The index of self destru.., p.35
The Index of Self-Destructive Acts, page 35
When Sunday came around, Justin sent Tommy to take his mother to church. He could have gone along and been home in plenty of time, but an afternoon with his oldest friend was suddenly an occasion for which he felt the need to prepare, and he didn’t want to be rushed. He went for a walk and when he got home he took a long shower. His phone was ringing when he stepped from the bathroom, but it had stopped by the time he got to it. He had a voice mail and two missed calls from Tommy.
When he called back, Tommy picked up right away.
“What’s up?” Justin asked.
“Your mom fainted in church. She’s all right now, but I’m taking her to Brooklyn Hospital just to be sure.”
“Not the hospital,” Justin cut in. He thought of it above all as the place that had killed his father, and he refused to send his mother there. “Take her to the Price Center.”
On his way to the garage, he phoned the center to make sure the doctor on call would be ready for them. He climbed into the driver’s seat of the Escalade, which he usually avoiding taking to Crown Heights. He was most of the way downtown when Tommy texted him.
Doctor at the P.C. ran some tests and says everything looked fine.
Do you want to drive her home? Justin wrote back. I can turn around.
Netta wants to wait for you here, Tommy responded after a minute.
When Justin arrived, Tommy pulled smoothly out of his spot to make way for the Escalade. Justin parked the car and crossed the street to the center. A woman walking in the opposite direction smiled at him and gave a tentative wave, as though they knew each other. Justin had already walked by before he realized that it was Lucy Waxworth. There was something so incongruous about her presence there, though the Waxworths were just the kind of people one found in the neighborhood these days. He felt bad for not returning a smile or a wave, but he couldn’t do anything about it now. The sight of her had jarred him a little bit. She was an emissary from a weekend he’d hoped to consign to oblivion. She was one of only a handful of people who could say for sure that Justin had spoken to Kit that day, and here she was casually waving at him. He hurried into the lobby, where Jonathan waited with a look of beatific reassurance on his face.
“False alarm,” he said enthusiastically. “Your mother forgot to eat breakfast this morning. She was singing and praising and she just started to feel a bit unwell. You know how the church gets in August. I guess the air conditioner wasn’t up to the job today. She got herself overheated. A little rest and something to eat did the trick.”
“How long has the air-conditioning been broken?” Justin asked.
Jonathan’s smile wavered momentarily.
“It’s not broken exactly, just old. It’s only a problem a few weekends each summer. We like to keep the doors open and the fans running.”
“If you need air-conditioning to make the place inhabitable, just let me know and I’m happy to pay for it.” Justin tried to keep his voice calm. “There’s no need for old women to be collapsing in the heat.”
“She didn’t collapse, Brother Justin.” The smile had returned in full to Jonathan’s face. “She just felt a little unwell.”
“Where is she now?”
“Up on the third floor. I told her I’d wait for you here.”
Justin found his mother seated on a couch beside a large woman about her age who looked eerily familiar to him. She was obviously one of Netta’s church friends, but he couldn’t think why he knew her face so well. The two women were laughing comfortably, and they waved Justin over energetically. His mother looked perfectly comfortable—if anything, more animated than usual—as though she always spent her Sunday afternoons on this couch and he had been there to pick her up countless times before.
“You remember Mrs. Taylor?” she said as Justin approached.
He hadn’t laid eyes on her since he was ten or eleven years old. She’d looked so familiar, he realized now, not because he remembered her face but because so much of her son was captured in it. She had the same freckled, light brown skin, the same round cheeks, the same sad eyes. She’d moved them out of the neighborhood the year after Justin went off to St. Albert’s. They’d gone to Newark, where Terrance’s father’s family lived, so he could have his own fresh start. Justin was surprised that she’d come back after all these years, but even more surprised that his mother was sitting with her.
“Justin Price,” she said, as though he were a long-lost relation. “It’s been so long. And here you’ve become famous, with your name on the building and everything.”
She said this with a hint of skepticism, as though she didn’t quite believe in Justin’s celebrity, or didn’t think it commendable in any case.
“My father’s name,” Justin corrected her with a smile.
“That’s right,” she allowed. “He was a very good man.”
“I’m sorry about Terrance,” Justin said.
This sounded perfunctory, but how could he possibly express the emotion passing through him? He’d thought about Terrance almost every day during his first year at St. Albert’s, when their mothers had kept them apart. He’d told himself that things must have gotten easier at school after he left, that Terrance probably liked life without Justin as much as Justin liked St. Albert’s, but he’d known this wasn’t so, even before they moved away. Once Terrance was gone, there was nothing Justin could do. In those days before email or cell phones, it wasn’t really possible for two boys to keep in touch if their parents didn’t want them to.
He’d been in college when Terrance was killed. There was a memorial at the Pathway, but Justin had been so angry (at whom, exactly? well, at everyone) that he knew he wouldn’t be able to step inside. He hadn’t even taken the train up from Georgetown. He’d never had a chance for any kind of goodbye. After that, it had become easier not to think of the boy at all, or to think of him as the instrument that had brought Justin his new life, rather than as someone who’d been denied the same opportunity.
