Waking the Dead Read online

  Waking The Dead

  Scott Spencer

  This book is dedicated to Celeste and Asher.

  But some man will say, “How are the dead raised up and with what body do they come?”

  I CORINTHIANS

  Contents

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  15

  A Biography of Scott Spencer

  1

  SARAH WILLIAMS LEFT for Minneapolis with our life together in the worst possible repair. I knew enough about the suddenness of things to know that you ought never say good-bye to someone you love without acknowledging that you might be looking at them for the very last time. I broke this emotional law and twenty-six hours later Sarah was pronounced dead and zippered up in a black rubber bag in Minneapolis Community General Hospital.

  The police informed Sarah’s family down in New Orleans but the Williamses didn’t have the decency or perhaps the presence of mind to find me. I finally learned about it on the CBS news that evening, as I sat in our apartment in Chicago, surrounded by the things Sarah and I had accumulated over the three years of living together. The picture that flashed on the TV screen was of Francisco and Gisela Higgins, who had left Chile when the generals took over the government and who had been making the rounds internationally, describing the horrors of the current Chilean regime. As it happened, Sarah had been driving Francisco and Gisela to a church in St. Paul where the parish had given sanctuary to a few Chileans who had fled to the United States illegally. They were in a white 1968 Volvo station wagon, with an indestructible KEEP ON TRUCKIN’ bumper sticker in the back—six years hadn’t peeled it off, nor had six hundred days of winter in the northern tier, nor, finally, had the blast of the bomb that had been taped to the bottom of the car and radio-detonated when they were just a block from Our Lady of the Miracle. But for me the details came later. I knew something whose terribleness was beyond anything I’d ever known happened as soon as I saw Francisco and Gisela’s faces on the screen and the news reader said, “This afternoon, terror struck a quiet neighborhood in Minneapolis.” And then Francisco and Gisela’s images were gone and the newscaster went on talking and there was film running. I saw the white Volvo covered in firemen’s foam, bare trees, a light April snow falling, and then a reporter standing on the street with a microphone, looking very official and indignant, a big blond boy with a movie star haircut and a fancy winter coat with a fur collar. But my hands were over my ears and I couldn’t hear what he was saying. And then there was a picture of Sarah. The same old picture I had seen on her parents’ piano in their house on St. Charles Avenue, a picture of her sitting on a wicker chair on their porch with her arms around her knees and a completely happy smile on her face which was rarely that completely happy. The sunlight was in her hair, shining also in the whites of her eyes, the moisture of her teeth, the little gold chain around her neck. My own voice was echoing as I said no over and over and then I hit the Off switch.

  I left the apartment without closing the door behind me and without a coat. The late snow that had been falling in Minnesota was now falling through the coarse gray darkness over Chicago. Somehow I seized on the idea that there was something I needed to decide, a course of action I needed to affirm. I don’t honestly know what I was thinking; the truth is most of my effort was probably spent fighting going mad.

  We were living on 51st and Blackstone. I was going to law school at the University of Chicago and Sarah was working on the northwest side in a place called Resurrection House. We had few friends and virtually no money, so most of the time we had to spend together we spent alone, in the apartment.

  I was still strange to the streets I walked that night. The lights in the windows seemed sharp and unfriendly and the families living on the ground floors, whose domesticity I could spy in brightly lit wedges, seemed remote, unknowable. From time to time, I became aware of how cold it was. I looked up and saw the snow drifting past the streetlights. Sometimes my heart seemed not to be beating at all and sometimes it seemed to be beating far, far too quickly. I made my way to 53rd Street and found a bar. I had a few dollars in my pocket and I ordered a beer. I was supposed to be stopping drinking and it didn’t quite occur to me that this was a time I could back off that vow. The taste of the beer was too real and its reality made the night undeniable.

