Fiction from The Literary Review
While we are waiting for Mrs. Vaughn to return, I work on a divorce agreement for one of the professors at Littleton College. Arlon culls a lot of business from the college, in large part because the professors-most of whom are not originally from Vermont-distrust the locally born lawyers (there are three in the town, only one of whom is actually making a living at law), but also because Arlon has gotten his degree from Harvard Law School and the professors are conditioned to seek out people withthe most impressive credentials. To Arlon's credit, most of his customers like him and know that he will do the job right the first time. So Arlon's practice, over a period of seven years, has become fairly lucrative.
At lunch time, Arlon sends me to the library to do a little research on Mr. Vaughn. I return with photocopies from Forbes and Who's Who, read them over while eating my turkey with cranberry roulade and alfalfa sprouts on French bread, bought from the very healthy but slightly too imaginative sandwich shop in Littleton center.
Forbes magazine lists Jack Vaughn as number three-hundred and two in its list of the four-hundred wealthiest businessmen in America. He is chairman and founder of Vaughn Industries, a conglomerate of chemical and pharmaceutical companies, and his assets are estimated at well over half a billion. He served on an industry advisory board for the Reagan and Bush administrations, and is currently head of a thinly disguised pharmaceuticals lobbying group called the American Health Organization. He is also part-owner of the New England Revolution, as well as an avid offshore racer and polo player. Who's Who adds that he is a graduate of Littleton College and served as a captain in the Air Force during the Vietnam War. After the war, he got a masters in chemical engineering from Boston University.
"In other words," Arlon says, when I have given him the run-down, "he's smart, rich, powerful, athletic, and probably has an ego a mile wide. Should be a fun guy to talk to."
"He doesn't worry you?" I ask.
"Well, if he was part-owner of the Red Sox, then I'd be worried," Arlon says. He laughs, a sound like a gunshot echoing across his wide flat teeth. Arlon is anything but a quiet man. "Actually, he scares the shit out of me. But we're pretty small fish. Hopefully we can wrap this up before he takes any notice of us."
"You don't think we're going to find anything?"
"Doubtful. But you never know."
When Mrs. Vaughn returns, we gather in Arlon's office. I bring a legal pad to take notes.
Mrs. Vaughn has brought photos of Daniel, one taken last Thanksgiving, the other two summers ago. In the Thanksgiving picture he is dressed in a jacket and tie, seated beside his mother at an elaborately decorated table, his fork poised over his plate. He stares directly into the camera, laughing, but with a look that says the photographer had better take the picture now, the moment will not last. His head leans out from his shoulders, suspended on a long, delicate vulture's neck, and one arm is planted on the table, as if without this buttress his head and shoulders would collapse. Even so, he is clearly taller than everyone at the table.
In the summer picture, he is in a bathing suit, reclining in a chaise-longue on a patio somewhere. He looks pale and thin and brittle as an old split-rail, his chest hairless and flat, his legs a pair of stiff dividers covered with only the lightest shadow of hair. He seems oblivious to the camera. His head is turned slightly, and his dark eyes stare somewhere into the earth a hundred yards away. In the Christmas picture his rosewood hair had been cut short and brushed back with gel. Here, his hair is longer on top, unbrushed, a black feathery sheet slipping down into his eyes. He looks gaunt, his brow and cheekbones bulging like fossils under his sandstone skin. He is strange looking, and yet he is also very handsome, like a vampire or brooding alien-exotic, mysterious, a voyager of flesh and bones.
It is difficult for me to look at the pictures, knowing that the subject-alive less than three days ago-is now dead. And yet I can't help scrutinizing his face, his eyes, trying to find some clue-a birthmark, an unnatural cast to the eyes, a strange glow about the face, as if his self-destruction must always have been visible and no one looked hard enough. But what I notice, instead, is that he is surrounded by friends and family in the Christmas picture, and, in the summer picture, though he is clearly unhappy, there was someone to take his picture, someone who wanted to look at him, to remember him, whatever his mood. Whereas I can't remember the last time anyone took my picture.
Mrs. Vaughn has also brought copies of his school medical records and his transcript.
"As you can see, he was in perfect health," she says. "And though his grades have been erratic over the last three years, he always did well in biology, his major."
Arlon glances at the transcript, then leafs through the medical folder. "What about mental health records?" he asks. "Was he seeing a counselor or therapist?"
