The Quiet Game

“Mom, what’s wrong? On the phone—”

“Shh. We’ll talk later.” She blinks back tears, then pushes me into the house and takes Annie from Dad’s arms. “Here’s my angel! Let’s get some supper. And no yucky broccoli!”

Annie squeals with excitement.

“There’s somebody waiting to see you, Penn,” Mom says.

I pull the suitcases inside. A wide doorway in the foyer leads to the dining room, and I stop dead when I see who is there. Standing beside the long table is a black woman as tall as I and fifty years older. Her mouth is set in a tight smile, and her eyes twinkle with joy.

“Ruby!” I cry, setting the bags on the floor and walking toward her. “What in the world …?”

“Today’s her day off,” Mom explains from behind me. “I called to check on her, and when she heard you were coming, she demanded that Tom come get her so she could see you.”

“And that grandbaby,” Ruby says, pointing at Annie in Peggy’s arms.

I hug the old woman gently. It’s like hugging a bundle of sticks. Ruby Flowers came to work for us in 1963 and, except for one life-threatening illness, never missed a single workday until arthritis forced her to slow down thirty years later. Even then she begged my father to give her steroid injections to allow her to keep doing her “heavy work”—the ironing and scrubbing—but he refused. Instead he kept her on at full pay but limited her to sorting socks, washing the odd load of clothes, and watching the soaps on television.

“I’m sorry about your wife,” Ruby says, “’Cept for losing a child, that the hardest thing.”

I give her an extra squeeze.

“Now, let me see that baby. Come here, child!”

I wonder if Annie will remember Ruby, or be frightened by the old woman even if she does. I should have known better. Ruby Flowers radiates nothing to frighten a small child. She is like a benevolent witch from an African folk tale, and Annie goes to her without the slightest hesitation.

“I cooked your daddy his favorite dinner,” Ruby says, hugging Annie tight. “And after tonight, it’s gonna be your favorite too!”

At the center of the table sits a plate heaped with chicken shallow-fried to a peppered gold. I’ve watched Ruby make that chicken a thousand times and never once use more than salt, pepper, flour, and Crisco. With those four ingredients she creates a flavor and texture that Harland Sanders couldn’t touch with his best pressure cooker. I snatch up a wing and take a bite of white meat. Crispy outside and moist within, it bursts in my mouth with intoxicating familiarity.

“Go slap your daddy’s hand!” Ruby cries, and Annie quickly obeys. “Ya’ll sit down and eat proper. I’ll get the iced tea.”

“I’ll get the tea,” Mom says, heading for the kitchen before Ruby can start. “Make your plate, Ruby. Tonight you’re a guest.”

Our family says grace only at Thanksgiving and Christmas, and then almost as a formality. But with Ruby present, no one dares reach for a fork.

“Would you like to return thanks, Ruby?” Dad asks.

The old woman shakes her head, her eyes shining with mischief. “I wish you’d do it, Dr. Cage. You give a fine blessing.”

Thirty-eight years of practicing medicine has stripped my father of the stern religious carapace grafted onto him in the Baptist churches of his youth. But when pressed, he can deliver a blessing that vies with the longest-winded of deacons for flowery language and detail. He seems about to deliver one of these, with tongue-in-cheek overtones added for my benefit, but my mother halts him with a touch of her hand. She bows her head, and everyone at the table follows suit.

“Father,” she says, “it’s been far too long since we’ve given thanks to you in this house. Tonight we thank you for the return of our son, who has been away too long. We give thanks for Anna Louise Cage, our beautiful grandchild, and pray that we may bring her as much happiness as she brings to us each day.” She pauses, a brief caesura that focuses everyone’s concentration. “We also commend the soul of Sarah Louise Cage to your care, and pray that she abides in thy grace forever.”

I take Annie’s hand under the table and squeeze it.

“We don’t pretend to understand death here,” Mom continues softly. “We ask only that you let this young family heal, and be reconciled to their loss. This is a house of love, and we humbly ask grace in thy name’s sake. Amen.”

