Personal Effects

By Tom Casey

The accidental death of his friends results in a “discretionary duty” for writer Jeffrey Stevens, who goes to their home to sort through their personal effects. In one day he learns secrets of how past informs present, and that the future belongs to the living. A novel of quiet existential adventure.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tom Casey
• Release date: Apr 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9780982595015

Tom Casey

Tom Casey is the Managing Principal for Discussion Partner Collaborative a Global Executive Advisory firm. This is his fourth book focused on Talent Readiness.

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Personal Effects

A Novel

by Tom Casey

Published by Tom Casey

Smashwords Edition

www.tomcaseynyc.com

Copyright 2009 Tom Casey

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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For Kathy Andrews

PART ONE

After the first death, there is no other.

---Dylan Thomas

Chapter 1

Their embracing corpses were found lying side by side in the snow, faces without expression in that preternatural repose of death, of body without soul. These are the facts: they had reached the summit in early afternoon. A sudden storm overtook them in the descent and they lost their way in low visibility. Darkness fell. Rescue teams were unable to find them until daybreak. They were forty-two years old, in the prime of a vigorous early midlife. David Tobin had been a psychiatrist, and his wife, Kathryn, was an artist.

Jeffrey Stevens, now on his way to their home in his car to sort through their personal effects, had photographs of their final hours, given to him by their attorney. They are together in sunlight on the mountaintop smiling triumphantly. Kathryn’s photos of David: goggles at the top of his blue woolen cap squinting at the camera; another of him presenting the panoramic view with an outstretched hand, as if to say, This is splendor; this is tangible truth. In pictures that David took, Kathryn’s face is beaming. A final shot of the two of them together taken by David betrays no awareness of the fate awaiting them; they never supposed that this was the day of their death.

Besides the camera, a small pad was found in David’s jacket where he’d made record of their last hours. In rapidly written, barely legible notes, we discover: Summitted, 1433L. Storm gathering below. Unexpected.

At first their retreat had been simple; they retraced their path, David, we can surmise, leading, as he always did, Kathryn following close behind. According to weather reports, an hour into their descent the winds picked up. A weather pattern formed to the west producing clouds that spread laterally below them. The clouds grew swiftly as the storm rose up to meet them. They continued down, though hampered by the changing conditions. At one hour and twenty minutes they entered the clouds. In David’s now nearly unreadable script:

1553L We are not properly dressed for this. Lost the trail. Must double back. Forty minutes lost.

1657L. Dark.

Sunset had trapped them in blizzard snows; David comprehended their deteriorating situation. Disoriented, cold, exhausted, they had made a makeshift shelter, lying shoulder to shoulder, backs to the wind.

Unless rescued we will not survive the night. Concerned. Kathryn frightened.

Jeffrey put himself in their situation. It was easy to imagine David mad with regret, thoughts hovering above them as a tumultuous reflection of what life had been, images of challenges met, obstacles overcome, insights gained, pain endured, pleasures enjoyed and sorrows shared in the strange string of fifteen thousand days that had been theirs to live on earth. And what had been Kathryn’s thoughts? What was she thinking as David drew her into his arms? Did they simply fall asleep with hope of rescue calming their fears? Jeffrey Stevens speculated: how odd it was, how strange and ephemeral; how at peril life had always been; and mysterious; and in the face of ultimate loss, they held each other while the wind howled like a fierce cry for help, a cry for rescue. But they were not rescued; instead, in the morning, after snows subsided, they were discovered.

Chapter 2

The unexpected death of David and Kathryn Tobin made it necessary to dispose of their personal effects. There were no immediate relatives competent to do it; Kathryn’s parents were deceased; she had a sister in Alaska, but they weren’t close. David’s mother was a resident in a nursing home and his father was a patient in an asylum; he had a brother in Texas with drug problems who was out of touch with the family. Therefore the task fell to Jeffrey Stevens, the closest friend of the couple. He had been asked by David’s attorney, who was also his attorney, to go to their home and sort through their belongings.

