My Father More or Less Read online

  He heard something or thought he did, the exaggerated breathing of someone who had run too fast or was in a state of severe anxiety.

  “Will you please get yourself together,” she said.

  Terman had one shoe on and hefted the other, thought of throwing it at Marjorie.

  She caught his eye in the wall mirror and winked. “Whoever it is, I don’t believe it’s Max,” she whispered. “Max has a distinctive step as I should imagine you’ve noticed.”

  “I’ve felt it on my neck,” he said.

  “Have you?” she said. “I shouldn’t be at all surprised. Mon ami, I really have to be on my way.”

  The shoelace knot opened in his fingers like a flower. Not all frustrations were without remedy.

  “It’s not as if I had a choice,” she said. “I really have to be somewhere. It’s an irreversible commitment.”

  “I understand that you have to be somewhere,” he said.

  Terman stood behind her at the door, listening to the news on the other side. The intruder had found his way to the staircase and was coming up the steps.

  “Do you have any idea who it is?” she asked. “It’s not a housebreaker, is it?”

  Imagining that it was his son, Terman declined comment, indicated with a shrug an unlimited set of possibilities.

  “Hallo,” Marjorie called. “We’re locked in a room on the third floor. Could you let us out?”

  There was no apparent response and she repeated her request, emboldened to raise her voice so that it seemed to echo through the large house, returning to them like a muted scream. “Please please please,” she added.

  A door opened and closed below them, a gesture of indifference or contempt. “You say something,” Marjorie said to him.

  “Who’s there?” he yelled in an unused voice. A sudden rage took him. “Damn you,” he yelled.

  “I hope to god you haven’t frightened the person,” Marjorie said, banging on the door with her fists. “It’s queer, isn’t it, that he or she hasn’t answered. It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if Max had sent someone here to murder us both. I should never have mentioned to him that I was coming to your house for tea.”

  “You mentioned to Max that you were coming here?”

  “I wanted to give him back a little of his own,” Marjorie said. “I can see now that it was an error of judgment.” She tried the door again. “I think I’m getting it, luv. If we both pulled at the same time, don’t you think it might make all the difference?”

  “We’ve rounded them all up,” says Colonel Lindstrom, putting the gun in his coat pocket as he might a pair of gloves. “All of them except the woman and Adriano.” He comes over to check on Adriano’s condition, puts his ear to the dead man’s chest. “He made you do it, I suppose,” he says to Berger.

  “I suppose,” says Berger.

  “Whatever you want to say about his character,” Lindstrom says, “he was a man that lived and died by the rules. I suppose he said a few thinks, did he? before he went.”

  “Only that he regretted dying.”

  Lindstrom is looking over the ratling, his hand in his gun pocket. “Quite a view I should say. What?”

  Another man in a uniform comes on to the terrace. “No signs of the woman, sir,” he says. “We’ve taken the place apart with nothing to show for it.”

  “Keep at it, lad,” says Lindstrom. “That attractive young lady is a veritable nest of scorpions. Let’s go inside, Berger, before the late afternoon chill gets into the bones.”

  We cut to the woman, as she’s called, letting herself into a crawl space under the lip of the roof.

  Marjorie was working on the door, pulling and pushing, making imperceptible progress. “Come over, why don’t you, and give us a hand.”

  Terman went to the window and looked out, saw someone that might have been his son go into the park across the street.

  An hour passed and Marjorie wondered out loud whether they oughtn’t to break down the door. If they both threw their shoulders into it, she thought, it might do the trick.

  “The door is too thick,” he said.

  “Won’t you try even once?” she asked. “You just might be stronger than you think.”

  To set an example, Marjorie rushed her shoulder into the door and came away in pain. She was looking at the reflection of her martyrdom when she said, “My time spent with you has been the occasion of crippling injuries.” For the next few minutes she appeared inconsolable.

  Terman thought he heard the outside door open and he mentioned it to her, which eased the pain in her bruised shoulder if only for that moment of illusion.

