Due Preparations for the Plague Read online

  Amy is sobbing convulsively, gasping for air. “I want Mommy,” she says.

  “Yes,” Lowell says, panicky, “right. I’ll drive you back to Mommy’s place now, okay?”

  “I don’t want to go in your pickup,” Amy sobs. She seems to be choking. A thin stream of bile trickles over her chin, and when Lowell wipes her mouth with a tissue, she throws up over his hand. “I want … Mommy … to come … and get us.”

  “I’ll call her, I’m calling her now,” Lowell promises. Amy’s eye sockets look dark and bruised, and there is a bluish tinge to her lips. He holds her while he dials her mother’s number.

  Rowena, his former wife, is exasperated. “I was afraid of this,” she says. “I’ll be right there.” In his driveway, she says despairingly, “For God’s sake, Lowell. As if their nightmares weren’t vivid enough. You have to tell them about planes blowing up.”

  “Oh God.” Lowell rakes his fingers through his hair. He knows he is incurably inept.

  “They already have counseling once a week,” Rowena says. “Jason’s been wetting the bed ever since you moved out.”

  “That wasn’t my choice,” Lowell reminds her.

  “Especially when you are flying down for the funeral,” she says. “When they know you’ll be on a plane.”

  “Rowena, couldn’t you come too? Couldn’t we bring them? Don’t you think that might—”

  “Out of the question,” Rowena says. She says it quietly, more in disbelief than in anger. “Lowell, are you completely blind? Every time they’re with you, Amy runs a fever afterwards, and Jason wets the bed.”

  Lowell, stricken with remorse, leans in the back window to kiss his children goodbye, but they flinch away from him slightly before submitting. He feels the pain of this like a razor blade in his heart. He is never sure which might inflict greater damage: not spending enough time with his children, or spending time with them. He is highly infectious with doom. “I’m sorry, Rowena.” It is his own desolate experience that there is nothing anyone can do. Nothing will shelter children from life. The young, the fragile, the vulnerable, all are at catastrophic risk. “I guess I thought, you know, if I told them about the hijacking, it might explain why their grandfather—”

  “Call them when you get there,” Rowena says crossly. “And call them when you get back. Otherwise they will worry themselves sick.”

  “Yes,” he promises.

  “Oh, Lowell,” she says, not without tenderness. “You’re such a mess.”

  He thinks of telling her that things might begin to improve. It could be different now.

  “And you won’t do anything about it,” she says. “You’re stuck, and you don’t even try to get unstuck.”

  You don’t even try. The injustice of this is so monumental that Lowell can think of nothing to say.

  Rowena turns the key in the ignition. “And for heaven’s sake,” she says in parting, “when you get back, get a new muffler on your pickup. The noise scares them.”

  At Logan Airport, he leaves the pickup in the long-term lot. He checks in for the Boston-Washington shuttle, leisurely, because there is time to kill, time to kill, and then he looks at his boarding pass and sees the word terminal and a panic-bird big as a bald eagle picks him up in its talons and carries him off, jerking him along corridors and up and down elevators and into restrooms and out again and into the shuttle that weaves between parking lots and then back again until it drops him abruptly and unceremoniously and he finds himself sequestered in the middle nook of a bank of Bell telephones, a cozy and semi-private and semi-safe spot. He needs to talk to his children again, he must speak with them, but when he gets Rowena’s answering machine, he hangs up without saying a word. Instead, he talks to a waitress in Starbucks. “Flying down for my father’s funeral,” he explains. “He died violently, just like my mother. I think I’ve always been waiting for it. Other shoe to fall, you know?”

  Later, circling high above Boston, he tells the passenger seated next to him in the plane. He tells a cabdriver in D.C. and he tells the manager of the funeral home. He edits and fine-tunes as he goes.

  “The explosion devastated him,” he says. “It was the second time my father had been widowed.”

  “Sixteen years old?” The passenger next to him, a woman, touches his wrist. “It’s a terrible age to lose your mother.”

  “He lived under a curse,” Lowell says.

