Son of Destruction

23




Dan


This isn’t where Dan expects to be, but in a strange way, he’s finding it extremely pleasant.

Where he should be down at the Star digging up clips on the incinerations, he is in the McCalls’ sunny Florida room with Mrs McCall, who for the fifth time has instructed him to call her Nenna. They’re side by side on her flowered sofa, bent over Chaplin’s old yearbook. Mildew has turned the faux leather to silver. Flattened insects breathed their last between these pages years ago, and a smell he doesn’t recognize rises from the gutter between the glossy pages. Mrs McCall is pointing out pictures in The FJHS Swordfish, although for reasons that are opaque to Dan, she hasn’t forgiven him for carbon-dating her.

He didn’t know what he wanted when he broke in to Chaplin’s house. God knows what made all that noise; he had to leave! With his search cut short, he grabbed The Swordfish and bolted. He got stupendously lost, escaping on back roads where everything looked like everything else. By the time he found his hotel he was too wired to sleep, but too wiped to do anything but crash. Maybe he slept, but if dreams are bookmarks, there’s nothing left to prove he did. Mostly he remembers thrashing.

His eyes popped open long before it got light. Four. Colon. Oh. Oh., the digital clock reported aggressively, taunting him. Four. Colon. Oh. Eight. Nyah, nyah. At Five. Oh. Oh. he declared the sun over the yardarm and opened the book. Sitting cross-legged in his briefs like a kid with a fresh porn mag, he scoured the pages, in hopes. Of what?

The answer fell into his hands like a gift. His mother’s photo led the senior class portraits: pretty Lucy Carteret, silenced for once, composed for her photograph. Smiling as ordered, but with that defiant glint. Looking into her face captured more than thirty years ago, he understood that Lucy had always been the same person. At eighteen, she faced the camera with her chin lifted in the proud, I-can-do-this way that Dan knows; seconds before the end she lifted her head and faced the future with that exact, intelligent glare.

The biography was like Lucy, short on detail. She’d listed only the necessary: May Court, 1, 2, 3, 4, May Queen, 4; The Liveoak, 1, 2, 3, editor, 4; president, National Honor Society, 3, 4. There was no nickname specified, even though high school kids without them usually improvised. There were no favorite sayings or flip mottoes to bring real Lucy to this page, no boyfriends named that he could interrogate and no girly lists of favorite flowers or songs to remember her by. The only thing personal about the entry was her smile. It hit him in the chest. These people, like their photos, began fading the moment the camera’s iris flexed and snapped shut, fixing them in time.

Maybe cows are right, he thought. The photographer who captures your image really has stolen your soul.

He wouldn’t have known the others. Chaplin’s text ran for several lines, beginning with Nickname: ‘Bobby.’ The list of achievements covered every sport, plus: FJHS Swordfish, 1, 2, 3, editor 4. Senior musical, 1, 2, 3, 4. Fort Jude Chamber of Commerce Sun King, 4. Science Club, 1, 2, president, 3, 4. The things they did, Dan thought, wondering if these itemized exploits carried the same freight as objects in that Vietnam vet’s story, ‘The Things They Carried.’

It was hard to reconcile this jaunty, bulletproof boy and the guy with the crumbling house in Pine Vista. At eighteen, with a fresh shirt and an untarnished grin, Bobby Chaplin was a different guy, brash and freshly minted. Chaplin is not a bad-looking guy but he looks – well, defeated. Thinner, with telltale shadows in the hollows at his temples and eyes making their inevitable descent into the skull.

Where other seniors cited songs and slogans, dropping hints about epic bashes they’d survived or naming their loves, Bob Chaplin included one personal item. Favorite saying: ‘Harvard Fair Harvard.’ His staff added an editorial comment in italics: ‘We always knew he was gonna be a star.’

Yeah, right, Dan thought. Like that worked out. All those expectations, and now look.

He said to the photo, ‘I’m sorry.’

He found Mrs McCall accidentally, because she looked exactly like Steffy on a fat day. The plump teenager’s glossy hair had that freshly ironed look and her eyes gave back the bank of studio lights. She was smiling – happy and excited, open to whatever came next. Her thumbnail bio was touchingly girlish. GENEVIEVE HENDERSON, he read. Nickname: ‘Nenna.’ Pen Club, 4; Drama Club, 3, 4; FJHS Tarponettes, mascot, 4. Slogan: Puh-leeze. Favorite color: blue. Favorite player: Number 67, Now it Can be Told! Favorite song: ‘The Way We Were.’

