Requiem, Mass.

  REQUIEM, MASS.

  ALSO BY JOHN DUFRESNE

  The Way That Water Enters Stone

  Lousiana Power & Light

  Love Warps the Mind a Little

  Deep in the Shade of Paradise

  The Lie That Tells a Truth

  Johnny Too Bad

  REQUIEM, MASS.

  a novel

  JOHN DUFRESNE

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

  New York London

  Copyright © 2008 by John Dufresne

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

  Production manager: Anna Oler

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Dufresne, John.

  Requiem, Mass.: a novel / John Dufresne.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-0-393-06941-9

  1. Problem families—Fiction. 2. Massachusetts—Fiction. 3. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

  PS3554.U325R47 2008

  813'.54—dc22 2008001343

  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

  www.wwnorton.com

  W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.

  Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

  For My Friends,

  Especially Those Whose Lives I’ve Borrowed

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Portions of this book appeared in different form in Bat City Review, The Pinch, and The Pedestal.

  I want to thank my friends and family for helping me on the journey, and in particular Doris Bartlett, David Beaty, Jill Bialosky, Keith Blate, John Bond, Mary Bonina, Kim Bradley, Don Bullens, Anjelica Carroll, Alan Dayton, Tom DeMarchi, Kevin Harvey, John LeBow, Richard McDonough, Debra Monroe, Marie Monroe, Leonard Nash, Don Papy, Fran Quinn, Eve Richardson, Tom Swick, Elizabeth Weber, Dan Whatley, Evan Wondolowski, and Nina Zaragoza. And, of course, Cindy and Tristan.

  The past is what you remember, imagine you remember, convince yourself you remember, or pretend to remember.

  —HAROLD PINTER

  REQUIEM, MASS.

  Contents

  What Is This Thing Called, Love?

  If the Phone Doesn’t Ring, It’s Dad

  The Nuns Didn’t Teach You to Write Like This

  Once Upon a Time

  I Know You Are, But What Am I?

  His Haws

  Spilled Milk

  A Show of Affection

  Geography

  Living with Herself

  Concessions

  Beauty

  Knife in the Head

  Limbo

  Boysville

  Your Beamish Boy

  Five Years Next Week

  The Bathtub

  Staging

  A Door, A Jar

  You’ve Got the World on a String

  She’s a Mental Case

  In Their Summer Dresses

  Dead Reckoning

  The Charm of Distance

  What Is This Thing Called, Love?

  AT FIRST I pretended that all of what follows here—all three hundred or so pages—that all of it happened to someone else and not to me, to someone I made up, a boy named Bix Melville. Bix at twelve was a lot like me at twelve, but not exactly like me. For example, he was decidedly more self-assured when talking with Dr. Courtney Rinehart than I ever was talking to my mother’s shrink. Bix was also more wistful and quick-witted than I. He was the me I wish I had been. Bix once told his little sister Chloe (in the role of my sister Audrey) about how certain songs, when you hear them again on the radio, will cause your skin to shiver and bump, and that’s because you love the song even if you hadn’t realized it till just that moment. Bix told Chloe that the skin doesn’t lie.

  Bix was just as shy with his Betty as I was with my Veronica. But he was more imaginative in his pursuit—if that’s not too strong a word—of her. Bix built a remote-controlled blimp which he fitted with a camera. He flew the blimp over Betty’s house and snapped photos of her backyard, and occasionally of Betty and her mother, Clara, sunbathing. Myself, I’ve always been mechanically disinclined. Best I could do was walk past Veronica’s house twenty times a day, whistling like I didn’t have a care in the world, imagining my startled demeanor when she would lean out her window and call my name, which she never did. Bix saw faces, not always human, everywhere he looked—in electrical outlets, in grains of wood, in plumbing fixtures, on the abdomens of spiders. And he took comfort in their gazes.

