“What’s going on?” I asked the rapt older man beside me.

  “Sh!” He shook his head without taking his eyes from the t.v. screens.

  The woman in front of me was more helpful. “The guy that killed him. They got him,” she said over his shoulder. “Lee Harvey Oswald.”

  “Who’s Lee Harvey Oswald?” I asked. “Killed who?”

  Chapter 3

  That did it for our discussion of Lily’s father over a quiet dinner of roast chicken and salad. Instead, like everyone else, we had whatever leftovers were in the refrigerator and sat, devastated, in front of the television set, hour after hour, focused on the events of that terrible day. The same on Saturday. Like the rest of America.

  There were times when I might have raised the subject of her father with her, but I was as heartsick and disoriented as everybody else and it just didn’t seem important enough. And then on Sunday horror was piled on top of grief when a squat, hatted Jack Ruby jumped from a crowd and shot Oswald point-blank in the stomach in full-frontal view of the rolling cameras. Monday it was back to grief. With the schools closed—with everything closed—we watched the funeral march: the riderless black horse, the veiled, slender young widow walking behind, the bare-legged young son’s salute …

  By late afternoon—this was four days of it now—I’d had all I could stand. I was ready to move on to something else: my own life, for example.

  “Lily,” I said when she was in the kitchen brewing us some coffee after dinner, “I think it’s time we sat down and talked about your father, don’t you?”

  She jerked her head. “Pete, I just couldn’t. Not now. It’s such a horrible time.”

  “We’re going to have to talk about him some time, you know that.”

  “Yes, I know. But not now. I need a little time, that’s all.”

  The funny thing is, she’d often talked willingly enough about him in the past; not about his supposed execution—she’d steered clear of that after the early days—but about the idyllic August vacations she’d taken with him in the Thirties at his family’s chestnut farm in Corsica (castagna, “chestnut,” was the only Corsican word I knew), where Vercier himself had grown up before heading to the French mainland at fifteen to seek his fortune. She would tell me about the mustachioed, rustic, nineteenth-century man that had been her grandfather, and about the glorious country walks she and Vercier had taken in the close-by hills overlooking the harbor of Calvi, and their picnics on the beach, in the shadow of the ancient citadel, and about the secret, spooky, earthy-smelling, stone-walled root-cellar on the farm, where they’d go when it rained, and eat crusty bread smeared with olive oil and salt while her father told her romantic stories about Corsican vendettas that always ended with the lovers dying in each others’ arms. And always, her voice would soften when we talked about him.

  Well, it was anything but soft now. In fact, I noticed that her accent had thickened a little, which it did in times of stress. Ordinarily it’s hardly there at all, almost as non-existent as mine. Strangers sometimes hear something when she speaks, but they think perhaps she’s from the South or the Midwest; once in a while even England. They rarely guess France.

  Later, at about seven-thirty, when we were browsing through magazines side by side in the living room armchairs after dinner, the telephone rang. I picked it up.

  “Is it BE 6-2122?” an elderly-sounding voice said, very French.

  “Yes.”

  “Lily Simon, please,” he said. Lee-lee Seemawng.

  I handed the receiver to her. “For you.”

  She hesitated, took it from me, listened for maybe two seconds, and slammed it down into its cradle, her face dark. “Damn him.”

  “Lily—”

  She headed me off. “Pete, I’m not going to talk to him. I’m not.” She was on the verge of tears. “I’m sorry, but I don’t care what you think.”

  “Honey, I hate to see you like this. Isn’t there something I can do to help?”

  “No.” She closed her eyes.

  I put my Time magazine aside, reached across the little table between us to grasp her hand, and tugged her gently from her chair. She held back for a second but then came, settling on my lap and leaning her head on my shoulder with a sigh. I rubbed her back.

  “Pete, my darling, I love you so much,” she murmured into my neck. “I can’t begin to tell you.”

  I stroked her hair, her beautiful. boyish, auburn hair. “I love you.” It had been almost two decades, and I still honestly couldn’t figure out what she saw in me.

