Stephen L. Carter

by New England White

  Vanessa suddenly covered her face, telling Julia that she had gone too far, even before Frank Carrington exploded.

  “You have no right! No right!” He was on his feet, the formerly mild visage splotchy with anger and fear. In his hand were the small-bladed, long-handled scissors he used to trim plastic for his toys. He looked ready to stab somebody. Instead, he put the shears away and pointed at the door. “I want you out of here. Right now. Just go, Julia. I mean it.”

  “I wasn’t trying to—”

  “I told you I’m not going to talk about it. I haven’t talked about it for thirty years, and I’m not going to start now. No, Julia. No more arguments. You’re too persuasive. Keep your mouth shut and go. Just go.”

  Julia protested and cajoled, but Frank escorted his guests to the door, his fury crackling in the air like heat lightning. He said he would be leaving for Norwich, most likely tomorrow, and was never coming back to this horrible town. Silent Vanessa turned her head away, as if offended, or hearing sounds they had missed.

  On the doorstep, chill wind nipping, Frank forced a calm into his voice. He was no less angry, but he was in control. “I’m sorry I yelled at you, Julia. But I don’t ever want to hear from you again.”

  “I understand,” said Julia, defeated. “I’m sorry.”

  “Bad times in the Landing. That’s all.”

  “I understand,” she said a second time, because she could think of nothing else. She had thought Frank Carrington a pushover, but fear can do amazing things.

  Vanessa stood beside her, embarrassed at the failure of their mission, and by her mother’s obvious intimidation. The teen cast about for a way to turn defeat into victory, as the generals she admired always figured out how to do. Suddenly Gina was beside her, first time in ages, signaling urgently for her attention, and Vanessa, after an initial period of trembling resistance—If you look at those things too long, you’ll turn into one of them!—turned to listen. Gina got up on her toes and spent half a minute or so whispering in her ear, until Vanessa finally nodded.

  “Mr. Carrington? May I use the powder room?”

  The former deputy sighed as if to say this always happened in the end, then pushed the door wider, and pointed down the hall. “Second left,” he said.

  Vanessa turned to her mother. “I’ll only be a minute.”

  “I’ll wait here, honey.”

  Worried about her. Naturally. Vanessa said, “How about if you start the car and get the heater going?”

  “I’d rather wait.”

  “She’ll be fine,” said Frank, annoyed.

  “He’s right, Moms. I’ll be fine. I promise. But you have to wait in the car.” She leaned over and kissed her mother on the forehead. “Trust me,” she said softly. “Please.”

  (II)

  VANESSA HURRIED into the powder room—she really did have to go—and heard the front door slam, and the antiques dealer’s booming voice commanding her to let him know when she was done. She stood in front of the mirror, adjusting her braids, listening to Gina’s further advice, and stoking her courage. You are here, Gina was saying. You might as well find out.

  Then she stepped out. “Mr. Carrington?” she called.

  Voice from the family room studio again, no trace of welcome. “I assume you can find the front door.”

  “I just wanted to ask you one more thing.”

  “I have nothing more to say. I’m sorry.”

  Vanessa stepped down into the room, where the antiques dealer was brushing blue paint into his diorama as a river took shape, bowing in like a topped V, and another river, already painted, bowed back toward it, and Gina murmured that she could do this one, she could, yes, and she heard Frank Carrington’s voice wanting to know why she was still here, and she looked and looked and raced through the hundreds upon hundreds of maps stored in the amazing memory that no one ever respected because they did not respect what she put in it, and at last a light went on and the student-who-could-have-been whispered from deep inside her, Volga.

  He was growing angry again, and squaring to throw her out, but she kept her eyes down.

  “What are you staring at?” he demanded.

  Vanessa pointed to the bottom right-hand corner of the diorama. “The terrain is wrong.”

  “What did you say?”

  “It’s too green. There shouldn’t be trees or grass. Most of it was barren.”

