my ex.” She shuddered. “About six months ago, I attacked him in Golden Gate Park. Pretty serious, very complicated, and talk about embarrassing. But enough of that.” She opened the door as the cab stopped in front of her building.
I asked the driver to pop the trunk, then got out. I grabbed Helen’s luggage and carried it to the building’s entrance. “I could have done that,” she said, extending her hand. “Now you’re wet.” Helen left her hand in mine for a small eternity. “You’re a nice man, Alexander Romanovsky, and I enjoyed meeting you. Hopefully we’ll see each other again. Take care of yourself in the meantime.”
“You too.”
“Doing my damnedest,” she said.
CHAPTER 7
DECEMBER 1986
SAN FRANCISCO
I took a cab to Fred’s memorial service at a large funeral home out on California Street near Fiona’s. Somber chamber music was playing when I arrived; an usher directed me to a pew’s end seat. Looking around, I saw Fiona on the other side of the crowded, twilit room. I tried staring to get her attention, but she looked straight ahead as a man appeared at the podium and began remembering Fred with amusing anecdotes.
The remembering turned solemn with a poem by Anna Akhmatova, the Russian poetess. I had heard the poem before: it was about loved ones, their deaths, and ensuing emptiness. Translations seldom capture a poem’s soul, and I repeated the first verse to myself in Russian. In its original the poem was more affecting, and the internal rhymes worked better. I was working on the second verse when the speaker returned to his seat.
I tried listening to the next speaker while looking around and recognized several of Drew’s friends I’d met at his gallery receptions. In the front pew sat two men whose profiles resembled Fred’s. The older man I decided was Fred’s father, the younger his brother. More uncomfortable than grieved, they were witnessing the conclusion of Fred’s journey when he stepped out of the closet in small-town Wisconsin and kept going until he reached San Francisco. Arriving in the late ’70s, Fred was another fresh face in the sexual anarchy of the Castro’s bars and bathhouses.
Before Fred, Drew had collected lovers and tried refashioning them into the men they were incapable of becoming. Most were tall, more than a few were blond; some lasted longer than others. All of them fled until Drew found Fred, who would not be made over; and, having given Drew his unconditional love, he could offer nothing more. With time, Drew returned Fred’s love, and their bond provided Drew the stability that allowed his talents to flourish. I thought that Fred was somehow a surrogate for the parental affection Fiona had denied Drew.
Drew was approaching the lectern. Looking at my watch, the service had started a half hour ago, and I couldn’t remember much of it. Drew spoke about death, its liberation for the ill, and the sorrow for the survivors. But it wasn’t death he was addressing; it was suicide. I realized that I had avoided Fred’s service as I had my mother’s. Like my mother’s, Fred’s was a contrived ceremony memorializing self-destruction without benefit of church or clergy.
When the service ended, I stood up and saw Fiona leaving. The rain had let up, and Fiona was going down the front steps when I called to her.
“Alexander, you look terrible,” she replied. “You’re okay?”
“Jet lag and a night in the Denver airport,” I said after we hugged. “Was my mother’s service held here?”
“Yes, in one of the smaller chapels.”
“I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.”
“Neither could I,” Fiona said. “Sorry, I’m somewhat frantic. Drew’s hosting a reception at home, and I have last-second things to do. We’ll talk later. Oh, most of my family will be there. Nothing I can do about that.”
“That’s too bad.”
“Isn’t it though,” Fiona said. “Do you want a ride?”
“Thanks, but I’m going to walk and try to clear my thoughts.”
The mental picture most people have of the Golden Gate is looking west from downtown San Francisco through the bridge out to the Pacific. Fiona’s home was in the Sea Cliff neighborhood on the City’s northwest side overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and the bridge was to the northeast and downtown San Francisco to the south. Sea Cliff was an eclectic collection of stately homes: French châteaus, Tuscan palaces, and ’50s modern. The expensive neighborhood was one of San Francisco’s foggiest, and the mist secluded the homes into individual manors or, in Fiona’s case, a hacienda.
Zorro could have designed Fiona’s California-Spanish home and commissioned Rob Roy to decorate it with paintings of Scotland. The collection’s centerpiece, an original oil of a battle the Scots lost to the English over two hundred years ago, was displayed in the dining room. Drew called it “kilts and claymores”—the Scottish broadsword. The home and the paintings were a terrible mismatch, and I thought the collection had less to do with Fiona’s Scottish heritage and more to do with Drew. Fiona appreciated good art, and Drew could have purchased paintings she would have enjoyed; instead, the dreary collection belittled Drew’s talent and served as a testament to their relationship’s desolation.
Everyone knew that Fiona and Drew didn’t get along, but in public, they implemented a truce. At the reception, they would transform themselves into a sophisticated mother and son by virtue of Drew’s captivating charm and Fiona’s acting ability when her family was present. And that afternoon, Fiona’s relatives would be out in full force; if Drew had AIDS, the implications for the Sinclair estate could be enormous.
The Sinclair fortune dated back to the Gold Rush when merchants like Leland Stanford made their initial capital by provisioning the miners and then went on to become tycoons. Three Sinclair brothers from Inverness started as teamsters and grocers. When the Gold Rush ended, the brothers and their descendants invested in California real estate. The extended Sinclair family was vast—direct descendants of the three brothers lived well; closer family had money for educations, distant relatives nothing. Fiona was the direct descendant of the oldest brother, Ian, and controlled the holding companies and trusts containing the fortune.
The crowd gathering at Fiona’s grew to over a hundred and included Drew’s friends, the haut monde of San Francisco’s gay community. I entered the cavernous living room when Robert de Montreville, one of Drew’s friends, stumbled into me. “Long time, no see,” he managed.
“Been in Moscow for several months on bank business.”
“Russia: an enigma, inside a puzzle, inside a condom,” Robert slurred. “Or a conundrum? Or something like that?”
“Something like that.”
“Oh my good gracious,” Robert said with a frown. “Have I offended the elegant Russian? What in the world got into me?”
“Sounds like a good deal of your inventory.”
Robert called himself a wine merchant and owned three wine/liquor stores in San Francisco’s upscale neighborhoods. He spoke Cajun and called it French; the t at the end of his first name was silent. I doubted if his original surname was the aristocratic-sounding de Montreville—not many of those types paddling around Louisiana’s swamps.
Speaking with the precision of the very drunk, Robert said, “Needed
