No Book but the World: A Novel (14 page)

I
DRIVE INTO
P
ERDU AT MIDDAY,
telling myself I have no special plan. I might sit in the lone diner, order the soup and half-sandwich special, possibly stroll past the few blocks of shops or along the thin brown mill river that runs behind them, somehow biding the hours until four, when Mr. Charles told me to try calling the jail. But as I approach the coin-op news box outside the diner, my eye is drawn to the front page of the local weekly, the
Perdu Citizen
. I feed a couple of quarters into the slot and extract a copy. I know what I am looking for. There on the sidewalk, I flip through its few pages until I find the event listings, and yes, there it is:
JAMES
FEREBEE
MEMORIAL
SERVICE
.
THURSDAY
,
NOVEMBER
18.
TIME
: 1:30
P
.
M
.
LOCATION
:
BUCK
WALLACE
COMMUNITY
CENTER
.

My chest is thudding. I am going to attend. Not a decision but an imperative.

The day is sunny and brusque. I stand outside the diner, whose awning furls and flaps, the scant rectangles of newsprint snapping in the wind, the noon light spangling the page, my hair fluttering ticklish in front of my eyes, all of it combining to produce a feeling of near-vertigo that reminds me of the other night, when I slipped on Mrs. Tremblay’s walk. Everything appears palsied, provisional, even the ink, spiky and smudged now in the corner where my thumb has gripped.

Inside, the diner is busy and warm and redolent of bacon and sugar. The sound of spattering grease pebbles the air. I stand by the
PLEASE WAIT TO BE SEATED
sign. A waitress calls, “Sit anywhere.”

I slide into the only empty booth, a two-top against the wall. The customers at this hour appear to be mostly seniors, the men thickset and gravel-voiced, with baseball caps over their stiff gray hair; the women soft and lumpy in their hand-knitted sweaters. At the table behind me they are speaking of last night’s hard frost, how it caught somebody named Emmy by surprise.

“Had ’em deliver a load of manure Monday,” a man is saying. “Been sitting there ever since—”

“Sitting pretty,” puts in a woman.

“—like a big lawn ornament,” the man continues. “So last night, Emmy’s getting ready for bed, hears on the radio the temperature’s going to drop. Suddenly it hits her that pile of crap’s about to petrify. She throws her coat over her jammies, makes Mort get up, has him out there in the dark with two flashlights, one in each hand, while she’s shoveling shit over her seed beds for all she’s worth.” His laugh wheezes like a cracked concertina and is accompanied by his tablemates’.

I feel a prick of longing I do not understand.

The waitress, her hair in gray snails, takes my order. She goes. I wait.

Tables empty and tables fill. All around me, more people, more of the same: regulars, retirees with glasses so thick their eyes swim, distorted, behind the lenses. These are Fred’s jurors. For all the visible indignities of age, they have about them a kind of collective grandeur. How comfortable they appear, how established. They are that thing I will never be.

We must choose between making a man and a citizen
. So quoth Neel, so we were raised to believe.

Food comes. Split pea soup and tuna on toast. I eat slowly, the
Perdu Citizen
propped against the napkin dispenser. I read as I eat but hardly know what I am reading; even as my eyes scan the print, my mind is elsewhere, turning that word—
citizen
—over and over, asking Neel, beseeching him: Why did you insist on making us unfit?

Around me the customers murmur, the waitresses joke. The diner is shot through with spooling gold light and the whole place smells of syrup and ham, echoes with the clatter of plate and mug. It’s just the sort of place we would have gone with Neel and June on one of our jaunts; the sort of small-town place—entrenched, timeless, homely, unstriving—that I learned to love, but to love ambivalently, in wistful fashion, because it went without saying that in such places we could never belong.

As a freshman in high school, when I proposed trying out for cheerleading, Neel and June were for once equally aghast. Cheerleading, they sermonized, represented the epitome of both mindless conformity and sexist stereotype. They had my attention: I’d found the ideal thing to rile them both. “You can’t not let me,” I said. “It’s my choice”—a word I relished flinging back at Neel as often as I could throughout (and, disgracefully, beyond) adolescence.