  The bartender had a large white distorted face, unbelievably grotesque, like something underwater. There was one other person in the bar, a bus driver sitting in front of what looked like a Scotch and soda. There were framed photographs of famous boxers on the wall— that listless automatic decoration they use in bars without any real character. I had some change in my pocket and I went to the phone booth. I was wet, shaking. I dropped the dime in and dialed our apartment and listened to the ringing. And with each ring I thought: My God, it really happened.

  SARAH AND GISELA and been in the front seat and they were instantly dead. Probably they were each buried with shreds of the other in the casket. Francisco Higgins had been in the backseat, lying down. They took what was left of him to the hospital, where he died two days later. By this time, I was in Minneapolis, too, and I visited his hospital room. He was small in that bed; the equipment was larger than he was. It was a cheerful room. Nordic and up-to-date, with little humanizing touches that were coming into vogue: warm colors on the wall, a child’s crayon drawing framed, an orthopedically designed chair for visits.

  I really didn’t know Higgins. I’d met him only once, at dinner with Sarah and a few of the others the night before the trip to Minnesota. I’d liked him that evening. He was a sort of Chilean government-in-exile, but he had a way of not taking it so awfully seriously, or at least not rubbing your nose in the seriousness of it. I’d liked him then but I did not like him in that hospital room, and as soon as I walked in I realized it was wrong for me to be there. I started to shake and I was having vile, desperate thoughts, my mind jerking this way and that like a snake tortured by a sharp stick. He had clearly been the object of the attack; his wife was a secondary target and Sarah had just happened to be along for the ride. He’d been deliberately attacked, but, in a sense, Sarah’s death had been accidental. It seemed inarguable from the beginning that the bomb had been planted by terrorists in the pay of the generals running Chile—the generals who’d held Francisco and Gisela prisoner and who, having succumbed to international pressure to set them free, wanted them silenced. But the last thing they wanted to do was kill an American citizen. Francisco and Gisela were world famous, but it was Sarah’s death that became the focus of the stories about the bombing, Sarah’s death that made people in America care. And soon Francisco’s friends the world over would be making the most of it. They were going to take her away from me and make her stand for something.

  Sarah’s father was in Minneapolis to accompany the casket on the flight down to New Orleans, where she was going to be buried in the family tomb—burials are above-ground in New Orleans because the loam is too soft to hold the dead securely in their pine and mahogany cocoons. He spoke to the police and avoided the press. He thought the reporters were somehow conspiring with the dissident Chileans to use Sarah’s death to disgrace America. He was a large, aggressive man, fit from tennis and the isometrics of his own bad temper, and he came into the cold Minnesota spring wearing a light blue suit, a white belt, and white shoes, as if these were the tribal colors of his better way of life.

  A woman from a local TV station focused in on me. It wasn’t as if she cared. She was just trying to be original in her handling of the story. I wa
s, at first, the boyfriend of the deceased, and then she promoted me to the fiancé, in time for the ten o’clock report.

  I thought I owed it to Sarah to say something but really there was nothing left of me. I’d tried to eat some toast but I couldn’t keep it down. It had been twenty-four hours living off the sugar in Scotch. I didn’t dare sleep or even close my eyes, and the worst part was I knew that my response to all of this was just in its larval stage, that I had managed to isolate my shock and grief, freeze it back a little, but I wouldn’t be able to keep it like that for very long and soon—well, who knew what I was going to feel or what I would make of it? “Whom do you hold responsible for this?” the reporter asked me, shoving the microphone before my mouth.

  I thought. I couldn’t answer quickly. “I don’t know,” I finally said. “The government of Chile has a secret police force and they’ve been known to follow dissident Chileans all over the world in order to silence them.”

  She waved to her cameraman and then shook her head, dropping the microphone to her side. “That sounds like propaganda,” she said. “Can we just keep it—I don’t know, keep it personal and immediate?”

  “I’ll try,” I said.

  “Good,” she said. “It’ll seem more real that way.”

