Death of the Black-Haired Girl

18

ON A MILD DECEMBER DAY — so soft that on his rounds he thought he could smell new grass and budding trees in the park — Eddie Stack had just returned from his walk when a New York police captain came to his door. The sight of the senior man frightened Stack for a minute. He was no more at ease when the officer took his cap off.

“Mr. Stack?”

Stack’s daughter was dead, the victim of a nighttime hit-and-run driver right off her college campus. Stack heard himself ask the officer in, but the captain declined. Hit-and-run driver at night. There would be information and assistance. The captain gave him a folder with advice and instructions, a police chaplain’s card clipped to it, and said something about Mrs. Stack and prayers and it being personal to everyone in the job.

When the captain was gone, Stack walked to an armchair with his blood roaring in his ears. His legs were failing under him. He realized that things, his life and identity, had become more different than he had thought the wildest compass of possibility could have afforded.

At first Stack could not believe it. Then, although he knew perfectly well what he had been told in the captain’s soft professional tone, he kept thinking that the thing announced had been his own death. He had absorbed his wife’s death by feeling that it had transported him into a kind of post-life of his own in which he was as close to her as to any of the living. Dying was frequently on his mind. He had the city’s health care benefits but as a rule he did not go to doctors. Stack simply assumed that his emphysema and the damage he had done to himself by years of alcoholism were bills about to come due. It might be slightly premature — he was under seventy — but where he came from it was considered respectable in men. Now he tried to tell himself that he had been given notice. But Maud had no connection in his mind with death at all; her problems came from her insistent pursuit of living. Of the more abundant life her intelligence, her beauty and diligence, her courage, could win for her. During one of their constant arguments in past years she shouted at him:

“I have to live more of a life! I have to live inside a bigger circle than you and Mom did.”

Trying to understand what he had been told, Stack was presented with a puzzle. Going off to the college, she had stepped out to the big circle. They rarely spoke after she moved up to Amesbury. When she came home to visit, she talked down to him. He beset her with cautions that he himself knew were clichés. So in that sense she was gone, lost to him. The other side of this was that she was a living part of him, someone who was so much of his mind and body that he could no more lose her and live than he could lose his heart.

In the gathering shock he felt his arms go numb. “My arms,” he said aloud. When he sat down, the sensation went away but, holding his forearms in front of his eyes, it was impossible for him not to imagine his way back to the nights when his wife was working and Maud was a baby and he had carried her back and forth against his shoulder in the same room where he now sat, more or less dying. He would not let her do it, he thought. He stood up to run away, lurched back and forth in the room, swinging at phantoms, throwing elbow punches to free his arms of her. That was no good — it just brought back the memories and took his breath away and there was nowhere on planet Earth to run.

After the captain’s visit, in terror of grief, to save his life, to humiliate himself, to undo time and death, to make a fool of himself unworthy of burning, he went out and bought a bottle to replace the one Maud had stolen. He thought he could catch fire more slowly with the whiskey but it made him violently sick in the downstairs bathroom. Then he drank more of it and was better.

Prompted by the whiskey, he fled up the stairs and stood for a few minutes at the door of Maud’s room. Finally he could not enter, so he went to his own room and removed his Glock from a locked drawer and put in the clip. How stupid, he thought, to keep a weapon in your house unloaded. However, he knew why it was unloaded and not ready to hand as it should have been. He took the Glock downstairs with him. He had forgotten to go slowly on the stairs. Panting, he sat down again and poured more liquor. It was a waste, eight years of sobriety, but there was no way to put the stuff back in the bottle.

He stared at it, at the label. Jameson, the Catholic whiskey, as opposed to Bushmills, the Protestant. Some indeterminate rage had come over him, preferable to the pain. It was them, Catholics. Us. No, he thought. Them. They — them — had been many things over his lifetime — lawyers, perpetrators, judges, anyone they called mokes, civilians, the public in general, anyone who was not in the job. They had come to include just about the whole world now — the people who wrote the newspapers, the people you read about in the newspapers, the people who wrote letters to newspapers, the readers of newspapers. And television and its hypnotized witnesses. He had warned her about them and what would happen with the article. He had warned her they would hurt her. And she had become one of a different department of them, an anti-them, same thing, he thought, nutso fucks. He had tried to save her. But he himself was one of them because he was a drunk, a red-nosed clown, a fool.

