Trust Me (2 page)

“If you can snowplow here, you can come down from the top of the mountain,” Harold told her.

“Really?” Her cheeks were pink, from her day on the baby slope. She wore a white knit hat. Her eyes were baby blue.

“Absolutely. We’ll come down on the novice trail.”

She trusted him. But on the chair lift, as the slope beneath them increased and the windswept iciness of the higher trails became apparent, a tremulous doubt entered into her face, and he realized, with that perversely joyful inner widening the torturer feels, that he had done the wrong thing. The lift rumbled onward, ever higher. “Can I really ski this?” Priscilla asked, with a child’s beautiful willingness to be reassured. In the realms of empathy, he was again standing on the edge of that swimming pool. The evil-smelling water was a long way down.

He told her, “You won’t be skiing this part. Look at the view. It’s gorgeous.”

She turned, rigid in the chair as it swayed across a chasm. With obedient eyes she gazed at the infinite blue-green perspectives of wooded mountain and frozen lake. The parking lot below seemed a little platter tessellated with cars. The lift cable irresistibly slithered; the air dropped in temperature. The pines around them had grown stunted and twisted. Mist licked off the ice; they were in the clouds. Priscilla was
trembling all over, and at the top could scarcely stand on her skis.

“I can’t do it,” she announced.

“Do what I do,” Harold said. He quickly slid to a few yards below her. “Put your weight first on one ski, then the other. Don’t look at the steepness, just think of your weight shifting.”

She leaned her weight backward, away from the slope, and fell down. Tears welled in her eyes; he feared they would freeze and make her blind. He gathered all his love into his voice and rolled it toward her, to melt her recalcitrance, her terror. “Just do your snowplow. Don’t think about where you are.”

“There isn’t any snow,” she said. “Just ice.”

“It’s not icy at the edges.”

“There are
trees
at the edges.”

“Come on, honey. The light’s getting flat.”

“We’ll freeze to death.”

“Don’t be silly, the ski patrol dusts the trails last thing. Put your weight on the downhill ski and let yourself turn. You
must
. Goddamn it, it’s
sim
ple.”

“Simple for
you
,” Priscilla said. She followed his directions and began gingerly to slide. She hit a small mogul and fell again. She began to scream. She tried to throw her ski poles, but the straps held them to her wrists. She kicked her feet like an infant in a tantrum, and one ski binding released. “I
hate
you,” she cried. “I can’t do it, I
can’t
do it! I was so
proud
on the baby slope, all I wanted was for you to
watch
me—watch me for one lousy minute, that was all I asked you to do. You
knew
I wasn’t ready for this.
Why
did you bring me up here,
why?
”

“I thought you were,” he said weakly. “Ready. I wanted to show you the view.” His father had wanted to give him the joy of the water, no doubt.

Dusk was coming to the mountain. Teen-aged experts
bombed past in an avalanche of heedless color, with occasional curious side-glances. Harold and Priscilla agreed to take off their skis and walk down. It took an hour, and cost him a blister on each heel. The woods around them, perceived at so unusually slow a speed, wore a magical frozen strangeness, the ironical calm of airplane rivets. Her children were waiting at the edge of the emptying parking lot with tears in their eyes. “I tried to give her a treat,” he explained to them, “but your mother doesn’t trust me.”

During this same perilous period, Harold attended his son’s seventeenth birthday party, in the house he had left. As he was rushing to catch the evening train that would take him back to his apartment in the city, he noticed a fresh pan of brownies cooling on the stove. This was odd, because birthday cake had already been served. He asked his son, “What are these?”

The boy smiled cherubically. “Hash brownies. Have one, Dad. You can eat it on the train.”

“It won’t do anything funny to me?”

“Naa. It’s just something the other kids cooked up for me as a joke. It’s more the idea of it; they won’t do anything.”

Harold as a child had had a sweet tooth, a taste for starch; he took one of the bigger of the brownies and gobbled it in the car as his son drove him to the railroad station. In the train, he leaned his head against the black glass and entertained the rueful thoughts of a separated man. Slowly he came to realize that his mouth was very dry and his thoughts were not only repeating themselves but had taken on an intense, brightly colored form in his head. They were squeezed one on top of another, like strata of shale, and were vividly polychrome,
like campaign ribbons. When he swung down from the train onto the platform of the city station, one side of him had grown much larger than the other, so he had to lean sharply or fall down. His body did not so much support as accompany him, in several laggard sections. Walking in what felt like a procession to the subway entrance, through a throng of hooded strangers and across a street of swollen cars, he reasoned what had happened: he had eaten a hash brownie.

One half of his brain kept shouting prudent advice to the other:
Look both ways. Take out a dollar. No, wait, here’s a token. Put it in the slot. Wait for the No. 16, don’t take Symphony. Don’t panic
. Every process seemed to take a very long time, while his ribbonlike thoughts multiplied and shuttled with the speed of a computer. These thoughts kept adding up to nonsense, the other half of his brain noticed, while it called instructions and congratulations throughout his homeward progress. The people in the subway car stared at him as if they could hear this loud interior conversation going on. But he felt safe behind his face, as if behind a steel mask. Wheels beneath him screeched. A code of colored lights flew past the windows.

He was in air again, walking the three blocks from the subway to his apartment. Something in his throat burned. He felt nauseated, and kept selecting hedges and trash cans to vomit in, if it came to that, which it did not, quite. It seemed the confirmation of a gigantically abstruse theorem that his key fit in the lock of his door and that beyond the door lay a room full of dazzlingly familiar furniture. He picked up the telephone, which had the sheen and two-dimensional largeness of an image on a billboard, and called Priscilla.

“Hi, love.”

