Light of Day (34 page)

T
he morning paper was on the front porch. There were three messages on the answering machine. Mutt wanted to go out.

The world continued heaving and pitching through its daily rounds, delivering the news, leaving phone messages, standing at the back door barking. Jack could watch only as a stranger, like the survivor of a car wreck who walks away unscratched, stunned yet alert, oblivious yet focused. Except Jack had no focus, he was alert to nothing.

He opened the back door but did not stop to wait for Mutt to plunge through the verdant soil and hop the fence. He couldn't look at the field where Danny had made his decision to die.

He didn't play the messages. He had spent his summer afraid of what the answering machine might bode, fearing
What next?
Now he was not capable of fear. There was no
next
. There was nothing in the future to be afraid of. And there was nothing in the past to look back on, not without following it to this day. He was the man from the past whose past had forsaken him and whose future held no consequence. It was the morning after and all that remained was what remained to be done, methodically, with the attention to detail that Dr. Owens was known for. Pack just enough clothes for one suitcase. Leave room in the car for photographs from the Danny wall. Select a dozen books…

He went up to his bedroom to get the box with Anne's orange button and carried it with him while he performed these last rites. The call
to the phone company to cancel service, the utilities to turn off the lights and shut off the gas—stopping to watch the sunlight bend on the yellow windowsills in the kitchen. The final walk-through, past the furniture, the piano, the art, the scattering of his life, which did not flash across his mind the way it does for a drowning man.

 

He was thinking that this was not the way he imagined he'd leave his house. It wasn't supposed to happen until Danny was a young man, out of college, living somewhere else—Jack had always imagined Danny would move back east, to New York, back to where he was born. Danny would have a girlfriend, someone not from around here, someone he'd meet after college, with no ties to Gilbert or Indiana. She would be smart and sweet in a way that was never pretentious. She wouldn't try to impress Jack with how much she loved Danny, although she would love him very much—he'd see it in the way she kept herself out of Danny's good-bye to his father and his good-bye to the home where he had lived and which had kept him safe. Danny wouldn't be ashamed to give Jack a hug and Jack would kiss him. Then they would no longer live here together, and it would be so damn bittersweet that Jack would cry, not in front of Danny, but later, when he was alone, and again when he sold the house and moved out. Jack had always thought he'd go west. On the map the land looks endless. It makes you think you can't go wrong with so much of America to choose from. Or maybe he thought he'd go west because he had no history there, no past. Or maybe because it's that place in your mind you call “Away.”

But Jack wasn't crying now. He simply kept to his work, the final task. He retrieved Lamar Coggin's baseball glove from the basement.

He thought about Danny trying to decide, “Which is more important, Dad, honesty or loyalty?”

And where did he learn that? “From you,” Jack said softly.

After he packed the car, got Mutt settled down—just as he had done countless times when he and Danny were leaving for vacation—Jack dropped the baseball glove on the front seat and held onto the wooden box, like a traveling companion, like a child. He sat still for a minute longer, looking at the house, the graceful wraparound porch, the
swing sitting motionless. The house where Anne did not want to live and where he'd taken Danny to try to undo the damage done to him.

Jack listened while the wind rushed softly through the trees and the birds sang. He could not imagine never again hearing these birds singing outside these windows.

 

He drove along Main Street where the sulfur and sunlight turned the air sepia, like an old daguerreotype photograph or a silent movie, and the rose tint and warm brown hues looked so comfortable you wanted to crawl in, pull them over your head and hide; where the old-timers hobbled, wrinkled and weathered like old leather. Jack drove toward the river, past the ruins and across the nameless bridge, and headed west away from Gilbert, away from his home.

Tonight, in some motel off the road, he would lie on a strange bed with an unfamiliar pillow and the unfamiliar motel smell in his nose, the impersonal smell of impermanence. He would call his father and tell him he'd quit his job. He would lie about the reasons. He would lie because there was no truth anymore. Jack would not call Lois and he would not call Stan. He would not call Marty, who of all people would understand why he couldn't make the call. They would have to draw their own conclusions, it no longer mattered.

Robbie would wait in the office, dutifully, until he was told that Dr. Owens was not coming back.

Dr. Owens was leaving no doubt of his abandonment and his failure. His final act was to kill Dr. Owens, homicide and suicide. Kill the mythology of Dr. Owens, who was not golden, and who did not have the touch, who could not make things right, and could not undo the damage. Kill the mythology of Anne Charon, his mythology of Anne Charon, who was the creation of his hubris and desires, after all.

But he would not harm the mythology of Danny Owens, who played the piano and pitched his team to the semifinals and…And who would always be “the boy who killed himself out by the ruins. Nobody knows why.”

But Jack knew why, and the three boys knew, while their parents were spared. While Joseph Rich was put on trial for his life.

 

They were sitting in the loft on Crosby Street. Outside it was cold and the early October dark was settling in. The streetlights were glowing the urban yellow that streetlights glow in New York. Anne was lying with her head on Jack's chest. She had that arousing musky scent, paint and turpentine, perspiration and perfume.

She said, “I went to the doctor today.”

“And?”

“He says that if we're going to end the pregnancy, we should do it within the next two weeks.” She turned her head and looked into Jack's eyes. “It isn't like we won't still be us? If we keep it?”

“Just
more
of us.” Jack combed his fingers through Anne's hair.

