Fatherhood

  “Anything is possible,” shouted the man in the robe.

  “What can you do then,” someone taunted, “perform miracles?”

  “Anything is possible. As long as there is a will to do it.”

  “You’re full of crap,” someone said again, and with that the crowd began slowly to disperse.

  The man in the robe watched them for a moment, then he said in a voice loud enough to bring them back, “I can do a thing you have never seen. I can do it with my will alone.”

  But the crowd continued to move away heedlessly.

  “I can gaze on the sun!” shouted the man. “I can do it with my naked eyes! I can walk away unharmed!”

  A few people turned toward him, and one of them said, “With shades, buddy?”

  “With my naked eyes.” He pointed to a shining square of sunlight. “Follow me,” he said.

  The crowd seemed to hesitate for a moment, seemed to calculate whether this man was worth a few more minutes.

  “Come on now if you want to see something,” shouted the man. He stood in the center of a large patch of light. He lifted his arm and pointed at the sun. “There it is. You want to see something, don’t you? Well, now’s your chance.”

  Haltingly, the crowd began to move toward the block of sun and the man standing in the center of it, his arms held tightly against his sides, his robe bleaching in the light.

  When they had gathered around, an attentive audience once again, the man in the robe took several deep, athletic breaths and closed his eyes. “When I open my eyes again,” he said solemnly, “they will be staring straight into the sun.”

  He hesitated a moment, took what seemed to be a brief, dramatic pause, then he opened his eyes.

  The crowd seemed to draw in its collective breath.

  He stood rigidly with his head tilted upward, his eyes staring wide open toward the sun, his eyebrows arched high up his forehead, holding his eyelids sternly open, exposing the entire balls of his eyes to the boiling light overhead. He did not blink as the tears began to bead instantly in the corners of his eyes.

  “Stop it,” someone whispered.

  The staring eyes seemed transfixed. They began to pour forth a stream of tears, sweeping down from the withering sockets, down the cheeks and off the face, darkening the collar of his robe with tiny spots of moisture.

  “Someone get a cop.”

  He continued to glare fiercely at the sun. His head became a mop of wet, tangled hair, but the eyes remained fixed as if they had left his body and had assumed an indomitable identity of their own and a will to victory over the sun itself—a triumph which was not his triumph but their triumph, the triumph of the eyes.

  “Stop it, mister,” said someone in a frightened voice. “This is going too far.”

  But still the eyes stared straight ahead with a terrible density of intent, still pouring out futile tears, still holding to the very center of the sun with the physical, tangible grasp of clawing hands.

  The city seemed to stop its clang and hiss and whistle. It was only the eyes now in battle with the sun; only the dream of conquest and transcendence over the iron laws of light and flesh.

  Someone tried to cover the eyes with his hands, but the man in the robe slapped them away ferociously and continued to stare at the sun, the eyes shining so terribly in the light that they seemed to cast of little orbs of flame.

  After that, no one spoke. They stood silently and waited for the man in the robe to end it. Finally, he did, closing his eyes very slowly, very gracefully, with a poet’s sullen grandeur.

  A little patter of applause began among the people around him, but the man didn’t wait to hear it. He bolted away quickly, moving almost at a trot toward 41st Street.

  I followed him at a distance. On 41st Street he turned left out of the park and then left again into an alley near the library. I kept after him, not really knowing why but sensing that surge of the miraculous which crowds seem to feel in the wake of prophets.

  The alley was a dead end, entirely empty except for a large metal drum resting next to a wall. I took a few steps and stopped.

  I walked almost stealthily toward the drum, feeling like an intruder in the temple, expecting the man in the robe to leap out from behind the drum at any moment and shrivel me with embarrassment. But I kept going, and after a moment, I could hear a low moaning coming from behind the drum just beyond my vision. I nearly turned back at that, and I had to step forward quickly to keep from doing it.

