The Testing of Luther Albright Read online

  These late arrivals at dinner seemed another. Now they happened once, sometimes twice a week. I glanced at the window again and tried hard not to think of the kind of amused detachment with which he had regarded me during the driving lesson that morning. I read an article about the long preparations for Challenger’s maiden flight. Finally, finally, Belsky’s old gray Pinto with the rusted fenders and the missing side mirror pulled into the cul-de-sac and jerked to a stop in front of our driveway. Elliot stepped out of the passenger side and laid a hand on the roof, talking. When he slammed the door, the car lurched away, and he walked towards the house across the lawn. He brought cool air in with him, and Liz turned on the flame beneath a frying pan.

  “Sorry I’m late,” he said.

  “That’s okay,” Liz said. “Did you have fun?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Did he have any good new Atari games?”

  “One, but we didn’t really play it.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Sat in the hot tub, mostly.”

  She cut a look at me and winked. Every week she had a new explanation for the hours he spent there: Joyce served junk food; Robert let them tinker with the engine on the beat-up Ford.

  The hamburgers hissed as she set them in the pan. “That hot tub must make Tim’s a great place to hang out.”

  “I guess.” He pulled a spatula from a pitcher of spoons she kept on the counter and handed it to her. He had grown deft, almost overnight, at evasion. “How was work?”

  “Great,” she said. “They say I’m almost ready to take calls on my own.”

  Last month, she had begun training at the Crisis Center, just as I’d asked her to, and at the time I was still proud of myself for the boost it seemed to give her. Twice that month I had overheard her talking on the phone to one of her sisters, describing her trainer, or explaining the principles of “passive assistance,” and although she still tried to engage me on the topic of Elliot’s visits to Belsky’s house, in general my deflections seemed less of a frustration to her. I was considering this, trying to focus with satisfaction on the way I had helped her, when the stack of plates on the counter began to rattle. Little jolts of movement beneath our legs. All three of us grabbed the lip of the counter. I am sure Liz would have stepped towards us to usher us to safety, but it did not last long enough. She turned off the heat beneath the pan, and we followed her into the living room.

  Already there was a bright red icon in the upper-right-hand corner of the TV screen: AFTERSHOCK! The newscaster’s lipstick was candy pink.

  “What may have been an aftershock of the October earthquake just struck the greater Sacramento area. We don’t have details yet, but the flood of calls to our hotline suggests that the people of Sacramento are deeply concerned and ready to band together again as they did last fall.” Then they ran a montage of clips from their coverage of the earthquake: again the ten-car accident; again the people streaming senselessly from the façade of the capitol building.

  “Oh, man,” Elliot said.

  Liz laughed. “Should we eat in here?”

  And although I suppose I sensed even then that the spasm of familiar ease in him would not last, briefly I was overcome by a weird gratitude for the trick of nature that had triggered it. On screen, a broken window on a stagecoach in Old Sacramento. Liz and Elliot laughed again.

  “Yes, let’s,” I said. “But I think we’re going to need some popcorn.”

  THERE IS SOME IRONY THEN THAT, WHEN I OPENED THE kitchen door a few evenings later, I smelled sewer gas. My father and I had encountered something like this only once, on a call to a row house on Adeline Street. A heavy woman and four children waited on the stoop beneath dripping icicles, and we could smell it through the windows, which were open, before we even climbed the stairs. Steam rose in a column beside her skirt where one of them had vomited in the snow.

  Initially, at least, all I felt was fear. Sewer gas is a noxious mixture of methane, hydrogen sulfide, gasoline vapor, carbon monoxide, acetylene, ammonia, hydrogen, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and a little oxygen. Ventilation is important, but methane, hydrogen, gasoline vapor, and acetylene are explosive in the presence of oxygen. Hydrogen sulfide and carbon monoxide are poisonous. Hydrogen sulfide is also corrosive. And standing at the threshold to my kitchen, what bothered me most was that sewer gas has a notoriously varied effect on people. While some may work a lifetime in poorly ventilated sewers without trouble, others have died shortly after descending too hastily into a manhole.