And his own parents. And their parents. Them. His teetotaler bartender father with the holy pledge to Matt Talbot, and his mother with her scented novena cards. Them. We ourselves. Too long sacrifice, yes. And we, they, quite probably, had destroyed Maud, the very people who begat the people who begat her. Finished ourselves off, our family, finished my rash young daughter and me. Too long sacrifice, to be sure. Burned our own house as always, in the name of ghosts.

God, he thought, she was right about all the pussy-faced bishops and slobbering priests. Maud had been right. She might just have broken our spell. He took out the gun’s clip, looked at it and snapped it back in. Though it continue the cycle.

He woke, sick and breathless, the next afternoon feeling that grief, rage, alcohol and insomnia were likely to make short work of him, and soon. Then he thought with true terror of the grief that awaited him, the years of it he would have to endure. A grief that sooner or later would infest his heart and burn him down. All his love turned to scarring, a craze. Her childhood blotted out.

Downstairs, he drank ice water from the refrigerator until it eased his thirst and somehow steadied his heart. He still had the Glock semi-automatic he ought not to be in possession of. He had always thought of using a weapon against himself if the worst came. It would be nothing but shameful panic to turn it on himself so. He had seen, he thought, enough of that. It also occurred to him that it would be wrong to make so sudden and violent an end of Maud’s memory, leaving no truly loving trace of her within the length of a day — girl gone, mother, father gone. It was not right. As to religious scruples, he had none. He drank more water and then had another swallow of the whiskey.

But as he had learned before, there were things to be done, and one of them was to call the members of his family. The best person he could think of to handle it was his older sister Gerry, who had done it before. Gerry lived in Florida and passed the time there hating her wealthy ex-husband.

“Don’t cry on me,” he told her at first. He needed a tough cookie to pass the word.

He also called a former police surgeon named Sorkin, a friend of a friend, who would not give him barbiturates but called in a prescription for Ambien. The Ambien worked well enough for him to handle a call the next day from Gerry’s despised ex, Charlie Kinsella, a dapper and much-feared former policeman. Stack feared Charlie as much as anyone and was not pleased to hear that Kinsella promised to drop by later in the day.

“Aw, God, Eddie,” Charlie said when he came. He took Stack in his arms, affording him a whiff of his cologne. “I’m so sorry.”

Charlie had his hair cut in a place that actors went to. He looked like an actor who might play an Irish cop on television and in fact had provided filmmakers with constabulary advice until even the most rash and reckless of the aspiring moguls had become afraid of him. Stack watched his former brother-in-law enter his living room with princely condescension. Stack thought he might actually be waiting to be shown a seat.

“Have a seat, Charlie.”

Kinsella took off his overcoat in a way Stack thought showed every facet of the Harris weave. He had no idea what such an overcoat might cost. A thousand dollars? Five thousand dollars? More? The dark suit he wore was most impressive.

Charlie Kinsella took Stack’s best chair, carefully removing the past week’s newspapers from it, including a copy of the Gazette. He rested his resplendent overcoat over an adjoining rocking chair, leaving the sofa to Stack, and looked around the room.

“No pictures of Barbara?” He spread his hands, almost smiling, seeming really to require an answer.

“No pictures.”

“I put them up myself, pictures of the departed. I’m not afraid of living in the past.”

I must show nothing to him, Stack thought. Not a wariness of the eye nor a flicker of tongue to lips. Nor the rage he felt at the sound of his dead wife’s name on the thin lips of this man who could dazzle her with a glance, before whom she blushed and melted from shame. Who can freeze me with undifferentiated fear in the throes of my grief when I care nothing whatever for living.

Stack thought he knew where the coat and the cloth of his suit had come from. From an expensive tailor’s shop he was reasonably certain could not be far from Ground Zero on the flame-lit night of the day in question.

“Yez should keep a picture of Maudie.”

