Mystery

“Think about what I said. Don’t get—ah, you know.” Victor stood up and moved toward the liquor cabinet. “Something mild, I think,” he said, but he was no longer talking to Tom.

Tom spent the rest of the day walking around the house, unable to come to rest for longer than half an hour. He read a few pages of a novel, but kept losing his way in the sentences—the words jittered into a general blur as he pictured a uniformed policeman tossing his envelope onto Fulton Bishop’s desk, Fulton Bishop glancing at it, either picking it up or ignoring it.…

Tom carried the book into the living room. From the other side of the staircase came the roars and yells of a Yankees game booming fuzzily from the television in the study, where his father had collapsed into his chair. The gladiatorial New York fans always made a lot of noise. The front windows framed Lamont von Heilitz’s big grey house. Had von Heilitz’s father ever advised him to start thinking about business opportunities? Tom jumped up and walked twice around the living room, wishing that the ball game would end so that he could switch the television to the Mill Walk station and wait for the news. Of course there would be nothing on the news. Church bake sales, the scores of the local Little League teams, the announcement of the construction of a new high rise parking lot … Tom wandered up the stairs and went into his room. He got to his knees and checked under his bed. The leather-bound journal was where he had left it. He heard his parents’ bedroom door click open, and stood up in an almost guilty scramble. His mother’s footsteps went down the front stairs. Tom left his bedroom and went down after her.

He found her in the kitchen, looking unhappily at the dishes in the sink and the empty beer cans his father had dropped on the table. She had brushed her hair and wore a long peach-colored satin nightgown and a matching bed jacket that looked like a compromise between underwear and clothing. “I’ll wash the dishes, Mom,” he said, realizing almost for the first time that, despite the uncertainty and puzzles of his life, his parents often made him feel as though they were his children.

For a moment Gloria seemed utterly confused about what to do next. She went uncertainly toward the table. “Are you all right?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” she said, her voice as blurry as her face.

He went to the sink and turned on the hot water. Behind his back, Gloria moved around the kitchen turning on the kettle, rattling the cups, opening a box of tea. She seemed to be moving very slowly, and he thought that she was watching him busy himself with the pile of dirty dishes. He heard her pour hot water into the cup and sit down again with a sigh. Then he could not stand the silence any longer, and said, “Mr. Handley wanted me to come to his place after school yesterday, to show me some rare books. But I thought he really wanted to talk to me.”

She uttered some indistinct sound.

“I thought that you asked him to talk to me. Because of my scrapbook.” He turned from the sink. His mother was slumped over the cup of tea with her bright hair hanging like a screen before her face. “There isn’t anything to worry about, Mom.”

“Where does he live?” The question seemed to bore her, as if she had asked it only to fill a space in the conversation.

“Out near Goethe Park, but we didn’t get to his place.”

She brushed back her hair and looked heavily up at him.

“I got sick—dizzy. I couldn’t go any farther. He drove me home.”

“You were out on Calle Burleigh?”

He nodded.

“That’s where you had your accident. I suppose … you know. Unpleasant memories.”

She took in his start—Tom nearly dropped the dish he was drying—with an expression of grim confirmation. “Don’t think that things like that go away. They don’t, let me tell you.” She sighed again, and seemed to tremble. She snatched up the cup of hot tea and bent over it so that again the bright curtain of her hair fell to hide her face. Tom still felt as if the insight she had casually tossed his way had knocked the breath out of his body. He had a quick, mysterious mental glimpse of a fat old woman yelling “Cornerboy!” at him and knew that he had actually seen her on the day of his accident. The world had cracked open to let him peek beneath its crust, then sealed itself shut again. Down below the surface was an angry old woman waving her fist, what else?

An instant before he realized that his mother was crying, he caught, like a sharp, distant odor, the urgent, driven feeling of that day. Then he noticed that his mother had curled down even further into herself, and that her shoulders were shaking.

He wiped his hands on his trousers and moved toward her. She was crying soundlessly, and when he reached her, she pressed her napkin to her eyes and forced herself to be still.

Tom’s hand hovered over the nape of his mother’s neck: he could not tell if she would allow him to touch her. Finally he permitted his hand to come down softly on her neck.