Beautiful Kate (28 page)

It was like being wedged between a bull and a corral; there was no way out. I thought of Kate and how my real need was not to expose her but to hold her, love her. And all I could do was shake my head.

“What’s the matter?” Cliff asked. “What are you crying for?”

“I’m not crying.”

“The hell you’re not! What is it? Tell me!”

But I could not. Instead I just stood there, wet-faced and humiliated, gripping the railing so he would not see that I was trembling as well as crying. He put his hand on my shoulder, but I shook it off. I pushed him from me.

“Go to bed,” I said. “Get the hell away from me.”

“I just want to help, Greg.”

“Then help
her
, for Christ’s sake! She’s the one that needs it!”

After that outburst, I knew he was not about to let go. So I ran like a branded calf. I plunged back into the house and down the stairs to my room. And if I slept at all that night, I don’t remember it. What I do remember are the cigarettes and the silence and the grandfather clock measuring the hours of my life.

It seems to be dawn, though I can’t be sure. I am lying with Toni in our upstairs room and I hear a distant urgent whispering that causes me to unbraid my body from hers and to put on my robe and leave the room. I follow the whispering sound into Jason’s bedroom and see him through oak branches lying very still in bed, most of his body covered by the snow that has blown through the shattered wall, covering almost everything in the room. Outside a small black tramp with a toothless grin stands behind a broken tombstone staring in at Kate who is sitting on the edge of Jason’s bed in a bikini, gently stroking his forehead and whispering words I can’t make out, but which have set the old man’s eyes blazing in the cold white deadness of the room.

Hearing me, Kate turns and smiles. “He’s paralyzed now,” she says. “He can’t speak. So I told him all about us. And about Cliff and me too. He doesn’t like it, but what can he do?”

In a rage I go to the bed and seize her. I pull her up and drive my mouth into hers as my hands tear at her bikini. I clasp her buttocks and pull her against me, and she is amused. She pulls her mouth free and looks down at Jason and says, “See? What did I tell you?”

But I can’t stop. I get her down on the bed, in the snow, on top of Jason. And I strain, I plunge, in desperation, because I know I am losing it now. I know it is going. I fight to stay there, with her, but it is like trying to hold on to the wind.

12

Sarah’s room is like no other in this house. Instead of the solid semi-antique furniture that crowds the rest of the place, her bedroom set is of recent origin, a white French provincial group probably purchased from Sears or Levitt’s. The floor is carpeted in beige and three walls are painted in “salmon” while the fourth is covered with wallpaper in a fleur-de-lis design that reappears in the drapes and in her bedspread. As such, the room strikes me as an unfit place for a man to sleep, let alone die, though I never say this to Jason, who undoubtedly has more important things on his mind than the esthetic qualities of a room that I increasingly fear may be the last place on earth he sees.

Yesterday morning he sat up in bed and let me feed him some oatmeal and toast and a few sips of tea. Afterwards he asked me to sit down in the chair next to his bed because he wanted to “get a few things said.” Normally I sit down without being bidden and we exchange a few words about the weather and how he’s feeling, or he simply rolls away from me and I get the message and leave. This was different, however. Just in the way he laced his fingers across his shrunken belly and glared up at Sarah’s too-cheerful wallpaper, I could see that this was not to be any ordinary conversation. And so it turned out. As he spoke—in a whisper—he kept clearing his throat and every few seconds he would have to pause and catch his breath. Seeing what the effort was costing him, I suggested that he wait and tell me some other I time, when he was more rested. But that only made him angry.

“It’s now or never!” he said. “I’ve got to explain!”

“There’s no need.”

“I’ll decide that.”

“Explain what?”

“My life.”

I smiled at him. “You sure we have time for all that?”

“What
all that
? We both know there hasn’t been much of it.”

“Come on, Jason. You had a big family and none of us ever went hungry. You produced some of the best cattle in the country and you’ve probably read more books and understood more things than—”

His hand feebly waved me quiet. “I’m talking about
my life
. My doing
nothing
all these years. Didn’t you ever wonder about it?”

“I never thought of you as doing nothing.”

He shook his head in regret. “I never intended it that way. I came here to prepare myself. I thought my work would be in politics.”

“I know that, Jason.”

“A congressman, I thought. Or senator.”

“You’d have been better than most.”

He gave me a scalding look. “Don’t interrupt. I must get this said.”

I gestured agreement, giving him the floor, and he went on in a rush, as much of a rush as his frail wind would permit.

“So, when the political thing didn’t pan out, then I thought, well—I would write. I’d become a writer on social and political matters. And I tried that too. There are manuscripts up in the attic right now—one I even finished, on the evils of the mobile society. But no one was interested. The publishers just returned them.”

Even whispering, as he was, he did not have the wind for this and he kept having to stop. Each time he did so, he would lie there glaring up at me in a rage of infirmity, and I would wait until he had breath enough to go on again. To silence him, I thought of getting up and walking out. But I knew that that would only have infuriated him and taxed his heart even more.

“So here I was,” he went on. “A man nearing forty. My ambitions dead. What could I do? Go teach school somewhere, like Sarah? Get a sales job or go to work in a bank—I, who had studied at Yale and the Sorbonne?” By now, tears were rimming his eyes. “Oh no—not your father. He was too proud for that. He was too great. Too special. So here I sat, reading books and fumbling around in my library, like an old man.”

“It wasn’t like that,” I tried.

“Oh yes it was. And I know it’s one of the reasons you children never cared for me as you did for your mother.”

“That’s not true.”

“Yes it is. Especially you and Kate. Oh, you may have felt for me as a father—but you never liked me. You never loved me. I always knew that.”

“You’re wrong.”

“You laughed at me,” he said. “Both of you.”

