Summertime Read online

  I try to protest but he continues: ‘My dear Lucia, although it is some years since I have seen your father, I have many warm memories of him. He was a good man, the best of men, and I am quite overcome with sadness for you. I take it your mother has been informed?’

  ‘Apparently. But I don’t know if she could comprehend it.’

  His voice is salty. ‘Such a great loss for all who loved him.’

  Everyone seems to feel Daddy’s death more acutely than I do. ‘Thank you Sashinka.’ I give him details of my flight.

  ‘Sashinka will be there,’ he assures me. ‘Despite the fact that he is almost pathologically late, on such an occasion his punctuality can be relied upon.’

  ‘All arranged?’ asks Jim as I put the receiver down.

  ‘Yup.’ Back into the bedroom. ‘Can I tell you what happened with Thinking Toys now?’ I open the closet and pull out some old but comfortable shoes. I am relieved at the way they close gently around my battered feet. I throw the new ones into the bag and start to fold a nightdress. Jim’s curious. He’d like to stare openly at the bedroom, at the clothes I’m packing, but he doesn’t want to be intrusive and so he sits in the armchair in the next room with his back to me and the door wide open.

  ‘Did you tell the meeting about your father?’ he asks. ‘Or did you actually pretend everything was normal?’

  ‘I told them. It strengthened my position.’

  Jim grimaces with his back.

  ‘They all turned into lambs, even Kent, and acquiesced to virtually all my suggestions.’

  ‘Which were?’

  I summarize the problems that arose and the solutions I proposed and Jim looks impressed.

  ‘Good. You did good.’

  ‘It’s kind of peculiar when someone congratulates you with their back to you.’

  Jim twists around. He looks into my face.

  ‘You did real good.’

  He twists away again.

  ‘And there’s more. George is going to fly a company jet.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, maybe. He sat there saying he couldn’t run a toy company, couldn’t participate in concept, development, management, research, marketing… Kent was getting more and more scathing. Then someone, okay, hell, it must have been me, asked about the Mittex jets. Whaddya know, there are three of them. Three jets and George Air Force trained. The answer’s obvious, so long as he can stay off the liquor.’

  Jim turns around. He checks anxiously that I’m not packing anything too personal. He says: ‘Except one thing makes that kind of expensive.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘No one’s going to travel in a jet George Hifeld’s flying, I mean, not without their own parachute.’

  I giggle.

  ‘Okay, I’m all packed.’

  He stands up and looks right at me.

  ‘Lucy. Your father’s dead,’ he says.

  And this time I let the truck roll its big wheels right over me. My heart is crushed in my chest, my breath is short. I gasp at the pain. I feel the heat of my tears. My sobs are a mechanism which has seized control of my body. He’s dead and no one else will ever love me so much. He’s dead and the lifetime of knowledge and wisdom inside his head counts for nothing any more. He’s dead and now there are empty spaces which his big body and firm voice used to fill. He’s dead and the house he lived in and all his things and the people he knew and the places he went are all still there, but there without him. And when enough tides have washed in and out then all evidence of his life will have vanished too. I sob time after time into his void. But he’s dead, and he can’t answer my sobs.

  5

  At Jim’s house, June is waiting. She ushers me in from the cold night and puts her arms around me and walks me through the hall and into the living-room, over toys, past small children, around a big bunch of flowers.

  ‘Darling,’ she says, ‘don’t even try to dry your tears. When my daddy died I swear I cried every day for a year. That’s the only way to make it better. You’ve just got to cry and cry and cry.’

  June is lonely, the only woman in her block, perhaps in ten blocks, who stays at home reproducing. Every year another baby. Jim is bashful as he announces each forthcoming birth.

  ‘That wife of mine,’ he says, ‘I just can’t stop her having babies. She wants a whole goddam football team.’

  He is half proud, half awkward now in his own home, reminded by my presence that all day he has been someone big in investment banking but here he is only Daddy, caught up in a whirlwind of demands, small children and domestic details which he relies on June to control. He stands, submissive, Chaplinesque, with his feet turned out and his shoulders bowed as children crawl up his legs.

