Erased From Memory (6 page)

“Wonderful, wonderful,” Egon says.

It’s almost eight o’clock, late for sunlight. But there was still a bright glow in the west last time I looked. That probably will keep my dad happy.

“And we need some powerful water,” he adds. “Water that has been poured over a sacred talisman.”

That’s a stopper. Egon looks distressed. “Oh, dear.
Sacred
water?”

Everybody looks at everybody. But Scott, after a minute, comes to and smiles. “Right here. In my Thermos,” which he produces from his pocket.

The Thermos isn’t a Thermos, not to my eye. It’s a small curved silver flask, one of those upper-class antique doodads they advertise in the back pages of the
New Yorker
. Probably made for whiskey.

“Yes,” Daddy says, looking satisfied as the gurgling little receptacle is handed over to him. “I think that is necessary for this spell. Otherwise we can’t be sure.”

I’m wondering what the flask contains. Whiskey? Vodka? Probably not water. I hope it’ll be okay with my father, who has picked up the snake-blob with two fingers and is heading through the main hall and toward the side door, flask and snake-blob in hand.

Rita gets up, protesting, “Stud, I know what you put in your flask. And maybe I’ll tell. I could tell a lot of things.”

 
 
Egon does some digital clicking to unlock the side door and then rushes ahead for further unlocking. Daddy stands at the closed portal like the seeker at the gates. Finally the door swings wide and he leads us outside. We follow onto a wide cement platform above a garden where green and gray plants contend for space with native grasses and Egyptian-type statuary. Steps lead down into a garden; the residue of a sunset pulsates at the end of a pebbled walk.

My father says, “Ah!” and “A good setting.” The rest of us make similar murmurs. We’re all looking out, across the garden, toward the lighted evening sky. Daddy raises his arms high, holding aloft the snake, the magic water; he starts out, “Listen to me, oh you powers.” It’s a mystic scene, a ridiculous scene; it commands attention; my father the hierant; no wonder we don’t look down, right near our feet, where something is very much the matter.

“Daddy, stop! Oh, my God. Honey, stop.” That is me speaking. Carla, yelling at her father the spell-binder. I am the one who has finally looked down the steps into the garden and seen what’s waiting for us there. Something we can’t avoid anymore.

At the side of the cement platform, partly in a stand of oleander, partly in a patch of lavender, a man. Or a man’s body. The same man as before, I think, wasn’t he stretched like this before, legs splayed, and wearing the same cashmere sweater, the head turned like that before, though I’m not sure about the head; the face now partly hidden by some broken oleander branches.

Egon says, “Oh, dear God.” My father and Scott are silent. Rita says, “Je-sus.” I am the first one down the stairs.

He’s alive, I’m telling myself. Last time he was alive; he’s alive now; they took him away and examined him; I don’t even know what was the matter with him.

I know I’m not supposed to touch him, but I think maybe his legs are twitching, a sign that he’s alive. He needs help. I take his left hand and feel for the pulse. He hasn’t any. I try again. No. His flesh is cold, damp, and pale.

He feels very inert to be alive.

His head is back, half-buried in a clump of bushes, but one eye is visible, a gray-blue eye, not staring at me, looking at something behind my shoulder. His lips are pulled back and the teeth are together; I see that there’s a bright blue object in his mouth, loosely resting on his teeth. A bright blue something small, about the size of a quarter. I reach toward it and it falls off to rest on a clump of lavender.

It’s a modeling made of blue glazed clay, a representation of the ankh, that loop-shaped symbol of eternal life that the Egyptians were so fond of.

He was holding an ankh in his mouth.

My father has come up behind me. He has watched the blue shape and follows its progress into the bushes. “Yes,” he says in a resigned voice, “I am much too late.

“I told you, he was trying to eat life.”

Chapter 5

Four hours have passed since the discovery of Marcus Broussard, the dead-again trustee.

The sheriff has been here and has been obnoxious; he has once again accused my father of sinister involvement in fatal events. And I have been obnoxious in return; I have mentioned lawsuits, legal appeals, newspaper stories, injunctions. The sheriff has finally retreated, looking harassed and promising to schedule a recorded session with my father.

“Great,” I tell him.

It is ten-thirty at night, and I am ready to leave.

I am not ready for what Egon Rothskellar does now, which is to proffer an invitation to come live at Egypt Regained.

“For at least a month,” he says. “Dear Dr. Day. As part of our Resident Scholars’ Program. And you, too, Miss Day, for as long as you like.”

I do not say, “My God, no,” which is what I think. More time at this strange place? I am dying to leave. I simply decline.

“No,” I tell Egon Rothskellar, with impolite directness.

Unfortunately he isn’t inviting only me; his true invitation is to my father. He must have thought carefully about this. He does it in the perfect form. “Edward, I would like very much for you to stay here. For several weeks. As part of our Resident Scholars’ Program. We really need you.”

Daddy is Johnny-on-the-spot. He doesn’t say, “Why so sudden?” or “What’s the Resident Scholars’ Program?” or “What’s the meaning of the word
resident
?” or any of the other remarks he could make. His response is simple and heartfelt. “Yes.” After a minute he adds, “Good.”

This is followed, very emphatically, by, “It is good to be needed.”