As we echo the “amen,” Dad and I look at each other across the table, moved by my mother’s passion but not its object. In matters religious I am my father’s son, having no faith in a just God, or any god at all if you shake me awake at four a.m. and put the question to me. There have been times I would have given anything for such faith, for the belief that divine justice exists somewhere in the universe. Facing Sarah’s death without it was an existential baptism of fire. The comfort that belief in an afterlife can provide was obvious in the hospital waiting rooms and chemo wards, where patients or family members often asked outright if I was saved. I always smiled and nodded so as to avoid a philosophical argument that would benefit no one, and wondered if the question was an eccentricity of Southern hospitals. In the Pacific Northwest they probably offer you crystals or lists of alternative healers. I have no regrets about letting Sarah raise Annie in a church, though. Sometimes the image of her mother in heaven is all that keeps my daughter from despair.

As Dad passes around the mustard greens and cheese grits and beer biscuits, another memory rises unbidden. One cold hour before dawn, sitting beside Sarah’s hospital bed, I fell to my knees and begged God to save her. The words formed in my mind without volition, strung together with strangely baroque formality: I who have not believed since I was a child, who have not crossed a church threshold to worship since I was thirteen, who since the age of reason have admitted nothing greater than man or nature, ask in all humility that you spare the life of this woman. I ask not for myself, but for the child I am not qualified to raise alone. As soon as I realized what I was thinking, I stopped and got to my feet. Who was I talking to? Faith is something you have or you don’t, and to pretend you do in the hope of gaining some last-minute dispensation from a being whose existence you have denied all your life goes against everything I am. I have never placed myself above God. I simply cannot find within myself the capacity for belief.

Yet when Sarah finally died, a dark seed took root in my mind. As irrational as it is, a profoundly disturbing idea haunts me: that on the night that prayer blinked to life in my tortured mind, a chance beyond the realm of the temporal was granted me, and I did not take it. That I was tested and found wanting. My rational mind tells me I held true to myself and endured the pain as all pain must be endured—alone. But my heart says otherwise. Since that day I have been troubled by a primitive suspicion that in some cosmic account book, in some dusty ledger of karmic debits and credits, Sarah’s life has been charged against my account.

“What’s the matter, Daddy?” Annie asks.

“Nothing, punkin.”

“You’re crying.”

“Penn?” my mother says, half rising from her chair.

“I’m all right,” I assure her, wiping my eyes. “I’m just glad to be here, that’s all.”

Ruby reaches out and closes an arthritic hand over mine. “You should have come back months ago. You know where home is.”

I nod and busy myself with my knife and fork.

“You think too much to be left alone,” Ruby adds. “You always did.”

“Amen,” Dad agrees. “Now let’s eat, before my beeper goes off.”

“That beeper ain’t gonna ring during this meal,” Ruby says with quiet certainty. “Don’t worry ’bout that none.”

“Did you take out the batteries?” Dad asks, checking the pager.

“I just know,” Ruby replies. “I just know.”

I believe her.

My mother and I sit facing each other across the kitchen counter, drinking wine and listening for my father’s car in the driveway. He left after dinner to take Ruby home to the black section north of town, but putting Annie to bed took up most of the time I expected him to be away.

“Mom, I sensed something on the phone. You’ve got to tell me what’s wrong.”

She looks at me over the rim of her glass. “I’m worried about your father.”

A sliver of ice works its way into my heart. “Not more blockage in his coronary vessels?”

“No. I think Tom is being blackmailed.”

I am dumbfounded. Nothing she could have said would have surprised me more. My father is a man of such integrity that the idea seems utterly ridiculous. Tom Cage is a modern-day Atticus Finch, or as close as a man can get to that Southern ideal in the dog days of the twentieth century.

“What has he done? I mean, that someone could blackmail him over?”

“He hasn’t told me.”

“Then how do you know that’s what it is?”

She disposes of my question with a glance. Peggy Cage knows more about her husband and children than we know ourselves.

“Well, who’s blackmailing him?”

“I think it might be Ray Presley. Do you remember him?”

