Innocent Page 39

  "Nothing," I say.

  I have returned to see my therapist several times, but Dennis has no answers to the insane opera in which I found myself enmeshed after Barbara died, in part because he told me not to see Nat in the first place. But there's one thing Dennis and I always agree on, and that's that telling Nat the truth now would be impossibly destructive--not only of us, but of him. Most of what he assumed about his life on earth has shifted already in the last year. I can't ask him to pay another price just to relieve my overwhelming guilt. For me, this was always going to be a relationship built across the crater of a volcano. I have to walk those dangerous heights alone.

  But people get used to things. Rusty got used to prison, amputees learn to live without limbs. If I can stay with Nat, the present will overwhelm the past. I can see us in a house, with kids, frantic with two jobs and figuring out who is going to be able to get home in time to pick up from the soccer games, can envision us anchored in a world entirely of our own making and still thrilled to the core by who we are to each other. I can see that. But I am not sure how to get from here to there. I kept thinking that if we could hold it together until the trial ended, we would be able to go on, a day at a time, and I still believe that now.

  "I'm going to leave you two in peace," he says. "I can't really live here. Not now," he says. "Maybe I can come back eventually." He's quiet a second. "Can I ask something really personal?"

  I am instantly afraid, until he says, "Do I have any hope of grandchildren?"

  I just turn to him and smile.

  "Wild horses," he tells me.

  Outside, the garage door creaks and clatters. Nat is back. We both look in that direction. I stand up and Rusty gets up, too. I hug him quickly, but in earnest this time, with the sincerity and appreciation people always owe somebody they loved.

  Then I head to the garage door to greet my sweet, sweet man. But before I get there, I turn back.

  "You know, there's another reason I love him," I say.

  "Which is?"

  "There are ways he's a lot like you."

  The Camry starts. With the long drive north, the battery will recharge. Nat gives Rusty the cables just in case, then we stand on the driveway, waving. The car backs down the drive, then Rusty stops and gets out, and he and Nat hug each other yet again. I think one of the hardest things in a relationship is dealing with the way your partner sees his parents. I learned that in my marriage to Paul, the fact he didn't understand how his mom tended to boss him, and I've witnessed similar things a number of times since. It's like watching someone struggle with Chinese handcuffs. You keep thinking, No, in, push in, don't pull back, they just get tighter, and the poor sap, this guy you love or hope to love, struggles anyway. I am glad for Rusty and for Nat, glad for this night, but I know they still have oceans left to swim across.

  Then Nat and I start home. When you love someone, he is your life. The first principle of existence. And because of that, he has the power to change you and everything you know. It is like suddenly turning a map over so that south is at the top. It's still correct, still able to get you to anyplace you want to go. But it could not seem more different.

  As an intellectual matter, I remember that I clerked for Nat's father and was once mad for him. I remember that I actually knew Rusty long before I first met Nat. But Nat was someone else then, a stick figure compared with the person who now dominates my life, while Rusty's chief significance today lies in the inevitable ways he can affect his son. My life is Nat. With Rusty gone, I feel the utter solidity of that fact.

  We are both quiet, humming with our stuff. It has been quite a night.

  "I need to tell you something," I say suddenly as we are crossing the Nearing Bridge. There is pink light leaking up from the horizon, but the buildings in Center City are still blazing, reflecting gorgeously on the water.

  "What?" he asks.

  "It's upsetting, but I want you to hear this now. Okay?"

  When I glance over, he nods, looking darkly pensive beneath those thick eyebrows.

