CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE FALCON WAS POOLSIDE, FROWNING INTO THE SUN, A SEAWALL of newspapers stacked around him like a fortress when I took up my seat across from him, a climate unto myself—the fog rolling in, gray sky as far as the eye could see. He was eating lunch beneath a huge unfurled patio umbrella. A creature of enshrined routine, the Falcon ate scrambled eggs and fruit every day at ten minutes past twelve, the table always formally set, white linens and white porcelain plates shimmering.
Lifting his eyes from his grapefruit, he took one long, wintry look at me and let me have it.
“Look here, Collie, this nonsense, this infernal silent routine of yours, has gone on long enough. Your jaw’s healed. There’s not a thing wrong with you. Grief is not something to be indulged; it’s to be overcome. Moping is very unbecoming in a young man. Even the dogs are starting to think you’re nuts.”
I reached for a piece of bread, my gaze fixed on the butter, the sharp edges of all those words passing through me like rock through haze.
Impaling the summer air with his fork, his arms approximating a flail, his white cheeks deeply flushed, the Falcon was reaching new depths of lividity.
“Good God, these eggs are a culinary obscenity. Ingrid, is it possible to get a decent lunch around here, or must I make it myself?” He banged the fleshy part of his palm on the table, making the cutlery jump and inspiring the canaries in their cages to sing.
The Falcon kept a dozen canaries in a collection of antique cages in the dining room’s big bay window—their cheerfulness seemed to be voice-activated; the more annoyed the Falcon got, the more loud and joyful grew their collective chorus—since I had moved in, their soaring high notes threatened to shatter glass. In summer, staff moved them outside for short periods during the day.
“They’re done the way you like them. I can’t imagine what would be wrong with them,” Ingrid said, winking in my direction. I smiled back at her and reached for the cheese. Ingrid had been with the Falcon for years, since before I was born, since Ma was a little girl. She supervised the staff—cook, chauffeur, gardeners, a couple of housemaids, the groom—good old Ingrid knew where all the bodies were buried.
“They simply have no flavor. . . .” The Falcon was going on and on. “Is it too much to ask that an egg should taste like an egg? Never mind. Coffee and grapefruit will have to do.”
“No, it won’t do at all. Don’t be so stubborn, and eat,” Ingrid insisted. “I’ll reheat them for you. Just give me a moment,” she said as she absently went about deadheading long stalks of freesia in a tall vase set in the center of the table.
“By all means, Ingrid, take all the time you need. Don’t rush on my account. Where was I? . . . Ah yes, Collie. Where’s your fight? Have a little moxie. This other stuff, sulking like a little girl, is bloody offensive. I have a philosophy about life and it’s served me well, and I’ll pass it on to you at no cost.” Pinning back my shoulders with the sharp edges of his tone, he leaned across the table. “Get on with it!”
I broke off a small piece of buttered bread and tossed it to Cromwell.
“Must you feed the dog at the table?” His dramatic sighs were taking deadly physical shape, rising up like mushroom clouds and hovering overhead.
“Would you mind passing the sugar?” I asked, the first words I’d said aloud in almost a month. Cromwell lifted his head and wagged his tail. Otherwise it was a pretty anticlimactic moment; despite his ranting, the Falcon never even noticed.
“Don’t you think you get enough sugar? My God, you’d think you were five years old the way you eat sweets.”
“It’s nice to have you back, Collie,” Ingrid whispered, pausing on her way to the kitchen, hugging me in the open doorway between the conservatory and the dining room.
Alexandra broke up with me a few days later. She came to Cassowary to spend the weekend and, intermittently crying and shaking, kept talking about the merit of going our separate ways. She was sorry for the timing, but given the circumstances, wouldn’t it be worse for me if I were to rebuild my house on a shaky foundation?
She broke down, beige hair covering her face, and talked about how difficult this whole thing was for her, how terrible she felt about Bingo and Ma, and what an impossible spot she was in.
“I swear to God I planned to break up with you that weekend, but then Bingo died and your mother . . .”
“It’s okay,” I said, handing her a tissue, giving her an epicene squeeze. “I understand. Believe me, if I could figure out a way to break up with me, I’d do it.”
“Oh, Collie,” she wailed, face flushed and soggy.
It didn’t matter. I didn’t care. You could have popped a live grenade down the front of my pants and I wouldn’t have reacted. I felt as if I’d been stripped of my humanity, were empty inside and inured to the concussive effects of all that was exploding around me.
Wringing out my shirt, water dripping onto the floor from her equatorial drenching, I watched from the dining room as she drove away, hand like a white glove waving proper farewell, when the Falcon appeared in soundless landing behind me.
“Well, sorry as I am for your situation, one can hardly blame her. After all, women do like a knight in shining armor, and unfortunately, Collie, given recent events, your breastplate’s looking a little tarnished—at least to those who make a habit of being uncharitable in their judgments.”
