A Multitude of Sins (8 page)

“What do you do in St. Louis,” I said to my father. It was the thing I wanted to know.

“Well,” my father said thoughtfully. He sniffed, “Golf. I play quite a bit of golf. Francis has a big house across from a wonderful park. I’ve taken it up.” He felt his forehead, where a mosquito had landed on a black mud stain that was there. He rubbed it and looked at his fingertips.

“Will you practice law up there?”

“Oh lord no,” he said and shook his head and sniffed again. “They requested me to leave the firm here. You know that.”

“Yes,” I said. His breathing was easier. His face seemed calm. He looked handsome and youthful. Whatever silent event that had occurred had passed off of him, and he seemed settled about it. I thought I might talk about going to Lawrenceville. Duck blinds were where people had such conversations. Though it would’ve been better, I thought, if we’d been alone, and didn’t have Renard Junior to overhear us. “I’d like to ask you …” I began.

“Tell me about your girlfriend situation,” my father interrupted me. “Tell me the whole story there.”

I knew what he meant by that, but there wasn’t a story. I was in military school, and there were only other boys present, which was not a story to me. If I went to Lawrenceville, I knew there could be a story. Girls would be nearby. “There isn’t any story …” I started to say, and he interrupted me again.

“Let me give you some advice.” He was rubbing his index finger around the muzzle of his Italian shotgun. “Always try to imagine how you’re going to feel
after
you fuck somebody
before
you fuck somebody.
Comprendes?
There’s the key to everything. History. Morality. Philosophy. You’ll save yourself a lot of misery.” He nodded as if this wisdom had just become clear to him all over again. “Maybe you already know that,” he said. He looked above the front of the blind
where the sky had turned to fire, then looked at me in a way to seem honest and to say (so I thought) that he liked me. “Do you ever find yourself saying things in conversations that you absolutely don’t believe?” He reached with his two fingers and plucked a mosquito off my cheek. “Do you?” he said distractedly. “Do ya, do ya?”

I thought of conversations I’d had with Dubinion, and some I’d had with my mother. They were that kind of conversation—memorable if only for the things I didn’t say. But what I said to my father was “no.”

“Convenience must not matter to you much then,” he said in a friendly way.

“I don’t know if it does or not,” I said because I didn’t know what convenience meant. It was a word I’d never had a cause to use.

“Well, convenience matters to me very much. Too much, I think,” my father said. I, of course, thought of my mother’s assessment of him—that he was not better than most men. I assumed that caring too much for convenience led you there, and that my fault in later life could turn out to be the same one because he was my father. But I decided, at that moment, to see to it that my fault in life would not be his.

“There’s one ducky duck,” my father said. He was watching the sky and seemed bemused. “Fabrice, would you let me apologize for acting ugly to you, and ask you to call? How generous that would be of you. How nice.” My father smiled strangely at Renard Junior, who I’d believed to be brooding.

And Renard Junior did call. I didn’t see a duck, but when my father squatted down on the dirty planking where his topcoat was smeared and our empty shell casings were littered, I did too, and turned my face toward the floor. I could hear my father’s breathing, could smell the whiskey on his breath, could see his pale wet knuckles supporting him unsteadily on the boards, could even smell his hair, which was warm and musty smelling. It was as close as I would come to him. And I understood that it would have to do, might even be the best there could be.

“Wait now, wait on ’im,” my father said, hunkered on the wet planks, but looking up out of the tops of his eyes. He put his fingers on my hand to make me be still. I still had not seen anything. Renard Junior was blowing the long, high-pitched rasping call, followed by short bursts that made him grunt heavily down in his throat, and then the long highball call again. “Not quite yet,” my father whispered. “Not yet. Wait on him.” I turned my face sideways to see up, my eyes cut to the side to find
something
. “No,” my father said, close to my ear. “Don’t look up.” I inhaled deeply and breathed in all the smells again that came off my father. And then Renard Junior said loudly, “Go on, Jesus! Go on! Shoot ’im. Shoot now. Whatchyouwaitin’on?”

