William Lashner - Past Due

“Telushkin?”

“Smoking his pipe, checking our mail. But there was nothing to find and eventually he disappeared too. That’s the one thing right in the world. You wait long enough everyone disappears. Except my wife. But you met her, didn’t you?”

“Yes I did.”

Henry Greeley laughed, stuck the rest of the second dog into his mouth, and stood. I stood with him.

“I’m going to practice,” he said. “I was making like a lawn mower on those greens. Putt, putt, putt, putt. Golf. Thing is, I never much liked golf. I played just to join that fancy club and when that went to crap I quit. Always seemed stupid to me. But what else am I going to do now, stay all day in that house? With her? Are you insane?”

“How’s your game?”

“Shit. I thought I’d be better by now. But that’s the lie that everyone believes. They go through life getting worse at everything but they think golf is different. They think, play more, score lower. But after ten years of retirement I still slice like a butcher.”

I walked out of the grill room with him, shook his hand, watched as he wheeled his pull cart around the clubhouse toward the flat practice green between the clubhouse and the street. I tried to see in him the massive and stern Buck Greeley of Eddie Dean’s story, but all I saw was an old man crushed small by the disappointments of his life. Except something didn’t seem right. I couldn’t put my finger on it just yet, but something didn’t seem quite right.

I crossed my arms, leaned against the side of the clubhouse, watched as Mr. Greeley sent his practice balls skittering across the green with derisive swats of his putter. He was always one for slipping out of trouble he had said of his son. He was here and then he wasn’t. Pfft. And there was that strange greeting when I first mentioned Tommy Greeley’s name. Did they find him? Him. Not his body, not his bones – him.

Maybe I was overreaching, maybe I was trying to force fit what I was seeing to the new possibility that had opened in my consciousness the night before while I sat beside my dying father, but still, these things Mr. Greeley said seemed to add up to something.

And then there were those bottles of gin in Mrs. Greeley’s china hutch. Something about them was simply wrong. She was a drinker, Eddie Dean had said she was and Jimmy Sullivan had said she was, pickled was the term he used, and I could see it in her face. But then what was it with those bottles? I remember the bottles I found scattered in the drawers of my mother’s sewing table, the table she never sewed upon. Open the drawer and there they were, bottles and bottles, empty bottles, until she got it together enough to throw them out, and start collecting the empty bottles once again. And that was it right there. When I found my mother’s bottles they were always empty. She could never keep them full for long. So how was it that Mrs. Greeley had all those bottles still untouched. Apparently of differing ages, some there for years, decades even, and all of them full. As if kept for some reason other than the alcohol.

It wouldn’t have come to me, it couldn’t have come to me except that I had been feeling strangely connected to the doomed Tommy Greeley. He had been a poor kid fighting to make good, a tall lanky irreverent kid trying to charm and wile his way to success, the only child of alcohol and bitterness seeking to transcend the limitations of his parents’ failures, and with all of that I could identify. And Chelsea had said we were so alike. And then there was the way Mrs. Greeley made my scalp itch, like only my mother could.

I never understood the first thing about my mother. Bear with me here, this has relevance here. I never understood the roots of my mother’s toxic bitterness, never understood how she ended up married to my father, how she found herself in the sad fading suburb of Hollywood, Pennsylvania, with a husband she didn’t love and a son who wouldn’t stop crying. I never understood what my mother was trying so desperately to drown with her drinking. In fact, the only thing about her life that I could possibly understand was that she left it. I couldn’t help but believe that my failure to understand my mother constituted a sucking wound, a whirlpool of ignorance that devoured much of the possibility from my life. How could I not trace my financial and romantic failures, both of them legion, to this primal failure? And how could I not therefore turn the bitterness I contracted from my mother like a disease back at her with a horrifying intensity?

I was engaged once for a short time until my fiancée ended it just before the wedding – not much to say, there was a urologist involved, which pretty much says it all – and for the longest time thereafter I drifted through life as if a spineless jellyfish adrift in a sea of bitterness. It was coming upon my mother’s birthday. I was shopping for a suitable present. The usual places. Strawbridge’s. Wanamaker’s. The State Store on Chestnut Street. I found myself holding a bottle of vodka, my mother’s spirit of choice. Nothing fancy. White Tower Vodka, I think it was, a house brand if ever there was one. And I weighed it in my hand with all its awful implications. It was what she always wanted, it was the only thing she really needed, it meant more to her than I ever could. White Tower Vodka. And I couldn’t deny the pleasure I felt as I pictured her face when she opened the gift, part greedy delight, part horror. Yes, Mom, that much I do understand about you. Drink up.

But whatever level of bitterness I had fallen into, even in that bleak year, it hadn’t been deep enough. I sent a scarf that year, nothing the next: better silence than what I had been considering. Yet I had held the bottle in my hand, I had felt its weight, I had thought it would make a jimmy of a gift. I was close.

I watched Mr. Greeley chase the chimera of a holed putt across the flat practice green at Dee Dubs for a long time as I tried to put it together, tried to figure it out. Then I pushed myself off the wall and headed toward him to ask one question more.

A line of cars was stopped at a traffic light close to the green. A kid in one of the cars yelled out “Fore.” Someone on the practice green yelled back “Five.” Mr. Greeley shook his head before standing up straight and watching me approach. He eyes narrowed when he saw my face.

“I thought we were done,” he barked.

“Just one more question.”

“I’m putting here.”

“Is that what you call it? Just tell me this, Mr. Greeley. When do they come? I’m talking of the bottles of gin, the ones your wife keeps in the china hutch. Her birthday? Her anniversary? When?”

He stared at me and then stared over my shoulder and then glanced around as if he was under an intense surveillance.

“Get the hell out of here,” he said lowly.

“Twenty years worth of gifts, twenty bottles of gin. When do they come?”

“What do you know about anything, you little bastard?”

“I know enough to stir things up. I know enough to ask everyone here if they knew what your successful son was up to before he disappeared. I could ask the neighbors too. I could spend days and days asking questions.”

“This is none of your damn business.”

“When do they come, Mr. Greeley?”

He stared at me for a long moment and I could see just then, beneath the old man’s veneer, the ferocious Buck Greeley of Eddie Dean’s story. He would have scared me then, thirty years ago, but it wasn’t thirty years ago and he didn’t scare me a whit and, when he saw that, something went out of him.

“Christmas, all right?” he said, softly.

“Okay,” I said.

He glanced around once more. “Now get the hell out of here and leave us alone.”