  June keeps her arms around me and continues her incantations. ‘Oh darling Lucy, I wish you came here more often,’ she says. ‘You’ve got some crying to do, you know you can come here to June to do it. Just you hear me, you just hear me now.’

  And, in the warmth of their living-room, a baby calling somewhere else in the house and the flowers June thinks are from Jim misty inside their cellophane, I do cry, over and over, my sobs as repetitive as some tried but reliable machine. When, later, it’s time to go, Jim takes me out to the car. The windshield and all the windows are frozen.

  ‘Shit!’ says Jim, getting back out. ‘Who would have thought it was cold enough to freeze in that time? Should’ve put her in the garage.’

  He reappears, pursued by June with a steaming pan and various small children, some in pyjamas. He jumps into the car and starts the engine. June pours hot water across the windshield and the icy fog cracks and dissolves and behind it are the kind, plump faces of June and the children, smiling into the dark car. As Jim drives off the image of their faces seems imprinted on the windshield despite the street lights and the garish colours of the restaurants and stores we pass.

  After a long silence, Jim coughs.

  ‘Your dad got much family?’

  ‘None at all. All our relatives are on my mother’s side.’

  ‘Nobody?’

  ‘His family lived in a religious community and when he gave up the faith he had to give them up too. He hasn’t been in touch since he was sixteen.’

  ‘That’s drastic,’ says Jim. He blows his cheeks out. ‘That’s very drastic. Leaving them all at sixteen. Boy, it must have been hard. Hard to do it, hard afterwards when he was all alone. How old was he when he met your mother?’

  ‘That was much later. He was already teaching at the U and she was a secretary there. They met and married within three weeks.’

  ‘A whirlwind romance, huh?’

  She was beautiful and mysterious and foreign and exciting. I think that’s how she used to be. I’m not sure if I imagined her that way or if I really remember it.

  ‘Didn’t he meet anyone else? After she…’ Jim falters.

  ‘After her first acute psychotic break?’ I offer. ‘No, he’s been devoted to her all these years.’

  Jim coughs again. ‘How you take a death depends… it sort of depends how far down the line you are to accepting your own. How far down that line are you, Lucy?’

  My own voice comes back, filtered by a great distance.

  ‘After Stevie I didn’t care if I lived or died any more. It’s been pretty much that way since.’

  ‘You’re right down the line? Total acceptance?’

  ‘Yes. It’s good. It means you can ride on an airplane or with a crazy cab driver and not feel frightened. You can walk home at night. You can unlock your apartment without thinking that someone might be in there.’

  ‘I don’t believe you, Lucy.’

  ‘Jim, I’m ready for my own death and I always have been. It astonishes me when the plane doesn’t fall out of the sky. There have been a few occasions in my life when I thought I was almost dying – falling in a canyon, nearly drowning in a pool, a car crash – and the only thing that shocked me was to find myself alive.’

  ‘No. No. I don’t belie
ve that. You think your bucket went right to the bottom of the grief well when your baby died but there’s still a lot left in there. When there’s nothing else in the well, that’s when you’re ready to die. In my opinion. Because we grieve for ourselves, not for our dead.’

  ‘We miss the dead, Jim. That’s grief.’

  ‘No, that’s missing them.’

  We continue in silence to the airport. Jim insists on parking the car. When I leave him to go to the gate, refusing his offer to accompany me, I glance back once and see him standing there, still in the hurrying crowd, his stance humorous with feet turned outwards and hands dropped helplessly by his sides, his body swollen. He does not wave but he watches me. I cannot control my urge to cry. I can barely make my legs keep walking towards the airplane. I’m going home.

  On the flight it seems to me that Daddy’s death and Stevie’s death and the death of my brother, name unknown, features forgotten, all roll up into one huge ball of sadness and grief which sits in the adjacent seat crushing me like an obese passenger. I’m thinking of you and I don’t want you to be sad. Please don’t be sad, my little Lucy.

