Secrets & Surprises (13 page)

Back in the States, William did not even hear the news the day it happened. He heard it days later and flew to New York. The apartment was full of mourners, including Diana and Griffin, and the only order was kept by Peter Jenkins, who, after a little time had passed in which the mourners expressed their sorrow to the family, would walk up to them and thank them kindly for coming, and slowly edge them toward the door. Peter Jenkins did not do that to William Duvall, or to a couple of other old friends. They sat with Diana and Griffin, in silence mostly, and stared about the room as if the ceiling might go at any second, or the floor. Most of them seemed to be betting on the floor.

Griffin took Diana for a walk when Peter Jenkins suggested it. Peter took Diana’s mother for a walk, too, putting her sweater around her and leading her, unprotesting, out the door. They locked the apartment and went outside, Peter indicating to Griffin that he was walking left and that he and Diana should go right. Griffin, shocked by the death and still remembering Diana’s first cry of pain, was very glad that Peter Jenkins was there to manage instead of him. He did everything the man said, and hoped that Diana would stay as calm as she had become. He meant to do nothing wrong—he had left town with her, even though he thought it meant he would lose his job. He intended only kindness, but walking down the street and seeing her sorrow, and thinking that he understood its peculiar quality, he said to her that one time when his own father had been ill with hepatitis and he had seen him losing strength, he had been amazed that as his father lost weight, as he got slighter in the hospital bed, he had nevertheless grown larger in proportion. “It was as though even in death—and although nobody else thought it, at least I thought he was dying—he was becoming larger than life, rather than shrinking. He was a famous man, and that was getting
more
intense, he was …”

“Shut up, you son of a bitch,” she said. “You don’t understand anything, and I’m not going to let you rage against my father the day after he’s been buried.”

He looked at her, shocked that she would call him that, sorry for having said the wrong thing. She had let go of his arm and stood there, her face firm and challenging, and he could see that she did not want to do anything more than kill him. He looked at the sidewalk and muttered an apology, reached again for her arm. She snapped it in to her side and began to walk, and he walked at her side, thinking, for the first time, My God—she’s bigger than I am. He looked up at her, a large girl, even taller than usual in the high-heeled black boots she had worn to the funeral. She would never understand. Horace Cragen
had
been larger than life, he was right about that, and she was larger than life too, though she would never admit it. Didn’t his own father disparage the constant photo-taking, the constant reporting on, analysis of, his work? Great men didn’t want to think they were great all the time—only when they needed confidence, or when they felt like playing the role. But he squinted hard here: she was not great in that she was accomplished, she was just large and silent—her father and not her father.

He squinted again, this time looking at her: she had admitted that she was shy as a child. He was that way, too, and he understood it: he had quit Harvard because he did not want to let people know he was bright and talented, just another rich man’s son making it big. He would rather be passive, lie low, carry out the pointed-toe shoes to the fan-shaped feet of the women who came into the store. It was no wonder she had admired the statue so—she had envied the young dancer, poised to take her step. Like him, Diana had no clear ambition. He knew more than he ever had before, and he wanted to explain it to her, but there was no way to do it. She was walking ahead of him, still furious. He trailed beside her, but her face was set. If a man walking along had not touched Griffin’s sleeve to ask what time it was, the intensity of his own thoughts might not have been interrupted and he might have continued to walk with her—she clearly did not know where she was going, but was getting breathless going there—across the city for even longer. Griffin looked at his watch and was shocked to see that they had already been walking for almost two hours, that he must get her back to the apartment.

She lived with Griffin in the month following her father’s death, not hating him for his problems or even for what he had said so coldly on the walk in New York to leave him instantly, but unhappy still, in spite of their occasional compatibility and even happiness, now knowing she would have to leave soon. She asked Louise if she would be able to stay with her and her roommate until she could find an apartment to share, and Louise, of course, said yes.

Since coming back, she had had recurring dreams: grotesque in their comicness, dreams clearly planted in her mind by Griffin (the way her mother had planted the word “home” and she had innocently repeated it to him) in which she would approach her father’s tombstone and it would grow higher and higher, blocking everything from her view. She would finally be standing before a wall of total gray, and this is the point in the dream at which she would wake up. Lately the dream had become even more horrible, with a loud noise—a confusion of voices—that augmented as the tombstone rose: the voice of her father reading fragments from his long poem, the voices of a Lion and a Wolf talking with human voices, a shout from Lyca, even the landscape of the cemetery—the softly-out-of-focus bushes but the bright tall sunflowers bordering the path she walked to her father’s headstone—all put in her head by her father.

Her father had told her that she didn’t do well in literature classes because she knew more than the teachers; Griffin told her that because her father was a literary man, naturally she resisted competing with him. Why did Griffin stubbornly insist that her father was such a dominant force in her life? He had been a gentle man, not overbearing at all, the man she skated with in the warm weather, who brushed her hair and told her bedtime stories like any father. But then why—if he had not been that force—why the nightmares? Because anyone would have nightmares when a parent died. Louise had said so.

