Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [93]
“Left his room way nicer than he found it. Fact, it’s almost like it was when he took off. I don’t let people in there unless I’m full up and have to. Best apartment in the joint.”
Ariel asked if she could have a peek.
“Vacant right now, I don’t mind,” she was told.
Its walls could not have been whiter, nor the room more simple, spartan. Its warm wooden floor was sanded and varnished like some pauper ballroom’s. For a vagrant, a wanderer, he surely had a refined ascetic sense of what home, if only a plain room, should be. Like some monastic cell, but purer yet. She left, reminded of how she had felt once when she visited Arrowhead, up in Massachusetts, the austere house where Melville had written his great novel. Kip was no novelist, but she could imagine his mind swimming through kindred dark waters. And what shores had Melville beached on if not the most desperate and melancholy, convinced of his failure even as he merely triumphed?
Feeling conflicted—as she knew it was not her place to divulge her parents’ long-held secret to Brice’s mother and sister—she decided to go ahead and put up a few tentative posters in places Bonnie and her husband wouldn’t likely see them. Bowling alley, a couple bars—certainly no churches, and nowhere near the center. Had to do something; even half-measures were better than none.
Missing
William “Kip” Calder
Born Los Alamos 1944, Viet Vet
Any Information Leading
To His Whereabouts Appreciated
Please Contact…
appended with Ariel’s name and the Pear Street number. Up they went, handmade things, foolish and hopeless. Muddy way-outdated photograph and no reward. Notices for stray dogs were more assured of success.
She contacted Social Security but got nowhere: Privacy Act, and besides, she didn’t have his number. Went through every local phone book in the state, looking up Calder in the central library. She even encountered a few, but ran up a telephone bill without result. Hesitant, she finally called the police to inquire if there was any William Calder in their records. Brice could have told her how unhelpful she’d find them. A visit to the morgue was equally in vain.
Illumination came slowly to Ariel, but come it did.
Kip Calder was gone, extinct, vanished, never to return. It had to be so. The conscientious thing for her to do was abandon her search. Pathetic, the forsaken child hunting for the wayward father. One of the oldest, most hackneyed tales in the book. Kip as grail, as end of the rainbow, as Wiles’s solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem. No, no. She would see her grandmother through her crisis, and then would get back to New York and start over. As for the pregnancy, she hated to admit it, but maybe David was right that she wasn’t mother material and an abortion was the only wise choice. All else was leading to nothing but a botch. Damned if Emerson hadn’t nailed it. Self-reliance was our beginning and our end. You had only yourself to work with. Others might show kindness toward you along the path, or meanness. But only your feet walked that path, only yours chose the course at every crossroads. Platitudes, surely. But it seemed to Ariel tonight that these carried the weight of truth. Every cliché was once a revolutionary concept.
From the vantage of a few winding miles up the dry riverbed of Rio Nambé, they could see the big satellite dishes far off in the western distance catching and reflecting sunlight from their safeguarded perches on Mesita del Buey and Frijoles. The three men of three generations sat down to rest on the bank, and Marcos smoked slowly and tossed egg-shaped stones into the current, which ran meager even in the deepest channels, threading its way down to Pojoaque. They’d talked about this and that on their walk, some about good old days, some about bad ones. Turned out Delfino had noticed a newspaper article Kip clipped a few weeks ago, a lengthy