  “Shock takes people funny ways,” the D.C. taxi driver says. “Takes a long time to wear off too. You just go ahead and get it off your chest.” He eases into the Beltway traffic. “I get a lot of funeral business.” He looks at Lowell in the rearview mirror. “Arlington,” he explains. “That where yours is?”

  “Yes,” Lowell says.

  He has several evening hours to kill, hours to kill, and he moves like the Ancient Mariner from this bar to that. He drinks beer, only beer, and only Sam Adams. “It’s a kind of a statement,” he tells the bartender. “A reaction against the cocktail parties I had to endure. My father tried to keep me in those social circles, and I won’t touch spirits or wine.” After two schooners of Sam Adams, he leans toward the guy on the next barstool.

  “My father gave the impression,” Lowell says, “of a man soldered to doom.”

  His listener grunts and glances momentarily sideways, then returns to the TV screen. “Yankees gonna win,” he tells Lowell gloomily. “You a Yankee fan?”

  “No,” Lowell says.

  “Good.”

  “My father knew in his bones he was doomed,” Lowell explains. “He accepted it, he didn’t think he had any choice, but he took it like a man. He made a vow he’d give no sign. At any rate, that was my theory when I was sixteen years old, and I still hold to it.” He orders another drink for himself and for the ball-game watcher. “Of course, it cost him,” he says.

  He shakes his head sadly.

  “Manager oughta change pitchers,” his neighbor complains.

  Lowell says, “He should have changed games, but he was stubborn.”

  “At times,” he tells someone else in a different tavern at the dangerous end of M Street, “you would have thought he was a robot. You would have thought some kingpin was pushing buttons on his remote. I mean, even the way he moved. He had this strange jerky—I don’t know, as though his clockwork was jammed.”

  Lowell’s clockwork moves smoothly on amber juice.

  “Hey, listen, pal.” A black bartender, big as a house, bends toward him. “Don’t want to be nosy, it’s your funeral. But don’t you think you’ve had a few too many?”

  “I asked him once,” Lowell says, as though earnestly refuting the bartender’s claim, “is it the Mafia or something? Because it wasn’t just the Soviets, you know. They kept tabs on all sorts, the Mafia, the Klan, the neo-Nazis, the crazy Unabomber types, you name it. And you and me, we’d be a lot more worried about a Mafia contract than the Soviets, right?”

  “Listen, pal,” the bartender says, “I don’t think you fully understand where you are. What part of town, I mean. I think you got the wrong joint.”

  “I got the feeling something dangerous was yanking his strings,” Lowell explains earnestly. He leans back, straining against fierce bonds. “It was like there was this hidden force dragging him one way, but he dug in his heels and kept on going in the other. Or tried to.” Lowell’s body jerks itself around, fish on a line. “It was probably only me who noticed,” he says. “Maybe I imagined it. He got kind of distant after the plane exploded. Even more so, I mean. Couldn’t reach him. Work gobbled him up.”

  The bartender rolls his eyes.

  “Depressed?” Lowell asks, on the bartender’s behalf. “You think so? Good question, when you think of the way my mother … But he never had any patience with stuff like that. No excuses, no whining. He couldn’t stand wimps who let personal matters … the therapy junkies spilling their guts, you know the type. Common as dirt in this neck of the woods, I bet. I bet you hear a few sob stories. Confessions a dime a dozen a
round here, I’ll bet. And now it’s all over,” he says. He looks around the bar and pronounces solemnly and drunkenly, “My father, Mather Lowell Hawthorne, died on September ninth in the year 2000, just four days short of the thirteenth anniversary of the death of my mother.”

  “R.I.P.,” the bartender says. “Go home and sleep it off, pal. You’ve had enough.”

  “For which death, he seemed to hold himself responsible,” Lowell announces. “Against all logic.”

  He lifts his glass.

  “You celebrating?” the bartender asks.

  Lowell watches the light move through his beer.

  Mather Hawthorne was already dead, the coroner has explained to him, at the point of impact with a shagbark hickory. Lowell closes his eyes and imagines the scattershot of nuts, kettledrummers of death. Although the wreckage of the car is absolute, and although Lowell’s stepmother (his father’s young third wife) was barely able to identify the body, the mortuary certificate indicates, Death due to natural causes: heart attack.

