Due Preparations for the Plague

“Yes,” Lowell says.

He has several evening hours to kill, hours to kill, and he moves like the Ancient Mariner from this bar to that. He drinks beer, only beer, and only Sam Adams. “It’s a kind of a statement,” he tells the bartender. “A reaction against the cocktail parties I had to endure. My father tried to keep me in those social circles, and I won’t touch spirits or wine.” After two schooners of Sam Adams, he leans toward the guy on the next barstool.

“My father gave the impression,” Lowell says, “of a man soldered to doom.”

His listener grunts and glances momentarily sideways, then returns to the TV screen. “Yankees gonna win,” he tells Lowell gloomily. “You a Yankee fan?”

“No,” Lowell says.

“Good.”

“My father knew in his bones he was doomed,” Lowell explains. “He accepted it, he didn’t think he had any choice, but he took it like a man. He made a vow he’d give no sign. At any rate, that was my theory when I was sixteen years old, and I still hold to it.” He orders another drink for himself and for the ball-game watcher. “Of course, it cost him,” he says.

He shakes his head sadly.

“Manager oughta change pitchers,” his neighbor complains.

Lowell says, “He should have changed games, but he was stubborn.”

“At times,” he tells someone else in a different tavern at the dangerous end of M Street, “you would have thought he was a robot. You would have thought some kingpin was pushing buttons on his remote. I mean, even the way he moved. He had this strange jerky—I don’t know, as though his clockwork was jammed.”

Lowell’s clockwork moves smoothly on amber juice.

“Hey, listen, pal.” A black bartender, big as a house, bends toward him. “Don’t want to be nosy, it’s your funeral. But don’t you think you’ve had a few too many?”

“I asked him once,” Lowell says, as though earnestly refuting the bartender’s claim, “is it the Mafia or something? Because it wasn’t just the Soviets, you know. They kept tabs on all sorts, the Mafia, the Klan, the neo-Nazis, the crazy Unabomber types, you name it. And you and me, we’d be a lot more worried about a Mafia contract than the Soviets, right?”

“Listen, pal,” the bartender says, “I don’t think you fully understand where you are. What part of town, I mean. I think you got the wrong joint.”

“I got the feeling something dangerous was yanking his strings,” Lowell explains earnestly. He leans back, straining against fierce bonds. “It was like there was this hidden force dragging him one way, but he dug in his heels and kept on going in the other. Or tried to.” Lowell’s body jerks itself around, fish on a line. “It was probably only me who noticed,” he says. “Maybe I imagined it. He got kind of distant after the plane exploded. Even more so, I mean. Couldn’t reach him. Work gobbled him up.”

The bartender rolls his eyes.

“Depressed?” Lowell asks, on the bartender’s behalf. “You think so? Good question, when you think of the way my mother … But he never had any patience with stuff like that. No excuses, no whining. He couldn’t stand wimps who let personal matters … the therapy junkies spilling their guts, you know the type. Common as dirt in this neck of the woods, I bet. I bet you hear a few sob stories. Confessions a dime a dozen around here, I’ll bet. And now it’s all over,” he says. He looks around the bar and pronounces solemnly and drunkenly, “My father, Mather Lowell Hawthorne, died on September ninth in the year 2000, just four days short of the thirteenth anniversary of the death of my mother.”

“R.I.P.,” the bartender says. “Go home and sleep it off, pal. You’ve had enough.”

“For which death, he seemed to hold himself responsible,” Lowell announces. “Against all logic.”

He lifts his glass.

“You celebrating?” the bartender asks.

Lowell watches the light move through his beer.

Mather Hawthorne was already dead, the coroner has explained to him, at the point of impact with a shagbark hickory. Lowell closes his eyes and imagines the scattershot of nuts, kettledrummers of death. Although the wreckage of the car is absolute, and although Lowell’s stepmother (his father’s young third wife) was barely able to identify the body, the mortuary certificate indicates, Death due to natural causes: heart attack.

“Fortunately,” Lowell explains in an all-night hamburger joint, “the accident happened in the small hours of the morning and there were no other cars on the road. My father was only sixty-seven.”

Lowell can imagine himself repeating all this, casually, from time to time, and after several drinks, to strangers at parties and in bars.

