Disclaimer: I do not own the characters of Cal, his father, etc. Please do not publish this story elsewhere without my permission. Feedback is welcomed and appreciated.
Spring 1930
We do what we can. We do what we must. When we see a burrowing, bright light we instinctively move toward it. And when—as if in the worst nightmare or a dark, unwelcome daydream—there is no light, then what?
Cal's jaw ached as if it had gone missing altogether. He opened his eyes slowly, weakly, testing their strength against the insistent glow of the overhead lamps. There was a terrible, acrid smell filling his nose and that aching… He tried to move his hands but his body was leaden, useless. With a groan he blinked again, rapidly, feeling drunk and slow and uncertain. Through the blinding haze of white lights he saw a pale, drawn face with squinting eyes.
"Cal?"
He knew that voice. Vaguely he knew it, as if it arose from a long forgotten childhood that he had not lived but witnessed. Gradually, recognition dawned. Cal tried to respond but his mouth was sluggish, unresponsive.
"It's quite alright," the voice said again. Now it was attached to a pair of thin, withered lips painted with a dark finish of red lacquer. "Don't try to speak, darling. Don't worry now, I'm here."
Despite her words, he worried. He worried very much. The last thing he could remember, other than the dark, deep and dreaming sleep he had just risen from, was the balcony and the shiny, slender eye staring him down. And there was a noise buried in his subconscious, a loud, ringing bang. Cal tried to shift his weight and even that tiny movement made his face throb with pain. Someone was holding his hand, squeezing the life out of it.
"Everything's alright dear, everything is just fine now."
This woman, this woman speaking to him as if they knew each other intimately, who was she? Cal squinted at her again, lifting his head to take in the size and shape of her face. She was not ugly, but faintly repellant, with a too-large forehead and unnaturally skinny eyebrows. They were too small for her face and for the dark slits that made up her eyes. She was covered in make-up, cakey, thick make up that gathered in her crow's feet and the corners of her red, red lips. She must have registered his confusion, for she squeezed his hand again, her long nails digging crescent moons into his palm.
"It's Miriam, darling. Your wife. Miriam."
Yes, of course. Miriam his wife. Had her voice always been so high and whining? Cal looked beyond her shoulder. His father stood back in the shadows but Cal recognized him, would recognize that coat and that huge, crooked nose anywhere. Life—memories--were returning.
"Son," his father said, taking a big step forward. "Hello, son."
That was alright. What else was a father to say when his son had just attempted suicide? Cal laughed, a hard, grating laugh that rasped his throat. He had botched it. He couldn't even kill himself without screwing it up. Miriam was cutting off circulation to his hand now and maybe her desperation was right, maybe she knew what he was thinking about. His jaw ached again. Was it gone?
Miriam touched his cheek with the back of her clammy hand. "Have the medicines worn off, dear?"
Cal shook his head and then shrugged. His mouth was still slow to respond and his throat hurt from his first attempt at laughter.
"Oh let him be, Miriam," his father said, shaking his head impatiently.
Miriam obeyed, scuttling back into the shadows, clasping her hands to her chest and wringing them. Cal's eyes shifted over her tawny fur coat to his father's long, black trench. He looked like an undertaker. Cal noticed the bulge of a cigar in his father's coat pocket. Nathan Hockley stepped up to the bedside, his eyes sweeping over Cal appraisingly, as if he were a piece of broken machinery at the mill.
"That was a damn fool thing to do, Cal."
Cal opened his mouth to argue but Nathan held up a gloved hand, calling for silence. Behind him, Miriam began to cry silently. "It was a damn fool thing. And if you try that again, son, I'll finish you off myself."
And then he was gone. Cal smiled, wanly; that was what passed for father-son bonding in his family. He wanted to laugh again but remembered the pain. Miriam rushed forward, her tears smudging the thick kohl of her eyeliner. She looked like a clown, a horrible, old clown. He had married this woman?
"Don't listen to him," she pleaded, taking his poor, abused hand again. "Don't you dare listen."
"Don't tell me… what to do," he croaked. Icy pain laced his throat like a collar. Miriam's face fell, collecting in a pile of wrinkles around her mouth and chin, like a melted basset hound. What had she expected? Had she thought the bullet might cleanly excise the part of Cal's brain that made him cold and remote? Miriam collected herself, plastering on a fake smile.
