They were a hardy, sporting family whose quail and venison graced the dinner table and whose basement had been strung with bulbs of elk sausage. Hemingway had been a guest at the cabin, as they called the five-bedroom fortress, and the thirty-aught-six he had shipped to Roland in gratitude hung over the mantel. A wooden plaque identified its provenance: Papa.
And they were, it turned out, supremely Christian. Theirs was an unfamiliar practice to Albert, his own exposure having run to the darker end of the spectrum, and he dismissed their rosy outlook as unserious, a child’s version of the faith, and their admiration for John’s accomplishments, their genuine wonder not just at the amplitude but at the timbre of his instrument, as the Breckenridges referred to it, was an extension of that unserious worldview in which things were good or bad, beautiful or ugly, and complaisance masked an unchecked and vicious insistence on the rightness of their attitudes.
He and Sydney had spent three nights there before returning to San Francisco where Albert had client meetings. Mornings on the hunt; afternoons engaged in outdoor sportsmanship; and every night after dinner, Bron’s mother had insisted on a song. John, Albert noticed, displayed none of the formality or reticence with his in-laws that defined communication with his own parents, and he would rise with a broad grin and walk to the hearth of the fireplace as though it had been constructed for the express purpose of his performance. Such was parenthood; you instilled the ideals that caused them to reject you. So be it.
The last night Albert glimpsed the true source of his son’s pride, however. Instead of watching his son sing, Albert watched his daughter-in-law listen. She was enraptured, red-cheeked, face upturned to John as he lilted through a lied, her fingers clasped in her lap as though attempting to form a cage over the orgasm no doubt building in her wet little snatch. So that’s it, Albert thought, and he reclined in the enormous leather chair and folded his hands over his belly, satisfied at his discovery, a tidy explanation of his son’s good humor, his voice just another trick for getting laid. Of course the ruddy-faced Breckenridges couldn’t see the truth, living as they did in the benevolent glow of their happy Jesus and his tum-tumming Negro band. Just remember it’s the same Christ who smiles down on my son’s bare ass while he pounds away at your little girl, Albert thought.
That day in Florida, it had fallen to Albert to phone Roland and Gerta Breckenridge. In the even, gray-flannel tones he’d have used with a client, he explained to the silent line that the little boy had fallen into the swimming pool that afternoon, efforts had been made to revive him, but he had been pronounced dead at the hospital. Roland had asked to speak to his daughter but Albert had said she’d been sedated and wasn’t able to come to the phone. Roland asked to speak with John. Albert called his son over. John took the phone and walked with it through the nearest open door, which happened to lead to the bathroom. He’d yanked the cord in behind him and closed the door. Caldwell did not hear the light switch. His son remained in the bathroom for half an hour, and when he emerged said only that the Breckenridges would arrive the next day.
Together the two families flew with their terrible cargo to New York. They buried the boy. Roland and Gerta took their daughter back to California. She returned to New York only to appear at the divorce proceedings.
Sydney was dead within a year, like something from Shakespeare, killed by grief. Her heart broke: an arrhythmia. A failed surgery and she was gone. Gone before that, though.
And in the end, an unnatural state of existence, an inversion of the order of all things, the earth in orbit around the moon, rivers flying into the sky, hoary old Albert Caldwell living on, Sydney and the little boy cold in their graves.
For all their days together, Sydney had been his shepherd, unflappable, coaxing out conversation with her good humor, but after the boy’s death, even she had been silenced. Tracy and Fil had retreated to what comforts they could find in their own families, John to his catastrophe. Albert’s dinners with Sydney were concertos of silverware on porcelain, resonant mastication. He had already formulated the idea that the boy’s death was his fault, but it was Sydney’s silence that convinced him he was right.
Sydney’s airless place was not unlike Bronwyn’s, the stones packed tight around her chest. The frantic gasping for shallow breaths. The wild, hair-tearing agony of white pain that, like a nuclear flash, blotted out everything else with its light. Albert wondered what it was about these women that their collapse had to be complete, a total shattering of their psyches?
He would have done well to level the question at himself. What did he think he was doing, implanting his own ineffable sorrows in surrogates so that he might, via the twisted logic of the serial repressive, for once in his life experience his own feelings?
