Who Named the Knife Page 11

  She kept an old footstool in that closet – a wooden box with an upholstered lid and a slipcover. Over the years she had used it to hide her silverware and her jewellery. “Who would bother to look in it?” she’d always say, and now opening it felt like a case of bad manners – as if she might suddenly jump in her Oldsmobile and drive home, sweep through the door carrying groceries, the dry cleaning, the mail, and find me en flagrante.

  “Oh my God! Sandee! Come in here!”

  Sandee was cleaning the kitchen shelves. She waded through the dining room, into the bedroom, past the bureau, and over to me. “A .357 Magnum,” she intoned, with a big intake of breath. “Beautiful!”

  The last of my father’s guns.

  “You could take it to the cops.”

  “No way.”

  Dying with his boots on, collapsing of a heart attack during a courtroom argument (defending a client he distrusted and disliked), my father had left a legacy of thirteen loaded guns. Spell spaghetti. Seventeen times thirty-eight. Holding his gun put my father’s voice into my head and my hand began to shake. “I’m sure it’s not registered. Anyway, they’d sell it.” Raised to be more suspicious of cops than of robbers, I tucked the gun back into its sheepskin holster and told Sandee about the day my brother had taken us – what was left of the family – out to Mission Creek, which ran through a piece of land my father bought when he was already out of money or time to build on it. My father had planned to erect an adobe house there, brick by handmade brick. Skip told Mother to choose one of the thirteen guns and, while children and grandchildren watched, she chose her weapon, loaded it, and took aim at a log that was bobbing along in the muddy water of Mission Creek. I have a photograph of this moment – Esta’s wide eyes and my brother with his shirt off, looking straight ahead as if we were proving ourselves against a common enemy, although the only one we shared was Death.

  “You never tell me anything,” I’d heard Velma say to Mother. And I might have said the same. The rumours about Jill Seegram and all the others, even the mother of that boy in my class. My father’s ward. I used to imagine that he was a brother and maybe he was. Maybe he was a secret my father and I kept, like the clients he visited when I was in the car with him, broken women, chain-smoking. “Your father was crazy about you,” is what Mother used to tell me, as if any failure of affection between us was mine. She never complained about his temper and seemed not to notice that he terrified and humiliated me, that I was expected, at all hours, to be without blemish, to perform on demand. Spell pragmatic. Now! Sound it out. In his presence, I’d make myself small, being careful not to give him reason to notice me. Do you want to come inside for your spanking or take it out here in front of your friends? Hearing his car in the driveway, I’d go to my bathroom and lock the door. Sometimes I’d be sick. “I have nothing to tell,” is what Mother would say to Velma. “I’m a happy person except for being here.” But while she was there, propped up in her hospital bed, I suddenly wanted to shout at her. Lies! Lies lies lies!

  What had come over me? I wanted to shake this mother who had kept herself blind and silent. I wanted to expose an old woman who was too far gone to defend herself. All my life I had wanted only to make her happy, but her happiness depended on something entirely false. I remembered, while she was in that bed that was wound up like a beach chair, that she had made me promise to stop seeing my college friends. A particular boy. I was hurting her reputation. “What you do in Boulder gets back to Topeka, don’t forget,” she’d told me. She and my father had driven across the whole state of Kansas and into the mountains to deliver this message. It was then that I made my call to Mexico. It was after that afternoon that I ran away with Philip. I could never go home again, not to a mother who would demand such a sacrifice.

  “We have your mother on a new medication,” one of the nurses announced later that day. “These things work their wonders fast in the elderly.”

  The next day, I rented the apartment that looked right into the branches of the tall oak tree. The wonder of people, like stories, is that they are mutable, or so I like to think. When ten days had passed and I walked Mother out of the locked ward and into the elevator, she had gone down the darkest hole of her life and come out the other side. She said she was ready to go home, and I said, “We’re going to your new apartment. With a nice tree and birds.”

