Concert of Ghosts (24 page)

“Nothing,” he said.

“Okay. Leave it. We'll go to the Haight. We'll take a look at Schrader Street.”

He agreed, although he felt the need to linger here at the junction of Grant and California, an intersection where a key had been dropped and lost. The scent of Chinese food—ginger and soy and garlic—floated through the remnants of mist, and he was suddenly hungry.

She tugged at his sleeve. “Harry. Let's go.”

He swung his bag from one hand to the other. The church was struck by sunlight briefly and the red brick assumed a warmth of sorts. A priest, defined by this abrupt brightness, came out of the place and turned right, heading down to the heart of Chinatown. Tennant watched him. A priest. Had there been a priest on that far-off day? A religious ceremony of some kind? He wasn't sure. He might have been trying too hard to convince himself of a memory. Self-delusion.

“I don't think we should hang around,” Alison said. “Let's find a cab.”

He followed her away from St. Mary's, glancing back once. But the church had absorbed the past and wasn't returning it, despite Tennant's longings.

They took a cab to the Haight. The mist had withered away now, the day was clear and sharp, a mischievous wind blowing unpredictably. Tennant rolled down the cab window. He heard voices in the wind, faint whispers. This way, Harry. Welcome back.

The sun was white like a damaged eye.

The cab crawled through slow traffic toward Haight Street. At the Panhandle, that large rectangle of parkland surrounded by trees, Alison and Tennant got out. For a moment he was reluctant to move. He might have been standing at the entrance to a maze, one of those elaborate labyrinths in which hapless strollers become trapped like flies in a fly bottle. Nearby was Golden Gate Park. What came back to Tennant suddenly was the exhausting humidity of the Conservatory of Flowers, the Japanese Tea Garden, the Oriental stone lions outside the museum, the flocks of pigeons that clustered there day after day in a manner he'd always found quietly malicious.

Now, as he walked through grass, he was flooded by recollections of Frisbees skimming between the trees, the scent of reefer, dogs running wild, boys and girls in headbands and sandals and beads, naked children decorating themselves with firrgerpaint; he remembered flowers, guitars, the Diggers passing out spaghetti to hungry dopers and sundry derelicts attracted to the Haight by free food. Bright days from long ago. Good vibes, as they once said in that time of bleak innocence. All the ghosts were agitated. He had come here to this parkland on the edge of Haight-Ashbury and disturbed them.

On the other side of the Panhandle lay the entrance to Schrader, which connected after a few blocks with Haight Street. He paused in his stride. He seemed to see himself across the way, an apparition that was a young Harry Tennant, long-haired, bearded, shuffling in a doped way along the sidewalk, his arm linked through Maggie Silver's, their heads together in the manner of lovers who have no more than a passing interest in the world outside their hearts. An idyll, a summer of light, and then an eclipse. Strange, terrifying.

The apparition vanished. There was nobody on the opposite sidewalk except for a man walking a yellow dog. It was Alison who had her arm linked through his, not Maggie Silver.

“We cross here,” he said, looking into oncoming traffic.

They took one step off the sidewalk. A long gray limousine pulled alongside, blocking their progress. The back door opened. A man got out.

Another apparition.

Tennant said, “
Jesus Christ.
”

Rayland Tennant—frail in the pale sunlight—moved toward his son.

15

The sun made the old man transparent, the way a flashlight held behind a hand will pierce flesh. Harry, who took a few steps forward from Alison, remembered when his father had been sturdy and healthy, his stride confident, his manner one that suggested the world was his personal fiefdom. The contrast between now and then amazed him. Rayland looked infinitely weary; the whites of his eyes were yellow, his thin lips colorless. Tennant had the sudden urge to hug the old man, to say that what lay in the past between them should be forgotten, grudges finally buried. He understood, as he'd always known on the level where the heart secretly operates, that he still loved this fragile figure, a realization that did nothing to dispel the surprise and tension he felt, and the odd little flicker of fear—which was focused on the understanding that another man sat in the back of the limousine, someone whose face he couldn't make out. Up front, the driver was concealed by smoked glass.

