Chapter One
As they came to a stop at Walden and Huron, Malcolm said."That's my car," referring to the old cream-colored Corvair in front ofthem. A moment later, he said, "Poor old Dad." He drummed outsome kind of transitional rhythm on the steering wheel, looked at hersmiled, reached for her hand, and said, "How are you feeling, SarahVaughn?"
"Whatever it was," she said, "it went away. I think I just needed toeat something."
He released her hand, lowered his head a bit, squinting throughthe windshield, and then absentmindedly began to sing the openingbars to an old song Sarah recognized as Gershwin but couldn't quitename.
Harry, up way past his bedtime, bored with a long night of adultbusiness, groaned, almost inaudibly, in the backseat, his plight nowenlarged by his father's singing. The traffic light changed from red togreen, but the Corvair in front of them didn't move, and that interruptedMalcolm's song.
Sarah said, "I think he's fallen asleep," meaning the driver of theCorvair.
Harry, misinterpreting her, said, "I'm not asleep," then sat forward,put his face between the two front seats, and said, "Why aren't wegoing?"
Malcolm tapped the horn once, politely, but still the Corvair didn'tmove. Sarah thought the driver was a teenage boy, though she couldn'thave said why she thought that; all she could actually see was the backof his head, in silhouette. They were in her Jeep wagon, as Malcolm'scar was in for a tune-up, and briefly, sitting high above the low-slungCorvair, Sarah wondered if they mightn't just lurch over it, tanklike.
"Or dead drunk," she added, and then, for no apparent reason, theCorvair slowly moved forward. Without signaling, the driver made aright turn, onto Huron.
"Oh, great," said Harry, "he's going the same way we're going,"and Malcolm asked Harry to please sit back.
They crept along behind the Corvair at about fifteen miles anhour. It was a quarter to ten, and in this quiet residential district theCorvair and the Jeep were the only cars on the road. "Pass him," saidHarry. "We're going too slow."
Malcolm glanced in his rearview mirror and said, "Rememberwhat we talked about, Harry ... earlier this evening."
As they came to another stop, Harry let out a dramatic sigh. Thiswas the long traffic light at the parkway. When at last the signalchanged to green, the Corvair did not move. Malcolm tapped thehorn, to no response. "Here we go again," he said and raised the parkingbrake.
"What are you doing?" Sarah asked.
"I'm going to see what's up with this guy," said Malcolm, openingthe car door.
"Don't, Malcolm," she said. "Just pull around him. He's probablystoned out of his mind."
Malcolm, already out the door, leaned in and said, "Well, if he'sthat stoned he's liable to get somebody killed. Besides, he might besick or something."
"Can I come?" shouted Harry, but Malcolm had shut the dooragainst the cold, and Sarah told Harry to stay put.
For a moment, she noticed how eerie Malcolm looked, lit by theJeep's headlights. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, she recalled thename of the Gershwin song, "Things Are Looking Up." She watchedas Malcolm rapped with his knuckles on the driver's window.
Then Harry, who'd again slid forward between the seats for a betterview, said, "Wouldn't it be funny if that guy was going to ourhouse ... if we just followed him the whole way and he stopped infront of our house?"
Sarah turned and looked at him. His skin caught some of the greenglow from the traffic light, and while she was looking at him the glowchanged from green to yellow to red. Briefly, she worried about howtired he would be at school the next morning. She said, "That wouldbe funny," and started to lean toward him, intending to kiss his cheek,but something changed suddenly in his eyes. He said, "Mommy—"
Ever afterward, she would recall that she'd seen nothing like terrorin Harry's face. His expression was alarming only because it had goneso absolutely neutral, as if some vital force inside him had abruptlyshut down—that and his using "Mommy" rather than the more usual"Mom." He said it again, "Mommy—" and she thought she heardat the same instant another sound, from outside, a kind of poppingnoise, perhaps from under the hood of the car. When she turned tosee what Harry was seeing, Malcolm was already moving slowly backtoward them.
