The Last Supper

by Charles McCarry

  “Who exactly are the people in the book?” she asked at last.

  “They’re imaginary.”

  “That evil old man with his mills is not imaginary. Neither are the Irish and German children going to work in the darkness and coming home in the darkness and dying of tuberculosis.”

  “The old man is evil? He’s like my grandfather in some ways. There are children in his mills who go to work when they are eight years old and die of tuberculosis before they’re twenty.”

  “And the boys, the inseparable brothers?”

  “The good one is like a cousin of mine.”

  “And the bad one is you. You’re going to publish this novel?”

  “If a publisher will take it.”

  “How will your family take it?”

  Hubbard shrugged. “It’s all true.”

  “Precisely. You don’t fear your family?”

  Hubbard shook his head.

  “They’re going to hate you,” Lori said.

  Hubbard fetched the beer bottle, opened the top, and offered it to Lori. She was on her face again, staring into the fire.

  “I hadn’t expected this,” she said. “You’re a genius.”

  Hubbard, his mouth full of tepid beer, paused for a moment, then swallowed. The bitter taste of the beer ran up into his nose. Lori’s intense gray eyes looked directly into his.

  “You won’t answer me? Then I will answer for you. You are a genius. I’ll insist on that, and not only to you. To the world.”

  Lori kissed Hubbard on the mouth. She looked as if she had remembered a delicious secret. She turned down the lamps and drew him to the floor. It was utterly plain to him what she expected.

  Two

  — 1 —

  When Lori was in the eighth month of her pregnancy, Paulus von Buecheler came to call on her in Hubbard’s flat in Charlottenburg. Hands folded on the knob of his walking stick, Paulus sat on a chair made of steel tubes and leather straps.

  “What medicinal furniture,” he said. “Even the arts and crafts of the Socialists are designed to correct the flaws in humanity. This is like sitting on an artificial limb.”

  It was eight-thirty in the morning, late in the day for Paulus, who had been reading out orders at dawn all his life, to be discussing matters of importance. He had refused a cup of coffee, a signal of stern intentions.

  “Hubbard should be back soon,” Lori said. “He’s meeting the train from Paris; his cousin is visiting us.”

  Lori had not seen Paulus for six months, not since she had moved in with Hubbard. She had not mentioned her pregnancy when she left Berwick; her intention to live in concubinage had been enough of a shock to Hilde. If Paulus was surprised by Lori’s condition, as he sat in his Bauhaus chair, he gave no sign. Lori folded her hands on her kicking baby and waited for her uncle to say what he had come to say.

  “Pregnancy seems to agree with you,” he said, by way of addressing his subject. “Your Aunt Hilde thinks you ought to be in Rügen. The sea air is full of iodine. Hilde always went to Berwick when she was pregnant in order to breathe it in; her doctor believed that it strengthened the fetus.”

  Paulus had been staring into space as he spoke. Now he turned his face to Lori, monocle glittering in one eye socket, moisture in the other.

  “We are quite alone at Berwick, you know,” he said.

  Paulus stopped talking and Lori said nothing to fill the silence. She knew how alone her uncle and aunt were. The first of their sons had been killed in 1914 at Tannenberg, the second had fallen in 1916 at Verdun, and the third, a pilot, had been shot down in 1918 by an American aviator. The American, a member of a naval flight called the First Yale Unit, had written to Paulus and Hilde, describing what he termed the “sportsmanship” of their son: evidently, Bartholomäus had saluted the American just as his ship burst into flames. It seemed queer to Paulus that his youngest son, the most gifted of his children, should have been added to the total of 1,773,000 Germans killed in the Great War, dying at the hand of an amateur American sailor who, to judge by his letter, looked on the war as a university prank. After Paulus, inasmuch as Lori’s father had been murdered, there were no more Buechelers in the male line.

  “You do not, I suppose, have any idea of going to America to have the baby?” Paulus asked his niece.

  “I doubt that I’d complete the voyage. Besides, Hubbard is not very welcome at home because of his book.”

  “Oh? Has he insulted somebody?”

  “Nearly everyone; it’s about his mother’s family. But it is a brilliant novel.”

