“With chocolate chips and walnuts?”
“For Mom and Dad, we’ll make them with chopped anchovies and lima beans, just to see their expressions when they bite into one. The rest with chocolate chips and walnuts. We’ll take a plate of them to the new neighbors and introduce ourselves.”
She rattled off a list of things she needed: baking sheets, mixing bowls, a spatula, a pair of tablespoons, a measuring cup.… Because I suspected that this might be the first of many tests to determine if I could eventually be entrusted with a steam iron, I remembered every item, collected them in a timely manner, and didn’t drop even one.
The delicious aroma of baking cookies eventually reached the living room, where our mother left the TV long enough to come to the kitchen and say, “Are you making a mess?”
“No, ma’am,” Amalia said.
“It looks like a mess to me.”
“Only while we’re baking. It’ll all be cleaned up after.”
“There’s housework that should come before this kind of thing,” our mother said.
“I’m ahead of schedule on the housework,” Amalia assured her, “now that school is out.”
Mother stood just inside the door to the hall, an apparition in her quilted pink housecoat and morning hair, looking mildly confused, as though the task upon which we were engaged must be as mystifying to her as any complex voodoo ritual. Then she said, “I like mine with almonds, not walnuts.”
“Sure,” Amalia said, “we’re going to make a batch like that.”
“Your father likes the walnuts but not the chocolate chips.”
“We’re going to make a batch like that, too,” Amalia promised.
To me, my mother said, “Have you dropped and broken anything?”
“No, ma’am. I’ve got it together.”
“I like that glass measuring cup. They don’t make them like that anymore.”
“I’ll be careful,” I said.
“Be careful with it,” she said, as if I’d said nothing, and she went back to the TV in the living room.
Amalia and I baked the cookies. We cleaned up. I didn’t break anything. And then we went next door to meet the new neighbors.
3
When we climbed the steps and set foot on the porch, we saw that the front door stood ajar. The sun remained slightly to the east, hot light slanting under the eaves and painting a bright rhomboid on the floor. We stood on that illumined patch of gray-painted boards, as if on a trap door, while Amalia held the plate of cookies and I pressed the bell push. No one responded to the chimes, and I rang again.
After I’d rung the bell a third time, when it seemed obvious that no one was home, Amalia said, “So maybe it was a burglar last night. In spite of all the lights. I mean, a burglar wouldn’t care about leaving the door open after himself.”
Through the four-inch gap between door and jamb, I could see the shallow, shadowy foyer and the darker living room beyond. “Then why would a burglar bother to turn off the lights? Maybe something’s wrong, someone needs help.”
“We can’t just barge in, Malcolm.”
“Then what’re we gonna do?”
Leaning close to the door, she called out, “Hello? Anyone home?”
The answering silence was worthy of our father when he stood on our back porch eating his breakfast sandwich.
Amalia called out again, and when no one responded, she pushed the door inward, so that we had a better view of the cramped foyer and the living room, where everything appeared to be furnished as it had been when Mr. Clockenwall had been alive. In the month since his passing, no one had come to dispose of his belongings.
After my sister called out again, louder than before, I said, “Maybe we should go home and call the police and report a burglary.”
“But if there hasn’t been a burglary, can you imagine the hell they’ll put us through for making that call?”
By “they,” she didn’t mean the police. Our mother liked nothing more than having a legitimate reason to criticize us. She’d peck and peck and peck at you for the littlest mistake, until you thought she was going to keep at it until you were nothing but bones. And our old man, who couldn’t stand the sound of our mother’s voice when she was in attack mode, would shout at Amalia and me, as if we were the ones making all the noise: “I’m just tryin’ to watch a little TV here and forget what a shitty day I had at work, okay? Is that okay with you two, is it?”
Repeating her admonition to me, I said, “We can’t barge in.”
“No, we can’t,” she agreed, as she stepped across the threshold with the plate of cookies. “But remember how Mr. Clockenwall wasn’t found for a whole day after he died. Someone might need help.”
I followed her, of course. I would have followed my saintly sister through the gates of Hell; by comparison, the house next door wasn’t particularly forbidding.
Although the sheers hanging over the windows allowed a little daylight to enter, the living room remained cloaked in shadows, a silent solemn chamber in which you might have expected to find a cadaver casketed for viewing.
Amalia flipped a wall switch that turned on a lamp beside an armchair.
A film of dust sheathed the table on which the lamp stood. A pair of reading glasses lay beside a paperback that Mr. Clockenwall might have meant to read before his day turned as bad as any day could be. There were no signs of vandalism.
“We live next door,” Amalia called out. “We came to say hello.” She waited, listening. Then: “Hello? Is everything all right?”
In the kitchen, the refrigerator hummed. Breakfast dishes were on the table, a smear of egg yolk having turned hard and dark on the plate. Toast crumbs littered the Formica surface. The heart attack had felled Mr. Clockenwall here, perhaps as he’d risen from his meal, and no one had cleaned up after the coroner’s van took the body away.
“It’s terrible to live alone,” Amalia said.