  His eyes grew wide, fear and fury mixing. “Miss”—had she been male, it might have been “boy”—“I hate to say it, but you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. Excuse my French.”

  She moved closer, fingers still extended. “This is the Kalmyk Steppe, isn’t it? Due south of Stalingrad.”

  “Is that so?”

  “This is Operation Blue, summer of 1942, when the Germans are winning. I loved that one.” A sliding motion of her hand. “The Fourth Panzers, curling south and then shooting north again, and nobody to protect the Steppe except some sailors rushed in from Siberia or someplace.”

  “There were tanks. T-34s.”

  “Just sailors. Marines, maybe. No tanks.”

  “Barbarossa,” he said, eying her. “Not Blue.”

  “No. By summer it was Operation Blue. If Hitler had just gone after the oil fields and not insisted on taking the city, he might have won the war. Thank God he was such a military idiot.”

  “How do you know all that?”

  Vanessa allowed herself a grin. “I guess I like to read.”

  “About war?”

  “Yes.”

  “Famous battles? All that?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Frank Carrington did not really smile—she did not think his facial muscles ran to that—but he did grunt and twist his face in a grimace that might have meant delight at discovering a long-lost relative or dismay at learning that the tests were positive. “Funny hobby for a girl.”

  Vanessa nodded. “At school they all think I’m nuts.”

  “Funny thing. In the village, they think I’m nuts, too.”

  She searched for an appropriate response. Gina, who loved Emily Dickinson, supplied it. “Then there’s a pair of us,” Vanessa recited from Gina’s dictation. “Don’t tell.”

  (III)

  OUTSIDE, IN THE ESCALADE, Julia began to grow nervous. How long did it take to use the bathroom? She wondered whether she had been wise to leave Vanessa alone. She worried the problem over in her mind. Usually so decisive, Julia could not figure out whether to ring the bell again or not. The sun passed behind a low winter cloud and took her confidence with it. She shivered and turned the heat up and pressed the button to direct more of it to her legs, even though the cocooning warmth made her drowsy. The familiar dream came, fleeing through winter woods, a fearful night creature nipping at her heels—

  A tapping on the window, like claws on a corpse.

  Julia started, then shook herself awake. On the passenger’s side of the car, Vanessa stood impatiently, stamping her feet against the cold.

  Odd how Julia did not remember locking the doors.

  “What were you doing all that time? I was worried about you.”

  “We talked.”

  “About what?”

  “What we went there to talk about.”

  “That meeting?”

  Vanessa nodded. “But first we talked about Stalingrad.”

  Julia’s foot hit the brake, but the Escalade was still in the driveway. “About what?”

  “Stalingrad. Worst battle of World War II. Maybe of all time. Ended in the winter of 1943, and probably turned the war.”

  “Oh.” A pause while each waited for the other. “Ah, and what did you decide about…Stalingrad?”

  The answer was a long time coming, and echoed, sepulchral and distant and touched with tragedy, as if Vanessa was orating at a funeral a long way off. “That the only human lives we really believe are precious are the lives of the people we know well. Everybody is willing to sacrifice other people’s lives.”
/>   Julia, stung, took a few seconds to realize that this was not a slap at her personally. She decided to let it go. “I see,” was her only comment.

  “You don’t believe that, do you?” A smirk? No, no, just the usual sardonic innocence by which Vanessa evaluated the world outside her own mind and perceptions. “Or you don’t think you do.”

  “I believe every single life is precious,” Julia said quietly, but firmly.

  “Even unborn ones?”

  Oh, Heaven! Oh, help! Vanessa never asked her mother’s opinion on matters of morality, and Julia, none too certain of her own ethical perceptions, preferred to keep it that way. “I, ah, I’m not entirely convinced that those are lives.”

  “Father Freed says they are.”