  So I wrote about Bix Melville, and I wrote about him in third person, thereby distancing myself even further from the unwonted and baneful events of my own childhood. In this way, I figured, among other things, that I would not embarrass family and friends, would not hurt or otherwise upset and anger the people I care about and who might still care about me. Plus if anyone ever said, “You shot your father!,” I could deny it. I was calling the novel Almost Touching, Almost True. Here’s how it began:

  Bix Melville’s story begins many years ago when he sat in the parlor of his second-floor apartment and tried to explain to his mother, not for the first time, that he and his sister Chloe were her children, and not, as Mom contended, shrewdly crafted replacements. They were not from another planet; they did not work for the government; they were not here spying on her. Mom blocked her ears and hummed “To Sir, With Love.” Chloe slumped on the sofa, her cat asleep on her head, her cowgirl boots up on the coffee table where they did not belong. Chloe had her mother’s psychology book opened to a page of photographs of a monkey making faces to express fear, anger, joy, alarm, confusion, and sadness. Chloe made a face like an electrical outlet and said, “Bix, look at me. I’m startled!”

  I showed the manuscript to my sweetheart Annick. Annick’s a freelance theatrical set designer, a part-time real estate stager, and a generous reader, who enjoys counseling my so-called literary career, such as it is. We were out on the deck at dusk, folded into our Adirondack chairs, sipping our postprandial cocktails. We heard hunk hunk and the flutter and whistle of an ibis’s wings and looked up to see him rise above the mangroves, a tree snail in his decurved red bill. Annick draped her leg over my knee. I browsed through the new Archie McPhee catalogue while Annick vetted my draft, a pencil—a #2 Sanford Earth Write—in her hand. The pencil had an orange, wedge-shaped eraser slipped over the ferrule. I can’t write with pencils myself. The scratch of graphite on paper hurts my teeth. The pain was worse when we had to use that miserable, thready, yellow arithmetic paper back in grammar school. The only way I was ever able to do my long division was to make these analgesic but irritating-to-everyone-else susurrant noises to cover the hiss of the pencil. We all have our curious aversions, I suppose. Audrey could never stand the feel of suede against her skin. Annick gags at the smell of pears. Blackie Morrissey was, maybe still is, afraid of milk.

  Annick took notes. Occasionally, she tsked. I ordered a Shakespeare action figure and some Evil Clown Nesting Dolls. Spot was over by the steps, gnawing through a log-cabin birdhouse that until that morning had hung in a tamarind tree in the Llinases’ backyard.

  “HANDMADE, AMIGO,” Raul Llinas told me. He shook his head, lifted his eyebrows. “Very expensive.” He took a receipt out of his guayabera pocket and quite ceremoniously unfolded it.

  I said, “Dogs don’t climb trees, Raul.”

  He pointed with his chin at Spot. “What that is in the doggie’s mouth?”

  “Yes, he has it now, but—”

  “Gnatcatcher.”

  Was he calling me a name?

  “Charming gnatcatcher family lived in that birdhouse.”

  “What do I owe you?”

 
ANNICK HUMPHED. At what? I wondered. At a redundant adjective? a flimsy verb? some motiveless behavior? an inexplicable phrase? a self-regarding passage, perhaps? So much can go wrong. I turned up the stereo, closed my eyes, and lost myself in Charles Trenet’s “La Mer.”

  She said, “Did you even hear a word I said?” and I was back on the deck.

  Annick lifted her leg off my knee. She slipped the pencil behind her ear, eraser end up, held the manuscript in both hands, lifted it twice like she was weighing it, leaned toward me, and said, “Why the masquerade?”

  And then we heard a splash. Sometimes a monkey will dive from a mangrove after a crab. If he catches it, he’ll crack it open on the retaining wall by the fence. We listened. Other times a monkey will toss a squirrel into the canal. It seems to be a sport with them. We heard a rustle in the trees and a scream. I switched on the yard lights. A yellow-crowned night heron squawked, leaped to the fence, turned her hunched back to us.

  I said, “It’s fiction.”

  She said, “It doesn’t breathe.”

