The Grievers Page 7

“Are you kidding?” I asked, looking to Neil for even a modicum of support. “I remember like it was yesterday. You asked me what I was doing, and I said I was cutting open the cat’s scrotal sack. Then you told the class to come and watch, and when I cut it open, the kittens popped out.”

  “That’s right!” Frank shouted. “They popped out and Ennis asked if your scrotum was full of kittens.”

  “Something like that,” I said, suddenly wishing I’d left well enough alone. “Billy tried to warn me.”

  “Fun times,” Frank said wistfully. “But like they say, you can’t live in the past, right?”

  Screw you, Frank, I thought as Ennis went to the minibar and asked the bastard if he wanted his regular drink. I can live anywhere I want—including the past.

  Frank’s job, Ennis explained, was to help me and Neil with the letter. And, of course, with planning Billy’s memorial service. There were, after all, a lot of details to consider—what to serve, how big a crowd to invite, whether or not to involve the press. In short, Frank was there to make sure we got the most bang for the Academy’s buck.

  “I think we can handle it on our own,” I said.

  “No worries, gentlemen,” Ennis insisted. “Think of Frank as part of the team. He was doing some consulting for us a while back when I figured out that it was cheaper to hire him full time. Publicity and marketing, mainly. The man’s a wizard when it comes to finding the right words.”

  “What can I say?” Frank said, taking the drink from Ennis. “Working for the Academy is my mitzvah. Know what I mean, Schwartz?”

  “This letter,” Neil said before I could answer. “It’s what? An invitation to the memorial service?”

  “More or less,” Ennis explained. “You can leave the details to Frank. All we really need is for you and Schwartz to sign off on it.”

  “It really isn’t a big deal,” Frank said. “We’ll mention Billy’s passing and how much the Academy meant to him. We’ll talk about the new cafeteria, the new gym, the new swimming pool. Drop a few hints about how much money it all cost. With any luck, we’ll get some checks in the mail and a few bodies in the door on the day of the service. The real trick is to keep things light and not dwell too much on the negative aspects of the situation.”

  Frank stirred his drink with his finger.

  “Keep things light?” I said. “Billy killed himself.”

  “That’s one story,” Ennis said. “But it’s not the only one.”

  “You’re saying he didn’t?”

  “I’m saying there’s a difference between the forest and the trees.”

  “Ideally, we try to avoid specifics in cases like this,” Frank added. “Only because they detract from the larger message. But like Phil said, leave the letter to me. All we need from you guys are a couple of signatures and your blessing.”

  “Our blessing?” I said.

  “A letter from me is one thing,” Frank said. “But a letter from you guys?”

  “But it won’t be from us,” I said. “It’ll be from you.”

  “In spirit, the letter will be from all of us,” Ennis said. “But with your imprimatur—”

  “Our imprimatur?” I asked.

  “It means endorsement,” Frank said. “Your seal of approval.”

  “I know what the word means,” I shouted, struggling to rise from my deep, soft chair with an air of authority. “I just don’t know why—”

  “We’ll do what we can,” Neil said quietly. “Whatever you need, just let us know.”

  I turned and glared at him.

  “We understand that it’s a tragic situation,” Ennis said, stepping forward and turning out his hand to indicate that our audience had reached its end. “But it’s times like these that bring out the best in all of us.”

  “Exactly,” Frank said, raising his glass in our direction as Ennis made a less than subtle gesture toward the door. “Grace under pressure.”

  I choked back my rage as Neil thanked Ennis for his time and told Frank that it was great to see him again. Gradually herding us out of his office, Ennis said that Frank would be in touch as soon as he had a draft of the letter. We could feel free to tweak it a little to make it sound more personal, Frank added, calling after us from inside the office, but in the meantime Neil and I could give some thought to the kinds of refreshments we wanted for the memorial service—and if either of us was up for it, to come up with a few nice words about Billy.

