Happenstance, page 36
Bernie was right, of course; Jack knew he was right. Even if the English barmaid had left a written record, he would never be able to bring himself to trust it. She had a soul of permafrost, despite her willing nature. If, for instance, she had somehow been taught to write in her old age – Jack pictured her bent over a rough table, a small leaded window furnishing light – what she would put down would be something altogether different from her actual experience in the tall grass; the minute her pen touched ink, a second self would begin to flow, conditioned, guarded, forgetful, ecstatic, vain, lyric, discursive, the words becoming what all recorded history becomes eventually, a false image, bannered and expository as a public freize, a mixture of the known and the unknowable. The shapely distances of the past were emblematic and no more.
Even something as brief and as nearly accidental a notation as his son Rob’s message sagged under the weight of particular assumptions. Mr. Carpenter would live. Mr. Carpenter would live? The assumption would have to be – Jack turned it over in his mind as he opened a can of chicken noodle soup – the assumption would have to be that Mr. Carpenter’s – Larry’s – ability to live was somehow thrown into jeopardy; a calamity of some kind had overtaken Larry Carpenter. And no ordinary calamity, either; it would have to be something extraordinary and serious.
He dumped the soup into a saucepan, added water, heated it briefly over a bright flame, then poured it into two cereal bowls.
Laurie was lying on the rug in the living room, watching the last sixty seconds of the game. Green Bay was within inches of the goal line as Jack handed her a bowl of soup and slumped into a chair. He loved the Green Bay Packers, and he waited, expectantly, as the front line was whistled into motion and they let loose with their invisible ball.
It looked so simple on the tube; Green Bay was so close, only a yard away, and yet they failed. Jack leaned forward, spilling a stream of soup on the rug, but he couldn’t make out exactly what was going wrong. Arms, legs, a close-up of shoulders and bullet-heads and dancing buttocks, sliding and collapsing; where was the ball? A referee stepped in, raised burly hands above his head; the game was suddenly over.
Laurie pulled herself up, stretching. Jack scooped at the last of his soup, thinking he was still hungry, then thinking that he really should phone the Carpenters again.
He could see the corner of their house from the window; there was a light burning; someone was home. He should do something. Yes, he would phone. Right away. Before he changed his mind.
Chapter Seventeen
MONDAY morning. Jack was waiting for Dr. Middleton to arrive; he was early, it was just 10:25. For some reason he was trembling slightly; high on his left cheek, just beneath the eye, a nerve twittered. His throat rasped with dryness. Of course he’d hardly slept last night; it was midnight before things calmed down, and after three before sleep finally came – he’d dreamed, amazingly enough under the circumstances, of Brenda, a lush, burrowing, sexual dream. The alarm had gone off at seven sharp.
It was only natural, Jack reasoned, to feel a little on edge after a night like that, and his edginess was sharpened now by the sight of Dr. Middleton’s desk, broad, heavy, calmed by neat piles of papers that were weighed down by small flashing specimens of Michigan ore. An antique desk lamp with an amber glass shade spread a circle of warmth on the fine-grained surface. A framed photograph of Mrs. Middleton – smiling, her Nordic lips relaxed – stood in one corner; next to her the telephone gleamed with a gentlemanly lustre. ‘Dr. Middleton should be here in a sec,’ Moira Burke told Jack.
She was looking jaunty on her second last day at work, almost military in a navy blazer and yellow silk scarf, thickly knotted under her chin. Twin arcs of blue eyeshadow made her look tough and quizzing.
‘So,’ Jack said in what he recognized as his phony good-cheer voice, the one he dredged up for hangover mornings, ‘so, at last, D Day’s finally arrived.’
‘Ha!’ Moira said.
He had more or less decided what he would say to Dr. Middleton about Chapter Six. That was one good thing about driving in from Elm Park; those early morning traffic jams provided an opportunity to get your thoughts together. Not that there should be any real difficulty, he reflected, since confrontations with Dr. Middleton required no explanation beyond the simple truth. There was about Dr. Middleton a square, straightforward frontality, unusual in a man of his particular discipline. Jack saw him as a kind of boulevard historian with an intellect both spry and elastic, and a rare willingness to deal with actuality so that there was no need for elaborate excuses or face-saving alibis. Delays, distractions, detours were all acceptable in this civilized environment. Jack could relax, take a deep breath. So he hadn’t managed to get Chapter Six rounded off as promised; Dr. Middleton certainly wasn’t going to fire him for that, or clap him over the head with a ruler; the worst that would happen would be a mild, sympathetic indication of disappointment, an almost imperceptible shaking of the head, a tapping of his pen upon the desk blotter, an instant’s brief silence. Why then this turmoil?