“Thank you,” Mrs. Taylor said. Justin watched the tears come briefly into her eyes, and then watched her control herself. “I think a lot of what he would have been like if he’d reached your age. He would have been happy to see you again.”
“I would, too,” Justin said.
“You’ll be back here soon, I hope,” Mrs. Taylor told them both while taking Netta into a hug.
Before they could leave, Netta had to do a round of the floor, saying goodbye to everyone she saw, including people Justin was quite sure she’d never met in her life. Finally they got downstairs, where Jonathan still waited in the lobby.
“Do you need a ride?” Justin asked.
“That’s very kind, but there are some people I’d like to visit, so long as I’m here.”
Justin wondered whether Mrs. Taylor was among them. How long had she been back in town? Had Jonathan stayed in touch with her? They’d never talked about it, but Justin imagined that Jonathan had gone to the funeral, which his father had overseen. They had made an odd triangle in their early boyhood. Jonathan had always been somewhat superfluous to Justin. He had to remind himself that Jonathan would have thought those days belonged to him as much as to them.
“Get that air-conditioning fixed,” Justin said. “Send an invoice to the foundation.”
“I appreciate that, Brother Justin,” Jonathan answered, ignoring the imperative tone.
“It’s such a shame what happened to that boy,” Netta told Justin as they got into the car. “You were so close back then.”
She said this without a trace of irony, and Justin wondered whether she was even still conscious of the work she’d done to keep him and Terrance apart.
“It was funny to see you two together,” he said. “I don’t remember you liking Mrs. Taylor so much.”
“Who has time to hold on to things? At my age you stick to people when you’ve got a little history with them.”
He wasn’t sure what she was suggesting. She and Mrs. Taylor had acted coldly toward each other long before they’d gotten wind of what was happening and acted abruptly to put an end to it.
“I didn’t know she’d come back to Crown Heights,” he said neutrally.
“Just a few months ago. I’ve been seeing her in church. It’s that time of life. We’re all getting old.”
Netta was in her late fifties and, notwithstanding whatever had happened that day, she seemed to be in perfect health.
“You’ve both got decades left.”
“Maybe so, but I got a scare in me today. I kept thinking about how quick your father went. I was ready for them to tell me they’d found something.”
“But they didn’t.”
Justin didn’t mention what they both knew—that Brooklyn Hospital hadn’t found anything the first time his father went in with a sore on his heel. They’d debrided it, bandaged it up, and sent him home with a topical ointment. He’d returned only when the growth had taken over most of his foot, by which time it was too late.
He reached over to pat her knee, and she softly stroked his wrist.
“I want to go home,” she said.
“We’re on our way.”
“You know what I mean. Where we’re going might be your home, but it’s never going to be mine. Whatever time I have left, I want to spend it in my place, with my people, just like Sue Taylor.”
For a moment he imagined that she might mean Barbados. That, at least, he could understand: island sun, childhood memories. But Crown Heights? She really did have decades left, in all likelihood. Wouldn’t she be happier spending them in a doorman building facing Central Park, rather than a fourth-floor walk-up facing a mobile police tower?
“Let’s talk about it after you’ve had some rest. I know it’s been a tough morning.”
“This isn’t a bad morning speaking,” Netta said more sharply. “I’ve tried living your way. I’m ready to go home.”
Justin couldn’t see the road in front of him. He thought he might have to pull over. What was it that bothered him so much? It was her life, after all. What difference did it make if she spent it in Crown Heights? He could put her up in the Denison or some other nice place, and he could make sure she was well taken care of there. Wasn’t the point just for her to be happy? But there was something more at stake.
He’d started talking about getting his parents out of the neighborhood as soon as his first bonus from Eisen came in. They’d simply refused. When he’d brought up their safety, his father had been offended at once on his own behalf and that of the neighborhood. They’d lived through the riots, watched liquor stores turn to coffee shops, beauty parlors become vegan restaurants. They weren’t going to start worrying about the crime rate now. Justin explained that he wasn’t speaking about the usual street violence. People knew he had money, and that made them inviting targets. His father had told him he was making too much of himself. If criminals were going after rich people, wouldn’t they have better luck on Fifth Avenue?
“Save that money,” he’d finally said. “Don’t assume it will be coming in like that forever.”
Justin had been tempted to tell him what kind of numbers he was dealing in. It didn’t need to keep coming in forever; he’d already made more than enough to support them all for the rest of their lives. But his father’s refusal was obviously motivated by something more than thrift.
At the time, he was a couple of years short of retirement. At fifty-five his city pension would kick in, and he promised to reconsider the question then. When the apartment above Justin’s came on the market, Justin bought it quietly and prepared to wait him out. The diagnosis came six months later.
