The Circuitous Return of Naufpeque

 

An overture of Bach played on the Philco radio, but it did little for the internal mush of Graby’s youngest daughter, Jolene. Her internal mush had been in a state of upend ever since her father had shot Jolene’s eldest sister Marge, seemingly in a disagreement over who was to inherit the 1936 Alfa Romeo ragtop convertible (the injuries, fortunately, were minor, but Marge remained in the hospital). And so, dear reader, though listening to the Philco was Jolene’s absolute favorite thing to do on a Sunday evening, and though there was nothing she liked to hear on it more than a Bach overture, she remained rather dour. 

The 1936 ragtop was built in the town of Cheblon, in the southeastern Italian province of Pulia, just before the war. Graby had had it shipped across the Atlantic in the late 60s, and used it, almost exclusively, for joy rides along coastal highways in the summer. It reminded him, he said, of his childhood vacations to Greece.

Jolene didn’t give a hoot who inherited the car. She hated cars, in fact. “What could be more stupid than the personal automobile? What single invention can be more proportionally credited with destroying this world?” She said this over the phone to her sister, Marge, who was, if you’d forgotten, in the hospital. 

While Jolene did not care for cars, she did care that her father had shot her sister. That part of it reeked to high heaven, and she couldn’t get the smell of it away. 

“I can’t get the smell of it away,” she said to Marge, over the phone.

“Don’t worry about it.” Marge’s words were breathy. Jolene imagined bandages obfuscating her breathing. 

“I’m worried about it,” she said, “I think it’s a reasonable thing to be worried about.”

Jolene, while talking on the phone, was frying duck eggs in a skillet. The radio program had moved on from Bach to Debussy, of whom she was not a fan. Bach made the rules, Debussy broke them. Bach invented the genre, Debussy soiled it. She groaned into the phone. “Why meddle with a good thing?” 

“Hang on,” she said, setting down both the receiver and the metal spatula, and crossing the kitchen towards the radio. But she got distracted halfway by the family portrait hanging on the wall. It contained not only Graby, Marge, and herself—with whom, dear reader, you’ve already become acquainted—but also the seven other living Nikochevs: Marco, Roberto, Madeline, Maximus, Jean Jaques, Marques, and Naufpeque. Her eyes fell quickly—heavily even—on the last. Tall and gaunt, Naufpeque wore a fisherman’s cap and a pair of overalls that somehow made him all the thinner. What might he think of this most recent reeking episode? 

Unfortunately the only way to reach him was by the Canadian Royal Post, and the Canadian Royal Post only delivered to the god-forsaken, far-northern parts of Newfoundland on a bimonthly basis throughout the winter, which, as the wind and white flakes beating against her Bostonian kitchen windows could attest, was the current season.

“Fuck,” she shouted, for the eggs had begun burning in the pan, and the only thing (the only thing in the world) Jolene hated more than the personal automobile was removing burnt eggs once they congealed to the pan. To make matters worse, a new Debussy number was on, “Clare de Lune.” 

“I love music passionately,” Achille Claude Debussy was purported to have said, “And because I love it, I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it.” Jolene remembered these words from her years in conservatory, how they sat wrong in her gut. If you love a thing, you do not free it, you do not change it. You hold it close and dear. 

Jolene marched over to the Philco and ripped the plug from the wall before her favorite Sunday program could be forever ruined. The receiver lay upturned on the counter, her hospitalized sister, presumably, still on the other end. 

࢈

Graby looked at the ceiling.

“Why do you have a gun?” Jolene demanded of him, over the phone.

“Every gentleman has a gun,” Graby replied, “To protect his family. And to hunt, if he feels so moved.”

“Would you consider shooting your daughter protecting your family?” Jolene asked. “Or is that more so the hunting?”

Graby did not reply. He’d been absently wrapping the cord of the telephone round and round his forearm, and now its off-white curlicues bound him like a cast. The gun, his gun, lay on the ground beside the bed on which he sat, in the precise location he’d thrown it after its discharge two days prior. He could not look at it. Each time the wood, the metal, the lock, the stock, the barrel—any of it—so much as entered his peripheral vision, his gastrointestinal fluids began to gurgle, verging towards a roil, a sensation he remembered only ever feeling once before, in the winter of 1984. The sight of the gun so disturbed him, in fact, that he’d taken to sleeping on the couch in the parlor, washing in the guest bathroom, avoiding the general premises of his bedroom for all but phone calls (the only other phone in the house, parked in his study, hadn’t worked properly in years). 

The only silver lining to the whole god-awful mess was that he might—if he used incredible tact and was able to quiet the throbbing of his conscience—be able  to bring Naufpeque home. His son had not returned to Boston since the aforementioned winter of 1984 (which involved, among other more minor calamities, the premature death of Priscilla, his beloved wife and the mother of all nine of his children) had driven him to a luddite existence in the hinterlands of Northern Canada. He had not even come home for Jean Jaques’ wedding. 

