Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [111]
“You’re next,” I promised Grossman. I didn’t know what I was going to do about the tuba.
“All right if we stay here?” whispered Crabtree, through his open window, as I came around the car. I heard the rattle of the little vial of mollies in his hand.
“I’d prefer it,” I said.
I looked in at James, sitting in the backseat beside Crabtree. He had the glassy eyes and gelid smile of someone bearing up under a mild irritation of the bowels. I could see that he was trying very hard not to be afraid.
“You all right with this, James?” I said, with a toss of my head that encompassed the body of Doctor Dee in my arms, the immense and shadowy backseat of my car, the Leer estate, moonlight, disaster.
He nodded. “If you hear a weird sound like an elevator,” he said, “run.”
“What will that be?”
“It’ll be an elevator.”
“I’ll be right back,” I said.
I carried Doctor Dee along the gravel drive, around the back of the house, to James’s room. To free one hand I rested the dog’s body against the door, turned the knob, and stepped inside. Holding Doctor Dee in the crook of one straining arm I yanked back the covers on James’s bed and dropped his dead body onto the mattress. The springs of the mattress rang like a bell. I pulled the covers up over his head and left a black tuft of fur protruding from the top. This is such a stupid thing to do, I thought; but it looked so convincing that I couldn’t keep from smiling.
When I went back into the billiards room to put away the Hudson Bay blanket, I noticed another array of photographs on the wall over the Philco. These were not movie stills, however. They were old family pictures, none more recent than a shot of a five-year-old but unmistakable James Leer, dressed in a red-and-black cowboy getup, gravely brandishing a pair of chrome six-shooters. There was one of an unknown handsome man holding baby James in his arms, with the Duquesne Incline train cars rising and falling on the wintry hillside behind them, and another of James wearing a tiny red bow tie and sitting on the lap of a much younger Amanda Leer. The rest of the pictures were standard studio portraits from prewar Europe and America, brilliantined men, lard-cheeked babies in frilly gowns, sepia-toned women with marcelled curls. I probably wouldn’t have remarked them at all if one were not the exact duplicate of a photograph that was hanging from a wall in my own house, in the long downstairs hallway where Emily had carefully framed and nailed up a history for herself.
It was a photograph of nine serious men, young to middle-aged, dressed in dark suits and posed in stiff chairs behind a glossy velvet banner. The man in the center of the group, small and dapper and looking faintly angry, I knew for Isidore Warshaw, Emily’s grandfather, who’d owned a candy store on the Hill not far from the present location of Carl Franklin’s Hi-Hat. ZION CLUB OF PITTSBURGH, read the appliquéd letters on the banner, in an arc over a large Star of David. There was a second motto sewn on underneath the star, in shiny Hebrew characters. I was so surprised to find this photograph on the wall of someone else’s house that it took me a minute to realize I wasn’t looking at the same photograph. Then I noticed the tall, thin fellow sitting off to one side of the picture, legs crossed at the knee, staring away to his right while all of the other men faced the camera. He’d always been there; I’d noticed him, without ever quite seeing him, a thousand times before. He was thin, dark-haired, and handsome, but his features had an unformed, blurred appearance, as if he’d moved his head at the instant the shutter opened and closed.
I heard a sound, a low, sorrowful half-human moan like the call of a lighthouse in a fog. For a weird instant I thought that I was hearing the sound of my own voice, but then I could feel it resounding deep in the house, rattling all the hidden joists and