Sympathy Between Humans

31

At the cemetery where the Hennessy children’s mother was buried, a marble angel stood guard over the headstone, either serenely reflecting or grieving. Below, the stone read, Elisabeth Hannelore Hennessy, Beloved Wife and Mother.

It was a bright Sunday afternoon, and I was sitting at the graveyard’s highest point, a mausoleum with a half flight of stone stairs leading up to it. Two pine trees offered shade from the western sun, and it was here that I’d staked out a spot to watch Elisabeth’s grave and wait for the visitor I hoped was coming on the anniversary of her birth.

For the past two days, I’d tried to put the Hennessys out of my mind. Early on, when Marlinchen had come to visit me, asking for help I’d thought I couldn’t provide, all I’d wanted was to be shed of these people. Now Marlinchen, the official head of her household, had given me leave to forget about them, and I couldn’t. I was maddened by a contradiction that I couldn’t resolve.

Dr. Leventhal had supported the idea that a young child’s mind could be so malleable that it would fabricate a memory, even a visual one. But the detail in Aidan’s story was so realistic: the finger was just barely attached… blood was dripping off it. From the little individual tooth mark he’d seen, filling up with blood, to the fact that his finger hadn’t quite been severed- it was You Are There, documentary realism.

Somehow, I didn’t think Aidan would be able to conjure such a detailed, lurid image of his injured hand. He didn’t seem that imaginative to me. It was one of the things I liked about him, that he was simple and straightforward. I wasn’t the world’s biggest fan of hidden depths. Shiloh had plenty of them, and they’d ended up ruining his life.

Besides, to fabricate a memory was one thing, but a fear? Aidan was truly afraid of dogs. That indicated my theory, about the study and the loaded pistol, was wrong. I could deal with that. I’m semipro at being wrong; it’s a correctable situation. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was Marlinchen and her memory of what she thought was a lightning strike, but sounded to me like an accidental shooting in the house. A memory Aidan didn’t share. Either Marlinchen was mistaken, or Aidan himself was, and yet they both seemed convincing when they told their stories.

Then there was the old BMW. Hugh had locked it away for fourteen years. It fit in the same time frame as the carpet replacement in the study and Aidan and Marlinchen’s mismatched early memories. It was one more thing that occupied that fourteen-years-ago plateau. The threshold, as Dr. Leventhal had called it.

My first idea was that Hugh had put the car away because Aidan had bled copiously in it, and unlike the study, Hugh couldn’t get it properly cleaned up. But if Aidan shot himself in the hand, the universal first instinct would be to wrap the hand in a towel and keep pressure on it. Certainly it would have bled, but I couldn’t see it bleeding so much that Hugh couldn’t clean it up. And had he believed that someday someone would examine his car, looking for evidence that his son’s accident didn’t happen the way Hugh had said it happened? I’d seen some paranoia in my day, but that seemed outlandish.

It wasn’t impossible, though. The problem was that I knew so little of Hugh’s character. I couldn’t talk with him, and there were limits to what his children could explain.

What I really needed was the memories of an adult who’d been close to the Hennessys early in their marriage. One who’d known Hugh and Elisabeth well during that time of their lives. One who, like Aidan, had been banished from the Hennessy home. Whose banishment, like everything else, had happened on that fourteen-years-ago threshold.

It was two hours later when he came, a tall, thin man heading up the path, toward Elisabeth Hennessy’s grave, holding a small bunch of white narcissus in his hands. Time had changed J. D. Campion little. His black hair was still long enough to be caught back in a small ponytail on his neck, and he still wore a beard. There was no gray in either. The flowers he slipped into the recessed holder were wrapped in the clear cellophane that florists provide.

Campion had good hearing. He turned to watch me coming while I was still ten feet off.

“Mr. Campion,” I said. “My name is Sarah Pribek,” I said. “I’m a friend of Marlinchen Hennessy.”

“Marlinchen?” he said, surprised. “Then you know Hugh?” he said.

“Not exactly,” I said. “I’d like to talk to you.”

“You’ve been waiting for me here?” he asked.

I acknowledged it. “You’re hard to track down otherwise. I tried to find you through your publisher and phone listings, but I didn’t have any luck.”

Campion watched a pair of squirrels fight over a perch high in a tree. “That seems like a lot of planning just to meet me,” he said, slowly. “You’re not here to talk about Vedic references in Turning Shadow, are you?”

