All the Dead Yale Men (28 page)

“Hey,” said the news vendor with a change apron on his fat belly. “Are you going to pay for that or just walk away?”

“Oh,” I said. “Sorry.”

The dollar disappeared into his hand like a rat devoured by a snake.

“They're going to fry that guy, I'll tell you that,” said the vendor. He tapped the story. “He can just bend over and kiss his ass good bye.”

“You think so?” I said.

“Does a bear do it in the woods?” he said.

“I guess,” I said.

“No guessing, Jack,” he said. He put a finger onto the front of the
Globe
. “This character is roadkill.”

He arranged the girly magazines, one just covering the front of another. The store window behind me, where I read the newspaper, smelled of the donuts the place sold. The news vendor was probably right: Boston loved a scandal, as though it was a way of knowledge, a morality play, the same pattern shown again and again, like something from the Middle Ages. The accusation, the denials, the outrage, the fight to the death.

The Raver moved sideways, along the newly cleaned window, his hair in the wind that carried the scent of a recent shampoo.

“Remember . . . ,” he said to me, his hand picking at my sleeve, then turning the paper so he could see the front page. “The good and just and beautiful, which generates and holds together all things . . . And thou wilt give thyself relief, if thou doest every act of thy life as if it were the last.”

In the fourth paragraph the story said that they had the councilman on tape, soliciting a bribe and giving his guarantees that the thickness of the concrete, poured for a new road, and the depth of the gravel beneath it, would never be checked. After the jump, next to an ad for Feline's, was a picture from the tape. Grainy, but all the more damning for that.

“Listen to me,” said the Raver. “Listen. You are worried. Did you pour the lousy cement?”

“No,” I said.

“Hey,” said the Raver to a man who stood behind a card table covered with neatly folded tie-dye shirts. “Where's your contribution? Didn't I tell you this spot costs? Pony up or move on . . . ”

One of the musicians started in on “I Want to Be Sedated” again, and the woman with the piercing and the three-card monte boys all looked hungrily at the ten dollars I dropped into the musician's cigar box. The opened lid had a painting of a woman with dark hair in a gold burst. My father had used cigars, sent to him in a Red Cross care package from his father, to trade for blood sausage in Poland.

•
  
•
  
•

The barbed wire was bright at the top of the fence, and the piles of cars still stood with that modern solidity, as stern as those faces on Easter Island. I had gotten this far, but the coming scandal and the loss of Pia's trust (if it looked as if I had lied to her) were right there, as definite as those piles of broken automobiles and as tragic, too.

Yana was at the computer, as always, her white hands on the white keys. But every now and then a woman walked behind Yana's chair, her gait familiar and pleasant, a mature woman but still oddly sultry. Her hair was dyed red and her freckles showed when she turned and made the short walk, about fifteen feet, before she turned again. Then she came up to the window, her eyes set on mine: it had been a long time, but even so we stood there, mesmerized, unblinking, surprised.

The samovar gave off a wisp of steam, like a thin beard on an old man, but the tea, with that exotic scent, was just waiting.
A couple of clean cups sat on the plywood counter, although only one had a handle. Stas's chair was empty. Outside the wind moaned between those stacks of cars, which seemed like evidence of sudden and yet hidden violence.

“Here, Frank,” said Pauline. “Let me get you some tea.”

The samovar made a trickling sound as she filled the cup with the handle.

“You want a cookie?” she said. “Chocolate chip. From that upscale bakery in town. I remember you had a sweet tooth.”

The tea was the temperature of a kiss. Yana typed, then scrolled through a page of photos and Pauline said, “No. Those are twice what they should be.”

The samovar made that trickling sound. Pauline offered a cookie, holding it out as though it was a way of reaching across those years. It was sweet and buttery.

“So, Frank?” said Pauline. She was still thin, more knowledgeable, it seemed, than ever. “How have you been?”

“I came to see Stas,” I said. “Do you know where he is?”

“And what about me, Frank,” she said. “Aren't you glad to see me?”

“Of course,” I said.

“Just listen to him,” she said to Yana. “Butter wouldn't melt in his mouth, would it? What a cool one you are, Frank.”

“Why are you here?” I said.

“Business. I was born and bred to the trade. My father taught me. Didn't you read my sheet all those years ago, or were you too busy trying to pretend you didn't know me?”

“I tried to help,” I said.

“Tried to help,” she said. “Now isn't that something?” She turned to Yana. “You hear that?”

Yana scrolled down the page.

“There,” said Pauline. “We can do something with those air
bags. Are they genuine Mannhausers? At that price they may be phony. How many have they got?”

“Three hundred,” said Yana.

“Maybe we can knock them down a little?” said Pauline. And as she looked at the screen, she said, “It's funny how things work out, Frank. I was in Florida, you know, looking for a deal on parts and I make an offer to Yana, and we get to talking and she says she knows you. How about that? So I thought I might come up and see how things are doing in my old stomping grounds.”

She turned, her eyes that same blue, at once furious and filled with grief or regret. As though it was stronger after simmering for twenty-five years. She seemed youthful, although she was tired, and dropped her eyes, as though showing them to me was hard work.

“You two were close?” said Yana.

“It seemed that way,” said Pauline. “Didn't it, Frank?”

“We were close,” I said.

“Ah,” said Pauline. “But not close enough.”

