World's End (49 page)

“My father!” she shrieked, lunging into him to pound her balled hands on the drum of his chest. He tried to snatch at her wrists, but she was too quick for him. “Look at you,” she snarled, pushing away from him so violently he nearly lurched backward over the railing and plunged to the unforgiving peg-and-groove floor below. “Look at you, in your faggoty suit and fucking crew cut—what do you think you are, some kind of Shriner or something?”

“Mardi?” Depeyster's voice echoed from the rear of the house. “That you?”

She stood poised in the doorway, drilling Walter with a look that tore through the last tattered rags of his self-esteem. “I'll tell you what you are,” she said, lowering her voice as a bull lowers its horns for goring, “you're a fascist just like him. A fascist,” she repeated, lingering over the hiss of it as if she were Adam discovering the names of things—fink, pig, narc, fascist—and slammed the door for punctuation.

Terrific, Walter thought, standing there in the empty hallway. He was footless, fatherless, loveless, his wife was living with his best friend and the woman he'd left her for probably felt better about Mussolini than she did about him. And on top of it all, he was sick to his stomach, his head ached and he'd nearly ripped the bumper off his car. What next?

Walter braced himself against the banister and turned to peer down the well of the staircase. Below him, at the foot of the stairs, in an old pair of chinos and a faded blue shirt that brought out the color in his eyes, stood Depeyster Van Wart—Dipe—his boss and mentor. Depeyster was working something in his hands—a harness or bridle, it looked like—and he wore a puzzled expression. “Walter?” he said.

Walter started down the stairs. He was forcing a smile, though the muscles of his face seemed dead and he felt as if he were either going to pass out cold or break down and sob—hard, soulless and free though he may have been. All things considered, he did pretty well. When he reached the last step, leering like a child molester, he held out his hand and boomed “Hi, Dipe,” as if he were greeting him from the far side of Yankee Stadium.

They stood a moment at the foot of the stairs, Walter losing all control of his face, the lord of the manor dropping the bridle—yes, bridle it was—to lift a hand and scratch the back of his head. “Did I hear Mardi?” he asked.

“Uh-huh,” Walter said, but before he could enlarge on this curt and wholly inadequate reply, Depeyster cut him off with a low whistle. “Jesus,” he said, “you look like hell, you know that?”

Later, over successive cups of coffee in the ancient cavernous kitchen that gleamed with the anachronisms of dishwasher, toaster, refrigerator and oven, Walter experienced the release of confession. He told Depeyster of Jessica and Tom, of his hallucination on the road, the defeat in his heart and his crazy confrontation with Mardi. Hunched over the bridle with a rag soaked in neat's-foot oil, Depeyster listened, glancing up from time to time, his aristocratic features composed, priestly, supremely disinterested. He offered the encouragement of the occasional interrogatory grunt or interjection, heard him out and chose sides without hesitation. “I hate to say it, Walter”—he spoke in
clean, clipped, incisive tones—“but your wife sounds like she's gone off the deep end. I mean, what can you expect from a woman who could move into a shack that hasn't even got electricity, let alone running water—and with a doped-up screwball like that Crane kid, yet. Is that stable or what?”

No, of course it wasn't. It was irrational, stupid, a mistake. Walter shrugged.

“You made a mistake, Walter, forget it. We all make mistakes. And as for Mardi—well, maybe that's for the best too.” Depeyster gave him a long look. “I admit it, Walter, I hoped that maybe you and her, well. …” He broke off with a sigh. “I hate to say this about my own daughter, but you're worth ten of her.”

Walter blew the steam from his fifth cup of coffee and toyed with a wedge of peach cobbler. He was feeling better, the nausea held temporarily in check, his despair tempered in absolution. And he was feeling something else too, a sense that his moment of triumph and decision was hovering just in front of him: his life had come to a point of crisis, and now, he thought, still drunk but infused with a sort of alcoholic rapture, he was on the verge of release. “You know all those letters I wrote to my father?” he asked suddenly. “In Barrow?”

If Depeyster was caught off guard by the abrupt turn in the dialogue, he didn't show it. He leaned back in the chair, dropping the bridle on the newspaper he'd spread out on the table. “Yeah,” he said, “what about them?”

