A Private Sorcery (29 page)

“N
O GO
,” M
ONK SAYS
. “I went through all the brass in Riyadh and then to the State Department. They can't justify a search for Flora Fahrsi since there's no evidence that she's missing. She's what they call
absent
—someone who has removed themselves from communication.”

“You told them why? About Bernardo's body needing to be claimed?”

“I tried the ‘one hand washing the other' routine—that this was their affair in Guatemala that they could clean up if they'd put in the legwork in Riyadh, but they didn't bite. The only thing they said they could do was to allow an exception to the rules of claim.”

“What does that mean?”

“If it could be documented that Flora Fahrsi is the sole living relative and that she cannot be reached, friends of the deceased or of the family would be permitted to claim the body.” Monk snorts. “After a truckload of notarized triple-stamped paperwork.”

She pulls a chair out from the kitchen table, holds herself back from saying she's glad he is getting such a chuckle out of all this.

“How's your little boy?” she asks.

“He's fine. About to finish his first year of preschool.”

“How old is he now?”

“Four. Going on sixteen.” He laughs the laugh of parents dying to tell the cute stories about their kids they know better than to tell.

“Bernardo was his only son.” It's a low blow and she knows it. Monk makes chewing sounds. Or are they spitting sounds? Something with his mouth.

“Who do I contact?” she asks.

“For what?”

“To get permission to claim the body.” She looks down at her hands. They're shaking. This is just a piece of theater, she thinks. I'm just trying this out on Monk.

“Christ, Rena, don't go cracking up on me here. How many months has it been? February, March, April. Fourteen months. Look, you come
down tomorrow and we'll have lunch, okay? I'll take you out for Irish corned beef and cabbage, and we'll talk it over.”

His voice has turned soft and pillowy, and she thinks how nice it would be to sit with him in a dark wood-paneled bar, drinking and saying nothing.

“Meet me here at one.”

She's seen only one picture of Bernardo. Santiago had extracted a dog-eared photograph from his wallet. A thin face framed with glossy black hair. Brown eyes. A cleft in the chin. At the time, she'd wondered if Santiago had ever seen the photograph—if the little tears and creases, the scratch that ran diagonally across the face, were from his pressing it to his cheek as he did that day.

“I have to do it,” she says. “I have no choice.”

11
Leonard

I believe that every life has a navel, a center point from which everything else evolves. As a teenager, you were fascinated by those fringes of physics where time is viewed as a Möbius strip curving back on itself. How can this be, I imagine you asking, that what comes after could determine what comes before? This is not, though, what I mean. Nothing mechanical, no crystal balls. Rather, we organize the stories we tell about ourselves around that navel so that what came before is seen in relation to that point as much as what comes after.

For me, that navel is Maria. You would be confused, I know, to hear me say this—a name you have never heard me speak. But how could I have told you about her? Besides, even I can see that she is irrelevant. By this, I mean it is not the she whom I knew for only nine months and haven't seen in thirty years—I don't even know if she's still alive—but the she who lived then and lives now in my mind.

I practice this speech as I prepare for my trip to see you tomorrow, an unscheduled visit prompted by Monk's call yesterday afternoon. “She's losing it,” Monk said. “Your daughter-in-law. This happens. They hold on tight while it's an emergency, and then they fall apart. She wants to claim a body from a morgue in Guatemala City. A graduate student murdered in the seventies.”

“They found the son?”

“You knew the neighbor?”

“He was a teacher of Saul's. I met him once.”

“Right, right. I forgot about that part. Well, I thought you'd want to know.”

For a few moments after I put the phone down, I imagine myself as the protagonist of a Mexican melodrama. Rescuing the beautiful widow of my dead younger brother. Murdered, aren't they usually murdered? Murdered younger brother. Not imprisoned son. Then I called
her. Listened while she told me about the letter from the State Department, the failed attempt to contact the ghoulish daughter.

“I know this sounds like I'm trying to be Mother Teresa or some such thing,” she says, “but you tell me, what would you do in my shoes?”

Nothing. Goddamn nothing.