I waste twenty minutes arguing that he is needed back at the Manor, that he has good friends at the Manor who will miss him, that he has a lovely apartment at the Manor and duties there to the classes he attends in art, macramé, concert appreciation. That he thinks the food there is good. That Susie is coming to see him.

I do not point out that the museum is an unstable environment, the setting of a death that I suspect of being a murder and of a crazy lady (Rita) who has it in for my father, and also the setting of minor pilferings that I suspect of . . . I’m not sure what I suspect of those little thefts. They seem peculiar. I don’t say any of this to my dad, but I think it.

Daddy is so adamant, so insistent, and so fired by unreasonable hope . . . things have not been good, but now they are going to be better; this is a turning point, once again the world will recognize his coffin lid for the discovery it was . . . he has been feeling bad, yes, he knows that, but now he is going to feel better. All this is so moving and upsetting that I finally haul out my cell phone and call Rob.

Rob knows my father very well. I’m thoroughly in the habit of talking to him in any crisis.

“Hey,” is his first response to my story. “That’s great.”

I answer with a flock of
yes, but
’s and he says, “Oh. Uh-huh.” There is a moment of telephone silence during which I guess he is thinking. Then he confers with someone beside the telephone, “Hey, what do you think, mumble, mumble.”

The person who may think something isn’t really audible, but I get a weird feeling that there’s a Southern accent involved.

“Hey,” Rob says, confirming this perception, “guess what? Cherie is here and I asked her what she thought and . . .”

Cherie apparently thinks it would be wonderful for darling Croc to stay and be an expert at the museum. “Yeah,” Rob says. “Like, I think she has really good perceptions about people? We had dinner together and we’ve been talking all evening and we really hit it off, isn’t that great? Wow. It’s not often that it happens like that. And she really loves your dad. And I took her around the hospital and . . .”

This is the point at which I turn off my imaginary hearing aid. There’s an exercise where you pretend you’re stuffing your ears up with those round white foam stoppers.

“So,” Rob is saying five minutes later when I come back to earth, “we both feel pretty good about that. About meeting each other. And I certainly think, yes, Ed should accept. I’m in favor of taking on every option that life offers.”

I tell him good-bye and thanks loads, and when I’m back in the museum setting, Egon informs me that everything is all arranged. He will come to get us. Tomorrow? Well, then, the next day.

“There, dear Dr. Day. That is all settled.”

Among the many things I don’t understand here is why Egon is so anxious to get my dad, who is vague as to what century it is, into his think tank.

And it’s an exaggeration to say that I agree to the arrangement just because I’m furious with Rob. But for certain that’s a contributing factor.

Chapter 6

Daddy and I leave the following Monday. He’s good about helping me pack. He looks like a new man, a younger one. He helps me find the right socks to go with his blue plaid shirt; he remembers his special shampoo; he collects some Egyptian figures that need to come with him.

“Oh, this will be interesting,” he says.

And he is sociable during the drive over in Egon’s limousine, chatting with the driver about the quail families we see en route. “The ancient Egyptian bird of this type was the guinea hen,” he volunteers.

 
 
Egon’s Resident Scholars’ quarters are on the third floor of his handsome house. We are conveyed there by an elevator. The predominant color of everything—elevator, doors, halls, outside grasses—is a golden beige. There is stained glass. There are passageways with indirect light and bathrooms with spas and warmed towel bars. I’ve been expecting Egyptian funerary beds and chairs, but no; Egon’s guest quarters, resplendent in (I immediately check this and count) six bedrooms, an upstairs parlor, a library; these quarters are almost Egypt-free except for the carpets on which endless processions of tan people parade bearing libations.

This is, in fact, an excellent hotel with the usual hotel extras. Exotic fruit—pineapple, mango, et cetera—is offered in a silver-plated basket; chocolates adorn each pillow. I’m sure someone will be around in the morning to remake the tousled beds.

“What a delightful accommodation,” says my father. He sits on the edge of his new bed with its Ralph Lauren spread and arranges the stone and clay figures he’s brought with him, plus a knitted representation of the Sacred Eye. Susie gave him this; she has a friend in Berkeley who makes them.

“I can tape that up on the wall for you,” I suggest. But he clutches the object. “I can do it,” he says accusingly, as if I’m telling him that he can’t.

I drift off. Today is not Carla Day’s Day, nor was yesterday. I won’t offer to help him unpack his leather suitcase. I’ll be good; I’ll be supportive and nondirective. I’ll let him unroll his socks all by himself.

 
 
Half an hour later I ask Dr. Scott Dillard, “Am I a nag?”

“Huh?” inquires Dr. Scott, who has just wandered into the library, where I am attempting simultaneously to listen to a Leadbelly tape and read a mystery novel set in first-century B.C. Rome.

When I pull the earphones away, the strains of “Good to the Last Drop” detach and Scott raises an eyebrow. “
What
are you listening to?”

“Egon has some great tapes.”

“I never before met a girl blues fan.”

“Woman. Woman blues fan. Blues enthusiast. All my best friends say I’m a nag. But you wouldn’t know.”

“Damn right not. What are you keening about, Woman Blues Fan?”

“Some facts would be nice. I’d like to know why we’re here. Egon won’t speak straight. My father can’t. I’m forgetting how.”

“Je-sus,” says Scott. He’s been balancing in front of me holding a couple of books; now he settles slowly into a recliner, watching me. He tilts the back of it and tents his legs.