The Crime of Julian Wells

by Thomas H. Cook

  “I would certainly doubt it,” I answered, though it was conceivable that a rootless man might eventually have sunk secret roots.

  “I always hoped that he had someone,” Loretta said. “Some whore in Trieste, if nothing more. Just someone he was growing old with, someone who might comfort him.”

  “Then perhaps you should believe he did,” I said.

  Loretta’s eyes flashed. “Is that what gets you through the night, Philip?” she asked. “Choosing to believe something, whether it’s true or not?”

  “In one way or another, Loretta, isn’t that what gets everyone through the night?” I asked.

  “You don’t think he ever fell in love?” Loretta asked.

  “No, I don’t think he ever fell in love,” I answered, and again felt the pain of losing my wife three years before, a hole in my heart I could find no way to heal.

  Loretta reached for her drink but only stared into it. “It was Argentina,” she said, her tone quite thoughtful. “The map Julian was looking at the day he died. Maybe he was thinking about that trip the two of you made down there.”

  “That was thirty years ago, Loretta,” I said. “Why would he have been thinking about that?”

  She released a breath that was like a tired breeze, driven too far over rough terrain. “Like the winds from off the Karst,” as Julian had once written in one of his college essays, “thirsting for the Adriatic.” Such had been his style in the high days of his youth, his language predictably stilted, cluttered with allusions to places he’d never been. So different from what his work later became, those emaciated sentences, so darkly spare.

  “A map of Argentina,” Loretta said softly, almost to herself. “Do you think he was on the trail of something down there?”

  “It’s possible, I suppose.”

  But on the trail of what? I wondered, though there seemed no way to know in what direction Julian was heading when he decided to go to the pond instead.

  “By the way,” I said, “have you read the manuscript Julian brought back?”

  “No,” Loretta said as if my question had only drawn her deeper into Julian’s mystery. “He cut out their eyes, you know, that Russian horror. And that’s not all, of course.”

  “Yes, I know what Chikatilo did,” I said with a wave of the hand.

  Loretta’s attention drifted toward the window. “We were in Rome, Julian and I. Just children. We were in that little piazza, the Campidoglio. He said it looked perfectly square because Michelangelo had designed it to look perfectly square by widening it here and elongating it there. It wasn’t actually square at all. It was a masterful trick of perspective. ‘It’s distortion that creates perfection, Loretta,’ he said.”

  She turned toward me and I saw a subtle shift in the mosaic of this woman, and with that shift I realized just how deeply Loretta had loved Julian, and that she always would. He’d been the older brother who had taken time with her, who had offered her his thoughts, his feelings, and then, for some reason she would never know, had chosen to remove himself for years on end, one of life’s true vagabonds.

  “Julian was good,” she said softly. “That’s what I’ll miss. His goodness.”

  I felt a scuttling movement in the place where my youth lay like a discarded old traveling case, timeworn and battered, layered in gray dust. I glanced at my watch. “I’m sorry, but I have to look in on my father.”

  Loretta nodded. “How is he?”

  For the first time in a long time, I felt an uneasy loosening in the grip I was careful to maintain upon myself.

  “Fading,” I said. I looked toward the window, where the rain had not let up. “Bad night.” I rose, grabbed my coat, and drew it on. “Well, I’ll see you at the service on Friday.”

  Loretta stared at her now-empty glass. “Do you think you knew him, Philip?”

  “Not enough to have saved him, evidently,” I answered. “Which means I’ll always be silent in that boat.”

  She looked up at me. “I guess we all leave a trail of little pebbles scattered on the forest floor,” she said. “But I’ll always wonder where those pebbles would have led to with Julian.”

  I had no answer to this question, nor ever expected to have one. She saw my retreat, and so offered her own admittedly inadequate one.

  “Just to more pebbles, I suppose,” she added with a small, sad smile.

  I gathered up my coat. “I’m afraid so.”

  I expected this to be the end of it, but something behind Loretta’s eyes darkened. “I’m silent in that boat, too, you know,” she said.

