Trophies And Dead Things

laughed his way through the stormy days at Berkeley. Even the man Hank had known in Vietnam had sounded more connected to others. I wondered if it had been the deaths of the woman and child over there that had changed him. But even when they had been alive, Hilderly had been closed off in certain respects,

I asked, 'After the divorce, did you see Perry?'

'Very occasionally. He'd pick up the boys on their birthdays to take them to the city to the zoo or a ball game. On Christmas he'd send gifts-usually ones that were inappropriate for their age levels-and call. But that was the extent of it.'

I'd been wrong in thinking Judy Fleming knew anything useful about her husband's past. 'I know you find Perry changing his will inexplicable,' I said, 'but I'd like to ask you to think over the contacts you and your sons have had with him in, say, the past year. Was there anything in his behavior that even hinted he might do such a thing?'

She considered, pleating the fabric of her skirt between her fingers. 'One occasion comes to mind. Perry was behaving oddly… but maybe you'd best talk to Kurt about it. He was there and I wasn't.' She went to the glass door and opened it, called out to one of the boys by the pool. He came to the house, toweling himself off as he walked.

At around sixteen Kurt looked quite a bit like early pictures of his father. He was tall and lanky, but possessed of a natural grace; his hair was blond, curly, and somewhat on the long side. He shook my hand and greeted me with a directness unusual in one of his age.

The introductions over, Kurt sat down on the raised stone hearth, his long arms wrapped around his bare knees. His mother said, 'Tell Ms. McCone about your birthday celebration with Perry.' To me she added, 'Neither of the boys felt close enough to call him 'Dad.' That's what they call my husband.'

Kurt asked, 'You mean tell her about the weird stuff?'

Judy Fleming nodded.

'Okay. This was in the middle of June, a Saturday. I went into the city on BART and we took in a Giants game. Perry was kind of quiet. I thought it might be because for my present he'd given me this video game that was really for young kids, and I couldn't work up much enthusiasm over it.' Kurt paused, looking at his mother. 'He was always doing that. You remember the year he gave me the big stuffed koala bear for Christmas? I was thirteen and into Indiana Jones.'

Mrs. Fleming merely smiled.

'Okay,' Kurt went on, 'after the game we started back here and stopped in Walnut Creek at a Mexican restaurant. Perry got into the margaritas. They make a strong one there-' He glanced at his mother again. 'Or so I'm told. Perry had four. After the second he started going on, sort of-what's that word I just learned? Maundering.' He seemed to savor the new word; his mouth shaped it as if he were tasting each syllable.

'About what?' I asked.

'All sorts of stuff. He started by asking me if I'd decided on a college yet, but before I could answer, he said that the decisions people make early on are important, that the wrong one can change the whole course of your life. He said that even a right decision can come back at you later, even if you know you did the right thing.'

'That sounds like fairly standard father-to-son advice.'

'You didn't know Perry. He wasn't much on advice. Anyway, then he started going on about this seminar he'd had to go to for his job a couple of weeks before. He said he hadn't wanted to go, but that it was one of the best things that ever happened to him. 'It's changed my whole life,' he said. 'I know what I have to do to get in touch with my former self.''

'Those were his exact words?'

'More or less.'

'What kind of seminar was it?'

'He didn't say, and I couldn't ask; he was getting really weird by that time. Then he started in on… well, what he said was, 'You can't beat yourself up for being unable to control the consequences of your actions.' And other stuff along that line.'

It sounded to me as if Hilderly had been trying to articulate the preachings of a pop psychologist to his son-and had not done too good a job of it. 'Anything else?'

'Well, there was some stuff about ideals. How you should hang on to them, but sometimes you had to dump some in order to live up to the most important of all. And then he got into guilt and atonement. All the time I was trying to eat my enchiladas, he was sucking up margaritas and carrying on like a born-again.'

'Maybe he had gotten involved in some religion; there's a lot of that going around.'

Kurt looked dubious. His mother said, 'I can't imagine that. Perry was a lifelong atheist.'

'What else did he say?' I asked Kurt.

'Not much that made any sense. It worried me; I'd never seen him that way before. Like Mom says, I wasn't close to Perry, but he was a nice man, and I hated to see him sort of… losing it. You think maybe he was cracking up, and that was why he made that weird will?'

'Maybe.' I made a mental note to ask Hilderly's former employer about the seminar he'd attended late in May.

'Well,' Kurt said, 'whatever made him do it must have been really something. I know he loved my brother and me, even if he was sort of off on another planet most of the time.' Up to now Kurt had sounded almost cavalier about his last dinner with his father, but as he spoke a tremor came into his voice. He turned to his mother. 'I wish I could have done or said something-you know, to let him know I cared.'

Judy Fleming said, 'Kurt, he knew you cared.'

'But there should have been something.I'm sorry now that all those years I wasn't a better son to him.'

Quickly she went to him and put her arms around his shoulders. 'You were a good son. You were the best you could be, under the circumstances.'

She could easily have countered Kurt's feelings of regret by pointing out that Perry hadn't been much of a father, but instead she'd chosen the more difficult option of refusing to degrade her former husband's memory. She may, as she'd said, have let Hilderly down when she divorced him, but now, at the end, she hadn't failed him.

Seven

On the way back to the city I stopped at a K-Mart to buy a birthday card and a hanging fuchsia plant for Anne-Marie. By the time I reached the building she and Hank owned on Twenty-sixth Street in Noe Valley, it was close to ten and a refreshing fog once more enveloped San Francisco. I went up on the front porch, fuchsia dangling from my hand, and surveyed the row of hooks for plants that Anne-Marie had installed in front of the door to her first-floor flat; one was still vacant, and the space was the right size for my gift. I turned, nodding in satisfaction, but something across the street caught my attention. I looked back. There was no one over there, at least no one discernible, and all I heard were distant traffic noises and voices down the block.

In a few seconds I turned away again, remembering the conversation I'd had with Hank on Saturday, when he'd described his paranoid feeling that someone might have been lurking around outside All Souls. 'Nerves,' I'd said. 'Typical urban ailment,' he'd said. Right on both counts. Quickly I went to the door of the upstairs flat and rang the bell.

Anne-Marie and Hank are one of those couples who, once married, discovered they couldn't live together. She's fastidious, he's just plain messy. She values a routine, he thrives on chaos. In the end they solved the problem by occupying separate flats in the same building-far enough apart, but never out of reach.

The buzzer sounded, and I pushed the door open and climbed the narrow flight of stairs. The air was redolent of chili-an aroma that in the past would have made me cringe, because Hank's secret recipe was one he should have carried untried to the grave. But the previous winter Anne-Marie had critiqued it in a fit of anger, I had backed up her damning judgment, and since then Hank had made a concerted and moderately successful effort to improve it. Not that it mattered: nobody went to Hank's for the food. We went for the good talk and company.

I hung my coat and bag on the hall tree and walked to the rear of the flat. Hank had reversed the typical order