Waking the Dead (14 page)

All we really needed from each other was a decent good-bye, and we were used to saying good-bye so it ought to have been easy. Yet she felt heavy, almost comatose, in my arms as I brought her close to me for a parting kiss and her lips were cool, hard, and I don’t know that mine were any more appealing.

“I’ll call you tonight,” I said.

“You’ll probably forget,” she said.

“Of course I won’t.”

“It’s OK. It doesn’t really matter.”

“Then why’d you say it?”

“It’s just that you always do when you go to New York. Forget.”

“I’m sorry about the other night, Juliet.”

“I know you are. You can stop apologizing now. I mean I really wish you would. There’s too much to do. Let’s just go on to other things.”

“To the business at hand?”

“OK.”

I pulled her to me again for another try and this time, as she did her best to return my embrace, I realized how empty and sad my gesture was. My suitcase was packed, shut, and standing at the door next to my stack of Christmas presents. There was the sound of a car’s horn honking below. Isaac had insisted on taking me to the airport. It was Christmas morning, before eight o’clock.

Juliet watched from the window as I walked to Isaac’s car. I looked back at her; framed by the beige curtains, the glare from the snowbound street obscuring half her face, she waved slowly—or seemed to—and I waved back. Isaac stayed at the wheel of his Continental, dressed in his herringbone overcoat, his Russian hat. He’d be asking no questions about why Juliet wasn’t taking me to the airport or coming along for the ride. That would be indiscreet. Isaac was not interested in the necessarily untidy private lives of others.

I got into his car. It smelled of pipe tobacco and that after-shave lotion he got mail order from a little Bulgarian chemist’s shop on Portobello Road.

“Juliet says hello,” I said as we pulled onto the street.

“She’s well?” he asked casually, in a tone that didn’t invite an answer.

“Fine,” I said softly. I watched the apartment houses go by and tried to think of all those souls inside as my constituents. I wanted them to live better and to
be
better; I wanted them to need me as I needed them. Yet they slept now, with their presents beneath the trees, and if they knew my name at all they probably assumed I was just another jackal running with the pack, another set of sticky fingers in the public pocket, another overgrown jock with a gung ho heart.

“We’ll be seeing Juliet later this afternoon,” Isaac said. He turned in his seat to see if a car was behind him before making a left turn. He didn’t trust mirrors.

“Keep an eye on her, will you?” I asked. “She holds so much in.” “Her father was exactly like that, Fielding. And it always worked itself out.” He accelerated and we were on the Outer Drive, following the shoreline of the gray, chunky lake.

“I suppose you’re looking forward to seeing your family in New York,” Isaac said wistfully. I don’t think Isaac very fully understood why I needed my old family, now that I had him and Adele. He saw them as dicey characters. My sister had married a black man and what little Isaac knew of Danny made him jittery head to toe. He must have seen them as bad influences and seen my continuing attachment to them as a danger—as if they represented an unruly sort of life into which I might suddenly revert and fall.

“It’ll be good to see them. I just wish there was more time.” “Yes,” he said. “But there isn’t. You realize that, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“The election will be January 22. It’s around the corner.”

“I know. But how can I lose? There’ll be no one opposing me.” “There’s a great deal more to do than winning,” Isaac said. “After the election, you’ve got to hit the ground running.” We drove in silence for a few moments. A wave of terrifying, senseless hope was going through me. I had just had a vision of seeing Sarah at the airport. I wanted to close my eyes and follow that thought, to worry that inflamed nerve of longing, but I didn’t dare. Yet even as I tried to let it pass, it left its traces on me, like a fog can leave shreds of itself in the tops of bare trees.

“So you’ll be at your parents’ for the Christmas festivities,” Isaac said.

“Yeah,” I said. “I haven’t even seen their new house. Did I tell you? They moved outside the city.”

“Ah,” said Isaac with a smile. “The great working-class heroes have opted for life in the suburbs.”

“You’ve got it all wrong,” I said. “The suburbs are for the working class. The city is too fancy for normal people and it’s even spilling over into Brooklyn. My parents’ apartment went co-op three years ago and they either had to buy it or get out. Talk about changing neighborhoods. To them, it was a tragedy. So they sold their apartment to a Wall Street couple and took the money they made on the deal and bought a house out of town.”

