Words

Since January his father had had a word more each week.

Frederick had not set out to count them. Sam had, without being asked, in the back of the notebook, on a page headed E. in small capitals, with a column of Sundays down the left; and in February Frederick had found the page by accident, looking for the statistics, and had looked at it for a long time, and had not said anything, and the next Sunday had come back from the step and told Sam the word, and Sam had written it down.

21 Jan. One word. Fredde.

His father had said it the way he had said it since the September Frederick was fifteen: carefully, almost right, the Swedish name in an English mouth, as though he were setting down something that might break. It was the first thing he had said to Frederick on the telephone since the Sunday in January when Brannigan had rung at four in the morning, and Frederick had sat on the step under the narrow window and listened to it, the one word, and had not been able to say anything back for some time.

28 Jan. Two. Fredde. Hill.

“Hill,” Frederick had said. “Yes. This morning.”

“Hill,” his father had said again, with satisfaction, as though it were a thing he had sent Frederick to do and been told was done.

4 Feb. Two. Hill. Good.

9 Feb. (Friday.) Eighty-eight. Sam had written it as a single word, with the hyphen, and then in brackets, (counts as one), and then crossed out the brackets, and then written them in again.

11 Feb. Three. Fredde. Box. Good.

18 Feb. Three. Sun. Hot? Good. The second had had a question mark on it, which was new. His mother had told him afterwards, in Swedish, that it was the first question his father had asked anybody since January, and that he had asked it of the weather forecast on the BBC before he asked it of Frederick, and had been pleased with the answer from both.

25 Feb. Four. Fredde. Ask. Ask. More.

Sam had looked at that one for some time.

“He said ask twice,” said Sam.

“Yes.”

“Was that a mistake? Or a word?”

Frederick had thought about it, at Sam’s desk, under the poster of the federal tax brackets.

“A word,” he said.

---

The question was on the inside of the History folder.

It was the maroon folder that the university bookshop sold for two dollars with the pitchfork on the front, and on the inside of the front cover, in pencil, since Thursday the twenty-second, Frederick had been writing the question and crossing it out. By Saturday afternoon there were eleven of them.

Were you told? Crossed out.

Did Shirley Chisholm tell you on 7 September 1974? Crossed out twice.

What did you ask? Crossed out, and then the crossing-out rubbed out, and then crossed out again.

Goldwater says you asked a question. Not a question. Crossed out.

“You have been doing that for three days,” said Alexander, from the desk by the door, without looking round.

“I can’t get it right.”

“You can. You have got it right four times. You keep crossing out the ones that are right.” Alexander turned his chair round. “May I see?”

Frederick held the folder up. Alexander read it from across the room, all eleven, in the order they had been written, which he could tell, Frederick supposed, from the pencil, which was softer at the top where it had been sharp on Thursday.

“Sam,” said Alexander.

Sam was in the doorway, because it was four on a Saturday and the door of 312 was open and Tyler was on the floor with his headphones, and Sam had come along the corridor to see whether Frederick wanted to do statistics, which Frederick was not taking this semester and did on Saturdays anyway, out of habit, and because Sam liked it.

“Count the words,” said Alexander. “In each.”

Sam came in and looked at the folder. He did not need the notebook.

“Three,” he said. “Eleven. Four. Six. Nine. Four. Twelve. Seven. Three. Fourteen. Four.”

“He had four last Sunday,” said Alexander.

“Yes,” said Sam.

“Then the question should be four words or fewer. Not because he cannot hear more. He can hear everything. Because he will want to answer the whole of it, and if there is more question than he has words, he will spend the words on the question.” Alexander looked at the folder. “It is the same with the box. If a minister sends me three questions in one paper, I answer the first and the paper comes back.”

“What did you ask,” read Frederick. “That’s four.”

“Yes. Ask that one.”

“It assumes he asked her something.”

“He did,” said Alexander. “It is in a carbon.”

On the floor Tyler lifted one side of his headphones an inch.

“Just ask him, dude,” he said. “Like, what happened.” And put them back on.

Frederick looked at him.

“That’s three,” said Sam.

---

The call was at nine on Sunday morning, which was four in the afternoon in London, which was after his father had slept and before the light went, the best of the day, his mother said, since January.

He did not take it on the step.

He had meant to. He had got up at six and gone up the butte in the dark with Rhys, and come down, and showered, and dressed, and at ten to nine he had picked up the telephone and the maroon folder and gone to the door; and then he had stopped, with his hand on the door, and looked back at the room, at the bed by the window with the textbook on it open at six hundred and twelve and the copy of the carbon beside it, and come back, and sat down on the bed by the window instead, with the folder open on his knee.

Alexander was on the bed by the door, with the Charter and Brennan’s reading. When he saw Frederick come back and sit down he closed the Charter on the pencil and began to get up.

“Stay,” said Frederick.

Alexander looked at him.

“Please,” said Frederick. “If you don’t mind. Stay.”

Alexander sat down again, on the edge of the bed, and then, after a moment, put the Charter on the blanket beside him, and sat back against the wall with his hands on his knees, and did not pick it up again.

