by Sarah Smith
Gilbert the librarian angel had saved only two undistinguished collections of Bible stories, Through the Looking Glass, R. M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island, and Huckleberry Finn. The last three had been given Richard by Gilbert.
Gilbert had put the stove lids back on the stove, closed the damper, and opened the windows. He had set the lids back on too soon; one cracked with a loud ping from the heat of the fire below. Gilbert fussed and, using the lifter, moved the broken pieces to the back of the stove.
“Why?”
Gilbert pushed the two broken pieces with the lifter, trying to fit them back together.
“Stop that.” Reisden threw the book he was holding into the crate again. He took Gilbert by both shoulders and shook him. Gilbert stared up into his eyes, hypnotized by fear. “I’m not eight years old, Gilbert, I came here to find out and not to be lied to. What’s in these, that you want to burn them rather than let me see?”
Gilbert shook his head, flinching.
“I won’t hurt you.” Reisden let him go. Gilbert dropped back into the chair. “Please. Gilbert. Please talk.”
Gilbert kept on shaking his head, but his cheeks flushed. “You say you aren’t Richard,” he trembled. “If you aren’t Richard then it is of no consequence to you. You don’t want to remember any of this. Don’t make me tell you. Richard, please.”
Gilbert turned and almost ran out of the kitchen.
Richard’s books; a dance lesson and a discovery
Reisden took the books upstairs in their box. He had a pure research problem; one box of books is one set of data to make sense of. He did what he usually did when the paper mounted up: declared himself sick for the duration, stayed in bed with coffee and cigarets, and went through everything.
Why did Gilbert want to bum Richard’s books?
It took him until the middle of the morning to read them.
Horatio Alger wrote six books about Mark the Match Boy, “a timber merchant in a small way.” William Knight, who had been a timber merchant too, had given Richard all of them. Reisden riffled through the pages of two, then put all six back in the crate. They were just boring.
The rest were sadistic in the peculiar style of Victorian children’s books. In Jack Saunders, a Tale of Truth, the twelve-year-old hero told a lie, was horribly burned in a fire, and expired repentant. Sin and Redemption collected no less than forty-two stories of youthful sinners. Lying, swearing, and cheating on exams caused them to be run over by horses, felled by tuberculosis and smallpox, imprisoned for debt, maimed, and in one case buried alive. They died with a prayer, a hymn, or their mother’s name on their lips, at ages from five to eleven. F. X. Farrar’s Eric, or Little by Little followed Eric Williams through a career of crime: irreverence in the school chapel, swearing, smoking, and the intemperate use of spirits. For this the child was expelled from school, shanghaied into the navy, and flogged almost to death by his captain. (The book opened by itself to the flogging scene, which sounded as if Farrar had whipped a schoolful of boys for research and enjoyed it. William Knight had written in the margin, “The way of the transgressor is death!—Take this to heart!”) Reisden skipped a hundred pages of broken repentance, threw the book with all the others back into the crate, and leaned back, massaging a headache out of his eyes, feeling as if he had spent the morning being raped by Christians.
The books were bad, but no worse than others. Why would Gilbert bum them?
So Richard wouldn’t see them.
Reisden took another two hours and examined each one minutely as a physical object. Nothing between the leaves. No missing pages. No codes created by underlining certain letters. No pages soaked in mysterious poisons or treasure maps written in blood on the flyleaves. A few more annotations in William Knight’s hand, mostly in the history or mathematics texts. In the back leaves of a German text, someone had penciled in a child’s blocky picture of a black-and-white dog with a big smile. Underneath, in staggering script, “This is Washington a Dog. I love him.” Richard’s dog, the one in Richard’s picture. (My dog? Reisden thought. But he had never had a dog. He knew this the same instinctive way that for twenty years he had known he was Alexander von Reisden.) He wondered what had become of Washington.
In the morning light, his old photograph looked far more like himself than like Richard, and the gruesome photograph of William Knight had nothing to do with Tasy. What was he doing in Richard Knight’s house—understanding something, or making it all up? He distrusted his insights and distrusted the distrust.
He could spin a story that would make himself sane, but it didn’t answer much. Richard Knight hated William. Why? William had terrible taste in books and kept Richard under his thumb. Very likely William had flogged Richard, F. X. Farrar- style. The books indicated that much. Then William died. Richard was happy, very happy. Relieved. He would never be hit again and he would never have to read Horatio Alger.
What nonsense.
He took his own letters downstairs to the kitchen and burned them in the stove, disturbing the kitchenmaid, who was cleaning. The two broken pieces of the stove lid were still on the back of the stove. He took a walk outside, through the fields behind the old barn and into the woods. In the fields it was hot, itchy, and buggy; in the woods, humid, smelling of mold and leaves, far more buggy. He sat in the old damp gazebo staring at the lake, smoked far too many cigarets, and felt dissipated and disarrayed. It was Friday, August third, and he had no ideas at all.
Perdita was downstairs in the music room, sitting on the piano bench with the piano lid closed, deep in thought, and with her hands outspread on the lid.
“Perdita, do you know why Gilbert should bum Richard Knight’s books?” he began.