The skin on my forearms tingles. Ray Presley was a patient of my father for years, and a more disturbing character I have never met, not even in the criminal courts of Houston. Born in Sullivan’s Hollow, one of the toughest areas of Mississippi, Presley migrated to South Louisiana, where he reputedly worked as hired muscle for New Orleans crime boss Carlos Marcello. He later hired on as a police officer in Natchez and quickly put his old skills to use. Brutal and clever, his specialty was “vigorous interrogation.” Off-duty, he haunted the fringes of Natchez’s business community, doing favors of dubious legality for wealthy men around town, helping them deal with business or family troubles when conventional measures proved inadequate. When I was in grade school, Presley was busted for corruption and served time in Parchman prison, which to everyone’s surprise he survived. Upon his release he focused exclusively on “private security work,” and it was generally known that he had murdered at least three men for money, all out-of-town jobs.

“What could Ray Presley have on Dad?”

Mom looks away. “I’m not sure.”

“You must have some idea.”

“My suspicions have more to do with me than with your father. I think that’s why Tom won’t just tell Presley to go to hell. I think it involves my family.”

My mother’s parents both died years ago, and her sister—after two tempestuous marriages—recently married a wealthy surgeon in Florida. “What could Presley possibly know about your family?”

“I’m not sure. Even if I knew, Tom would have to be the one to tell you. If he won’t—”

“How can I help if I don’t know what’s happening?”

“Your father has a lot of pride. You know that.”

“How much is pride worth?”

“Over a hundred thousand dollars, apparently.”

My stomach rolls like I’m falling through the dark. “Tell me you’re kidding.”

“I wish I were. Clearly, Tom would rather go broke than let us know what’s going on.”

“Mom, this is crazy. Why do you think it’s Presley?”

“Tom talks in his sleep now. About five months ago he started eating less, losing weight. Then I got a call from Bill Hiatt at the bank. He hemmed and hawed, but he finally told me Tom had been making large withdrawals. Cashing in CDs and absorbing penalties.”

“Well, it’s going to stop. I don’t care what he did, I’ll get him out of it. And I’ll get Presley thrown under a jail for extortion.”

She laughs, her voice riding an undercurrent of hysteria.

“What is it?”

“Ray Presley doesn’t care about jail. He’s dying of cancer.”

The word is like a cockroach crawling over my bare foot.

“Which is almost convenient,” Mom goes on, “but not quite. He’s taking his sweet time about it. I’ve seen him on the street, and he doesn’t even look sick. Except for the hair. He’s bald now. But he still looks like he could ride a bull ragged.”

I jump at the sound of the garage door. Mom gives me a little wave, then crosses the kitchen as silently as if she were floating on a magic carpet and disappears down the hall. Moments later, my father walks through the kitchen door, his face drawn and tired.

“I figured you’d be waiting for me.”

“Dad, we’ve got to talk.”

Dread seems to seep from the pores in his face. “Let me get a drink. I’ll meet you in the library.”

FOUR

All my life, whenever problems of great import required discussion—health, family, money, marriage—the library was the place it was done. Yet my positive feelings about the room far outweigh my anxieties. The ash-paneled library is so much a part of my father’s identity that he carries its scent wherever he goes—an aroma of fine wood, cigar smoke, aging leather, and whiskey. Born to working-class parents, he spent the first real money he made to build this room and fill it with books: Aristotle to Zoroaster and everything in between, with a special emphasis on the military campaigns of the Civil War. I feel more at home here than anywhere in the world. In this room I educated myself, discovered my gift for language, learned that the larger world lay not across oceans but within the human mind and heart. Years spent in this room made law school relatively simple and becoming a writer possible, even necessary.

Dad enters through a different door, carrying a bourbon-and-water brown enough to worry me. We each take one of the leather recliners, which are arranged in the classic bourgeois style: side by side facing the television. He clips the end of a Partagas, licks the end so that it won’t peel, and lights it with a wooden match. A cloud of blue smoke wafts toward the beamed ceiling.

“Dad, I—”

“Let me start,” he says, staring across the room at his biographies, most of them first editions. “Son, there comes a time in every man’s life when he realizes that the people who raised him from infancy now require the favor to be returned, whether they know it or not.” He stops to puff on the Partagas. “This is something you do not yet have to worry about.”

“Dad—”

“I am kindly telling you to mind your own business. You and Annie are welcome here for the next fifty years if you want to stay, but you’re not invited to pry into my private affairs.”