When I did not make the squad, the humiliation was terrible. I had not only practiced the routine until I was sure I had it down, I’d scrutinized every detail of the likeliest girls’ appearance: their outfits, their high ponytails, their shimmery makeup, even the fetching way they chewed their lips and squealed with nerves outside the gym while waiting to be called in groups of eight. All of these I imitated as faithfully as I could and with what I believed a high degree of success. So when the list went up the next day and my name did not appear, it seemed the final proof of my intractable otherness—a residue that clung like a stench wherever I went and no matter how many times I tried to rinse myself clean.

Worse than the shame I felt reading the names of girls who’d made the cut were the palpable relief (from June) and vindication (Neel) I faced when I brought the news home.

“I’m sorry, Ayv,” said June. “But to be honest, I’m also glad.”

Neel crushed me in an embrace. I was as tall as he by then, and his five o’clock shadow ground against my cheek.

“Scratchy,” I objected.

He let me go but couldn’t help seizing my arm and giving it a pleased joggle. “I knew you could never pass for one of them.”

“But why?” I moaned. “Why couldn’t I?” I pulled the elastic from the ponytail I’d worked hard to mirror those of the girls on the squad and let my hair slop over my face. I was parodying despondency a little, in order to conceal my real despondence. “What’s
wrong
with me?”

“You’re free,” declared Neel warmly. “Free from custom, free from pretense, and now free again from expectation.”

Was he right? Was that true? Does the concept of such freedom apply when custom, pretense and expectation have never been yours to reject?

It was easy for Neel to celebrate their riddance from his own life; he’d grown up stultified by societal pressures, not only in school but at home. His parents, first-generation Scottish-Americans who’d owned a dry goods store, died decades before I was born, and about them I knew little. Except this: Neel had grown up addressing his father as sir. And this: on Sundays they always had a formal meal in the middle of the day, always with roast beef and turnips, which Neel to this day detested. And this: when Neel was a boy, his mother used to make him kneel on a cool oven rack as penance for misbehaving. June is the one who told me this last, and I remember staring at my father the next time I saw him, caught between pity and fascination, until he snapped, “What’s so interesting? Did I forget to put in my teeth this morning?”

After Neel died Fred spent less time than ever under the Office roof. I knew June was lonely; I knew she worried about Fred, but any guilt I felt about the infrequency of my own visits I managed by not thinking about it, a feat that required I minimize my visits even more severely. Although I could easily have spent more time with her (it was only an hour and fifteen minutes from Grand Central to Freyburg), I made excuses as to why I couldn’t get away: I was busy at work, my marriage needed attention, we had concert tickets, we had houseguests, we had the flu—anything to beg off going to see her more than once every three or four months.

When I did go, almost always alone (I was loath to remind Dennis of my strange and increasingly deficient-seeming origins), a knot would gather in my stomach as the train advanced north, a sense of duty and longing and apprehension all clenching there confusedly. Fred would pick me up at the station, invariably five or ten minutes after my train came in, taking the turn slowly and parallel parking in the tiny passenger pick-up area with geometrical exactitude, even though there were rarely any other cars and he might as well have parked head-on. After getting his license late, at age nineteen, Fred turned out to be a good driver, earnest and careful, but not a relaxed one; in fact, his prowess in maneuvering a car seemed a direct result of how unnatural he found the project, so as to require his complete, heightened concentration.

We never kissed or hugged hello. Swiftly and without a word, he’d come take my bags and put them in the trunk, always handling them with such gentleness that I was able to take this minor chivalry as a surrogate expression of affection. No matter how much or little time had passed since I’d last seen him, he always looked bigger than I’d remembered.

“Hey, good-looking,” I liked to tease, an older sister’s prerogative, when he came around and got into the driver’s seat. He had June’s stature, her long elegant back, and Neel’s rampant curls, shiny as blackberries.

“Ah hi,” he’d reply, ducking his head in a brief salutatory nod before giving all of his attention to driving. His sober response always left me feeling both frivolous and snubbed.

(But Kitty was the frivolous one, wasn’t she, Fred? While I was—am still—almost as conspicuously solemn as you.)

