Bereavements

  BEREAVEMENTS

  NOVELS BY RICHARD LORTZ

  Bereavements

  A Crowd of Voices

  Lovers Living, Lovers Dead

  The Valdepeñas

  Children of the Night

  RICHARD LORTZ

  BEREAVEMENTS

  BEREAVEMENTS

  The poem on page 85 is from the play The Innocents by William Archibald. Copyright, 1950, by William Archibald. Copyright, 1950 (Revised and Rewritten), by William Archibald. Copyright, 1951 (Acting Edition), by William Archibald. Reprinted by permission of Samuel French, Inc.

  Copyright © 1980 by Richard Lortz

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce

  this book, or parts thereof, in any form, except for

  the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

  Library of Congress Number: 80-65001

  International Standard Book Number: 0-932966-08-X

  eISBN: 1-57962-292-5

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  THE PERMANENT PRESS

  Sagaponack NY 11962

  fugue (fug) n. Music, a polyphonic composition based upon one, two, or even more themes, which are enunciated by the several voices or parts in turn, subjected to contrapuntal treatment, and gradually built into a complex form having somewhat distinct divisions or stages of development and a marked climax at the end. (t. F. t. It.:m. fuga, g. L fuga flight)—fugue’like’, adj.

  For Ramon

  “I played sly tricks on madness.” — Rimbaud (1854-91)

  BEREAVEMENTS

  Book I

  THE BOY, who was dead, who had died eleven months ago, was standing on the corner of Christopher Street and Seventh Avenue in Sheridan Square, and when she saw her son, Mrs. Harrington-Smith Evans knew the truth of it and the illusion simultaneously.

  His back was to her as he nodded and gestured excitedly, speaking to two other boys his own age, both like Jamie dressed prematurely in the ubiquitous uniform of the Village: patched, faded levis and either a tank-top or a wash-thin t-shirt.

  His blond, careless hair, always so neglected, hadn’t improved. It was scooped back from his forehead and hung in its usual thick, heavy coil from the nape of the neck, twisted ’round with a rubberband.

  Grief, if profound, is a kind of madness. Like a fish from the sea greedy to devour the sun, Mrs. Evans’ heart leaped from its despair to embrace the illusion that shimmered before her eyes.

  A hand she could barely control seized the door handle of the car, while the other, equally shaken, rattled a few frantic diamonds against the glass that separated her from the chauffeur. She saw Dori’s eyes lift to the rear-view mirror, then his head turned to see what had attracted her attention in the street as he braked swiftly and brought the long black Rolls to a smooth stop against the littered curb.

  Later, when she thought about the incident and was sufficiently herself again to be able to laugh just a little, her cheeks nevertheless warmed with embarrassment. What must those three boys have thought?!—a woman heavily veiled, enveloped in black, trailing heel-length yards of diaphanous silk, flying like a witch from a chauffered limousine to seize one with a shattered cry only to confront—so intimately!—a startled stranger.

  The boy jerked to one side in alarm, as amazed as if a giant taloned bird had plunged from the sky, pulling away from hands that literally clawed at this shoulders, a sudden wild mouth that sought to embrace his.

  She succeeded in kissing him, missing the parted lips but smearing his cheek with a streak of pale pink before she stumbled back, her palms those of a child at a blackboard, scrubbing the air as if she could instantly erase the sight of the boy who wasn’t Jamie.

  Thank heavens Dori was quickly behind her to lead her away, return her to the car, or she would have appeared even more of a freak, the shock of disappointment prepared to drop her sobbing to her knees.

  She wanted to apologize, but it was impossible. She made Dori do it, watching from from the safe, cool shadows of the car, listening to his faint words.

  “Madam is sorry. She didn’t mean to startle you.” And to the blond boy who so resembled Jamie: “She mistook you for someone she knew. You look very much like him . . . from the back, and from the side . . .”

  The explanation was too long and elaborate, and totally unnecessary. He ended it there, touching the visor of his cap.

