THE SUMMONS Strange that it would come to me by such commonplace means not by special delivery, or registered mail, but with the regular mail delivery. A few first-class letters, the usual bills, printed matter, advertising flyers. In a grimly official-looking manila envelope with a translucent oval window through which GREENE TERENCE C 7 Juniper Way Queenston NJ 08540 glared up at him like an accusation. The return address was SHERIFF'S OFFICE, COUNTY OF MERCER, TRENTON, N.J. 08650. It was a Saturday in late March. Overcast, smelling of wet, rotted leaves, with a faint undertaste of spring. A day of no significance except (but this could only be coincidence) it was the day before Terence Greene’s forty-fourth birthday. An event which, but for the arrival of the summons, Terence Greene would not have recalled. # "Daddy, something for you!—looks like trouble." Eleven-year-old Cindy, the Greenes’ youngest child, was the one to bring Terence the summons. She called down into the basement, her voice thrilled. But where was Daddy? Why wasn’t he interested? Annoyed, she called again, "Dad-dy. Mail." Below, in semi-darkness, because one of the overhead lightbulbs had burnt out, Terence was absorbed in repairing a loose rubber tread on the basement stairs. His wife Phyllis had complained she’d almost tripped, might have broken her neck, so Terence was making the repair, or about to. The problem was, when he’d switched on the light over the steps there was a dazzling flash, and darkness. So he’d gone to look for a flashlight in the utility room, which required some minutes of searching since the flashlight wasn’t in its designated place, and when he found it, he discovered that the battery was dead; so he’d gone off to search for a new battery, for he was sure he’d purchased more than one at the hardware store; this search led him, whistling thinly through his teeth, upstairs into the kitchen, to search the closet, and at last into the garage, to his work bench which was cluttered with tools, where he located a battery for the flashlight but was distracted by the realization, as he glanced about the garage, that he had much to do here. My house, my home. My responsibility. And I am equal to it. He was husband, father, homeowner. What pleasure he took in a morning of simple, manual, household chores.He had a wife, Phyllis. A nineteen-year-old son Aaron, now at Dartmouth. A fifteen-year-old daughter Kim. And eleven-year-old Cindy, once the baby of the family, whom Daddy loved beyond his love for the older children. Because she is closest yet to babyhood, innocence. Only Cindy and Terence were home, in the Greenes’ large colonial house at 7 Juniper Way. And Terence was preoccupied, frowning and smiling to himself, whistling, now back downstairs in the basement, shining the flashlight about into the shadows, where, to his dismay, he discovered the rolled-up carpet remnant he’d intended to haul upstairs and out to the curb for the Saturday morning trash pickup. "Damn!"—this was the third time he’d forgotten. That week, his wife had said, "Terry, you won’t forget the carpet again, will you?" and Terence had laughed and said, "Certainly not." But there it was. A memento, layered with dust, of the beige wall-to-wall carpeting they’d had installed in the family room a decade ago, or more—Cindy just an infant, Kim in first grade, Aaron a slim sweet-faced child who had adored his father. But several months ago Phyllis had had a new carpet installed in the family room, so what need was there of the old? None, obviously. Grimacing, Terence tugged and shoved at the remnant, pushing it into the shadows beneath the basement steps. Since the trash pickup wasn’t for another week, there was no point in keeping the bulky thing in plain view, and upsetting Phyllis. Like the garage, the basement needed to be cleaned, cleared. Terence took note of that shelf cluttered with rusted, long-unused gardening tools, from an era when Phyllis had had time for tending rosebushes. Another shelf, weighted with yellowed copies of The Way, The Truth, and The Light, a religious journal of conservative political opinions faithfully passed on, for years, to the Greenes from Phyllis’s lately deceased father, a Presbyterian minister of New Bedford, Massachusetts. And cast-off sports equipment of Aaron’s, devoutly requested and soon neglected: an absurdly expensive German-manufactured tennis racquet that, in