Untying the Moon, page 10
This wouldn’t be like with the gun, when the grandfather would shoot rather than have the rabbit get away. It had to do with other things and the boy knew it.
At the last possible second the boy jumped before his grandfather could push him and came down hard with the club. Not hard enough. The rabbit sprang and the boy sprang with him, crying, the man yelling hit him again. He did and the rabbit stopped, but not altogether, not yet perished. The boy stared as the rabbit jerked, but he could not move, the grandfather steadily yelling hit him again.
When the jerks turned to nothing more than nerves twitching, the blood of the rabbit swelled inside the boy and he came down again, harder, harder, pounding the bloody rabbit, unable to stop, flesh coming through, fur sticking to the club. The man was yelling something else now, but the boy could not hear because he was screaming himself, nothing with words, screams to drown out the thuds, to drown out the soft smell of the new blood, the limpness lying in the dirt.
The man was on the boy now, pulling him away, into his down jacket, his flannel shirt, holding his arms around him until the boy ceased flailing, until the club dropped from his hand, until the boy went limp in his grandfather’s embrace and stopped screaming, pendent but finally able to take in air.
Padgett Turner takes the left hand of his excited son Daniel and the right hand of his not-so-excited son Michael and leads them into the East Building of the National Gallery of Art, knowing the design of the place itself will be enough to amuse them. They wander past Calder’s mobiles and pause at pieces by Rothko and Pollock, Lichtenstein and Klee, the boys comparing their own efforts and pronouncing they could be famous some day.
They’re most taken by the House of Mirrors exhibit where shoes are removed and feet shod in footies before they can enter. Inside is nothing but mirrors—on the floor, on the ceiling, on the walls. There’s a bed, a dresser, a table, four chairs, even a toilet, all constructed entirely of mirrors. Everywhere they look the boys can see only themselves, an infinity of their curly blonde hair, the blues of Danny’s shirt, the reds of Michael’s. Picture perfect boys in something like a picture perfect world. Pretending.
They wave and jump and spin in the myriad and whirling reflections of themselves, and as soon as they exit they’re ready to go again.
“Come on, Dad,” Michael says.
“Maybe another time,” Padgett says, but his ruddy face flushes darker.
“It’s really not scary,” his younger son patiently clarifies.
“You’re chicken,” the older one says. “It just feels weird because there’s only you, everywhere you look. You never stop seeing yourself.”
“Next time,” Padgett says as his boys lace their sneakers. Christ Almighty—one mirror is more than he wants staring back at him. He turns from them to forestall the rising demons. “Come on,” he says, “let’s check out the other building.”
They ride the people mover to the West Building and the boys are wide-eyed when told the Rembrandts are well over three hundred years old, incredulous that anything could last that long. As Padgett leans into Philemon and Baucus to discern each brush stroke it’s incredible to him as well. That’s it, he tells himself. Steady, Turner. The youngsters’ rowdiness is subdued as they move through the hushed halls of the Old Masters, but when they get to the Impressionist galleries their father is spending too much time at too many paintings so they venture ahead.
Padgett seeks an empty corner in one of the smaller gallery nooks and stares into the serene, imperturbable brown eyes of a Renoir, pretends they mirror his own, as he talks himself out of the red zone, reminds himself there is no danger in this labyrinth of rooms, cautions himself that his children await him. Insists to himself they will never wait long.
He finds them standing behind a woman with an easel who sits before a painting of children by the sea. She’s painting the exact scene and they’re mesmerized. She tells them she has special permission to copy these works, and when Michael asks if that’s cheating she laughs and says yes, but the idea is to look closely at masterpieces and learn from the greats.
And then Padgett sees. It’s her. The grape arbor. It is she.
“Excuse my sons,” he tries to say, but she turns with a smile and though there’s no sunlight through her hair, there she is. In the swirl of senses he hears Michael ask her name.
“Bailey,” she says. “And you?”
“I’m Michael,” he tells her, “and this is my little brother Danny. He’s six and this is my dad.”
