Lying with the Dead Read online

  At the hotel, I’ve booked us separate rooms. I go to mine and browse through the biography. Tamzin has underlined a passage from a journal where Odets noted about his mother, “She wanted to be consoled. So did I. She was lonely, distressed, aggrieved. So was I. As a child, I expected to be petted, brought in (not cast out), consoled and comforted; and she begrudgingly would do none of these things for me; she was after all a child herself.”

  Has Tamzin somehow been channeling my sessions with Dr. Rokoko? How does she know about Mom? I don’t need this. I put down the biography and pick up the Oresteia. Then I put it down too and go to the bar and begin drinking.

  By the time Tamzin joins me for dinner, I’m still drinking. I suggest we skip tonight’s films and eat at the hotel, far from the festival’s frenzy. In the all but empty dining room I continue drinking and to my surprise and shame commence babbling about my sad-assed childhood. Clifford Odets and the Oresteia have opened the floodgates and I feed for fear of not being fed. Not that I’m a depressing raconteur. Unreliable, yes, but never dreary. My monologue, I’m confident, sparkles with poignant reminiscences and self-deprecating wit.

  But Tamzin seems subdued and picks at her food, pushing a seared fish around her plate. Then she shoves it aside and sits back, and I wish I’d shut up. I natter on as a cat sidles out of the darkness over to our table. After rubbing against her legs, it leaps onto Tamzin’s lap, and she breaks off chunks of the fish and feeds them to it.

  How long I talk, how long she lets the famished cat eat from her fingers, I can’t estimate. I only know I’ve finished a bottle of Greco di Tufo and Tamzin has reduced the fish to its skeleton. Just as I’m about to suggest ordering a second bottle, the cat stands up. It’s choking on a bone and convulsively gags into Tamzin’s lap every bite that it’s eaten. I rush around and fumble at her dress with a napkin. Suddenly we’re caught in a skit from an off-color cartoon, an underground clip of Charlie Chaplin in his cups. My hands are all over her. And she doesn’t object. In the elevator, I keep up this pantomime of pawing and cleaning, and murmur an apology.

  “For what?” Tamzin asks.

  “Your dress is ruined. The evening’s a shambles.”

  “It’ll wash off.”

  We’re barely into her room, the door half-shut behind us, when she stoops at the waist, seizes the hem of the dress and strips it off as she straightens up. Easy as … easy as skinning a cat. She draws a bath and plops the dress, not herself, into the warm water. Then it’s off with the rest of her clothes. Her skin is so pale and flawless, I’m afraid it’ll smear to the touch.

  “Thank God for that cat,” Tamzin says, stepping into my arms. “I thought you’d never quit talking.”

  Candy

  While Mom’s upstairs, I shuffle through the photographs. It’s a melancholy business, this revisiting the dead and their out-of-date clothes and old cars and furniture that ended up in a Goodwill dumpster. I’m glad all that’s over and done with, and I don’t have to live through it again. It’s fading in the rearview mirror, like a crash you zoom past on the interstate.

  But a clutched-up feeling stays in my throat. When Mom comes back, I’m afraid she’ll pick up where she left off and plow on toward the ending where we’ve been too many times before. She’s like one of those old women with rosary beads reciting the same Sorrowful Mystery over and over. I’ve heard it so often, I could trade places with her and tell the story myself.

  Maury killed Dad on my fifteenth birthday. I was out of the house, treating myself to a matinee. I’ll never forget the movie, Splendor in the Grass, which was about whether Natalie Wood should have sex with Warren Beatty or go insane. Her dilemma hit me hard. Although I didn’t have a boyfriend and had never been on a date, I was sick with worry that if things didn’t work out for a beauty like Natalie, what hope did I have?

  On the walk home, I was chewing over the film’s sad ending—Warren married to a fat Italian, Natalie mulching the past into poetry—when I noticed that our house was decorated with yellow ribbons. My first foolish thought, I’m ashamed to admit, was that Mom had thrown me a surprise party. But then I saw neighbors milling around on the sidewalk, and there were squad cars and an ambulance with bubbling roof lights.