  I turn the rock from Arizona in my pocket over and over until it is warm again. Daddy said that the stripy stones were worthless, globally abundant, geologically uninteresting, but I liked them so much that I took them anyway. They were my only souvenir from that terrible trip.

  It began right after my brother died. I guess Daddy thought it would be good to get mother away from the house. Of course it was a subdued vacation, Mother mostly silent, but after a while something in the primitive landscape touched us and we submitted to its timelessness.

  Daddy liked clambering through the red canyons in Arizona until the rock dust had turned his dark hair red. Jane was seven and she followed him: I was only four and I followed Jane. We followed on one white-hot day I will never forget. Mother refused to come, choosing to sit in the car, a strange, upright silhouette in the rear window, sizzling, despite the open doors and windows, on the lonely blacktop.

  Daddy had a way of moving fast through the desert. He slipped between obstacles like a ghost, climbed dried riverbeds with firm steps that defied the small rocks to slide from under him, and sometimes he jumped, without hesitation, across cracks or between big rocks. Jane and I soon fell behind. I carried my own small rock hammer. I seldom chipped at rocks but told Jane I intended to use it to protect us against rattlesnakes and scorpions. Then, when we felt too hot for falsehood, when the sun was so fierce it seemed to hinge us to the ground, Jane and I admitted to each other that the rock hammer was probably not a useful weapon against deadly snakes. It was no more than a lucky charm. We advanced through the desert cautiously, looking at the ground. Way ahead of us we could hear the ringing of Daddy’s hammer or his voice, ‘C’mon, c’mon girls,’ echoing from around some vast, rocky corner. Then, when we reached the corner, he would already be distant. We never seemed to catch up with him.

  After the fall, when my arm had become one vast, throbbing temple of pain and the rest of my body, thought, feeling, everything, had disappeared inside it, Jane emptied the rocks we had found from our canvas bag in a way which indicated their unimportance. With concentration stitching her mouth into a small, straight line, she turned the bag into a sling. Then she left me and went to find Daddy, my arm against my heart throbbing its pledge of allegiance to the rock cliff. I watched her scramble along the bone-white trail of some absent river, growing tiny beneath a massive eyebrow of rock until she disappeared behind a pillar and didn’t reappear.

  Alone in the canyon with the ridiculous rock hammer, I understood why Mother had chosen to fry in a car. In the car you could look in front of you and see the blacktop rolling so far ahead that the distance and sun seemed eventually to melt it while here in the canyon the rocks and cliffs pressed in on you like a crowd. A silent crowd. I looked all around me and the silence was so intense that it was a presence here. It seemed to come tumbling down the canyon sides like great boulders, crushing the life right out of me. It was unbearable. My leg was reluctant to walk since some vicious fingernail of rock had scored the skin right off but I knew I had to move.

  I stumbled when I left the shade as though the sun had just slapped me. Its light and heat were viscous, impeding my progress, dragging at my slow, swelling leg, plucking at the canvas sling. I limped gradually, stopping frequently, learning not to lean on rocks that would burn me. When the silence was broken I thought at first that it was by the shriek of some shrill, angry bird and instinctively looked up. I searched the sky standing so still that I barely breathed. When the sound came again I recognized it. A woman’s voice. A woman’s voice so forceful and high-pitched that it eventually collapsed but within seconds it had recurred, this time with even greater strength. Its pitch was higher and louder than anything natural. And in this heat, which magnified even thought, I recognized the voice’s craziness and hysteria and I shivered. I had thought we were alone in this wild country and now it seemed some other, crazy person had joined us.

  The woman’s words, long forgotten now, echoed around the canyon. I watched a lizard scuttle up a vertical rock, pause, and then disappear into a crevice. And then, my legs weakened by fear, I stumbled towards the source of the noise.

  I emerge, suddenly, from between the canyon’s rocky teeth to find myself by the road. The canyon is a semicircle and a fourth of a mile away, standing on a blacktop faded by the sun and splintered by cold nights, the car seems to waver in the heat. Standing next to it, also wavering, as though this isn’t the parched desert but some underwater place, are Daddy, Mother and Jane. No crazy stranger, just my family, their faces turned to me in silence.