Y
OU WILL BE SURPRISED
, I know, to see me on a Thursday. I'm not sure if the visit will please you. “It's an odd kind of loneliness, here,” you've told me. “Surrounded always by people, so that I would give any sum of money for an hour a day of solitude, and yet completely alone.” Uncertain, I make only a cursory attempt to call you first, giving up after ten minutes of pressing the redial button. Instead, I prepare for tomorrow's absence from your mother. Put on my old corduroy coat and drive to the A & P to buy a chicken and lettuce. Roast the chicken the way my mother did with cut-up potatoes and onions in the pan and a piece of cooking string tied in a bow around the legs. Wash the lettuce—half for tonight's meal, half for tomorrow's—add the garlic croutons your mother likes. Fix her dinner tray. Help her into her armchair, set up the lap desk I bought for her birthday, place the tray on top.

“Aren't you going to eat?” she asks.

I shake my head no, grateful that she is not one of those women who cannot bear to eat unless there is someone with them eating more heartily than they.

She is watching a magazine show, an exposé of a car company that knew two years before five people died from locked brake rotors that there was a defect. I wait for the commercial.

“I'm going to go see Saul tomorrow.”

Her mouth tautens, mid-chew. Fleetingly, I entertain the idea that it is feeling for you, that she will say,
I'll come, I want to see him
, but then she lifts the thighbone to her mouth and arranges it so her tongue can reach the fatty morsel wedged behind the cartilage and I know that what she is thinking about is who will make her meals and the unease that overtakes her on being alone in the house.

“I'll cut up the rest of the chicken so all you have to do is warm it in
the microwave. And there's washed lettuce in the vegetable crisper. I'll be back by eight.”

She glares at me, the thighbone midair between her glistening mouth and the plate.

“I can ask Mrs. Smiley to come for the day.”

She wipes her mouth with the pink cloth napkin, shakes her head with a violence intended to communicate that she'd starve to death before submitting again to Mrs. Smiley. She turns back to the television screen and for the first time in the more than twenty years since she assumed this invalid role, it strikes me as having a kind of backbone to it, some principle to which your mother is sacrificing herself, and I have to refrain from smiling at the old girl.

Y
OU'RE CLEANLY SHAVEN
, and there's something different, more erect, about your posture. You stick a hand in your pocket and pull out a candy wrapped in silver foil. A chocolate toffee, the same kind I buy your mother by the bagful every week at the grocery store.

“Here,” you say. “Mom sends them to me.”

I look at the silver foil, confused, trying to imagine how she even got your address or the envelope or the stamps. “She's been writing you?”

“I guess you could call it that. She tapes the candies, two or three at a time, to a piece of pink stationery and sticks them in an envelope. They used to open each one to check if they were drugs, but the guards now know they're the toffees from Mom. I don't eat them. Just carry them around to give the guys when they look like they're going over the edge.”

You hold the toffee between your thumb and forefinger. I watch you slip into your middle gaze, an expression that used to disarm your grade school teachers, who mistook it for insouciance.

“It's odd, when you think about it, how arbitrary what we call a drug is. Mom is as addicted to these candies as I ever was to my pills. The pharmacologists have all these criteria about tolerance and withdrawal that they get around when they need to by allowing for psychological dependence. But in the end what we call a drug boils down
to money. Half the countries in South America, if we didn't threaten to cut off aid, would have long ago legalized marijuana and cocaine. And their governments would be a lot better off, not just because of the tax dollars but also because of all the money lost on enforcement, all the corruption illegality breeds.”

You tap the table and I study your hands, the way they've roughened from manual work. “Still working in the kitchen?” I ask, not in the mood to debate the legalization of drugs or the social structure of prohibitions.

You look at me.

Sorry, I want to say. I just can't do it today.

