My Beautiful Failure (21 page)

W
hy didn’t I let Jenney talk?

Why didn’t I let her tell me she had taken the pills?

I stayed in my room all day Wednesday, asking myself those questions, hoping no one would find me or call. I pretended to be sick. Mom, Dad, Linda, and Jodie hardly noticed my hiding. They were still high from Sunday, and they probably thought I was just avoiding the show again. On Monday, Dad had decided to leave most of the artwork up for another week. He was going to photograph and catalogue the art and invite some Boston gallery owners out for a visit.

Why didn’t you let Jenney talk, you imbecile?

Why didn’t you listen to her? You ass.

I walked in circles from room to room. This was the way my father had paced last winter, talking only to the demons inside himself.

That evening, Mom was reading the
Hawthorne-Beacon Times
, criticizing the grammar on the op-ed page.
Linda was cutting pictures from a magazine to decoupage a lunchbox. Mom held the paper up, and I saw the back of it.

“What’s wrong?” Linda asked. “Billy, you look really weird.”

She looked from me to the paper.

So that was Jenney’s face.

J
ennefer Alves, nineteen. Daughter of Jordan and Takano Alves. Hawthorne High graduate, champion swimmer, employed by Beauport Clam Company.
Yes, that was my Jenney. The article didn’t mention suicide. It referred to her death as “sudden” and “unexpected.” It identified her parents as the owners of a wholesale lobster business but said nothing about the books, the fancy parties, or the TV station. The article didn’t mention a brother named Tobey. Or her friends: Stacey. Rebecca. Me.

B
y answering the phone when it was her.

By always being happy to hear her voice.

By not knowing her before, so she could explain herself to me from the very beginning.

By liking or praising whatever I saw in her to like or praise.

By some of those things being things no one else might have thought of.

I
know what you mean by “done better.” But you have to look at the basic qualities that each person brings to the job. And you have to assume that those qualities will come into play. In other words, that a volunteer is not a senseless automaton pushing buttons and burping platitudes. If that’s what you want, why don’t you fire everybody and set up an automated answering system like you get at a bank or some other place that’s not trying to help people? At least they’re not pretending.

Okay, I know I seem a little angry now. Give me a few minutes.

I
guess I have trouble understanding how easily you can put a limit on the amount of yourself you’re willing to give to someone. In fact, many people believe that the most admirable form of human behavior is a heroic sacrifice, in which you push yourself to extremes in order to cheat death of its claim on another person’s life, throwing yourself repeatedly to the brink of exhaustion and being washed back limp. I suppose you, Pep, believe hoarding your compassion allows you to save some for tomorrow and the day after that. But I guess I’ve always thought compassion is one of those self-perpetuating resources—the more you use, the more you have.

I
’d like to say that my efforts with Jenney, which could not have been more sincere, led me to an award of some sort. But life isn’t often like that. I should have realized that Pep wasn’t made of normal teenage stuff. I had expected her to wail, shed tears, leap in her car, and drive across town to hug me, buy a cross or a teddy bear or a bouquet for the door to Jenney’s building, and act the way people generally act after a death. Instead, she said, “I know it’s difficult, but there was nothing more you could do.”

Then the executive board called a meeting that they called a “process exploration” but which I thought of as a “court-martial.” Pep tried to pull the story out of me by emphasizing my feelings: “What were you feeling when that happened?” “What were you feeling when you decided that?” But the other board members, three college students and two professionals in their thirties, listened with an expression that said, “What were you thinking?”

“Are you aware,” said Gerald, a professor of social
work at Hawthorne State, “that when news of this gets out, some Incomings will feel that they can never trust us with confidential information again?”

“I guess so.”

“We’re already getting calls,” Pep added. “Some Daily Incomings have called to ask which Listener was prowling around Maple Ledge the night a girl died.”

“They’ll figure it out,” a college student said. “They have an uncanny sense for discerning what goes on around here. They have this quivering, like, antenna that senses the slightest possible change. They’ll figure out it was you.”

“How will they figure it out?”

“When you’re no longer on the schedule,” Pep said.

I knew that was coming, but I hadn’t gotten around to thinking about it yet.

“We don’t have a choice,” Pep said.

“Remember,” Gerald said, “what happens at Listeners—”

Stays at Listeners. Along with my badge, my key, and my procedures manual. The rest of the meeting was an avalanche of nots. I stopped fighting.

I
stood on the Common with my bike and waited for them to end the tribunal, gather their papers, and turn out the lights. When that last yellow square was extinguished, the top floor of Cabot Hall blended into the surrounding darkness as if it had never existed. As if I’d never been there at all.

B
lack and black and black and black and black and black and black and black and black and black and black and black and black and black and black and black and black and black and black and black and black and black and black and black and black and black and black and black and black and black and black and black and black and black and black and black and black, with two bright dots that could be Stacey and Rebecca.

O
fficially, I didn’t know her.

So I didn’t attend the funeral. But I did wait two blocks from the funeral home for the procession to go by. Ten cars, five limo and five civilian, with magnetic flags on the hoods saying
FUNERAL
. I allowed several nonfuneral cars that had waited respectfully at the intersections to join the flow of traffic. Then I made a distant, unofficial end to Jenney’s parade. When the limos stopped in the cemetery, I rode past. I pretended to be someone who was riding through recreationally, which is forbidden in the cemetery but which I’ve done before. One or two mourners glared at me, and I looked away, pretending ignorance. But I saw two girls who hid their bright dresses under black coats and their bright hair under hats and sunglasses, and who howled and hung on to each other like they were going to collapse. So maybe they did care about her more than she thought, or maybe they were calling attention to themselves, or maybe their central nervous systems
were stimulated by the drama. Spiraling away from where the mourners would leave Jenney, I had an aerial view of myself as a peripheral detail, a small, mechanical figure. Someone who rides in circles while others are living their lives.

