Strong Motion

  “You’re happy she’s dead! You’re happy!”

  “That’s a very muffle muffle muffle to any person, muffle your mother. A very un-Christian thing.”

  “It’s true.”

  “I have to get dressed now.”

  “It’s true. You’re happy!”

  “I must get dressed. Although I can’t help wondering—well, muffle muffle muffle a young man who would put his casual girlfriend—”

  “His what?!” Eileen’s high voice went twice as high.

  “His casual girlfriend up to—”

  “His—!? What are you talking about? This has nothing to do with Peter. And for your information—”

  “Oh Eileen.”

  “For your information—”

  Here Louis, with a gesture of disgust, threw his fist against the door a couple times. Eileen let him in. Tears had muddied her eyeliner.

  “Who is it?” their mother said from behind the bathroom door.

  “It’s Louis,” Eileen said grimly.

  “Hi Louis, I’m dressing.”

  Eileen retreated towards the window, which looked out over the river at her business school. She was wearing the same bulky sweater she’d had on the last time Louis saw her. Today it looked as if she’d been sleeping in it.

  “Where’s Dad?” Louis said.

  “He’s at the pool. What are you doing here so early?”

  Louis thought a moment. “What are you doing here so early?” She made a ghastly teenaged face at him, tongue and gums showing, and turned to face the window. Louis scratched his ear thoughtfully. Then, shifting gears, he prowled, he snooped. On one of the hotel room’s many luggage surfaces, lying like junk mail amid car keys and open Trident packages, he found a pair of official-looking documents, a police report and a medical examiner’s report, the back sides of which his mother had been using to jot down names and phone numbers. He looked at the official sides while Eileen carefully rubbed the skin around her eyes and their mother punctuated long bathroom silences with dressing and grooming noises. The police report consisted principally of the testimony of Rita Kernaghan’s live-in Haitian maid, Thérèse Mougère.

  At 15:45 on April 6 Mougère completed her afternoon duties and placed inside her reticule three oranges and a ladies novel in French. She was scheduled to drive the deceased to downtown Boston at 17:00. She stated that the novel was for reading in the parking garage. As Mougère was granted from 16:00 to 17:00 every afternoon to watch television she retired at approximately 15:50 to her room which is down a short hall to the rear of the kitchen. The deceased was speaking on the kitchen telephone when Mougère last saw her alive. Shortly before the end of her program (it was established that the program was “Star Trek” which ends at 16:58) the house began to shake. The windows of Mougère’s room rattled and one pane broke. Mougère heard “a booming.” The lights flickered and the television faded for a moment. Mougère went to the kitchen where vases had fallen from the table and the cabinet doors were open. In the dining room a plate and vases had fallen from the breakfront. Mougère went to the parlor. Small articles had fallen from tables and there was a smell of whiskey from behind the bar. Mougère went upstairs calling the deceased’s name. Hearing nothing she became alarmed and searched all the upstairs rooms. She searched the parlor again and encountered the body of the deceased behind the bar. Blood, broken glass and a large volume of whiskey were present. A barstool was on its side. Mougère called the police. Dobbs and Akins arrived at 17:35. It was established that Mougère had not disturbed the body. When it was surmised that the deceased had fallen from the barstool while taking down a bottle Mougère averred that she habitually placed the deceased’s favorite labels of whiskey on a high shelf to discourage consumption. Mougère volunteered that a familiar spirit named Jack inhabited the house and had caused the death and destruction. This and other supernatural theories were discounted. The death appears to have been accidental in nature, in all probability occasioned by the moderate earthquake at 16:48. Questions regarding Mougère’s illegal residence status and the manner in which she obtained a valid Mass. operator’s license were referred to USINS. USINS was advised that the Coroner no longer required Mougère’s presence in the Commonwealth.

  More hurriedly, because his mother was now making pre-exit noises in the bathroom (cases snapping, the water tap turned briskly on and off), Louis read through the report of the Essex County medical examiner, which assigned “massive counter-coup trauma” as the cause of death and attributed this trauma to an accident wherein the deceased, who was 62" tall, had fallen from a 38" barstool, resulting in a total drop of 100 inches, a fall sufficient, in combination with the marble floor, to flatten the left frontal portion of the skull and immediately terminate all brain activity. Blood loss from lacerations caused by broken glass was dismissed as a factor. The blood-alcohol content of the deceased was 0.06 percent, equivalent to “moderate” intoxication.