I lean back in the recliner and consider whether I can honor my father’s request. Given what my mother told me, I don’t think so. “What’s Ray Presley holding over you, Dad?”

“Your mother talks too much.”

“You know that’s not true. She thinks you’re in trouble. And I can help you. Tell me what Presley has on you.”

He picks up his drink and takes a long pull, closing his eyes against the anesthetic fire of the bourbon. “I won’t have this,” he says quietly.

I don’t want to ask the next question—I’d hoped never to raise the subject again—but I must. “Is it something like what you did for Sarah? Helping somebody at the end?”

He sighs like a man who has lived a thousand years. “That’s a rare situation. And when things reach that point, the family’s so desperate to have the horror and pain removed from the patient’s last hours that they look at you like an instrument of God.”

He drinks and stares at his books, lost in contemplation of something I cannot guess at. He has aged a lot in the eighteen years since I left home. His beard is no longer salt-and-pepper but silver white. His skin is pale and dotted by dermatitis, his joints eroded and swollen by psoriatic arthritis. He is sixteen years past his triple bypass (and counting) and he recently survived the implantation of two stents to keep his cardiac vessels open. All this—physical maladies more severe than those of most of his patients—he bears with the resignation of Job. The wound that aged him most, the one that has never quite healed, was a wound to the soul. And it came at the hands of another man.

When I was a freshman at Ole Miss, my father was sued for malpractice. The plaintiff had no case; his father had died unexpectedly while under the care of my father and five specialists. It was one of those inexplicable deaths that proved for the billionth time that medicine is an inexact science. Dad was as stunned as the rest of the medical community when “Judge” Leo Marston, the most prominent lawyer in town and a former state attorney general, took the man’s case and pressed it to the limit. But no one was more shocked than I. Leo Marston was the father of a girl I had loved in high school, and whom I still think about more than is good for me. Why he should viciously attack my father was beyond my understanding, but attack he did. In a marathon of legal maneuvering that dragged on for fourteen months, Marston hounded my father through the legal system with a vengeance that appalled the town. In the end Dad was unanimously exonerated by a jury, but by then the damage had been done.

For a physician of the old school, medical practice is not a profession or even an art, but the abiding passion of existence. A brilliant boy is born to poor parents during the Depression. From childhood he works to put food on the table. He witnesses privation and sickness not at a remove, but face to face. He earns a scholarship to college but must work additional jobs to cover his expenses. He contracts with the army to pay for his medical education in exchange for years of military service. After completing medical school with an exemplary record, he does not ask himself the question every medical student today asks himself: what do I wish to specialize in? He is ready to go to work. To begin treating patients. To begin living.

For twenty years he practices medicine as though his patients are members of his family. He makes small mistakes; he is human. But in twenty years of practice not one complaint is made to the state medical board, or any legal claim made against him. He is loved by his community, and that love is his life’s bread. To be accused of criminal negligence in the death of a patient stuns him, like a war hero being charged with cowardice. Rumor runs through the community like a plague, and truth is the first casualty. His confidence in the rightness of his actions is absolute, but after months of endlessly repeated allegations, doubt begins to assail him. A lifetime of good works seems to weigh as nothing compared to one unsubstantiated charge. Smiles on the street appear forced to him, the greetings of neighbors cool. Stress works steadily and ruthlessly upon him, finally culminating in a myocardial infarction, which he barely survives.

Six weeks later the trial begins, and it’s like stepping into the eye of a hurricane. Control rests in the hands of lawyers, men with murky motives and despicable tactics. Expert witnesses second-guess every medical decision. He sits alone in the witness box, condemned before family, friends, and community, cross-examined as though he were a child murderer. When the jury finds in his favor, he feels no joy. He feels like a man who has just lost both legs being told he is lucky to be alive.

