“What?”
“Look. Ashes.” I pointed.
The fireplace in the house had never been used. Our mother was so afraid of fire that she’d insisted on electric stoves and electric baseboard heat throughout the house. Mother came back with her bag and her face powdered.
“How did these ashes get here?” Lisa asked, sidling up to the subject in her way.
“When you burn things, you make ashes,” Mother said. “You should know that, with your education.”
“What was burned?”
“I promised your father I’d burn some of his papers when he died. Well, he died.”
“Father died seven years ago,” Lisa said.
“I know that, dear. I just finally got around to it. You know how I hate fire.” Her point was a reasonable one.
“What kind of papers?” Lisa asked.
“That’s none of your business,” Mother said. “Why do you think your father asked me to burn them? Now, let’s go to dinner.”
At the door, Mother fumbled with her key in the lock, complained that the mechanism had become sticky lately. I offered to help. “Here,” I said. “If you turn the key this way and then back, it turns easily.”
“Monksie fixed my lock,” she said.
Lisa groaned and stepped down ahead of us to her car.
Mother spoke softly to me, “I think there’s a problem with Lisa and Barry.”
“Yes, Mother.”
“Are you married yet?” she asked. I held her arm as she walked down the porch steps.
“Not yet.”
“You’d better get started. You don’t want to be fifty with little kids. They’ll run your tail into the ground.”
My father had been considerably older than my mother. In June, when school ended, we would drive to the house in Highland Beach, Maryland, and open it for the summer. We’d open all the windows, sweep, clear cobwebs and chase away stray cats. Then for the rest of the summer we would all remain at the beach and Father would join us on weekends. But I remember how the first cleaning always wore him out and when it came time to take a break before dinner and play softball or croquet, he would resign to a seat on the porch and watch. He would cheer Mother on when she took the bat, giving her pointers, then sitting back as if worn out by thinking about it. He had more energy in the mornings and for some reason he and I took early strolls together. We walked to the beach, out onto the pier, then back, past the Douglass house and over to the tidal creek where we’d sit and watch the crabs scurrying with the tide. Sometimes we’d take a bucket and a net and he’d coach me while I snagged a couple dozen crabs for lunch.
Once he fell to his butt in the sand and said, “Thelonious, you’re a good boy.”
I looked back at him from the ankle-deep water.
“You’re not like your brother and sister. Of course, they’re not like each other either. But they’re more alike than they’re willing to admit. Anyway, you’re different.”
“Is that good, Father?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said, as if figuring out the answer right then. He pointed to the water. “There’s a nice fat one. Come at him from farther away.”
I followed his instructions and scooped up the crab.
“Good boy. You have a special mind. The way you see things. If I had the patience to figure out what you were saying sometimes, I know you’d make me a smarter man.”
I didn’t know what he was telling me, but I understood the flattering tone and appreciated it.
“And you’re so relaxed. Hang on to that trait, son. That might serve you better than anything else in life.”
“Yes, Father.”
“It will also prove handy for upsetting your siblings.” Then he leaned back and proceeded to have a heart attack.
I ran to him. He grabbed my arm and said, “Now, stay relaxed and go get help.”
That turned out to be the first of four heart attacks he would suffer before just out and shooting himself one unseasonably warm February evening while Mother was off meeting with her bridge club. His suicide apparently came as no surprise to my mother, as she called each of us, in order of age, and said the same thing, “You must come home for your father’s funeral.”
Dinner was typical, nothing more or less. My mother said things that made my sister roll her eyes while she smoked an entire pack of imaginary cigarettes. Mother told me about telling all her bridge buddies about my books, asking as she always did if there wasn’t a better word for fuck than fuck. Then my sister dropped me at my hotel and perfunctorily committed herself to lunch with me the next day.
I was scheduled to present my paper at nine the next morning, so my intention was to get to bed early and maybe sleep through it. However, when I entered my room I found a note that had been slipped under the door that told me to return a call to Linda Mallory at the Mayflower. I went to the lobby for the telephone.
“I was hoping you would come to the conference,” Linda said. “The secretary in your department told me where you’d be staying.”
“How are you, Linda?”
“I’ve been better. You know, Lars and I broke up.”
“I didn’t know you were together. I suppose asking who Lars is at this juncture is pointless.”
“Are you tired? I mean, it’s early yet and we are still on California clock, right?”
“Is that Bay area talk? California clock?” I looked at my watch. 8:20. “My paper’s at nine in the morning.”
“But it’s only eight o’clock,” she said. “That’s five for us. You can’t expect me to believe you’re going to bed at five. I can be over in fifteen.”
“No, I’ll come there,” I said, fearing that if I declined completely, she would show up anyway. “I’ll meet you in the bar.”
“There’s one of those little bars in my room.”
“In the bar at eight-forty-five.” I hung up.
Linda Mallory and I had slept together three times, two of those times we had sex. Twice in Berkeley when I was doing some readings and once in Los Angeles when she was down doing the same. She was a tall, knock-kneed, rather shapeless-however-thin woman with a weak chin and a sharp wit, a sharp wit when men and sex weren’t involved at any rate. She zeroed in on male attention like a Rottweiler on a porkchop and it became all she could see. In fact, before her ears perked to male attention she could be called attractive, dark eyes and thick hair, lean and with an easy smile. She liked to fuck, she said, but I believed she liked saying it more than doing it. She could be pushy. And she was completely without literary talent, which was both irritating and, in a weird way, refreshing. Linda had published one volume of predictably strange and stereotypically innovative short fictions (as she liked to call them). She’d fallen into a circle of innovative writers who had survived the sixties by publishing each others’ stories in their periodicals and each others’ books collectively, thus amassing publications, so achieving tenure at their various universities, and establishing a semblance of credibility in the so-called real world. Sadly, these people made up a good portion of the membership of the Nouveau Roman Society. They all hated me. For a couple of reasons: One was that I had published and had moderate success with a realistic novel some years earlier, and two, I made no secret, in print or radio interviews, what I thought of their work. Finally, however, I was hated because the French, whom they so adored, seemed to hold my work in high regard. To me, a mere strange footnote to my obscure and very quiet literary career. To them, a slap in the face perhaps.