  Louis covered up the document with a paperback and turned around. His mother was emerging from the bathroom.

  It was obvious that she’d been spending money. Spending money and (so it seemed to Louis) sleeping, for she looked approximately fifteen years younger than she’d looked at dinner on Sunday. The skin of her face was golden and glowing and so tautly attached to her jawline it seemed to pull her dark eyes open wide. She’d had her hair set in a short pageboy—and colored also? What Louis remembered as an even dark gray had been resolved into black and silver. She was wearing a pale "yellow linen dress with black velvet trim, the hem about an inch above the knee. The high collar was joined with a brooch that contained a nickel-sized pearl. At the mirror, nostrils flared in concentration, she touched invisible and possibly nonexistent hairs around her temples. Then she went to the closet and with the exact same fluidity of vertical motion that Eileen had inherited, dropped to her knees and drew a shoe box from a plastic Ferragamo bag.

  “You’re lookin’ nice there, Mom.”

  “Thank you, Louis. Isn’t your father back yet?”

  With raised eyebrows he watched her remove a pair of shoes from a bed of crimson tissue paper. He turned to Eileen, wondering if she too might raise her eyebrows at this spectacle of a mom transformed by sudden spending power. But Eileen was no less transformed. With eyes pinkened by hurt and hate and a face in which every muscle had gone dead she watched their mother slip her small feet into a pair of shoes as sleek as Jaguars. No way Louis could catch her eye. She needed to have her sorrows noticed by their mother, not by him. So while she suffered by the window (cold rain falling between her and the business school) and their mother complacently fitted a pair of white roses into the black band of a floppy white hat, he sat down on the bed and opened the sports section of a handy Globe. It could almost as easily have been he and not his sister suffering by the window, but what is a pack dog thinking, what’s going on behind its yellow eyes, when it sees one of its fellows taken aside by a polar explorer to have its throat slit and be made into supper for its siblings?

  “Your father’s going to have about three minutes to shower and dress,” their mother said. “Maybe one of you could—”

  “No,” Eileen said.

  “No,” Louis said. Their father swam in earplugs and goggles and had to be physically prodded to leave a pool.

  “Well.” Their mother stood up with her hat on, flattened her dress across her hips, and spun around once on her toes. “How do I look?”

  There was a silence, Eileen not even glancing.

  “Like a million bucks,” Louis said.

  “Ha ha ha!” Eileen cawed mirthlessly.

  Their mother, without expression, began to reload a new-looking black clutch. “Louis,” she said. “I’m going to have to talk to you.”

  “Yeah, well, I already heard it,” Eileen said, stamping across the room. “So I’ll see you guys at the service.” She pulled her raincoat from a hanger and opened the door and reeled back before their father, who, towel around his waist and goggles nes
tled in the sodden gray fluff below his throat, was advancing like an interested lobster, saying to Eileen, “Well, if it ain’t the Infanta Elena! Dark star of Aragon! Keepress of the emerald scepter!” She swung back into clothes hangers, her fingers splayed and rigid near her ears, while the lobster gathered her waist in the crook of its stout claw. She shied writhingly. “Don’t! Don’t! Don’t! Oh, you’re still wet!” Color was returning to her cheeks. Her father kissed one and released her, saluted across the room to Louis, and disappeared into the bathroom. Their mother had witnessed none of this.

  Fifteen minutes later the four Hollands were sitting in the parental rented two-door Mercury, Melanie at the wheel, the kids in back. The kids’ cars had stayed behind in the hotel lot because Bob Holland considered automobiles an abomination and had threatened to walk if they took more than one. Louis was folded together like a card table and incipiently carsick, with his under-insulated head against a cold fogged window and the taste of heavy rain and diesel exhaust in his throat. On his shins he held his mother’s hat. Someone who was not Louis and probably not Eileen was farting steadily. Bob, looking diminished in a thirty-year-old suit, was glaring out his window at overtaken drivers in the heavy midmoming traffic on Memorial Drive. He thought that driving a car was an act of personal immorality.