It was Jean Jaques’ idea, actually—to leverage the situation. Like all the siblings, he called after hearing of Marge’s hospitalization. One after another, like clockwork, they rung him up—his children. They yelled at him. They cursed him up, down, and sideways. They threatened to have him institutionalized. Not one, he noticed, asked him for his side of the story.

J.J. did not ask either. But he did at least offer something. 

“I don’t know what the hell happened,” he said, “and, to be honest with you, I don’t want to. But if you could just be a good sport about this whole thing, if you could just maybe hold your tongue in the right moments, maybe make it out to be bad enough—not too bad mind you—but just bad enough. Maybe, if you play the cards just right, you could bring Naufy home.”

This is why Graby did not reply to Jolene on the phone, but let the silence ring out between them, the phone’s cord cutting into his arm, the gun splayed on the ground just out of view: it was his attempt at “being a good sport.”

࢈

Marge put the hospital phone back in its cradle, her third attempt of the evening to reach her little sister, Jolene, unsuccessful. This worried her, for when Priscilla died, Jolene took up the mantle of maternal duty with gusto. She responded with lightning speed to the slightest discordant or tremorous breath of anyone in the large family, as if she somehow knew, before they did, that something foul was afoot. For her not to be at Marge’s beck and call (and she had called thrice!) spoke of potential doom and disaster.

With a growing sense of unease, of potential abandonment by the world (first her father, now her sister, who next?) Marge pressed the nurse call button hanging from the side of her bed. 

A man nurse, incredibly handsome, entered the room. Marge instantly forgot what it was she had been wanting—why she kept calling her sister, why she’d called for the nurse—and instead launched into the internal rearrangement of self she invariably practiced in the face of masculine beauty, the careful stacking of the Jenga blocks within to form a tower of apparent solidity, driven by the ever more desperate hope that she may, before forty, be rightly wed. 

“How can I help you, Miss Nikochev?” the nurse asked.

Yes, yes!—this was her moment. The machines inside her went whir. Her posture lifted, her vocal chords softened, her quirks and eccentricities, unsavory bits of familial history—all temporarily smoothed over or suppressed, a blurry glaze painted over everything not prim and supple.

But even as she undertook this ritual, she felt in herself a resistance. For could she really build a life with a man who was a nurse? No matter how handsome? Could she tell her friends at the Charles River Country Club? Could she put it down in ink—on forms at the bank, the doctor’s office, the annual insurance application—that this was the profession of her husband? And besides (and here she was struck by a pang of utter doom) wasn’t any man who had chosen nursing for his profession of the “bent wrist” variety? That is to say: gay, queer, reeking of fruit— a homosexual? And therefore not possibly interested in her, unless, of course, as a “beard”? A co-conspirator, to help hide this part of himself from the cruelty of the world (the year was 1997). What kind of life would that be? A sexless delusion?

Then, all in the flash of this same moment, Marge caught a glance of her reflection in the darkened hospital window and felt an even deeper sinking of her spirit, a sobering to the reality that was. For she was wrapped endlessly around the face with bandages, and therefore it did not matter if she could overlook this man’s professional choices. His sexuality was irrelevant. There was no point in stacking her internal Jenga blocks to perfection to impress upon him her genteel nature and to be awarded in the currency of a marital bliss. She was, on account of her father, ugly and pathetic, and that, to her mind, precluded all. 

࢈

Naufpeque lay under seven and a half blankets (he felt he could not credit the eighth as a complete and entire blanket, so thin was it, so threadbare, but he used it each and every night on sentimental grounds, as it was a gift from his late mother, Priscilla). The blankets went up over his nose, and a wool skullcap was pulled down over his brow, so only a thin sliver of the man, the section containing his small, close-set eyes, was visible. 

This was what the old timers called “Deep Winter”— two months that offered only a single daily hour of sunlight and temperatures that kept one in bed except to tend the fire, relieve oneself, and eat borscht, perhaps. In Deep Winter one didn’t expect to spend much time conscious, much less have their real-life, non-dream door pounded on loudly, clearly, and with passion. 

“Winter be damned. The Canadian Royal Post be damned. I am here!” Jolene shouted, accompanying the pounding.

Though he could recognize the voice anywhere as that of his youngest sister, Jolene, Naufpeque did not reply. He did not even move. Or, more accurately, he could not reply or move. For Deep Winter, dear reader, places one in a vegetative, semi-coma-like state. It takes minutes, if not hours, to unfurl oneself from bed. It takes pep talks and toe wriggilings and deep chanting, if not shouting. The surprise arrival of one’s youngest sibling in a state of passion can speed up this process, but only by degrees.