  Henry Berger doesn’t like the present business, likes it less and less as it ramifies before him.

  “What’s your opinion, Henry?” Lindstrom asks him, while his men disassemble the villa. “Are we going about this the wrong way?”

  “Why do you want her?” he asks.

  “It’s the old story, Henry. We want her because she is there.”

  Berger and Colonel Lindstrom and one of the Colonel’s aides, a Chinese sumo wrestler named Yin, go up the stairs to the entrance to the roof, Berger in the advance. Lindstrom says his men have already checked the roof but if Berger wants to take a second look he has no objection. Yin follows him up the ladder to the roof while the Colonel and Sergeant Clark wait below, their guns drawn. Who can tell what Henry Berger is thinking as he walks across the tiled roof, moving methodically from one side to the other, concentrating on the sounds his steps make? “You were right,” he shouts down to Lindstrom, stopping at the hollow place where the woman is hiding. “She must have gotten away while you were rounding up the others.”

  There were moments when Marjorie didn’t think about being imprisoned but they had only limited duration. Mostly, she struggled for self-possession. If one didn’t panic and went with the flow, she told herself, eventually a way out would present itself. “A situation like this makes one reevaluate one’s entire life,” she said. “Or do you think that’s taking it a bit far?”

  Terman looked out the window to avoid being mimicked by his own image, his sense of himself undermined by overstatement. At the last extreme, he could always get the attention of a passerby and ask whoever to notify the police of their entrapment. It hadn’t yet reached that moment of urgency. Oddly, in the extended period he had spent at the window, no one had come by on his side of the street.

  The urge to account for himself overwhelmed him. “I’ve been treading water for too long,” he said over his shoulder. “Everytime I reevaluate my life, it seems to have fallen off from the year before. I age without getting wiser, tend to forget more than I learn. My relationships with people are as tentative and incomplete as they ever were. More so than ever.”

  “You need to break with Max,” she said, “and go back to your own writing.”

  “The fact is, I like working with Max,” he said. “If I didn’t have a screenplay to write, I might sit around drinking beer and staring at the walls. I don’t even enjoy going to the movies any more.”

  “It’s not an adult pleasure, is it?” she said. “The first step for you, Terman, is to get away from Max and on to something else.”

  Marjorie tried the door for what must have been the tenth time, felt it yielding just a little, nothing the eye might acknowledge, but enough to let her entertain a whisper of hope.

  Terman had been saying the word “father” to himself. “Father father father father father father father father father father father father father father…” At some point the word evolved from “father” to “farther.”

  “I felt something,” Marjorie said.

  He took an andiron from the fireplace and went to the door to see if he could help. The room echoed a sense of contrition.

  Henry Berger is standing a few feet away from the downslope of the roof. “You can come out,” he says. “Lindstrom and his men have gone.”

  After a moment or two, a voice comes from the crawl space under
the eaves. “I have a gun trained on you,” it says. “Throw your gun across the roof and do it quickly. It would please me to kill you.”

  “I promised your husband I’d keep you from being caught,” he says.

  “I don’t trust you. Throw away your gun.”

  “Wouldn’t I have given you away before if that’s what I wanted to do?” When she doesn’t answer he says, “I’m going to walk away. If you shoot me it will attract the attention of Lindstrom s men who are sitting in a parked car at the edge of the woods. I’m going now to walk to the ladder at the other side of the roof.” Henry Berger turns around and walks slowly toward the other side of the roof.

  A trap door opens at the lip of the roof and the woman, not a little crumpled, emerges without attracting Berger’s notice. She holds an unusually small handgun and is pointing it at Berger’s back when he turns instinctively to face her.

  “Will you take me with you?” she asks. “You’ll find me a resourceful companion.”

  They go out the back door of the pensione and move through tall grass towards Berger’s car, which is obscured by two large trees. When they reach the car, when Berger unlocks the door to the passenger’s side, she presses her handgun to his hack. “Take off your jacket and trousers for me, please.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “If you test me,” she says, “you’ll never know how serious I was.”