  Annick suggested that I tell the story simply. Artlessly. Genuinely. Transparently. For once in my life. “Just do it like this: ‘Once upon a time in Requiem, Massachusetts…blah, blah, blah…and they all lived happily ever after. Amen.’”

  “My mind doesn’t work that way.”

  “A to Z, Johnny. Zig to zag. Beginning, middle, end.”

  “In that order?”

  Spot sniffed at the $85 nest he’d unhoused. He stood, backed up, woofed at it, lay down, rolled over. He looked at the nest upside down, and he whined.

  Annick said, “It’s your childhood. Call it memoir.”

  “I would have to change some things.”

  “That’s what memoirists do.”

  “Just seems easier to make it fiction.”

  “What’s easy have to do with it?”

  “I’m used to lying.”

  “If you call it memoir, no one will believe it. If you say it’s a novel, people will assume you’re writing about yourself.”

  I made two dry martinis, up, with twists. I put Israel Kamakawiwo’ole on the stereo. Hawaiian music is not Annick’s cup of tea. I hate it when you spend fourteen months on a 322-page manuscript, and your honey tells you that you haven’t started yet. I came back with the drinks. I said, “All right, how about this, then?”

  My new and hastily constructed narrative strategy went like this: The central character is a reporter for the Requiem Standard-American. He stumbles across a story about a woman he once knew, went to high school with or something, and this woman believes that her two children have been abducted by aliens and replaced by very clever androids. (And, in fact, some folks living in Requiem all these years later may recall that my own dear mother was once the subject of a story in the Manhattan Tattler, the headline of which read “Martians stole my baby.” The tabloid ran my sixth-grade class photo with the story, only they airbrushed antennae to my forehead.) The Standard-American reporter, Jimmy Tivnan, knows the story can’t be true, but he smells an even better story between the lines. So he calls his old classmate, Carla Todd Melville, arranges a luncheon meeting at Arturo’s, and so begins his investigation. “I’ll call it Let’s Get Lost.”

  Annick said, “Write it like it happened. A little invention here and there might be inevitable.”

  The fact is I have often written about my family, but always my family in disguise. Like my sister might be a brother or a younger cousin. My father might be blind or going blind or he’s suffering visual hallucinations, eye problems being my favored metaphor for parental disinterest. My own mother, as the mother in the story, might be a country singer who has run off with the charming and devilish pedal-steel player. Often my mothers are so normal and predictable that they fade into the background and often vanish from the final drafts. One father was a lineman for the electric company who abandons his family and moves to Tahiti, of all places, with another woman, leaving his wife to take up with a series of eager, ruddy-faced, and unreliable suitors. In one story the narrator’s dad dies when he drives his drunken self through the guardrail, onto the ice, and into the waters of Lake Purgatory. In another, a terminally ill father has a fortunate and heartwarming reunion with his estranged son just before the father dies. Once I made my father the narrator’s uncle, and as the uncle he was most like my father—a compulsive and flamboyant liar, a man unable to tell or recognize the truth and completely indifferent to it. He’d lie like an unfelt smile, lie without blushing in the presence of people who knew the truth.

  In my dad Rainy’s defense I have to say this. He could charm the knickers off a nun. People loved Rainy. Wherever he was, he was the center of attention. His lies were never malicious. Here’s an example of what I mean. This was Rainy’s kind of lie. He once took me to the wrestling matches at Mechanics Hall. He told me he knew all of the wrestlers personally. He put two fingers together, said, “Me and Rocca, we’re like this.” He told me about their home lives. “The Beast has a boy with polio. Sad.” When I asked him why don’t your wrestling friends ever stop by to visit, he said, “We’ll have Rocca over for dinner. How about that? Soon. Wait’ll you see him eat. Eats like a, like a friggin’ wolverine.” When the matches ended, Dad took me back to the dressing rooms. He just nodded at the guard and kept walking. He said hi to the wrestlers, all in various stages of undress, and they nodded. We watched Argentina Rocca shower while Dad congratulated him on the magnificent dropkick that sent Joey Maestro to the mat. I had never seen a naked man. I looked at my Keds.

