Past Due

Chapter 40

AND THEN A doorway of shelves in that treasure room swings away, swings open. And there, in the opening, the hidden doorway, darkness streaming in from behind him, stands the old man. Tall, thin, his hair brushed back, his back only slightly bent by age, his eyebrows raised in mock surprise. And he’s smiling, smiling with the eyes of a fox, smiling at all his little treasures, his golden statuettes, his jade fetishes, his pearls, his coins, her, smiling at her, my father’s love, smiling at her as if she were merely another one of his trinkets that had only temporarily been misplaced.

He takes a step toward her and my father is at him like a panther, driven forward by his love and his rage. The old man’s ropy neck is in my father’s fist, the old man’s crooked back is slammed so hard against the shelving that a crouching jade dragon is hurled to the ground and smashes in a dazzling blossom of green.

Don’t touch her, my father growls.

I wouldn’t dream of it, gasps the old man, his accent purebred Brahmin.

His sly smile, dropped only at the onset of the attack, returns. My father loosens his grip on the old man’s neck.

I was merely admiring the coin, the old man says. A very rare twenty-dollar piece. Saint Gaudens. 1907. Ultra-high proof. The most beautiful American coin ever minted. Only twenty-four were struck, twenty remain in private hands. I own four. He looks beyond my father at the girl. You always had exquisite taste, he says.

I was well taught, she says.

Do you mind, the old man says to my father, tapping lightly on my father’s wrist.

My father is puzzled at the calmness of the conversation. There is no shock on the old man’s face at seeing the two of them in his treasure room, no threats of arrest from the old man, no howls of abuse from her. A brittle civility holds sway. He lets the old man go, steps back, slinks into the corner, subdued as much by the old man’s accent as by the actual nature of the relationship playing out before him. Whatever has gone on in this house, he realizes, she has not told him the half of it. And whatever is to come, the old man’s accent has marked with utter clarity their respective positions in the world, the old man’s and my father’s, has shown all the old man can offer to this girl and all that my father never could.

My father’s voice as he recounted the scene to me was faint, barely discernible through the oxygen mask and beneath the rasp of his breath. His blood oxygen level couldn’t fight its way above eighty-seven percent and his respiratory rate was in the mid-twenties. He was weaker than I had ever before seen him in his life. Nothing was working, the new drug wasn’t working, death was coming, and he was struggling mightily to beat the scythe as he told me the story. He didn’t have the strength to set the scene, to lay in all the details, so I was forced to do that for myself, but by now I had been so captured by the story, and by his burning desire to tell it, that it was not a burden to listen to his faint words and provide for myself the details of the conversation between the old man and the girl my father loved.

I knew you’d come back, the old man says.

Just for what I’m owed, she says.

And what do you believe is that, dear girl?

She gazes around the room, her eyes full of light. She scans past my father as if he were a ghost, while she takes in all the riches on the shelves. She looks down at the coin in her hand. She returns the coin to its small velvet sack, places the sack back in the box, closes the lid. Atlas with his burden stares balefully out at her.

Maybe just this, she says, placing her hand on the box. This should be enough.

I daresay it would, says the old man. That one coin is near price-less. The entire set is beyond imagining. More than one fortune has gone into acquiring what is in that box. Nora has asked for you. You didn’t say good-bye.

How is she?

Her arthritis, well, you know. She hobbles through her day but is ever cheerful. She is making her famous duck tomorrow evening. Such an event, all the flame and pageantry. It was always your favorite. You must join us.

I can’t, she says.

Just one last time. Please. For Nora’s sake. To say good-bye.

She glances at my father. No, she says.

Her glance is quick, furtive, but the old man catches it with all its import. He turns to my father. So this is the one.

Yes, she says.

Our motorcycle man. Well, he certainly is big enough.

He loves me.

I don’t doubt that. And you, my sweet. Do you love him back?

Her jaw rises, there is a quiver in her voice as she says, Yes. I do.

And that is why you can’t share one last meal with me, one last evening to pass our good-byes, one last chance to share brandy by the fire, to kiss gently as the phonograph plays the Verdi you so much admire, to hold hands as we ascend together the stairs, one last time to spread the satin sheets on your soft featherbed.

Go to hell, she says.