  He undresses without further protest, keeping one hand behind his head as instructed. The widow of his old friend puts his clothes on over her own, while Berger leans against the side of his car with hands behind his head.

  “I ought to kill you,” she says, “but I don’t want to attract attention if I can help it. I want you to open the driver’s door with your left hand, keeping the other behind your head. Don’t make any moves you’ll regret.”

  “You’ll be better off with me than without me,” he says. “I’m really quite good at avoiding the police”

  “I’ve already got the better part of your identity,” she says. “Take your left hand from behind your head and open the door. When the door is opened, drop the key on the seat, then turn around, take three steps and throw yourself face down on the grass.”

  “Adriano was lucky to have a woman like you,” he says.

  “Not lucky enough. Are you opening the door or do I have to shoot you?”

  Trying to unlock the car with his left hand, he drops the key to the ground.

  “I hate the sight of you,” she says. “I despise the way you do things. I hate your preposterous self-satisfaction.”

  Henry Berger bends down to retrieve the key. As he comes up he turns as if to hand it to her. We see the shadow of his arm moving through the air, followed by the sound of a shot. There is a second shot shortly after the first, then a third.

  Dressed again, Berger carries the dying woman back toward the villa.

  “I should have killed you the first time I saw you,” she says.

  “You misjudged my intentions,” he says. “I would have helped you get away if you had let me.”

  “You’ve done that; I’m away.” A thin stream of blood comes from the side of her mouth, keeps coming like a scarf in a magician’s trick. “The pain is gone,” she whispers. “It just went somewhere else.”

  Berger puts her down on the grass and sits alongside her, holding her hand. Three cars drive up in short succession. He continues to hold the dead woman’s hand, staring into the distance as several men, including Colonel Lindstrom and Sergeant Clark, approach.

  They had been trapped in the room for almost five hours and Terman had reached the point where the sight of his own face, no matter the angle of distortion, sickened him. He sat on the bed with his hands over his eyes, besieged by other selves at every turn.

  Marjorie had talked non-stop for a time and then, as though her quota of words had run out, had fallen into a protracted silence. Although she heard something, the front door unlocking and someone (a man, she thought) stepping almost noiselessly into the front parlor, she withheld report of the news, superstitious about false alarms.

  This time they both heard it, the almost noiseless entry, the hesitant steps in the living room, the uncertain movement of someone who didn’t know the house.

  “Up here,” Terman called out, without turning his head.

  “We’re locked in a room on the third floor,” Marjorie shouted into the door. “Would you let us out?”

  “Is it your son?” she asked him.

  There was nothing amusing in the situation for Terman, though he discovered a smile on the face of several of his reflections when he allowed himself to turn his head. He had a sense of the same scene playing itself out without resolution again and again. The unknown intruder comes in the house, awakens expectation, then disappears without heeding their cries for help. The incident varied a little on each occasion (the way memory tends to twist events into narrative pattern), though the basic scenario remained faithful to itself.

  When she heard someone coming up the stairs Marjorie turned to Terman and winked. The wink recurred in the first two mirrors and then was gone. “In here,” Marjorie called. “We’re on the top floor.” She recovered her cane which was hanging over the back of a chair.

  Between calls for help, Marjorie reported the movements of the intruder. After a brief respite on the second landing, he was coming up the stairs to the third floor.

  He or she was on the third floor, coming down the long hallway toward them.

  “Second door on the right,” Terman roused himself to say. He had the premonition that when the door opened, if it ever did, another distorted reflection of his own face would be waiting for him on the other side.

  They watched the door handle turn, down and back, down and back, to no startling effect.

  Terman took a hand, pulled on the handle as the other pushed against the door. The door remained adamant.

  “Put your weight against it,” Marjorie advised. “Push with your shoulder.”

