Voice of Our Shadow (7 page)

I’ve never been lonely in either an airport or a train station. The sounds and smells of travelers, dust, and huge metal; people rushing around in every direction; arrivals, departures, and expectations in their veins instead of blood. If I am ever traveling somewhere, I try to be in the station at least an hour before departure so I can sit somewhere and enjoy the bustle. You can always go to a train station and sit there and enjoy it, but it’s better if you’re on your way someplace or expecting someone.

The original Vienna Westbahnhof was destroyed in the war, and the building that replaced it is one of those modern boxy things with no character at all. What saves it in the end is that about eighty percent of the place is glass — windows everywhere — and no matter where you are, you have a panoramic view of that part of the city. It’s wonderful to go in the afternoon and watch the sun drift through the windows and over everything. At night, climb the wide middle staircase, and once at the top, turn around quickly: the Café Westend across the street is full and bright, trams stream by in every direction, and the neon ads on the sides of the buildings splatter the dark with words and catch phrases that remind you that you’re in a far country. Car insurance is
Interunfall Versicherung
, cars are Puch and Lada, Mercedes. Coca-Cola as well, only here
Coke macht mehr draus!

I had a cup of coffee at one of the stand-up buffets and then started the long hike down the endless platform to the car with my reserved couchette. The lights in the train were off when I passed through the departure gate, but they suddenly clicked on all at once; street lamps at the end of dusk. A workman and a baggage porter, both dressed in different shades of blue, were leaning against a metal support post, talking and smoking. Since we were the only ones there, long appraising looks passed back and forth. This was their land until train time — what was I doing out there so early, trespassing? The porter looked at his watch, scowled, and flicked his cigarette away. The two of them separated without another word, and the workman walked over to the other side of the platform and climbed into a darkened first-class coach that said on a white and black sign that sometime deep in the night it would be going to Ostend, and then on to London.

Far up the tracks a single black engine scooted shrilly away and out of sight. I hefted my overnight bag and kept looking at the numbers on the sides of the cars. I wanted to be in my compartment. I wanted to be in my seat, eating the jumbo hero sandwich I’d made at home for dinner and watching the other people arrive.

The light was out in one compartment of my car. Climbing up the steep metal stairs, I made a silent bet with myself that it would be the light in mine. It would be broken, and if I wanted to do any reading before I went to sleep, I would have to walk ten cars back to find an empty seat. The light in the corridor was on, but sure enough, the dark one had my berth number on the door. The blue curtains were drawn across both windows. The Inner Sanctum. I reached down and pulled the door handle, but it didn’t move. I put my bag down and pulled with both hands. Nothing happened. I looked up and down the corridor for anyone who could help, but it was empty. Cursing, I snatched at the damned thing again and pulled with all my might. Not an inch. I gave the door a kick.

Immediately the curtains began to slide aside. I took a startled step backward. A theme from
Scheherezade
came on faintly. A match flared and broke the inner dark. It moved slowly left and right, then stopped. It went out, and a dull yellow flashlight beam came on in its place.

Outside, I heard the
chunk
of railroad cars being coupled together. The lemony light held, motionless; then it moved over a white-gloved hand that held a black top hat. A second white hand joined it on the other side of the shiny brim, and for a moment the hat moved in time to the sultry music.

“Surprise!” The light blasted on, and India Tate stood with a bottle of champagne in her hand. Behind her, Paul had the top hat on his head at a rakish slant and was opening another bottle with his clown-white gloves. I remembered the painting on the wall of their apartment. So this was Little Boy.

“Jesus Christ, you guys!”

The door slid open, and she yanked me into the little hot room.

“Where’re the cups, Paul?”

“What are you doing here? What happened to your movies?”

“Be quiet and take a glass of this. Don’t you want any of your going-away champagne?”

I did, and she slopped so much into my cup that it foamed up and over the edge and onto the dirty floor.

“I hope you like this stuff, Joey. I think it’s Albanian.” Paul still had his gloves on when he held his cup out to be filled.

“But what’s going on? Aren’t you missing
North by Northwest
?”

