Lying with the Dead Page 17

  “She told me that more often than not she’s the one that slapped him.”

  “He didn’t have to hit her. He hurt her in other ways.”

  Quinn doses his coffee with cream and more sugar, still hoping to make it bearable. “When she was winding up to throw me her beanball,” he says, “she warned me I’d hate her, I’d never forgive her. I told her not to worry; it wouldn’t change a thing. I didn’t admit what I already feel about her.”

  “I’m not sure I want to hear it. No matter what, she’s our mother.”

  “Yeah. O dear Mother Night.”

  “Stop it, Quinn. I know you’re hurt. But this doesn’t help.”

  “I can’t quit asking myself what else she’s lied about. You know her, the way she lets out bad news piecemeal. She never just makes a clean breast of things.”

  “Now, you know she wouldn’t stand for any talk about breasts,” I try to joke him out of his mood. “She warned me to keep my legs crossed. ‘If you get pregnant, don’t bother coming home. I’m not raising any bastards for you.’”

  “And here she was raising one of her own. Me!”

  “When I asked about the facts of life, she acted like it was a mortal sin. I mean, asking was a sin. Doing it was out of the question. She advised me never to get completely naked in front of a man, not even my husband, because that ruins the romance. I suppose she thought I should wear a sock or a glove on my wedding night.”

  “She’s like some bog-trotting nun,” Quinn exclaims. “All she ever told me about sex is you sort of roll around. If that’s how she and Dad did it, God knows how we were conceived.”

  Now we’re both laughing. Like a lot of our conversations that lurch back and forth between kidding and almost crying, the point is in danger of being lost. After I’ve had another bitter sip of coffee I ask, “Seriously, Quinn, are you all right?”

  “I don’t know. At first it didn’t sink in. Now I feel like I’ve had a collision with a chainsaw. Mom just keeps hacking away—cutting you off at the ankles and the knees until you don’t have a limb to stand on.”

  “She promised me she’d tell you who your father is.”

  “She did after a little coaxing. Said it was someone named Tom Trythall.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Maybe he worked with her at Safeway. The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker,” he mutters. “It could be anybody. And why should I believe she told me the right name? It’s a family tradition. She admits her mother lied about everything including her name.”

  “Why would Mom lie about this? She could simply have kept it to herself.”

  “Same reason she does everything,” he says. “Her never-ending need to run the show. Before she told me about Trythall, she suggested I check out the cedar chest. There were piles of photographs and birthday cards and baby teeth.”

  “I know. We looked through them a few days ago.”

  “Then you must have seen the folder with Maury’s confession and case records.”

  “No. We stuck to the pictures.”

  “Maybe she went back and slipped it in for me to read.”

  “Well, she did mention that you’re doing your memoirs.”

  “So she’s what? Lending me a hand with my research? Come on, Candy, level with me. What’s going on here? How long have you known Dad wasn’t my father?”

  “Only since last week. But I always thought there was something different about you. You weren’t like other kids. You weren’t like Maury or me.” I take his manicured hand in mine. “You were smarter, better looking, more lovable.”

  “All because of Tom Trythall, the missing link.” His eyes crinkle at the corners as they do on camera when his character grudgingly breaks into a fake grin.

  As I totter to my feet and clear off the coffee cups, my leg throbs. “Will you do me a favor? I’d like to see Lawrence. Some weeks we’re so busy at the office, Sunday’s the one day we have to spend together. Would you mind keeping Maury company tonight while I go to his place?”

  “You don’t trust Maury on his own?”

  “It’s not that. I don’t want him to feel deserted. You could sleep in my bed. Or on the couch.”

  “I’d rather take him out to a restaurant, then back to the Hilton. My room has two king-size beds. And there’s a minibar. You go to your happy place, I’ll go to mine.”

  As I pass his chair, I lean down and kiss his cheek. “Thanks.”