Her voice rose in pitch. “What’s happened to you, Harold?”

“Do I sound different?”

“Very.” Her voice was sharp as porcupine quills, black with white tips. “What did they do to you?”
They
—his children, his ex-wife.

“They fed me a hash brownie. Jimmy said I wouldn’t feel anything, but on the train in, my thoughts got very little and intense, and on the way from the station I had to keep coaching myself on how to get from there to here.” The protective, trustworthy half of his brain congratulated him on how cogent he sounded.

But something was displeasing to Priscilla. She cried, “Oh, that’s disgusting! I don’t think it’s funny, I don’t think
any
of you are funny.”

“Any of who?”

“You know who.”

“I don’t.” Though he did. He looked at his palms; they were mottled. “Sweetie, I feel like throwing up. Help me.”

“I can’t,” Priscilla said, and hung up. The click sounded like a slap, the same echoing slap that had once exploded next to his ear. Except that his father had become his son, and his mother was his girl friend. This much remained true: it had not been his fault, and in surviving he was somehow blamed.

The palms of his hands, less mottled, looked pale and wrinkled, like uncomfortable pillows. In his shirt pocket Harold found tucked the dollar bill rejected at the subway turnstile, extremely long ago. While waiting for Priscilla to relent and call back, he turned to its back side, examined the mystical eye above the truncated pyramid, and read, over and over, the slogan printed above the ONE.

L
YNNE
’
S FATHER
’
S HAND
felt warm and even strong, though he lay unconscious, dying. In this expensive pastel room of the nursing home, he was starving, he was dying of thirst, as surely as if he had been abandoned in a desert. His breath stank. The smell from the parched hole that had been his mouth was like nothing else bodily she had ever smelled—foul but in no way fertile, an acid ultimate of carnality. Yet the presence was still his; in his unconscious struggle for breath, his gray face flitted, soundlessly muttering, into expressions she knew—the helpless raised eyebrows that preceded an attempt at the dinner table to be droll, or a sudden stiffening of the upper lip that warned of one of his rare, pained, carefully phrased reprimands. A lawyer, lost to his family in the machinations of cities and corporations, he had been a distant father, reluctant to chastise, the dinnertime joke his most comfortable approach to affection. He had spent his free time out of the house, puttering at tasks he lacked a son to share. In New Hampshire, over many summers, he had built a quarter-mile of stone wall with his own hands; in Boston,
there had been the brick terrace to level and weed; in the suburb of his retirement, compost heaps to tend and broken fences to repair and redesign. In the year past, his hand had lost its workman’s roughness. There was no task his failing brain could direct his hand to seize. Unthinkingly, Lynne had asked him, this past summer, to help one of the children to build a birdhouse; manfully, chuckling with energy, he had assembled the tools, the wood, the nails. His pipe clenched in his teeth as jauntily as ever, he had gone through the familiar motions while his grandson gazed in gathering disbelief at the hammered-together jumble of wood. The old man stood back at last, gazed with the child, saw clearly for a moment, and abandoned such jobs forever. Dry and uncallused, his hand rested warm in his daughter’s.

Sometimes it returned her squeeze, or the agitation that passed across his face caused his shallow pulse to race. “Just relax,” she would chant to him then, bending close, into his caustic breath. “Re-lax. It’s all right. I’m right here, Daddy. I won’t go away.”

Lynne was reminded, in these hours of holding and waiting, of a childhood episode scarcely remembered for thirty years. It had been so strange, so out of both their characters. She had been a cheerful child—what they called in those years “well adjusted.” At the age of thirteen or so, the first of three daughters to be entering womanhood, she was visited by insomnia, an inexplicable wakefulness that made sleep a magic kingdom impossible to reach and that turned the silhouetted furniture of her room into presences that might, if left unwatched, come horribly to life. Her mother dismissed the terror with the same lightness with which she had explained menstruation, as an untidiness connected with “the aging process”; it was her father, surprisingly, who took the
development seriously. As Lynne remembered it, he would come home pale from one of his innumerable meetings—the cold of the Common on his face, the weight of City Hall on his shoulders—and, if he found her awake, would sit by her bed for hours, holding her hand and talking enough to be “company.” Perhaps what had seemed hours to her had been a few minutes, perhaps her recollection had expanded a few incidents into a lengthy episode. In her memory, his voice had been not merely paternal but amused, leisurely, enjoying itself, as if this visiting were less a duty than an occasion to be relished, in the manner of the country world where he had been a boy, where sitting and talking had been a principal recreation. He had not begrudged her his time, and she wanted not to begrudge him her company now. She would put him to sleep.

Yet she hated the nursing home, hated and fled it—its cloaked odors, its incessant television, its expensive false order and hypocrisy of false cheer, its stifling vulgarity. These common dying and their coarse nurses were the very people her father had raised her to avoid, to rise above. “Well, aren’t you the handsome boy!” the supervisor had exclaimed to him upon admittance, and tapped him on the arm like a brash girl friend.

His body, tempered by the chores he had always assigned himself, had stubbornly outlasted his judicious brain; then, suddenly, it began to surrender. A succession of little strokes had brought him, who a week earlier could shuffle down the hall between Lynne and a male nurse, to the point where he could not swallow. A decision arose. “The decision is yours,” the doctor said. His face was heavy, kindly, self-protective, formal. The decision was whether or not to move her father to a hospital, where he could be fed intravenously and his life could be prolonged. She had decided not. The fear that the
ambulance ride would compromise her father’s dignity had been uppermost in her mind. But from the way the doctor seized her hand and pronounced with a solemn, artificial clarity, “You have made a wise decision,” Lynne realized that her decision had been to kill her father. He could not swallow. He could not drink. Abandoned, he must die.