Bridge ahead of them, and found his reflexive tensing begin. He needed to make conversation to take his mind off the impending sharp ascent, the looming feeling of weightless height, the slight panic that worsened when there were no distractions. ‘Who was that on Jermaine’s porch?’
‘That’s Lemar. Jermaine’s boy.’
‘I’ve seen him before,’ he said softly, waiting to see what Duval thought of him.
‘Well, then you know he is one bitter young man.’
‘What’s he bitter about?’ Duval was the one with the right to be bitter.
‘You tell me. The world. The big wide world.’
‘Wide? Or white?’
Duval smiled at the word play. ‘Yeah, that too. He’s got it into his head that his hands are tied behind his back, all on account of his being black.’
‘What do you think, Duval?’
‘It ain’t no help, Bobby, it ain’t no help at all. But no point going on about it. Everybody says it’s better than it used to be.’ He sounded doubtful himself. ‘Jermaine doesn’t know how to handle him. He said Vanetta used to chew him out when he went on like that. “Boy, ain’t no good blamin’ everything on the white man. You got opportunities.”’
‘Vanetta never liked anyone to feel sorry for themselves.’
But Duval didn’t seem to hear him. ‘They wouldn’t let me go to her funeral.’
‘I know.’
‘How?’ He was suddenly suspicious.
‘I was at the funeral, Duval.’
‘I thought you was living in England then.’
‘I flew back for it.’
Duval nodded, but he was more concerned with his own grievance. ‘They said if it had been my mother or father, then they might have considered it. Grandmother, no. I told ’em I’d never had a father, and my mother wasn’t worth shit – Vanetta was my mother as far as I was concerned.’
Me too, thought Robert, but it wasn’t something he felt entitled to say. He suddenly realised they were past the apex of the Sky Bridge, and saw that Duval was taking in the view. He himself relaxed, contemplating the downward slope of the road, thinking also of the one time he had met Lemar.
X
HE’D FLOWN IN the day before the funeral, through an ice storm over Canada which tossed the 747 like a penny arcade’s bucking bronco. They landed in the dark; outside the terminal Robert waited half an hour for a taxi, staring dumbly at the frozen slush and the dirty snow banks – par for the course in February.
He stayed at the Middleton, a small hotel where his grandfather had lived when Robert’s grandmother had gone into a nursing home. Then more shabby than genteel, it had been recently renovated, and was also expensive, though the rooms were still little more than large closets. To cheer himself up, Robert gave himself dinner at the Cape Cod Room in the Drake Hotel, catty-corner from his grandparents’ old apartment, once Chicago’s fanciest restaurant in an era when pork chops were still king of Midwestern cuisine. Suddenly lonely, he thought of people he might call to say he was in town. There was no one.
He’d thought of going to a bar, but felt dissociated in the unrecognisable city of his youth, and knew he didn’t want to talk with anyone. So he’d gone back to his room and curled up with the local papers and a bottle of bourbon on the bed, waking in the middle of the night with all his clothes on, the television playing reruns of Sergeant Bilko, and the overhead light shining bleakly.
Hotel rooms in the middle of the night filled him with an emotional blankness; they were the scene of an essential solitude which hinted at despair’s move towards suicide. The false accoutrements of a home were luxuriously assembled around him – classy soap, bonnes bouches of shampoo, body lotion, conditioner; a mini bar, a luna matrimoniale-sized bed. None compensated for his sense of aloneness.
He thought of the dead woman he had come all this way to mourn, waiting for eventual exhaustion or, if his anxiety overrode fatigue, the rescuing arrival of the dawn. He was dreading the funeral, he suddenly realised, having deferred any serious contemplation of it as he had hurried to make the arrangements, bought his ticket, cancelled meetings, reassured Sophie he would be home soon. Though Anna had understood at once – to his surprise, perhaps, since his first wife had always mocked his accounts of his closeness to Vanetta.
‘Of course you should go,’ Anna had said at supper, taking in her stride his announced intention to fly four thousand miles the next day to