Brush in hand, she smiles at each of them.
“Nice to meet you.” She turns back to the canvas.
Silence as the boys watch and Padgett tempers his pulse enough to compliment her work and ask if she does portraits.
“Of a sort,” she says.
He looks to his sons and asks with upturned palms.
“Sure,” Daniel pipes.
“Okay,” Michael shrugs.
They promise they’ll be able to sit still while she paints so she gives Padgett her number and says to call later in the week.
“Hey Boss.”
“Hey Boo.”
“I saw him again.”
“Who?”
“The one in the arbor.”
“I thought you didn’t.” Ben is doing pushups when the phone rings but switches to sit-ups so he can hold the phone with his neck.
“I didn’t. I’m not. I bet you seven weeks and it’s been almost a month. But listen.”
“Okay.”
“I told you the eyes, but it’s not just the eyes. There’s something else. Something in the gut.”
“Hmm,” he says, as if listening to a patient.
“A pull that makes me want to come close—but run away at the same time.”
“Hmm.” He closes his eyes, pushes his powerful shoulders up and down, and holds his well bitten tongue.
“I saw him at the National Gallery with his two little boys.”
“Great.”
“He asked me to do their portrait.”
“Since when have you painted portraits?”
“Why not?”
“Watch out, Boo.”
“Okay, I gotta go.”
A week later she ushers them, Padgett and his sons, into the loft dressed in jeans and a billowy white blouse, deep brown hair tied loosely with a silken scarf. She’s made jasmine tea and pours for the four of them. The boys bewilder their father by taking the cups and saucers in hand as if they’d done so every afternoon of their lives, but as they drink and nibble ginger snaps they look around the room wide-eyed. It’s like the House of Mirrors might be if somebody wonderful actually made a home there.
“Have you always lived in Washington?” she says.
“Yes ma’am, well really Bethesda.” Danny answers but his eyes never leave the aquariums.
“He has,” Michael says with big brother swagger, “but I lived in Camden until I was seven.”
“South Carolina?”
“Yes ma’am. But then we got rich and moved here and got two new houses.” Big brother reaches for another cookie.
Padgett has listened to one or the other of them blurting this kind of synopsis since they were old enough to understand something of the inheritance, but it’s especially awkward for him now.
“Reader’s Digest version,” he says, redfaced.
The afternoon is spent sketching the boys in different poses as Bailey opens herself to whatever it is she thinks she’s doing, and when they come for the next sitting dressed in yellow and blue sweaters and khakis and saddle oxfords she places them back to back on a low pillowed platform while Padgett settles into an armchair with a strained sense of pride and protectiveness. When the music clicks off she absently asks him to reload the stereo.
“What would you like to hear?”
“Another flute piece maybe, or a piano sonata. Something airy.”
Two tapes later they call it a day and make a time for the weekend while the boys take a last look at the aquariums, still deciding which fish are their favorites.
“Who’s that guy?” Danny stands before a white marble miniature of the Oceanus sculpture at Trevi Fountain.
“Oceanus,” Bailey says. “The Greeks say Okeanos—the Titan god of the sea. He’s the same one in that mosaic with his wife Tethys.”
“A merman?”
“Well, he’s a god, but yep, he’s of the ocean so he’s got that fish tail and crab claws for horns.”
“And a star on his forehead.”
“Yep,” Bailey says. “Part of his deal is he controls when the stars and planets and moons rise and set into the water.”
“Stars in the water?” Michael is unconvinced.
“Ancient Greeks believed everything in the sky comes out of and goes back into the sea.”
“They knew a lot of stuff,” Danny says.
“You’ve got it, buddy.”
In the next days, hours between time at work and with his sons, Padgett sits in the small space he’s sealed off in the basement. It’s entered through a sheet of plywood in the electrical closet behind the laundry room, never when the boys are there. He replays all the “airy” classical music the guy at Olson’s record store could recommend—Mozart, Vivaldi, Chopin, Debussy, Berlioz, even some Bach and Beethoven. Fauré and Poulenc. A switch from his usual Metallica, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Def Leppard, and Dio. Not so far from Pink Floyd. Nothing’s far from Pink Floyd.