She told Griffin she was leaving, and he was very unhappy. So unhappy that he rose from the bed before her—she heard the faint music from the other room when she awoke from the nightmare and reached out to touch only tangled blankets. She listened and could pick it up faintly: “Little boy lost, he takes himself so seriously …” And she pursed her lips until she realized that this time she was making too much of it; he would surely not have been able to time the singing of that phrase with her awakening if he had wanted to. So she went out to the living room and put her arms around him.

•  •  •

She saw him hardly at all after she left, then not at all, and when he called her in late September she was surprised to hear that he was back at Harvard. She knew from Louise that he had called there wanting to find out about her—he had called drunk one night and demanded that Louise tell him if she had another boyfriend.

“I’m sorry,” Diana sighed. “What did you say?”

“I didn’t want to say no, so I hinted that you did.”

“That was silly. You should have just said that I didn’t.”

“You will,” Louise said. “You will.”

“I don’t want a boyfriend,” Diana said. “I just want to be left alone.”

“You’re still upset about your father,” Louise said, laying her hand on Diana’s in sympathy.

And it was only because she knew Louise meant to be kind that she didn’t yank away her hand. How many times would she have to endure hearing how her father’s life and her father’s death had to do with her life?

Not long after hearing from Louise about Griffin’s call, he called her himself. She was going to berate him for drinking and for bothering her friend, but thought better of it. He had said enough to her, and she had said enough to him—she should just let it go.

She was glad that she had not criticized him for anything when he said that he was back in school, with money on loan from his mother. She was glad that he had gone back—she thought that he was wasting his time working, and had told him that all along. She was glad she had not been critical (and would not be critical, as he would have been, about the semantics of taking money from his mother but not from his father) because he sounded happy, and he seemed to know he had made a sensible decision. He had called her for approval, and she gave it to him. He had also called to see if she would have dinner with him, and she said that she would.

“Do you have night classes Monday?” he asked.

“I don’t have any classes. I’m working on Newbury Street from nine to five, and I love it. I go home at night and read a book or go to the movies.”

“You’re kidding,” he said.

“No. I know it’s ironic, your going back to Harvard and my dropping out of school, but you made the right decision, and I did too. I wasn’t getting anything out of it.”

“Christ,” he said. “You didn’t make the right decision.”

She let that go, too. The last thing she wanted was another argument with him.

The dinner was nice: the food was good, he had only one glass of wine, and it made her a little sad that she was no longer with him. She knew that she had done something to him that she had not meant to do—she knew it at the time, when she awoke to hear him listening to sad songs late at night. But it was inadvertent—at least she could say that; he had continued his drinking and badgering her, when he knew she could not stand it, but she had only lingered with him a little time before deciding to go. And now that she was gone, he seemed better. She was so glad that he had gone back to school. They left the restaurant and took a walk before she went back to her apartment and he went back to his when, swinging her hand and speaking very kindly, he said, “I guess Louise told you what I did. My apologies to you for acting so stupid, but no apologies to her—if anything, it put a little excitement in her life.”

“She’s a nice person,” Diana said. “Why don’t you care about her feelings?”

“I do—it’s just that we’re so different that we can’t come close to understanding each other. Look, it’s simple: Louise didn’t have a famous father, so she doesn’t know what it’s like. I’ve missed you so much because we could talk, we could know things and not have to say them, couldn’t we?”

She could not believe that he had said that. And because he had ruined her evening, she spoke without thinking that it did no good to argue. “No, Griffin. All our time together should have taught you that I didn’t agree with you, that we didn’t have that common bond.”

“You know we did,” he persisted. “The nightmares told you that, didn’t they? That wasn’t me putting thoughts in your head; that was your head telling thoughts to you.”

“Why did you call to put me through this again?”

“Because you have to know it. You have to know that it’s all right, and that you’ve got me—you can have me again in a second—that you can work through it. He’s going to vanish. He might expand from a tombstone to a tower, but eventually the tower will topple. But don’t give in—don’t quit school and not come back to me. Don’t—”

“Stop it!” she said, so loudly that people turned to stare at them.

“Please,” he said, taking her arm. “I didn’t tell you that day in New York when Peter sent us off on a walk, but I think about it every day, and it’s still clear in my head and I can still tell you about it.”

“Tell me what?” she said. She began to wonder, as she had after the car crash, as she did so often when they argued, if he might really be crazy.

“What I was trying to say before: that your father’s dead—”

She threw off his arm and ran, praying he wouldn’t follow. And by the time she had gone several blocks she felt free, his voice had stopped ringing in her head. She looked back, thinking she would see him, but she had left him behind. She had missed him, in spite of his obsession, and it angered her that that was so, because of what he had just done. She remembered what her father had told her one time when she came home crying from grade school because she wasn’t selected to be on anybody’s team: “It’s hard, but that’s what life is like, and you’re very special, so you’ll see that sooner. You know, I’m an outsider too—if I hadn’t been a poet, I wouldn’t have been fit for much of anything else. And even outsiders hate other outsiders: poets hate novelists, painters look down on sculptors …” The rest of what he said was blurry, but she remembered the feel of his hand on her shoulder, felt it there as she moved down the street and walked more than twenty blocks home because as she looked down at the sidewalk, remembering, she didn’t think to take a bus or a cab—she just kept putting one foot in front of the other, as the sidewalk kept lengthening.

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