The Invisible World - Couverture rigide

Smolens, John

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0609609963 ISBN 13 : 9780609609965

Editeur : Crown Pub, 2002

Synopsis

Book by Smolens John

A propos du livre

Extrait

My mother died on the second Tuesday of October, at 3:14 p.m., to be exact. For the previous ten days she'd lain abed in the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. From her sixth-floor window I could look down Brookline Avenue toward Kenmore Square and the lights above Fenway Park. I took some solace in the fact that she died with such a view of the city, but the truth is the last day she was so out of it, she didn't know where she was--the nurse called it last-stage dementia, as though it were some saving grace.

But I had my doubts. Can a seventy-five-year-old woman go from perfectly lucid to drooling stupefaction in less than twenty minutes? I asked the nurse what they had given my mother while I was down in the cafeteria. She said nothing. No painkillers? Nothing--nothing that would bring this on so quickly, so completely. The nurse, a beefy woman with a pink Irish face that almost undermined the steel of her blue eyes, fingered the cross around her neck and suggested that perhaps it was the hand of providence. We were standing out in the fluorescent white corridor, and I stared back at her until she left for her nurses' station.

Petra Mouzakis was sitting on the long bench wedged between two laundry bins, listening to our conversation. She'd been there on the sixth floor all morning. I want to say lurking, but that would suggest that the woman tried to blend in, to conceal herself. That simply wasn't the case. Petra was, like myself, a journalist and she was the kind that rarely hides. To be fair, she was a working journalist; I was not--had hardly written a word in over a year.

Petra got up from the bench, swinging her sleek dark hair over one shoulder, and walked toward me. She wore black leggings beneath a loose white blouse that hung down over her hips. "Your mother had a visitor."

"When?"

"While you were down in the cafeteria."

"Who?"

"A man." Her large eyes were so dark they seemed incapable of admitting light, even the fluorescent kind. Something admirable in that. "I only caught a glimpse of him as I came out of the women's room down the hall. I think it was your father."

"My father? We haven't seen him in--in years. Are you sure?"

She touched the side of her head with a long hand and nodded. Her nails were green.

"You know what my father looks like?"

"That's why I've been here," she said. "To ask your mother about him. She wanted to tell me things about him, but it was a slow process. She kept going back, skipping around in time. The sequence of events was jumbled."

"In my family they usually are."

"But she wanted to tell me. She wanted to get it out--at last, I think."

"Deathbed confession."

Petra glanced away, embarrassed, as she fingered the thin silver chain that hung about her graceful neck.

"That your brand of journalism?" I asked.

"You used to write for the Beacon. You know what it takes to get a story."

"The Boston Beacon I wrote for was a very different thing--it was a different time."

Something in her jaw shifted, firmed up. "I know, you wrote for the first Beacon--when it was this renegade alternative paper." Petra was in her late thirties, about ten years younger than I was--and this was starting to feel pointless.

"The paper should have stayed folded," I said. "Somebody bought the name and now it's just a lightweight designer rag meant to give boomers flashbacks. Anybody who could really write went to the Globe. Or New York. Or Washington."

"Except you," she said.

"Maybe that's because I can't write."

"Maybe," she said, and now she looked me right in the eye. "Though I thought some of your stuff in the Beacon was better than that book of yours."

"You a writer or an editor?"

"It was a struggle to finish the book."

"Or maybe a critic?"

She folded her arms and said, "All right. I've been looking for your father for years--on and off."

"Have you? And why would you do that?"

"Probably for the same reasons you have," she said. I didn't answer. I started to turn to go back into my mother's room. "That's what she told me," Petra said. "You've been looking for him for years--even when you didn't know it, that's what you've been doing. I think it hurt her that she couldn't help you more. I think she was trying to protect you."

I didn't turn around but said, "You've gotten all you're going to get out of her." I entered the room and closed the door. Beyond my mother's bed, the window framed a view of the Citgo sign above Kenmore Square and the lights of Fenway Park on a gray fall day.

My name is Samuel Xavier Adams. I think. For some time, most of my adult life, I've suspected that little about my family could be stated with certainty. I believe I was born in New York City, and something about my mother's eyes tells me that that fact at least is solid. My father, John Samuel Adams, has been an employee of the United States government since he enlisted in the navy at the beginning of World War II. Exactly what he has done for the government since the end of the war I'm not certain. In fact, he has never actually admitted being a government employee, not directly--it's always been one of the many tacit understandings we supposedly shared. There have been times when my best hunch was that he worked for the FBI, the CIA (and its predecessor, OSS), various branches of military intelligence, and, at one point, a little-publicized federal agency known as SOS, Secret Operations Section. The branch names may change and shift, but I know that since the end of the war he has worked in government (as opposed to for the government), though at times I suspect he worked freelance for the Mafia (as opposed to in the Mafia).