I think of all the betrayals we foist on those we love—of the way trust deteriorates, tooth by tooth, joint by joint. For years, I couldn't forgive your mother for crying the day my mother died: for crying for herself and the way my mother's death revived her feelings about her father's death five years before, for forcing me to attend to her grief over mine. “I just can't handle it,” she said, and I thought, no, you just
won't
handle it—the perversity of our therapeutic culture where the awareness of self wipes away common decency so that your mother no longer felt obliged, even ceremonially, even on the day of my mother's death, to let my emotions be in the foreground. I know you would consider it foolish denial to not allow that the self is the vortex of each of our universes.
Isn't that what ultimately allows for personal freedom?
you would say.
By placing the self center stage, we are forced to acknowledge that we are masters of our own destinies.
Yes, I would counter. But does that not mean that we have the will to yield that center at times to another?

“I'm rising through the ranks. Off pots and onto dishes. There are dishwashers for the plates and flatware so it's a lot easier. If I stay long enough, I'll get to be a cook.”

My jaw locks. What was it Monk said about days off for good behavior? Some kind of formula. What I can't remember is if the opposite is true—days added for bad.

“Just kidding.” Oh, I see. A little revenge for throwing water on your sociology of drugs dissertation.

“I'm a model inmate. An exemplar of penal rehabilitation. Now that I've earned C-level privileges, I can go to the library on my own. Most of the white-collars end up in Danbury, but there are a couple others here. A chiropractor in for insurance fraud, an accountant for embezzling, an engineer convicted on a manslaughter charge. We've formed a club: The Fallen. Prisoners need an officially declared and approved reason to convene, so we've constituted ourselves as a reading group. The only thing we could get four copies of here is the Bible, so that's what we're reading.”

The guard presses his nose against the wired glass. He holds up five fingers. I wonder if they hate you white-collar guys more than the others or if it's like in school where the teachers seemed to be in awe of the rich kids, as though wealth were a special talent.

“Rena told you about wanting to go to Guatemala,” you say.

“Actually, Morton's the one who told me. I called her after that.”

You look me in the eye, the way you did as a very young child when you'd say things that at the time seemed preternaturally true. “You should go with her.”

I gape at you, rooted in that swampy place of understanding but not understanding what you mean.

“To Guatemala. You speak Spanish. It would help her to have someone along who knows the language.”

There's a jangle of keys as the guard opens the door. You twist around to look.

“Time, Dubinsky.”

“Two minutes,” you say.

“One. And that's my watch that's ticking.”

You stand. “I would feel better if you went.”

I, who've never left this country, who, for that matter, rarely leaves the eastern seaboard, feel too stunned to respond. That it's absurd for Rena to go? That it's even more absurd for me?

“Trust me,” you say, and then, glancing down at your inmate's uniform, you smile bemusedly. “It's the right thing to do.”

Out in the hallway, the guard is whistling. “I could never leave your
mother for that long.”

“Mrs. Smiley could stay with her.”

“Now that I've spoiled her, she'd never accept going back to Mrs.

Smiley's regimen.”

“I'll handle Mom.” You pause. “If I handle her, you'll go?”

I laugh. “Sure.”

The guard pokes his head in. “Okay, Dubinsky. None of your dawdling.” He pulls the metal door open. We exit, first you, then me, in accord with the visitation rules. In the second while he circles behind us, you hold out your pinkie finger. Quickly, I crook my own in yours.

“Deal,” you say, as it dawns on me that this is not a philosophical debate. You've ambushed me.

I
N THE MIDDLE
of the night, I wake with my sister Lil on my mind. I cannot remember when we last spoke. Years. Shortly after you were married, when I called to tell her the news. Now I remember. She asked questions about Rena that I couldn't answer. She the film producer, me the psychiatrist, and yet it was she who put into focus how little I knew: the father, the route from waitress's daughter to Yale.

How can it be that four years have passed since we've spoken? Weeks, months, years gone by without my making a phone call. For a long time, I thought the distance between all of us was a thick hide acquired after my sister Eunice's death. None of us grown: Rose just twenty-one, Lil only eighteen, me barely fourteen. Eunice, a tall nineteen-year-old with round everything and red hair gathered into a ponytail. It was summer, and Rose had taught Eunice how to trick the maître d' at the Catskills hotel where they both worked into thinking she'd complied with the stockings requirement by using an eyebrow pencil to draw a line up the back of each leg to look like a seam. A boy, a place one drove to for drinking and dancing, a car crash.