  “Fortunately,” Lowell explains in an all-night hamburger joint, “the accident happened in the small hours of the morning and there were no other cars on the road. My father was only sixty-seven.”

  Lowell can imagine himself repeating all this, casually, from time to time, and after several drinks, to strangers at parties and in bars.

  4.

  At the cemetery, Lowell feels strangely lightened. He wonders if the sense of freedom, the sense of a lifelong congestion clearing, might be what other people call happiness. He wonders if he might be able to begin to be as other people are. Now officially orphaned, he feels for the first time in his life not-lonely. Rain is falling lightly, which seems appropriate. An old self is being washed away. Lowell feels clean and new. He is barely able to restrain himself from a gregarious impulse to tug at the sleeve of one of the other pallbearers, a total stranger in an officer’s uniform, some former colleague of his father’s no doubt, and say: I was an only child. For many years, I tried with all my heart and soul to please my father, but I was a disappointment to him.

  He manages not to splash confession on the pallbearer’s sleeve, but he does nod at his stepmother and smile. She is small and pale and looks, Lowell thinks, rather striking dressed in grief. Is she beautiful? He supposes so; his father always had an eye for women; but since this thought evokes the memory of Lowell’s own mother, he shies away from it. Even so, his stepmother or the occasion or something else makes him smile again. His smile goes on too long. Elizabeth, his stepmother, raises an eyebrow in surprise and stares at him.

  Words, intoned, drift between and obscure Lowell’s view.

  … exceptional service to his country … Mather Lowell Hawthorne, guardian of our most precious … unsung work, and invisible, but essential to the preservation of liberty and justice for all.

  Mather Lowell Hawthorne’s widow is not much older than her stepson, who now, on impulse, pulls a gardenia from the wreath that she has placed on his father’s coffin and hands it to her. Some of the mourners exchange glances. Elizabeth begins to cry then, soundlessly. Her hair, rain-wet, clings to her cheeks, and Lowell wonders if perhaps they may begin to become not-lonely together.

  Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of His great mercy to take unto Himself the soul of Mather Lowell Hawthorne, we therefore commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope …

  “I hardly knew my father, really,” Lowell tells Elizabeth later, hours later, over drinks in a quiet lounge. “I worshiped him when I was little. He wasn’t often home, but when he was, he used to sit on my bed and tell me stories. Strange stories to tell a child, I suppose, but I was greedy for them. I hung on his every word: Greek gods and goddesses, the Iliad and the Odyssey. My favorite was Odysseus tied to the mast, trying to hurl himself into the sea while the sirens sang.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Four. Five.”

  “Must have given you strange dreams,” Elizabeth says.

  “I still have mermaid fantasies. I get a humming in my ears whenever I see a woman with wet hair.”

  “Sometimes,” Elizabeth says, lowering her eyes and studying the stem of her glass, “in the middle of the night, I would find him reading Homer in his study. He said it calmed him.”

  “That was always his first love. But he won prizes in math and science too, and that’s where he went.”

  “He claimed all he ever really wanted to be was a classics professor.”

  “Sometimes I believed that,” Lowell says. “But mostly I didn’t. What made him take the direction he finally did, I’ve never understood.”

  “They needed linguists,” she says. “In Intelligence. That’s what he told me. Especially ones with scientific training as well. An old friend from his prep school recruited him, he said.”

  “He used to have me reciting Homer in Greek at dinner parties when I was six,” Lowell says. “Like a little parrot. His personal performing dwarf. Still, he was less strange to me then than later.”

  “It was like living in parallel universes, he said. All the time. Simultaneously.” Elizabeth sighs and turns the stem of her wineglass in her fingers, clockwise, three revolutions. “I was never sure which one he was in when he was with me.”

  “He was always somewhere else. Even when he was with us, he wasn’t with us. I never really knew him at all.”

  “I didn’t either,” she says.

