Blameless in Abaddon (8 page)

He peered into the hole. The casket was half normal size. His first thought was that one of Corinne's pets had died without his knowledge, and her friends had decided to begin the ceremony by covering its little corpse with a layer of earth, after which a hearse bearing her body would arrive and then she herself would be interred. Or else they'd
already
buried Corinne, beneath her pet, and he—the damn fool—had missed it.

He looked at the tombstone,
BRANDON APPLEYARD
. 1992–1999.
I MISS YOU SO MUCH . . . ALL MY LOVE, MOMMY
. “Excuse me,” he said, brushing the sleeve of a stout woman in a print dress who appeared more bored than bereaved. “I'm Corinne's wife. Husband, I mean. Was. Martin Candle.”

The woman absently kicked the flowers with the tip of her shoe. “Wife? What?”

He pointed to the brick building. “They told me . . . the lawnmower shed. My wife's getting buried today.”

“That's where they keep the backhoe.”

“They keep the backhoe in the lawnmower shed?”

“No, that
building
is where they keep the backhoe. You know, to dig the graves.”

“Don't they use shovels?”

“Nope, a backhoe—this is the twentieth century.” The woman gestured toward the rising sun. A lobe of flesh jiggled from her upper arm like a rooster's wattle. “The lawnmower shed's in that direction, quarter mile or so.”

“It's awful about the boy.”

“Spina bifida. I'm his great-aunt. We're waiting for his mother. The father bailed out two years ago. Couldn't deal with having a sick kid.”

“How irresponsible,” said Martin automatically, wondering how he might go about redressing such knavery in his courtroom.

“I never met the jerk. You aren't him, are you?”

“Oh, no.”

“If you ask me, Brandon's better off with the Lord. Spina bifida, right? Boy couldn't walk, brain damaged by hydrocephalus, not to mention the constant pain. Turn around. Quarter of a mile.”

“Thanks.”

Martin faced east and started away, hobbling past the ranks of glossy granite stones. He realized that a necropolis, like any other city, had enclaves. To his right lay a wealthy neighborhood—Republicans, he mused—with tombs that were veritable houses. To his left, a blue-collar district. Ahead: a Korean section, the markers carved with incomprehensible glyphs.

A slender woman wearing black pumps and a dark gray business suit rushed toward him, her mourning veil pulled back over her head, revealing an oval, tear-streaked face. Her eyes were red rimmed and unusually large, the eyes of a cartoon rabbit.

“Are you the mother?” asked Martin, leaning breathlessly against a poplar tree.

The woman stopped running and blinked. “What?”

“Brandon's mother—that's you, right?”

“My therapist said it would be good if I came here on my own, but I went to the wrong funeral,” she replied, nodding. “Somebody named Corinne.”

“I'm Corinne, actually. Martin, I mean. Her husband. Candle. Do you know where my funeral is, Mrs. Appleyard?”

“Please don't call me that. It's his
father's
name, not mine. A retarded son with spina bifida, five orthopedic operations, and the bastard up and divorces me.”

“What
should
I call you?”

“Patricia Zabor.” Her hair was smooth, raven, and amazingly long, flowing down her back like a nun's veil. “Your funeral's by the lawnmower shed, straight past the Korean markers.” She extended a black-gloved index finger. “It's invisible because of all those fir trees.”

“Your funeral's right behind me, Miss Zabor. Just keep walking. You can't miss it.”

They parted company, marching off bravely in opposite directions.

 

By some miracle, he got through the morning. He survived the stupefying graveside elegy offered by Vaughn Poffley's minister, a weasel-faced man who spoke as if his mouth were full of peanut butter. He endured the gleaming casket sitting in its earthen groove; the grotesque flowers; the remorseless stone on which someone had inscribed
SHE LOVED ALL CREATURES GREAT AND SMALL;
the insipid gathering at Vaughn's house, where the drapes clashed horribly with the slipcovers and the rugs stank of carpet shampoo. Corinne's parents barely spoke to Martin. Lifelong Socialists and die-hard bohemians, they'd never understood why their daughter had married a Republican. The only gratifying moment of the entire reception occurred when Jenny informed him she'd found the ideal home for Corinne's pets. An eccentric Main Line dowager named Merribell Folcroft had promised to add them to her private zoo.