"He was seeing Dr. Townsend, at the college," Mrs. Vaughn says. "Ever since spring of freshman year, I think. Dean Waters had originally said she would talk to him about releasing his notes, but now there's a problem. My ex-husband doesn't want the notes released."
"Can't they just release them to you?" I ask. The question comes out broken, hoarse, a sandpapery birth, and almost as soon as it is out I realize that there is an obvious answer here, something that Arlon and Mrs. Vaughn know but I don't.
"Confidentiality laws," Arlon answers. "He can't reveal any information about his patient without permission of the patient. In this case, the patient is deceased, so the next of kin would have to grant permission. But the law doesn't recognize a mother as having greater kinship than a father, or vice versa. So if the parents don't agree, it becomes a legal nightmare, especially for the therapist."
"Dr. Townsend is willing to release Daniel's records to me," Mrs. Vaughn says, "but my ex-husband's attorneys have already filed for an injunction against both him and the college. And the college is much too afraid of a lawsuit to press the issue."
"So you won't be seeing those records anytime soon, if ever," Arlon says. "But what I don't understand is why Mr. Vaughn is putting so much effort into blocking any investigation. You would think as the father he would want to know what happened."
Mrs. Vaughn sighs. "Actually, Jack doesn't want to know at all what happened. Or, more to the point, he thinks he already knows what happened, and he wants to put it to rest as quickly and quietly as possible."
"Why?" Arlon asks.
"Because he can't accept Daniel's . . . lifestyle."
"Daniel was gay?"
Mrs. Vaughn nods, starting to cry again. She pulls a handkerchief out of her pocket. "Daniel told me last Christmas. I always suspected, but it was still hard to hear. You want your children to live a nice safe life. And when you find out, instead, that they're going to spend the rest of their lives battling hate and prejudice, it's-it's awful. And keeping this secret from us had already made him so unhappy for so long."
"How did Mr. Vaughn react?" Arlon asks.
"Jack didn't really believe him at first, thought that it was some silly phase Daniel was going through. Then they got in an argument-Daniel trying to convince his father he was gay, Jack trying to convince him he was not. Daniel won, I suppose, because Jack finally threw him out of the house."
"Did they talk again after that?"
"Daniel tried to call him a few times. The first time, he got a fifteen minute tirade about how no son of Jack Vaughn could be a homosexual, how stupid and deluded Daniel was, how he hadn't fought two years in Vietnam just to defend the rights of perverts and pedophiles, that if that was the way Daniel wanted to be then he had no son-that sort of thing. But after that, Jack would just hang up each time Daniel called. I don't think they ever spoke to each other again."
There is a moment of silence, then Arlon asks, "Do you think that your ex-husband might have been involved in your son's death?"
Mrs. Vaughn smiles. "Jack? No. I don't have any worries about that. He loved Daniel."
"Love can make people pretty angry, especially under the circumstances."
"No, Jack would never have hurt Daniel, not like that. He has a violent temper, but it's all noise. I've never seen him actually hurt anyone, except on the polo field. Jack doesn't want this investigated simply because Jack doesn't want to admit his son was gay, especially now that he's gone. If he could stop the newspaper reports he would. But since he can't, the next best thing is to bury Daniel and all his secrets as quickly as possible."
"He's afraid of the publicity?"
"Somewhat. But he's much more afraid of what else he'll find out. You see, Jack doesn't doubt that Daniel killed himself. I think he even imagines it's the logical culmination of the 'sordid lifestyle' his son had adopted. But what he doesn't want to know are the details of that lifestyle. He doesn't want to know how his son lived, and he doesn't want to know why he died. He just wants to bury the gay part as quickly as possible and hold onto the rest of Daniel. You might say he wants to recreate Daniel's memory in his own image, make the 'little Jack' he would have preferred to have."
Arlon pauses to allow me to catch up in my note taking. Then he asks Mrs. Vaughn about the autopsy.
"I assume you've asked for one," he says.
"Jack's blocking me there, too," Mrs. Vaughn says. "I think he's afraid they'll find something-well, embarrassing. But my attorneys don't think he can stop it," Mrs. Vaughn says.
"The circumstances are pretty muddy, and what with it being a college and all, the county's likely to want to make sure it's not homicide," Arlon says. "Your ex-husband is pretty influential but I doubt he can get the medical examiner to bend on this one. Of course, the autopsy may not reveal anything, in which case you might want to reconsider the investigation."