  “I need to go home first and get my clothes. And what about Miss Pym?”

  I told her the cat, all her clothes, her books, her furniture were waiting at the new address and we drove there without incident, without passing Go or collecting two hundred dollars or bursting into tears. Mother looked out the passenger side of the car at the town she had adopted seventy years before. She watched it go by. And at her new door, one she had never entered before, she invited me in for iced tea.

  34

  That gun of my father’s was a beautiful object perhaps, but it was something I wanted not to exist, as I want all guns not to exist. Anyway, I would never be able to bring it back to Canada, where handguns are prohibited, just as they should be.

  As if my father’s spirit were embedded in the gun, I could feel its weight all that week, while Mother was settling into the apartment and I slept in her more or less empty house. Knowing the gun was there, in the closet, full of my father, I did not feel safe. Knowing the decision of what to do with it was mine to make, and that my father was somehow involved, I actually could not sleep. There must be a right answer. Where my father was concerned, there was always a right answer. And my problem, eternal, was to find it.

  Word problems, tests. I began to wonder what had happened to the other guns – twelve – that he had left in various places when he died. Under the front seat of his Lincoln, in the basement, in the linen cupboard … and where else? I wondered why he had wanted so many guns – a man who believed they were useful for one purpose only. “Never pick up a gun unless you intend to use it. Never shoot unless you intend to kill.”

  Like that man on the jury, Mr. Sugai.

  My father kept a gun in his handkerchief drawer.

  “Is it loaded, Daddy?”

  “Of course it is.”

  I used to put his handkerchiefs away after they were ironed. I used to touch the strange skin of this gun. I used to watch my father get dressed in the morning, putting on his undershirt first and then his socks. Boxers, starched shirt, suit pants, tie. Always the same. Order. Finally the jacket. And nakedness always part of our family life. I watched him open and shut the drawer. Unfold a handkerchief. Tuck it and his wallet into the right back pocket.

  It didn’t occur to me until years later that only when one of us was naked did I feel safe. At those moments, we were like dogs with our bellies exposed. Paws up. You don’t ask a naked girl to do arithmetic. Peeling the vegetables, cleaning the sink, sweeping, or vacuuming, I was bound to irritate. It was while vacuuming that I finally rebelled. There had been a dinner party the night before and I was put to cleaning the Oriental rug before we went out someplace. A long drive, I think it was going to be.

  The table had been shoved off the rug. It sat, large and polished in an unusual situation, relegated to the margins of the room. I had followed orders. Had pulled the vacuum quietly in from the broom cupboard near the back door. I was wearing a full skirt, already dressed for our departure. Dressed up, because that was the way things were in those days. One of my duties was to be pretty. Smile. Stand up straight. Walk with my shoulders back, toes forward. Once, I had mentioned to my father that ballerinas walk with toes angled out, but my father said, “Nonsense,” and kept his eyes on my feet.

  I was prepared for constant scrutiny; it was a fact of life. Maybe, on some level, I was even prepared for the rage that boiled up in my father when he saw me plug the old Hoover in and start across the rug with it. Anyway, I should have known it was coming. I was doing something he had told me to do, but I was doing it wrong, as always and usual. Still, I pushed the vacuum. Back and forth, back and forth. I pushed and
pulled until my father grabbed the handle and yanked it away. This instant. Right this minute! Do it correctly! Beside himself, if that phrase means what I think it means. But when I tried again, pushing and pulling, every swipe was worse, more terrible, more a blow to what he knew vacuuming ought to be. He stood there shouting and grabbing, but I could not get it right. I was too fast. Too slow. I was pushing randomly. I wasn’t pulling back all the way. My crying always made things worse, so I tried to control my breath, but the tears were starting. No show of emotion! He wouldn’t stand for it. “I’ll give you something to cry about.” He grabbed and shouted and squeezed until I sank to my knees, skirt billowing out, face on the rug – colours I knew from rolling around down there with our dog.

  It was the only protest I had ever made, but it ended something.

