in the back along the way, then let him, but you’ll all be dead before the night is out. Angel and Louis will tear you apart, and for the next eleven months, rabbi, every time one of your children rises to say Kaddish for you, they’ll receive a piece of you in the mail.’
Epstein raised his right hand, then let it fall gently. The guns were lowered, and I heard a click as a hammer was slowly eased down. The fear and anger that had briefly animated Epstein left him, and he was once again as he had always been, or seemed to be.
‘If you wish to leave, none here will stop you,’ he said. ‘But look at the list first.’
‘Why?’
Epstein smiled sadly.
‘Because your name is on it.’
18
When I was seventeen, and my mother and I were living with my grandfather in Scarborough, Maine, following my father’s death, a man named Lambton Everett IV would come visit, and he and my grandfather would share a beer on a seat in the yard or, if the weather was cold, they’d share something stronger: blended Scotch, mostly, on the grounds that they weren’t single malt men or, if they were, then they couldn’t afford to be so on a regular basis, and therefore there was no point in raising false expectations for their palates.
Lambton Everett IV was a long string of misery, a man who never owned an item of clothing that fitted him correctly. In part this was because his body was so indiscriminately proportioned that no cloth that was not cut to measure could ever have accommodated his limbs without leaving a sock peeping or a forearm exposed halfway to the elbow. Shirts hung from him like collapsed sails from a mast, and his suits appeared to have been stolen randomly from the dead. Yet even had his suits been made from the finest Italian wool, and his shirts spun from silks beloved of kings, Lambton Everett IV would still have looked like a scarecrow that had tired of its frame and wobbled unsteadily from its field to seek pastures new. With his downturned mouth, and his huge ears, and his balding, pointed head, he was a source of genial terror at Halloween, and prided himself on the fact that he didn’t have to dress up as a ghoul to scare the children.
There hadn’t even been three Lambton Everetts before him: the numeral was an affectation, a private joke that not even my grandfather understood. It lent him a certain gravitas among those who didn’t know him well enough to be able to spot the fraud, and gave his friends and neighbors something over which to shake their heads, which is a very important gift to bequeath to others in certain circles.
But my grandfather liked Lambton Everett IV because he had known him for a long time and believed that his flaws were minor, and his decencies major. Lambton Everett IV appeared never to have been married, and it was said that he was a bachelor of the most pronounced kind. He seemed to have little sexual interest in women, and none whatsoever in men. There were those who were convinced that Lambton Everett IV would die a virgin; my grandfather speculated that he might possibly have tried intercourse once, if only to strike it from the short list of things he felt that he should do before he passed away.
But it turned out that my grandfather didn’t know Lambton Everett IV at all; or rather he knew only one Lambton, the face that Lambton had chosen to present to the world, but that face bore no more relation to the reality of the man than a mask bears to its wearer. Lambton shared little with my grandfather about his past; my grandfather knew him only in the present, in his Maine existence, and he accepted the fact of this with no rancor. In his bones, he knew Lambton to be a good man, and that was enough for him.
Lambton Everett IV was found dead in his house in Wells on a gray Tuesday morning in December. He had failed to turn up at the Big 20 Bowl for his regular Monday morning session, and telephone messages did not elicit a response from him. Two members of his bowling team visited him shortly after breakfast the next morning. They rang the doorbell with no result, then walked to the back of the house and peered in through the kitchen window, where they saw Lambton lying on the floor, his hand clutched to his chest and his face frozen in an agonized grimace. He had gone quickly, the coroner later said: the pain of the heart attack had been immense, but brief.
