Bomber's Law (15 page)

She paused. “I know you don't like him, Harry,” she said, “and I think you've got very good reasons not to. But that doesn't alter the fact that Bob Brennan right now is an extremely troubled man. A deeply-troubled man.”

“Look,” Dell'Appa said, “if he is then I'm sorry. Not
very
sorry, just: sorry. But that's not what's on my mind now. What worries me's not how he feels, but what he may've done to feel better, that he shouldn't've done. Or, equally scary, far's I'm concerned: what he might not've done, that he should've. Mistakes and misjudgments: everyone makes them—we all deal the best we can with them. But what if his conscience's told him to do something the law says he can't? Or excused him from doing something he should've, so then
I
wind up in the shit—tell me: then what do I do?”

“I don't know,” she said. “I can always describe what I see in the data. I can't always prescribe how to change it.”

He took a deep breath. “Okay,” he said, “so much for that then, I guess. I just wish I felt like I had Brian with me, though. Beyond here, I think there be dragons.” He paused and swirled the last of his wine once. “I know you think that I'm after Bob,” he said, frowning, “even though I never said that. But even assuming that you're right, I do not want him to've done this. As much as I hate him, really despise him, I do not want to come around an ordinary corner on an ordinary day and trip right over unavoidable evidence, fuckin'
proof
, that Bob Brennan has done or is doing something that is gonna fuckin' ruin him, if anyone finds out—and he knows that it will, and I've been looking. I do not want that, Gayle. I want him to go in peace, and I will tell you honestly that I am scared to fuckin' death it doesn't matter, what I want. At all.”

“I've got to admit,” Dennison had said, “that sort of shook me up, when it first dawned on me one night while I was paying the damned mortgage, writing out the monthly check for the payment that we can't afford to make, on this house that we don't want, that the reason I am doing it proves the Bomber Rule is right. Or put it this way, at least: As many times as I've applied it to somebody's behavior that I just couldn't understand, my own or someone else's, it's never failed me yet. Time and time again, when there's just no explanation for why someone did something, you'll find if you look far enough, dig deep enough, wait long enough, that, yes, there
is
an explanation after all, and it's: money. The Frogs've got
‘cherchez d'argent'
; Bomber's got his Reason; and both of them are right. Right there, on the money.

“Virginia mostly did all right by herself for the first couple years after Lucy died on her. The two of them'd had time enough to locate most of the emergency services—oil-burner repairman, snow-plow man, stuff like that—that a person dumb enough to buy a house'll usually need in the normal course of things, so when something went wrong that had to be fixed right off, and needed a genuine repairman or a guy with the right equipment—like a truck with a plow on it—to do it, not just some handy-dandy, all-purpose, rechargeable adult daughter or a clumsy son-in-law but someone who actually knew something about fixing a busted sump-pump or getting a garbage disposal unit running again, she had one she could call.

“Like I say, her health was good. Plus she'd had a certain amount of practice, living by herself, in the years after Stan'd died but before she'd had the operation on her hip and Lucy'd come in. She didn't
like
being by herself again, not by any means, but it wasn't new to her. We gave her a season ticket to Megabucks for Christmas—because quite naturally after she'd won it the once there was going to be no way ever afterward of talking her out of faithfully betting it twice every week until doom finally cracked—so that cut down considerable on her need to get out to the store. Tory got down to see her at least one afternoon a week, not all that easy to do, even though it sounds like it would be, not if you're trying to start up your own small business at the same time and you've still got your family responsibilities, too. As Tory did and does. And they talked every day on the phone. She was functioning. She could handle it.

“She could handle it,” Dennison had said, “but she could only handle it as long as she could handle it, you know? She was not the type of person who ever would've faked it, laid a guilt-trip on somebody to get something that she really didn't need, just because she craved attention or something. But she also wasn't stupid. When she got to the point where she really did need help, or else she was going to end up in some truly serious gravy, she knew it, and she wasn't too proud to admit it.