“I don’t think so, Charlie. Wouldn’t put one up for a while, I believe.”

How crazy he was, Stack thought. How foul he was! That he should refer to my lost child as “Maudie.” For many years, between the time Maud was a small child and an occasion when she was almost grown, Charlie had not seen the girl. And when introduced to the young adult Maud, he had taken her hand and looked into her eyes with astonishment. Stack knew why. Because Charlie had seen there the youthful married Barbara whom it had been his delight to seduce and perhaps even display once or twice to his hoodlum company, to her mortification.

So Maud had met him. And after meeting him she had said, “Oh, my God. This man is my uncle! He says ‘yez.’ He says ‘I ain’t.’ He’s a cretin!”

And Stack had said, “The word is troglodyte.”

Stack and his daughter had had a laugh. But Charlie was not a troglodyte or a cretin. He was of the rarest.

Kinsella’s eye fell on the bottle of whiskey Stack had not troubled to put aside.

“Oh no, Eddie. This is not the way.”

“Fuck you, Charlie. I mean, go fuck yourself, Charlie.” His adding the second part risked making Charlie Kinsella cross.

“I think I know how you feel,” Charlie said. “You said this thing was a hit-and-run?”

“That’s what I was told.”

“They get him, it might be resolved. To some satisfaction. They get him, he’s ours, Eddie.”

Stack let it pass, but a similar thought had not spared him.

“Gerry was a lot of help to me when Barbara passed.”

“Certainly you can count on her,” Charlie said curtly.

They sat in silence for a moment.

“Listen, Eddie,” Charlie Kinsella said. “There isn’t a chance that in the recovery operation somebody misunderstood something? That something got out and some fuck saw it wrong?”

“You mean heard something and hurt Maud?” Stack stared at him. At first he failed to grasp what Kinsella was asking him.

“You didn’t hear about what she wrote?”

“Yeah, sure,” Charlie said. “But I thought just to eliminate… you know.”

“You know I didn’t touch that shit, Charlie. You know that!”

So the evil of Kinsella and Stack’s own weakness caused the shadow of the dark side to flicker over his grief. The man was suggesting Maud was struck down in vengeance for a guilt that never touched her. Or so lightly. So hardly at all.

“As though I ever fucking referred to it. You’re crazy.”

Charlie did not see himself as crazy. Ever.

Many understood that more personal possessions — cash on a primitive level, credit cards, financial documents, keys and codes, little things and larger things — were found in the dreadful ruins of the twin towers than could ever be returned or passed along or released in an orderly manner to every one of the survivors, if any. Many understood that early in the day on September 11 a brutal, lawless element accompanied the responders, requiring, demanding a share of what was gathered up in that inferno. It happened all the time. It was the world. It was mere humanity.

Old criminal conspiracies that had been, so to speak, present in the pilings under the river, the shafts, the salt-encrusted drowned alleys and bricked-up tunnels, with the eels’ nests and the wrecked rope walks — that had been there in spirit since the first white men, with their bindles and kit, and before them — had emerged with the fire coming down. The word had gone out. Competing villainies saying, It’s ours. Nobody ever suggested such a thing was common or general or even frequent. It was despised and aberrant. Still, it happened.

In depraved quarters, greed and suspicion. “We said all. All over a certain figure. We said all what yez got!” Were all your average citizens a hundred and fifty percent better? No way! So mistakes were made. Charlie Kinsella and associates had a crust. A crust and maybe a crumb besides. It wasn’t more.

Eddie Stack was present that day. His share was emphysema. Placed where he was, he knew a little of what was going on. He could no more have picked up some poor lost soul’s posthumous possession than he could have plunged his hand into a molten girder or into the guts of some poor woman who might have been his own wife or daughter. It was impossible not to half know it, in flashes and fits and the edge of vision, at the rim of a policeman’s mind. And of course there was his then brother-in-law Charlie Kinsella. Stack never saw him that day, but Charlie was there.