  The mimic in the several reflections mocked all human endeavor.

  “It’s coming,” Marjorie shouted.

  The door opened suddenly, severed its restraints, and a man with his own face came into the room.

  Terman opened his eyes the next morning with a burgeoning sense of self-contempt, regretted the light of day. He had no breakfst, had no need of food, could barely stand to cover himself with clothes. Something was the matter with him or something had been the matter and had cured itself, leaving him untenanted like some derelict building. The air around him, the air he breathed, smelled of neglect.

  He dialed Isabelle’s number with no expectation of finding her in, so when she answered on the fifth or sixth ring it was almost a dissap-pointment.

  “I didn’t expect to find you home,” he said.

  “I hope that’s not why you called. As a matter of fact, I’m waiting for the studio to ring up to find out where I’m supposed to be.”

  He stammered his request, the question begging refusal. “Why don’t we meet for a drink after you finish work?”

  “I believe I already have an appointment,” she said. “Can’t you tell me over the phone what you want?”

  He wanted nothing. An unbearable weight of shame oppressed him. “Isabelle, look I’m sorry.”

  “Yes? That makes two of us, doesn’t it?”

  “I’ve behaved unforgivably. I’ve no excuses.”

  “I don’t want to hear it, Terman. Do you have anything else to say?”

  “Isabelle, I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t know what you’ve done. How can you possibly be sorry?”

  “I’m terribly ashamed.” He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, the gesture premature, the tears of shame unrecorded.

  “I simply hate this,” she said. “If you continue to apologize, I’m going to hang up on you. Don’t you have any dignity at all?”

  He could do no more than act on the feelings he supposed himself to have. “Coul
d we have dinner tomorrow night?” he asked.

  “I don’t want to see you,” she said in a constricted voice. “Haven’t I made that clear? I don’t want to see you, not now, not tomorrow, not next week, not next year.”

  She hung up before he could apologize again, then called back moments later to say she had no business losing her temper at him. “You’ve done nothing to me I haven’t done to myself, have you? I apopogize for hanging up on you, Terman, and for letting you think you had done me some great injustice when you hadn’t at all.”

  He resented her apology, felt it in competition with his own. “You didn’t have to call to tell me that,” he said.

  “I don’t know why I called back,” she said. “I thought you might come by until I had to leave for work, though I’m not sure that’s what I want either. I’m sorry to be so equivocal. It makes me unhappy when you make yourself an abject show and I don’t want to subject either of us to that again.”

  “I can see your point,” he said.

  “Can you? Terman, what do you want from me?”

  “Nothing,” he said. He felt himself in a fever of desirelessness.

  “Then leave me alone, Terman, will you? Stay away.”

  “I’ll do whatever you want,” he said.

  “You’re not mocking me, are you? Excuse me, someone’s at the door.” She hung up.

  There were no transitional moments, no opening and closing of doors. Dressed in a baggy three-piece suit, he was walking south on Abbotsbury Road, the morning unusually warm, the white light of the sun everywhere. He turned left at Leicester Place, walking briskly and without descernible limp. If his ankle hurt him, he avoided the pain by thinking of something else. The white light scorched him. Each step he imagined as the last of its kind, the last he might allow himself within a certain frame of reference. Each gesture supplanted its predecessor, was complete and distinct, never to be recalled or repeated. He walked around the southern end of the park—something he had only done once before—and went along Fillmore Walk to Camden Hill Road. Two burnt-out teen-age girls, lounging in front of a boutique called Sex Sisters, were eyeing him furtively. He turned toward them, nodded, held out empty hands. They put their heads together and giggled. He was struck with the idea of ending his screenplay with Henry Berger walking along a street very much like the one he was on, while a sniper on a rooftop studied him in his sights. The last shot would be of Henry Berger framed (like the subject of a photgraph) in the sights of a telescopic lens. After the picture dissolved to black, The End in white on a black screen, we would hear the sound of a gun shot echoing.