Port Mungo (23 page)

Silence, there on our windswept crag high above the Hudson River. Then she began to speak again, staring straight ahead, her hands flat on the boards of the bench. That’s when she told me. It took a few minutes. Calmly and quietly she told me how Peg had become so depressed that she went into the mangroves one night and swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. She told me how Johnny had been in the bar of the Macaw when Jack came in about ten days after her body was found. He was in a bad way. He had been drinking for days. He had to talk, and whatever antagonism existed between the two men was forgotten in the extremity of Jack’s desperation and need. He began to spill his feelings at the bar, and Johnny took him to a table at the back of the room where they would not be overheard.

What Jack had then told him, Johnny had immediately passed on to Gerald. Since then he had said nothing to anybody until the night he’d sat at Vera’s kitchen table. What he’d told her was this: One night Peg and Jack had sat up drinking—Vera was away, somewhere down the coast—and the more they drank the more distraught Peg had become. Jack’s memory of that part of the evening was more or less intact. But what happened after midnight, about that he was confused. What he
thinks
happened was that he had at last been forced to agree with her that her life had become an unspeakable horror. And such was the state of drunkenness they had reached, he said—or such the state of
clarity,
rather, a certain kind of drunkenness can create in the mind, the alcohol rousing a kind of higher sobriety—he had agreed with her that she would be better off dead.

Vera stopped here.

—Jack told Peg, I said slowly, that she would be better off dead. Told his own daughter she’d be better off dead. Why?

—He didn’t know if he said it or not. He said it was possible, given all that had been said already. I don’t have to tell you why. You know why. Gerald told you.

—Oh dear god.

Over the hills on the far bank of the Hudson a hawk hung in the sky, far off in the distance. Tiny bird drifting on the currents of the wind. The bare bleak facts of the thing, coughed out in a Port Mungo bar by a drunken man incapable any longer of keeping to himself the evil he had done. I doubt he ever told anyone about it again, said Vera, and Johnny Hague, whom he had chosen, perversely, to hear his confession, spoke of it only twice: to Gerald, and to herself. And who had Vera told? Only me, she said.

—Not Anna?

—No.

—Anna doesn’t know?

—No.

—Why didn’t you tell her?

—Better she think it my fault than that Jack—

—Jack what?

She wouldn’t say anything more. So I repeated what Gerald had told me in his room at the Park Plaza twenty years before, and she disputed none of it, not even her own guilty awareness of the changes in her daughter, and the suspicions she repressed, or drowned, rather, in floods of booze, until the day Johnny Hague sat at her kitchen table and told her what Jack had told him in the bar of the Hotel Macaw.

—That was the end. I had to stop drinking, I had to get straight. I couldn’t see Jack after that. Not until last week, or whenever it was.

—Because you’d heard about Anna.

—I couldn’t miss Anna, could I? And you two were keeping her to yourselves.

—I should have called you.

—Yes you should, said Vera hoarsely.

—So you’re telling me that it started, I said, this thing between Jack and Peg, before Anna was born, and went on after? And she killed herself because of it?

—Yes. And there’s more.

—What?

—It was Jack took her out to the mangroves.

That was quite enough for me. The entire edifice rested on the word of Johnny Hague, and Johnny Hague
hated
Jack!

—I don’t believe it, I said. I don’t believe a single bloody word of it. Not a bloody word!

Chapter Eighteen

I caught an early-evening train. I got into Penn Station after dark and found a cab. There was nobody in the sitting room or in the kitchen. It was Dora’s night off. I poured myself a drink. The silence in the house was not comfortable. I paced about downstairs, responding to a restlessness, or a disturbance, rather, in the atmosphere of the house. Something had happened—this thought struck me all at once, and with considerable force. While I had been away, while Jack and Anna were alone, something had happened here. No, it was me. I was rattled, anxious and desperately weary. I had been numb on the train, unable even to begin to assimilate what I had heard that afternoon. I remember once thinking, with regard to Peg’s death, that there are no mysteries, only secrets. Only people who keep secrets. Nothing had changed. People were still keeping secrets.