  Her head came up. “Everything is still all right between us, isn’t it? I couldn’t stand for anything to come between us.”

  “Between us? God, they couldn’t be any better.” It was true too, if you discounted the last few days. If anything, I loved her more than I had when I married her. I sure needed her more. And I didn’t want anything to come between us either.

  We sat like that for a while, nuzzling and stroking like the old, affectionate married couple we were. Once the telephone rang again, making her jump. “No, I can’t talk to him,” she said quickly, looking as if she was about to break and run.

  I kept her on my lap while I picked it up.

  “Lee-lee—”

  “N’appelez plus ce numéro, s’il vous plait,” I said sharply and hung up. Don’t call this number again.

  “Thank you,” Lily breathed, and snuggled in again.

  “Honey?” I said when we had just about fallen asleep in the chair. “I just want you to know that there isn’t anything that you can tell me that could possibly make me love you less.”

  “Mmm.”

  “I mean—look, if he … if he did anything to you as a child, or took advantage of you, or convinced you to do something you didn’t want to do, it doesn’t mean—”

  Her head came up. “Are you asking me if he abused me? If there was—if there was incest between us?”

  “Well—yes.” I was thinking about those long, rainy days in the root cellar, I guess.

  “No,” she said, making a face. “Of course not.” Her head settled against my shoulder again. “Good gosh.”

  That made me feel a little better: not only the reply itself, but the fact that I’d actually gotten an unambiguous answer from her. Encouraged, I pushed on.

  “Well then, how about telling me what is going on?” I asked softly. “I think it’s time, don’t you?”

  She surprised me with the violence with which she pushed herself off my lap and stood up. “Damn you! Can’t you leave me alone for a single minute?” She was suddenly furious. “Can we please get something straight? I don’t ever want to see that man, I don’t want to talk to him, and I don’t want to talk about him!” She started to say more, but turned and stalked off toward the stairs and the bedroom.

  I sat there, astonished. Astonished and wounded. Lili had never thrown a “damn you” at me before, or anything like it. In seventeen years, not once. It just wasn’t her style. It took me a few seconds to find my voice. “Well, I damn well want to talk about him,” I called sourly after her. Not my usual m.o. either.

  Lily yelled something down at me from the top of the stairs and I yelled something back. We shouted a few more clipped, angry words at each other. I forget who got the last word in, whatever it was, and then the bedroom door slammed and put an end to it.

  I turned off the light and sat there muttering to myself in the dark, licking my wounds and coming up with some snappy after-the-fact ripostes.

  * * *

  Now by nature I’m a pretty peaceable person. Like Lily, I try to steer clear of squabbles, grudges, and general hysterics of any sort. Of course my good pal Louis, being a psychologist, sees this as something to worry about and has explained it to me as a withdrawal mechanism, a shying away from meaningful dyadic interaction (I’m quoting here), preferring to accept people’s surface, ceremonial words and actions rather than to take the chance of delving to a deeper, more authentic level, and therefore risking a more risky and demanding relationship. Generally speaking, I have to admit the guy has a point. Who wants to “delve” into a relationship that’s doing just fine as it is? Who needs relationships that are more risky and demanding than they already are?

  Not me.

  Naturally, Louis ascribes this “defensive” attitude to my early childhood experiences, and there I’m inclined to agree with him. I had all the anger, frustration, and emotion I’ll ever need watching my driven, tortured father make himself—and my mother and me—miserable while I was growing up. You know those tattoos—Born to Love? Born to be Bad? Dad should have had one that read Born to be Unhappy. He was endlessly striving, endlessly embittered and boiling inside, constitutionally unable to settle for what we had, which was more than a lot of our neighbors had. The kind of man who took little joy in his achievements but suffered agonies over his failures, he never stopped struggling for something more, something better. But nothing (and no one, including and especially himself) ever lived up to his hopes. His idea for a fabric business failed, his several investment schemes flopped, his French-style bakery chain never got off the ground. Always he lost whatever hard-earned money he put in. Always it led to noisy squabbling with my mother.

