Stairway to Forever (2 page)

But Fitz would not, could not, force himself behind the wheel of a car otherwise than stone cold sober. That was because of Janet . . . and Kath. Indeed, he still frequently awoke from sleep in a cold sweat, tears streaming down his cheeks, gasping

out wrenching sobs, at the terrible, unbearable memories of what he had seen that horrible night.

Choosing his spot for the feline's grave, he laid the cloth bundle to one side, spat on his hands and began to ply the spade, portions of it flaking away with each shovelful of dirt, while the warped, crooked handle wobbled loose in the socket.

It had not any of it been poor Janet's fault, not really, he mused darkly while deepening and widening the hole in the rich black soil of the mound. She just had never been a truly strong woman—a sweet and a loving wife, a faithful and a devoted mother, yes, but never really strong. The tragic loss of their only son, young Fitz, had started it, begun the disintegration of Janet, Kath, his life and everything he had once held dear.

". . . regrets to inform you that your son, Lance Corporal Alfred O'Brien Fitzgilbert III . . . died this day of wounds sustained through enemy action, while in the service of his country . . . the Commandant deeply and sincerely . . ."

That, alone, would have been bad enough. But even more shattering to poor Janet had been that her son's bright, cheery letters had kept trickling in— one or two at a time—for long weeks after she had known that he was dead, that none of the plans he detailed in those letters could ever now come to fruition. The drinking had started during those torturous weeks.

At first, it was only Fitz and Kath who noticed the sharp increase in the wife and mother's consumption of alcohol, and that only because of her genetic predilection to alcoholism—not only was she of pure Irish stock, but both of her parents had died young of drink and her older brother was already become a sodden, divorced wreck of a man.

But both her husband and their surviving child had deluded themselves into the belief that the situation was only a temporary one, engendered entirely by the grief that they all shared, and that Janet would snap out of it when once she had finally adjusted to the facts and learned to live with them, soberly.

Such as the father and daughter fantasized just possibly might have occurred in fact, but ever-capricious and cruel fate had deemed otherwise, in this sad case. The agony had dragged on and on, rather than ending quickly and decently. It had been more than six weeks before the metal casket had arrived from Southeast Asia, accompanied by a young-old gunnery sergeant, bearing a manila file folder.

Sergeant Heilbrunn had been polite, but formal and taciturn, until Fitz had given him a brief rendition of his own service with the Corps. Then the young man had unwound a bit and accepted the proffered drink. No, he had not known the deceased, they had not even served in the same regiment. Heilbrunn had just been a warm body snagged on his way through headquarters after having been discharged to duty from a hospital. As he began to steel himself for the coming ordeals of wake, funeral mass and interment, Fitz thought that such impersonality was not a hallmark of the Corps in which he had served so long ago.

He had just about psyched himself up sufficiently to take it all, himself, and to provide strength for his wife and daughter, as well . . . then the mortician, Alexander Flodden, telephoned.

"Fitz? Fitz, I know you were coming down here this afternoon . . . don't."

Through clenched teeth, Fitz had replied, "Look,

Alex, I served in the Fifth Marines for the best part of three years in the Pacific, then served two more years in Korea, and Tve seen . . . seen . . . Well, anyway, I'm not going to throw up or faint or anything on you is what I mean.

"Okay, he was my son, my only son, and it'll be rough, but hell, Alex, somebody has to ... to identify the . . . him. And God knows, poor Janet and little Kath aren't either of them up to it, not now, not yet."

Flodden sighed deeply. "That's just it, Fitz, this body here is not your son's body. Somebody has fouled up, somewhere along the line."

"Well. . . well, of course it's my Fitz!" Fitz Senior had expostulated. "It's got to be! That Gunny, Heilbrunn, has the files and all."

"Yes, yes, Fitz," Flodden quickly interjected. "I've seen the paperwork, it's accurate, complete, but it's just that they sent the wrong body with those papers, Fitz."

Fitz had screwed his eyes tightly shut, shaking from head to foot, cold sweat oozing from his pores. If Flodden was right . . . ? If this damned, bloody, torturous business was to drag on still longer, could Janet take it without cracking completely and/or crawling so far into the bottle that she could never get out of it alive? Kath, too, was beginning to crumble a bit around the edges. And he, himself. . .?

