Читать книгу Seven Mile Bridge - Michael M. Biehl - Страница 8

1

The House, Day One

As I start to clean out the house where my mother spent the last fifty years of her life, it occurs to me that in a half century the woman never got rid of anything.

Except my father.

Wandering through the forlorn rooms where I spent most of my childhood, I see that my mother has left the house in such a state of disrepair that the piles of old clothes, stacks of paper, and mind-boggling mass of memorabilia might be all that’s holding the place up. I have never seen a house with so much deferred maintenance. In fact, you couldn’t even call it deferred. It has been denied maintenance.

The roof has apparently been leaking for years, with the result that the drywall is so rotted with mildew that in places it has acquired the appearance and texture of Roquefort cheese. The Thermopane picture windows all lost their seals so long ago that they are milky white and nearly opaque, while the wooden frames around them are black with mold. All the doors are warped, all the floors squeak, all the faucets drip. The wallpaper is stained and faded, and in some places it has peeled off and curled into scrolls that hang on the walls like sconces. The fuse boxes are plugged with pennies, a hazardous temporary means of restoring power that apparently became a permanent solution for a woman so worn out that she chose to risk a house fire rather than make a trip to the hardware store. The whole house smells musty, with hints of rotted vegetables and urine.

The condition of the house speaks volumes about how much my mother’s faculties deteriorated in the last few years before her death. It seems to me it also indicates that the neighborhood has changed a lot since I left thirty-four years ago. The neighbors I remember were as nosy as foraging warthogs, and obsessed with property values in their middle-middle-class subdivision. They would have reported anyone to the police who let knee-high weeds flourish in the lawn and had seed-bearing trees growing out of the gutters. Perhaps, as the Glen Oaks subdivision of Sheboygan, Wisconsin, matured, its occupants became more tolerant and easygoing. Or maybe they just don’t give a damn anymore.

Merely contemplating the Herculean task of clearing out this cataclysmic clutter and getting the dump in any kind of shape to sell wearies me like a long hike up a steep hill. It also frightens me more than a little, and I know why. Lurking in the heaps of junk are undoubtedly countless mementos of the events that led to the death of my father, damaged the rest of the family beyond repair, and ended my youth on the sourest note imaginable. I think of the archaeological dig portrayed at the beginning of the movie The Exorcist and wonder what demonic icons I might unearth in this excavation.

The inevitability of uncovering buried souvenirs along with buried memories is what has kept my younger brother away and left me to handle the job alone.

“I, um, I, uh, can’t do it,” Jamie had told me on the phone a week earlier.

“But there might be some stuff in there you want,” I said.

“No, uh, not enough to face all that shit. I can’t.”

I understood. Jamie knows his own limitations better than I do. He was four years younger than me, only thirteen, when it happened. I always thought that was why it had affected him more profoundly. Unlike Jamie, I have never spent time in a psychiatric hospital.

“You want me to keep anything for you?” I asked.

“Just my old record albums, if they’re still there.”

I have no doubt that Jamie’s LPs — a comprehensive collection of Wagner and Mahler that seemed totally bizarre for a thirteen-year-old boy to own — are still here. Like I said, my mother never got rid of anything.

I decide that a good way to start the project is to go into the kitchen and see if there is anything potable in the liquor cabinet. Sure enough, the humble cupboard over the refrigerator is pretty well stocked, as it always was. Mostly cheap crap, American blended whiskey in a plastic bottle and vodka with a fake Russian name. But I manage to dig out a couple of airline bottles of Old Crow that look about forty years old, wipe the thick dust out of a water glass, and make myself a drink. It smells safe, and tastes fine.

Is there anything in this house worth anything? I wonder. Sitting in the kitchen, which has not been redecorated since the early ’60s, I think of my mother scurrying about in her favorite frilly yellow apron, cooking dinner, and I remember she had a set of bone china she only used on holidays that she claimed was worth plenty. She would have a fit every Thanksgiving and Christmas, yelling at us, “Be careful with my grandmother’s china! It’s irreplaceable and it’s worth a fortune!”

I find the china in the same place she used to keep it, the built-in cabinet in the dining room. The pieces are all cracked and chipped. Every single plate, saucer, cup, bowl, and serving piece, cracked and chipped. Worthless. The china cabinet also holds her set of cracked and chipped crystal. A bunch of Hummels and other figurines, as well, and a couple dozen vases. All of it damaged. It seems as if everything the least bit fragile that was in this house for long got damaged.

Everything and everybody.

Her sterling silver tea service is in here, too, pitch-black with tarnish and dented like a junked car. I realize there is slim chance I will find anything in the place that could be turned into enough cash to make it worth the time and trouble. From a practical standpoint, it would make more sense to pay someone to haul every last scrap to the dump, and raze the house or abandon it to the taxman. Or burn it to the ground.

But I didn’t travel from Marathon, Florida, to Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and close my dive shop for three weeks because I thought I would find valuables or money in the house on Foxglove Lane. I came because I thought I might find answers.