I just stood up, then, without knowing what I would see, and brought my shotgun up to my shoulder before I really looked. And what I saw, coming low over the decoys, its head turning to the side and peering down at the brown water, was one lone duck. I could distinguish its green head and dark bullet eyes in the haze-burnt morning light and could hear its wings pinging. I didn’t think it saw me or heard my father and Renard Junior shouting, “Shoot, shoot, oh Jesus, shoot’im Buck.” Because when my face and gun barrel appeared above the front of the blind, it didn’t change its course or begin the backward-upward maneuvering I’d already seen, which was its way to save itself. It just kept looking down and flying slowly and making its noise in the reddened air above the water and all of us.

And as I found the duck over my barrel tops, my eyes opened wide in the manner I knew was the way you shot such a gun, and yet I thought: it’s only one duck. There may not be any others. What’s the good of one duck shot down? In my dreams there’d been hundreds of ducks, and my father and I shot them so that they fell out of the sky like rain, and how many there were would not have mattered because we were doing it together. But I was doing this alone, and one duck seemed wrong, and to matter in a way a hundred ducks wouldn’t have, at least if I was going to be the one to shoot. So that what I did was not shoot and lowered my gun.

“What’s wrong?” my father said from the floor just below me, still on all fours in his wrecked tuxedo, his face turned down expecting a gun’s report. The lone duck was past us now and out of range.

I looked at Renard Junior, who was seated on his peach crate, small enough not to need to hunker. He looked at me, and made a strange face, a face I’d never seen but will never forget. He smiled and began to bat his eyelids in fast succession, and then he raised his two hands, palms up to the level of his eyes, as if he expected something to fall down into them. I don’t know what that gesture meant, though I have thought of it often—sometimes in the middle of a night when my sleep is disturbed. Derision, I think; or possibly it meant he merely didn’t know why I hadn’t shot the duck and was awaiting my answer. Or possibly it was something else, some sign whose significance I would never know. Fabrice was a strange man. No one would’ve doubted it.

My father had gotten up onto his muddy feet by then, although with difficulty. He had his shotgun to his shoulder, and he shot once at the duck that was then only a speck in the sky. And of course it did not fall. He stared for a time with his gun to his shoulder until the speck of wings disappeared.

“What the hell happened?” he said, his face red from kneeling and bending. “Why didn’t you shoot that duck?” His mouth was opened into a frown. I could see his white teeth, and one hand was gripping the sides of the blind. He seemed in jeopardy of falling down. He was, after all, still drunk. His blond hair shone in the misty light.

“I wasn’t close enough,” I said.

My father looked around again at the decoys as if they could prove something. “Wasn’t close enough?” he said. “I heard the damn duck’s wings. How close do you need it? You’ve got a gun there.”

“You couldn’t hear it,” I said.

“Couldn’t hear it?” he said. His eyes rose off my face and found Renard Junior behind me. His mouth took on an odd expression. The scowl left his features, and he suddenly
looked amused, the damp corners of his mouth revealing a small, flickering smile I was sure was derision, and represented his view that I had balked at a crucial moment, made a mistake, and therefore didn’t have to be treated so seriously. This from a man who had left my mother and me to fend for ourselves while he disported without dignity or shame out of sight of those who knew him.

“You don’t know anything,” I suddenly said. “You’re only …” And I don’t know what I was about to say. Something terrible and hurtful. Something to strike out at him and that I would’ve regretted forever. So I didn’t say any more, didn’t finish it. Though I did that for myself, I think now, and not for him, and in order that I not have to regret more than I already regretted. I didn’t really care what happened to him, to be truthful. Didn’t and don’t.

And then my father said, the insinuating smile still on his handsome lips, “Come on, sonny boy. You’ve still got some growing up to do, I see.” He reached for me and put his hand behind my neck, which was rigid in anger and loathing. And without seeming to notice, he pulled me to him and kissed me on my forehead, and put his arms around me and held me until whatever he was thinking had passed and it was time for us to go back to the dock.