  I found the stripy stones in my pocket later, when I was waiting for X-rays at the hospital. They pleased me because they looked as though someone sloppy like me had painted them. I kept them on the floor of the car and when we drove home, suddenly, violently, soon after the red canyon, the rocks slid from side to side every time Daddy turned to the right or the left. And, although it had been set and plastered at the hospital, each time he flung us around another bend and the rocks slid, my arm throbbed with pain. We were fleeing Arizona and Daddy’s face and knuckles were white. Maybe he guessed that the woman he found when he walked out of the canyon was not the same woman, would not ever be the same woman, we’d left behind on the blacktop in the hot car.

  We seldom spoke on that journey, except for Mother of course. When she lapsed into long silences we sank inside the silences with her, relieved, wanting them to last for ever, to last all the way back to California, and Daddy would accelerate still more, as though speed would put more ground between the last gas station and the next, between Mother’s last outburst and the next. Jane and I assured Daddy that we didn’t want lunch, we didn’t need the bathroom, we didn’t want to stop for anything because most of all we didn’t want Mother to get out of the car. And maybe we thought that when we finally got her home she might be the same Mother she was before, as though she’d stayed at home all along.

  It is some years since I last saw Sasha and I have an irrational fear that I won’t recognize him. But his wide face, his mouth stretched right across it, is first in the group of faces clustered at the gate. He is smaller and broader than I remember him, perhaps smaller and certainly broader than me. His face has grown fleshy, his hair thin.

  I put down my bag and at once he flings his arms around me, pushing his bristly cheek to mine. He smells of cigarettes, leather and chocolate.

  ‘My dear Lucia, I don’t know whether to be happy to see you or sad at your loss. I think I must allow myself to experience both emotions simultaneously.’ He picks up my bag. ‘Don’t you have any more than this?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How different from my wife for whom no trip is complete without an excess baggage fine.’

  ‘Are you and Marina divorced?’

  ‘Let us say that I regard her as my excess baggage fine in life’s journey. Follow me, please.’
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  I am content to trail behind Sasha’s round, leather-jacketed back into elevators and across the dim parking lot to his car. The last time I saw him was four, perhaps five years ago, at the clinic. A birthday celebration for Mother at which she behaved badly. I remember how angry I was that he seemed to find the whole event comical, and how my anger itself amused him.

  When he pauses by the elevator he asks: ‘How long since you were in California, Lucia?’

  ‘Three years.’

  ‘You haven’t been back since you left? A brave exodus indeed.’

  We reach his car and Sasha turns to me. I am able to examine his face for the first time. Its structure is lost in folds of flesh, his teeth are uneven, his hair is thinning at the centre and unkempt at the sides but his eyes have a piercing, frightening beauty. They are like Jane’s, like my mother’s, like my grandmother’s.

  He is looking at me too, about to speak, reluctant to do so. At last he asks: ‘Lucia, what have you been told about your dear papa’s death?’

  ‘Nothing. I mean, just that he drowned in the Pacific. I don’t even know where.’

  ‘At Big Brim beach, as I understand it.’

  ‘Big Brim?’ A line of uninviting sand dunes by the coast road, the beach invisible.

  Sasha is persisting hesitantly. ‘You know nothing more? You are unaware, for example, of police involvement?’

  ‘Oh, the police. I think someone mentioned the police.’

  His face folds itself with concern. ‘Lucia, you look so tired that I can hardly bear to tell you this…’

  I feel no curiosity, no anticipation.

  ‘Instead of driving you now to our apartment where Mama and Aunt Zoya have been cooking and preparing your room and looking forward to administering tender affection, I must take you at once to your father’s house as you originally requested.’

  I think of the old house, crouched on the hillside like an enormous, dark bird waiting to flap its wings and fly out across the valley beneath. It’s been waiting for me and now, at last, I’m back.