"Probation" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mendicino Tom)

Season’s Greetings from the King of Unpainted Furniture

Everyone is titillated by the prospect of snow. Everyone has an opinion: It’s definitely coming. It’s not coming because it only happens when it’s completely unexpected. Everyone’s preparing, stockpiling toilet paper and milk. One school of thought says it would have been welcome two days ago. It would have been the first White Christmas in thirty-five years. Now it will just ruin the rest of the holidays. Another school of thought says better late than never and at least all those gruesome New Year’s celebrations will have to be cancelled.

My window is open. It’s definitely colder than last night. If it’s coming, at least it waited until my sister packed her husband, two sons, and daughter into the SUV and headed south, back to the palm trees and tennis courts of Boca Raton. I finish knotting my tie and lick my palm to flatten my stubborn cowlick. Not so bad, I think. Why have I never seen a picture of myself where I resemble the man I see in the mirror? The camera never lies, they say. Out there, somewhere, my mug shots, full face and profile, are in the public record.

I pass my mother’s bedroom on my way downstairs. She stands perfectly still, transfixed, as if stunned by her reflection in the mirror, gripping her pearl necklace, her yellow satin jacket burnished by the white winter sunlight.

My mother, by Vermeer.

She blinks like a startled bird and comes out of her trance. She seems puzzled, as if she doesn’t recognize the brushes and combs and jewelry box on her dressing table. Feeling like an intruder, I go downstairs and wait for her to join me.

She disapproves when she sees me with a vodka and soda in hand. She usually doesn’t comment on my drinking since she comes from the generation of women who nurse a single glass of wine or a very weak cocktail, if they partake at all, while their men drink themselves into oblivion. But this afternoon she reminds me the roads could be very hazardous in a few hours. I laugh and tell her it’s bone dry out there and not a cloud in the sky. Nonetheless, she wins. I take one last long sip and pour it in the sink.

My mother and I are going on a date. I return from the kitchen, expecting to find her in the foyer, all buttoned up and pocketbook in hand. She isn’t there. She’s in the parlor, resting against the arm of the sofa, studying the Christmas tree, touching one of the glass balls, smiling at a memory of a long-ago holiday. Each and every ornament has a history. Only she knows all of them. After she’s gone, they’ll just be anonymous trinkets tucked in tissue paper.

I tell myself I’m overreacting, surrendering to my predilection for crepe hanging. It’s probably just Christmas. She’s just pushed herself too hard. My sister spent the past four days cataloguing every burner left lit, every door left open, every toilet unflushed, every pair of eyeglasses misplaced. She inventoried my mother’s medicine cabinet and recorded the labels of every prescription bottle to look up in the Physicians’ Desk Reference. If she doesn’t understand the entry, she’ll consult her gynecologist. My mother denies that anything is wrong. Regina has been insistent, a battering ram. There has to be a reasonable explanation for the pallor of our mother’s skin and the dark pouches below her eyes. She’s going to get to the bottom of this. There’s nothing to get to the bottom of, I told her. She’s getting older. It’s what happens to people when they get older.

“Bullshit. She’s not even sixty. My doubles partner is seventy-five years old and has a better backhand than me!”

Fucking Christmas. Thank God it’s over for another year.

Hard to believe that, once upon a time, I started counting the days until December 25 on the October afternoon I came home from school to find the Spiegel catalogue had arrived in the morning mail. I’d sit at the breakfast table for weeks, thumbing through the well-worn pages, changing my mind two or three times a day, never settling on a present for Gina until my mother announced it was time to send in the order.

It didn’t matter that by New Year’s Eve, parts would be broken, pieces missing, instructions lost, pages ripped, because I knew that she loved every doll or game or book I ever gave her. She couldn’t help that she was clumsy, awkward, and forgetful. Just the opposite of me, who carefully preserved the DC and Marvel superhero comic books she gave me every Christmas, reading each one carefully, no folds or tears, then slipping it in a plastic envelope for posterity.

“Do you like them? Do you really?” she asked every year, needing to be reassured she’d made all the right choices despite having tagged along on my weekly visits to Woolworth from January through November, watching me cherry-pick the same titles from the comic book rack.

Damn, we loved Christmas back then. Neither of us was ever disappointed after all the build up and anticipation. And Christmas night was the best-no Midnight Mass to attend, flannel pajamas instead of my bow tie and her tights, no limit on the number of Christmas cookies we could stuff in our mouths. Mama let us stay up until we were exhausted and longed for our beds, both of us already counting the days until Christmas rolled around again.

