He’d been staying at an Embassy Suites Hotel in Dallas, on the tenth floor.
According to the police report, Charlie had called the front desk of the hotel shouting for help. Someone was chasing him, he’d insisted, trying to kill him. The hotel sent the police up to his room to investigate. When two policemen arrived, they found a “paranoid man who believed he was being pursued.” Opening the closets for Charlie, they reassured him that he was alone in the room and safe. Charlie seemed calmed. One of the policemen patted him on the shoulder, told him to “take care,” and then they left.
The police took the elevator down to the lobby, spoke for some minutes to the hotel manager, and then exited the hotel. At the very moment they stepped outside, a large mass tangled in a white sheet fell from the sky, landing onto the pavement in front of them with a horrible thud. They looked up. Torn bedsheets, tied together and fashioned into a makeshift rope, dangled from the balcony of a room on the tenth floor.
My mother sat knitting in the living room of my apartment, her face sagging in a way it never had, the eyes uneven, the skin of the cheeks thickened. Mishka was draped across her chest, asleep. “It wasn’t suicide,” she said, her knitting needles clicking. “He was trying to escape.”
“Who said it was suicide?” I asked.
We’d all assumed, on the basis of the police report, that Charlie had been attempting to escape his imaginary pursuer by making a rope out of bedsheets and lowering himself off the balcony.
“One of your cousins,” said my mother. “But it wasn’t.”
I watched my mother cradle Mishka with her arm as she knit him a blanket. Her first grandchild. This visit, long planned, had taken on a dual purpose, and she looked at once totally wrecked and wholly content.
“I know it wasn’t,” I said.
I was stoking the logs in the fireplace, thinking of that line apocryphally attributed to Mark Twain, “The coldest winter I’ve ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.”
Arkady had driven the three of us to Big Sur the day after receiving the news. In the evening I’d walked with our new baby down some stone steps to a hot spring, resting him inside his Moses basket, and looked up at the sweeping dome of stars. Waves crashed on the sides of the cliffs below, one after the other. It all felt vast—the sky, the rocks, the ocean—vast and oppressive.
“The service will be in Grosse Pointe in September,” my mother was saying now. “He’s being cremated.”
I didn’t want to know any details about the body, what condition it had been in, how it had been shipped back to Michigan. Nor did my mother ever think to mention these things. Bill Penner, I imagined, had handled everything.
“Helluva nice guy,” Bill said when we spoke just after I received the news. I could tell he’d been crying. “I’ll sure miss him.”
“So will I.” I myself had been unable to cry. I kept telling myself we’d always known something like this was coming. But the guilt I shouldered now was, in truth, too much to feel.
“Have you spoken with Whitney?” asked my mother.
I crossed the room and sat down in a chair. “He’s holed up in Missoula,” I said. “Getting a couple of summer school credits to finish college.”
“He was so upset he had his girlfriend fly out to be with him,” said my mother. “He’s taking this very hard.”
For all his bravado, Whitney could be deeply sensitive. I remembered how we’d both cried quietly in the car the year before, just after we’d visited Uncle Peter, who’d been diagnosed with a brain tumor.
The three of us had sat together in Peter and Nicole’s living room while Nicole talked on the phone upstairs. Outside the bay window the golf course burst with savage green, cruel beyond measure in its vibrant health. Peter sat quietly in his tweed jacket and gray flannels, slightly shrunken, unable to make the usual conversation. The poor man was stunned, having received the terrible news only days before.
“You’re going to be okay, Peter,” I told him, putting my hand on his, echoing his words to me all those years before.
He looked at me with those warm, small eyes for the last time. “Thank you, Franny,” he said, managing a smile.
Four months later, he died.
Mishka gurgled and my mother adjusted him gently. I poked at the logs to get the embers going again.
“And Bobby? Have you spoken with him?” my mother asked.