  “People have different opinions on that question,” said Julia, fighting her way out of a conversational corner into which she did not remember backing. “Even different religions have, ah, different opinions. And that’s why, uh, why nobody has the right to, uh, to impose…ah, their view on a disputed issue….” She ran down. She had lost the thread. I tall seemed so clear and obvious, sitting around Kepler lamenting the assault on the most fundamental of all human rights, but, sitting in this too-hot car with her brilliant and inquisitive daughter, Julia found everything muddy and uncertain. She said, voice trembling, “Maybe we should, ah, talk about this another time.”

  Vanessa seemed unaware of her distress, but Julia suspected that she was concealing her perception, for this child saw everything, a fact Lemaster seemed not to understand. “Okay,” she said.

  They were passing the Town Green. Light afternoon flurries had started to dance across the windshield. “Vanessa?”

  “Hmmm?”

  “What did Mr. Carrington tell you about the meeting?”

  “He got a lot nicer after he found out I knew Stalingrad. I helped him with his diorama. He had made a few mistakes.”

  “Mistakes?”

  “Terrain. The name of one of the towns. The route the Sixth Army took. He had them crossing the Don south of Kalach, if you can believe it.”

  A quick glance. Who was this precocious child? What else went on in that brain that she hid from public view? What had God wrought in this creature?

  And where did that thought come from?

  “What else?”

  “Oh, he knew a lot more than I did.” Unlike most smart teenagers—or most smart adults—Vanessa was able to admit this truth with no embarrassment, perhaps because she met the species so rarely. “I learned a lot about war. He even gave me a book to read.” She held up a well-thumbed volume by somebody named Keegan. “He said I can keep it if I want.”

  “Vanessa—”

  “Did you know that a lot of the movies are wrong? Archers couldn’t shoot through armor, so, a lot of the time—when cavalry wore armor?—the only real point of attacking them with arrows was psychological. The impact and the noise. No real harm. Just fear.”

  Frustrated by this circuitous disquisition, Julia asked, directly, “What happened at the meeting?”

  “I was getting to that,” said Vanessa, as if it was the less important part of the conversation. “The meeting was the first selectman, and Sheriff Huebner, and Mr. Carrington, and a black man.”

  “A what?”

  “A black man. And he seemed to be in charge.” Julia’s face went gray, but her daughter continued merrily on. “Tall, broad across the shoulders, a little overweight. Skin almost yellow. He never gave his name, but Mr. Carrington thinks he might have been a congressman. Moms, are you okay?”

  No, she was not okay. She was furious at being misled, and frightened out of her wits. But she kept her voice calm. “I told you I didn’t want you involved.”

  Vanessa was tart. “If not for me, you wouldn’t know any of this.”

  Maybe I didn’t want to know, said Julia, but not quite aloud. She decided to drive back to Boston in the morning to ask Byron Dennison to his face what he was doing in the Landing ten days after Gina Joule died, and, for all Julia knew, in Elm Harbor a year later, persuading DeShaun’s family to drop the lawsuit.

  But the hospital called that very night, to say that Bay had fallen asleep again—for good.

  CHAPTER 51

  MONA

  (I)

  IN THE SECOND WEEK OF FEBRUARY, over the fervent objections of her husband and for the sake of her daughter, Julia Carlyle flew to Paris, where she spent the night at one of those delightful little hotels that dot the side streets, and took the morning train south for Toulouse, where Hap, Mona’s live-in companion, waited in the aging red Renault 18 GTX. He was a slumping, shuffling man in his fifties, with rounded shoulders, as if from decades of hard labor, and the cheerless when-will-it-end smile of an exhausted headwaiter. He jerked his way through the cranky five-speed manual gearbox as if it was an old enemy, making little conversation as they darted through suburbs and into the countryside, slipping through copses of trees and between endless fields. Julia was grateful for the chance to doze and watch the view and, mostly, to consider and reconsider how to approach the mother who had omitted a big chunk of the family story.

  “She’ll be pleased to see you,” Hap ventured at one point.

  “I bet she will,” Julia snapped, which shut him up for a while.

