The Dead Man’s Insomnia

Conrad

A dead man ought to sleep.

It seems to me the least that could be asked. You go into the ground in a good suit, with your name on a black stone and a wreath of white lilies at the foot, and the world agrees to stop expecting things of you. No more lunches. No more galas. No more being introduced to people who are going to be so very useful. I attended my own funeral in a hat. It rained. My mother wore gray and wept exactly once, at the lowering of the casket, in a manner that the Times later called dignified.

And then I went home and lay down on a bed in the east wing of my father's house, and stared at the ceiling until the sun came up.

That was the fourteenth of October. It is now the twenty-second of December. I have slept, by my own reckoning, for thirty-one hours in sixty-nine nights. I know because I count them. It's the only habit I have kept from her.

I am lying on top of the quilt in my clothes, in a room the size of a tennis court, in the dark. Somewhere beneath me a grandfather clock in the hall strikes four. I listen to it, as I listen to everything, with the whole of my body.

It's the best clock in Dutchess County. It was made in Philadelphia in 1791 for the first Marrow to make a serious fortune, and it is as correct today as it was then. I hate it. It has been telling me what time it is, in one way or another, since I was a boy.

…

Marrow Hall is a stone house on a hill. That is all one needs to know.

It has forty rooms, a ballroom, a library of eleven thousand volumes bought by the yard, a chapel nobody uses, and a staff of nineteen, none of whom has ever been asked what they think. It was built in the 1790s by a man who sold flour to both sides of a war and wished to be remembered as a patriot. The portraits of his descendants line the main stair, going up, in oils: senators and judges and one admiral, each with the same square jaw, each with the same look of having been told, at the age of five, that the sun came up for them as a courtesy.

I have the east wing now. It was my father's idea. "A man in your position," he said, "cannot be seen." He said it as he said everything: loudly, across a dining table, with a fork in his fist. Augustin Marrow has never in his life entered a room without announcing it. He is seventy-one years old, a state senator for thirty-four of them, a man with a mane of white hair and a face like a ruined cathedral, and when he is displeased, which is always, the windows hum.

The staff have been told that I am a distant cousin from the Foundation. Mr. Pryce. Quiet, delicate, recovering from an illness. Only Pruett, the butler, who has served the family for forty years, knows who I am; he brought me my breakfast on the first morning, and set the tray on the table, and said, without looking up, "Welcome home, Master Conrad," in a voice with no more feeling in it than a clock.

I could have wept. I could have kissed his hand.

I asked him to leave.

I do not like to be pitied. I never have. It is a Marrow vice.

…

At a quarter past four I give up.

I get out of bed and put on my coat. The camel one, the cashmere scarf. I have a pair of boots by the door, and I take the back stair, down through the servants' passage, past the still-room and the cold larder and the green baize door that leads to the garden. The latch is stiff. Someone has salted the step.

Outside the world is silent. Snow lies over everything to the depth of a hand, white and blue, with a crust that shines under a quarter moon. The sky is clear and enormously high, the stars hard as nailheads. Cold takes my face in both hands.

I walk.

I go down the long lawn, past the dead fountain, through the yew walk where the hedges have been trimmed into the shape of a clock, past the ice-glazed pond, to a small iron gate in the garden wall. It is a gate that few people know. The first Marrow had it made, so that he might reach the churchyard without going by the road.

St. Aldric's lies on the other side. A square stone church with a stunted tower, and around it, in the snow, rows of old stone, tilting like bad teeth.

I find my stone without a torch.

It is black granite, polished, tall as my chest, and the moon shows me the gold letters as clearly as day.

CONRAD AUGUSTIN MARROW. BELOVED SON.

The dates. The flowers: someone has been laying fresh ones, white lilies, brought in from a florist in New York at four hundred dollars a bunch. My mother. She comes on Sundays. She stands where I'm standing and says a decade of the rosary, though she has not been a believer in forty years, and then she goes home and has lunch.

I stand there for some time with my hands in my pockets.

I take out a cigar. A Cuban, a Cohiba, which I have not been allowed to smoke indoors since the first of November. I bite off the end and spit it in the snow. The Zippo is in my right pocket. A new one, brass, plain. The old one went into the fire with the house.

Snap.

The flame leaps up, small and gold. I hold it to the cigar and draw until the tobacco crackles, and I let out a long breath of smoke.

It hangs in front of the stone, white, and rises.

"Well, Dennis," I say.

He lies below me. Or rather, his ashes do, in a bronze urn, in a hole that my brother paid a mason to dig. I've thought of him a great many times, there in the dark, in my name. It seems to me the single honest thing I've done, to allow a man his own grave, even if it's mine.

"I came to tell you something."

The wind stirs the yews.

"You were right." I laugh. It comes out strangely. "I said it, you know. I said it was the only thing numbers ever did. I stood in that kitchen with my hand on the lighter, and I thought: they lie, Dennis, they lie all the time, it's only that they don't know it. And you looked at me. You had that look. And I thought, you old fool, you're sorry for me."