We’ll make arrangements with a moving company in a few days, the attorney had told him.

What will happen to their possessions?

Eventually they’ll be sold at auction.

Sold at auction?

Any items not specifically designated to beneficiaries in their wills.

Have you seen their wills?

I haven’t reviewed them yet, but I drew them up a few years ago.

Do you remember anything exceptional in them?

Not really. When they moved from New York they revised their previous testament. There were changes in beneficiaries; Kathryn’s father died that year and David’s mother was moved to a full care facility. As I recall there were trusts to secure their future. The attorney shrugged. The house will be sold and assets liquidated. In the meantime, it’s a good idea, as a friend, to gather up items that would be of no interest in an estate sale. The need for discretion makes it essential to have someone like you, a close friend, protect their trust. He paused, adding, It’s a delicate duty; I think you understand.

Jeffrey understood.

After leaving the attorney, Jeffrey went back to his boat, a sloop, Moonstruck, moored in the Five Mile River at Rowayton, where in summer he lived aboard. A writer of novels and a minor celebrity in the village, he sat with a glass of wine, watching the movement of sailing vessels in the harbor channel. He tried unsuccessfully to comprehend the enormity of this sudden loss of his best friends, coming less than a year after the death of his fiancé. David was a seasoned climber; it was his passion. Kathryn was less enthusiastic about it, but, naturally athletic, she accompanied him happily enough when time and opportunity allowed.

A butterfly landed on the boom. It rested nervously for a moment and then resumed its flight, circling above the cockpit in a hullabaloo of whirls, and then shooting a straight course for the garden basket on Mrs. Murphy’s kitchen window. He had read that some butterflies migrated thousands of miles each year. Thousands of miles! Jeffrey sipped his wine, wondering what perils a butterfly might expect to meet on a journey like that.

Chapter 3

The sun was bright in late morning on the first Saturday of May when Jeffrey Stevens turned on to the street where the Tobins had happily lived for many years. As their home came into view, an unexpected discomfort came over him. The neighborhood had that cheerful aspect of spring’s sudden fecundity, one of those quiet and peaceful suburban precincts that feels like happy memories of childhood. Their house, a New England white clapboard cottage with gabled windows and an attached garage, stood as though awaiting their return, but it was Jeffrey who turned into the driveway, parked, switched off the motor and sat silently for a moment with a growing sense of foreboding. Nothing felt right about any of it. When he got out of his car he walked up the flagstone path to the main entrance. He found the false rock by the front door, picked it up and turned it over. His thumb slid the plate back and a hidden key fell into the palm of his hand. He fit the key into the brass keyhole, turned it, and the lock tumbled. He paused for a moment then pushed the door open but lingered outside, an irrational resistance keeping him standing there. The sun disappeared behind a cloud and then reappeared, reconstituting bright colors and defining shadows into the neighborhood’s mosaic of security and optimism.

They had seemed to everyone the perfect couple, and in many ways they were: a psychiatrist and an artist of recognized talent; if you knew them it felt right: a speculative scientist and an abstract impressionist, each deeply involved in the secular spirit of the human experience. Jeffrey had often noted how well they communicated on that non-verbal level possible only when sympathies are intertwined so that the voice of one speaks for the spirit of the other.

They had moved to the suburbs five years earlier. Until then, they had lived happily in New York’s Greenwich Village, on Barrow Street. The move to Darien was a natural progression; this old line Sound shore town forty miles from midtown had a peaceful settled atmosphere. David moved his practice and Kathryn had ample space to establish a studio in the back yard, where she spent her days painting and sculpting.

Still standing at the front door as though waiting for an invitation to enter, Jeffrey could see inside where sunlight falling brightly in the room enhanced a sense of life ongoing. Jeffrey at last entered into their home; dread shaded his mood as the door closed behind him.

