“Who?” asked Caitlin. She smiled when she felt the slightest fear and that usually seemed to work.
“Gordon Jaffrey, the photographer. He used to be quite a good friend of yours.”
“He was?” asked Caitlin, indicating confusion, and a willingness to be let in on an absurd joke.
“It would be really a shame if you held the truth back from us,” said the Mexican-looking agent.
“Shame?” said Caitlin. “I used to feel shame all the time, now I never do, practically never.”
And that was exactly when the kid waddled in. He was four years old but not terribly coordinated. Poor thing, he already wore eyeglasses. He had been going through his mother’s dresser drawers and found, hidden away in one of those accordion files made of brown cardboard, a cache of photographs. Gordon’s photographs, taken at Camp Sunrise, exactly eleven years ago. The Fee-bees never guessed but the pictures were all there, right under their noses—the empty flagpoles, the zodiac ceiling, the last of that day’s sunlight making a Bethlehem-star pattern in the tangle of empty branches.
“Mama,” the child said, holding the pictures before him, his belly showing beneath the hem of the blue flannel shirt he had outgrown, the sunlight flashing in his glasses, his roseate mouth in its characteristic querulous pucker. “Can I have these pictures to keep?”
THREE
FEBRUARY 21, 1929
It was the day after Caitlin’s birthday. She was eight years old, tall, graceful, with long, already shapely legs, delicate fingers, and her eyes had an element of virtuosity to them— they could accuse, appraise, they could even, in some childish, innocent way, smolder.
Her parents had imbued the story of her birth with a sense of drama that floated in Caitlin’s vague sense of herself like a long curl of blood in a glass of water. They thought at first that Annie was barren and then there was a miscarriage, and then another—Caitlin’s vision of miscarriage was based on the still-born calf she once saw: a liver-and-white creature glistening with its mother’s gore, which the other cows stomped on their way through the barn.
For Caitlin’s eighth birthday, Annie made a vanilla cake and spelled her name on the icing with nasturtium petals, which Peter had saved from the summer, pressed in his copy of Ivanhoe. Caitlin had wanted a dog or a cat, but the Flemings were strict about the families in the tenant houses keeping animals—the Flemings had expensive hunting dogs and an Abyssinian cat to whom they gave the run of the property and which they didn’t want polluted by the sperm of lesser animals. And so Caitlin was given a thick green sweater, which her mother had knitted, a smooth wooden bracelet, which her father had carved out of cherry, and a subscription to the Saturday Evening Post, which would come every week in a brown envelope and be placed in the tin mailbox on River Road and which would have her name typewritten on the wrapper— and this was paid for with cash money.
Now, the day after, she was in her bed, in the cold room at the north end of the house, wearing over her nightgown the new green sweater and wearing on her wrist the smooth, burnished oval her father made. A rime of ice was on the window and behind that was the faintly silver darkness of a winter morning without sun. Caitlin gripped the hem of the quilt; beneath her bed, currents of cold air twisted and turned like eels under ice. The window glass rattled in its pane.
She must go to school today, a journey of two miles, which she must make walking backward against the wind that would pant in her face like an eager dog no matter which way she turned.
But for now she could be still. She did not have to worry about oversleeping because she knew her father would come in when it was time.
He minded her now, after leaving the first years to Annie. Caitlin was like a baton that had been passed and now Peter was running with her. He had taken over her upbringing, if not her care. He showed her sunsets, the stars; they went often to the woods with a torch to see what went on in the night. He taught her the names of the trees, flowers, grasses, and weeds. She knew where the morels grew, and next year he said she could take them to town and sell them for money. He taught her poetry and chess. He made her a pair of real Dutch wooden shoes, and when she was too shy to wear them he made a pair for himself and together they walked the muddy fields, leaving in the soft earth marks that looked like small anvils.
It had been a disappointment for Peter when Annie did not produce a son—even as it was for Annie, for whom manhood was not necessarily exalted but for whom womanhood was a state of danger and humiliation. Peter had wanted one day to pass along the tools and costumes of his trade, the outfits that meant as much to him as caps and ribbons would to a soldier. He had wanted a boy to give the green-and-tan gum boots one wore when working in a mucky barn, the moleskin trousers one wore when clearing the brush, the heavy wool birding pants, the gloves, the hickory-handled hammer, the brilliant little carbon-toothed saw that could cut through lead, the thick and aged ropes. These were the things that represented a way of life, a way of doing things Peter respected; they were a part of a harmony he found comforting and even beautiful, though of course it drowned out whatever his own personal song might have been.
Caitlin heard the door below her room open with a groan. She slipped out of bed and ran to the window. She pressed her hand against the ice until a palm-shaped peephole melted, and then she looked through and saw her mother on her way up the black frozen path to the Flemings’. She must be there early to roll out dough for bread and to make the breakfast in case someone in the main house got up early. There was barely any snow on the ground, just a little crust here and there nestled into the bare branches of the forsythia or mixed in with the dead leaves along the stone walls. Annie wore a long black coat over her white uniform, and black rubber boots with the snaps open, and they seemed to want to come off her feet as she trudged up the incline.
