The Afterlife: And Other Stories Page 3

  Ferris still remembered a moment, freighted with guilt and rapture, early in his separation from his wife, when the property where he had lived still called forth his husbandry. He had come out from Boston and he and his son, Jamie, then in his mid-teens, were up on the tennis court, readying it for winter by placing two-by-fours on the tapes and weighting them with rocks. Otherwise, the freezing and thawing of the clay lifted the aluminum nails during the winter. Ferris happened to glance up. At the far edge of the shaggy field a family of deer had emerged from the woods. It was an unseasonably warm day in November, misty, and in this mist the forms of the three deer—the stag, the doe, and the smallest, no longer a fawn—hesitated as if posed in a soft old photograph, elegant gray-brown creatures from the dignified prehuman world.

  “Look!” Ferris told his son quietly, but even this whispered utterance sent the ghostly forms racing, bounding across the wet unmowed field to the patch of woods in the opposite corner of the property, where the tidal creek turned. Ferris had not felt entitled, that haggard guilty day on the edge of winter, to so magical a sight, and had pressed it upon his son as if in compensation for his coming years of absence.

  Now his son, in his mid-twenties and called James or Jim, had grown accustomed to his absence, and the deer had become a famous civic problem, which Ferris read about in the Boston newspapers. They multiplied while the undeveloped land around them diminished; starving, they robbed the dunes of vegetation and ravished the landscaping of the expensive seaview homes being built above the marshes. A Christmas tree tossed out into the snow was stripped of needles by the frantic animals, even in daylight; at night, high-school couples parking on the beach lot found themselves surrounded by a crowd of deer standing mute and mendicant around the car. The deer in their delicate heraldic beauty had become as pestilential as rats, and the town, with its curious flair for scandal, where another town might have found a quiet solution, debated the issue into a storm of publicity. Nature-lovers from the other end of the commonwealth came to protest the selectmen’s proposal to import hired Army sharpshooters to reduce the herds. Irate women threatened to mingle, dressed in deerskin, with the animals on the scheduled day, thus sacrificing their own lives to the ideal of unpolluted natural process. Several veterinarians came to testify that starvation is relatively painless and weeds out the weak; others counter-testified that it is agony and selectively destroys the young. There were meetings, picketing, interviews on television. Meanwhile, throughout large regions of the town—and these the most fashionable and expensive—garbage cans were kicked open, azalea bushes eaten leafless, and dead deer bodies found frozen out by the bird feeders.

  Then, worse yet, it developed that the deer population was crawling with the tiny tick Ixodes dammini, which in turn harbored the spirochetes of Lyme disease, named after the town in Connecticut where it first was recognized. Round red lesions, malaise and fatigue, chills and fever and stiff neck: these are its symptoms. Its final results can be heart damage and lifelong arthritis. We live in plague times. As our species covers the earth like a scum, the bacteria and viruses and parasites inventively thrive. When Ferris lived in the town, no thought was given, for example, to venereal disease. Herpes and AIDS and chlamydia were unheard of; sexual affairs involved a spiritual and economic peril only. Men and women tasted one another as if at a smorgasbord of uncontaminated dishes, a tumble of treats, some steaming, some chilled, some nutritious, some not, but all clean.

  The deer-lovers were overruled, and on appointed days the sharpshooters descended on the dunes. But cases of Lyme disease continued to trickle into the local hospital from all along the beach road, where property values, always high, had been soaring, and now dipped.

  Ferris’s old property was not on the beach road, but on a road off of it, that led nowhere. The road went over a small arched bridge that spanned a tidal creek, passed a few more houses, and then became a turnaround of packed dirt amid the encroaching marsh grass, with its bleached litter of beer cans and horseshoe-crab shells. The road was paved as far as the bridge, and Ferris knew every turn, sway, and jolt in the ride; it, too, seemed sexy, and brought back younger days. It had been a woman’s town, dominated by female energy. To find oneself, of a weekday afternoon, in bed with another man’s wife was to have achieved a certain membership—an accreditation in primordial coin, a basic value within an Amazonian tribe. At parties, there were four kinds of people: women who had known a number of the men, men who had known a number of the women, and men and women who were innocent. Sometimes the latter were married to the uninnocent, and that produced sadness and divorce. Ferris was returning to visit Jamie, who was house-sitting while the former Mrs. Ferris was off for a week in Nova Scotia with the latest of the series of lovers and attendants that for ten years had failed to yield another husband. Ferris for all his failings had proved to be irreplaceable.

