The New Yorker Stories Part 54

"I know nothing about this," he said.

"We've been seeing each other for more than a year. We met at a painting group in Portsmouth. At Christmas, he all but proposed."

"Oh?" he said. At Christmas, Matt had prepared a goose and cooked parsnips from the root cellar. They had eaten the meal with some Stonewall Kitchen condiment-a sort of jelly with garlic. Was he to believe that all that time Matt had been in love but had never mentioned the person's name? Of course, anything was possible. A patient having a physical would say that nothing was bothering him, and only when he'd taken off his shirt would Cahill see that he was broken out in shingles, or had cut himself badly and wasn't properly healing.

"I'm not sure why you're here," he said. She was an unpleasant-looking woman-in her early twenties, he thought. Her beak of a nose, crammed too tightly between her small eyes, made it difficult to look at her with a neutral expression.

She said, "I wanted to tell you that you wouldn't be losing a son; you'd be gaining a daughter."

"My child is grown and gone," he said. "I am looking for neither."

She looked at him blankly for a moment. "He doesn't feel like he can leave," she said again.

"I a.s.sure you he can," Cahill said.

"We have our art work in common," she said, as if he'd asked for further explanation.

He looked at her.

"Matt and me," she said finally.

"This matter is entirely between you and Matt," he said. "You don't have to persuade me of anything."

"He respects you. You're like a father figure to him. It's just that he doesn't think he can leave you."

"You've said that many times," Cahill said. "I've explained that he can leave."

"He loves me," she said. "He said he'd take care of me."

"Well," he said, "perhaps you can work things out. When people are meant to be together, such things have been known to happen."

"You're trying to get rid of me," she said in a trembling voice. "You don't think I'm good enough."

"Please do me the favor of not attempting to read my mind," he said. "I was about to eat a late dinner when you knocked, and now it's time to do that, if you'll excuse me."

She stamped her foot. The woman was ridiculous; he would have to get a peephole and not let such people in.

"Can I see?" she said plaintively.

Cahill stared at her. "See what?" he said.

"Just once, can I find out if somebody's trying to get rid of me or if you're really eating dinner?"

He almost expressed his surprise, but checked his reaction. He leveled his eyes on her, wondering whether she wasn't shamed by her own childishness. Of course, such people rarely were. "By all means," he said. "The kitchen door is right there."

Surely she would not really go in, but no-of course she would. Like an obese patient advised to diet who would proceed immediately to the nearest vending machine for a candy bar. There she went, to view his potpie. She would be seeing that, and the landslide of mostly unread newspapers that needed to be thrown out, a few days' worth of dirty dishes in the sink. He had not yet carried out the trash, so perhaps even the dead chipmunk had begun to smell.

"That's all you're eating?" she said, returning to the room. In a gentler tone of voice, she said, "I could cook for you. Make extra when I cook for Matt and me."

"I a.s.sume Matt doesn't know you're here?" he said.

She shrugged. "I can't find him," she said. "I thought maybe he was here."

He gestured toward the front door. "When you find him, you can discuss with him these generous impulses," he said. "I wish you good night."

She started to say something. He could almost sense the second when she decided against it and turned to leave. He followed her out the door and stood on the stoop. No lights were on in the barn. The stars shone brightly, and there was a faint, wind-chime-tinged breeze. Breezy's house was the only one he could see that was lit. Matt's car was not in the driveway. Audrey waved sadly, overacting, the poor child cast out into the night. He did not return the wave.

d.a.m.n the woman! There was nothing he liked less than getting caught up in other people's soap operas. He wrote a quick note on the pad by the phone and walked over to stick it to Matt's front door. "Met your friend Audrey," the note said. "Stop by when you get back."

The next morning, when he answered his front door he saw not Matt but Deirdre Rambell, who worked as a secretary at town hall and had heard about what she called, with hushed sincerity, the situation. "Deirdre, it's a few rocks that I've already put back," he said. "The town is making a mountain out of a molehill."

"Oh, it's the Historical Society, you know. The volunteers go around checking, and they really care. For my own part, I've always felt the dead have souls that cannot be at peace when they sense any lack of respect."