The sadness in her voice seemed genuine, though Clockenwall had not been a man who reached out to his neighbors or sought in any way to alleviate his loneliness, if in fact he was lonely. He had been polite; and if he happened to be in his yard when you were in yours, he would spend a few minutes in agreeable conversation over the fence. No one considered him aloof or cold, only shy and on occasion melancholy. Some felt that perhaps in his past lay a tragedy with which he had never been able to make his peace, that the only companion with which he felt comfortable was sorrow.
Amalia was somewhat distressed. “Somebody should have cleaned up these dishes and emptied the refrigerator before things in it spoiled. Leaving it like this … it’s just wrong.”
I shrugged. “Maybe no one cared about him.”
My sister seemed to care about everyone, even making excuses for our parents at their worst, but now she said nothing.
I sighed. “Tell me you don’t mean we should clean this up.”
As she was about to answer, her attitude abruptly changed. She turned with a start and said, “Who, what?”
Perplexed, I said, “What—who, what?”
She frowned. “You didn’t hear that?”
“No. What didn’t I hear?”
“He said, ‘Melinda. Sweet Melinda.’ ”
“Who said?”
“It sounded like Mr. Clockenwall.”
When I was younger and my sister was not yet perfect, she had enjoyed spooking me by reporting with great conviction things like, Dad didn’t realize I was there, and he took off his face and under it was this lizard face! Or on one occasion, Oh, God, I saw Mom eating live spiders! She was so convincing that I needed about a year to become immune to her bizarre declarations, and for another year I pretended to believe them because it was such fun. Then she became interested in boys and lost interest in scaring me, although I was never so scared by any of her hoaxes as by a couple of the idiot guys she dated; even in those days, however, she was too smart to go out with a psychopathic maniac more than twice.
“Mr. Clockenwall is dead
and buried,” I reminded her.
“I know he’s dead and buried.” Holding the plate of cookies with her left hand, she rubbed the back of her neck with the right, as if smoothing away gooseflesh. “Or at least he’s dead.”
“I’m not nine anymore, sis.”
“What’s that mean?”
“I know Mom eats only dead spiders.”
“I’m not joking with you, Malcolm.” As before, she startled and turned, as if toward a voice that I couldn’t hear.
“What now?”
“He said it again. ‘Sweet Melinda.’ ”
Suddenly she set out as if in search of the speaker, turning on lights as we entered each new space, and I followed her through the rest of the ground floor, turning off the lights in our wake. When we arrived at the front of the house once more, Amalia peered up the stairs toward the gloomy realm on the higher floor.
After she stood transfixed for a long moment, her face clenched with revulsion, and I asked what was happening now, and she said, “He’s disgusting. Obscene. Sick.”
Suspicious but half believing, I said, “What?”
“I won’t repeat what he said,” she declared, and she hurried out through the open front door.
I stood at the foot of the stairs, gazing up, wondering if she might be yanking my chain or if she might be serious, when I heard heavy footsteps in the upper hallway. And then a creaking arose from the stairs, as though somebody was moving from one tread to the next. The landing at the head of the lower flight creaked, too, and made a cracking noise, as if an old board had splintered a little under a punishing weight. The shadows on the stairs were not so deep that they could have concealed anyone. Whoever descended toward me, if anyone did, was no more apparent to the eye than Claude Rains in that old movie The Invisible Man.
Bad things happened to good people when invisible men or their equivalent were around. I quickly left the house, pulled the front door shut behind me, and joined Amalia as she descended the porch steps and hurried along the front walk.
As we passed through the gate, I said, “What was that about?”
“I don’t want to talk about it now.”
“When do you want to talk about it?”
“I’ll let you know,” she assured me as she turned toward home.
I said, “I guess we’ll have to eat those cookies ourselves.”
“Yeah. She doesn’t want them with walnuts.”
“And he doesn’t want them with chocolate chips. And I don’t think the new neighbor has any interest in cookies at all.”
“There isn’t a new neighbor,” Amalia declared as we hurried alongside our house, under the limbs of the twisted sycamore.
“There’s something,” I said, glancing over the fence at the Clockenwall place.
4
Sitting in my room, at the window, watching the house next door through a gap in the otherwise closed draperies, I tried to remember everything I knew about Rupert Clockenwall. He had taught English at Jefferson Middle School for forty years. He was scheduled to retire at sixty-two, but he died a month before the end of the school year.
During his career, he twice received the city’s Best Teacher of the Year award. He had never been married. Some people thought he might be gay, but he had never been seen in the company of a companion of that persuasion. Those were the days when people were ignorant enough to think that all gay men minced or lisped, or both, and had no bones in their wrists. Mr. Clockenwall exhibited none of that behavior. He never went away on vacations. He said that he was a bad traveler and a homebody. He always declined with regrets when he was invited to a neighbor’s house, and to express his gratitude for the invitation, he sent flowers. He never spoke an unkind word about anyone. His voice was soft and melodious. He had a warm smile. He liked to putter in the yard, and he grew amazing roses. Around the house, he favored Hush Puppies, khaki slacks, and long-sleeved plaid shirts; cardigans on cooler days. He’d once found an injured bird and nursed it back to health, releasing it when it could fly again. He always bought Girl Scout Cookies, usually ten or twelve boxes. When the local troop sold magazine subscriptions, he bought a lot of those, too, and when once they peddled hand-woven pot holders, he’d taken a dozen. He had a soft spot in his heart for Girl Scouts. He had no pets. He said that he was allergic to cats; dogs frightened him. He stood about five foot nine. He weighed maybe a hundred sixty pounds. Washed-out blue eyes. Pale-blond hair, going white. His face was no more memorable than a blank sheet of typing paper.