  The boy greeted his father with complaints, and looked exhausted. He stooped, and had not shaved for a day or two, so that black whiskers of an alarming virility stood out on his jaw and chin. “I’ve been trying to impose some order on the bushes,” he explained. “Mom just lets everything grow. She has this philosophy that every plant has a right to live.”

  Yes, Ferris recalled, that had been the local philosophy; while the women of surrounding, proper towns tended their gardens and joined Garden Clubs, the housewives here went off to the beach to deepen their already savage-looking tans. Personal cultivation had been the style, and horticultural neglect a token of liberation. Once Ferris had tried to prune a giant wisteria vine that was prying clapboards off the house, and his wife had accused him of being a butcher, a killer. All he had craved had been a little order. She had thought dandelions and burdock rather pretty and allowed the forsythia bush to swallow the yew hedge. The lawn had been mown primarily for croquet games and had emitted a different aroma in each month of summer—that of a spicy fresh salad in June, of a well’s deep walls in July, and of dry hay in August, with scuffed patches of earth around the improvised soccer goals, and oil-stains where the children had worked on their bicycles.

  August was Ferris’s favorite month. It was August now. “Jimmy, just don’t get into the poison ivy,” he warned his son, who as a boy had had a fearful case of it, his eyes swollen shut above scarlet, oozing cheeks. “Shiny leaves, always in sets of three. Not serrated and feathery, like Virginia creeper. Shiny, with a pinkish stem.”

  “That reminds me, Dad. I have something to show you.”

  “What?” Ferris’s heart skipped a beat.

  “I’ll show you inside.”

  Ferris took this as an invitation to survey the outdoors first. He and this boy who had replaced him as the man of the place walked up through the remnants of a onetime orchard to the neglected tennis court. The wire fencing that had once been virgin and rust-free, stapled to bolt-upright posts fragrant with creosote, now sagged under the burden of entwined honeysuckle. Rotten old sails had been spread along the edges, to suppress the weeds that invaded from the field. Ferris looked up toward the place in the field where he had once seen the deer, but saw only forest, taller and coming closer. Old photographs of this region showed clean curves of land, stripped for firewood and cropped by sheep, and a view clear across low drumlins to the sea. Now shaggy groves covered the high ground, and the saltwater of the channel merely glinted through, with the noise of motorboats and of teenagers gleefully shouting.

  “A big job,” he sighed to his son. In August, there came a scratching in the air, an unlocatable buzzing undercurrent that people called crickets or cicadas but that Ferris associated with the sound that a bedside electric clock makes beside an insomniac’s head in the night.

  “And the dumb pear trees,” his son went on, in that affronted voice children use, “keep producing all these pears to drop into the grass to gum up the mower.” His tone was a child’s but his timbre adult, an aggrieved baritone that went with the black whiskers, the thick powerful legs, the big-boned wrists and hands. Ferris
had trouble understanding the sex lives of his adult children. He had met some of this son’s girlfriends; they were presentable young women with well-conditioned figures, oily bleached ringlets, bright eyes, relaxed and sympathetic manners, and mouths curved in expectation of being amused. Yet, no sooner had Ferris mastered the name of one, and the rudiments of her geographical and educational background, than she was gone. None of them lasted, none of them apparently excited that romantic wish so common to men of Ferris’s generation, the wish to marry—to claim in the sight of church and state this female body, to enter into formalized intimacy as if into a territory to be conquered, tamed, sown, and harvested. The wife at the kitchen sink, the wife at the cocktail party or the entr’acte buffet, the wife showering to go out or coming back from shopping with sore feet, the wife docile on one’s arm or excitingly quarrelsome in the back of a taxi: the romance that, for Ferris, had attached to these images and made him want to marry not once but repeatedly had quite vanished from American culture—a casualty, perhaps, of co-ed dormitories or the impossible prices of starter housing. His deep-voiced son, for example, lived here for months at a time, with his lonely mother and her overgrown peony beds.