“Very enterprising,” Isaac said. “Has it changed them?”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, they’ve always been on one side of the bargain. Now capitalism’s working in their favor. I was only wondering.”

“A way of life ended for them, Isaac. Don’t you understand? It was like the weight of all the new people with their new money opened up a hole and everything my parents once knew sunk into that hole and now’s gone forever.”

“Well, they made the most of it,” said Isaac. “That’s the important thing. Surviving.”

When we got to the airport, Isaac glanced at me from the corners of his eyes and said, “There’s something I wanted to bring up with you.”

“Good,” I said.

“Good?”

“Well, it explains why you’re going to all this trouble. I could have just as easily taken a taxi.”

“It’s no trouble, Fielding. I’m an early riser.” He was as aware as I was of my tactics and he knew I had, for a moment, deflected him. He moistened his lips and started in again. “I’m a little worried about your family.”

“Granted,” I said.

“I’m only talking about possible repercussions on our campaign.”

“What am I supposed to do, Isaac? Get another family?”

“It’s just something to be aware of, that’s all.You have a sister with an unconventional marriage and a brother—well, you know, a brother with all the earmarks of a dangerous style of life.”

“I think of them as assets,” I said. We were falling into pattern with the other cars arriving at the airport.

“Yes. Well, this isn’t about how
you
think of them.”

“They humanize me, Isaac.”

“I think you’re quite human enough.” He glanced at me to see if I was smiling.

“I don’t,” I said, and I wasn’t smiling. “Anyhow, if the president can survive a beer-swilling brother who makes private arms deals with Libya, then I think I can survive Danny and Caroline.”

“And Sarah Williams, as well,” added Isaac. “We have to expect that to come up one of these days.”

“Yes,” I said. “One of these days.”

We drove to the American Airlines terminal. Traffic was thick and rude—even on Christmas, I thought inanely, as if the mere birth of Christ could make people stop leaning on their hooters. Isaac was nervously clearing his throat, as if sentiment was congealing at the back of it. It was hot in the Lincoln but he kept his lamb’s wool cap on and his white hair was damp with perspiration.

“I don’t even know how to thank you, Isaac,” I said.

“There’s nothing to thank me for.”

“Right. And Pinocchio owed nothing to Geppetto.”

“Folklore,” said Isaac with a shrug. He turned toward me and with a stiff, clumsy lurch of emotion, he put his arms around me and pressed the side of his face against me. “God bless you, Fielding. I know you’re going to do well. Just remember:The barbarians are all around us.” He put his hand in his coat and pulled out an envelope. “Will you take this? Adele asked me to give it to you.”

I looked at the pale green envelope. My initials were written on it.The snow rattled against the windshield like a beaded curtain.There was a solid ring of taxis and buses and cars around the airport. Skycaps were pushing luggage around in their pipe-metal carts, cutting unstable tracks in the wet snow. There were at least a hundred travelers and any one of them could have been Sarah—Sarah in a fur coat, Sarah in disguise, Sarah transmuted by time. I promised myself not to look in anyone’s face. I was in the grip of a long and powerful hallucination; I would hide from it.

“What is it?” I asked Isaac, holding up the envelope.

“From Adele,” he said. “Go. Your plane takes off in ten minutes. Go.”

I clapped my hand on his shoulder and made a determined face at him—lips pursed, eyes wide and steady, head slightly nodding. He smiled back, the light dancing in his eyes.

“Wonderful career,” I heard him say as I climbed out of the car. A skycap near the American Airlines door looked questioningly at me and I tried to indicate with a shake of the head that I was too hip, too virile, to be helped. I turned to look at Isaac a last time. The snow was sticking to my hair, my eyelashes. The weight of the suitcase was cutting a groove in my hand.

“I’ll call you,” I said.

I hurried through the airport, down the carpeted ramp with its metal walls radiating cold and the disinfected odor of the plane at the end of it, and found my seat. The 727 was full. It was Christmas morning and the stewardesses were wearing reindeer pins on their uniforms.

After takeoff, I opened the envelope and saw to my great surprise that Adele had written me a poem.