Off to the left of the small foyer was the living room; beyond it, to the rear, was the kitchen and dining area. On the right, down a hall that went past the stairs, was David’s study. David’s taste coincided with his own; their furniture was comfortable, unpretentious, and arranged to give a welcoming impression of warmth. These spaces were familiar to Jeffrey; these rooms knew him; as he moved through them he had a sense that the rooms were alive to his presence.

The glassed door to the study was open; Jeffrey went in. It wasn’t a big space, but it had a wide greenhouse window that curved out at the top and overlooked the garden. The garden was well tended and defined with a fieldstone border. Flowers had begun to blossom, and in sunlight their colors seemed to deepen the richness of the green lawn. Beyond the garden to the right was Kathryn’s studio. Old growth elm and sycamore trees gave the yard a woodsy character, and on the far side, in contrast to these, a large weeping willow spread its limbs over a frog pond completing a composition of great natural beauty. On the lawn birds strutted, squirrels gamboled, butterflies tinkerbelled, and in the tweet and twitter of it all, bumble bees hovered over buttercups in the sun. Jeffrey studied the view: freezing to death had nothing to do with this.

He sat down at the desk of his lost friend. From his pocket he withdrew a notebook he habitually carried and began to write: He died of misjudgment, of hubris. He died stupidly and unnecessarily. He died of a mistaken belief that certain gifts of mind made him immune to nature’s indifference. He was ultimately unwise.

Jeffrey paused, put down his pen, and stared out the window in abstraction. These were not words he’d intended to write. He’d meant to write something affectionate, a note to himself in a way to express his fondness for both of them. Instead, his hand wrote an angry remonstrance. Well, wasn’t anger a form of regret? Quite without warning tears welled in Jeffrey’s eyes; his friends were gone, this was a fact, but part of him had been lost also.

He stood up suddenly, put away his pen and notebook, and went through old fashioned pocket doors to the adjacent family room, where photos on the wall revealed David’s lean handsome face smiling with its hint of boyish misdemeanor; Kathryn’s dark good looks and the circumspect, somewhat skeptical seriousness of her natural expression. A cluster of framed pictures stood on a table behind the couch: David and Kathryn skiing; David and Kathryn sailing; David and Kathryn at the beach, and in the Rocky Mountains on their first climb. Jeffrey’s thoughts drifted: David and Kathryn dead. This was a notion at odds with evidence everywhere of vigorous life.

Two large oil paintings by Kathryn dominated the wall opposite the fireplace. Jeff had thought the paintings colorful but indecipherable; Kathryn had a more coherent style; but these were favorites of her husband. Jeff speculated that David’s enthusiasm for such art could be correlated to the scattershot verbal effusions of his troubled patients.

Book shelves from floor to ceiling on both sides of the fireplace gave the room particular warmth. These suited Jeffrey’s taste admirably. Here were Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Maupassant, Huysman, Proust, the Brontes, Wilde, Lowry, Twain, Melville, Hawthorne, Conrad, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and other writers of fiction arranged on one side roughly according to country and chronology. Then biographies: all of the same writers in several treatments, and others; Boswell’s Johnson; Freud, his complete works; the complete works of Harry Stack Sullivan; the works of Churchill including a shelf devoted to twentieth century history, and many books of Kathryn’s on art and artists. It was a room of erudition, an impressive collection of volumes that had been read and annotated and re-read.

In addition to photographs on the table, black and white photos in black frames covered the best part of one wall. These photographs continued a pictorial story of their life, and Jeffrey and his late fiancé were featured in many of them. A large red and green vegetable dye Persian carpet finished the room with a richness of soft natural tones.

This is clearly a home, Jeffrey thought, turning his head slowly, surveying the room and the good feeling it resonated. The house itself was not large, which was part of its charm. The furnishings and art and objects within were tasteful but not excessive. They had lived, thought Jeffrey, with what Virginia Woolf insisted was all anyone needed: enough space and a few good things.

Chapter 4

Minutes passed. Jeffrey Stevens contemplated death. His thoughts were indecisive, insistent but unresolved, running in circles the way they hover when you’re half-asleep. The neat composition of the family room, the photographs, paintings