“Zia, please, wait. Uncle Pete, really? Calling here?
“You want me to tell him it’s not a good time?”
“I’ll try, Kit. But I mean, a letdown like this, a disappointment like you laid on me today …”
“No no, I’ll, ah, I’ll take it in a minute.”
“You want this phone?”
“ … I’m not too big on handling that kind of disappointment.”
Zia was out the door by the time Kit and his uncle had finished their hellos. Maybe she caught Kit’s last look, uncertain, showing her — Zia, do you know the best way to test the worth of your work? — maybe she saw it, maybe not. Anyway Uncle Pete was a bad tangle, himself. A demanding tangle. Uncle Pete was the gay one, in the closet but no secret.
To begin with there was the problem of the man’s voice. “Mnhm, Kit. How’re you doing?” No way Kit could assimilate that voice. No way, not here; it made no difference even when he switched the receiver so he could no longer hear Zia’s diminishing footsteps. To properly appreciate Pete’s voice, packed in the cotton of long cattleman silences, a person had to be just finishing up a long night’s difficult calving. A person had to be standing in the flashlight’s sepia, in the placental stink. Then you had room for that voice, you were weary and pliant enough for its good sense and its capacity for hope: astonishing stuff at such an ungodly hour.
“How am I doing?” Kit said finally. “Think of how Rod Carew stands at the plate.”
Even his uncle’s laugh sounded barn-like. “.388 last year.”
“And he does it looking like a pretzel.”
“Mnhm. Are you going to get back here this summer, Kit? Are you and I going to take in a ballgame?”
“Aw, Uncle Pete. You know I’m an Easterner now.”
Then the silence. In Pete’s case, there was always more to it, more than cowboy ways or the Minnesota Shys. Kit too suffered a long tongue-tied moment, thinking how often lately he’d brought up this man’s secrets. Again and again he’d brought it up: I have an uncle who’s … He’d become a city boy, a talker.
But the hardest thing to deal with was Corinna’s note. As Kit leaned against her desk trying to think of the next icebreaker — trying to imagine why Pete had called — his Administrative Assistant yanked what she’d been writing out of her typewriter. A rackety yank. Bette’s Apple had nothing to match the loud finality of pulling a sheet out of a typewriter carriage. Then she handed it to him: a resignation letter.
It ran three lines, under the letterhead. Formal business English: I therefore give you my notice to resign, as of the end of this pay period.
“You know, Kit,” Uncle Pete said in his ear, “I’ve tried to reach you at home.”
Hard to assimilate. The distance seemed suddenly a matter of light years — and the likelihood of getting anywhere seemed far less than with this wide-faced young mother beside him. Corinna hadn’t moved, after she’d handed him the note. She hadn’t taken those round eyes from him. She was still giving him a chance.
*
The worst of the Boston’s new construction was in the old West End. Just below Beacon Hill between the expressways and the Charles, you got a series of Cold War bunkers, a chain-mail cityscape: Massachusetts General Hospital, Government Center, and one steel-and-glass cereal box after another, packed with offices and condominiums. Even the plaza spaces wore on the soul. Flat swaths of brick or concrete, they suggested a firing range. The area was one big shrine to brute force, a Fascist temple cluster, and Kit always felt particularly disheartened to find it at the foot of Beacon Hill. The Hill of course showed you the city of the previous century and earlier, the stoops and cobblestones. Kit loved its quirks of layout, architects on foot thinking of people on foot. No building stood taller than four stories and every block presented a stipple of differently colored house fronts: not exactly a rainbow, but variations on brick red and stone-gray at least, with occasional flashes of yellow or even blue.
But then you came down the Hill into an airport: monochrome, fortified, echoing. It was a wonder that anyone could walk from one neighborhood into the other without turning into a militant Marxist. Just coming off Beacon Hill and into the West End, you saw the capitalist machine breaking down. You saw the bourgeoisie hunkering into a defensive camp. All in all, it didn’t seem like the place for Corinna’s family counselor.
But here they were, Corinna and Kit going to see her Arturito’s therapist, in a not-quite-articulated test of whether she could continue to work for him.
On the MTA, the woman avoided saying anything specific about what she had in mind. Back at the office, likewise, she’d set the trip up mostly by implication. “How about,” she’d said, “you come with me and meet Arturito? Meet the boy, meet our counselor — you got time for that?” The only suggestion that her resignation depended on Kit’s answer had been a slow sideways glance at the letter in his hand. Very slow glance, her thick Latin lashes barely moving. And she’d said that today she could “use” him. In fact, now that Kit had agreed to coming, Corinna seemed concerned mostly about whether he didn’t have anything more important to do.
“You sure you don’t need to be seeing your lawyer now?” she asked. “You sure you can put that off?”
Kit nodded, folding his coat-collar up around his throat. They’d come out into the wind of the Government Center plaza. The brick flats like a firing range, the wind like a runway.
“When are you supposed to talk to that Grand Jury anyway?” Corinna asked. “Thursday?”
He nodded again.
“Hmm, Thursday. Deadline day, you know? Or I guess I should say, Thursday would’ve been our deadline day.”
Kit couldn’t catch her eyes, the way this wind whipped up her thick career-girl hair. In fact Popkin hadn’t liked being put off. It didn’t help, either, that Kit couldn’t explain with any clarity just what he found so much more important.
“Anyway you rescheduled, right?” She headed across the bricks. “You and the man, you set another time.”
Eleven o’clock, tomorrow; Popkin must’ve repeated it a dozen times. And the lawyer had told Kit to start drafting his testimony. He’d said he wanted to see something by tomorrow. Longhand, typewritten, index cards, the lawyer didn’t care — so long as he had something he could work with. Tomorrow, eleven o’clock. Popkin said Kit could even give him a recorded statement, something on cassette.
“What about your Uncle Pete?” Corinna asked. She muscled through the cold, a hardheaded bundle. “You sure there’s not some big emergency back in Minnesota?”
Again Kit shook his head. Whatever it was that had Pete so determined to talk with him, apparently it could wait. Mom was fine, Uncle Chris was fine. Then too, Kit hadn’t exactly been baring his soul either. Ah, Bette and I, ah, we haven’t been home much these last couple of days. At least Kit had arranged for the uncle to call him back at the office, that afternoon. At least he wouldn’t have to be lying to his family while sitting in his own empty kitchen.
“Okay Kit,” Corinna said. “Okay if you say so. Anyway this won’t take long, here.”
Her building was the ugliest bunker on the block. Nothing but shaded riot-proof glass at sidewalk level, and Kit couldn’t have said where the door was. But as Corinna approached she picked up speed, almost breaking into a trot. Inside, at the far end of the lobby, stood Arturo.
The nine-year-old bore only a passing resemblance to the photo on his mother’s desk. In the flesh, the boy kept showing Kit surprises, his hair especially, a carrot red curling at the tips. Irish hair. Also you couldn’t see the kid’s hands in the picture, quick-pecking dark-nailed hands; the boy was in the middle of some fantasy play when Corinna and Kit arrived. He packed a real sting when he slapped five hello.