Ministers of Fire. Mark Harril Saunders

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СКАЧАТЬ I fancy the water here is drawn from the cesspool that flows directly from the bowels of our, I should say your, elected officials. Nothing but undigested fat from stale red-baiting leftovers and the roughage of lefty post-Vietnam paranoia. Did you see what those jesters had to say about you in the Post?”

      “I didn’t read it,” Burling said from inside the freezer door. The ice in his mother’s old, nickel-plated trays, imported from Philadelphia, was covered with fuzzy crystals and specks of food, as if they hadn’t been emptied for years. He wondered what had happened in his house in the months while Amelia had lived there alone with his children.

      “How could you resist?”

      Burling slammed a tray against the refrigerator door, dislodging shards of schist-like ice that skittered away across the linoleum. “I don’t give a damn what they think.”

      “Bravo,” said Bell, raising his glass. Burling retrieved a piece from the ice tray and dropped it into the tumbler, taking a layer of skin from his finger with it.

      “Ouch,” he said, tasting blood as he sucked at the tip.

      “Honestly, Lucius, I felt a bit sorry. The kids must really have caught it today at school.”

      Burling reached for the edge of the kitchen table and collapsed in a straight wooden chair. Betsy and Luke had already been in their bedrooms, asleep according to Amelia, when he got home from the Agency at ten. They were at awkward ages, and since he’d gotten home he’d found their appearances slightly alarming. Elizabeth’s hair was lank and greasy, her eyes unable to focus on him from behind her big pale glasses. Luke’s clothes looked worn out and half a size too small. The possibility that his mistakes would touch them deflated him completely.

      “I brought this in for Luke,” Bell explained, sliding the paperback onto the glass-topped table in front of him. “I thought it might take his mind off things.”

      Burling opened the book. Henry IV, Part 2. “Enter RUMOUR painted full of tongues.”

      “Oh, glory be,” Burling said, putting his head in his hands.

      years later, when he had sold the house on macomb and moved to his present apartment, Burling found a story Luke had written for the Sidwell Friends literary journal, about those months before his father came home. Thinly veiled autobiography, it told how Bell and Luke and Elizabeth acted Lear and The Tempest in the living room for Amelia’s entertainment that spring. When the weather turned warmer and Betsy was shipped off to camp, where she would spend eight miserable weeks falling out of canoes, dropping balls, and being tormented by thinner girls, mosquitoes, and poison ivy, Bell and Luke moved the repertory company to the deep porch that curled around the front of the house. In the damp mornings, Bell’s paperbacks were still on the little wicker table beside Amelia’s chaise longue, curling with dew and the dried rings of sweat from her highballs. Sometimes after Luke had gone to bed, his mother and Simon talked on, of Paris where Amelia had gone to the Sorbonne, and the Comédie Française, of which she had been a fan. Simon’s voice rose slowly and distantly, like an old-time announcer on the radio, vaguely corny but filling with a timbre that seemed like a wave from another, more confident world: Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America, and all the ships at sea.

      In June, they started the Henry plays, with Bell playing Falstaff. This production Burling saw in the flesh, having returned from Kabul at one of the lowest points of his life. He had done something careless, taken a chance with April; in turn, chance, or fate—thought of now in the upper case, ontological sense of the word, a condition of life on which he’d expended a lot of thought—turned bad and collected a terrible debt. Or maybe the mujahedin just didn’t give a fiddler’s fuck what he or Joseph Conrad thought, a possibility that expelled him from the comfort of his thinking, put him outside of himself.

      It was a strange place to be, and yet stranger still was how much the scene he discovered in his house on Macomb, after he had a few weeks to get used to it, seemed to match his internal condition of exile: Amelia cueing the corpulent Simon and the thin, shaggy Luke in the scented summer night, her pale hand flitting up and down like a moth within the baggy silk cuff of her dressing gown. She was vaguely alluring, in a fey sort of way.

      “Peace, good pint pot,” Bell declaimed, leaving his Ballantine ale on the windowsill beside her. Bugs popped against the frosted milk-glass globe of the porch light. “Harry!”

      Luke, draped in the pose of a dissolute scion on the railing, put one white Adidas sneaker on the floor of the porch and turned to face the beer-bellied Sir John. Since returning to the States he had adopted a punk affect, fraying Izods and olive fatigues, a safety pin stuck through the alligator’s jagged red mouth. The part of Prince Hal—Harry—who drank with John Falstaff and the other braggart soldiers, only to take up his heroic place at their lead, appealed to him.

      “That thou art my son,” Simon began.

      The wicker of the chaise made a crackling sound, and Amelia whispered, “Chamomile,” and giggled, tipping the ash from her French cigarette onto the floor. Her third glass of white burgundy leaned precariously on the arm of the chair, and her voice was a bit giddy, but not with the breathlessness that came before one of her fugues. Sitting in an upright chair in the shadows, elbows on his knees, Burling could see the bond that had grown between Luke and his mother in his absence: Luke was her pal, her companion, and also a connoisseur of her moods, a hard thing to be. “You forgot,” she said to Simon, “‘The more it is trodden on the faster it grows.’”

      “I’m improvising.” Simon bowed, his forehead glazed with perspiration. “Plenty of precedent for it. Boys these days don’t want to hear, ‘Youth, the more it is wasted the sooner it wears.’ They know all about that already, they do.”

      “I suppose you’re right,” said Amelia. She turned to Burling, but her face was a mystery.

      “That thou art my own son,” Simon continued, “I have partly thy mother’s word, partly my own opinion, but chiefly a villainous trick of thine eye, and a foolish hanging of thy nether lip, that doth warrant me.”

      The wicker squealed beneath Amelia, and Luke forgot his line.

      Burling watched from the guest room that night, but Simon padded across the grass to the carriage house alone. Quietly, so as not to wake Luke on the third floor, Burling moved down the hallway to his old room.

      “I was wondering when you’d come.” Amelia was sitting in the window seat, blowing the smoke from her cigarette through the corroded screen. “I’d like to talk to you, you know.”

      Burling moved closer. The fine features of Amelia’s long face were white from the streetlight. Her cigarette smelled strange.

      “What is that you’re smoking?”

      “It’s pot. Marijuana,” she giggled. “You want some?”

      “I don’t think so, no.”

      “I got it from Luke,” Amelia said.

      “You’ve been smoking marijuana with our son?”

      “Oh, he doesn’t know I have it. I think he got it from Simon.”

      “Bell smokes dope?”

      “Apparently so.”

      “That can’t be good,” Burling said, sitting down on the slipper chair. Their room, the canopy bed, the sheer curtains, the СКАЧАТЬ