Could the present-day blackmail somehow be tied to that calamitous case? I have never understood the reason for Leo Marston’s attack, and I’ve always felt that my father—against his nature—must have been keeping the truth from me. My mother believes Ray Presley is behind the blackmail, and I recall that Judge Marston often hired Presley to do “security work” when I was in high school. This translated into acting as unofficial baby-sitter for Marston’s teenage daughter, Olivia, who was also my lover. I remember nights when Presley’s truck would swing by whatever hangout the kids happened to be frequenting, its hatchet-faced driver glaring from the window, making sure Livy didn’t get into any serious trouble. One night Presley actually pulled up behind my car in the woods and rapped on the fogged windows, terrifying Livy and me. I still remember his face peering into the clear circle I rubbed on the window to look out, his eyes bright and ferretlike, searching the backseat for a sight of Livy unclothed. The hunger in those eyes …

“Does this have anything to do with Leo Marston?” I ask softly.

Dad flinches from his reverie. Even now the judge’s name has the power to harm. “Marston?” he echoes, still staring at his books. “What makes you say that?”

“It’s one of the only things I’ve never understood about your life. Why Marston went after you.”

He shakes his head. “I’ve never known why he did it. I’d done nothing wrong. Any physician could see that. The jury saw it too, thank God.”

“You’ve never heard anything since? About why he took the case or pressed it so hard?”

“To tell you the truth, son, I always had the feeling it had something to do with you. You and Olivia.”

He turns to me, his eyes not accusatory but plainly questioning. I am too shocked to speak for a moment. “That … that’s impossible,” I stammer. “I mean, nothing really bad ever happened between Livy and me. It was the trial that drove the last nail into our relationship.”

“Maybe that was Marston’s goal all along. To drive you two apart.”

This thought occurred to me nineteen years ago, but I discounted it. Livy abandoned me long before her father took on that malpractice case.

Dad shrugs as if it were all meaningless now. “Who knows why people do anything?”

“I’m going to go see Presley,” I tell him. “If that’s what I have to do to—”

“You stay away from that son of a bitch! Any problems I have, I’ll deal with my own way.” He downs the remainder of his bourbon. “One way or another.”

“What does that mean?”

His eyes are blurry with fatigue and alcohol, yet somehow sly beneath all that. “Don’t worry about it.”

I am suddenly afraid that my father is contemplating suicide. His death would nullify any leverage Presley has over him and also provide my mother with a generous life insurance settlement. To a desperate man, this might well seem like an elegant solution. “Dad—”

“Go to bed, son. Take care of your little girl. That’s what being a father’s all about. Sparing your kids what hell you can for as long as you can. And Annie’s already endured her share.”

We turn to the door at the same moment, each sensing a new presence in the room. A tiny shadow stands there. Annie. She seems conjured into existence by the mention of her name.

“I woke up by myself,” she says, her voice tiny and fearful. “Why did you leave, Daddy?”

I go to the door and sweep her into my arms. She feels so light sometimes that it frightens me. Hollow-boned, like a bird. “I needed to talk to Papa, punkin. Everything’s fine.”

“Hello, sweet pea,” Dad says from his chair. “You make Daddy take you to bed.”

I linger in the doorway, hoping somehow to draw out a confidence, but he gives me nothing. I leave the library with Annie in my arms, knowing I will not sleep, but knowing also that until my father opens up to me, there is little I can do to help him.

FIVE

My father’s prediction about media attention proves prescient. Within forty-eight hours of my arrival, calls about interviews join the ceaseless ringing of patients calling my father. My mother has taken messages from the local newspaper publisher, radio talk-show hosts, even a TV station in Jackson, the state capital, two hours away. I decide to grant an interview to Caitlin Masters, the publisher of the Natchez Examiner, on two conditions: that she not ask questions about Arthur Lee Hanratty’s execution, and that she print that I will be vacationing in New Orleans until after the execution has taken place. Leaving Annie with my mother—which delights them both—I drive Mom’s Nissan downtown in search of Biscuits and Blues, a new restaurant owned by a friend of mine but which I have never seen.

It was once said of American cities that you could judge their character by their tallest buildings: were they offices or churches? At a mere seven stories, the Eola Hotel is the tallest commercial structure in Natchez. Its verdigris-encrusted roof peaks well below the graceful, copper-clad spire of St. Mary Minor Basilica. Natchez’s “skyline” barely rises out of a green canopy of oak leaves: the silver dome of the synagogue, the steeple of the Presbyterian church, the roofs of antebellum mansions and stately public buildings. Below the canopy, a soft and filtered sunlight gives the sense of an enormous glassed-in garden.