Where Are You Now?

25

I spent Saturday morning in Mack’s room in the Sutton Place apartment. I won’t say it had a Sunset Boulevard quality to it, but I do know that it no longer held any sense of his presence for me. After Mack had been missing a few days, Dad ransacked his desk, hoping to find some clue as to where he might have gone, but the only things he found were the usual trappings of a college student-notes for exams, postcards, blank personal stationery. One file contained a copy of Mack’s application to Duke Law School and his letter of acceptance from them. On it he had scrawled an exuberant “YES!”

But Dad didn’t find what he was looking for-Mack’s daily calendar-which might have given us a clue to any appointments he had made prior to his disappearance. Years ago, Mom had our housekeeper take down the banners Mack had tacked on the wall and the corkboard covered with group pictures of him and his friends. Everyone in those pictures had been questioned by the cops, and later by the private investigator.

The brown and beige coverlet, matching pillows, and contrasting window treatments were the same, as was the cocoa brown carpet.

There was still a picture of the four of us on top of the dresser. I found myself studying it and wondering if by now Mack had any strands of gray on his temples. It was hard to imagine. He’d had such a boyish face ten years ago. Now he was not only long past being a college student, was probably a suspect in absentia in more than one kidnapping and/or murder case.

There were two closets in the room. I opened the doors of both of them and detected that faint musty odor that grows when no fresh air circulates into a relatively small space.

I took a stack of jackets and slacks from the first closet and laid them on the bed. They all had plastic cleaners’ bags over them, and I remembered that when Mack had been missing about a year, Mom had everything he owned cleaned and put back in the closet. I remember at the time Dad had said, “Livvy, let’s give them all away. If Mack comes back I’ll take him shopping. Let somebody else get some use out of all this stuff.”

His suggestion had been rejected.

There was nothing to be found in this sterile clothing. I didn’t want to just dump everything in large trash bags. I knew that would make it easier to carry them to the donation center, but it would be a shame if anything got wrinkled. Then I remembered that a couple of Mack’s large suitcases, the ones he’d used on our last family trip, were in the storeroom behind the kitchen.

I found them there and brought them back to his room, hauling them up on the bed. I opened the first one and as a matter of habit, ran my fingers through the pockets to see if there was anything in them. There wasn’t. I filled the suitcase with neatly folded suits and jackets and slacks, lingering over the tuxedo Mack wore in our family photo that last Christmas.

The second suitcase was a size smaller. Again I ran my hand through the side pockets. This time I felt something I guessed to be a camera. But when I pulled it out, I was surprised to see that it was a tape recorder. I never remembered seeing Mack using one. There was a tape in it and I pushed the play button.

“What do you think, Ms. Klein? Do I sound like Laurence Olivier or Tom Hanks? I’m recording you, so be kind.”

I heard a woman’s laugh. “You sound like neither of them, but you sound good, Mack.”

I was so shocked that I pushed the stop button as tears welled in my eyes. Mack. It was as though he were in the room bantering with me, his voice lively and animated.

These yearly Mother’s Day calls and the ever-increasing resentment that was my reaction to them had made me forget the way Mack used to sound, funny and energetic.

I pushed the play button again.

“Okay, here I go, Ms. Klein,” Mack was saying. “You said to select some passage from Shakespeare? How about this one? Then he cleared his throat and began, “When, in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes…”

His tone had changed drastically, had suddenly become ragged and somber.

“…I all alone beweep my outcast state, and trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries-”

That was all that was on the tape. I rewound it and played it again. What did it mean? Was it a random selection or had it been chosen deliberately because it suited Mack’s frame of mind? When was it made? How long before he disappeared had it been made?

Esther Klein’s name was in the file of people the cops spoke to about Mack, but obviously she had offered nothing of consequence. I vaguely remembered that Dad and Mom had been surprised that Mack had been taking private acting lessons with her on the side. I can understand why he didn’t tell them. Dad was always afraid that Mack was becoming too interested in his theatre electives.

Then Esther Klein had been fatally mugged near her apartment on Amsterdam Avenue, nearly a year after Mack went missing. The thought occurred to me that there might have been other tapes that he made while he studied with her. If so, what happened to them after her death?

I stood in Mack’s room, holding the recorder, and realized it would be easy enough to find that out.

Esther Klein’s son, Aaron, was a close associate of Uncle Elliott. I would call him.

I put the recorder in my shoulder bag and began packing Mack’s clothes. When I was finished, the drawers in the dresser were empty, as were the closets. Mom had let Dad give Mack’s heavy coats away one particularly cold winter, when the charities were pleading for them.

As I was about to close the second suitcase, I hesitated, then took out the formal black tie I had tied for Mack just before we posed for our Christmas picture that last year. I held it in my hands thinking back to how I had told him to lean down because I couldn’t reach high enough to tie it tight.

As I wrapped it in tissue and put it in my shoulder bag to take back to Thompson Street with me, I remembered Mack’s laughing response, “‘Blest be the tie that binds.’ Now, please don’t make a mess of it, Carolyn.”