"Souls sense respect?" he said. He realized with slight embarra.s.sment that although he was wearing chinos, he still had on his pajama top.

"Indeed they do," she said.

"Then let me inform you, Deirdre, that at this point I have replaced all but a couple of the six or seven stones necessary to give the souls their deserved respect. Let me also ask you this: Do you happen to really know or care anything about the people buried on this property? About their lives, I mean-as people, rather than as souls?"

Nothing in his tone registered with her. "Aren't they Moultons?" she said. "Fine people, among the first settlers."

"Onward!" she exclaimed when she finally drove away.

Yes, he thought, that sort of woman always feels that she's making progress.

You Got No Choice appeared next, apologizing for what he called the "slipup" at town hall. "That lamebrained letter was embarra.s.sing," he said, rolling his eyes. "I just found out, Doc, and came right over to apologize."

"You, and the rest of the town, will be relieved to know that, as infirm as I am, the wall has been repaired, and now all is well with the world."

"Excellent, Doc!" He tugged the brim of his cap.

"You wouldn't have seen Matt's van anywhere around town, would you?" Cahill said. "I haven't seen him in a while."

"Are you kidding?" You Got No Choice said.

"Kidding?"

"You don't know?"

"Know what?" Cahill said.

"Up in Warren," he said warily, as if Cahill might be having him on. "It's been all over the papers."

You Got No Choice saw the answer in Cahill's expression. "Doc-they got him on some molesting-a-minor thing, or something. I didn't want to bring up a sore subject. I know he was like a son to you. You get rounded up by the cops, you got no choice-you go where the Man says you go, right? Don't mean you're guilty."

Cahill put his hand out to brace himself on the door frame. His mind was racing, but it moved neither backward nor forward. It raced like a car on a lift, with someone inside gunning the engine.

"Sorry to drop a bomb on you. Articles have been in the paper every day, as far's I know."

"It's impossible," Cahill said, having recovered enough to speak, though he could hardly hear his own voice.

"Say what?"

"Why wouldn't he have called me? Why wouldn't police have come to the barn, why-"

"There you go," You Got No Choice said. "Fishy, huh? You got a point; it's odd if they haven't made no search."

Cahill almost tripped on the rug in the entryway on his way back into the house. He walked toward the kitchen and the pile of papers, which he wanted to look through immediately, and not at all. "Real life," as his wife would have said. He sank into a kitchen chair and brushed the newspapers onto the floor, putting his head in his hands. The phone rang, and he got up and walked numbly toward it. Matt? Calling to say what? "This is Joyce," his daughter said.

"Joyce, my dear, this is not a time I can talk," he said, but another voice intruded. "And this is Tara," a younger, more high-pitched voice sing-alonged, and he realized he'd been talking to a recording. He heard chimes, and the first unmistakable notes of the wedding march. His daughter's voice said, "We're sending this recording on the happiest day of our lives to announce that at one o'clock July 20, 2005, we were joined together in a commitment ceremony, blessed by Mother G.o.ddess Devi, and we are now officially Joyce"-the squeaky voice broke in-"and Tara." "Forever!" the voices shouted in unison. Next, he recognized the familiar strident voice of his daughter: "Don't be put out that you weren't invited," she said. "Our ceremony consisted of only Mother Devi, Tara's brother who lives next door-who did a bee-yoo-tee-ful Sufi dance-and our little girl Fluffy Sunshine, with a collar of bells and white pansies." Tara broke in: "When you get this message, we'll be in the air to Hawaii." "Peace and love to you, and may you recognize the happiness we have experienced today," his daughter said. Bells clanged merrily; over their ringing, he heard them giggling, voices overlapping: "Inshallah. G-g-g-goodbye, folks!" G-g-g-goodbye, folks!"

He put his head in his hands again, pushing his fingertips against his eyelids until he felt pain.

He went to the barn in the dark, shining the flashlight in front of him. It had rained, and tiny frogs leaped across the dirt road like tiddlywinks. In front of him grew the rhododendrons that Matt had been so delighted to have found in some nursery's compost heap: two of them, with electric-lavender flowers, grown large beside the door. The ink on Cahill's Post-it note had run into one black smear. He knocked, though it was obvious that the place was deserted. He had read enough in the paper to make him sick.

