Trinity Fields (25 page)

There is structure to her dialogue, but it works its way along through a complex series of stitches, thinkings and rethinkings. The gin makes no obvious impression on her, neither speeds her up nor slows her down. She has matured into a splendid character, perhaps not as sad as I'd thought, and by the time evening comes I find myself thinking, I am glad I have come here if only for these couple of hours with her.

The telephone rings and I answer. It is Bonnie Jean. “How's it going over there?” she asks.

“We're having a wonderful reunion,” I say.

“Are you going to want to stay here tonight or with Mom?”

I haven't thought about this. I'd thought, in fact, to return to Santa Fe for the night. But given that tomorrow's the day, there seems no reason to circle back to Michael and Alyse's when I could just as easily leave from here.

“Does she have room for me?”

She's overheard, and says, “Plenty of room here, Brice. You stay here and tell your sister if she and the rest of them want to come to dinner, it's fine with me.”

I begin to repeat to Bonnie Mother's offer, but she cuts me off. “You two go on with whatever you're doing,” she says. “Is she still in Corinthians right now?”

“She is.”

“Corinthians Two?”

“One,” I say.

“I'll talk to you later, Brice,” she says.

“Later.”

Mother, lovely wisps of white hair curling about her ears and shoulders, is telling me that though the speeches of Apollos might have been more elaborate than those of Paul, there was something to be said for the power of crudity and plainness. Apollos was the lesser orator because he could only be articulate, whereas Paul could be both elegant and unpolished in the same breath.

She has some pasta in the cupboard. I put on water to boil. I tell her to keep on talking.

“It
is
interesting, isn't it, Brice?” she asks.

“It is, Mom.”

“What are you doing?”

“I'm going to make us something to eat before this gin sends us both to heaven.”

She is relighting her pipe when she says, between draws, “If you could get to heaven on gin, I'd already have booked passage a long time ago. But Brice?”

“Yes?”

“Did you know that Corinth was the home of Sisyphus?”

And she was off into her bedlam of mythology once more.

How it came to pass that I have no photographs of Kip is beyond me. Certainly photographs were taken. I can easily imagine one when our families visited Mesa Verde together during the summer of 1957. Kip and I at the foot of a long, lashed ladder, our arms over each other's shoulders, straw hats. Watches, I believe, with flexible silver bands that dug into the wrist, matching watches whose faces caught the sunlight and flashed back at the camera, making it look like we held small suns in our hands. We two browned by summer stood against the blanched stonework of Cliff House. I envision him now as possessing marvelous and intricate crow's-feet spreading like fans at either edge of his eyes. Maybe some smile lines, maybe not. The skin under the eyes would be limpid, possibly sallow. He was always stronger than his size might convey. Narrow shoulders, indeed the shoulder blades were pronounced and his chest was rectangular. Kip had long arms, which swung with characteristic ease at his sides when he walked, and his wrists seemed if anything too thin for his hands, which were as large as those of a workman—veins standing high between and behind the knuckles that, when we were kids, were often bruised, or cut, from the extravagance of our activities. Wide feet, and long, too—and if I remember right, yes, ankles thin just like the wrists.

Kip was as fragile as he was sturdy. As for myself, I have always been less fragile, less sturdy, and even now live in the commodious in-between. I look at my wrists and hands and see that they are of a more harmonious (or, rather, common) symmetry; I see that my fingers are neither too long nor short, but average and proportional. When I study myself in the mirror—something I seldom do, by the way; makes me feel uncomfortable—I see a man of certain purpose and energy, right there on the pivot point where youth is behind but old age is still ahead. I am in good health, good form. Lord knows I don't do anything to keep myself fit.

—In the genes, my father'd have said if he could see me, and no doubt he'd have disapproved of my easygoing inertia. He was always the active one, the winter skier, the spring hiker, the summer rider. I'm more like Mother, I suppose, given to bursts of mental activity combined with stretches of physical indolence. My father liked to work standing in the lab, read and wrote standing—just as Karl Marx did when writing
Das Kapital
, as he was fond of reminding me.

—The Reds stand, we can stand, too, he'd say.

I tend now to the sedentary, and when I walk in the city I prefer to amble. Jessica has long since given up walking with me. I hold her back. She and Father would have gotten along famously as walkers if they'd ever had the chance. The stroke that brought my father down was enveloped in its own ironies. But though his regimes of exercise didn't save him from his own dying heart—given where he lived and worked, I'm surprised cancer didn't find him first, in the way it found so many of them who worked up here on the Project, playing with radioactivity before its effects on the human cell were fully known—I don't fool myself into believing that by taking a different approach to diet and health (my approach is to ignore such matters) I have any better chance than my father had of tricking death into some delay.

And as for Kip? There is no telling what his genetic fate had in store for him. His parents' death in the accident precluded our ever knowing how long a natural life they might have enjoyed.

