We drifted in silence. On every side I saw spidery, stiltlike mangrove roots branching out from thick-clustered branches before plunging into the soupy waters of the swamp. There was movement within the tangle of roots, sudden cries, now and then a distinct plop! as some unseen creature dropped into the water. Peg sat up in the bow with her legs hanging over the side, and turned to see if I was still terrified. I had spent enough time in boats with Jack, when we were young, that I was quite accustomed to daredevil nautical adventures, and Vera was every bit as reckless in a boat as Jack had once been. Suddenly we were through the mangrove and into a lagoon, this body of silver water placid, utterly still. Here the mangrove gave way to mudflats, a narrow fringe of gravelly beach, and a small boggy field of grass and bush behind. Peg called softly that we’d arrived, then stood up. As the bow scraped against the gravel she leapt off the boat and hauled it a few feet up from the shore, with Vera pushing from the stern.
The beach was firm enough but when Peg reached the pasture her bare feet sank into oozing black mud. A profound stillness had settled over the lagoon, intensified by the sudden screams and chatterings of birds. Peg pulled bottles of beer from the icebox and opened one for each of us, then handed out the sandwiches she’d made the night before. Happily we munched our breakfast and swigged cold beer as the sun climbed into a pale-blue sky streaked with wispy white clouds. It was in that place, or in a place very like it, that Peg’s decomposing body was later found, submerged face-up in a tangle of mangrove roots.
This is what Jack eventually told me about her death. When Peg was sixteen she and Vera had taken the boat out one night. They were both drunk. They wanted to get to a village up the coast because Johnny Hague was drinking in a bar there and had insisted they join him. Jack knew it was a foolish idea, and told them he wouldn’t allow them to go. They laughed at him. There was an argument on the dock, and after a few minutes he threw up his hands and went back inside. They took off into the bay and then turned north, up the coast. It was a cloudy night.
They were going way too fast when they hit the coral head. Vera was knocked unconscious. When she came to she found herself alone in the boat, drifting on the open sea with no idea where she was, or what had happened to Peg. The motor had stalled but there was no damage to the propellor, and she was able to start it up again. For hours she went round in circles shouting for Peg until she had almost no gas left. As Jack described all this I could see her in my mind’s eye, leaning far out over the side of the boat, growing increasingly desperate, screaming her daughter’s name into the darkness—but no answering cry. The wind was already rising when she got back to Pelican Road and told Jack what had happened.
They went back out and searched for several hours more. The weather grew worse. Vera was no longer sure where the accident had occurred. The mangrove swamps north of Port Mungo cover many square miles and form an intricate labyrinth of channels and lagoons, and Peg might have been swept almost anywhere by the current. Five days later a crab fisherman found her. In those five days Jack and Vera had continued to search, as had many others from Port Mungo, but with growing certainty that they would not find the girl alive.
Jack decided at the time of the accident to stay silent about the circumstances of that last trip in the boat, in the belief that no good would come of speaking up. He talked to me about it only once, and as far as I know he told only one other person. Nor did Vera ever admit her involvement in her daughter’s death, in fact she vigorously denied it. At the time they said they didn’t know who Peg had been with the night she died, and that was why it had remained a mystery.
It is hardly surprising then that my brother did not merely grieve for Peg, but was haunted by her memory and found no peace. I don’t think he was free of a sense of his own culpability for the rest of his life: he believed he should have stopped them going out that night. When he came to live in New York I became sensitive to his moods in this regard, and saw for myself the extent to which Peg continued to dominate his consciousness. I knew when she was coming to life in his mind, I could almost feel her stirring, and although he tried to push her down by sustaining his focus on his work, with Peg that rarely succeeded. I have never had a child myself but I do know erotic love, I know all about the bone-deep grinding and screaming of buried living emotion and worse, the utter black despair it engenders—all transient. All healed by time. But Jack’s feelings for his daughter were more intense than that, and after she died those feelings did not fade away, as a lover’s do, they merely slept, and why? Because his love for his daughter was infected with guilt, and the guilt interacted with it like an unstable chemical, producing virulence and combustion.
I remember watching him once while it happened. He was standing at the window in the big room downstairs, gazing down at the street below. For minutes on end he stood there silently, and I stood beside him, but he was not with me, he was somewhere else, he was in Port Mungo—when all at once a Yellow Cab came to an abrupt stop outside the house and provoked a blast of horn from the car behind. Some faint shouting as a fat young man in a black leather jacket clambered into the back of the cab. Jack came awake. He clicked his tongue, he was annoyed, as he always was when his thoughts began this absurd cycle again. It is me, Jack Rathbone, and I am the one who is still here, alive—can I not live a month of my life without being ravaged by these ancient memories? This was the voice of the upper self, which at the sight of a fat man climbing ungainly into the back of a cab all at once dispelled the phantom. He crossed the room and flung himself into an armchair and drummed his fingers on the arm. He banished her memory, and for a while, at least, through the sheer force of his will, he was free of her.
He told me once of seeing her in Central Park. Late autumn in the park: schoolchildren, joggers, a few tourists, people with dogs. Peg was in his thoughts, for in the early days after her death he had become adept at rousing her, and found he missed her less if he assumed she was with him, and spoke to her in his mind.