  “So,” Neil said as Ennis closed his door behind us and our footsteps echoed down the cold, stone stairwell that led to the ground floor. “Frank Dearborn.”

  “Yeah,” I said, shaking my head in disbelief. “Frank Dearborn.”

  Beyond that, there was nothing more to say.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A soft rain had begun to fall as Neil turned out of the Academy parking lot and onto the broken street. His windshield wipers slapped a steady beat as we passed the row homes, pawnshops, taverns, bus stops, liquor stores, churches, supermarkets, and gas stations that slumped shoulder to shoulder in various states of disrepair along the narrow wrecked roads of North Philadelphia. Some of the houses were undergoing reconstruction, but most were crumbling to the ground. Halfway down a block, we’d see a gap in the row, like a missing tooth in an ugly, brown smile. The vacant space would be overrun with weeds and stray cats, and the imprint of the fallen home would still be visible on the flanks of its neighbors—where the floorboards had been, the walls and the staircase. People used to live in these spaces, I thought to myself. They used to sit down to dinner and talk about their days or lie awake at night and wonder how to make ends meet. They had holidays here. First dates and clandestine meetings. They talked and loved and fought and lived, and now they were gone. Ghosts. Memories. Dust.

  “I told you we shouldn’t have come through Australia,” Neil said, doing Groucho once again as his Pontiac bumped along Girard Avenue. “You know it’s all ripped up. We should have gone straight up Lincoln Boulevard.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, assuming it was yet another cue to spit out the wrong title of a Marx Brothers movie.

  “Take a guess,” Neil said.

  “Do I have to?”

  “Here’s a hint: Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I’ll never know.”

  “I really don’t feel like it.”

  “Not even close,” Neil said. “But thanks for playing just the same.”

  “Can you at least try to be serious for once?”

  “Me?” Neil said. “I’m not the one with The Jeffersons ringtone. How’d that get on your phone anyway?”

  “Anthony did it,” I said. “It was a birthday present.”

  “And you haven’t thought about changing it?”

  “Of course I’ve thought about changing it,” I said. “But there’s a principle involved.”

  “Right,” Neil said. “A principle.”

  We crossed the Schuylkill at 34th Street and passed the zoo where street vendors were still out, hawking soft pretzels and inflatable superheroes despite the rain.

  “You could have at least said something back there,” I said. “All that bullshit about Noblac ideals and bringing more alums back into the fold?”

  “What was I supposed to say?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “How about that Frank’s an asshole? How about that Ennis could go to hell? How about that we weren’t going to sign their stupid letter? That would have been a nice start.”

  “What good would it have done, Charley?”

  “We’re talking about Billy,” I said. “We’re talking about his memory. What do you mean what good would it have done?”

  “They’re doing this with or without us,” Neil said. “And in the end, who knows? Maybe they’re right. At least this way, something good comes of it.”

  “Of Billy’s suicide?” I said.

  “Yes,” Neil said. “Of Billy’s suicide.”

  “So we just, what? Roll over and take it?”
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  “We make the best of it,” Neil said as I realized that we missed the on-ramp for I-76. “I haven’t mentioned this to anyone, but my father isn’t doing so well.”

  “Is it his heart again?” I asked.

  “No,” Neil said. “Alzheimer’s.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  I never know what to say.

  Neil’s dad printed forms for a living, documentation and paperwork for banks and small businesses. Name, Date, Social Security Number, I thought to myself. Fill in the blank. Check all that apply. Press firmly with ballpoint pen: __I’m sorry your father is sick. __I’m sorry he’ll forget your name. __I’m sorry you’ll watch him fade over time. __I’m sorry he’ll look at your children one day and smile blandly like my grandmother used to as he wonders who they are and why they’re hugging him, and I’m sorry they’ll never know how funny he was, how witty, how smart, how full of life.

  __I’ll never forget the summer after college when the world was still big and full of possibility, how you’d call me at work and say let’s go to the shore, and I’d grab a fresh shirt, and we’d meet up for pizza and beer and talk about everything life had in store for us.