"You were so lucky," she said, wiping futilely at her tears and making more of a mess. "I don't know what I would've done if… But you're alright, darling! You're alright and tomorrow I can take you home."
Cal stared at her, lost as to what to say. Home. That, like the concept of time or gravity or the universe, was too bizarre to grasp. She was talking in quaint generalities to make him feel better. He had no home, not really. His life with Miriam consisted of precisely timed intervals of civility broken up by longer periods of open hostility in which neither of them spoke but both of them drank heavily. These bad spots tended to coincide with Miriam's many lovers. The fact that she was unfaithful did not bother him; the fact that all he had to return to was a depressing sham did.
Miriam turned around, embarrassed, and began fixing her make-up in her compact. Cal wondered if he ought to feel distressed or shamed but he felt nothing, just a bleak disappointment. He had failed to outrun everything he despised and now he was back, back to the world of the living, back to Miriam and his father and the cold, dragging life of a man with everything and nothing.
* * *
The house at Webster Avenue looked alarmingly familiar as Cal ducked out of the black Bentley. For some reason he had expected to feel a pang of relief at the first sight of the old sprawling mansion with the imposing front archway and meticulously-kept gardens. The house sat far back from the street, allowing room for an intricate spread of roses and hedges. Miriam was at his side as he stood and beheld the front of the house. She fussed over him endlessly, scolding him for this and that, irritating him as he looked at his house and realized for the first time that it bore a remarkable resemblance to an institution for the criminally insane. The windows were dark, drawn, empty except for damask curtains.
It was March, unseasonably warm for that time of year. A few jonquils had managed to shove their way up through the wet earth to show their green and yellow faces to the world. The market had crashed in October, Cal thought with a smirk as he drifted up the paved drive toward the door, and it had only taken him three months to decide that living was no longer a reasonable option. He wondered briefly if Miriam would understand, if she would empathize with his total lack of interest in life and the trivial, petty interactions contained within. His attitude, his mood as he had stood on that balcony a week ago was still sharp in his mind. It didn't bother him, not at all, rather it intrigued him that his brain had chosen to store the memory with perfect clarity.
There had been no subconscious attempt to stifle his moment of greatest despair and weakness. He remembered every minute of it in excruciating detail. There was the empty Scotch glass on the ground and the cold, small gun in his hand and then there was his life, his life that stretched out in front of him as one repetitive, meaningless game.
Cal glanced down at Miriam on his arm. She looked straight ahead, leading him to the front of the house with a smug little smile of victory, as if she herself were somehow responsible for his triumph over death. Insufferable. No, she wouldn't understand his reasons, the vast, boundless disgust of his life and everything it entailed, including her. He smiled, almost hysterical as Miriam paused at the door and waited for the butler to let them inside. His house and he couldn't be expected to open the door with his own hand.
Inside, the manor was overly-warm, choked with smoke from the fireplaces and the buttery smell of candles. Miriam, when she was around, kept the house stifling, like a brick furnace with chintzy curtains. Cal felt out of place. He had never expected to see this place again. On the floor of the northwest balcony, lying in a growing pool of his own blood, he had felt a tremendous joy run over his body, a shiver like an orgasm, consuming and frightening. At the time he had thought it was his soul releasing, rushing out of his body like a last hard breath. Now he wasn't so sure. Perhaps death was a kind of pleasure, a pleasure that had been robbed from him at the very last second.
He wanted it back.
The front hall calling table and the desk in the butler's entryway overflowed with hot house daisies and sunflowers. Cheery. Miriam strayed, veering off to hold up one of the nicer vases and show it to him, as if he were a dull child who couldn't figure it for himself. The inundation of flowers and cards struck him as odd. This implied that there was concrete acknowledgement of his entirely uncivilized behavior or that there was some level of sympathy flitting through the rich ranks of the Pittsburgh elite. Cal was not stupid enough to feel touched by these empty gestures, which—while outwardly attractive and expensive—did nothing to ease his sense that he was being laughed at. He glanced at one of the cards in passing.
Our deepest condolences on your accident. Here's to a speedy recovery!