Her own kids could barely summon enough enthusiasm to crawl out of bed on Christmas morning. Michael, the oldest, had to be threatened with bodily injury to tear himself away from messaging his friends long enough to come to the table. Jennifer and Dustin rolled their eyes and sighed at every comment or question, mimicking the bratty “tween” queens of the Disney Channel. The only real pleasure the three of them seemed to get was taunting their father, a combustible sort like our old man, but without his redeeming qualities of fidelity and reliability. I suspect the rock he presented my sister on Christmas Eve is reparation for his latest flight attendant or Pilates instructor. Family honor says I should hate him, but he’s a nice guy despite his philandering and occasional outbursts, unimpressed by his own Olympian status, someone to watch hoops with, arguing over who’s the best point guard in the ACC while we ignore Regina’s battle with her surly brood over the ridiculous “festive” holiday sweaters she bought them to wear for the video she wants of our happy Christmas dinner.

“These kids are too goddamn spoiled to appreciate anything,” she complained last night. “Do you remember how you’d light up every time I gave you a pile of damn comic books on Christmas morning?”

Yeah, I do. What shocked me was that she did too.

The tension headache I’d been nursing for days started to fade as their SUV backed down the driveway. We got through the holiday, but only after endless hours of vigilance, waiting for Regina to bite through the tip of her tongue and violate the unspoken Nocera Family Agreement to rewrite history, erase the past, and expunge any trace of a major character from the story: Have you heard from Alice? Alice? Alice who? I don’t know any Alice. You must have me confused with somebody else. Wonder of wonders, the moment never arrived, thwarted, no doubt, by my mother’s steely gaze each time she saw temptation flicker across her daughter’s face. I don’t know what you were so worried about. I told you I wouldn’t bring it up, I overheard Regina say as the SUV pulled away.

My mother takes a deep breath, fortifying herself for the afternoon ahead. I ask her if she really wants to go. Of course, she says. She’s been looking forward to this all week.

“This” is the farewell reception for the bishop of the Diocese of Charlotte. On January first, he’s being retired to a community for elderly prelates in New Mexico.

Maybe the forecasters are right. In just the few minutes since we’ve come downstairs, the sun has disappeared and the daylight has turned dishwater gray. The noisy winter birds have gone into hiding. The neighbor’s cat streaks across the driveway, headed home to wait out the storm. My mother blesses herself as I back the car into the street.

I expect that she, like my sister and me, is desperately seeking a simple explanation for all the many ways her body is betraying her. She hopes all she needs is one good night’s uninterrupted sleep. Maybe all it will take is the right combination of vitamin pills. Maybe her eyeglass prescription needs to be adjusted. Maybe, just maybe, tomorrow she’ll spring out of bed, those heavy sacks of rocks she’s been carrying for too long now tossed aside somewhere along the highway of her dreams, and she’ll greet all the familiar little aches in her joints like old friends. My sister insinuates my “situation” is the reason our mother has taken up smoking after twenty years of abstinence. That’s easier than accepting the fact that she suspects it can’t hurt her anymore.

My mother and I drive in silence. We have to make a quick stop at the cemetery. I insist she stay in the car, that it’s too cold up on this bleak hill. I don’t want her to see that the grave wreath, locked in the trunk over a week ago, has wilted. My mother’s name and date of birth are already etched into the granite. The old man is biding his time, waiting for her to join him. The sky seems to brighten as we arrive at the bishop’s residence. Maybe the forecasters are wrong.

The door opens before we have a chance to ring. Only a bishop can get away with having an ancient black man in Gone with the Wind livery greet his guests. He welcomes my mother as if she were visiting royalty. Merry Christmas, Nathaniel, she says, was Santa good to you? Oh, the best, Miz Nocera, he chuckles, the very best. I’m dumbfounded she knows his name and that she is a familiar face here. I’m shocked by what I don’t know about her. We both have our secret lives, my mother and I.

Nudging my way to the punch bowl, I speculate there wouldn’t be a wealthy Catholic left in all of North Carolina if a bomb fell on this place…and then it hits me, hard.

