At last he shook his head as if to clear it. “This is—” He seemed as confused as I was; the robe, the gray hair loose gave him the look of a crownless king in a costume play for children.
“I’m sorry,” he said, shaking his head again. “This is all so new.”
“Excuse me?”
“Well, you see, it’s just—” he leaned forward and blinked, quick and agitated—“It’s all very different from what I was told, you see. They said he died instantly. Very, very emphatic on that point.”
“But—” I stared, astonished. Did he think I was making it up?
“No, no,” he said hastily, putting a hand up to reassure me. “It’s just—I’m sure it’s what they say to everyone. ‘Died instantly’?” he said bleakly,
when still I stared at him. “ ‘Perfectly painless’? ‘Never knew what hit him’?”
Then—all at once—I did see, the implications slithering in on me with a chill. My mother too had “died instantly.” Her death had been “perfectly painless.” The social workers had harped on it so insistently that I’d never thought to wonder how they could be quite so sure.
“Although, I do have to say, it was difficult to imagine him going that way,” Hobie said, in the abrupt silence that had fallen. “The flash of lightning. Falling over unawares. Had a sense, you do sometimes, that it wasn’t like they said, you know?”
“Sorry?” I said, glancing up, disoriented by the vicious new possibility I’d stumbled into.
“A goodbye at the gate,” said Hobie. He seemed to be talking partly to himself. “That’s what he would have wanted. The parting glimpse, the death haiku—he wouldn’t have liked to leave without stopping to speak to someone along the way. ‘A teahouse amid the cherry blossoms, on the way to death.’ ”
He had lost me. In the shadowy room, a single blade of sun pierced between the curtains and struck across the room, where it caught and blazed up in a tray of cut glass decanters, casting prisms that flickered and shifted this way and that and wavered high on the walls like paramecia under a microscope. Though there was a strong smell of wood smoke, the fireplace was burnt-out and black looking and the grate choked with ashes, as if the fires hadn’t been lit in a while.
“The girl,” I said timidly.
His glance came back to me.
“There was a girl too.”
For a moment, he did not seem to understand. Then he sat back in his chair and blinked rapidly as if water had been flicked in his face.
“What?” I said—startled. “Where is she? She’s okay?”
“No—” rubbing the bridge of his nose—“no.”
“But she’s alive?” I could hardly believe it.
He raised his eyebrows in a way that I understood to mean yes. “She was lucky.” But his voice, and his manner, seemed to say the opposite.
“Is she here?”
“Well—”
“Where is she? Can I see her?”
He sighed, with something that looked like exasperation. “She’s meant to be quiet and not have visitors,” he said, rummaging in his pockets. “She’s not herself—it’s hard to know how she’ll react.”
“But she’s going to be all right?”
“Well, let us hope so. But she’s not out of the woods yet. To employ the highly unclear phrase the doctors insist on using.” He’d taken cigarettes from the pocket of his bathrobe. With uncertain hands he lit one then with a flourish threw the pack on the painted Japanese table between us.
“What?” he said, waving the smoke from his face, when he caught me staring at the crumpled packet, French, like people smoked in old movies. “Don’t tell me you want one too.”
“No thank you,” I said, after an uneasy silence. I was pretty sure he was joking although I wasn’t a hundred per cent sure.
He, in return, was blinking at me sharply through the tobacco haze with a sort of worried look, as though he had just realized some crucial fact about me.
“It’s you, isn’t it?” he said unexpectedly.
“Excuse me?”
“You’re the boy, aren’t you? Whose mother died in there?”
I was too stunned to say anything for a moment.
“What,” I said, meaning
how do you know,
but I couldn’t quite get it out.
Uncomfortably, he rubbed an eye and sat back suddenly, with the fluster of a man who’s spilled a drink on the table. “Sorry. I don’t—I mean—that didn’t come out right. God. I’m—” vaguely he gestured as if to say I’m exhausted, not thinking straight.
Not very politely, I looked away—blindsided by a queasy, unwelcome swell of emotion. Since my mother’s death, I had cried hardly at all and certainly not in front of anyone—not even at her memorial service, where people who barely knew her (and one or two who had made her life Hell, such as Mathilde) were sobbing and blowing their noses all around me.
He saw I was upset; started to say something; reconsidered.
“Have you eaten?” he said unexpectedly.
I was too surprised to answer. Food was the last thing on my mind.
