Waking the Dead (2 page)

“I’m having a nervous reaction to all this crap,” Eugene said. “I don’t know whether I’m coming or going.”

“You’re going,” I said.

Eugene’s intelligence went toward the keen; he regarded what other people said the way a prisoner looks over the walls of his cell, searching for the loose brick, the patch of spongy mortar. Eugene squinted at me. He was forever sizing me up.

“I guess if we knew how all this was going to end up,” he said, “then you and I might have worked a little harder on being friends.”

“I guess so. And I guess you would have worked a little harder with Sarah, too.” I know what that sounds like now, but at the time it seemed like a fair thing to say, and certainly within my rights to say it.

Eugene’s eyes filled with tears but just for an instant. “Don’t you give me any of your shit, pal. I’ve forgotten more about that girl than you’ll ever know. I changed her diapers and held her hands when she took her first little bitty baby steps.”

He took in a deep beleaguered breath and sat deeper in his seat. I could sense the tranquilizer kicking in for him and it made me glad I hadn’t swallowed mine. I realized dimly that the expression on his face was meant to inspire guilt in me, guilt over my lack of respect for his loss. But Sarah was in the cargo, directly below us for all I knew, and I could not make a peace that she herself had failed to negotiate. Eugene and Sarah hadn’t been easy with each other since Sarah was ten, and I felt I had to keep that going. I suppose it was a way of keeping her alive awhile longer and maybe Eugene was provoking me for the very same reason.

“I’m still waiting for you to tell me what the hell she was doing with that couple from Chile,” Eugene said. “Or why she was mixed up with this whole mess in the first place.”

“I wouldn’t know where to begin,” I said.

“Well, I wish she could have come to talk to me about it,” he said. “I could have told her she was getting in way over her head.”

In New Orleans, Eugene had offered me a bed in his house, but I didn’t want to be with them and the prospect of sleeping in or even near Sarah’s old room seemed too difficult. I didn’t want to put myself through it. I checked into a small hotel called Maison Dupuy— picturesque on the outside, anonymous within—and once I was there I turned on the TV, the air conditioner, and began to cry without control. It was like colliding with a self who had always been curled within me but whose presence I’d never suspected—just as the self who had once seized Sarah’s love had taken me by surprise. I believed in duty, in service, in carefully laid plans, in measured responses and calculated risks, but all of that was gone and what was left was terror and bitterness and a feeling that I was going mad.

It would have been even harder on me except my family flew to New Orleans. My father and mother arrived that evening, with my brother, Danny, and Caroline, my sister. I’d gone out for air and when I returned there was a note in my mailbox that my family was in Rooms 121 and 123.I knocked and my father answered the door. He was reading the
Times-Picayune
, holding it in one hand; he had wire-rimmed bifocals. His hair was duck white, full, wavy, long. His chest was massive and ruddy under his open shirt; he looked as if he’d been body-surfing in the cold Atlantic off the Rockaways. When he saw me, he dropped the newspaper and flung his arm around me, pulled me toward him. “Christ almighty,” he said in my ear, in his rich, porous voice—it always sounded as if he ought to clear his throat. I put my arms around him, held on. I saw my mother standing behind him, with her fingertips touching the bed, as if for balance. She had a pretty, round face. Danny used to say that Mom wore her hair like Lesley Gore. It was parted in the middle and had a dramatic flip on either side. She looked reserved, isolated, a little lonely, like a widow. She wore her glasses on a chain around her neck and they rose and fell on her bosom as she took deep emotional breaths.

Dad walked me in and handed me over to Mom, who held my face in her large, soft hands and kissed me on each cheek and then the chin. My parents had always meant safety and loyalty to me and seeing them shored me up. I began to see how I might be able to get through this.

“It’s the worst thing that’s ever happened,” Dad said.

“What can we do?” Mom said. “Do you want to talk about it? Just tell us what to do. We’re here for you.”

“And for her,” added Dad. He’d really liked Sarah. He thought we would get married and give him wonderful grandchildren. He also hoped that she would help me with my career, keep me strong and a little bit hungry. They both believed in absolute right and wrong, and they each had little bulletin boards within their hearts upon which grievances were posted and never taken down. “She was a wonderful girl, Fielding. There’s nothing more to say. A rare and wonderful girl.”