“No,” I said. “I’m not.”

“So how is it that you know Marlinchen, but not Hugh?” he said.

“I met Marlinchen only recently,” I explained. “Hugh had a serious stroke two months ago.”

“I didn’t read about that,” he said.

“It wasn’t in the news,” I said.

“How bad is it?” Campion said.

If I satisfied his curiosity right here, I’d give up an incentive for him to talk with me. “I’ll tell you all about it,” I said, “but I was hoping we could talk someplace more”-private wasn’t the word, as no one was within earshot-“comfortable.”

Campion didn’t bite right away. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I don’t really understand who you are.”

“I’m a Hennepin County Sheriff’s detective,” I said, “but this isn’t an official investigation. I’m helping Marlinchen with a family situation.” I looked down the hill, to where I’d parked. “Like I said, I’d like to talk to you about it, but this might not be the place.”

“Maybe not,” Campion said. “Would you have a problem with a bar?”

I’d been curious what sort of drink a poet might order in a bar. The answer wasn’t very exciting: Budweiser. I had a Heineken to keep him company. We sat at a table near the back of the bar, next to a pair of unoccupied pool tables.

In my line of work, you usually have the luxury of saying, I’m asking the questions here, even if you don’t have to say it in so many words. Either you’re interrogating suspects who are under arrest, or you’re interviewing witnesses who are intimidated by the gravity of the situation they’ve gotten involved in. In those situations, the answers generally flow one way, toward you.

With Campion, I had to give information to get information. It wasn’t that he was unfriendly. But he hadn’t been in contact with the Hennessy family for nearly fifteen years. He wouldn’t even understand the questions I was asking until I explained a few things about the Hennessys’ situation. Nor, I thought, would he be inclined to. He didn’t know me, and he only had my word that I was here on Marlinchen’s behalf.

I told Campion about Hugh’s stroke, Marlinchen’s quest to find her brother, and Aidan’s return, keeping quiet only about Hugh’s child abuse. When I was done, Campion said, “It’s been fourteen years. I don’t know what I can tell you that’ll help.”

“Tell me about fourteen years ago.” I drank a little of my Heineken. “What’d you and Hugh Hennessy fight about?”

“I don’t know,” Campion told me.

“Of course you know,” I said levelly. Campion didn’t seem the type to be offended by straight talk. “Friendships don’t break up permanently for no reason.”

“You’ll have to ask Hugh, when he’s better,” Campion said. “I know how it sounds, but to this day, I don’t know what he was so angry about.”

“Tell me how it happened,” I said.

He settled back in his chair. “I was on the road a lot back then. Minnesota was like a home base for me, because Hugh and Elisabeth were here.” He drank. “One night, I got into town late and went by their place. I hadn’t seen them in about four months. When I got there, Hugh wouldn’t let me in.” Campion shook his head, as if freshly baffled. “He said I was a bad influence on his kids, I’d always been jealous of his success, and he didn’t want me coming around anymore. Then he shut the door and didn’t open it again.”

“And then what?” I asked.

“I left,” Campion said. “I wasn’t going to mope at the door, like a dog who’d been bad. I called him a few days later, to see if he’d gotten over whatever it was. He told me not to call again, and hung up on me.”

“Did you ever talk to Elisabeth?” I asked.

“No. I tried, but she never answered the phone. It was always Hugh.”

“Do you think Elisabeth was at the root of Hugh’s anger?” I asked. “Was he jealous?”

Campion stiffened, as if about to take offense. Then he relaxed a little. “I guess when a guy’s bringing flowers to a woman’s grave ten years after she died, it’s not a big secret he’s hung up on her,” he admitted. “But Elisabeth made her choice, and I respected that. And she would never have been unfaithful to him. Hugh knew that.”

Campion shook his head again, as if letting go of a mystery that would never be solved. He drained the last of his beer.

After getting us another round, I asked, “If it wasn’t about Elisabeth, could it have been about her sister?”

“Brigitte?” Campion said. “What about her?”

“You had a relationship with Brigitte, didn’t you?”

“It didn’t last, but yeah, I did.”

“Hugh didn’t seem to like her. She never visited the family or vice versa.”