I pull on the cigar.

"I'd give a great deal to be sorry for you."

…

I want to be precise about this, since I am not a man who is precise about much.

I did not mean it.

I know that nobody believes this. I've told it to myself so many times that it has the dry smooth feel of a coin worn by handling. But it is true, in the sense in which things are true that are said at four in the morning to a headstone. I did not go to Lake Verrin to kill a man. I went to get a binder.

It was the binder or my father. That was the arithmetic. I understood arithmetic only that autumn, and I was thirty-eight years old.

There was a day in September when my wife came home from work and did not speak. She went into the kitchen and put the kettle on and stood there with her back to me, and I knew. I have always known when she was about to take something away. She put down the kettle and said, in the quiet voice she uses for a very large number: "Conrad. I've got to show you something."

I won't repeat what she showed me. I've been over it since. Four hundred and twelve million dollars, drawn from a fund that was meant to feed the families of drowned men, run through a series of companies so elegantly that I had admired the design before I knew whose it was. It was Father's. It was Warren's. It was Mother's, in the sense that nothing was ever done in that house without her consent. And it was mine. I had signed the papers. I was the Executive Director of the Foundation. I had put my name where I was told, in the manner of a man signing for a parcel. (There had been a girl in the accounts department, once, who found a corner of it. I saw to that with a telephone call and a kindly word. I do not think about her. It is a rule.)

She stood in the kitchen, with her small fierce face, and said: "I have to take it to the state."

I said: "Els. You can't."

She said: "I'll make them treat you as a witness. I'll say you didn't know."

And I said: "But I did."

I will remember her face as long as I live. It didn't harden. That is the thing that nobody understands. It opened. Like a window. For one second there was nothing in it but a dreadful, sorrowing, almost tender surprise, as if I'd shown her a scar she hadn't known about.

"Oh, Conrad," she said.

Oh, Conrad.

It's what you say to a child who has broken something he cannot mend.

I have not slept since.

…

"You do go on, brother."

I do not start. I have been expecting him for some minutes; I heard the iron gate.

Warren is standing in the snow ten feet behind me, in a long black overcoat, with the collar turned up and his hands in his pockets. His breath smokes. He has the Marrow face under a gray wool cap, heavy and square and sleepless, and in the moonlight his eyes are black.

"Hello, Warren."

"Pruett told me. He said you'd gone out." He steps forward, into the glow of my cigar. "It's four in the morning."

"It's the best time. Nobody sees."

"Mother does."

"Mother sees everything. She doesn't mind it."

"Mother would mind it," says Warren evenly, "if you were found weeping on a grave in the middle of a cold snap."

I draw on the cigar.

He is my elder brother by four years. He has been telling me what to do for thirty-eight of them. I suppose that I have always loved him, in the way one loves a wall that has held up a house. I don't know that I have ever liked him.

Warren was born a Marrow in the sense that other men are born with two arms. It did not occur to him to be anything else. He went to Princeton and then to Yale Law, and he came out of both as a smooth gray tool, with an Eldredge knot and a way of lowering his voice at the exact moment a judge wanted to hear it. He is very good. He is the best fixer I have ever seen. He has taken every disaster Father ever created, every drunken senator and murdered mistress and doctored report, and turned it, within a week, into a minor misunderstanding.

And he has never once, in his life, asked what any of it was for.

"Come back to the house," says Warren. "We have breakfast at seven."

"I'm not hungry."

"We are going to discuss January."

I look at him.

He does not look away. He has the same black, steady, expressionless gaze that he has used all my life on witnesses, on judges, on me. And behind it, I see something that I have seen only a few times in forty years: a flicker of unease.

It's gone at once. He turns and strides back toward the gate. I drop the cigar in the snow, and it hisses, and I follow him.

…

Breakfast at Marrow Hall is taken in the morning room, a long yellow chamber with French windows, at an oval table set for four. There are silver covers. There is a toast rack and a pot of Earl Grey and a bowl of hothouse strawberries, brought from Hudson at some expense. At the head, in his wheelchair, with a napkin tucked in his collar, my father is shouting.

"...a disgrace! An absolute disgrace! Eight months! Eight months, and not one of you can tell me what the damned auditors are asking!"

"They aren't asking anything, Augustin," says my mother.

"They will!"

He bangs a fist on the arm of the wheelchair. The cups jump. He is a heavy, ruined, magnificent old man with a face the color of boiled beef, and he has not been told "no" in sixty years. Three weeks ago the doctors said that his blood pressure was dangerously high. He said that doctors were employees. He has since doubled his salt.

Cordelia, at the foot of the table, pours tea.

She is small and straight in dove-gray wool, with a rope of old pearls and a face that has not changed in twenty years. I have always thought that she looked like a very beautiful bird of prey that had learned good manners. She is sixty-eight. She has never once raised her voice at a meal. She sets a cup in front of me and says, "Conrad, darling, you look tired."