  Not that they got along that well at the best of times. Mom had married beneath her, and neither of them could ever forget it. Mom’s family owned an industrial chemicals plant near Lyon; Dad’s father had a little grocery store in the city, where Dad had worked as a clerk. When they got married, her family disowned her. A few years later, and largely in retribution for that, or so I’ve always believed, Dad pulled up stakes and took Mom and me to America. That was in 1933, the black heart of the Great Depression. But Dad was a hard worker, willing to take on anything, there was no taking that away from him, and he did manage to support us by carving out a niche for himself as a fruit-and-vegetable supplier to grocery stores all over Brooklyn.

  We ourselves settled in a tenement in the Brownsville section because Dad had heard that’s where the Jews went. He was right too; at that time Brownsville was known as the Jerusalem of America, with a larger population of Jews than any city in the world. It’s changed since then, with the decrepit old tenements, the ones I and Morty and the rest of my friends all lived in, being gradually replaced with decrepit new tenements, otherwise known as “the projects,” and the beaten-down Jewish and Eastern European faces gradually being replaced with beaten-down black and brown ones. But it’s essence hasn’t changed; it was a slum then and it’s a slum still.

  Like everyone else, we lived in one of those six-story walk-up apartment buildings with fancy marble entries giving way to gloomy hallways with embossed-tin ceilings painted algae-brown, and apartment front doors that usually opened directly into the kitchen. Aside from us, however, none of the tenants seemed to be French. Every family we knew had its roots in Russia or Poland, Lithuania or Estonia.

  With Dad’s sweaty, six-day-a-week, up-at-three-in-the-morning business and the smell of rotting vegetables that always clung to him, we were as solidly working-class as any of them, but our Frenchified speech and manners gave us a toney quality in the eyes of our neighbors, who regarded us as the patricians of Hopkinson Avenue. Unfortunately, my father started believing it, which made him more frustrated with our lot than ever, and even more haplessly upward-striving. While most of my friends’ at-home language was Yiddish, ours was French. I’d even heard him imply to strangers that he wasn’t Jewish at all, that the apparent Yiddishness in his accent was actually Alsatian, by way of his grandmother.

  Oh, I got bar-mitzvahed when the time came, but that was more for the sake of propriety than conviction. Nobody in our circle was what you’d call Orthodox, but if you were a kid on Hopkinson Avenue, you got bar-mitzvahed when you hit thirteen, period. As for the religious responsibilities that went along with becoming a man, Dad very conspicuously didn’t care about them or push them on me. Not for him were the ways of the tallis and the tfillen. On the other hand, such was the complex man who was my father, he was the one who went into a male version of hysterics a few years later when I told my folks that I wanted to marry a Gentile (and a Frenchwoman at that). Not that Lily didn’t eventually win him over, of course.

  Anyway, back in the thirties, by the time Hitler began to openly covet France we’d been living in Brooklyn for six or seven years and I was already more American than French. Punch ball, stoop ball, stick ball, the Dodgers … your everyday all-American first-generation kid. I was fourteen or so and Europe seemed very far away, but I remember how appalled Dad was at what was happening to France. At first, oddly enough, he’d mainly been angry at the anti-Nazi movement—“bastard Communist agitators”—who in his view were more interested in spewing upheaval and anarchy than in trying to resist the inevitable. Then he was furious at the appeasers and the collaborationists, with the once-sanctified Marshal Pétain at their head, who were selling the country down the river and willingly rounding up every Jew they could find for deportation to the camps. Then it was de Gaulle and the Resistance that he couldn’t stomach, for bringing so much retribution on innocent Frenchmen and women, and for screwing things up in general. That he hated the Nazis themselves went without saying. Also the Vichy government, for so cravenly and enthusiastically doing their bidding.

  And that was my father in a nutshell: raging at every side there was, straining toward some impossible end, something he probably couldn’t have put into words himself. “Tire pour les étoiles,” he used to try to drum into my head when the subject of my eventual career came up. “Tu pourras arriver à la lune.” His own philosophy: shoot for the stars, maybe you’ll hit the moon. Me, I saw it the other way around, not that I’d ever said it to his face: Tire pour la lune. Tu pourras arriver aux les étoiles.”