  “Here’s his daughter,” someone shouted. “It’s his sister,” another one said. At the crime scene tape, I cried out, “What happened?” And people hollered, “She lives here. Let her through.”

  “I’ve got my orders,” a cop said.

  “Where’s my mother?”

  A detective in a brown suit and snap-brim hat told the cop he’d take charge. He lifted the tape and motioned for me to duck under it.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, although I was afraid I knew. I figured Mom and Dad had been fighting again. Neighbors were always complaining about their shouting and shoving matches.

  “Your father …” The detective hesitated, searching my eyes. “… he’s in bad shape.”

  “Where is he? In the ambulance?”

  “Still in the house.”

  “And my mother?”

  “She’s there, too, answering questions. Do you feel up to talking to us, hon?”

  “I want to see my mother.”

  “In a minute. After we talk.”

  A few reporters rolled in. I didn’t understand that. A flashbulb popped, the first blinding shot in what became a barrage. Questions splashed over me like water bursting from a hose. I ducked my head, but the flood of noise and the flashes didn’t stop.

  “Let’s go inside.” The detective hurried me along until he realized that I limped. Then he gentled me toward the front door.

  The living room, dining alcove, and kitchen were churning with cops, the rescue squad, a priest, a doctor, a man with a measuring tape, and a guy dusting for prints. I begged them to be careful. If anybody broke Mom’s knickknacks, there’d be hell to pay.

  The detective led me over to the new sofa. Covered in clear plastic, it was off-limits to Maury and me. When we watched TV, Mom made us sit on the floor. The sofa was reserved for grownups. I didn’t want to have to explain this to the detective. So I sat down and hoped Mom wouldn’t find out. The detective settled in beside me, and the plastic gave an embarrassing squeak under his butt.

  “Did they fight a lot?” he asked. “You can trust me, hon. Just tell the truth, and help us help your family.”

  Maury and I had been raised as close-mouthed as a Mafia clan. Whenever bookies or collection agents pounded at the door, we knew not to answer questions and never to blab about Dad’s whereabouts. For years he’d been in and out of hiding. So it shocked me to hear the detective say, “Your mother’s already told us plenty.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like they fought a lot.”

  That described Mom and Dad to a T. But I argued, “They don’t fight any more than other married couples.”

  “I’m not talking about your parents. It’s your brother. He and your father didn’t get along, did they?”

  I didn’t know what to say. With Dad and Maury, the fighting was all one way. Dad just didn’t have any patience with Maury’s quirks.

  The detective removed his hat. His large-pored face became blurry as my eyes teared up. “Did your brother threaten your father?” he asked. “Did he say he meant to hurt him?”

  “Maury never hurt anybody. He hated it when anyone hurt an animal, even a turtle. He doesn’t like to be touched, himself, and he doesn’t touch other people. Whenever Dad spanked him—”

  “Maury’d get mad?”

  “No, he’d fall into one of his fits.”

  “And do what?”

  “He’d moan on the floor and rock back and forth.”

  “What your mother tells us, he did a lot worse today. He stabbed your father.”

  I shook my head no.

  “He confessed.”

  I started screaming. Not saying words, just screeching. That brought Mom out of the bedroom. Blank-faced and slow, she led a procession of detec
tives down the stairs. There was blood on her hands, on her arms and the front of her blouse. She looked like the butcher at Safeway, gory in his apron behind the meat counter. When she came near, I cringed and kept screaming. She hugged me, and the blood was hot to touch.

  Only her eyes had expression. Compared to her empty face, they had every possible emotion in them, all at the same time. I was put in mind of staring out a window. On top of what you see through it, there’s your own image in the glass and a reflection from the wall behind you where a mirror shows the scene backward, and on and on. That’s how full Mom’s eyes were with panic and pain and sadness and anger.

  “Is Dad dead?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “Maury killed him?”

  She cut her eyes to the detectives. She didn’t want to talk in front of them. “I gotta go to the police station and be with your brother.”

  “Let me go with you.”