  "When I moved in with Dede Wirklich after my divorce, I was working at Masterston Buff, writing ad copy, and still trying to finish college at night. And I was taking this advanced macroeconomics class in the U Business School. I'd gotten an A plus in Intro Econ, and I thought I was good at math and could sail through. The prof was Garth Morse. Remember that name? He was one of Clinton's economic advisers, and he's still on TV all the time, because he's really smooth and good-looking, and I thought it would be totally cool to take a class from somebody like that. But it was way, way over my head, with all these out-there equations that the B students understood instantly. I was upset anyway about leaving Paul and having a hard time concentrating, and I got back the midterm and there was this big fat F. So I went to see Morse. And I was in his office about ten minutes, and he gives me this long, long look, like he's seen too many old movies, and says, 'This is too complicated, we need to talk about it over dinner.' And okay, I wasn't totally surprised. He had a reputation. He thought he was God's gift. And Dede was like, 'Are you crazy, go ahead, you want to stay in college forever?' He really was good-looking and a pretty exciting, interesting guy, totally charismatic. But still. His wife was pregnant. I don't remember how I knew that--maybe he mentioned it in class--but that part really bothered me. But Dede had a point, I needed to graduate and move on, and I really couldn't stand just then, right after my marriage ended, to fail at anything else. And so--"

  Nat hits the brakes so hard that I clutch and think about the air bag, when I can think at all. I look out the windshield to see what we hit. We are on the shoulder, right at the foot of the bridge.

  "Are you okay?" I ask.

  He has released his seat belt so he can bring his face close to mine.

  "Why are you telling me this?" he asks. "Why now? Tonight?"

  I shrug. "Because I'm sleep-deprived?"

  "Do you love me?" he asks me then.

  "Of course. Of course. Like I've never loved anybody else." I so mean that. He knows. I know he knows.

  "Do you think I love you?"

  "Yes."

  "I love you," he says. "I love you. I don't need to know the worst things you've ever done. I know you had a rough time getting to me. And I had a rough time getting to you. But we're together. And together we're better people than we've ever been. I really believe that. That's all." He leans over to kiss me softly, looks in my eyes another second, then checks the mirrors before pulling the car back onto the road.

  When you are twenty, you come to your boyfriends fresh. You are still hoping to find The One, and everybody who went before is really just a stepping-stone to that place and doesn't really matter. But at thirty-six--thirty-six!--that's no longer the case. You have been to the summit, believed in somebody's love forever, had the greatest sex you think you'll ever know--and somehow moved on to find something else. You have come to whoever is with you now along a rope line of experiences. You both know it. You cannot pretend what's in the past didn't happen. But it's the past, the way Sodom and Gomorrah lay in ash behind Lot's wife, who should have known better than to look back. Everybody understands when you get to this age that you carry history along, a person, a time whose effects cannot be fully forgotten. Nat has Kat, who I know still e-mails now and then and manages to upset him. And that is how it will be with Rusty and what happened with him. I see that now. He will be like the telltale heart still beating every now and then in the wall. But gone. It will be the past I lived, crazy but over, the past that somehow brought me to the life I really, really want that I will live every day with Nat.

  CHAPTER 45

  Rusty, August 25, 2009

  I was in my teens before I realized my parents were not a physical match. Their marriage had been arranged in the old-country manner. He was a penniless refugee, piercingly handsome, and she was a dowdy old maid--twenty-three--from a family with property, meaning the three-flat in which my mother lived until the day she died. I am sure she was thri
lled with him at first, while I doubt he ever tried to pretend he was enamored and grew ever more surly.

  Every Friday night when I was a boy, my father disappeared after dinner. I looked forward to that, truth be told, since it meant I would not have to sleep on the floor in my mother's bedroom, locked in there, which was how we hid out from his frequent drunken rages. When I was in grade school, I assumed my father was spending his Friday nights in a tavern or playing pinochle, both routine pastimes for him, but he seldom came home from his carousing and instead went directly to the bakery to begin preparing for Saturday morning. But one Friday night when I was thirteen, my mother started a small kitchen fire. Most of the damage was to her--she was high-strung and fretful by nature--and the parade of firemen who stormed into her house reduced her to a state in which all she could do was shriek for my father.

