The Night Listener : A Novel

on The Defenders , my mother on Connie’s Country Kitchen .
    Once she told me tearfully that my father—her son—had been killed by “a mob of radical nigras.” She’d seen this on TV, she said, and could not be convinced otherwise. Even when I brought her martyred child to the rest home, where he yelled at her like a man accused: “Goddammit, Mama, I’m not dead! Look at me! I’m here, goddammit!” But Dodie couldn’t stop crying, so Pap snatched a plastic lily from her dresser and reclined on her bed. “Okay,” he bellowed, erecting the lily over his chest, “I’m dead! Are you happy now, Mama?” After a moment or two, Dodie giggled like a girl, her demons expelled by her lingering grasp of the absurd. Sanity escaped her, but she knew a good laugh when she saw one.
    “ Jeopardy ?” I said, blinking at my bookkeeper. “I’ve never been on Jeopardy .”
    “You have now,” she replied. “Two days ago.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “You were a question. Or an answer, I guess. However they do it. You know, like: ‘This city is the setting for Gabriel Noone’s stories on Noone at Night .’ Your dad saw it. Him and your stepmom.”
    “No shit?”
    Anna wiggled her eyebrows. “Way cool, huh?” I had to admit it was. I could see Pap slouched in front of the quiz show, his trousers undone at the waist, munching Triscuits out of the box. I imagined the little grunt of amazement he made when he heard Alex Trebek speak my name—his own name, in fact—and saw it spelled out on the screen in blazing blue and white. My Pe-abody Award had barely fazed him, but Jeopardy was different.
    Jeopardy swam freely in Pap’s mainstream, next to Patton and Roy Blount Jr. and The Sound of Music .
    “Plus,” said Anna offhandedly, “he’s coming to town.”
    “He said that?”
    She nodded. “On their way to Tahiti.”
    “When?”
    “Two weeks, I think. He wants you to call him.”
    “Fuckshitpiss.”
    “Hey,” said Anna, turning back to the computer. “Don’t shoot the messenger.”
    It was Jess, in fact, I wanted to shoot. How could he not be here for this—my champion and co-conspirator, my happy ending, my living proof that men could love each other deeply? My father would see this house at last, but with a vital piece missing: the one that had charged it with passion and politics. And I knew how he’d react to the separation. I could hear him already, telling me I was better off without the sorry bastard, ticking off the faults of a man he had never bothered to know. His long-stifled distrust of my “lifestyle” could flourish again in the name of taking my side.
    “This is not good news,” I told Anna.
    “How old is he?” she asked. “He must be ancient.” I gave her a look. “Because I am, you mean?”
    “Well…yeah.”
    “There are other bookkeepers, you know.” She wasn’t at all ruffled. “I just meant, I hope I’m over my parents by the time I’m your age.”
    “Good luck,” I said.
    Anna’s parents, as I remembered, were both women. She had a birth father in the East Bay who ran a chain of convenience stores, but she’d met him only once, just for curiosity’s sake. Her twin brother, who seemed as straight as she was, worked weekends at a center for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered, and Questioning Youth. None of this struck her as especially unusual. She was a recent invention, placidly free from entanglements. Unlike me, she had never experienced the dark tidal pull of the past.
    When I was little, I knew almost nothing about my grandfather, who died before I was born. In another family this might not have been odd, but ours was obsessed with the trappings of kinship. My father briefed us daily on our ancestors. We knew that a Noone had died of dysentery at Fort Moultrie, that another had been a dashing bachelor governor, that Granny Prioleau had been forced to quarter Yankees during Sherman’s March. Some of these figures, so help me, we could have picked out of a lineup, but not my father’s father. To my memory, I’d never even seen a picture of him.
    He was just a grayish blur, an abstraction without a lore.
    This didn’t change until I was twelve, when my friend Jim Huger buttonholed me on a school field trip to tell me what the rest of Charleston had known for decades: the original Gabriel Noone had blown his head off with a shotgun. There were several versions of this, Jim said. One held that my grandfather had done the deed in my father’s