Shadow Man: A Novel (18 page)

The morning light glared harsh. I turned and squinted. Alice was gone. She left me the nub of a joint in the ashtray and an Almond Joy wrapper on the TV. She had been here. It was real. I closed my eyes and retraced her once more in my mind. I wanted it etched deeply. A knock and the door flew open.

“There are strange goings-on, Jim. I need to play tennis. Let’s go.”

“I’m a little rusty.”

“You’ll be fine today.”

Kurt handed me a Jack Kramer racquet, a towel, and a can of balls.

“Where’s Vera?”

“We’ll talk about Vera later. We need to find a court.”

Down the elevator to the lobby; Slim, a raggedly thin, aptly named man, a man without the preacher’s gift, without God’s blessings on his tongue, sat where Alice usually sat, looking over the ledger at the
front desk while the gimpy uncle sipped coffee. Slim gave us directions to a high school with good courts about five miles away.

“Have a wonderful game, gentlemen,” he said.

Kurt and I dropped the top on the Impala and took off with a roar through sparse Sunday-morning traffic. Kurt popped in Walter Jackson and that big, deep voice filled the air like its own kind of church. The sun was warm, but the breeze was cool, and as we drove the ocean’s stickiness thinned. Nobody was on the courts. They were smooth with evaporating dew, the white lines bold, the green uncracked, like a gardener’s lawn on the Philly Main Line. Kurt opened a can, a snap and a whoosh of air and the gluey locked-up smell of new balls.

“Swing easy like I taught you.”

“That was a long time ago.”

“Just easy long strokes, don’t hurry, just glide to the ball.”

I hadn’t played tennis with Kurt in two years. He hit softly so I could find a rhythm. It took a while. I sent balls streaming over the fence and skidding across other courts. Kurt kept saying: “Relax … Long strokes … Get your racquet back … You’re hitting too late … You’re hitting too early … Topspin … Roll the wrist … Relax.” One good thing about Kurt — he seldom got mad, rarely raised his voice. Tennis was his passion, and he did not like to see it played poorly, but he was patient, knowing that this game of mathematics and art needed time and humor; otherwise a man would throw tantrums and smash a lot of Jack Kramers.

This was the Kurt I knew from Philly. The Kurt of Mom and me. Lately, with his uncombed hair and tan, and his unconcern for detail, like having a clean white T-shirt or stiff, newly washed jeans, Kurt, who even let slip his meticulous care of the Impala, a sandy rolling box of crumbs and soda stains, was a different shade of himself. Vera had done it, which when it first happened was good, watching Kurt, like a snail peeking out after a rainstorm,
come back to the light after Mom’s death. She drew me out, too. She enchanted.

Kurt was out too far, though. He wanted the cover of his shell again, he wanted to paint ships gray and hang from rope ladders. I didn’t ask him about this. I saw it. Vera, the one who drew him into the light, was losing herself, reaching for a gun and scrunching up scared in the night; she could no longer keep Kurt in her fairy tale. That sounds strange, but I think it was a fairy tale. I wanted there to be a man from Marrakesh clawing outside the fortress walls, not for the danger or a boy’s adventure, but so Kurt and I could have faith.

Faith was a never-ending work in progress. I wished I had more of it, but I often felt faith was a trick on the spirit. Was Christ really on your tongue at communion? Did His body and blood dissolve into yours and flow through your veins to make the impure holy? Faith and mystery were twins. That’s what Fr. Heaney preached; that’s what made a tiny moon of unleavened bread the body of God’s son. You could doubt that, even as you knelt while Fr. Heaney rummaged his stubby fingers in the gold chalice and plucked up your Christ and held Him before you as you uttered “Amen” and crossed yourself and walked to your pew with the Lord sliding down your throat and into your soul. Kurt believed in God and communion but the tennis court was what he most trusted, the place that no matter where he went was the same divine rectangle of familiarity protected by a fence that held back parking lots, tall grass, and other annoyances seen and imagined. I watched him on the other side. He was beautiful when he moved. His body born for the game; bone and reflex synchronized to the swoop of his racquet, an arc of symmetrical perfection as precise as the twitch of a swan’s wing. The ball lifting off the strings and finding the invisible weight of topspin as it accelerated and dipped over the net like a piece of light. He kept me running, side to side, up to the net, back-footing it to the baseline. I wasn’t beautiful. I breathed hard and played with abandon,
and I could hear Kurt laugh across the net, not making fun of me but admiring, maybe it was admiring, the strange, gangly theater of my game.

