Concert of Ghosts Read online

  In San Francisco a ghostly afternoon mist, rolling in from the Pacific, obscured the sun. Tennant remembered those mists and fogs that turned the sun to milk. He remembered how they’d filter light from the streets, and then, as whimsically as they’d come, they’d be gone. Sometimes, when the mist fudged the lower parts of buildings, San Francisco had the appearance of a city on stilts. He’d seen Golden Gate Park vanish, watched the Bay disappear, strolled through the lingering haze of the Haight, thinking how the city seemed to come and go at will, in and out of existence, a fanciful place. Now, in the taxi that passed the boxed houses of Daly City and headed toward the center of the city, Tennant felt he was traveling, not toward his private past, but into the heart of a place unknown and unknowable, a city of vapors. A dream city, half-recalled, unfinished. Had he really lived here once? Why hadn’t he let this whole business lie still?

  The need to know. The driving force. But Maggie Silver would not be here. He was convinced of that. Even as the taxi headed toward Union Square, where a spectacular broadsword of sunlight perforated the mist, he felt the city was devoid of her presence.

  Alison had directed the driver to Chinatown, to St. Mary’s.

  The taxi, whining, climbed. The driver was an old hippie with his gray hair worn in a ponytail. I might have known him once, Tennant thought. The hills of the city, impractically steep, made him wonder at the sheer nerve of men who’d chosen to build here: the ruthless dedication of construction. You tried to build something here too, Harry. Some kind of life once. Some kind of love. Devoted to a spirit, a phantom, a love from another dimension. Haunted, and not knowing how haunted he’d been.

  He had a sense of strange physical imbalance, exacerbated by the unreality of San Francisco. It was as if gravity had been briefly suspended. Alison laid a hand on the back of his wrist, a sympathetic gesture. She understands what this place means to me, Tennant thought. She knows what’s going on inside.

  “I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “About how I behaved on the plane, it was stupid of me.…”

  “Forget it.”

  “Look. I care about you. But I don’t know where it can go. I’m flying blind, Harry. And I don’t like the sensation.”

  He wished some of the old utterances still had currency. Go with the flow. Play it as it lays. But these, if once they’d been vibrant and useful, were trite and feeble now. Flying blind. He wondered if a time would come when they’d know exactly what direction they were taking. Look into tomorrow and what do you see, Harry? You and Alison Seagrove living a life of growing love and contentment in some quiet town in the heartland? Unstalked, unthreatened, at peace? Get real. He had the whiff in his nostrils of human flesh on fire: Could you whittle idly on the porch of some clapboard house and listen to a spring wind shake the oaks lining the street and forget something like that? Shove it inside the closet where all the bad memories were stashed?

  “Why the hell couldn’t we have met in some other way at some other time, Harry? Why couldn’t we have been two different people? I get this feeling the gods are not what you’d call charitable when it comes to matters of the heart.”

  “Charitable? They’re a callous crew,” he remarked.

  “I don’t want callous. I want something good. I want to think there’s some justice at the end of it all. I want to think it balances out somehow. But I don’t have a sense of the future when it comes to you and me.” She sounded sad. Her eyes were dull with unhappiness. “You don’t build relationships in the dark. You need to be able to hope for something. Anything. Any small thing you can just hold on to. I don’t know what. Right now I feel this god-awful uncertainty. I don’t know who you are or what the hell we’re really doing together. What can we even hope for, Harry?”

  “You said you care. So do I. I figure that’s a beginning.” And more than I would ever have expected.

  She sighed and sat back. “A beginning to what? Maybe there’s nothing for us at the end of all this anyway. Maybe you and me are coming in through different doorways, Harry.”

  “I don’t want to think that way.”

  “We’re being positive, are we? We’re being optimistic?”