  I SAT NEXT to Sarah’s father on the flight to New Orleans. Neither of us wanted the company of the other but there was no way around it. His name was Eugene, named after his father. He sold insurance and acted as if this gave him a certain insight and competence in matters of life and death, as if he were a surgeon or a priest. He was successful but not well liked. Sarah was one of his three children—all daughters. He’d named her Sara, thinking it was ladylike, fetching; she’d added the h to her name later on. Sarah’s mother’s name was Dorothy and she was afraid and evasive around Eugene. It was hard to say where her loyalties were. She seemed mostly to care about appearances, and even though it is probably an emotional impossibility to care only for the surface of life, Dorothy seemed to do so.

  Eugene and I watched the stewardess demonstrate the safety features of the 727. It was a rough takeoff, right into the wind. It surprised me how fervently I wanted the plane to crash. Clouds raced past like torn dirty rags. You could hear the engines straining. Then the NO SMOKING sign went off with a little ping and we were securely airborne. Eugene lit up a Kool and tilted his seat back. He toed off his white loafers and exhaled smoke through his nose. Sarah’s body was in the belly of the plane. Minneapolis was beneath us looking clean, ordinary, distant. Then it curved away, as if the earth in its rotation suddenly jerked forward, and beneath us was the frozen stubble of farmland, and little blue-enameled bumps: the silos. We were flying. We were going to heaven.

  When the stewardess came by, Eugene asked her for a vodka and tonic. They weren’t serving drinks yet, but she seemed to know he was the father of the woman, the body, below. She seemed also to know who I was and she asked me if I wanted something as well. I said no, just because it was easier. When his drink arrived, Eugene took a bottle of pills from his jacket and shook one out into his hand—he had a large palm and the lines in it had a faint reddish tinge. “Want one?”

  I shrugged. “What are you taking?”

  “Dorothy’s doctor gave her some tranquilizers and I’m taking them,” he said. He smiled, as if there was some tragic irony in a man of his enormous strength having to take a woman’s medicine.

  “Are they doing any good?” I asked.

  “I think so. I’m not so … jumpy, you know.”

  I put my hand out and he gave me one. It was the same light blue as Eugene’s suit on one half, and dark brown on the other. I put it in my pocket. “I’ll keep it for later.”

  The word later had a bad effect on me. Time was moving on, but it was empty now. The word later made me realize that my life might be very, very long and that now I would have to live every second of it without her.

  “I’m having a nervous reaction to all this crap,” Eugene said. “I don’t know whether I’m coming or going.”

  “You’re going,” I said.

  Eugene’s intelligence went toward the keen; he regarded what other people said the way a prisoner looks over the walls of his cell, searching for the loose brick, the patch of spongy mortar. Eugene squinted at me. He was forever sizing me up.

  “I guess if we knew how all this was going to end up,” he said, “then you and I might have worked a little harder on being friends.”

  “I guess so. And I guess you would have worked a little harder with Sarah, too.” I know what that sounds like now, but at the time it seemed like a fair thing to say, and certainly within my rights to say it.

  Eugene’s eyes filled with tears but just for an instant. “Don’t you give me any of your shit, pal. I’ve forgotten more about that girl than you’ll ever know. I changed her diapers and held her hands when she took her first little bitty baby steps.”

  He took in a deep beleaguered breath and sat deeper in his seat. I could sense the tranquilizer kicking in for him and it made me glad I hadn’t swallowed mine. I realized dimly that the expression on his face was meant to inspire guilt in me, guilt over my lack of respect for his loss. But Sarah was in the cargo, directly below us for all I knew, and I could not make a peace that she herself had failed to negotiate. Eugene and Sarah hadn’t been easy with each other since Sarah was ten, and I felt I had to keep that going. I suppose it was a way of keeping her alive awhile longer and maybe Eugene was provoking me for the very same reason.

  “I’m still waiting for you to tell me what the hell she was doing with that couple from Chile,” Eugene said. “Or why she was mixed up with this whole mess in the first place.”