  __And I’ll always remember the night a girl cut her toe on a broken bottle and her boyfriend threw a punch at the guy who dropped it, and a table turned over and the whole place exploded, and the cops burst in wearing gas masks and riot gear as we slipped out a side door with a couple of Asian women who spoke twelve words of English between them and asked for a ride back to Wildwood where they were living with their cousins; one had to be fifty, and the other was her mother, and they were both wearing skintight sequin dresses, and when we pulled up to a motel after a thousand wrong turns, ten guys with mustaches and butterfly knives swarmed around the car as the women stepped out, and they eyed us up and down, flicking their knives and lighting unfiltered cigarettes as they tried to decide how to dispose of our bodies until one of the girls said something in a language we didn’t know and the men started laughing and slapping the hood of your car, the roof, and the windshield, and the younger woman leaned in as if to kiss you goodnight and said, “Don’t worry, big boy, I tell them you candyass homo couple bigtime,” and we both nodded and said goodnight as you threw the car into gear and peeled out of the parking lot in a cloud of exhaust fumes and burning rubber, a small army of Asian men laughing their asses off in your rearview mirror as we vowed to never breathe a word of the incident to anyone.

  __And now your father’s sick, and I wish I had the words to make sense of everything I want to tell you.

  NEIL FOUND a cramped pizzeria where a man in an apron stood behind the counter and tossed dough in the air. We ordered a medium pie and two iced teas and sat in a booth by a window where flies beat their wings in vain against the glass. We ate and talked. We sipped our drinks and ordered refills. Watching from a distance, a stranger might get the impression that Neil was my accountant or my insurance agent or maybe even a social worker assigned to deal with a mentally challenged adult with a penchant for rubber boots and brightly colored stockings. Up close, the impression I got was more or less the same.

  This was my friend, I thought to myself as Neil filled me in on the details of his father’s illness: he was still in the early stages, still recognized faces, was starting on Razadyne, but the look of almost perpetual confusion and frustration on his face said that he wasn’t the man he used to be. There was a time when Neil and I talked all the time, when no secret was too great, no dream too wild. Now this was what passed for our relationship—exchanging the digest versions of each other’s lives in a fiberglass booth at some dirty, run-down pizza place.

  “And the hits keep coming,” Neil said. “Madeline got a job.”

  “That’s great,” I said. “Isn’t it?”

  Neil’s head bobbed from side to side. “It’s in Baltimore.” It wasn’t much further than where she was already going to school, Neil said, but living in Delaware was too much for them—not the state so much, but splitting their lives between two cities.

  “Two hours each day,” he said. “And for Madeline, it’s worse. The good news is I can waive into DC, so the bar exam won’t be an issue.”

  I wasn’t sure what this meant, but I smiled and nodded anyway.

  “My mother’s a wreck,” Neil said. “She thinks we’re abandoning her and my dad in their time of need.”

  “At least you’ll get Packer out of your hair,” I said.

  “That guy,” Neil said. “You wouldn’t believe half the shit he does. He called me at work the other day and asked if I could drive him to Conshohocken for a haircut.”

  “That was me,” I said.

  Neil laughed, so I laughed, too, but if I wanted to be honest with myself, I had to admit that calling him away from his job to pull me out of the mud suggested that I was at least a little clingy, if not entirely helpless.

  “That was different,” Neil said. “You wanted to tell me about Billy. All Greg ever wants is a free ride and a haircut—though this time around it’s a ride to the hospital.”

  “Is he sick?” I asked.

  “No,” Neil said. “He wants an epidural.”

  “No kidding,” I said. “Who’s the father?”

  “It has something to do with his back and this girl he’s meeting in Chicago. He sent her a picture, by the way.”

  “And it didn’t scare her off?”

  “It was a picture of me.”

  “Creepy,” I said. “Why do you bother?”

  “I don’t know,” Neil said. “I’ve been thinking about Billy lately. Maybe with Greg we can make a difference.”