  “F’r a minute,” grinned the blond boy, wiping his cheek, “I thought it was some kinduh new fuckin’ ripoff.” And just to make sure, he reached for the bulge of his wallet in the back pocket of his levis.

  When they reached the Village Post Office on Christopher Street, Mrs. Evans was so oddly postured, the eyes lidless, fixed in an unblinking stare, that for one jolting moment Dori thought she had suffered a stroke, or that her heart had stopped.

  But then he remembered how often he had seen her this way, when she appeared stupified, a superb fakir, so lost to the sensible world in her grief, that he imagined a mirror held to her lips wouldn’t cloud, or if she cut a finger, not a single drop of blood would bleed.

  The last time . . .

  It had happened after he’d driven her to the heart of Spanish Harlem and a shambles of a building for a visit with Alejaunita-Clemencia Luz, a medium who, it was said, had an extraordinary ability to communicate with dead children.

  He opened the car door, kicked some garbage aside near the stoop for her to pass, and with tight lips and worried, almost tearful eyes, shook his head quickly, warning her, begging her in his own shy way not to go in.

  The small waiting room was lighted with candles, choked with incense, curtained with beads, crowded to standing with half-crazed mothers, and one gaunt father so heartsick with loss, there were two round wounds in his head instead of eyes.

  “Sons,” a woman’s mouth whispered, close to her ear; “he had two sons. Fine boys. Four and nine.”

  Mrs. Evans moved away; intuitive, frightened to hear the rest, but there was no place to go.

  “They died together. Both at once. A week ago. Exactly as the clock struck twelve. Something in the blood I was told . . . a rare germ, a mysterious disease the doctors knew nothing about, eating them alive. They wasted away, became withered and small, with their heads still big, like midgets in their coffins, like babies just hours from being born. . . .”

  She was ushered through a cloud of gauze and velveteen into a circular room with just enough theatrical lighting to make out the white-gowned, curiously-luminous form of Mrs. Luz, and the ornately-carved captain’s chair on which she sat, raised on a two-step dais.

  Possibly because the waiting room was so crowded, the seance, if that’s what it was, began without the slightest delay.

  “I get a ‘J,’ ” the high priestess of Mu intoned “James or John. Perhaps Joseph.—No no; don’t tell me! Names are unimportant. When a communicant appears, he is never alone. He is with relatives or friends. Sometimes their names crowd into my head; everyone is so anxious to speak, to be heard. Your child was a boy of course; yes?—that much is certain. Is a boy, I should say, because death, my dear, is an illusion, a transition, the shortest of journeys. Your son is well. And happy. He sends his love, many kisses. . . .”

  In the next moment, the amazing woman was ostensibly in trance, foam-flecked and writhing, while a cord of ectoplasm began to materialize in the air above her. This, like television, had apparently improved with the technology of the age: no longer white, misty, fearfully malformed, but as real as a knot of hanging rope, subtly multicolored, burning with an unmistakable “dayglo” brilliance.

  If that wasn’t heartbreak enough, a child’s voice was heard—boy or girl, nevermind—from nowhere and everywhere at once, reverberating faintly, like a popular ballad in an
echo chamber, surely a record or tape, even a bored child behind a secret curtain wailing into a pillow or through a mouthful of cotton.

  “Mrs. Evans—?”

  Dori touched her shoulder, smiling because she always “came to” with an expression of mild surprise, like an 18th Century lady overcome by the “vapors.”

  “Are we there?”—there being the Christopher Street Post Office where he had been driving her once a week on what mysterious errand he hadn’t yet been told.

  Dori was, more than anyone—and Mrs. Evans thought of this now because his eyes were curious, shyly questioning—one of her very few remaining confidants. He’d been in her employ for more than thirty years—long before the death of her second husband. Consequently, to the degree it was “seemly,” he was very much loved, sharing many of her most secret thoughts and feelings—not a practice, sadly, uncommon to rich, lonely widows like herself. After beloved friends die and shallow ones disappear, servants, who are devoted, often become—at least in warm affection and a reciprocity of confessed private feelings—truly intimate friends.