  On the road to Lawrence’s house, I drive faster than the speed limit, faster than my cautious nature normally allows. But after a day with Mom, Maury, and Quinn, I feel liberated and lighthearted. Although I didn’t own up to it with Quinn and have difficulty admitting it to myself, I feel strangely relieved that he and I didn’t have the same father. When he left home and became so successful, it was like a reproach. If he could do it, why couldn’t I? Now I think I’m not inferior. I’m simply from different stock.

  When I first visited Lawrence’s farm, it stunned me that such properties still exist in the overbuilt corridor between Washington and Annapolis and Baltimore. I had never seen anything like it except in My Weekly Messenger. Required reading for every parochial-school kid in the fifties, the Messenger was a comic book of Bible stories and uplifting articles that carried an ongoing serial about a family that fell on hard times in the city and retreated to the country where life was cheerful. They renovated a broken-down farmhouse and raised chickens and a cow, and Mom and Dad and Buddy and Sis bonded through hard work and prayer. They grew vegetables, produced plenty of fresh milk and eggs, ate hearty meals, and said grace before and after each one. Gradually the worn-out father and frazzled mother regained their health and love, and the kids became happy again.

  Because Mom lived in constant fear that our house would be repossessed and we’d wind up on the street, I prayed that we’d move to the country and farm our way to recovery. I kept the idea to myself, however. After she slapped me silly that time for drawing up a budget, I didn’t dare say a word about my secret dream.

  Then miraculously, half a lifetime later, I met Lawrence and that dream came true. Crunching over the gravel road onto his land, I spot his house, a rambling white brick colonial on a rise above the river. Big trees grow out front, oaks and maples, bare in this season, and a barn shelters his Volvo and a sit-down lawnmower. The lights are on upstairs and down, and the brightness makes me feel warm and welcome. I’m home.

  I let myself in, and Lawrence calls from the kitchen. “Is that you, honey? I’m fixing crab cakes.”

  I hurry to him without taking off my coat. As in those dreams where I dance or run or swim with no thought of my bad leg, I’m graceful, flawless. Hugging him from behind, I kiss his neck and his ears.

  “Whoa!” he says. “Careful or I’ll lose track of how much Old Bay I’ve added.” He’s stirring the crab meat in a bowl. “How many can you eat?”

  “I’m starving.”

  “I’ll cook us two apiece.” He lights the flame under a frying pan. “Now five minutes on each side and—”

  “I can’t wait that long.” I’m nibbling his ears.

  “You must have had a good day.”

  “No, a hard one. Now what I want is a hard man.” I giggle at my own bawdiness.

  He switches off the flame and swivels around in my arms. He’s wearing an apron I bought him, one with Michelangelo’s David on the front. He looks like a body builder, not the type of man to hesitate in this situation. A guy who’d just tear off his fig leaf. But Lawrence isn’t accustomed to this kind of talk from me.

  “I’m so happy to be here,” I say. “I’m so happy you’re in my life.”

  “What a sweet thing to say.”

  “I mean it. I love you.”

  We waltz into the living room, onto a throw rug in front of the fireplace. After he presses the button for the gas and sets the artificial logs ablaze, Lawrence unties his apron. Then we undress each other, a couple on the wrong side of fifty, fleshy and sun-freckled, well
past our prime, making a spectacle of ourselves. But I’m not apologizing. I’m grateful.

  Of all the things he might do at this moment, Lawrence acts as if he has been eavesdropping on Quinn and me. He rolls me off my back and up onto his chest. A minute later I’m under him again, then back on top of him, and it’s all I can do not to whoop with joy at the goofiness of what’s going on. For once Mom has told the truth. A man and a woman can roll around, yet remain locked together in love.

  Quinn

  After Candy leaves, I try to decide how I feel. What does it mean to have grown up fatherless, then suddenly discover that you’ve had a stranger for a father all along? For forty years I lived in the shadow—yes, even Dad’s absence cast a shadow—of a dead gambler. Now I’m confronted by another shade, a murkier absence. Tom Trythall, if that’s his true name, hardly seems an admirable sort—a guy tomcatting around on his wife and family. Still, I’d like to know more about him. I’d like to see him or his picture.