  “We’re trying.” He thought: She doesn’t even sound like herself. It was as if the grit had gone out of her. Let’s have justice and hope. Some of that good stuff. Give us a rainbow. He wasn’t accustomed to the idea of optimism because he’d never needed to think about it one way or another before. You didn’t ponder such things as aspirations when your life was a mindless day-to-day affair and the heaviest matters you entertained had to do with whether your crop would flourish or fail. You had so few needs. Then somebody blows into your world and all kinds of sediments are stirred and suddenly nothing is ever the same. The map you thought flat was abruptly contoured. The landscape you considered featureless was filled with shadow.

  He stared at buildings, swirls of mist, surreal outbursts of sunshine. From nowhere emerged a white-faced mime in top hat and tails pretending he was locked inside a glass box. His flattened palms pushed against imaginary barriers. On his face was an expression of exaggerated terror. Tennant watched him as the taxicab passed.

  Nob Hill now, and Huntington Square, and the Fairmont, and the Mark Hopkins where so long ago he’d had that outrageous altercation with Rayland. Peanuts and booze thrown and his father’s sudden flare of violence. He could still feel the sting of Rayland’s hand on his cheek. In the square, a group of men and women went through the strange slow motions of t’ai chi, balancing one-legged, stretching, reaching for invisible objects. Tennant had an urge to tell the driver to stop, he wanted to get out, didn’t need to go any farther because the city was impenetrable, he’d find nothing of himself here, the exercise was pointless. He restrained himself. There was a rough, dry sensation at the back of his throat.

  When the taxi stopped on the edge of Chinatown, Alison paid the driver, who said, Have a good one. She and Tennant stepped out of the cab on the corner of Grant and California. The mist was unexpectedly cold even as it thinned. Tennant turned up the collar of his coat and shivered.

  Across the way was St. Mary’s Church. Poised on the rim of Chinatown, it had an incongruous look, a redbrick monolith besieged by Oriental forces, an outpost of Catholicism surrounded by Chinese souvenir shops and restaurants and Cantonese signs. The entrance to Chinatown. From somewhere came the sound of a guitar being strummed. A major, a minor, a seventh. Tennant thought of his broken guitar in the house in upstate New York. He couldn’t remember ever having played the damn thing. It belonged in somebody else’s life.

  Opposite St. Mary’s Alison set her overnight bag on the sidewalk and took Obe’s photograph from her purse. “I figure this is the precise spot where the picture was taken. The background’s the same.” She looked over at the church. A cable car sailed past, metal on metal, ferrying giddy tourists in the direction of Fisherman’s Wharf.

  Tennant, beset by an odd awareness that time had been charged with static electricity, gazed at the edifice of the church. An adjoining bookshop had a window filled with ecclesiastical volumes. Along the sidewalk a crazy man did a quick two-step, humming a tune as he went past. He glared at Tennant and Alison as if he considered them trespassers; then he danced on, still humming furiously.

  “I don’t remember,” Tennant said in a flat way. He was disappointed in his failure. He’d somehow foolishly imagined that the past would come back like cavalry charging. “Nothing. Sweet fuck all.”

  “Five kids stood here. Obe took pictures. You saw something on the other side of this street. You pointed. Everyone looked. What did you see, Harry?”

  The church yielded nothing.

  “What did you see?” she asked again.

  He stared hard at St. Mary’s. Something happened over there. Something to do with the church. Long ago. He saw a woman emerge from the bookshop clutching a package. He strained for recollection, for clarity. It doesn’t even need to be clear, does it? A spark would be enough. He turned his face
away. Whatever had happened outside St. Mary’s on a particular day more than twenty years ago was as closed as a miser’s fist.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Alison picked up her bag. “It was worth a try,” she said. “I hoped your memory might be jogged.”

  “Wait. Gimme a minute.” He walked up and down, facing the church from different angles, as if he were himself a photographer assessing a shot—but it was a curious kind of photograph that could only be developed in the darkroom of his mind. Back down the years, Harry. Down anonymous little streets and lanes, past windowless houses, bolted doors, chain link fences. When the past faced you and you still couldn’t remember it, you felt something more than despair—a heightened desperation, a fiery panic, because you were reduced to nothing. He wished he could set himself free, kick over the traces. He longed to be complete, but he would have settled for something less ambitious right then. A simple recollection; it wasn’t much to want.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “Okay. Leave it. We’ll go to the Haight. We’ll take a look at Schrader Street.”

