They were all healthy success stories, each having willingly agreed to sell their kidney to pull their family out of poverty. They were posed against a non-descript Manila slum of corrugated shacks. Their lives were not changed so much. It was no different when you overdrew on a credit card. Extended credit, or pawning something, was never tied with absolute freedom, or to a definitive change of fortune. It bought the illusion of a certain respite from crushing debt. It let you luxuriate in things you did not need.
Nate’s cell phone beeped, a declarative one-liner email. In the lobby.
A minute passed, then five, then ten. Nate waited. The reel kept playing.
Theodore Feldman had done Helen Price a great harm. Nate believed it. It had taken a willful act to exert his improvident influence over a woman so fundamentally lost. She had a lazy float to the left eye. It gave her expression a flattening quality. She had never been good looking, and perhaps it was this that had made her susceptible to his father’s advances.
It had taken the two of them in their mutual foibles. Nate would make this conditional assessment, not to relieve his father of a great wrong, but to apportion how it happened, the ease with which Helen Price fell under his father’s influence.
She had represented a reprieve from the war, an endearing faithfulness, distinct from the underhanded affectations of Harper Delacroix, who as an incessant presence had foisted his Southern sensibilities on Shelby Feldman, who, in a desperation in coming north, was never truly comfortable there, no matter what Theodore Feldman or any other Northerner might have offered.
Nate could discharge their relationship as simply as that. He understood better what they never shared, but for a brief flicker in the intensity of the war.
Whatever about his mother, in those rare instances when Helen appeared on the reels, there was a strangeness of her general disposition, a stiffness to her movements. She pulled at her skirt and jacket, all of it managed, but not with any assuredness, so she was forever an amateur negotiating a bit part, a woman caught in some far cast plot she couldn’t finally manage, so her world, what she sought, had disappeared, and had long before she was born.
Nate was turned toward the door, caught in the beam of light. A tape was still playing, his father at his desk, the camera rolling in a stultifying omniscience God must have endured, watching over this man, this hero, determined to persevere as best he might a life, when his best days were behind him.
Nate closed and opened his eyes, his thoughts landing on the awful circumstance of Walter Price’s suicide. He had given absolutely no thought to the man, to this cuckolded man. What a terrible word! “Cuckold!” that it even existed in a language, that it had a name.
Did Walter Price know it?
*
Another email arrived, a single word, Here!
It had been a mistake summoning Norman Price. It had troubled Ursula greatly that Nate had come upon the idea of approaching Norman. It was a betrayal to her, extending their natural union in death. She had settled like a bad conscience.
He whispered, ‘Sorry’ into the grey dark.
Nate let out a long breath. In light of what he now knew, the meeting seemed pointlessly hurtful. How could he explain the reels, when he had come upon them so recently, and he had yet to come to terms with something not yet fully understood?
He would not presume to assert any influence as a half-brother, or as a half-not-brother. They were bound, but not in a way that should be pushed upon either of them. There could be nothing gained. He had been rash and too mindful of his own circumstances, when there was Norman Price to consider.
At some point in the future, he would forward the reels to Norman and let him configure his own understanding. It was decided.
He sent a cursory email, abrupt but deferential, ending any chance of their meeting. ‘Regrettably, due to unanticipated circumstances, I am returned to Canada. I beg your forgiveness.’
Of course, Norman Price, if he wanted, could have checked the desk to see if Nate was checked out. In fact, a minute later, the phone in the room rang and rang.
Nate held his breath, waiting for it to stop, its insistence in his head, the shrill ring. Norman Price knew he was there.
A minute passed, then another, and then five minutes.
Nate heard voices and footsteps along the corridor. He sat staring at his father, the tape at the end of the reel, the last tape. He purposely played it last, this the day he died, the quiet meditation of a life coming to an end. It was different from the other reels. The date was written in his handwriting, not Helen Price’s.
His father had set up the tripod. He walked toward the camera and away, sat with a conscious stiffness that his destiny was decided, and had been for a long time. He did not look up or drink in the way he did on other occasions.
He put his signature to a series of letters or statements, the flourish of his hand raised at the end of signing his name. At a certain point, his father simply stood, and, adjusting his tie, he was then out of frame. A sheer curtain billowed a moment later, a ghost passing, his father gone to his death.
The reel went on a good while longer in his absence. Fifteen minutes or so, until it was uncovered, who had jumped, because there was no identifying the body from such a height, a search conducted floor-by-floor, until there was the frightful desperation on Helen Price’s face, her hand raised to her mouth, upon entering the office. She was caught staring at the camera, the absolute horror of it, the wide-eyed stare and her mouth open in an awful bawling that he heard in his head, when there was no recorded sound.
The phone rang again, a shrill ring from another era, the inherent alarm in the sound itself when a phone was never at arm’s length, and it took a breathless rush to reach it. It kept on ringing. Nate had his hands to his ears.
Norman Price had the tenacity to knock on the door. He called Nate’s name, and when he was done knocking, when Nate was sure, when the persistent shadow from under the door was gone, when he heard the elevator door open and close, he unplugged the projector, let the bulb cool.
Standing in the sudden dark, he lifted the projector for its dead weight, to know he still existed, to somehow anchor the present.
PART II
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
24
THERE WAS ACTIVITY on the house, as the realtor described it, a tentative cash offer by a family of Mexicans.
The outstanding issue not yet managed was their legal status. The family had been to the house three times already. There was nothing easy in real estate, and it was made more difficult in the tightening of credit. An intermediary, a legal immigrant, might front the offer. It was done within their community. The realtor sounded unsure. She had not worked with this community before.
Under better market conditions, the house might have been a starter home for a young couple, a law grad, accountant, a medical intern, those of upwardly mobile means, starting out, the house close to the commuter train. A house, until recently, meant equity in soaring market values, monopoly money, a recoup against unrealistic student debt and credit cards. Accommodation had been made within the system.