Let Me Be Frank With You by Richard Ford Page B

the stairs, trading in and out the single humid bathroom, congregating in what was then the “dining room,” talking over school matters, eating PB&J’s, all of them satellites of one another in empty space, trying, trying, trying to portray a cohesive, prototype, mixed-race family unit, and not succeeding. It would do any of us good to contemplate the house we live in being peopled by imperfect predecessors. Itwould encourage empathy and offer—when there’s nothing left to want in life—perspective.
    Somehow I knew, though, by the orderly, semireluctant way Ms. Pines was advancing to what she meant to tell, that I wasn’t going to like what I was about to hear, but would then have to know forever. My brain right away began sprinting ahead, rehearsing it all to Sally, an agog-shocked look on her face—all before I even knew what it was! I wanted to wind it back to the point, only moments before, at which Ms. Pines looked all around her, as if she’d heard ghostly old Hartwick pounding up the stairs from the basement with bad intentions filling his capacious brain. I could lead her to the front door and down to the snowy street, busted wrist and all; let her go back to where she’d come from—Gulick Road. Lavallette. If in fact she wasn’t a figment —my personal-private phantasm for wrongs I’d committed, never atoned for, and now had to pay off. Am I the only human who occasionally thinks that he’s dreaming? I think it more and more.
    I badly wanted to say something; slow the onward march of words; win some time to think. Though all I said was, “I hope he didn’t do something terrible.” Hope. There , I’d hoped something.
    â€œHe wasn’t a terrible man, Mr. Bascombe,” Ms. Pines said meditatively. “He was exceptional. I have his coloring. And she was a perfectly good person in her own way, as well.Not as good or exceptional as he was. As I said, he was like a wonderful idea, but labored under that delusion. So. When life turned un-wonderful, he didn’t know what to do. That’s my view, anyway.”
    â€œMaybe he didn’t tolerate ambiguity well.”
    â€œHis life was a losing war against ambiguity. He knew that about himself and hated it. The essence of all history is contingency, isn’t it? But it’s true of science, too.”
    â€œSo did they have a terrible fight and everything got ruined? And it all happened in these rooms?” (In other words the way white suburbanites work things out?)
    â€œNo,” Ms. Pines said calmly. “My father killed my mother. And he killed my brother, Ellis. Then he sat down in the living room and waited for me to come home from debate club practice—which we were having through the Christmas holidays. Debating the viability of the UN. He was waiting to kill me, too. But I was late getting home. He must’ve had time to think about what he’d done and how ghastly it all was. Being in this house with two dead loved ones. He took them down to the basement after they were dead. And either he became impatient or extremely despondent. I’ll never know. But at around six he went back down there and shot him self .”
    â€œDid you come home and find them?” Hoping not, not, not. I was full of hope now.
    â€œNo,” Ms. Pines said. “I would never have survived that.I would’ve had to be committed. The neighbor next door heard the two earlier gun reports and almost called the police. But when he heard another report an hour on, he did call them. Someone came to the school for me. I never actually saw any of them. I wasn’t permitted to.”
    â€œWho took care of you? How old were you?”
    â€œAbout to turn seventeen,” Ms. Pines said. “I went to stay with the debate-club sponsor that night. And after that my father’s relatives came into the picture—though not for very long. They didn’t know me or