  Louis pushed out the hinged rear window and put his nose and mouth against the flat surface of the cooler air outside. He was beginning to relate his carsickness to flatten the left frontal portion of the skull and immediately terminate all brain activity, the imagination of death having advanced covertly and autonomously, penetrating his consciousness only now. He managed to suck a fortifying breath of air in through the window. “Do you think she knew it was an earthquake?”

  Eileen gave him an ugly, morose look and retreated within herself.

  “Who?” Melanie said.

  “You know. Rita. Do you think she knew the shaking was an earthquake?”

  “It sounds,” Melanie said, “as if she was far too inebriated to think much of anything.”

  “It’s kind of sad,” Louis said, “don’t you think?”

  “There are worse ways to go. Better this than cirrhosis in a hospital bed.”

  “She’s left you all this money. Don’t you think it’s kind of sad?”

  “She didn’t leave me any money. She didn’t leave me anything but a quarter of a million dollars in illegally secured debts, if you want to know the truth.”

  “Oh come on, Mel.”

  “Well, she did, Bob. She had a mortgage on a house that didn’t belong to her. The bank in Ipswich was unaware of this little fact, which—”

  “Your mother’s father,” Bob said, “left everything he had in a trust—”

  “Bob, this doesn’t interest Louis.”

  “Sure it does,” Louis said.

  “And it’s not particularly his business either.”

  “Oh, well.”

  “But the basic point,” Melanie continued, “is that by the time my father died he had a very clear idea of the kind of woman he’d taken for a second wife, and while he had a duty to leave her comfortable he also didn’t want her to fritter away an estate that he eventually wanted to go to his children—”

  Bob barked with delight. “Meaning he didn’t leave your mother a cent! And not a cent to your Aunt Heidi either! He wrote exactly the kind of spiteful, arrogant, dead-handed, lawyer’s lawyer will you’d have expected from him. Everybody beggared, everybody bitter, and a committee of three lawyers from the Bank of Boston meeting twice a year to write themselves checks on the fund.”

  “I like the way you honor the dead.”

  “Could you open a window a little?”

  “And Mel’s going to right a few wrongs now, isn’t she? See, Lou, after Heidi died it all came to devolve on your mother. It was supposed to go to the surviving daughters. Your mother’s in exactly the same position your grandfather was ten years ago. Only the rich have gotten richer, haven’t they? Your mother’s in a position to build some schools and clinics, maybe give a gym to Wellesley. Or help the homeless, huh, Mel?”

  Melanie tilted her head back, removing herself from the discussion. Eileen smiled bitterly. Louis asked again to have a window opened.

  The memorial service, which was to have been held in a meadow in Essex County if the sun had shone, had been shifted to the ballroom of the Royal Sonesta, a luxury hotel overlooking the mouth of the Charles at the extreme northeast corner of Cambridge. For a moment, when Louis followed his parents through the doorway, he thought they’d entered the wrong room; milling in sad social lumps were, it seemed to him, the very people he’d seen marching against abortion on Tremont Street a week earlier—the same inflexible middle-aged female faces, the same smattering of vacant-eyed men, the same curtain-colored clothing and sensible shoes. But then, alerted by the beeline Eileen was making, he saw Peter Stoorhuys.

  Peter was standing slightly apart from a group of three uneasy-looking men in nice suits, three obvious executives or professionals. With his legs spread and his shoulders thrown back and his hands shallowly in his pockets, he looked like a person to whom the world may come if it really must. Eileen, colliding with him, pressed her ear against one of his houndstooth lapels and rested one hand on his stomach, the other on his shoulder.

  Louis stopped in his tracks and stared at the embrace with his hands on his hips. Then, altering his trajectory as though a repulsive field now surrounded Eileen, he caught up with Bob and the two of them shuffled after Melanie, whose approach was causing the three gentlemen in suits to break into smiles of relief. She brushed cheeks with two of them, shook hands with the third. Peter freed himself from Eileen and came over to Melanie with his arm outstretched, but suddenly she was keeping her hands to herself. She smiled glacially. “Hello Peter.” Bob Holland, like a grateful second-stringer, claimed the unshaken hand and pumped it, but Melanie’s snub had not escaped Eileen’s attention; she glowered at Louis. Louis smiled back pleasantly. He was interested to see that at some point during the week his parents had made Peter’s acquaintance.