Even there in the shadows of his cave he can see light as it bounces around her room from cobalt pitcher to small crystal hurricane lamp to vase of white flowers to silver picture frame. Each time she lifts a brush the light catches her bracelet and creates a circlet of waves on the ceiling. He is not qualified for this, wishes he were.
Next week before they leave for Alexandria, Michael and Danny are tugged the entire two blocks between their mom house and their dad house by Maynard, their Boykin Spaniel. In the backyard Maynard fetches the ball until his tongue drags the ground. If the boys wear him out he can come in the house and curl into his bed for a nap, otherwise he is an uncontrollable maniac that whips around like a hairball tornado. When they suggest Bailey would like to meet him and maybe he could be in the portrait their dad says no, but when they ask Bailey she says why not, there’s a fenced playground downstairs, and then their dad says okay.
When they get to her apartment Maynard is still drowsy so Bailey works him into the composition and begins sketching right away, saying she’s pleased with the more comfortable expressions of the boys. But then the spaniel wakes with fully charged batteries—time for more fetching.
Bailey stands at the kitchen sink rinsing grapes and watches them play.
“You’re quite the devoted father,” she says without turning.
“Didn’t have one. Mine always will.” The snarl is immediate and intense.
“Sounds like a threat,” she says. Puzzled.
“Not at all,” he says, damning himself, calming his voice. “More a promise I made myself when they came along.”
There’s been an early cold snap and drafts run heavy through the old warehouse building. A kerosene heater is lit near the easel and Padgett could move closer to share the warmth but he likes the distance to look at Bailey with her back to him and the boys in a time lock of innocence, a scene he can engage as he pleases, or seal away for a while with The Killer Angels, the book he’s brought along. Bailey stands and sits, pivots and leans, but she works quietly, and the boys have become accustomed to their routine of poses and breaks. They all know their parts, are easy with them, and music wraps the room in sweet reprieve.
Padgett ranges between what was just said and where he might take the boys for dinner and how she spends her time. And how sometimes she looks exactly like she did that first day in the arbor and sometimes she looks completely different. He wonders if it’s possible that she doesn’t remember. Everything about her is beyond his training. When he hears her asking him to choose more music he realizes she’s repeating herself and begins a tape of Liszt’s second piano concerto.
He settles once more into the frayed chair that’s become his accustomed spot and considers the edge she heard in his voice. Thoughts turn to his mother and Beaton, that son-of-a-bitch, and Nam, a place he’d hoped to avoid but instead is with him every day of his life.
Mr. Beaton will help you someday his mother had said to him as a child, many times over. Because Beaton was such a big shot Padgett had assumed. Because Padgett’s grandfather was the caretaker of Beaton’s Carolina hunting plantation, Beaton might put in a good word for him somewhere, sometime. Or Padgett could drop Beaton’s name and impress somebody.
But not until Padgett was a high school senior and his mother’s heart-strings ripped at the undeniable nightmare of Vietnam did she tell him. College or no college she feared her son might be called up, a fear that spawned confession because Beaton, she was certain, could ensure Padgett the same protection afforded those of privilege. Maybe he could, but Padgett never gave him the chance. Violet Turner tried to explain to her son that she had been young and in love, that she had believed Beaton loved her as well, that she remained of that belief. When she found herself with child she was sent to live with her aunt until the baby came. Him. Padgett. How about that. He had a father after all, except that he didn’t. Fucking A.
He had hunted with the son-of-a-bitch. Well, he had saddled the horses and ridden with the Yankee bastards and released the birds for them to shoot. So full of “yessirs” and “nosirs” it put a rock in his stomach to remember. As a young man Padgett had spent part of every summer with his grandparents at the caretaker’s cottage, and he knew Mister Beaton very well. His father.
