"Connecticut," Mrs. Fetters repeated to herself; a state she had never seen, had barely imagined. "Well, you must be wondering what I did!" She looked like she was ready to walk to Forest Lawn and dig Parsifal up with her hands. "What can a mother do to make her son say that she's dead, the whole family dead?" It was as if he had killed them.
"He wanted to separate from his past," Sabine said. "That's what I know. Nobody's saying that it's because of anything you did." But of course, Sabine thought, that is exactly what I'm saying.
The bar stayed open until two A.M. Who would have thought it? It was quieter now, no piano player, one waitress. The bartender waved them back into the fold like lost friends, brought them the same drinks without being asked. It seemed like a miracle, a bartender who remembered.
"We'll drink to your husband and my son," Mrs. Fetters said, and they touched their glasses.
"Guy," Mrs. Fetters said.
"Parsifal."
They drank. It was that wonderful, fleeting moment when the scotch was still warm on top of the ice cubes, so very nearly sweet that Sabine had to force herself to pull the glass away from her mouth. There was so much to say it was impossible to know where to start. But the place Mrs. Fetters picked to begin was a surprise.
"Tell me about that fellow in the cemetery."
"Phan?"
Mrs. Fetters nodded, her hair holding fast. "Him."
"He was a friend, a friend of Parsifal's, a friend of mine."
"But more a friend of Guy's."
Sabine ran the thin red straw around the rim of her glass. "Parsifal met him first."
"And what did he do?"
"He worked in computers, designed software programs. He was very successful. He developed Knick-Knack."
"Knick-Knack?"
"It's a game," Sabine said.
It meant nothing to her. Ask anyone else in the bar and they would have gone on and on about how they'd thrown half of their life away playing Knick-Knack. Sabine watched while Mrs. Fetters sorted things out in her head. At the table beside them a man was telling a woman a story in a low whisper while the woman bowed her head and wept.
"Listen," Sabine heard him say to her. "Listen to me."
"I know nothing about Parsifal," Mrs. Fetters said. "I've been out of the picture for a long time. But I know one true thing about my son, Guy, one thing that is making all of this difficult to figure." She looked as if she were trying to remember how to say something, as if the words she needed to complete the story were Swedish and her Swedish was no longer very good. "Guy was a homosexual."
Sabine took a sip of her drink. It was something like relief. What she did not have in life she would not have in death. It was only fair. "Yes," she said, "so was Parsifal."
Mrs. Fetters nodded like a satisfied detective. "So now where does this leave you, exactly? You're too pretty to just be faking it for somebody."
"We were very close," Sabine said. Her voice was quiet. The bar seemed to press forward; the bartender pushed his upper body across the polished wood, pretending to reach for a bowl of salted nuts. There was no answer, not unless you were willing to sit down and look at all the footage, sift through the ephemera. "We worked together, we were friends. After Phan died, I think we both had a sense that it was just going to be the two of us, and so we got married."
"But why didn't you marry somebody else?"
There was a votive candle in a pale orange cup burning between them on the table. A whole host of somebody-elses stretched out in front of her, all the men who were in love with her, who begged her to be reasonable. Architects, magicians, rug dealers, the boy who bagged her groceries at the supermarket-none of them were right, none of them came close. "I was in love with him," Sabine said. Everyone knew that.
"Everyone was in love with that boy," Mrs. Fetters said, making Sabine's confession common as ice. "But weren't the two of you ever"-she tilted her head to one side, as if straining to hear the word-"together?"
"No."
"And that was okay with you."
"Oh, Christ, I don't know," Sabine said. "No, not at first." It embarrassed her even now, and Parsifal was dead. "When I was young I guess I thought he'd come around, that it was all about having patience. I'd get angry at him and then he'd get angry at me. Finally we broke up the act. I was maybe twenty-five then. We were only apart for a week, but-" She stopped and looked at Parsifal's mother. Maybe she could see him there, just a little bit around the mouth. "When we were apart something changed for me. I missed him so much I just decided it was better to take what I had. To accept things. I really believe he loved me, but there are a lot of different ways to love someone."
"It seems to me that you got a bad deal," Mrs. Fetters said.
"I had a very good deal," Sabine said, and picked up her drink.
Mrs. Fetters nodded respectfully. "Maybe you did. There are a lot of things in this world I'm never going to understand."
"Do you understand why Parsifal told me you were dead?"
Mrs. Fetters polished off her drink in a clean swallow and caught the bartender's eye, which was easily caught. "I do."
"Good," Sabine said. "Tell me about that. I'm tired of confessing."
Mrs. Fetters nodded, looking as if the late hour of the night was finally catching up with her. "I was born in Alliance. I lived there all my life. When I was growing up, if you had told me there was such a thing as a man who loved another man-" She stopped, trying to think of something equally impossible, cats loving dogs, but it all fell short. "Well, there was no such thing. There were two men I remember worked for the railroad who lived together just outside of town. There were lots of fellows worked for the railroad that lived together, but there was something about these two made everybody nervous and after a while they were run off, and even then I don't think folks could put their finger on what it was, exactly. We were a backwards lot, and I was way out there in front, the most determined to keep myself backwards. I was a grown married woman before someone told me what it was to be gay and it was a while after that before I believed it. And yet all the time I knew something was different with Guy, and he was only three or four before I knew that was what it was. I never exactly said it to myself, and I sure never said it to anyone else, but I knew."
The bartender arrived with two fresh drinks. "Coming up on last call," he said helpfully, picking up the used glasses and damp napkins.
"We'll think about it," Mrs. Fetters said. She drank while Sabine waited. "I'm taking too long to get to my point. That's because I'm not so interested in getting there. By the time Guy was fourteen there was a little trouble, him messing with friends, playing games that I didn't think were games. I sent him to Bible camp, I got him saved, but all over him I saw his nature. I thought it was something that could be changed, a sickness, and so I sent him away when I was pregnant with Bertie. I sent him to the Nebraska Boys Reformatory Facility up in Lowell to get cured. I sent him into the worst kind of hell so that what was wrong could get beaten out of him. The day he turned eighteen he came home, packed up his things, and left. That was that. He didn't want anything to do with us after that, and once some time had gone by I couldn't say I blamed him. I never knew what happened to him, not until fifteen years later, when I saw the two of you on the Johnny Carson show. You can't imagine what that's like, thinking your child is probably having some miserable life somewhere because of what you've done to him and then seeing him on television, a big famous magician. I liked to fell out. I wrote to the people at the show and asked them to forward a letter on to Guy-Parsifal the Magician. Oh, I was sorry and I told him how sorry I was and how we all wanted him to come home. I just about held my breath every day going out to the mailbox. Then, sure enough, I get a letter with no return address and a postmark from Los Angeles. It was very polite. He said all was forgiven and forgotten and the past was in the past, but the past needed to stay right where it was. He said he just didn't want to think about it, not ever again, and would I please respect that. He sent us some money. Every now and then more money would come. In the last few years it was a whole lot more money, but he didn't write to me again and he didn't write to Kitty, which I think was wrong of him no matter how mad he was." Mrs. Fetters looked right at Sabine and Sabine did not look away. "So that's what I did."