“You mean Piet Aukema? The dwarf?”
Walter nodded.
“Shit. I haven’t seen him in twenty years—how the hell would he know where I was?”
Walter’s stomach sank. He felt history squeezing him like a vise. “I met him in the hospital,” he said, as if the fact would somehow corroborate his story. “He told me he just got a letter from you. From Barrow. Said you were teaching.”
“Well, he’s a goddamned liar!” Truman roared, lurching to his feet, his face puffed with sudden rage. He looked around him wildly, as if he were about to fling his cup against the wall or rip the stove up off the floor or something, but then he waved his hand in dismissal and sat down again. “Ah, piss on it,” he murmured, and looked Walter hard in the eye. “Hey, I’m glad to see you anyway,” he suddenly boomed, a bit too heartily, as if he were trying to convince himself. “You’re a good-looking kid, you know that?”
Walter might have thrown it back at him—What the hell do you know about it?—and he would have been justified, too, but he didn’t. Instead he gave him a shy smile and looked back down into his cup. It was the closest they’d come.
But then the old man surprised him again. “There’s nothing wrong with you, is there—physically, I mean? You weren’t limping when you walked in here or anything, were you?”
Walter’s eyes leapt at him.
“I mean, it’s none of my business. … I just … it’s easy to get a touch of frostbite up here, you know.” He shrugged his shoulders, then threw back his head to drain his cup.
“You mean you don’t know?” Walter looked at him and saw the ghost ships, the dark lane opening up before him with its patches of ice clinging like scabs to the blacktop. He was incredulous. He was indignant. He was angry.
Truman looked uneasy. Now it was his turn to glance away. “How the hell would I know,” he mumbled. “Listen, I’m sorry—I left all that behind. I haven’t been much of a father, I admit. …”
“But, but what about that night—?” Walter couldn’t finish, it was all a hallucination, of course it was, he’d known that all along. The man sitting before him now was a hallucination, a stranger, the vacant terminus of a hopeless quest.
“I told you I’m sorry, for christ’s sake,” Truman snapped, raising his voice. He pushed himself up from the chair and crossed the room to the stove. Walter watched him fill his cup from the kettle perched atop it. “Another toddy?” the old man peered at him over his shoulder, his voice softening.
Walter waved him off, then struggled to his feet. “All right,’ he said, thinking, the letters, the letters, he never even bothered to open them, “I know you don’t give two shits about me and I know you want to get this over with, so I’m going to tell you why I came all the way up here into the ass-end of nowhere to find you. I’m going to tell you everything, I’m going to tell you what it feels like to lose your feet—yes, both of them—and I’m going to tell you about Depeyster Van Wart.” His heart was hammering. This was it. Finally. The end. “And then,” he said, “I want some answers.”
Truman shrugged. Grinned. Lifted his mug as if to offer a silent toast, and then drained it in a gulp. He brought the bottle of gin back to the chair with him, sat down and filled his cup, nothing to dilute it this time. His expression was strange—sheepish and belligerent at the same time, the look of the schoolyard bully hauled up in front of the principal. “So go ahead,” he said, the gin at his lips, “tell me.” He nodded at the door, the blackness, the unbroken tundra and the icy sea that lay beyond it. “We’ve got all night.”
Walter told him. With a vengeance. Told him how, when he was twelve, he waited through the summer for him, and then waited again the next summer and the next. Told him how hurt he’d felt, how tainted and unwanted, how culpable. And how he got over it. Told him how Hesh and Lola had nurtured him, sent him to college, how he’d found a soft and sweet girl and married her. And then, when the first bottle was empty and the gin burned like acid in his veins, he told him of his visions, of the poison that infested him, of how he’d skewered Jessica with his bitterness and run up against the ghost of his father till his feet were ground to pulp. He talked, and Truman listened, till long after the sun should have set and the cows come home. But there were no cows. And there was no sun.