  He agreed, although he felt the need to linger here at the junction of Grant and California, an intersection where a key had been dropped and lost. The scent of Chinese food—ginger and soy and garlic—floated through the remnants of mist, and he was suddenly hungry.

  She tugged at his sleeve. “Harry. Let’s go.”

  He swung his bag from one hand to the other. The church was struck by sunlight briefly and the red brick assumed a warmth of sorts. A priest, defined by this abrupt brightness, came out of the place and turned right, heading down to the heart of Chinatown. Tennant watched him. A priest. Had there been a priest on that far-off day? A religious ceremony of some kind? He wasn’t sure. He might have been trying too hard to convince himself of a memory. Self-delusion.

  “I don’t think we should hang around,” Alison said. “Let’s find a cab.”

  He followed her away from St. Mary’s, glancing back once. But the church had absorbed the past and wasn’t returning it, despite Tennant’s longings.

  They took a cab to the Haight. The mist had withered away now, the day was clear and sharp, a mischievous wind blowing unpredictably. Tennant rolled down the cab window. He heard voices in the wind, faint whispers. This way, Harry. Welcome back.

  The sun was white like a damaged eye.

  The cab crawled through slow traffic toward Haight Street. At the Panhandle, that large rectangle of parkland surrounded by trees, Alison and Tennant got out. For a moment he was reluctant to move. He might have been standing at the entrance to a maze, one of those elaborate labyrinths in which hapless strollers become trapped like flies in a fly bottle. Nearby was Golden Gate Park. What came back to Tennant suddenly was the exhausting humidity of the Conservatory of Flowers, the Japanese Tea Garden, the Oriental stone lions outside the museum, the flocks of pigeons that clustered there day after day in a manner he’d always found quietly malicious.

  Now, as he walked through grass, he was flooded by recollections of Frisbees skimming between the trees, the scent of reefer, dogs running wild, boys and girls in headbands and sandals and beads, naked children decorating themselves with firrgerpaint; he remembered flowers, guitars, the Diggers passing out spaghetti to hungry dopers and sundry derelicts attracted to the Haight by free food. Bright days from long ago. Good vibes, as they once said in that time of bleak innocence. All the ghosts were agitated. He had come here to this parkland on the edge of Haight-Ashbury and disturbed them.

  On the other side of the Panhandle lay the entrance to Schrader, which connected after a few blocks with Haight Street. He paused in his stride. He seemed to see himself across the way, an apparition that was a young Harry Tennant, long-haired, bearded, shuffling in a doped way along the sidewalk, his arm linked through Maggie Silver’s, their heads together in the manner of lovers who have no more than a passing interest in the world outside their hearts. An idyll, a summer of light, and then an eclipse. Strange, terrifying.

  The apparition vanished. There was nobody on the opposite sidewalk except for a man walking a yellow dog. It was Alison who had her arm linked through his, not Maggie Silver.

  “We cross here,” he said, looking into oncoming traffic.

  They took one step off the sidewalk. A long gray limousine pulled alongside, blocking their progress. The back door opened. A man got out.

  Another apparition.

  Tennant said, “Jesus Christ.”

  Rayland Tennant—frail in the pale sunlight—moved toward his son.

  15

  The sun made the old man transparent, the way a flashlight held behind a hand will pierce flesh. Harry, who took a few steps forward from Alison, remembered when his father had been sturdy and healthy, his stride confident, his manner one that suggested the world was his personal fiefdom. The contrast between now and then amazed him. Rayland looked infinitely weary; the whites of his eyes were yellow, his thin lips colorless. Tennant had the sudden urge to hug the old man, to say that what lay in the past between them should be forgotten, grudges finally buried. He understood, as he’d always known on the level where the heart secretly operates, that he still loved this fragile figure, a realization that did nothing to dispel the surprise and tension he felt, and the odd little flicker of fear—which was focused on the understanding that another man sat in the back of the limousine, someone whose face he couldn’t make out. Up front, the driver was concealed by smoked glass.

