Somebody's Fool, page 45
This time, when her voice fell you could hear a pin drop.
“Okay,” she said. “That’s it. I’ll shut the fuck up now.”
Another Whoa!
“Interesting word, gifted,” Peter said, addressing the whole class now. “Think back. What did it mean to you, back when you first heard it?”
“Smart?” somebody suggested.
“Anything else?”
“Superior?”
“What else?”
“White?” said the only other Black student in the class.
“White people have problems, too,” one of the bros said.
“Okay,” Peter said, “but let’s not overlook the obvious. What if gifted just means you’re somebody who’s been given gifts. Piano lessons. Tennis camp. A home full of books. Spring break with the family at Disney. Summer vacations abroad. Have you ever noticed how people who get gifts tend to get a lot of them?”
Pretty much universal agreement on this.
“How about the expectation of success? Isn’t that the gift that underlies so many of the others? Take my sons. All three were smart, but only one was gifted. By that I mean he grew up in a nice big house in a safe neighborhood and went to a good school and his father was a college professor. He got into all those gifted and talented classes Imani was talking about. He excelled in school because he was smart and hardworking, but also because that environment was familiar to him. He’s now a college professor himself, in a postdoctoral program in England. I don’t think he has anyone to clean his house yet, but the day will probably come. I’m pretty sure the son who came to visit me this weekend was given very few of the gifts my gifted son was given and as a result he was not seen as gifted. I suspect he spent much of his young life like Imani, wishing things were different, and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he’d recently come to the same conclusion she did—that they weren’t likely to change, not ever. One of you asked earlier why he came to visit me after so long. One possible answer is that he came all this way to throw in the towel and he wanted his father to see him do it.”
One young woman who Peter was pretty sure was a fundamentalist Christian was shaking her head. “I’m sorry about your son and I’m sorry Imani’s so tired all the time, but I don’t understand what’s going on here. I thought the whole idea of going to college was to know about things. Isn’t that the whole point of taking classes? To learn about things? You’re making it sound like none of that matters. I don’t know why you want us to tell you our secrets. So you can read them out loud and embarrass us?” Now her eyes were full. This was either a good class or a very bad one.
“I don’t want you to tell me anything you’d rather keep private,” he assured her.
“Then I don’t know what you want. I don’t know what you expect of us.”
“I expect you, all of you,” he said, “to succeed. If someone’s told you you’re not smart or talented, I expect you to prove them wrong. I expect you to beat the odds. That’s my gift to you, in fact, that gift of expectation.” He checked his watch. “That and the remaining twenty minutes of this class.”
“You’re not going to read from our essays?”
“Not today.”
“We can go?”
“Yep. In fact, I insist.”
As the other students filed out of the class and Peter stuffed their essays back into his shoulder bag, Imani remained seated, a puzzled look on her face. “What happened to your other son?” she said. “The third one.”
“Don’t you dare give up,” he told her.
“Why not?”
“Because you’re way too smart.”
* * *
—
Out in the corridor, J.J. Julowitz was seated on the floor with his back against the wall. Peter slid down next to him.
“Wow,” said J.J. “That was some class. Did you plan all that or just wing it?”
“I wung it,” Peter admitted.
J.J. nodded. “Knowing and knowing about,” he said. “Cool distinction. I might steal that.”
“Feel free.”
“And on the subject of gifted, did you know that nobody from SCCC has ever been admitted to Edison for their junior year?”
“Seriously?”
“I shit you not. You still know people there, right?”
Peter admitted that he did.
“Ask them about it some time.”
“I will,” he promised. “So…what’s up?” Because if J.J. had been sitting out here in the hall for the last thirty minutes, something must be.
“Well, the lede is that our friend Delgado is gone.”
“Gone as in…”
“As in, yesterday he was here and today he isn’t. At least that’s what I’m hearing.”
“Huh,” Peter said, not sure he believed this. “He didn’t impress me as the kind of guy who cuts and runs.”
“There are two competing theories on that. The first is that the writing was on the wall. Everything was unraveling. When Delgado lost it and roughed up your son, nobody worried much because cops all stick together and they assumed your son was nobody. Then you show up and all that changes. Also, the second arresting officer, who isn’t one of Delgado’s crew, is reneging. Claims he was pressured into signing a false arrest report. So, maybe, game over?”
It was possible, Peter supposed. What was it that he’d overheard Delgado’s partner say as he was leaving the station? That the whole thing was now officially a shitshow?
“Also, I stopped by Hattie’s, like you suggested. The woman you wanted me to talk to refused, but guess what? One whole side of her face is bruised and swollen.”
“What’s the competing theory?” Peter said, making a mental note to call Ruth later about her daughter.
“Delgado may have an enemy we don’t know about. He was seen this morning limping badly. One arm in a sling. Like somebody beat the shit out of him. I’m thinking maybe there’s a vigilante out there. Your Imani, except a dude. Maybe a North Sider. Like everybody, he’s been hoping that one day things would be different, but that hasn’t happened, even with a Black chief of police, and now he’s decided it never will. He snaps. Finds out where Delgado lives and waits for him to come home.”