"I'm fine, Mother."

"Sit."

I sit.

"The doctor reports that you are making progress," says Cordelia. She stirs her tea. The spoon does not touch the cup. "He says you slept for forty minutes on Tuesday. I was pleased."

"I slept for three hours on Saturday."

"Did you?" The pale eyes lift. "How remarkable. What do you suppose was different?"

I hesitate.

I think of a brass voice in the dark. Of a tune with three notes rising, and two falling, and a long soft fall at the third bar. I had thought it a dream.

"I don't know," I say.

"Hm." She sips. "Warren."

"Mother." Warren, on my left, unfolds his napkin. He has his legal pad beside his plate, as he does at every meal, and a pen. "The hearing. Judge Hale has confirmed the third of January, in chambers. I have the petition drafted. Doctor Kestrel will give evidence on the diagnosis. The court-appointed evaluator is a Dr. Whitcombe, from the county, who has been very reasonable."

"Reasonable."

"He is a man with a daughter at Vassar."

"I see."

"I expect an order of indefinite commitment by noon." He makes a note. "She'll be transferred to the secure unit on the fourth. And then..."

He stops. He glances at me.

"And then?" says my father, loudly.

"And then it will be a quiet matter," says Warren. "Between the family and the institution."

Silence.

Cordelia places her cup in its saucer. It makes no sound.

"I think," she says, "that Warren is worried about the doctor."

"I am."

"Why?"

"Because he's sentimental." Warren's voice is flat. "He has been for some weeks. Hollis says he fired him over a key. Sorrell has been seen in the pantry at night. And the cameras in the Lantern Wing have been out since the storm. I don't like it. I want my own man in the room on the fourth."

"Your own man."

"I'll send Hollis. And one other."

My mother looks at her plate.

"Mother," I say.

It is not a voice I have used at this table in many years. It's smaller than I mean. It cracks in the middle. "Is it necessary?"

"Is what necessary, dear?"

"Hollis. And the other."

"We are speaking of a patient in a secure unit," says my mother gently. "Who is dangerous. Who killed you."

"She didn't."

The words are out before I know it.

There is a pause. My father has stopped shouting. He is staring at me, his mouth half open, with a bit of egg on his chin. Warren's pen lies motionless on the pad. My mother's face hasn't altered by so much as a line.

"I mean," I say, "that she... that it was an accident. The whole thing. That she isn't..."

"Conrad."

"I only mean..."

"You're tired," says Cordelia. "You've been under a great strain. Perhaps you should go and lie down."

I look at her.

I think: a Marrow never begs. I think it in my father's voice, in the voice of the man who is looking at me across the table with his napkin in his collar and his terrible red face. I think of a diner on Second Avenue. Of a hand on a Formica table, with a finger tapping.

I put my napkin on the table.

"Yes, Mother," I say.

…

I do not sleep.

I lie on the bed in the east wing, in the pale light of a winter morning, with my arms at my sides. I count the plaster roses on the ceiling. There are forty-eight. I count the panes in the window. Thirty-six. I count the seconds between the strokes of the hall clock, and the seconds between my heartbeats, and the seconds since I last said her name.

Els.

I try it in my head. It is a dreadful little word. A hiss and a click. She hated it when others used it. She allowed it to Dennis, and to me.

Somewhere, deep in the house, a door closes.

I turn on my side and put my knees up. It's the position in which she used to hold me. Her arms round my chest, her face in the back of my neck. I can feel the warmth of it, as if she were lying behind me now. I can feel her breath. I can feel the little lift of her ribs as she began, very quietly, to hum.

Little lantern.

I don't know when I began to hum it too.

I'm doing it now. Under my breath, into the pillow. Three notes up. Two down. The long, soft fall of the third bar, the place where she always put her hand on my hair.

I have never been able to get beyond the second line. For two months I have tried. In the shower, in the car, in the Orchard with my eyes shut. It breaks off. It slides away from me like a fish.

Now I take it up the stair of the second verse, easily, without thought. I go on. The fourth line, the question. Who will light the way I know? I finish it.

I lie there, stunned, with my mouth open.

I have it. All of it. As if she had put it into my hands.

And I understand, with an awful clarity, that I did not dream it. That on Saturday night, in the Orchard, with my eyes closed, something sang to me through the walls. I do not know if it was a recording, or a ghost, or a trick of the doctor's. I do not know what it is. I know only that it came from nowhere, in a voice I would have known in the dark of a hundred years, and that when I woke I had been, for the first time in two months, at peace.

I put my knuckles against my teeth.

A Marrow never begs.

But I think, lying there in the gray light, with a stranger's face and a dead man's name, and the clock in the hall counting out the minutes of a life that nobody asked me to keep, that I would. That I would get down on my knees on the Orchard's cold glass floor, in front of the doctor, in front of God, and beg, if there were anyone left to beg to.

I turn my face into the pillow.

I sleep.

For six hours, I sleep like a child.