So that was the explanation. It made a sad kind of sense. In Miriam's mind there was no such thing as suicide. The idea, the concept simply didn't exist in her world. A gun discharging accidentally, on a balcony in the middle of the night with no cleaning or polishing products around - to her that was a more likely scenario than suicide. And that was why there were flowers. Either way, Cal thought with a sneer, their friends were still laughing at his expense.
It was just before dinner time and Cal was hungry, half-starved from the measly hospital portions. Miriam shucked her ragged fur coat and escorted him into the dining room. The sconces and chandelier blazed, a welcome home party without guests. The servants were all there waiting, lined up like toy soldiers against the right wall. They looked like part of the house, part of the furniture, so clean and polished in their black and white uniforms. The maids and valets bowed their heads respectfully, each of them searching the floor. Cal knew they were frightened of him, that his ageless temper had turned them into kicking posts. Their presence made him uncomfortable, as if they had been trotted out to make him feel guilty. Look, they seemed to say, you almost left all of us behind!
The dining table was ready, the silver gleaming in the warm yellow light twinkling down from the chandelier. Cal waited but didn't take his seat at the head of the table. He couldn't remember the last time he and Miriam had sat down to dinner together, alone. Nathan Hockley shuffled in behind them.
"I said Kiwi Dark Tan you idiot! You expect me to put this anywhere near my shoes? What kind of garbage is this?"
Cal heard a crash and the smallest whimper from his butler. Nathan stomped up behind them, his face the color of a boiled beet. "Unbelievable," he muttered, brushing invisible dirt from his shoulders, "You'd think your man would know how to polish a shoe, Caledon."
"Oh Nathan, I'm sure Jeffrey is just distraught," Miriam said in a meaningful tone. She was, of course, implying that their butler was somehow moved by Cal's brush with death. It wasn't so; Jeffrey was perfectly competent. Cal was certain and had been for years that the butler took great pleasure in going out of his way to make Nathan Hockley's life a little worse. Cal never intervened to set the butler straight.
"You should fire that fool," Nathan added, going to sit down at the head of the table. Cal didn't argue, going to sit beside Miriam.
"Jeffrey's been with us since we were married," Miriam replied. They had staged this argument before, in almost the exact same language. "I couldn't fire him. He's part of the house, practically part of the family."
"Don't be sentimental," Nathan replied, settling into his chair with a grunt. He was old and getting fatter by the minute. The chair creaked under his substantial girth. One of the servants made a tiny cough to cover the chair's righteous protest.
"I've had them mash something for you," Miriam said grandly, patting Cal's hand as they each sat staring at the cutlery. She was enjoying playing the nurse entirely too much. Cal wanted a drink but Miriam moved the decanter out of his reach, prompting him to take a long, petulant swig of water.
"It better not be mutton again," Nathan said, running his pudgy red hand over his mustache, "I can't stand mutton."
Miriam said nothing. It would probably be mutton. Cal wanted very much to speak up but his voice was still tender and talking made the roof of his mouth shriek with pain. Complaining about the food was just another way for Nathan to point out the precarious financial state of Hockley Steel. If he could, Cal would have mentioned that at least they could still afford fresh meat--unlike most of the country--and that the old whiner should be happy with mutton or Cal would feed him shoe leather instead. Miriam tried to pat his hand again; Cal pulled it down into his lap.
The food arrived and Cal grimaced as the dome on his plate went up to reveal a sedate pile of mashed yams with a little gooey sliver of butter floating on top. He saw Miriam's hand twitch, as if she meant to feed him, and he shot her a subduing look. What he wanted to say was: You will spoon feed me over my dead body.
Cal grinned, making Miriam recoil. Over my dead body. What a riot.
She tried to open Cal's napkin and arrange it for him; he jerked his head away.
"Oh for God's sake, Miriam!" Nathan thundered, slamming down his fork and knife. "He's a grown man. Stop treating him like he's some kind of cripple."
Without another word, Nathan attacked his mutton, devouring it like a wild animal. Miriam couldn't look at him but Cal could. He studied his father closely, noting with satisfaction that his father was back to his old self. Either Nathan had anticipated that Cal might one day try to do away with himself or the incident had registered as just another irritating inconvenience. Work at the mills had probably stalled for an afternoon while Nathan begrudgingly visited the hospital to see his son. Lost revenue, reputations damaged, that was the way Nathan saw the world. Cal spooned a mouthful of the flavorless yams down his throat, grimacing at the greasy aftertaste. One of the logs in the fire place split open, belching a shower of sparks against the grate.