The conversation continues until three o'clock, Arlon questioning Mrs. Vaughn about her son's friends and teachers while I scribble furiously on my notepad, trying to keep up. When she is gone, Arlon lies down on the floor to rest his bad back.
"I think I'm going to put you on this case, Mark," he says, stretching out his long legs.
This is not what I expected to hear, and not at all what I want. Images of Jack Vaughn chasing me through the streets of Littleton in a Phantom F-4 flash through my mind. "Me?" I say. "Why me?"
"Four reasons. One, it's going to take a lot of legwork, and being a one-lawyer operation I can't afford to go running around town all day playing detective. Two, I doubt we're going to find anything. Three, Bridget has been complaining that she's not learning anything about law, so I can have her take over some of your less interesting work to free you up. And four, you're a lot closer to the students' age than I am. They might trust you a little more."
"But I'm not a detective."
"Neither am I."
"But you know everyone . . ."
"So will you-soon."
I leave his office depressed, heartsick. I don't want to get involved in the Vaughn's drama. I don't want to talk to any college students, or be anywhere in the room when Jack Vaughn is being questioned about his feelings towards his son. It is not just that I am afraid of Daniel's father, not just that, at the ripe old age of twenty-five, I have decided I don't like people, would be just as happy or unhappy to live without them. It is that I see Daniel Vaughn's suicide as something parasitic, something that might slowly work its way into me and breed with my own unhappiness, upset the delicate balance I have managed to keep over the past three months. I have no natural immunity to these things, no means of self-defense other than avoidance, and I know that once Daniel Vaughn's drama is inside me, it will never leave. I am the perfect host.
My father once asked me how I could be so stupid, and I replied that it must be genetic. I see my depression the same way-a family curse that has been handed down to me from both sides, the apple falling from a homozygous tree of misery. My father spent the first six years of my life throwing tantrums. He was a CPA but he did not like the jobs he was offered and had a fatal tendency to lash out at his bosses. We moved four times, until finally he landed a managerial position with Hand & Rubicon, a large New York accounting firm. He must have been happy enough there, or finally learned some diplomacy, because he did not change jobs again.
We settled in Hokopee, a small town in northern New Jersey that three years earlier had been nothing but woods and farmland but now was covered with row upon row of fake, baby-blue and white and beige Colonials-all on half-acre lots, all two-stories with a bay-window in front, a one-car garage, two saplings strapped to the newly sodded lawns. Our section of the neighborhood was on a hill leading from the center of town down into a little valley with a pond everyone called "the mudhole." Our backyard butted up against this mudhole and Dad grumbled constantly about the smell and the noise of the kids playing there. But he must have gotten a good price on the house, otherwise he would never have even looked at it. He was-and still is-the cheapest man I know, as close to a miser as anyone can get without actually hoarding money. Every Sunday he used to sit Mom down at the kitchen table and review her expenditures for the past week-checking, savings, credit card charges, paychecks (if she was working). The meetings were very much an official event, my father sitting at the head of the table, hair slicked with Brylcreem, dressed in his weekend costume of twill pants (sharply creased), loafers (polished), off-white oxford or plaid shirt, and, in the fall, spring and winter, a v-neck sweater. This was casual wear for him. During the week he wore nothing but charcoal-grey suits, white linen shirts with cuff-links, black wing-tip shoes, and thin, black socks riveted to his legs by garters-his uniform, as important as any military one. He always wanted people to know that he had authority and rank, that he was somebody important.
The budget meetings followed a pattern of logic midway between the Inquisition and the Mad Hatter's tea party. It did not seem to matter how carefully Mom had spent the money during the week, or how essential the expenditures were. Dad would question every item, express surprise and indignation at bills he had paid a hundred times, as if Mom had somehow allowed the bank to cheat her by paying the same mortgage we had been paying for the last seven years. His goal, more than anything, seemed to be to find reasons to be angry with her, and he was almost always successful. For light infractions, such as not shopping around for the cheapest gas, he would furrow his brows into this distinctive lightning shape, look at her through his sharp, osprey eyes, and snap, "You don't give a shit where this money comes from, do you?" But for more serious transgressions, such as when Mom spent two-hundred dollars more on clothes for Laura and me than she was supposed to, or when she did not pay the credit-card bill in full and incurred finance charges, Dad would get up, kick his chair away, scatter the bills and receipts everywhere
"I know what you're doing, Sarah!" he would shout. "You think you're going to throw every penny I make down the drain, don't you? You think I don't see?"