  “No doubt. Do you plan to marry this extraordinary novelist?”

  “Yes. I didn’t suppose that you wanted an illegitimate great-nephew named after you.”

  “Named after me?”

  “Who else would I name him after?”

  “Your father.”

  “Children shouldn’t be named for the dead. I’m tired of the dead. He’ll be an American; Americans don’t seem to die young for stupid reasons, like the rest of us.”

  Paulus looked around the room at the primitive lines and the raw colors of Hubbard’s growing collection of revolutionary works of art. His eyes rested on a naturalistic drawing of Lori, smiling her chatoyant smile, standing easily with her feet together and her hands hanging loose, nude and pregnant.

  “That is quite beautiful,” he said.

  “I’m glad you think so. The maid quit when I hung it.”

  They heard the key in the lock and stopped speaking. Two male voices spoke English in the hall; suitcases thudded to the floor. Hubbard, enormously tall, came into the sitting room. When he saw Paulus, his face lighted up with his guileless grin. Paulus stood up and gazed with amazement at the young man who followed Hubbard into the room.

  He, too, was a gigantic, smiling American. He looked exactly like Hubbard. Lori, who had begun to rise from her chair, sank back in astonishment. Where Hubbard was fair, this fellow was dark. Otherwise they might have been twins.

  “My cousin Elliott,” Hubbard said. “Paulus, what a pleasant surprise. Colonel Baron von Buecheler, may I present my cousin, Elliott Hubbard.”

  Hubbard spoke German. Elliott, who did not understand this language, said nothing, but shook hands vigorously with Paulus. Then he turned to Lori. “I’m Elliott,” he said in English.

  Lori gripped his hand. “The good brother,” she said. “This is indecent. You’re replicas. Hubbard, why did you leave this secret out of your novel?”

  “It’s the only thing he did leave out,” Elliott said.

  Hubbard, grinning in pleasure over the success of his surprise, explained to Paulus. “Elliott’s father and my mother were twins,” he said. “They did everything together. It was a double wedding, and Elliott and I were born a year later, a month apart.”

  “Who is older?”

  “Elliott.”

  “If your name is Hubbard Christopher,” Lori said, “why is his name not Christopher Hubbard?”

  “Things are bad enough as they are, Lori,” Elliott said.

  An exact duplicate of Hubbard’s grin lit up Elliott’s long bony face. Lori rang for the new maid and ordered midmorning coffee. The servant, a red-faced cheerful fat girl from Rügen, burst into laughter and clapped her hand over her mouth when she saw Hubbard and Elliott, side by side.

  This time Paulus took coffee when it was offered, and ate a plum tart. When he had finished, he addressed Elliott, speaking English as swiftly as he had chewed his pastry.

  “Any special reason for your journey?”

  “You didn’t know? I’ve come to be best man at the wedding of my cousin and your niece.”

  “Excellent,” said Paulus. “It looks as if you’ll have a chance to be a godfather as well.”

  — 2 —

  In the event, both Elliott and Paulus von Buecheler were godfathers to the son of Hubbard and Lori Christopher. The child was born at Berwick on June 14, 1924, a date celebrated in the United States as Flag Day. The midwife who, ni
neteen years earlier, had delivered Lori was in attendance, and the birth took place in the same room in which Lori’s father, uncle, and more remote ancestors had been born.

  “All those spirits will be with me,” Lori said, “but I want Hubbard here, by my bed, in the flesh.”

  “A man, in the birth chamber?” barked the midwife.

  Lori insisted. The labor lasted for hours. Hubbard sat through the night beside Lori, timing her contractions. These became stronger and more rhythmic.

  “Think of the sea,” the midwife said. “Row, row for the shore.”

  “My God,” Lori said, “it’s worse than the sea. This is taking away my will. It’s taken over my body. It’s doing what it wants to me.”

  The crown of the baby’s head appeared, then his flattened ears and his glistening unawakened face. Lori’s body opened to release him and the petals of her flesh and the baby’s skin were the same hues of pink, as if Hubbard’s child were undoubling from a rose.

  “Here is the prow of the little ship,” the midwife said.

  “I have no control over this, Hubbard!” Lori said. “No one told me!”