Campion tilted his head, thinking. “You have to understand,” he said slowly, “that Hugh was a rigid guy. Morally rigid. Brigitte did some drugs; she did some guys. Hugh didn’t like that. In contrast, he and Elisabeth were married at 19. That was almost medieval, for the times.”

“I know,” I said. “If Hugh disapproved of her so much, why do you suppose he’d send Aidan to live with her?”

Campion frowned. “I have no idea,” he said. “You’re asking me to make a guess, and I’ve already proven I don’t understand what makes Hugh Hennessy tick.” He watched as a woman in her early twenties, with brilliant coppery hair, half jumped onto the bar and kissed the bartender hello, supporting herself with the heels of her hands. “I’m more surprised that Gitte would have taken the kid in. She never had much money, and she was a single mother herself by then.”

I had been lifting my glass toward my mouth, and stopped midway. “Really?” I said. Aidan hadn’t mentioned living with a cousin.

Campion nodded. “She let me stay at her place once, several years after we had our quick, flame-out affair. She had- it’s a dated term, but I thought of this guy as her common-law husband.”

It was an old-fashioned term, one that some of the grizzled veterans used around the squad room, as common in its day as baby mama is now. Generally, it was used in describing the affairs of slum dwellers whose idea of couples counseling involved frying pans or screaming matches. Campion didn’t sound like he meant it that way.

“You know how some people are really together, even when they’re not married? You can just tell it’s a serious thing?” he said.

I nodded.

“That was her and Paul. I forget his last name. Something French. They were obviously good for each other.”

“Well, they couldn’t have been that good together,” I pointed out, “if she was a single mother years later.”

Campion shook his head at my assumption. “Paul never left her. He died.” His voice dropped a little lower. “I was there.”

I wasn’t prompting him at all, by this point. There was a story inside him that wanted to come out.

“Paul wasn’t threatened by an old flame, so when I came to visit, I planned to stay for a week,” Campion said. “They’d been living together for three years. Gitte was happy. Paul did something in construction. God, he was a big guy. Maybe six-four, and tough. But a good guy. Thought the world of Gitte and the kid. Their son, Jacob, was two years old.

“Toward the end of the week, I went out drinking with Paul. We went to this bar he liked, a real bucket of blood. I’ve been in some bars in my day, and even so, I was glad to have Paul at my side. We were fine until Gitte’s neighbors came in. These guys- I don’t use this kind of language lightly, but trust me, I’m a wordsmith- these guys were douche bags.”

I smiled to let him know I wasn’t offended.

“Gitte’s neighbors raised pit bulls to fight,” Campion said. “The dogs scared the hell out of Gitte, not just for her sake, but for Jacob’s. She wanted the neighbors to pay their share of a better fence between the two yards, but these guys’ attitude was ‘You want the fence, you pay the whole nickel.’

“Paul was willing to ignore them that afternoon, but they starting getting in his face, making remarks about Gitte. Then it was on. Half the bar jumped into the fight. Me included. I’m not much of a fighter, but Paul was my drinking buddy at the time. Them’s the rules, you know?”

“I know,” I said.

“I got my clock cleaned fairly early, but Paul… I’ve never seen anyone fight quite like that. The thing is, he looked happy. Incandescent.” Campion shook his head, remembering. “It took four cops to subdue him and get him into the squad car. I walked outside after them. They left Paul to sit there while they mopped up the rest of the fight. But as soon as Paul was in the backseat, he put his head down, against the window, and closed his eyes, like all the fight had gone out of him. Like he was at peace.” Campion paused. “The cops didn’t question it either.”

“Question what?” I said.

“He was dead,” Campion said. “When they got to the police station, he didn’t have a pulse. It was one of those rare, undetected heart conditions, the kind that sometimes makes an athlete drop right after a race. Some lawyers called Gitte afterward, talking about a negligence suit against the cops, but it wasn’t the cops’ fault, and she knew it.” Campion sipped a little more beer. “I stayed around another month afterward, with her and the little boy, Jacob. I wanted to help out. But I wasn’t Paul, and Gitte and I weren’t suited for each other. We’d been down that road before. I moved on.” He shook his head. “I’ll never forget that afternoon, though. I remember walking out of the bar after Paul and the cops, and the sun was setting, and I was standing in that dirt parking lot, and Paul just laid his head down and died. I’ve always wanted to write about it, but I’ve never been able to.”