  The feeling I saw rise in her at that moment was striking in its subdued passion. She had worked at home for years and years, while nursing Colin through his long dying, and yet, for all that, something still sparkled in her, a fierce curiosity.

  “And if I never find those words, I feel that I’ll live a bit like poor Masha,” she said. “Dressed in black, in mourning for my life.”

  They were dramatic words, of course, but the moment was dramatic, too, I thought, and in its aftermath, as I stepped outside and hailed a cab, it struck me that both for her and for me, what she’d said was true. A man we’d both loved had taken his own life. He had done so alone and had given neither of us a chance to stop him.

  There are times when the very earth seems poised to move against us, and at that instant, I recalled Julian at Two Groves, playing croquet with my father, while Loretta and I looked on. He’d hit the ball with both verve and confidence, which had given his game a dead-on accuracy that even then I suspected he would later apply to whatever he chose to do. Upon his inevitable victory, he had leaped into a shimmering summer air that had seemed to embrace him.

  How, from so bright a beginning, I wondered, had the world conspired to bring him to so black an end?

  2

  There are some bridges you cannot cross again, and so your only choice is simply to make the best of the shore you have chosen. And so, in the taxi, heading toward my father’s apartment, I concentrated on my life’s many satisfactions. The smaller ones, like good food, and the larger ones, like the years I’d had with my wife—comforts that Julian had not found in his youth and later chose not to seek.

  For some reason, these thoughts brought to mind a passage from one of Julian’s books, his description of Henri Landru. He’d written that the famous French serial killer had begun to talk as his date with the guillotine grew near, even going so far as to make a crude drawing of the kitchen where the bodies had been burned. Death’s approach had turned him quite gossipy, Julian said, so that in the last days, Landru had been less the condemned man silently brooding on his crimes than a washerwoman chatting in the market square.

  Not so Julian, I thought now, and instantly imagined him alone on the sunporch with his map of Argentina and God only knew what grim thoughts in his mind. Had he, in his last hours, inexplicably returned to the first tragedy that touched him? And if so, why?

  There could be no answer to these questions, of course, so rather than pursue a fruitless trail, I drifted through the mundane details of Julian’s early life.

  He was born upper-middle-class, his father a State Department official who’d been one of my father’s closest friends. His mother had died giving birth to Loretta, and after that Julian and his sister had been overseen by a series of nannies. By the time Julian and Loretta were in grade school, James Wells had retired because of a heart condition. A few years later, he’d bought the Montauk farmhouse, in which he had died at age fifty-five.

  That death had devastated Julian, and something of his lost father settled over him for many months, a lingering presence, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, which is exactly how Julian once described it. In the wake of his father’s death, he seemed ever more determined to make a mark in life. Even so, the space his father had occupied remained empty, a void never filled. “A little boy needs a hero,” he once said to me, though without adding what I knew was on his mind, the fact that with his father gone, he’d
lost that hero in his own life.

  A cautious man, Julian’s father had left his two children, Julian, fifteen, and Loretta, twelve, well fixed, mostly by means of a substantial life insurance policy, the proceeds from which had retired the Montauk mortgage. A bachelor uncle had promptly moved into the house and from there attempted to assume the role of father. Boarding school had taken up the remaining slack. College tuitions had later absorbed what was left of the inheritance, so that by the time Julian graduated from Columbia and Loretta from Barnard, only the Montauk house remained.

  The surprise in all this was that despite the loss of his father and the rather haphazard and emotionally flat nature of his later upbringing, Julian had emerged with so solid, even sterling, a personal character. He had not received the intense moral education my father had provided for me—his many lectures on charity as the greatest of all virtues, his compassion for the poor and the disinherited, his deathless hope that the meek might one day inherit some portion of the earth. And yet, Julian appeared to have taught himself those very lessons, so that by the time he began to spend summers with me, he seemed already primed to receive the finishing touches of my father’s table talk—that is to say, his ancestral tales of men who’d fought under the banner of some universal goodness.