Moira gestured toward a chair. ‘Why don’t you sit down. Might as well take a load off your feet while you’re waiting.’
‘Maybe I will.’ There was something coarse about Moira – ‘Take a load off’ – a broad, snapping brassiere-strap bravado – would Mel, her replacement, be any different? Jack turned and gave Moira a companionable, low-energy smile, uttering a soft moan. ‘Monday morning,’ he explained, his fingers moving painfully to his temples.
‘You really don’t look all that perky.’
‘What a weekend!’
‘Oh?’ She looked interested.
‘Fellow next door tried to kill himself.’
Why had he said that? Why had he spoken at all? He hadn’t intended to, not to Moira. Christ! At least he hadn’t mentioned any names.
‘Really?’ A rewarding gasp.
Jack felt himself growing calm; Ah, the insidious pleasure of passing on bad news. ‘Early Sunday morning, about eight. They found him just in time.’
‘How –?’
‘The old garage trick, carbon monoxide. Had the car running, the door shut. But he’s going to be all right, they think. No brain damage, at least nothing that can be detected at this point.’
‘Old? Young?’ Moira eased herself into a chair. Her brow split into a half a dozen evenly spaced furrows. Attractive.
‘Middle,’ Jack said. ‘Thirty-something. Late thirties.’
‘That can be a bad time,’ Moira said. ‘I remember that period. Thirty, early forties –’
Stop. Jack cringed; he didn’t want to know about Moira’s early forties. Or anyone’s early forties. ‘Another neighbour found him. Lucky, really. This other man, Bud Lewis, is a jogger. Three miles every morning before breakfast, even Sundays, if you can believe it. He does laps around Van Buren Park, thirty, forty laps every day. Well,’ he paused, ‘fortunately he starts his run down the alley behind us, and he was just going by the garage next door when he happened to notice some exhaust leaking out under the door. Lucky it was a cold day.’
‘I’ll say –’
‘He broke the window and got in somehow. It was just a little window. He had to hoist himself up and then crawl through to get inside. They said at the hospital that if it had been another five minutes –’
He paused. Five minutes; he watched Moira absorb the implications beyond that five minutes.
‘Men,’ Moira remarked with energy, ‘are under a lot of pressure these days. In their work. It never lets up, it’s a jungle. My husband, Bradley, he’s had his rough times.’
‘Yes,’ Jack said, ‘these things happen.’
‘Or family pressures, too,’ Moira said. ‘They can be just as bad.’
‘Yes.’
‘I nearly went to pieces when our daughter Sandra quit high school. She was on the honour roll and then she got in with the wrong crowd. Drugs. I know what it can be like. You get over it but it takes a toll.’
Jack nodded. He had met the daughter once. She had come with Moira and her husband to one of the exhibits, but that had been years ago. She’d been about eight then, with long beautiful brown braids. What could have happened to that little girl? Poor Moira. Poor little girl.
‘Do they know why he did it? Like did he leave a note? They usually do.’
‘No, no note. But they figure it was depression.’
‘Depression can be bad.’
‘It sounds crazy, to me anyway, but he was in a play, this man. A local thing, strictly an amateur deal. But someone went and did a review of it for the papers, called it a real bomb, and zeroed in on him in particular.’
‘I’ve seen some of those play reviews. In Chicago Today. And in the Trib. They can be pretty biting. Downright cruel.’
Jack stopped, caught himself. Should he be telling Moira all this? Janey had been emphatic: she didn’t want the whole world knowing about Larry, at least no one who didn’t absolutely have to know. She’d even gone around, she said, to all the nurses on the floor and begged them to keep the thing quiet. Larry would die if this gets around, Janey said. ‘You know what they’d say, Jack. That Larry Carpenter can dish it out, but he can’t take it. That’s what they’d say, I can just hear it.’