"But, Alex, you never saw that much of Fitz as he was growing up, so do you think you remember his face well enough to . . . ?"

Once more, the mortician interrupted in his calm, sad voice. "Ah, Fitz, ah . . . this body has very little, ah, face left to it. I, for one, would hate to have the task before me of having to restore it for an open casket ..."

"Then, damn it," Fitz had shouted into the telephone mouthpiece, his eyes still tight-closed, but now with tears compounded of grief and frustration and fear for his wife and daughter oozing from beneath the lids to trickle down his cheeks, "just how in hell can you assume it's not my boy?"

Sensing the undertones of incipient hysteria, Flodden's voice became instantly, professionally soothing. "Fitz, my friend, it disturbs me deeply to have to add to your grief this way, please believe me. But this body is clearly not that of your brave, departed son, and there is no question about it. Fitz, this body is that of a negro—a very dark-skinned negro."

More than three months after the initial notification of his demise, the remains of Lance Corporal Fitzgilbert, Alfred O'B. Ill, USMC, really came home. But by that time, his father's worst fears for his mother's emotional balance had been realized in full.

Fitz had just lived with Janet and the endless problem she was become. Kath did too . . . for a while; but when the girl had had enough, she left home and, try as he might and felt he should, Fitz could in no way fault her decision, for Janet, when she was not comatose, was becoming more and more disgusting and unbearable with each passing day.

The Janet he had married after World War Two had kept an immaculate house, had been an accomplished and innovative cook and had been possessed of high standards of personal cleanliness and appearance. This new Janet, however, went long periods without bothering to either bathe or change her clothing, and the house about which she staggered in her filthy, slept-in clothes was become as unkempt and slovenly as was she, herself, acrawl with flies and roaches. Now, those few meals that Fitz took at his

home were of his own preparation—mostly TV dinners, cold sandwiches or canned beans or soups.

Cursing himself for a coward, the time, he actually sought the out-of-town travels that once had been something he had accepted only when there had been no one else of his qualifications to send. But he always made arrangements before such trips for one of the sympathetic neighbors to place food outside for Tom—that and keep the back door water dish filled.

At last, when matters had progressed far beyond the beyonds, he closed Janet's checking account and signed the necessary papers to deny her any access to his own. He took every one of her credit cards from her wallet, then paid off and closed every account. When next he came into the one-time home, she railed long and obscenely at him, spat out profane crudities that he had never in all their twenty-odd years of marriage suspected she knew.

Then, a piece at a time, the sterling silver began to disappear. When he had cleared out or locked up everything of intrinsic value in the house, Janet began to steal.

It was only after he had had to leave in the midst of a very important conference to fetch Janet—a sober, very shaky and sobbingly sorry Janet—from the city police lockup, wherein she had been immured for some hours after being apprehended and booked, caught in the act of shoplifting table wine from a supermarket, that he and Father Dan Padway had been able to convince her to enter a "rest home." He had had to dip deeply into their savings to finance the steep costs of her care and treatment, but he had felt the money well-spent when she had at length emerged so very much the old, much-loved Janet.

The matted grass, weeds and woody roots of the

hushes had made the digging slow with nothing but

the dull, rusty spade, but nonetheless, Fitz felt that

1 the grave was almost wide and deep enough when he

■ struck a much harder obstruction—stone, from the

; way the spade rang upon it. Sighing, he tried gently

| pushing the edge of the tool down in first one place,

then another, endeavoring to get under the rock and

lever it up, out of his way.

Janet had stayed dry for almost a year, faithfully ' attending her AA meetings, being counselled by Father Dan, as well as by a psychiatrist recommended by the priest and by the staff of the rest home that had done the job of drying her out. They had given her back her lost dignity, too: the house was once more become a well-tended home for her and Fitz and Tom. Fitz had begun to breathe almost easily once more and was considering the best ways of finding his absent daughter.