The telephone went at nine exactly.

---

“He has been ready since half past three,” said his mother, in Swedish. “Brannigan has lit the fire again, which we do not need, because it is eleven degrees and sunny and the daffodils are out by the steps, but he likes to look at it. He is in the green chair. He has had his tea. He knows it is you.” A pause. “I told him at lunch that you might have a question. He looked at me for a long time and said good and ate all of his fish. He does not usually eat all of his fish.”

“How is he?”

“He is himself,” said his mother. “Every week a little more of himself. On Thursday he walked to the end of the garden and back without the stick, with Brannigan beside him not touching him, and when he came in he looked at me as though he had been to Stockholm.” A pause, and then, more quietly: “What is the question, Fredde?”

“Seventy-four.”

There was a silence on the line from London.

“The mercy,” said his mother.

“Yes.”

“We say he read it in the papers.”

“Yes.”

“Is it not true?”

“I don’t know,” said Frederick. “That’s the question.”

His mother did not say anything for a moment. He heard the kitchen in London, which he knew: the clock, the tap that dripped, the window over the sink with the garden beyond it.

“I will give him to you,” she said. “And then I will go and sit in the kitchen, and not listen, and Brannigan will stand in the door and listen for both of us.” A pause. “Puss. Take your time. He has all afternoon.”

---

There was the sound of the house: the corridor, a door, the clock in the study, and the fire, which he could hear quite clearly, a log settling; and then his father breathing, close, in the way he breathed when the telephone had been put in his hand and he was getting ready.

“Yes.”

“Dad. It’s me.”

“Fredde.” A breath. “Hill?”

“This morning. At six. With Rhys. It was fifty-one at the top.”

“Good.”

Frederick looked at the folder on his knee, at the eleven questions, ten of them crossed out, and the one that was not.

“Dad. I found something. In the library. A letter. From Goldwater. To Ford. In September 1974, two days after the mercy.”

He stopped. He had said too much. He had said a paragraph to a man with four words, and he heard it go into the telephone and down the line and out into the study in London, all of it, and he waited, and did not say anything else, and across the room Alexander sat against the wall with his hands on his knees, quite still.

The fire settled again in London.

“Goldwater,” said his father.

He said it slowly, all of it, the two parts, as though it were a name he had not said for a long time and was pleased to find still there, and had wiped it on his sleeve.

“Yes. He says Shirley told you. The night before.” Frederick looked at the folder. “We always say you read it in the papers.”

There was a silence on the line from London, and it was not the looking kind.

It was a different silence, and Frederick had not heard it before. It was not his father going along the corridors of the house of himself, opening doors. It was his father sitting quite still in the green chair, in front of a fire nobody needed, with the telephone at his ear, being told for the first time in sixty years what his family said about him at Christmas.

Frederick did not fill it. He made himself not fill it. He sat on the bed by the window with the pencil in his hand and the folder on his knee, and the room was very quiet, and across it Alexander did not move at all.

“Papers,” said his father, at last.

It was not a question. It was the word, said back, the way a man reads a line of a document aloud to be sure it says what he thinks it says. And then, after it, a sound, short, in two pieces, out of the breath: and Frederick did not know at first what it was, and then knew, because he had heard it on a step in May when his father did the cheers, and it was his father laughing.

---

“What did you ask?” said Frederick.

Four words. He heard Sam count them, in his head, in Sam’s voice.

There was no laugh now. There was the silence again, the looking kind this time, and it was long. It was the longest he had heard. He heard his father go along the corridors, a long way in, further than he had gone for the herring, further than he had gone for the pencil; opening doors, and closing them, and going on. The clock ticked in the study. The fire settled. Somewhere very faint, behind it all, a door, and Brannigan’s voice saying something to somebody, and stopping.

Frederick waited.

He looked at the inside of the folder. He did not look at the clock. He thought, without meaning to, of a man lying on the bed by the door at a quarter past three in January with his eyes on the window, saying I had not looked, and he did not look either.

“Asked,” his father found.

“Yes. What did you ask?”

“Whose.”

The word went. Frederick heard it go, and heard his father hear it go, and be cross, and not give up; heard him breathe, and go back along the corridor after it, slowly, with his hand on the wall.

“Mercy,” said his father.

And then, quite clearly, the two of them together, all at once, the way his sentences came when they had been carried about a long time and set down at last:

“Whose mercy.”

---

Frederick wrote it down.

He wrote it in pencil, on the inside of the folder, under the eleven questions, small, in the top corner of the space that was left, where you write a thing to show you have read it.

Whose mercy.

“Dad,” he said. “That’s what you asked her? Whose mercy?”

“Yes.” A breath. “Paper.”

“She wrote back?”

“Not her.” A breath, longer. The fire. “Him.”

Frederick sat very still.

“Ford,” he said. “Ford answered it. On paper.”

“Yes.”

He looked at the copy of the carbon on the blanket beside him, which he knew by heart now, and at the sentence halfway down the second page. And she made you answer it on paper.

“Thank you, Dad,” he said.