“Ah, I thought not,” he said, rising creakily to his big feet. “Let’s go rustle up something.”
“I’m not hungry,” I said, so rudely I was sorry. Since my mother’s death, all anyone seemed to think of was shovelling food down my throat.
“No, no, of course not.” With his free hand he fanned away a cloud of smoke. “But come along, please. Humor me. You’re not vegetarian, are you?”
“No!” I said, offended. “Why would you think that?”
He laughed—short, sharp. “Easy! Lots of her friends are veg, so is she.”
“Oh,” I said faintly, and he looked down at me with a sort of lively, unhurried amusement.
“Well, just so you know, I’m not a vegetarian either,” he said. “I’ll eat any old sort of ridiculous thing. So I suppose we’ll manage all right.”
He pushed open a door, and I followed him down a crowded hallway lined with tarnished mirrors and old pictures. Though he was walking ahead of me fast, I was anxious to linger and look: family groupings, white columns, verandahs and palm trees. A tennis court; a Persian carpet spread on a lawn. Male servants in white pyjamas, solemnly abreast. My eye landed on Mr. Blackwell—beaky and personable, dapperly dressed in white, back hunched even in youth. He was lounging by a seaside retaining wall in some palmy locale; beside him—atop the wall, hand on his shoulder and standing a head taller—smiled a kindergarten-aged Pippa. As tiny as she was, the resemblance sounded: her coloring, her eyes, her head cocked at the same angle and hair as red as his.
“That’s her, isn’t it?” I said—at the same instant I realized it couldn’t possibly be her. This photo, with its faded colors and outmoded clothes, had been taken long before I was born.
Hobie turned, came back to look. “No,” he said quietly, hands behind his back. “That’s Juliet. Pippa’s mother.”
“Where is she?”
“Juliet—? Dead. Cancer. Six years last May.” And then, seeming to realize he’d spoken too curtly: “Welty was Juliet’s big brother. Half brother, rather. Same father—different wives—thirty years apart. But he brought her up like his own child.”
I stepped in for a closer look. She was leaning against him, cheek inclined sweetly against the sleeve of his jacket.
Hobie cleared his throat. “She was born when their father was in his sixties,” he said quietly. “Far too old to interest himself in a small child, particularly since he’d had no weakness for children to start with.”
A door in the opposite side of the hallway stood ajar; he pushed it open
and stood looking into darkness. On tiptoe, I craned behind, but almost immediately he backed away and clicked the door shut.
“Is that her?” Though it had been too dark to see very much, I had caught the unfriendly glow of animal eyes, an unnerving greenish sheen from across the room.
“Not now.” His voice was so low I could barely hear him.
“What’s that in there with her?” I whispered—lingering by the doorway, reluctant to move along. “A cat?”
“Dog. The nurse doesn’t approve, but she wants him in the bed with her and honestly, I can’t keep him out—he scratches at the door and whines—Here, this way.”
Moving slowly, creakily, with an old person’s forward-leaning quality, he pushed open a door into a crowded kitchen with a ceiling skylight and a curvaceous old stove: tomato red, with svelte lines like a 1950s spaceship. Books stacked on the floor—cookbooks, dictionaries, old novels, encyclopedias; shelves closely packed with antique china in half a dozen patterns. Near the window, by the fire escape, a faded wooden saint held up a palm in benediction; on the sideboard alongside a silver tea set, painted animals straggled two by two into a Noah’s Ark. But the sink was piled with dishes, and on the countertops and windowsills stood medicine bottles, dirty cups, alarming drifts of unopened mail, and plants from the florist’s dry and brown in their pots.
He sat me down at the table, pushing away Con Ed bills and back issues of
Antiques
magazine. “Tea,” he said, as if remembering an item on a grocery list.
As he busied himself at the stove, I stared at the coffee rings on the tablecloth. Restlessly, I pushed back in my chair and looked around.
“Er—” I said.
“Yes?”
“Can I see her later?”
“Maybe,” he said, with his back to me. Whisk beat against blue china bowl:
tap tap tap.
“If she’s awake. She’s in a good deal of pain and the medicine makes her sleepy.”
“What happened to her?”