  Hubbard gripped her hands. Lori seized his huge curved thumbs in her tiny fists and dislocated them both. The baby slid free. The midwife turned him over and squeezed his penis. The baby opened his eyes and turned his head. He had his mother’s deep gray eyes.

  “A little baron!” the midwife cried.

  Paul Christopher was a quiet child. Born into a family of talkers, he was a listener. Even as a very young child he never interrupted. Years afterward, he might ask a question about a story he had heard at the age of four; he seemed never to forget anything.

  “He is writing,” Lori would say, watching his alert face as he sat on the floor at coffee time, listening to adults, puzzling over jokes. She wanted him to be a poet, but she feared that his genes would compel him to be a soldier.

  In the morning, Paul would stand beside his parents’ bed in his nightclothes, watching and waiting until one of them woke. Lori opened her eyes morning after morning to find herself gazing into the eyes of her son that were so much like her own eyes. As soon as she woke, he told her what he had dreamed the night before. He dreamed about Massachusetts long before he ever went there: Hubbard’s stories about their family, about the woods and the American animals, so truly wild, gripped his imagination. Paul had his mother’s face as well as her eyes, but an American body, strong and loose and made for sport. He had inherited his father’s temperament, joyful and forgiving. He walked at ten months and his first connected words were in English, though Lori always spoke to him in German.

  For three seasons of the year, in Berlin, Hubbard wrote every day from six in the morning until noon. He published his books, novels and poems, in the United States, and as they were never translated into German he was unknown to the Berlin intelligentsia. He was little better known to most of his own countrymen. “They tell me you’re a writer, Mr. Christopher?” American women would say to Hubbard at the Fourth of July party at the Embassy. “How interesting. What sort of things do you write?” With his instinctive good manners, Hubbard would begin to reply. Lori would interrupt. “Not the sort of things you read, obviously,” she would say in withering tones. She never stopped believing that Hubbard was a genius.

  The Christophers spent summers at Berwick. Exercise and conversation were the family pastimes. By the time he was six, Paul could climb any cliff on Rügen. He was a strong swimmer who knew the treacherous island tides. He woke every morning at five-thirty, drank a cup of hot milk and ate a piece of black bread, and went for a two-mile walk through the beech forest with Paulus. Before the boy learned to read, Paulus told him about Rügen, its flora and fauna and history.

  Others had told him about Paulus, heroic tales. Paulus had commanded a regiment of lancers at the Battle of Tannenberg. When the Russian center broke, at about six in the evening on August 28, 1914, Paulus had pursued the flying rabble of the Russian 15th Corps through the forest of Grünfliess, putting two hundred enemy to the spear in a brisk skirmish on the shores of a lake and setting their bivouac on fire. During a saber fight with a Russian officer, conducted from the backs of heaving chargers, Paulus had severed the right hand of his enemy. Incredibly, the maimed Russian had turned his horse and galloped into the lake, shouting to rally his routed troops. Paulus, seeing his wounded foe fall from the saddle, spurred into the water and rescued him. Dragging the unconscious Russian into the burning camp, he thrust the spurting stump of his wrist into a fire, cauterizing the wound. The Russian, treated by Paulus’s regimental surgeon, survived.

  “Did Uncle Paulus meet the Russian again, after the war?” Paul asked Hilde.

  “He invited him to Berwick, but he never came. He must have been slaughtered by the Bolsheviks, like your grandfather.”

  Paul received little Christian instruction from Paulus, his German godfather. “Bismarck was a Christian, he was very vocal about it,” Paulus said, “and a greater bastard never lived. Memorize the Sermon on the Mount; I advise you to live by it even if you don’t have a single spark of religious faith.”

  Conversation was an addiction of the Buechelers. During their long banishment under Bismarck, the family learned to get along without outsiders. To avoid turning into a family of bores, they had kept their minds fresh by learning new facts, new languages, new skills. Even now, guests were a rarity at Berwick. Anecdotes were forbidden. Stories withered the mind, Paulus said; new talk had to be invented every day. This required a great deal of reading, and there were hundreds of books in the house. The hours between lunch and dinner were set aside for reading; at the beginning of June, twenty books were placed in Paul’s room, and he was expected to read them all by the end of August.