His mother told him this as he came of age in the belief that they could reach out to Beaton for help. Instead Padgett bottled the rage, went straight to the recruiting office, and signed on for special services. Hello Phoenix. Goodbye. In the end nobody but the ghoulies rose from Phoenix. And they rise to meet him both daylight and dark.
“I’m starving, Dad.”
“Me too. Can we send for pizza?”
Padgett looks to Bailey for the part he missed, but she shakes her head and smiles.
“Fine by me,” she says. “I was thinking about Thai, though. Anybody interested?”
“Tie?” Danny squinches his freckled nose Dennis the Menace style.
“Maybe we should stick to pizza,” Padgett says.
“It’s a kind of food,” she says, “and it’s really more fun at the restaurant.”
“What about Maynard?” Michael says.
“Can’t he stay in the bathroom?” Bailey says.
“Sure,” Padgett says.
“If you’re good with that.”
“Then let’s roll,” she says.
Bailey brings quilts and bundles the boys into Blue Ruby. The ride is just far enough to make soup sound even better and they hurry down the stairs past the neon signs and potted plants that flank the door of the dimly lit restaurant. The table is prepared with red and gold cloth of the same pattern that covers the walls and ceilings, and on it they eat lamb and chicken with their fingers and laugh with red curry sauce on their faces, the boys devouring strange dishes as if they’re cheeseburgers. Padgett leans into the black leather booth and drinks the plum wine Bailey has ordered, aware that he would never have ordered it himself, knowing exactly how the boys feel.
It’s a night his sons are with their mother, a night when none of it holds. Booze. Demons. Floodgates of fatherhood. Voids to fill, voids that gape forever. Beaton. The son-of-a-bitch that died and left him five million dollars. Five million goddamned dollars out of the clear blue sky and he hadn’t so much as laid eyes on him in fifteen years. The Boston millionaire with darling grandchildren and yachts and a cottage at Cape Cod and another in the Hamptons and a “little place” down in Carolina where he hunts. How do people have five fucking million dollars for bastard sons?
Padgett was supposed to have been given the money anonymously, with only the law firm and accountants aware of the transaction. The certified letter informed him a man had recently deceased, that the man was his biological father, that the man had never forgotten him, even though circumstances prevented acknowledgment, and that since Padgett had never known him, it would be better for everyone concerned if his identity continued to be withheld, but that he hoped the gift would prove to Padgett that he had never been a fatherless child.
He could withdraw any or all of the funds at his discretion. They had been deposited in an interest bearing escrow account at Chase Manhattan Bank but could be transferred to any bank Padgett saw fit to designate.
Of course Padgett knew the money was from Beaton. Beaton who went to his grave unaware that lovely Violet Turner had broken her vow of silence trying to protect her son from the useless war that robbed his soul outright. Violet had gone to her premature grave while that son, Padgett, was in Southeast Asia learning to become invisible.
His mother never married. When Padgett was shipped back to the states he drove to Missouri where Rose, his mother’s sister, told him that his mother understood how angry he was and why he wouldn’t answer her letters. That Violet was proud of him for serving his country. That she loved him beyond measure and always would. Some of it truth.
Rose said her sister died loving two men who had turned their backs on her. But she could never stop hoping that one day Beaton would do right by her, do right by his own heart. That one day the stack of delayed letters would come from Padgett. She had forgiven both of them but the day came when Violet Turner simply could no longer saddle up her broken heart and ride on.
The sonofabitch, Padgett thought. Maybe Beaton did love his mother. And look what she had to show for it. Him. Padgett. He wasn’t so sure he’d been worth it.
Fuck Beaton. Padgett didn’t touch the money or so much as acknowledge receipt of it. When Beaton died Padgett was already working his way through college, married to Liz. Michael was born and they’d moved into family housing at the university, bought a set of bunk beds at a garage sale because it was the only thing that would fit with the crib and all the baby’s things. Padgett slept on the top bunk and fell out one night trying to get to his mother. Thought he heard her calling, but of course it was only the baby. His mother had been dead for years.