He put his hands on either side of my neck and tightened his grip in some bizarre burlesque of comfort, as if asphyxiation were somehow reassuring. He relaxed his hold on me, and as I turned to leave, I noticed a framed portrait of my mother, an oil painting done when she was in her teens, newly hung on the dining room wall.
“It went up this morning,” the Falcon explained, seeing my expression.
“It’s nice,” I said. “She’s not smiling.”
“No,” he said. “It’s a good likeness.”
“Ingrid told me that when Ma was a baby she used to sleep all day and that you could hear her laughing alone in her crib at night. She said that when she was six she drowned her pet crow in a rain barrel after he flew off with her charm bracelet.”
“Ingrid should confine her hyperbolic color commentary to the back staircase,” the Falcon said as he positioned himself directly in front of the portrait, turning his back to me. I hoisted myself onto the dining room table.
“What was Ma like when she was younger?” I asked him.
“Your mother was right-handed.”
“No, she was left-handed,” I said, puzzled by the remark. “She always made a big deal of it, saying that Fidel Castro was left-handed and Joan of Arc and Cole Porter.”
The Falcon turned around to face me. He wore a mildly condescending expression—usually he looked at me as if he were suppressing his gag reflex. I perked up a little, thinking that his view of me had evolved from contemptuous to patronizing.
“So were John Dillinger and the Boston Strangler . . . and you, too, for that matter. I assure you, Collie, your mother was right-handed. She decided as a little girl that being right-handed was dull. She trained herself to use her left hand so that she would appear more interesting to the greater world. Anais thought being difficult was the hallmark of the artistic mind. . . .”
I nodded in recognition as he continued.
“If her criterion was accurate, then your mother died with the distinction of being the most creative intellect of her time.”
He walked over to the garden doors, where something caught his attention, and he trained his focus on the canaries trilling away in the background.
“Canaries are remarkable for being uninteresting,” he said, reaching into one of the cages, setting things aflutter. “They tend not to form attachments to their human caretakers and need very little interaction or stimulation to make them happy. Pretty, entertaining, and remote—a perfect pet for those who admire beauty and performance but don’t want to be bothered with emotional engagement.”
“Unlike Carlos,” I said. Carlos was the Falcon’s forty-year-old hyacinth macaw.
He laughed—laughed! I couldn’t believe it. This was turning into a latter-day version of A Christmas Carol.
“Carlos is a damn nuisance,” he said.
Encouraged by his friendliness, I persisted. “Did you and Ma ever get along?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Genetics. Let’s just say that when it came to alienation of affection, her mother, your grandmother, could have written an instruction manual.”
He snapped shut the birdcage door and walked back toward the portrait, pausing in front of a large mirror in an ornate Oriental frame.
“In some ways, your mother was very much like my grandmother Lowell, who was a willful, opinionated, stubborn woman. Very stern and unyielding, though certainly she had her good qualities, too,” he said, making some concession to her character while seeming a little unconvinced. “I spent a great deal of time with her when I was a child after my mother died. I lived with her until I was twelve, and I formed an attachment to her of sorts. She passed away when I was about your age. She was the most humorless person I’ve ever encountered. I suppose I loved her, well, yes, I did love her, but to this day, I’ve never shed a tear over her passing. ” He paused and glanced over at the grandfather clock as it chimed in the background, and then he turned and waited for me to speak.
“I don’t know why, but I haven’t cried over Ma,” I blurted out. “I did love her.”
“Maybe you loved her in the same unkind way that she loved you,” the Falcon said softly.
“Maybe . . . I don’t know.”
“Don’t worry, Collie, your mother will extract her period of mourning from you. Some people just get buried more deeply than others. You’ll find out that sorrow takes different forms, but in the end true grief is an honorific conferred on those people, however unlikely they may be, who bring us some measure of joy. Your mother was many things, but a joyful presence she was not. Unfortunately, Anais’s grave is not a shallow one.”
Ingrid appeared at the dining room door. “Have you forgotten the plane is waiting?” she said to the Falcon, tapping her foot.
“Please feel free to interrupt us anytime, Ingrid. Do I actually pay you to be meddlesome? If so, then you deserve a bonus for a job well done.”
The Falcon reached for his leather bag looped over the back of one of the dining room chairs.
“Well, I must be going. I’m flying to Chicago, but I’ll be back tomorrow morning. In the meantime, Collie, please don’t sit on the table. It makes you look like a yahoo.”
Hearing his footsteps on the stairway, his vigor belying his age, I slid off the table and walked through the garden doors and out onto the patio, where cages of canaries were enjoying the brilliant sun and its early morning warmth.
Ingrid followed behind me. “Would you like some tea, Collie?”
“No thanks,” I said, the prosaic sound of my voice no match for the singing of the canaries and the responsive chorus of wild birds. “I’m fine.”
“Of course you are,” she said.