I therefore hunted up the Haddam “purple pages.” An Edward Medley still resided at #28 Hoving Road, four down and across from my old Tudor family home — long since bulldozed for a rich man’s showplace — then rife on the Haddam townscape, but less so now with realty cratered and Bush’s recession that Obama took the heat for.
Standing in the kitchen, I called Eddie’s number — because I could. A watery-warm, half-sunny springlike morning had turned the tree trunks damp and black and punky. The ground was sogged, almost snowless, and puddled — the grass showing-through still green, the rhododendrons unfurled as if it was March. Three nights before, when I drove to visit my former wife, Ann, in her fancy facility where she has Parkinson’s, winter’s icy curtain had already descended — rain, sleet, snow, and cold fused together. Today, all was forgiven.
“Mr. Medley’s house,” a softly resonant, funereal voice said. A man’s. Not Eddie’s.
“Hi,” I said. “It’s Frank Bascombe calling. I’m trying to reach Eddie. He left me a couple of messages. I’m just calling back.” My heart started whomping — boompety, boomp, boomp, boompety. I knew already. A miscalculation. Potentially a bad one — the sweetening weather possibly was the resolve weakener, along with having too much time on my hands. As I’ve been told. I began handing the receiver to its wall cradle, as if I’d just seen a burglar’s head pass my window and needed to find a place to hide, my heart boompeting…
“Is it ole Basset?” A drastic voice buzzed through the extended earpiece, trapping me with my name. Basset Hound. Why are we such fuck-ups? Why couldn’t the wrong thing just declare itself without my having to dip a fucking toe in? Errors are errors long before we commit them. “Frank?” Eddie — hoarse, failing, spectral voice and all — had me pinioned via his speaker phone, through which he sounded even more back-from-the-dead than before. And nobody I wanted to talk to. A big, eruptive tussis boiled up through the line. I should’ve clicked off, “lost” the connection and beat it out the front door. Most people are happy with someone having tried. “Are you there, Basset?” Eddie was shouting. The dense webbing in his lungs made a worrisome, organic groaning noise. “Oh, shit,” he said. “I lost the fucker.”
“I’m here,” I said tentatively.
“He’s on! I got him. Okay!” Whoever owned the funereal voice — a male nurse, a hospice worker, a “companion”—also said “Okay,” from the background.
“When’re you coming over here?” Eddie shouted. “You better hurry up. I’m hearing bells.”
Not that far away on Hoving Road, Eddie was hearing the same bells I was hearing in my kitchen — the carillon at St. Leo the Great RC, gonging out Angels we have heard on-high, sweetly singing o’er the plain.. .
“Well… Look. Eddie…” I tried to say.
“Why didn’t you call me back, you jackass?” Cough. Groan. Organ deep “Uuuhooo wow. Jesus.”
“I am calling back,” I said, irritably. “This is calling back. I’m doing it. I was busy.” Boomp-boomp-boomp.
“I’m busy, too,” Eddie said. “Busy getting dead. If you want to catch me live, you better get over here. Maybe you don’t want to. Maybe you’re that kind of chickenshit. Pancreatic cancer’s gone to my lungs and belly. I’m not catching, though…”
“I’ll…”
“It is goddamn efficient. I’ll say that. They knew how to make cancer when they made this shit. Two months ago I was fine. I haven’t seen you in a long time, Frank. Where the hell have you been?” Cough, wheeze. “Uuuhooo,” again.
The mellow male voice said, “Just ease back, Eddie.”
“Okay. Owwww! That goddamn hurts. Owww. OWWW!” Something was crunching against the speaker like Christmas foil. “What’re you trying to do to me… Frank? Are you coming?”
“I’m…” Eddie was way too much of a tryer, I saw — the way he always was. I never really liked him, agreement or no agreement.
“I’m what? I’m an asshole? Grant a dying man his wish, Frank. Is that too much for you? I guess it is. Jesus.”
“Okay. I’ll come,” I said quickly — trapped, miserable. “Sit tight, Eddie.”
“Sit tight?” Cough. “Okay. I’ll sit tight. I can do that.”
The soft voice again, “That’s good, Eddie. Just…” Then the line was empty between us. I was alone and breathless — in my kitchen. A pronged filament of golden sunlight passed through the chilled window from the back yard, brightened the dark countertop in front of me. My heart was still rocketing, my hand clutching the receiver out of which someone had just been speaking to me and now was gone. Too fast. Reluctance to acquiescence. I hadn’t meant it to come out this way. Possibly I didn’t have enough to do. I needed to find strategies to avoid such moments as this.
A WITTERING URGENCY HAS COMMANDEERED MY DAY and self. Plans I might’ve had have gone a-flutter. Packing for my Christmas Day trip to KC is postponed. Practice, which I do for reading-to-the-blind, is now put off ’til later (I’m reading Naipaul — always tricky). I know I’ve claimed to leave 60 percent of available hours for the unexpected — a galvanizing call to beneficent action, in this case. But what I mostly want to do is nothing I don’t want to do.
Still, in thirty minutes, I’m out the door, to my car and the moist, milky winter-warm morning. A big L-10 is just whistling over — so low I can almost see tiny faces peering down, quizzical, as New Jersey’s middle plain rises to greet them. On our rare ocean-wind days, the Newark approaches shift westward, and the in-bounds from Paris and Djibouti lumber in at tree tops, so that we might as well live in Elizabeth. The current warm snap also denotes new weather moving across from Ohio, readying a jolly white Christmas for wise stay-at-homes, though a nightmare for the imprudent — me — flying on Christmas Day, using miles.
My Christmas-trip idea, in its first positive iteration, was for a festive family fly-in to ole San Antone (my life-long dream is to visit the Alamo — proud monument to epic defeat and epic resilience), all bankrolled by me, including a stay at the Omni, an early-season Spurs’ game, capped off by a big Christmas almuerzo at the best “real Mexican” joint money could buy — La Fogata, on Vance (I did my research). Others could then wander the River Walk and do as others wanted, while Sally and I took a driving trip up to the Pedernales and the LBJ shrines — locales of dense generational interest and meaning; then backtrack through Austin so I could see the Charles Whitman Tower from sixty-six, then be climbing onto Southwest by the twenty-eighth, headed home to the Garden State.
None of which worked out. Sally decided the grievers of South Mantoloking needed her “at this critical holiday season” more than I did. Clarissa, in Scottsdale, is currently having “issues” with her brother, who means to expand his garden-supply business to include a rent-to-own outlet in the building next door — which she and I oppose. They’re not talking. In the face of our opposition, Paul has declared the Alamo (the “à la mode” in his parlance) to be an historical bad joke and waste of time and blood, and that no one should ever enter Texas in the first place. Instead, he’s insisted I come to KC, where he can grill me about his rent-to-own theories. Not very appealing, to be honest. Though it’s what I’ve decided, since there are days (which must be true for all fathers) when I badly miss my surviving son — as strange a man as he is and will be. Plus, I don’t want to be home alone on Christmas.
I am, though, questioning my wisdom this morning — with the possibility of a weather lockdown at Newark and snow up to my butt. In the world today, no one should experience a wittering urgency without knowing there’s a cause somewhere close by, even if you can’t see it.