4.

At the cemetery, Lowell feels strangely lightened. He wonders if the sense of freedom, the sense of a lifelong congestion clearing, might be what other people call happiness. He wonders if he might be able to begin to be as other people are. Now officially orphaned, he feels for the first time in his life not-lonely. Rain is falling lightly, which seems appropriate. An old self is being washed away. Lowell feels clean and new. He is barely able to restrain himself from a gregarious impulse to tug at the sleeve of one of the other pallbearers, a total stranger in an officer’s uniform, some former colleague of his father’s no doubt, and say: I was an only child. For many years, I tried with all my heart and soul to please my father, but I was a disappointment to him.

He manages not to splash confession on the pallbearer’s sleeve, but he does nod at his stepmother and smile. She is small and pale and looks, Lowell thinks, rather striking dressed in grief. Is she beautiful? He supposes so; his father always had an eye for women; but since this thought evokes the memory of Lowell’s own mother, he shies away from it. Even so, his stepmother or the occasion or something else makes him smile again. His smile goes on too long. Elizabeth, his stepmother, raises an eyebrow in surprise and stares at him.

Words, intoned, drift between and obscure Lowell’s view.

… exceptional service to his country … Mather Lowell Hawthorne, guardian of our most precious … unsung work, and invisible, but essential to the preservation of liberty and justice for all.

Mather Lowell Hawthorne’s widow is not much older than her stepson, who now, on impulse, pulls a gardenia from the wreath that she has placed on his father’s coffin and hands it to her. Some of the mourners exchange glances. Elizabeth begins to cry then, soundlessly. Her hair, rain-wet, clings to her cheeks, and Lowell wonders if perhaps they may begin to become not-lonely together.

Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of His great mercy to take unto Himself the soul of Mather Lowell Hawthorne, we therefore commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope …

“I hardly knew my father, really,” Lowell tells Elizabeth later, hours later, over drinks in a quiet lounge. “I worshiped him when I was little. He wasn’t often home, but when he was, he used to sit on my bed and tell me stories. Strange stories to tell a child, I suppose, but I was greedy for them. I hung on his every word: Greek gods and goddesses, the Iliad and the Odyssey. My favorite was Odysseus tied to the mast, trying to hurl himself into the sea while the sirens sang.”

“How old were you?”

“Four. Five.”

“Must have given you strange dreams,” Elizabeth says.

“I still have mermaid fantasies. I get a humming in my ears whenever I see a woman with wet hair.”

“Sometimes,” Elizabeth says, lowering her eyes and studying the stem of her glass, “in the middle of the night, I would find him reading Homer in his study. He said it calmed him.”

“That was always his first love. But he won prizes in math and science too, and that’s where he went.”

“He claimed all he ever really wanted to be was a classics professor.”

“Sometimes I believed that,” Lowell says. “But mostly I didn’t. What made him take the direction he finally did, I’ve never understood.”

“They needed linguists,” she says. “In Intelligence. That’s what he told me. Especially ones with scientific training as well. An old friend from his prep school recruited him, he said.”

“He used to have me reciting Homer in Greek at dinner parties when I was six,” Lowell says. “Like a little parrot. His personal performing dwarf. Still, he was less strange to me then than later.”

“It was like living in parallel universes, he said. All the time. Simultaneously.” Elizabeth sighs and turns the stem of her wineglass in her fingers, clockwise, three revolutions. “I was never sure which one he was in when he was with me.”

“He was always somewhere else. Even when he was with us, he wasn’t with us. I never really knew him at all.”

“I didn’t either,” she says.

“I wanted so much to please him, but he kept on raising the bar. I could never measure up. So of course I chose to measure down. Easier to get his attention.”

“I had the same problem,” she says. “I could never measure up either.”

“That’s not true.” Lowell stares at her. “You were the ideal Washington hostess, he told me. Everything my mother wasn’t, he said.”

“I tried,” she says. “I was sad when you stopped accepting our invitations.”

“Not your fault,” he assures her.

“You and I never got a chance to know each other.”

“No. Well. Nothing to do with you.”

“So why?”