  “I wanted so much to please him, but he kept on raising the bar. I could never measure up. So of course I chose to measure down. Easier to get his attention.”

  “I had the same problem,” she says. “I could never measure up either.”

  “That’s not true.” Lowell stares at her. “You were the ideal Washington hostess, he told me. Everything my mother wasn’t, he said.”

  “I tried,” she says. “I was sad when you stopped accepting our invitations.”

  “Not your fault,” he assures her.

  “You and I never got a chance to know each other.”

  “No. Well. Nothing to do with you.”

  “So why?”

  “Well, he just made me too nervous. I always felt like I was twelve years old again, not measuring up. And then, Rowena … I mean, my own marriage falling apart. I didn’t want one of his third-degrees.”

  “Your father was sad too. When you stopped coming, I mean.”

  “That’s a laugh. My father couldn’t stand sadness. My mother was sad for years, and it irritated him. It irritated him to have me around.”

  “I think you’re wrong,” she says. “I think he missed you. He was very proud of you.”

  “Oh no, believe me, he was embarrassed by me. He sent me to his own boarding school—”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “—but I blew it. Loser in a school for winners. My father’s name was on all the honor boards, Mather Lowell Hawthorne, gold medal in this, gold medal in that, Latin, Greek, math, physics, athletics, glee club, drama club. Awful. Like a millstone around my neck. Most expensive private school in Massachusetts, and I could always see him thinking sow’s ear when he looked at me.”

  “He kept a photograph of you on the bedroom dresser.”

  “He did?”

  “You’re wearing your school blazer and holding a silver cup.”

  “Oh yeah. That. Cross-country run. Only prize I ever won. Yeah, I’m good at running. Running away’s my specialty. But there you are. The way my father calls it, you win or you lose. He was a winner, I was a loser. Like my mother.”

  “You seem to me very like your father,” she says. “Sharp-minded and courtly and sad.”

  “Courtly! Me?” Lowell laughs. He looks curiously at his reflection in the dark plate glass behind the bar.

  “He could be so gentle,” she says. “It’s not true that he never showed his feelings. He was always sad. Always haunted.”

  “He was haunted,” Lowell agrees. “My mother did that. You
know she left him for another man before the … I never forgave her. They were both on that plane.”

  “No, I didn’t know,” she says. “You mean they went down together, your mother and her—?”

  “Not down. You know the details. The hijacking, the explosion.”

  “Hijacking?” she says, leaning forward, avid. “I don’t know details. I hardly know anything. He’d never—He just said she died in an airline disaster.”

  Lowell is stunned. “September ’87,” he says. “Paris to New York, the nerve-gas hijackers—”

  “Oh my God. That hijacking.”

  “Air France Si—I can’t say it. I’m superstitious about the number.”

  “No survivors.” Elizabeth presses her hand against her lips. “Isn’t that right?”

  “Except for the children.”

  “Oh, the children, that’s right, I remember now. I remember seeing those poor little children on TV.”

  “I can’t believe you didn’t know.”

  “No. Nothing. He’d never say a word about the past. I’ve always been curious.”

  “Look,” he says uneasily. “It isn’t something I can talk about.”

  “No, of course not. I’m sorry.” She plays with her wineglass, puddling spilled wine with her finger. She draws an S in the liquid on the low table. “Was the man’s name Sirocco? The man your mother left him for?”

  Lowell frowns. “It was Levinstein. Violinist.”

  “Who was Sirocco?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “He was tormented by Sirocco,” she says. “He used to cry out in his sleep.”

  “My father?”

  “He never mentioned Sirocco to you?”

  “Doesn’t ring any bells. Mafia, maybe? They gathered intelligence on all sorts.”

  “What exactly was Mather’s role?” she wants to know.

  “I never exactly knew. Not precisely. Gathering information and misinformation and deciding which was which, I suppose. He was a spook, and then after the hijacking, when he stopped junketing all over the planet, he trained spooks. That’s all I know. Maybe he still did other stuff too, I really don’t know. He used to say someone has to do the dirty work to keep the country safe. I never got much more detail than that.”