Peter shook his head. “Occam’s razor, J.J. The simplest explanation is probably right. Like you said before, everything’s unraveling. Even his girlfriend won’t back up his story. He goes out to the Green Hand and gets gloriously shit-faced, falls down in the parking lot and breaks his arm. If he assaulted Janey last night, he probably took off to avoid being arrested.”
J.J. shrugged. “Pretty good story either way, though, right?”
“It has the makings,” Peter admitted.
“Actually?” J.J. said. “It’s half a story. The other half is your student. What do you say I write the Delgado part and you write the Imani part? We use both stories to transition the magazine from Schuyler Arts to the Schuyler Review.”
Peter couldn’t help smiling. What J.J. wanted, of course, was what just about everybody he knew—Rub, Birdie, Ruth, Carl—seemed to want: for Peter to remain in the very place he was determined to escape. Was that what his father had in mind as well? Why else would he have given Peter that list of people to check on? His mother, of course, would be crushed if he stayed. She’d taken advantage of Sully’s absence to convince Peter that he was made for finer things and better places. The way she saw it, his escape—from Bath, from his father and his father’s friends—was his rightful destiny. What she wouldn’t be, however, was surprised. In all likelihood Vera had known the battle was lost that first time he’d showed up in her house wearing a tool belt. To her it was probably a foregone conclusion that he would one day slide onto the stool at the Horse that had his father’s name on it.
What was less clear to Peter was what his doing so would mean. Was this, to borrow Imani’s term, his “lot in life”? Would it mean he was “throwing in the towel”? Probably not, he decided. Maybe the choice wasn’t even his. Free will was not the Get Out of Jail Free card people wanted it to be. You begin to understand that when you start inheriting things—money and houses, yes, but also obligations. What would be difficult to give up, Peter thought, was not the idea of finding a finer place to live out what remained of his life, so much as his fond hope that when he at last arrived there, he would find a finer version of himself, as if that other Peter Sullivan already existed and had been patiently awaiting his arrival, wondering what the hell was taking him so long to show up, so their real life could begin.
There was a word for this, of course, and Peter knew what it was: folly.
Cahoots
“HEY, it’s your own damn fault,” Charice told him, apparently attempting to tease Raymer out of his dismay over her sudden and, to his mind, inexplicable decision to resign as Schuyler’s chief of police. By the time he arrived at the hospital she’d already called Bert Franklin to give her notice. Had Jerome been involved in the decision in some way? Raymer had run into him in the parking lot on his way in. He’d looked excited about something but refused to say what or where he was off to in such a hurry. When he asked Charice what was up, she claimed not to know, but he wasn’t sure he believed her. Odious Dougie, he still feared, had been right about their being in cahoots their whole lives and that they always would be.
“My fault?”
They were seated side by side on the edge of her unmade bed, waiting for a wheelchair. Though she’d been formally released from the hospital, patients were not permitted to leave under their own power. A chair had been requested half an hour ago, but it still hadn’t arrived.
She elbowed Raymer playfully. “You promised me you wouldn’t do too good a job.”
His figuring out the identity of the hanged man, she meant. Which, okay, was good work.
“Franklin was amazed by how you pieced it all together.”
He sighed mightily. “I never should’ve told you what was going on.”
He’d wanted to wait until morning. After all, what possible good could come of waking her up to share upsetting news after such a punishing day? Indeed, he wouldn’t have except that Jerome had assured him that his sister wasn’t asleep. Despite the sedative she’d been given earlier, she’d awakened around midnight and been unable to get back to sleep. “I just got off the phone with her, Dawg. Call her. We promised to keep her in the loop.”
Unconvinced, Raymer had texted instead: Some breaking news on the BlackBerry. It’ll wait till morning tho.
Ten seconds later his phone rang. “Tell me,” she said.
“Like I said…it can wait—”
“It’s somebody we know, isn’t it.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but it’s Gus.”
The line went very quiet. “Gus Moynihan? You’re sure?”
“Not one hundred percent, but yeah, pretty sure.” He then told her about the telephone handset he finally remembered seeing on the floor of the Sans Souci’s ballroom, how it had struck him as odd, though at the time he hadn’t made the connection to Alice, Gus’s troubled wife, who had brought just such a handset with her everywhere she went so she could carry on conversations with imaginary friends.