“Yup, but we decided you deserved a proper send-off. So drink up and don’t say anything else about it. Believe it or not, Lennox, we love you more than Gary Grant.”

“Baloney.”

“You’re absolutely right —
almost
as much as Gary Grant. I would now like to propose a toast to the three of us. Comrades in arms.” A man walked past in the narrow corridor behind me. I heard his footsteps. India held her cup up to him and said, “
Prosit
, pardner!” He kept walking. “Anyway, to get back to what I was saying, I would like to propose that we all drink to a truly wonderful life.”

Paul echoed her words and nodded in total agreement. They turned to me and held their Dixie cups up to be toasted. I was afraid my heart would break.

Sometimes the mail in Austria is very slow; it can take three days for a letter to get from one side of Vienna to the other. I wasn’t surprised when I received a Tate postcard from the town of Drosendorf in the Waldviertel section of the country a week after I’d returned from Frankfurt. That night on the train during our party they’d said they were going up there for a few days of rest and relaxation.

The card was written in India’s extremely neat, almost too-tight, up-and-down script. Every time I saw it I was reminded of the sample of Frederick Rolfe’s handwriting in A. J. A. Symons’s fascinating biography,
The Quest for Corvo
. Rolfe, who called himself Baron Corvo and wrote
Hadrian VII
, was nutty as a fruitcake. As soon as I knew her well enough to be able to kid her, I’d made a point of pressing the book on India and instantly turning to the page to show her the amazingly similar scrawl. She was not thrilled by the comparison, although Paul said I had her dead to rights.

Dear Joey.

There is a big church here in the center of town. The big attraction inside the big church is a skeleton of a woman all dolled up in a wedding gown, I think. She’s behind glass and has a bouquet of dead flowers on her.

Little hugs,

Mr. & Mrs. Little Boy

The postcard was interesting only because neither of them liked to talk about anything that had to do with death. Several weeks before, a man in Paul’s office had keeled over dead at his desk from a cerebral hemorrhage. Apparently Paul was so shaken by it that he had to leave work for the day. He said he’d gone for a walk in the park, but his legs were shaking so much that after a few minutes he had to sit down.

Once, when I asked him if he ever saw himself growing old and dying, he said no. Instead, he said, he envisioned an old man with gray hair and wrinkles who was called Paul Tate but wasn’t him.

“What do you mean? There’ll be another you in your body?”

“Yes, don’t look at me as if I’m goony. It’s like working a shift in a factory, see? I’m working one of the middle ones — the thirty-five to forty-five shift, get it? Then some other man checks into my body and takes it from there. He’ll know all about being old and arthritic and that sort of thing, so it won’t bother him.”

“He’s got the old-age shift, huh?”

“Exactly! He comes in for the midnight-to-seven spot. It makes good sense, Joey, so don’t laugh like that. Do you realize how many different beings you are in a lifetime? How all your hopes and opinions, everything, change every six or seven years? Aren’t all the cells in our bodies supposed to be different every few years? It’s just the same. Listen, there was a time when all India and I wanted was a saltbox house on the coast of Maine with lots of land around us. We wanted to raise dogs, can you believe it? Now just the thought of that kind of permanence makes me start to itch. Who’s to say the little guys in our bodies who wanted to live in the house haven’t been replaced by a whole new bunch who like to travel around and see new things? Apply that to who we are at the different times in our lives: You’ve got one crew that takes you from one to seven. Then they’re replaced by the group that steers you through puberty and that whole mess. Joe, are you going to tell me you’re the same Joe Lennox you were when your brother died?”

I shook my head emphatically. If he only knew …

“No, no way. I hope to God I’m miles down the road from
that
me.”

“All right, then, it just goes along with what I’m saying. That little-Joe shift checked out a while ago, and now there’s a new bunch in you running things.”

I looked to see if he was serious. He wasn’t smiling, and his hands were unusually still.