I stood up. “Jason, this is ridiculous. You can’t do this to yourself. You’ve got to rest.”

“Like that,” he said. “Like calling me Jason. You never called Mother Emily, did you? No, because you loved her. But me—by your teens I was always Jason. I thought of making you stop, but it would have been like begging.”

I told him that I had to leave him now, that I had to check the fire, but he wheezed on, oblivious of anything except his need to get it all out.

“All those years what I really wanted was to be close to all of you, as Mother was. But I didn’t know how. I pretended that I stayed in my library because I had important work to do. But all I really did was hide there. I spent my life hiding in that terrible room.”

There was no way I could have left him then. I sat down on the edge of his bed and tried to console him by telling him that few people ever really thought they had lived successful lives. I pointed out to him my own case, that here I was at forty-four, unemployed and living off him, twice divorced, the father of young girls I seldom even saw. But he heard none of it, so intent was he on sucking in enough air so he could get out a few more words of self-destruction.

“One last thing—that night you came to my room and threatened me, you said that I killed Cliff.” Coughing now, he had to break off again. And while he waited, he kept staring intently at me, with eyes that looked as if they might combust at any second. “You tell me the truth now. That, I demand. Call it a dying command.”

Helplessly, I nodded.

“
Why
?” he got out. “Why did you say I killed Cliff?”

In this extreme hour of his life, I found that I was no more able to lie to him than to look away from his consuming stare.

“Because you were so strict with him,” I heard myself say. “Because you were so demanding. He lived for your approval. After what happened to Kate—while he was driving—”

“Rather than face me—he did what he did.”

I nodded just as his gray face began to crumple, to implode. And he nodded too, as though in agreement with my terrible charge. But if he was willing to accept it, I discovered that I could not, and I seized his wrists with such force that he looked up at me in sudden fear, as if he thought I might indeed kill him after all. Instead I pulled him to me. I put my arms around him and hugged him and said that he was my father and that I loved him and would not leave him. And finally I felt him break too and begin to weep, and I think I even felt some pressure in his bony old arms as he tried to hug me. Crying freely, I kept saying the same thing over and over.

“You’re my father. And I love you. And I won’t leave you.”

The Saint Helen’s Hospital Ball was easily the most misbegotten annual social event in the county. Ostensibly organized as a charity affair to raise funds for Saint Helen’s Hospital, its true purpose seemed more along the lines of stimulating business for the hospital’s detoxification and psychiatric wards. The lethal character of the affair came about, I believe (with the benefit of grown-up hindsight) mostly as a result of the dance being held at the nearby Elysian Fields Country Club, which was probably the most exclusive and certainly the most luxuriously housed and maintained private club in the entire southwest suburban area. With its large membership roster of Chicago millionaires, it had no trouble maintaining a seventy-two-hole golf course as well as an Olympic-size swimming pool and a cluster of tennis and handball and other courts, all discreetly laid out around a sprawling ivy-covered Tudor manse that fairly exuded the rarefied air of old money and social prominence.

For Woodglen’s hustling middle class, it must have been a heady challenge, the prospect of donning formal wear and dancing in such a setting, possibly even rubbing elbows with club members who just might be highly impressed with you and invite you to—well, there was no end to the flights your fancy could take. It was simply a helluva fine opportunity and anyone worth his salt would have been a fool not to take advantage of it, even if the affair did tend to be much too wide open, full of lowlife and teenagers and the like, in fact anyone with the price of a ticket.

So each year the dance apparently excited a fever of anticipation in the hearts of the locals, especially the socially ambitious wives of our more prosperous plumbers and dentists and hardware merchants, such as Mr. Fielding. And I imagine that that fever must have mounted into pure terror by the time they drove up to the clubhouse on the winding drive through the trees and gave over their Chevrolets to liveried parking attendants and then ventured on red carpet into the beautiful building and out onto the dance floor, all so luxurious, so perfect—and finally, so brutally disappointing. In no time at all, their girdles must have been killing them and their husbands must have begun to resemble waiters (who danced like farmers). Most likely, the only people who spoke to them were ones they already knew, from business and church. And worst of all, there were those goddamn teenagers everywhere: pimply, greasy-haired boys and impossibly firm-armed, small-waisted girls without a wrinkle on their empty faces. So it was bottoms-up: martinis and manhattans sliding down like lemonade. And even before the band’s first break, the squabbling would begin, marital spats that had a way of developing into shoving matches between the men and hair pullings between the women, often followed by the feckless losers vomiting either right at their tables or on the way to the rest rooms. And finally there was the magnetlike appeal of that huge, unused swimming pool, gleaming like a sapphire in the lantern-lit night.

That at least is how I see the affair now, from the vantage point of a quarter century later. But even then the ball did have a certain fame as an annual local calamity not to be missed if one could help it. In the Kendall household we had heard about it for years and I even had gone to see for myself the year before, hoping my date would become sufficiently infected with the general mood of bacchanalia to get tight herself, and thus hopefully a little loose as well. Instead she professed shock at the whole affair and had me take her home before midnight, still every bit as sober as she was chaste.

This year, however, I never would have gone to the dance if it hadn’t been for a girl named Barbara Polanski, whom I met one afternoon at the Farmer’s Lumber Company. New in town, and newly employed there as a clerk, she was about twenty and struck me as very friendly and sexy, so I engaged her in conversation and finally asked her for a date, forgetting for the moment that I wanted to have nothing to do with women or a social life. It developed that she had two tickets to the ball (given to her by an uncle, who owned the lumberyard) and I readily agreed to escort her. At the time I didn’t know that Mr. Fielding, the hardware merchant, had been similarly dragooned into buying tickets by the hospital auxiliary and had given four of them to Arthur and Sally, which meant that Kate and Cliff would be going too.