Why had he still refused, even then? In death, Daryl Price had become a great mystery to his son. If he had not been the same in life, this couldn’t be entirely blamed on the narcissism of youth. The man had seemed so solid, so self-sufficient, that the broad outlines of his story—the few facts that even an uninquisitive child comes to possess as a matter of course—hadn’t seemed to require shading in. Daryl Price was born and raised in Wrigley Park, a place to which he referred so rarely that Justin had been a teenager before he figured out that it was not a city or a town but a neighborhood in Paterson. He’d been drafted at twenty and served in Vietnam, a period about which he’d never spoken to Justin. After the army, he’d briefly played the trumpet in a church band, which was how he’d met Netta Headley, whose own father had moved their family from Barbados to Brooklyn when she was a teenager.
For nearly thirty years he drove for the MTA, mostly the B8 from Bay Ridge to Brownsville. He worked fourteen-hour shifts, often on weekends and holidays. Justin and his mother were usually done with dinner and getting ready for bed by the time he got home. After a few words of greeting, he opened a beer, put on a record—Miles or Dizzy, Freddie Hubbard or Donald Byrd—and sat on the couch to listen while he ate. Netta sat with him, but they rarely spoke. Instead he attended to the music carefully, as though engaged in conversation with it. After he’d finished his food and opened his second beer, he called his son from his room to join them. He might ask a few questions about Justin’s day, but always the music got its share of his attention. After a third beer he tended to nod off, at which point Netta would shake him gently awake and bring him to bed.
Though he wasn’t a spiritual man so far as Justin could tell, he put on a jacket and tie every Sunday morning and spent his day off in church with his wife. When Justin made too much ruckus beside them, he reached down and took the soft flesh between Justin’s shoulder and neck into a firm pinch, sending shivers through the boy’s whole body, the closest the family came to the corporal punishment to which so many of Justin’s young friends were subject. On sunny days, he set up a beach chair out on the street after services, and he sat with the other neighborhood men while they cooked on the grill and smoked cigarettes. In this way, a life had been lived. Had it been a happy life? It had never occurred to Justin to ask.
Like a would-be suitor, he’d waited only as long after his father’s death as decorum demanded before broaching the subject of the move with his mother. When he did, he interpreted her continued reluctance as posthumous loyalty to her husband of thirty-six years, but as the months wore on he was forced to admit that she sincerely shared his father’s feelings. She didn’t think people needed all of the things the Doyles had to be happy. “What good is it to gain the world but lose your soul?” she’d said to him more than once. But she’d given in eventually, and he’d been sure she would change her mind once she moved.
He couldn’t accept the idea that she simply belonged in Crown Heights in a way that she didn’t belong where she was now. Did Frank Doyle ever stop to wonder whether he belonged on the Upper East Side, just because he wasn’t born there? There was a black family in the White House—could there not be one on Fifth Avenue? It was only Netta’s old-fashioned ideas that made her refuse to be happy there. And this refusal, by implication, suggested that Justin should not be happy there either. She’d sent him into this world, why would she not come with him? Then there was something else, too, something in him that thought: If she goes back, it was all for nothing. Providing her this life was part of a larger effort to make good of what he’d done. When she refused to accept this life, she was refusing him redemption.
Justin left the car for Tommy to park, and he helped his mother to her apartment. It was a few minutes after noon by the time he got back downstairs, so he texted Eddie to say he’d be late. A few hours earlier he would have hesitated before sending that text, but the morning’s events had made much of his anxiety seem overblown. Still, he opted to take the subway downtown, thinking vaguely that his movements would be harder to track that way. Eddie’s block was all the way east, another fifteen minutes once he got off the train, and it was after one o’clock by the time he got there.
Despite Blakeman’s warning, Justin was perplexed when he arrived at the address Eddie had given him and found the kind of distressed property his REIT might have bought and refurbished. Why was it so difficult to imagine Eddie living in such a place? He’d always enjoyed staying over with Justin when they were kids, but Justin’s childhood building had been in considerably better shape than this one, and in any case there was a difference between putting up with such conditions for the sake of a friend and seeking them out. Even if Eddie didn’t want to spend any of the savings Justin knew he had, whatever new job was keeping him so busy must have paid enough to cover the rent on a nicer apartment. Failing that, he could have gone on living with his parents. If he was living in this apartment, he must have wanted for some reason to live in a place like this. In this way, he was more like Justin’s parents than like his own.
Daryl and Netta had always loved Eddie, whatever their reservations about the rest of his family, with whom they’d had a polite but uneasy relationship. His mother had felt real gratitude toward the Doyles, and she’d often defended the family to her husband, but she’d been cold toward them ever since the publication of a business section profile in which Kit had called Justin “a second son.”
It was typical of the Doyles, this assumption that being counted in their circle was such a gift that even his real family could only be flattered at his inclusion. Or maybe it was just that his actual parents, not being in the circle themselves, didn’t matter enough to worry about offending. Netta had never mentioned the article to Justin. It was his father who had thrown the paper down in front of him and asked, “What’s wrong with the mother you’ve already got?” Justin was almost glad his father hadn’t been around to hear Frank’s remarks in that announcer’s booth, which he would have taken as confirmation of his long-held suspicions of what lay in the man’s heart. (“Some of us can’t afford to just say any old stupid thing that comes into our heads” was all his mother had cared to comment on that matter.)