Good God, why hadn’t I thought of it before I let a stranger spirit away our coats to the hidden recesses of this too-big house? A quick escape is out of the question now. Why hadn’t she thought of it before accepting my offer to drive her here? Maybe she had. I hate being suspicious of my mother. No, obviously it hadn’t occurred to her, otherwise she would have told me to stay home and relax in front of the tree and she would get a ride to the party with one of her cronies. She couldn’t have an agenda. This wasn’t a Saturday night dinner at the club where she could ever so genteelly force the truly disgusted or the downright amused or the blissfully unaware to acknowledge my ongoing existence. This was J. Curtis McDermott, Jr., the King of Unpainted Furniture himself. The largest donor to Catholic Charities in the entire state, certain to have received the coveted invitation, probably the first name on the list.

Two weeks ago, thumbing through the Christmas cards she’d received, I’d opened a reproduction of a Bellini Madonna and Child and was confronted by the printed salutation.

Season’s Greetings from the King of Unpainted Furniture

Curtis maintained two Christmas mailing lists, one for the recipients of Italian Masters religious scenarios, the other for those who were sent the Currier and Ives seculars. After all, the King explained, Tar Heel Heritage, the world’s largest manufacturer of unfinished pine furniture, can’t offend its Jewish friends, but we gotta remember that most of our Christian friends think, well, if it weren’t for Christ there wouldn’t be any goddamn Christmas anyway. Curtis’s staff could effortlessly spit out catalogues, spreadsheets, and quarterly statements; certainly they should have been competent enough to hit the DELETE button and purge my mother’s name from the Italian Masters mailing list.

This benign little outing is turning into a full-blown exercise in tactical maneuvers. The crowd looks harmless enough. A young man and woman, their first Christmas together as a married couple, giggle and spit hors d’oeuvres into paper napkins. An old man with hairy ears corners them to gloat over the American Civil Liberties Union’s failure to persuade the Mecklenburg County emergency judge to order the removal of the crèche from the entrance to City Hall. They feign interest, caring less about civil liberties and the Baby Jesus than in finding a trash can. A spinsterish woman in a Fair Isle sweater folds her arms and pretends to survey the cookie table, trying to make eye contact so she can strike up a conversation with me. A tired little girl in a velvet party dress skates across the hardwood floor on the soles of her patent leather Mary Janes. Braking with her toe, she looks up and asks me my name. Andy, I say, and ask hers to reinforce her lessons on good manners. Brandy, she answers. She must be the aftermath of an evening of one-hundred-proof induced lust, her name a commemoration, like winter babies named April or June. Our names rhyme, I say, making conversation. Whatever, she snorts, tossing her head.

Someone is tickling the ivories in the next room. The piano player runs through a few scales to loosen up his fingers. I recognize the opening bars of a Broadway show tune.

“You coax the blues right out of the horn…”

His booming voice crushes the weak harmonizing of the members of the chorus.

“…MAME!”

J. Curtis McDermott. Having located ground zero, I can avoid him, escaping to the kitchen. A martinet caterer is bullying a platoon of exasperated college kids who persevere because she pays fifty bucks a night under the table. No one is permitted to leave the room without her approving the arrangement of toast points and smoked salmon on their serving trays. She dresses to intimidate, with short-cropped hair and a Chanel skirt under her kitchen smock. She’s oblivious to the fact that people take one look and assume she’s a lesbian, a creature to be pitied because she can’t get a man.

An effeminate boy sweeps into the kitchen, tossing his empty tray aside: “It’s snowing! It’s really snowing!”

The college kids ignore their boss and rush to the kitchen windows. The pots stop rattling and voices are still. The windows are wide and high and someone hollers that everyone can see if we just squeeze a little closer and y’all in the back stand on tippytoes. A high girlish voice, probably the sissy boy’s, starts singing “White Christmas” and everyone joins in.

The snow doesn’t look like the big fluffy Hollywood downpour at the end of the movie. These snowflakes are aggressive. An advance attack secures the front line, melting on impact with the still-warm ground. The swift, hardy infantry assaults the rhododendrons and azaleas and chokes the lawn. A strong wind rattles the pine trees and slaps the power line, heralding the arrival of the cavalry. The final victory is swift, eerily quiet. The powder is accumulating.

Merriment dissolves into nervous apprehension as the snow starts to drift. Bing Crosby had snow tires; no one in North Carolina does. The caterer snaps at her crew, telling them to circulate, fast, before everyone deserts the party. She wants them to push the paté on melba.

I see one of the servers shooting her the finger behind her back. Caught red-handed, he gives me a bashful shrug. He’s a tall, lanky boy, probably a track and field star, a Country Day School type. I wink to let him know I approve. She deserves worse than the finger. The track star offers me a piece of bruschetta. We’re conspirators now. “Super cunt,” he whispers, “what a lezzie.”