  But why was I recounting Julian’s personal history? I wondered. What good would it do now?

  None whatsoever, of course, and so I had no explanation for this bend in my mind, except that something in my latest exchange with Loretta had set me to considering Julian’s life in the way a detective might, as if he were a mystery whose disparate clues I was now trying to puzzle out. No, not a detective exactly, I decided, more like a writer seized by a mysterious purpose: Charles Latimer in A Coffin for Dimitrios listening as Colonel Haki describes the nefarious career of a strange Greek swindler, wondering what he really was, this dead Dimitrios, and as he listens, growing slowly, haltingly, and against his own better judgment, ever more determined to find out.

  I thought again of the summers Julian had spent at our home in Virginia while Loretta either attended a theater camp in upstate New York or stayed at her aunt’s house in Connecticut. Those had been hot, languid days at Two Groves, days of fishing in the pond, canoeing down the river, reading together in the study, or listening as my father talked, mostly to Julian, about having a career in the State Department, one he expected to be very different from his own, Julian more what he called “the James Bond type” than he had ever been.

  And this was true enough. There’d been a genuinely dashing quality to Julian. It was easy to imagine him swinging a polo mallet or leaping hedges on a black stallion. He had an ear for classical music and an eye for painting, but even these less muscular attributes did not detract from how very male he was. Both men and women loved him, and that, as my father once noted, cannot be said of many men. Sometimes he reminded me of Sebastian in Brideshead Revisited, equally favored by the stars. But Sebastian had lost himself to drink and thus lived his life in a blur of attenuated afternoons. Julian on the other hand was strictly spit-and-polish, ready to work and quick to pitch in, a young man who drank very little and whom I often found alone in our orchard, his back pressed against the trunk of a pecan tree, studying, it seemed, the crazy patchwork of the limbs.

  From my great store of memories, I suddenly drew out the one of Julian visiting me at Princeton. It was a memory that lifted me, as if on the swell of some elegiac refrain, then drew me down again like sand in a wave, so that I was once again seated on my dormitory bed, alone, reading, of all things, A Sentimental Journey.

  “Sterne hated Smollett, you know,” Julian informed me as he swung a chair around and sat down before me. “He said his travel writing was all ‘spleen and jaundice.’”

  Tall and slender, he wore dark, well-pressed pants and a white shirt with both sleeves rolled up to just below the elbow. He’d done his share of sports at school, but what he gave off, more than health and raw competitiveness, was that confident American sense of not only getting what you want, but of getting it easily and, in a way, deservedly, as if it had been awaiting you all along.

  “Are you really going to major in English, Philip?” he asked.

  I turned to face him. “What’s wrong with studying English?”

  “Nothing at all,” Julian answered. “But your life will be rather sedentary, don’t you think?”

  And so it had turned out, I thought now, my life just the sort Julian had never contemplated for himself any more than he would have contemplated the darker one that had come to him after Argentina.

  After Argentina.

  Had it begun there, I asked myself, the downward spiral of Julian’s life?

  The question brought up one of Julian’s abiding themes, the fact that in each life there are confluences, currents, and undercurrents, and that in some swim the Graces—Splendor, Mirth, and Good Cheer—while in others there are surely monsters. So it was in much of Julian’s writing, a chance encounter, a hastily spoken word, some idle conversation that might seem of no importance but which, for better or worse, changes a life forever. In The Tortures of Cuenca, it is the mundane selling of a lamb that ignites suspicions that ultimately lead to a great crime.

  Crime, I repeated in my mind, then cut off any further thought along such lines as the corner of West End and Seventy-eighth Street came into view.

  “That awning there,” I said. “The blue one.”

  The cab drifted forward a few more yards, then stopped. I paid and got out. The building’s uniformed doorman nodded as he approached. “How’s your father?” he asked.

  “Holding his own,” I answered.

  “Give him my regards.”