  “Well, Harry,” Rayland said.

  “This is a hell of a place to meet,” Tennant said. There was strain in his voice, a quality he tried to subdue. Pretend you’re not surprised out of your mind, Harry. Pretend this is common, an everyday thing, meeting your father in the middle of San Francisco. Let’s have coffee or a beer, son. Let’s chew over old times. How’s it been going? What’s new?

  “I suspect any place would be a hell of a place.” Rayland stretched out a hand, touched his son’s arm, then glanced briefly at Alison, who stood quietly some feet back.

  Tennant fought against the urge to move away from Rayland’s hand. This is your father, Harry. This is the man whose blood runs in your veins, no matter what. “Your people must be pretty damn good hounds, Rayland.”

  “I could never stand amateurs.” Rayland looked across the Panhandle. Birds rose out of a tree, startled by the abrupt backfire of a car, which rang like an assassin’s gun.

  Tennant looked at the limousine. The figure in the back was motionless and for that reason alone, sinister. Rayland, who flinched slightly at the backfire, had a faraway expression, that of a man who finds the taste of an old dream lingering. He still wore his wedding ring, a distinguished band of thick gold in which were inscribed his initials and those of his late wife. His hands had silvery hair upon them. The nails, flecked with white, were manicured as they always had been. Rayland had his vanities even now.

  “Since I last saw you, Harry, I’ve entered what you might call, for want of anything better, the age of pathos. Winter of life, as they say.” He smiled at his son, and there was the brightness of affection in the look. “I never dreamed I’d live quite this long. I thought I might see, oh, sixty, sixty-five, but when seventy came I began to consider infirmity a real possibility.”

  Tennant was crowded by too many questions. His head might have been an amphitheater in which a mass of people were clapping their hands discordantly in the dark. “Why are you having me followed?”

  The old man ignored Harry’s question. He said, “We used to be so damned close, you and I. I don’t think I ever knew a father and son as close as we were, Harry. I think of that often. Too often. I get sick to my heart just remembering.”

  “You’re evading me, Rayland.”

  The old man shook his head. “I’m far less interested in explaining the mechanics of how this meeting came about than I am in enjoying a sense of reunion, Harry.”

  “I don’t think I have quite the heart for reunions, Rayland.”
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br />   “Just seeing you again …” Rayland gestured vaguely with his hands, the act of a man who finds himself wandering along the limits of vocabulary. “I can’t tell you how it makes me feel. I can’t begin to tell you.”

  “You’re not listening to me. I said I didn’t have the heart for a reunion.”

  “You still can’t get around it, can you, Harry? After all this time. I’m disappointed. Your outrage is passé.” The old man looked solemn. “Everyone has the right to due process of law. A child molester. A serial killer. The most despicable criminals. I don’t care who. They have the right to the best representation that can be found.”

  “Or bought.”

  “Harry, we’ve traveled this road before. Colonel Harker is past. He’s history. All that was long ago.”

  “Harker’s a monster, for Christ’s sake,” Harry said.

  “I wonder how much effort it costs you to keep your heart this hard. All that energy wasted in something as negative as a grudge. Let it go, Harry. Don’t resent me. I miss you. I miss you more than I can possibly say. This is the time to bury the past.”

  I miss you too, Harry thought. You were always there when I was a kid. But where were you later, Dad? Harry, who looked away from his father’s face, had a childhood memory of a tree house Rayland had once built in the backyard of the family home. Hacking through branch and foliage with saw and machete, Rayland—who had no affinity for manual labor—had sweated and bled to construct this tiny fragile retreat for his only son. There had even been a sign done in bright red paint: HARRY’S PLACE. A sweet little image. Childhood had been a fine time, a great time, despite the premature death of Harry’s mother. Rayland had striven to compensate for her absence, minimizing the extent of the boy’s grief. Father, mother, friend.