  When I reached the front hall, they were both standing there. Liz had kicked off her shoes, a pair of pumps she sometimes wore to volunteer, her toes a smooth unit beneath her panty hose. A fine run traveled up her leg from the heel. Elliot’s forehead betrayed the barest trace of perspiration in its shine.

  Liz said, “I picked up Ellie at the library. We haven’t been here long.”

  I felt a breeze on my forehead, and the sheer underdrapes in the living room sucked out the window and waved like flags.

  She said, “We opened all the windows.”

  Elliot said, “What happened, Dad?”

  I made myself smile. “Let’s find out,” I said.

  We started in the powder room, and this time I did the work myself, because I knew I couldn’t feign patience if he was slow. He made himself of use. He put a baking pan under the pipe to catch the water that would slop out if the trap was full, and sitting on the threshold with the flashlight he did his best to shine a beam on my work. But I didn’t really need it. When I swung the trap free, it was easy to see the pipe was empty. “Eureka,” I said, but neither of us could make ourselves smile at this. I swung the pipe back into place and scanned hopefully around the floor of the cabinet for signs of leaking—at the little basket of colored guest soaps and the stack of white hand towels Liz stored there—as I tightened the nut. But there were none. I stood and turned the water on.

  Fixture traps started appearing in American homes around the turn of the century; their proper functioning, by this time, is well understood. A little slug of water in a U of pipe will keep gases out of the house, and when a tap is shut off, gravity will make water settle in the U every time. Not much can get in the way of this. In Saudi Arabia or Death Valley, a plumber probably comes across some that evaporate, but even this only when a family leaves for a very long vacation. If a piece of floss runs down a drain and by luck gets beached on the high side of the trap when the water is shut off, it can draw the water slowly across the hump and leave it dry. But this is as unlikely as it sounds, and the evidence is there when you open the trap. A clog or crack can conceivably create a vacuum when you run a fixture somewhere else in the house, and this could suck a trap dry if the conditions are just right.

  The primary offender, though, is installation error, and now that my fear of the potential danger had waned, I found it was replaced by a distressing suspicion that the culprit was the vent pipe Elliot had roughed-in in the attic. There was a long horizontal run behind the knee wall. If he hadn’t used enough strap hangers to attach it, a plastic pipe might sag enough to collect a slug of rainwater during big storms. As I said, I had checked his work each day, but in my yearning to show respect for him I had often moved too quickly to approval, and I saw how easily I could have overlooked something like this. The work had been reviewed by an inspector as well, but the man the county sent had been an amateur gardener, and he gazed out the new opening at Liz’s roses to ask me questions about the composition of our soil. He smelled of cinnamon gum and jiggled his keys in his pockets. His lack of focus had bothered me even then.

  It might have saved me some time to suggest this possibility first, but at the thought of implying and investigating an error in Elliot’s work, I had difficulty swallowing. We would have to move his bed away from the wall; take down the calendar with the girl in the green swimsuit; cut through the Sheetrock we had raised together with a block and tackle; pull back the insulation he had stapled to the studs. It has
since become clear to me that I was guilty of a thick-headed obliviousness to most of Elliot’s deepest needs, but at the time I still believed that respect for his privacy and competence were chief among them.

  Instead, we spent the next half hour on tests. Elliot jogged down the hall and ran a faucet or flushed a toilet, and when he called to me from the landing, I lowered a screwdriver bit down the drain. Each time it came up glistening. “Still wet,” I would say, and wipe it dry with a hand towel. When he came downstairs finally, he was panting.

  “That’s everything,” he said.

  “Did you run the tubs?”

  “Yes.”

  “And then did you run the water through the shower heads as a separate test?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about the attic?”

  He nodded. This was enough said, for now. I moved quickly to the only other explanation I could think of.

