shop early because the printing order he was supposed to wrap and deliver had been canceled. It was Saturday afternoon. Early summer. Ricky had left his bike beside the house, and he decided he’d put it in the garage. That meant a detour that took him across the grass right under the window where Martin Mathias spent his days. He’d heard his parents talking, and the anger in his father’s voice had stopped him. He’d never heard that tone before.
“I think, she’d been cleaning him up. After a bowel movement, probably. Doing one of those humiliating personal things. And something must have gone wrong and he was yelling at her. Or actually, I guess he was yelling at himself. He was calling her names. I remember he kept repeating ‘Stubborn as a damned mule.’ And he said he knew Mother wouldn’t put him out of his misery by killing him, easy as that would be. And he could understand that. He could understand the moral problem. But why wouldn’t she give him a divorce? Would that hurt her pride? Make her feel she’d been a failure? Or put him in a nursing home. Would the neighbors think that was selfish of her? If she didn’t want to have a life for herself, she should have one for Ricky and me. And then my mother said something too low for me to hear, and he said, ‘That’s not true. Dr. Morick is in love with you. He always has been. He could give you a decent life.’ And she said something like, ‘I’d be bored to death.’ And I didn’t hear any more of it.”
“You went away?” Julian asked.
“I went back to the shop and got the pistol my father had kept in a cabinet there. A little twenty-two-caliber revolver. I loaded it and put it in my pocket and went home again.”
“To kill your father?”
“When I had a chance. When my mother wasn’t there.”
Julian shifted in the pew, sighed. “The tragedy multiplies itself,” he said. “Love and pity can make a terrible blend if faith is left out of it.”
“Faith? Faith in what? Faith that God would mend a damaged spinal cord?”
“All right, then,” Julian said. “I hope you can tell me that, without faith, this story of yours had a happy ending. You didn’t kill him, did you?”
“Not me,” Moon said, and laughed. “Not likely. Mother went back to the shop after dinner. It was my night to take care of Dad, so Ricky was off somewhere. I went in his room and he said something normal to me, like what was new down at the shop or something like that, and I told him I had overheard him yelling at Mother and I asked him if he really wanted to die, and he said-”
Moon stopped. He was having trouble with this. Julian sat motionless beside him, waiting. Moon cleared his throat.
“And he said he was terribly sorry I had heard that. That sometimes one just loses control and says things he regrets. And I said, But do you really want to die? Would you if you could, if no one would suffer for it, if you could just force yourself to stop breathing, for example? He didn’t answer that for a while. Just studied me. And then he said, Yes, he would. It would be better for him and for Victoria and for all of us. Then I showed him the pistol. I told him I would do it for him.”
Moon stopped again, remembering that moment as he had remembered it a thousand times, remembering fumbling the pistol out of his pocket, its oily smell, showing his father that it was loaded. And his father’s expression. Every time he remembered it, it seemed that when the surprise had gone away it had been replaced by a kind of longing. And then by pride. That’s what it looked like. But how could it have been?
“Tell me why you didn’t,” Julian said. “You were-what? Thirteen or fourteen? Not wise enough yet to see why you shouldn’t.”
“Thirteen by then,” Moon said. “Well, we talked about it, the pros and cons. He said it would be better if he did it himself. Asked me to put the pistol in the hand he could move a little. He could hold it down in his lap, but he couldn’t raise it up to his head. Then he said nobody would believe it anyway. How could I explain his getting the pistol? Too many people would know he couldn’t have shot himself. He told me to take the pistol, and I did, and he asked if there was still that box of rat poison on the high shelf down at the plant. I told him that Mother had said it was too dangerous to have around and got rid of it.
“He said then he guessed we’d have to wait a little while, but not long. Dr. Morick had said his liver was failing fast and he wouldn’t live long anyway. Victoria would not have to put up with him much longer. But if I killed him, I would be her burden for the rest of her life. Her heart would break for me.”
“Indeed,” Julian said, “it would have. Your father was a wise man. So you put away the pistol?”
“Mother came in while we were talking. I must have been terribly upset. I didn’t hear the car.”
“And she heard you?”
“I was still holding the pistol. Dad saw her standing there in the doorway. And he said, ‘ Victoria. Malcolm overheard me yelling at you this afternoon and has offered to solve our problem for us. I think I’ve persuaded him it would just make a bad situation worse.’”
Moon took a huge shuddering breath.
“And she came in and took the pistol out of my hand and hugged me and started crying. We were all crying, all three of us.”
“Catharsis,” Julian said. “So you did have a happy ending. Sometimes love can be as effective as faith.”
Moon cleared his throat again. “Ah,” he said. “But that’s not the ending.”
“It couldn’t be,” Julian said. “Your story hasn’t come yet to the great sin you’ve teased me with. Did that involve your father?”
“He died the next year,” Moon said. “When I was fourteen. And my mother mourned for him.”
“And so did you,” Julian said.
“So ‘I had the example. A brave man and a brave woman and some notion of what you give up for love. So I didn’t have any excuse.”
“Excuse for what? Oh, for what you are about to tell me you did?”
“For what I did,” Moon said. “I had killed a man. I was driving drunk and driving an army vehicle off the post without authorization. We did it a lot, but the crime is being caught at it. So I was awaiting trial. Clearly guilty. The charge was homicide committed during the conduct of a felony. Drunk driving being the felony. I was assigned a first lieutenant as defense attorney. He advised me to plead guilty, saving the court time, and plead for leniency. The most I’d get was twenty years. I was terrified.”
“I can see why,” Julian said. “How old were you then, early twenties?”
“I don’t know why I was so frightened. Not for sure, anyway. I think maybe it was because I didn’t know myself very well yet. It seemed that a military prison was not the place I should be spending so much of my life. I felt like I was going to be buried alive.”
“Reasonable,” Julian said.
“My mother was notified, of course, and she came to see me. I told her about the lawyer. What he had said. She said that was intolerable. I said it was also inevitable. And she said surely something could be done. I said no it couldn’t be done, because we had no money for the big law firms and no political clout. I gave her the whole self-pity business. If I couldn’t have freedom, have my life back, at least I could wring some sympathy from my mother. And I did.”
Moon hesitated.
“I even cried,” he added. “I’ll never forget that. I actually cried.”
“Twenty years in prison,” Julian said. “I would have cried too. Who wouldn’t?”
“So my mother went home, and almost right away I got a letter from her. She was marrying Dr. Morick.”
“An,” Julian said.
“I told you Morick was Dad’s doctor. But he also had inherited real estate, and he was smart, and he’d made great investments in California land and in Florida beachfront. And was chairman of the county Democrats and a great friend of a congressman on the House Military Affairs Committee and had all sorts of connections. A lawyer showed up at the stockade, a white-haired man with an assistant carrying his briefcase. He took about fifteen pages of notes on what happened, and who questioned me, and what went on in the military hospital. And-guess what-a little later somebody at a higher level reexamines the charges, and they are reduced to conduct unbecoming a noncommissioned officer, unauthorized use of a military vehicle, and so forth. The penalty becomes loss of rank, loss of six months’ pay, and a general discharge.”
That finished the story for Moon. His confession had been made. He was tired.
Julian considered it. “Someone might say that was a happy ending,” he said. “But it wasn’t. Not for you.”