It was true the review had been rough; late last night Jack finally got around to reading it, and as he read, his heart froze. A royal hatchet job, unsparing. But at the same time it occurred to him that if he hadn’t lived next door to Larry Carpenter, if he hadn’t known where it would end, he might have read the same piece with a certain amount of – what? – glee? Here was a drama critic drowned in his own brand of vitriol. Rough justice. Just desserts. A chunk of irony to chew on. There was no doubt about it; Larry had on occasion been equally vituperative. He had a short, sharp way with the second-rate, although he normally muted his blows with the special Carpenter cleverness – perhaps that made the difference. Gordon Tripp – and Jack had always considered his movie reviews to be stylish and distanced – seemed out for blood; every word fell with malice. (Or did it? The year he and Bernie had discussed modern morality, Jack had argued that evil was the result of simple carelessness.) Larry must have got on the wrong side of Gordon Tripp. Either that or Larry really was the ‘most pompous, self-congratulatory Hamlet, amateur or professional, ever to disgrace the Chicago stage.’ (Something of an overkill, a statement like that, the kind of thing Larry himself would have avoided.) Had Larry really stood at centre stage and ‘declaimed in the manner of a wet owl on the make, horny with ego, pop-eyed with importance’? Christ! Was it true he had ‘scratched at his crotch behind the canvas trees’? (If he did, Janey said, it was because the polyester armour itched.) ‘This too, too arrogant flesh isn’t solid enough to play Mickey Mouse, let alone Hamlet,’ Gordon Tripp had railed. ‘Could it be that the Elm Park Little Theatre forgot about the shoes of the cobbler’s children? Or were they simply bowled over by a case of downtown puffery?’ (Leah Wallberg would burn at that, probably already was burning.) ‘At least,’ the review concluded, ‘theatrical history has been made. Hamlet, as played in the venerable old suburbs by Chicago’s own Larry Carpenter, is no longer the tragic hero Shakespeare envisioned. He has been remodelled out of all recognition into a kind of Clark Kent unable to locate a phone booth.’
It was too bad. It was ill-natured and uncharitable. But suicide? Janey said Gordon Tripp, once a friend of Larry’s, had been miffed when Larry’s column was picked up for syndication and his wasn’t. A case of jealousy, clear and simple. She also suggested that it hadn’t been the review alone that had set Larry off. She’d told Jack and Bernie late last night, sitting in Jack’s kitchen, eating chicken wings, that there had been other factors involved, numerous other factors. Larry had had a good deal to drink that night; certain kinds of red wine, Janey told them, were scientifically known to have a negative effect on the psyche. (Jack remembered how Larry had looked late Saturday night, strangely calmed and amicable; but according to Janey, he was sailing, by that time – fully rigged for disaster.) The play itself had worn him to a frazzle, late-night rehearsals, the demanding four-hour performances. And once, years ago, Janey confided, at Princeton, just before mid-terms, Larry had had a sort of breakdown. Nothing serious, but he’d had to drop one or two courses. He’s really, Janey said, whispering, sort of a lonely man. So –
Janey, leaning on the kitchen table, had been close to hysteria, her green eyes glassy, feverish. She was ravenously hungry, grabbing the chicken wings out of the sauce with her fingers and stripping off the meat. Her blonde hair fell greasy and lank, the clumped strands separating over her ears. There were fearful, sodden elongations around her mouth, but her lips were soft and sensuous, with a look, Jack thought, of summer fruit. She had phoned Larry’s parents in Connecticut; his father was coming on an early-morning flight and planned to go directly to the hospital.
Sitting there, the three of them, they seemed to Jack to be swimming in the heightened, ardent immediacy of other, earlier lives. Hospitals; whispers; heroism; the gorging of food; manic celebration, dangerous and cautionary and somewhat reverent. On impulse Jack had opened a bottle of wine.
