Michael Collins - The Death of All Things Seen

She eventually looked across at him. ‘Anything wrong?’

Norman cradled the phone in his lap. ‘No, it’s all good.’

Joanne was again distracted. She used the tone she used when explaining things to Grace. ‘This is where people live if they don’t live in the city.’

Norman smiled and added compliantly, ‘Like your dollhouse, Grace, and Mr and Mrs Crumby. Everybody has a bedroom and a bathroom of their own.’

Joanne enthused. ‘Right… like Mr and Mrs Crumby.’

Grace didn’t respond.

Joanne averted her eyes. She knew enough about psychology to know that important milestones had been missed in Grace’s development.

Norman broached an explanation. They had talked little about anything of substance since the revelations of New Year’s Eve.

‘When we first got Grace, I was dead against the imperialism of English. I read that if you spoke just your language, and let a child maintain their language, the two languages could work alongside each other. I felt she deserved to have her heritage intact. But maybe it was a mistake. How much can one person hold on to?’

With it said, there was a quiet indictment of his life, his past, and Joanne’s, too.

Joanne was forgiving in her answer. ‘Grace just needs friends, maybe that’s all it will take. I see potential , real potential.’

In her voice was the charge of a clinical and compassionate concern, the true measure of who she was, stern and loving in the way a child needed direction and the assumed role of a strong parent. It was obvious Joanne loved this child.

Norman looked out of the window. He turned his phone over in his hand. He was aware his mind was processing Nate Feldman.

Joanne angled in the impropriety of wanting to see it, asking, ‘What are you hiding?’ so Norman held the phone up as a part of full disclosure.

He read the message, broaching its greater context.

Joanne interrupted, ‘Is this Mr Feldman even still alive?’

Norman advanced the story by degrees. ‘Mr Feldman committed suicide on Black Monday, 1987. He jumped from his office building.’

In Norman’s voice there was a tone that betrayed a greater intimacy.

Joanne half-turned with a familiarity that came from simply being in the presence of another’s life and asked, ‘You knew him?’ She was holding the wheel with the determination of a captain steering a ship.

Norman looked ahead at the advancing street. He said with a tone of quiet remembrance, ‘I used to go to my mother’s office. Mr Feldman did this trick. He’d reach behind my ear and pull out a silver dollar. I was young. I always wanted to know how he did it and my mother used to say he couldn’t tell because that’s what made him the boss. He could make money out of thin air.’

‘Your mother liked Mr Feldman, huh?’ Joanne said it as though it was the stuff of ordinary life.

It meant little to her, a story to pass the time on a drive together.

Norman felt it in the act of telling it. He offered as a point of continuance, not for Joanne as much as himself, ‘I have a vague memory of my mother telling my father something about Nate.’

The word Canada formed under his breath. He said, as though it was revelation, which it was, ‘Nate, he was a draft dodger.’

Joanne didn’t know these people. She was presently distracted. She looked in the rear-view mirror at Grace. There was the ever-present to occupy the totality of one’s existence. ‘You okay, Grace?’

She turned to Norman with the pressuring sense that perhaps there had been too much talk and not enough attention paid to Grace. She said by way of reconciliation, ‘Grace can get a doll for being so good, right?’

Norman said, ‘A new doll, why not?’ just as Grace leaned forward and threw up in a spew that hit the back of Joanne’s head.

NATE WAS A day early for his appointment at the office of Weatherly, Sutherland, and Saunders, Lawyers. He called in the mid-afternoon from a coffee shop out in Winnetka, politely asking if he could be slotted in at the end of the day perhaps. He was in town ahead of plan. He could be at the office in less than an hour.

He was put on hold, then the message came back that he could not be accommodated. Documents needed to be drawn up. Nate heard the receptionist opening and closing a ledger or scheduler. She confirmed his appointment. He thanked her and assured her he would keep to the schedule.

There was no need to head into the city. He used his phone to search for a hotel in the area and found a Comfort Suites room, breakfast included. An immediate upgrade pop-up appeared as he was registering — a California king sized bed for an extra $9.95, including a spa upgrade for the gym. It was too complicated to decline, or navigate back through the site, so he booked it. Margins were met on $9.95 upgrades. The final price was never what you were quoted.

*

The old carriage house was off to the side, not visible from the road, but Nate saw its distinctive rooster weathervane and felt its presence loom over him. He heard the word Duchess in his head.

It still hurt. He felt it and winced. It was all there again in his heart and head. In wartime, gear and supplies had to be meticulously packed and weighed. This was how his father packed for him, military style, deciding what to take and what to leave behind. They had the lie rehearsed.

They were going on a fishing trip, wilderness gear packed into the car, canned provisions, oil-slick parka and wading boots, thermal underwear, a Swiss Army knife, flint, and a cache of dry kindling. His father weighed it all in the carriage house on a scale taken from the kitchen.

In pulling out of the drive, Nate saw his mother in the upper floor window of his old bedroom. A curtain moved. She was then gone from his life.

They talked among themselves eventually miles out of Chicago. His father drank whiskey from an engraved pocket flask set between his knees. At times the car swerved and had to be corrected. Thankfully, they didn’t run into anyone as they drove along the funneling timberline.

Business had been going to hell, or so his father had determined, or it was getting so. He saw bad times ahead. There had been mistakes made at all levels of government. It wasn’t even about governments anymore, but multinationals, about prevailing interests that transcended any one border.

His father cast into a great pool of discontent. He was then anticipating the rise of the Japanese imports. He had a head for understanding the ways of the world, or it was his hatred of the Japs that keyed him in on them specifi-cally. In looking back, it was hard for Nate to decide what was prophetic and what was rage within his father. It was perhaps both.

Whatever the case, the Vietnam War was a great distraction. His father announced it, banging the dash of the car, the joke of those early Toyota and Honda four-stroke engines — a lawnmower motor in a car — the compacts that nobody in their right mind would think of driving, and didn’t, but then did eventually, in what would be the subtle narrowing of dreams and skyrocketing inflation.

It was never about Nate. That was one of the fast truths emerging at the time. There would be no succor. His father was lost. It was the Japs , what he had experienced in war.

His father pulled over and pissed into the desolate landscape against the onset of evening. He wavered and steadied, went round the front of the car, shielding his eyes against the cone of light.

Getting in, he reached back and touched his hunting rifle with a strange reassurance that it was still there, so it had frightened Nate what might have happened if they were stopped, or what might happen after he was gone across the border.