I tried to read the newspaper. Normally I enjoy having the house to myself, for me solitude is a pleasure. On those rare occasions when I am alone here, I indulge the pleasure of possession—the house is
mine.
Not shared, mine. Not this night. This night the house was by no means mine, others had taken possession of it, in a manner that was not yet apparent to me, and had then gone out. Or were in their rooms, though they had not responded when I went upstairs and called them. Nor was there anybody in the studio: I had seen no lights on up there when I got out of my cab. For some reason there was a large kitchen knife on the windowsill, and nobody had drawn the blinds. I drew them now. Then for some minutes I sat down with the paper, until I heard steps on the staircase.

I became unaccountably alarmed at that descending footfall. I was unable to say a word. I sat frozen in my armchair, half turned towards the door.

Why could I not call out?

Anna appeared in the doorway.

—Oh hi, Gin.

I stared at her, the tumult still working in me.

—Anna.

She flung herself into an armchair and would not look at me. She chewed her thumbnail. When she did lift her eyes to mine I was unable to read her expression. I felt we were back where we’d been when she first moved in, awkward with each other and unable to make conversation.

—Is everything all right? I said.

—Not really.

—What’s the matter?

No answer to this. A kind of morose shrug, eyes averted once more, then out with the tobacco and the rolling papers. I felt I was in a dream. With trembling fingers she assembled an untidy cigarette and lit it.

—Gin.

—Yes Anna.

—Jack’s dead.

I don’t suppose I shall ever forget that moment. How to describe the—lurch—the mind makes when it is given information so utterly unanticipated—a lurch into the void, as though one has stepped off the high ledge of a building, and in one’s freefall, clutching at the oddest twigs—

—But I’ve only been gone a few hours, I said.

How could he be dead when I’d been away so short a time? My words made no sense to Anna either. I was sitting forward, staring at the girl. I became aware that my mouth was open. I shut it.

—Where is he?

—Upstairs.

But I didn’t move. I suppose I was in shock. It took a minute for me to organize an appropriate question.

—What makes you think he’s dead?

—I better tell you what happened.

—Have you told anyone else?

—I was waiting for you.

So she began to talk, and I sat there attempting to make sense of this girl’s telling me that my brother was dead upstairs. I didn’t know what she was saying. I interrupted her.

—Is he in his bedroom?

—No, he’s in the studio.

I told her to go on. I suppose the reason I didn’t want to go upstairs was that then I would have to confront it, whatever it was she was talking about. Down here in the sitting room it was not real. I think I expected to see Jack appear in the doorway at any moment. Then it would be clear that this was all some new oddness on the part of this odd girl. She was telling me that after I’d gone Jack had asked her to pose for him again. He wanted to work on the portrait. She didn’t really want to but it seemed so important to him that she’d agreed. She went up to the studio in her bathrobe, as she’d so often done before, and when he was ready she’d slipped it off and stood in front of the hanging drape in the pose he had taught her.

I nodded my head. This was all clear enough.

But he was behaving so strangely. He was muttering to himself and she couldn’t understand what he was saying. He would suddenly turn towards the window and stand very still, as though listening to somebody speaking to him from the building across the street. She grew more and more uncomfortable but when she moved he shouted at her to stay where she was. After this she became frightened.

Then she was disgusted.

—Why?

This was not easy for her. Her fingers were knotted together and twisting round and round. Her head was down, she was frowning. Her eyes flickered to mine and then away again. From where she stood she couldn’t see him properly, she said, he liked to put the easel close to her and at an oblique angle. But out of the corner of her eye she could see what he was doing.

—What was that?

—He had it out.

—What?

She made a gesture. She was lying.

—No, I said.

—Yes, Gin.
Yes.

She was suddenly so angry!

—Then what?

Then she put her bathrobe back on, in spite of him shouting at her not to move. Couldn’t she see he was working? She tried to leave the room but he stood with his back to the door. She shouted back at him.

—You shouted back at him?

—I really shouted at him.

—You weren’t afraid of him?

—No! Dirty old man. Christ.

All she saw, she said, was a contemptible, pathetic, dirty old man. Then what?

—He started crying. He kind of slid down the door. Pathetic. I just stepped over him and came downstairs. Got dressed. I called my mother, but she said you’d left.

—Did you tell her what happened?

—No.

I began to think about going upstairs. My breathing was coming very fast now. I felt hot, and rather nauseous. I had to sit still a little longer.

Then what?

—I got a knife from the kitchen drawer and sat down here waiting for you.