  “You have to stay and look after the house. Go up to your room and wait there.”

  “How can I look after the house up there?”

  “Don’t argue, Candy. Just do what I tell you.”

  “One of my men’ll keep her company,” a detective said.

  “She’d rather be alone. Wouldn’t you?” Mom prompted.

  I had no choice but to trudge upstairs and change out of the clothes she had bloodied. I soaked my birthday dress in the bathroom sink, and bloodstains swam off the wool like stingers from a sea nettle. The sight of it made me sick to my stomach. But even sticking a finger down my throat, I couldn’t bring anything up.

  I sat beside the window in my bedroom, hidden by a curtain. The crowd on the sidewalk grew bigger, and reporters interviewed neighbors and snapped pictures of the house. Everybody pressed against the yellow crime scene tape and gawked. Nobody wanted to miss a thing.

  I felt … After all these years I’d just be guessing what I felt at fifteen. I’m positive self-pity topped the list. My birthday was ruined and so was my dress. The idea that my family and my life were ruined followed next. Then shame pushed everything else aside.

  It was like the summer I caught polio and came home from the hospital to find people staring and pointing and whispering. Now it seemed I had contracted another disease and if I didn’t agree to quarantine myself, people would do it to me.

  Later I sobbed to Mom that I felt scalded with shame. “Don’t be such a sissy,” she said. “You make it sound like you’ve been peed on.”

  Which was exactly how I felt.

  After the rescue squad carried Dad’s body out in a black bag and the crowd drifted away, it hit me how much I’d miss him. Because of my bad leg it had been years since I’d run and fetched him a beer. Now I’d never do it again, nor climb onto his lap while he blew smoke rings through my hair.

  After a few hours, I disobeyed Mom and left the bedroom. Downstairs, the living room and dining alcove had a scattering of gum wrappers, cigarette butts, and scorched matchsticks. Because the police hadn’t cleaned up after themselves, I did it, same as I did every time Mom and Dad stumbled off to bed leaving the house a mess.

  I postponed going into the kitchen till last. I was afraid there’d be blood wall to wall. But when I pushed through the swinging door, things were spic and span, every plate, glass, and piece of silverware in its place. Only the butcher knife was missing.

  I crossed the gummy linoleum floor in my bare feet. I got no spooky feeling that somebody had died here. That was the creepiest thing—the sense that nothing seemed to have happened, yet everything had changed.

  I pulled at the refrigerator door, and the rubber seals yielded with a moist pop. This was forbidden territory. Maury and I weren’t supposed to eat between meals. Snacks and soft drinks were against the rules except on Saturday night. Since I was sinning already, I grabbed a beer instead of a Coke. If there had been a pack of Dad’s Camels handy, I’d have fired one up and blown smoke rings through my own hair.

  With a second bottle of beer, then a third, a nice glow took hold. This, I decided, was how I’d survive. I’d sit tight and I’d stay tight. The beer pooled deep inside, freezing me at the center so that I felt less and less, then nothing.

  By the time Mom came home, I had passed out with my cheek glued to the kitchen table. It was after midnight, and she must have known I was exhausted. But that didn’t stop her from shaking me awake and yakking into the wee hours.

  The fight with Dad had started over nothing, she said. “Who knows what riled him? Some nights you needed to throw a net over that man. Not that it was anything Maury hadn’t heard before. Just the typical hollering and cussing. But it upset Maury and he grabbed the butcher knife and stuck it in Dad’s belly.”

  I heard her through a haze of beer, and as she talked on, the room started sliding under me. Some of the words didn’t stick. I didn’t want to picture Maury stabbing Dad. I didn’t want to know what he confessed to the police, or how he acted when they locked him in solitary confinement for his own safety.

  Maury probably preferred that to a cell full of prisoners. He liked to be alone in little places. I imagined him stretched out on his cot, like in the bathtub, his hands rubbing the walls for reassurance. Then tomorrow morning some smart person—a policeman, a lawyer, a priest—would show up and declare that he couldn’t be held accountable.