  I refused to get up.

  My mother fled upstairs and sat in a chair in the guest room, where she never sat. She was crying. “I don’t like you. Either of you.”

  Now, as I tried to sleep alone in my mother’s house with my father’s gun, so many images came back from the past that I’d get up and drink a glass of milk and begin to attack her library. Because, if my father had guns, my mother had books. There were mysteries, art books, cookbooks, novels, and histories. The political lives of FDR, Truman, and Adlai Stevenson, her heroes. Anthropology, Biblical scholarship, decorative design and ballet. I tried to sort them and then gave up. I told people to drop by and take some home. I called the library.

  I solved the gun problem privately. All by myself, I took an evening drive. It felt appropriate, once I had thought of it, because my father had a sailboat that was the love of his life. The truth is that most of the time, year after year, it was in dry dock in our garage. My boyfriend helped sand it. My brother helped sand it. My father worked on it at odd hours of the night to ease the pain in his back from a war injury. The boat was wood, a Thistle, designed in Scotland. And it was decidedly the fastest, definitely the loveliest boat on Lake Shawnee. But when my father got elected to the schoolboard, there was no time for sanding and the boat developed a serious case of dry rot, which meant it was never where it was designed to be. For years we stored yard equipment and grass seed in its shapely hull and it became a not very funny family joke. But I remember a few hours of early childhood when riding the surface of the lake brought me close to bliss. My father had made me a seat up in the bow and we often sailed at night, when I could feel the swell of wind from the billowing jib sail and count the comforting rhythm of the flashing red and green warning light. Up there, riding the dark surface of the lake, I was under his protection but happily out of reach. My father directed his temper at the sails and lines.

  It was therefore a sort of tribute, a kind of memorial to my father, when I heaved the last of his guns – the beautiful .357 Magnum – into the water near a place where the boat had been moored in the years before I started fourth grade. I watched it sink. I could not throw the gun very far and the water was not very deep. Wondering whether some bad person might see it or find it or fish it up and put it to evil use, I hovered at the shoreline. I felt slightly silly. I felt apologetic. It seemed to me that I should apologize to my father. It seemed to me that I should indulge in an appropriate rite. Eventually, though, I turned on my heels and went back to my rented car. There is very little to be said about such events. As I drove away, travelling the bumpy road we had driven so many times, so many years ago, I had to admit to myself that throwing the gun in the lake was not a tribute to my father, but exactly the opposite. I had buried his gun in the waters of Lake Shawnee out of spite.

  35

  Maryann’s father was born a Baptist, like mine, but when Maryann talked about him, I felt jealous. He came into his manhood during the Depression, like my father did, and while my father was selling silk stockings door to door, Bert was selling tires in east Texas. He was also paid to collect on bills when drought, dust storms, and wind took out three wheat crops in a row. He’d hoped to be a pharmacist, but when he was still a boy his father died and he went to work for the family. That was his character. And near the end of his life, he typed out a letter on fifteen single-spaced pages for his surviving children and for his three grandchildren, for whom he must still have felt some shred of hope. Penne found the letter after he died and sent a copy to Maryann. The sentences run off the paper at the bottom, but Maryann says that is just like her father, who refused to waste anything, even space.

  “Sometimes I would encounter a distraught and angry farmer,” he wrote about the years he spent collecting on bills. “I have been run off with a shotgun, hay hook, and fence post. I would drive my truck into his yard, turn it around leave the engine running, both doors open and by this strategy could get away with a whole skin.”

  When things dried up completely, Bert decided to join the great exodus to California, but he stopped in Phoenix on the way. It was 1939, and he looked around at the town. It was a whole lot better than east Texas and he found a job there pretty easily, riding the bus from Mesa into Phoenix every morning, taking the route that Doug must have taken to visit Maryann’s apartment in 1978. “There was a real cute girl who rode the bus from Mesa. I wanted to get acquainted with her but had a problem as she always sat with her girl friend and I had difficulty talking to her. I finally got a break. Her friend was ill one day and she saved me a seat by her. She denies she saved me the seat but I don’t believe her.”