Rupert Clockenwall seemed to have been too bland a soul to come back from the grave on a haunt. The more that I thought about what had happened in his house earlier, the more certain I became that I had misunderstood it. After an hour, when I saw nothing of interest through the gap in my bedroom draperies, I went downstairs to help Amalia with her chores.
We worked together for half an hour, making the beds in our parents’ room, using the vacuum cleaner, dusting, before I asked if she was ready to talk about what had happened. She said no.
Forty minutes later, in the kitchen, after we had toted that barge and lifted that bale, as we were peeling carrots and potatoes for dinner, I asked her again, and she said, “Nothing happened.”
“Well, something did.”
Focused intently on the potato that she was skinning, Amalia said, “Something happened only if one or both of us insists it did. If both of us decide nothing happened, then nothing happened. You know what they say—if a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one there to see it, then it didn’t fall. Okay, all right, I know that’s not how it goes. If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one to hear it, maybe it didn’t make a sound. But my version is a logical corollary. Entirely logical. No tree fell in the Clockenwall house, so there was nothing to hear or see. You’re twelve, so maybe that doesn’t make sense to you, but when you’ve had a few more years of math and a course in logic, you’ll understand. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“If nothing happened, what is it you don’t want to talk about?”
“Exactly,” she said.
“Are you scared or something?”
“There’s nothing to be scared of. Nothing happened.”
“Well, at least now we’re talking about it,” I said.
She threw a ribbon of potato skin at me, and it stuck to my face, and I said, “Sibling abuse,” and she said, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”
5
That evening, after we washed and dried the dinner dishes, but before the old man could tell me to take it to the garage, I went out there with my saxophone, while Amalia sat at the kitchen table, being smoked at by our mother and made to appreciate the reasons for the dreadful inadequacy of the mashed potatoes that she had served with the roast chicken, even though both our parents had taken second helpings.
I didn’t start playing right away, but listened to some cool big-band stuff. We had a cheap stereo in a corner of the garage and some records, including a number of vinyl platters from the 1930s that we’d found for next to nothing in a used-record store. I was in the mood for the band called Andy Kirk and His Clouds of Joy. Several times during the ’30s and early 1940s, they almost got famous, but never quite. Now, some thirty years later, I was a fan of their tenor saxist, Dick Wilson, and of Ted Donnelly, one of the best swing-band trombonists ever, though it was Mary Lou Williams on piano that fully captivated me. I sat on a crate and let “Froggy Bottom” wash over me twice and then “Walkin’ and Swingin’ ” before Amalia arrived.
We listened to “Roll ’Em,” which Mary Lou Williams had written, as good as big-band boogie-woogie gets, and when it was over, my always-energetic sister wasn’t jumping or finger-popping or in any way stoked by the music. She hadn’t brought her clarinet. We weren’t going to play together.
I said, “What’s wrong?”
She stepped to the single small window, which faced toward our deceased neighbor’s house, and the distilled sunlight of that early June evening gilded her
lovely face. “There was this time I was in the backyard, standing at the picnic table, working on an art project for school. I was really into it, and after a while I looked up and saw Clockenwall just the other side of the fence, staring at me. He was very … intense. I said hi, and he didn’t respond, and he had this look, it almost seemed like hatred, but it wasn’t just that. The day was warm, I was wearing shorts and a tank top, and suddenly I felt as if … as if I was naked. He wasn’t anything like he’d always been before. He wasn’t Teacher of the Year, that’s for sure. He licked his lips. I mean, he made this huge production of licking them, staring at me so bold, I can’t even describe how bold, with this need. Maybe there was hatred on his face, hatred and rage, but not entirely that, if you know what I mean.”
I knew what she meant, all right. “What did you do?”
“I picked up my art supplies and took them inside.”
“You didn’t tell anyone?”
“I was too embarrassed to talk about it. Anyway, who was I going to tell? Dad was at work. When he comes home, he doesn’t want anyone to get between him and that first beer. Mom was glued to afternoon game shows. I’d have rather put my hand in an alligator’s mouth than distract her from Bill Cullen and The Price Is Right.”
“You could have told me,” I said.
“This was four years ago. You were eight, sweetie. You didn’t need to hear about something like that when you were only eight.”
“And you were only thirteen,” I said. “Man, what kind of creep was he?”
She turned from the garage window, and that square of golden sunshine backdropped her head. “It happened again, about six months later. I took some trash out to the alleyway to put it in the can. He wasn’t there at first, but when I turned to come back to the house, he was right behind me, like three feet away. I didn’t say anything, and neither did he, but he did that lip-licking thing again. And he … he put one hand on his crotch. I dodged past him. He didn’t reach for me or anything, and after that, nothing ever happened again.”