“Eddie,” Mom said, with a note of caution.

“It’s OK, Mom,” I said. “He’s right.”

“It’s not a question of right,” she said softly. It seemed as if it had been years now that half of what she’d said had been murmured to the side, as if the people who really understood her were phantoms, just offstage.

“We weren’t even getting along,” I said, suddenly putting my hand over my eyes. And then I had a desolate thought: Every misunderstanding, every quarrel, every overheated contest of the wills was now, by dint of her death, destined to become a memory of unutterable sweetness.

“It’s still in the newspapers,” Dad said. “It’s not something that’s going to go away. Not just the local papers,” he added, gesturing to the
Times-Picayune
, which lay open on the floor, turned to a page of advertisements showing drawings of lawn furniture, “but all the papers. The
New York Times
, the
Washington Post
, and of course your Chicago papers, too.” Dad was still a printer, coming to the end of a thirty-year hitch at the
New York Times
plant. Yet no matter how many half-truths and retractions he’d set type for, he still believed almost religiously in the printed word. He read three papers a day and every week or so went to the public library to read out-of-town papers. He subscribed to a dozen magazines and patrolled the used bookstores on Fourth Avenue, often buying books for no other reason but that he liked the look of them.

“Do you know anything more about what happened?” Mom said.

“Nothing,” I said. “Just what you know. I haven’t been trying to find out.”

“There’s going to have to be a thorough investigation,” Dad said, bringing his hands together and nodding, as if he’d just then decided to conduct the inquiry himself. “This isn’t Tijuana or somewhere. They can’t just come here and carry on like it was.”

“We were a little surprised,” Mom said, tilting her head in a way that suggested tactfulness, “to learn how … involved Sarah had gotten. We didn’t think of her that way.”

“It was recent,” I said.

“We sent letters to Senator Moynihan and Senator Javits,” Mom said.

“A different letter for each of them,” added Dad. “You can’t appeal to a Javits the way you would a Moynihan. Pat’s stuffy, but he’s from the streets.”

“You’ll come home with us when this is over,” Mom said.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” Dad said, sitting on the bed, resting his weight on his hands. “Killing an American girl was just about the stupidest thing those bastards could have done. People are never going to forget this.”

“I guess Sarah would be glad of that,” I said. I was hearing my voice as if it were coming from a different spot in the room.

“It’s a terrible thing to say, I guess,” Mom said, coming to my side and putting her arm through mine, sensing, I think, that I might lose my balance at any moment, “but we’re going to have to sit down soon and talk this whole thing through. This is going to involve you in all
kinds
of ways and maybe you’d like a chance to figure out just how you’re going to handle it.” Mom had worked for twenty-one years for a state assemblyman named Earl Corvino, whose motto was Let’s Minimize the Impact. Mom had gotten a pretty raw deal from Corvino but she’d learned a few things while she was at it.

That night, I moved into Danny and Caroline’s room; I couldn’t afford my own room and, more, I couldn’t bear being alone. I was still accepting the truth of Sarah’s death one cell at a time. With Danny and Caroline, I felt protected; they would know what to do if I suddenly fell into ten thousand pieces.

We stayed up late talking. I remember laughing. I remember Caroline recalling the tricky little current events quizzes Mom forced us to take over breakfast. What kind of plane was Captain Jerry Powers flying on his mission over Russia when the Soviets shot him down. Answer: a U-2. Right but wrong, silly: his name isn’t Jerry, it’s
Gary
. Like fanatical gardeners working in soil of questionable fertility, our parents slaved over us with a kind of diligence that certainly included love but was not confined to it. And now here we were, the three of us, bound together not only by the normal genetic magic of siblings but by the sort of loopy heroic narrative that binds veterans of a long war. Veterans of the Asian wars wear those satin jackets that say on the back I Know I’m Going to Heaven Because I’ve Spent My Time in Hell and then have a drawing of Korea or Vietnam. Danny had wanted us to wear jackets that said the same thing but with a picture of our genteel shabby brownstone in Brooklyn instead.