  Still, there were a few activities held strictly her own affair, and her weekly visits to the post office was one of them.

  Dori noticed, however, that she had a small steel key which she never bothered to conceal, usually taking it from her purse long before she stepped from the car. Afterward—twice now—she’d returned with a few letters in hand, so it was obvious she possessed a personal box to receive mail. But what kind? Dori had no idea, and it was this that generated his curiosity and concern.

  Why would a wealthy woman with two home addresses in the East, a third in Florida, together with many secondary ones (those of a battery of lawyers, accountants, brokers, business managers and advisors) need, or want a private mail box besides?

  With some slight embarrassment the thought that the letters might be of a sexual nature occurred to Dori. Surely, many post office boxes were rented for exactly that reason. But to attribute such a motive to Mrs. Evans seemed wildly improbable, in conflict with all he knew of her—even more so now after the shocking death of her son, a death that had left her devastated, irreparably broken, it seemed, in spirit and mind.

  Dori had known sorrow himself, grieving as all men must when the inevitable, inescapable time for grief is upon them. He had buried his parents four days apart, his father dropping dead at his feet the moment the handful of earth was thrown into the open pit of his mother’s grave.

  Some years later, he lost a lovely young wife, suffering on the day and hour of her funeral a seizure so insane, he wrenched the artfully blushing corpse from the coffin, thinking to bring the wretched cold dummy of white satin and subtle stink back to singing life in the total, miraculous crush of his arms—while his two brothers, wild in their frenzy to stop him, sought almost in vain to pry the shapeless broken doll from his grasp.

  So then.

  Grief he had known.

  And his empathy for Mrs. Evans was boundless. As was his care. And his watchfulness.

  He had not, at first, expected her to live. He was convinced she would arrange to die as gracefully and theatrically as the way she had chosen to live: breathing death in a fragrance, or mixing it into dark sweet chocolate in a Wedgewood cup.

  She had done neither. But it was clear she lived out her daily nightmare like the anonymous alcoholic who saves himself with one word: today. Today only. Today.

  Sexual motivation discarded, Dori was left with a head empty of thought: only that his employer, for her own private reasons, must be corresponding with a person or persons to whom she wanted her Manhattan address as well as the estate on Long Island kept secret.

  “Are we there?!” And Mrs. Evans smiled almost brightly, her shadowed eyes playing with his, not above teasing in her familiar way, apparently recovered from the vapors which today were indeed visibly real, the smog outside the car dust-thick and golden in the unusual heat and glare of the late September afternoon.

  She found her small key, put a hand on the door, but then sank back, her face swiftly bloodless, the smile she had forced turning fake and thin.

  That boy, that boy . . . !—So like Jamie, his after-image became a teared blindness, a pressure against her chest.

  Faded blue, white, watered gold, cinnamon (these had been his colors, too): jeans, shirt, a weight of pale sun-streaked hair so heavy and abundant she was forever begging him to have it cut—at least thinned or shaped to sane proportions—and the darkening olive of his skin, flawless and even finer-grained than his beautiful Spanish father’s.

  With dismay, helpless censure, secret pleasure—warning him against the dangers of cancer—she’d watched his thin young body tan to an astonishing cocoa after months of surfing. By summer’s end, he appeared as black as a Black! Indeed, against the evening’s darkening sky off the veranda of the Palm Beach house, he became invisible! Or so she joked (to his vain joy) pretending child and heaven had become indistinguishable.

  Laughing, blind, she played at reaching for her elusive boy, her lovely gentle boy, through the scented, honey-suckled darkness . . .

  Your son is well. And happy.

  He sends his love.

  Many kisses . . .

  It was impossible to move, embarrassing to be able to find only enough strength, desire, will, to lift a shaking, hesitant hand.

  “Dori—”

  She placed the key in his palm, and after a slight pause murmured faintly: “Box 89.”