"I'll need to speak with you tomorrow," Nathan muttered, dabbing at his mustache with his napkin. Cal nodded. This meant that there was business to see to and that Miriam didn't need to hear about it. It also meant that Cal was still considered part of the inner circle; in the grander scheme—the important scheme--his "accident" had meant nothing.
Dinner crawled by. Nathan mumbled about the mill, about contracts and new opportunities and the future. Miriam made small noises in the back of her throat, agreeing with Nathan when she remembered to, pretending that her opinion registered and mattered. Cal watched all of this with his mouth full of mashed yams. He wanted it to be full of Scotch, but Miriam had hovered over the decanter like a cursed old mythological guardian lording over a powerful relic. It was only Scotch, but judging by the jealous gleam in her eyes it represented something more, a return to their old life, his old ways.
When the dessert course was over and the candles had burned low, Nathan excused himself, slamming Cal on the back with a congratulatory man to man pat. Congratulations, Cal thought, things can go back to normal now that you've gotten that nonsense out of your system. This was affection. Cal thanked his father, for what he wasn't sure, and saw him out. Already, things were ordinary again. Even though he couldn't speak or laugh or argue, things were slipping back into their regular pattern. Nathan departed, stuffing his hat down onto his gray head with a ruffling of his thick mustache.
"I'll stop by tomorrow," Nathan said on his way out, "We have something to discuss."
Cal shut the door before Nathan could say more. He was tired of business, exhausted by the thought of returning to the mills and the stuffy, cold offices with their clouds of cigar smoke and quiet, whispered agreements. On his way to bed he took the Scotch decanter from the dinner table, cradling it to his chest.
Miriam waited for him outside their bedroom door. This was unusual. Cal couldn't remember the last time they had slept in the same bed; Miriam's obsession with young blonde men meant she was almost always spending the night elsewhere. But there she waited, clad in a bright, silk robe with loud bursts of magenta flowers across the shoulders and chest. She looked like a prostitute, worn out and desperately painted. Her eyes ghosted over the Scotch decanter but she didn't comment on it.
"Good night," she said, lingering outside the double doors leading to their marital room. Cal grinned, running his hand over his smooth, clean-shaven jaw; this was as awkward for her as it was for him. He nodded his head down the hall.
"Do you want to sleep in the guest room?" Miriam asked, her red lips turning down at the corners.
Cal nodded gravely, theatrically, holding his throat for emphasis.
"Of course," Miriam said, backing away from their suite as if it housed the flames of hell. "But let me sleep there, you must be exhausted. I'll take the guest room tonight, and you just try to rest, alright darling?"
Cal stayed still, letting her go up on tiptoes to brush her dry, withered lips against his cheek. He felt the greasy smudge of her lipstick and held back a shudder.
"I'm so glad…" she said, trailing off, "Well, I'm just so glad. Good night."
It was the truth, a cunning truth. Without Cal she might be penniless, destitute, too old to find a new husband, left to live on whatever scraps Nathan tossed at her. Cal frowned as she turned away and sauntered back down the hall. Miriam would never die. That was why he had killed himself, to get away from her. She was too mired in this aristocratic life they led, a symbol of a tradition, a status that was rapidly eroding in the landslide of women's rights and forward thinking. Miriam didn't want forward thinking. Miriam feared independence. She wanted to stay as she was, supported by a man, using her uselessness, her leisurely co-dependence as a sort of talisman. Miriam would never, ever die and that was why—in the end--Cal had to take matters into his own hands.
She was gone, the last flourish of her magenta robe vanishing into the shadows of the long, silent hall. Candles flickered in the wall sconces, the electric lamps turned down to save money. Cal slipped into their bedroom, massaging the tightness in his neck. He hoped his voice would return soon but knew that little would change when it did. He had run out of patience with Miriam years ago and stopped indulging her even before their honeymoon was over. Her one redeeming feature was that she put up tirelessly with his black moods. Miriam was an uncomplaining sort and for sixteen years that had been enough.
Cal pulled off his heavy black coat and tossed it carelessly in the direction of the wardrobe. His shirt, tie, undershirt, shoes, belt and pants soon followed.