“They never came back.” Walter paused to let this sink in.

“So you think he's there, then, huh?”

“Uh-huh. And I want to go find out.” Walter raised the cup to his lips, but in his excitement put it down without drinking. “I've been saving my money. I'm going to fly up there.”

“Walter, listen,” Depeyster began, “that's terrific, that's great—but have you really thought about it? What if he's not there and you waste all that time and money for nothing? How you going to feel then? Or what if he won't see you? Or if he's changed? You remember his problem with alcohol. What if he's a drunk in the gutter? Look, I don't want to discourage you, but don't you think if he wanted to see you he would have answered your letters? It's been what—eleven, twelve years? A lot can happen in that time, Walter.”

Walter was listening—Dipe was only trying to protect him, he knew that. And he was grateful to him. But he had to go. He hadn't told Depeyster about the marker—he'd never have believed it was an accident—but the fact was that it was gone: blasted, obliterated, wiped out. There was nothing here that had a hold on him any more—not Hesh, not Dipe, not Mardi, Jessica, Tom Crane or Laura Egthuysen. The marker had started the whole sick cycle and now he'd completed it—the Van Wartville stage of it, anyway. There was nothing left now but to go find his father and bury the ghosts forever.

“I think you're crazy,” Depeyster was saying. “You're a strong smart young man, Walter, with a lot of good qualities and personal attractiveness. You've had some bad luck—terrible, rotten luck—but I say forget the past and look ahead of you. With what you've got you can go a long way—and I don't just mean in my business, but in any business you want.” Depeyster pushed back the chair and went to the stove. “More coffee?”

Walter shook his head.

“You sure? You feel all right to drive?” Depeyster poured himself a cup and crossed the room to sit back down at the table. Outside the window, a solid unbroken monolith of shadow fell from the house to engulf the lawn and the rose garden at the foot of it. “I'm paying you a good salary, Walter—damn good, for a kid of your age,” Depeyster said finally. “And you're worth every penny of it. Stick with me. It can only go up.”

Walter pushed himself up from the table. “I got to go, Dipe,” he said, a fearful sense of urgency on him, of things closing in.

At the front door, he turned to shake hands with him, so charged with emotion he felt as if he were leaving that moment for the penumbral wastes of the north, felt like a daredevil climbing into his barrel on the icy lip of Niagara. “Thanks, Dipe,” he said, nearly choking up, “thanks for listening and, you know, for the advice and all.”

“My pleasure, Walter,” Depeyster said, grinning his aristocratic grin. “Be careful now, huh?”

Walter dropped his hand, and then, in the rush of his good feeling, said, “One other thing, Dipe—I'm going to need two weeks off. … I mean, if it's not going to be a problem or anything.”

In that instant Depeyster's face went cold. The look he gave Walter was the same look Hesh put on when he was challenged or disappointed. Confused, growing hot, already knowing the answer from the set of that face, Walter suddenly thought of the last time he'd seen Hesh, nearly a month ago. It was during dinner—Walter's favorite, borscht, lamb chops and potato latkes, with sauerkraut and homemade apple sauce and lettuce from the garden—and Walter had mentioned his father—Truman—and Hesh had made some deprecatory remark.
Well, you may hate him,
Walter blurted,
but Depeyster says—

At the very mention of Depeyster's name Hesh had exploded, leaping up from his chair to pound his fist on the table, leaning over to rage in Walter's face like a barking dog.
Depeyster says,
he mocked.
Who the hell you think it was that raised you, huh? The bum that left you an orphan? This, this robber baron, this crook that puts all these ideas in your head—is he the one? What right does he have?

Hesh,
Lola was at his side now, her slim blue-veined hand on the rock of his forearm, trying to restrain him, but he shook her off. Walter sat frozen in his chair.

Hesh rose up to his full height, his bald head flushed and his nose as red as the borscht in the bowl before him. His voice dropped an octave as he struggled to control it.
When I got you that job at Depeyster Manufacturing it was through Jack Schwartz because I know him from all my life and I thought you could use some experience of the real world and maybe some money in your pockets … but this, this is crazy. The man is a monster, Walter, don't you know that? A Nazi, a union buster. Depeyster this, Depeyster that. It was him that ruined your father, Walter. Know it. On the grave of your mother, know it.