Naufpeque began, at once, an attempt at wriggling his toes and a pep talk that went something like this: “Oh boy, Naufy. Christ in a manger, Naufy. It must really be bad if she came clear up here. And in winter no less!” Yes, that was the essence of his pep talk, but it came through less in sensical language (as nothing can be truly sensical when one is emerging from such a hibernation) and more as electromagnetic impulses that swept through the cold of his tendons, undulating through the sinewy bits of his connective tissue.

“Naufy!” Again the voice and the pounding came at him through the door. He tried to say something, to respond, even if only to grunt meekly, but alas, more time was needed.

“Please be home, Naufy.” The tenor of her voice seemed to be changing now, perhaps faltering. “Please wake up. I’ve come all this way.” Yes, there was certainly a waver to it. “Please,” it said. “Please.” And then once more, with utter brokenness, “Please!” 

And Naufpeque was transported. It’s as simple as that. He was transported. He was in a bed, but not the one he had just been in. Yes, that’s right, he was peacefully asleep in his big bed in the Beacon Hill house. And what was it, noon? Half past? Somewhere in there. A Saturday. No reason to wake up. No school, no church, no basketball practice, not even a plan with the friends. No, nothing—nien, zilch—to demand he leave his bedroom chambers. Just hours stretching on and on in which to sleep, in which to let the five thousand calories he’d consumed the day prior—in the form of sliced fruit, french fries, greek yogurt, double-stacked cheeseburgers, candied oranges, and even, secretly and with some degree of shame, liver on toast— do the work, in the time-honored tradition of late male adolescence, of growing him ever skyward. So why—dear God, why?!—was his little sister pounding on the door without relent? Her voice so strained? Saying something about “mother, mother, mother”? 

࢈

They had only just sat down to coffee in the parlor, when Marge asked her father, “Who’s to get the car, Daddy?” She tried to present the question as a kind of random and spontaneous curiosity, something that just popped into her mind from the blue, that had nothing whatever to do with the fact that her father had, on Monday, had his annual appointment with the family lawyer, Peter Gulfenstein, during which, among other turbid formalities, he made enhancements and amendments to his will. 

“The car?” Graby asked. “Which car?” Though there was only one.

“The Romeo, Daddy. The 1936 ragtop Alfa Romeo.” Her lip nearly quivered with expectation.

“Ah yes, of course. The Romeo.” He stirred the spoon in his coffee, with which, just moments before, he’d moved two heaping scoops of sugar from the bowl. “I’d like it to go to Jolene, I think.”

“To Jolene?” She tried, unsuccessfully, to keep her voice from breaking to a high squeak.

“Yes, dear. Jolene.” He smiled, provocatively. 

Marge looked at him slack-jawed, the color draining from her face, as if she had seen not one ghost, but many, and all at once. In silence, she folded her napkin in thirds, laid it down on her place setting, and walked towards the bathroom.

“Wait,” Graby called after her. “Marge!” But she was already shutting the door. 

Graby frowned at the closed door. This is not how he imagined the exchange going. It was supposed to be light, fun, teasing. Something more like Marge saying,“But Jolene hates cars, Daddy!” And him saying, “Ah yes, but that’s exactly the point,” and then going on to explain the whole clever plan, to get her in on it, to pull a little familial stunt with his favorite daughter. But his favorite daughter, goddamnit, was too fragile for fun. He pushed out his chair and climbed the stairs to the upper floor. 

Graby kept the .22 where he kept most of his sentimental and valuable belongings since the passing of Priscilla, under his bed, in a state of total disarray. He gave the cleaners strict orders to leave the area alone. He could not bear the thought of anyone else’s hands plunging into the sacred clutter. 

After some moments of rifling around, he found the gun. It had belonged to the late Count Norvelde of the Isle of Orkey. And while Norveld’s legacy meant little to most humans in most places, his surviving effects were nearly priceless amongst a certain class of British antique collectors. 

He looked down the sights of the .22, aiming, for no particular reason, through the open bedroom door. He could not remember the last time he’d fired a rifle. Could he still remember how it all worked? No matter. It was not its firing capabilities he was interested in. 

Monday, during his annual meeting with Mr. Gulfenstein, Graby had modified his will such that the rifle, which he’d been planning to donate to the National British Museum, be redirected to his daughter Marge. The truth was, Marge needed money. Nearing forty, she proved thus far incapable of holding down either a job or a romantic partner for more than a few months at a time. In Graby’s paternal estimation, at least one of these material phenomena was essential for the health and happiness of all of his children if they weren’t skilled (or lucky) enough to maintain both. 

“Very well,” said Gulfenstein, looking down at his computer screen, the cigar in his mouth filling the room with acrid smoke. “And even with this adjustment, Marge is still to get the car, am I right? I’ll note that none of the other children are getting much from you.”