She thought Malcolm had been wearing his plaid cap with theearflaps, but now he was hatless, and there was something odd abouthis hair; it looked spiky, and some of it hung down over his foreheadthe way it did when he was just out of the shower. As he movedcloser, into the direct blaze of the Jeep's headlights, he caught her eye,through the windshield, and looked at her with a disappointment soenormous she thought her heart would break. For reasons she wouldnever entirely understand, her second-grade teacher passed throughher mind, a black-haired grumpy old woman named Mrs. Cole who'dfancied herself an artist. Sarah actually did feel something odd in herheart, a kind of rough single quake, and then a great scalding sensationin her ears. A druggy hum had started up inside her head; she whispered Malcolm's name.., or maybe his name was whispered bysome other voice, deep inside the hum. And then she watched as Malcolm leanedagainst the front fender of the Jeep and slid down to thestreet out of sight.
Somewhere off in the vast wasteland of the future, Harry wouldask her why she had shoved him so hard against the seat when he'dtried getting out of the Jeep, but she would not recall doing that; norwould she recall getting out of the Jeep herself, or telling Harry toclimb up front and to keep blowing the horn until she told him tostop. She would recall Malcolm on the cold pavement, slumpedagainst the front wheel of the car, one leg folded under the other. Shewould recall the surprising moment when the Corvair began to moveidly away across the parkway, leaving Malcolm's plaid hat lying precisely in themiddle of the street's double yellow line.
Then there was a woman in a motorcycle jacket, a tough-lookingwoman with a diamond stud in her nose and very short platinum hair,leaning over her and Malcolm. She told Sarah that somebody wouldbe there in a minute—Sarah thought the woman said somethingabout "empties," which made her think, bewilderingly, of sodabottles--and then the woman opened the door to the Jeep and toldHarry to stop blowing the horn. Oddly, she called Harry "honey" and"sweetie" and took him in her arms, not lifting him out of the car butonly holding him there in the seat, and Sarah thought they must knowthe woman, though she couldn't think how. Meanwhile, Sarah wasnow the one slumped against the front wheel of the Jeep. She heldMalcolm's head in her lap. There was a smudge on his white shirt,near the collar, put there earlier, before they'd left for the dinner,when he and Harry had done some roughhousing in the window seatat home. Sarah wanted to keep Malcolm warm and reached forwardover him and struggled with the buttons of his coat. While she didthis, she tried to prepare a statement in her mind, an explanation thatbegan, My husband has been shot, but somehow shot had too manymeanings, and. she felt she needed to add, with a gun, which thenseemed utterly foolish. She thought she could get the coat buttonedand keep Malcolm warm, and she could get her explanation right ifshe could only stop herself from shaking. A comprehensive sense offailure was overtaking her--she recalled a heat lamp she'd stupidly leftburning in the lab at school two years earlier--and though shecouldn't stop herself from shaking, couldn't control the horrible disjointedspasms in her arms and shoulders, and wasn't able to managethe backward buttons on Malcolm's coat, she was comforted by thethought that Malcolm wouldn't mind, that he would forgive her,which was like him.
This occurred on the second day of March, a Sunday. Harry hadrecently returned to his second-grade year at school, following a ten-dayFebruary vacation. That night, they'd all attended an awards din-ner at the Historical Commission, where Malcolm was honored forhis restoration of the Planck Building. No one at the Historical Commission hadexpected Harry to come, and an extra chair and a placesetting had to be squeezed in at their table. It was like Malcolm not tocheck with anyone about whether or not children were invited to thedinner, and it was like Sarah to be overly embarrassed. Harry wouldn'teat anything that was served--Sarah thought the menu was meant tobe historical: roasted squab, wild rice, spiced apples, bread pudding.Fortunately, he had managed to fill up on buttered rolls, and somewhere near themidpoint of the evening, it seemed to Sarah that spreading icedbutter on spongy dinner rolls was what she'd come for,wife of the honoree, mother of his offspring. The thing had gone onlonger than it should have, and it was nine-thirty by the time they gotout.