  I said, “It must have been simultaneous use, then.”

  He furrowed his brow.

  I said, “You flushing a toilet while Mom was running the dishwasher, for example. If there’s a crack or clog in the pipe, a combination of fixtures can siphon a trap too.”

  He set his glasses back on his ears. “So how will we figure it out?”

  “We’ll have to do a smoke test.”

  And before he could ask me what this was, Liz appeared in the hall with a glass of wine. “Dinner’s ready,” she said.

  She was prepared. While we worked, she had closed all the windows, betraying an underestimation of the problem I could not bring myself to correct, and she had brought out the new slide projector and screen, along with four carousels from the history she’d spent the holidays organizing, sorting through paper bags and shoe boxes of old photos, eyeing negatives with a jeweler’s loupe, and making long lists for the specialists at Ken’s Cameras of the images she’d use to tell our story in slides. As we ate, she clicked through them: the frame of our house tied with balloons, the grandfather clock I had built, Liz pregnant and asleep on the sofa, Elliot’s second birthday, a potluck celebrating my first promotion, Yosemite, and finally the three of us at the Grand Canyon, the one that made my heart swell. As each new image flashed up on the screen, she shared little memories, and soon so did we, and by the time we stood up, we were able to clear the table and do dishes and switch off lamps talking about what she had made us see, conjured magically from my gift of cowardice to eclipse the details of the plumbing problem.

  But of course, for me, beneath the surface ease, it was always there. As she washed her face, she kept up a steady patter about the slides, but I was focused on the water swirling down the drain. It took only fifteen minutes for her to fall asleep, and as soon as she did, I got up in the dark and crept downstairs to check. The trap was still full, but I couldn’t help worrying about what might happen if either of them rose in the night and flushed a toilet. I tried to console myself that we were not in a densely populated neighborhood, so the concentration of gases in the city line was probably low, but, given the potential danger, this was an irresponsible line of thinking. I went to the keypad by our front door and deactivated our burglar alarm. I slid the powder room window open, stepped out into the hall, and closed the door. Then I went back upstairs and sat down at the desk in my study and looked out over our lawn.

  In my twenty years living there, I had heard of only two burglaries in our neighborhood, but this did not really make me feel any better. When I was five, at my mother’s insistence, my father had installed iron safety grates on all our windows in Trenton. These were hinged, and could be opened, but we always kept them locked, and as I fell asleep, at first I found them a comfort. I wasn’t old enough to know then about the crime in our neighborhood, but what I did know was that before he installed them, my mother would come to check and recheck the latch on my window as soon as she thought I’d fallen asleep, and afterwards she did not. It was the waning of her fear that calmed me. She was not an openly emotional woman—her eyes didn’t well up when I painted her a picture, and she didn’t yell when I tracked mud on the floor—but the full, violent force of her maternal love could be glimpsed in her irrational obsession with my safety. She wore a pair of nursing gloves in the kitchen when she was sick. She held a hand to her chin when I pumped high on the swings at the Veterans Park playground. And when I went to stay the night at other boys’ houses, she called their mothers to ask a list of pointed questions: whether they kept their doors locked at night, whether they heated their house with a woodstove, and whether they kept a gun in the house.

  In my earliest memories my father was sympathetic, even delicate with these worries. He did not protest when she insisted on the security grates, although it hurt his sense of aesthetics to install them. He liked to whittle in the evenings—toy soldiers for me, mostly—and although I sat close to him while he worked and pestered him with requests to let me handle the knife, each time, he would slide his eyes towards my mother to read the look she gave him and then tell me it wasn’t time.