Bernie tipped back his glass. The high red frizz of his hair caught the light; separate threads sprang up, bluish and electric. Tonight he looked exceptionally young; he looked twenty years old tonight. Earlier in the evening he had been fiercely apologetic about dragging Rob out to Charleston in the afternoon to visit his daughter Sarah. Rob, he said, had been sitting around the house, looking dejected, and on impulse Bernie had asked if he wanted to come along for the ride. (Rob came home from Charleston sick with shock, his stomach upset. Bernie had had to stop the car twice for him on the way.) It was all right, Jack said. He’ll forget about it in a day or two, Bernie said. Of course, Jack said – weren’t people always saying that kids were overprotected these days from the realities of death and deformity? He’d said it himself more than once. Well, Rob had made up for it today; he’d gone straight to bed when he got home and had fallen asleep in minutes.
‘I can’t get over Bud Lewis,’ Janey went on, her mouth full, a bead of sauce jiggling on her lip. ‘If it hadn’t been for Bud jogging by at that very minute – I’ll just never be able to thank him if I live a hundred years. Neither of us will.’
‘It really was a –’ Bernie hesitated, and Jack hoped he wouldn’t say the word blessing or, worse, miracle, ‘it really was incredibly lucky.’
‘And if Bernie hadn’t been staying here in our guest room last night –’ Janey had inhaled sharply, gazed at Bernie with sober regard – a near brush with tragedy had cleared away her sulkiness, ‘if he hadn’t been in the house I don’t know what I’d have done. It must have been fate. I’d have gone to pieces, probably. I was shaking like a leaf when Bud brought him in. He carried him in. Actually carried Larry into the house.’
‘You were a lot more collected than you realize,’ Bernie assured her. His tone was intimate. ‘You were the one who just picked up the phone and asked for emergency. While we were arguing about who to call first.’
‘And they got that oxygen unit here so fast,’ Janey’s voice shrilled, ecstatic. She reached across for another chicken wing. ‘How long would you say, Bernie? Ten minutes?’
‘No more than that. Fairly swift anyway for that hour in the morning. And they sure knew just what to do when they got here.’
Janey turned to Jack. ‘I guess you heard,’ she said quietly, ‘what Bernie did?’
‘What?’ Jack said, hating himself for not knowing.
‘While the ambulance was coming? That ten minutes when Larry was lying there on the couch with his eyes shut? Bernie gave him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. While I was tearing out my hair and running around screeching, he gave him mouth-to-mouth.’
‘Well, I –’ Bernie said.
‘The doctor, the man in Emergency, said it probably kept the brain cells alive for that critical –’
‘I took this course a couple years ago,’ Bernie apologized. ‘First aid.’ His voice cracked.
‘And he stayed with me all morning. At the hospital.’
‘I hated like hell to leave you alone in the afternoon. If I hadn’t had to go to Charleston –’
Jack looked at him closely. When had he last seen Bernie’s face as luminously tender as it looked at this moment? He and Janey had been awake since eight; and both of them looked radiant.
And he had slept through it all, all of it. Bud Lewis breaking the glass on the garage window – with his bare hands, Janey said; he had had to have stitches. He had slept while Bud Lewis carried Larry into the house. And how exactly had this feat been accomplished? Had Bud carried him in his arms the way a child would be carried? over his shoulder? how? He had slept through the arrival of the ambulance and the valiant oxygen unit. Probably there had been a siren. Bernie breathing into Larry’s unconscious mouth. Jack had slept through that, too. Asleep, dreaming, always asleep, that’s where he had spent his life, asleep; that’s where he always ended up, in a state of semi-consciousness, just outside the crowding of real events. Shut out. Cut off. As though a partition existed in the world, a heavy wall of plate glass, unassailable, where on one side people moved through immense self-generating dramas, conquests, feats of courage and knowing. Brenda was on that side; so was Larry Carpenter and Janey and Bernie and so, incredibly, was Bud Lewis. Bud Lewis. While he – and a few others like him, he supposed – stood immobilized on the other side; all they could do was watch it happen; there was no way through for people like him. They were condemned, something predetermined perhaps, something faulty in the genes, a primal failing, an unlucky star. He was going to be, would always be, a man who listened to the accounts of others, a man who comprehended the history of events but not the events themselves. He was a secondary-source man; he hadn’t even gone to see Hamlet; even a simple thing like that had slipped past him. And here, at his own kitchen table, he was an incidental witness, a grotesque and fatal second step behind. Bernie and Janey seemed scarcely aware of his presence.