“Of course Margret gets the car,” Graby said, waving his hand. “The rest will be fine. More than fine. Besides that car is a heap of junk. You’ve seen it, Peter. It runs one day, then not the next. It’s practically worthless.”

“Worthless?” Gulfenstein looked over his reading glasses at him.

“I mean you could get a couple thousand for it, maybe.”

Gulfenstein harumphed. “I’ve been an estate lawyer for a long time, Graby,” he said, “I can tell you this inheritance business is about a lot more than money.”

True enough, thought Graby, true enough. And of course this was why he planned to give that lemon of an automobile to Marge: she’d loved it practically from the time she’d left Priscilla’s womb, begging him to take her on car-seated Sunday drives as soon as she was developmentally capable of making such requests. It was of immeasurable sentimental value. Duh. Like the little blanket Priscilla gave Naufpeque when he was four years old, that he carted around with him everywhere. Sentiment, sentiment, sentiment.

And at this notion, Graby felt a perverse and mischievous part of himself—always present but often dormant—stir, sit up, dust itself off, and invite itself right up to the table, into the cigar smoke. For if inheritance was not merely the act of passing cash from one generation to the next, if it could fulfill the seemingly unrelated function of conferring sentiment, what else might it be able to do? Perhaps he’d been thinking about the whole institution in far too limited terms, taking it all too seriously. Perhaps it could . . . Perhaps. . .

“You know what?” he said, smiling. “You’re right. Let’s spread the love.”

“Spread the love?”

“Yes.”

“What do you mean, exactly?” asked the lawyer.

“You say the other children aren’t getting much from me. I say, okay then, let’s spread the love. Give the car to Jolene.”

“To Jolene?”

“Yes. That’s what I said. Your hearing is in check. Give the car to Jolene.”

Gulfenstein was still peering over his glasses at him. “I thought Jolene hated cars,” he said. (And indeed, dear reader, Jolene’s hatred of cars was strong enough—that is to say, vocalized frequently enough, publicly enough, and in unambiguous enough terms—that even peripheral connections, such as the family lawyer, were well aware of it.).

“Oh she does!” Graby replied, his smile widening, “More than anything.”

Gulfenstein looked at him still, unblinking. “I don’t get it.”

“Do you have to?”

The lawyer shrugged, turned back to the computer, and made the necessary clicks and clacks.

Graby could imagine Jolene at the reading of the will, the horror on her face when she learned of her newest acquisition, the slow shaking of her head, in that way she reserved for her father’s shenanigans, a gesture that, perversely, so endeared him. It would be one last poke in the ribs, good for a hearty post-mortem chuckle. Yes—how he would giggle and dance in his grave. 

Jolene would give Marge the car, of course! She wouldn’t want to keep the bloody thing. She would move it to its rightful home without delay.

But oh Marge. His sweet darling Marge, sulking off to the bathroom before he could even get a breath out about the whole shabang. Such a delicate constitution on that one, so thick-skulled and self-absorbed, so very much like himself, and so (suddenly, shocking, disorientingly) directly in the crosshairs of Count Norvelde’s multi-million dollar firearm.

࢈

Naufpeque had not been in an airport in some time—since 1984, in fact—and things were not the same.

“The planes are all white,” he said to Jolene as they sat in a row of black leather chairs at their gate. “I remember them being silver.”

“A lot changes in thirteen years, Naufy,” Jolene said plainly, without malice, as a matter of fact. And yet the words sent a searing pang of guilt through him. 

Fathers abandon their families all the time—with such frequency, in fact, that there is a kind of collective cultural resignation to, if not outright acceptance of, this trend. Deadbeat dad, absent father —we all know the trope. But eldest brothers, as a class of people, do not abandon. They stick around, clean up the messes, hold families together, become “the man.” They work two jobs if necessary, check up on everyone, tend to the younger siblings, the nieces and nephews, sweep their own suffering under a rug made of wizened responsibility. 

But in this mixed up family, dear reader, after the events of the winter of 1984, Naufpeque, who was not only the eldest brother but also, by all accounts, the most capable and level-headed member of the entire family, hightailed it for the hinterlands, leaving, by default, his nutjob father and seven siblings of varying health and mental-fortitude in the care of the next most capable and level-headed Nikochev, his baby sister, Jolene. In 1984, she was nine years old. 

Jolene, Naufpeque realized belatedly, was squeezing his hand on the arm rest between their chairs. He felt he did not deserve this. He felt he was the least of the people in the world who deserved this. But, simultaneously, it felt so utterly wonderful that he had to turn quickly to look out the window and hide from her the water gathering in his eyes. And then, on second thought, he turned back towards her, so she could see it.