Dear Penelope,
I imagine you reading this letter on your journey to Vienna, and I say from the outset—do not turn around. Do not come back. I will not receive you with open arms, but rather push you away. I think you can see that there is another life for you now, there’s another way to be.
Inside this envelope are all the documents you need. When you get to Vienna, do not take a taxi to the camp. It is overpriced and you will arrive far too early. There is a bus, and that will get you there. Also, don’t say you are seeking to leave for economic reasons. Say only this: you are afraid of reprisals from the government.
I expect it will not be easy, but you will make it. You will survive and live, and one day I hope we will see each other again, and you will read these books to me in English—for I expect that to be the language you will speak. If it turns out that you never come back, I ask you to read it to your own children, if that is to be what happens out there, on the wine-dark sea.
The last thing I will say is that I taught only one person in this world to play the piano, and although you were a great mistake maker, it was my pleasure and privilege. It is what I’ve loved best, and most.
Yours sincerely, with much love, Waldek Lesciuszko
Well, what would you do?
What would you say?
Penelope, the Mistake Maker, stayed standing a few seconds longer, then sagged slowly back to her seat. She kept quiet and shivery, with the letter in her hands, and the two black books in her lap. Without a sound, she started to cry.
Into the passing face of Europe outside, Penelope Lesciuszko cried her stray, silent tears. She cried all the way to Vienna.
He’d never been drunk, and therefore never hungover, but Clay imagined this was probably what it was like.
His head was next to him, he gathered it up.
He sat awhile, then crawled from the mattress and found the heavy plastic sheet next to him, in the grass. With tired bones and shaking hands, he made his bed with it, he tucked it in, then walked toward the fence line—an obligatory white sports field divider, all rail and no palings—and rested his face on the wood. He breathed the burning rooves.
For a long time, he tried to forget:
The man at the table.
The quiet background noise of brothers and felt betrayal.
It came from many moments, that bridge of his, but there, at The Surrounds that morning, it came from last night most of all.
* * *
—
Eight hours earlier, when the Murderer left, there were ten minutes of uncomfortable silence. To break it, Tommy said, “Jesus, he looked like death warmed up.” He held Hector over his heart. The cat purred, a lump of stripes.
“He deserved to look a lot worse,” I told him.
“What a shocker of a suit” and “Who gives a shit, I’m going down the pub,” said Henry and Rory, in sequence. They stood like melded elements, like sand and rust combined.
Clay, of course, famous for saying all but nothing, said nothing. He’d probably spoken enough for one night. For a moment he wondered, why now? Why had he come home now? But then he realized the date. It was February 17.
He put his injured hand in a small bucket of ice, and kept the other from the graze on his face, tempting as it was to touch it. At the table it was he and I, at silent loggerheads. For me, this much was clear: there was only one brother to worry about, and that was the one in front of me.
Hi, Dad, for Christ’s sake.
I looked at the ice, bobbing around his wrist.
You’ll need a bucket big as your body, boy.
I didn’t say it, but I was sure Clay read it on my face, as he lost the battle and placed two trigger-like fingers on the wound below his eye. The mostly mute little bastard even nodded a bit, just before the clean pile of dishes, in all its outlandish altitude, collapsed into the sink.
It didn’t stop the standoff, though, oh no.
Me, I went right on staring.
Clay carried on with his fingers.
Tommy placed Hector down, cleaned up the crockery, and soon returned with the pigeon (T looking on from his shoulder), and couldn’t get out of there fast enough. He would check on Achilles and Rosy—both exiled, out back, to the porch. He made a point of closing the door.
* * *
—
Of course, earlier, when Clay had said those two fateful words, the rest of us stood behind him, like witnesses at the scene of a crime. A grisly one. Caught and swollen, there were many things to be thought, but I only remember one: We’ve lost him now for good.
But I was ready to fight it out.
“You’ve got two minutes,” I said, and the Murderer slowly nodded. He slipped against his chair; it ground into the floor. “Well, go on then. Two minutes aren’t long, old man.”
Old man?
The Murderer queried and resigned himself to it in the same breath. He was an old man, an old memory, a forgotten idea—and middle-aged though he might have been, to us he was all but dead.
He put his hands down on the table.
He resurrected his voice.
It came out in installments, as he awkwardly addressed the room.
“I need, or, actually, I was wondering…” He didn’t sound like him anymore, not to any of us. We’d remembered him slightly left, or right. “I’m here to ask—”
And thank God for Rory, because in a broiled voice that sounded just like it always had, he unloaded a full-blooded reply, to our father’s timorous stutterings. “For Christ’s sake, spit the fucking thing out!”
We stopped.
All of us, temporarily.
But then Rosy barked again and there was me and a bit of shut-that-bloody-dog-up, and somewhere, in the middle, the words: “Okay, look.” The murderer found a way through. “I won’t waste any more time, and I know I’ve got no right, but I came because I live far from here now, in the country. It’s a lot of land, and there’s a river, and I’m building a bridge. I’ve learned the hard way that the river floods. You can be locked either side, and…” The voice was full of splinters, a fence post in his throat. “I’ll need help to build it, and I’m asking if any of you might—”
“No.” I was first.
Again, the Murderer nodded.
“You’ve got some fucking neck, haven’t you?”—Rory, in case you didn’t guess.
“Henry?”
Henry took my cue and remained his affable self, in the face of all the outrage. “No thanks, mate.”
“He’s not your mate—Clay?”
Clay shook his head.
“Tommy?”
“No.”
One of us was lying.
* * *
—
From there, there was a sort of bashed-up quiet.
The table was arid between father and sons, and a hell of a lot of toast crumbs. A pair of mismatched salt and pepper shakers stood in the middle, like some comedy duo. One portly. One tall.
The Murderer nodded and left.
As he did so, he took out a small piece of paper and gave it to that company of crumbs. “My address. In case you change your mind.”
“Go now.” I folded my arms. “And leave the cigarettes.”
* * *
—
The address was torn up straightaway.
I threw it into the wooden crate next to the fridge that held assorted bottles and old newspapers.
We sat, we stood and leaned.
The kitchen quiet.
What was there to say?
Did we have a meaningful chat about uniting even stronger at times like these?
Of course not.
We spoke our few sentences, and Rory, pub-bound, was first to leave. The Naked Arms. On his way out he put a warm and humid hand, just briefly, on Clay’s head. At the pub, he’d likely sit where we’d all sat once—even the Murderer—on a night we’d never forget.
Next, Henry went out back, probably to arrange some old books, or LPs, which he’d amassed from weekend garage sales.
Tommy followed soon after.
Once Clay and I had sat for a while, he’d quietly walked to the bathroom. He showered, then stood at the basin. It was cluttered with hair and toothpaste; held together by grit. Maybe it was all he needed to prove that great things could come from anything.
But he still avoided the mirror.
* * *
—