North of Montana

smash right into it.

Wild Bill climbs out. “This is a government vehicle!” His arms fly up and back down to his sides. Then he shakes his head and skates back inside, slams the door, and we begin our slide across Boston. It feels like I am going sideways. There are wrecks at every intersection. The AM radio blasts an old Rod Stewart song, “Maggie May,” out the open windows and the heater is turned up to broil. I am reckless. I know nothing about this city except that it is complex beyond imagining. There are millions of beds in this city like cocoons in a butterfly colony and inside each one is a unique individual with a unique history about to be born or replicate itself or die except for me: I don’t have a bed, I think with boozy self-pity, skidding to a lopsided stop at a light on a corner before a row of darkened redbrick town houses. Behind one drawn parchment shade there is a warm light. Maybe there, in a room I will never see, in a city I know nothing about, a mother is awake nursing a child and the child is at peace.

Certainly not my mother, and not me. She was there, in the house, but vague. What the hell was she doing? I demand to know in the middle of Commonwealth Avenue. The question arises, righteous and crystal clear. Why don’t I remember being held by my mother or soothed by her, why was I always alone in my room, listening to her cry? Because she didn’t want to have me, comes the self-righteous response. She was a teenager and pregnant and her lowlife boyfriend split. She was weak and couldn’t cope with having a half-breed brat. Only Poppy was strong enough to love me.

When we get to the Prudential Center, Walker waves his gloved fist out the window of the now battered and bruised government vehicle and heads off. I plunge into some mammoth underground garage and rise up again carrying my suitcase to a lobby like every other in America, then rise even further to a room with a stunning view of the city, hard white lights and provocative red ones; sitting down at a desk, inebriated, reaching for the phone instinctively, unreasonably, selfishly, from unutterable loneliness for the only one who loved me, dialing 8 for long distance and then the number where my grandfather lies asleep in the icy cold bedroom of the condominium in Desert Hot Springs, California, longing to wake him from his deep stillness and bring him back to me, but the phone rings emptily many times and I cannot.

I force myself to drink three glasses of water and strip down to my underpants before sinking into the thick soft mattress where I pull the sheet, blanket, and heavy bedspread over my shoulders and dream about the helicopter.

I am outside the Santa Monica police station holding my grandfather’s big warm hand. Everything is colored red by sunset light, like looking through the orange wrapper of a Charms lollypop. The President’s helicopter is landing in a storm of fine orange chalk, its huge belly pressing down on us — I am terrified that we are going to be crushed. The chopper touches down and JFK climbs out, floating along the steps, not waving, very sober, something is wrong. He is wearing a dark suit. His face is dead white and his head is mangled by bloody gunshot wounds. He is a walking corpse.

Beneath the heavy coverings I wake up frozen stiff, mummified by fear. The dream is not about JFK. It is about my father, bloodied and dead.

• • •

Wild Bill Walker and I are sharing a bench in a playground on the northwest corner of the Cambridge Commons. It is hard to tell which direction is northwest at nine in the morning with a hangover. I circled the park several times until sighting a big galoof sitting alone, looking like a bum with his big raincoat and cap, and realized that must be him. As we waited there under leaden overcast skies I began to envy that cap and the heavy black shoes with thick gum soles.

Claudia Van Hoven had insisted on meeting here instead of her place or anywhere else. She told Wild Bill she has a tiny apartment and her husband, a graduate student, works at night, sleeps during the day. With the baby, she told him, it’s hard enough.

The playing fields are bald stretches of half-frozen mud. I turn my face into a wet wind. We have now been waiting almost an hour and a half during which I have heard every detail of Wild Bill’s radiation treatments for prostate cancer five years ago.

Finally I stand restlessly. “This is fucked.”

“She’ll show.”

“Let’s go to her house.”

We are already through the iron gate of the park when I look back and see a slight woman in a long dark coat with a trailing red scarf wheel a stroller across the puddles and into the playground.

“That’s the lady,” Walker says with relief. “Told you she was good.”

We approach and shake hands all around. Claudia Van Hoven smiles brightly. She is younger than I am, early twenties, young enough to have smooth uncrinkled skin around the eyes.

“Have you been waiting long?”

I glance at Wild Bill, who I know would say nothing.

“We got here at nine,” I tell her.

Claudia looks worried. “What time is it now?” She checks her watch and makes a pained frown, as if just realizing she had lost something. “I’m sorry. I don’t know how that happened.”

“My daughter has four kids, all boys,” Wild Bill says with a corn-ball wink. “Sometimes she loses entire days at a time.” He takes her elbow and eases her down on the bench, going on about his grandsons and getting her to talk about her baby. I’m starting to admire his style.

“What will happen to Dr. Eberhardt?” Claudia wants to know.

“He could lose his license to practice medicine,” Walker tells her gravely. “He could go to jail.”

She closes her eyes for a moment then looks off into the distance through gold-rimmed glasses; small, old- fashioned oval frames like they wore to sign the Constitution. She is bareheaded. The wind blows her straight shiny brown hair. It must look pretty when she bends to play the violin.

“Do you want to see him go to jail?” I ask.

“The angry woman inside me does.” She gives us a reassuring smile. “Not to worry — I won’t let her interfere.”

She has an artsy way of talking but seems sincere.

“Tell us how you became a patient of Dr. Eberhardt.”

She doesn’t balk at the tape recorder. She explains how three years ago last March she was crossing the street to go to a concert at the Gardner Museum when a kid in a Datsun Z nipped around the corner and bounced her off the windshield twenty feet into the air. She spent six weeks in the hospital in a body cast. Dr. Eberhardt was the senior orthopedist.

“He talked to me a lot. I was trapped in this cast and he talked to me, for which I was grateful.”

A tear forms and she wipes her eye. I am thrilled by the emotion. Save it for the witness stand, baby.

“I was worried I would never play again. He sat with me … and he promised I would.…”

Walker fishes out a pocket-sized pack of Kleenex and gives her one.

“I don’t know how long I was on medication in the hospital, but it was all those months afterward that he kept giving me pills.”

“What kind of pills, Claudia?”

“Dilaudid. Valium. Halcion when I couldn’t sleep. I was so doped up I couldn’t even listen to music anymore.”

“Were you able to go back to the violin?”

Claudia shakes her head. “She died.”

“Who died?”

“The musician inside of me.” She is pushing the stroller back and forth in short strokes. “I kept telling Dr. Eberhardt she was dying.”

“What did he say?”

“He told me to be patient, that the healing process takes a long time, and gave me more pills.”

The crown of her head and the nap of the brown wool coat along her shoulders glisten with the first tentative drops of rain. The stroller cover is all the way down over the baby, who I assume is asleep since I have not heard or seen it. I can’t feel my fingers or toes. Walker writes in a small spiral pad.