“You’ve got your own style,” he said walking to the net to pick up balls.

“Looks funny.”

“No, Jim, it doesn’t. It’s unique and there’s nothing wrong with that. A man needs uniqueness in his life. It sets him apart, you know. Nothing wrong with that. Keep being unique, Jim. The world has a way of wanting to take that away from you.”

“You feel unique?”

“In moments.”

“Vera’s unique.”

“That’s one word for it.”

“This girl Alice at the front desk, she’s unique.”

“What’s going on with her? I saw you two swimming beyond the waves the other day.”

“We’re just friends.”

“Women are unique by nature.”

“Maybe.”

He slipped a ball into his pocket and looked at the late-morning sun. Sweat shone on his face and beaded at the tips of his long hair. His white shirt was drenched. It was a moment he wanted to keep in a bottle and twist shut. You can tell when a man feels that way; there’s a smile, but not a full one, the shoulders slump a bit, and the legs seem balanced on oiled springs; a man is quiet at this moment; feeling like the speck he is in the world is brightened, made known. To speak would wipe it away; to make a sound would be to lose the true, unpronounceable thing that gives him the measure of who he is. I wasn’t a man, but I studied men. I studied Kurt, and while a lot of him had changed since we met Vera, his pose of contentment, like the way he sipped a beer on the summer stoop or how he used to
look at Mom when she pulled something sweet from the oven, had not changed, although it had become harder to find.

“Alice wears mostly halter tops, doesn’t she, Jim?”

“A different color every day.”

“Like pulling flags from a drawer.”

“She’s a Baptist.”

“Not many of them in Philly. Nuns and girls in plaid pleated skirts. When I’m late for work and stuck in traffic, I see all those Catholic girls, holding books to their chests and hurrying in packs to school. When I see them it’s like being young and being old at the same time.”

“You’re not old.”

“Some of those girls will marry men like me and move into row houses and raise families. Others will move to Rittenhouse Square and be secretaries and accountants. A few will leave and won’t come back.”

Kurt took the ball from his pocket and bounced it on his racquet as he spoke. He didn’t look at it; he just kept it bouncing like a thing with its own life.

“Your mom and I knew a girl who left. She was from St. Thomas’s and she was a genius. Her father was a cripple and her mother had run off. The girl raised herself and cared for her broken old man. He drank too much but he was a gentle drunk. I was in her house a few times. It smelled like Pledge. Her name was Mary and man, could she do math. Whole pages of numbers and graphs and squiggles I couldn’t even begin to understand. She was communicating with a whole other world. The nuns didn’t know what to do. They couldn’t keep up with her. They brought in college professors. I felt sorry for her. She was this quiet thing no one could figure out. Our neighborhood mystery. It was the first time in my life that I really understood how different people are. You grow up in a tight neighborhood of alleys and brick homes and everyone knows everyone from the
shipyards and the factories, everyone’s connected and you feel that they’re all like you. But they’re not. The ones like Mary let you know that. I asked a nun about Mary and she said, ‘God dispenses His gifts in different quantities.’ I’ll never forget that.”

Kurt’s voice was low and soft.

“Mary disappeared after graduation. She went to schools in New England and sometimes her dad would mix her into his drunken stories. ‘Mary was working on something for the government.’ ‘Mary was splitting atoms.’ Mary never came home. Not for Christmas. Not for anything. Not even for her father’s funeral. One day I was reading the
Inquirer
and saw a headline:
BRILLIANT PHILLY-BORN SCIENTIST DROWNS
. There was a picture of Mary. She had kept those same pointy-framed glasses and that funny sideways part in her hair. But she was gone, leaving behind, the paper said, a three-room apartment and unfinished theories. She drowned in Walden Pond outside Boston. Fell through thawing winter ice. I thought, How could that be? How could a girl so smart not know the dangers of thawing ice? All that math and all those numbers in her head. She must have felt the temperature. She must have seen the sheen of water on top of the ice. But she fell through. The smartest person I ever knew drowned like a child or a fool not paying attention.”

“Maybe it was suicide.”

“There was no note. No inkling of it. Her scientist friends said she was excited, that she was about to solve an unsolvable equation, or some scientific thing.”

“Maybe in the end she couldn’t solve it.”