“Well—” His tone was both brisk and subdued and I recognized it at once since it was much the tone I employed when people asked about my mother. “She’s had a bad crack on the head, a skull fracture, to tell you the
truth she was in a coma for a while and her left leg was broken in so many pieces she came near to losing it. ‘Marbles in a sock,’ ” he said, with a mirthless laugh. “That’s what the doctor said when he looked at the x-ray. Twelve breaks. Five surgeries. Last week,” he said, half-turning, “she had the pins out, and she begged so to come home they said she could. As long as we had a nurse part time.”
“Is she walking yet?”
“Goodness, no,” he said, bringing his cigarette up for a drag; he was somehow managing to cook with one hand and smoke with the other, like some tugboat captain or lumber camp cook in an old movie. “She can hardly sit up more than half an hour.”
“But she’ll be fine.”
“Well, that’s what we hope,” he said, in what did not seem an overly hopeful tone. You know,” he said, glancing back at me, “if you were in there too, it’s remarkable that you’re okay.”
“Well.” I never knew how to respond when people commented, as they often did, on my being “okay.”
Hobie coughed, and put out the cigarette. “Well.” I could see, from his expression, that he knew he’d disturbed me, and was sorry. “I suppose they spoke to you too? The investigators?”
I looked at the tablecloth. “Yes.” The less said about this, I felt, the better.
“Well, I don’t know about you, but I found them very decent—very informed. This one Irishman—he’d seen a lot of these things, he was telling me about suitcase bombs in England and in the Paris airport, some sidewalk café thing in Tangier, you know, dozens dead and the person right next to the bomb isn’t hurt at all. He said they see some pretty strange effects, you know, in older buildings especially. Enclosed spaces, uneven surfaces, reflective materials—very unpredictable. Just like acoustics, he said. The blast waves are like sound waves—they bounce and deflect. Sometimes you have shop windows broken miles off. Or—” he pushed the hair out of his eyes with his wrist—“sometimes, closer to hand, there’s what he called a shielding effect. Things very close to the detonation remain intact—the unbroken teacup in the blown-out IRA cottage or what have you. It’s the flying glass and debris that kills most people, you know, often at pretty far range. A pebble or a piece of glass at that speed is as good as a bullet.”
I traced my thumb along the flower pattern of the tablecloth. “I—”
“Sorry. Maybe not the right thing to talk about.”
“No no,” I said hurriedly; it was actually a huge relief to hear someone speak directly, and in an informed way, about what most people tied themselves in knots to avoid. “That’s not it. It’s just—”
“Yes?”
“I was wondering. How’d she get out?”
“Well, it was a stroke of luck. She was trapped under a lot of rubbish—the firemen wouldn’t have found her if one of the dogs hadn’t alerted. They worked partway in, jacked up the beam—I mean, the amazing thing too, she was awake, talked to them the whole time, though she doesn’t remember a bit of it. The miracle of it was they got her out before the call came to evacuate—how long were you knocked out, did you say?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Well, you were lucky. If they’d had to go off and leave her there, still pinned, which I understand
did
happen to some people—Ah, here we go,” he said as the kettle whistled.
The plate of food, when he set it before me, was nothing to look at—puffy yellow stuff on toast. But it smelled good. Cautiously, I tasted it. It was melted cheese, with chopped-up tomato and cayenne pepper and some other things I couldn’t figure out, and it was delicious.
“Sorry, what is this?” I said, taking another careful bite.
He looked a bit embarrassed. “Well, it doesn’t really have a name.”
“It’s good,” I said, slightly astonished how hungry I really was. My mother had made a cheese-on-toast very similar which we ate sometimes on Sunday nights in winter.
“You like cheese? I should have thought to ask.”
I nodded, mouth too full to answer. Even though Mrs. Barbour was always pressing ice cream and sweets on me, somehow it felt as if I’d hardly eaten a normal meal since my mother died—at least, not the kind of meals that had been normal for us, stir fry or scrambled eggs or macaroni and cheese from the box, while I sat on the kitchen step-ladder and told her about my day.
As I ate, he sat across the table with his chin in his big white hands. “What are you good at?” he asked rather suddenly. “Sports?”
“Sorry?”
“What are you interested in? Games and all that?”
“Well—video games. Like Age of Conquest? Yakuza Freakout?”
He seemed nonplussed. “What about school, then? Favorite subjects?”
“History, I guess. English too,” I said when he didn’t answer. “But English is going to be really boring for the next six weeks—we stopped doing literature and went back to the grammar book and now we’re diagramming sentences.”