Aaron’s judgment, "wasn’t worth shit," and twenty-pound dumbbells and other weightlifting equipment that within weeks had bored an impatient teenager. Seeing these things, and numerous others, Terence felt his throat constrict. For here was the shadowland of the household, the graveyard. He’d clear it out another time. Shame. Hettie’s boy, isn’t he? But how much does he know? But look where he lives! He’s in charge. Tuffi appeared suddenly underfoot, wanting affection, wanting to be fed. Terence said, exasperated, "But you were just fed, Tuffi, weren’t you?" The terrier was quivering with emotion; since Aaron’s departure the house was too large and too lonely; Terence could see the mute animal perplexity in Tuffi’s liquidy amber eyes, but had no time for it now. Once a puppy, everybody’s darling, Tuffi was now an aging thick-bodied dog with graying whiskers and an occasional odor as of decomposing organic matter. Terence sighed, and rubbed Tuffi’s bony head, and accepted the eager silky-damp licking of Tuffi’s tongue against his fingers. "Yes, yes, good dog, good Tuffi, of course you’re loved, never doubt it!"—so Terence murmured, pouring dog chow into Tuffi’s empty bowl. Though it was not a good idea, and how many times he’d instructed the children, to indulge an overweight dog. Terence went to fetch his hammer, where had he left his hammer?—feeling a touch of panic, that Saturday morning was passing so swiftly. It was a time precious to him, hours of quiet, privacy, household chores. A day when he didn’t have to commute to 81 Park Avenue, Manhattan, to the headquarters of the Nelson P. Feinemann Memorial Foundation where he was executive director, as he did five days a week; a day he could take a curious, stubborn pleasure in tending to the house in which he and his family lived. What anonymity in household tasks. For while Terence C. Greene was a name of distinction, authority, power in certain quarters, it was not a name that, murmured aloud, in the basement of his house, would seem to mean much at all. Overhead, the sound of Cindy’s footsteps. On Saturday mornings the child was lonely, restless. In imitation of her mother and her sister she ran and rushed about, breathless, yet with no evident objective, no clear purpose. Somehow she seemed not to have friends, or at any rate friends who lived near Juniper Place. Thinking of Cindy, hoping Cindy didn’t know where he was, Terence felt a prick of tenderness, guilt. He wondered if in all families there was one child about whom a parent felt somehow guilty as if I can’t protect her enough, shield her from hurt. His older children Aaron and Kim he’d had to surrender, they weren’t children any longer, not as they’d been; they hadn’t need of Daddy’s protection, and certainly didn’t want it. But Cindy. Cindy was different. Too intelligent for her childish ways, too childish for her intelligence. The one most like myself, that must be it. Terence gripped the twelve-inch claw hammer in his right hand, swinging it in a short arc. He wondered how many millennia had passed before the human hand had evolved such a tool. The ordinary household hammer was a model of efficiency and compression: the handle a marvel of simplicity and the head an ingenious combination of power (the power to pound nails in) and its reversal (the power to pull nails out). Since becoming a homeowner, Terence had come to love the feel of a tool in his hand: screwdriver, pliers, saw, hammer. In the local hardware store he admired those tools—power saws, axes—for which he had no use. He stocked up on nails, screws, bolts, washers. There was a pleasure in purchasing such things as if he were demonstrating to the hardware clerk and the other customers that he, Terence Greene, was certainly one of them. His name, his address, there on his credit card, stamped in raised plastic letters, like Braille.Terence C. Greene. Terence smiled. He’d created an identity for himself, and a personality to inhabit it, affable, reasonable, good-hearted and a good citizen, the way, as a shy but gifted child, he’d modeled clay figures in school. No one in Queenston knew of his past. Not even that it was a shadowy, mysterious past, only haphazardly known to Terence Greene himself. "Daddy?—mail’s here!" Cindy had discovered him after all, and was calling down the stairs excitedly. "Something for you, Daddy—looks like trouble." Copyright © 1997 by The Ontario Review, Inc.