  There were five letters in all; no, seven: one a postcard, another an eight-by-10 manila envelope marked PHOTO-DO NOT BEND, nevertheless folded exactly in half, obviously to fit into the small post office box. The remaining letters were all roughly the same size. Most were addressed Occupant, or simply Box 89. Only two had return addresses.

  One of these was very thick, containing something of plastic or metal; fingering it carefully, Dori decided it was a tape cassette.

  But, of course, the postcard proved the most interesting and rewarding of all—if thoroughly baffling—and, to Dori’s well-developed sense of mystery and intrigue, just the slightest bit hair-raising.

  It was addressed, Box 89, plus city and zip, but no return address.

  He turned it over and with the greatest surprise read the first two words: Dear Mother—with the “Mother” underscored.

  Beneath this bizarre salutation, complete with smudged erasures and several words crossed out with such industry and pressure an actual hole had been scrubbed into the paper, Dori’s widening eyes trailed over a wavering pen’s scrawl that only a badly-schooled child or an uneducated adult could have written.

  Dear Mother. I seen what you wrot. Im lost. Please fine me. Youre loving son. Angel.

  The “loving” had been partially scratched out but was intended with the slightest effort to be easily read. The “son” like the “mother” was heavily underscored. And in parenthesis in the lower left-hand corner was a telephone number.

  With the following afternoon free to spend as he pleased—more likely to “kill” or somehow dispose of, since he hated being out-of-doors in the humid, Indian summer’s heat and the day’s intermittant rain—Dori considered a film. But his taste was limited to science fiction and suspense melodrama, a good one not always easy to find.

  Instead, he decided to shop. He badly needed shoes, and could do with a few shirts and a tie or two. Besides, on his way out Mrs. Evans had called after him, her voice deceptively idle: “Oh!—and if you happen to pass a record store, do buy me a cassette. Have you enough money?” (He did.) “I’ve always wanted to own one.”

  She had never wanted to own one, of that he was sure.

  Occupant. Box 89 . . . The thick envelope.

  “But please. Dori. Only if it’s convenient. Don’t go out of your way.”

  He bought the cassette first, in a small shop off Eighth Avenue; a handsome, compact beauty bound in leather.

  Shoes were next, inordinately troublesome to find in a day of bizarre styles and rai
nbow-dyed leather and plastics.

  “Size nine, double-E, black, thin soles, absolutely plain tip . . .”

  Three clerks in three stores looked at him as if he were a visitor from outer space.

  He settled for a pair of relatively plain wingtips, hoping Mrs. Evans wouldn’t notice, or, if she did, wouldn’t mind.

  I seen what you wrot . . . Now why should he have thought of that!?

  He walked idly east, forgetting the shirts, the ties, stopping for coffee, ostensibly with nothing more on his mind than a leisurely stroll.

  Dear Mother . . .

  The Village was always interesting: crowded, busy, noisy, sometimes a bit exciting if one encountered a street brawl, talented tramps, youngsters who sang or danced, a violinist who, except for luck, or dope, had enough genius to place him on the stage at Carnegie Hall . . .

  Im lost. Please fine me . . .

  But the crowd thinned, the noise diminished, the excitement was nowhere to be found, and the brawlers and the tramps, if there were any, were occupied elsewhere.

  Dori had walked much too far east, away from the Village proper, finding himself ultimately, and surprisingly without surprise, directly facing the door of a local newspaper office: The Village Voice.

  Youre loving son. Angel . . .

  What had happened, of course, was similar to a post-hypnotic suggestion, the subliminal logic something like this: if “Angel” had seen what Mrs. Evans had written (“I seen what you wrot”) then whatever had been written must have been public: a public announcement of some kind. This accounted for all the letters, the announcement making Box 89 available to its many readers. An “announcement” could only have been an advertisement, a personal ad surely. This eliminated The New York Times as well as The Post and News, none of which carried such ads. And since it was impossible to consider seriously any of the underground papers, the only answer was right before him. In all probability, Mrs. Evans had placed a personal ad in The Village Voice.