I remember the night Kip was orphaned. Why does it come to mind just now? Because they were in the same car the night they died as they'd been in when we caravaned to the Four Corners and Mesa Verde.

Like all the accidents that descend upon us, this one seemed inadvertent, though maybe more cruel in its timing and circumstances than any I had known before, harsh and meaningless. And yet it is so meaningful in its absence of valuable meaning. So long ago and still rife with paradox. It was catalytic. I speculate that his father had suddenly diagnosed what Kip's blue pony meant, figured it out in a deeper way than I had, and hoped to dissuade him. This may be a romanticization of their purpose in coming east, however. The engineering department at the university had been the recipient of significant grants from the Atomic Energy Commission and had begun to expand its nuclear science programs. The dean was recently quoted as having said, “Technology is liberal arts.” Maybe Kip's father was thinking of leaving the Hill for academia, just as my father threatened to do every so often. Of course, I will never know. But I do know that it seemed to me at the time they were doing nothing else but being parents who loved their wayward son, and were on their way to be supportive of him, on their way to New York to visit him. They were coming, and though Kip had been a model skeptic, he had not been able to betray—by my sights—his subdued joy at the prospect.

They were in Pennsylvania or New Jersey or somewhere. They talked to me when they telephoned, since Kip wasn't in. I found myself wondering what they would look like in New York, as opposed to on the Hill, but try as I might I couldn't picture them here.

—How's the weather there, Brice? Emma Inez asked me.

—Okay, I said.

I wasn't sure how the weather was, nor why it mattered.

—When do you think Kip'll be home?

—Pretty soon, I said.

I wasn't sure at all when Kip would come home. I was never sure when Kip would come home.

—And how you doing, Brice?

—I'm doing fine, Missus.

—That's good.

Some Western habits don't die hard, they simply never die. Yes, I did say
missus
. I'm sure of it, same way I still put
melk
in my coffee and know the opposite of weakness is
strainth
. I waited for her to speak next. All this was beginning to make me a little angry with Kip. Where was he and why wasn't he here to take care of answering all these questions his mother put to me?

—Brice?

—Yes?

—Would you tell Kip we're looking forward to seeing him? And you, too. And his girlfriend Jessica, too.

—I'm looking forward to seeing you, too, and I'll tell Kip what you said.

—Goodnight, Brice.

—Goodnight, I said.

It was I who got the next call, too, and though I wasn't told what had happened, I knew something was wrong. The man wanted to locate Kip. His voice was more sour than curdled cream. There was boredom behind, or inside, his constraint. Voice of an official. Made me indignant in the same way virtuoso bureaucratic behavior still provokes me. He was an intimidator and tease, this man who called, with his dismal inquirings. Yes, I would find Kip right away. Yes, this was where he lived. No, he's not here right now, I already told you. I already told you my name. Yes, that's with an
i
not a
y
. Can I tell him what this is in reference to? Well, all right, his parents are coming in this afternoon and so he's bound to show up sometime soon. Yes, that's our address but—

Kip did turn up, not quite sure how to take this visit from the folks, on the one hand nervous that his father intended to ride him about his drifting lifestyle, on the other excited—as much as he could allow himself to be—to see Emma Inez. He had been over at Jessica's, so I supposed but didn't ask. He had a composite dreamy and astute look to him, difficult to describe yet nothing I hadn't seen before.

—Some man called looking for you, I told him.

—What about? as he wandered into his room, unbuttoning his shirt to change into a relatively fresh white one.

Wasn't sure. —How's Jessica?

—Was it about a job?

—I don't think so. I don't know.

—Did the parents call?

—Last night, your mother did.

Rummaging through the chaos of clothing piled on the floor of his closet, Kip finally drew forth a tie, a wide conservative swath, and said, —She say when they're showing?

—You're really going to wear a tie?

—I wish you asked the guy for a name at least.

—He knew our address, I said, watching Kip knot the tie.

Nothing more was said, at least that is how I remember the day, until the police arrived and broke the news to Kip. Something of an emotional smear or haze thereafter. Kip left on the tie. To this day I am ashamed I wasn't able to piece together the quite simple puzzle the man on the telephone had provided me. Those weeks that followed the accident were unmoored—and I cannot help but think that if I'd been discerning, I could have softened the blow. But maybe that is the worst sort of wishful thinking. We were helpless. What can I say? Jessica and I went out with Kip into the night, walking together, stopping for a drink here and there as we went, and she cried, and I came very close to crying myself, and Kip changed as he walked, got darker and darker, but never cried. Not even when the sun came up the next morning and we decided, all three—if for no other reason than to keep going for a few hours more before Kip and I faced returning to the apartment and the responsibilities that death in the family brings to the living—to take a ferry out to Liberty Island.

We somehow found the ferry, and bought passage. We were all sick during the short windy crossing. None of us had the strength or desire to take the circular stairs up into Lady Liberty's crown, from whose vantage the downtown buildings and bridges could be seen. Instead we sat on the scant, colorless grass and watched the brown waves build their own white crowns and carry them for a little and then lose them in the muddy harbor swells.