Days later the smoke was still everywhere, seeming to be the only source of light. Stack was beginning to understand that he would never draw his breath as before. Maud was safe in her classy Catholic boarding school, where the nuns were long gone but underpaid youths of the Ivy postgraduate faculty struggled to balance the tragedy of the city’s martyrdom with the understandable grievances of the Third World. Barbara had been dead and gone for more than a year, but he still talked to her and still felt she heard him. Then appeared what some old party in an immigrant past might call “a wee man”—sure enough, a little fellow. A little Pinocchio face of a guy. He looks like UPS but he’s not. He’s wearing a messenger’s uniform but you look at his mug, Stack does, and sees not a messenger in the usual sense. He’s come in a panel truck and there are two men with him, not messengers either. The small man has a big box.

So the guy says, “I come from Charlie K.”

And Stack is so confused he thinks, What is that, a Chinese restaurant? but just as well doesn’t say that, or anything. The man at the door’s impatient and thrusts the box at him. It’s medium heavy. Stack struggles to hold it.

“Charlie,” the man says, lowers his voice.

“Charlie Kinsella.” Leaning on the K, what Maud would call a plosive, almost ending the word with an s, which she’d call a sibilant. “Keep it very safe. A day. Maybe two. Be here. Stay with it.”

When the guy’s gone, Stack is so rocked he’s merry and he makes a black joke to dead Barbara.

“Can I open it?”

God only knows what’s in the box he stays inside with, missing his doctor’s appointment, until the same man comes back for it. He knows what’s in it. He doesn’t know what’s in it either.

The following year, Maud’s admitted to every college he’s ever heard of. She’s got the National Merit Scholarship and financial aid up the gazoo — the guidance counselor at the classy Catholic school helped arrange this. In the end, she picks the college in Amesbury, one of the top liberal arts schools in the country.

It is a great relief to Stack that so much aid is being supplied because it is all unbelievably expensive. And beautiful Maud wants clothes and presently, over her freshman year, will want other things that college girls have, and money for travel and so on.

One day there arrived the man himself, Charlie Kinsella.

“Listen, Eddie, I just wanted you to know we know you got expenses, and we really thought, This man helped us and we should help him. Because I know you’re a guy who thinks, you know, and I don’t understand half the fuckin’ words you say, it was the same with Barbara, God rest her soul — educated — and the kid’s gonna be more so, right? So we wanna help.”

“I… I’m good, Charlie. Seriously, brother, I’m good. We’re good.”

Kinsella shows no sign of leaving. He looks very assured in his new clothes. He’s very assertive.

“We want to give you something. We want yez to take it.”

“Really, Charlie, I don’t want anything.”

Charlie K. makes a pained face. As one on the horns of a dilemma.

“Um,” he says, “I don’t lie to the people I work with. Everybody knows that. They know that. Never.”

“Right,” says Stack.

“Anyweez,” he says in a rollicking fashion, “I gotta be able to tell them we helped you out. You see what I mean?”

As much as to say, Stack thought, that there was no way around it.

Stack was reduced to shaking his head, as in no. Kinsella let him understand that the “something” offered was cash. “Nobody’s,” Kinsella said, which Stack inferred to mean unmarked. It was nowhere to be seen on that visit. But Stack mercifully would have no more of such packages or of the unspeakable Charlie until — until now, Maud dead.

What had happened was this. Maud’s college career indeed called for more expenses than might have been foreseen. Charlie Kinsella had a son, Michael, from his first family with Stack’s sister Gerry. Michael practiced law in Florida and might one day be a young champion of conservative forces in that state. The attorney administered a fund for the purpose of paying whatever expenses Maud Stack incurred during the term of her education and the years of her setting forth in the world. The bills and such were passed along and Michael Kinsella wrote checks to meet them in order that Maud not be denied the full enjoyment of the opportunities presented her by a fine education at a world-famous seat of learning.

Now here was Charlie suggesting some fuck saw it wrong.

“Would I know anything, Charlie?” Stack asked. “Would something come from me? What could I say, for God’s sake!”

He saw that his protestations had convinced Charlie and also curled his lip very slightly.

“Sure, Eddie,” Kinsella told him with a punch on the arm. “Yer a standup dude.”