The idea intrigued me. If only the Joe-Lennox-who-killed-his-brother crew
had
left. I’d be clean. A whole new me who had had nothing to do with that day …

“I’ll tell you, all you have to do is look at my wife if you want proof of my theory. She
hates
to think about dying. Christ, she doesn’t even like to admit she’s sick. But you know what? She loves to read about diseases, especially really rare ones that kill you, like lupus or progeria. And her favorite films in all the world are horror movies. The bloodier the better. Give her a Peter Straub novel and she’s in seventh heaven. Now, you cannot tell me the same crew’s working inside her. Not unless they’re all schizo.”

I giggled. “You mean there’s different guys in there doing all different things too? Like a football team? You go out for a pass, you block …”

“No doubt about it, Joe. Absolutely.”

Neither of us said anything for a while, and then I slowly nodded my head. “Maybe you’re right. I think my mother was like that.”

“What do you mean?”

“She changed all the time. She was a peacock’s tail of emotion.”

“And you’re not like that at all?”

“No, not a tad. I’ve never been very emotional or flamboyant. Neither has my father.”

He winked and smiled devilishly. “You’ve never done anything out of the ordinary? No disturbing the universe?”

The moment froze like film in a broken projector. It almost started to burn from the middle outward. Paul Tate knew nothing about what had happened with Ross, but suddenly I had the feeling that he did, and it scared me.

“Yes, well sure, sure, I’ve, uh, I’ve done some strange things, but —”

“You’re beginning to look a wee bit cornered, Joey. It sounds to me as if you’ve got some dark trunks stored down in your basement.” He leered, delighted to know it.

“Uh, Paul, don’t get your hopes up too high on that. I ain’t no Attila the Hun!”

“That’s too bad. Didn’t you ever read
Dorian Gray
? Listen to this: ‘The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.’ Amen, brother. I bet you Attila the Hun died a happy man.”

“Come on, Paul —”

“Don’t play footsie, Joe. You know exactly what I mean. There isn’t a person on earth who isn’t up to their elbows in badness. Why don’t you drop the damned facade and admit it?”

“Because I think it’s better to move away from it! Get on to other things! And hope we’ll be able to do better next time, if we’re
given
a next time.” I was getting too excited and had to turn my volume down.

“Joe, you are what you’ve done. You are what you’re doing. Okay, we’re all trying to do better, but it just isn’t that easy, you know. Maybe it’d be better if we just looked what we’ve done smack in the face and started dealing with it. Maybe instead of always looking forward to tomorrow, trying to ignore what we did yesterday or today, it’d be better if we squared off with our past actions —” He stopped in mid-sentence and looked at me queerly. His face was bloodless, but what really struck me was a kind of terrible stillness in his eyes and on his lips. It was gone in an instant, but it left his face looking drawn and blurred, as if something important had gone out of him, leaving him only half filled. Ironically, no sooner had I gone to sleep that night than I started dreaming about Ross. As far as I can remember, nothing much happened, yet something scared me awake; it was a long time before I could sleep again. In the dark I looked toward the ceiling and remembered the time he had poured syrup on me. How do you square off with your past actions when you don’t know if they were right or wrong?

“Who’s that?”

“Us, dummy! Can’t you tell?”

I sat forward and looked more carefully at the picture on the screen. The people were holding on to the edge of a swimming pool, their hair slicked back and wet from the water. They looked young and exhausted. It really didn’t look like either Paul or India. India put the bowl of popcorn on my lap. It was almost empty. We’d been popping and eating it all night.

“Are you bored, Joey? I hate looking at other people’s slides. They’re about as interesting as looking in someone’s mouth.”

“No! I love pictures and home movies. It lets you catch up on the part of people’s lives you missed.”

“Joe Lennox, career diplomat.”

Paul pressed the button, and a shot of India came on. It must have been taken shortly after the last one, because she was still in the same swimsuit and her hair was wet-flat on her head. She was smiling to beat the band, and there was no mistaking her loveliness now. She must have been five years younger, but she was the same delightful woman.

“This next one is my father. The only person he ever liked besides my mother was Paul.”

“Aw shucks, India.”

“Shut up. That’s no big compliment. He did
not
like me, his one and only daughter. He thought I was stuck up, which I am, but so what? Next slide, Professor.”