  “I know what you mean,” I said. “I still feel—I wish we’d done something. I wish I’d done something. Said something, even.”

  “You can’t think like that,” Neil said. “It’ll make you crazy.”

  “Too late,” I said. “Do you feel like going for a ride?”

  “I have to get back to work,” Neil said.

  “Me too, but there’s something I need to see.”

  Neil rolled his eyes by way of protest, but a mischievous grin spread across his face at the thought, I guessed, of skipping work for one last romp with his best friend before he moved.

  “Call Dwayne,” I said. “It’s in his neck of the woods.”

  DWAYNE LIVED alone in a three-bedroom twin on the outer fringes of Philadelphia. As a civil servant, he was bound by law to live within city limits, but as a human being, it was the last place on Earth he wanted to live. The solution most civil servants found to this dilemma was to take up residence in the northernmost part of the city—north of North Philly and west of the Northeast in neighborhoods like Chestnut Hill, Manayunk, Germantown, and Roxborough—the same part of the city where Billy had grown up.

  “Do you know what time it is?” Dwayne asked when we arrived on his doorstep. “I’m working nights this week.”

  “I told you he’d be cranky,” Neil said. “The man needs his beauty rest.”

  Dwayne stood, unamused, in his doorway, wearing nothing but a tattered brown robe and fuzzy blue slippers. In the two years he’d lived in the house, he only invited us inside once, and that was to move furniture. Since then, he’d painted the walls and had carpets installed, so whenever Neil and I visited, Dwayne stopped us at the door lest we track mud all over the place like a couple of wild animals. Holding up a pizza box, I said we brought lunch, but he only opened his door wide enough to join us on the front steps.

  “It’s cold,” he said, opening the box. “And you took a bite out of it.”

  “I got hungry,” I said. “Listen, we need your help. Can you show us how to get to the Henry Avenue Bridge?”

  “No way,” Dwayne said. “Bad idea.”

  Radio towers loomed over his house, red warning lights flashing in the gray, gloomy sky.

  “I just want to look,” I said.

  “Trust me,” Dwayne said. “The view is terrible.”

  “I’m not talk
ing about the view,” I said. “I’m talking about closure.”

  “Closure? Please. Morbid curiosity’s more like it.”

  “Morbid curiosity, then. I want to see it.”

  “You crossed that bridge to get here,” Dwayne said. “Isn’t that enough?”

  “We did?” Neil said.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

  “Christ,” Dwayne said, lifting a cold slice from the box. “Where’s the car?”

  If I were a considerate friend, I’d have let Dwayne take the front seat, but the part of me that let him squeeze into the back of Neil’s Pontiac with my balloons and my giant dollar sign also told me it would be funny to force his knees up to his chest by pushing the passenger seat as far back as it would go. Still in his bathrobe, Dwayne called me an asshole, then grunted directions at Neil between bites of cold pizza.

  Dwayne was right, of course. I was an asshole and probably still am, but the voice that told me it would be funny to crush Dwayne’s knees with the passenger seat also told me that my brand of assholery, if such a thing exists, was the good kind, the kind that let guys like us push each other around and call each other pussies and make jokes about each other’s mothers even when they were dead or dying of unspeakable diseases. Crushing Dwayne’s knees was like breaking his balls, I told myself. It said I knew I could fool around with him, knew that deep down he had a good sense of humor, and knew most of all that he could take it. If there was anything four years at the Academy had taught me, it was that the best way to tell my friends I loved them was through torture and abuse. But as we neared the Henry Avenue Bridge, I remembered that the lesson was completely lost on Billy.

  The evening commute was hours away, but the avenue was already heavy with traffic as Neil parked his car and we walked the hundred or so yards of tree-lined sidewalk that led to the bridge. If anyone on the force saw him out and about in his bathrobe, Dwayne complained, it could mean his badge. They’d arrest him for indecent exposure or, worse, force him into counseling if the wind happened to blow his robe open at just the right moment.