  At first he didn’t see me. He was pressed firmly against the wall behind the drum, his legs pulled tightly together in a crouch, his knees directly under his chin. He was frantically applying a thick white cream to his eyes, rubbing it in with his fists and whimpering pathetically as he rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet. His eyes were covered with the cream; it oozed between his fingers like pasty globs of fat and plopped stickily onto his immaculate blue robe.

  When he finally opened his eyes and saw me, it was obvious he recognized me instantly as one of the people who had witnessed his sungazing performance. I almost expected him to jump up and run away in a seizure of humiliation. But he didn’t. He looked at me closely, silently, his lips parted only slightly in what looked to be an apology. It was the face that mattered. A look of deep, in-dwelling agony passed over it. It was the terrible pain of a man who cannot live without miracles in a world where there aren’t any.

  When I got home that night, I found a note from Marilyn saying she had left me. She had taken Lisa, of course, and she was very apologetic about that, admitting it wasn’t fair. She had wanted to let me say goodbye to her, but she had felt there was no way other than to leave immediately, while the impulse was strong. Otherwise, she said, it would just keep going on, and she would never leave at all.

  I wandered about the house for several hours after finding the note. I couldn’t think what else to do. For a while all I could do was rage, but that was useless.

  I ended up sitting in the kitchen the way I had the night before, drinking endless cups of coffee, trying to come to terms with what had happened. I saw Marilyn the night of our first date and gloated at what a helpless thing she had seemed to be. Then I remembered her stories, the way they turned upward, always at the end, toward some unreachable hope, and I cried remembering good times, bad times, never really sure where the good blended invisibly into the indifferent, then into the bad.

  Around nine the phone rang. It was Marilyn.

  “You found my note?”

  “Yes,” I said stiffly. “Where are you?”

  “Pennsylvania. Some little town. I don’t know for sure. We’re going to Indiana for a while.”

  “Your parents?”

  “Yes. I don’t know where after that.”

  “Is Lisa all right?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Marilyn said. “I told her I had to get away. I told her other things will have to be settled later. There are lots of things we have to settle before …”

  “We’ll settle everything later, Marilyn.”

  “All right.”

  “Are you driving straight through? I mean to Indiana?”

  “No, we’ll stop at some motel tonight. Get up early in the morning, about dawn. Go the rest of the way tomorrow.”

  “Okay.”

  “Well, I’d better go.”

  “All right.”

  “I’ll call you when we get home.”

  “Please do that, Marilyn. I just want to know you made it. You know, that you’re safe.”

  “As soon as we get there, I’ll call.”

  “Okay.”

  She hung up, leaving me standing absurdly, the dull buzz of the phone humming in my ear. I slammed the phone down, hoping she might somehow hear my rage and fearfully, repentantly, come back to me.

  There was nothing to do the next morning but go to work. I had watched television until almost dawn, finally lapsing into nervous, tumbling sleep. I could not bear the idea of remaining in the house, in the suburbs,
listening to the children in the street.

  I set about making an ordinary day of it. I shaved and showered and dressed myself, trying as best I could to keep chin up, upper lip stiff, my eye, as they say, on the buttered side of life.

  On the train into the city, I tried to interest myself in a newsmagazine, but the anger kept welling up in me, the feeling of unwarranted betrayal. What did she want, this woman I had been fool enough to marry? What would she do in Indiana, for God’s sake? What would she do anywhere at all, except poison life with her discontent? Watching the murky towns of New Jersey pass by the window, I felt like something primed for explosion. If Marilyn had been within my grasp, I think I might have strangled her to death. I saw her as a little red ball of inchoate sensibilities, then as a tiny ravenous mouth gnawing insatiably at the lineaments of decent, ordinary life. The very image of her face in my mind sickened me almost physically.

  At the office, I put all my will to the service of a calm, unruffled demeanor. I took my morning coffee and sipped it casually while staring sightlessly at the papers spread out across my desk, white and flat, a plain commercial snow.

