T. Boyle - World's End

Miss Egthuysen was the secretary. Doug had scrawled her name and the number of her office on a soiled scrap of paper—#1, or maybe it was #7, Walter couldn’t tell which — and escorted him through the door at the far end of the shop and into the inner sanctum. Then he’d swung around without a word and faded back into the gloom of the shop. Walter was cursing under his breath — cursing Doug, cursing the hours he’d wasted in the pit behind him, cursing Huysterkark and Mrs. Van Wart, cursing the meanness and perfidy of a world every bit as rotten as Sartre had made it out to be in Philosophy 451—when he found it, #1, a frosted-glass door with nothing but the single numeral painted on its face. He tried the door. It was locked. No one answered his knock.

Cursing still — cursing Miss Egthuysen and the bosses who’d hired her, cursing the eggheads in lab coats and ties who strolled out of this very hallway and into the shop once a month to make notations in loose-leaf binders — he swung around and considered the slip of paper in his hand. What he’d taken to be a one could actually have been a seven. Or a nine, for that matter. Doug’s scrawl was just about undecipherable — but then, with his soaring I.Q., Doug couldn’t really be expected to waste his precious mental resources on so tedious a consideration as penmanship. Walter trudged back up the hall, located #7, and tried the door.

It was open.

Manning his crutches with a clatter, he leaned against the corrugated glass and pushed his way in. He saw a desk, a chair, a filing cabinet. Plants. Framed pictures. But wait a minute: something was wrong here. This wasn’t Miss Egthuysen gaping up at him in alarm, slipping an envelope into the desk and slamming the drawer with a report like the blast of a shotgun, this was the man in the tan summer suit, the one he’d glimpsed now and again probing among the eggheads at the door to the shop. “I, uh—” Walter began.

The man was glaring at him now, boring into him with a look of such ferocity that Walter suddenly began to wish he were out in the shop breathing fumes, back in the hospital, anywhere but here. “Uh, I was looking for Miss—” Walter murmured, but then stopped cold. There was a nameplate on the man’s desk. Of course.

“What are you doing here?” Van Wart demanded. He was on his feet now, and he looked alarmed. He looked angry. Threatened. “You were at the house yesterday, weren’t you?”

“Yes, but”—guilty, guilty, why did he always feel guilty? — “I … I work here.”

Van Wart’s face went blank. “You work for me?”

“Just since the end of May, but I didn’t know. … I mean, I didn’t realize—”

But the eponym of Depeyster Manufacturing wasn’t listening. “Well, that’s rich,” he said, dropping into his swivel chair as if the news had somehow weakened his legs. “Out on the floor?”

“Uh-huh. I run one of the lathes?”

“That’s really rich,” Van Wart repeated, and suddenly he cracked a grin that was like a crevasse leaping across an ice field. “Truman Van Brunt’s son.” Then he glanced down at Walter’s foot and the smile faded. “I was sorry to hear about your accident.” There was silence. “Your name’s Walter, right?”

Walter nodded.

“I read about it in the paper.”

Walter nodded again.

“I knew your father.”

Walter said nothing. He was waiting.

“Years ago.”

“I know.” Walter’s voice was hushed, almost a whisper. There was another moment of silence, during which Van Wart slid back the desk drawer and began to fumble through his papers. “That’s why I went out to your house,” Walter confessed. “That’s what I wanted to ask you about. My father.”

Van Wart looked distracted. He looked old, and in that moment, vulnerable. Without lifting the envelope from the drawer, he slipped a pinch of something into his mouth. “Truman?” he said finally. “What, he hasn’t turned up, has he?”

When Walter answered in the negative, Van Wart seemed relieved. He helped himself to another pinch of whatever it was he kept in that precious envelope and then stared down at his impeccable shirt cuffs and manicured hands. So this was the ogre, Walter thought, the bogeyman, the Fascist who’d masterminded the slaughter of the innocents and haunted the bedtime tales of a generation of Colony children. Somehow he didn’t look the part. With his fine, clean, razorcut hair, his strong teeth and even tan, with his air of well-being and the precise hieratic tones of his speech, he could have been the saintly and forebearing father of TV legend, he could have been a judge, a professor, a pianist or conductor.

But all that was dispelled in the next instant. Van Wart looked up and said suddenly, “Don’t you believe them, Walter. Don’t listen to them. Your father was all right. He was somebody who could stand up to the lot of them and their stinking vicious lies.” His eyes had taken hold of Walter’s now and there was nothing genial about them. Those eyes were outraged, formidable, those eyes were capable of anything. “Your father,” he said, leaning forward and making an effort to control his voice, “your father was a patriot.”

Then there was the wedding.

If life had begun to peel away from Walter, layer by layer, like some great unfathomable onion, if all its mysterious manifestations — the accident, the marker, the ghosts and pancakes, the face in the doorway at Van Wart Manor, Van Wart himself — were pieces of a puzzle, the wedding was a breath of fresh air: the wedding, at least, was unequivocal. Walter, former brooding and alienated hero to whom commitment and marriage were as death, loved Jessica, and she loved him. But no, it was more than that. Or maybe less. Walter needed her — he had but one foot on the ground now — and she needed to be needed.

The ceremony was performed in a field of lush, knee-deep grass amidst the sleepy drone of Tom Crane’s bees and within a stone’s throw of his shack. Jessica’s family had pushed for a traditional wedding, with organ music, garter tossing and a seven-tiered cake, to be held at the Episcopal church in Peterskill, but both bride and groom had rejected it outright. They were no slaves to tradition. They were originals, free spirits, flamboyant and daring, and it took them no more than five minutes to hit on Tom Crane’s place as the ideal site of their nuptials.

What could be better, after all? No corrupt institution would cast its gloom over the ceremony, and nature itself would become a celebrant. It would be an outdoor wedding, irreverent and unconstrained, with a barbecue — and tofu sandwiches for the vegetarians. And they would have readings from Gurdjieff or Kahlil Gibran instead of the dreary maunderings of the civil and religious ceremonies, and music from Herbert Pompey and his nose flute rather than the tedium of Mendelssohn. The bride would wear flowers in her hair. The groom would wear flowers in his hair. The guests, in serapes and boots and fringed suede, would wear flowers in their hair. And then of course, for Walter, the pasture below had its own special significance.

Walter arrived early. His bachelor party, which had begun at the Elbow with several rounds of boilermakers and ended with cooking sherry and kif at the apartment of one of his old high school compatriots — he couldn’t remember which — had left him feeling drained and hung over. He’d finally got to bed around four, but a steady procession of historical markers began marching around his room to the beat of “Yankee Doodle Dandy” as soon as he closed his eyes, and his dreams were the dreams of a man who has left his youth behind. He woke at seven, shagged and unrefreshed, to an intense itching in his missing foot. That was when he decided to pull on his wedding outfit and head over to Tom Crane’s.