Curious, he went to the full length mirror that was propped against the wall next to the wardrobe. Cal had used this mirror thousands of times before, scrutinizing his appearance before dinner parties and balls and key business meetings. Now he looked at himself with a different kind of intent. He stood in his white, crisp shorts and let the immensity of solitude roll over him. Finally he was alone, and yet he felt watched, as if a million unseen eyes cluttered up the walls of his most intimate chamber, judging and studying his every move.
There he was, almost nude, standing in front of a reflection that made him feel nothing. Was it wrong, strange, that he could remember age seventeen more vividly than he could remember forty? What had happened? What had changed? Nothing, he decided, nothing had changed. At seventeen he had been young and alive, perhaps even hopeful; at forty he had been empty, hollow, and closer to death than a man of that age should ever rightly be.
Cal looked at his eyes, at the dark void that stared back. He looked at the black, lustrous hair that fell in shiny waves over his forehead. The tiniest hints of gray began at his temples, whisked back and away, signs of maturity, not deterioration. He looked at the straight line of his nose and the hard, masculine shape of his chin. There was a creeping pallor to his skin – not enough sunlight, too much time spent indoors, in the hospital. Despite his age he looked young, well, except of course for the thick bandages strapped around his head. He reached up and carefully unwound the bandages from his jaw. For a moment, just before the last wrap fell away, he stopped. Fear gripped him, a terror that held his heart and his hands fast. What if he was hideous? What if the one thing that was absolutely incontrovertible in his life—his looks—had been destroyed?
And so what? Cal thought, chuckling, feeling reckless and crazed. He let the bandages fall away, knowing that there was nothing he could do. Either he was a hideous monster or he wasn't, there would be no in between. His fears were unnecessary; the bullet had traveled through his cheek and exited out the back of his head through the ear canal, just as the doctor had said. Other than the sharp soreness in the roof of his mouth, there was no trace of that bleak evening on the front of his face. Cal turned his head, pulling his right ear forward slightly. Ah, so there was the mark. His hair had been shaved away a little and a pale pink line of stitches ran just below and behind his ear, like the gentle curve of a C.
He was forty-seven years old, not decrepit and not young but painfully alive.
With one last glance at his mouth and the concealed wound within, he turned away from the mirror and went to bed. He poured himself a few fingers of Scotch and tossed it back, wincing as the liquor burned him all the way down. The roof of his mouth stung, still tender, but Cal ignored it, swinging his legs into the bed and lying flat on his back. He reached up and pressed carefully on the line of stitches near his ear; it hurt but the spasm of pain was welcome. It reminded him that even if his brain and heart were exhausted beyond reason, his body would go on without him, soldiering forward whether he liked it or not. He placed his palm over his chest, absorbing the rhythmic, methodical punching of his heartbeat. There were two Cals, he thought, the physical one that walked and talked and breathed and fucked and the other Cal, the quiet, resigned ghost living inside the blood and flesh of the other. Once, that invisible spirit-like Cal had clamored to get out, scratching and kicking and biting, desperate to be the greater of the two. He tried to pinpoint when exactly that struggle had stopped.
The answer came with a wave of nausea. Rose. That struggle for a life led beyond the physical had died with Rose. Her corpse was beneath the waves somewhere, part of the water, dissolved into a million dying particles. Cal wondered if she was still there, still rotting at the bottom of the sea, her bones turning to sand. Breathing became difficult as he recalled that terrible night on the Titanic, the night he had, once and for all, felt the fight go out of him. He had spat at her, screamed, even fired a gun at his beloved, and all of it was part of that last gasp for something more than cold, white smiles and slick, breezy gestures. That night the physical Cal, the hard-bodied, sneering, calculatingly handsome Cal had won. And it was that Cal that now grumbled and tossed and turned, unhappy, unsatisfied with the food at supper and the quality of the Scotch and the tension in his body born of too long a spell without sex.
But it was the quiet, invisible Cal that finally became dragged down into sleep, into the sticky net of dreams. Before unconsciousness he hoped tentatively for no dreams at all but he knew, sensed, that dark, vicious things lingered on the edge of his brain, waiting for sleep to take him, waiting until he was weak and defenseless and utterly deserving of dread.