  It may in fact be the first sign of the changes that would come over him later that when I was nine, he sat me down at the kitchen table and gave me my own knife. I looked immediately to my mother when he did this, and although she did not say anything, there was something—a whiteness in her skin tone, or a stillness in her posture maybe—that made me sure he had not discussed this with her. I suppose it is a measure of just how much she trusted and loved him that she didn’t object. Her breath caught when I stood on a stool to get a cup from the cupboard, but she said nothing each night when my father took my whittling knife from his dresser and handed it to me over the kitchen table. Even after my second accident, she did not question his choice. Blood seeped out of my thumb in time with my heart, and she made a businesslike bandage of gauze and tape because the precut adhesive variety were more than we could afford. Then she served us some chicken.

  Even back then, I recognized the half hour when I whittled with my father as a violation of the natural order of things in our house. All predictability of behavior was suspended, and as much as I loved the knife, and the attention from my father, and the challenge of the whittling, the strangeness of these lapses was painful. My mother’s fear had always been a burden to me on the playground, but I found its absence was much more unsettling. I spent most of the time as I worked the knife trying hard to imagine what she was thinking, and I think each cut I suffered can be attributed to the distraction of this. Looking at the grates on my windows as I tried to sleep, I would try to reconcile these contradictions, and I would fall asleep trying to see the world through my mother’s eyes.

  Now in my study looking out at my cul-de-sac, I think some of the sensitivity I felt to the open window below me was hers. My eyelids grew heavy, but I felt a buzzing at the top of my head and looked out my window at the three-quarter moon. Finally, I went downstairs to the kitchen and took three cans of tomatoes from the cupboard and stacked them outside the closed powder room door. It made me feel better, but seemed somehow embarrassing, and so upstairs I groped quietly for my travel alarm clock in the closet and set it for five o’clock. I slept fitfully, thinking of prowlers, waking to every sound, and trying not to lose heart at the thought that Liz noticed this and pretended that she was still asleep. I tried to remind myself that they had preoccupations of their own. Elliot had been working in his room each afternoon, hunting and pecking out the long rough draft of his paper on my father, and other days driving, I guessed, on back roads with Tim Belsky in a car that engine-work had made seem his own, and Liz had finished her training and begun answering calls at the Crisis Center. At breakfast she filled the air with stories of this—a man who had not left his trailer in a week; a girl with a handful of purple pills—and Elliot flipped through his Road & Track so that I could almost imagine they were not thinking about how the house I had built had filled with poisons while they were at home alone.

  I forced myself to endure a normal morning at work, but at lunch, I drove t
o Briggs Plumbing Supply. Through the window glass, I saw Larry’s wife sitting behind the counter watching her TV. The show held her so rapt that she did not notice me there, less then seven feet from her, staring. On the counter next to her was a small box of fruit punch and half a cheese danish on a paper plate spotted with oil. When I came through the door, she looked up. “Back for more Drano?” she said.

  “I’d like to rent a smoke pump.”

  She picked up her box of punch and took a sip through its tiny straw. “What for?” she said.

  I can still recall the mixture of ire and disorientation she stirred in me. Larry had worn an apron and kept a bottle of glass cleaner behind the counter. I wondered what had drawn him to her.

  “Something I’d like to check with a smoke pump,” I said.

  She smiled a little and shook her head. Then she slid off her stool and disappeared through a narrow doorway into the storeroom.

  Next to the cash register lay a strip of paper from a fortune cookie and a gray button on a piece of broken thread. Behind the stool sat a pair of running shoes and socks shaped by recent wear.

  When she reappeared she had a box of bombs and a device that looked like a hair dryer. “If you’re such a big do-it-yourselfer, you should consider buying one of these,” she said.

  “Thanks, but I think I’ll just rent.”

  She started ringing it up. “I just helped the last of my three boys pass his licensing exam. The book says on average homeowners who do some of the repairs themselves end up paying for twice as many service calls from licensed plumbers.” She paused over the keys and looked at me. “My point is, you could have a lot of work cut out for you that calls for a smoke pump.”

  “I’ll just rent,” I said, and handed her my credit card.

  She shrugged and then held the card with two hands and examined it. Her fingernails were pink, but the polish was chipped. “Luther Albright, eh?” she said.