The same look. Depeyster leveled it on him now. “Walter, you know this is our busy season. We've got six thousand aximaxes and three thousand muffins to ship to Westinghouse by the end of the month. Orders are coming in by the truckload. And then that guy just quit in the paint room, didn't he?”

Walter may have been fatherless, but everybody seemed to want the job. “You won't let me go, then?”

“Walter, Walter,” Depeyster said, and again his arm went around
his shoulder, “I'm just trying to look out for you. Listen, if you really want to go, can't it wait a little? Two months, how's that? I'll give you your time off in two months, in the fall, when things slow down at the plant and you've had some time to think about it—what do you say?”

Walter said nothing. He broke away, and trying to muster all the dignity he could, what with his rumpled shirt, crapped-over pants and the first sharp stab of a crippling hangover shooting through his brain, he shuffled down the steps of the porch.

“Walter,” Depeyster called at his back. “Hey, come on, look at me.”

Walter turned when he reached the MG, and despite himself gave his boss and mentor a rueful smile.

“Hey, I didn't tell you the good news!” Depeyster shouted as Walter turned the engine over. Walter waited, the car shuddering beneath him, as Depeyster sprang down the steps and leaned over the passenger side. He still had the bridle in his hand, and now he held it up in triumph, like a hunter with a brace of pheasant. “I'm buying a horse!” he sang, and the evening seemed to rise up around him in all its promise, the golden glow of the setting sun illuminating his grinning face as if this were the final frame of a movie with a happy ending.

As for Walter, he made it home without incident—no scrapes with history, no shadows springing up out of the blacktop, no ghosts or mirages or other tricks of the eye. He pulled into the driveway of his lonely little rented place, cut the engine and sat a moment as the air balled up around him. Sitting there, he gradually became aware that there was something wrong with this air he'd dragged in with him—it was tainted, rotten, the rank, foul air of the fish market or dump. It was then that he remembered the groceries.

He lifted the lid of the trunk, and there they were: strewn cans, wilted lettuce, fractured eggs, deliquescing meat. It was too much for him. The smell of corruption rose up out of the hot enclosure to stagger him, ram one fist into his belly and another down his throat. He lost his balance and fell to his knees, mercifully, before the Old Inver House, the coffee and peach cobbler and whatever it was he'd had for breakfast began to come up. For the longest time he knelt there, bent over this acrid little puddle of spew. From a distance, you might have thought he was praying.

In that distant and humid summer of 1679, when the patroon came to Van Wartville to widen roads and improve his property, and Jeremias Van Brunt brazenly defied him, the
Jongheer
saw that defiance for what it was: yet another insolent blow struck against the very system of civilized government itself. Not half a mile from the cow pasture in which the Peterskill riots would one day unfold, and not much farther than that to where Walter knelt cathartically in the driveway of his rented cottage, Stephanus took his stand. If this ignorant, unwashed, violent, one-legged clod could challenge him, what would prevent a reprobate like Robideau or a subtle snake like Crane from doing the same? There were no two ways about it: if he were to give an inch, if he showed the slightest hint of indecision or trace of flexibility, the whole edifice of the manor would come crashing down around his ears. And how would that sit with his plans to build an estate that would make Versailles look like a cabbage patch?

And so, in high dudgeon, the patroon demoted Joost Cats, incarcerated Van Brunt's half-breed nephew and incontinent son, and sent word to the shirker that his tenancy was terminated come November. Then he ordered the carpenter to cease work on the roof and begin constructing a set of public stocks. Abuzz with gossip, scandalized and not a little afraid for themselves, the common folk—the Cranes and Sturdivants and van der Meulens and all the rest—took up their tools and went back to work. Scythes rose and dropped, trees fell, dust rose and deerflies hovered over redolent
paltroks
and sweaty brows. But they worked with one eye only, the
other fixed firmly on the road ahead of them—the road that branched off to Nysen's Roost.