It will be painful and exhausting to sort through this dismal mess and the vestiges of a fairly happy family that failed, but I have a feeling that I might find something here that I have been looking for for a long time. Something tells me this is my last chance to finally figure out what really happened to my father.

*

I’m draining the last precious drops of bourbon from the glass when I hear a clicking that sounds like a fingernail tapping on glass coming from the direction of the front door. I open the door and find our neighbor from across the street, Agnes Atkins, standing on the doorstep. My brother and I used to call her “Old Lady Atkins” even though she was only a few years older than our parents. She was the kind of fussy sourpuss who would yell at us if our ball rolled into her yard. I haven’t seen her in three decades, but I must have been subconsciously aging her because I recognize her immediately and am not surprised by her appearance. She’s diminutive and slightly hunched. Her face is pale and crinkly, and she holds a brown wool coat that’s way too big for her closed in front of her neck with an arthritic-looking, purple-veined hand. Behind her, a herd of dry brown leaves stampedes down the sidewalk, driven by a stern wind.

“Mrs. Atkins, nice to see you.”

“I tried the doorbell,” she says, wagging a swollen finger at the button. I test it.

“It’s broken,” I say. “Probably has been for years.”

She squints at my face for a moment, then widens her gray eyes.

“Jonathan?” she says. Her head moves slowly down and up. “Look at you! I almost didn’t recognize you. Don’t you look nice.”

A polite lie. I have gained at least thirty pounds since she last saw me, have lost a lot of hair, and am dressed in a faded black sweatshirt and blue jeans with holes in the knees. My face is probably flushed from bourbon. It often is.

“You, too,” I lie back. “Please, come in. It’s cold out there.”

“Not too bad for November,” she says. She has to put both hands on the door frame to boost herself up the four-inch step into the house. A candied, floral smell accompanies her into the small foyer. “I saw the car and wondered who was in Louise’s house.” She glances around like a furtive bird. “Is Jamie with you?”

“Nope, just me.” I’m relieved that someone in the neighborhood cares enough to snoop. Given the appearance of the house, I had thought that my mother could have dropped dead on the front lawn and been there long enough to attract vultures before anybody noticed.

“Where is Jamie now?” she asks. Apparently she and my mother haven’t communicated much. Jamie has been in the same home for at least ten years.

“He’s living at a place down in Port Washington,” I explain. The “place” is an assisted living facility run by a private charity that houses adults who need help either staying off drugs, or, like my brother, staying on them. “He has a view of Lake Michigan.”

“Oh, how nice. Are you still living in Florida?” She says “Florida” like she has something against the place, which I suppose she does. That was where her husband Tom ran off when he left her, back about the time I was in college. I recollected that my mother had told me another woman figured in Tom’s exit. Tom and Agnes were childless, so she was alone after he split, and presumably still is.

“Yeah, I’m down in Marathon, at the east end of Seven Mile Bridge, if you know where that is.”

“Still scuba diving?” Again, a hint of poorly concealed scorn in her voice, as if she thinks it deplorable that a college boy ended up as a scuba bum.

“Yep.”

“Your dad got you into that, didn’t he?” Her eyes move in the direction of the garage. It seems that for her, like everyone else, the memory of my father is inextricably linked to that garage.

“Yeah, he did.”

She tilts her head and gives me a coquettish glance that makes her wrinkled face look sort of adolescent. “Ever get married?”

She reaches out and puts her hand on my forearm, making me aware that I have crossed my arms in front of me in response to her personal questions. I repress a subtle urge to tell her it’s none of her goddamn business if I ever got married.

“Nope. Still batchin’ it.”

“Oh, Jon,” she says, “your mother was always so proud of you boys.”

Another lie. My mother stopped being proud of me when I dropped out of college. As far as I could tell, she was never proud of Jamie, not for ten minutes.

“I know,” I say, returning the lie. “Can I offer you something? A soda, something to eat?” As soon as I say it, I wonder if I can back up the offer. The putrid smell that hangs in the house is particularly strong in the vicinity of the refrigerator. God knows what fetid refuse is in there.

“No, nothing, thank you,” she says, to my relief. “I’m sorry I missed Louise’s funeral. Her obituary didn’t say anything about a service.”

“It was very small,” I reply. In fact, there has been no service. Jamie couldn’t handle it, my mother’s siblings and second husband all predeceased her, and I don’t know who her friends are anymore, if any. She never expressed any wishes on the subject, except that she thought embalming and open caskets were hideous. As I speak to Mrs. Atkins, my mother’s cremains are resting in peace in the trunk of my car.

“You take care now, Jonathan,” she says, turning toward the door. “Let’s get together for lunch or something before you leave town, okay?”

“Okay,” I say. The biggest exchange of lies in the conversation. I can tell neither of us wants to get together, for lunch or anything. I figure I will never have any reason to speak to Agnes Atkins again for the rest of my life.

About that, like so much else, I am wrong.