The next two weeks passed in a blur of angry victims, happy perpetrators, and miscarried justice. When an accused shoplifter pleaded innocent in the face of massive counterevidence, Martin dismissed the charges, setting the kleptomaniac free to steal again. In another such case, the judge was offered proof that Dustin Grant, a Deer Haven adolescent, had been mutilating his neighbors' trees with his father's chain saw—Dustin had been videotaped in the act—and Martin merely reprimanded the vandal: no fine, no family counseling. Then came the complaint of Alfred Lafferty, a Chestnut Grove resident whose property abutted the golf course. It seemed that, some weeks earlier, Susan Curtis of Glendale had teed off on the sixth hole while intoxicated, and the ball had sliced into the plaintiff's backyard, killing his beloved cat, Leopold. Normally Martin would have required the defendant not only to replace the slain cat but to pay for its successor's shots. Instead he threw the case out of court. He wished Susan Curtis's golf ball had beaned the wayward Irish setter instead, thereby preventing it from running in front of Corinne's truck. If God could part the Red Sea and set the planets spinning, why couldn't He send one lousy golf ball on the proper trajectory?

As Martin awoke on the last morning in August, the alarm clock droning in his ear, he experienced a rare moment of perfect resolve. He would not go to the Abaddon Municipal Building this day. Instead he would take a vacation, pursuing the hobby he termed “urban spelunking,” one of the enthusiasms he shared with Vaughn Poffley—the others being Monday-night NFL broadcasts and Friday-night poker games. Both men took supreme pleasure in driving through the seedier sections of Philadelphia on Sunday afternoons and visiting its moribund factories. Like archaeologists digging up a lost civilization, they would piece together the city's past, feeling a peculiar joy upon deducing that the empty building on Cadwallader Street had once been a meat-packing plant or that the Eternal Life Temple at Nineteenth and Tioga had formerly housed dozens of looms. It was the melancholy of such places that moved Martin, the exquisite loneliness of broken windows and shredded conveyor belts, the sublime sorrow of a rusting caboose sitting on a spur.

He told his secretary to contact the relevant parties in the three cases on the calendar—a bait-and-switch appliance store in South Hills, a rent-control squabble between a Kingsley landlord and his deranged tenant, and a mixed-faith couple (he a Roman Catholic, she a Buddhist) who wanted to marry despite massive parental disapproval—and inform them he was indisposed. At 1:20
P.M.
he boarded a SEPTA train out of Perkinsville and headed into the city.

A castoff
Philadelphia Inquirer
lay on the seat. Out of habit he perused the articles pertaining to justice. A woman in Prescott, Arizona, was suing to retrieve her biological son from his adoptive parents. A doctor in Little Falls, Minnesota, had been convicted of murdering an eighty-year-old Alzheimer's patient in the name of compassion. As the train pulled into Wayne Junction, Martin read how the United Nations, seeking to crack a white slavery ring operating out of Singapore, had after much debate amended the statutes of the International Court of Justice, giving its nine judges jurisdiction over individuals and the authority to try “crimes against humanity.”

He got off the train and started his explorations.

Poking around an abandoned Schlitz brewery on Clarissa Street, a fire-gutted cavern reeking of mildew and pigeon dung, Martin inevitably began meditating on the drunk drivers who filed through his courtroom. From his attempts to point these offenders toward the AA way of life, he had come to understand that an alcoholic's convoluted psychological makeup could ultimately be grasped only by another alcoholic. Was the same true of grief? Did it take a mourner to know a mourner? One thing was certain: he wasn't supposed to be in a defunct Schlitz brewery right now. He belonged in the company of the bereaved.

A battered phone booth rose from the corner of Clarissa and Juniata. He lifted the receiver and, much to his surprise, heard a dial tone. For twenty-five cents he obtained the number of a P. Zabor in Deer Haven. Hunger pangs assaulted him, competing for his attention with the ache in his hip. He slipped the AT&T card from his wallet, punched in the appropriate digits, and connected with Brandon Appleyard's mother.

“Hello?”

A mere two syllables, but he recognized her voice. “Is this Patricia Zabor?”

“What do you want?” she asked suspiciously.