Walter was disoriented. He peered through the iced-over window and saw the deep of night. He hadn’t eaten in god knew how many hours and the drink was getting to him. He fell heavily into the chair and glanced up at his father. Truman was slouched over, his head lolling sloppily on the prop of his hand, his eyes weary and red. And it came to Walter then that they were sparring, that was all, and that for all the exhilaration he’d felt in laying out his wrongs, it was only the first round.
“Dad?” he said, and the word felt strange on his tongue. “You awake?”
The old man lurched up as if from a bad dream. “Huh?” he said, instinctively feeling for the bottle. And then: “Oh. Oh, it’s you.” Outside, the wind held steady. Unforgiving, relentless, eternal. “All right,” he said, rousing himself. “You’ve had it tough, I admit it. But think of me.” He leaned forward, the massive shoulders and great brazen head. “Think of me,” he whispered. “You think I live up here because it’s a winter wonderland, the great vacation paradise, the Tahiti of the North or some shit? It’s penance, Walter. Penance.”
He rose, stretched, then shuffled back to reach under the desk and fish out another bottle. Walter watched him crack the seal with a practiced twist of his hand, pour out a full cup and then proffer the bottle. Walter was going to say no, going to lay his palm over the rim of the cup as he’d done in the café, but he didn’t. This was a marathon, a contest, the title bout. He held out his cup.
“You get tired,” Truman said, “you sleep over there, by the stove. I’ve got a sleeping bag, and you can take the cushions off the couch.” He sat again, arching his back against the hard wooden slats of the chair. He took a long sip from the cup and then walked the chair across the floor till he was so close to Walter he might have been bandaging a wound. “Now,” he said, his voice a hard harsh rumble of phlegm, “now you listen to my story.”
Truman’s Story
“No matter what they tell you, I loved her. I did.”
The old man drained his cup, flung it aside and lifted the bottle to his lips. He didn’t offer Walter any. “Your mother, I mean,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his sleeve. “She was something. You probably don’t remember her much, but she was so—what do you call it?—earnest, you know? Idealistic. She really bought all that Bolshevik crap, really thought Russia was the workers’ paradise and Joe Stalin everybody’s wise old uncle.” There was a single lamp burning, brass stand, paper shade, on the desk behind him; the shadows softened his features. “She was like Major Barbara or something. I’d never met anybody like her.”
Walter sat there transfixed, the rasping voice and the everlasting night holding him as if by spell or incantation. His mother, she of the soulful eyes, was right there before him. He could almost smell the potato pancakes.
“But you’ve been married, right? What was her name?”
“Jessica.” The name was an ache. Jessica and his mother.
“Right,” the old man said, his voice gravelly and deep, ruined by drink and nights that never end. “Well, you know how it is, then—”
“No,” Walter snapped, suddenly belligerent. “How is it?”
“I mean, once the first glow dies and all that—”
Walter jumped on him. “You mean you screwed her over. From the beginning. You married her so you could destroy her.” He tried to get up, but his feet were numb. “Sure I remember her. I remember her dead too. And I remember the day you left her—in that car out there, right? Depeyster Van Wart’s car, isn’t it?”
“Bullshit, Walter. Bullshit. You remember what Hesh taught you to remember.” The old man’s voice was steady—he wasn’t debating, he was narrating. The pain of it, the pain that made hi
m hide out in the hind end of the world, was up on a shelf in a little bottle with a tight cap. Like smelling salts. “Don’t give me that self-righteous look, you little shit—you want to know hurt, you listen to me. I did it. Yes. I’m a fink, I’m a backstabber. I murdered my wife, set up my friends. That’s right, I’ll tell you that right off. So don’t argue with me, you little son of a bitch. Just listen.”
The temperature had gone up high under the old man’s voice, and for the second time in as many hours he looked as if he were about to lurch up and tear the place apart. Walter sat frozen, so close he could smell the stink of the gin on his father’s breath. “If you want to get beyond all that, I mean. And you do, right? Or you wouldn’t have come all the way up here.”
Numb, Walter nodded.
“Okay,” the old man said, “okay,” and the calm had returned to his voice. He was wearing mukluks and a bulky wool sweater with reindeer dancing across the front of it, and when he leaned forward, his hair and beard touched with gray, he looked like some scored and haunted figure out of an old Bergman movie, the pale oracle of the north. “Let me start at the beginning,” he said, “with Depeyster.”