T
he day after the funeral I said nothing to my parents and Linda. I felt dry and hollow, like a gourd. I had seeds instead of guts, and if someone had shaken me, I would have rattled. But I went to school as usual.

In music history class I sat beside Gordon. Dani Solomon, a tennis player with red hair, got up to do her presentation on Klezmer music. She wore a white skirt with fringe that swung as she walked.

“Ooh,” Gordy whispered as she passed, “there she is.”

Dani talked about how this type of music began at Jewish weddings and borrowed tunes from Roma (Gypsy) bands. How the instruments were meant to sound like human voices laughing and crying. How Klezmer clarinet had influenced the first note in Gershwin’s
Rhapsody in Blue.
After hitting the play button for each music sample on her CD player, Dani twisted her hands and waited for the music to end.

Mr. Gabler walked toward my desk. Naturally, I hadn’t
done anything about my paper since Dad’s show. How could I? I tried to figure out what to tell him. I wouldn’t say that someone I loved had died. I would say that although Mr. Gabler thought school was my big life or a stepping stone to it, my big life was actually elsewhere.

Just as Gabler arrived at my desk there was a knock at the door. A police officer came into the classroom and spoke to Gabler, then asked me to come with him and removed me from the class.

W
e rode in Officer Novello’s cruiser, with no siren, to a coffee shop opposite the state fish pier.

“Let’s grab some breakfast,” Novello said.

When the waitress came, Novello held the menu in front of his face without reading it. I saw him watch a park next to the pier where drug deals were reputed to go down.

After two cars left the park he lowered his menu and eyed me with his head tilted, the way people express thoughts like, You’re putting me on or Now tell me something I don’t know.

“Unbelievable,” he said.

“What is?”

“You’re exactly like your portrait.”

I shrugged. “My portrait is exactly like me.”

“You know, every person who comes into that bar, Marty walks them around your portrait in a hundred-and-eighty-degree arc. ‘Do you see it yet?’ he says. ‘Do you see it?’”

“He sure seems to get a kick out of it,” I said. I was glad Dad had decided to give Marty the painting for free.

“Do you know the story of Emma P. Braumann?” he asked me once we’d ordered our food.

“No idea.” I hadn’t really thought of the person behind the snack cabinet.

“I’ll tell you. Emma P. Braumann was a very nice lady, about my mother’s age. She would have been. If she had lived. But she didn’t live. Which was the whole thing. She was a jumper. Right off the bridge there, before the chain-link fence went up.

“Not many people know the whole story. The story is that Emma P. Braumann’s dear friend Mary Alice was engaged to someone in the service. They had been childhood sweethearts. In fact, the boy lived right across the street. Hale Street. He was only a month or so from the end of his tour of duty. And then he would return home and they would be married. So Mary Alice is at home, idly looking out the window. She sees an official car pull up across the street. A soldier in uniform gets out and for a minute she’s excited, thinking it’s him. But then she sees it’s a dress uniform. Not the fatigues he would wear for a visit home. So who is it?

“The soldier goes up the walk. Removes his hat and rings the bell. The fiancé’s mother answers the door. And then of course Mary Alice realizes. The army has sent someone to tell the family that the fiancé is dead. They wouldn’t come to Mary Alice’s, house of course. They would go to the mother’s because the mother is the next of kin. Mary Alice runs across the street to her fiancé’s family,
wild with grief. She spends the afternoon attempting to comfort the mother, and then Emma comes over and sits with the two of them and suddenly Mary Alice says she doesn’t want to live anymore and she’s going to throw herself off the bridge. She gets in the car, parks on the near side of the bridge. Emma had insisted on following her on foot and saw her climb the railing. Mary Alice jumped, and the river started carrying her along. The sun was just setting and she was being pulled along, waving her arms, still quite visible because of her pale yellow blouse. Emma, without even thinking, jumped in right after her. She was a strong swimmer, after all; she came from a line of fishermen. It was a long drop, but in she went. But she hit the water at the wrong angle and was instantly killed.”

“What a shame.” That explained Emma’s Listeners connection. I piled pieces of egg yolk onto an English muffin.

“She was a true hero. But you’re right, what a shame.”

“So she tried to rescue her friend. And that’s why her family is so proud? Her nieces and nephews?”

“Very proud. And rightly so.”

“But I have a question.” Preparing to talk, I sipped some juice and wiped my mouth.

“What’s that?” He opened his hands toward me as if I were a witness in the box.

“You mentioned the sight of Mary Alice riding the current in a pale yellow blouse. That was Emma’s viewpoint. If Emma drowned, how does anyone know that’s what she saw? How do we know that the pale yellow was
still visible? How do we know she was waving? How did all that get into the police notes?”

I resumed eating. So much for this urban, or suburban, legend.

“It didn’t.”

“How do we know, then?”

“Because that’s how Mary Alice told it.”

“Mary Alice lived?” I popped my head back in surprise, just the response he was looking for.

“Yes, she did live. She thought better of it and allowed herself to be carried toward shore, behind a house with a private dock downstream near the railroad bridge. She pulled herself onto the pilings and lay there until help arrived. She was taken to the hospital for emotional exhaustion but was physically fine. In fact, after a few hours in the hospital and a change into dry clothes, she walked home and went directly across the street to help the woman who was supposed to become her mother-in-law. People were tough in those days. And they walked a lot more.”

“That’s unbelievable.”

“And after an appropriate interval of paying respect to the fallen, she met someone else and married and had children. And she’s my mother.” He slapped the table.

“Mary Alice is your mother?”