There have been times when I doubted that the man I thought was my father was really my father. Some of the evidence that I've gathered over the years suggests that the real John Samuel Adams died a long time ago--perhaps in combat, though even that is not certain--and that the man I've considered my father from childhood was really some kind of substitute. But despite the weight of that evidence, I've always resisted such a wild possibility. Why? Because of my mother's eyes, my mother's voice--ever since I was young there was something in them when she spoke of my father that suggested that the man she called Jack was indeed my father.

As she lay on her hospital bed, I could clearly see her scalp through her thin white hair. Her face, usually flushed--an Irish flush much like that of the nurse who attended her--was slack and pale. Her eyes were opened, staring at the ceiling, but they didn't appear to comprehend anything.

"Mom?" I waited and there was no movement, no response. "Ma."

Nothing.

I sat down by the window. And looked out at Boston.

When I think of my mother, I often see her as she was in a photograph that was taken shortly after she was married and, I assume, about a year before I was born. It's a black-and-white photo taken sometime in 1948. Fall or perhaps winter. She's sitting on a couch wearing a finely cut suit with padded shoulders. The wide-brimmed hat shades one eye and around her neck hangs her mother's mink, its little dark eyes seeming to stare out at the camera. Her lipstick is dark, a deep red, no doubt, and she's holding a cigarette in her right hand. Her smile is wide, her eyes are bright, her figure is stunning. She's twenty-six years old. None of the lines of worry have yet etched their way into that face. She's a South Boston girl who's moved to New York City with her new husband, an ex-navy officer with a job in the government. Has there been a more optimistic time in America's history? I once asked her who took the photograph and she said, "Oh, your father took that, in our apartment, the one in the city before we moved out to Lake Success." Since I first saw that photo, I've wanted to be able to somehow beam back to that moment when the camera flashed. Wanted to look around the living room, to smell her perfume, to listen to the rustle of such clothes (she wore not only stockings but gloves), to hear the ice in their Scotches, to smell the smoke of their filterless Chesterfields, lit by a Zippo that had a distinct ring and click every time my father flipped the top open (a sound I have associated with him since early childhood).

There's another photograph taken, I think, about the same time, before either of their children was born. My mother and father are both sitting in a semicircular booth in an Italian restaurant. The tablecloth is white, their hands are poised over ashtrays, their drinks are full, and she leans against his chest. She's wearing a different outfit, this time a print dress, and without her hat her long hair is draped over her right shoulder. She had what used to be called a plait. It's dark in the black-and-white photo, but I know that then her hair was a deep red. My father is wearing a double-breasted suit with a silk tie and a matching handkerchief. It's one of the few photos I've seen of him--all or most were taken during that brief optimistic time, after the war and before they started a family. Apparently taken by the restaurant's photographer (because the photo came in a cardboard frame that said Giovanni's Grotto in the corner), this portrait is unique for two reasons: It's one of only a few photographs I've ever seen where my father, who was then about to turn thirty, wasn't in military uniform, and he's grinning. Not smiling. Grinning. Both of them, grinning for the photographer in Giovanni's, somewhere in New York City.

Staring out at that fine Boston drizzle, I wondered if it was possible, if my father had really slipped into my mother's hospital room...

Présentation de l'éditeur

Critically acclaimed author John Smolens conjures a world of hidden truths and intrigue in which the familiar is the most mysterious force of all.

For years Samuel Xavier Adams’s father has been a shadow figure in his family’s lives, vanishing and reappearing, keeping a slender connection from afar while his wife and children are haunted by loneliness, his daughter wasted by addictions, and his son, Sam, hounded by his father’s enemies. Sam has spent his life trying to discover what his father, who “worked for the government,” was doing that was worth the family’s ruin. Sam’s insistence on answers and his suspicions of his father’s involvement in the events of November 1963 drew the wrong kind of attention from powerful quarters, scuttling his journalistic career. But at least, Sam believed, he had put his dealings with his father to rest.

Now the older man has resurfaced, has been seen slipping in and out of his wife’s hospital room moments before her death. Her autopsy report is suspicious and her ashes are missing. And Sam is again on his father’s trail, in a high-stakes game of hide-and-seek played out in the dark underworld of Boston’s hushed and foggy roads and waterways. There are other players in the game—many of them figures from the past whose allegiances and motives are tangled and obscure. All are racing toward a deadly reckoning, and for Sam it may be the last chance to solve the puzzle of his life by seeing his father clearly for the first time, before he inevitably vanishes again.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Crown Pub
• Date d'édition: 2002
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0609609963
• ISBN 13: 9780609609965
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 301
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: MUSIC STORE professional GmbH; 022188841282; Lars.Mueller@musicstore.de; ; Istanbulstr. 22-26; Köln; 51103; Allemagne