The war of our childhoods had been all the more peculiar and exhausting because it had all been waged quite clearly and endlessly for our own good. And here we were, the sum of their efforts: Danny was a fly-by-night businessman living six golden miles above his means; Caroline was a painter without enough money to buy paint, with two children and a tough marriage; and I was almost a lawyer. Yet, none of us worked the swing shift; none of us carried our lunch in a pail. We’d hightailed it out of our class.

We drank a few bottles of tepid wine and fell asleep. But I was up again before dawn. My heart was pounding as if I were being chased. I lay in bed listening to the air conditioner, to the deep, almost musical breathing of my brother, the slow rich exhalations of my sister, and it seemed that this thicket of horror and loss into which I’d been tossed had always been my life. It was impossible to believe that there had ever been any happiness.

The sun was getting ready to crest and another day without her was going to begin. And in New Orleans, too; the city of her longing. How she missed the smells of the place, the grillwork, the shotgun houses, the music, the tall icy drinks … We ought to have spent more time here. Tears were rolling into the corners of my mouth and I rubbed my face with the harsh, starchy sheet. I got out of bed and dressed in silence. Then down to the lobby, where the night man at the desk was reading
Our Lady of the Flowers
and the porter was walking slowly over the tiled floors, pushing an ammonia-soaked mop in front of him. I just sat there with my hands between my knees, staring straight ahead. A while later, I looked up and Danny was standing there. He hadn’t bothered to dress. He was in blue silk pajamas. His eyes were a similar color. His hair was the same light tan as the Minnesota farmland seen from the plane. His face was angular, his mouth a little tense: he never looked tired.

“Are you losing your mind?” he asked, crouching down before me, putting his bony, powerful hands on my knees.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“You look terrible,” he said. “And you’ve got to get through this whole fucking day. You’ve got the funeral. And there’s going to be reporters, questions, everything. This is going to be very hard.”

“It’s just the beginning,” I said.

“I know. But let’s get through today. Come on. Follow me. I’ve got something for you.” He got up and put his hand out for me. He put his other arm around my shoulders and took me back to the room.

Caroline sat up in bed as we walked in. It was not yet seven in the morning. Caroline slept in her underwear and a black T-shirt. She had brown hair and dark eyes; her jaw was square, her cheekbones high— she would never go pasty like the rest of us. Her looks fit her dramatic personality. “What are you guys doing?” she asked. In childhood, she’d been our ringleader, but life had been tougher on her and now poverty and disorganization made her uncertain.

“I’m going to medicate Fielding,” Danny said. He pulled his Mark Cross bag from beneath the bed and flipped it open. Zippered into a little side compartment was a tinfoil packet. My stomach lurched but only for a moment, like a drunk trying to get out of his chair but then giving up. Danny opened the foil packet and inside was a dingy powder, caked on the top, loose on the bottom.

“Are you seriously doing this?” asked Caroline. “I know what that is.”

“You’ve got something else to get him through this?” Danny asked, the confidence blowing through his voice like a stiff breeze.

“And what’s he supposed to do tomorrow?” Caroline asked.

“Tomorrow he can flip out. At least half the world won’t be watching.”

Is this what I think it is?” I asked.

“Yes. OK now, just take a little.”

“Am I going to be sick?”

“Why would I give you something to make you sick? Just don’t take too much.”

“I suppose you’ll be joining him,” Caroline said.

“And how ’bout yourself, Sis?” asked Danny.

“Forget it,” said Caroline. “In my neighborhood, this is no game. A junkie ripped off Rudy’s lunch money last week.”

“Well, it wasn’t me,” said Danny, handing me a piece of candy-striped straw.

A
ND SO AS
I walked into Sarah’s funeral it was within the soft armor of two snorts of heroin, each the size of a match head. The service was in a Catholic church, though Eugene was barely Catholic and Dorothy was nominally Episcopalian. It was the same church I’d gone to with Sarah for her grandfather’s funeral: St. Matthew’s. The whole issue of Catholicism was suddenly very touchy. It wasn’t as if the Williamses blamed the Church for what happened, but clearly mere were
elements
in the Church they did blame. After all, Sarah had been in Minneapolis to deliver three Chilean refugees to a Maryknoll convent, where they were to be given sanctuary. The Williamses had had it with priests and they’d had it with me. I was not expected to sit in the first pew with the family but had to find a place among the fifty or sixty others who made up the human periphery of Sarah’s short life.