Curtis and I spot each other at exactly the same time. He’s slipped into the kitchen to be incognito since it’s a dry party. He sees me when he looks up from the silver pocket flask tipped at his lips. I’m smiling at the obscenities the teenager is whispering in my ear. He couldn’t have caught me at a worse moment. It’s not the booze flushing his cheeks. His hatred of me has not diminished one bit in the six months since our last encounter.

Life is nothing more than a succession of what-ifs?

What if I had had more than ten bucks in my wallet when it came time to post the bond?

What if, having finally summoned up the courage to call Alice, fate hadn’t intervened in the form of a malfunctioning automated teller that swallowed her one and only debit card?

What if I had thought to tell her the holding cell wasn’t like the snake pits you saw in the movies, but was a spotlessly clean little corner I had all to myself, no bruising inmates to corrupt and abuse me?

What if her judgment hadn’t been so clouded by worrying about my safety that she would have thought twice before calling her father and telling him she needed three hundred dollars, now?

He would have killed me if Alice hadn’t jumped on his back, trying to pry his hands from my throat. He came close enough as it was. Those huge fists crushed my vocal cords and left me hoarse for weeks. But that was minor compared to the damage he wreaked on his own flesh and blood. She cracked her skull against the hard tile floor when he threw her off his back. The police arrived, summoned by a report of a domestic disturbance, the second time in twenty-four hours I found myself confronted by a badge and a blue shirt. Fire rescue was close behind.

Curtis insisted I’d tried to kill her. Alice, groggy from the concussion, refused to press charges. There’s no charges to press, she insisted in her soft drawl. Daddy’s wrong, she said, I fell. I remember the way “fell” tripped off her tongue, sounding more like “fill” or “feel.” Most likely the effects of the concussion.

Her first instinct was to protect me. Given time, she might have learned to accept “it,” “this.” Someday, not right now, but maybe in the not-too-distant future, soon, once things got back to normal, we could come to an understanding over pinot grigio and Orange Milano cookies. She read about things like this in Cosmopolitan; she’d seen something like this in a movie of the week. It wasn’t so unusual, was it? You don’t pick up and leave if someone is paralyzed from the waist down in a car accident, do you? Was this really all that different?

Yes.

I knew it and Curtis knew it. It took Curtis to do what neither she nor I could: cut me out of her life.

Another man slips into the kitchen and accosts the King, wanting a sip from his flask. I take the opportunity to escape. Curtis reaches out to grab my arm. I manage to slip away from his fingers. He hates me not for betraying his daughter, but for betraying him.

I slither into the crush of bodies around the bishop, who’s crouched over the keyboard, crooning “What I Did for Love.” His dry voice resists the emotion he’s straining to squeeze into every note. A fey young acolyte, most likely a seminarian, stands at attention, his long fingers ready to flip the sheet music at just the right moment. He seems to be the only person in the room who hears music in that voice. It’s obvious to everyone in the room that His Excellency is sending a valentine to the boy. No one dares to wince, but one or two of the more irreverent stifle the clearing of throats, their amusement peeping from behind closed fists.

His Excellency is retiring at fifty-nine years of age. He doesn’t just have the occasional binge anymore. He keeps himself permanently lubricated, which makes it easy for his predilections to slip into open view. The Vatican tolerated it longer than it should have in deference to his remarkable talent for fund-raising. Next week, he’s being cashiered to an isolated outpost where he can drink himself to death in peace. The diocese is honoring him today with fruit punch and hors d’oeuvres and the announcement that the annual golf tournament for Catholic Charities will bear his name.

Curtis is not a man given to intrigue and stealth. His course of action is the full-frontal attack. But the bishop’s audience is between us, making it impossible to make a direct charge. He has to maneuver through the bodies at the fringe to get to me. As he inches closer, I creep farther away. He’s a little tipsy. Not a good sign. Curtis usually carefully measures his intake, believing drunkenness to be a liability. But the sight of me caused him to throw a little fuel from the flask on the fire of the rage that’s been simmering on low heat since last summer.

His Excellency saves me, calling out to Curtis, insisting on a duet. The King isn’t actually drunk, he’s still in control and he gives the bishop a bear hug to compensate just in case it’s apparent to anyone that he wants to tell the old fag to fuck off. Then he realizes he should have. He’s mortified when he recognizes the first few measures of the song His Excellency has chosen. I take advantage of his temporary paralysis to slip away as the bishop sings the first few lines of “People Will Say We’re in Love.”