Mom invariably sat quietly through these sessions, doing her best to keep him calm. She was not always a passive woman. I had heard them fight hundreds of times. But in these things, on the issue of money, she knew she could not win, could not even tie. Maybe she felt guilty because it was his money and she was not making any of her own. But I think it was more that she had become conditioned to his perspective-money was blood and every drop had to be accounted for. She had accepted his rules, assimilated them the way conquered nations eventually assimilate the culture of their conquerors, even though if she had had her own money, her own life, she would never have subscribed to any of this.
Laura and I dreaded these discussions and did our best to be out of the house on Sundays. When we were young, we would go over to our friends' houses, or play all day at the mudhole. Later, Laura worked, first washing dishes at the diner, then waitressing, then working as an orderly at the Shining Bay Senior Citizen's Home.
I did not work, at least not until senior year, by which time Mom was dead and Laura was long gone and the Sunday budget meeting consisted of Dad leaving me a check on the kitchen counter. My escape was either my room or Eaglin Woods, a dark, tree-choked area on the opposite side of the mudhole that the developers of Hokopee had been unable to buy. The owner, Mr. Eaglin, lived in a house embedded in the spruce-covered hillside on the opposite side of the valley. He was rumored to have made millions in oil exploration in the fifties and sixties. He loved hunting and nature in general and he had made it very clear that he did not want to be surrounded by little pink and blue houses, did not want sewers or paved roads, did not want sidewalks and stop signs, and most of all did not want to have to find someplace else to take his walks or hunt his pheasant and quail. As he had money and powerful friends, no one pushed him very hard on this.
Eaglin Woods was my real home, the only place I ever felt safe. I went there to escape, to cover myself in leaves and shadows, feel the closeness of the maples and spruce and ironwood, the leaves cracking beneath my feet, the blackberry and hawthorn branches whipping my legs. Nature seemed impenetrable to me and this is what I wanted, a living screen to hide me from the outside world. Some days I would crawl into the densest underbrush I could find and crouch there for hours, listening to the squirrels, the warbling cries of startled pheasants, feel the calm seeping into me, a thin trickle like sap rising out of the muddy ground and spreading from my rooted fingertips to my head.
I became obsessed with the idea of living in the wild, surviving by hunting and fishing and gathering. I read books on wilderness survival, tried to memorize the different edible and medicinal plants-cattail root for starch, dock for Vitamin A, hemlock for congestion, hawthorn leaves and oak bark for burns, willow for fever. I learned to make fires with flint and steel, practiced setting snares for rabbits, fished in the stream. The fact that I rarely caught anything should have been a hint to me that I was no Daniel Boone. But the kind of survival I was practicing in those woods really had nothing to do with food. I was trying to keep another part of myself occupied, trying to feed some inconsolable and insatiable voice inside of me that, if I stopped, would start feeding on me. I would not say I was aware of this. In fact, I am not sure I was aware of much in those days. I only knew that the closeness and darkness and silence of the woods fed me in a way that nothing else could. I was a mushroom, a pale phobic stalk hiding from the sun, and this was my only shelter.
There was only one person in our family who pretended to be happy, who believed she was happy-my mother. She weighed nearly four-hundred pounds by the end, and she slept on the couch because she could not make it upstairs to bed, and she drank two glasses of vodka every night to make her forget the pain in her back and legs. But she always insisted she was happy. She bustled through the schools, friendly, cheerful. She bustled through the PTA meetings, saying hello to everyone, laughing, gossiping, battling opponents with wit and humor and a finesse that would have overwhelmed Kissinger. She bustled her way back and forth from the doctors, everything always okay, her health always getting better, just needed to lose a little weight, just a little trouble sleeping, just some pain now and then. She acted as if unhappiness was a crime against nature, a selfish indulgence that any truly moral person could easily avoid. But when she died, she did not look happy. We found her in the morning, laid out on the couch in her robe, an empty bottle of vodka on the coffee table. The flesh around her eyes had turned the color of oil, her cheeks and jowls and lips distorted like melted plastic. Her arms were suspended half in the air, stiff, crooked, as if she were reaching for someone to pull her up, and there was no peace in her eyes-just fear and loneliness and a terrible confusion as to how, after pouring so much happiness into every nook and cranny of her life, she could be drowning in her own unhappiness. In the end, I think, her heart stopped because there was no space left for it to beat. She had stuffed too much around it.
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