  It doesn’t strike me as implausible that he shared the same curiosity. How could he have resisted looking in on his son? His love child? I imagine him driving past the house or cruising by school hoping to catch a glimpse of me. Later, he might have noticed my name on a movie poster or spotted me in a late night TV rerun.

  On an impulse, I unearth the local telephone directory and thumb through its pages. Several Trythalls are listed, and I’m debating whether to dial them one by one when Maury saunters into the kitchen. His hair is cowlicked where he slept on it wrong.

  “Did you get some rest?” I ask.

  “Not much.”

  “Did Candy’s and my talking keep you awake?”

  “No.”

  He sniffs the scent of coffee, fishes a cup from the sink, rinses it and spoons in some instant. Then while his water boils in the microwave, he rolls open a drawer where Candy stores plastic bags. There are dozens of them, and they expand and breathe like living organisms when Maury pulls them out and dumps them on the drainboard. Methodically he separates each bag, wads it tight and stuffs it into another bag. His goal appears to be to compact them into the smallest possible sphere. But when the microwave pings, he imitates the sound and abandons his project, forcing the loose bags back into the drawer.

  Seated opposite me with his coffee, he says, “I do this for Nicky every morning.”

  Does Maury fix her coffee? Or compact her plastic bags? I don’t ask.

  “Did Candy tell you I cried?” he says.

  “No. She mentioned you visited a friend at Patuxent.”

  “He’s dying. He’s in a bed with tubes and wires in him.”

  “Sorry. I’m sure that made you sad.”

  Not that he looks sad. His granite face, the ledge of his jaw, call to mind a laconic cowpoke idling over coffee at the end of an exhausting day. But the soundtrack is out of sync and stutters along, with no transitions. “Did Mom tell you something and give you something?” he asks.

  “No, we talked about the past.”

  “She phoned that she’s got something to tell me and something to give me.”

  Worried about the surprises she might spring on him, I say, “Keep in mind that she’s old and you can’t always count on what she tells you.”

  He nods and gravely sips his coffee. “Did you know that snakes lay eggs just like chickens?”

  “I don’t believe I did.”

  “I used to find them in the woods. Snakes. Never eggs.”

  “Look, Candy’s out for the night. Why don’t we eat at a restaurant, then go to my hotel? What kind of food do you like?”

  “The kind in pictures.”

  “Pictures?”

  “On the menu. I like to see my food.”

  My spirits plummet. I had my heart set on a drink and a bottle of wine. I’d settle for the lowliest tavern as long as it has liquor. But I don’t want to disappoint Maury. We stop at the International House of Pancakes, where he accepts the waitress’s offer of coffee. Afraid more caffeine will destroy my chances of sleeping, I order orange juice and a club sandwich. Meanwhile Maury consults the laminated menu and its multicolored photos like a millionaire poring over his stock portfolio. He asks for a stack of hotcakes with syrup and seasonal berries. In Maryland at this time of year a seasonal berry should be something you’d pick from a holly bush. But his plate arrives smothered in raspberries and strawberries, probably flown in from Mexico.

  While this IHOP may bustle at breakfast or lunch, it’s dead at this hour. Half the dining room is roped off and unlighted, and we have an enormous corner table to ourselves. Maury positions the hotcakes directly under his chin and digs in.

  Toying with my sandwich, I admire his appetite, if not his table manners. “Challenged” is how he would be referred to in polite circles. But I’m the one that’s challenged—challenged to comprehend him and explain him to others. I have no idea what transpires inside Maury’s head. Nor could I hazard a guess what he makes of me. Does he know what I do for a living? Does he know where I live? If I told him that we have different fathers, would he be as upset as I am?

  “Do you remember a man named Tom Trythall?” I ask.

  A speared raspberry drips syrup from the tines of his fork. “Was he in Patuxent with me?”

  “No. He’s a friend of Mom’s. He might have worked with her at Safeway.”

  He shakes his head. “Can’t help you.” He devours the berry.

  “Do you remember things from when you were a boy?”

  “Sure. I have it in the box in my head. Most of it.”

