“No, that’s not—”
“Adam, I cannot stand here all day—I cannot stand to listen.”
“Yeah?” I said to the man who raised me, who always came through for me. “Well, this is who I am, take it or leave it.”
A pause, a millisecond that hangs in the ether for all eternity.
Herschel said, “Then I leave it,” and hung up.
I never went to pick up the check and I never spoke with him again.
Now I started the car, with a terrible, restless yearning—to see him, to be with him one last time, to apologize, mend the unmendable. Gasping for air—the memory of his final rejection only made me crave more, to connect, bond, bind for all time, but what could I possibly do with this violent frenzy of the heart? I could visit his grave, but the thought twisted me up inside like an old rag, and anyway I didn’t even know where his grave was. I headed for Maya’s, almost weeping again for the second time in twenty-four hours—I was losing it. I drove the freeway reckless. When I got there nobody was home—of course not. Steph was in elementary school; they were all at work. I knew they hid the key under the garage clicker, behind the pots. I let myself in and went upstairs, up into the attic, and knelt before Herschel’s trunk.
The impasse.
I started digging through—old letters, postcards, a photo book—the wedding, Lydia in white, all that jet-black-and-white hair, the Semites. Herschel’s diary—tomatoes / Food King = $1.18. There was a small, framed picture of my mom in there—I didn’t have the heart to stare at it for long. Then I opened the trumpet case—the horn was beautiful, golden, engraved—Fred Berman for Martin Custom, 1954. I tried to blow a note through it but only got a little squeak. With great care I placed it back in the purple velvet.
I kept digging—tax returns, meticulous stapled receipts, a matchbook from Earl Scheib Auto Body. Then, at the bottom, wedged under the trumpet case, an old pad, foolscap, top page blank. I flipped it open. Marked-up drafts, of letters he wrote—most to Maya, one to his cousins in Cleveland, one to his bosses at the DWP, and then the last one, to Charles Elkaim, August 16, 2016—he was not yet in the home. I sat with the fanned-out pages on my lap, scanned the neat cursive, nervous for what I might find, then my name—
I remain worried about Adam. His innocence terrifies me. In fact, he is so much like me in my youth that I get a chill when I hear the foolish things that come from his mouth.
I closed the pad in a complete daze, looked around the room like there was somebody watching, but there was only quiet.
—auditioning for Stan Kenton, how I didn’t make the cut.
Poor Herschel. Didn’t make the cut—such savage language, butchery. Didn’t make the cut. The phrase followed me as I closed the pad, stashed it under the trumpet case, closed the trumpet case, and closed the trunk.
—didn’t make the cut.
The brutality of those four little words wouldn’t leave my head—merciless. They gripped me as I locked up the house, turned toward my car. They hung over me as I got behind the wheel.
—didn’t make the cut.
I drove home, showered off the long week, and slept the sleep of the gutted.
In the morning it hit me.
38
Forty minutes later, I was pulling into the cul-de-sac in Cheviot Hills under steady morning rain. I knocked on the door of Devon Hawley Senior. He stood there in terry cloth, smelling of hard liquor.
I said, “Good morning—hope I didn’t wake you.”
He grumbled. “I could use a visitor. Come on in.”
Soon I was in a dark sunken living room with Tudor beams and a steel-grated fireplace black with soot. The faded orange couch covered in crocheted throws, the low oak table, the dim lamps and hanging needlepoint, and the unpolished silver suit of armor overlooking the whole scene all seemed to be stolen off an old Hollywood movie set, like the place hadn’t budged since the days of The Daily Telegraph. A built-in bookcase was packed end-to-end with newer hardcovers though, mostly true crime and rugged masculine reads, lots of Grisham and Jack Reacher.
Hawley Senior said, “We got off to a bad start last time—can I fix you breakfast? You look wrecked.”
“Mr. Hawley,” I said, “you remember last time we spoke you told me about the amateur contest. And the yearbook photos?”
“Well, sure.”
“I’d like to see it, the yearbook, I mean.”
He paused, looked me over. “Why the hell not.”
Around a gray chairlift, up the carpeted staircase, Hawley Senior hauled himself, clutching the banister, and I followed. Along these walls, framed family photos hung, all faded. Hawley Senior and Hawley Junior in matching conductor hats, operating a small outdoor train packed with little kids, then a portrait shot of the wife, a little rigid and depressive looking, then a framed Kodak of a three-person family picnic. They seemed lonely together, cul-de-sac’d in a cul-de-sac.
“What happened to your wife?” I asked.
“She died of Parkinson’s eight years ago,” he said.
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, well.”
At the end of the stairs, another work of art—a framed needlepoint that said LOVE IS…A RAINBOW. I’d been right—nothing had changed in this place since his wife had passed away. Maybe a cleaning lady came, that’s it. Another mausoleum, another man stuck in time. Down the hall, first door on the right hung a kid’s poster—cartoon firemen and the printed words DEVON’S ROOM. In uneven marker the word Junior was scrawled underneath.
Hawley opened the door, flicked on the light, and said, “After you.”
One poster taped to the wall: Hendrix, Axis: Bold As Love. And out the window, a straight shot across the green lawn and over the hedges to the back of the Persky house—probably I was looking right at Cinnamon’s window.
Soon, we were seated side by side on the hard old bed, looking over the pages of Hamilton High Class 1983/1984.
“Where the hell’s that picture?” he said. “They played in the auditorium there. I helped ’em set up the speakers, AV stuff.”
As he spoke, Hawley Senior thumbed page by page. There was something excruciating about high school yearbooks, even when they weren’t your own. You felt the gloss of a bubble about to burst. Finally, he landed on a messy photo collage—Winter Talent Show. And in the corner of the page was a single blurry black-and-white stage shot scissored into a hasty blob, with a caption across the bottom in corrector ribbon white—Daily Telegraph with all the names listed.
“Here they are,” he said, tapping the pic. “In all their raggedy-ass glory.”
Impatient, I grabbed the book, looked closer.
It was not a great photo, taken longways from one corner of the stage. It was as if the photographer, Hawley Senior himself, of course, wanted to make sure you knew what kind of sneakers they were wearing. This put his son, Hawley Junior, at the far, far end of the stage, an apparition in a velvet tux, his face shrouded by a mop of blond curly hair, hunched over his old-time keyboard. Durazo was shirtless in the way back but Grunes you could see the most—staring at his fingers on the frets of his bass like they were his worst enemy. Sandoz was at the fourth wall, lurchin’ like Jagger.
“Who’s this?” I said. “On guitar?”
“That’s Emil.”
“Yeah?” I shook my head. “It…it doesn’t look like him.”
He grabbed the book back and looked closer, squinted. “It’s a funny angle, that’s all. This is them and they are it.”
“Wait, hold on,” I said, and yanked the book back. Then I fished out my cell to take a close pic. “Gimme a sec, we’ll blow it up.”
I took a pic of the page, did a quick stretch with thumb and forefinger. Hawley Senior had grabbed the yearbook back but I was focused on the cell phone now.
“See?!” I said, holding the phone out. “Who the heck is that?—’cause it’s not Emil.”