  When Gladys moved to Phoenix, she was “much more available for serious romance and I tried to sweep her off her feet. Didn’t work out that way she was a serious conservative lovely Mormon girl and made me use all my skill to convince her I was her knight in shining armor.”

  They went to movies. They went to dances. At the end of an evening out, they would pass her house and keep walking two more blocks to a coffee shop where they could talk the rest of the night. “I decided if I was ever to get enough sleep to stay alive I had to change my tactics and see if the woman would marry me.”

  On December 7, 1940, they began married life in a small apartment. A baby boy was born a month before Pearl Harbor and they named him Butch. He was to provide them with a bonding tragedy. As I read the letter written so many years later, I am alert to Bert’s casual dismissal of disaster and his joking references. Although the baby’s death, which was caused by a paper clip that pierced his throat, must have caused unfathomable heartbreak, Maryann’s father does not betray his feelings. There was an infection. The child was six months old. Then there is this: “Gladys was and is a life long member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and believing that Butch would be returned to her to raise in the millennium helped her to overcome the terrible loss and face the future with hope. She convinced me this was true and it helped me too. We took up our lives and walked straight into WW2.”

  Bert and my father were both in the navy, stationed in the Philippines. It seems possible that they knew each other there. It’s a coincidence that I cannot help imagining. I have a folded piece of paper on my desk – a memento of that time. It’s the menu for Christmas dinner, 1944 – a drawing of candles lighting up the word Liberation. After Three Years is written underneath the candles. And In the Philippines. The dinner began with an orange basket and chilled tomato juice. There were olives, sweet mixed-pickle relish, pineapple and cheese salad, turkey supreme soup, and roasted tom turkey with sage dressing and giblet gravy. There were snowflake potatoes, cranberry sauce, buttered carrots, and peas. There were roasted sweet potatoes, whole kernel corn, and Parker House rolls. Chocolate milk, demitasse, hard candy, and “home baked” pumpkin pie. To the left of the menu, my father collected a group of signatures. A few are indecipherable, but right in the middle is the signature of Douglas MacArthur, who has written underneath, May God preserve and protect you all – is my Christmas prayer. I’ve searched among the names for Bert Bray’s and while I can’t see it, I like to imagine him there.

  At that time, I was barely alive and Maryann was a long
way from being born. Gladys had given birth to a second son a few months after Bert shipped out. When he left Australia for New Guinea, he was located in a place where the Japanese had been entrenched. “I still remember their privy,” he writes. “It was built of split bamboo with a floor of bamboo over the holes in the ground. The holes in the floor were cut square and the edges were neatly laced with bamboo and covered with bamboo mats. Between each hole, a two-foot-high curtain of woven grass was hung. I thought that was pretty neat compared to a slit trench the GIs sometimes used.”

  I have a tiny photograph of a man from New Guinea left among my father’s papers. The man is bare-chested, with wild, starchy hair. There is a note on the back: man of the admiralties. Maybe our fathers met out there in the aboriginal Pacific. And then, back in Manila in June 1945, they might have met all over again as they were being shipped out. In September, Bert’s outfit was decommissioned and he went home through Hawaii, just as my father did. It was in Hawaii, jumping to the ground from his plane and then catching his heavy pack, that my father sustained his only apparent war injury. Two weeks in Pearl Harbor and Maryann still so far in the future that a small stitch in time might have changed everything. If she’d been born an hour later, a day later … if she’d been given to another family … if Gladys and Bert had divorced … if Bert had been killed … if the second son had not died … Larry Hasker would still be alive. And Cesario Arauza, as well. But Gladys met Bert in L.A., where they had a brief second honeymoon. They danced at the Paladium Ball Room, visited the beach, and wandered around hand in hand. It was exactly the kind of honeymoon Maryann would try to replay with William.