‘Oh, lady,’ he said to the photo, to all of them. ‘What happened to you?’

Looking for his mother in endless group photos, he studied all the group shots: May Court, N.H.S., kids lined up over cutlines identifying them, left to right. Lucy wasn’t among them. Pretty as she was, she didn’t show up among the laughing kids caught partying or mugging for the camera in the candids either. He had to wonder, did the woman have no friends? Skimming for anything that would link her to the guys in her cherished Polaroid, he overlooked the ragged spot where somebody razored out a page. He won’t find the photo of Lucy Carteret standing with Bobby Chaplin on the steps of City Hall over the cutline, Most Likely to Succeed.

He turned to the inscriptions in Chaplin’s yearbook, loving screeds in flashy colors, but Lucy wasn’t anywhere. Desperate to be different, girls wrote gushy notes with curlicues and flourishes, dotting their I’s with hearts or smiley faces, scrawling cliches like, ‘You’re the best.’ Sallie, Bethany, Betsy, Jane, began, ‘Remember that time’ or ‘houseparties!!!’ followed by paragraphs of bla, bla, bla, ending with multiple Xes and Os. He found Nenna Henderson’s timid, ‘Love ya Bobby,’ almost by accident, she wrote so small. The guys’ were briefer, scrawled in drunken haste. A gifted speed-reader, he skimmed them all.

At Six. Oh. Oh. he was still in lotus position, reading long after his feet had gone to sleep.

The last note he found was neatly printed. ‘Thanks for that.’ No explanation, no effusions in contrived script, just the signature in a spot so obscure that he had to look twice before he noticed it. ‘Sincerely, Jessie Vukovich.’ Flipping back, he found her photo. Less angular. Brunette back then, the woman who signed him in yesterday with the same brash smile, the same sultry toss of the hair. There it was. A plan.

He snorted orange juice and ate his way through the mini-bar before he showered and prepared for the day. Dumping the promotional bumph out of the Flordana’s complimentary goody bag, he slipped The Swordfish inside. Flash it at the people you know. See what they do when you point to Lucy’s photo. He took the stairs, peering into dim corridors as though he expected Jessie Vukovich to pop out and tell him everything.

What did she mean when she wrote, ‘Thanks for that’? Do she and Chaplin have a secret history? Yesterday she handed back his snapshots with an indifferent shrug. The woman graduated the same year as his mother, could they actually not know each other in a school that small? Perched on a tapestried love seat outside the coffee shop, he mainlined swash from the coffee machine, lying in wait for her. As if he really believed that aging, overtly sexy Ms. Vukovich could solve his life.

A skinny old guy with a comb-over came out of her office at seven sharp, straightening his black string tie on his nerdy white short-sleeved shirt. Dan retreated behind the Fort Jude Star and settled down to wait.

At nine – late enough to make house calls, he gave up on Jessie Vukovich, FJHS grad who owed something to Chaplin, and what else did he have? The inscription. ‘Love ya. Nenna.’ He stuffed the yearbook in his Florida Trends bag and drove to her house.

Mrs McCall opened it, grinning as though something – life? – had just delivered a present, gift-wrapped, and she could hardly wait to get it inside and rip the ribbons off. She went all actress on him, trilling, ‘Daniel, how nice!’

‘It’s Dan.’

‘Come in, come in!’ Was she playing to a full house or an empty one? He wasn’t sure. He never saw the husband yesterday, just heard him stomping out. The lady was carefully put together for a Saturday, good hair and full makeup, yellow shoes. Was she expecting him, or did she always fix herself up like Barbie, just in case? ‘Come on, you could get heat prostration out there!’

‘Ma’am, if you’re busy . . .’

‘Who me? You’ve got to be kidding. Please.’ She moved him along to the Florida room a little too fast. Still, it was nice to be welcome somewhere.