  But Mom soon busted that pipe dream. “What we have to pray for,” she said, “is they give him life, not the death penalty.”

  “He’s just thirteen.”

  “They booked him as an adult. It’s a capital crime. If they prove premeditation—”

  “Maury never premeditated anything.”

  “That’s the point. Anybody asks, you tell them he wasn’t capable of planning ahead. That’s our best hope.”

  But nobody asked me that or anything else. Nobody spoke to me at all except Dad’s relatives, who carped out loud, never caring who was in earshot. Heavy drinkers and hell-raisers, railroad men from Pennsylvania and oil roustabouts from Louisiana, they made it a point to take me aside and tell me that Dad had married a hardhearted woman. It went unsaid that she had produced damaged kids, one sick in the head, the other crippled in body. But it was clear they believed he had had less luck in life than at cards. Now we simply had to hope that he had gone to a better place.

  Mom never asked me anything either. Not how I felt nor whether there was something she could do for me. She expected me to do for her. I became her dogsbody—honestly, that’s the term she used. I prayed Dad’s death would bring peace at home. But the battle between husband and wife turned into a mother-daughter donnybrook, and it took her no time to beat me down.

  The worst of it was I had to go through this without Maury, who loved me like no one else in the family. With him in jail and me on my own, a hunger took hold that was as raw and stinging as a skinned knee. Nothing eased that ache until Quinn was born, and I had an infant to fawn over. I dressed and undressed him, bathed him and pushed him in his stroller. He was a doll, my living doll, and all I had to love until Lawrence happened into my life.

  Still, I can’t complain that Mom had it easier than me. She wore herself to a nub working for Maury’s release. And when the public defender convinced her that that wouldn’t happen and that he should plead guilty to second-degree murder in exchange for a life sentence, she didn’t despair. Roaming the halls of the County Service Building, she cornered lawyers and begged them to do his appeal for free. She wrote petitions to shrinks and social workers pleading for help. Driven by a love hard to separate from lunacy, she paid out of her Safeway salary for tests that were supposed to prove his diminished responsibility. Finally she managed to have him transferred to the Patuxent Institute for Defective Delinquents, where he got psychological treatment and a chance for parole once he was no longer a threat to society and himself.

  After that, I expected Mom to move on with her life and move out of the house where the murder was committed. But she fixed her course and wouldn’t swerve from it till
her son was free. I don’t know where she drew the strength.

  People insisted I was strong too because I stuck by Mom. But I knew better. I knew I stayed with her out of weakness.

  “Candy!” she calls from upstairs. “Candy, where the hell are you? I’ve been hollering for five minutes.”

  Afraid that she’s fallen and hurt herself, I scramble from the rocking chair and risk my neck on the stairs, climbing them two at a time. Dust rollers nestle in every corner of the second floor. I’d lay money she hasn’t vacuumed or changed her sheets since last summer. She’s living in her own house like a bag lady in the streets.

  The door to her bedroom is shut. She shouts again, summoning me to the bedroom that used to be mine. Nothing’s left of me here, and Mom calls it “the library.” It has a shelf full of paperbacks, some of them from when Quinn was in college. Eventually, Mom read them herself, dead set on keeping pace with her son. But I have to say that where they fed his mind, all those books seemed to feed her mouth. Even at her age, nobody can outtalk her. There’s also a card table where she wrote letters to Maury in prison, then later to Quinn in London. Now that her dealings with the boys have dwindled to phone calls—about once a year from Maury and twice a month from Quinn—the room has become a catchall for every type of keepsake.

  Like I feared, Mom’s down on the floor, propped up by a bony elbow. “My God, what’s wrong?” I exclaim.

  “Not a damn thing except you fell asleep on me.”

  “Lemme help you up.”

  “I’m okay where I am.” She gives a dismissive flick of the fingers that hold a lighted cigarette. “Sit down.”

  I’m in my church clothes and the carpet’s filthy. Still, I do as I’m told. I know there’ll be trouble standing up again. Mother and daughter, we’ll be like a couple of turtles flipped on their shells, struggling to turn upright.