In front of her, rising out of a wreath of mist, was the brick mansion with its towering, narrow chimneys, which seemed to impale it, pins through a butterfly. In the summer, Caitlin might spy her mother walking barefoot on this path, suddenly girlish, swinging her white, square-heeled shoes in her hand as she breathed her only free breaths of the day. But in the winter speed was all. Annie walked quickly, with her head bowed against the wind, and Caitlin watched as she got further and further away, in a landscape shaped by Caitlin’s small hand, until the ice formed again in the handprint, the fingers filled in and then the palm, and then the glass was opaque and Annie was gone.
Caitlin ran back to her bed, pulled the covers up to her chin, and closed her eyes.
It was Peter’s job to awaken Caitlin, feed her, get her off to school. The Flemings could never complain about what time Peter started working—everyone knew he did more than his share on the property, did the work of two men, maybe three, and barely got the pay of just one.
He liked to wake her gently, recalling and recoiling from the raucous risings of his own Dutch childhood—his mother beating a spoon against a pot, his father simply throwing open the windows. Peter wanted his daughter to have mornings that allowed contemplation, gratitude for life, reverence, pleasure. He would say, “Only a still pond can hold a reflection.”
Sometimes he woke her by merely sitting on the bed and letting his thoughts stir her. Sometimes he stroked her hair until she opened just one eye, a dolphin breaking the water’s surface; she would smile at him, reach for him. And then there were the times when he would slip into the bed with her, the small bed that he had made with his own hands and he and Caitlin had lacquered one distant afternoon in an equipment barn while the rain had drummed on the tin roof, drummed and drummed and drummed.
This was one of those frigid winter mornings when even the wind is too cold to make a sound. Peter had made oatmeal—he believed in hot breakfasts, just as he believed in hard work. His long face was raw from a cold-water wash and the scrape of the straight razor; he smelled of brown soap and the strong coffee he had poured into himself. His hands were always cold, with something waxy and pious about them. He
blew on them to warm his fingers. He was wearing dark brown boots that laced almost to the knee, and he was careful not to get them on the quilt as he stretched out next to his daughter and whispered in her ear, “Caitlin, rise and shine.”
She had a slight cold, she’d had it since the harsh weather settled in, and her breathing was raspy, belabored. It was only ten years since children died by the thousands from influenza and winter colds were still occasions for dread. Peter listened to her phlegmy breaths and he spun between the magnetic poles of concern and rapture: her beauty was braided around her vulnerability and it broke his heart.
He loved Caitlin with the core of his being. It was a love so deep, so alive, so boundless and incoherent that there were times he was lost within it. He walked through his love like a man through a blizzard. And he would never mean to hurt her, or frighten her in any way. But he must lie next to her; he must feel the abrupt curve of her spine through the quilt as she lay curled into herself.
His love of order bent beneath the burden of his love and he felt fear this morning, real fear. There was something lonely within him, something ravenous, and he didn’t know what this beast of appetite required of him. He wanted to cover his little girl’s face with kisses but he knew he must never. Desire came to him like a traveler from a distant land: he didn’t understand its language, he couldn’t communicate with it except for pleading, impatient gestures.
He was perfectly suited for running a large estate and there was not one man who worked under him who felt he ought to have Peter’s position. He knew every stone and tree on the property, his Dorset lambs, his Guernsey cows, his horses. He knew the proper mix of ash and oak and cherry to make a perfect sugaring fire, knew the exact direction to place the bales of hay for the best drying in July and how to change the angle slightly in August. He knew carpentry and plumbing, and was lucky when it came to wells. He knew everything on this property except his own heart, but this was the moment when everything else fell away and it was only this mysterious muscle with which he had to contend.
He stretched out next to his sleeping daughter and slowly brought his fingers closer to her hair, never knowing, never even suspecting, that though Caitlin’s eyes were closed she was entirely awake.
Maybe some men who dream of fondling their children, who want to press them close in a long, forbidden embrace, do so out of some need to debase and defile the innocence before them. Or perhaps they are compelled to reenact some childhood wound—a moment, perhaps, when an adult did the same to them. But in Peter’s case it was largely the consequence of a heart and a conscience unprepared for the love that was thrust upon it. His view of himself was small and tidy, and now he carried within him too much passion. He stumbled beneath it, just as a man staggering down the road beneath a load of kindling on his shoulders can drift far from the path and end up in the briars, the bog, in a world of trouble.
“Caitlin?” he said in a whisper like a flame guttering in a candle.
She pretended to sleep.
“Caitlin,” he said again, this time louder.
And she knew, without exactly knowing why, that he was testing to see if she was asleep and, if so, how deeply. She slipped her arm beneath her pillow and breathed herself deeper into the mesh of the mattress.
He moved closer to her and then closer still, until he could not be closer without being on top of her. “Shhh, shhh,” he said.
And then he pressed himself against her, hard, and he was hard, too, though it would be some years before she could remember that part of it, that hardness at his center.
“Shhh,” he said, “sleep. I love you, my darling. I love you.”
It was an incantation, and as he said it he was pressing against her and moving, rubbing, once, twice, again and again. And then he rolled away and got quickly out of the bed, ran from the room, and out of the house.