  The house was small and ragged and stuccoed, with red tiles on the roof and red awnings covering some of the windows and metal frames from which awnings were missing covering the rest. The garden, mostly brown, was sprinkled with an unexpected snow, and she wondered if she had somehow brought it with her. The foyer was a reddish marble. So were the frayed carpet runners. Every time she visited, Julia felt she was overdosing on the color, and wished Mona would redecorate: not that there was money for such frills, because Mona, lacking the good fortune to be married to a frugal first-generation immigrant, had spent her years doling out her inheritance to anyone with a cause or a sob story or cute eyes. The house backed on the woods. Two downstairs bedrooms opened onto a walled garden where faded tiles, wobbly wrought-iron furniture, and a desiccated fountain warned you that life dried up in the end. Dying vineyards lay just over the rise. Mona had once thought to produce an income, before discovering that they yielded a particularly inferior variety of grape.

  “She’ll be down in a minute,” said Hap, with an air of depleted apology. “May I offer you anything?”

  “I’m fine,” said Julia, whose mother loved to make her wait.

  Mona had the master suite upstairs, Hap slept in what must once have been the maid’s room next to the kitchen, and Julia would have the guest suite at the other end of the house. On the rare occasions when she visited with one or more of the children, they shared the suite, far closer to Hap than to Mona, and Julia had yet to recover from the rejection. This was her mother’s world.

  Mona appeared at the top of the stairs, small and pert, wrapped in a robe, sneezing noisily into a handkerchief. She smiled an uncertain welcome, because Julia would not have made the trip for the sheer joy of familial reunion. Mona allowed the expected hug but turned away before Julia was quite ready to let go, citing as excuse whatever virus was pummeling her thin body, even if her true reason was different.

  “You’ve lost weight, dear.”

  “No, I haven’t. I’ve put on five pounds since last year.”

  “You always did keep careful track. Watching that figure of yours so hard. And the boys watched it, too.” She sneezed, then caught her daughter’s mood. “Well, you were a flirt back in those days, dear. You were. I’m not saying you’re one now.”

  The other thing about Mona was that you never knew what angle, in her sweet, unassuming way, she might choose for her attack.

  “It’s good to see you,” Julia offered, but Hap appeared with tea and crackers, protecting his beloved Mona from the burden of response. Julia went off to unpack, and sulk. Over dinner, Mona moaned. She moaned about how the proximity of Airbus was driving prices up. About how terrible it was that so many Americans were c
oming to town these days to “hunt” at the Safari Parc. About how the United States was the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism. About how she liked the way the French did not allow Muslim girls to wear head scarves in school, and she wished America would confiscate them too, along with all the crosses and little red-white-and-blue flag pins. She moaned about everything she could think of, except the issue that had brought her daughter to France. She rambled with the nervous energy of the condemned prisoner who knows that when the words stop the reckoning begins…and swiftly ends.

  Julia asked her about the old days, probing, pressing, enticing. But missed the mark.

  “The Empyreals were always a very odd fraternity,” Mona said as she struggled ostentatiously up the staircase, delighting in her ill health. “This was back before their collapse, of course. Before the bankruptcy and everything. Oh, but they were a treat! They were limited to four hundred members nationwide. Four hundred colored gentlemen of quality is what the charter used to say. Everyone knew how exclusive they were, but they never bragged about it. As a matter of fact, dear, back in the day, members were not even allowed to admit that the group existed. They were never the most showy men. Never the smoothies. The quiet, successful types who never had a word to say at the parties.” Halfway up, voice trailing behind her like steam from the engine of memory. “I’ll tell you something, dear. I couldn’t have seen it at the time, but you know what they were like back in the day? The Empyreals? Like a quiet, sullen kid at school who isn’t in a clique and never talks to anybody and doesn’t have any friends, the kind of kid you don’t even notice until the morning he shows up with a hunting rifle and decides to make the world pay attention.”

  She went to bed.

  (II)