There was a pause on the line from London of tremendous dignity.

“Never,” said his father. A breath. “Asked.”

Frederick put his hand over his eyes, on the bed by the window, and laughed, because it was that or something else, and heard his father hear it, in London, in the green chair, and breathe out in the short pieces.

“I’m asking now.”

“Good,” said his father, and the telephone went across the room to the door, where Brannigan was, and Brannigan said, “Sir,” to Frederick, very correctly, and then, in a different voice, lower, “He’s very pleased with himself, sir. He’s looking at the fire,” and the line went.

---

The room was quiet for a long time.

Frederick sat with the folder on his knee and the telephone in his hand, and looked at the two words in the top corner of the space. Outside, beyond the half-raised blind, it was seventy-six degrees and Sunday and the car park was full of light, and somebody on the second floor was playing the same four bars of something on a guitar, over and over, and getting it wrong in the same place.

Across the room Alexander had not moved. He was sitting against the wall on the bed by the door with his hands on his knees, as he had been sitting since nine, and he was looking at Frederick, and he did not say anything.

He did not say anything for some time.

Then he said, quite quietly, “That is a very good question.”

Frederick looked at him.

“Mine?”

“His,” said Alexander.

---

“Whose was it, then?” said Frederick, later, at the window, with the folder. “Ford advised it. Chisholm completed it. It was in Dad’s name.”

“Yes.”

“So whose mercy was it?”

“That,” said Alexander, “is why it is a very good question.” He had the Charter on his knee again, closed, with the pencil in it. “Your father did not ask whether he could stop it. He could not. He did not ask whether it was lawful. Somebody would have told him that it was. He asked whose it was.” He considered it. “If it is in my name, and I may not refuse it, and I did not advise it, whose is it? The person who signs it? The person who advises it? Or the person in whose name it goes out, who will be blamed for it at Christmas for sixty years?”

Frederick looked at the folder.

“Ashby said on Wednesday,” he said slowly, “that she examined the instrument. And required written reasons. Before she completed it. He said it was her method. Everything in writing.”

“Yes.”

“She made Ford answer it.”

“Yes.”

“The reasons were the answer. To Dad’s question. Whose mercy. Ford’s. In writing. So nobody could ever say it was Dad’s.” He heard himself, and stopped, and looked at the window, at the butte. “Ink is yes,” he said. “Pencil is read.”

“And the reasons were the minister’s name at the bottom of the page,” said Alexander, “in ink.” He opened the Charter at the pencil. “You should tell your historian.”

---

Theo rang at seven, from New Westminster, where it was nine, for one more week, until the Realm’s clocks went forward on Sunday and Tempe’s did not.

Desmond was in the corner of the screen in his maroon-and-gold scarf, which had come back from Tempe in November round Theo’s neck and had gone straight back round Desmond’s, and somebody had put a pair of reading glasses on him.

“How’s Alex?”

“He’s all right. He’s doing Brennan’s reading.” Frederick turned the laptop so that Theo could see the bed by the door, and Alexander lifted one hand without looking up, and Theo lifted his.

“Hi, Alex.”

“Good evening, Theo.”

“How’s your dad?” said Theo, to Frederick.

“He laughed. And he said two words together. And he made a joke.”

Theo stopped.

“A joke,” he said. “Freddie. That’s huge.”

“He said I’d never asked. Which I hadn’t.”

“That’s not just words, that’s memory, that’s timing, that’s…” Theo stopped himself, the way he did when the textbook voice came out in front of somebody who had not asked for it. “That’s really good,” he said, in his own. “What did you ask him?”

Frederick looked at the folder on the window sill.

“What he asked somebody,” he said. “In 1974.”

“And?”

“Whose mercy.”

Theo was quiet for a moment, in New Westminster, with the skeleton in his scarf and glasses behind him.

“That’s a good question,” said Theo.

“Everybody says that.”

“Desmond says it too,” said Theo, and held the skull up to the camera, nodding it, gravely, until Frederick laughed.

---

He wrote to Ashby at nine, by email, because it was Sunday and Ashby had said in January, terrified, that he did not mind being emailed on Sundays if it was about a source.

Dr Ashby. I asked my father. He says he asked her one question, and the question was “Whose mercy.” He says Ford answered it, on paper. F. Hanover.

The answer came at eleven, when Alexander’s light had been off for half an hour and Frederick’s was still on.

Mr Hanover. Thank you. Um. That is, I don’t have a word for what that is. Could you, would you mind, write down exactly what he said, in the order he said it, with the pauses where they were? Not what it means. What he said. The pauses are part of the source. N. Ashby.

Frederick read it twice.

Then he opened the maroon folder on his knee again and turned to the inside of the back cover, which was clean, and took the pencil, and wrote it down, in the order it had come, with the pauses where they had been, each one a space on the page, as long as he could remember it being.

Goldwater.

Papers.

Asked.

Whose.

Mercy.

Whose mercy.

Yes.

Paper.

Not her.

Him.

He looked at the spaces between them. They were the longest things on the page.

On the bed by the door, in the dark, Alexander turned over, once, and was still.