It took her a moment to come out of her thoughts. “Bum them?” She seemed as distracted as he was.
“Am I in your way? Would you like to practice?”
“No,” she said vehemently; “please stay. I’m not practicing.”
It was hot. They fell into silence, he thinking his thoughts, she thinking hers. She ran her fingers through her long hair, lifting it up away from the back of her neck, then twisting it absently in a knot. Not quite a grownup’s style, but as she let it fall, it struck him that this was almost the last time he would see her in her childhood. She would be eighteen on Sunday. Her skirts would lengthen and her hair be put up, and officially she would be a woman. In her distracted mood she seemed older.
“Are you going to the dance tomorrow?” she asked.
“I suppose I’m required.” Because dances required a four- to-one ratio of men to women, men were in desperately short supply.
“Oh, please. I’d like to dance with you,” she said. “You’re the only nice thing about this summer.”
“Then of course.” The last dance he had been at was a Communist Party Bastille Day celebration in Hampstead. He remembered Tasy in her striped skirt, dancing with a fan in her hand. It had been hot and she had fanned them both while they waltzed, cheek to cheek, comfortable, domestic, and married.
Tasy dead on the leaves. William Knight and Richard Knight.
“Have you ever been to a big formal dance?” she asked.
“Yes. And you haven’t?” Of course not; she wasn’t yet eighteen. “But you’ve had dancing lessons. It’s very much the same.”
She shook her head. “Harry doesn’t care much about dancing. I made Uncle Gilbert teach me to waltz. ”
He could imagine the results. “Waltzing may have changed somewhat since Gilbert learned to dance,” he said cautiously.
“I don’t want to ask you about everything,” she said.
“I do know how to waltz.” Vienna taught one that. “Would you like to practice?” He got up and moved the sofa and chairs to the sides of the room. She scrambled up, almost as if she were eager to get away from the piano. “Here, we have a little room.”
“Uncle Gilbert says I should stand like this.” She stood at arm’s length from him.
“Not since the 1830s. Sta
nd close by me. You rest your hand on my shoulder, I put my right hand on your waist. Your right hand clasps my left hand, so. Now, dancing is like being led by a guide. I guide your path, so, by suggesting it to you with the pressure of my hands. You know how to do that; you should be good at dancing.” He counted, one-two-three, one-two-three, then thought of her metronome and set it ticking. They danced a simple box step in the space between the chairs and the piano. The blinds were down against the heat; the room was dim. Her back muscles were rigid against his hand. Right-left-right; left-right-left. They danced for a while in silence. His legs were longer; he experimented with how large the box should be so that they would both feel natural. The metronome kept up its rigid ticking. They fell into a rhythm together, but it was odd to dance with this strange skeletal clacking, no music at all. Suddenly she began breathing too deeply, in gasps under his hand, as if she were trying to control herself. He set her down on the sofa and sat down beside her.
“Is anything wrong?” he asked.
“It’s so sad without music.”
“What?”
She wasn’t going to cry. She turned away her head and put her knuckles to her eyes. Her voice trembled. “It’s so silly. Harry can’t dance.”
She held her long fingers in front of her, put them down in her lap, clasped them, as if she didn’t know what to do with them. “I don’t know why I should mind it so much. Harry can’t keep time. Harry can’t sing. Music doesn’t mean one thing to him. ” In her lap her hands kept turning like trapped things. “I did something, I made a promise. Yesterday—” Her hands flew up and hid her face. Reisden took them gently. She half drew away from him; he let them go. “I told Harry that I wanted to be married to him, more than anything, and that I wouldn’t play the piano if he thought it was wrong.”
She was trying to look at him, but blindly; she reached out her hands again and he took them.
“You made that promise? And Harry took a promise like that from you?” he said.
“Harry was glad,” she said simply. “He wants me to be his wife more than anything else. I want to be completely faithful to him.”
He said nothing and only held her hands.
“But I don’t know how I can do it!” she said in a sudden high, clear voice, almost a shout. She stood up, withdrawing her hands from his. “There’s music everywhere. I can—not do it—but I can’t ignore it—I would listen to a hurdy-gurdy if there weren’t anything else.—How can I keep my word to Harry?”
She dropped down on the sofa, sitting stricken, like someone shot.
“You can’t,” he said.
She swayed back and forth like someone grieving, soundless. She grimaced as if she wanted to cry, soundless, as if not having music had deprived her of any voice. Creative work requires, at some level, perfect lifelong attention; and Harry had told her not to pay attention at all.
“Fully, and sincerely, and with your whole heart, you cannot, ever.”
“Uncle Charlie said I could,” she whispered.
“And so you asked someone else,” he said, not being cruel to her, “who would give you another answer.”
She bowed her head miserably.
“You are a musical person and you have given your word not to be. That was stupid, like locking yourself in a closet. You’re not the sort of person to kick down the door or scream for help; but you can’t spend your life there.”
She looked up at him, wide-eyed and pale, as she would have looked at the edge of a precipice.
“He’ll like who you really are, you know. Anyone would.” He hoped it was true, since it had to be.
“He doesn’t like my music. And I love him.”
