Fletch Won

“He’s better with the kids than I am. He has much more patience.”

“Much more tolerance.” He turned the ignition key. “Where are we going?”

“The Monastery of St. Thomas, in Tomasito.”

“Tomasito!” Fletch looked at her. “That’s a hundred kilometers from here!”

“Yes,” she said. “It is.”

“I thought I was just dropping you off downtown.”

“My brother is in the monastery.” Nancy stared at the unmoving landscape through the windshield. “It is a cloistered monastery. I don’t think he yet knows Father is dead. I feel I must go talk to him. I have no other way to get there.”

“Your brother is a monk?”

“A monk, a monk,” she said. “I suppose Tom could make a vicious nursery rhyme from that. A monk, a monk/ hiding in a trunk/ to have nothing to do/ with his father, the punk. Not very good.”

“Not very.”

“Guess I’ll leave poetry to my husband. I’ll just keep birthing his little monsters.”

Fletch put the car in gear. “Sorry,” he said. “There’s a hole in the muffler.”

“I don’t hear it.”

“Are you a Christian?”

“Me? God, no. Bob’s going into the monastery was his own thing. It had nothing to do with the family, I mean, our upbringing, at all. I suspect he’s trying to atone for the sins of his father. Aren’t they supposed to be visited on the son? He’s got his job cut out for him.”

Across from the university, Fletch drove up the ramp to the freeway and accelerated.

He said, “Someone who talked with your father just last week told me your father said he intended to enter a monastery.”

Nancy gasped. “My father?” She laughed. “I knew newspapers print nothing but fiction.”

“It’s true,” Fletch said. “At least it’s true that somebody said it.”

“Maybe my father would enter a monastery if he heard the Judgment Day Horn. It would be just like him. A clever legal defense.”

“He was getting older.”

“Not that old. About sixty.”

“Perhaps he wasn’t well?”

“Hope so. If anyone deserved leprosy of the gizzard, he did.”

“Were you never close?”

“Emotionally? I don’t know. I never saw him that much, growing up. Black suit and black shoes coming and going in the driveway. Intellectually? After I grew up, I realized how he’d been screwing the system all his life. A real destroyer of values. For profit. He never believed in good, or evil, or justice; any of the things we have to believe in, to center our lives, to focus. He believed in having his own way, despite the social consequences; in lining his own pockets. He was the most completely asocial and amoral man I ever knew. If he weren’t educated as a lawyer, he probably would have been a psychopathic killer himself.” After a moment, she laughed wryly. “My father, a monk!”

“Your husband,” Fletch said, “extolls violence.”

“You don’t see a difference?” Nancy asked. “My husband is a teacher. A poet. At sacrifice to himself, he’s pointing out the beauty in violence, and there is beauty in violence. We are attracted to it. He’s making us confront the violence in ourselves. He’s teaching us about ourselves. His poetry wouldn’t be so damned effective, if it weren’t true.”

“What sacrifice to himself?”

“Come on. People cross the street when they see him coming. They won’t even talk to me. We haven’t been invited to a faculty cocktail party in three years. Most of the faculty want to get rid of him. He could never get another job teaching. We’re going to end up in Starvation Lane. Just so Tom can make this statement, not about the nature of violence, but about the nature of you and me. Don’t you understand?”

“Anyway.” Fletch stretched in his car seat. “This man, who should know, told me your father intended to give five million dollars to the museum. The money was to be spent on contemporary religious art. He was going to give the rest of his wordly goods to a monastery, which he was going to enter.”

Nancy shrugged. “He had an angle somewhere. I’d guess someone had the goods on him. The Justice Department. The Internal Revenue Service. The American Bar Association. I expect that after the dust settled, you would have found my father living luxuriously somewhere with his sexy, pea-brained young wife behind the facade, the protection of some religious or cultural foundation, all brilliantly, legally established, and funded, by himself.”

“Maybe. But did you know your father had stated the intention of disposing of his worldly goods?”

“I read something of the sort in the newspaper. This morning’s newspaper. After he was murdered.”

“No one had told you before?”

“No.”

Fletch said, “It’s always hard to prove that you don’t know something.”

They rode without speaking for a while. They listened to The Grateful Dead on the radio.

Finally, Fletch said, “At your father’s house yesterday, I met a woman who was about sixty years old, white- haired, or blue-haired, whatever you want to call it, wearing a colorful dress and green sneakers. I asked her if she was Mrs. Habeck, and she said she was. All she’d say about your father was that he wore black shoes and wandered away. She referred to Habeck, Harrison and Haller as Hay, Ha, Haw.”

“Ummm,” Nancy said.

“That your mother?”

“Um.” Nancy shifted in her seat. “What it says on your shorts is correct. You can be a friend, I guess.”

“That’s not quite what the legend means.” Fletch had changed T-shirts. He had hoped his own, pure T-shirt, left outside his shorts, had covered the advertisements.

“You put your finger on it,” Nancy said. “Growing up, my father and I ignored each other. He wasn’t interesting. When I got older, I learned contempt for him. ‘Brilliant legal practitioner.’ Bullshit. He was a crook. When he put Mother away, had her legally committed to a home for the mentally unwell, I absolutely despised him. I never spoke to him again, or voluntarily saw him again. Sorry. I didn’t tell the exact truth, before. I hate the son of a bitch.”

“Oh.”

“Mother didn’t need to be thrown out of her home. Confined to an institution, however swank and gentle. She’s just pixilated.”

Fletch remembered Mrs. Habeck looking down at her green sneakers and saying, I don’t have any privacy.

“Pixilated,” Nancy repeated. “Year after year, Dad left her alone in that house. No one wanted to know her. At first, she tried to get out, go do things, you know, join the Flower Club. The other ladies didn’t want her. Some sensational case of my father’s would be in the newspaper, a small editorial outcry about Donald Habeck getting a not-guilty verdict for some rapist. And Mother’s flower arrangements wouldn’t get into the show. Her phone wouldn’t ring. Once, when I was a teenager and getting independent, Mother marched downtown and got herself a job behind the counter in a florist’s shop. My father put a stop to that, quick enough. Poor, damned soul. She moldered alone in that house. Talked to herself. She began setting the dining-room table for luncheon and dinner parties, for six people, eight people, a dozen. There were no people.” Tears streamed down Nancy’s face. Her voice sounded dry. “What could I do? I went home as much as possible. She used to go to six different hairdressers in one day, just to have people to talk to. Her hair was getting burned out. Then she took to spending all day in the shopping malls, buying everything in the world, lawn mowers, washing machines, towels. There were about twenty washing machines delivered to the house one week. When she was being packed up to go to the Agnes Whitaker Home, it was discovered she had over two thousand pairs of shoes! She liked to talk to the salespeople, you see.”

Fletch took the turning for Tomasito. “Does she escape from the home often?”

“Almost every day. At first the institution staff would be alarmed and call me, I suppose call my father. Scold