After that, we rode the carousel, which was a replica of the one Patty had ridden as a child, or so she remembered. We drove home and had a nightcap, then went to bed. We did not make love that night, both of us too exhausted, but the next morning began with a series of amorous embraces resulting in bad-breathed, bleary-eyed, sleepy sex that I would rank among the most satisfying couplings of our married years. Not since those early “love is a drug” days had my heart felt so completely given over to her.
We drank coffee together and looked over the paper, then she went shopping. I procrastinated for half the day, going to the car wash, et cetera, before returning to the quiet chamber of my home office via the Mailboxes Store. Lily and Raven, like twin Golden Retrievers, had been waiting for me faithfully the whole time. Moles, moles, get in your holes.
Lily
Moses said he sent you a letter but I didn’t hear back from you yet. I was out-of-reach there for a while because of some incidents we don’t need to get into. My biggest concern in life at this time is whether you got rid of Mr. Clancy yet because if you didn’t I can see where this boat is going and I’d rather stay on shore.
As a matter of fact if you didn’t get rid of Clancy good riddance stop reading right here.
If you’re reading this now you got rid of that jerk and that’s a good thing. I might seem rough around the edges but a lot of my actions are as a result of my having a bigger heart than most people. Some people
say “Control yourself!” and I say to them “Don’t you have any feelings at all?” because it seems like their whole lives they’re trying to have NO feelings. That’s who I am and your heart which I’m sure is plenty big does not have room for me and someone else. Trust me on that Lily.
As you probably figured out I was in the hole again. One of Stewart-Know-It-All’s friends tried to settle the score in the middle of Group while I was talking. Group is stricter than other places so they put me away good for beating on him. He didn’t get punished even though interrupting someone in Group is a punishable offense but with shrinks whoever cries loudest wins.
The whole time I was in the hole I thought about you and when I got out the guards said I seemed calmer in there than before. I used to scream and yell but they weren’t shrinks. The squeaky wheel gets the grease but the nail that stands up gets hammered down.
I wrote most of this letter to you and then I was flipping through the poetry book and right there on page 86 Walt Whitman said it better than me:
As if a Phantom Caress’d Me
As if a phantom caress’d me,
I thought I was not alone, walking here by the shore;
But the one I thought was with me, as now I walk by the shore—the one I loved, that caress’d me,
As I lean and look through the glimmering light—that one has utterly disappear’d,
And those appear that are hateful to me, and mock me.
That’s exactly what it was like in the hole this time. Do you know if Walt Whitman was ever in jail? It seems like it. I don’t think that other guy Richard Lovelace was ever in prison even though he called one of his poems “To Althea from Prison.” Either he was never in prison or he didn’t have as big a heart as you would think a poet should.
H
Dear Henry,
I got rid of Clancy, like you asked me to. He is, of course, still teaching until Greta returns. I told him I thought about his nice offer but I am otherwise attached. Yes, I used the A-word: attached. I said before that I’d rather have a real man where you are than a phony man out here, and now I’ve put my money where my mouth is.
As for Clancy, don’t worry; he took the news well and has not tried to flirt with me since. As a matter of fact, I think he has now set his sights on another teacher. So much for steadiness of heart, huh?
I spent some time recently (I had the long weekend to myself) looking over the letters I’ve received from
you and I realized something. I’ve heard a lot of stuff about what’s going on in there, and a little bit about your ex (boo!), and you’ve made some general points about the kind of guy you are … All well and good, by the way—a lot of you comes through between the lines. BUT at the risk of exchanging mystery for depth, I must ask you, especially now that I’m rejecting suitors out here, to share more of yourself. Who is Henry Joseph Raven? I don’t even know where you’re from, where you’ve lived, what your childhood was like, etc. Maybe they make you talk about this in Group and you’re burned out? Or maybe you’re a really private person? Or maybe (and this is probably most likely) we’re just getting started? I don’t know. But I want to know. What’s your story?