  After a while, Joe Thompson peeped into my office. “Hear the news?” he asked jubilantly.

  “What news?”

  “The Jefferson Recording Company ad won a prize,” Joe said. He stepped into my office and clapped his hands happily. “Isn’t that great?”

  I nodded. “Yeah.”

  “We’re having a celebration down in Harvey Field’s office. Why don’t you come on down.”

  I walked down to Harvey’s office. It was crowded with ad men whooping and laughing and slapping each other on the back. Someone threw a shower of confetti into the air, and I saw Marilyn standing quietly in those other campus showers long ago, showers of words, dreams, hopes which had invigorated her, them, everyone, it seemed now, but me. And I also saw myself, not as I am but as I must have seemed to Marilyn: a man, like those around me, celebrating in a small, grim office; a man who was not only satisfied with the small victories but who never looked beyond them; a man who not only accepted ordinary life but sanctified it; a man who never meditated upon a stormy sky or cast his eye—however briefly—toward some distant, shining sun.

  I walked to the window and looked out. The great buildings towered above me—silent, immobile, uninstructive. The sun cast deep gray shadows across the streets. It was this same sun which would light Marilyn’s way. Standing where I was—dreaming of where she was—my soul suddenly pronounced a wild, cheering blessing on her head. I could see her clearly now, moving into the white, beaming heart of the country, moving sunward.

  WHAT EDDIE SAW

  “Y ou know why you’re here, Eddie?”

  Eddie nodded. He knew that he’d been summoned to the police station because Sheila Longstreet had been missing for more than twenty-four hours. He was a friend of Sheila’s, but Eddie saw that the detective knew more about him than that, knew more about him than he’d likely have known about any high school junior who made decent grades and never caused trouble. Clearly the detective knew what everybody else on Cape Cod knew, that Eddie Panacci was the Coed Killer’s son.

  “A couple of kids at school said that they saw the two of you together just before Sheila disappeared,” the detective said.

  Eddie saw that the kids had actually seen not just him and Sheila, but the Old Man, too. It didn’t matter that he’d been murdered in a prison bathroom twelve years before, because his memory still haunted the woods of Cape Cod, lingered among its wavy dunes and misty bogs, swam in and out of the ghostly afternoon light when couples walked on lonely wooded trails. But more than anything, as Eddie saw, the Old Man lingered in Eddie himself. “You look like him,” someone had once said, and each time Eddie glimpsed himself in a mirror, he saw the Old Man’s full lips and dark sunken eyes.

  “These kids said they saw you and Sheila at the general store. Around five yesterday afternoon. Nobody’s seen Sheila since then.”

  Eddie saw that he was supposed to respond to this, but how could he? He’d seen Sheila get out of his car, walk away, look back, smile. He had no idea why she hadn’t made it to her house only a short distance down Breakwater Road, but he knew that the detective wouldn’t believe this. He sat at the little square table in a plaid shirt and faded jeans, but he knew that the detective saw him in the gray flannel work clothes, oily and bloodstained, that his father had buried, along with the bodies of the two women he’d strangled, in the gravelly soil of Nickerson State Park.

  “How did you and Sheila happen to end up at the general store?”

  “I don’t know. We just sort of … ended up there.”

  “The two of you just sat in the car? Your car? The one you have out in the parking lot?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you mind if we took a look at your car, Eddie?”

  “No, I wouldn’t mind.”

  The detective exited the room, then returned to it. “Okay,” he said. “Tell me about Sheila. What you two did yesterday afternoon.”

  Eddie saw Sheila’s head loll to the right, then float back against the headrest, where she released one of those world-weary sighs like the woman in a book Eddie had read about this rich guy who loves this woman so much that he takes a hit-and-run rap for her.

  “We just talked,” Eddie said.

  “Then she walked home.”

  Eddie saw the doubt in the detective’s eyes. He didn’t believe that Sheila had walked home. He believed that she’d been driven to some deserted section of Nickerson State Park and that Eddie had strangled her. Because it was in his blood, this murderousness.