“That's what I've been thinking. The baby would be us, and not some stranger.
Our
baby.” She touched his hand with the tips of her fingers. “And we can raise it
our
way. We don't have to leave the city if we don't want, or even this loft. Things are going well enough for us now, don't you think? With the gallery and your work? I want to keep it, Jack. At least, I'm pretty sure I do.” She sounded neither excited nor afraid.

“I'm pretty sure, too,” he said. “I think deep down I've always wanted to. I just had to be sure we both wanted the same thing.”

“I know.” She nuzzled her face in his neck. “Oh, Jack, the way we love each other and get on so well, it won't be a problem.” She lifted her face and kissed him. “If there are any two people who can make this work, it's us. Don't you think?”

I have been fortunate to know many special people who all had a direct, or indirect, influence on the writing of this book. My first thanks goes to my brother Lawrence A. Saul, a sweet and wise man. And my love and admiration to Joy Harris, a great friend and a great agent.

Sheron J. Daily has been both friend and lifetime teacher. Marcia and William Braman have given me their subtle, gracious support. Rose Tardiff taught me what it is to love a child. My thanks to Melissa Tardiff, who shared her experience, and her daughter, with me. Louisa Ermelino, fellow writer, has been a strong shoulder to lean on. The talented Robert Sabbag never stinted on encouragement. Thanks to Paul White, who makes it easy to be his friend, always. I owe much to Jane B. Supino, whose insights are treasures. Sherill Tippins was a great resource. I am grateful to Nancy Yost, who was there at the beginning. Holly Braman and Mary Braman have always offered their good cheer and patience. Thanks to Jacqueline Mandia and the Little Red School House. And thanks to Michael Morrison, a gentleman and true aristocrat of publishing.

I can't thank enough my extraordinary editor, Jennifer Brehl, because I wouldn't know where to start. I do feel incredibly lucky to have found, and been found by, her. And I can't begin to thank my wife, to whom this book is dedicated, because I wouldn't know where to stop.

About the author

Meet Jamie M. Saul

About the book

Writing
Light of Day

Film References in
Light of Day

Read on

Author's Picks

An Excerpt from
The First Warm Evening of the Year

Meet Jamie M. Saul

In an interview with Mark G. Gibson, associate director of communications at Saul's alma mater Indiana State University, the author talked a little bit about himself. Here is an excerpt from that interview.

 

I
N
L
IGHT OF DAY
Jamie M. Saul tells the story of a college professor coming to terms with devastating personal loss. The story unfolds in the fictional western Indiana town of Gilbert, a mythical setting that draws its roots from Saul's college days at Indiana State University in Terre Haute, Indiana.

The native New Yorker studied English and graduated with a bachelor's degree. Memories of time spent crossing the grassy quadrangles of the university campus, the whistles of trains passing through town on their way to destinations unknown, and visits to Terre Haute's Fairbanks Park on the banks of the Wabash River were inspiration for Saul's Gilbert. But while memories of Terre Haute laid the foundation for the book's setting, the writer's imagination provided the infrastructure.

“Gilbert, Indiana, is not Terre Haute, nor was it meant to be,” Saul contends. “But it incorporates elements of Terre Haute. I wanted to place a story in that kind of setting and have the town almost become a character in the story.”

The Midwest captured Saul's imagination as an eighteen-year-old. Growing up in the Bronx, Saul attended Dewitt Clinton High School, an all-boy's public school that educated James Baldwin, Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, Neil Simon, and Richard Avedon, among others. At the urging of a college advisor Saul picked Indiana State as his institution of choice.

“I think that coming from New York City to Terre Haute was a very good experience,” Saul says of his college decision. “I managed to appreciate the history of the town and was really taken by it.”

While American artists, writers, and musicians have long sought inspiration in New York's vibrant, sprawling metropolis, this teenager wanted to experience America beyond the borders of the five boroughs. And Saul thought the best place to do that was in the nation's heartland.

“I felt, even at the age of eighteen, that New York City could be very provincial. I just wanted to get away. And somehow for me the Midwest was America, and I really wanted to see America. I wanted to see
what was beyond the Hudson River.”

For Saul, Terre Haute was America. Eugene Debs came from Terre Haute. So did Theodore Dreiser. Saul recalls reading Dreiser's
Sister Carrie
and thinking it was a revelation.

Saul once hitchhiked to St. Louis “just because it was St. Louis. It was America and I wanted to see it,” he says. “I knew this and I didn't know that, and that's how you learn.”

Saul spent a summer after college working in maintenance at a summer stock theater in Boothbay Harbor, Maine. He then returned to New York, where he got a job as a copy boy at
Time
magazine. Through connections made at
Time
he found freelance work writing for magazines like
People
and
Playboy,
and taught creative writing as a guest professor at Yale University, all the while keeping alive a desire to write a novel.

The process wasn't as simple as “sit down and write it,” but the result is
Light of Day.

“It's about a relationship between a father and son,” Saul says of the book, “and it's about how a person can do everything right and it can all go wrong through no fault of his own. It's just the nature of life. But it's really a book with a focus on ambivalence and irony.”

Another theme of the book is the reality that “we are our memories,” Saul adds. “Memories are what make us moral, but memories are also what make us human. Without them we'd have no bearings, we
wouldn't know who we are, we wouldn't know why we like the things we like, and we wouldn't know why we fear the things we fear.”

Saul now lives in Manhattan. He is working on a second novel.

“Right now it's a love story,” he says tentatively. “We'll see what happens.”

 

Jamie M. Saul invites readers to e-mail him at [email protected].