  “My first memory,” I say, “is of Mom and Candy holding me up at Patuxent to look at you through the glass.”

  “I remember that,” he exclaims, delighted.

  “I remember wearing your clothes as a kid. I remember liking to wear them,” I lie.

  Were Dr. Rokoko present, he would lambaste me for showboating—speaking purely, or impurely, because it soothes me to say these things. Whether it soothes Maury is questionable. His expression, as he eats, remains as marmoreal as a statue’s.

  The truth is, I hated wearing Maury’s clothes. They didn’t fit, they were out of fashion, and although I never let on to Mom, I regarded them as a punishment, a hand-me-down hair shirt. They stigmatized me as surely as a prison uniform. I didn’t understand what crime I was paying for. I worried it was for a future wrong I was destined to commit.

  While I go on ruminating, Maury shovels in his hotcakes. I finish the orange juice and shove aside the half-eaten sandwich. Neither of us speaks again until we’re out of the IHOP and in the car, where he delivers another nonsequitur. “Remember the bear?”

  “The what?”

  “The fighting bear at the carnival.”

  “Oh yeah.”

  The summer of his parole, Mom packed us off to the county fair, me barely thirteen, Maury in his late twenties, the two of us ill-matched and ill-suited for a good time on the town. Amid the 4-H exhibits and games of chance, there was a boxing ring, with a mangy bear on a stool in the corner. “Fight the bear,” a barker cried out. “Survive a single round and win fifty bucks.”

  Muzzled and declawed, the animal didn’t look ferocious. It looked, in fact, like a moldy, cheaply upholstered piece of overstuffed furniture. But it was huge and its pugilistic strategy was irresistible. Wrapping an opponent in its furry arms, it shambled around the ring, then flung him to the canvas. Match over. Prize money lost.

  Maury watched several bouts with keen fascination before declaring that he was ready to fight the bear. Though he shied away from human contact, he showed no reluctance to mix it up with a hairy hugging animal. He climbed into the ring, paid the barker a dollar, and watched unruffled as the bear rose onto his hind legs and lumbered forward. Without waiting for a signal, Maury embraced the beast, and like a ballroom dancer hell-bent on leading, he whirled it in a circle. I knew he was strong from his years of jailhouse weightlifting. What surprised me was the balance and light-footed grace that kept him upright. Minute after
minute he and the bear didn’t wrestle so much as pirouette around the canvas.

  In the end, the spinning was what did Maury in. Dizzy, he lost his footing and staggered. One knee buckled, then the other. He never lost his grip; he kept his arms locked around the bear. But he slid down the front of it, as if its fur were finest silk.

  Maury was eager to pay a dollar for another dance. But the barker refused, aware that in that crowd of college boys and country bumpkins screaming for blood nobody would settle for more ballet.

  “I won,” Maury maintains now.

  “You sure did.”

  “They should have paid me fifty dollars.”

  “You deserved it,” I agree.

  When we reach the parking lot at the Hilton, he asks, “Am I spending the night with you? Because if I am, I need my toothbrush from Candy’s.”

  “We’ll buy you a new one.”

  The hotel gift shop has toothbrushes in a blinding array of designs and colors, and the choice falls to me. I grab one at random while Maury obsesses over a red turtle on a key chain. It’s a Maryland terrapin, the university mascot. When I pay for both items at the cash register, the girl asks whether we’re going to the game, and Maury flashes back to the bear. “I won.”

  “Let’s hope we win,” she says.

  “I should have won fifty dollars.”

  “Well, good luck,” she says.

  In the elevator, confronting his warped funhouse image in the panel of numbered buttons, he clings to the rubber turtle as if to an amulet. The floor jerks beneath us, and he says, “The rope is made of steel. It’s too strong to break.”

  I’m past due for a drink and pray that the coffee at IHOP doesn’t keep Maury awake and moaning all night. Do I dare pour him a Scotch?

  The maid has folded down the covers on one bed and deposited a foil-wrapped chocolate on the pillow. It’s the same size as the terrapin, and Maury’s entranced by it.

  “Eat it,” I tell him.