It took me a moment to understand what he meant. 'Not at all. You saw her at the funeral parlor.'
He sighed. 'Ah. Yes.'
I slid the shirt down his arms and laid it on his bed.
'Poor Grant.'
I didn't say anything. Alan undid his belt and stood up to push his trousers down over his hips. He sat again on the bed, and I pulled the trousers off his legs.
Dazed and unfocused, he watched me pull a handkerchief, keys, and bills from his trouser pockets and put them on his bedside table.
'Alan, do you know why April was interested in the Horatio Street bridge?'
'It had something to do with the Vuillard in their living room. You've seen it?'
I said that I had.
'She said one of the figures in the painting reminded her of a man she had heard about. A policeman—some policeman who killed himself in the fifties. She couldn't look at the painting without thinking about him. She did some research on it—April was a great researcher, you know.' He wrenched the pillow beneath his head. 'I need to get some sleep, Tim.'
I went to the bedroom door and said that I'd call him later that evening, if he liked.
'Come here tomorrow.'
I think he was asleep before I got down the stairs.
Ralph and Marjorie Ransom, back in their black-and-silver running suits, sat side by side on one of the couches.
'I agree with John,' Ralph said. 'Thin stripes and puckered cotton, that's a seersucker jacket. That's the
By this time I was coming into the living room, and Marjorie Ransom leaned forward to look past her husband. 'You saw that poor boy too, didn't you, Tim? Did he look like John's student to you?'
Ralph broke in before I could respond. 'At this stage of the game, Alan Brookner couldn't tell Frank Sinatra from Gabby Hayes.'
'Well, I don't know,' I said.
'Mom,' John said loudly, carrying a fresh drink in from the kitchen, 'Tim has no idea what Grant Hoffman looked like.'
'Right,' I said. 'I'm a stranger here myself.'
'Get yourself a drink, son,' Ralph said. 'It's the Attitude Adjustment Hour.'
'That's what they call it at our center,' Marjorie said. 'Attitude Adjustment Hour. Isn't that cute?'
'I'll get myself something in the kitchen,' I said, and went around the back of the couch and looked at the Vuillard over the tops of the Ransoms' heads.
Only one figure on the canvas, a child, looked forward and out of the painting, as if returning the viewer's gaze. Everyone else, the women and the servants and the other children, was caught in the shimmer of light and the circumstances of their gathering. The child who faced forward sat by himself on the lush grass, a few inches from a brilliant smear of golden light. He was perhaps an inch from the actual center of the painting itself, where the shape of a woman turning toward a tea service intersected one of the boughs of the juniper tree. As soon as I had seen him, he became the actual center of the painting, a sober, dark-haired boy of seven or eight looking unhappily but intently out of both the scene and the frame—right at me, it seemed. He knew he was in a painting, the meaning of which he contained within himself.
'Tim only came here to admire my art,' John said.
'Oh, it's just lovely,' Marjorie said. 'That big red one?'
I went into the kitchen and poured a glass of club soda. When I returned, Ralph and Marjorie were talking about something the day had brought back to them, a period that must have been the unhappiest of their lives.
'I'll never forget it,' Marjorie said. 'I thought I was going to faint.'
'That guy at the door,' Ralph said. 'God, I knew what it was as soon as the car pulled up in front of the house. He got out and stood there, making sure the address was right. Then the other one, the sergeant, got out, and handed him the flag. I didn't know whether to cry or punch him in the mouth.'
'And then we got that telegram, and there it was in black and white. Special Forces Captain John Ransom, killed in action at Lang Vei.'
'Nobody knew where I was, and another guy was identified as me.'
'Is that what happened?' I asked.
'What a foul-up,' said Ralph. 'If you made a mistake like that in business, you'd be out on your ear.'
'It's surprising more mistakes like that weren't made,' I said.
'In my opinion, John should have got at least a Silver Star, if not the Medal of Honor,' Ralph said. 'My kid was a hero over there.'
'I survived,' John said.
'Ralph broke down and cried like a baby when we found out,' Marjorie said.
Ralph ignored this. 'I mean it, kid. To me, you're a hero, and I'm damn proud of you.' He set down his empty glass, stood up, and went to his son. John obediently stood up and let himself be embraced. Neither of them looked as though he had done much embracing.
When his father let him go, John said, 'Why don't we all go out for dinner? It's about time.'
'This one's on me,' Ralph said, reminding me of his son. 'You better get me while you can, I'm not going to be around forever.'
When we got back from Jimmy's, I told John that I wanted to take a walk. Ralph and Marjorie headed in for a nightcap before going to bed, and I let myself out, took Damrosch's case from the trunk, and walked on the quiet streets beneath the beautiful starry night to Tom Pasmore's house.
PART SEVEN
Familiar jazz music came from Tom's speakers, a breathy, authoritative tenor saxophone playing the melody of 'Star Dust.'
'You're playing 'Blue Rose,' ' I said. 'Glenroy Breakstone. I never heard it sound so good.'
'It came out on CD a couple of months ago.' He was wearing a gray glen plaid suit and a black vest, and I was sure that he had gone back to bed after the service. We emerged from the fabulous litter into the clearing of the sofa and the coffee table. Next to the usual array of bottles, glasses, and ice bucket lay the disc's jewel box. I picked it up and looked at the photograph reproduced from the original album—Glenroy Breakstone's broad face bent to the mouthpiece of his horn. When I was sixteen, I had thought of him as an old man, but the photograph showed a man no older than forty. Of course the record had been made long before I became aware of it, and if Breakstone were still alive, he had to be over seventy.
'I think I'm trying to get inspired,' Tom said. He bent over the table and poured an inch of malt whiskey into a thick low glass. 'Want anything? There's coffee in the kitchen.'
I said that I'd be grateful for the coffee, and he went back into his kitchen and returned a moment later with a steaming ceramic mug.
'Tell me about the morgue.' He sat down in his chair and gestured me toward the couch in front of the coffee table.
'They had the man's clothes laid out, and Alan recognized the jacket as one he'd given to this student, Grant Hoffman.'