But then, of a day, Kath appeared on the doorstep. Painfully thin she was, with sallow skin and permanently dark circles under her unnaturally bright eyes. Her once-golden hair now hung dull and matted and lifeless over the shoulders of her too-big man's shirt. The shirt and her torn jeans were crusted with layers of filth and her cheap, ankle-high boots lacked more than a trace of what had been heels and soles. There were open sores on her face and neck, her hands were broken-nailed and grubby and a nauseating stench hung about her. The girl was— although it would be a while before they were confronted with all the unpalatable facts—suffering from the combined effects of malnutrition, drug addiction, two venereal diseases and enteritis. She also was by then three months pregnant and had not even the

foggiest notion as to who might have fathered her bastard.

At some time during those first weeks of discovery atop painful discovery—none of them helped by the fact that Kath had allowed her health insurance to lapse and so every one of the multitudinous medical expenses had had to come out of Fitz's shrinking financial cushion—concerning the returned wreck of their only surviving child, Janet had crawled back into the bottle for good and all. And Kath, when once she had ingested everything in the house that even looked as if it might have been a drug, joined her mother in the bottle.

Fitz had then tried to lose himself in his job, coming to the house that had once been his home as little as possible, and then only to collect the mail and feed Tom. Otherwise, he lived out of his car, staying out of town as much as he could and, when unavoidably in town, sleeping on the couch in his office and washing in the small sink of his half-bath there.

Each and every necessary visit to the house left him sadder and more haggard. None of the neighbors any longer even spoke to him as he made his way through the knee-high grass from the driveway to the front door. Unless one or both lay comatose, Janet and Kath would be screaming filth at each other, usually ignoring him except to demand money.

Upon entering, he had to gulp and breathe as shallowly as possible. The house stank, the air thick with a miasma of dirt, stale booze, rotting food, long-unwashed female flesh, excrement, urine and vomitus. The mail was always strewn the length and width of the tiles foyer, lying just as it had fallen through the door slot and been then scattered by

heedless, stumbling feet. When he had stuffed it all into his briefcase, he went directly to the kitchen, now become roach paradise, where bowls and plates of unidentifiable food substances sat on the floor and on every other surface, covered with mold or alive with white, writhing maggots.

In the beginning, he had at least tried. He had scraped and bagged and canned the garbage and trash, washed the dishes enough to run them through the dishwasher, mopped the floor and scrubbed the counter tops. But in the end he gave up, just as he had given up on Janet and Kath and trying to live any sort of life in close proximity to the two of them.

From his briefcase, he would take two large cans of cat food and a one-pound box of cat kibble. He had given over leaving canned cat food at the house after he had come back to find the opened cans here and there throughout the place, the spoons still in them, like as not, clearly eaten by one of the two women after the food money had all been spent for drugs or alcohol.

Then he would go through the screened porch and down the back steps to heap the contents of both cans into Tom's licked-clean plate. He would rinse out and refill the feline's water dish, then empty the box of kibble into the weatherproof gravity feeder. After sitting for a while beneath the trees and giving the loving cat the human affection that he craved, Fitz would steel himself for another pass through the fetid house, retrieve his briefcase, get back in his car and go back to work, hating himself for having given up on his wife and daughter, but fearing for his own emotional equilibrium should he try to do other.

"Maybe," Fitz mused as he dug, widening the hole in the mound top, vainly trying to find an edge

to the flat-topped stone, which looked to have the smooth regularity of worked stone, "maybe Janet's death was not really accidental. Maybe, deep down inside her, she really wanted to die. But maybe not, too. At least the Janet I knew and loved and lived with for all those years, the good years, would have never—no matter how personally suicidal she'd become—have taken her own daughter and unborn grandchild with her into death."

At last, the entire slab of stone was cleared of its covering of earth and roots and smaller pebbles and Fitz softly whistled to himself at the size of the thing. No wonder his prying spade had accomplished nothing on the first couple of stretches of edge he had found. The flat, rectangular stone was a good five feet long, nearly three feet in width and just how thick was anybody's guess. Yes, it was most definitely made work, not natural, though the master craftsman who had cut and shaped it had done it with such expertise that the fading afternoon light showed not even a single faint tool-mark on it—on it or on the stone-block framing around it.