The Florida room was a little creepy. Where Lucy loved the light, Mrs McCall had layers of fabric covering all the glass. All Florida might be blooming outside but Nenna McCall kept this place hermetically sealed against the heat. The flowers were fake irises embellished with silk leaves so finely made that he could see the veins. Rose patterns crawled across the squashy chairs flanking the sofa and ivy crept up the legs of the wrought iron table and chairs. Underfoot, beige roses bloomed on the Chinese rug. On the walls, he saw gaudy hibiscus prints and watercolors of the Fort Jude scenes framed in bamboo. Having shut out nature, the intelligence that chose this room had tried and failed to replicate it inside.

It made him reluctant to sit down.

She reached as if for his arm but at the last minute bent and patted the sofa. ‘Sit here. I’ll get us some iced tea. Unless you’d prefer lemonade,’ she went on in that nervous, girlish way. ‘Or coffee. Peet’s, from California? It’s really good.’

‘Thanks, I’m pretty much caffeined out.’

‘Oh,’ Nenna looked at the shopping bag like a child jonesing for a present. ‘Is that for me?’

‘Kind of. I wanted to ask you a couple of things.’

‘Sure!’

He proffered The Swordfish. ‘You were in school with my mother?’

Guilty. She jerked away. ‘When?’

‘At FJHS?’ He sat down so she would sit. Then he opened the book. He couldn’t say what, exactly, happened to her face when he pointed out plump little GENEVIEVE HENDERSON. ‘You knew my mother, right?’

She jumped up, as if to prove it wasn’t true.

‘So, did you?’

Her tone chilled. ‘Wait here.’

What pissed her off? Waiting, he leafed through the yearbook, wondering what just went wrong. It was sweet in a way, seeing these long-ago kids’ faces, because they were so young. Flashing on Lucy in her last hour, he saw the future; smart or stupid, pretty or not, these people were hostages to biology and destiny. Nothing that the eighteen-year-olds facing the camera with such hopes could say or do or buy or get would prepare them, or help them arm themselves against what was to come. Today Nenna wore white jeans and a tank top that exposed her tanned, buff upper arms. Her hair was almost perfect, but her face betrayed her; she worked too hard on it.

Right. Now he gets it. She’s pissed at me for knowing how old she is.

By the time she comes back, she’s forgiven him. Smiling, she puts down the tray and offers homemade cookies that he doesn’t want. Offended by being nailed as a late-late Seventies person at Fort Jude High in the Middle Ages, she makes him take two before she asks, ‘Who was your mother?’

He shows her the picture.

‘Lucy. Carteret. You kept her name.’

‘It’s the only name I have.’

Her head snaps back as if everything inside it just jerked to a stop. ‘I’m sorry!’

He flushes. ‘It’s no big.’

Recovering, Mrs McCall – sorry, Nenna – bends over the book with him, dropping details like breadcrumbs along a forest path. ‘Lovely girl but she kept to herself, which is why . . . OK,’ she says in that youthful tone aging women work to maintain, ‘OK. We thought she was snotty.’

‘She was shy.’

‘It’s not like we didn’t like her.’ Defensively, she adds, ‘She didn’t want to be friends. I’m sorry, we should have tried harder.’

‘Don’t feel bad.’

‘Maybe living with your grandmother makes you weird. Her mother died having her and the old lady flew to Charleston and scooped her up.’

‘Charleston?’

‘Carteret’s an old Charleston name. She said David wasn’t fit to bring up a child, and that was that. They duked it out in court and she won.’ She taps the page. ‘Which is how Lucy ended up down here.’

‘So you did know my mother.’

‘We didn’t, like, hang out with her.’ She sighs. ‘I’m afraid nobody did.’

Like a good student, she waits for his next question, but he is dead beat. Flat out of questions, he sinks into the down sofa cushions. The Florida room smells of cleaning products; so does nice Mrs McCall.

Finally she offers, ‘She didn’t hang with us. When we were little, it was the car and driver. Later she had her own car.’

‘She gave my mother the car?’

‘Oh, she gave her everything she wanted. Clothes. The car, when she was old enough to drive. Lucy was the only thing she had. It’s sad,’ Nenna adds without explanation, ‘they used to be so close.’

‘Lucy and her grandmother. What happened?’

‘She was your great-grandmother, I suppose.’ Smiling, she proffers the plate.

Deflection, so ladylike. Must be a Southern thing.

‘Another cookie? I’m famous for these.’