  “Tell me the very last thing you saw of Sheila, Eddie.”

  He saw her pull herself out into the faintly pinkish air. A breeze riffled her long dark hair. She drew back an errant strand, turned, and headed toward Breakwater Road. When she reached it, she looked back and smiled.

  Eddie told the detective what he’d seen, leaving out the errant strand of dark brown hair.

  “Did you see anybody following her?” the detective asked.

  “No.”

  “Anything suspicious at all?”

  “There was a van,” Eddie said, then described it, dark green and dusty. It was parked on Breakwater, he told the detective, and sat low, as if weighted in the back.

  “And Sheila, she was walking down Breakwater toward this van?”

  “Yes,” Eddie said, and saw her closing in behind it, then imagined a pair of eyes watching her in the van’s cloudy rearview mirror, dark and sunken, his father’s eyes.

  “What’s the matter, Eddie? You look a little shook up.”

  “I just hope she’s all right, that’s all.”

  “I’m sure you do,” the detective said.

  Eddie saw that the detective didn’t believe a word of what he’d just told him. Weren’t all missing girls snatched into vans? Wasn’t that what the Coed Killer had done?

  “How long have you known Sheila?”

  “Three years.”

  “How would you describe your relationship?”

  “We’re friends.”

  “Just friends?”

  Eddie saw that the detective’s suspicion was full-blown now. There was no dusty green van. There was only Eddie and Sheila, and Eddie wanted her, but she didn’t want him, and so they’d argued, and he’d …

  “So there was nothing … romantic between you two?” the detective asked.

  “No.”

  “Okay, after Sheila left, where did you go?”

  “Home.”

  “So she went one way, and you went the other, right?”

  “Yes.”

  He saw Sheila turn back and wave to him just before she wheeled left and headed down Breakwater. She had always been nice to him, always trusted him, even invited him to her house once. He’d said no to that, afraid of seeing that look in her parents’ eyes as they opened the door and saw not just Eddie but the Old Man, too, standing there beside him.

>   “When you got home, was anybody there?”

  “No.”

  No witnesses, then. Eddie saw that this was very important. No one to tell the detective that he’d come home and spent the rest of the afternoon reading this book about a rich kid who dreams of catching little girls in fields of rye. Not to hurt them, though. Only to save them from tumbling over a cliff.

  “When did your mother get home?”

  “Around seven.”

  He saw his mother hunched over the table in the kitchen, smoking a cigarette, still half-believing that it really didn’t prove anything, the stains and hair, the skin beneath her husband’s nails, the rope that matched, his teeth marks on their broken necks.

  “So you were alone in the house from five until seven?”

  “Yes.”

  And so, as Eddie saw, there’d been plenty of time for him to strangle Sheila Longstreet, find a place in Nickerson Park, and dig a nice deep hole.

  “It’s strange that Sheila would just disappear like that,” the detective said. “Just half a mile from her house. With nobody else seeing her between the time you say she left you at the general store and now. So, tell me, Eddie, did she mention any problems she was having?”

  They all had problems, Eddie knew, all the kids at school. He saw them sitting listlessly in class, getting high four times a day, with nothing to point the way, exert a force, give true direction. He saw Sheila in the car, her wide, searching eyes. What do you want, Sheila? To be left alone. They all said that, but Eddie saw that the last thing Sheila or any of them really wanted was to be left alone. What she wanted was an eye at her back, a hand on her shoulder, a world that didn’t come at her like a meteor shower, time to think.

  “Do you believe she ran away?” the detective asked.

  Eddie saw that the detective’s question wasn’t really about Sheila. It was about him, Eddie Panacci. The detective was probing his mind, looking for a bead of sweat on the upper lip, a subtle shift of weight, listening for that sound Eddie had read about in a short story, the muffled thump of a telltale heart.