All winter the weather had been warmer than usual, with littlesnow. While they'd been inside the Historical Commission, a briefrain shower had left a clear sheen outside on the streets. There wereisolated, perfectly round dots of water, like tiny magnifying lenses,dotting the Jeep's windshield. The night world had a hard edge to itsomehow, and the air felt colder than it actually was.
When, at the intersection of Walden and Huron, Malcolm hadsaid, "That's my car" he referred to the 1965 Corvair his father hadgiven him on his sixteenth birthday—automatic transmission, newtires, six-cylinder engine, black interior, and only 38,000 miles on theodometer. In this car, Malcolm had taken Patti Bolling, vice presidentof the student council, to see Psycho at a drive-in theater. He'd put hisarm around her, and after about ten seconds his whole life hadbecome focused in his arm, what his arm was feeling, what it wascausing Patti to feel, and he left it there, paralyzed, until it went numb.When he started smoking Pall Malls, he carried a bottle of Lavoris inthe glove compartment of the car. He'd got his first speeding ticketdoing thirty in a twenty-five-mile-an-hour zone in front of the juniorhigh school. When Malcolm had become involved, as a high schoolsenior, in some civil rights work in Baltimore, the car had beentrashed by anonymous eggers. All this Sarah knew, all this was containedin "That's my car." Afterward, whenever she would recall thenight of the shooting, she would sometimes think of young earnestMalcolm putting his arm around Patti Bolling's shoulders, and itwould make her cry.
Malcolm's father, a career man in the navy, had been retired earlyfrom the service on account of some mysterious mental episodes thatwere eventually diagnosed as petit mal. Three years into his retirement,his wife, Malcolm's mother, had died of a stroke, and he'dbecome increasingly fond of raking pine needles into small roundpiles in the backyard of their Maryland home; he would set themablaze and then stand leaning on the rake handle, watching themsmolder and smoke. In the Jeep, when Malcolm said, "Poor old Dad,"he meant too bad about how lost the man had become in his last years,too bad about how his life had gone off course and had never found anew footing, too bad about how he'd seemed to welter into his owngrave at the age of sixty-three.
When they'd been stuck behind the Corvair the first time, atWalden and Huron, and Malcolm asked Sarah how she was feeling, itwas because she'd complained during the dinner that she had a headache.And "Sarah Vaughn" was a kind of joke name for her. At the timeof their marriage, eighteen years ago, she'd not taken his surname forthe obvious reason—it would have made her Sarah Vaughn, andthough she liked Sarah Vaughan, the singer, she didn't want to spendthe rest of her life being teased and asked to sing a few bars of ColePorter. She'd remained Sarah Williams, and when Harry had comealong he was christened Harry Vaughn-Williams—a name with a similarproblem but involving a much smaller audience. As they waited forthat first traffic light to change, Malcolm's choice of song, his beginningthe intro to "Things Are Looking Up," most likely reflected hismood; though he'd pretended not to care about the Historical Commission'saward, Sarah knew it actually meant a lot to him.
When Malcolm said to Harry, "Remember what we talkedabout ..." he referred to an exchange they'd had earlier that eveningas they were getting dressed for the Historical Commission dinner.Harry had come into their bedroom for the third time in ten minutesto say in a whiny voice, "When are we leaving?"
Sarah, the only one of the three who wasn't ready, had snapped athim, and Malcolm had taken him out of the bedroom, into the hallway,and sat him down in the window seat. "Harry," he said. "Why areyou always in a rush to get on to the next thing?"
This question was followed by a long silence, which meant thatHarry was pondering it; Harry tended to view questions of this sortas puzzles to be solved, as something to be made into a game. "Idon't know," he said at last. "I guess I was born that way ... it's in mygenes."
In the bedroom, Sarah could hear this exchange. She thought, He'sunderstood the implied criticism in Malcolm's question, turned itaround, and made Malcolm responsible for it. Fourteen hours she'dbeen in labor with Harry, and it occurred to her to call out to themfrom the bedroom and remind them that Harry hadn't been in any bigrush in the delivery room.
But Malcolm said, "Well, Harry, I doubt that's true, because yousure weren't in a hurry to get born."
