paint dry quicker—he was in that much of a hurry—and then he went back upstairs and turned on the radio and lay down on the living room floor with the dogs.

Meg and Dan decided to come home for Christmas after all, and Molly was coming too, bringing her Indian boyfriend, whose name was Tejin or Tinder or Ginger—something like that. He taught mathematics at the University of Michigan. She’d met him, she told Rudy on the phone, at the family table at Metzger’s German Restaurant. He’d really like to see an American Christmas.

Rudy was relieved like a man who’d come through a serious traffic accident without a scratch. He vacuumed up the dog hair and brought down the boxes of the old Christmas decorations: the crèche that his wife, Helen, who’d taught art history before she died, had brought back from a sabbatical year in Italy and the snowman candles, like skaters on a pond made out of a mirror. He bought a tree but he didn’t put it up, because they never put the tree up till Christmas Eve. He got out the old ornaments that the kids had made out of baker’s clay when they were little: salt and flour and water rolled into a paste, cut with cookie cutters, baked in the oven, and then painted. And on the day before Christmas he bought two fresh capons instead of a turkey. It wasn’t till he carried the capons down to the basement in the big roaster—to keep them cool but not frozen—that he remembered the For Sale sign, which was propped up against the freezer. The electric fan was still blowing on it. His first impulse was to hide it, in case one of the girls came downstairs to get something out of the freezer; but then he decided it might be a good idea to put it up, just for one night, just to shake them up a little, make them think. Sometimes it takes a little jolt to make us
appreciate what we’ve got, to keep us from taking it for granted. That’s what Rudy had in mind—a little jolt.

The ground was frozen too hard to drive a stake into, so he nailed the sign to the porte cochere and turned the outside light on so you couldn’t miss the sign as you drove up the driveway. Then he went inside and rolled out the dough for the sour cream apple pies, which he made in springform pans so that they stood straight-sided, about four inches high. He used eight big Granny Smith apples in each pie.

He hadn’t heard from Margot since right after Thanks-giving, when he’d gotten a card saying she was staying in a convent. The card was up on the refrigerator, held by a magnet shaped like a ladybug. It was a picture of the Virgin Mary and an angel with great, big gold wings. He figured he’d come home from work one day and she’d be there—Margot, not the Virgin Mary—but she wasn’t. Icelandic Airlines had flights to New York on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but it was Friday, and she hadn’t come home. He called Alitalia and
TWA
, which had direct flights from Rome to Chicago, but they wouldn’t release the passenger lists, so he had no way of finding out if she was booked on any of the flights. By Christmas Eve he had just about given up hope. “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth,” Helen used to say, “it is to have a thankless child.” She was joking, but there was some truth to it too. How much trouble was it to write a postcard? Or to pick up the telephone? What was she doing for money? Was she going to become a nun? Nothing would surprise him.

Christmas was a time to make allowances. Take Molly’s boyfriend, for example, whose name turned out to be Tejinder, which means “the embodiment of power” in Punjabi. He was a Sikh and wore a cream-colored turban made out of some
kind of soft material that reminded Rudy of some fancy underthings he’d bought for Helen once. Concealed on his person, Molly had told him, were several items—five, to be precise—of great importance: a comb to comb out his long hair, a knife to defend himself against his enemies, a ring, a bracelet, and some special underwear called
kaccha
.

Rudy had given considerable thought to where Tejinder ought to sleep and had finally decided on the floor of the study. He lugged one of the extra mattresses down from the attic and made it up nicely with matching sheets and pillowcases and a Pendleton blanket. He’s probably used to sleeping on a mat on the floor anyway, Rudy told himself. But Molly carried Tejinder’s suitcase right up to her own small room with its single bed. Rudy followed her.

“I’ve got a bed made up for him in the study,” he said.

Molly plopped the suitcase down on the floor, sat down on it, and looked around at the empty aquarium, the books, the portable Smith Corona on the desk, and the beanbag chair.

“Wouldn’t he be more comfortable in the study?” Rudy asked.

“He might be more comfortable,” she said, “but he wouldn’t have as much fun.”

“Well,” he said, “suit yourself, if that’s what you really want.”

Or take the portable television set that Meg and Dan brought, with a bright red ribbon tied around the handle. “Merry Christmas,” they said. It took him a while to realize that it was his Christmas present.

Rudy and Helen had never had a
TV
. With Helen it had been a matter of principle—on account of the kids. Rudy’d
never cared much one way or the other, but he’d gotten used to not having one, and he got a kick out of telling people that he didn’t have one.
“WHAAAAT?”
they’d say. “You don’t have a
TV
?” No one could believe him. He might as well have told them that they didn’t have indoor plumbing. Babysitters had looked around the living room in disbelief and then desperation. Guests at Thanksgiving couldn’t believe they were going to miss the football games.

“We just never got around to getting one,” he’d say, or, depending on his audience, would add, “On account of the kids, you know. We’d rather they read books or played the piano.”

And now Dan was hooking the thing up in the living room. He’d brought along the sort of antenna you set on top of the
TV
, with two spikes sticking up, and was turning it this way and that. The
TV
was making a loud static sound. Daniel, five, and Philip, seven, were waiting impatiently.

“C’mon out here, you guys,” Rudy shouted from the kitchen. “I’ve got some baker’s clay here; you can make Christmas tree ornaments like your Mama used to. We’ll bake them and then you can paint them.”

But either the boys couldn’t hear him or they preferred to watch the snowy screen.

One Christmas was much like the next at the Unterkircher house, just like in the Dylan Thomas story,
A Child’s Christmas in Wales
, and one of the things that was always the same was that somebody would give Rudy a copy of
A Child’s Christmas in Wales
—a record in a red-and-white jacket with the text printed in a little booklet. There were half a dozen of them in the record cabinet. On the other side of the record was a poem called “Do Not Go Gentle
into that Good Night,” and sometimes Rudy wondered if maybe
that
was the real message they were sending him. He liked to think so.

For supper Rudy, Molly, Tejinder, Meg, Dan, and the children ate spaghetti with clams, which is what they’d eaten every Christmas Eve after Helen’s sabbatical, because that’s what they’d eaten on Christmas Eve in Florence, and Helen had liked traditions, especially Italian ones.

After supper they put the lights on the tree and decorated it with strings of cranberries and popcorn and the baker’s clay ornaments. Rudy must have had three or four hundred of them, enough for several trees. Daniel and Philip had not forgotten about the
TV
, which could not be coaxed into working, much to Rudy’s satisfaction, but Tejinder entertained them with a trick involving two hats and two or three little wads of paper, which he passed back and forth through the solid surface of the dining room table, and by demonstrating several yoga positions which the boys were eager to imitate: the Lotus, the Fish, the Crow, and finally the Dead Man’s Pose, which, he said, was the most difficult of all. The boys lay quietly on their backs.

“Not even your toe must twitch,” Tejinder warned. “Not even the tip of your finger must move.”

Rudy put a little applejack in their cider and helped them write a note to Santa, which they left in front of the fireplace, along with a glass of milk and a plate of cookies.

Nobody said anything about the sign till it was almost bedtime and they were finishing off the last of the applejack in front of the fire. The dogs were on the side porch, banging to get in. Tejinder and Dan had gone upstairs, one to meditate, the other to settle the boys down.

MEG
:  “I see you’ve got the house up for sale.”

RUDY
:  “Oh, that.”

Molly got up to let the dogs in. Rudy suddenly realized that she’d quit smoking.