  For years, right up until the day he keeled over onto his face with congestive heart failure, I’d watched him bang his head against stone walls and then fume and seethe and drive Mom nuts when they wouldn’t budge. And Mom gave as good as she got, believe me. Four times she walked out on him, twice dragging me with her, one time for a full month, but in the end she always came back. Once my father ran away too, but he came back after a couple of days as well, looking sheepish for once in his life.

  As a reaction, I suppose, my own approach to living has been the opposite of what his was; more along the lines of take-things-as-they-come, don’t-overreach, and—especially—don’t-take-a-chance-on-making-the-gods-angry-by-expecting-too-much. As a result, I haven’t been the kind of person who makes things happen. Things happen to me, and I make the best of them. And as far as I’m concerned, it’s worked. Life has been good. Unlike Dad, I’m not consumed with envy or resentment. I live in a nice neighborhood. I took advantage of the G.I. Bill to go to college, and my academic career, if not spectacular, has been fulfilling and secure; I’ll be up for associate professor next year. Lily, the one star I aimed for and got, has been everything I could hope for. My marriage is (or has been until lately) tranquil, affectionate, and settled, with few bumps in the road.

  I suppose a lot of people would say my life has been on the uneventful side, even boring. Well, that’s okay with me. I like uneventful. Uneventful is good. If you’d grown up with my mother and father you’d like it too.

  So what had just happened between Lily and me—that brief, exasperated blow-up, which probably wouldn’t have qualified as anything more than a minor skirmish in most households, was for us a full-scale battle that had left both of us bloodied.

  For an hour I sat there in the dark getting more depressed. When I went up to bed Lily was lying on her back, pretending to be asleep. I figured it had gone far enough and I was ready to make up. But when I crawled in beside her and reached out to touch her face she twisted immediately away, with much rustling of bedclothes. The hell with it, I thought. What did she have to be mad about? I turned away too, heaving a noisy, exasperated sigh through my nostrils, just to let her know that she wasn’t the only one who knew how to be crabby.

  Chapter 4

  That was Monday night. Tuesday was a chilly day at the Simons. We were civil enough, we had breakfast and dinner together and chatted about this and that. But no olive branches, no kiss-and-make-up, and no further discussion of Marcel Vercier, the Undead. A really, really lousy day. Another not-so-great night either. Aside from everything else, I had the Dream again.

  Wednesday morning started off much the same, and neither of us seemed able to do anything about it. We’d had off-days before, sure, but two in a row was rare and upsetting. I could see that Lily was as miserable about it as I was, and as powerless to turn things around.

  So on my way to the college for my back-to-back Wednesday morning classes I went to the St. George to find her father. Something bad, something I didn’t understand, had come down on us out of nowhere, and if I was going to deal with it I needed some sort of handle on it. Whatever it was, it was Marcel Vercier who had brought it to us with him.

  In the marble lobby the desk clerk rang the old man’s room. “Sorry, Mr. Vercier doesn’t answer. Would you care to leave a message?”

  I didn’t want him trying to get in touch with me at home because I didn’t want Lily involved at this point—if ever. I’d thrashed it over with her as much as I intended to, with no result beyond screwing up our lives, and now it was her father I wanted to talk to, not Lily. So I left an anonymous note in French, saying that I wished to talk to him about something of importance to him and that I would return at noon.

  Which I did. Again, he wasn’t there, and the clerk told me that he hadn’t picked up my note. I went home, planning to telephone him hourly until I got him. Conveniently, I had the house to myself until about five; Lily works as a counselor at a junior high school and Wednesday is after-school staff-meeting day. I got out of my sport coat and tie and into a sweater, heated up a can of pea soup for lunch, and at one o’clock I tried Vercier’s room at the St. George. No response, but a second after I hung up the phone it rang. I snatched it up,