by Mary Malloy
“What do you want?” Martin asked finally. There was resignation in his tone, but not patience or understanding.
For several minutes the two men talked. Lizzie could hear only Martin’s side of the conversation.
“I didn’t call the police,” he said at one point, adding that he thought Richard deserved jail time and only Lizzie’s affection for George had prevented him from calling them. “I don’t know,” he said repeatedly, answering either the same question over and over, or different questions with the same answer, and then, “No, you can’t speak to her.”
When he finally hung up the phone, he pulled Lizzie into his arms and the two of them held each other tightly for several minutes. She put her face against his chest and let the tears flow.
“Why did he call?” she whispered. “Is he threatening me?”
Martin shook his head. “I think he’s more likely to hurt himself at this point. He sounded desperate.”
Lizzie thought about this for awhile. “Did he say the police are after him for poisoning me?”
Martin said that they were.
“Did you call them?” she asked.
“No.” His tone was serious. “You made it very clear that you didn’t want that, but he’ll be arrested anyway. They’re giving him a chance to turn himself in tomorrow.”
Lizzie never loosened her grip on her husband all that night. The next day was Sunday and she spent most of it sitting in her chair in Martin’s studio as he worked on sketches for the Newcastle mural. She didn’t feel comfortable that day being more than a few feet away from him. It wasn’t that she felt she was in danger, but she was extremely disquieted.
The phone rang again in the late afternoon. Martin answered.
“It’s Edmund,” he said, handing the phone to Lizzie.
She took it tentatively. “Hello Edmund,” she said softly. She waited for the news.
“Richard is dead,” he said simply. “I thought you needed to know.”
Lizzie reeled a bit from the information. Martin came to stand behind her and she leaned hard against him. She didn’t know what to say and for a long time she said nothing.
“How did it happen?” she asked finally, her voice a raspy whisper.
“He killed himself,” Edmund answered. “He jumped from the window of his office in London.” Lizzie could hear the pain in his voice.
“Oh Edmund,” she said, “I’m so sorry.” She wasn’t sure if she was sorry that Richard was dead, but she was sorry that Edmund was hurting. And George, she thought. A tear slid down her cheek and she reached up to wipe it away. Martin put his arm around her waist. She turned slightly to look up at him as she spoke next.
“Martin didn’t call the police,” she said. She tried to explain that she hadn’t wanted to hurt any of the Hattons. The words came tumbling out somewhat incoherently until Edmund interrupted.
“I know,” he said. “I called them.”
His explanation was almost as incoherent as Lizzie’s. He felt it was his obligation, he said, legally as well as ethically, to report Richard’s actions against her. It was a crime, he said. She had been assaulted, and he couldn’t, in good conscience, let the fact that the assailant was his brother make him keep the information to himself.
“It’s a terrible thing,” she stammered, hardly knowing what more to say, but imagining the guilt that Edmund must be feeling. “It’s not your fault,” she said softly. She wasn’t sure he heard her.
“I have to go,” he said. “My father needs me.”
They mumbled goodbyes and Lizzie collapsed against her husband.
She slept fitfully that night, picturing Richard as he hung up the phone and moved to the window. How long had he stared at the sidewalk below? She remembered with awful vividness how she had felt that night on the roof of Hengemont when she had thought that death would be swift and welcome if she just let herself slip over the edge. It would have been so easy. She shuddered and reached for Martin, who slept soundly beside her. “Damn Richard,” she thought. “Damn him.”
The next morning Lizzie cancelled her office hours, telling her departmental secretary that there had been a death in her family but not explaining further. She stuck close to Martin for another day. At one point she asked him if he thought they should go to England for the funeral, and was relieved when he assured her it was neither necessary nor expected. She felt like she couldn’t make the decision on her own.
It was a painful night and day and another night that followed for Lizzie as she acknowledged, for the first time since it happened, how close she had come to dying. When she thought how incomprehensible it would have been to Martin, to her family, her friends, that she would take her own life, she sobbed uncontrollably. At the time she had been able to distance herself from the seriousness of the event by declaring it to have been a dream, even though she had feared some more sinister, unexplained influence. When she learned from Edmund that Richard had drugged her she was angry, but there was also a certain comfort in being able to rationalize her otherwise unexplainable behavior as drug-induced.
Lizzie had imagined those dead girls before, but never as vividly as she now pictured Richard—or herself if Edmund had not stopped her. Several times in a half-sleep she felt herself falling, saw hard pavement rushing at her like a fast train. She imagined the feeling of smashing into the concrete, and she pictured Richard’s handsome face mangled by the impact.
Martin watched helplessly, offering supportive smiles and soft touches through two nights and two days, but not understanding what she was feeling.
“Is all this for Richard?” he asked at one point. As she tried to explain, he realized that the feelings she had repressed in the weeks since her foray to the Hengemont roof were now forcing themselves to the surface. He also knew, in his pragmatic way, that if he waited another day or two the vividness of the pain would pass. Lizzie knew this too and, in time, it did.