“You love him. Not the girl he’s made up and put in your place. She doesn’t feel anything; she doesn’t exist. He’ll be able to tell the difference. He’ll resent you if he doesn’t get the real thing.”
She looked at him dubiously.
“You will have to tell him callously and repeatedly, I should guess. But you have got to, Perdita. End of sermon. Would you like to take a walk?”
The afternoon heat hung like sweat in the air, smudged with convection over the rocks. He took her out in the rowboat. The lake absorbed sound, or it was only that the whole lake valley had filled with a hot silence. The water moved slowly past their boat with an almost inaudible creaking, so close to soundless across the bow that they might have felt it in the skeleton of the boat, and heard it only in the imagination. She said nothing. She turned and put both her hands in the water, then held her cold wet hands over her face and neck. She moved down the boat toward him, held her hands in the water again, and held both her hands over his forehead, cooling him. Harry would have disapproved. Still she said nothing.
Reisden remembered the first time he had come up against something that he could not do. It had been just after he had graduated from university. Reisden’s future had included a post in the diplomatic service, on the staff of an influential member of the royal family, and marriage to his cousin Dorothea von Loewenstein, who was rich, beautiful, and clever. He had been missing chemistry day and night, and he and Dotty both knew that they were in love with other people, but it could well have worked out; less promising matches were made every day. So he had argued to himself.
He shipped the oars and looked at her, the child Perdita, to memorize her face before it became a woman’s. Oval chin, straight nose, eyes lidded by shadows. Her mouth was full and wide, a woman’s almost, drawn with seriousness. Her hands moved against each other in her lap, the fingers folded together, as if they had been put away, things with no use. This is my hand; why does it move? The obvious questions are the hardest to take seriously. He wanted some sound in the bowl of the valley for her, something that she could make into music.
Suppose that he had loved Dotty; would he have been able to let her and his well-planned future go?
Reisden bumped the rowboat against what had been William Knight’s landing stage, below the half-ruined gazebo covered in bittersweet. The old rose garden lay between them and the house. The roses were gone to fruit and desiccated leaves. In the elm trees by the barn a mockingbird had nested. As they walked under the trees the bird began to sing. She held up her hand. They stopped. She listened, and he watched her while the mockingbird sang, a girl in a white dress with her head tilted up toward the music, her hair down her back and her hands clasped in front of her, enchanted while the music lasted.
Please, he asked whatever balanced the universe, turn her way.
“I think I want to learn some more about dancing,” she said when the bird flew away. They were near the big front door of the barn; he led her inside into the coolness and the long shadows, thinking that they could dance on the second level.
But on the second level the Shakespeare Club’s big background flat, a forest scene, was spread out to dry on the floor, and there were no west windows. At four o’clock it was just barn-dim, but for her it was almost dark.
The attic stairs were blocked by a wooden door. The afternoon light would be stronger up there. “Are you afraid of mice?” he asked her.
“Little barn mice? No.”
“Lots of little barn mice. Let’s try.”
He went ahead of her. The air puffed out as he opened the door: hot air, old, complex, smelling of grass and decay. He smelled the sweet rotten smell of hay, something like manure gone bad, and the ammonia smell of mice. She wrinkled her nose. The hay filled half the big room, mostly baled; but mice had eaten the twine on the outermost bales and the hay had drifted down, half covering the floor. Hay drifted under their feet and whispered underfoot.
“I’ll open the windows,” he said.
She stood still in the middle of the floor. The thumb-rule of the partially sighted: when in doubt, don’t move. “I can see to sweep if you can find a broom.”
There were five windows on one end of the loft and, on the west end, four and the low, broad hayloft door. An antiquated broom stood brush-up against one wall. It
looked usable. “Can you sweep some of this into a comer while I open windows?” he asked.
“Yes.” She started at the east end, brushing methodically, while he pushed open the windows on the west end. They hadn’t been opened since William Knight died, but they screamed open reluctantly, letting in cool air and a fly that buzzed aimlessly around the ceiling. The hayloft door was partly open, probably why the smell wasn’t worse. He saw owl scat by the door. He braced himself against the doorframe and forced the door the rest of the way open. Through its frame he saw the east side of Island Hill beyond the rose garden: the windows of the office, Jay French’s bedroom, and the murder room.
“Be careful of the loft door,” he called to Perdita.
“I can see it.” She was efficiently brushing the dirt and hay into piles, which helped her to see where she had been. He started on the east windows, making a cross-draft. They were harder because higher on the wall. By the time he had opened three, she had cleared the floor and was brushing the piles up against the wall of baled hay.
“Where did you learn to brush like that?” he called to her.
“The Clinic! It gets dirty all the time. This is easy!”
He decided to give up on the window half buried in the hay. The one over the stairs looked easy, but he would need to stand on the stair rail and it was starting to give. He looked for another way up.
“Excuse me? Would you come here?”
Her tone made him turn around quickly. She was standing by the hay-bales with the broom in both hands, not brushing, but holding it like an extension of her fingers, as she would have used a cane. She was feeling at something hidden by the drifts of hay.
“There’s something here,” she said, her voice high and nervous. “Will you come and tell me what it is?”