  “Admirable,” said Hubbard, “but Paul ought to get in more sailing.”

  Hubbard was a great believer in sailing. With the meager royalties from his writings, he bought a white-hulled yawl and named it Mahican, after the tribe of Indians that had lived on his family’s land in the Berkshires. In this vessel, Paul and his parents sailed in all weathers in the shallow, heaving Baltic. Lori packed delicious lunches in a wicker picnic basket that Paul’s American godfather, Elliott Hubbard, had bought at Abercrombie & Fitch. This hamper glistened with varnish and its broad riveted straps smelled of good leather. Thermos bottles, food boxes, plates, glasses, and cutlery fitted inside, also fastened by leather straps. All his life, Paul remembered the picnic basket as the most beautiful object of his childhood.

  It was a nine-hour sail to their favorite destination, a Danish island called Falster. They would cast off in the dark, on the tide, arriving at Falster at midmorning, then sail back to Rügen the following midnight. Falster was a windy, peaceful island of low grassy dunes, with a wooded cliff along the northeastern shore. They would anchor under the cliff, load the picnic basket and a blanket into the dinghy, and row ashore. Here, the rules of Berwick did not apply, and Hubbard would tell stories.

  The stories always had to do with Paul’s paternal ancestors. Fifty years before the American Revolution, a twenty-year-old youth named Aaron Hubbard (always called “the first Aaron” by the Hubbards) drove a herd of spotted pigs up the Housatonic Valley from Connecticut into the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts, to fatten them on beech nuts. In the eighteenth century, the Berkshires were still a Mohawk hunting ground—wild, stony, mountainous country. No one lived there except for a few Mahican Indians who had been driven out of the Hudson Valley, farther to the west beyond the mountains, by the fiercer Mohawks. Aaron did not run into any Indians. He spent the summer alone with his pigs, wandering through the woods, sleeping in the open, falling in love with the country.

  “There was an October blizzard that year,” said Hubbard Christopher, telling the story on the beach at Falster, “and Aaron and his pigs were caught in it. He was driving them through the woods, trying to find a cave or something for shelter, when he saw, of all things, a light among the trees. It was a Mahica
n encampment. The Indians took Aaron in. He stayed all winter as there was no way to get out through the snow, slaughtering the pigs one by one and sharing them with the Mahicans. The Indians took a fancy to pork. Aaron had already taken a fancy to the land.

  “In the spring, Aaron made an agreement with the Mahicans. In return for one pound sterling, a barrel of molasses, and ten spotted pigs, the Hubbards could have all the land they could fence in a single day. Aaron went back to Connecticut and fetched his nine brothers. Between sunup and sundown, the Hubbard boys nailed rails to trees and fenced twenty square miles.

  “On the highest hill at the western edge of their land, the Hubbards put up a house. At first it was just one room, a kitchen with a sleeping loft above it, made out of whipsawed planks and hand-hewn maple beams, fastened together with wooden pegs. When the wind blew, it creaked like a sailing ship; it still does. They were the first Hubbards to own land and that gave them the feeling that they’d come into port after a tremendous stormy voyage. They called the house the Harbor.

  “A family of Mahicans lived on the place until one summer when they died of measles, all but one. The survivor was a ten-year-old boy named Joe. He came to live at the Harbor. The second Aaron, your great-great-grandfather, was about the same age as Joe. He and Joe had always been inseparable friends. In the family they were called Damon and Pythias. Outsiders called the Mahican boy Indian Joe, but to the Hubbards, he was—well, I’ve always imagined that he was pretty much what I was, growing up at the Harbor two hundred years later: not exactly a son, but more than a nephew.

  “One day, when Joe and Aaron were about eighteen years old,” Hubbard continued, “Joe went out hunting by himself. It was early December. The ground was frozen but there was no snow. Joe was a great hunter. He always got something. But this time he came back empty-handed. He told the family he’d fired his shotgun at two crows and brought them down with a single charge of buckshot. He’d looked for the dead crows but couldn’t find them. It was almost dark when Joe got back.