“That's right,” I said. “I didn't understand.”

She stepped closer, her nose just inches away from mine.

“And what would you have done if you had understood?” she said.

“I don't know,” I said. “It was a long time ago.”

“Some people, they just move on. They get married. They have a kid. Like Frank here. He's got a daughter, don't you, Frank? Is she beautiful?”

“What are you crying for?” said Yana. “I don't want a kid. That's for sure.”

“Wait until you're a little older,” said Pauline.

Yana shrugged. She scrolled another page of air bags.

“Those look good, too,” said Pauline.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “We were young. What did we know?”

“You were young,” she said. “Not me. No, sir. I didn't get to grow up that way. In the auto parts business, you have to learn the ropes pretty fast.”

“I guess,” I said.

“There's no guessing about it,” said Pauline. She wiped her eyes with a handkerchief, which she put back in the pocket of her black jeans. “I guess you went around and broke a lot of other hearts, just for the hell of it, huh?”

“No,” I said. “It did something to me, too. You think it didn't?”

“Can I believe that?” she said.

“Why not?” I said. “Why would I lie now?”

She shrugged.

“I don't know,” she said.

“Well,” I said to Yana. “Tell Stas I came by to see him.”

“Sure,” said Yana. “Have you got a message for him?”

“Just tell him I came by,” I said.

Yana shrugged.

The door came open with a squeak, like something caught in a trap, and then the air, tinted with oil and plastic seats that have been out in the sun, blew into the room. Keys clicked. Then Pauline followed me outside. The wind moved through those piles of cars.

“It was good to see you,” I said.

“Fuck that,” she said. “Don't be so polite. You don't want to see me.”

We listened to the wind.

“Did it really do something to you?” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Why do you ask?”

“It might make a difference,” she said.

The stink of oil, the earthy scent, a few sad blades of grass, the icy triangles of glass.

“You look worried, Frank,” she said. “I wonder why that is?”

I shrugged.

“Nothing special,” I said. “Work. Time. Nothing special.”

“You never were a good liar,” she said.

“No,” I said. “I never was. I just tried not to feel certain things. But that catches up with you. One day, well, you make a hash of things, like a case, and you did it because you had so much under wraps.”

“I warned you,” she said. “Don't you remember?”

She cried, leaned against me, trembled there: in that touch the years took on a new weight, as though a hundred times more heavy now, in confronting them, than in just looking the other way.

“So, Frank,” she said. “I want you to ask me something.”

“What's that?” I said.

“Ask for my help,” she said.

“What kind of help is that?” I said.

“Don't be stupid,” she said. “It's clear enough. You can do it or not.”

“OK,” I said.

“That's not asking,” she said.

“All right,” I said. “Will you help?”

“I'll think about it. Maybe I'd like to watch you twist in the wind,” she said. Then she put her hands on my chest and shoved me away. “Get out of here. Go on. Leave me alone. That's what you were good at.”

I drove away but still glanced up, from time to time, to the rear-view mirror. She stood with her arms crossed beneath her breasts, the wind moving her hair, her eyes set on the car. A blimp floated overhead, silver and swollen as it towed a sign that said L
OWEST
M
ORTGAGE
L
OANS
. M
ANCHESTER
B
ANK
. C
OME IN TODAY
.

AT THE END
of June the box for a pregnancy test sat in the wastebasket in the upstairs bathroom in my house, the one next to Pia's room, although she had her own apartment in Cambridge now. Robert probably lived there, too. Here, in her bathroom at home, the wallpaper was the same as when she had been a child: sail boats on little waves, with sailors, in blue hats, hiking out over blue water, their teeth as white as whale bone. And, for a moment, the question was why she had brought the pregnancy test here, to her old bathroom. So, I put the pregnancy box back in the trash, although now I buried it under the used Kleenex and tissue that had been on the bottom. Then I sat on the turned-down toilet seat, with a little sort of blue rug on it, and considered the facts.

The little stick was blue.

Pia sat downstairs in my study. Robert was about to arrive. I
had invited him for the weekend on that land along the Delaware River. We'd spend some time in the woods, along the water, maybe gather some watercress at the top of a seep where the bear appeared from time to time. And, of course, I thought we would have a picnic where the cress grew.

Pia and Robert hadn't yet enrolled, but they both had their first-year law books and were already reading them.

We'd stay in that stone house that had meant so much to my father and had hurt him in a precisely equal amount. It was a way of appeasing the dead of the previous generation. And, in fact, I had come up here, to this bathroom, to get some Band-Aids, since I have noticed that this is a critical item to have on a trip to this land. Someone was always bleeding, sometimes worse than others.

Alexandra left this trip to me, since, she said, the land had always left her feeling like something was lying in wait. No, she said, if she got moody, she'd go into the small graveyard behind our house and spend some time with Juduthan and Polly Wainwright, or at least their fading stones and the stones of their children.

So, you can't say I hadn't been warned about intensity. Pia stared into the distance, as though she could see the greatest of all mysteries: the arms of DNA combining like the collision of galaxies. I packed a picnic in a basket, and I carried it and a bag with some clothes and a sweater in it, one I always took to the farm, a leather one that had belonged to my grandfather and father. Sort of stinky like a cigar.

I put the basket and bag on the floor in the study. Pia was on the couch. I sat down next to her.