My dear dear sweet. He mows lawns for a living.

Our love is enough.

Obviously not, or you wouldn’t be here. But if that is what you want, then go. My blessing on you both, he says even as he steps forward to the table, grabs hold of the box of coins, snatches it away from her hand, and clutches it to his chest. Go, he says. But know that when you leave here, you leave with nothing. Let your lawn mower man take care of you from here on in. The two of you will be quite happy, I am sure, in your penniless love.

You owe me, she says.

Who owes whom? Go back to what you were when I found you, in your cheap clothes, chewing your gum, so very proud of your stenography.

She steps forward and slaps him.

And the old man laughs. He laughs, laughs his Brahmin laugh, his jaw tight, his laughter loud, mocking, carrying in it all the solid self-certainty of his class.

She hits him with the bottom of her fist, first the one then the other, she hits him on the shoulder, on the chest, she hits him again and again, hits him with all her fury, even as the old man continues his assaultive laughter.

It is then, only then, that my father feels able to intrude upon their scene. The same thing in the laughter that so infuriates her sends a calm into my father. He knows where he belongs, he understands perfectly his place, finds a comfort in that knowledge that his son will never know. The truth is in the very Brahmin accent that intimidated him just a few moments before. Except he doesn’t want anything that the world of this room, this house, this man has to offer. My father has already gotten all he ever wanted, his lover, his one true love. It was a mistake to come here, he knows, a mistake from the start. But he also knows, with a sense of relief, that it is over, that whatever she had come for is gone and it is now time to leave. He steps forward with his own calm, takes hold of her from the waist, pulls her back, away from the old man, who is now shielding himself with the box.

Let’s go, says my father.

No, she says.

But he is pulling her away, away from the man, this room, this house. She is fighting him, fighting him and the old man both as he pulls her away, and then she slips out of his grasp.

She slips out of his grasp, grabs the box from the old man, swings it back, and slams it into the old man’s head.

The old man falls to his knees.

She swings the box again, a corner plunges into his scalp, blood spurts. She swings the box again.

By the time my father is able to make sense of what he has seen, is able to gather his wits enough to grab her at the waist and pull her away, throw her to the other side of the room, the old man is sprawled dead on the floor, the bloodied box is lying by his side, and her skirt, her blouse, her hands are stained red with the old man’s blood.

What have you done? he says, staring now at the devastation before him.

She rises from the floor, slowly, carefully, weaving back and forth as she rises, and when, finally, she is standing, she makes her way to her lover, my father, her lover.

I didn’t mean to, she says. He drove me to it.

He steps away from her, backs away until his shoulders are against a wall and the corpse is between him and the girl, his love, the girl in the pleated skirt. But she steps up to the corpse of the old man until she is facing my father, close to my father and she says, It will be all right, Jesse, won’t it?

My father is paralyzed with loss as she reaches her bloodied hands to touch him, leaves a trail of blood on his arm, his shoulder, his collar. She places her hands at the back of his neck and stands on tiptoes and pulls him to her as she pulled him to her just moments before in the darkness.

We’ll be forever together, like we said, Jesse, like we promised. Together forever, you and me, like you told me was all you ever wanted, like you made me promise.

And then she kisses him, while they stand over the old man’s corpse, she promises my father everything he ever wanted just moments before, and she kisses him, and my father, God forgive him, kisses her back.

“Kissed,” he said in the softest of whispers as I leaned so close the plastic of his mask brushed against my ear. “Kissed her back.”

It would have been nicely symmetric if the poison of the story had its way with him right then, sent him into respiratory failure, clanging the alarms, bringing the army of doctors and nurses and technicians rushing to that room to battle for my father’s life as I stood by and watched with a horrified silence. But it didn’t right then, not right then. My father whispered, “Kissed her back,” and then his eyes closed and he drifted off to some finer place. And his respiratory rate eased, and his heartbeat slowed, and somehow the level of the oxygen in his blood started to rise. Eighty-eight percent. Eighty-nine percent. Ninety percent. I left my father in the hospital that night with a slight sense of hope that maybe the worst had been revealed and so the worst was behind him.

But it was a feint, hope with my father was always a feint, and the alarms were sounded not long after I stepped out the hospital’s front door.