  Dogs bounded around the two men as they crossed the lank brown lawn to the kitchen door. Inside, the animals clattered and slid about on the linoleum in hope of being fed. There were three dogs, disparate mongrels acquired by Ferris’s former family at various impulsive moments and now collected here, along with a neighbor’s dog that had attached itself to the pack. Their hair was everywhere, on rugs and sofas and in little balls collected along the baseboards like tumbleweed along a barbed-wire fence. The furniture, much of it once joint property, seemed to float in temporary arrangement, not rooted in place but at rest—Fifties modern grown old and worn. The teak arms of the Danish chairs were cracked; the glass tabletops looked permanently smeared. His ex-wife had scattered garish throw pillows and squares of Indian cloth about as if to distract the eye, and these many festive patches intensified the air of dishevelment, of carefree improvisation, an air that made the shirt on Ferris’s chest and the very trousers on his legs caress his skin with an excited slither.

  His son at his side fetched a weary sigh. “I was going to paint the woodwork for a project but just keeping it halfways tidy in here and the kitchen seems to take all my time.”

  Ferris asked, “What did you want to show me?”

  “Oh yeah. I, er, have to lower my britches.”

  “Really? Well, do, I guess. Don’t be shy. I used to change your diapers.” Ferris’s blood raced with the mystery of it.

  Beneath his khaki pants his son wore boxer shorts, such as Ferris associated with old men. His father had worn such baggy underpants. Ferris wore Jockeys, the snugger the better. “On the back of my right thigh, Dad. Up high. See it?”

  “A big round red spot. How long have you had it?”

  “A while. I remember, about two weeks ago, this little critter bit me. A tiny tick—smaller than a dog tick. I didn’t think much about it but now this terrible itching and this hot feeling are there, where I can’t quite see it even with the mirror.”

  Ferris asked, though he knew the answer, “You’ve been working in the bushes?”

  “I had to,” the child whined. “They were coming into the yard. There was hardly any yard left. I’ve been feeling exhausted lately, too.”

  “Chills and fever?”

  “Chills once in a while. I don’t know about fever. The thermometer’s broken.”

  “Is your neck stiff?”

  “Only in the mornings, a little sometimes.”

  “Jamie, you poor guy. We must get you to a doctor.” As Ferris bent lower to re-examine the symptom, he tried to suppress the happy thought that he had got out just in time.

  Brother Grasshopper

  Fred Emmet—swarthy and thick-set, with humorless straight eyebrows almost meeting above his nose—had been an only child. If he ever fantasized a sibling for himself, it was a sister, not a brother. His father had had a brother, an older brother, who, he let it be known, had dominated him cruelly. Yet into even his more resentful reminiscences crept a warmth that Fred envied, as he tried to imagine the games of catch, decades ago, on the vacant lots of a city that no longer had vacant lots, and the shared paper route in snow that was deeper and more dramatic than any snow today is, with a different scent—the scent of wet leather and of damp wool knickers. Though his father’s brother had deliberately thrown the ball too hard, and finished delivering papers to his side of the street first and never came back to help but instead waited inside the warm candy store, a brother was something his father had had, augmenting his existence, giving it an additional dimension available to him all his life. “My brother down in Deerfield Beach,” he would drop into a conversation, or “If you were to express that view to my brother, he’d tell you flat out you’re crazy.” And, though the brothers lived over a thousand miles apart, one in Florida and the other in New Jersey, and saw each other less than once a year, they died within a few months of each other, Fred’s father following his older brother as if into one more vacant lot, to shag flies for him.

  But this was years later, when Fred’s own children were grown, or nearly. He had married early, right after Harvard, supplying himself with another roommate, as it were, rather than launching into life alone. He envied siblings their imagined power of consultation, of conspiring against parents who otherwise would be too powerful. Not the least of the charms his future wife held for him was her sister—a younger sister also at Radcliffe, with her own circle of friends. Germaine was more animated, more gregarious, and more obviously pretty than Fred’s sensible Betsy. Among her numerous suitors the most conspicuous was Carlyle Saughterfield, a tall bony New Englander with a careless, potent manner.