My father lived thirty years after that morning in December, on the Grand Lake, in 1961. By any accounting he lived a whole life after that. And I am not interested in the whys and why nots of what he did and didn’t do, or in causing that day to seem life-changing for me, because it surely wasn’t. Life had already changed. That morning represented just the first working out of particulars I would evermore observe. Like my father, I am a lawyer. And the law is a calling which teaches you that most of life is about adjustments, the seatings and reseatings we perform to accommodate events occurring outside our control and over which we might not have sought control in the first place. So that when we are
tempted, as I was for an instant in the duck blind, or as I was through all those thirty years, to let myself become preoccupied and angry with my father, or when I even see a man who reminds me of him, stepping into some building in a seersucker suit and a bright bow tie, I try to realize again that it is best just to offer myself release and to realize I am feeling anger all alone, and that there is no redress. We want it. Life can be seen to be about almost nothing else sometimes than our wish for redress. As a lawyer who was the son of a lawyer and the grandson of another, I know this. And I also know not to expect it.

For the record—because I never saw him again—my father went back to St. Louis and back to the influence of Dr. Carter, who I believe was as strong a character as my father was weak. They lived on there for a time until (I was told) Dr. Carter quit the practice of medicine entirely. Then they left America and traveled first to Paris and after that to a bright white stucco house near Antibes, which I in fact once saw, completely by accident, on a side tour of a business trip, and somehow knew to be his abode the instant I came to it, as though I had dreamed it—but then couldn’t get away from it fast enough, though they were both dead and buried by then.

Once, in our newspaper, early in the nineteen-seventies, I saw my father pictured in the society section amid a group of smiling, handsome crew-cut men, once again wearing tuxedos and red sashes of some foolish kind, and holding champagne glasses. They were men in their fifties, all of whom seemed, by their smiles, to want very badly to be younger.

Seeing this picture reminded me that in the days after my father had taken me to the marsh, and events had ended not altogether happily, I had prayed for one of the few times, but also for the last time, in my life. And I prayed quite fervently for a while and in spite of all, that he would come back to us and that our life would begin to be as it had been. And then I prayed that he would die, and die in a way I would never know about, and his memory would cease to be a memory, and all would be erased. My mother died a rather sudden, pointless and unhappy death not long afterward, and many
people including myself attributed her death to him. In time, my father came and went in and out of New Orleans, just as if neither of us had ever known each other.

And so the memory was not erased. Yet because I can tell this now, I believe that I have gone beyond it, and on to a life better than one might’ve imagined for me. Of course, I think of life—mine—as being part of their aftermath, part of the residue of all they risked and squandered and ignored. Such a sense of life’s connectedness can certainly occur, and conceivably it occurs in some places more than in others. But it is survivable. I am the proof, inasmuch as since that time, I have never imagined my life in any way other than as it is.

Reunion

When I saw Mack Bolger he was standing beside the bottom of the marble steps that bring travelers and passersby to and from the balcony of the main concourse in Grand Central. It was before Christmas last year, when the weather stayed so warm and watery the spirit seemed to go out of the season.

I was cutting through the terminal, as I often do on my way home from the publishing offices on Forty-first Street. I was, in fact, on my way to meet a new friend at Billy’s. It was four o’clock on Friday, and the great station was athrong with citizens on their way somewhere, laden with baggage and precious packages, shouting goodbyes and greetings, flagging their arms, embracing, gripping each other with pleasure. Others, though, simply stood, as Mack Bolger was when I saw him, staring rather vacantly at the crowds, as if whomever he was there to meet for some reason hadn’t come. Mack is a tall, handsome, well-put-together man who seems to see everything from a height. He was wearing a long, well-fitted gabardine overcoat of some deep-olive twill—an expensive coat, I thought, an Italian coat. His brown shoes were polished to a high gloss; his trouser cuffs hit them just right. And because he was without a hat, he seemed even taller than what he was—perhaps six-three. His
hands were in his coat pockets, his smooth chin slightly elevated the way a middle-aged man would, and as if he thought he was extremely visible there. His hair was thinning a little in front, but it was carefully cut, and he was tanned, which caused his square face and prominent brow to appear heavy, almost artificially so, as though in a peculiar way the man I saw was not Mack Bolger but a good-looking effigy situated precisely there to attract my attention.