Alas, as with so many things in life, the answers you were searching for just led to more questions. In this case who transitioning naturally to why and how. How had Gus’s decision to end his life come to him? Raymer wondered. All at once or in stages? Had he opened his desk drawer one morning and discovered that he still had a key to the Sans Souci from his days as mayor? Had he immediately seen the key’s utility, that he could use it to let himself into the old hotel and do what he needed to without having to worry about anyone finding him and causing that person or persons trauma? Had he at some point opened the trunk of his car and noticed a length of rope peeking out from under the spare tire? Or had he made a special trip to the hardware store? What made him choose that particular day and not some other? (Raymer had a strong intuition here.) At what point, Raymer also wondered, had the tragic chain of events become irreversible? Why had no one seen it coming and tried to intervene? Surely, there’d been signs? Hadn’t Raymer glimpsed one or two himself without grasping their import? How many times had he seen the man sitting all by himself on a bench in Sans Souci Park, staring off into space. He remembered stopping one afternoon to say hello, and Gus had feigned delight to see him, explaining that the bench he was sitting on was the one that he and Alice had donated years ago. He’d even slid down so Raymer could read the plaque with his and Alice’s name on it. Despite his attempt at good cheer, he’d seemed as utterly lost as Alice had been. Had he returned to that same bench the day he decided he could bear his life no longer? Had he perhaps left his parka there in the hopes that some needy person would come along and take it? Had he shivered in the cold as he climbed those ballroom stairs, or was he numb, inside and out? Who had he called on his freshly scrubbed cell phone before leaping from the balcony? Had he made some sort of pact with himself—to leap or not—depending on the outcome of that final call?
After hanging up with Charice last night, he’d called the same number Gus had called back in January. Given the lateness of the hour, he wasn’t surprised when it went immediately to voice mail. “Hi, this is Alan,” said a lilting voice. “Leave a message.” Raymer, unable to think of one, had simply hung up. Alan, he thought.
First thing this morning, after a night of tossing and turning, he’d called the hospital in Utica and learned that his intuition about what had set events in motion was correct. Alice Moynihan had died there in early January from complications of advanced dementia. Gus had been duly notified and come to Utica to make arrangements and to retrieve his wife’s few personal belongings, among these the cracked, pink handset she still used to talk to her imaginary friends, including, of late, Gus himself. How devastating must it have been for him to learn that Alice had finally admitted him into her inner circle of confidants. The night when Raymer came upon him in the hospital parking lot, what had distressed him most was the fact that Alice never came to him for comfort. He was right there, but she’d preferred to talk to people in her head, using a phone that was really just a prop. And now, his wife gone, that same prop had made its cruel way back to him. Any remaining doubt that the handset Raymer remembered seeing on the ballroom floor was indeed Alice’s was laid to rest when Jerome returned there that morning and found it right where Raymer said it would be. It was, beneath layers of accumulated dust, cracked and pink.
Raymer’s instinct had also been correct about the man Gus had called just before jumping. Alan, it turned out, was a bartender at Infinitum, where Jerome had gone for drinks with Dr. Qadry the night before. He’d introduced himself, in fact, and had recommended a red wine that was on special. (Jerome sheepishly admitted that it wasn’t just white women who fell hopelessly in love with him. Gay white men were often unable to resist his elegant plumage as well.) This morning, using Gus’s BlackBerry, Raymer had again called Alan’s number, and this time the man picked up right away. “Gus,” he said, drawing the natural but incorrect inference. “I thought we agreed it’s over.” When Raymer explained who he was and how he happened to be calling on Gus’s phone, the man had exploded into tears, crying “Oh my God! Oh my God!” over and over. Eventually he’d calmed down enough to confirm Raymer’s hunch that, yes, they’d been together for a while, though the relationship had been fraught from the start. Alan was much younger and “out, out, out,” Gus older and deeply closeted. “Why call me?” he wanted to know when Raymer explained that the BlackBerry had been wiped clean, that Alan’s was the only number on its call log. “I mean, we hadn’t even spoken since he headed south for the winter.” Here, there was a pause, followed by a fresh round of oh-my-Gods. “He never left, did he.” Raymer attempted to say something soothing, but Alan was having none of it. “Oh my God,” he remembered now. “I didn’t pick up! I saw who was calling and didn’t pick up! I’m such a bad, bad person!”
* * *
FROM THE CORRIDOR came the sound of a squeaky wheelchair, but instead of entering the room, the chair, occupied by a frail, elderly woman and pushed by an orderly, rolled right on by.
“I just don’t see what the hurry is,” Raymer said, still hopeful he could change Charice’s mind about resigning. “Why not give yourself a day or two to think it over?”
“I have thought it over,” Charice assured him.
He shook his head, genuinely bewildered. “But this was your dream job,” he said, the word reminding him of the Langston Hughes poem he’d read that morning before coming to the hospital—the one with “dream” in the title. (He’d gone on Google to look the poet up, even tried to commit a few lines to memory, but of course they’d fled. Apparently poetry, like therapy, was lost on him.) “And, unlike me, you were good at it, right from the start.”
“I’m not saying I wasn’t.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m not sure,” she admitted. “Maybe that you can want the wrong thing? Or for the wrong reason?”
“But how was your wanting to be the first Black chief of police north of Albany wrong? Can you explain that to me?”
“I think what was wrong was that I’ve been trying to make police work be about justice.”
“Isn’t it?”
She shook her head. “It’s about enforcing existing laws fairly. Justice is about crafting better laws. Jerome’s been right all along. I should be in law school. And you belong here, running Schuyler’s police department.”