“Well, Harry,” Rayland said.

“This is a hell of a place to meet,” Tennant said. There was strain in his voice, a quality he tried to subdue. Pretend you're not surprised out of your mind, Harry. Pretend this is common, an everyday thing, meeting your father in the middle of San Francisco. Let's have coffee or a beer, son. Let's chew over old times. How's it been going? What's new?

“I suspect any place would be a hell of a place.” Rayland stretched out a hand, touched his son's arm, then glanced briefly at Alison, who stood quietly some feet back.

Tennant fought against the urge to move away from Rayland's hand. This is your father, Harry. This is the man whose blood runs in your veins, no matter what. “Your people must be pretty damn good hounds, Rayland.”

“I could never stand amateurs.” Rayland looked across the Panhandle. Birds rose out of a tree, startled by the abrupt backfire of a car, which rang like an assassin's gun.

Tennant looked at the limousine. The figure in the back was motionless and for that reason alone, sinister. Rayland, who flinched slightly at the backfire, had a faraway expression, that of a man who finds the taste of an old dream lingering. He still wore his wedding ring, a distinguished band of thick gold in which were inscribed his initials and those of his late wife. His hands had silvery hair upon them. The nails, flecked with white, were manicured as they always had been. Rayland had his vanities even now.

“Since I last saw you, Harry, I've entered what you might call, for want of anything better, the age of pathos. Winter of life, as they say.” He smiled at his son, and there was the brightness of affection in the look. “I never dreamed I'd live quite this long. I thought I might see, oh, sixty, sixty-five, but when seventy came I began to consider infirmity a real possibility.”

Tennant was crowded by too many questions. His head might have been an amphitheater in which a mass of people were clapping their hands discordantly in the dark. “Why are you having me followed?”

The old man ignored Harry's question. He said, “We used to be so damned close, you and I. I don't think I ever knew a father and son as close as we were, Harry. I think of that often. Too often. I get sick to my heart just remembering.”

“You're evading me, Rayland.”

The old man shook his head. “I'm far less interested in explaining the mechanics of how this meeting came about than I am in enjoying a sense of reunion, Harry.”

“I don't think I have quite the heart for reunions, Rayland.”

“Just seeing you again …” Rayland gestured vaguely with his hands, the act of a man who finds himself wandering along the limits of vocabulary. “I can't tell you how it makes me feel. I can't begin to tell you.”

“You're not listening to me. I said I didn't have the heart for a reunion.”

“You still can't get around it, can you, Harry? After all this time. I'm disappointed. Your outrage is passé.” The old man looked solemn. “Everyone has the right to due process of law. A child molester. A serial killer. The most despicable criminals. I don't care who. They have the right to the best representation that can be found.”

“Or bought.”

“Harry, we've traveled this road before. Colonel Harker is past. He's history. All that was long ago.”

“Harker's a monster, for Christ's sake,” Harry said.

“I wonder how much effort it costs you to keep your heart this hard. All that energy wasted in something as negative as a grudge. Let it go, Harry. Don't resent me. I miss you. I miss you more than I can possibly say. This is the time to bury the past.”

I miss you too, Harry thought. You were always there when I was a kid. But where were you later, Dad? Harry, who looked away from his father's face, had a childhood memory of a tree house Rayland had once built in the backyard of the family home. Hacking through branch and foliage with saw and machete, Rayland—who had no affinity for manual labor—had sweated and bled to construct this tiny fragile retreat for his only son. There had even been a sign done in bright red paint:
HARRY'S PLACE.
A sweet little image. Childhood had been a fine time, a great time, despite the premature death of Harry's mother. Rayland had striven to compensate for her absence, minimizing the extent of the boy's grief. Father, mother, friend.

True, the outrage Harry had felt years ago had lost some of its fire, but not to the point where he could slough it off and embrace the old man, as if nothing had ever happened. Rayland, no matter how you looked at it, no matter how you tried to conceal it behind talk of due process, had been the butcher's partner.