—So what makes you think Jack’s dead?

It took an effort for me to say it. There didn’t seem to be enough oxygen in the room. This conversation had shifted from being entirely unreal to being too real and now it had shifted back into unreality again.

—I went back up.

—Why?

—I don’t know. I got bored, I guess.

Twenty minutes later I went upstairs with Anna. Climbing the last flight up to the attic I was not strong, and more than once I had to pause for breath. At the door she waited for me. We stood a moment outside the closed door to the studio, the only sound my panting.

—Okay, I said.

She opened the door. It was dark, only a dim glow seeping in from the outside. There was a strange unpleasant smell. On the far side of the studio something lay on the floor. Anna hit the switch, and for a second or two the room was flooded in brilliant white light.

—Enough! I shouted, and she turned it off.

The thing lying on the floor was my brother Jack in a pool of blood: flat on his back, naked from the waist up, hands clawed. Long skinny white body. The wounds were under his elbows, each of them now a clotted, crusty mess. His eyes were wide open and so was his mouth, as though he was utterly astonished. His large feet splayed off to either side. Like a huge dead bird. Above him hung the portrait of Anna, and he seemed to be staring up at it. In the clawed fingers of his left hand was a razor blade wrapped in black electrical tape.

Much later, after the police had come and gone, and the medical people, and the body had been taken away to the morgue, Anna and I sat downstairs together. I had made a number of phone calls—Vera, Eduardo, Jack’s doctor, one or two others—then Dora returned home and found strangers in the house, and on being told why they were here, became hysterical for five minutes. Then she pulled herself together and made coffee. We could hear her sweeping the stairs and the hallway now. For several hours I had acted the competent householder as I’d dealt with the cops, and then the doctor and the paramedics. Anna stayed with me throughout, and remained as calm as I was. Not even the sight of two men in white jackets bringing Jack’s bagged body down the stairs to the gurney in the hall disturbed our grave, unflappable demeanour. Now we sat each with a large whisky, and our demeanour had not yet begun to show any sign of crumbling.

—How did you do it?

—Do what?

There was no need for her to pretend with me but I didn’t say a word.

—Do what, Gin?

More silence. Dora appeared and in an unsteady voice asked if there was anything else we needed. I told her there wasn’t. She went back into the hall, closing the door behind her. We heard the vacuum cleaner. The studio was locked. I didn’t know if I could ask Dora to wash the floor up there. Perhaps I would ask her if she knew anybody who’d clean the studio, then she could say if the task was too painful for her. After that I would have to see to his things. So many paintings he had up there! I read somewhere that you can never get blood out of floorboards, not completely. They always stay pink.

—I guess I should feel sad or something, said Anna, but I don’t feel anything.

—You will.

When I told Vera, she had shrieked with dismay. Eventually she could not speak any more. She said she would come down to the city tomorrow.

So Anna and I sat glumly in the sitting room.

—I was glad when Gerald died, she said. He was suffering such a lot.

—You think Jack wasn’t suffering?

She got up without a word and ran out of the room. I thought of Rothko then. Jack’s hero. I was living in New York when he died, and I remembered how he’d cut himself with a razor blade, not his wrists but the brachial arteries under his elbows. So there was a derivative quality to Jack’s death, it lacked originality. Say the same about his paintings, I suppose. I began to laugh. I was feeling a little giddy. I think I may have been close to hysteria. I wondered how she’d managed it, how she’d convinced him to do it, I mean, or perhaps what happened was that she’d convinced him to let
her
do it—a ritualistic sort of a thing, ritual vengeance. Ritual parricide, long contemplated, deliberate in execution: all that would come out, I thought. Not publicly, of course, not in a court of law, I mean here in the house, where she’d be safe. For we would have to protect her, Vera and I, and Dora too, we women would have to keep her safe so nobody would ever know that Jack Rathbone did not commit suicide, no, he was put to death by his own daughter. Thinking this, I began to feel the grief rise in me and as it did I became aware that in the toilet down the hall Anna was being violently sick.

Then all at once I could hear Jack laughing! From somewhere up at the top of the house, the lovely wild laughter I remembered from my childhood, and dear god it did for me, it did for me utterly, and as the floodgates opened my poor heart burst and the pain poured out of me like a river—