More often, though, it was June who’d pick me up. Even during times Fred was nominally living at home, I might come to Batter Hollow and never catch sight of him. When I’d ask where he was, June would incline her head toward the window, and I got used to imagining him out there at all times. The idea of Fred seemed to exist throughout the woods, in every tree and rock, almost as though he had become one of those giants we used to pretend lived out there, spread across the whole area, large as a shadow.

On one visit June mentioned he’d been away in the woods without setting foot in the house for days. She said it mildly, as if it were normal, as if she’d trained herself to regard it as normal. “What about food?” I asked. “What about washing?”

“He’ll come in by and by,” she replied in the trailing voice I had grown to expect and abhor. We sat in the kitchen over tea and seaweed crackers. I’d been there maybe an hour and promised to spend the night. The rest of the afternoon stretched gray and infinite before me.

I pushed back from the table. “Think I’ll take a walk.”

It was autumn, not cold yet, the woods on fire with rosy orange light, the trees lit up like candles. I walked in and out of slats of sun until I came to his tree house, a platform with three sides built above the old swale. June hadn’t told me which part of the woods to look in. She hadn’t had to. What other site would Fred have chosen?

I hadn’t thought of Midgetropolis, neither the place nor the word, in a long time. It formed on my tongue and dissolved. I recognized the swale and the shapes of things we’d given names: the Arch, the Thrones, the Tower. No one was around. I listened. The entire forest seemed to be listening to me. I climbed into the tree house—Fred had nailed pieces of wood for rungs into the trunk. I found his nest of army blankets, prickly with pine needles. I found an electric lantern, Neel’s old pocketknife. I found a metal canister with a screw lid that contained a dozen plastic jelly containers, the kind they have in diners. I found the spread-winged skeleton of a bat. Its bones were not entirely stripped of carcass; leathery bits still clung in places, but not enough to hold it all together. Rather, the parts had been assembled in a corner of the platform with evident care, even—the word popped into my head and made me shudder; I didn’t know why—fastidiousness.

Then my foot touched something buried under a heap of leaves, and when I brushed them aside I found the old Indian dolls that had been in June’s family for generations. Their beautiful, serious faces had been erased, their clothes were in faded tatters, their beaded necklaces broken. The male doll’s legs had been forced apart so that one hung limp, and most of their hair was missing; only a few straggly clumps remained.

I imagined for a moment Dennis at my side, sifting through Fred’s things with me, and felt sick with relief that I’d left him in Queens. He had known Fred’s strangeness as a child, had witnessed it in snatches, but I was desperate to keep him from knowing the extent of Fred’s strangeness as an adult.

Buried underneath the blankets, in a metal box, I found a stash of papers. Old maps from our long-ago jaunts, disintegrating at the folds. Our entire collection of Ladybird books, and also
The Little Prince
, which I had read aloud to him years ago; and a Wildlife Sanctuary Guide, and a composition book.

I fingered the cover of this last, its mottled black-and-white design. Then opened it, my throat clogged and dry. There was Kitty’s old handwriting. There were my old sketches. Stories and pictures documenting the games we’d played out here with Fred. I turned page after page, cymbals clashing in my chest. Halfway through the book, the writing mercifully ran out. Then it picked up again. Words and drawings in a different hand. Not Fred’s. Someone else’s. There was a date: July 5, 1998. The summer Neel died. The summer Fred had gone to the Magdalen Islands with that family, with their son. Hand-drawn maps, lists of words: carex, bulrush, spartina, Indian pipe. A sketch of a bird. A sketch of cows. Pages of tic-tac-toe. A page of hearts, drawn over and over. A page with a single heart shot through with an arrow. I sealed the books back in the metal box, buried the box back under the blankets.

At the house I did not tell June I’d found her old dolls, the knife, the canister of jelly, the box of books. I came into the warm kitchen where she was peeling apples and stood in the doorway and broke down.

She whirled around. “Ava?”

“What’s the
matter
with him?” I choked.

“What is it, Ayv? What’s happened?” She put down the paring knife and rubbed my back. I was doubled over, clutching myself around the middle. “Did you see your brother?” I could not speak. I shook my head. I tried to get myself under control.