“And that's where the money came in,” he had said. “That cock-and-bull story she'd told us about how she and Lucy were buying the house together? Well, it hadn't been one-hundred-percent-pure, total bullshit. There was considerable truth to it. The deal they'd worked out really did protect what was Tory's rightful share of her
father's estate that Virginia'd sunk into the house. If what the two of them'd figured was what'd likely happen, if things'd really turned out that way, with Lucy the survivor, she would've had enough money to pay rent to the bank every month that would've come to her half the mortgage payment. For as many years as there were left to run on the mortgage—
and
, on top of that, since Lucy'd never shown any signs of wanting to live like the queen of England, more'n enough to take care of her for as many more years as she turned out to have on this earth.

“Now, give the old biddies credit here, that setup would've handled the whole thing very well. Tory and I could've stayed right where we were in Canton, paying Virginia's half of the mortgage, if she died before it was paid off, out of her Megabucks checks. And Lucy could've stayed put too—her Megabucks money would've covered her half the rent easy and still left her more'n enough to live on. Then, when she kicked the bucket, Tory would've inherited the whole house of horrors, and we immediately would've turned right around and sold the goddamned thing for whatever the market would've brought.

“
But
, with Lucy dying first, and leavin' her Megabucks checks to some niece or other down of hers down in ragin' Cajun country, well, that made it an entirely different bag of cats that we had on our hands. Virginia had enough to pay the whole mortgage and cover all of her other expenses, but it was going to be a real tight squeeze. What she actually had, income from all sources, would've been just barely enough to do both, if you really stretched it. And that was the real problem that we all had to face: the stretching. She just didn't have any slack at all. One heavy, unexpected expense, like a new roof, or one more small but steady, regular expense, some new prescription'd keep her breathing but that'd cost as much to refill every month as the payment on your first car did; some other article she simply had to have: either one'd do it, just sink the whole thing. The minute she needed anything more'n a cleaning lady dropping by three, four hours a week—because this's still a great big house we're talking about here, keep in mind, even though there's only one person living in it; even though some rooms're vacant, closed off in order to save heat, that doesn't mean they still don't have to be opened up
and dusted every now and then—that'd be her camel's-backstraw. She'd be in over her head.

“She was trapped, and because she was, so were we. If she paid the whole mortgage, she'd need help with her overhead. If she covered all her medicines, her normal incidentals, plus the food, and the car, the insurance; the phone, heat and water, lights and so forth, well, then, she'd need help with the mortgage. Which we'd be in no position to give her. Not with the kids' tuition bills, and not on top of what it was costing us to live in the house in Canton. We just couldn't do it, even with both Tory and me working—and we're not living in any kind of luxury that I'm talking about here either. There was just no way that we'd ever be able to swing it. It just wasn't going to be possible.

“Well, what all of us were really hoping, of course, that none of us of course'd even so much as hint at, especially Virginia herself—was that when it happened to her, well, it would just happen, like a bolt out of the blue, and then it'd be over with. But of course that didn't turn out to be what happened.”

“I wonder if it ever does,” Dell'Appa had said.

“Of course not,” Dennison had said. “Or at least, not often enough so anyone'd be anything more'n a fool if he relied on it happening that way. If it did there wouldn't be any such thing as a motor-vehicle fatality, let alone forty-five or fifty thousand people getting killed that way every year. Everyone'd always wear their seatbelt. Nobody'd ever get himself reeling-shitfaced and then get behind the wheel. When your wife was out in the old family car, just coming up on a crosswalk, the brakes wouldn't all of a sudden let go on her. And there wouldn't be a school bus stopped there at that very moment, letting all the little kiddies out to run into the street, right in front of her. Everybody's timing would be perfect, every time. If there were two ways that a given thing could happen, one that'd be disastrous and the other a fine beach day, we'd all have lovely golden tans. Melanoma'd be unknown. Disasters wouldn't happen. Casualty-insurance guys'd starve, and there'd be no more venture capital to put up more office buildings than anyone'll ever use.