“We met two weeks ago. In the cemetery. Martin Candle.”

“Oh, yes . . . I've been thinking about you.”

“You have?”

“Yes, I should've offered you my condolences.”

“That's why I called.”

“For my condolences?”

“To offer mine. I've never been a parent, but I can imagine . . . anyway, I'm terribly sorry—that's all. I'm so sorry.”

“I talked to your mother.”

“My
mother
?”

“At your wife's funeral. She told me I should be taking calcium supplements so I won't get osteoporosis.”

“Patricia, I was wondering—would you like to grab some dinner, maybe? There's a Greek restaurant in your neighborhood, the Athenian Corner.”

“I don't want to go out tonight.”

“Not hungry?”

“You kidding? I've been eating like a pig all day, and I'm still famished. Grief sharpens the appetite, have you noticed that? I'm in no condition. You understand?”

“Of course.”

“I'm a wreck.”

“Right.”

“Another time, maybe.”

“Sure.”

“If you wanted to drop by, I could make us some spaghetti.”

“No, that's too much trouble. Let me bring a pizza. You like pizza?

“Sure. My twin sister's here. She likes pizza too. Sixty-five Mapleshade Lane, a mile past the Valley of Children Daycare Center.”

“The building with the big wooden clown out front?”

“Right. My sister runs the place. I designed it for her.”

“You're an architect?”

“Don't I wish. Commercial illustrator. Trading cards, mostly, like kids buy in the drugstore.”

“Bubble-gum cards?”

“We call them trading cards.”

“You design the clown too?”

“One of Angela's clients is a sculptor.”

“A four-year-old sculptor?”

“The father. After he went to all that trouble, Angela had to accept the thing. The children seem to like it.”

 

The clown who guarded the Valley of Children was even more grotesque than he'd remembered, its twelve-foot-high emaciated form looming over Mapleshade Lane like the trademark of a fast-food restaurant catering to anorexics. Slowing down, he flicked on the turn signal and pulled into the driveway of number sixty-five, a stout Victorian mansion boasting a greenhouse in the side yard and a gazebo on the front lawn. Patricia's exhusband was evidently rich. Martin parked, got out, and limped to the door carrying two pizzas, the dough's sultry moisture seeping through the cardboard and wetting his palms.

Angela Zabor, Patricia's twin, resembled her sister the way a symphony played on a piano resembles the full orchestral treatment. The themes are the same, but the depth is missing. Martin found her instantly annoying; he wished she weren't there. Seated at the hardwood counter dominating Patricia's kitchen, the three of them speedily devoured pizza number one.

“You own this place?” he asked.

“Booty from the divorce settlement.” Patricia opened the second pizza box, revealing a fetus-shaped stain on the underside of the lid. “I got the house, a few bucks, and Brandon. Paul got what he wanted. Out.”

“Wealthy man?”

“Spiritually impoverished,” said Angela.

“Tenured professor at Villanova,” said Patricia. “My sister receives nine thousand dollars a year for working with kids when they're most malleable. Paul receives seventy thousand for working with them when it no longer makes any difference. Angela teaches reading readiness. Paul teaches fucking Aristotle. Did you love your wife?”

“Very much.”

“Good for you.” Patricia lifted a slice from pizza number two, batting at the tendrils of cheese connecting it to the parent pie. “Brandon shouldn't be dead.”

“Of course not,” said Martin.

“No, I mean it was a fluke. He needed to have his V-P shunt replaced, a routine thing with spina-bifida kids—most of them have hydrocephalus—and after the surgery he got an infection, resistant to penicillin and everything else.”

“That's awful.”

“There's no justice,” said Angela.

Martin shifted on his bar stool and bit into a discarded pizza crust, wincing as a cancer pain exploded in his hip. “Sometimes, in my little courtroom . . . not always, but sometimes—on a good day—there's justice.”

“I was in your courtroom once,” said Angela.

“You were?”

“Two years ago. You'd summoned me. I'd witnessed a guy running a stop sign and plowing into two fat ladies rolling a piano down the street. Nobody got hurt. The piano was totaled.”

“I remember the case.”

“You made the dork buy them a new one. Good decision.” Angela slid off her bar stool. “If you need me, Pat, I'm doing the laundry.”