TO A MAN AT THE BEGINNING

Life is a journey between solitudes.

We are born in aloneness and we

Die in aloneness

We dance on graves

We are solitary as stones

The wind through the window extinguishes the

Last candle

Sorrow is everywhere

Betrayal

A world of death camps and soft fur coats

Human lampshades and exquisite chocolates

A bird on the wing and then the sky darkens

And then there is light

Darkness and light.

Darkness again and

Then there is light, there is light, there is

Light.

Adele Green    December 24, 1979

In New York, I rented a Ford and drove from LaGuardia to my parents’ new house in Nyack. They lived on Mayfair Street, a narrow strip of asphalt that pointed straight down at the Hudson River like the barrel of a gun. The river was filled with ice islands, moving slowly like squares in one of those hand-held puzzles. The street was icy and I held onto the steering wheel of my car with both hands, feeling not quite in control.

My parents’ house was near the bottom of the street. It was made of fieldstone and yellow wood. With the prerogative of homeowners, they’d put a large Styrofoam snowman on their icy front lawn. Dad’s instructions had been to pull into the driveway behind their Impala, but the town plow had left a wedge of hard dark snow in front of the driveway, grille high, and I had to park on the street. Carrying the suitcase and shopping bag uphill, I felt a senile shortness of breath. Nerves. I spit and put my left leg in front of my right, pivoting off it like a gondolier. The sky was coming closer, notching down like a canopy upon which plaster is falling.

I went up the little salt-pocked sidewalk to their house, patted the Styrofoam snowman, looked for their faces in the window. I climbed the three-step porch and rang the doorbell. In a moment, the door opened and they were standing there. I was the socket and they were the plug and now we were together and the lights were on.

“Merry Christmas, Congressman,” Dad said, and opened the aluminum storm door to me. I trudged in and dropped the suitcase on the bare, highly polished floor and opened my arms to Mom, who was gliding next to me like a boat sidling into the dock. They both looked superb. Somehow younger, more fit than they had a year before. Mom’s hair was cut short, pixyish; her jawline was tight, youthful. She was wearing dark red lipstick and nail polish, a turtleneck sweater and new blue jeans. Dad was in jeans, too, with a blue and green flannel shirt. He’d put on a little weight and it suited him. His hair was bright white and combed back in three gentle waves. His face was pink, healthy, scrupulously shaved.

“Look at you two,” I said. “You both look fantastic.”

“What’d you expect?” Dad said, furrowing his John L. Lewis eyebrows and raising his fists. “What else we got to do but make ourselves pretty?” He grabbed my valise, making, I thought, rather a show of it, hoisting it up as if it weighed a pound or two.

“Am I the first one here?” I asked.

“Danny and Caroline’ll be here soon,” Mom said. She was looking at the suitcase Dad was carrying: she had an eye for expensive things. “Nice bag, honey.”

“A gift from Isaac,” I said.

“I thought so.”

We walked into the living room: low ceilings, smooth walls, a mustard-colored sofa, a new red-brick fireplace with glass doors over the hearth. The console stereo was playing, tuned to an easy listening channel.

“We’ll take you for a tour later on, Congressman,” Dad said.

“Place looks great,” I said.

“Well, there’s plenty of work to do,” he said, pleased. He’d been a frustrated handyman all his life—but he’d always refused to improve property he didn’t own, not wanting to be a sucker for the landlord.

“Does anyone want to come out to the backyard with me and plant some tulip and daffodil bulbs?” Mom asked.

“Mom,” I said, “it’s the dead of winter. There’s snow and ice on the ground.”

“Her bulbs came late,” Dad said. “Mail-order crooks.”

“If I get them in now, they can be up by spring,” Mom said.

“But the ground’s frozen,” I said.

“You just do a little at a time,” Mom said. “It’ll look so pretty when they come up in spring. I really don’t want to miss that.”

“
Dutch
bulbs,” Dad said, with displeasure.

“Dad’s on a Buy American thing,” Mom said.

“Half the American Beauty roses come from the Middle East,” he said, as if that opened the case and shut it. He turned to me. “Did you catch that thing on the news about Jamaica? By next year, we’re going to be getting thirty percent of all the plastic bottles used in this country from Jamaica.”