“Well, he just made me too nervous. I always felt like I was twelve years old again, not measuring up. And then, Rowena … I mean, my own marriage falling apart. I didn’t want one of his third-degrees.”

“Your father was sad too. When you stopped coming, I mean.”

“That’s a laugh. My father couldn’t stand sadness. My mother was sad for years, and it irritated him. It irritated him to have me around.”

“I think you’re wrong,” she says. “I think he missed you. He was very proud of you.”

“Oh no, believe me, he was embarrassed by me. He sent me to his own boarding school—”

“Yes, I know.”

“—but I blew it. Loser in a school for winners. My father’s name was on all the honor boards, Mather Lowell Hawthorne, gold medal in this, gold medal in that, Latin, Greek, math, physics, athletics, glee club, drama club. Awful. Like a millstone around my neck. Most expensive private school in Massachusetts, and I could always see him thinking sow’s ear when he looked at me.”

“He kept a photograph of you on the bedroom dresser.”

“He did?”

“You’re wearing your school blazer and holding a silver cup.”

“Oh yeah. That. Cross-country run. Only prize I ever won. Yeah, I’m good at running. Running away’s my specialty. But there you are. The way my father calls it, you win or you lose. He was a winner, I was a loser. Like my mother.”

“You seem to me very like your father,” she says. “Sharp-minded and courtly and sad.”

“Courtly! Me?” Lowell laughs. He looks curiously at his reflection in the dark plate glass behind the bar.

“He could be so gentle,” she says. “It’s not true that he never showed his feelings. He was always sad. Always haunted.”

“He was haunted,” Lowell agrees. “My mother did that. You know she left him for another man before the … I never forgave her. They were both on that plane.”

“No, I didn’t know,” she says. “You mean they went down together, your mother and her—?”

“Not down. You know the details. The hijacking, the explosion.”

“Hijacking?” she says, leaning forward, avid. “I don’t know details. I hardly know anything. He’d never—He just said she died in an airline disaster.”

Lowell is stunned. “September ’87,” he says. “Paris to New York, the nerve-gas hijackers—”

“Oh my God. That hijacking.”

“Air France Si—I can’t say it. I’m superstitious about the number.”

“No survivors.” Elizabeth presses her hand against her lips. “Isn’t that right?”

“Except for the children.”

“Oh, the children, that’s right, I remember now. I remember seeing those poor little children on TV.”

“I can’t believe you didn’t know.”

“No. Nothing. He’d never say a word about the past. I’ve always been curious.”

“Look,” he says uneasily. “It isn’t something I can talk about.”

“No, of course not. I’m sorry.” She plays with her wineglass, puddling spilled wine with her finger. She draws an S in the liquid on the low table. “Was the man’s name Sirocco? The man your mother left him for?”

Lowell frowns. “It was Levinstein. Violinist.”

“Who was Sirocco?”

“I have no idea.”

“He was tormented by Sirocco,” she says. “He used to cry out in his sleep.”

“My father?”

“He never mentioned Sirocco to you?”

“Doesn’t ring any bells. Mafia, maybe? They gathered intelligence on all sorts.”

“What exactly was Mather’s role?” she wants to know.

“I never exactly knew. Not precisely. Gathering information and misinformation and deciding which was which, I suppose. He was a spook, and then after the hijacking, when he stopped junketing all over the planet, he trained spooks. That’s all I know. Maybe he still did other stuff too, I really don’t know. He used to say someone has to do the dirty work to keep the country safe. I never got much more detail than that.”

“Nor did I,” she says.

“When I was little, he was always flying off to talk to ‘contacts’. He’d never tell us where, but I’d pick up clues, you know. He’d bring back presents and say, Got it in a bazaar in Cairo, or, The wives of the camelmen in Afghanistan make these. Stuff like that.”

“We never traveled anywhere by plane. He wouldn’t let me fly alone either.”

“Planes spooked him after ’87. Plus I think, you know, he was pushed into semi-retirement. I think they were afraid he was losing it. Kept him in Washington.”

“There used to be a car and a driver,” she says. “Every day. And then suddenly, no more official limo, and he had to use his own car. Mostly he shut himself up in his study with his computer and his books.”

“They put him out to pasture,” Lowell says. “Short life span in Intelligence, he always said that.”

