“Mr. McGill, Twill,” someone said from the doorway.
In her fifties, broad-shouldered, and brown like cured mahogany, Sister Agnes stood there, a questioning look on her face.
“Sister,” I said, propelling my bulk from the window. “Where’s Katrina?”
“I thought you knew,” she said, almost as if the words formed a question.
There are moments in life when the heart makes itself known to the man that lives with his feelings but rarely recognizes them. When Sister Agnes spoke those words I felt the emptiness of the room and a coldness went through me. I could taste the grief that had escaped my lips when talking to my father. At that moment I was beginning to mourn the loss of my wife.
“Didn’t Sister Alona tell you?” Agnes asked.
“Tell me what?” I said in a tone usually reserved for lowlifes and gangsters I intended to hurt.
“That, that she was down at the corner at the Trattoria Lucia,” the big woman stammered.
“What the hell is she doing down there?” My anger would not heel.
“She went there with your father.”
“I thought your father was dead,” Twill asked as we headed for the little restaurant.
I had never told the family that Clarence was probably alive. Why would I? I could hardly believe it myself.
“I just found him recently,” I said. “He came by the apartment last night. I forgot about it because of the break-in and tryin’ to find you.”
“Is that what’s wrong with you?”
“What do you mean?” I said, stopping there on the sidewalk.
“There’s somethin’ definitely wrong with you,” my son averred.
“Wrong how?”
“Like you went crazy or sumpin’ an’ haven’t made it all the way back yet.”
Marella, I thought, or something Marella meant to me; something I had been missing for a long time; but whatever it was, that something didn’t fit where it used to be.
“Let’s go,” I said.
Trattoria Lucia had a smallish dining room with a high ceiling that was deceptive because there were many hanging plants drooping down from overhead. Through the foliage I could see a table for four in the far corner. Seated around various plates of food was Dimitri, my only blood son; Tatyana, his Belarusian girlfriend recently delivered from the East European underworld; Katrina, wearing an alluring blue dress; and Clarence Tolstoy Bill Williams McGill. Katrina, most recently a depressed invalid, and Dimitri, who had always been a sour child, were both laughing.
“Trot!” my father called out. “Twill, come on over.”
He spoke to a waiter who pulled up another table.
Twill went to join the family affair while I remained there at the entrance trying to get all the pieces of my life into some kind of semblance of order. I stood there for a full minute and was at work on the next revolution of seconds when Dimitri, whom we all called Bulldog, came over to me and put his hand on my elbow.
“It’s okay, Dad,” he said. “Everybody’s fine.”
Looking at my son was very much like peering into my own face. He was almost a walking facsimile of me except for the fact that he was five inches taller and almost always brooding.
“Come on, Dad,” he said. “Come sit with the family.”
Twill took to Clarence like his wild feline totem; more by scent than logic.
After we were settled the party went back to the way it had been before we arrived. Clarence was telling jokes and Katrina was laughing at them. She had color in her cheeks and that look in her eye that always told me when she was falling in love.
After a while I got my equilibrium back and asked, “How did you get Katrina out of that bed?”
“He came in and told me who he vas,” my wife answered. “That made me sit right up. Then he asked me vhen vas the next bus due in? I said there is no bus and he said ve better hurry then if ve want to get out of there in time for dinner. It vas so silly that I started laughing. I’m still laughing.”
A waiter came up then to refill Katrina’s wineglass, but my father waved him away. Katrina saw this exchange but said nothing. If I had tried to keep her from a drink we would have fought the rest of the night.
“And where’d you pick up Bulldog and Taty?” I asked, feeling oddly jealous of my father and family.
“Taty finally got me to come by,” Dimitri said. “Twill told her that I might help Mom get up or something but when we got to the front desk the sister told us to come down here.”
Dimitri was grinning while Katrina beamed, placing her palm on my father’s forearm from time to time. Everyone was saying how happy they were that Clarence came out of the shadows and rejoined them. No one questioned his long absence except to ask where he’d been. My wife and sons were all happy just to see him. Only Tatyana and I seemed somewhat somber. She caught my eye at one moment there and we both smiled.
“I’m checking out of the sanatorium tomorrow,” Katrina announced after devouring a plum tart. “Will you come get me, Tolstoy?”
“Me an’ Trot’ll be there with bells on.”
What could I say? The only way to get Katrina on her feet again was for her to be enveloped in the euphoria of love. I wondered if any hospital had ever used love therapy to cure their depressives and other psychosomatic sufferers.
At about eight o’clock the party broke up. Tatyana and Dimitri trundled off to their new place.
They went maybe fifteen feet when Tatyana turned and came back, to me. She took my arm and leaned in close so that no one else could hear.
“Are you all right, Mr. McGill?”
“Sure I am, Tatyana. Why?”
“My father left me, my mother, and sister and never said a word. He left and I hated him.” She was looking into me.
“What can I say, honey? You’re right.”
She kissed me and then went back to her boyfriend.
I watched them walking away, wondering at the complexities of the semisocial, partially civilized human heart.
Twill went off to find Fortune and remind the Jones gang that he was still with them. Clarence and I saw Katrina back to her room. She kissed us both good-bye but the caress lingered on my father.
“Tomorrow,” she said, looking at him.
“That’s a fine woman you got there, Trot,” Clarence said on our walk back to the apartment.
“Not hardly,” I replied.
“What do you mean by that?”
“She hasn’t belonged to me in many a year.”
28
After a month of a dedicated housekeeper’s hard work the smell of old socks and twenty years of brooding had finally been cleaned away from Dimitri’s room. My father, whom I would always and forevermore call Clarence, was asleep therein. He told me that he felt best sleeping in a different bed every night; that he felt safer moving around.
I should have been asleep too. My days had been strenuous and the drinking wasn’t light. But there I was in my den/office wondering how it could be that I had discovered hidden feelings for my wife and once again lost her in just a few minutes’ time?
I picked up the phone at four minutes shy of midnight and dialed a number. After four rings a recording of Aura Ullman’s voice said, “You have reached me, so talk to me.” I hung up before the beep.
I’d called Aura hoping that there might be love somewhere for me, too. But if I couldn’t have love I had to dig deeper.
“Mr. McGill,” she said after the Hotel Brown switchboard operator connected us. “What revelation do you have for me at this hour?”
Just the sound of her voice brought up a vibration like a growl in my chest. The creature making this sound in me was like a wild thing — both hunted and free.
“I want you to know that I’m not asking you for anything, but...” I said.
“But what?” There was a lot of satisfaction in those two words.
“I’d like to come over.”
“I understand,” she said with no underlying gratification. “Come along.”