That was funny, Sarah thought, the way Malcolm had spoken aversion of what had just passed through her mind, but he'd phrased itso that it included not only the long hours of labor but also the sixyears of their trying to get pregnant.
"Do you remember when we were at the county fair last summer?"Malcolm said to Harry in the window seat. "Remember how,when we were on one ride, you'd be talking about what we weregoing to ride next? You see, you can't enjoy where you are now ifyou're always thinking about what's next. I want you to try practicinga little patience and not always be thinking about what's next. Okay?Also, when you rush other people, they tend to make mistakes."
Another long silence. Then Sarah heard Harry say, "Can we goback to that same fair next summer?"
This made Malcolm laugh, and they'd done some roughhousing inthe window seat that left a brown smudge from Harry's shoe on Malcolm'swhite dress shirt. Sarah had urged Malcolm to change the shirtbefore they left, but he pulled on his jacket and said it wouldn't show.He'd returned to the bedroom and, briefly admiring himself in thewardrobe mirror, said something about not looking too bad for aforty-three-year-old man. She came and stood behind him, gazingover his shoulder, and with the impeccable timing he now and thenmanaged, he turned and kissed her. He said that for a forty-three-year-oldwoman she didn't look too bad herself. I'm forty-five, shetold him, and he pretended, as he always did, to be surprised.
The afternoon of Malcolm's funeral, Sarah will recall that she was irritatedat Malcolm when he got out of the Jeep, deeply irritated by hisdecision to confront the driver of the Corvair. It will seem to her thatMalcolm was always on some princely mission, always taking the highroad. After the cemetery, back at the house, she'll say to Malcolm's bestfriend, Deckard, as Deckard sits in a chair in the corner of the livingroom, weeping, "Of course, we lesser beings would just blow our hornsand drive around the fucking car, but not Malcolm.... Malcolm wasalways looking for the nobler thing." Harry, undetected at a nearbydoorjamb, will overhear her say this, and then, despite all her penitentialefforts, he'll refuse to look at her or speak to her for hours. Whenfinally he relents, he'll speak only to tell her that she has bad breath.
And late at night, night after night, as she lies sleepless in bed,Harry's face will float up out of the darkness, glowing green, thenyellow, then red, and then go neutral, and she'll hear his startling"Mommy—" first when he saw an arm extend from the Corvair'swindow, an arm with a hand, a hand with a pistol; and again,"Mommy—" when he saw what looked like sparks fly out of theshort barrel, when he saw his father turn and look back at the Jeep andput his hand first to his stomach—the way he did sometimes when hehad indigestion—and then to his head, knocking his good cap offonto the street but not stopping to pick it up, as if, inexplicably, he nolonger cared about it.
Most dreadfully, Sarah will hear again and again the poppingnoise—dreadfully because, when she hears it, she fears she'll dream ofit again: sometimes the sound is the branch of a tree, snapping in astorm. In this dream, she's asleep in her bedroom, the howling ofwind wakes her, and, surprised to find that Malcolm has left the bed,she walks to the window and looks out just in time to see the greattree limb crack in a sudden gust. Sometimes, in another dream, thesound is electrical. She and Harry are having dinner at home—alone,because Malcolm has mysteriously failed to show up—when suddenlyall the lights go out; she finds a flashlight and goes down the stairs tothe basement, where she opens the circuit box; when she flips aswitch, there's an electric pop, and sparks in the dark. And sometimes—thisby far the worst one—she will dream of the murdererhimself. She and Harry and Malcolm are walking on the beach nearthe summer house; Malcolm trots ahead of them and disappears overa dune between the beach and an immense parking lot; when she andHarry reach the parking lot, it's empty except for a white Corvair,and there's no sign of Malcolm; a man sits behind the wheel of theCorvair, apparently sleeping; they walk to the car, and when she asksthe man whether he has seen her husband, he turns his face to her, aneon-white oval with a mouth, no eyes and no nose; he opens hismouth and makes a horrible clucking noise with his glossy pinktongue, the sound of the gunshot.