Truman had met him in England during the war—they were both G2, Army Intelligence, and they’d struck an immediate chord on discovering they both hailed from the Peterskill area. Depeyster was a smart guy, good-looking, tough—and a pretty good ball player too. Basketball, that is. They shot some hoop with a couple of other guys once in a while when they were off duty. But then Depeyster got another assignment and they drifted apart. The important thing was that Truman met Christina—and married her—before he ever laid eyes on Depeyster Van Wart again. And that was the truth.
“But you joined the party,” Walter said, “—I mean, that’s what Lola—”
“Oh, fuck,” Truman spat, a savage crease cut into his forehead. He pushed himself up from the chair and paced the little room. Outside, the wolf dogs set up a howl. “Yeah. Okay. I joined the party. But maybe it was because I was in love with your mother, ever think of that? Maybe it was because she had some influence over me and maybe because, in a way, I wanted to believe that happy horseshit about the oppressed worker and the greed of the capitalists and all the rest of it—hey, my father was a fisherman, you know. But who was right, huh? Khrushchev comes along and denounces Stalin and everybody in the Colony shits blood. You got to put things in perspective, Walter.” He paused at his desk, picked up a sheaf of paper covered in a close black typescript, then set it down again. Instead he shook a cigarette—a Camel—from the pack that lay beside it, and raised a lighter to it. Walter could see that his hands were shaking, for all his bravado.
“So then, what—we’re married a year, two years—and Depeyster comes back into the picture. After, Walter,” he said, something like a plea in his eyes for the first time, “after I met your mother and married her, I run into him in the store at Cats’ Corners out there, we’re going on a picnic, your mother and me and Hesh and Lola, and I stop in for a beer and pack of smokes on a Sunday afternoon, and there he is.” He paused, took another drink from the neck of the bottle. “There’s a lot of factors here, things you know nothing about. Don’t be so quick to judge.”
Walter found that he was gripping the arms of the chair as if he were afraid he would topple out of it, as if he were high up on a Ferris wheel in a wind like the wind outside the door. “I told you,” he said, “I work for him. He’s all right. Really, he is. He says Hesh and Lola are wrong. Says you’re a patriot.”
Truman let out a bitter laugh, the pale swampy green of his eyes obscured in smoke, the massive torso swaying ever so slightly with the effect of the alcohol and maybe the emotional charge too. “Patriot,” he repeated, his face contorted as if he’d bitten into something rotten. “Patriot,” he spat, and then he stretched himself out on the floor in front of the stove and fell asleep, the lit cigarette still jammed between his fingers.
In the morning—if you could call it morning—the old man was guarded, frazzled, hung over and furious, as communicative as a stone. At some point, deep in the folds of that interminable night, Walter had heard him stagger up from the floor, pour himself a drink and dial the phone. “I’m not coming in today,” he growled into the receiver. There was a pause. “Yeah, that’s right. I’m sick.” Another pause. “Let ’em read the Constitution—better yet, have them copy it out.” Click.
Now it was light—or rather there was a noticeable softening of the darkness that pressed up against the windows—and there was a smell of bacon, strong as life, mixed in with a subtler smell, a mnemonic smell, a cruel and heartless smell: potato pancakes. Walter lurched up out of the sleeping bag as if it were on fire, living flesh in a house of ghosts. The dogs howled. It must have been about noon.
Truman served him bacon, eggs over easy, potato pancakes—“Like your mother used to make,” he said out of a pouchy, expressionless face, and then he said nothing more till the sun flickered out an hour later. “Gone dark,” he said suddenly out of the silence. “Cocktail hour,” he said with a sloppy grin. “Story time.”
There was more gin. Endless gin. Gin that flowed like blood from the gashes under a middleweight’s eyes. Not yet two in the afternoon and Walter was reeling. Slouched in the easy chair, his limbs gone plastic and light, so light they seemed detached from his body, Walter cradled a glass of industrial-strength gin and listened to his father tell out history like an Indian sachem telling out beads.