She heard his footsteps going away and she heard his voice. His voice was low, it sounded stunned, he was talking to himself but she could not understand the words. The wind carried them away.
She lay there for a long while, lonely for him, confused, feeling queerly ill at the pit of her stomach, the way she once did when she heard something she was not meant to—her mother saying to Peter: “It hurts when I pass my water. Do you think I should see the doctor?”
It was cold in that room and she pulled the covers over her head to be away from the air, which moved everywhere, looking for someone to make miserable. The darkness beneath the quilt was cold, too, but at least it was still and soon she was asleep again, thinking as consciousness faded that if no one came to waken her then she would not go to school.
When she did awaken, it was well past the time to go to school. The sun had streaked the icy window; long ovals of blue showed through the gray glass. She heard voices below, excited. She heard Shorty Russel saying, “Put him down here—careful now, careful.”
She sat up in bed, knowing something awful had happened. And then someone said, “Go up to the house and tell Mr. Fleming.”
“Yes, and Annie, too,” another voice said.
“My leg is broken,” she heard her father say, his voice filled with anger and wavering with the effort to remain calm.
“You’re lucky you ain’t dead,” Shorty Russel said. “What could be the matter with you? And what were you doing with that tractor in the woods anyhow?”
“I was bringing in some wood, the red oak we cut down last week.”
“Well, I think you must be crazy. You just drove that tractor off that ledge as if you was blind. Here, I’m going to put your leg up here to make you more comfortable.”
And more than anything else that day, she would remember sitting up in her bed and holding her ears as her father made one final strangled shout of pain.
FEBRUARY 21, 1940
Years later, Caitlin would learn that today the Germans began building the concentration camp at Auschwitz. But in her own life this day seemed only the beginning of her first true adventure, the day she left Leyden for Washington, D.C., the day when the restless and grandiose part of herself that had always dreamed of a life away from the estate, a life full of sleek errands and witty friends, a life of real importance, had suddenly to find a heretofore undiscovered internal ally—a self who could actually manage such a life.
Her parents brought her to the train station. Mr. Fleming had loaned Caitlin’s father the Buick to take Caitlin to the station and eighteen dollars to buy the ticket, which Fleming had handed over in a flour sack into which he swept spare change from his bureau at the end of every week—the eighteen dollars was in pennies, nickels, and dimes and weighed as much as a fieldstone.
Peter drove slowly, with his knuckles like bleached stones from gripping the steering wheel so tightly. Caitlin sat beside him, watching the snowy countryside go past in fits and starts. Annie sat in the back, checking through the wicker basket full of provisions she had packed for the train journey. Fleming had neglected to give Peter the key to the trunk, so Caitlin’s trunk and suitcases were also in the back; Annie sat precariously perched on the suitcase with her feet propped on the trunk while she touched now the apples, now the jar of pickled green beans, now the little tin of biscuits.
They were silent. It was six in the morning; dawn was two red furrows in an ice-gray sky. Peter drove the car over a slushy pothole and gasped at the thought of having damaged Mr. Fleming’s car. “What did Dr. Freeman have to say for himself?” Peter Van Fleet asked, as he took the turn off River Road. They were just a half mile from the train station by now.
“That’s funny, I was just thinking about him,” said Caitlin.
Peter smiled, pleased and regretful—he always said they had a special communication, and now it was ending.
“A clean bill of health and all that?” he said.
“He said I should eat more,” said Caitlin.
“As if we didn’t feed you,” said Annie, from the back seat.
It struck Caitlin then that her mother was alw
ays a voice from the back seat, or the next room, someone just out of earshot, someone not entirely included. She turned to look at her mother but it was difficult, wearing such a bulky coat, sitting as she was. She straightened herself out and felt her heart grow heavy.
“We may as well face it,” said Peter. “Freeman’s a quack. He moved here from the city. Running from something, I’ll bet.” As respectful as Peter was toward the Flemings, he was just that scornful toward everybody else.
“Then why did you make such a fuss about me going to him?”
“Well, with you going off halfway across the country …”
“I’m going to Washington, not Kansas City.”
“You got that right,” Peter said, smiling. “Kay Cee. Halfway across the country.”
“If I put it on your plate and you don’t eat it, I don’t think it’s my fault,” said Annie.
“I know that, Mama,” said Caitlin. This time she did not attempt to turn around. She just said it and left it at that.
“Everything else check out, though?” asked Peter. “Ticker?”
Caitlin had had scarlet fever when she was ten and there had been persistent concern about her heart since then.
“Ticker’s great, pulse is the cat’s pajamas.”
“I always actually see a cat wearing pajamas when you say that,” said Peter, grinning happily. He had been sullen for days, dreading this goodbye at the train station, but now his spirits were rising like a fever.
Caitlin was thinking about the look on Dr. Freeman’s face—he was a small, dapper man, with a pencil mustache and brilliantined hair—when he said, “Are you still intact?” She had told him it was none of his business and he smiled, smoothed his mustache down with his forefinger, and interpreted her little flash of temper as a kind of confession.
Secret Anniversaries Page 5