Cleve Rose was never able to talk to his father about his suspicions about the identity of the murderer, because days later Cleve himself was killed in a motorcycle accident, far from the Catskill Mountains, near Chicago. Different circumstances, different setting. Nevertheless, Ian Rose, devastated by the loss, could not help but think that his son’s fate had been sealed beforehand, when Mr. Eagles’s unsolved murder had left a dark cloud floating over these mountains.
“Well, you can’t help but be suspicious,” Ian Rose tells me. “Such a brutal act in such a peaceful place. It was a terrifying mystery, breaking the natural rhythm of the day-to-day, and more so if they suggest that something is lying in wait. It wasn’t just us; all the neighbors had trouble. Some left for a while, others put up bars or alarms, something unheard of before. And right in the middle of that period of fear and uncertainty, Cleve just happens to die. I’m sorry; I’d rather not speak about that. I don’t feel well, it’s something too personal to talk about,” Ian Rose says, but he keeps on talking. “Look, no one is prepared for the death of a son. There’s no recovering from that and nothing to be said about it, so I won’t say anything else, what’s implied is understood.”
Sometime after Cleve’s death, a package arrived at the house in the Catskills, a package that disturbed his father from the moment he received it, partly because he didn’t recognize the name of the sender, but particularly because it wasn’t addressed to him but to his son, Cleve. And Cleve was no longer. For Ian that death was something he could not handle, a wound that did not heal. He blamed himself and was drowning in guilt because he had sensed something was wrong, that some ambush was waiting for them, and yet he had done nothing to stop the threat from closing in on Cleve.
“That same night on the day Eagles was murdered we should have left the house, at least for a while,” he acknowledges now. “I thought about it, but there were the dogs — it’s not easy to find a place to stay with three dogs. Naturally, we weren’t going to fit in Cleve’s studio in the East Village. But we should have done it. It was one of those times when you hear a voice inside you telling you to do it again and again, but you ignore it.”
In his dreams after Cleve’s death, Ian Rose confused the boy who had not grown up with him with the young man who had wanted to get closer to him but was with him for so short a time. He mixed up the younger Cleve and the older Cleve. He woke up asking himself why he had allowed his ex-wife, Cleve’s mother, to take him so far away, why he hadn’t been paying attention, how was it possible that the years had passed by so fast, why hadn’t he understood that in the blink of an eye a child grows up and is free, and if you are not vigilant he gets on a motorcycle and kills himself.
“I couldn’t take it,” he says. “My failure. And the passing months weren’t helping. Nothing shattered the silence or shortened the distance that separated me from my son. And all of a sudden he gets this package in the mail.”
A package that someone sent Cleve as if he were still alive, and as such brought him back to life for an instant, because there was a flash of confusion in his father’s head, for a moment the past was erased, and he was about to call out to his son: “There’s something for you down here, son.” But the spell broke immediately, the whole weight of Cleve’s death came down on him, and Ian Rose remained standing there for a while, not able to move, steadying himself against the blow of a sorrow that returned like a boomerang, and in the end he couldn’t think of anything else to do but go up to the attic where his son had slept. He put the package on the bed without opening it and said, “This is for you, Cleve. It’s from a woman in Staten Island.”