  I went to the tavern first, where one of my father's acquaintances--he really did not have friends--took mercy on me and my obvious agitation and said, as I was leaving, 'Hey, kid. Try the Hotel Delaney over on Western.' When I told the desk clerk there that I had to find Ivan Sabich, he gave me a watery, unhappy look but finally grunted out a number. It was not the kind of place where there were phones in the rooms in those days. I would say that even as I thumped up the filthy stairs, with the carpet worn to its backing and the halls reeking of some naphthalike agent used to control the infestation of pests, I was actually in some doubt about what I would find. But when I knocked, I recognized the woman, Ruth Plynk, a widow a good decade older than my father, who peered through the crack in the door in her slip.

  I don't know why she came to the door. Maybe because my father was in the john. Probably because he was afraid the desk clerk had come up for more money.

  'Tell him the house is on fire,' I said, and left. I did not know exactly what I felt--shame and anger. But mostly disbelief. The world was different, my world. After that, I sat enraged at dinner every Friday night, because my father hummed during the meals, the only time during the week that any sound came from him that bore even a remote resemblance to music.

  Of course, I never thought once about staring at Ruth Plynk through the small space in that parted door when I was in the several hotel rooms I visited with Anna. It was only when I had to tell my son I'd had an affair that the moment returned to me, but it has not gone away in all the months since, whenever I see Nat's evident confusion in my presence.

  That look is on his face now as he stands on my back doorstep. He told me last night, when I called to say I was finally headed back to sign the agreements Sandy has worked out, that he wanted to visit, but he has arrived earlier than expected. The first fall air has brought intermittent storms today. He wears a hooded sweatshirt, and his dark hair tosses in the high wind.

  I am happy in the most fundamental way to see my son, although the sight of him is also accompanied by faint distress. We mean well by our children, but so much rests beyond our control. There is a nervous distraction to Nat, a looking here and there that I suspect will be permanent, and an ingrained frown that I realize I have seen for more than sixty years in the mirror. I pull open the door, we hug briefly, and he steps past me, stamping the rain off his shoes.

  "Coffee?" I ask.

  "Sure." He takes a seat at the kitchen table and looks about. This is surely hard for him, to return to this house where so many charged moments have passed in the last year. The silence lingers until he asks how I enjoyed Skageon.

  "It was fine." I debate saying more but decide for many reasons that candor may be best. "I actually saw a bit of Lorna Murphy. The next-door neighbor?" The Murphys' vast summer house sprawls over several lots next to our little cottage.

  "Really?" Despite all that has gone on in the last two years, he seems more amazed than troubled.

  "She wrote to me last fall after your mom died, and we sort of stayed in touch."

  "Ah. Grief counseling," says the permanent wise guy.

  There is actually something to that. Lorna lost Matt, some kind of construction king, four years ago. A lithe blonde, an inch or two taller than I am, she has expressed a stubborn faith in me. I thought that was because she had been so long getting to the point of thinking about another guy, she simply couldn't change her mind after I was indicted. She wrote to me every week I was in prison and was my first call as I drove to Skageon on the morning of my release. I had no clue if I had the courage to suggest meeting up there, and in the event, I didn't have to. She said she would come up as soon as I told her I was headed that way. It was time for each of us to be with someone else.

  She is a dear woman, quiet, warm but contained. I suspect she is not my future. Time will tell. But I learned one thing with her. If I don't fall in love with Lorna, I will fall in love with someone else. I will do it again. That is my nature.

  "I was going to ask if you fished while you were up there."

  "Oh, I fished. I fished from the canoe. I caught two nice walleye. Great meals."

  "Really? I'd love to fish with you one weekend this fall."

  "It's a date."

  The coffee is done. I pour for each of us, and I sit down at the cherry kitchen table, with its wavy edge. It has been here throughout Nat's life, the story of our family written there in the stains and gouges. I can remember the origin of many of them--misfired art projects, temper tantrums, pans too hot for bare wood I stupidly set down.

  Nat is looking away, lost in something. I stir my coffee and wait for him.