“You chose to take the side of the military, Rayland,” he said. “I went in another direction.”

“I don't call bad drugs a direction, Harry. I had hopes you might make something out of your life. You had opportunities, far more than most young people. You could have gone to the college of your choice. You could have done something useful. Achieved something. You may call it a father's wishful thinking, but when you were born I remember saying to myself, ‘This kid is going to be somebody special.' He's going to make a mark. Instead …” The old man looked sad, a figure disappointed by the expectations of love.

Somebody special, Tennant thought. Yeah. Somebody without a life. A hollowed-out man. I'd call that special. “You can't have ambitions for other people, Rayland. You can't impose your notion of destiny on anybody else. People live their own lives.”

Rayland raised an eyebrow, an old courtroom mannerism, something to undermine the statements of some poor bastard in the witness box. He might have been asking:
Do they, Harry? Do people really live their own lives?
Then the look was gone, and he was glancing at Alison with an expression that might have been one of sympathy.

A breeze moved through the trees. The Panhandle was noisy with the roar of leaves. Rayland appeared to be listening to this abrupt green vibration in the fashion of a man who yearns for the simplicity of things, a life lived at a distance from the stressful complexity of cities. Was there regret in that look? Harry wondered. Did the old man yearn to turn back a clock and change the way his life had gone? Odd. Tennant would never have imagined his father to be the kind of man in whom regret would stir. Rayland had always made decisions and stuck to them. Age had changed him in more than the physical sense. Was it that simple?

In a voice that was strangely uncertain, he said, “I'll never forget the boy you were, Harry. My feelings for you have never changed. I've never stopped loving you, Harry. I never will.”

“I don't doubt your love, Rayland.”

“Then an amnesty is in order, Harry. I want your friendship.”

“And the ledger closed.”

“I want reconciliation. An embrace. I want my son back.”

“I'm not ready, Rayland. One day maybe. Not right now.”

“Harry, Harry. Don't you realize time is running out? I'm seventy-five. Sometimes at night when I close my eyes, I can see my own headstone. I see my name carved in granite. I see the date of my birth and death. You don't have any idea of what that feels like. How could you? Some nights I don't want to fall asleep because I think I'm not going to wake up again. I lie in the dark with my eyes open. Those are the worst times. That's when I start remembering. I see your face. And I cry, Harry. I cry. Rayland Tennant cries. He lies there and remembers the time he took you to the Grand Canyon and how goddamn hot it was, and how blue the sky was, and the way he was afraid you were going to fall off the edge somehow and how damned hard he held on to your hand because he didn't want to lose his little boy.” The old man raised his face and looked up. His eyes were damp. “One time we were at a theme park somewhere in Virginia and we went on the roller coaster and I remember this dreadful panic I had because I sensed, I just
knew
, the whole structure was going to fall apart. I put my arms around you, Harry. I wanted to save you. I must have come close to a heart attack that day.”

He shut his eyes a moment, rubbed them, smiled. “A father fears for his son. Every step of the way, Harry. Love and fear. You can't always separate them.”

Harry Tennant remembered that ride. He remembered air rushing past him and his blood racing. He remembered people screaming as the cars plunged at terrifying angles.
Maggie Silver had screamed too once
.

“It's terrific to stand here and talk about the past, Rayland. But you're still evading me. You're still refusing to answer my questions. Like—why are you having me followed?”

Rayland Tennant didn't speak. He was clearly lost in the gloaming of recollection and had no desire to step out of that twilight into the present time.

“Does the name Sajac mean anything to you, Rayland? Or Paul Lannigan?”

Rayland shook his head. When he spoke he did so slowly, reluctantly. “You're in trouble, Harry.”

“You mean the drug bust, which presumably you know about—”

“I'm not speaking of your legal difficulties, Harry. I'm not referring to drugs nor to a corpse in your hotel room and the fact that you jumped bail. I'm talking about another kind of trouble.”

“Let's be specific.”

“This is the bottom line: I'm not sure I can go on protecting you.”