  Fred had been sickly and much-protected as a child, and even his late growth spurt had left him well under six feet tall. He found Carlyle, who was two years older than he and a student at the Business School across the river, exotic and intimidating—a grown man with his own car, a green Studebaker convertible, and confident access to the skills and equipment of expensive sports like sailing, skiing, climbing, and hunting. Carlyle and his B-School friends would load up his snappy green convertible with skis and boots and beer and sleeping bags and head north into snow country with the top down. Details of their mountain adventures made Fred shudder—sheer ice, blinding fog, tainted venison that left them all vomiting, ski trails bearing terrible names like Devil’s Head and Suicide Ravine. Climbing in the White Mountains one summer, Carlyle had seen a friend fall, turning in the air a few feet away as Carlyle pressed into the cliff and gripped the pitons.

  “What was the expression on his face?” Fred asked.

  Carlyle’s somewhat protuberant eyes appeared to moisten, as he visualized the fatal moment. “Impassive,” he said.

  His voice, husky and hard to hear, as if strained through something like baleen, was the one weak thing about him; but even this impressed Fred. Back in New Jersey, the big men, gangsters and police chiefs and Knights of Columbus, spoke softly, forcing others to listen.

  As their courtship of the Terwilliger sisters proceeded in parallel, Fred and Carlyle spent an accumulating number of hours together. In the spring, waiting for the girls to come out of their dorms, they played catch in the Quad with a squash ball; Carlyle’s throws made Fred’s hands sting and revived his childhood fear of being hit in the face and having an eye or a tooth knocked out. The strength stored in the other man’s long arms and wide, sloping shoulders was amazing—a whippy, excessive strength almost burdensome, Fred imagined, to carry. Carlyle had been a jock at prep school, but in college had disdained organized sports; a tendency to veer away from the expected was perhaps another weakness of his. Behind the Business School, across from Harvard Stadium, a soccer field existed where the future financiers played touch football. Carlyle passed for immense distances, sometimes into Fred’s eagerly reaching hands, and protectively saw
to it that his timorous and undersized brother in courtship usually played on his team.

  In March of the year that Fred and Betsy graduated, the two couples went skiing, and Carlyle was as patient as a professional instructor, teaching Fred the snowplow and stem christie and carefully bringing him down, at the end of the day, through the shadows of the intermediate slope. All these upper-class skills involved danger, Fred noticed. That summer, after he and Betsy had married, Carlyle took them and Germaine sailing on Buzzards Bay and, while the two sisters stretched out in their underwear for sunbaths on the bow, commanded in his reedy voice that Fred take the tiller and hold the mainsheet—take all this responsibility into his hands!

  “Take it. Push it left to make the prow move to the right. The prow’s the thing in front.”

  “I’d just as soon rather not. I’m happy being a passenger.”

  “Take it, Freddy.”

  The huge boat leaned terrifyingly under gusts of invisible pressure, the monstrous sail rippling and the mast impaling the sun and the keel slapping blindly through the treacherous water, nothing firm under them, even the horizon and its islands skidding and shifty. Nevertheless, the boat did not capsize. Fred gradually got a slight feel for it—for the sun and salt air and rocking horizon. Germaine’s breasts in their bra were bigger than Betsy’s, her pubic bush made a shadowy cushion under her underpants as the sisters lazily, trustfully chattered. Carlyle’s face, uplifted to the sun with bulging closed eyelids, had a betranced look; his colorless fair hair, already thinning, and longer than a businessman’s should be, streamed behind him in the wind. This bastard, Fred thought, as the boat sickeningly heeled, is trying to make a man of me.

  When, the following summer, Germaine graduated and married Carlyle, the groom chose Fred over all his old skiing and hunting buddies to be his best man, perhaps in courteous symmetry with Betsy, the matron-of-honor. He bought Fred a beige suit to match his own; the coat hung loose on Fred’s narrow shoulders, and the sleeves were too long, but he felt flattered nonetheless. Betsy was five months pregnant, so her ceremonial dress, of royal-blue silk, was too tight. Between them, they joked, it came out even. So young, they were already launched on creating another generation.