It’s cold and quiet on the sun porch. The squealing radial tires, the sound of cars sliding on ice and snow, tell me I need to find my mother. I’ve neglected her. Actually, I’ve forgotten all about her. She is probably looking for me right now. The snow is the perfect excuse to get out of here. The nervous headlights of a caravan of fleeing automobiles creep down the drive. There’s a loud outburst inside. Genuine laughter, not just polite mirth. I can imagine what’s happened. The King has salvaged his dignity with a self-deprecating joke. But it doesn’t douse his fury at being humiliated by His Excellency. He needs revenge more than ever. He’s going to hunt me down.

Maybe I can wander off into one of the snowdrifts, disappear forever. At least until the big thaw which, this being North Carolina, will be the day after tomorrow at the latest. No. No more hiding. Let him find me. I deserve it anyway. The King has every reason to hate me. He’s never liked me, not really. He’d suspected there was something slippery, untrustworthy, about me on first meeting, when I blew cigarette smoke in his face over the brunch table. But he’d let himself believe in the charade, made me his partner, the heir apparent, took me into his confidence and assumed I’d taken him into mine.

He thinks I’m malicious, venal, that I duped him. And now, his duet with the bishop over, he’s found me. He’s going to extract his pound of flesh. My resolve cracks and, coward that I am, I crash through the door and run into the snow. He follows like I knew he would. If I can only stay an arm’s length ahead, at least until I can lock myself in the car and huddle in a corner until he is tired of banging his fists on the window.

Snow is a great equalizer and all the expensive sedans and coupes are fluffy marshmallows, one indistinguishable from the next. I slip and slide, swiping every hood, looking for metallic blue, until I stumble upon my mother’s car. I hear him panting, he’s that close. My fingers, trembling, drop the keys. They disappear, swallowed by the snow.

He intends to finish what he started months ago. He grabs me by the throat. I don’t try to defend myself. His huge hands take him to the brink of breaking my neck, then he pushes me away. What makes him stop? He sees something in my face that won’t let him smash me in a pique of anger. There’s something he wants to say to me but my mother calls his name before he can speak.

The sight of this tiny frail woman high stepping through the drifts summons his innate chivalry. He wades toward her and wraps his arm around her shoulder, guiding her to the car. I hear them exchange pleasantries and polite inquiries about health and holidays. They don’t acknowledge anything out of the ordinary though I’m gasping for breath. I find the keys while they talk about the snow. Curtis kisses my mother on the cheek after he helps her into the car. I close the door behind her and, by instinct, offer my hand to thank him for helping her. I break down when he accepts it.

My mother stares down at her hands to give me a little privacy. My father-in-law holds me upright, at arm’s length, not knowing what to do with me, afraid I might collapse in the snow. It’s awkward, standing face-to-face with him, my eyes red and snot dripping from my nose. He seems reticent, almost shy, his meat-and-potatoes mug more Ronnie Reagan than John Wayne. Maybe we’re going to have a moment, a tipping point, a reconciliation.

“I knew there was something wrong with you the first time I laid eyes on you,” he says, almost sympathetically, as if I were born with a birth defect for which the March of Dimes will never find a cure.

“I’m sorry,” I say, though he’s not the one who’s owed an apology.

“You should be,” he says, wiping his palms on his jacket as he releases me.

Let it go, I tell myself as I walk away. He stands, watching, as I open the car door and slip behind the wheel. I turn the key in the ignition and press the accelerator. The tires spin on the ice, going nowhere, proving once and for all my total incompetence. I’m completely emasculated by a few inches of snow.

“Put it in neutral and let it drift to a dry spot,” Curtis shouts, his loud voice barely muffled by the windshield.

The King of Unpainted Furniture plants his size sixteen wingtips and grabs the hood with his powerful hands, drawing a deep breath as he rocks the car out of the ice rut. He stands in triumph, fists on his hips, as the tires gain traction on the gravel.

“I’ll say it was an accident if you run over the son of a bitch,” my mother says, smiling sweetly as she waves good-bye.

“It’s not worth it, Ma,” I say, just wanting this day to be over.

“Ah, but think how good it would feel,” she says. “I love this song. Turn up the volume,” she insists, as the DJ on the AM band plays Anne Murray’s “Snowbird” in honor of the blizzard.