“Depeyster,” the old man rumbled by way of introduction, “I was talking about Depeyster Van Wart, wasn’t I?”
Walter nodded. This is what he’d come to hear.
Truman ducked his head, stuck a thick finger in his drink—gin and gin—and sucked it. “Maybe I misled you a little last night,” he said. “About that day when I ran into him at the store. It was an accident on my part, I swear it was, but not on his. No. Nothing he ever does is by accident.”
Walter fought down his fear, his anger, fought down the urge to challenge him, and sank deeper into the chair, sipping gin that tasted like cleaning fluid, while the old man went on.
It was funny, he said, the way Depeyster suddenly came back into his life. After that day at Cats’ Corners, he began to see more and more of him, even as he fell into the routine of Colony life, attending the lectures and concerts, even as he joined the association and then the party. Depeyster was everywhere. He was getting a new muffler at Skip’s garage when Truman took the car in for shocks and brake pads, he was hunkered over a drink at the Yorktown Tavern when Truman stopped in with one of the guys after work, he was in Genung’s buying drapes, at Offenbacher’s with a bag of kaiser rolls. He was everywhere. But especially, he was on the train.
Two days a week, when the 4:30 whistle blew at the plant, Truman picked up his lunchbox, pulled an old army rucksack out from under the iron work bench and walked the six blocks down to the train station. He was studying American history at City College, studying sociology, transcendentalism, American labor movements, the causes and effects of the War of Independence, and he chewed a sandwich, sipped coffee and read his texts on the seventy-five-minute ride into New York. One evening he looked up from his books and there was Depeyster, tanned and easy, in a business suit and with a briefcase under his arm. He had business in town, he said, though what sort of business he might have had at six o’clock at night Truman never thought to ask.
After that, Truman saw him frequently on the train, sometimes alone, sometines in the company of LeClerc Outhouse. They made a good group. Van Wart, of course, came from the old family, and he was a real repository of local history, not to mention a Yale B.A., class of ’40. LeClerc collected artifacts from the Revolutionary War, most of which he’d dug up himself, and he knew more about the fight for New York than Truman’s professor. They talked history, current events, they talked politics. LeClerc and Depeyster were hard-line Republicans, of course, Dewey men, and they saw Communists everywhere. In China, Korea, Turkey, in the incumbent’s
administration. And, of course, in Kitchawank Colony. Truman found himself in the position of defending the Left, defending Roosevelt and the New Deal, defending the Colony, his wife and father-in-law and Hesh and Lola. He didn’t do very well at it.
And why not? Maybe because he was confused himself.
“What did you mean,” Walter asked, interrupting him, “about Dipe never doing anything by accident? You mean he came after you? Purposely?”
The old man leaned back in that Essene chair, that hard untenable rack of a chair, and leveled a contemptuous look on him. “Don’t be a jerk, Walter—of course he did. Some of those guys we knew in G2 stayed on after the war and wound up in some pretty high places. Depeyster kept in touch.”
“So you were a spy,” Walter said, and the emotion was gone from his voice.
Truman sat up, cleared his throat and turned his head to spit on the floor. For a long moment he fiddled with the rubber band that held his hair in place. “If you want to call it that,” he said. “They convinced me. Made me see the light. Them and Piet.”
“But—” Walter was defeated, his last hope a fading contrail in a leaden sky. The rumor was truth. His father was shit. “But how could you?” he insisted, angry in his defeat and loud in his anger. “I mean how could anybody convince you—words, how could words convince you—to, to screw over your friends, your own wife, your”—it still stuck in his throat—“your son?”
“I was right, that’s how. I did what I did for a higher principle.” The old man spoke as if he had no problem with it, as if it hadn’t destroyed his life, taken his family, made him into a drunk and an exile. “There might have been people like Norman Thomas around, people like your mother, but there were also devious little shits like Sasha Freeman and Morton Blum, who set us all up, traitors and crazies like Greenglass, Rosenberg, Hiss, who just wanted to kill everything we had in this country—and they were right there in the Colony too. Still are.”