So he was walking through the park, conducting a mental conversation with his dead daughter, when he saw her on the path ahead of him. Lanky striding girl in a tattered hippie skirt, scuffed tennis shoes, faded denim jacket—same leggy gait, same tumble of tangled black hair—and he began to follow her. Jack loved the park, he knew it in all its moods, and that day there was mist in the trees, the squirrels busy among the heaped dead leaves, few people about, sounds muffled and colors muted, grays and browns, Rembrandt’s colors. She seemed to be making for the lake.
He stalked her along the path by the water’s edge. He kept his distance, still uncertain, but every moment growing more sure, and with a rising excitement, that it was her. Clumps of rushes all brown and dry in the shallows, a few geese still lingering, and drifting on the water the same mist that hung in the branches of the trees on the far shore. Beyond them the towers of Fifth Avenue beneath a gray, lowering sky. He saw a man throw a stick, and a dog go bounding into the lake and swim out to retrieve it. The geese lifted honking off the water. The dog returned to the bank, the stick between its teeth, and floundered out with its coat plastered wetly to its flanks.
He began running to catch up with her, calling her name.
Not her, of course, how could it be her? The face which abruptly turned to see what mad shouting creature pursued her was pitted, black-eyed, Slavic—Jack turned and walked off smartly in the opposite direction. It had happened before, he told me, this seeing-a-ghost, and I suspect it may have happened since.
Chapter Ten
It was a little over a year ago now that I came downstairs after my bath one evening and discovered an unfamiliar smell in the sitting room. I made myself a drink, and when Jack appeared I told him someone had been smoking. He took his time, I remember. He hovered over the drinks tray, laying his long careful fingers on the neck of the bottle I had brought up for him. Jack’s lack of interest in his own appearance may have accelerated with the years but occasionally, and without intending to, he achieved a certa
in careless elegance. After days in his studio he would be filthy, and when at last he noticed this he took to his bathroom, and then discovered in his closet fresh clean clothes, folded and ironed by my housekeeper, Dora. Then he presented a picture of elegance. So he did that night, as he loomed over the glass of wine he had poured, and lifted it to his nose.
When he had settled himself he told me he had been busy all morning with what he called the large canvas, a painting begun months before but as yet indeterminate. It was late October, so yes, a year ago, raw and damp, bad for his joints, and he was not in the best of tempers. He had stopped work at noon and eaten lunch at the kitchen table. He had asked Dora if there were any messages. Dora has been with me for many years. What an odd look she gave him, he said—full of foreboding, full of dire warning that what she was about to tell him he might not wish to hear. We both knew this look of Dora's. Jack told her to just please tell him who had called.
—Anna.
It took me a second or two.
—Your Anna? Anna Rathbone?
He nodded.
Anna. The other daughter. Whom he hadn’t seen in twenty years. He told me he picked up the phone and sat gazing at Dora with his hand over his mouth as though to keep from saying something he would later regret.
I never knew Anna in Port Mungo, but I certainly remembered her from the dreadful days immediately after we got the news about Peg. She was four years old then. She travelled to New York with Jack and they stayed with me. Vera arrived a few days later. We were all in a state of shock. Anna was silent and withdrawn, like a little ghost. She sat gazing out of the window, clutching a rag doll, her lips pressed together as though she had been forbidden on pain of death to breathe a word. Particularly frustrating from my point of view was that Jack was hardly more forthcoming. There had apparently been some sort of accident. Peg’s body had been discovered in a mangrove swamp. She had been missing for some days. The cause of death was unclear, as were the circumstances. There was no boat, so no indication of how she’d got there, and an open verdict was recorded. I felt sure that Jack could at least make a guess as to what might have happened, but when I tried to discuss it with him he glared at me then left the room without a word.
Matters were not improved by the arrival of my older brother. Gerald could at once be identified as one of us, as a Rathbone, I mean, for he was a gaunt, hawklike sort of a man, although unlike us he bore the marks of professional success: he was imposing and ponderous, he wore an expensive dark suit, his manner was clipped and grave and he had a way of taking off his spectacles when he wished to frown. What was he doing here? Extraordinary thing, but having somehow learned of Peg’s death he had flown to New York to sort things out; on the assumption, I suppose, that none of us was capable of it. It seemed he was most concerned about the welfare of little Anna. I have always believed children to be tougher than they look, it was certainly my father’s attitude towards the three of us, and I saw no reason why Anna wouldn’t get over the shock of her sister’s death provided she had an adult or two looking out for her. Jack felt the same. Gerald most certainly did not.
We were in the big sitting room downstairs, which in those days was very different from what it is today. Much more cluttered. It was just the four of us. Anna was there for the first few minutes until it became clear that this would be a stormy meeting, and Dora was called to take her upstairs. Vera took almost no part in the proceedings. She had not yet sobered up and had little to contribute to discussions of child welfare and the like, the only welfare which concerned Vera at the time being her own—I mean, her alcoholic welfare. And for the first time I noticed something which would become more apparent in her later sobriety, namely that real damage had been done in the years of heavy drinking. I didn’t trouble to analyze it precisely, but she couldn’t think straight any more. There were holes in her memory. Her logic was off. She lost words, proper nouns in particular. So Vera took almost no part in the proceedings, which left Jack to fight for Anna by himself.