A FAQ I read about writing to prisoners said not to ask about their crimes right away—that prisoners who felt like discussing them would do so of their own free will, but I think we’ve gotten to the point where I should know something more about what happened to land you in there.
I don’t mean to sound cold (I hope I don’t!) but if you want me, you’re going to have to give a little more of you.
xo
Lily
PS Richard Lovelace was in prison when he wrote that poem, but I don’t think he was in there very long. I
don’t think Whitman was in prison, ever, but he liked to use the Prisoner as a character in his poems. PPS I wrote the above a day ago and I haven’t mailed it yet, so this is an add-on. Something else happened to me when I went over our old letters. I realized I have not been entirely truthful with you. My father didn’t really invent any plastics. He was an inventor, that much is true, but he was not as successful as I have made him out to be. I thought, when writing to you before, that I could convince myself that things were different, but I cannot. He was a good man. I suppose he was something of a dreamer. I have vague memories of his laboratory in the garage. I’m sorry to have burdened you with untruths, but you have to understand that I’m struggling with this myself. My aunt told me a different version of my father’s story, that he was manufacturing drugs and selling them, but I refuse to believe her. You have to make your own version of events if you want to live a happy life. I just went a little too far.
xo
Lily
I found Patty packing up a file box in the living room. She had stopped wearing black altogether.
“What’s going in there?” I asked.
“Old videos,” she said.
“What’s the point of packing away old videos? Everything is coming out on DVD anyway.”
“CJ videos,” she said.
“Oh.” Did this mean I would no longer find my wife laughing and weeping on the sofa, watching increasingly static-filled images of her brother and his friends?
She looked up. “Don’t tell my mother I’m putting these away, or she’ll want them at her house, which will start a whole other cycle of her watching them, if you know what I mean.”
I nodded. I’m not sure what I was thinking, but I found myself unable to speak, unable to summon the required platitudes.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
I nodded again.
“I can’t keep doing this forever,” she said. She asked for the packing tape, from the table.
I handed it to her.
“I just want things to get back to how they used to be,” she said.
“Me too. That’s what I want too.”
She wrapped the box with packing tape and I carried it out to the storage shelving in the garage. I thought of my aunt’s meticulous Eileen archives. Everyone’s life is destined to become a bunch of boxes. We live, we leave behind a trace, the trace gets relegated to storage, we are forgotten.
It took me some time to realize what was going on with Patty. The way she had decided, as if on a whim, to suddenly stop mourning CJ, to pack his videos into boxes, was a clear indication that she was moving backward, emotionally. How can you console someone who refuses to admit she’s hurting? She, whose inner life revolved around remembering her brother, had suddenly decided to forget him, to block everything out. Patty
had always had that ability on a micro scale. She could pull herself out of any mood for the moment, if the situation demanded it. Now she was doing it with her whole life. She had given up, on some level unknown to her conscious mind, trying to find justice for CJ. That part of her which had nearly destroyed our sacred bond was being repressed even further. It would explode if not tended to. People die. Death is the mother of beauty, a poet said. We’re all on the clock. Awareness of death is the mother of beauty. The death of others is the mother of beauty. My own death is the mother of nothing. My own death is the end of everything. An absurd idea. A joke that tells itself. Patty had excused herself from the burden of feeling. I was concerned for her.
Feverish at the Mailboxes Store. I was generally careful to keep my feelings in check, but somehow a flash of superiority at the Mailboxes Store snuck around my defenses and stormed my emotional citadel. There is something undeniably exciting about being in contact with a man who has taken another man’s life. In my shoes you would have felt the same excitement. (My own sense of disgust threatens to censor me here, but if I cannot be honest, this is all a waste.)
The sight of my empty mailbox tempered my sense of superiority, with just enough disappointment to make me think twice about what I had been feeling. I was able to divide my feelings into three component parts and distribute them accordingly:
1. The allure of the killer. I assigned this part to Lily, as it would provide a useful motivating factor. She should be drawn toward whatever dark glamour attached itself to a killer.