  “I wouldn’t know where to begin,” I said.

  “Well, I wish she could have come to talk to me about it,” he said. “I could have told her she was getting in way over her head.”

  In New Orleans, Eugene had offered me a bed in his house, but I didn’t want to be with them and the prospect of sleeping in or even near Sarah’s old room seemed too difficult. I didn’t want to put myself through it. I checked into a small hotel called Maison Dupuy— picturesque on the outside, anonymous within—and once I was there I turned on the TV, the air conditioner, and began to cry without control. It was like colliding with a self who had always been curled within me but whose presence I’d never suspected—just as the self who had once seized Sarah’s love had taken me by surprise. I believed in duty, in service, in carefully laid plans, in measured responses and calculated risks, but all of that was gone and what was left was terror and bitterness and a feeling that I was going mad.

  It would have been even harder on me except my family flew to New Orleans. My father and mother arrived that evening, with my brother, Danny, and Caroline, my sister. I’d gone out for air and when I returned there was a note in my mailbox that my family was in Rooms 121 and 123.I knocked and my father answered the door. He was reading the Times-Picayune, holding it in one hand; he had wire-rimmed bifocals. His hair was duck white, full, wavy, long. His chest was massive and ruddy under his open shirt; he looked as if he’d been body-surfing in the cold Atlantic off the Rockaways. When he saw me, he dropped the newspaper and flung his arm around me, pulled me toward him. “Christ almighty,” he said in my ear, in his rich, porous voice—it always sounded as if he ought to clear his throat. I put my arms around him, held on. I saw my mother standing behind him, with her fingertips touching the bed, as if for balance. She had a pretty, round face. Danny used to say that Mom wore her hair like Lesley Gore. It was parted in the middle and had a dramatic flip on either side. She looked reserved, isolated, a little lonely, like a widow. She wore her glasses on a chain around her neck and they rose and fell on her bosom as she took deep emotional breaths.

  Dad walked me in and handed me over to Mom, who held my face in her large, soft hands and kissed me on each cheek and then the chin. My parents had always meant safety and loyalty to me and seeing them shored me up. I began to see h
ow I might be able to get through this.

  “It’s the worst thing that’s ever happened,” Dad said.

  “What can we do?” Mom said. “Do you want to talk about it? Just tell us what to do. We’re here for you.”

  “And for her,” added Dad. He’d really liked Sarah. He thought we would get married and give him wonderful grandchildren. He also hoped that she would help me with my career, keep me strong and a little bit hungry. They both believed in absolute right and wrong, and they each had little bulletin boards within their hearts upon which grievances were posted and never taken down. “She was a wonderful girl, Fielding. There’s nothing more to say. A rare and wonderful girl.”

  “Eddie,” Mom said, with a note of caution.

  “It’s OK, Mom,” I said. “He’s right.”

  “It’s not a question of right,” she said softly. It seemed as if it had been years now that half of what she’d said had been murmured to the side, as if the people who really understood her were phantoms, just offstage.

  “We weren’t even getting along,” I said, suddenly putting my hand over my eyes. And then I had a desolate thought: Every misunderstanding, every quarrel, every overheated contest of the wills was now, by dint of her death, destined to become a memory of unutterable sweetness.

  “It’s still in the newspapers,” Dad said. “It’s not something that’s going to go away. Not just the local papers,” he added, gesturing to the Times-Picayune, which lay open on the floor, turned to a page of advertisements showing drawings of lawn furniture, “but all the papers. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and of course your Chicago papers, too.” Dad was still a printer, coming to the end of a thirty-year hitch at the New York Times plant. Yet no matter how many half-truths and retractions he’d set type for, he still believed almost religiously in the printed word. He read three papers a day and every week or so went to the public library to read out-of-town papers. He subscribed to a dozen magazines and patrolled the used bookstores on Fourth Avenue, often buying books for no other reason but that he liked the look of them.