• • • • •
To cancel a class would have required explanations that Lizzie did not wish to give, even to her close friends, so on Tuesday she headed to campus and went through the motions of teaching. When she returned home Martin told her that George had called, that he wanted to be sure that Lizzie and Martin were still planning to meet him in Alaska for the repatriation of Eltatsy’s remains.
Lizzie hadn’t thought of the trip, only two weeks away, since she’d heard the news of Richard’s death. Martin insisted that the trip was a good idea and he was glad George felt up to making it.
“How’s your new class going?” he asked, changing the subject.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she answered, sinking into her chair, “my heart’s just not in it.”
Martin worked the stiff bristles of a paintbrush through his fingers as he dipped it into a pail of water. “Please don’t tell me that we’re going to have to go off on a trek to find it.”
“Good one,” Lizzie laughed. “I have to be more careful slinging around those old clichés.”
“You were looking forward to this new class,” Martin said, coming over to sit on the stool beside her chair and drying his hands on a towel. “I thought you’d be excited to try this new subject matter.”
Lizzie shrugged. “When I designed this class, none of this. . . .” She searched for a word, her hand waving in front of her face, “None of this stuff had happened. Life is different now.”
Martin put his foot onto the arm of Lizzie’s chair and leaned back on the stool, his arms folded. “It’s hard to come back to regular life after a trip to the edge, isn’t it?”
She nodded.
“What can we do to put spice back into your life, my sweet?” he asked gently.
She wished she had an answer. “I’m hoping this trip to Alaska will be a start,” she said.
“I hope so too,” Martin answered. “But then you are going to need a new proje
ct.”
She knew it was true, but the bar was now raised so high that she doubted any research venture could ever compare to the events of the past month.
• • • • •
Lizzie thought about Martin’s suggestion when she went to St. Pat’s early the next morning, and she headed directly to the library reading room. There were a few students sitting at widely scattered seats, heads bent and hard at work when she pulled the door open. She waved at Jackie. There would be no singing today and it was just as well; there was no song appropriate to Lizzie’s mood on this cold February day. She plunked her book bag down on one of the long tables and went over to greet Jackie at her desk.
“Could I see the last few days of the London Times?” she asked.
They were already at hand, a neat pile that Jackie had been reading as she sat at her elevated perch. Lizzie saw a headline on the top copy: “Financier Takes Suicide Plunge.”
“I assume this is one of your Hattons,” Jackie whispered as she handed the papers to her friend.
Lizzie nodded.
“Sorry,” Jackie said. “I know you liked them.”
Lizzie smiled ruefully at that. How could she explain that she had loathed this particular Hatton, just as Jackie thought she should, and for all the right reasons. Now that he was dead it didn’t seem appropriate to articulate her hatred.
She took the papers back to her desk and began to read them in chronological order. There was the story of Richard’s bad investments, but nothing about herself, or about Richard’s plot against her. He had told Martin that he was expected to turn himself in; perhaps that meant that they had not yet filed formal assault charges against him. She was relieved. She didn’t want any of this to be about her.
On an inside page was a picture of Richard’s corpse, lying on a London sidewalk, covered by a sheet and contemplated by a number of policemen and pedestrians. There was a mention of two divorces and three grown children; Lizzie had never known about any of them. Despite the horrendous, passionate hatred they had inspired in one another, she had not known as much about Richard alive as she was now learning about him dead.
The next paper had an editorial about Richard’s death that mentioned the suicides that had plagued the Hattons for several generations. The writer knew only enough of the story to make a comparison between the estate at Hengemont and the financial estate that Richard had built, and then to build metaphorical comparisons between the castle tower at Hengemont and the bank tower in London, both of which exploited the labor or capitol of regular people for the benefit of the wealthy.
Lizzie looked up at Jackie as she read this. Had she derived pleasure from reading it, she wondered? Jackie’s gaze was firmly directed at the screen of her computer. It must have been devastating for George, Lizzie thought, though surely these hard truths had to be confronted at some point in his life.
What an ending to the story, Lizzie thought as she folded the paper. She sat very still for several minutes, then pushed her chair back from the table and stood up. She went to stand at the window, just as she had done so many times in the Hengemont library. Her breath on the cold glass created a fog of condensation that obscured the world beyond even more than the wavy indistinct glass did. The fact that she couldn’t see anything clearly was now an advantage. She contemplated Richard and his awful death. At least he hadn’t gone back to kill himself at Hengemont, she thought with some relief.
She touched the cold windowpane with two fingers. Helen would have been left to clean up the mess, she thought. Just like her great-grandmother on that grim and fateful day—the day she had begun her love affair with Edmund Hatton over the corpse of his sister.