An oversized T-shirt was draped over an oak ladder-back chair. Matt had glued the chair's leg for him some months back, and somehow it had remained in the barn. On the kitchen table were a few shiny copper pennies, and a Little Mermaid Little Mermaid key ring. Cahill felt revulsion. He was also afraid that the police might zoom in on the barn and find him there, snooping. He understood sadly and too late about the toys that Matt had taken pride in rescuing from the dump. They were to lure children, of course. The tag-sale Barbies on the bathroom shelf, stripped of clothes and bracketing the can of shaving cream, the bathroom gla.s.s, and the electric razor that Cahill had given Matt for his birthday-he saw the dolls as the bait they were. How could he have been so obtuse? key ring. Cahill felt revulsion. He was also afraid that the police might zoom in on the barn and find him there, snooping. He understood sadly and too late about the toys that Matt had taken pride in rescuing from the dump. They were to lure children, of course. The tag-sale Barbies on the bathroom shelf, stripped of clothes and bracketing the can of shaving cream, the bathroom gla.s.s, and the electric razor that Cahill had given Matt for his birthday-he saw the dolls as the bait they were. How could he have been so obtuse?

He sat in his old chair and surveyed the room. It resonated with silence. This had once been his wife's dance studio, the place where she practiced-only for the love of it; she'd been too old to seriously dance ballet. This had been her private place, where she watched tapes of Nureyev dancing and no doubt imagined herself being lifted high by his strong hands; where she wore tights and one of Cahill's old white shirts long beyond the time when she would have appeared coquettish in such attire. But now he had to accept the fact that the barn had been desecrated, inhabited for years by a person he'd misjudged, toward whom his wife would have felt the greatest contempt. A slight smell of sweat hung in the air-at least, the kitchen had that odor. He got up and opened the refrigerator-not expecting a Jeffrey Dahmer banquet but checking nonetheless. A bottle of cheap champagne lay on its side, and a couple of packs of moldy cheese, unsealed. Yellow celery lay in a brownish puddle in the drawer. The opened cans he didn't peer into. He took out the one can of c.o.ke, pulled back the top, and drank it, hoping it would settle his stomach. It was not exactly rea.s.suring that the police hadn't come. Hadn't they made Matt tell them where he lived? He saw an old calendar held with a magnet to the side of the refrigerator: Shirley Temple as a child, sniffing a yellow daisy. Oh, the ba.n.a.lity of it. The sad predictability of people's intense yet ultimately unoriginal desires. "You're so superior?" his wife used to chide. Well, yes, he was. At least to some. He took another sip and put the can aside. Well: there were no lollipops. No pictures of little girls naked on the computer, because Matt did not own a computer. A back-to-basics child molester.

It might be, Cahill thought, that the s.p.a.ce itself was cursed. There was the time, during its reconstruction, when the carpenter-a strong-bodied, red-haired woman named Elsie-had flirted with him, the strap of her sweaty tank top fallen from one shoulder, and he had questioned her with his eyes, and she had answered in the affirmative. He had moved toward her and gently slipped down the other strap, intending only a kiss to such peach-perfect b.r.e.a.s.t.s, when, with the timing of a bad movie, Deirdre Rambell had walked into the barn, carrying the sandwiches and drinks his wife had sent out on a tray. It was funny now-or, if not funny, he still took pleasure in having shocked Deirdre, that holier-than-thou woman. There had been no chance in the world that she would ever report what she'd seen to Barbara. He could still hear the gla.s.ses rattling on the tray.

