“You haven’t,” I said. “It’s only eleven thirty.” I consulted my watch, though I eerily always know what time it is — as if a clock was ticking inside me, which it may be. “You haven’t told me the climax. Unless you don’t want me to know.”
“I’m not sure you should,” Ms. Pines said, returning her gaze solemnly to rest on me. “It could alienate you from your house.”
“I sold real estate for twenty years,” I said. “Houses aren’t that sacred to me. I sold this one twice before I bought it myself.” (In arrears from the bank.) “Somebody else’ll own it someday and tear it down.” (And build a shitty condo.)
“We seem to need to know everything, don’t we?”
“You’re the history teacher,” I said. Though of course I was violating the belief-tenet on which I’ve staked much of my life: better not to know many things. Full disclosure is the myth of the fretting classes. Those who ignore history are no more likely to repeat it than anyone else but are more likely to feel better about many things. Though, so determined was I to engage in an inter-racial substance-exchange, I clean forgot. It wouldn’t have been racist, would it, to let Ms. Pines leave? President Obama would’ve understood.
“Well. Yes, I certainly am,” Ms. Pines said, composing herself again. “So. Sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas of 1969…” (neuropsychically, a spiritual dead zone, when suicides abound like meteor showers) “… something disrupting apparently took place between our parents. I possibly could have found out what. But I was young and simply didn’t. My brother and I didn’t talk about it. It could have been that our mother told our father she was leaving him and going away with the music teacher. Mr. Senlak. I don’t know. It could have been something else. My mother could be very dramatic. She could have said some wounding and irretrievable thing. Matters had gotten bad.”
For the first time since Ms. Pines had been in my house, I could feature the lot of them — all four Pines — breathing in these rooms, climbing the stairs, trading in and out the single humid bathroom, congregating in what was then the “dining room,” talking over school matters, eating PB&J’s, all of them satellites of one another in empty space, trying, trying, trying to portray a cohesive, prototype, mixed-race family unit, and not succeeding. It would do any of us good to contemplate the house we live in being peopled by imperfect predecessors. It would encourage empathy and offer — when there’s nothing left to want in life — perspective.
Somehow I knew, though, by the orderly, semireluctant way Ms. Pines was advancing to what she meant to tell, that I wasn’t going to like what I was about to hear, but would then have to know forever. My brain right away began sprinting ahead, rehearsing it all to Sally, an agog-shocked look on her face — all before I even knew what it was! I wanted to wind it back to the point, only moments before, at which Ms. Pines looked all around her, as if she’d heard ghostly old Hartwick pounding up the stairs from the basement with bad intentions filling his capacious brain. I could lead her to the front door and down to the snowy street, busted wrist and all; let her go back to where she’d come from — Gulick Road. Lavallette. If in fact she wasn’t a figment—my personal-private phantasm for wrongs I’d committed, never atoned for, and now had to pay off. Am I the only human who occasionally thinks that he’s dreaming? I think it more and more.
I badly wanted to say something; slow the onward march of words; win some time to think. Though all I said was, “I hope he didn’t do something terrible.” Hope. There, I’d hoped something.
“He wasn’t a terrible man, Mr. Bascombe,” Ms. Pines said meditatively. “He was exceptional. I have his coloring. And she was a perfectly good person in her own way, as well. Not as good or exceptional as he was. As I said, he was like a wonderful idea, but labored under that delusion. So. When life turned un-wonderful, he didn’t know what to do. That’s my view, anyway.”
“Maybe he didn’t tolerate ambiguity well.”
“His life was a losing war against ambiguity. He knew that about himself and hated it. The essence of all history is contingency, isn’t it? But it’s true of science, too.”
“So did they have a terrible fight and everything got ruined? And it all happened in these rooms?” (In other words the way white suburbanites work things out?)
“No,” Ms. Pines said calmly. “My father killed my mother. And he killed my brother, Ellis. Then he sat down in the living room and waited for me to come home from debate club practice — which we were having through the Christmas holidays. Debating the viability of the UN. He was waiting to kill me, too. But I was late getting home. He must’ve had time to think about what he’d done and how ghastly it all was. Being in this house with two dead loved ones. He took them down to the basement after they were dead. And either he became impatient or extremely despondent. I’ll never know. But at around six he went back down there and shot himself.”
“Did you come home and find them?” Hoping not, not, not. I was full of hope now.
“No,” Ms. Pines said. “I would never have survived that. I would’ve had to be committed. The neighbor next door heard the two earlier gun reports and almost called the police. But when he heard another report an hour on, he did call them. Someone came to the school for me. I never actually saw any of them. I wasn’t permitted to.”
“Who took care of you? How old were you?”
“About to turn seventeen,” Ms. Pines said. “I went to stay with the debate-club sponsor that night. And after that my father’s relatives came into the picture — though not for very long. They didn’t know me or what to do with me. The school, Haddam High School — the guidance counselors and the principal and two of my teachers — made a special plea on my behalf to be admitted midyear to the Cromwell-Aimes Academy in Maynooth, New Hampshire. A local donor was found. I was made a ward of our debate-club sponsor and lived with her family until I started Barnard. Which saved my life. These are the people I’m staying with. Their children.”
Ms. Pines lowered her soft chin and stared at her lap, where her un-injured hand held her injured one in its grasp. Her green tam held its perch. A thin aroma of Old Rose escaped from somewhere. I heard her breathe, then emit a sorrowing sigh. Her posture was of someone expecting a blow. (Where was I when all this mayhem transpired? Happy on Perry Street in Greenwich Village, as worry-free as a guppy, high on the town every night, in love-and-lust with a canny, big-boned, skeptical Michigan girl, and trying my hand at the “longer form” for which I had no talent. Living the life of the not-yet-wounded. Though why didn’t I finally hear about all this? I was a realtor. Towns keep secrets.)
“Does it seem beneficial to come back now?” I am muted, grief counselor-ish, skipping over twelve consolatory, contradictorily inadequate expressions of what? Empathy more complex than words can muster? Grief more dense than hearts can bear? I’ve never sought the services of a grief counselor. A dwindling group of us still holds out. Though from Sally I know what the basic mission entails: first — avoidance of the plumb-dumb obvious; second — the utterance of one intelligent statement per five-minute interval; third — simple patience. It’s not that difficult to counsel the grieving. I could’ve said, “Roosevelt was a far better choice than Willkie back in ’40.” Which would be as grief neutralizing as “What a friend we have in Jesus,” or “Mercy, I can’t tell you how bad I feel about your loss.”