Lizzie thought of her great grandmother. They shared the same name and her father had often told her that he thought there was a resemblance between them, of temperament as well as looks. All the horror that Lizzie had felt in the last few days at the manner of Richard’s death, that other Lizzie had confronted in flesh and bones and blood on the terrace at Hengemont.
She hadn’t fully appreciated this aspect of history before now. The further back the story went, the more possible it was to give it a romantic glow that blurred the edges and made the awful more palatable. Though she had been through all the documents, read the letters and poems, examined the paintings, somehow that was different than the cold, stark, black-and-white typeface with an accompanying photo on page A2.
Lizzie knew that this would change soon enough. More time would pass and the next person to research the Hatton family would pull the newspaper, by then yellowed by time or distanced by the technology of microfilm reader or laser scanner, and Richard would become just another interesting story to tell. His blood and brains on the pavement would add color to the telling. But there would be many things that the next researcher would never know, could never know, because Lizzie was going to make certain that no tangible, documentable evidence survived to tell of her hatred for Richard, or her desire for Edmund, or her conflicting feelings about envying the aristocracy and wanting to be a part of it while simultaneously rejecting all of the attractions that underpinned the wanting. She began to see the difference between doing history and being history.
The papers behind the cenotaph in the Hatton church nagged at her. She would never have destroyed such valuable historical documents, but she knew that she might as well have put a match to them, for all the use they would be to anyone in the future. She had justified her actions by thinking that this was the Hatton family’s business, a small story; it was not like a government rewriting history after a war.
Lizzie felt the chill of the window and took a step back, lost in her thoughts. She knew that individuals tried to manipulate their image all the time—both to present themselves well in their own time and to position themselves for posterity. Politicians, celebrities, businessmen, artists, governments did it all the time. No thinking person could resist the chance to make himself or herself appear more intelligent, benevolent, heroic or romantic, and less dull, dreadful, evil or stupid. The complexities of human beings were the hardest part of any story either to discover or describe, but that was also what made her job interesting.
She smiled to herself. Part of what she must keep in mind in the future was that she would need to outwit people like herself. It was a false rationalization for a historian to say that personal stories were different than public stories. The former made up the latter.
This had been an odd assignment. Her story had gotten entangled in history in a way that she had not expected. It could not ever happen again so potently, she thought, as she turned and went back to her seat. She folded her hands in front of her and thought about her job and how in this instance it had turned out to be her life, and how satisfying and disturbing that felt. Everything she had learned about the Hattons had told her something about herself.
How much had the members of this strange family changed over time? There was still madness and confusion, fear and exultation, masters and servants. In some ways it seemed that things had not changed all that much in seven hundred years. But she knew they had. At this moment in time she was the ultimate evidence, the document of what the Hattons were and had been and could become. When she was gone, many intangibles would go with her.
She promised herself to try to remember that, to always look beyond the documents of the story to those things that lay unspoken behind them. She did not know yet what the next story would be, but she was certain that it was already headed her way. All she had to do was keep her eyes open for the right manuscript, old book, strange tool, evocative painting, intriguing query. The past was all around her, waiting to be rediscovered.
The newspapers on the table in front of her lay half in and half out of the bright circle of lamplight. Lizzie let her eyes move from the harsh glare of the illuminated paper, past the windows with their beams and patches of cool green light, and up to the dim diffuse gloom of the
high ceiling above her. She felt calm, quiet, receptive. She waited.
Epilogue
Through a Tlingit artist, Martin managed to identify a descendent of Eltatsy in Hoonah, Alaska, and Lizzie called him at home one evening to tell him the story of Francis Hatton. Robert Eltatsy was completely surprised by her call. He didn’t know the specifics of the incident in which his ancestor’s grave had been robbed, but he was happy to learn that the remains were going to be returned. He began immediately to make plans for the arrival of Lizzie and Martin from Boston, and George, Edmund, and Lily from England. They rendezvoused in Juneau in the middle of February and traveled together to Hoonah to meet the Eltatsy family.
Like the Eltatsy described by Francis Hatton, Robert Eltatsy was tall, intelligent, and well-spoken. He had one of those face-transforming smiles that made you like him instantly. He greeted the invading party of the extended Hatton family shyly, but warmly, as they got off the ferry at Hoonah. He introduced his wife, brother, and his daughter Sarah, who was about the same age as Lily.
Robert and his brother helped Martin and Edmund with the crates that contained the burial box and the blanket. Lizzie had sent the dimensions to the British Museum and through Tom Clark had commissioned two traveling cases from their conservation department. Now she watched as the boxes were loaded onto the back of Robert Eltatsy’s pickup truck.
George had rented a car in Juneau and taken it on the ferry, and the plan was for Lizzie and Edmund to ride with him and follow Robert to the tribal longhouse. Martin and the two girls climbed into the cab of Robert’s pickup, and another truck brought up the rear, filled with goods ordered by George and shipped on the same ferry on which the visitors had arrived.