He called the police from Matt's phone-a rotary dial, another of Matt's Salvation Army finds. That was what Cahill thought Matt had been doing: going here and there, collecting trivia as a way of getting over his wife's death. The policeman who answered on the eighth ring-eighth!-seemed none too interested in what he was saying until he raised his voice. "That child molester you've got up there in Warren," he said. "You might want to come over to his house and check through it. This is his landlord calling." Already, he had retreated from the notion of friendship. "I can't understand why you haven't been here before now," he added. The c.o.ke rose up his throat, the acid rush subsiding sickly. He looked at a pencil sketch of trees in an open sketchbook on the counter. A rather lovely little depiction. Well, he thought, n.o.body does what they do all the time. Another person came on the phone and took down his name and address. When the police appeared, about fifteen minutes later-local police first-he found out three things: that Matt had given an address in Syracuse, though he claimed he'd been living out of his van; and that there was was an address in Syracuse-the address of his second wife, who was not dead at all. The third thing he found out, but not until they were leaving, was that Matt had got into an altercation with a man in the holding cell and had been stabbed with a homemade shiv. an address in Syracuse-the address of his second wife, who was not dead at all. The third thing he found out, but not until they were leaving, was that Matt had got into an altercation with a man in the holding cell and had been stabbed with a homemade shiv.

A few weeks later, Cahill received a note from You Got No Choice, whom he now resolved to think of, more charitably, as Bill: "My boss is breathing down my neck and even though these are rough times and you have my heartfelt condolences, Doc, the wall around the grave still hasn't been fixed to come up to code. I'd be glad to drop by this weekend and have at it with some stone." It was nice of Bill to offer to pitch in, but the letter only strengthened Cahill's resolve to fix the wall himself.

Which he set out to do, after eating a grilled-cheese sandwich for lunch. Protein and carbohydrates were good together, midday. Bad eating had contributed to his wife's untimely death; she'd been diabetic and sometimes wouldn't eat anything for an entire day, calling him a nag. She "felt sick," yes, but it was a vicious circle: feel sick, don't eat; don't eat, feel sick.

He walked to the side of the house where the soil was mixed with chips of old brick and rocks. Nothing much would grow in the shady area, but it was a good place to harvest rocks. He piled them into a discarded one-gallon plastic flowerpot. After some digging, he had what he hoped was enough, and set off with the pot pressed to his ribs, his other hand grasping the handle of his toolbox. Hi ho, hi ho. He wondered if Matt would expect him to get in touch. Hear his side of things. Offer help-if not as a doctor, then as a friend? Whatever Matt expected, Cahill could not bring himself to make an attempt to contact him-at least, not at this point in time.

The barn wasn't roped off, though he supposed it wasn't really a crime scene. So many men had come in unmarked cars lately: anybody could have been rummaging around inside, after a while. What was he supposed to do, run out every time he saw another car and ask to see identification?

Cahill turned to see Napoleon bounding across the lawn, foolish ears flapping like luffing sails. The dog tipped sideways as he came close, rudderless with friendliness. "Come to see the old man?" he said. In answer, Napoleon snapped at a bug. "Cross the busy road for the billionth time, tempting fate?" He rubbed the dog beneath his ears. "Let's let her come after you if and when she gets lonely, yeah," Cahill said, continuing to scratch. While he stacked rocks, he kept an eye on the dog, who was nosing at the edge of the woods.

The wall repair took longer than he'd antic.i.p.ated, and he had to get the shovel and dig up one quite large stone from beside the porch, but finally he stood back and admired his handiwork. "There you go, Bill, my friend," he said aloud, saluting the air. "Your job done, my job done." He cleaned some fallen leaves and bits of stick out of the area, stepping carefully around the wall. What had they died of, these four? In those days, people could die from an infected tooth. Dying young was to be expected: young, then, had another meaning.