He was hardly in better shape than Vera, but for all that he was capable of a furious resentment that his brother should presume to come to New York and tell him what was good for his own daughter, and he lost no time telling him so. That’s when I suggested Anna be taken upstairs.
—How do you know what’s good for her? snapped Gerald, contemptuously. This isn’t even your house.
I was astonished by his animosity. Gerald was older than us by several years. We had never been close to him, but nothing had happened as far as I was aware to account for the intense hostility of his tone. Jack was not strong, but he came back at him with some gusto, he said he had a damn sight better idea than Gerald did, this wasn’t even Gerald’s country.
—Then perhaps she should live in the same country as me. Be a part of a proper family. That child has every right to a respectable upbringing.
I think Jack must have made some mocking remark about the English and their cult of respectability. Gerald calmly waited for him to finish.
—All I’m saying, he said, is that nobody is looking after that child apart from a housekeeper who goes home at five o’clock.
—And?
—My dear man, you think that’s adequate?
—My dear man, this is a house where music and conversation and books are taken seriously. That child comes from a family of artists. She’ll suffocate in Surrey.
The argument continued, and at one point Gerald said that my household had “no structure,” that it was “sexually irregular,” which aroused my own indignation though Jack could not contain a hoot of laughter. After a while it got more personal still, and Gerald came close to suggesting that if Jack had raised his daughter differently she might still be alive. That’s when the words “criminal irresponsibility” were uttered.
—For god’s sake, Gerald! I cried, angry myself now.
—Shut up, Gin, he said, you know nothing about this.
That was certainly true. I was mystified by the impression he was giving of having information about events in Port Mungo of which I, for one, knew nothing.
You may imagine Jack’s reaction to all this. But he did not lose control. He did not throw a punch at his brother. He did not come at him with the sharp end of a broken bottle, which I was afraid he might, given the state he was in. He turned instead to Vera, and for the first time that afternoon she spoke up. She said to Gerald, Just cut it out.
Her nodding silence up to that point seemed to lend her a certain authority, when she did choose to speak. Then she turned to Jack and said she thought Anna should go to England with Gerald, at least for a while. I think Jack knew then he was beaten. He was not strong enough to resist his brother’s will, and I think he also recognized that he was in no condition to be a father to Anna. But he resented it fiercely.
Gerald wasted no time. The meeting broke up soon afterwards, and he went out into the hall and told Dora to please pack up Anna’s things, as she was leaving. It was a pathetic sight, the child silently coming down the stairs with her hand in Dora's, clutching the little bag containing her few scraps of clothing, her rag doll stuffed in on top. She had no idea what was going on. Gerald dropped to his knees and spoke softly to her, telling her she would be going with him now, to live with his family in his house in England. Jack and Dora and I stood in the hall watching this. Gerald stood up and Anna gazed about her, looking for her father. Jack stepped forward and she ran into his arms, and he lifted her up, holding her close. For several interminable seconds he held the child, whispering to her, and then he set her down and with a cold, sorrowing glance at his brother he turned and went upstairs. He was so very weak. A broken reed, I remember thinking. He was letting his own daughter go, giving her up. All at once she began to scream—“Daddy!”—and Gerald picked her up and carried her swiftly out the door and down the steps. It was terribly distressing for all of us. I went back into the sitting room. Vera was standing at the window. I stood beside her and we watched as Gerald flagged a cab and l
ifted the little girl in, then climbed in after her. I became aware that tears were streaming silently down Vera’s face.
—Darling, I said.
She turned to me.
—Poor Jack! she whispered.
It was some days before he could talk about any of this. By then Vera had left, vague about where she was going but promising to be in touch. Her own feelings about the loss of her daughter were blurred by alcohol. Gently I asked Jack how he felt about losing Anna. He had decided to be tough about it. A shrug, a snort. Well, we’ve lost that one. We’ve lost a good one there. And I understood then without his having to tell me that he had resolved not to pursue the child. Almost, it seemed, as if to intensify his pain—he had lost one daughter, what of it if he lost the other?—he let her go. And when Gerald moved to adopt Anna formally, Jack did not contest it. I had frankly no desire to have her living here, but I too was saddened at the thought of her growing up in Surrey. I did say to Jack later that it was possible we hadn’t lost her at all, because if she was really one of us—a Rathbone, I mean—then no amount of Surrey would keep her down.
The night of Anna’s visit Jack and I went out to eat at the Spanish place round the corner. The maître d', Luis, was always very fond of Jack. He took us at once to our table, which was in the corner at the back where it was private and quiet and dark. The candle was lit. The wine appeared. Above our heads hung framed posters of bullfighters. Jack put his glasses on to study the menu. I knew my brother too well to ask him outright what had happened with Anna. Instead, studying my own menu, I murmured that I thought she must want to make terms with the past.
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