Chet, who has said little during the meal, sits back in his chair.
“There’s only one cure for that. You’ll have to start going, too.”
Damn. I look at Wynona, who nods.
“She probably can’t tell you what it means to her. When you first start getting to know your family, there’s a kind of glow.
That’s how me and Chet met. Trey and I were assigned to be part of his family when he began coming regularly six months ago.”
My head spins to look at Chet, who gives a confirming nod and a sheepish grin. I guess I should have figured, but I’d never heard about Chet having a wife or family before. With those ears. Trey couldn’t look any more like Chet if he’d had plastic surgery.
“How long have you been married?” I ask, incredulous.
“Three months,” he says, beaming at his bride. The kid calls him Dad, and Chet and Wynona look as if they have been married forever. Everyone seems happy. How can they stand it? The Lord’s will? I suppose if you believe it’s all for a purpose, you can endure anything, although I can’t quite buy that.
As Wynona clears the table and does the dishes with Trey, we take our dessert and coffee and adjourn to the square, lodge like room to sit in front of the huge fire place and continue our discussion of the case. Chet gets a fire going easily, and yet it is obvious that he is tired and is not able to concentrate as I ask him questions about the case. Talk to Leigh tomorrow is his only ad vice. I drive home wondering if the only reason I was invited out to dinner was to have his kid browbeat me into going to church. Bracken is preparing for the next world; I’ve still got to live in this one.
As I drive I am thinking how hard it is to know an other person. Chet Bracken the lawyer is one hundred and eighty degrees opposite from Chet Bracken the man. He was positively docile tonight. Was it the cancer Clearly, he was exhausted. After dinner it was as if he were waiting for me to take charge. Perhaps that’s what he really wants but is too proud to say it. Yet nobody was too proud to put me on the spot about religion. My skin crawls as I remember the kid’s face. Are you saved? And they let him get away with it! Why am I reacting so strongly to this incident? It seems a matter of bad taste. Almost a matter of class differences.
It hits me that I am reacting as my mother probably would have. Nice people don’t get in your face like that. It wasn’t as if she were the Queen of England, but for the first time in a long while I remember that she and my father, before he went crazy, considered them selves and their friends far above the ordinary residents of Bear Creek. Her father had been a doctor, and she saw herself as a member of the eastern Arkansas aristocracy, with its disdain for emotional outbursts and theatrics of any kind. This wasn’t so bad, actually. She and her friends weren’t taken in by the demagoguery of Orval Faubus, who, as governor, on the pretext of preventing violence incited the state to wage a guerrilla war against school desegregation. How much of my mother’s sense of who she was would have rubbed off on me if Daddy hadn’t gone nuts and become a source of embarrassment? Yet perhaps tonight I saw vestiges of her emotional fastidiousness in my reaction to Trey. I know nothing of Chet’s background, but in any case, he is way beyond a feeling of distaste for what is socially and aesthetically incorrect. Death, or the fear of it, I realize as I hit the outskirts of town, will do that to you.
3
“It’s all a crock,” Dan Bailey says cheerfully, “And you know it.”
Dan, who became my best friend almost immediately after I moved into the Layman Building nine months ago, is obese, obscene, and remarkably immature. He stands at the window of my office, dreamily staring at the women in the Adcock Building across the street.
Separated from us by the width of the avenue and the illusions of youth and middle age, they deliberately tease us, coming to the window and sticking their tongues out at Dan when he won’t go away. I push Leigh’s file into my briefcase.
“If you’d seen Bracken’s face at the dinner table,” I say, “you might not think so.”
“Acceptance, the final stage,” Dan says, literally pressing his nose against the glass as he ogles my neighbors.
“More power to him. If there is a God, Bracken ought to be punished for all the murderers and dope dealers he’s gotten off.”
I pull a yellow pad from a drawer and shove it into the case. The valise is bulging, like Dan. His neck, crammed into a too tight shirt collar, seems about to explode.
“There’s an inner peace about the entire family,” I say.
“Even Rainey.”
Dan sticks out his tongue in the direction of the Adcock Building, a sign that he’s been made to understand his staring is not appreciated. I come around my desk to see what’s going on. A blonde in a tight sweater closes the blinds. I’ll probably be arrested for sexual harassment, and I barely saw her.
“The mountaintop experience,” Dan sighs.
“It never lasts. Highs never do.
Physics 101. What goes up eventually sinks like a lead balloon. They’re able to sustain it longer because of the group. New people coming in keep the fires burning for everybody, but eventually they will go out. We all return to our evil ways, sooner or later.” Smiling happily at the memory, Dan cackles, “You should have seen that blonde’s chest. Just before you got over here she turned sideways to the window just so I could check her out.
Julia looks like she got a couple of marbles put in compared to her.”
I stand by Dan and look down at the street. Deserted.
Everyone is inside pretending to be working.
“You don’t even believe there’s a God behind the Big Bang?”
Dan bumps his swollen stomach against the window ledge.
“What we don’t understand we call God. That’s why you don’t ever read about preachers filing for patents.”
Dan’s zinc gingham broadcloth shirt has a grease stain on it. Probably from the croissant he carried into my office. By his own admission, he drives his rich society wife crazy. According to Dan, Brenda, by her choice of a totally unsuitable marriage partner (himself), proves irrefutably the perverseness of the human species.
Accustomed to his logic, I cross my office and flip the light switch. Dan will stay and talk forever if I let him.
“I don’t read about many lawyers filing for patents either.”
“A complete lack of imagination is our only redeeming virtue,” he says, silhouetted against the window. He is beginning to develop the profile of Alfred Hitchcock, double chin and all.
“We’re totally opposed to progress, creativity, and ingenuity. Once the human vocal cord was developed, unborn lawyers everywhere rejoiced, knowing the species had no further need to evolve.”
I laugh, knowing that Dan, down deep, is one of the good guys, his cynicism a defense mechanism to deal with the chaos closing in around him. A man who has put up with as many divorce cases as he has can’t be all bad. Brenda complains because they call him all night and on the weekends, In the office his patience is legendary, money no object. What could be worse than the pain of divorce? he asks, when I kid him about how many women are stacked up in the waiting room. The only bad thing about women, he says, is that they persist in marrying men. Nothing is more damaging to their self-esteem. My phone buzzes, and it is Julia with a message for Dan. I listen and sigh.
“She says,” I say to Dan, “tell Butterball it’s Mr. Tatum again. His landlord has cut off his electricity, and he’s having an asthma attack.”
Dan looks at me in horror.
“Will you let me take it here?” he asks, reaching for the phone.
“It’s the second time that son of a bitch has done this. By the time I get to my office, he might have hung up. The poor guy’s on SSI, and every time he gets behind on his rent, he gets his heat turned off.”
“Sure,” I say, handing the telephone to him.