By the time his daughter had graduated from high school, he hadn't loved her or his wife for some time. His fingertips scratching beneath Napoleon's ears now communicated more sincerity than all the kisses he'd planted formally on the cheeks of his wife and daughter. His wife knew that he'd done things automatically, without feeling. "Reading your rhymes like they make order of things," she'd sneered, as, in her last days, he sat beside her bed reading poems by Yeats, or D. H. Lawrence, poems that rarely rhymed. It was clear where his daughter got her mocking ability. She'd pattern-stepped into bitterness, too. She'd complained about being named for a man (James Joyce), especially for a man whose own daughter had ended up a madwoman. But what ultra-feminine name had she wished they'd given her, what other rose would have gone better with her scuffed work boots and her black-framed gla.s.ses? He had no wand of malice; age alone had turned his wife into a failed ballerina, while genetic signals had resulted in her diabetes. He had determined nothing about his daughter's future by naming her Joyce; it was her own doing that made her what she was. He'd provided well for them, even after he'd stopped loving them. You could will yourself to stop (as he'd done upon hearing the revelations about Matt), or you could stop slowly, point the blades of your skates inward, so to speak, so that coming to a halt was done gracefully, sometimes unnoticed by you or by others. He thought of some lines from Byron: ... I seek no sympathies, nor need;The thorns which I have reap'd are of the treeI planted: they have torn me, and I bleed:I should have known what fruit would spring from such a seed.

There it was! The thorns and bloodshed were a bit of a cliche, but look at the poet's real pa.s.sion. To know something about oneself-that was what caused that pleasurable ache which put one in another state entirely. Too much time was lost trying to figure out other people.

There had been nights in recent years when he had sat awake, a tumbler in his hand filled with chilly Perrier (as a young man, he would have had a gla.s.s of brandy), reading to Matt. What did it mean that someone who appreciated poetry also appreciated, s.e.xually, children? Oh, he supposed he knew that humans were "complicated," that they clung to exteriors, that they instinctively turned away from the ill.u.s.trations in Gray's Anatomy, Gray's Anatomy, which offered factual information about their inner selves; why did people have no interest in the real coherence of their inner workings, the rhythms of the muscles, the-all right-poetry of the vascular system? He knew that these were the thoughts of a peculiar old man, marginalized and dismissed for years, acerbically p.r.o.nounced upon by his daughter. Guileless children told the truth? They did, but not so well as poets. which offered factual information about their inner selves; why did people have no interest in the real coherence of their inner workings, the rhythms of the muscles, the-all right-poetry of the vascular system? He knew that these were the thoughts of a peculiar old man, marginalized and dismissed for years, acerbically p.r.o.nounced upon by his daughter. Guileless children told the truth? They did, but not so well as poets.

On his way back to the house, he picked up the day's mail. He found in the pile a newsletter from the A.A.R.P., a packet of coupons, a letter from a local charity, and-he almost dropped the flyer-a grainy photocopied picture: "MISSING PERSON," it read, and gave her age as sixteen. Last seen in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. He remembered Audrey standing at his door. But could this be the same girl, if she was only sixteen? He held the page farther away, squinting. Audrey's eyes followed him as if he held a hologram. He wandered into the living room, debating whether to call the police yet again. Audrey's having been a friend of Matt's, her visit... all of it would be of interest to them. It was his obligation to call-he really should-but for the moment he thought that, actually, no one had done much for him lately, except to ha.s.sle him about rebuilding a pointless wall around a graveyard. It also occurred to him that he did not want to be the one to put another nail in Matt's coffin, so to speak: Matt's friendship with the disturbed teen-age girl could not possibly help his cause, whatever had or had not gone on between the two of them. Cahill decided that he could use a shower and a nap.

This many years after her death, he was still using his wife's Dove soap. Yellowed packages of it were stacked here and there, even in canisters in the pantry. You discovered people's secret stashes when they died. The little, unknown things filled them in, as if they hadn't had quite enough dimension in life. Or perhaps those discoveries took them farther away, dried-out cigarettes and hidden half-pints reminding you that everyone was little known.

He turned on the fan and curled onto the bed, and when he awoke it was evening, and he was in a cold sweat. Sounds he'd been making had awoken him, and he struggled up so suddenly from a dream that he knocked his arm against the light. It was a dream, it had been a dream, but it had been so shockingly real. He went into the bathroom and splashed water on his face, but the water only intensified his already palpable dread. He all but ran down the stairs and across the lawn to the graveyard. He had dreamed that Audrey was buried there. Just hours earlier he'd seen that the ground was undisturbed, yet he had gone to sleep and smelled the newly dug soil, felt its graininess beneath his fingernails, stared wide-eyed at the fallen gravestones.

