Free Muller, Marcia - [11] Trophies and Dead Things(v1.0)(html)

what?" I asked.
    "All sorts of stuff. He started
by asking me if I'd decided on a college yet, but before I could
answer, he said that the decisions people make early on are important,
that the wrong one can change the whole course of your life. He said
that even a right decision can come back at you later, even if you know
you did the right thing."
    "That sounds like fairly standard
father-to-son advice."
    "You didn't know Perry. He wasn't
much on advice. Anyway, then he started going on about this seminar
he'd had to go to for his job a couple of weeks before. He said he
hadn't wanted to go, but that it was one of the best things that ever
happened to him. 'It's changed my whole life,' he said. 'I know what I
have to do to get in touch with my former self.'"
    "Those were his exact words?"
    "More or less."
    "What kind of seminar was it?"
    "He didn't say, and I couldn't
ask; he was getting really weird by that time. Then he started
in on . . . well, what he said was, 'You can't beat yourself up for
being unable to control the consequences of your actions.' And other
stuff along that line."
    It sounded to me as if Hilderly
had been trying to articulate the preachings of a pop
psychologist to his son—and had not done too good a job of it.
"Anything else?"
    "Well, there was some stuff about
ideals. How you should hang on to them, but sometimes you had to dump
some in order to live up to the most important of all. And then he got
into guilt and atonement. All the time I was trying to eat my
enchiladas, he was sucking up margaritas and carrying on like a
born-again."
    "Maybe he had gotten
involved in some religion; there's a lot of that going around."
    Kurt looked dubious. His mother
said, "I can't imagine that. Perry was a lifelong atheist."
     "What else
did he say?" I asked Kurt.
    "Not much that made any sense.
It worried
me; I'd never seen him that way before. Like Mom says, I wasn't close
to Perry, but he was a nice man, and I hated to see him sort of ...
losing it. You think maybe he was cracking up, and that was why he made
that weird will?"
    "Maybe." I made a mental note to
ask Hilderly's former employer about the seminar he'd attended late in
May.
    "Well," Kurt said, "whatever made
him do it must have been really something. I know he loved my brother
and me, even if he was sort of off on another planet most of the time."
Up to now Kurt had sounded almost cavalier about his last dinner with
his father, but as he spoke a tremor came into his voice. He turned to
his mother. "I wish I could have done or said something—you know, to
let him know I cared."
    Judy Fleming said, "Kurt, he knew
you cared."
    "But there should have been something. I'm sorry
now that all those years I wasn't a better son to him."
    Quickly she went to him and put
her arms around his shoulders. "You were a good son. You were
the best you could be, under the circumstances."
    She could easily have countered
Kurt's feelings of regret by pointing out that Perry hadn't been much
of a father, but
instead
she'd chosen the more
difficult option of refusing to degrade her former husband's memory.
She may, as she'd said, have let Hilderly down when she divorced him,
but now, at the end, she hadn't failed him.
Seven 
    On the way back to the city I
stopped at a K-Mart to buy a birthday card and a hanging fuchsia plant
for Anne-Marie. By the time I reached the building she and Hank owned
on Twenty-sixth Street in Noe Valley, it was close to ten and a
refreshing fog once more enveloped San Francisco. I went up on the
front porch, fuchsia dangling from my hand, and surveyed the row of
hooks for plants that Anne-Marie had installed in front of the door to
her first-floor flat; one was still vacant, and the space was the right
size for my gift. I turned, nodding in satisfaction, but something
across the street caught my attention. I looked back. There was no one
over there, at least no one discernible, and all I heard were distant
traffic noises and voices down the