He is both grateful and sorry that she isn’t wearing perfume. For Dan, perfume is a distinct turnoff; this lady smells of toothpaste and fresh shampoo, which makes it harder to refuse. For the first time since the hospital he is aware of his body, which is waking up after a week of grieving. Yo, Dude! ‘Thanks, but I’d better not.’

‘Do you have a girlfriend?’

He did but he doesn’t. Nenna doesn’t need to know. ‘Did she have a boyfriend?’

‘Who?’

‘Lucy.’

‘Oh, Lucy. Everybody was in love with her.’ Nenna’s face turns into a mix CD, producing music from several different albums all at once. ‘We thought she and Bobby . . .’ She waits a beat too long, considering, before she buys him off with a smile. ‘But you never know.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Hidden fires,’ she says.

Reporters know silence works better than a question. ‘Yes Ma’am.’

‘Oh please,’ she says. ‘We are way past Ma’am.’

‘About these hidden fires . . .’

‘You never know what’s going on behind people’s faces, do you?’

‘No.’

The pause that follows takes on a life of its own. He hears ice cubes dropping. Footsteps upstairs. The husband stomped out like Bigfoot yesterday. Must be Steffy. Wish she’d come down.

‘Something happened,’ Nenna says finally.

Keep your head down, Carteret. The best interviewers are invisible. ‘And . . .’

‘And . . .’

Repeat, so she’ll have to complete the sentence. ‘Something happened and . . .’

Generations of ice cubes drop before she says, ‘To be honest with you, we never really knew.’

This brings his head up fast. ‘Ma’am?’

‘Nenna.’

‘Nenna.’

She goes on, but in a new direction. ‘Lucy’s father went to Clemson, I think. Unless it was The Citadel. Either way . . .’

‘David Carteret.’ His next source. ‘Still in Charleston, right?’

‘We heard he died.’

Oh f*ck.

‘Suicide.’

Oh, f*ck.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I never knew him. It’s OK.’

‘Either way,’ she finishes, as if this explains it all, ‘he wasn’t from around here.’

‘I see.’ This is a lie. He will never understand this town.

‘I mean, he wasn’t one of us.’ Nenna pauses to regroup. When she goes on, it is about nothing he expected. ‘You know, Davis and I are what Fort Jude calls having trouble.’ She lets this float between them.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘You don’t know what it’s been like.’ She reaches for his arm, rethinks and laces her hands like a child playing this is the church and this is the steeple. ‘He fell in love with his first cousin. How obscene is that?’

Because he has noplace to go with this, he sinks the same old hook. ‘Did she have a boyfriend?’

‘Who, Gayle? Hell no. She’s already used up one husband, and she’s getting cranked up to dump number two . . .’

‘I meant Lucy.’

‘. . . Clueless Ed. Who knows what the law is in California. For all I know, she has Davis lined up to be number three.’ Nenna raises her head, looking at him until he softens and meets her eyes. ‘It’s my mistake, really. Davis wasn’t local either.’

The silence stretches so thin that he is obliged to ask. ‘Um, about my mother . . .’

‘I’m so stupid, how was I supposed to know? I mean, it’s practically incest, but how could I not see the signs?’ Now that she has his full attention she says, ‘I may have to divorce him.’

‘I see.’

Her voice lifts in a trill of discovery. ‘In fact, I think I will.’

‘Thanks, Mrs Um.’ He’s tired. They’ve been sitting here too long. Clumsily, he weighs exit lines. ‘I’ve wasted enough of your time.’

‘Oh, not at all.’ Nenna puts her hand on his so swiftly that he jumps. ‘You need more ice.’

‘Not really. I should go.’

‘It’ll only take a minute, and I’ll get more cookies too . . .’

‘No thanks. Really,’ he says, too late. Rounding the island that separates the territories of Florida room and kitchen area, she strikes for the interior, rattling utensils, foiling any attempt to shout goodbye and go.

Dan is alone, surprised by an unexpected message from his body. Hi there. Nenna’s too old, but the presentation is very nicely done.

Stop that. There’s only one safe way to do this. Get the f*ck out. He can’t, quite. He needs to go but now that the possibility is obvious, messages keep coming. Available. Coming on to you.

I have to get out of here.

As if she has powers and can hear him thinking, Steffy McCall slaps into the room on rubber flip-flops. Dead on target, she says, ‘You don’t have to stay just because Mommy says you do.’