  “This is our son, Louis,” Melanie said. “Louis, this is Mr. Aldren, Mr. Tabscott, Mr. Stoorhuys—”

  Mr. Who, Mr. Who, Mr.—?

  “Good to know you, Louis,” they chorused, pressing his flesh. The same courtesies were then extended to Eileen.

  “Peter’s dad,” Mr. Stoorhuys added for Louis’s benefit, waving a hand at his son, to whom he bore a resemblance both unmistakable and unflattering to himself. Seen from close up, Mr. Stoorhuys did not actually match his two companions. Mr. Aldren and Mr. Tabscott appeared to be real Men, men with the beefy faces and inflamed-looking bull’s nostrils of frequent beefeaters, men who were emphatically not “young men” and even more emphatically not “women.” They had gold chains across their necktie knots and a hard red shrewdness in their eyes.

  Mr. Stoorhuys was more nervous and lanky. Three inches of shirt cuff stuck out of his jacket sleeves on either wrist. His hair grew in half a dozen directions and half a dozen shades of gray; a long, seventies-style forelock rested on his dandruffy eyebrows. He had sunken pitted cheeks, teeth so large he seemed unable to keep his lips over them, and bright intelligent eyes that were engaged in looking over his shoulder even as he stood facing Louis, one hand raised to keep him on hold.

  “Louis,” Melanie said. He turned to see her standing on one leg, leaning through bodies. “Maybe you’d like to get me a cup of coffee.”

  “Actually—” Mr. Tabscott pinched the cuff of Louis’s jacket. “I think the, uh, service is going to start here in a minute.”

  “Yes,” Mr. Aldren said. “We’re going to sit with your mother if you don’t mind.”

  “Good to meet you, son.”

  “Good to meet you, uh, Louis.”

  Mr. Stoorhuys followed them, escaping his stillborn conversation with Louis the easy way: by just leaving.

  The drab crowd was herding itself towards rows of function-room chairs set
up facing a lectern and a grand piano on which a Japanese man with expressive shoulders and a ponytail had begun to play the Pachelbel Canon. Louis’s father, with his academic’s respect for lecterns, had already taken a seat. Eileen stood hugging Peter’s chest. And a tableau presented itself: Mr. Aldren leading Melanie away, his elbow linked with hers, and Melanie not needing to be led but walking with him as naturally as if they were sweethearts on a boardwalk; Mr. Stoorhuys following with a grip on her other arm, smiling his smile that was not a smile, lagging behind for a moment to look over his shoulder through the rough tufts of hair in his eyes; and Mr. Tabscott like a rear guard with his back squarely to the three of them, unambiguously warning off anyone foolish enough to pursue. A white hat and a yellow linen dress—a lady as little a man as at least two of these men were ladies—fenced in by dark pinstripe.

  Louis, staring, extended one finger and rammed the tip of it into the bridge of his glasses.

  The Canon had grown deafening. Melanie sat down between Mr. Aldren and Mr. Tabscott with Mr. Stoorhuys crowding in from Mr. Aldren’s side, his thin arm almost long enough to reach behind all three of them, five inches of white shirt cuff showing now. Louis roughed up the pastel broadloom with a heavy shoe. Asking Eileen who and what these men were was not an option; she had her cheek against Peter’s necktie and was feeling around under the back of his jacket as if looking for the key one wound him up with. Their lips were moving: they were conversing inaudibly. They and Louis were now the only mourners not seated in the array of chairs. An ashen-faced woman in a caftan had stationed herself behind the lectern and was resting one elbow on it as she gravely watched the pianist. The pianist had begun to grapple visibly with the Canon, trying to enforce a ritardando while hurrying the ponderous chords to find a respectable point for breaking off. The Canon was showing its backbone and seemed far from surrendering.

  Louis walked over to the young lovers in their invisible sphere of oblivion and stood, as it were, outside their door. “Hi, Peter,” he said.