  Lies could also be excuses. One night at supper when we were all giving him the silent treatment for coming home two days later than he said he would, Dad said, “So you want to know why I’m late? Is that what you want to know? Is that it? I was busy saving the lives of twenty-four people. That’s right. That’s how come. While you were sitting here eating your bonbons and watching TV.” He put down his knife and fork. “I was delivering a shipment of medical supplies to Mexican Hat, Utah. Highway 316 was washed out in the flash flooding, so I had to drive the Mokey Dugway, a treacherous road for a sedan, never mind for a big rig. I’m just easing out of a hairpin turn on a stretch of gravel road when I see ahead of me a church bus with its right front wheel off the road, in the air, and the bus itself tilting over the edge, fifteen hundred feet above the Valley of the Gods.” And here he set a wax bean at the edge of his dish to illustrate. “On the side of the bus it says THE SANCTIFYING JUBILATORS. I hoped to hell they were saying their prayers. I heard moaning from inside and crying and wailing. Someone sang ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.’ I told them, ‘Don’t one of you move an inch. Don’t even move your eyes. I’ll have you out of here pronto.’ Long story short, I got the chain wrapped around the bus’s frame and pulled them back to the surface. I figure I had maybe two inches of leeway before I went over the side myself, backing up the way I was. Anyway, the story was in all the papers, and I am in all their prayers.”

  The thing is, I believed him at the time and admired his courage and humility. Of course, I also believed he’d been a cowboy named the Cheyenne Kid and had also pitched for the Boston Braves after returning from Korea. In one game against the Dodgers, when his arm grew weary in extra innings, he borrowed Warren Spahn’s glove and pitched the twelfth inning left-handed and won the game. I wonder if my gullibility encouraged his lies. Or was it the other way around? He would tell people we met these gratuitous and fruitless lies, like he’d say that he and I had won the father/son fishing derby at Lake Purgatory on opening day—kid caught a seventeen-inch rainbow—when we hadn’t even gone fishing. He’d say it in front of me. I suppose he counted on my being too embarrassed or puzzled to ever correct him. And I never did.

  He told us all one time that he was occasionally asked by the government to transport certain top-secret items from Point A to Point B. “I shouldn’t even be telling you this,” he said. “I don’t ask questions. I do my duty to my country.” Then he asked me if I’d ever read “A M
essage to Garcia.” I said I had. It was mandatory reading at St. Simeon’s. “It’s not very good. More like a sermon.” And then Dad quoted from it about the man who does his work when the boss is away and how that man is the cornerstone of civilization. And I said, “What the author didn’t write would make a good story.”

  What Annick was asking me to do was to strip away the pretense and let Rainy and Frances be Rainy and Frances. Let Audrey be Audrey. Me be me. (Me be I?) But how do you write your own truth without casting doubt on the truths of others? You don’t, Annick said.

  So we drank to the launch of the memoir. I said I’d call it My Future Just Passed. Annick tapped my knee, said I’d probably think of something better, not to worry. She kissed me. Spot woofed. He wanted his kiss, too. Annick called him over and kissed him, meaning she let him lick her face. And then he kissed me. And then his tail knocked over Annick’s martini. He jumped back. Annick told him it was okay, he was a good boy, yes, he was. She swept up the glass.

  Annick said, “My mother used to say there are two kinds of people in the world. Folks who look at their reflection in a pond and folks who dive right in.”

  I told Annick what my mother always said. “The mask is more real than the face.” And in the morning I began to write my life.

  If the Phone Doesn’t Ring, It’s Dad

  THE TROUBLE I want to tell you about began in 1968 when I was twelve, when my mother, who had already suffered two “breakdowns,” whatever that means, was getting crazy again, when my father decided to absent himself from our lives, when my sister Audrey and I were threatened with foster care and separation, when we were saved by the kindness of neighbors, some of whom did not exist.