My grandfather was one of four men who carried the casket from the church on the morning of the funeral, but he was surprised to be informed by Lambton’s lawyer that Lambton had nominated him as executor of his will. The lawyer also gave my grandfather a letter addressed to him in Lambton’s messy scrawl. It was short and to the point: it apologized to my grandfather for springing the executorship on him but promised that it would not be an arduous task. Lambton’s instructions for the disposal of his estate were relatively simple, mostly involving the dispersal of the proceeds of the sale of his house and possessions among a number of named charities. Ten percent was to be given to my grandfather to do with as he saw fit, along with a gold-and-onyx pocket watch that had been in Lambton’s family for three generations. My grandfather was also directed to an album of photographs and newspaper clippings in Lambton’s bedroom closet, the contents of which Lambton requested he share only with those who might understand them.
It is difficult for men and women to keep secrets these days, especially concerning matters that might, at some point, have found their way into the media. A quick Internet search can expose even the most personal of histories to the light, and a generation has grown used to being able to access such information with the click of a mouse, but it was not always so. I think now of my grandfather seated at Lambton Everett’s kitchen table, the album open before him in the fading winter daylight, and the sense he had that Lambton’s shade was somewhere nearby, watching him carefully as his secret pain was exposed at last. Later my grandfather would say that, in looking through the album, he felt like a surgeon lancing a boil, releasing liquid and pus, scouring the infection so Lambton Everett IV might be permitted the peace in death that had been denied him in life.
The album revealed another Lambton Everett, a young man with a wife named Joyce and a son called James. He was still recognizably himself, according to my grandfather: a gangling man, an awkward yet strangely handsome individual, smiling contentedly beside his tiny, pretty wife and his grinning son. In the final picture taken of them, his wife and child were twenty-nine and six respectively. Lambton was thirty-two. The picture was dated May 14, 1965, the place Ankeny, Iowa. Three days later, Joyce and James Everett were dead.
Harman Truelove was twenty-three years old. He had been dismissed from his job slaughtering hogs for undue cruelty to the animals, his sadism exceptional even in a profession where casual brutality was the norm, inflicted by men of subnormal intelligence on animals that were probably smarter than themselves, and certainly more worthy of continuing their existence. Harman Truelove’s response to his firing was to set fire to the pens housing the hogs awaiting slaughter, burning two hundred of the animals alive, before hitting the road with only a single change of clothing, sixty-seven dollars, and a set of butcher knives. He hitched a ride as far as Bondurant with a man named Roger Madden, who lied and said that he was going no farther just to get Harman Truelove out of his truck because, as he later told police, ‘the boy wasn’t right’.
Harman ate a bowl of soup in the Hungry Owl Diner, left a quarter as a tip, and started walking. He had decided that he would stop when the sun began to set, which it did just as he reached the house of Joyce and Lambton Everett, and their son James. Lambton, who had traveled to a conference of insurance adjusters in Cleveland, was not home, but his wife and child were.
And they spent a long night with Harman Truelove and his knives.
Lambton got the call in Cleveland the following day. Harman Truelove had been picked up by police as he headed northwest on foot toward, he said, Polk City. He hadn’t even bothered to change his clothes, and he was sticky with blood. He had left a trail of it from the Everetts’ bedroom, all the way through the house, and halfway down their garden path. Curiously, he had cleaned his knives before he left.
This my grandfather learned from the album at Lambton Everett’s kitchen table. He would later recall softly touching the face of the woman and the boy in the picture with his fingertips, and allowing his hand to hover over Lambton’s image, just as he might have done if the man were seated before him, seeking to express his sorrow and regret yet conscious that Lambton was a man who had always refrained from unnecessary physical contact. Even his handshakes had been as delicate as the touch of an insect’s wings against one’s skin. My grandfather had always considered it merely to be another of Lambton’s peculiarities, like his refusal to eat meat of any kind and his particular hatred for the smell of bacon or pork. Now the odd details of Lambton’s personality began to take a new form, each making a terrible kind of sense in the context of what he had endured in life.
‘You should have told me, my friend,’ my grandfather said aloud to the listening silence, and the drapes behind him shifted slightly in a cool winter breeze, although the day outside was still as stone. ‘You should have told