“It gnawed at him,” she says. “It wasn’t just the nightmares. Sometimes he would disappear all night. Just driving round the city, I think.”

Lowell stares at her.

“I could tell from the mileage,” she says. “I’d check the odometer. He could put in fifty, sixty miles in a night.”

“I told you he was a stranger to me. I knew the mailman better.”

“There was no one I could ask about it,” she says. “Everything’s classified, or else that was his excuse.”

“Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies,” Lowell says. “I know the routine.”

“He said if I mentioned anything to anyone, our lives were in danger. I never knew whether to believe him or not.”

“I never knew either,” Lowell says. “This calling out in his sleep … did he do that often?”

“Toward the end, every night. Arguing with Sirocco. Shouting at him. Or with Salamander. That name mean anything?”

“Not to me.”

“They stalked him. They terrified him. Especially Sirocco.”

“I guess I suspected he was losing it. But he kept such a tight hold on himself.”

From the pocket of her black suit jacket, she takes the gardenia that Lowell gave her at the graveside and holds it in the palm of her hand. The edges of the petals have turned brown. She reaches for Lowell’s hand and opens it and places the gardenia in it. “And now we have both lost Mather,” she says. “Permanently.”

At that point, he is able to cry; well, not cry, exactly, not cry in any luxurious or extravagant or consolatory or even noticeable way, but he does become aware of functioning tear ducts, of a physical sense of swollenness, of overflow which moves him profoundly. The fact of grief moves him, as of some precious thing long mislaid. He is overcome by this reentry into the experience of emotion per se, and he thinks of it as an atmosphere emanating from Elizabeth. She drives him back to the airport and he wears dark glasses and stares out the window all the way.

“You could stay the night, Lowell,” she offers.

He turns then, but does not remove his dark glasses. They sit for some time, not speaking, on the fifth level of the airport parking garage. When she turns the key in the ignition, as though agreement has been reached, he says, “Thank you, Elizabeth, but I can’t. Rowena says Amy and Jason will panic if I don’t get back tomorrow, and I know she’s right. The kids … you know, I have a bad effect on them, but they need to see me. They need to know I’m okay. I promised I’d take them to the Public Garden tomorrow.”

“You will need to go through your father’s things,” she says, “and decide what you want. Give me a call when you’re ready. You can stay at the house.”

“All right,” he promises. “And anytime you’re in Boston …”

But weeks pass, and they do not make contact with each other again, and then Dr. Reuben calls Lowell.

5.

One month after the funeral, Lowell receives a letter of sorts and certain documents in his father’s handwriting. Dr. Reuben delivers the package, and the circumstances are strange.

“I’ve just flown up from Washington,” Dr. Reuben says. “Your father wanted me to do this personally.”

Lowell tries to put a face to the voice on the telephone. “Do I know you?”

“No, you don’t, and I’m afraid I don’t know Boston. We need to meet somewhere central and very public. Where do you suggest?”

“I don’t understand,” Lowell says later. They are walking side by side in the Public Garden. Lowell marvels at the shine on Dr. Reuben’s black leather shoes. His own sneakers are badly scuffed.

“I was your father’s psychiatrist,” Dr. Reuben explains.

“I see. I didn’t know he—I never thought he had any time for that sort of thing.” Lowell is mesmerized by the flash of black leather alongside his own paint-spattered joggers. He and his father’s psychiatrist are out of step. His sneakers do a quick-step, skip-step, to bring themselves into alignment, but Dr. Reuben stops abruptly—startled or perhaps affronted by the maneuver—and looks back over his shoulder. When they move forward again, they are still not in step.

“Precautions had to be taken,” Dr. Reuben says. He seems to be embarrassed, and is seized by a fit of coughing as though the words are too peppery in his mouth. His eyes water. “At least,” he says, “your father believed so.” He gives way to another short paroxysm of coughing and then laughs in a self-deprecating way. “Your father was very convincing. You know what I’m talking about?”

“I’m not sure,” Lowell says.

“To tell you the truth, I can’t tell if all this is necessary, or if I’ve been swept up into his condition.” Dr. Reuben looks sideways at Lowell, waiting.

“His heart condition? Congestive heart failure, they said—”

“No,” Dr. Reuben says. “I mean paranoia.”