2. The sense of superiority. This part—most keenly experienced among the people of the Mailboxes Store—I stitched onto my sense of mission. I was not going to stop until I had brought Raven to his knees, until I had made him feel what he had done, and to accomplish that I needed a somewhat inflated sense of importance.
3. The remainder, the excess, the part that threatened to overtake me, the sense that Raven had somehow become my killer—as if he were a starving child I was sponsoring by sending five dollars a month—I let myself feel as a reward for having done a good job so far, for having made, in a preview of the main event, Raven suffer a little bit already.
Someone said once that writing was like trying to dance with a bear who only wanted to wrestle. I’d gotten Raven to dance a few steps. He and I had become protagonist and antagonist in a world of minor players. What did the husband/wife-cum-brother/sister couple behind the counter at the Mailboxes Store have to do with it? What did my aunt and uncle have to do with it? Minor characters, walk-ons, bit parts, atmosphere. And Patty, what could she contribute now, really, while I was teaching the wrestling bear to dance, lulling him, seducing him, pulling him close, dancing cheek to cheek, until he himself wanted to dance, and then wrestling him to the ground …?
This thinking of course resulted in an emotional hangover. Celebration of projected victories in the face of present setbacks is not recommended. In the midst of this aftermath, I realized I was leaving something out of the equation, something that would bring meaning to Raven’s future suffering. It wasn’t about me,
my superiority, Raven’s allure. It was about CJ. And he was disappearing. Patty was trying to put him away. I had met him only a few times. I remembered the polite disdain of a younger brother-in-law. An athletic build. A seemingly telepathic line of communication with his father, used primarily for inside jokes. Then he was gone and Patty, inconsolable Patty …
I left the Mailboxes Store and drove like a madman to the Stockings’ house. I expected only the housekeeper to be there, but when I knocked, Minerva answered.
“Hello, Owen.” She smiled in such a way as to ask what I was doing there. Not unfriendly, just inquisitive.
“Minerva—Minnie, hi. I’m sorry I didn’t call. I just wanted—well, it’s good you’re here, anyway.”
She invited me in, poured me a plastic cup of fresh-squeezed orange juice, the same kind I liked to purchase at the market we both frequented. I sipped from the cup and took a peek up the stairs. If she hadn’t been home, I could have gone straight up to CJ’s room. You can learn a lot about someone from the environment they create for themselves. I wasn’t planning to ransack the place, but only to soak up the atmosphere, to refuel, to remind myself that CJ had once been a living human being.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” I said, improvising, “but I wanted to talk to you about some things.”
“I’m always here for you, Owen.”
She made prayer hands at me and closed her eyes. It was a brief and spontaneous gesture, one I’d seen her make before, the intent of which was to convey blessings upon the recipient while also highlighting the humility of the one making the gesture. I
hoped, for everyone’s sake, that she wasn’t going around town doing this, but one never knew. She did hang a dream catcher from the rearview mirror of her Escalade.
“I’ve been thinking about what you said to me at the market some time ago—about Calvin Junior and the leaf you saw falling …”
This was the only common ground I could think of that didn’t involve other people. My first inclination had been to come to her with concerns about Patty’s wardrobe change, but I quickly realized that (1) it didn’t get me any closer to CJ’s room, and (2) knowing Minerva, Patty would hear all about it before I even got out of the neighborhood.
“Oh yes,” she said. “That was several months ago. He was right, too.”
“Right?”
“The leaf can fall without bringing down the whole tree. That moment was a life saver. Literally.”
How was I going to parlay this into a trip up to CJ’s old room? Up the colonial steps, down the jute rug runner, second door on the left. I knew where it was, had been inside even, to dump and retrieve coats during a party for Calvin Senior’s firm.
“How was it a life saver?”
“You’re young yet, Owen. You don’t want to know.”
“Ironic that CJ is the one saving lives.”
She nodded and dug up a smile. I was glad she’d remembered the leaf thing at all. The fact that she saw it as a life-saving event was even better, because while we sat upon the Early American furniture, I hatched a diabolical chick in my mental henhouse.