Dear Brice, Kip wrote from New Mexico, “Dear Brice, strange it is to be here again, and to see the old place. Staying at your house, thought I could hack it at mine, but I was wrong. Your parents are being nice. Nice, listen to me, no, they're being more than nice, they're being family. Your mother is looking after me like a hen, and your father came with me over to the house, my house, I mean, to help me sort through things. The authorities wanted to come by to go through Dad's papers, make sure there wasn't anything that might breach security. As if the old man would ever break their rule about engineers not keeping notes outside the Techs. He wouldn't even have thought to bend one, let alone break it. I started to go into a tirade over it, them combing through what's private property, but then I remembered what it was about this place that always drove me, and you too, Brice, drove us nuts. They still think it's 1945 here, some of them anyhow, the questions, the secrets, the poking and prying. Can you imagine these people wanting to go through Dad's stuff? What can someone like me do? Nothing is what. So I kept quiet and I certainly didn't let on that I managed to get his diary into a safe place. What do you think of that! I wanted to read it the other night, but I couldn't get myself to do it. Maybe someday, who knows, it may be interesting. Instructions on how to create a neutron shower in the privacy of your own home? I doubt it. If anything, it's probably pages of worrying about his son and wondering what he did wrong as a father to have a child like me—or is that just self-centered of me to think that? Am I just so narrow that I believe the world revolves around Kip? I don't know. But I do know I couldn't face reading it now. Maybe I should have handed it over, at least that way I'd know that nobody would ever see it again. But anyway, Brice, as far as possessions go there's not much here I really want. Your mother says to put them all into storage because someday, she says, I'll have a family of my own and I may want these heirlooms and all, but to me it's junk, most of it, just junk. Is there anything you remember in my house you want? Give a call if there is, because I don't know how long I'm going to be able to stay here. I go from being bad off, to getting these strange moments of feeling positive about the future. I know I am alone, and that's bad and okay too. What does it mean when you feel like you don't have a history? That's how I feel. I know I do, but I can't touch it somehow. I keep thinking Emma Inez is hiding around a corner somewhere and she is going to pop out of nowhere and say, Surprise, surprise—we're still here, son, and we know it's pretty harsh but we wanted to teach you a lesson in appreciation. Childish thinking, eh? Did I tell you your mom put me up in your old room, that's where I'm sleeping. Brice, she's kept it like some shrine, just exactly the way it was when you left. Creepy. I don't know how well I'm dealing with all this business out here, if you want to know the truth. Or did I already say that? The stars are out the window right now, I'm looking up at them, and I think it's new moon, real black outside. . . . Later same nite. So this is what I'm doing, I decided. Went out and walked over to Ashley Pond and thought about stuff and what I want to do is go by your mother's advice and not think about any of this junk, there's some money by the way, more than I thought they had, but while it's true I wasn't that close to them these last years I'd sure trade ten times, a thousand times the money to have them back safe and not gone, sounds soft but it's what I'm thinking. Something like this happens to you, like I was saying, you realize how alone you really are in this world. I got you, I got Jessica, and that's not nothing (backhanded compliment). What I have in mind to do is throw everything in storage, like your mom was saying, then come back to the city for a little while and do this. Don't tell Jessica what I'm going to tell you, promise me or else. And don't give me any shit about it either, because I don't need that kind of thing right now and you're my best friend, and I won't tolerate it, all right? Okay, so this is it. I've decided I'm going to ask Jessica to marry me. I'm not a child anymore, and if I was a month ago, I'm not now. Of course, I want you to be best man. You are the best man, so you can be best man. Then what I got to do, what I am going to do Brice old best man Brice, and I want not to hear one word out of you about it because I just don't, because I know what is right for me, what I want to do, and so lay off on the advice and especially the politics that are so important to your intelligentsia elitist shitfilled head, I say this knowing I like you better than any brother I would ever have had, as you know, asshole, what I intend to do is to go ahead and join the air force. I want to do something, and this is the only way that makes sense to me to do it. I know you think Vietnam is a bitch. I'm not even saying you are wrong, all right? I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is that it may be right for me. That's all. I remember you telling me that you and I had the same blood, when I was telling you that no, we've got different blood in us, and maybe you'll believe me now. So that's it, it's what I want to do, and if you're my friend, you won't say word one about it, and if you're not my friend, you can protest and lecture till you're blue in the face and Brice it won't make a bit of difference. What else—not much, I suppose. All I can say is I feel strong, given the situation, and that your parents are good people, Bonnie Jean's got a boyfriend, a nerd but all right, and I went way out of my way to tell her that her Charlie is the living end. Predict nuptials. Okay, that's it. I miss Jessica and I miss your sorry ass every so often. Please destroy this after you've read it.