In the night room Page 0,50
have opened up before him, all moist, yielding, ready to be conquered! For these services, Ms. Beech would be compensated with the use of an unspectacular but sturdy little house, access to a vice principal’s salary, and the kind of respectability valued by the newly Born-Again.
I had always liked and respected Nancy, Mark’s mother. Her suicide had felt like a wound. My brother should have taken more time before deciding to remarry. In typical Philip fashion, he had wrapped up his grief in resentment and tossed the whole package overboard. With the onset of China Beech, nice, kind, loyal Nancy Underhill had been escorted deeper into the Underworld, a kind of premature zamani. In fact, I thought this was exactly what Pop had done after April was killed. He wanted to forget her, to erase her traces from his life, and after the funeral, he never spoke her name or acknowledged that she had existed.
My book tour brings me to Millhaven right around the time of Philip’s wedding, September 12, and if I am to attend the ceremony, as I suppose I must, I have only to extend my stay there a couple of days, but I cannot say that I feel particularly well-disposed toward the bride and groom.
The first of my telephone calls from Philip came three days ago, that is, about a month after the receipt of the typo-riddled e-mail that announced his upcoming marriage. The message from Cyrax berating me for having lost all civility and kindness had prompted me to think about calling my brother, in fact to gaze at the telephone for extended periods when I should have been working, and when I picked up the receiver and heard his voice speaking my name I had a second’s worth of resentment that he had beaten me to the punch.
“Hey, Tim,” he said. “How are you doing? I just wanted to check in. How’s the new book coming along?”
With these harmless words, Philip broke two lifelong traditions: he spontaneously inquired about my well-being, and he displayed or at least feigned an interest in my work. It threw me so far off balance that my first response was to suspect that he wanted to ask me for money. Philip has never asked me for money, not once, not even in the years when my income must have been ten times his.
I mumbled something innocuous.
“Yesterday I saw your name in print. New Leaf Books sends out a newsletter once a month, and they have you down for a reading two days before the wedding. China and I sure hope you’ll be able to come see us get hitched.”
Come see us get hitched? Who was this stranger? My brother didn’t talk like that.
“Of course I’ll be there. I changed my tickets so I fly out the day after the ceremony.” When the moment had come, I discovered myself incapable of saying “your wedding.” “I thought you already knew.”
“Well, I don’t think you were ever very specific about it. But I know, your schedule must get pretty complicated when you’re out on tour and all that. We’re just really happy to hear that you’ll be able to make it. After all, you’re my only brother. In fact, you’re all the family I’ve got, Tim, and I want you to know how important that is to me.”
“Philip, is that really you? I don’t know who the hell I’m talking to.”
He laughed. “We’re not getting any younger, bro. We gotta get straight with ourselves, with our families, and with God.”
All of this had to be decoded. We’re not getting any younger was pure Philip, who cherished clichés. Bro, on the other hand, came from some other planet. Where the part about getting straight with God came from was no mystery.
“This girl seems to have had a tremendous effect on you,” I said.
“Why China’s willing to marry a dull old fogy like me I’ll never know, but I guess she saw something in me! And of course she pulled me out of the worst year I’ve ever had. After you went back to New York, I more or less fell apart. It was terrible. Nancy and Mark both gone. My life, wow, it was a smoking ruin. I reacted so badly to everything, I made the situation worse. I don’t know if you picked up on this, but I was very, very angry at Nancy.”
“That would have been hard to miss,” I told him.
“I’m sorry for the way I must have acted. I