“No, Jim. It didn’t feel that way. You don’t kill yourself in a half-frozen pond. Mary was too smart. She would have thought of a better way. But if she was that smart, why did she fall through? I keep thinking about that. It’s strange. The way your mom died is not strange to me. A car slides on the snow, jumps a sidewalk, and hits
someone. That’s freakish, but I can see it in my mind. The puzzle of it solved. Witnesses said the car went out of control in bad weather. But Mary through the ice I can’t get.”

“But Mom’s puzzle is not solved. We never found out who was driving that car. No one ever got a license plate number, or they were too scared to come forward with it.”

“You know who was driving that car.”

“A numbers collector for the mob.”

“That’s the kind of car it was. A black Fleetwood.”

“How do we live with that, Kurt?”

“We put it away. Store it deep somewhere. I figure it like this. Whoever hit her, hit her by accident. The crime was in driving away. That’s what I hold to, Jim. It gets me through. But one day, and you know how Philly is, I’ll be working at the shipyards and someone’ll whisper into my ear the name of the man who was driving that car. Then, I think, real quiet I’ll go see that man one night. You can’t act on anger. You got to let things settle. Let them harden so you can see clearly. Waiting can kill a man, but waiting, my dad used to call it ‘biding time,’ is what you have to do sometimes.”

“I want to come when you go see that man.”

“Maybe. Keep one of your dictionary pages open to patience.”

Kurt was still bouncing the ball on his racquet, but the racquet had switched hands.

“Nimble.”

“What?”

“You’re nimble. That’s my word for you today.”

“Procrastinator. As in a boy delaying getting his ass kicked in tennis by his old man. Get back over there and let’s hit.”

I smiled and ran to the baseline, my legs stiff from standing so long at the net. Kurt’s balls came quick, precise, smudging the white lines, every one in but every one so close to being out. Kurt said the key to the game was taking space away from the opponent,
gradually shrinking where the opponent could go, and then, just at the right moment, putting the opponent on the run. He said “opponent” when he played tennis. He didn’t say
guy
or
man
. I was his opponent on the court, not his son. I was somebody to be beaten. I liked that. I liked that he thought enough of me to give me his best. That’s what a boy wants most from his father. The respect of being counted as an equal, of losing, maybe, but keeping that respect until the day he wins, which I was sure must feel like it felt when I traced Alice in the darkness.

Kurt beat me 6–0. We played a second set and I lost 6–0 again, but I hit better and found angles that surprised Kurt a few times. I even slid an ace by him. An old couple played on the court next to us. Their skin was the color of pancake batter; webs of purplish veins ran through their legs. They wore long visors and big black sunglasses. They seemed uncommonly pale. I had to squint to look at them. They were consistent but what little power they had was all above the waist. Theirs was a languid game, the ball a burned-out planet, arching and landing with no spin, but staying in play as if you took the game that was in them long ago and set it to slow motion. Kurt and I studied them from the fence shade.

“The legs go first on an athlete,” said Kurt. “Look at the guy. He shuffles and his swing is stiff. What’s that word, Jim? He’s lost his, ah … fluidity. That’s it. He’s lost his fluidity. He’s doing okay for an old guy, but you hate to see it happen, don’t you? I bet he can remember those days when his legs worked just fine. I bet he can see his game like his memory sees it.”

“It’s good that they’re hitting at their age, though.”

“No doubt. That’s how I’ll be one day. An old man with a can of balls, roaming tennis courts looking for games. Everything slower. Knees stiff. Ankles brittle. Shoulders cramped. Aging is like going into battle day after day. That’s what it seems like to me. Just so long as I keep my mind, remember what I know now about chasing balls
and hitting angles. If I keep up my leg squats maybe it’ll be a long time before I slow down. It’s all about strong muscles.”

Kurt built his muscles in the basement of our Philly home. Like the back stoop he sipped his beer on after work, the basement, an unfinished, unpainted cave at the bottom of twelve narrow steps, was his place, except for the washer and dryer Mom had under a lint-shrouded window that let in strangled strands of light. When I went down, which wasn’t often, to hunt for a shirt or a pair of socks in a pile of laundry, it was an underworld of brass and copper pipes, slanted beams, half-driven nails, wires, circuit breakers, and gray metal boxes, the bones and veins of a house, absorbing and bending with footsteps that creaked like ghosts just beyond the square of light in the kitchen above.