Lowell thinks: This is a trap. My father has arranged for this. He’s paid someone to keep tabs and report on me. He’s keeping postmortem files.

“He believed he was to be murdered,” Dr. Reuben says. “Does that surprise you?”

“What?” Lowell says.

“Murder wasn’t his word for it. Eliminated, he said. I actually tried to get hold of the police report, you know, to see if brake lines were cut, anything like that. But just as he always said, the police reports were classified. Still, I think suicide is equally likely.”

“He had a heart attack at the wheel,” Lowell says. “There was a medical report.”

“Hmm. Maybe. I was unable to see a copy of that report.”

Lowell frowns. “Well, I saw it.” Then he thinks about it. “Maybe I didn’t. I guess they told me and it didn’t occur … It was classified too?”

“Classified.”

“Did you know it was the anniversary—?”

“Of course. That’s why I believe it was suicide. I’ll tell you what I think. I think he made the arrangements I’m about to discuss with you, and then his conscience was clear. It was the thing he had to do, and then he could eliminate himself. But either way, it’s … well, really, I’m ethically bound. There are only two sacrosanct relationships, aren’t there? Priests and shrinks. He might have been mad, or he might have been right. I’m supposed to be the one who can tell.” There is something plaintive about the laugh this time.

He made arrangements, Lowell thinks wearily. Surprise, surprise. So there will be conditions. There will be expectations. And still Lowell will not measure up.

For a month, one calm month, he has been almost at peace.

“This is not a situation I have ever encountered before,” Dr. Reuben says. In the Public Garden, the trees are turning red and gold. “And even now I can’t swear that I haven’t been infected with his … condition. I mean, I can observe myself becoming paranoid, which is an interesting and curious thing for a psychiatrist to observe in himself. Do you see that man staring at us?”

“Where?”

“The man on the bench over there.”

“The one reading the newspaper?”

“He’s staring at us.”

“He’s watching that little kid on the tricycle.”

“Maybe,” Dr. Reuben says. “But you see what I mean? Now that he’s gone, I’ve started to think like your father. Just the same, it seems better to err on the side of caution. And I made your father a promise. I did make him a promise. And I could tell that once I had made that promise, something shifted within him. His conscience was clear. Or as clear as past events would ever permit. Let’s sit here for a while.”

From a bench beside the pond, they watch the swan boats with their cargo of tourists rock gently in one another’s wakes. Willows trail in the water. Families throw crumbs to the ducks. “You will make of his message what you will,” Dr. Reuben says. “Even I haven’t seen the tapes or the journal, you understand.”

“You’ve got something to give me from him.”

“Indirectly. I have a key to give you. I will leave it on this bench and I want you to put your hand over it, very casually, and stay like that for a full ten minutes after I walk away.” He gives another embarrassed laugh. “I am quoting your father’s directions verbatim. If nothing else, he had a finely developed sense of the dramatic.”

Lowell thinks about this. A phrase comes back to him suddenly, falling out of a willow tree: the necessary rituals of risk.

Where are you going, Daddy?

I can’t tell you that, son, but I’ll bring back a present. One for Mommy and one for you.

When will you be back?

I can’t tell you that, Lowell.

For show-and-tell, we have to share if our daddy is on a trip and we have to show pictures.

I’m sorry, Lowell, but I can’t tell you where I’m going.

What will I say in show-and-tell? Will I say that my daddy is not allowed to tell where he’s going?

No, no, you mustn’t say that I can’t say.

What will I say?

You could tell them that your daddy’s on a business trip to Hawaii.

You’re going to Hawaii?

No, I’m not going to Hawaii, but that’s what you can say in show-and-tell.

I can tell them a lie?

Sometimes, when you have to look after the whole country, a lie is not really a lie. These are the necessary rituals of risk, Lowell. Do you understand? If you say anything, you could put lives in danger.

It was a catechism that Lowell often rehearsed to himself. I must never never say that I’m not allowed to say.

“This key?” Lowell asks. This damned key to a Pandora’s box of secrets that he has no wish to know.

“It’s the key to a locker at Logan Airport,” Dr. Reuben says. “International terminal. Locker B–64.”