  "How's all your work coming?" I ask eventually. Nat will continue subbing here in Nearing this fall, but he was also hired at Easton Law School to teach a jurisprudence course in the winter term, filling in for one of his former professors who will be on leave. He has been spending much of his time preparing for that. And he is back to work on his law review article, comparing the law's model of knowing conduct with what's suggested by the latest neuroscience research. It could be a pathbreaking piece.

  "Dad," he says without looking at me, "I want you to tell me the truth."

  "Okay," I say. I feel a stitch draw in my heart.

  "About Mom," he says.

  "She killed herself, Nat."

  He closes his eyes. "Not the party line. What actually happened."

  "That's what actually happened."

  "Dad." He shows again some of that perpetual agitation, the birdlike glancing about. "Dad, one of the things I really hated about growing up in this house was that everybody had secrets. Mom had her secrets, and you had your secrets, and you and Mom had secrets together, so I had to have secrets, and I always wished everybody would just fucking talk. You know?"

  This is one complaint I fully understand and would probably be powerless to change.

  "I want to know what really happened to Mom. What you know."

  "Nat, your mother committed suicide. I don't kid myself to think that my behavior had no role in it, but I didn't kill her."

  "Dad, I know that. You think I don't know that? But I'm your son. I get you, okay? And I've thought about this. And I know two things. Number one. You didn't sit here for twenty-four hours after she died to handle your grief, because frankly, that's not you. You've always pushed emotions down like somebody sticking wadding into a cannon. Maybe it'll blow later. But you go on. You always go on. You'd have cried or frowned or shaken your head for a while, but you would have gotten on the phone. You were sitting here trying to figure something out. That's one thing I know. And here's the other. I watched you when you pled guilty to obstruction of justice. And you were serene. You said you were guilty with absolute conviction. But since I know you didn't screw with that computer--because you told Anna that--that means that whatever lying and messing around you did, you did a long time ago. And I say it was when Mom died. Am I right?"

  Smart kid. His mother's son. Always a very, very smart boy. I manage a small smile, a bit proud, when I nod.

  "So I want to know everything," he says.

  "Nat, your mother was your mother. What I was to her o
r she to me doesn't change any of that. I wasn't trying to treat you as a child. The truth is that I asked myself if I'd want to know the things I never told you, and I really believe I wouldn't. And I hope you'll take a minute to consider that."

  Nat never really gets angry at anyone the way he does with me. Anger at his mother was too dangerous. I am a safer target, and the fashion in which I have always eluded him, or tried to, as he sees it, infuriates him. But the rage that closes his brow, that darkens his blue eyes, is, of course, Barbara's.

  "Okay," I say. "Okay. The truth, Nat, is your mother killed herself. And that I didn't want you, or anybody else, to know that. I didn't want you to be upset, or to have to shoulder the weight the children of suicides always carry. And I didn't want you to ask why. Or to know what I'd done to provoke her."

  "The affair?"

  "The affair."

  "Okay. But how did she die?"

  I raise a hand. "I'm going to tell you. I'm going to tell you everything." I take a breath. Sixty-two years old, I have the vulnerabilities of the Serbian kid who was never considered cool in school. I was smart and, as a young boy, no one to mess with on the schoolyard--I was vicious when provoked. But I was not cool--not someone anybody cared to hang with on the weekends, to invite to parties, or to joke with in the hall. I have always been alone and feared the meaning of my isolation. Although I have lived in Kindle County my entire life, attended grade school, high school, college, and law school here, practiced in this place for more than thirty-five years, I lack a best friend, especially since rheumatoid arthritis drove Dan Lipranzer, the detective I preferred to work with as a prosecutor, to Arizona. Not to say I don't have good times or enjoy the company of close professional acquaintances, like George Mason. But I lack a figure of essential connection. That was something I think Anna knew about me and seized upon. But my greatest hopes somehow have always been pinned to my son. Which is not a fair assignment for a child. Yet as a result I've always had a special fear of being rejected by Nat. I need to steel myself now.