“In Virginia's case,” he had said, “what she was praying for was a nice, neat, thunderclap of doom, but when her number was starting
to come up, her choice turned out to be out of stock and on back-order. What she got instead was a gradual, almost imperceptible, deterioration. Just a normal slowing-down that none of us probably even would've noticed if we hadn't all been braced for it, on the lookout like hawks to see if it would happen. And maybe that's got something to do with it too. You think? If there was the slightest chance, an
outside
chance, a longshot, that a bad thing might not happen, in any case like this, the fact that everyone still knows it might and can't get it out of their head, that that maybe brings it on?”

“Like one of those self-fulfilling prophecies there?” Dell'Appa had said.

“Yeah,” Dennison had said. “Maybe everybody's force field or something like that, maybe the worry waves just go out and cause sympathetic anxiety-vibrations, tremors, that kind of thing, in the cosmic milk, so you get whitecaps kicking up in the cereal bowl, washing your karmic Wheaties all over the sports section and the funnies while you're trying to read them.”

“I don't think so,” Dell'Appa had said. “If that could happen, then counting on something to happen the way it really should, under normal circumstances, the way you wanted it to—say, that Larry Bird's back really hadn't gotten so bad that he really was gonna have to quit the Celtics while he was still pretty young—then more things'd happen that way. The amount of hoping for the good result'd always reach critical mass 'way ahead of the anxiety and dread that the bad one might be already underway, and anyone who bothered to look around'd see a lot less grief.”

“I suppose,” Dennison had said. “Anyway, there was this one Sunday we drove down there—one of Tory's favorite woodland sprites was opening his first shop of his very own, down in Somerset, throwing what actually turned out to be a very elegant, summer-Sunday champagne brunch—big tent with flowers on it in the yard out back, lobster salad, chicken salad, leg of lamb, roast beef, local trio playing show-tunes—all of which we would've missed except that in addition to needing to stay on good terms with people like David, in her line of work, she also really does think a lot of him, so she thought we ought to go. And then after that we drove over to see Virginia.

“I can ‘see it now,' ” Dennison had said, deepening his voice. “My
father used to watch that show, Edward R. Murrow, when I was a kid. ‘See It Now.' Sunday nights at first, and then later on they moved it, some night during the week. Murrow cured him, cured my father, of smoking. For a while. Murrow got lung cancer, and he was the one that always had a butt in his face? Well, as long as he was all right, and you could see him every week if you didn't think he was, then all the scare-talk about smoking had to be just a bunch of bull. But then, when the word got out, he was dying of it? My father said: ‘That does it,' and he quit. And it was hell. He was in Hell himself and he always was real generous so he took us all along, everyone who lived with him and everyone he worked with. And then Murrow died anyway, which was just the kind of thing my father'd been hoping for,
any
kind of thing that'd give him an excuse to quit his quitting, and he said: ‘Well, fuck it, then,' and started up again.”

“That what killed him?” Dell'Appa had said.

“Sure,” Dennison had said. “Along with all the other things, I mean, that a person gets going wrong with him when he gets to be ninety-one. He lived for over thirty years after Murrow died, and when he finally did get into the speed checkout line, well, I think he died of basically the same thing that Tory's mother died of. Only in his case I think there was a greater amount of sheer wilfulness in it. During the last year or two of his life he spent a fair amount of time complaining that the only friends he had left who weren't dead were getting silly. But since he really only had one left, Peaches Cassidy, what that actually meant was that when he forgot to call Peaches over in Norwood to remind him they were driving out the next day to the alleys on Route Nine in Framingham, to watch Don Gillis tape the ‘Candlepin Bowling' shows—two or three, back to back, that the two of them'd watch again on TV when their Saturdays came up; they never missed that show—Peaches'd get nervous. He'd start to think Dad was losing
his
marbles, call him up and ask him: ‘You still doin' all right, Jake? Not gettin' simple on me, I hope.'