  The elevator was old and elegant, all dark paneling and brass, and in that way it struck me as oddly military, a device meant to convey the high command to some tower from which a general could survey the field. Curiously, this thought again returned me to Julian. This time it was his description of Waterloo, the day we’d walked the field together under the unblinking eyes of the Lion Monument. As we walked, he’d recounted the descriptions various travelers had written a few days after the battle, the field littered with bits of white paper, the stationery of two armies. They’d found blood-spattered love letters and letters to children, Julian told me, letters written by hands now severed by flashing sabers and cannon fire, a juxtaposition of images that suggested what his later writing would be like, slaughters, sometimes massive ones, described with a haunting poignancy.

  This flash of memory made me briefly wonder if I were becoming a character out of Proust, poor melancholic Swann biting into a madeleine or tripping on an uneven paving stone and by that taste and brief imbalance propelled backward to times past. If so, I felt the need to shake it off, because at a certain point memory becomes a beach strewn with landmines, all life’s many losses buried in those sands.

  My father was seated by the window, peering down at the rain-soaked street when I stepped into the living room. If he heard the jangle of keys as I entered the apartment, he gave no sign of it. His body remained still, his shoulders squared, his head upright, his eyes flashing with their customary fire.

  “You’re tardy, Philip,” he said.

  Tardy was one of those quaint words my father refused to jettison. To do so, he said, would be to surrender language to the whims of mere novelty. It was important to keep old things, he insisted, because it was through them alone that new things could be judged. He said this without rancor, and nothing in his demeanor suggested the crankiness of some old geezer bemoaning the loss of the five-cent cigar. Yet he was someone who fancied himself a defender of ancient values, and he’d often spoken of such things to Julian during those evenings when the two of them smoked cigars and drank port in the library at Two Groves, my father in full Socratic pose, despite the fact that he was hardly a man of great intellect.

  But the wish to be wise is almost as valuable in a man as wisdom itself, and so I’d always admired my fathe
r’s goodness. Julian, more than anyone, had known the depth of my love for him. Once, as the two of us had walked the grounds of Two Groves, he’d slung a brotherly arm over me. “You’re lucky to feel the way you do about your father, Philip,” he said to me. “A man needs to revere someone.” Years later, in Salzburg, he talked about Mozart’s contempt for lesser talents: “A man with no one to revere, Julian said, is a man alone.” At that moment, he seemed to consider such loneliness the worst of fates, a sentence he would not have imposed upon the vilest man on earth. And yet, at times, I thought now, he had seemed to impose that very loneliness upon himself.

  “So why were you late?” my father asked.

  “I was with Loretta,” I explained. “We met for a drink.”

  My father nodded softly. “So sad about Julian. Please give her my best at the service.”

  He had decided not to attend the upcoming memorial, and given his many aches and pains, I didn’t press the issue, since I knew that his arthritis would make the ride to Montauk difficult for him.

  “Did you hear what happened today?” my father asked. “More bombings in Europe. It’s the price of colonialism. You should never invade another people’s country if you don’t expect to be invaded in return.”

  My father had toiled his life away as a State Department bureaucrat, his eyes forever glancing wistfully at the oversized globe he’d hauled from office to office during his long tenure in the old gray C Street building rightly situated, he’d once joked, in an area of the capital known as Foggy Bottom.

  “When the Soviet Union fell, I thought we might have a few years of actual peace,” he added. He shook his head in grim frustration. “But humanity isn’t made for peace. It finds a hundred ways to keep itself riled up.”

  He’d hoped to devote his life to peace, an ambition that had foundered on the banks of Foggy Bottom at least in part because as a young man he’d made the mistake of joining a few ultraliberal organizations, though that was but the first of many problems that had stymied his career. Succinctly put, he’d had a warm heart during a Cold War, and for that reason he’d been shuttled from desk to desk, his hopes for an appointment that would give him genuine authority forever thwarted by his own fierce feeling that the human interest was larger than the national interest, a view that had won him many friends among the radical reformers of the Third World, but none in Washington.