Mario Puzo - Fools die

But suddenly Artie sat down on one of the station benches. His face looked very tired. I was standing over him and beginning to feel just a little uneasy.

Artie looked up at me. I saw a strange look of pity on his face. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll fix everything.”

He tried to smile. “Merlyn the Magician,” he said. “You’d better put on your fucking magic hat. At least sit down.” He lit up a cigarette. I thought again that he smoked too much. I sat down next to him. Oh, shit, I thought. And my mind was racing on to how to square things between him and Pam. One thing I knew, I didn’t want to lie to her or have Artie lie to her.

“I’m not cheating on Pam,” Artie said. “And that’s all I want to tell you.”

There was no question about my believing him. He would never lie to me. “Right,” I said. “But you have to tell Pam what’s going on or she’ll go crazy. She called me at work.”

“If I tell Pam, I have to tell you,” Artie said. “You don’t want to hear it.”

“So tell me,” I said. “What the hell’s the difference? You always tell me everything. How can it hurt?”

Artie dropped his cigarette to the stone cement floor of the train platform. “OK,” he said. He put his hand on my arm and I felt a sudden sense of dread. When we were children alone together, he always did that to comfort me. “Let me finish, don’t interrupt,” he said.

“OK,” I said. My face was suddenly very warm. I couldn’t think of what was coming.

“For the last couple of years I’ve been trying to find our mother,” Artie said. “Who she is, where she is, what we are. A month ago I found her.”

I was standing up. I pulled my arm away from his. Artie stood up and tried to hold me again. “She’s a drunk,” he said. “She wears lipstick. She looks pretty good. But she’s all alone in the world. She wants to see you, she says that she couldn’t help-”

I broke in on him. “Don’t tell me any more,” I said. “Don’t ever tell me any more. You do what you want, but I’ll see her in hell before I’ll see her alive.”

“Hey, come on, come on,” Artie said. He tried to put his hand on me again and I broke away and walked toward the car. Artie followed me. We got in and I drove him to the house. By this time I was under control and I could see that Artie was distressed, so I said to him, “You’d better tell Pam.”

Artie said, “I will.”

I stopped in the driveway of the house. “You coming in for dinner?” Artie asked. He was standing by my open window, and again he reached in to put his hand on my arm.

“No,” I said.

I watched him as he went into the house, shooing the last of the kids still playing on the lawn into the house with him. Then I drove away. I drove slowly and carefully, I had trained myself all my life to be more careful when most people became more reckless. When I got home, I could see by Value’s face that she knew about what happened. The kids were in bed, and she had dinner for me on the kitchen table. While I ate, she ran her hand over the back of my head and neck when she went by to the stove. She sat opposite, drinking coffee, waiting for me to open the subject. Then she remembered. “Pam wants you to call her.”

I called. Pam was trying to make some apology for having gotten me into such a mess. I told her it was no mess, and did she feel better now that she knew the truth? Pam giggled and said, “Christ, I think I’d rather it were a girlfriend.” She was cheerful again. And now our roles were reversed. Early that day I had pitied her, she was the person in terrible danger and I was the one who would rescue or try to help her. Now she seemed to think it was unfair that the roles were reversed. That was what the apology was about. I told her not to worry.

Pam stumbled over what she wanted to say next. “Merlyn, you didn’t really mean it, about your mother, that you won’t see her?”

“Does Artie believe me?” I asked her.

“He says he always knew it,” Pam said. “He wouldn’t have told you until he’d softened you up. Except for me causing the trouble. He was teed off at me for bringing it all on.”

I laughed. “See,” I said, “it started off as a bad day for you and now it’s a bad day for him. He’s the injured party. Better him than you.”

“Sure,” Pam said. “Listen, I’m sorry for you, really.”

“It has nothing at all to do with me,” I said. And Pam said OK and thanks and hung up.

Valerie was waiting for me now. She was watching me intently. She’d been briefed by Pam and maybe even by Artie on how to handle this, and she was being careful. But I guess she hadn’t really grasped it. She and Pam were really good women, but they didn’t understand. Both their parents had made trouble and objections about them marrying orphans with no traceable lineage. I could imagine the horror stories told about similar cases. What if there had been insanity or degeneracy in our family? Or black blood or Jewish blood or Protestant blood, all that fucking shit. Well, now here was a nice piece of evidence turned up when it was no longer needed. I could figure out that Pam and Valerie were not too happy about Artie’s romanticism, his digging up the lost link of a mother.

“Do you want her here to the house so that she can see the children?” Valerie asked.

“No,” I said.

Valerie looked troubled and a little terrified. I could see how she was thinking what if her children rejected her someday.

“She’s your mother,” Valerie said. “She must have had a very unhappy life.”

“Do you know what the word ‘orphan’ means?” I said. “Have you looked it up in the dictionary? It means a child who has lost both parents through death. Or a young animal that has been deserted or has lost its mother. Which one do you want?”

“OK,” Valerie said. She looked terrified. She went to look in on the kids and then went into our bedroom. I could hear her going into the bathroom and preparing for bed. I stayed up late reading and making notes, and when I went to bed, she was sound asleep.

It was all over in a couple of months. Artie called me up one day and told me his mother had disappeared again. We arranged to meet in the city and have dinner together so that we could talk alone. We could never talk about it with our wives present, as if it were too shameful for their knowledge. Artie seemed cheerful. He told me she had left a note. He told me that she drank a lot and always wanted to go to bars and pick up men. That she was a middle-aged floozy but that he liked her. He had made her stop drinking, he had bought her new clothes, he had rented her a nicely furnished apartment, given her an allowance. She had told him everything that had happened to her. It hadn’t really been her fault. I stopped him there. I didn’t want to hear about that.

“Are you going to look for her again?” I asked him.

Artie smiled his sad, beautiful smile. “No,” he said. “You know, I was a pain in the ass to her even now. She really didn’t like having me around. At first, when I found her, she played the role I wanted her to play, I think out of a sense of guilt that maybe she could make things up to me by letting me take care of her. But she really didn’t like it. She even made a pass at me one day, I think just to get some excitement.” He laughed. “I wanted her to come to the house, but she never would. It’s just as well.”

“How did Pam take the whole business?” I asked.

Artie laughed out loud. “Jesus, she was even jealous of my mother. When I told her it was all over, you should have seen the look of relief on her face. One thing I have to say for you, brother, you took the news without cracking a muscle.”

“Because I don’t give a shit one way or the other,” I said.