His horrific vision-the only one he'd ever had-turned out to have some validity, though it was wrong in the specifics. There was no sign of digging, but there were scratch marks in the soil, and the smallest of the gravestones was leaning toward the ground. But no: the ground had not been dug in. In the center of the plot-he could not stop a wry smile: dead center-was a pile of dog s.h.i.t, immense in size. A mound of it. Napoleon! Some of Cahill's earlier handiwork had been toppled yet again, and he realized with embarra.s.sment that his efforts had been slapdash.

He went back to the house and found Roadie standing in the hallway inside the screen door, holding his cap in one hand and a clipboard in the other. "Roadie," Cahill said.

"Yes, sir," Roadie said, replacing his cap on his head. It said "SHERYL CROW."

Cahill blurted, "Neighbor's dog just took a huge c.r.a.p in my backyard. Really annoying."

"Dog's gotta do what a dog's gotta do," Roadie said.

"Right," he said.

Roadie cleared his voice. "Doc, I've talked to two people I respect, who've advised two different approaches to your porch situation. One thinks sliding thermal doors, and, for my personal opinion, it's more money but that's what I'd be inclined to go with."

"Then that sounds fine with me, Roadie," Cahill said.

"Approach No. 2, Doc, for full disclosure, this comes from Hank, down at Elbriddle's. He thinks..."

He let Roadie drone on. As a younger man, he might have studied the figures longer, asked more questions, but if it was Roadie's opinion that the first option was the best, he was inclined to go along.

"Awful about your friend," Roadie said suddenly, with no segue. "My wife said, 'Don't you be bringing that up, it's none of your business, and how do you think the doctor feels? Don't tell me that no-good didn't hoodwink him, because the doctor wouldn't have a tenant but what he thought he was an honorable man-' "

Roadie stopped, seeing that Cahill was numbed by this sudden outpouring. Roadie cleared his throat again-a nervous habit. He said, "Men like that ain't much liked by other men. Way I've always heard it, you'd get more sympathy from the jailbirds if you killed your mother than if you've fooled with a child. I've got Hannahlee and Junior, as you know. Any pervert touched a hair on their head, I'd be on 'em in one second flat. How do you suppose a guy like that seemed so regular?"

Silence. Finally, Cahill spoke. "Roadie," he said, "do you think I should undertake such a project at all, given my age? Do you think I'll last the winter to enjoy it?"

Roadie's tongue darted over his lips. "Well, Doc, you'd know the answer better than me. You in bad health?"

"No," Cahill said.

"Well, I ain't here to build if you think your money should best be used elsewhere, but a closed-in porch with a real one down at the end? That's something I'd spring for if I had the money."

For Roadie, this was tactful-turning the subject from death to money. Roadie made a fist and pounded a black ant racing across the table. "Something my wife said, she said, 'Roadie, you go over there and express some human kindness to the doctor. That's a man's done a lot for a lot of people, and, if he had a moment of misjudgment, you tell me who hasn't.' She says, 'Come to think of it, I guess time's proven me a fool for marrying somebody like you, needs this much instruction before he goes to see somebody who lost his wife and his friend!' "

"She thinks herself a fool for marrying you?" Cahill said.

"You met Gloria Sue. Turns out she married me thinking I was going to build the Taj Mahal, or something. Where'd she get that? Nothing I ever told her."

"Do you love her?" Cahill said.

Roadie looked up, surprised. "Well, I don't know," he said slowly.

"I stopped loving my wife," Cahill said. "First, I thought I was just overloaded with all her minor annoyances-snoring, refusing to take her diabetes medicine, the way she ignored the phone every time it rang. Half the time it turned out to be her sister."

Roadie looked sideways, kicking some gra.s.s off his boot. "That right?" he said. He took a deep breath. "Well, these plans here, Doc-you want to give me a deposit, I'll run down and get some things Monday morning?"

"No," Cahill said. He waited for Roadie's face to register surprise, which it did immediately. "But I will," he said, "because it seems like closing in the porch is betting against death. Today I feel like that would be a good idea."

"You do?" Roadie said nervously.