With each of these nightmares, Sarah will wake at the moment ofthe pop, and always with a burning in her ears. She'll often think ofMrs. Cole, her second-grade teacher, a frightening witch of a womanwho, whenever Sarah drew pictures of green trees, would comearound with a yellow crayon and add sunlight to the topmost leaves,explaining that the topmost leaves always catch the sun. (The yellowlooked stupid to Sarah, as if someone had broken a giant egg over hertrees, and she hated Mrs. Cole.) Why the woman should have visitedher that night when she turned and saw Malcolm's face through theJeep's windshield, she will never entirely understand.
Malcolm's face through the windshield, lit by the headlights: itsaid, Sorry, my love. Sorry about how long it took for Harry to comealong, and sorry for everything.... Sorry that, in a way, we were justgetting started.... I guess we won't be ...
Harry behind the steering wheel, blowing the horn to arouse thepeople in the houses, trying to stir up some help: another sound thatwill visit Sarah in her dreams, disguised as the air-raid alert in oldBritish movies about the Second World War. She'll recall the shorthairedwoman in the motorcycle jacket who was the first to reachthem in the street, and she'll regret not having got the woman's name.Unexpectedly, forgotten details will ambush her. Pouring apple juiceinto a jelly glass for Harry, she'll suddenly recall a uniformed policemanpoking around the Jeep, a young man who looked like a moviestar ... but what movie star? And what had he been doing writingdown the license plate numbers of all the cars that were parked onboth sides of the avenue? Surely he could see that none of these wasthe white Corvair. Sorting through junk mail, she'll suddenly think,for the first time, of a red-and-blue bumper sticker on the back of theCorvair ... an ad for something, but an ad for what? Boarding thebus, she'll drop quarters into the change post and think of a youngLatino intern at the hospital—a kid, really, with gold hoop earrings ineach ear—whom she'd seen holding Harry's hand in a hallway somewhere,squatting down to Harry's level and talking with him quietly;as she approached them, the intern glanced up at her before movingaway down the hall, and she saw that he had been crying.
For a long time, Sarah will not button a coat without thinking ofMalcolm, and though details of this sort will prompt her grief againand again, in a wider deeper way, the world itself, life itself, life's plainrefusal to brake, its idiotic scheme to proceed, will fan her sorrow. Asshe leaves Harry at school and descends a flight of stairs, somethingabout the echo of her own footsteps in the stairwell fills her withremorse; outside, witchy Mrs. Cole's sunshine swoops down, causingher to shield her eyes and dig into her pockets for sunglasses; on thelawn, she spots a Japanese magnolia, about to blossom, and thinks irrationallyof Malcolm's red-and-black plaid hat, chosen for him byHarry out of a mail-order catalog. Her grief will be too large somehow,larger than it ought to be, and she'll feel indicted by others asinhumane for keeping such a large animal indoors. At every turn,everyone will encourage her to set it free, let it go, and to allow herfeelings to change. She will, of course, also feel misunderstood—akind of moist subterranean labyrinth beneath her loneliness. For whatwill seem an eternity, no one will quite see that she isn't interested inhaving her feelings changed: not the head of her department, who'lltry urging her back to work before she is ready; not Malcolm's friendDeckard, who'll endlessly offer advice, telling her what's best for herand best for Harry; not her own mother, Enid, the actress who can'tleave her play in New York to attend Malcolm's funeral and who'll trycoercing Sarah into the offices of grief counselors she has found. Noone will seem to understand that for nearly two decades Sarah envisionedher life only with Malcolm. No one will seem to grasp thatMalcolm is actually dead, that he was shot, apparently freakishly,apparently at random, by a total stranger, and that he didn't survive,that he truly died, that he was dying already as she sat in the cold streetand held his head and struggled with the buttons to his overcoat. Noone will understand that her grief is what she has left of him, and ifshe were to lose that, she would have nothing at all.
Continues...
Excerpted from Singing Boyby Dennis McFarland Copyright © 2002 by Dennis McFarland. Excerpted by permission.
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