Murray Cutler closed his eyes, and I stopped speaking. He opened them again and seemed disappointed that I was still sitting by his bed.
“When he discovered they were stealing his things, he was enraged. How dare they take advantage of him! He stopped teaching. He told them that no one was going to America with him, least of all Junius, who had stolen his alarm clock. The next time the mail plane came to our clearing in the bush, he got on board, and as we all watched him take off, he turned his face away from us. He said we had destroyed him. But of course it was we who were destroyed, or at least corrupted, which comes to the same thing. No one was the same after the visit of Charlie Saurin. The villagers began to resent me, and now spoke of wanting to leave the clearing, but there was no easy way out.”
I fell silent, Murray Cutler squinting at me. He snatched at the cord that hung beside his bed, to call the nurse, and yanked on it.
“This one man ruined everything by his meddling intrusion,” I said, staring at him in defiance. I got up from the chair and left the room before the nurse arrived. His last look was one of uncertainty, perhaps fear. I was relieved to breathe the sweet air outside the hospice.
But then, driving away, I remembered a better detail, how Junius’s father had gotten to Charlie Saurin. Mistaking this man for someone important, he had encouraged Junius to go with him, and had entrusted the boy to the intruder, and that was why Charlie Saurin had so much access to the boy.
Mother said, “Is there something wrong?” when I saw her that evening, alone in her house. Rose had left her to meet with the rest of the family, to see to the arrangements for the funeral at St. Ray’s. She had urged me to keep Mother company at this critical time, and so I slept these days in my old bedroom at the top of the stairs.
“I’m fine. I’m glad I’m here.”
Mother seemed doubtful, and this uncertainty looked like anxiety. The way she sat, hands clasped, knees together, slightly hunched, was like that of a peasant on a hillside weathering a storm.
“This is where I was born,” I said. “That’s an amazing fact to me. I’ve been everywhere, and yet this is the only place on earth where I truly belong.”
“Oh?” And she looked up hopefully.
“It’s kind of humbling to realize that.” Mother didn’t seem to hear me. I said, “Did you ever hear the expression ‘forgiveness is final’?”
“What does that mean?”
“This is what it means. A guy I know who’s also a writer found out that a man who’d hurt him was suffering a terminal illness. The writer was down on his luck, not much happening in his life — vulnerable to any slight. He had always resented the man who’d hurt him, but when he visited the man, he said, ‘I forgive you.’”
“What did the man say to that?”
“He couldn’t speak. He looked like he’d been slapped in the face. He was disarmed. There was nothing he could do. Because forgiveness is final.”
“That’s beautiful,” Mother said, and took my hand. “I’ll cherish that lovely thought. You could write about that.”
I looked away. I said, “And I keep meeting old friends here. Some of them are having health problems. I feel as if I can be useful.”
“You’ve always been kind that way, Jay.”
I returned to the hospice the following day. Murray Cutler looked at me with dread when he saw me enter the room, but he was too inarticulate to object, and, bedridden, unable to do anything but watch me seat myself and stare, he was the helpless one now.
“I knew a couple, very creative woman, very entrepreneurial man, partners in the trucking business”—just the sound of my voice made Murray Cutler hug himself in fear. “They split up. She said to me, ‘You have no idea. He was always hearing voices. His mother visited him in his office. The voices said, “Stab her in the eye! Stab her in the eye!”’ He explained this in detail to his wife. ‘You need to know.’ His father had died in a plane crash. He refused ever to get on a plane, but that was all right — his whole business plan concerned freight in long-haul trucks. His other quirk was that he had to take thirty steps whenever he entered a room, so if a room only used up twenty steps he marched in place for ten more, but very subtly. I asked her, ‘What was the attraction?’ She loved him, and she told me, ‘He had the charm that all psychopaths have.’”
In the time it took me to tell this story, the tension left Murray Cutler’s body, and when I finished he said in his usual mutter, with a half-smile, “What’s the point?”
“No one knew that he was crazy.” I shifted to be closer to him. I said in a harsh whisper, “Only she suffered, and when she told her story no one believed her. But I believed her. And as for the man, his punishment — he still heard the voices.”
The door opened, one of the nurses pushing a trolley with food trays on it. I was near enough to Murray Cutler to whisper to him without being overheard, “I’ll be back.”
The day of my father’s funeral was so scripted, and adhered so closely to the script, it seemed that his death was the fulfillment of a long-range plan, that this was the last act in the ritual. I was grateful for that, for the sequence of events that numbed me by their routine, following a set of cues: our designated seats, the vases of flowers, the chanting priest, the candle flames, the kind words, nothing jarring; and then the casket on wheels, the silent hearse sliding importantly to the cemetery, where the grave had been thoughtfully dug and the muddy hole disguised with a rectangle of purple satin fringed with gold ribbon; more prayers, more flowers, and then another procession, the withdrawal, all of it expected. We were sad, but no one cried. The nature and purpose of a ritual is to meet expectations; it is the unexpected that is upsetting.
Murray Cutler cringed when I appeared the following afternoon, later than I usually visited. He must have thought with relief that I was not coming, but then to see me at the end of the day, when he was tired and having to face another story, was demoralizing to him.
He tried to cover his face as I pulled the chair close to his bed and began speaking.
“I knew a woman who visited Greece on vacation,” I said. “A man stopped her on a back street in Athens, where she’d been buying souvenirs. He said, ‘I had a dream last night of Jesus Christ. Jesus said to me, “You must go to this particular street. There you will meet a beautiful woman.” And here you are.’ When she turned to get away, a man in a doorway said, ‘Come here. I will help you,’ and the woman fled into his house. The man locked the door and raped her. And when he was done, the other man was waiting to do the same.”
Murray Cutler, seeming to undergo a seizure, raised his arms as though to defend himself, and he cowered behind a tangle of plastic tubes.
“Raped her,” I said, leaning over and showing him my teeth.
Sitting beside my grieving mother, helping her answer the condolence notes, took almost a week. My father had many elderly friends, and none of them used a computer. Rather than send a printed card as thanks for these spidery scrawls, my mother felt — and I agreed — that it was best to write each person a reply that reflected their degree of intimacy toward my father. It was a sensitive business, but it brought my mother and me closer. When she grew weary she put her hand on mine as I was writing, improving her responses to these people, and said, “Everything’s going to be all right.”
Murray Cutler was much worse the next time I saw him, a few days later. I locked the door to the room, and he groaned when I sat down and started to speak.
“There was a man who, when he lusted after someone and didn’t want to be caught, pawed his prey in public places — in the bleachers at baseball games, in the back rows at concerts, in popular campgrounds. He possessed them by pawing them openly, looking like a dear friend and benefactor, and that was the paradox, because the victim was too fearful to make a scene. And when the victim went home he couldn’t report what had happened. He had to think of a story, but in his story he was not a victim. He was triumphant. He invented dramas and dialogue. He became such an expert at evasion that the oblique habit of storytelling became his profession.”